Barney was the next to stand up and, after quickly pulling Evelyn to her feet, he jogged over to check if the explosion had damaged the craft. He waded out of sight through the muddy terrain and scoured the ship’s exterior for damage, while Evelyn recruited their children’s help.

“Gimme a hand!” their mother grunted, as she climbed up and strained to unseal the main hatch.

As if someone had laid a large, capital “H” letter over a nest of flotation devices, the now-smooth containers had gained convex extremities during their final remodeling, and now resembled elongated, silver tic-tacs… and it took a moment for Sander and Lori to recover from their astonishment, stupefied at seeing the Beginner’s Luck for the first time out in the open.

Bound by a carbon-fiber tunnel that had thankfully remained unscathed, the pair of round metal shells looked almost alien, with patchy little forests of disparate antennae reaching out at seemingly random intervals, wherever the lack of rivets, solar panels or portholes permitted.

“Guys?”

Gathering themselves, the twins climbed up the shallow cradle of scaffolding and empty plastic barrels to join her… and the trio finally managed to snap the hatch into place.

“Damn!” Lori wheezed “I thought this was supposed to be light, what happened to minimum weight?”

“It’s aluminum alloy,” Barney answered distractedly, as he reappeared from behind the second hull and completed his survey. “That’s as light as it gets...”

“And believe me, you’ll be glad it’s thick once we’re up,” winked Evelyn as she pushed past her twins, vanishing into the shadows of the now-opened cockpit.

Sander watched her hit a switch that he’d wired a fortnight ago… and couldn’t help but feel a slight jolt of pride, as the craft’s milky LED bulbs flickered down the cabin’s walls, to the engine room.

Next into the Beginner’s Luck was Lori, but neither she nor her brother could take more than a few steps into their creation, before Evelyn had another job for them: she pulled open a compartment in the wall and heaved out their spacesuits.

“Put these on. Just- check the configurations to make sure it´s yours… ” she reminded them, tossing Sander a helmet

Picking up her suit as Barney returned and joined them, Lori gawked at the awkward pile of material in her hands… and realized she couldn´t recall much from her parents´ late-night demonstrations.

A glance to her brother told her that she wasn´t alone in her hazy recollections, as Sander had also picked up one of the suits, eyeing it suspiciously.

“How do we… uh, put in on again?”

Surprised by their reaction, Barney turned to the teens in confusion.

“Seriously guys?” he frowned “Through the back. Hang on… Just- Let me do this real quick, and I’ll show you. It´s easy…”

Considering that their mother and father had become engrossed in counting wires beneath the floor, the twins decided to let their parents be and exited the ship.

They dropped the suits onto the ground below them… and Lori immediately managed to land hers in a puddle.

“Shit… Mom?”

But Evelyn had already crawled halfway through into the Beginner’s Luck’s second hull, with only her feet still visible between them and their father.

“OK, I remember a little… Look!”

Sander, having avoided his sister’s mistake, had managed to release a pair of latches on the suit’s backside, and split the hard chest-plate on either side of its main circuitry, along barely visible hinges.

“You gotta climb through it from here…” And as he said it, Sander stepped into the surprisingly comfortable cocoon and pulled it up over his jeans.

Lori fought with the wet latches and eventually cracked her suit open as well. As she sank one, and then another foot into its’ snug recesses, she realized that despite the muddy exterior, not a single drop had penetrated the suit’s interior, and all the moisture had simply pearled off the waxy material.

“There we go,” Sander breathed, as he bent forward and felt the clunky, yet form-fitting suit hug him more tightly.

Puffing his chest out and sucking in his chin to get a better look, Sander then found the “on-off” switch... and flipped it. In an instant, a slight heat ran from his lower back to his knees and a constellation of little lights lit up all across the suit, culminating in his wrist-screen flickering to life.

“Nice… Ha-ha! It´s all coming back to me!”

Sander turned to his sister giddily, looking like some kind of human Christmas tree in the early morning. But before Lori could do the same, their father called out to them from the ship.

“You got it?”

Lori gave him a thumbs-up and then flipped her suit on as well, illuminating the inch-thick fabric on her forearms with a series of buttons and switches. Barney hopped down and waved Sander closer, as he grabbed his daughter´s wrist.

