Her Three Orbits

Chapter Five — Inventory

Artemis VI · Lunar South Pole · Day 2 of isolation · Natasha

The number was still there when I woke up.

Thirty-seven days. Pale blue. Unwavering. The secondary display had recalculated at 0001 hours with the same indifference it used to track oxygen partial pressure and fuel cell output. One day gone. The counter did not care that I had not slept. It did not care about anything. That was the contract I had always had with machines: they performed their function and they did not care, and in exchange for that, they were reliable.

Thirty-seven days of breathable air. I lay in my bunk and let the number settle into my body the way cold does, slowly, starting at the edges.

Ethan was already at the forward console. I had no way of knowing whether he had slept. He was upright and his hands were moving.

I got up. Day 2.

There was a procedure for waking up in a rover during an abort scenario, and it was not that different from waking up in a rover on a normal survey mission. You used the sanitation system behind its curtain in the precise order the manual specified, because the closed-loop system required sequence to function. You used thirty milliliters of water for hygiene. You ate whatever was designated for the morning ration. You ran the pre-shift diagnostic.

I did all of this. Ethan did not turn around.

At 0612, I pulled up the systems diagnostic interface on the secondary console and began.

The full inventory took two hours and forty minutes.

I started with life support: that was where the number lived and I needed to understand it completely before I could work with it. The LiOH scrubber cartridges were at ninety-four percent capacity. Current consumption rate: nominal for two occupants at moderate activity level. The onboard AI's thirty-seven-day estimate was accurate within a margin of plus or minus eighteen hours, which I could work with. I annotated the calculation in my mission log and moved on.

Water recycling: functioning at ninety-one percent efficiency. That was below the design spec of ninety-six percent. I flagged it and ran the secondary diagnostic on the condensate recovery system. A partial blockage in the humidity capture coil, manageable, something I could clear with a standard filter flush. I noted it, priority two.

Power: fuel cells at seventy-nine percent. Solar panel array nominal for current positioning. We were in a partial shadow window through 1400 hours. I ran the energy budget against the scrubber draw, the heating system, the navigation array, the comms equipment. The numbers were tight but not catastrophic, yet. They would become that if we lost any secondary system and couldn't compensate.

Navigation: primary array nominal. No issues logged.

Communications: DTE antenna locked. LunaNet backup operational. Gateway relay: still no signal. I looked at that line for a moment, then moved on. Looking at it would not change it.

Emergency protocols: all systems armed and ready. Suitport seals nominal. EVA suit pressure integrity: checked and confirmed the night before departure, which now felt like information from a different mission.

I worked through it methodically, system by system, annotating each result in my shorthand. Ethan had his own log. I did not offer to share mine. He did not ask. That was the arrangement we had reached without discussing it: parallel documentation of the same reality, from two different angles, to be reconciled if Houston required it.

When I finished, I sat with the complete picture for a moment.

The rover was functioning. Every backup was operational. The backup's backup was intact. We had thirty-seven days of breathable air, seventy-nine percent fuel reserves, and a blockage in the humidity coil that would take me forty minutes to clear. We had a mission log, a communication window every six hours, and a route Houston had sent us that I was not ready to trust.

My father's voice, unbidden: *At every step, there is something you can do.*

I closed the diagnostic interface. I opened the humidity coil repair protocol.

Ethan turned then. I felt him looking at the back of my head the way I always felt.

"Diagnostic complete?" he said.

"Everything nominal except the condensate recovery coil. I'm clearing it now."

A pause. "How long?"

"Forty minutes. Possibly thirty."

He turned back to the forward display. I took the access panel off the secondary ventilation unit and got to work.

It took twenty-eight minutes. When I replaced the panel and ran the confirmation diagnostic, the efficiency reading had climbed back to ninety-four percent. Not the design spec. Close enough.

I logged it. I looked at the thirty-seven-day counter. Then I looked away.

Moscow · One year earlier

Andrei had made pasta.

That was the detail I remembered first: the smell of garlic and olive oil when I came through the door at nine in the evening, already wearing the jacket I had not taken off since the morning briefing, when they had confirmed my assignment. Where I had sat in a room of people who were congratulating me and felt something I had not expected, which was the quiet, specific grief of a decision already made.

Andrei was at the stove. He had heard me come in but he did not turn around immediately. He had learned, across two years, that I needed a moment when I came home, a small, ungoverned space between the world and the room we shared. That was the thing about Andrei: he noticed things carefully and then made space for them without requiring credit.

I put my bag down and stood in the kitchen doorway without moving. The briefing documents were in my bag. The assignment was already filed. I was leaving in seven months for a mission that would last six to twelve months and that carried a risk profile I had not described to him in full and did not intend to.

"Andrei," I said.

He turned then. He looked at my face. A tall man, unhurried, with the kind of steadiness that had felt like safety for the first eight months and since then like something I kept measuring against a standard I had not told him I was using.

"You got it," he said.

"Yes."

He put the wooden spoon down against the side of the pot. He looked at the stove for a moment. Then he looked back at me. "When?"

"Training begins in three months. Launch in seven."

He was quiet for a long time. The garlic was starting to burn. Neither of us moved.

"I know you already accepted," he said.

"Yes."

It was the word that ended it, and we both understood that, and neither of us said so out loud.

He turned back to the stove. He reduced the heat under the pan. He moved with the particular precision of a man managing himself.

I should have said something. I had four languages and none of them had the right word for what I was doing to this person who had done nothing wrong except trust me for two years with a constancy I had never managed to return in kind.

I ate the pasta. It was good. Andrei was, among other things, an excellent cook. We talked about other things. A film he had seen. His mother's visit the following week. Ordinary details, laid across the thing we were not saying.

At midnight I lay in the dark beside him and understood what I had known since the briefing: I had not hesitated. Not once. The mission assignment had arrived and I had felt, underneath every appropriate professional response, a kind of relief so precise and specific that it told me everything about the shape of the life I had been trying to build in that apartment.

I was not built for staying. I had known that about myself since the kitchen in Novosibirsk, since my mother's hands around the cold cup, since the moment I had understood that what I feared most was not the leaving. It was the waiting. The not-going. The world reduced to a table and a phone that might ring.

What I had never resolved was whether that made me a survivor or just someone who kept choosing the exit before it could be taken from her.

I did not sleep. I looked at the ceiling. In seven months I would be on a launchpad. In seven months this apartment, this man's careful steadiness, this smell of garlic and olive oil, would be at four hundred thousand kilometers away and I would be exactly where I had needed to be since I was nine years old.

That was the truth of it. I had needed to go.

The question I could not answer, lying in the dark in Moscow, was whether needing to go was the same as being right to leave.

At 1400 hours, Houston's contact window opened.

Maya Chen's voice came through with the standard one-point-three-second delay. She gave us the update in the same careful register as the night before. Gateway relay: still no signal. Orion capsule: telemetry confirmed, stable orbit, no voice contact with crew. They were working. They would update us at the next window.

I logged the contact summary. Then I went back through my notes from the communication the day before, where Maya Chen had said capsule intact, stable orbit, no voice contact with crew.



Today she had given us the orbit. She had given us the silence. She had not given us intact. I sat with that omission for a long moment before I understood why it bothered me.

Houston chose words the way I chose tools. Carefully. For a reason. Yesterday they had been able to confirm the structure, even without the people inside it. Today, structure and silence had both gone quiet.

Either it no longer applied.

Or it had stopped being the right word for what they'd found.