#SonofaPitch: Query #3: Lunar Base Lost

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for. My normal musings will return next week.

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Title: Lunar Base Lost
Category and Genre: Adult SCI-FI
Word Count: 89,000

Query:
LUNAR BASE LOST is set in an underground moon colony that lost contact with Earth after nuclear war broke out. Over fifty years have passed since Mission Control’s last transmission. Lunar Base Three hangs on by maintaining a strict society and limiting its population.

Isabela (Izzy) Rodriguez is assistant to Presider Barbara Graham. Barbara’s more relaxed policies have politically split the moon base and even her own family. Barb’s son, Matthew Graham, has become her most outspoken critic, and Barb has Izzy spy on Matthew’s activism. When Matthew and his wife become pregnant, their unborn child exceeds the population that the colony can sustain. Because the young have priority over the old, Barbara, as the oldest colonist, must be euthanized.

Barbara suspects the pregnancy is politically motivated to force her out of office. She urges Izzy to run against Matthew during the special election. As the baby’s birth looms, Izzy and Matthew campaign for the colony’s votes. The baby arrives healthy and sound, so Barbara dies. When Matthew exposes Izzy’s most private secret, the election spirals into violence and jeopardizes the survival of the moon base.

First 250 Words:

Each time the curtain fluttered, Izzy, and those that needed to be here and those that didn’t need to be here but were here anyway, would jump. Once when the nurse came out, a quiet gasp echoed off the round metal walls. But the nurse silently picked up a stethoscope from her supply cart and went back behind that curtain.

One new life, one old death.

Izzy had dutifully done her job a few hours before and got the custodial staff to move several stacks of folding chairs to the bottom floor level of the Hospital Tower. Most members from the Assembly were sitting in them now, although Izzy couldn’t see her dad anywhere. Off duty specialists and novices from the Nuclear Plant were sitting or standing around the bottom floor too. Of course, they would be there to congratulate their boss if what happened happened.

She looked up at the curious heads on the ledges of each level that ringed the round, white metal Hospital Tower. Izzy recognized just about everybody except those on the top level, six levels above the open atrium on the bottom floor. The distance and the fluorescent lighting up there made most of them shadowy, although she did recognize Billy Smith looking down. Big for his age, Ten-year-old Billy had fractured his leg a couple day shifts before when he fell in the AgCenter. He shouldn’t be here now, but this was the Hospital Tower, so of course he should be here.