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winced at the statement. Then he swept a large hand out at the thick carpet of stars visible through one window and the blue Earth from the opposite. “You don’t truly attribute all this to a god, do you, Blake? Surely He doesn’t watch over us, at any rate, or we wouldn’t have been struck by lightning in the first place, right?”
    Blake let fly an exasperated sigh and was about to reply when a motion suddenly distracted him. The floating camera had slow-tumbled its way to within Asami’s grasp. She snatched it out of the air, pressed the Record button and turned the cam around on herself.
“Next time, Suzette, you ask before you go changing specs on your own,” she said, flipping the lens the bird. Then she flung it through the weightlessness back to Suzette, who never took her eyes off Asami as she cradled the spinning camera into her gut.
    Asami stared the VP down but said nothing else as a drop of blood broke free from the gash on her temple. The scarlet globule floated before her eyes in the weightlessness, a crimson bauble representing a tiny but undeniable piece of her humanity.
    “Medic,” she calmly requested through her headset.
    Dallas was there quickly. With expert, economical movements calculated to counteract the lack of gravity, he cleaned, sterilized and bandaged the skin over Asami’s right eye.
    “You’re good to go,” he pronounced, kicking off a bulkhead and grabbing strategically placed handholds to pull himself back “up” to the control deck, although that directional term no longer held any real meaning.
    After a short countdown, the main engines fired and their craft accelerated deeper into space. Asami’s suspended blood drop was thrust into motion, splashing into a window through which Caitlin could now see the moon.

 
    8 | Separation Anxiety
     
    Forty hours later
     
    Caitlin Swain took a deep breath as she tried not to think about the quarter of a million miles that now separated her from home. The lunar surface slid beneath them from an altitude of about forty miles. During the last couple of days, she had watched the moon grow steadily larger in her window until now it filled her entire view. No longer simply a sphere hanging in blackness, the moon’s surface was a grayscale world with visible terrain including vast craters, flat plains and epic mountain ranges. This lunar relief map was rife with navigational hazards for their fragile craft. Caitlin took two more deep breaths to calm her nerves while reminding herself that a small flotilla of robotic reconnaissance orbiters had, in the years prior to this mission, mapped out their landing region—and that of rival Black Sky—in ultra-high definition detail.
    It both relaxed her and induced anxiety that she would have little control over their descent to the moon. Dallas Pace, M.D., their Lunar Module Pilot, was in charge of that crucial leg of their journey, and he was as competent as one could be who had never actually done it. Still, she thought, peering into a huge crater that occupied her entire field of view, and then spotting another crater deep inside of that one, she would be glad once they touched down safely.
    Caitlin’s current train of thought had begun about thirty minutes ago when they had transferred from the Command Module, where they’d cocooned for the last two days, to the Lunar Exploration Module. The LEM, as it was called for short, was actually larger than the Command Module since it would serve as their habitat while on the moon. At the end of their lunar stay, the LEM would take them back up to rendezvous with the Command Module for the return trip to Earth.
    Caitlin and Dallas, instead of being seated above the passengers on a separate flight deck, were now situated on the same level as them but out to one side in a control alcove. Paul Abbott, as the Commander of the entire mission, would be the only member of the team to stay behind with the Command Module and orbit the moon while the other