Rocky and Lucy settle into the cockpit and buckle in. The canopy closes above them with a soft hydraulic seal. The spacecraft's boards come alive, a clean wash of indicator lights and steady instrument tones.
No Man's Sky ships are built for solo flight, with a single pilot's chair and one set of controls. The module system solved that. Two seats. Two harnesses. One shared view.
Rocky runs his hands across the control yoke and panels, studying the dials and the straightforward, simple UI. He has flown craft like this in Sims a thousand times. This is the first time the stick is real. Curiosity takes the edge off his calm. He wants to see space with his own eyes, not through a camera or a screen.
The attached training chip loads muscle memory into his head in seconds. He passes the chip to Lucy and waits while she blinks through the same download. When she looks back, they share a quick smile.
He nudges the throttle. The ship lifts, hovering cleanly into low air. An installed stealth field blurs the hull. At high speed, the field will smear and fail, but for takeoff, it is enough. Night City gets no show.
He gives Lucy a gentle loop over the skyline so she can feel the ship, then angles the nose up, brings in more thrust, and rides the ascent. The craft goes smoothly and fast. Clouds thin. The blue fades to black. The curve of the world appears and keeps widening.
Lucy sees Earth from space for the first time. Corporations have strip-mined and fought over the ground for decades. From this height, the planet is still beautiful. She turns her eyes outward and catches the clutter at the edge of the atmosphere: satellites blinking, clusters of stations with artificial gravity, busy windows of labs and medical bays, and the meeting halls where people pretend to govern what money already decided. The moon is seeded with company bases, too. If you have enough eddies, you can even buy a quiet life there. Interstellar colonization is still a dream on a far shelf.
They are not here to tour corporate sky real estate. Rocky checks the 3D starmap on the console, tags the moon's position, and brings the main drive online.
[ Barren Planet ]
[ Planetary Resources: Barren ]
The ship's scanner pings the target with a brief readout as they approach. He sets a descent corridor, threads past the lit corporate hubs, and selects a silent patch of regolith—landing routines spool. The gear touches down in a light plume.
The hatch opens. They step onto lunar dust together for the first time.
Lucy bounces on her toes and laughs, testing the low gravity. It matches the old braindance she once lived in for comfort, only this is real, granular, cold at the edges, and perfect. She seizes Rocky's hand and tugs him forward in skipping arcs across the gray.
They walk for a long time. When they finally sit, they pick a spot where the Earth hangs huge over the horizon like a painted eye. Lucy stares at the blue planet and lets the quiet work through her. She never thought a day would come when she could feel this with her own skin.[1] The old dream was distant and sharp. Reality is warm and impossible.
She turns and studies Rocky's profile. He is watching the same view and thinking his own thoughts. He notices her gaze and turns.
Their eyes meet. A wave of telekinesis blooms from Lucy and forms a pressure skin around them. The helmets unlatch. They lift them off together inside the invisible field.
Under the blue world, on this gray plain, they kiss.
Time moves, and then it doesn't. When it returns, Lucy rests her hands behind her back and looks at him with a slight lift of her chin.
"So where do we go next?"
"You don't want to stay on the moon a while?" Rocky had assumed she would want more time here, after all the nights she spent enjoying it.
She shakes her head and smiles. "The moon is enough. I want to see more with you."
Coming here like this already closed a chapter she had written in her head years ago. The silence is perfect, but she does not need a solitary world anymore. She wants a world for two. He wants to see other planets. She wants to be at his side when he does.
[1] telekinisis