✴

“Of course...the Shackleton’s Crater Disaster! Every Lunatic knows that,” you say.

[Electricité liked that]

“A critical moment in Lunar history,” Synth says.

“The moment in history for Arianeville,” Trisha says. “Those Earthling cowards almost gave up on colonization entirely. But when all the facts were known, by some luck it inspired them instead. Much of the crew died from asphyxiation when the station came apart, or from injury in the collapse into Shackleton’s Crater. Two alone survived, being suited up, just in the process of returning from EVA when the moonquake struck. They had no power, no long range comms, no hope at all. One evidently chose the quick embrace of death, found lying with her helmet in hand, regolith in her lungs.

“But the last survivor was found with her suit intact, her visor caked in dry ice frost, with the battery fully drained. The logs salvaged from the dead machine told her story--hours of desperate survival as she crawled her way out of a labyrinth of wreckage and dust under the starlight. It was years later they recovered her body intact, lying with her hand outstretched to the horizon, where Earth would have been half-visible at the time. They brought her all the way back to Earth for a full autopsy--a tossup between hypoxia and hypothermia.

“Earthlings would return to the peak of eternal sunlight, to stay. The entire colony would bear her name. And so there Lunatics are to this day,” they say.

“You south polers must know the details a lot better, I only vaguely knew about it,” you say.

“I know it better than most Lunatics even. For there was an engineer right here at Phénix Outpost, on its final doomed expedition--Nkiruka, best known as the girl whose body Ariane DeLune found amidst the wreckage and buried next to her own deathbed--her lover, so they say.

“Though Nkiruka was most famous to Earth for dying, her granddaughter was so inspired by her that she followed her to the Moon as one of the first permanent colonists of Arianeville, and there her descendants remain to this day, a long line of electrical engineers, until one child set out again to the stars to choose the life of a technopath and explore yet a greater frontier. And that enby goes by many names, but altogether...”

The lights power on inside the station, lighting up its chrome supports and white walls, bundles of hundreds of wires stretching across its ceiling, control panels and displays mounted anywhere they fit.

“...The Electrical System,” Synth says.

“You’re a direct descendant of one of the Phénix Outpost crew? That’s amazing,” you say.

“Less amazing for us here in the midst of this song. That moonquake we felt out there was a minor warning shock, just moments before. And here we are at Phénix Outpost, just coming in from EVA,” Trisha says.

On the song’s next measure, it cuts to dead silence for one beat. Then its sound waves shake the entire setting around you with a heavy distorted tone, a slow, pounding riff in an odd time. Every warning light on the control panels all around you lights up red as the station and the ground violently shake.

“Time to go,” Trisha says.

“Go?” Zeta says, looking around frantically.

Trisha points to a cupola window across the room from the airlock. As the heavy riff repeats itself, the entire station tilts that direction. You slide across the floor. The lights flicker--you see the tunnels to the other modules breaking apart as the station twists sideways. And you land on the slanted far wall, looking out through the window. Regolith dances on the Lunar surface, stirring up bright clouds of dust to either side. But just ahead, where your station helplessly slides along with the entire cliff face it sat upon, you see a pit of absolute black--the valley of eternal darkness, Shackleton’s Crater.

Helplessly your vessel slides down, pulled through the æthereal soundscape not by the Moon’s gravity, but by the song of Pulse. Even the stars above light up in sequences, cascading with each great shock of the legendary moonquake. And into the pit you fall.