Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

With an effort of will, she released the tension in her hands. The stiff gloves made her fingers pop open, as if spring-loaded.

She turned to the blackness. It was just so damn dark out there.

There had been no real training for this mission. None of the endless hours in the sims she’d endured during her Shuttle and Station training, so much simulation that the real thing had seemed somehow a disappointment by comparison.

But she’d always understood the real purpose of all those sims. It wasn’t to train her. It was to beat the unfamiliarity out of her, to destroy her fear.

For this mission, there hadn’t been the time for that. And here she was, exposed. More alone than she had ever been.

She raised her right hand and, just for an instant, raised her gold visor.

The sunlight was dazzling, glaring directly into her helmet and bouncing off the module’s sheer hull, and she screwed up her eyes. But the stars were still there: the sky crowded, the constellations immediately familiar.

Somehow she felt reassured, anchored in the universe again.

She closed up her visor and waited for her eyes to clear. Then she turned to her work.

Henry and Geena were loosely tethered to the Soyuz, inspecting the lander.

The Shoemaker was, Henry supposed, about the size of a small car. It was just a platform, with four spindly, open-strut legs protruding beneath it. There was a single rocket nozzle sticking out from under it, surrounded by four fat tanks containing propellant and oxidizer. And at the corners there were four little clusters of smaller rocket nozzles, attitude thruster assemblies, with flaring shields behind them. The whole thing was maybe six feet tall, from pads to the table surface, and on top of the table there were a couple of open metal rectangles, the size and shape of door frames.

And that was all: no more than the prototype unmanned craft he’d inspected at JPL, before his program was canned, minus the elaborate sample-return stage on top.

Henry’s training, which had focused on the hazards of launch and reentry, hadn’t covered this. He looked around. “Where’s the rest of it?”

Geena’s voice was tight. “You’re not helping, Henry.”

“No, I mean it. I see the landing stage, but where’s the cabin? Where are the seats? Where’s the ascent stage?”

“Come here.”

With one hand anchored to a strut, she grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. She guided him backwards, into the right-hand door frame. The metal rectangle neatly encompassed his backpack; Geena snapped latches, and the pack was secured, and so was Henry. He was stuck there, like a turtle glued by its shell, his arms and legs dangling.

“Put your feet down here.” She guided his feet to a little sloping shelf on the top of the platform.

He placed his feet where she showed him. There was a handrail in front of him, and he grabbed onto that, and he felt a little more secure. Not much, though. And in fact, the little foot platform made him feel as if he was tipping forward, about to fall off the damn thing.

Geena swam into place beside him, in the left-hand frame, and locked herself in. There they stood, side by side. There was a small control console in front of her, with a couple of simple hand-controllers.

She turned a switch, and there was a gentle shove beneath his feet. Latches had opened, releasing the platform, and some kind of spring-loading pushed it away from Soyuz.

Henry was suspended in space: just him, Geena, and a dining-room table with a rocket mounted beneath it.

“Oh, my God.”

“Don’t bend the handrail,” Geena said.

“You have got to be kidding. This is all there is. Isn’t it?”

“It’s called the open-cockpit design concept.”

“Jesus Christ, Geena.” The whole craft, Henry thought, would probably have fit inside the ascent stage of the old Apollo LM, which was, in Henry’s memory, starting to look luxurious. “What idiot designed this thing?”

“The idiot who was trying to show how he could bring your samples back from the Moon for under a billion bucks.”

“By leaving out the spaceship?”

“Look, the bright guys at JSC studied the open-lander concept. In fact the Shoemaker design was based on the concepts they dreamed up then. It’s feasible. It’s all about saving weight. There’s hardly anything of this craft but the rocket and its fuel…”

Henry looked down, at the pocked face of the Moon sliding beneath his feet. He was naked, he thought, about to fall to another world, utterly defenceless.

Geena tested her reaction control thrusters. She closed her hand over her little controller, and the engines banged, rattling the platform and swivelling it this way and that. Henry could see little streams of exhaust crystals, gushing out in perfect straight lines, glittering briefly in the sunlight.

The old LM ascent stage cabin had just been a bubble of aluminum, he reminded himself. But right now, even a canvas tent around him would have been better than nothing.

With no warning, Geena worked the thrusters again to tip the Shoemaker up. Now its engine bell faced the way they were travelling, and suddenly Henry was flying over the mountains of the Moon, face down, feet first.

“God damn it, my sphincter just clenched. I never felt that before.”

“Take it easy,” Geena said tightly.

They sailed into the shadow of the Moon.

Sunset was sudden, like a light turning off. His bubble helmet cooled, and started to get a little damper; as the temperature dropped, the environmental control system was having trouble removing all the moisture from the air.

Shoemaker, Houston, you are go for DOI, over.

“Roger, go for DOI. Do you have AOS and LOS times?”

Roger, LOS at 103:16 and AOS at 103:59, over…

DOI, AOS, LOS. More acronyms, Henry thought. Well, DOI must be descent orbit initiation. And LOS and AOS referred to loss and acquisition of signal; for, like so many of this mission’s most crucial moments, the descent burn would take place on the far side of the Moon, out of sight of Earth, and far from assistance.

The descent orbit burn would put them into a lop-sided ellipse of an orbit with a high point of sixty-nine miles, kissing Arkady’s circular orbit, and after skimming for three hundred miles around the Moon’s lighted face, they would reach a low point of nine miles: just fifty thousand feet high, close enough to touch the mountains of the Moon. And there they would burn their engine again, and fall all the way to the surface.

That was the plan.

There was no air on the Moon. Air would have made it easy, he thought. With air you wouldn’t need all this fuel. You could glide down, like the Space Shuttle returning to Earth, or even batter your way in with a heatshield and fall into the ocean under parachutes, the way the Apollo astronauts used to.

On the Moon, there was nothing to help you down. All you could do was bring along a rocket motor, and all the fuel you needed, and stand on it as it descended, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Like riding an ICBM back down into its silo, Henry thought bleakly, and about as stable. And expensive as all hell, considering the fuel load it took to bring an ounce of payload here…

Shoemaker, on my mark you’ll have twelve minutes to DOI ignition.

“Roger, Frank.”

Shoemaker, Houston, stand by for my mark. Mark. Twelve minutes.

“We copy.”

Shoemaker, Soyuz, this is Houston, three minutes to LOS. You guys look good going over the hill.

Geena said, “ Shoemaker, roger.”

Arkady chimed in, “Roger from Soyuz.”

Geena called, “Arkady, have a good time while we’re gone.”