Her Three Orbits

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

Seven days. Seven days of recycled air and protein bars and the particular silence of a man who said exactly what he meant and nothing else.

The Pressurized Rover was six meters of metal box with ten cubic meters of space to hate each other in. I knew every scratch on every panel. I knew which storage latch creaked and which one needed two hands. I knew the exact pitch of the CO₂ filter at three in the morning, the way it dropped half a register when the cabin temperature fell below twelve degrees Celsius. There was nothing else to know. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but wait, and run diagnostics, and listen to Ethan Drake breathe forty centimeters away while I pretended I wasn’t doing exactly that.

“Volkova.” His voice came from the forward seat. Flat. Controlled. “Houston confirmed the next contact window. Four hours.”

“I can read the schedule,” I said, without turning.

A pause. He exhaled through his nose, that small, precise sound I had catalogued over six months of hating him across increasingly confined spaces.

“I’m telling you anyway.”

I turned. He was watching the navigation screen, jaw set, profile cut by the blue glow of the display. Commander Drake at rest looked like a man calculating something. He always looked like that. It was one of the things I’d decided I despised about him, back when still felt like a productive use of my attention.

That was before seven days of silence from Gateway. Before Houston’s voice went careful in a way that said everything they weren’t saying out loud. Before I understood that the two people who were supposed to bring us home (Dmitri and Colonel Hayes) were simply gone. Not dead, Houston kept insisting. They couldn’t confirm that. They just weren’t there anymore.

A communication anomaly. Words that meant nothing and everything at once.

I pressed my back against the cold wall and closed my eyes.

Five weeks earlier · Gateway Station · Lunar Orbit

I was not supposed to be awake at 0200. But the Gateway hummed differently at night, a lower register, almost biological, and I had never learned to sleep well inside machines that breathed.

I found him in the observation module. He was sitting with his back to me, forearms on his knees, staring at the Moon through the curved window. The light turned his shoulders silver.

I should have gone back. I almost did.

“Dr. Volkova,” he said, without turning. Ethan Drake heard everything. I moved to the opposite side of the module. The Moon filled the window between us. Grey, enormous, indifferent.

We didn’t speak for a while. Normally our silences were hostile, weaponized. This one wasn’t. It was just two people in the dark, 400,000 kilometers from home, looking at something that made language feel insufficient.

“You ever think about what it looked like before we got here?” he asked. His voice was different at 0200. Less command, more person.

“It looks the same as before,” I said. “We haven’t changed it.”

“Not yet.”

I looked at his profile. The sharp line of his jaw. The way his hands had gone still, they were never still during the day, always checking something, running a protocol, keeping the mission moving with the focused discipline of a man who believed that stopping meant failing.

“You think that’s a problem,” I said. “That we’re going to change it.”

He turned. Our eyes met across the small module, and something moved through the air between us that I did not have a precise word for. Not hostility. Something older than that. Something that had been building since the day we’d boarded the Orion together and he’d looked at my mission patch and said nothing at all, and that nothing had somehow been louder than everything he might have said.

“I think it’s inevitable,” he said quietly. “Whether it’s a problem depends on what we do next.”

I held his gaze three seconds longer than I should have. Then I stood, said spokoynoy nochi in Russian out of pure reflex, and walked back to my bunk without looking at the window.

I lay in the dark for an hour. Told myself it was proximity, sleep deprivation, the specific cruelty of the human brain in a closed system with limited variables. I was an engineer. I understood closed systems. I understood that every output was traceable to an input. Whatever I had felt in that module had an input. I just needed to find it.

I was still looking for it when he sat down beside me. Close enough that his arm pressed against mine through the thin fabric of my thermal layer. Warm. Certain. Like he’d made a decision I hadn’t been consulted on.

“I don’t actually think you’re difficult, Volkova.” His voice was very low. Almost not a voice at all. “I think you’re the most competent person on this crew, and it scares the hell out of me.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t find the words in any of my four languages. He didn’t move away.

Twenty minutes. His arm against mine. The Moon in the window. Neither of us naming what it was.

Then the morning shift alarm went off, and Commander Drake stood up, straightened his spine back into protocol, and was gone.

The cold pulled me out of the memory the way it always did: a slow descent from eleven degrees toward something that made the joints ache. Houston had ordered us to cut heating output three days ago. Preserve the fuel cells.

I pulled the thermal layer tight around my shoulders and opened my eyes. Ethan was still at the forward console. His shoulders had the particular stiffness of a man who had been in the same position for too long and was refusing to acknowledge it.

“Drake.” I kept my voice level. “You should sleep.”

“I’ll sleep at the designated rest period.”

“The designated rest period was two hours ago.”

He didn’t answer. I got up, moved through the narrow cabin toward the front, steadying myself on the handhold rail. The lunar gravity made it feel like walking underwater, that soft, slow resistance that never fully let you forget where you were. I stopped beside the co-pilot seat.

The navigation display showed the topographical map Houston had sent forty-eight hours ago. A thin red line tracing a route across the Shackleton crater rim. Four hundred kilometers. That was the distance between us and the backup Starship lander, a decommissioned SpaceX cargo ship that had never been designed to carry people, sitting somewhere on the far side of the crater, waiting.

I studied the route. The crater gradients. The windows where the solar arrays would drop below threshold and we’d be on fuel cells alone. The secondary display in the corner of the screen tracked the CO₂ scrubber countdown. Thirty one days of breathable air at current consumption. The number was always there. We couldn’t turn it off.

Then I saw it. Something in the gradient data for sector seven. A subsurface reading that didn’t match the surrounding terrain. My stomach pulled tight. I ran it twice to be sure. It was real. And Houston had sent us this route without flagging it.

“Ethan.” I used his first name without thinking. He went very still. “Look at sector seven.”

He leaned forward. I watched his eyes move across the data. I watched the exact moment he found it, the same thing I’d found, because his jaw did something almost imperceptible. A single, controlled contraction.

He turned and looked at me. We were close. Too close for the version of us that hated each other without complication. The cabin was cold and the display light was blue and his eyes, up close, were not the flat command-grey I had filed them as in my memory.

“Houston didn’t flag this,” he said.

“No,” I said. “They didn’t.”

His voice dropped half a register. “Which means either they didn’t see it—”

I held his gaze. “Or they did.”