Kestrel: Nobile Rim 2028

Eight astronauts. Four go down to the lunar south pole, and the landing radar fails at two thousand meters.

What is left, forty-nine seconds later, is a vehicle lying at twenty-three degrees in a boulder field undisturbed since before there was anything on Earth that could be called alive — a commander dead in a compartment full of vacuum, two survivors behind a hatch held shut by twenty-eight thousand newtons, and no way to tell the Earth that anyone is breathing.

Houston can only watch. Two cameras pass overhead for eleven minutes out of every ninety-six, and what they see is the whole of what is known.

What follows is not a rescue. It is engineering, arithmetic and discipline, carried out by exhausted people in a room with no floor, in a shadow two billion years old — and the price of every hour of it.