Her Three Orbits

Chapter Ten — Secondary Display

Artemis VI · Lunar South Pole · Day 5 of isolation · Ethan

The chime from two nights ago turned out to be nothing. A rescheduled contact window, logged late by Houston's own system, correcting itself eleven hours after the fact. I'd told Volkova that the next morning, flat, factual, and watched something in her shoulders come down half an inch before she caught herself doing it.

Neither of us had said what we'd both been thinking in the dark when it sounded. There wasn't a protocol for acknowledging the exact moment someone let themselves stop bracing. I'd filed the correction, run the morning checklist, and gone on with the day. If some part of me had spent the last two nights replaying the sound of that chime in the dark, that wasn't something that belonged in the log either.

Thirty-four days. The number had recalculated at 0001, same as always, indifferent to the fact that I'd been awake to watch it happen.

I ran the math again at 0600, before she was up. Then again at 0640. I ran it a third time during the morning diagnostic, a fourth during the consumables log, and by the time Houston's contact window opened at 1100 I'd run it eleven times total, which was a number I only noticed because I'd started counting without deciding to. Scrubber capacity. Consumption rate at current activity levels. Fuel cell output against heating load, navigation draw, comms overhead. Eleven variations, eleven different angles into the same closed system, looking for the one input I might have weighted wrong.

There wasn't one. The math didn't care how many times I asked it the question. It gave me the same answer every time, clean and indifferent, the way Volkova's machines always did.

She was at the aft panel when I looked up, running a check I hadn't asked for on the fuel cell stack. Seventy-three percent. Down from seventy-six two days ago, which was exactly the rate we'd projected, which should have been reassuring but instead felt like watching a fuse burn at a speed you'd already calculated and couldn't do anything to change.

"You've redone that four times this morning," she said, without turning around.

"Five."

"You said eleven a minute ago."

"Eleven since yesterday. Five since this morning." I closed the display. "I'm aware of how it sounds."

She didn't answer that, which was its own kind of mercy. She went back to the fuel cell readout, and I went back to staring at a number that wasn't going to change no matter how many ways I asked it to, and the cabin held the quiet of two people working the same problem from two directions and arriving, every time, at the same place.

Cape Canaveral · Crew Quarters · Eleven days before launch

The corridor outside the suiting facility was narrow enough that two people standing in it had to choose, consciously, not to touch. Hayes was leaning against the wall with his flight jacket open, watching the technicians wheel a pressure suit past on its rack, and I was standing across from him doing the same thing. There wasn't much else to do eleven days out except watch other people check your equipment and trust they'd done it right.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm always quiet."

"You're quiet different." He didn't look at me when he said it. He had a habit of delivering the things that mattered most while looking at something else, like the weight of his attention would make them too heavy to land correctly. "The kind where you're already three weeks into the mission in your head and the rest of us haven't left the ground yet."

I didn't argue with that. It was accurate, and I'd learned a long time ago not to spend energy disputing true things.

"Volkova's run the ECLSS sims four times this week," I said. "I keep finding her notes attached to mine."

Something shifted in his face, brief, there and gone, the kind of thing you'd miss if you hadn't spent six months learning to read the specific weather of Hayes's expressions. He pushed off the wall, walked a few steps down the corridor, and looked through the observation window at the suit lab beyond it, where she wasn't, where nobody was, just empty stations and equipment racks under fluorescent light.

"Watch yourself with the engineer, Drake." He said it lightly, the way he said most things he meant entirely. "She doesn't break. She just leaves before anyone finds out they needed her to stay."

Personnel advice, I'd told myself. A colleague's read on a difficult crewmate, useful, slightly cynical, the kind of thing a man says about someone he's worked with and doesn't fully trust. I'd thanked him for it, or something close to thanking him, and we'd gone back to watching the suits, and I hadn't thought about the sentence again until eleven days into a mission that had stopped being a mission and started being a countdown.

I thought about it now. Not the words. The specificity. She doesn't break. She just leaves. That wasn't an assessment a man made about a colleague he'd watched from across a briefing room. That was an assessment a man made about someone he'd watched leave a room that had him in it.

Hayes had known. Of course he'd known. He'd been telling me, eleven days before launch, in a hallway too narrow to misread, and I had filed it under not my business and gone to check on my suit.

The number on the secondary display still read thirty-four when Houston's voice came through, except it came forty minutes early, off the standard schedule, and Maya Chen's first words weren't good afternoon and weren't the careful, leveled cadence she'd been using for five days straight.

"Artemis VI, this is Houston. We need you to stand by for an unscheduled transmission. This isn't the regular window."

I looked at Volkova. She was already looking at me.

"Copy, Houston," I said, and my voice came out steadier than the rest of me felt. "Standing by."

The line went quiet, not dead, just holding. The kind of silence that meant someone on the other end was deciding, right now, in real time, exactly how to say whatever came next.