“I think I see ‘em! Look, right there…” Lori pointed, trying to line her finger up with the shiny box, moving slightly above them in the distance.

“Not now, guys!” Evelyn snapped back, without turning away from her console.

Looking past his, Sander peered out her porthole to the darkness beyond... and after a second, saw it too: High above the pearly lunar soil, the Castor lazily glided across the heavens with its precious little cargo.

Barney tilted his joystick forward and the Beginner’s Luck slowly found it’s optimal entry angle.

“How’s it looking?”

Missing a beat, Lori realized her dad was talking to her and quickly pulled up their current trajectory.

“Oh, um... OK. Go a bit slower.”

“Lori!” her father insisted, wanting the exact numbers before letting Quentin´s autopilot sequence take over.

“I know, wait!” she shot back, as the computer beside her clicked through its computations. “Three and a half knots.”

Drawing nearer to the Castor, Sander watched them fire repeated, misting jets of pressurized gas, the lower they went. With each blast, the tiny ship shifted slightly, pointing its landing gear towards the lunar surface...

Having kept the radio on, Barney hit the button to bid one final farewell.

“Good luck guys, see you on the other side.”

Lori and Sander chimed-in as well, and their mother joined them in the collective well-wishing, and Professor Ariega gave a quick “Thank you” and that was it.

The boxy craft, already smaller than a grain of rice to the twins’ eyes, shrank even more as it flew lower... and soon, it was barely more than a pinprick against the moon’s pale face.

“OK guys, it’s gonna be our turn soon. Let’s-”

Before their mother could finish, Lori gasped. Her brother saw it too and didn’t even need to squint for this one. The Castor’s small silhouette, which only moments before had been nothing more than a dwindling speck, had blossomed into a small burst of light, followed by a plume of debris.

“What? What?” Barney panicked, twisting around in his seat to see what had happened to his daughter.

But after he and Evelyn had caught up and followed their kids’ eyes, there wasn’t much to say.

“Shit!” Barney rumbled, as the pit in his stomach returned with a vengeance.

“That’s not supposed to happen... right?” Sander said, already knowing the answer.

Barney instinctively reached for the radio but it was too much for Evelyn, who just let her head hang, unwilling to watch any more...

“Castor? Cast-”

All of a sudden, a metallic bang rang out from the capsule beside them... And with it, an alarm.

“No! Goddamn it!”

Ripping his seat belt off, Barney launched himself to the back of the hull slightly harder than planned and slammed into the wall. Steadying himself, he frantically started checking a series of dials.

“What was that? What’s going on?” Lori cried out, but nobody had time to answer.

Straddling both seats, Evelyn was calling out system readings to her husband, as the alarm continued to play its endless loop.... until she thought to switch it back off.

“Hey! Tell us what’s going on!”

Stuck next to his sister as their parents yelled at each other from each end of the ship, it was too much for Sander to do nothing, with so much adrenaline flowing, and he interrupted them with a shout.

“Hello? Can we help?”

Going to their father, who had begun wrestling with a large pipe in a particularly uncomfortable angle, Evelyn did her best to summarize the situation.

“We were hit with their shrapnel! I think… Put your helmets on!”

“But... what? I-”

“Hold it. Tight! Right here,” Barney groaned and stood up, cutting his daughter off.

He withdrew himself to grab a tool, as his wife replaced him.

“The alternate fuel line is losing pressure. You guys want to help? Get into the cockpit and tell me when the thrusters fire. Go!”

Barney’s wild tone gave Sander goose bumps, and he shot a look to Lori as they scrambled to suit up.

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“OK, what do I do?” Sander called back, as he dutifully floated to the front of the ship and lowered himself into the pilot seat next to his sister, gently gripping the controls.

“Isolate the left side.”

Looking for the switches, Sander fumbled around for a second.

“Yep! Did it!”

“OK… try it now!”

Sander hesitantly squeezed the gas... but nothing seemed to happen.

“Are we turning?” their father grunted, as he and Evelyn strained to tighten their respective bolts.

Lori pulled up their bearings, and watched them fluctuate ever so slightly.

“Yeah, a little…”

“OK... do it again. Tell me how many degrees exactly.”

They did the little maneuver again, and the Beginner’s Luck moved 7 degrees to the left.

“Six... no, seven.” Lori called back.

“Is that good?” Sander asked… but immediately got his answer from the look Evelyn gave him, as his parents released their wrenches and floated back towards them.

“No. Nothing’s good. We can reroute fuel through a different line, but the pipes aren’t meant for this stuff… and it’s corroding,” Barney responded angrily as he rushed past.

“What about... what about preparing in orbit?” Sander stammered.

“Yeah, no. Get your stuff ready, we’re speeding things up,” Evelyn continued, as she reached for a maintenance panel. “Now!”

Without a word, Sander hurried off to collect his belongings. Doing the same, Lori soon followed, while trying her best to forget about the Castor’s explosive fate (or their soon-to-be toxic air) as she crawled through the connector.

