The curtain did not stir in any wind.
One corner of the blue cloth floated away from the window frame. The rest was secured. Darae asked for a closer view. Mujin changed the observation magnification without changing the approach velocity.
Adhesive tape showed inside the old window. Someone had fixed the cloth to the wall.
This had been a home with air in it.
She corrected the thought. It was evidence that there had been air. Whether anyone could live there now needed separate verification. She had been told the interior was empty, everyone evacuated into the detached service module.
From a distance, the five modules looked like one body. As they came closer, different repairs appeared. The panels on one outer wall were a different color. Elsewhere, little painted stars remained above an erased construction number.
On the drawings, everything had been the same gray.
Darae opened L-204’s list of household goods. Bedding. Tableware. Plant-growing mats. The list had not explained where anything went. Looking at the five sets of windows gave the objects places to belong.
Mujin announced the observation holding phase.
S-6 lay off to one side of the window. Instead of driving straight at it, Narae reduced their relative motion. An object growing in a window did not mean they could stop beside it immediately.
“No docking. We observe rotation and the interface first.”
Darae and Seo acknowledged.
The ventilation sounded much as it had at the port. The distance between that steady hum and the silent object outside felt strange. Inside the cylinder, several people would be listening to a similar hum together.
Direct contact stabilized. Haeseong’s answers came back promptly now, without waiting for a relay booking. Proximity did not let them leave everything running. S-6’s power budget was unchanged.
“Approach lights confirmed. We’ve told everyone not to move around following them.”
Darae checked her feet, secured beneath her seat. Crowding toward the window would make restraint and ventilation inside S-6 more difficult. Someone there was deciding how to wait too.
Seo received the current measurements.
Sorbent capacity: 43 percent. Temperature: 31.2 degrees Celsius. Carbon-dioxide partial pressure was a little higher. Instrument identification and measurement time accompanied each new reading. Oxygen supply and pressure remained within their maintained ranges.
Darae added a note to the field where she had written eight to eleven hours. Preparation and flight had taken roughly two hours since then. Seo recalculated a conservative range using the present conditions: approximately six to eight hours. Temperature and activity could shorten it further, regardless of the capacity display.
“You haven’t just subtracted two hours from the first estimate?”
“I used the new readings. Even when the numbers are similar, we need to record why.”
He sent Haeseong the same explanation. He did not give the filter estimate and the safety of the entire cabin one shared deadline. Darae linked the measurement times between the two sets of figures. Elapsed time needed handing over as carefully as cargo.
S-6 turned a little. An external mark beside the window appeared, then entered shadow. Mujin compared the earlier rotation estimate with the close observations. They agreed broadly, but he could narrow the uncertainty. Narae’s approach attitude would wait for that result.
Darae looked at the secured cartridge box. People preparing to receive it were beyond a window. There was still no way to pass them a handle.
The last step, the one she did best, had become the longest.
Haeseong sent a brief interior video.
S-6 looked less like the home’s sixth room than a long workshop. Instruments and storage occupied two walls, with tied blankets arranged between them. The table folded against a wall. Utensil containers were linked with cord.
Darae did not count people from one picture. There were people behind a post and outside the camera’s view. Several visible faces did not confirm everyone.
Maru had one arm hooked through an inner handhold. An adult checked a nearby restraint and passed over the phone. Maru aimed it toward the receiving area rather than their own face.
“We cleared this. There’s room for a canister.”
On the side designated as the floor lay folded growing mats. Small leaves rested toward the wall inside clear bags. Darae remembered Haeseong tying cloth around potting soil to keep it from escaping.
She could not tell them to leave all those things behind without a thought. The vessel’s limits would not vanish either. When asking what mattered, she needed to look beyond an object’s size.
Seo asked about possible positions for support equipment. Haeseong did not rearrange people to make room. He read the dimensions of an unused bench. Taking away their resting places first would make it harder to hold on.
“We can’t open two packages here together,” he said.
Their decision at the port to separate the packing sequence would help. The cramped receiving area connected to a small adjustment inside Narae. Good packing still did not let them deliver it this instant.
