15 DEATH FROM ABOVE

15 DEATH FROM ABOVE Lunar day 217 Possibly the last few minutes of my life "Drive!" I yelled to Kira. "I know!" she yelled back, planting her foot on the accelerator. The rear wheels of the rover spun wildly, kicking up their own cloud of moon dust. For a few moments, I feared that we'd sunk into the surface and were stuck, but then finally, the treads caught and we lurched forward. My helmet clanged off the back of my seat hard enough to rattle my head around like a peanut in its shell. The emergency helmet repair kit nearly slid off my lap, but I snagged the handle at the last second and kept it

from tumbling into the dust. In our hurry to rescue everyone, we had forgotten to follow official moonwalk procedures and check for any potential clouds of meteorites in the area before heading onto the surface. Now there was nothing we could do except get to safety as fast as humanly possible. Three more meteorites plugged the ground in front of us, sending up plumes of dust. And those were merely the ones I could see. I had a limited range of vision in my helmet, which meant there were probably other rocks streaming in from outer space all around us. There wasn't any way to see the meteorites until they hit the ground. There was no atmosphere for them to spark off, and against the black sky the dark rocks were invisible. There was no sound as they hurtled downward. Every impact was eerily silent. We couldn't even hear the motor on the rover. The only sound was our own frightened breathing, relayed through our radio headsets to one another. A minute before, when Kira had been driving like a madwoman, I'd been worried that the rover was going too fast. Now it seemed terrifyingly slow. Meteorites were slamming into the surface around

us at hundreds of miles an hour, and we were barely moving. The safety of the lava tube ahead didn't seem to be getting any closer at all. A new sound suddenly echoed in my helmet. My mother's voice on the radio. "Dash! Kira! Are you out there?" "Yes!" both of us shouted back at once. Mom gave a gasp of concern. I'm sure she hadn't meant for us to hear it, because when she spoke again, she was obviously doing her best to sound steady and reassuring. "Where are you?" "We can see the lava tube," I reported. "It's about a hundred meters away." Several more meteorites streaked into the ground around us. There were too many to count now. The shower was growing in intensity. "Get here as fast as you can," Mom ordered. "We'll be waiting by the air lock. Once you're inside the tube itself, you'll be safe." I looked to Kira helplessly. "I'm going as fast as I can," she told me, then jammed her foot on the accelerator again, showing me she had it down as far as it could go. Everywhere around us, there were puffs of dust. They were rising from the plain where Moon Base

Beta would be built, from the dunes in the distance, and in the road around us, disturbingly close by. Kira kept her gaze focused straight ahead and her hands locked on the steering wheel, putting us on the most direct line toward safety. Every second counted. The tube was getting closer, though our progress still seemed agonizingly slow. I locked my eyes on the dark slash of rock, willing it to come closer. Suddenly a meteorite shot past me, so close I could feel it, and the right rear tire exploded. The rear axle dropped and plowed into the ground, spinning us off course. The rover leaped over a small ridge of rock and soared into the air. On earth, we might have jumped a foot or two, but in the low gravity, the rover was airborne for a frighteningly long time. "Hold on tight!" Kira screamed at me. I was already doing this, clutching the chassis as hard as I could with my right hand while keeping my left arm locked around the emergency helmet repair kit. Thankfully, we landed in a wide-open plain of dust, rather than on rock. The front of the rover plowed into the ground, kicking up a wave of dust

that poured over us, turning the world blinding white. I was thrown forward from the impact, but my seat belt held, yanking me back hard into the seat. The emergency repair kit was torn from my grasp. I'd closed my eyes to brace for the impact, and when I opened them again, I found myself plunged into darkness. For one brief, terrifying moment, I thought I might have gone blind, but then I realized that my visor had simply been covered in dust. I did my best to wipe it away, but it clung tenaciously, allowing me only a tiny smeared window to see through. There was so much dust still flying around us, I could barely see my own feet. It was as though we'd been plunged into a snow dome and shaken. At first I thought Kira had been thrown free, but then I realized she was still in her seat beside me, only so coated with dust that she blended into the scenery. "Are you okay?" I asked. "Yes," she answered. "You?" "I'm good," I said, hoping it was true. "Let's move." Kira and I tried to unbuckle ourselves as quickly as we could. Unfortunately, the latch on my belt

stayed stubbornly locked while I fumbled at it with my bulky gloved hands. "What happened?" Mom asked over the radio. "We wrecked the rover," I said. "A meteorite hit it!" Kira added quickly. "It wasn't my fault!" Unable to unlatch the buckle, I resorted to force, pounding on it angrily. It popped right open and I sprang from the rover. A bizarrely calm computerized voice suddenly spoke in my ear. "Warning," it said. "Your oxygen levels are down to twenty percent. Please search for safety immediately." This was accompanied by a holographic display projected inside the visor, showing how low my oxygen levels were. That seemed wrong. I hadn't been out long enough to use eighty percent of my oxygen. But maybe, in my panic, I was sucking it down much faster than I needed to. I did my best to slow my breathing. With the cloud of dust still drifting to the ground around us, it was impossible to tell where anything was. It was hard enough to see Kira, and she was only a few feet away. I grabbed her arm and staggered forward in the direction that I thought the