When this thing blew, would I feel anything, or would I disintegrate before my nerve endings could register pain to my brain?

I rubbed Sluggo headfirst against the hatch. Nothing.

In an Aaron Grodt nolo, a trapped hero would shoot off the door lock and escape.

The flare pistol still bulged in my thigh pocket. I drew it, backed off ten feet. Using Sluggo as a shield, I reached around him, aimed at the hatch, then closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

Nothing. I squeezed the trigger again, so hard my hand shook. Nothing. My last hope was a seventy-year-old dud.

I felt the swell in my closed eyes as tears started. I would die here for no reason.

I opened my eyes. In the purple light I saw my hand wrapping the pistol butt and the uncocked hammer above my thumb.

I could squeeze the trigger until the moon turned to cheese, and the pistol wouldn’t fire if I didn’t cock it, first!

My thumb trembled as it pulled back the hammer.

If the seventy-year-old flare fired, would it do any good? What if it ricocheted in close quarters and holed my suit?

I didn’t know prayers, so I just said, “Oh, please.”

I increased force on the trigger an ounce at a time until I felt the sear release. The hammer seemed to arc forward as though moving through molasses. It struck the cartridge primer.

The hatch remained closed. Then the flare pistol flashed, kicked in my hand, and the flare rocketed ahead and struck the hatch dead center. Nothing budged.

The flare ricocheted back at me, a red streak, and I dodged. The flare glanced off my helmet then bounced against an oval on the tube wall.

The hatch flower-petaled open again as the flare skittered in front of me, slow in the tepid gravity, then died. I looked at the oval on the tube wall. The Slug doorknob had been there all the time.

Black sky, more inviting than any blue summer day, shone beyond the hatch. The flare had not only punched the button that opened the inner door, it had broken either the air lock outer door or the mechanism that controlled it. Both ends of the air lock stood open. The only things holding apart the Projectile’s pressurized atmosphere and vacuum were Sluggo and me.

Explosive decompression spit us through the air lock like champagne corks. We shot out into sunlit vacuum, forty feet above the moon. Sluggo led, I followed, flailing and screaming like Superman chasing a rocket-boosted zucchini.

We arced toward the surface. At our projected impact point, two hundred feet from the air lock, Howard bent, back to us, scooping rocks into sample bags.

Sluggo’s shadow flashed across Howard, and he turned, too late.

I screamed, “Howard! Watch out!”

Sluggo slammed Howard like a ton of suet and flattened him. I spun a municipal pool-quality somersault, hit Sluggo feetfirst and trampolined ten yards. I had that cushion, and I weighed no more than a suitcase, but I sprained an ankle during my second landing.

I lay on my back, waited for explosive decompression from a suit puncture, and saw the Milky Way smeared across the black lunar sky. Whooping vibrated through my shoulder blades. I rolled to my hands and knees. Ten yards away, Howard lay spread-eagled and still, bombed by a giant gherkin. Sluggo lay alongside him.

I crawled to them. “Howard?”

No answer. He didn’t stir, and the only thing visible in his gold faceplate was my reflection.

No Projectile hull interfered between us, now. Maybe the impacts had knocked out one or both of our radios. If sound carried through rock, it should carry through helmets. I leaned forward and laid mine against his. “Howard?”

“Jason? What happened? What hit me?” His voice echoed like it came from a fishbowl. Which it did.

I shouted, “The Projectile’s booby-trapped! We’ve got to move! You okay?”

He sat up, then I dragged him to his feet and pointed him toward the LEM. “Run!”

He bent toward Sluggo, then reached to touch him. “What—?” I shoved him and gathered Sluggo under one arm. “ Run , goddammit!”

How long had it been since I entered the Projectile? How much longer did we have?

Beneath my arm as I lunar-bounded, Sluggo flopped like a salami. Pain spiked through my ankle every step. Ahead of me, Howard had mastered the lunar shuffle and bounded fifteen feet at a pace. I was making thirty. Give the moon that. If I have to run for my life, I want to do it where I cover thirty feet per step.

What was a safe distance from the Projectile? How big would the explosion be? I glanced back over my shoulder. We’d put a hundred yards between us and the Projectile. The whooping had faded, again.

It changed from a pulse to a solid tone, and my heart skipped.

I caught Howard in midleap and dragged him behind a mag-train-size boulder as the flash blinded me. I hadn’t dropped my sun visor when I came back out of the Projectile.

The blast sound and shock seemed to lift the moon, itself, but as soon as I bounced loose from the ground, the sound vanished. I landed on Howard. Exploded pieces swarmed above us and ricocheted off the boulder that sheltered us, though they made no sound in vacuum.

I lay facedown across Howard while baseball-size chunks and smaller bits that had been blown sky-high rained down on us for what seemed like minutes.

Finally, stillness returned to the Sea of Fertility.

I touched helmets with Howard.

“Wow!” he said.

We got to our feet and bits of Slug Projectile cascaded off us and plopped into the lunar dust. Sluggo lay at our feet, none the worse for wear. Howard knelt beside him. “Is this—?”

“The Projectile was crawling with them. They tried to shoot me and cut me to pieces. It was dark and terrifying.”

“God, I envy you, Jason!”

I sighed, then stepped around our shielding boulder and looked back. Where the Projectile had been was nothing. Moon boulders had been swept away for a hundred-yard radius around what had to be one big-ass crater, though I couldn’t see it from this angle. Across that swept surface, and beyond, the moon’s gray and white was sprinkled with black Projectile fragments as thick as poppy seeds on a bun.

A watermelon-size rock near us, but beyond the big boulder, lay split in two by a whizzing fragment. That could have been my head, or Howard’s.

The blast radius spanned easily two-thirds of a mile. We hadn’t come close to clearing it. We survived only by sheltering behind the boulder. I felt smart until I realized that I had not only failed to bring back information, I had blown the biggest Intelligence coup in world history into rutabagas.

Howard tapped my shoulder, then leaned his helmet against mine. “We need to get the alien out of vacuum.”

I lifted my chin. I had brought back something, after all. Mankind’s first prisoner in the Slug War. Even if he was currently frozen as stiff as a cucumber.

Howard pointed at Sluggo. “Let’s get him back to the LEM.”

The LEM! Metzger and the LEM had been a half mile from ground zero! I spun toward where they had been, but house-size boulders blocked my view. “Metzger?”

No telling if I was radioing or if he was transmitting to me. Metzger wouldn’t have known the explosion was coming, not that he could have done much about it.

My heart raced. I stepped back, got a skipping start, and jumped ten feet on top of a flattopped boulder. I nearly overshot it, then caught my balance.

Scanning the horizon, I couldn’t find the LEM. Maybe my radio worked up here. “Metzger?” I yelled it. Nothing.

Then I glimpsed the LEM’s gold-foil sparkle, half-obscured by a boulder field. My heart leapt.

Something seemed different. Maybe from this angle— I looked closer.

One of the LEM’s four legs lay alongside it. The Module tilted like a cocked hat. A dish antenna dangled where it should have stood straight.