Mercy Flight

A newsroom that expects a routine Luna mishap is jolted into a far more urgent story when a damaged spacecraft cannot reach any landing field. On board, pilot Phil Mooney is carrying Lillian Marshall, a child injured in a catastrophic explosion on Luna that killed her parents, and every cheerful, maddeningly incomplete response from Earth's spaceports only sharpens the danger. As reporters dig deeper, they uncover Mooney's past as a war pilot, his one-man unscheduled spaceline, and the lonely, precarious life of a small operator struggling against powerful commercial competitors. What begins as a news item becomes a tense human drama of survival and responsibility. Mooney, shaped by war into a man of fierce self-reliance, finds that the same isolation that once kept him alive now leaves him stranded in civilian space. Yet he keeps flying for Lillian's sake, even as she wakes frightened and weak and the newsroom turns his desperate flight into a race against time. Duty, memory, and compassion drive this stark, moving tale of life on the frontier of space. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.