‘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 . . .’

She ignored him, pulling open a steel cabinet and withdrawing a large white plastic box. ‘Medical kit,’ she explained. ‘We’ll need to dress that wound.’

Saul gazed down at Lester’s slumped form, with a feeling of hopelessness, as Amy hurriedly pulled off her helmet and dropped it to one side.

Saul pulled off his own damaged helmet too, then helped her remove Lester’s. Tears trickled down her cheeks, as she murmured Lester’s name over and over again, like a litany. Lester’s head rolled to one side, his jaw slack and his eyes vacant.

‘Amy, please, listen to me.’

She began weeping in earnest. ‘We can get him to a hospital in Copernicus,’ she insisted. ‘Someone might still be there, someone who can . . .’

Saul stared down at Lester’s lifeless features. ‘It’s too late for that.’