“So, little refresher: you got GPS, that’s you, Lori… those are our suits, still in the ship…”

Barney tapped the small screen´s plastic casing a few times and made a series of dots appear.

“You’ve got radio… there´s a camera feed from the helmet…”

“This is so cool!” whispered Sander, without even knowing why he’d lowered his voice.

“It should be! It’s basically a stripped-down version of NASA’s design, with all their redundancy replaced with this stuff, on the back-” he continued, spinning Sander around. “Extra air tank valves, parachute-”

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“Wait, we have a parachute?” Lori looked up in shock “Why?”

Her father stopped fiddling with the suits and paused, apparently trying to find the most suitable answer.

“Uh, well…” he began, before clearing his throat to assume a more confident tone. “Let’s be real: The math works, and Quentin´s construction is solid… but what we’re doing is inherently dangerous and you know that. Something can go wrong... God forbid in space, or once we get on the moon, but also during takeoff.”

Barney reached out to ruffle his son’s hair, in a way he hadn’t done in years.

“The second we leave the ground, our lives are at risk. So, to put all the chances on our side, I installed an altimeter in there,” he tapped his son´s wrist. “If we need to bail during our ascent, at least it won’t mean we’re doomed. And you don’t even have to do anything, either. The chute pops at 2000 feet.”

After digesting his wordy response, the reality that they might soon be falling out of the sky slowly dawned on Lori, and she looked back and forth between her parents in disbelief, as Evelyn reemerged from the hatch...

“What´s the matter?”

“Look, let’s focus on what we can control. Let’s try the helmets… and you guys practice your routines so we’ll be as prepared as possible,” Barney offered, trying to dissipate the sudden tension.

“OK let’s do this,” Sander shot back, trying his best to psych himself up for what was about to come. “We got this, right?”

Looking to her brother, Lori hesitated… but, seeing the steadfast look in her brother’s eye, nodded back. With a grin, Sander grabbed her with a bear-hug. Evelyn and Barney joined in to complete the family huddle and for a minute, simply stood there, heads together as the sun rose.

But the moment soon passed and, with their parents now also suited, they returned to the Beginner’s Luck in contemplative silence.

Tossing their belongings under their seats, Lori and Sander sat down and were promptly handed their air tanks and helmets, as Evelyn helped connect the different latches and valves.

Following her instruction, Lori lowered the glass over her and fastened the collar into place, just as a blast of stale air rocketed up past her ears. She looked to her grimacing brother, who seemed to be experiencing the same, annoying feature.

“Just make sure you don’t waste the tanks... We won’t need extra oxygen until about 10’000 feet, at the earliest.”

As he spoke, Barney closed the hatch and just like that, the last sliver of flooded grass vanished from view. Lori watched with a frown and thought how anticlimactic it was to see fresh air disappear from her life forever… but didn’t have much time to mourn her loss.

Her family buckled themselves into their seats and switched their suits on, and Lori pushed the sadness from her mind, while the first of many radio communications crackled in her ears.

“Honey, tilt your mic back. You’re breathing right into it.”

“Sorry.”

Sander rearranged the mic next to her, sending a blast of grating static into her helmet.

“God! Dude, watch it!”

“Sorry…”

The voice sounded stiff and distant through the earpiece, and Lori was already tired of it.

“Dad? Can I take this off? It’s making me claustrophobic.”

“Yeah of course,” Barney answered, taking his off as well.

The rest of the family followed suit.

“Thanks... OK, so now what? Test run, right?”

“You got it!” he shot back, turning away from the twins as his wife joined him in the cockpit.

In a flurry of clicks they turned on the monitors and equipment, and the Beginner’s Luck buzzed sleepily, as electricity rushed through the hull around them. Sander could see the second compartment to his right light up as well, as the portholes started glowing.

“Pressure.”

“Check.”

“Thruster rotation… Left.”

“Check.”

“Right.”

“Middle.”

“Check.”

The following minutes passed in a blur of system stress-tests, technical verification and inventory, but before they knew it, there was nothing left to do… Except lift off.

“So, this is it guys” a sweaty Barney turned to say, after having finally gotten to the end of his to-do list.

