Final Days

‘Doing fine, hon,’ said Lester, his tone calm and reassuring. ‘Just guide her in best you can.’

The craft twisted around in its flight until it was oriented the right way. They dropped yet lower over the next several minutes, until thick plumes of grey dust billowed up around the lander, obscuring the view through the external cameras. Almost before he realized it, the lander had touched down with a gentle thump.

Saul let out a shaky breath. I’m alive, he thought.

‘That was a sweet landing, honey,’ said Lester, turning to her with a look of approval. ‘Why, I—’

Saul saw the back of Lester’s helmet shatter under a blow from the wrench gripped in one of Mitchell’s gloved hands. Lester exhaled sharply and reached out with one hand to the control panel before him. Another blow followed immediately, smashing through the ruins of his helmet to strike the back of his skull with sickening force.

Saul scrabbled at his restraints, then raised one arm in a feeble attempt at defending himself, just as Mitchell aimed the next blow at him. Saul’s helmet fractured under the impact, but still held together.

Mitchell leaned over him, his face filled with a snarl. Out of the corner of his eye, Saul could see Amy unbuckling herself, before bending forward to reach under her seat.

Mitchell pulled the wrench back for a second swing, but the module was too cramped and the weapon slammed into a control panel behind him, tumbling from his grasp. Saul tore frantically at his restraints while, swearing under his breath, Mitchell crouched down to find the wrench.

Amy stood up from her seat just as Saul managed to fight loose of his restraints. She gripped a weapon of her own in both hands. At first glance it looked like a regular shotgun, but with a peculiarly home-made appearance, as if it had been assembled from random pieces of junk.

Before Saul had time to wonder what the Roses were doing with a shotgun hidden on the lander, Amy fired it at Mitchell from point-blank range.

It took some moments for Saul to register what happened next. Mitchell had shifted to one side with startling, inhuman speed, the bullet smacking into a compumounted on the bulkhead behind him. It was as if someone had inserted a jump-cut into reality: first Mitchell had been here, but now he was there.

Saul already knew from the how-tos how easily the bullet could have punctured the lander’s thin walls.

Amy swore and tried to take aim a second time, and Saul noticed how the trigger mechanism was roomy enough for a spacesuit-gloved finger to fit around it.

Mitchell leaned over Lester’s prone form to snatch the weapon away from her, moving once again with that shocking fluid velocity.

Saul then remembered what Donohue had said. He’s not even human.

He grabbed hold of Mitchell from the side, only for the man to swing Amy’s rifle around like a club, slamming the stock into Saul’s ribs and sending him stumbling backwards. By the time Saul had struggled half upright again, Mitchell was swinging the rifle back and forth between him and Amy. The lander felt more intensely cramped and claustrophobic than ever.

‘I don’t want either of you getting in the way,’ Mitchell shouted. ‘Amy, I—’

The interior of the lander was so tiny that, when Mitchell glanced towards Amy, it was easy for Saul to reach out with one gloved fist and knock the rifle barrel upward, so that it smacked into a control panel mounted on the ceiling. Saul pushed his advantage by grabbing hold of the barrel, struggling desperately to pull it from Mitchell’s grasp. Mitchell was sweating inside his suit, with an expression suggesting he was in considerable discomfort. As his eyes became unfocused, Saul felt the man’s grip on the weapon begin to loosen.

‘Now you listen, you piece of shit,’ Saul barked, ‘you’re going to—’

A sound like a hammer blow filled the tiny cabin, and a nearly irresistible force almost lifted Saul into the air.

He slammed shoulder-first into one of the forward control panels, hard enough to leave him feeling dazed. He caught a glimpse of lunar regolith, down between the lander’s legs, then realized the forward hatch had somehow been blown, the air inside the craft explosively decompressing. Mitchell pushed Amy out of the way and literally dived head-first through the narrow hatch, before landing between the lander’s legs, in a great cloud of dust.

‘Don’t move,’ he heard Amy warning him over the A/V. ‘Your helmet’s cracked. I need to resecure that hatch before we can do anything else.’

‘What the hell just happened?’

Amy reached down for a handle attached to one side of the hatch. ‘Give me a hand here,’ she ordered.

Saul took hold of the handle on the opposite side, and held it in place, following her clipped directions as she reset the locking mechanism. He had to lean over Lester to do s and noticed his unmoving eyes staring off through one of the lander’s triangular windows.

‘I don’t know how he figured out how to do that,’ Amy muttered tightly, ‘but he triggered the emergency release.’

Saul remembered studying Mitchell when he had assumed he might be asleep, and seeing the man’s eyes dart back and forth under their lids, no doubt planning and preparing, while searching out flaws in the lander’s UP-linked control systems.

‘I think I might know,’ he admitted.

Once Amy had finished resecuring the hatch, she reached out and flipped a couple of switches on a control panel, then did the same with a virtual panel floating to one side. A distant hiss quickly built to a roar as the cabin filled up with air once more, from an emergency tank.

‘How he did it doesn’t matter right now,’ said Amy. ‘Well, that’s us repressurized. Now we’ve got to help Lester.’

‘Amy . . .’