Her Three Orbits

Chapter Eight — Sleep Regulation

Artemis VI · Lunar South Pole · Day 3-4 of isolation · Ethan

She didn't answer the question. It was its own kind of answer, the way silence from Volkova was never actually silence. It was a calculation in progress.

"It doesn't matter now," she said finally. "It was three days into a different version of this mission."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know." She turned back to the aft panel and picked up a tool she didn't need. "Contact window is in twenty minutes."

I let it go. Pushing would have told her the question mattered more than I wanted her to know, and I had spent six months learning exactly how much information Natasha Volkova could extract from the people. I went back to the forward console and ran a system check I had already run twice that hour. My hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for an answer she wasn't going to give me yet.

Houston's window opened at 2030. Maya Chen's voice came through level and careful, the way it always was now, like she was reading off a script someone had reviewed twice. Gateway relay: still silent. Orion telemetry: stable orbit, no voice contact.

Thirty-six days. The number sat in the corner of the display, pale and patient, the same number it had been since morning.

By 2200 we'd run the evening protocol and the cabin lights had dropped to sleep setting. The bunks folded out from the rear seats thirty centimeters apart, which had sounded like a reasonable distance on a spec sheet and felt like something else entirely once you were lying in it, listening to another person breathe in the dark. I'd learned her breathing pattern over three nights without trying to. Slow when she was actually asleep. Slower and more deliberate when she wasn't, the specific rhythm of someone working hard to look unconscious.

Tonight it was the second kind. I didn't say anything. There wasn't a protocol for this. I closed my eyes and ran the pre-sleep checklist instead. Life support nominal. Fuel cells at seventy-six percent. Comm window in eight hours. Heading locked. I ran it twice, the way I always did, the second pass being the one that actually let me stop.

It didn't work tonight. I lay there with my eyes closed and thought about the observation module, the Moon in the window, the twenty minutes neither of us had named. I thought about what she'd almost said before the alarm cut her off, and what she might have said tonight if I hadn't asked it the wrong way, in the wrong order.

Johnson Space Center · Five months earlier

The EVA training bay smelled like chlorine and machine oil, a combination I'd never gotten used to. We were running the Shackleton terrain simulation, suited, submerged in the neutral buoyancy pool that approximated lunar gravity well enough to train muscle memory, badly enough that everyone hated it by the third hour.

Volkova was running the egress sequence when the simulated fault hit. A controlled failure, scripted, meant to test the standard recovery procedure: stop, assess, radio the anomaly, wait for instructor confirmation before proceeding. It was the correct procedure. It was the procedure she did not follow.

She diagnosed the fault in four seconds, decided the standard recovery sequence would have taken too long against the simulated oxygen clock, and improvised a bypass that wasn't in any manual I'd ever read. It worked. The simulation flagged her as a survival success and a protocol violation in the same line of output.

I pulled her debrief myself.

"You bypassed the recovery sequence," I said. We were out of the suits, dripping, the rest of the team filing out around us. "That sequence exists because someone died building it."

"The sequence also exists because someone wrote it for a fault profile that doesn't match what just happened to me." She was still breathing hard from the exertion, hair flattened with pool water, not remotely apologetic. "I had eleven seconds of margin in the simulated clock. The standard sequence uses fourteen. I did the math before I moved."

"You didn't have time to confirm that math with anyone."

"I had time to do it correctly. That's not the same as having time to ask permission."

I told her, in the flattest voice I had, that I was filing this for crew review. She told me to file it. She said it like a woman who had been threatened with paperwork before and found it survivable. I filed it. The review board spent two days deciding whether Dr. Natasha Volkova was an asset or a liability, and the vote came back fifty-one percent in her favor, which was the kind of margin that should have worried everyone in the room and didn't, because by then half of them had already watched her be right about something else.

I found Hayes afterward in the equipment bay, racking his suit. I asked him, because he'd trained with Roscosmos personnel before and I hadn't, what kind of person she actually was. Underneath the file. I wanted an operational read, something I could use.

Hayes didn't give me one.

"She's the kind of person who's already decided the manual was written by someone who's never been as scared as she has," he said, not looking up from the suit. "Which means she trusts herself more than she trusts the page. Most of the time that's terrifying. Sometimes it's the only reason anybody walks away."

There was something in the way he said it. A warmth that didn't belong in an operational assessment, the kind of warmth a man uses when he's describing something he already knows the shape of from the inside. I noticed it.

I said nothing. I went back to my quarters and didn't sleep well, and told myself it was the debrief, the paperwork, the fifty-one percent.

It wasn't the paperwork.

It was 0300 when I opened my eyes. I knew the time before I checked it, the way you know things your body has started tracking without your permission. I knew, too, before I turned my head, that she was awake.

She was lying on her side, facing the hull, perfectly still. Too still. The particular stillness of someone holding a held breath, except slower, sustained, the kind you couldn't fake for three minutes let alone three nights running. Her shoulders weren't moving with the deep, even rise of actual sleep. They were moving the way mine were. Shallow. Controlled. Awake and pretending otherwise, because pretending was the only privacy either of us had left.

I lay there in the dark and watched the back of her head, the line of her shoulder thirty centimeters away, and thought about Hayes's voice in the equipment bay five months ago, the warmth in it that had nothing to do with an operational read. I thought about the question I'd asked her tonight and the answer she hadn't given me. I thought about how long two people could lie in the dark, both awake, both silent, before the silence stopped being restraint and started being its own kind of admission.

Neither of us spoke. The CO₂ filter cycled somewhere behind the wall, dropping half a register the way it did below twelve degrees. The secondary display, twelve feet away, had recalculated at 0001 the way it always did.

Thirty-five days.

I was still looking at the back of her head when something on the forward console chimed. Once. A single tone I didn't recognize, soft and out of sequence with anything on the standard contact schedule, and in the dark I felt her go very still in an entirely different way.