She was inside her sleep locker, at the base of the Mission Module. The locker was little bigger than a cupboard, with a foldaround screen drawn across it. On the surface above her head was her overhead light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.

A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunward. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.

Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts “significantly relating,” in the typically obscure, euphemistic double-talk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight. So much for significantly relating.

And — on top of everything else — she needed a pee.

She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily. Christ. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube — the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station — was so uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual since coming up into microgravity.

She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.

After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around, and docked nose to nose with the Mission Module.

When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until after the TOI burn to accomplish separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured those things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have gotten out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.