The port thruster snapped away in a shower of cut high-pressure lines and frozen coolant. It sent the Vanguard Scalpel tumbling through the empty pocket toward the crater floor at one hundred and forty meters per second.
“Thrusters dead on the port wing!” Toby screamed, pulling the emergency manual descent levers with all his weight. “We’re dropping like a three-thousand-ton brick! We’re going to plow straight into the regolith!”
Through the forward viewport, the lunar surface was no longer a distant landscape. It was an oncoming wall of razor-sharp dark rock boulders and jagged impact glass rushing up at terrifying speed. In one-sixth gravity, a crash at this speed would skip the cutter across the crater floor like a flat stone, tearing the high-pressure habitat module to shreds and venting every living soul into the freezing void.
Arthur didn’t reach for the flight controls. He reached for the tamer’s true weapon: the unbending trust between a master and his companions.
“Titus!” Arthur roared through the neural link. He poured forty percent of his synaptic pool directly into the terrapin’s mind. “Deploy as moving keel! We’re using your belly as the landing skid!”
The land-wide terrapin didn’t hesitate.
Titus lowered his massive, tree-trunk limbs. He extended his black glass claws through the emergency service hatches in the cutter’s bottom hull. He locked his broad, flat belly shell—composed of twelve tons of iron-hard metal-infused fiery dark rock—directly against the ship’s main load-bearing load-bearing spine.
