Station Nine – Part 2: 20:00 Hours

The commander’s quarters had the only real window on Station Nine.

Everyone else had screens. Imani Osei had a single round pane of thick glass, half a metre wide, looking out over the red plains of Arcadia Planitia. The storm had passed. The sky outside was the colour of butterscotch, and the two small moons were rising.

Kai stood just inside the door at exactly 20:00, in a clean uniform, his hands clasped behind his back.

She was sitting in the room’s only chair, without her command jacket, in a grey T-shirt. Her dark hair, always tightly braided on duty, was loose around her shoulders. She looked younger. She looked, he thought, like someone who had not slept properly in two days.

“Sit,” she said, and pointed at the edge of the bunk.

He sat.

---

“I want to talk to you,” Imani said, “as Imani. Not as your commander. Is that all right?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She looked at her hands for a moment. “During the storm, I gave you three hundred and eleven orders. I counted afterwards. You followed every one of them. Even the ones you hated.”

“The bypass,” Kai said.

“Especially the bypass.” She looked up. “You’ve argued with me about everything for eight months. Then for thirty-one hours, you didn’t argue once. I need to know why.”

He thought about lying. Then he thought about her voice in his ear, every fifteen minutes, steady as a heartbeat. Trust me.

“Because I liked it,” he said quietly. “Not the danger. The,” he searched for the word, “the certainty. I’ve been making every decision alone for my whole career. For thirty-one hours, someone else carried that. And you carried it perfectly.” He swallowed. “I didn’t want it to stop.”

The room was very quiet. Outside the window, one of the moons cleared the horizon.

“I know,” Imani said.

“You know?”

“I heard it in your voice. Around hour twelve.” She leaned forward. “And I need to tell you something too. I’ve commanded people for fifteen years. Most of them obey because they have to. You obeyed because you chose to.” She paused. “I didn’t know how much I wanted that until I had it.”

---

She laid out the terms the way she laid out a mission briefing. Clear. Calm. Numbered.

“One. On duty, nothing changes. You’re my engineer. You argue when you think I’m wrong, because I need you to.

“Two. Off duty, in this room, my word is final. Unless you say yours.

“Three. Your word. Choose it.”

Kai thought for a moment.

“Scrubber,” he said.

For the first time since he had known her, Commander Imani Osei laughed out loud.

“That’s terrible,” she said.

“It saved fourteen lives.”

“It did,” she agreed, and stopped laughing, and her voice dropped into the low, steady register he had listened to for thirty-one hours. “Four. You don’t touch me until I tell you to. Understood?”

His whole body went still.

“Yes, Commander.”

“Not Commander. Not in here.”

“Yes, Imani,” he said.

“Good,” she said softly. “Stand up.”

---

What happened next belonged only to them: the round window and the butterscotch sky and two small moons rising over an empty planet, the calm, exact authority in her voice and the deep, chosen surrender in his. Fifty-five million kilometres from Earth, in a small metal room full of recycled air, two people discovered that the hardest thing either of them had ever done was simply to trust. It turned out to be easy.

---

The supply ship arrived six weeks later, as scheduled.

The captain came aboard Station Nine and found it in perfect order. The oxygen system was fully repaired. The crew report was glowing. The engineer and the commander were professional, polite and, as far as he could tell, slightly too careful not to look at each other in meetings.

At the end of the inspection, he handed Imani a data chip.

“Mission Control’s new orders,” he said. “Station Nine has been approved for another four years. They want you to stay on as commander. And they want your engineer.”

Imani took the chip.

That night, in her quarters, she gave it to Kai.

“Four years,” she said. “On Mars. With me. You can say no.”

Kai looked at the chip. Then at the window, where the sun was rising, small and pale and blue, over the red horizon. Then at her.

“Is that an order?” he asked.

Imani smiled.

“It’s a question,” she said. “The only one I’ll ever ask you. The rest will be orders.”

He put the chip down. He knelt in front of her chair, the way she had taught him.

“Yes,” he said.

---

The End.

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