Sarah's Perspective
As I watched Miles fly past the biologist and tumble headfirst into the crater, I gasped in surprise. I could almost feel my heart skip a beat as I saw him disappear from view. I rushed up as quickly as possible and yelled, "Mile's, are you okay?"
The grunt I received back from the radio was a weight off my shoulders.
"I bet he was lost in thought and didn't notice people calling out to stop because of the crater," I muttered to myself, feeling a sense of worry still creeping inside me.
But then, to my relief, I saw two military guys jump down into the crater after him. It was kind of impressive the way they threw him out of the hole and back onto the surface of the moon.
All this happened in the first minute of trying to get going.
As instructed, I fell in line with a group behind one of the military guys. We began our journey towards the "building" that served as the designated meeting place with the aliens. As we hopped, tripped, and shuffled across the rough lunar terrain, I could feel the exhaustion burning in all my muscles from fighting against the low gravity to stay upright. The craters and boulders were treacherous, and we had to meander our way around them.
As we made our way closer to the building, I could see it was octagonal with long and short edges. I couldn't see any windows or cameras on the outside, which made me wonder how the aliens were observing us. Or if they even cared to observe us.
Despite looking tiny from a distance, especially compared to the stupendous ramp, the building grew massive as we got closer. It towered over us even when we were hundreds of feet away. Its surface was smooth and almost seamless as if it had been carved out of a single piece of material.
As we approached, I noticed something strange about how the light hit the structure. It was as if the building was absorbing the light, rather than reflecting it. At the same time, there also seemed to be a glow from the structure itself. It gave the structure an almost eerie quality.
As we got closer, about 50 feet away from the building, I could make out some details I had missed earlier. The surface was not as seamless as it had appeared from a distance. Instead, it looked like a patchwork of metallic plates tightly fitted over what looked like pipes and conduits running along the structure's surface.
A massive door at the front of the building was easily twice as tall as a standard ceiling. The door was made of the same metallic material as the rest of the building, with a display panel and a set of levers and buttons on one side.
Next to the door were a few things that looked like grab bars. It looked similar to the grab bars by the airlock on the rocket.
For a moment, as I looked at the grab bars and the massive door in front of me, I remembered a sci-fi show that Isaac had made me watch when we first started dating. I couldn't remember the name of it for the life of me. Something Fly. It was strange how things come back to you in moments like this.
As quickly as the memory came, it was replaced by a sense of loneliness. I was a quarter of a million miles away from Isaac, my family, and everything that was familiar to me. I just wanted to hold my kids in my arms and be held by my Issac. The thought made my eyes start to tear up.
I knew that I couldn't cry inside the environmental suit. There was no way to wipe my tears away. So, I took a deep breath, looked up and focused.
Then I felt my face spread into a smile. My geek of a husband would have loved to see this. The door in front of us looked straight out of his sci-fi movies. Even if I can't share it with him now, I will tell him all about it when I come home.
