Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #11 February 2015 | Page 50

hope. that luck was with him.
As he marched on, he began to lose track of time. His
disorientation was worsened by the occasional echoes
he would hear. Some were familiar; the blast of gunfire,
the hollow explosion of a grenade or artillery shell.
There were other sounds, less familiar or totally alien.
A loud clack-clack-clack that seemed to follow him
for a while, before fading off into nothingness. An odd
murmur, almost like the chanting of Buddhist monks,
heard from far off. A horrible wet, gobbling noise that
issued forth from one passageway that Hiroshi ran
past. After hours of wandering, Hiroshi found a small,
dim alcove, little more than a crack in one rock wall.
He squeezed in and drifted off to sleep.
He didn’t dream; he was too exhausted. When he
awoke, it was to the same dim purple light, a light that
never wavered, never gave a hint of whether it was day
or night. Is it ever night on the Moon, he wondered.
Do the Lunarites even know what a day is? Unlike
men, with their spaceships and vacuum suits, pressure
domes and solar-steam crawlers, the Lunarites had no
way to survive outside of the controlled environments
of the caverns that honeycombed the Moon.
Hiroshi recalled the moment he had stepped onto the
surface of the Moon. The rubberised canvas of his
vacuum suit rubbed harshly against his body. The brass
helmet and oxygen tanks were oppressively heavy, even
with the low gravity of the Moon. The lead weights
around his waist, there to prevent him from bouncing
off the surface, pulled the entire suit down.
However, on the short march from the landing field to
the pressure dome, he had looked up. The Earth sat in
the blackness, a disk of blue, green and white. He could
make out India and Central Asia. Even as he wished
he could see his homeland, he was amazed by how
beautiful and terrifying the site was. Beautiful because
nothing in his life could compare with the Earth rising
over the slate grey Lunar surface. Terrifying, because
he had the feeling that it was unnatural to be here, that
Man wasn’t meant to leave that green and blue disk for
alien worlds.
Now, lodged in a crevice of rock, exhausted and lost,

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he wished he could see the Earth; but, above him,
there was only the softly glowing rock of this world of
burrows. Hiroshi shouldered his rifle and struck out,
heading in a direction that he hoped would take him
back to friendly lines.
After what seemed to be hours, he accepted that he was
hopelessly lost. All of the tunnels looked the same and
the sounds of fighting were a faint clash and clatter that
seemed to come from every direction. He could no
longer decide if he was heading up or down. Exhausted, he sat crosslegged on the ground and suppressed
the urge to weep.
“Mother, Father, I am sorry,” he muttered, “I should
never have l