Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“All right,” Henry whispered. “Five hundred and thirty feet,” he said. “Looking good.”

“Kind of sluggish,” she muttered.

“You’re doing fine…”

But the Moon rushed up at him — it was like riding a glass-walled lift — and new terrain swept over the horizon. A young, fresh crater slid under the Shoemaker’s angular prow. Henry made out details inside the crater: a square, blocky shape, a few scattered pieces around it, all of it casting long angular shadows at the centre of a rough disc of discoloured land.

The attitude thrusters pulsed, making the Shoemaker ’s frame shake. When Henry looked down he could see his restraints rattling silently.

The silence of the flight was eerie. Unnatural. No engine noise, no wind whistle. Not even a plume of smoke erupting from their engine. Just this platform, the two of them, and the sun and the Earth and the Moonscape wheeling past them, under a black sky.

The craft responded sluggishly, but the 8-ball in front of Henry tipped sharply, and the cratered landscape tilted, before righting itself again. He tried to help Geena, to follow the readings on the little computer screen. “Three hundred fifty feet, down four feet per second. Horizontal velocity pegged… Three hundred thirty, down six and a half…” He was Buzz Aldrin, he realized suddenly, relaying information to her reluctant Armstrong; it was all just as it had been before.

And suddenly the blocky lunar-floor shapes before him resolved, and there was the old Apollo site, right in front of him. He could see the boxy shape of the abandoned LM descent stage, little glittering packages around it.

The Moon’s surface was discoloured, in a rough circle centred on the LM stage. At first he wondered if that was some kind of raying from the LM’s ascent and descent engines. Then he understood.

The marking was footprints from American boots: after thirty years as fresh in the lunar regolith as if they’d been made yesterday.

And he could see a shadow, fleeing across the textured ground: it was a platform bristling with antennae, set on four spindly legs, elongated by the low sunlight — and there were two skinny forms, side by side, his own shadow and Geena’s, sailing across the surface of the Moon itself. The Shoemaker shadow was surrounded by a kind of halo, sunlight reflected brightly straight back the way it had come. Henry smiled. “I do believe we have found what we came for.”

And now there was a surge, upwards, that threw Blue onto his back; ash particles spattered his face. He could actually feel the acceleration this time, as if he was being carried aloft in a high-speed elevator.

But it wasn’t like a quake; the motion didn’t have that sharp, characteristic suddenness. Basic Newtonian physics: nothing moved a mass of rock like this suddenly.

Storm clouds gathered above him, turbulent, agitated. The air was being displaced, rammed upwards towards the tropopause.

The end game must be close.

The ground stabilized again, if briefly, and he got to his knees. He was starkly alone here, now, on this chunk of rock; his instruments had gone.

The Earth below was deformed, bulging upward.

He was riding a plug of rock, somehow held stable here, riding the flank of a new mountain that was pushing out of the ground, its sides still glowing hot from their new birth, lava rivers coursing, overwhelming levees even as they formed. Layers of steam and dust and smoke prevented Blue from seeing the original ground level, if that term had any meaning any longer.

He wasn’t even close to the summit of this sudden bulge, he saw; the glowing flank continued upwards above him to a peak, a new caldera, lost in more layers of steam and mist.

The noise reached a crescendo, then seemed to die away; he kept talking, but he could no longer hear his own voice, still less Sixt’s.

His hearing was gone, then. He doubted it mattered.

It looked as if all of Henry’s predictions were being fulfilled.

The plug of rock he was riding was tilting. Soon, it would tip him off. Even if not, the streams of lava gushing down the wounded flank of the higher hillside would surely overwhelm him soon; it was only the absurd expansion of the mountain which had saved him from that fate so far.

He wondered which peril would administer the final butt-whopping —

Slam.

It felt like a punch from a giant, deep in the base of his spine, and he was flying in the air, literally flying, among fragments of the rock which had, moments before, comprised the modest summit of Dumfoyne.

He couldn’t feel or move his arms or legs. Perhaps his back was broken, or his neck. He couldn’t even tell if he was still breathing.

The human body was, in the end, remarkably fragile.

He seemed to be riding a new fire fountain; without the rock to shield him he was surely burning up, yet he felt nothing.

Perhaps a god was smiling on him, even now, undeservedly sparing him the punishment dished out to others.

And, remarkably, he was still rising, high into the ash clouds, picked up like a rag by some thermal current. Lightning flared above, and the clouds parted.

And, for a brief moment, he saw the stars, so high had he risen.

Just a few seconds more, he thought. Let me see the new mountain from above, the greatest geological formation in a hundred thousand years. Olympus come to Earth.

But now even the gods, at last, failed him.

“…Two hundred feet,” Henry read. “Coming down at three. We’re going to make it. One hundred. Levelling off. Woah. Look at that.”

Suddenly they were kicking up dust, great bright streaks of it, rushing to the horizon over the ground. His view of the surface grew blurred, and he felt a tingle of new alarm. What if Geena couldn’t see the surface? How would she know where to set down the Shoemaker?

“Ninety-six feet, coming down at six. Slowing the descent rate,” Geena said.

He looked around, seeking the Apollo lander. A sheet of dust swept over the boxy LM. He hoped their kicked-up debris wouldn’t mess up the landing site.

Now all Henry could see was a streaked layer of dust, with a few of the taller rocks sticking up here and there, like low mist.

“Fifty feet,” Geena said. “Shit, we’re going backward… Henry, how much fuel do we have left?”

The fuel indicator was a little ticking clock. “Sixty seconds flying time.”

“More than Armstrong,” she muttered. “Thirty feet. Coming down at two. No lateral movement now.” Her voice was thin, but she seemed in control.

A blue glow lit up on the instrument panel, startling Henry. “What’s that?”

“Contact light!”

Geena slapped the ENGINE STOP OVERRIDE button on the panel. The slight vibration of the engine died immediately.

The Shoemaker fell the last few feet, into dust that was already settling.

The four legs hit the ground with a firm thump, that transmitted up his legs to his spine, the Moon itself punching up at his animal bones for his audacity in being here.

Geena went into a flurry of post-landing checks. “Descent engine command override is off. Engine arm off. Control stick out of detent…”

And the dust settled, falling out of the airless spaces around him like so many tiny projectiles, and the stillness of a billion years returned to the Imbrium plain.

Craters and rocks, just a few feet below him now; and under a thin layer of kicked-up dust, he could see footprints, a generation old. He was on the Moon.

“Houston,” Geena said, “this is Aristarchus Base. We have come home.”

The sky was dominated by the sun, a white spotlight too bright to look at. The Earth was there in the blackness, bigger than a full Moon but smaller than Geena had expected, just a thumbnail of blue light in the sky. The brightness of the sun made it impossible to make out the stars, and, away from sun and Earth, the sky was just a jet black, empty.