“This is it…”

With a final look to his children and wife, Barney took a deep breath.

“Need to use the bathroom?”

“Let’s go!” Sander snapped, tiring of the collective anxiety.

“Right.”

And with the flick of a switch, Barney turned all the equipment in the ship back off and then pulled a lever.

With a rattle, a huge, stratospheric balloon began inflating on the top of their craft. A second lever released the buoys from the Beginner’s Luck’s base with a splash… and just like that, they were off.

Leaning against their seatbelts, the Schwabs watched from their little windows as the ground drifted away beneath them…

Then the tree tops…

And soon they couldn’t even see the cratered river anymore, as the wind had started to drift them deeper into the wilderness behind their cul-de-sac. With amazement, Sander recognized even little lines as the freeway that ran by their house.

But all at once, another sight caught his eye, along with the rest of his family: In a smattering of contrails that stretched to each horizon, a dozen of what first seemed to be “missiles” began rising up around them.

But these were no missiles.

“Are those-”

But Sander never got to finish his question, as Barney detached himself from his chair to get closer to the window, laughing louder and louder as each second passed.

Drawn irresistibly to their own portholes, Lori and Sander also detached themselves despite their mother’s protests and eventually, Evelyn came to join her husband as he shrieked in exhilaration with each new rocket-ship he saw.

“Holy shit! It’s… They came! They’re going!” he gasped, fighting the English language to express his joy.

“Are those…” wondered Sander, quietly.

“We aren’t alone!” Barney interrupted with a cheer, as he hugged his wife and reached towards the other side of the shuttle, to shake his son triumphantly by the shoulders.

But their celebration was short lived… Indeed, just when Lori joined their passionate embrace, a different object appeared: black and cigar-shaped, an ominous blotch slowly exited a cloud amid the sparse fleet of homemade spacecrafts.

Noticing the dark stain on the otherwise gorgeously striped dawn, Evelyn was the first to comment on its bizarre presence.

“Woah, do you see that?”

Intrigued, the family turned towards her… but before anyone could answer, it happened. A silent, blinding flash distorted the air around the EMP, as its electromagnetic wave rippled out around it. When the Schwabs had blinked away the spots from their eyes, the dark tube was already tumbling back to earth.

“What the hell was that?” yelled Sander, rubbing his face furiously.

“No no no no….” was all Barney could answer as he stared wild-eyed from the Beginner’s Luck’s portholes, his vision slowly returning... But the horror awaiting him made their father almost wish it hadn’t.

As if frozen in time, the other ships had abruptly had their engines cut off and their circuitry fried, from the electrical impulse. As the last of their upward momentum died, the crafts reached their apogee and began falling back to earth.

In a rain of doomed souls, the skies cleared around them until only they were left. Barney fell to his knees, leaned his forehead against the thick circular glass, as Sander bellowed again.

“What the fuck just happened? What’s going on?”

Evelyn went to her husband in a daze, and eventually pointed to Lori’s darkened phone after a few more of her son’s outbursts.

“Calm down Sander. They hit us with a pulse...”

“What does that mean? I don’t- Why did they all start falling?” sniveled Lori, swept up in her dad’s despair without even fully understanding what she just witnessed.

“Anything “ON” got turned off.” grunted Barney, as he covered his eyes with his palms to stem the tears. “For good.”

“What about us?”

“Everything was off, we’re using balloons...”

Lori looked back to the window. The sun had risen enough to see the ocean in the distance.

“Why weren´t they using balloons?”

“They were just following the plan. Step by step…” her father mumbled solemnly, before surprising them with a question of his own. “You know why everyone´s leaving today, right? It´s not just some anniversary or whatever… The moon´s orbit is at its lowest point. Closest to Earth…”

“So what?” demanded Sander.

“We would´ve missed the deadline… Couldn´t cook enough fuel for the lift-off, with Owly´s God-damned gestapo sniffing around. And I wasn´t gonna wait a whole ´nother year… so I improvised.”

Barney blew his nose without looking up.

“We got lucky.”

For a few more minutes, Evelyn cried quietly on her husband´s shoulder… but the Schwabs soon fell silent, each sitting on the floor by their own porthole and playing the tragedy on a loop in their minds.