Her Three Orbits

Manuel Mustafá Science Fiction

There are three men in my orbit. I made my peace with all of them — or I thought I had.
Dmitri: the man who built me. Eleven years. No definitions, no names for what we were. He recruited me for Artemis VI. He is the reason I trusted this mission enough to leave everything else behind. Now the station where he's sealed has gone silent, and I don't know if he put me here to save me — or for something else entirely.
Hayes: six months of training and the cleanest arrangement I've ever had. No pretense. No strings. He is Ethan's commanding officer. Ethan does not know — or hasn't said he knows. I've been watching him not say it for six months.
Ethan: the only one who never looked at me like I was something he could have. I decided to hate him on day two of training. I haven't revised the decision. I've noticed, however, that his fury doesn't look like contempt. I haven't decided what to do with that.
Then, at 14:07 mission time, the Gateway station goes silent.
No explosion. No distress signal. Just a void in the telemetry where two men used to be — and a display on the secondary screen that has been counting down ever since. Thirty-eight days of breathable air. Then nothing.
Commander Ethan Drake and I are stranded on the lunar surface. The Orion capsule — our only way home — is docked to a station that no longer responds. Houston has one option: a decommissioned SpaceX cargo lander sitting 400 kilometers away, on the far side of Shackleton Crater. Never designed for people. Possibly unfueled. Getting there means crossing terrain no human has ever seen, in the dark, with systems failing in real time. No rescue coming from Earth. No margin for error. No protocol for this.
The problem is not the rover.
The problem is that Ethan knows about Hayes. He doesn't know about Dmitri. He looks at me like I am a variable he cannot control. I look at him like he is proof that American arrogance has no gravitational limit. And now we share ten cubic meters of recycled air, a CO₂ counter we cannot turn off, and the knowledge that the water he drinks has passed through my body first.
Above us, in the silence, two men who know everything are waiting to find out if we make it back. Houston is giving answers too smooth and too careful to be true. And somewhere between the hatred and the dark and the 400,000 kilometers of distance from everything that could stop us, I am starting to understand that the most dangerous man in my orbit is the one who never tried to collect.
I am an engineer. I solve problems by taking them apart.
I have not found a solution for this one yet.
Her Three Orbits is a +18 dark sci-fi reverse harem romance. Slow burn. Explicit. Enemies to lovers. Survival thriller. Dual POV. For readers who want their heat earned and their distance measured in something more than kilometers.

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