He felt his lunch rising in his throat, and he really, truly did not want that to go any further in a pressure suit helmet. So he closed his eyes and hugged the wall of the ship, and tried to tell himself he was safe and snug, inside the stinking interior of the Soyuz, crammed between the wall and Arkady’s bony body…

Geena could feel the oxygen blowing across her face, hear the warm hums and whirs of her backpack. She looked down at the bottle-green skin of the Soyuz. She could see — a mundane detail — that here and there the paint was bubbled, from the heat of the attitude thrusters.

And when she looked along the cylindrical length of the Soyuz, she could see at one extreme the big, soft-looking contour of the strapped-on heatshield that was supposed to aerobrake them back to Earth orbit, and at the other, strapped to the hull, the angular, spidery form of the little lunar lander.

She began to make her way towards the lander, hand over gloved hand, following holds built into the hull of the Soyuz. A tether trailed behind her. She felt her legs dangle behind her, inert and useless in the pressurized suit; the exertion sent a familiar warmth spreading through her arms and hands as she pulled herself along.

It was just like the three EVAs she had made from Station in Earth orbit, she told herself. Or just like the sims she had done in the Vomit Comet, or the big weightless training facility, the pool at Ellington AFB…

Except it wasn’t.

There was no Earth looming alongside the craft like a blue wall of ocean and cloud, huge and enclosing; nor was there the feel of water around her, the murky forms of swimmers to assist her.

When she raised her head from the metal surface before her, when she looked around, there was nothing. And if she let go, she felt, she was going to fall, all the way back down to that blue floor far below, like a trick diver aiming for a bathtub from a telegraph pole.

“Hey.”

She looked down. The upper half of Henry’s pressure suit, sharply lit, was protruding from the hatch; with his gloved hands he was paying out her tether.

Henry said, “You look as if you’re going to leave fingerprints in that handrail.”

When she looked to the hull before her, she could see how her hands had wrapped themselves around a rail.

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.