Read Chapter 2: Last Two Alive

The crawlspace was a coffin with a view. The service tunnel ran beneath the habitat ring, barely a meter high, its grated floor slick with frost that had condensed and frozen over the years. Elena lay on her back, breathing in shallow sips, watching her own breath fog the inside of her helmet. Her suit's HUD blinked at the corner of her vision: *AIR REMAINING: 1:12:34*. She'd been counting down since they'd crawled inside.

Jack was beside her, his broad shoulders scraping both walls. He'd stopped talking two minutes ago, which was either a good sign or the one before unconsciousness. Elena didn't ask. She was too busy trying to remember the schematics of this crawlspace, trying to recall if there was a maintenance hatch at the far end, trying not to think about the silence where the base's ambient hum should have been.

"Vasquez." His voice cracked through the comm. "You see that?"

She followed his gaze. Twenty meters ahead, a dull orange light pulsed in the dark: an emergency relay panel, still alive.

They crab-walked toward it, knees grinding against the grated floor. The panel was recessed into the tunnel wall, its screen cracked but functional. Elena pressed her palm against the reader. The screen flickered, then resolved into a cascade of diagnostics.

**COPERNICUS BASE — EMERGENCY OVERRIDE** **ATMOSPHERE: FAILED — SECTOR C** **LIFE SIGNS: 2** **DESIGNATION: VASQUEZ, E. / MERCER, J.**

Elena stared at the words. *Two*. Not three. Not seven. Just them.

"HQ won't know," Jack said quietly. "If we don't fix this, they'll just think we went dark. A bad day, a report, a salvage crew in six months."

"Six months." The words tasted like dust. "We'll be bones by then."

The AI chirped again, a secondary screen opening. **RELAY POINT 7: STATUS NOMINAL. COMMUNICATIONS ARRAY OUT OF RANGE. MANUAL INTERVENTION REQUIRED.**

Elena felt a spark of something dangerously close to hope. Relay Point 7—the external transmitter station that bounced signals over the crater rim to Earth-side satellites. If it was still functional, if they could reach it, they could send a distress call.

"How far?" Jack asked, reading her mind.

Elena's fingers flew across the screen, pulling up a topographical map. The route was ugly. Overland, through the basaltic flats, around the Tycho-adjacent ridge. "Forty-one kilometers. Three hours in a rover, if we push the battery."

"Three hours." Jack shook his head. "Our suits won't last that long. We'll need to be in a pressurized cabin the whole way."

"Then we take one of the utility rovers from the garage. They're not pressurized either."

Jack was quiet for a moment. Then he pushed himself up, hunched against the tunnel ceiling, and pointed at a different section of the map. A cluster of topographic lines that meant one thing: elevation change. "Here. The crater field."

Elena stared at him. "Are you out of your mind? That's a graveyard of micro-meteorite impacts. The terrain's unstable, the regolith is loose, and if we lose traction—"

"—we go faster." Jack's voice was flat. "Sixteen kilometers. Half the distance, half the time. We cut through the southern rim, hook around the Kepler massif, and come out two hundred meters from Relay Point 7."

"The drive time is shorter. The *death* time is shorter too." Elena scrambled to her feet, ignoring the way the tunnel ceiling scraped against the top of her helmet. "The rover's not built for that terrain. One bad bounce, one wheel in a fissure, and we're walking the rest of the way on foot. We won't have the air."

"You're assuming we hit a fissure."

"I'm *calculating* the probability. It's not zero. And if we're on foot—"

"They're not going to send a rescue," Jack cut in. "Not fast enough. The only way anyone knows we're alive is if we get that station back online. That means we get there before our air runs out. Not after. Not maybe. *Before*."

Elena opened her mouth to argue, but the ground chose that moment to remind her it was tired of being ignored. The tremor hit without warning—a low roll that built into a violent shake, the grating beneath her feet rattling like teeth in a skull. She grabbed the relay panel for balance, and the screen flickered, red warning lights blooming across its surface.

**SEISMIC EVENT: MAGNITUDE 3.8** **STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED** **SECTOR C COLLAPSE IMMINENT**

"Better idea, Vasquez," Jack said, and his voice had an edge she hadn't heard before. Not anger. Something rawer. "We move right now, over the crater field, and you save the debating for later. When we're alive."

Elena looked at the map. Then at her HUD. Then at him.

His eyes through the visor were steady. Not cruel. Just certain.

"Fine," she said. "But if we die, I'm filing a complaint."

The utility garage was a nightmare of shadow and twisted metal. The tremor had shaken loose a rack of tools, and they picked their way through the debris, stepping over what Elena tried very hard not to identify. The rover was where the schematic said it would be—a boxy, six-wheeled vehicle with an open cab and a set of thruster nozzles that hadn't been serviced in years.

"There." Jack pointed at the charging station. "It's at 82%. That's enough."

"Enough for your suicide route or for my actual route?" Elena asked, already climbing into the driver's seat. Her HUD told her she had forty-one minutes of air left. She tried not to look at the number.

Jack settled into the passenger seat beside her, his hand resting on the console. "Just drive."

The garage door was a massive steel shutter. Elena keyed the manual release, and the hydraulics groaned—old, tired, protesting the cold. One panel lifted, then another. Through the gap, she saw the lunar surface: infinite, black, strewn with the rubble of ages. Beyond it, the faint silver curve of the crater field rose against a sky full of stars that didn't care.

She reached for the ignition. Her hand stopped.

"Jack." Her voice was quiet. "The relay station. Even if we reach it—who are we calling?"

He looked at her. The silence in the cab stretched.

"The same people who sent us here," he said, and it wasn't quite an answer.

Elena wanted to press. She wanted to ask what that meant, why he'd hesitated, why there was something almost like guilt flickering behind his eyes. But the ground trembled again—a second, longer roll—and behind them, deep in the base, she heard the unmistakable sound of metal shearing.

She hit the ignition.

The rover lurched forward, out of the garage, into the night. The crater field swallowed them whole.