They closed the distance at the same time.
No wind-up. No techniques. No announcement of what was coming.
Just two people who had spent the last fourteen minutes learning exactly what the other one was made of, and had arrived simultaneously at the same conclusion.
That the only way to find the ceiling was to stop looking for it.
They met above the trench.
The collision didn't produce a sound. There was no air to carry one. What it produced was visible in every direction at once, a compression wave that rolled outward from the point of contact faster than the eye could track, the vacuum field's surface rippling in a perfect ring that expanded across the debris field and kept going, catching drifting asteroid fragments and spinning them sideways without touching them.
One of them got driven down.
Lucas hit the lunar surface back-first and the ground did something wrong.
