Soon enough, their first night aboard the Beginner’s Luck had passed, and the twins awoke to the sound of their wristwatch alarms.

After a light breakfast the Schwabs began their second day in space, and despite the cramped living quarters, lack of fresh coffee and cumbersome space suits, a pleasant -if anxious- atmosphere had enveloped the ship like the calm before a storm, with its crew caught somewhere between terror and wonder as they drifted through space.

“OK…” Sander sighed, dropping his hand. “I can´t do this anymore…”

Growing restless as the morning stretched on, the teen had been reduced to playing cards with his sister in between their tasks… and unfortunately, could no longer be distracted from the suffocating boredom of survival.

“Like, why Uno?” he whined “Nobody even likes it!”

“I don´t know, it was light!” Lori snapped back. “If you wanted something different, you should have packed it.”

But just as Sander began to argue back, Barney shouted out to them.

“Hey guys! Check this out!”

Interrupted in their budding quarrel, the pair went over to see what the fuss was about, only to watch a little blip flicker on a screen in front of their parents.

“Is that-”

“Yup,” he nodded, cracking his neck. “Looks like we have company.”

“Another ship…” Lori mused out loud, leaning closer. “Who is it?”

“We don’t know… haven’t called them yet,” Evelyn explained.

“Why not?”

“Gotta make sure it´s friendly first.”

The idea hadn’t even crossed her mind and Lori instinctively stepped back, as if the little blinking radar dot might jump out and bite her.

“What do you mean? Like…” She trailed off, scouring her dad’s face for reassurance.

“I mean, it sure looks like one of Quentin´s builds… so I´d say there´s a good chance that it´s just another runner, like us.” Barney squinted at the monitor. “Still… after that EMP, who knows how far they’re willing to go.”

Seeing the effect their words were having on her, Barney shot his daughter a confident smile and reached over to swivel down a screen from the ceiling.

“Hey, relax… look: That’s our trajectory.” He highlighted a vector with a click. “And from what we’ve seen, that’s theirs.”

He traced an almost parallel line.

“So, they’re- what, also going to the moon?” Lori said hopefully, as she compared the two flight paths.

“Seems like it. But they left from the other side of the equator… ” her father answered, as he put the screen away and reached for his water pack. “Anyways, by now we’re probably on their radar too... and they haven’t changed course. So we’ll keep a healthy distance, and let them make first contact…”

“Better safe than sorry!” Evelyn added cheerfully, on her way toward the other hull to prepare their lunch.

By the time they’d taken their first bite of lukewarm spinach-ricotta paste, the excitement of this new development had evolved into a family-wide discussion concerning their imminent arrival, punctuated by Sander´s improbable musings.

“So what do you think this place is gonna look like?” he asked

“What, the base?”

“He said three hundred people, right?” Sander burped, referencing Quentin´s manifesto. “That´s kinda got me thinking Deathstar vibes…”

Spitting out a piece of plastic wrap that had clung to his previous bite, his father struggled to answer and Evelyn spoke up.

“Deathstar? I don´t get it…”

“You know, like…hexagonal doors, bare metal… little robots zooming around…”

“It´s probably more of a bunker, or something,” Lori answered, turning to her father as he finished chewing.

“Yeah, the files weren´t too specific on that… but remember at home with the ´scope? Looked like some sort of connected tent structure, to me at least.”

“Oh yeah… ” she hesitated, thinking back to their stargazing escapades following Quentin´s launch. “Or maybe that´s just the top part!”

“Well, we´ll know soon enough.” Barney stretched with a groan, finishing his meal.

The Schwabs fell back into silence, already tired of imagining all the work still to come.

After tilting the thrusters and double checking their orbit-entry angle, they then decided to try playing the only board-game they had packed, but the game quickly devolved into a makeshift version of Pictionary, when Barney took a break to pedal... and decided to up the module’s oxygen slightly, which made them all a bit more cheerful.

By the evening, Beginner’s Luck had made it far enough into the earth’s shadow for them to uncover their portholes, and while Evelyn curled up in the pilot seat with her favorite book, Barney sat stargazing with the twins until Lori passed out on his shoulder.

The second night brought familiarity to their sleep-deprived routine, but somehow did nothing to make the time pass faster. In fact, it seemed like the closer they got to their lunar destination, the slower things went.

“You worried?” Sander asked, surprising his sister with a question in the dark, after she’d come back from a late pedaling shift.

“About what?”

