A separate lunar crew travels toward moon orbit and chats with Capcom, trading grimly comic trivia about lightning strikes and small rescues on Earth. As their command module begins its powered flyby, they describe the moon as shadowed, grey, and welcoming, and Capcom promises they will reach the South Pole landing site within nine hours.

The narration pulls back to an external view: the lunar craft threads through low Earth orbit’s dense field of debris—broken satellites, rocket stages, flecks of paint, and lost tools—before burning away toward cleaner space. The flight reads as both escape and conquest, leaving behind a storm-ravaged planet and heading into a “virgin” wilderness framed as the next resource and domain.

Back on the aging station, Anton, Roman, Nell, Chie, Shaun, and Pietro sleep in dark modules battered daily by micrometeoroids and junk. Messages accumulate unread: Pietro receives a link about the typhoon’s devastation from his wife, and Shaun receives a video from his daughter. Roman, half-asleep, tracks their position by instinct and memory, feeling how long he has lived inside the repeating geometry of orbits.

Near Roman’s head, the existing crack in the hull widens by a millimetre or two and sends out new fissures; a slight pressure drop follows, subtle enough to avoid alarms. In the cluttered, older aft module, the crew’s dinner remnants float, while a photo of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev presides like a quiet witness to an era ending—this laboratory of “peace” destined to fail under the same restless drive that built it. Roman’s thoughts spiral into speculation about humanity’s future migrations and the need for unity beyond nations.

On Earth, the typhoon’s destruction is rendered through a chapel sheltering dozens of people behind an altar as floodwater rises to the roof. They pray around a Santo Nif1o figure, watching the building hold while the wind ebbs and the sea’s surge tires; from space, the storm is now breaking apart over the Philippines and Indonesia and the worst has passed.

The orbit reaches its far edge with auroras over Antarctica, the moon looming, and the reminder that one day the station will bow out of orbit and fall into the Pacific. The chapter ends in a meditation on planetary “music,” translating electromagnetic phenomena into sound, and imagining Earth’s light as a briefly unified choir amid chaotic, layered noise.