Free Luna by Rick Chesler

happened to one of the rovers, or if we got lost and couldn’t find them again?”
    “We landed a bit further away than I aimed to, James, I admit that, but I think the fact that we are still able to do this crater walk demonstrates our flexibility and how agile our overall setup really is.”
    “But this is a more professional team than you plan to take up here, when any old billionaire will be able to afford a ticket. These are scientists and Outer Limits personnel and astronauts we’ve got with us. What’s it going to be like when you have some guy and his wife up here just because they happen to own a professional sports team or they bought some stock at the right time?”
    “Speaking of astronauts,” Blake said, “Caitlin —where are you?”
    “Just a few steps from the rim. Had to set the wheel chocks, over.”
    “Caitlin, I want you down here with us, now! We don’t split up.”
    “Copy that, Blake, I just needed to—“
    “Now, Command Module Pilot Swain! Am I understood?”
    “Copy that, sir.” Caitlin shook her head and took one last look at the rover before she started back up the crater. It’ll hold. Time to play Astronaut Tour Guide . It irked her that Blake would put her extensive and demanding training to use as little more than a glorified chaperone, but then again, she thought, reaching the lip of the crater again, he had given her the moon, which was something no one else had been able to do, even NASA.
    Blake’s voice droned on in her helmet as she steadied herself. “As I was saying, James, we’re perfectly capable of modifying the tour to suit our clientele. I realize you’re used to the rather rigid operating guidelines of a government bureaucracy, but we’re a small, agile company, able to....”
    Resting on the lip of the crater before making the descent into the interior after the rest of the team, Caitlin saw the undulating hills of the moon below, with the mysterious Black Sky lander off in the distance to her right. Now is not the time to ask about that, she thought. Raising her line of sight, she saw the moon’s horizon—much closer than that of Earth.
    The moon was only a quarter the size of the blue planet, and she could see the curvature of it. Even without being on top of a crater, the close horizon made her feel as though she stood atop a giant hill, rather than on a real planetary body. The effect was disorienting and a little unnerving. Up here on top of a crater, it was even more so. She forced herself to look away from the horizon before the onset of vertigo could take hold. Her eyes focused on the Earth beyond. She thought of Ray, spinning around on that blue-and-white sphere, talking to Paul and Dallas on the comm loops, making sure their mission was under control. And it hit her at that moment, with a team of moon walkers waiting for her inside a lunar crater. For all of her astronaut aspirations and lifelong dreams of other worlds, nothing could ever be more precious to her than home. She did not want to die here on this barren rock in the void of space.
    As she had discussed over drinks at FlyBoyz with fellow space junkies at their happy hour spot near the spaceport, at any given time while on the lunar surface you were a maximum of two system failures away from death.
    Taking a deep breath, Caitlin scrubbed these thoughts from her mind with an equally deep exhalation. Then she stepped off the rim down into the crater. The group was maybe fifty yards down the face, approaching a rock outcropping, the bottom of the crater far, far below that. The suit names were unreadable at this distance, but she saw one of the figures raise his or her arms in some kind of exclamatory gesture.
    Martin Hughes asked, “Is there ice down here in this crater?”
    “There’s no ice down here,” Asami declared flatly, using a pair of tongs to pluck a lunar rock from the ground. She placed it into a plastic bag. Caitlin knew that part of Asami’s responsibilities consisted of