Mujin illuminated the external interface.
One side of the cover extended beneath a short reinforcing plate: the corner hidden by shadow in the photograph. It did not quite match the registered drawing. He collected views from several angles without attempting connection.
“Do we have to go inside to understand it?” Darae asked.
“There’s more we can check outside. Seeing it doesn’t establish compatibility.”
Seo placed the diagram beside the new images. Reviewing the interface came next. A finding that the assistance equipment fitted did not apply automatically to the spacecraft connection.
Darae told Haeseong they could turn off the interior video. They had the layout they needed. Saving power would help more. After the screen closed, she felt as though the colored utensil containers and folded blankets still lay across her terminal.
The main cluster entered another window.
Seo marked the two folded radiators. Up close, one was fully stowed; the other had stopped at an angle partway out. Their visible positions did not identify the failed components.
“What would we need to check before sending people back there?”
“Pressure integrity. Power and ventilation. Heat rejection. The condition of the separated connection too. Intact-looking windows don’t make it safe to enter.”
He put the habitat and S-6 on separate displays. The conditions for reoccupying one differed from those for remaining in the other. Darae almost asked which was easier. They lacked the information needed even to choose.
White clouds crossed between the habitat and S-6. Different magnifications prevented her judging the gap by eye. They might look like two neighboring rooms, but there was no corridor of handholds between them. They were moving differently.
She remembered joining handover rails at the office. Everything then had been inside one station. They knew where the recipient and object were secured. Here she had to abandon even the idea that a single line could simply connect them.
Mujin added reference marks, separating the two motions on the display. S-6 slowly changed attitude while the main body presented its outer wall in another direction. Only after the magnifications matched did Darae see that the viewing angle had made them overlap like one home.
“We can’t just push it over,” she said, looking at the cartridge box.
“It also needs a way to stop where someone can receive it.”
She let go of the habit of thinking of receipt as a movement of her own hands. First there had to be conditions in which no one endangered themselves trying to catch the object. Only then could she pass a handle.
All the name labels faced the same way in the cabin lights. The new function labels remained readable after departure. Darae checked the pump restraint monitor once, then returned to the external observations. She would not let a corrected mistake stop everything else.
She asked Haeseong whether he retained records of the main habitat’s condition. Some automatic logs and instrument photographs taken just before evacuation, he said. Narae could add external damage observations and radiator positions.
They could look at the home people wanted to return to without being able to say they could return.
She did not know how Haeseong heard that silence. Rather than write his feelings for him, she prepared another question. Did everyone waiting actually want to return to the same place?
Mujin reported their close observations to the Safety Office. Relative motion remained within plan. The interface needed assessment. Even here, return fuel stayed separate. Any passenger plan would still require verification of numbers, mass, and seating limits.
Darae entered arrival in her ledger, then cleared the automatically selected COMPLETE.
APPROACH. OBSERVATION WITHOUT DOCKING.
An owner nearby did not justify marking a return complete. The record needed who received the item, its condition, and what had not yet been received.
Jingyeong sent a brief message. She was preparing the consent requirements for temporary contact addresses. Darae replied that verifying the people came first. Registering addresses required time to explain the choice to each person.
Intake number L-204 had helped them find this place. That did not make it an address for everyone here.
Haeseong requested another call.
“Would you like to verify the recipients first?”
Darae reached for her blank labels, then stopped. Peeling one open in this cabin would not verify anyone in the other. She opened the person-verification fields and explained that information unsuitable for the shared channel could be provided separately.
Haeseong repeated the reported head count: twenty-three.
She left the number and the words beneath it: NOT YET VERIFIED.
“We’ll check one person at a time. Please begin by explaining that anyone who disagrees with you receives the same assistance.”
Haeseong turned inward. Someone adjusted a restraint. They agreed not to call everyone to the window of the cramped workshop. People could speak from their places, or an adult could move beside them.
Darae opened the first recipient field.
Before Haeseong could give a name, another voice came through.
“Do we have to sign that we’ll return to those five rooms before we can accept the supplies?”