“Just... doing it right. The landing, I mean.”

Thinking about her responsibilities, Lori ran down the checklist in her mind and nodded to herself in the dark.

“I think it will be OK.”

“Yeah... me too.”

After a rather fitful night of odd dreams and sweaty space suits, their watches once again rang in a new morning... and with it, the countdown.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Crawling towards the cockpit, Lori saw that nobody had bothered to shut the porthole cover from the previous night. Through it, the moon loomed large ahead, flashing it’s giant, milky face with each rotation of the craft.

As their collective stomachs churned, the Schwab family couldn’t help but watch their mental hourglass empty, grain by tedious grain... wondering what the next hours would bring.

They ate breakfast but nobody had much of an appetite. Barney, in fact, barely touched his mushy brick of oatmeal before going over to the main console and reducing their speed. He then switched on a speaker as empty static poured out.

“Firmament? Do you copy?”

His words hung in the air... to no avail.

Barney repeated the same question a few more times, enunciating more clearly each time... until he finally gave it a rest and sat down to close his eyes.

Having seen his father practice their descent dozens of times (albeit in their living room) a quick glance at Barney’s fluttering eye lids told Sander that his dad was running that same, complicated sequence of procedures through his mind yet again.

Taking his lead, Sander did the same… Evelyn and Lori eventually followed suit and for the next hour, they all sat almost perfectly still as they focused on the tasks to come.

But Lori soon let her mind wander, confident in her abilities to poke 3 buttons at the designated times. Instead, she chose to calm her nerves by thinking about the other ship, as it floated around out there somewhere.

It was strangely comforting to know that someone else had also dared to attempt such a mission, and to know they weren’t so alone -or crazy- after all… And indeed, as she glanced at the radar, she saw that the mysterious little dot had crept slightly closer to them, as they soared together towards Quentin’s promised freedom.

Mid-meditation, Barney opened his eyes and tried to reach Vannevar again.

“Firmament? Do y-”

But suddenly, a voice broke through the wall of white noise and cut him off.

“Firmament? This is Castor. Do you copy?” the foreign voice said, before repeating itself.

Without leaving their posts, the Schwabs all leaned slightly closer to the speakers, hanging on to the stranger’s every word, and feeling more validated in their mission than ever before. But their elation was fleeting however, as the silence persisted… and another worry began to creep into Lori’s mind.

A look to Sander and then her parents, showed they were wondering the same thing: Why wasn’t anyone answering?

After a few more tries, and what seemed to be a curse in Spanish, Barney again held up the radio, switched frequencies and cleared his throat.

“Hey there, uh… Castor. This is Beginner’s Luck. Over.”

As they waited for a response, Evelyn reached over and cracked one of the window coverings to look out the slit... but between the sun’s glare and moon’s reflection, it would have been impossible to spot the other craft, even if they hadn’t been spinning.

“Castor? Do you read-” Barney tried again, making sure that their radio was set for broadcasting. But before he could finish, Castor’s captain finally responded.

“Beginner’s Luck… we read you…”

The words came slowly, as voices on the other end began to argue. Suddenly, the line went dead.

“Was that Italian?” Sander wondered aloud.

“Spanish… I think” Barney answered absentmindedly, as he spoke into the mic again. “Hey, uh... Where are you guys from? We thought we were the only ones to make it out here.”

Another pause, before Castor answered again, having apparently resolved their dispute.

“This is Professor Ariega, we left the Universidad technologica de Argentina four days ago. You are American, yes?”

“Uh Yes.” Barney said, looking back at his family “This is captain, uhh… Barney.”

Lori snorted at the self-appointed title, but her father just waved to quiet down.

“Yes, Hello. Have you managed to contact the Firmament?” Professor Ariega asked.

“No, not yet…”

“Please try again, we don’t have much battery power left. We need to land soon.”

Questioning his wife with a silent stare, Evelyn nodded back.

“OK, sure… hang on,” Barney cleared his throat. “Uh… Mr. Vannevar? We’re looking for your ship…”

“What was that?” said Sander, mocking his father’s unexpectedly stilted attempt.

“OK, Zip it!” Barney shot back, before trying again less formally. “Firmament? Do you copy? Firmament?... Hello?”

But still no answer came.

For the next couple of hours, both the Castor and the Beginner’s Luck began a strange, celestial ballet as they both approached the moon’s orbit, while taking great care as to not approach one another too closely.

