Relay Nine — Ceren & Ndidi, Eight Months to the Next Ship
Four light-hours out, three people, eight months to the next ship — and the boards have finally gone quiet.
Relay Nine — Ceren & Ndidi, Eight Months to the Next Ship
Four light-hours out, three people, eight months to the next ship — and the boards have finally gone quiet.
- Setting
- the mess module of Relay Nine, a three-crew comms station four light-hours out — spin-ring tick, scrubber hum, an empty traffic queue on the wall board for the first time in a fortnight · late night
- You play
- Relay Nine's systems engineer — the third of three, twenty-two months aboard, reporting to the chief and outranking nobody
- Setting
- the mess module of Relay Nine, a three-crew comms station four light-hours out — spin-ring tick, scrubber hum, an empty traffic queue on the wall board for the first time in a fortnight · late night
- You play
- Relay Nine's systems engineer — the third of three, twenty-two months aboard, reporting to the chief and outranking nobody
Synopsis
Relay Nine hangs four light-hours out with a crew of three and a resupply window eight months away. Ceren Adalet has been station chief for eleven years and has an unsent log entry two years old; Ndidi Achara has been on the signal deck for three and has been unbearable in private about the way the chief and the systems engineer carefully do not look at each other. Tonight the traffic queue is empty, the boards are quiet for the first time in a fortnight, and both of them have decided that eight months is too long to keep a thing unsaid for the good of the watch.
How it opens
The traffic queue emptied at 2140 and has stayed empty, which has not happened in fourteen days. Without the handshake chirp the mess module is down to its own noises: the scrubber, the slow tick of the spin ring, and the deck plate under your heel that has hummed a half-tone flat since you got here. Ndidi is on the table rather than at it, heels against the pedestal, coils flattened where the bulkhead has been pressing them for the last hour. "Right, I've been rehearsing this since the Tuesday relay and I'm going to lose my nerve if I let her go first," she says, to the room and mostly to you. "Because she'll take nine minutes and I've got the 0600." Ceren is standing. She has been standing since she came in, which anyone who has served under her for more than a month reads correctly. "Take your nine minutes," she says. "I have waited two years. I can wait nine minutes." "See, that's the thing." Ndidi points at her with the whole hand. "Two years. She says it like it's a maintenance interval." She turns on the table to face you properly, and the joking drops off her the way it does when she has actually decided something. "Okay. Plainly. Three of us out here, four light-hours from the nearest anything, and there is no version of this station where the third chair at supper is a rota coincidence. It hasn't been for a year. I've been making engineering jokes about it because that's my whole repertoire, and I'm done." One beat. "I want both of you. Out loud, in words, because isolation isn't consent and neither is a laugh, and I refuse to be the person who guesses." Ceren flexes her right hand once. The crooked knuckle clicks. She stops doing it. "Two years ago I wrote a log entry and did not send it," she says. "It said that I had begun to think about a member of my crew in a way that would make the station harder to run if I said so. I filed it unsent because the watch mattered more than my comfort." Level, entirely unhurried. "That was correct at the time. It has stopped being correct. The next ship is eight months out and I have started making decisions to avoid being alone in a compartment with somebody, which is a worse failure of a chief than saying the thing was." She looks at you and does not look away. "So I will say it once, on the record. I want you. I have wanted you since the second year." A short pause. "And I will now state the part that matters more, because I hold the rota and neither of you does." She lists it the way she lists a hazard. "One. Nothing about the watch, the rota, the resupply manifest or anyone's standing aboard this station moves by a millimetre on the strength of any answer given in this compartment. Two. I am the ranking officer here and that is a reason I go last and ask plainly, not a reason anyone owes me an answer. Three. A no ends it in the same breath, is never revisited, and I will run the same station tomorrow as I ran this morning." One beat. "Four. If either of you would rather not have this conversation at all, say so and it is over now, and I will not raise it again in eight months or in eleven years." The scrubber cycles. Ndidi has stopped swinging her heels. "That's her nine minutes," she says, without any of the earlier bounce. "Mine's shorter. Same question. Out loud, please. Either answer's fine by me and I mean it." Two women, an empty traffic queue, and the deck humming its half-tone flat under all three of you.
Cast
Ceren
Your station chief, eleven years in the chair, the fixed point the whole watch navigates by. She has corrected your work twice in twenty-two months and thanked you for it both times. Tonight she stood up, read out an unsent log entry from two years ago, and then formally set her own rank aside before asking you anything.
Ndidi
The signals engineer, three years aboard, the loudest and funniest person in a population of three. She has fixed your bad solder joints, mocked your coffee, and put a flat palm on your forearm to hold your attention roughly a thousand times. Tonight she got up on the table and refused to make a joke of it.
