Eagle Station

The anomaly made itself felt the moment they crossed the crater’s outer western rim. Here, the moon’s gravity was stronger, tugging them ahead faster and also dragging them downward toward Hertzsprung’s center, which lay nearly fifteen thousand feet lower. If they’d been orbiting higher up, the effects wouldn’t have been as pronounced and they would have had more time to react. As it was, Brad rotated the Xeus a few degrees and went for a prolonged thruster burn to offset the higher gravitational pull.

“Our thruster fuel reserves are down to fifty-five percent,” Vasey said coolly. That was a little lower than they’d predicted in their planning and simulator sessions back on Earth. The digitized maps created from hundreds of thousands of oblique images taken by earlier orbiting satellites hadn’t fully revealed the ruggedness of some terrain features or the exact irregularity of the moon’s gravitational field so close to its surface.

Brad eased up slightly on his burn, letting the Xeus drop a couple of hundred feet as they sped over the western curve of Hertzsprung’s inner ring wall, a rugged massif made up of four-billion-year-old anorthosite rocks flung upward when the original asteroid slammed into the moon at more than thirty thousand miles per hour. Seconds later, the sheer escarpment that marked the vast crater’s outer eastern rim appeared over the horizon. It was around forty miles off — less than a minute’s flight time at their current orbital velocity.

Frowning in intense concentration, he took the lander right through a gap torn in the cliff by debris from a later asteroid strike. Their side-view cameras showed slopes rising almost vertically above them, studded with broken boulders that were easily a hundred feet high.

He breathed out a bit as they emerged from the gap and headed across a steadily rising plain. A couple of minutes later, he spotted what looked like a jumbled mess of secondary craters, torn cliffs, and rounded hills.

Nadia leaned forward, peering closely at her display and then comparing it with her maps. “That is the Tsander crater,” she said confidently.

Brad nodded again. Tsander, large and heavily battered over hundreds of millions of years, was as far as they could safely go, even at this low altitude. Once past this ancient, eroded crater, they would come out onto a wide plain dotted with hundreds of much smaller craters. Across that steadily rising plain, the Russian plasma gun, mounted high up on the rim of Engel’gardt crater, would have a clear field of fire against anything flying more than a few dozen feet above the surface.

He twisted his hand controllers, spinning the Xeus around on its axis so that its main engine pointed ahead, against their direction of travel. Brad switched his display to the cameras rigged to the aft end of the lander. His eyes narrowed as he watched Tsander’s scarred outer edges grow larger and more distinct.

“Almost there,” he muttered, more to himself than to Nadia or Vasey. One side of his mouth twitched upward in a crooked grin. Could he really call this “flying by the seat of your pants” if the only thing holding him in his seat in zero-G was his safety harness? On his screens, he saw a tiny craterlet come into view. Sited several miles east of Tsander’s broken rim wall, it was more of an indentation in the lunar soil than a real crater. But it was definitely the aiming mark he’d picked out after spending hours studying maps and photos of their projected course. “Coming up on our retro burn… just… about… now.” He punched the RL-10 engine icon on his touch-screen control panel. “Main engine ignition.”

This was a hard, full-power burn to shed their orbital velocity. Slammed against his seat straps by deceleration, Brad fought to stay focused as his apparent weight tripled and then quadrupled in a fraction of a second. As the Xeus slowed rapidly, it began dropping toward the surface, now just a couple of thousand feet below.

Brad’s eyes darted back and forth between the aft-mounted cameras and others set on the lander’s underside, which showed the ground coming up with dismaying speed. As soon as the spacecraft’s forward velocity dropped to nothing, he shut down the big rocket engine and then immediately triggered the lander’s vertical thruster arrays to slow its rate of descent.

Less than a minute later, as their thrusters flared brightly, he brought the Xeus in for a landing. Dust billowed up, obscuring his view just before the skids touched down. He chopped the thrusters off, and they dropped the last few feet — hitting the ground with a thump that rattled the cabin.

Smiling in relief, he turned to the others. “Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly smooth. But at least it was definite. We’ve landed. So… welcome to the moon.”

In answer, Nadia leaned over and gave him a lingering kiss through his open helmet visor. “You are a wonderful pilot, Brad McLanahan.” He felt his face redden.