Chapter 450 - 441 Discovery_1

Capital Time: 1:07 AM.

"Victor, Victor..."

Victor felt as if he were dreaming, lying comfortably in a chair on the balcony, soaking up the sun. His mother had called him twice for dinner, but he just wanted to sleep and didn’t want to go down, so the door was knocked loudly, and his mother kept calling his name.

He didn’t know how long his mother had been calling, but he finally woke from his nap, slightly clearer-headed, and prepared to get up for dinner, only to find that his body couldn’t move.

The blanket on him felt as heavy as a thousand pounds. Victor remembered his strong muscles and tried desperately to get up, eventually feeling a bit looser, and even the air became fresher.

"Mom, Mom!"

"You’re awake, that’s great, that’s great, Victor."

When Victor opened his eyes, he saw a woman’s face.

Christina Koch was lying on the ground with her face mask pressed tightly against his, transmitting her voice through the vibration.

"Did I fall asleep? Koch, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, I was just too..."

"No, no."

Koch’s voice came through both the radio and the face mask:

"You almost died. Just now, you fainted due to low oxygen concentration. Do you remember?"

Victor frowned and started to recall, soon realizing his head was aching like it was being pricked with needles, but his memory slowly returned to him.

By that time, Koch had been calling for nearly two hours, exhausted, and seeing no response, she decided to attempt a self-rescue.

Climbing up was not an option, so Koch risked being crushed to death and walked out along the cave route that the lander had crashed through:

It was a large and long cave, and the lander had crashed through the entrance before sliding a great distance, then stopped in the place where the terrain raised and damaged the ceiling.

Koch walked for almost half an hour but found that the ground was still too deep to find a way up.

When she returned, she found Victor unresponsive. At first, she thought he was asleep, but upon closer inspection, she noticed his spacesuit was flashing red, a warning for low oxygen concentration.

Normally, an astronaut’s spacesuit would send a warning to other astronauts when something was wrong inside, but now this device was obviously also broken, just as the oxygen that was supposed to last six or seven hours was inexplicably running out quickly.

Koch desperately made a small gap to check Victor’s spacesuit and helped him open the backup channel, which finally restored the oxygen supply.

Victor, realizing he had just skirted death, was sweating coldly. Due to high mental stress and extreme fatigue, his attention had diminished, and he had fainted without any awareness, which was truly perilous.

"Koch, did you find a way out?"

"No, I walked up to where we came in and couldn’t find it. I don’t dare go any deeper."

Koch shook her head in despair. Even with her well-trained psychological resilience, she couldn’t help feeling somewhat dejected now.

"The astronauts of Dawn III must be resting by now, they just made a big splash in front of the whole world, and then contentedly went to sleep after having their fill..."

"Don’t say that, Koch. They must have noticed something’s off too. Maybe they’re working with NACA to look for us right now. We have to keep persisting every moment, keep going, keep sending out distress signals. There’s hardly any radio signal on the Moon; our calls for help are bound to be discovered."

"Think about Reed, and Jeremy, and the four hundred million people, although we really did have a little mishap, we still set foot on the Moon, didn’t we?"

"..."

Koch sighed and then pulled herself back together, climbing back up to the very top of the lander, and lifted the rough antenna high to check that the battery was fine and ready to continue sending the signal.

The two of them kept chatting nonstop; Victor’s suit malfunction had also sounded an alarm for her: the slightest negligence could result in one of them suddenly dying. During the crash landing, the lander kept tumbling over, and who knows what it might have damaged.

But after all, it had been over a dozen hours without rest. Drowsiness was increasingly overtaking them, and the frequency of their conversation was imperceptibly slowing down.

God knows how much time had passed when Koch, holding the transmitter, stopped moving, her fingers trembling slightly, her body already leaning to one side, she only jolted back to reality at the last minute and desperately grabbed onto an edge.

"Blue Moon" was over ten meters tall; even with the Moon’s gravity, a fall would likely result in serious fractures.

Heart racing, Koch took a deep breath, looked up, and then saw the creature with one red eye and green hair at the top of the cavern.

was sitting on the edge of the hole, searching for the position of the remaining astronaut and confirming if they were alive.

Since it had entered the lunar night and lost visible light, it had activated the active infrared light on its chest and the low-light night vision device inside its visor, appearing in the darkness like a moving mass of red and green light.

These two views were much clearer than any light.

Although Koch was startled, the psychological training of an astronaut prevented her from screaming, and instead, she tremblingly switched on the high-power searchlight on her helmet.

This time, a slightly lean astronaut’s figure came into view.

The person also made a gesture because of her light, and after a moment of surprise, Koch realized he was asking her to open the public channel radio.

"May I ask, which Artemis II astronaut are you? (English)"

The voice was of a young man, and one could clearly tell from the grammar that he was Asian—in fact, only Chinese People would speak such verbose and cumbersome English.

"I am Christina Koch, Payload specialist of Artemis II mission. My companion is Victor Glover, the lander pilot, buried under the rubble below.

Please save us, Victor’s spacesuit has malfunctioned and he might die at any moment. We crash-landed in a cavern, and almost all of our communication system is destroyed..."

Perhaps because Koch had imagined this scenario so many times in her mind, as soon as she began to speak, it was an endless stream of words, yet all of it was valuable information rather than an emotional outburst.

Meanwhile, down on the ground, the translator who had just communicated with her through 14 was rapidly taking notes with shorthand on a notebook, extracting crucial information.

In just a few minutes, the command center had pieced together the tragic circumstances of "Blue Moon":

Halfway through the descent, various electronic systems went offline and couldn’t be used. Attempts to enter orbit failed, the engines cut off, there seemed to be an explosion on the outside causing severe imbalance. If it hadn’t been for Victor fighting desperately to manually control the craft, and the stroke of luck that the engines restarted for a while, it would have been the end of both the machine and the crew.

Unfortunately, the landing site was right above a cavern and they slid along the cave, almost completely destroying the exterior of the craft, except for the protected internal cabins. The ground team could at least be credited for making sure that Victor was able to get out smoothly after opening the hatch.