There was a handrail, and two slide wires that ran the length of the curving hull, and Nadezhda tethered herself to the wires. It was a routine she’d practised a hundred times in the sims at Clavius and New Houston, and a dozen times in lunar orbit. There was no reason why now should be any different.

No reason, except that the Moon wasn’t where it should be.

In lunar orbit, the Moon had been a bright, curving carpet beneath her all the time. But out here, the Moon was all of five million miles away, reduced to a blue button three or four arms-lengths away. And Nadezhda was suspended in a huge three-hundred-sixty-degree planetarium just studded with stars, stars everywhere…

Everywhere, that is, except for one corner of the sky blocked by a vaguely elliptical shadow, sharp-edged, one rim picked out by the sun.

It was Icarus: a near-Moon asteroid, Nadezhda’s destination.

When she was selected for this mission, Nadezhda had studied the history of the Earthborn astronauts, right back to the beginning, Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard in their tin-can spaceships. She’d learned she had at least one thing in common with them.

She supported the objectives of the mission, of course. She had trained up on the science of Icarus, on near-Earth objects in general. She had trained up on the Moonseed, on the various coexistence and communications and exploitation schemes that had been proposed. She was interested in the science, the future of mankind, all of that stuff. Of course she was. She wouldn’t have come so far otherwise.

But what really motivated Nadezhda, here and now, five million miles from home, was not screwing up.

Every astronaut, right back to the beginning, had felt the same, she suspected. Don’t screw up. Finish the checklist, smile for the cameras. Because not screwing up was the only way to get on another flight.

Maybe that particularly applied to her, the first lunar-born deep-space astronaut, on this NASA-L mission. If she screwed up, the Earthborns would have a field day, and it would be a long time before she, or another Moonborn, would get another chance.

Of course, inevitably, their time would come.

All lunar citizens were astronauts anyway. The Earthborns just didn’t see that.

Under the big glass domes at Clavius and Tycho, human-powered flight was the most popular sport: thick air, low gravity…Nadezhda had grown up in a world where children flapped back and forth all the time like bony chickens, learning the rudiments of three-dimensional navigation and aerodynamics as soon as they were born.

And, on the Moon, everyone flew in space. You could reach orbit with a back yard rocket motor smaller than a car engine; even Armstrong and Aldrin had proved that. People went through sub-orbital lobs longer than Alan Shepard’s just to go shopping. Lunar inhabitants were nature’s astronauts.

But not to those Earthborn mission planners in New Houston, however.