‘Could he have flown another route?’ asked Evelyn.
‘It’s possible.’ Julian looked up at the sky, as if Locatelli had left some sign behind for them in it.
‘Probable even,’ said Rogachev. ‘He had problems regaining control of the shuttle. If he succeeded, he could have drifted off course a fair bit.’
‘Where exactly is the mining station again?’ asked Amber.
‘In the mining zone.’ Julian pointed his outstretched arm towards the dust barrier. ‘Just a hundred kilometres from here on the axis between Cape Heraclides and Cape Laplace in the north.’
‘By the way, how’s our oxygen looking?’
‘Good, considering the circumstances. The problem is that we can’t rely on the maps any more.’
Amber lowered her map. Until now, she had had the advantage of clear visibility. Every crater, every hill marked on the lunar maps had reliably appeared on the horizon at some point, clarifying their position precisely, but in the sea of dust their sense of orientation would be incredibly reduced.
‘So we should try our best not to get lost,’ Evelyn put in with matter-of-fact firmness.
‘And Warren?’ asked Momoka insistently. ‘What about Warren?’
‘Well…’ Julian hesitated. ‘If only we knew that.’
‘What a helpful response, thank you!’ She snorted. ‘Why don’t we look for him?’
‘We can’t risk that, Momoka.’
‘Why not? We have to go to the foot of the Cape anyway.’
‘And from there directly on to the station.’
‘We don’t even know if he really fell,’ Evelyn reflected. ‘Maybe—’
‘Of course he did!’ exploded Momoka. ‘Don’t kid yourself! Do you really want to drive happily on while he’s stuck in a wreck together with that arsehole Carl?’
‘There’s no question of us doing it happily,’ protested Evelyn. ‘But the zone is huge. He could be anywhere.’
‘But—’
‘We’re not looking for him,’ said Julian decisively. ‘I can’t be responsible for that.’
‘You really are unbelievable!’
‘No, but it would be unbelievable to not get to the mining station because of you,’ said Evelyn, her tone audibly cooler. ‘It’s not that we don’t care about Warren, but we can’t search the entire Mare Imbrium until we run out of oxygen.’
‘I have a suggestion.’ Oleg cleared his throat. ‘In a way, Momoka is right. We have to go over to the Cape anyway, so why don’t we just drive along a little and keep our eyes open? Not an organised search, just three, four kilometres and then on towards the mining station.’
‘Sounds sensible,’ said Evelyn.
Julian pondered the suggestion for a moment. So far they hadn’t needed to touch the oxygen reserves.
‘Okay, I think we can do that,’ he said reluctantly.
They veered off, headed for the landmass and steered into the bay a little, the ascending mountain range to their left. A few minutes later, they reached a shallow ditch which stretched out diagonally across the ground, seeming to emerge right out of the fog.
Julian slowed down the rover.
‘That’s not a ditch,’ said Oleg.
They were staring at a broadly carved-out path. It had been torn into the regolith like a wound, its edges forced up.
‘It’s fresh,’ said Amber.
Momoka stood up from her seat and stared into the distant cloud, then turned to the other side.
‘There,’ she whispered.
Something was lying at an angle on the slope where the strand of the Cape swung up to the mountain range. It was reflecting the sunlight: a small, elongated and alarmingly familiar shape.
It also marked the end of the path.
Without saying a word, Julian accelerated. He drove at top speed, and yet Momoka still managed to overtake him. The terrain was only gently inclined, bearable for the rovers, which thanks to the flexible wheel suspension were able to work their way swiftly up the path. By now there was no longer any doubt that they were looking at the wreck of the Ganymede. Its legs gone, it rested in the middle of the rockfall on the slope, wedged tightly between larger chunks of rock. Its rear hatch was wide open. Not far from the ramp lay a body, its head and shoulders in the shadow of the rock. While Julian was still figuring out how he could hold Momoka back, she had already jumped down from the driver’s seat and was rushing up the hill. He heard her wheezing on the speakers in his helmet, saw her fall to her knees. Her upper body was swallowed by the shadow, then a short, ghostly cry resounded.
‘Evelyn,’ said Julian on a separate frequency. ‘I think you would be the best one to…’
‘Okay,’ said Evelyn unhappily. ‘I’ll look after her.’
Sinus Iridum
Considering all the setbacks he had faced so far, Hanna had been amazed to make it to the mining station without problem. He was all too familiar with the nature of escalation. The damaged axle of the buggy was bound to break apart prematurely, and that’s exactly what it did, the dramaturgy of failure obliging fifteen kilometres too soon. It wasn’t a pothole or geological fault that finished it off, however. It broke in two with banal finality on even ground, bringing the vehicle to an abrupt halt, forcing it into a spin, and that was that.
Hanna sprang down into the debris. The basic rule of survival was to think positive. The fact that the old banger had even made it that far, for example. And the fact that he had an extraordinary sense of orientation, which had enabled him to find his way without fail so far. Regardless of the miserable visibility, he had held his course, of that he was certain. As long as he just kept going in a straight line, he should reach the mining station within about an hour. But he would have to really watch out from now on. The dust concealed dangers that weren’t so easy to get away from on foot as in the buggy. He would have to keep his distance. Admittedly the beetles were quite slow, but the filigree, nimble spiders had a tendency to make unpleasant surprise appearances.
Hanna let his gaze wander. Some distance away, he saw a ghostly silhouette hurrying along towards him. He walked over to the buggy’s cargo bed, grabbed a survival pack in each hand and marched off.
Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura
While Evelyn attended to her emotional support duties, Julian, Amber and Oleg feverishly searched the inside of the wreck and the nearby area, but there was nothing to suggest that Hanna was still around.
‘How did he get away?’ Amber wondered.
‘The Ganymede had a buggy on board,’ said Julian, as he trudged around the nose of the shuttle. ‘And it’s disappeared.’
‘Yes, and I know where,’ Oleg’s voice rang out from the opposite end of the ship. ‘Maybe you should come over here.’
Seconds later, they were all standing in the path. So far they had only noticed the devastation the shuttle had inflicted on the regolith when making its emergency landing, the brutality with which it had dug into the surface, but something different now captured their attention: a story about someone who had set off into the far-away dust, a story told by—