Her Three Orbits

Chapter Two ― Protocol Alpha

Artemis VI · Lunar South Pole · Day 7 of isolation · Ethan

She said my name.

Ethan. Like it had slipped out without her permission, and she was already pretending it hadn't. I noticed. I always noticed things I wasn't supposed to notice about Natasha Volkova.

I kept my eyes on the sector seven data and ran the calculation again. The subsurface void was real. A pocket under the intended route, approximately forty meters deep, with a density signature consistent with sublimated ice shelf. If the rover crossed it at any speed above walking pace, we were looking at a collapse risk. Houston's route sent us directly over it at kilometer 312. Houston's route had been flagged as cleared by their geology team three days ago.

There were two explanations. I had already considered both of them. I did not like either one.

"We confront Houston at the next contact window," I said. "Formally. On the record."

She was still close. Too close for the particular version of this situation we had been maintaining, the one where we operated in the same six meters of pressurized space without acknowledging that we were two people and not two machines. Her shoulder was eight centimeters from mine. I could hear her breathing. I had been tracking the rhythm of her breathing for seven days without meaning to.

Her voice was flat in a way that wasn't anger. It was assessment. "You think that matters now?"

She looked at me for a moment with something that wasn't quite contempt. It was the look she gave protocol when she thought it was the wrong tool for the situation.

I turned back to the display. "Get some sleep, Volkova. Four hours to the contact window."

"You haven't slept in nineteen hours."

"I'm aware."

She didn't move. I heard her exhale slowly through her nose, and then she pushed off the co-pilot seat and moved back through the cabin toward her bunk. The rover was quiet again except for the CO₂ filter and the fuel cell hum.

I opened a new entry in the mission log. Typed: Day 7. Sector 7 anomaly identified. Subsurface void, density consistent with ice shelf. Flagged for Houston contact window at 0600. Route deviation required. Then I stopped.

Houston did not flag this anomaly in the route clearance filed 72 hours ago.

I saved it. I didn't file it yet. Filing it was a statement. I needed four more hours to decide what kind of statement I was prepared to make.

Six months earlier · Johnson Space Center · Houston, Texas

The briefing room in Building 5 seated fourteen. There were eight of us at the table and six more in the back row. I was three minutes early, on time, which meant I was almost the last one there.

I took the seat at the end of the second row because that was where the sightline to the mission systems board was cleanest, and I had been told the Roscosmos specialist would be presenting the life support integration overview and I wanted to be able to read the data without squinting.

She was already at the board when I walked in. I didn't know her yet. I knew the name: Dr. Natasha Volkova, systems engineer, PhD Bauman MSTU, three prior EVA certifications, no prior lunar surface experience, assigned as the primary ECLSS specialist for surface operations. Her file was impressive and also, in two specific incidents, alarming. She had improvised solutions to equipment failures in ways that violated protocol with a precision that suggested it was not accidentally. Like she had looked at the manual and discarded it. I had noted that as a risk.

She had her back to the room, marking something on the systems board with a precision that made the handwriting look like engineering notation. She was wearing a blue Roscosmos technical jacket over civilian clothes. The mission patch on the left shoulder was different from mine.

Colonel Hayes walked in and sat down two seats to my left, and I watched him look across the room at Natasha Volkova's back, and I watched his expression do something brief and specific that I recognized immediately. It was the look of a man who already knew someone in a room and was deciding whether to show it. He pulled out his tablet and opened the mission brief and didn't look at her again for the next forty minutes.

She turned around when the room was full. Her eyes moved across the briefing table the way a technician scans an instrument array. Then she started talking, and I forgot about Hayes for the next hour because Dr. Natasha Volkova, it turned out, had a way of presenting life support data that made it sound like a problem worth solving and not a checklist worth surviving. She was precise. She was fast. She did not look at her notes. When she got to the CO₂ management protocols for the pressurized rover, she changed three parameters on the board mid-sentence and nobody asked her to justify them because the math was already there.

I did not think she was going to be easy to work with. I thought she was going to be right in ways that made her dangerous, and that was worse.

After the briefing, I approached her to introduce myself to every crew member in the first contact, establish professional register, assess for compatibility. She shook my hand and looked at me with eyes that were already cataloguing something, and I said, "Commander Drake. I have some questions about the emergency CO₂ parameters you updated.

"I know they conflict with the Houston baseline, it was built for a three-person configuration. We're running four." She paused. "I'm surprised your team didn't catch it."

It was a precise statement. It was also, technically, a challenge. She delivered it with the same tone she had used for the systems data: factual, without apology, completely aware of its effect.

I said, "I'll review the documentation and follow up."

She nodded once and turned back to her conversation with the Roscosmos liaison. End of interaction. Forty-three seconds. I walked back to my seat and ran her CO₂ parameter adjustment in my head and confirmed that she was correct and that our baseline had been wrong for two months and nobody had caught it.

I did not change my assessment of her as a risk. I updated it to a different kind of risk than anticipated.

Later that day, I watched Hayes catch up with her in the corridor outside the briefing room. I watched her recognize him. I watched the specific quality of that recognition, the slight relaxation in her posture, the fraction of a second before she said his name. Colonel. Professional. Correct. And then Hayes said something quiet and she looked up at him with an expression that was not professional and not correct, and then it was gone. They were walking side by side toward the debrief, as I kept walking behind them.

Not my business. I moved on.

I moved on for five months. I was still moving on.

The contact window alarm sounded at 0558. I had the sector seven data open on the primary display and the mission log entry queued and my coffee in my hand. I heard Volkova shift in her bunk behind me. She was already awake. She had been awake for the last hour. I had tracked the change in her breathing without meaning to.

The secondary display had not changed. Thirty-one days of breathable air at current consumption rate. After that, the CO₂ would build to lethal concentration in approximately six hours. The onboard system tracked it to the minute. We had requested, in the first forty-eight hours, that Houston provide a way to suppress the display during sleep cycles. Houston had declined. Operational visibility protocol.

Volkova unfolded herself from the bunk and moved to the co-pilot seat in two efficient motions. She pulled up a secondary copy of the sector seven data and set it beside mine without comment. I noted that she had not changed or added to the data in the four hours since we had found it. She had been sitting with it the same way I had been sitting with it. Working the same problem from different angles and arriving at the same place.

The comm crackled. Maya Chen's voice came through, precise and too careful, with the 1.3-second delay that never stopped feeling like a pause before bad news.

"Artemis VI, this is Houston. Good morning. We're reading you on the contact window. Go ahead."

I looked at the filed log entry. I looked at the sector seven data. I looked at the number on the secondary display. Before I filed it, I ran the density signature one more time. The number was familiar. Hayes had mentioned a number like it, once, before departure. I hadn't asked why.

Then I filed the log entry.

"Houston," I said. "We need to talk about the route."