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.