In 500... (or less)

Coming In Hot

Had she not been in this situation, Kichi would have marveled at the shimmering beauty of the debris field.

They were like thousands of little fireflies, blinking on and off as they caught the sun's rays and reflected them toward her. Beautiful, but deadly. Any one of them could tear a hole in her spacesuit.

The transmitter in her suit were not functioning, there was no way to tell Earth she had survived.

"About 30 hours of air," she mumbled. "If I don't talk."

The bodies of her crewmates, none quick enough to get spacesuit on, floated off in the distance. She would soon join them, once her air ran out.

"First solo mission to the moon," she thought. "First person to reach the moon without a ship."

The ship had nearly completed the burn to send it to the moon when a structural defect caused the ship to essentially disintegrate. Kichi was closest to the suits.

For perhaps an hour, she simply floated, lamenting her situation, unable to comprehend what happened. 

"God is it hot in this suit!" she said aloud, twitching the muscles in her forehead to direct the droplets of sweat about to drip into her eyes. 

She swung her arms gently to give her body rotation, the only way to evenly distribute the heat from the sun on her suit. It was then that she spotted Baijal's suit, floating perhaps 10 meters from her.

A few meters or a mile, getting to it without some means of thrust would be impossible. Rotating was one thing, altering her course was quite another.

"My glove!" Kichi gently twisted at the locking mechanism, carefully letting a slight amount of air out. 

"I know!" she yelled at the suit alarms. She inched toward the suit, one she hoped had a functioning transmitter.

Kichi could not risk adding too much speed to catch up to Baijal's suit, otherwise she might be going too fast to effectively grab it on the way past. It was so still and lifeless, it was hard to realize it was speeding along at 42,000 kph.

The moon grew larger and larger, she would be approaching it within the next hour or two. The suit was just beyond her grasp. 

"Another 15 minutes," she thought. "Hope it works."

Indeed, the transmitter was intact. One little problem.

"How am I going to get the microphone inside my helmet?" Her lip wobbled as she fought valiantly against the tears of despair about to burst from her. 

The team on the moon needed only a few moments to launch their escape vessel. That was not the problem. They needed time to maneuver into position, matching her speed and trajectory. If they managed to get her inside their craft, it might take another miracle of mathematics to either return to Earth or land back on the moon. 

It was going to take a lot of fuel to catch her. But first they had to know she was coming.

"Either I figure something out, or they'll name my crater after me."