"Chiefly, the mould of a man’s fortunes is in his own hands."

FRANCIS BACON
1625

Overall, it wasn’t a very spectacular death. Bryan Coleman, foreman of the LUNA-49 Miner’s Local #327, shoved a sharpened piece of ice through the back of laborer Trey Tanner’s compression suit. The disengaged hunk of gray ice passed beyond the white, billowy fabric of the miner’s outfit, traveled under the shoulder blade and lodged near the heart. As if hit by whiplash, Trey contorted and his bulbous helmet snapped up. Slowly, he fell forward onto the crescent of ice split apart by laser drills. Trey’s heavy boot nudged Bryan’s ankle as he moved and the supervisor lost his secure footing. Bryan tumbled backwards and landed on the areas bled of ice for propellant recently.

Shaking his head from side to side, Bryan rose up. Through no sound came to his senses, he witnessed Trey’s suit rip open again as the laborer landed on the sharpened ice. Gradually, Trey rolled over and Bryan beheld the helmet face to face. Splattered on the glass, obscuring the countenance of his victim was a mass of quivering blood, more akin to jelly than liquid.

Although he knew Trey would be beyond hearing, Bryan said, "My gift to you for screwing my wife, you snotty bastard. No one will question a young maverick like you getting sloppy and dying here, pierced in the lunar ice."

When Trey’s suit relaxed, it soon grew tight around the thin body. The blood receded from the helmet’s visor while the pressure eased. Bryan’s mind filled with glee at Trey’s expression of astonishment. Trey, nicknamed Don Juan for his many conquests in the bedroom, didn’t look handsome anymore. The youth seemed shocked to face death, Bryan mused. The short blonde hair of his nemesis would be scarlet forever.

Looking up, Bryan focused on the Earth. So imperious, so colorful looking down on them, the sense of irony clutched Bryan’s heart. "How many times did you two stare at the Moon and think about your future?" Bryan said without looking down. "Yes, destiny awaited you in the moonlight."

Laughing and full of anger, Bryan glanced back the way they came into the crater dubbed AC-CLARKE-#101. Panic, then confusion grabbed Bryan as he saw another miner. This man lay in the jagged ice, suit ruptured and motionless not far from him. Mind afire, Bryan hopped to the body and stared at the helmet. Full of crimson jelly, it was a doppelganger of Trey’s visor when his suit decompressed. When the gravitationally challenged liquid drained and receded from the male face in rivulets of red, Bryan found he couldn’t breathe.

The miner, skewered through a dozen times by ice shards, bore the face of Bryan Coleman.

Looking at his hands, Bryan realized his digits were bare…naked to the elements. When he turned, Bryan saw Trey leering…but this Trey levitated above the crater, nude, enwrapped by an ethereal corona of green light.

Looking back at his own face in the helmet, locked in a shocked rictus, Bryan Coleman found insight to a bigger void than what loomed overhead.

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