Her Three Orbits

Chapter Six — The Rules

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

He had written the protocol at 0400, in the dark, while Volkova slept or pretended to. Five points. Numbered. Each one load-bearing.

A rover was not a base. A base had walls between people, doors that closed, rooms a person could disappear into when they needed to stop being looked at. This six meters of pressurized space had none of that. Two people and one volume of recycled air would either run on structure or run on friction, and over thirty-seven days that was how systems failed. He had seen it happen to better-trained people than the two of them. He was not going to let it happen here.

He read the secondary display before he woke her. thirty-seven days. The number had dropped by one since yesterday. No surprises. He preferred it that way.

"Volkova." He kept his voice level the way he always did before delivering something she wasn't going to like. "I want to go over a few things before the next contact window."

She came off the bunk in one motion, already alert, no transitional grogginess, just awake. She looked at the tablet in his hand like she was deciding, before reading a word of it, how much of it she intended to keep.

"A protocol," she said.

"A cohabitation protocol. Five points." He turned the tablet toward her. "Sleep cycles synchronized to 2200 and 0600, no exceptions for personal preference. Designated hygiene windows, thirty minutes each, posted on the secondary display so neither of us has to ask. Comm silence during contact windows unless it's mission-relevant. A fixed division of workspace, my side forward, yours aft, so we're not negotiating six square meters every time we both need to move. And a consumables log, signed off by both of us daily, so rationing decisions are documented and neither of us has to take the other's word for what's left."

She read it twice. He watched her eyes move down the list fast, exact, already building counterarguments before she'd finished the first pass.

"Three of these are fine," she said.

"Which three."

"Hygiene windows. The consumables log. Comm silence, although I think your definition of mission-relevant is going to be narrower than mine, and we should talk about that before it becomes a problem." She handed the tablet back, but didn't let go of it yet. "The sleep schedule and the workspace division, no."

He had expected resistance, but he had not expected her to sound entirely reasonable while delivering it, which was somehow worse. It was harder to argue with someone who wasn't raising her voice.

"The sleep schedule keeps us both functional," he said. "Fatigue compounds error. You know that better than most people on this crew."

"I know that fatigue compounds error. I also know that I don't sleep on command, and forcing a schedule I can't actually follow doesn't produce rest, it produces the appearance of rest, which is worse than no schedule at all, because then you think the problem is solved." She crossed her arms. "I'll commit to a window. I won't commit to falling asleep inside it on a timer like you do."

He didn't have a counter for it yet, because she wasn't wrong, and he had learned a long time ago not to argue with a true thing just because it was inconvenient.

"The workspace division," he said instead.

"Is arbitrary. There's no operational reason the side of a six-meter cabin needs to be fixed. It needs to be whatever the task requires. If I'm working the ECLSS panel, that's forward, on your side, by your logic. Are you going to ask me to move it?"

"No."

"Then the division doesn't survive its own first day. Don't write rules you're not going to enforce. It teaches the other person which rules are real."

He looked at her for a second longer than the conversation required. It was, he thought, a commander's instinct she'd just described back to him, more precisely than he'd ever said it himself.

"Fine," he said. "Strike the division. Sleep schedule stands as a window, not a mandate."

"Agreed."

Two points conceded. Three intact. It was not the protocol he'd written, but it was a protocol, and it had her name on it now in a way that meant she'd actually follow it which was worth more than five points she'd ignore by day four.

He typed the revision into the log. She watched him do it, arms still crossed, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and the silence had the particular quality of two people who had just done something efficiently and were both a little surprised by it.

USAFA · Colorado Springs · Sixteen years earlier

The handshake came before the diploma did. That was the part nobody told you about graduation. You expected the cap, the formation, the flyover. You didn't expect that the first contact with your father in four months of training would be a grip and a release, professional, dry, over before you'd finished registering it.

"Lieutenant Drake." He said it like a title, because to his father it was one, the only one that had ever fully satisfied him. Air Force colonel, twenty-six years in, a man who measured affection in the same units he measured everything else: precision, restraint, the absence of waste.

Ethan had wanted, for one unguarded second, to be hugged. He had wanted it knowing he wasn't going to get it, which made the wanting both private and a little shameful. His mother hugged him instead, hard, both arms, her ER nurse's grip that had pulled people back from worse things than a graduation. She held on a beat longer than the moment required and he let her, because she was the one in the family who'd never confused control for love.

His father stepped back and looked at him the way he looked at a finished aircraft inspection. Thorough. Satisfied. Closed.

"You'll do well," his father said. "You don't waste motion. I've watched you since you were six years old."

It took Ethan another decade to understand that this was the closest his father had ever come to saying he was proud, and another five years after that to understand it was also, in its own contained way, a kind of love. His father had not been withholding affection. He had been translating it into the only language he trusted not to fail under pressure. Discipline was not the absence of feeling. It was what a man did with feeling when he didn't trust himself to survive it any other way.

Ethan had built his entire career on that translation. He had not questioned it once. Not really. Not until a woman who refused to fake sleep on a timer looked at him like she'd just caught him writing rules he didn't actually believe in.

The cabin was quiet when he came back from it. Volkova had moved to the aft section, running a hand along the ECLSS panel, checking a reading he hadn't asked her to check. The secondary display read thirty-seven days, same as it had an hour ago, pale and patient in the corner of his vision.

"Ethan." She said it without turning around, and something about the way she used his name instead of his rank made him go still before she'd finished the sentence.

"There's a number on this panel that doesn't match yesterday's log."

He crossed the cabin in four steps. "Show me."

She didn't answer right away. She just kept looking at the readout, her jaw set in the way he'd learned, over two days, meant she was deciding how to say something that hadn't fully become a sentence yet.