To kill the time (and maybe just to avoid thinking about all the terrible possibilities that the Firmament’s silence brought up), Barney and Professor Ariega stayed on the line. At first, what started as a polite exchange of bearings and measurements, soon turned into slightly more personal questions... and eventually, jokes.

“You should cut the gravity soon if we’re gonna do this…” Evelyn whispered rather stiffly, as her husband finished his latest, cringe-worthy pun. “And turn it down, it’s hurting my ears.”

“Okay, hang on… Better?” he chuckled, lowering the sound.

“Uh-huh,” answered Evelyn, who couldn’t help but grow increasingly more anxious, the longer they went without any signs of life beneath them.

“Cut it? You mean... turn it off?”

Sander suddenly straightened in his seat with excitement, at his mother’s suggestion.

“Yeah, we have to start the landing sequence,” Barney acknowledged, checking the time.

“Yes!” the teen fist-pumped with delight.

Slowly, Barney hit the brakes on their spin, and the thrusters shook the Beginner’s Luck to a slower and slower rotation. The Schwabs felt themselves rise slightly against their seat belts, as weightlessness had returned.

Taking control of the craft, he then motioned it into position as Evelyn helped stabilize them for the descent. But just as Lori double-checked their trajectory to make sure they touched down in the planned landing zone, she spotted something strange in the corner of her topographical display.

Far below, between the sunken craters and cracked, chalky mesas, a strange speck had appeared... and, after rubbing her screen for a second, Lori realized that she wasn’t looking at a smudge after all: It was a ship.

“Hey, uh... I’ve got something here.”

Turning to see what her daughter was doing, Evelyn pulled up her feed and looked to Barney after a few confusing seconds.

“Is that the Firmament?”

With a distracted squint, her husband did a double take before staring intently at the blotch before him.

“Hang on…” he mumbled, before unbuckling himself to go kneel by an inverted periscope in the wall.

“Did you find the base?”

“Sit down!” Barney barked, catching his son with the corner of his eye, just as Sander was about to come join him.

It was hard to find the right angle from their off-kilter orientation... but with Evelyn’s help, they eventually managed to keep the Beginner’s Luck immobile just long enough for Barney to get a good look at the object below.

When he finally removed the lenses from his his eyes, Barney didn’t seem too happy.

“Come here…” he muttered to his wife.

She unstrapped herself and came floating over curiously.

“What does that look like to you?”

Evelyn fidgeted with the dials and refocused on Quentin´s landing coordinates with a wider view.

Instead of a single craft, Lori´s initial discovery slowly transformed before her very eyes, as almost a dozen vessels lay in various states of disrepair, all throughout the plateau beneath them.

“Oh wow...”

Although it was hard to be sure from such a distance, most ships looked to be in working condition… yet a few had evidently crashed upon arrival, with several patches of debris and charred, mangled wrecks strewn randomly about the improvised parking lot.

“Is everything OK?” Sander whined behind them, desperate to be part of the action… and Lori tilted her screen a bit, so that he wouldn’t feel left out.

“Those builds…” Evelyn muttered, oblivious to her son’s requests. “They´re all runners…”

“I mean up there…” Barney corrected her gravely, raising the periscope´s aim and grabbing the radio once more. “Are you guys seeing this?”

Right on the horizon´s lip, a spectral dome stood semi-deflated, reclining in on itself like a massive, wounded bouncy-castle that had been frozen in time. And embedded in it´s flank, the unmistakable remnants of a wayward runner, that had veered too far off course and apparently crippled Quentin´s campsite.

“Oh no…”

Feeling like she´d been punched in the stomach, Evelyn looked to her husband just as the Castor responded.

“Where is everyone?” asked Professor Ariega.

“I don’t know... They’re not answering. What do you want to do?”

After a slight pause, the Castor radioed back.

“No matter. We will land soon, then will know.” Ariega concluded.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Barney frowned. “Maybe if we orbit a little more...”

“We are at minimum power. There is no time.”

“Wh- hang on... so you’re just coming in hot?”

“Yes. That is our only option.”

Dumbfounded at their predicament, Barney didn’t know what to say.

“Do... Where are you aiming to touch down?”

“What do you mean? Tranquillitatis. Like in the landing files,” Professor Ariega answered, over a buzz of static.

“Yeah, OK…” Barney answered, his eyes glazing over as a million scenarios raced through his mind.

“Dad?”

Barney looked at his family and then at the microphone in his hand, as they crept ever nearer to the moon… but he had nothing else to say: It was time.