“Don’t forget to take extra tanks,” Evelyn said in their earpieces.

Realizing that his oxygen had dipped below ten percent, Sander slid an air tank out of their stash and switched canisters. His sister, having already done so the night before, instead started bouncing back and forth off the walls between their hammocks, to grab whatever was still floating around.

Their parents soon joined them and, after a few hectic minutes, finally managed to pack all their bags and return to the main hull.

“Shit, hang on...”

Evelyn doubled back to take some food and water that they’d forgotten, while Barney triple-checked that all essential supplies had been secured for landing... but soon, he ran out of things to do except sit down and take a deep breath. Sander and Lori did the same, holding each other’s hand in an effort to keep calm.

Noticing the Ammonia crystallize on the side of his visor as the Beginner’s Luck’s air turned deadly, Barney looked to his children in their seats... and barely recognized them under all their equipment. With a silent prayer, Barney settled himself as much as possible and spoke into his mic again.

“Alright, tell me when we’re good to go.”

Evelyn slowly reemerged from the plastic tunnel, pushing the excess rations that she couldn’t carry in front of her like some sort of water-polo player.

“Almost.”

After tethering the cloud of supplies, she closed the airlock behind her and came to join her family, just as Barney started their landing protocol.

“Everybody strapped in? Good… OK, GPS check… Remote…”

The readings were all positive, and he called back to Sander, “OK... You up, bud.”

Hitting a line of buttons in precise order, Sander closer off the valves and rerouted all fuel to the second hull. Then came the electricity, and the lights flickered off.

“Main lines off, and generator B... is... on. Whatever’s left in the pipes is all we got,” Sander concluded, waiting for the stats to confirm his actions.

Changing radio frequencies, Lori verified the numbers flying by on her screen to help triangulate their flight path, and mindlessly armed the airbags… but the more information she saw, the less she could focus. Numbed by the danger and urgency of it all, things somehow seemed so distant and fake behind her visor.

“We´re a little steep… flatten us out…” Barney ordered. “Good. In three, two-”

Yet even when he started his countdown, it was like she was only half there… until the Beginner’s Luck jerked to the side and snapped her back to attention, as a burst of pressurized gas and a drum roll of whipping carbon-fiber cables released their ship’s second hull.

And still lower they flew...

“How we doing with Pressure?”

Evelyn rubbed the Ammonia off her helmet and gave her husband a thumbs-up. Lori did the same, thinking how odd it was to watch the collapsible tube they´d spent the last days crawling through, float right by past their starboard portholes... to say nothing of seeing an element of their ship stay in orbit, as they continued their descent.

But there wasn’t much time for contemplation: calling out each step as it happened, Barney switched scanners and juggled the joystick to position themselves sideways. Then, with a sputtering hiss, he used the last of their fuel to slow and rotated their capsule, as Evelyn opened their chute for the most crucial part.

“It’s gonna get bumpy, watch out!”

Almost immediately, the Schwabs all whip-lashed again and Sander gave out a painful little yelp, as his coccyx collided with his seat.

“You good?” radioed Barney, his voice barely a whisper in the sudden roar that had engulfed them.

Lori looked over and saw her brother struggling against the turbulence... but with a groan, he managed to pull the handle down and release the seats from their moorings. No longer bolted in place, they began to slide back and forth along the circular rails with each shake of the craft, letting the oily tracks compensate for the turbulence.

Unfortunately, all these measures did little to slow the rapidly plummeting family as they streaked through the moon´s atmosphere-less sky. Lori watched the hull around them tilt lower, until the shifting portholes revealed just how fast they were rushing towards the ground.

“We’re too fast!”

The words escaped her throat before she knew she had said them, and were met by a scolding growl from both of her overwhelmed parents.

“Stop it!”

“Just hang on!”

Hitting a final series of buttons, Barney inflated a pair of massive, Kevlar tires around the outside of the ship, then crossed his arms over his chest and leaned away from the console.

“Done!”

Evelyn and the twins did the same, retracting their limbs as best they could as they waited for the inevitable impact…

And then it happened.

The Beginner’s Luck slammed into the ground and her seat belt knocked Lori’s wind out, as the ship around her made first contact with the lunar soil.

She heard her mom scream something over the radio, but her ear-bud was soon knocked out by the second, gut-churning impact... and everything began to spin.

The walls and floor became a whirlwind of plastic and metal, as the Schwabs’ chairs slid lighting-fast around and around their rails, yet remained mostly upright compared to the rest of the ship around them.

A loose bag ricocheted off Lori’s back and hit Sander, and the Beginner’s Luck hit the ground once again with a sickening bounce.

And another bounce… the metal walls heaved around them with a mighty groan.

And another.

But the closer the bounces became to each other, the faster the Beginner’s Luck seemed to spin… and just as Lori couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to reach out a desperate hand towards her brother, the ship hit a large rock and cracked open.

In the split-second before losing consciousness, Lori felt herself get rag-dolled from her chair into the blindingly white aperture that had suddenly been torn into their spaceship... and her world went black.