These last few days reminded Tanya of her first week at university, but with less drinking and partying and considerably more bickering over household management. At least in the dorms, when someone left a mess, you could escape to another room. On the Vanguard, there was nowhere to run.
The ship should have been big enough. It had three levels and was designed to house six people for month-long missions, with military discipline assumed. On paper, a week with only three crew should have been perfectly manageable. Yet Tanya could tell she'd broken the equilibrium the siblings had developed over years of working together. It had become like a three-body problem: stable until the math said otherwise. This was the truth she had learned over the last three days. The Vanguard had been built for soldiers with regulations and rotations, not three twenty-somethings with mismatched habits and no chain of command.
It started with dishes.
Tanya believed in cleaning them immediately after use and putting them away in their designated locations. This wasn't negotiable farm-girl practicality; it was how civilised people maintained functional living spaces. Cameron had different ideas. He would use a bowl or cup, then leave it wherever his mind had moved on to the next technical problem. Tanya found bowls at the navigation console, half-finished cups of tea abandoned on a lab bench, sometimes balanced precariously on equipment housings where one bump could send them flying.
Janet would normally pick up after him, a pattern they'd established that worked fine when it was just the two of them. She did it with the casual efficiency of habit, humming while she worked, never making an issue of it. But watching Janet constantly cleaning up after her brother while Cameron remained oblivious to the domestic labour involved made Tanya's teeth itch.
"Could you just put the bowl in the sanitiser when you're done?" she finally asked Cameron after finding his breakfast dishes scattered across three different workstations.
Cameron had looked genuinely confused, blinking at her as though she'd pointed out some obscure mathematical flaw. "I was planning to use it again later."
"When later?"
"When I get hungry again."
"That's not how dishes work, Cameron."
"Sure it is. See—" he held up the offending bowl, spoon still inside, "—it's not even that dirty."
Tanya stared at him for a long moment, then just turned around and went to find another part of the ship to work in before she said something that would start an actual fight.
Eventually, after a ship meeting that felt more like family counselling than mission planning, they'd adapted to a system where Cameron set timers to remind himself about household tasks. It worked, well, sort of. It was a start. Then there were also the tools.
Tanya wanted them returned to their proper locations. Everything had a designated place and a logical sequence. You took what you needed, used it, cleaned it if necessary, and put it back where the next person could find it. This was basic workshop discipline. It was how it was done at university. It is how it should be done.
To Janet, tools were a shared commodity. She would borrow equipment for quick adjustments or modifications, then leave it wherever the task had taken her. Not maliciously, just with the casual assumption that whoever needed something next would track it down. Usually, the only person who needed it next was herself. Janet had become so used to being the only person using the tools that she didn't see it as a problem.
"Has anyone seen the plasma cutter?" Tanya asked for the third time in two days, hands on hips.
"I think Janet was using it to adjust the beacon housing seals," Cameron replied without looking up from his calculations, stylus scratching furiously across his tablet.
"Where?"
"Somewhere on level two, probably."
Janet popped her head around the doorway, hair slightly mussed and face smudged from her last project. "Oh! Right. It's in the cargo hold. I was fixing a housing for one of the beacons and forgot."
The arguments that stemmed from these domestic friction points were painful but inevitable. Growing pains were normal when people who'd never lived together suddenly found themselves sharing confined spaces and limited resources. Tanya knew she must have habits that annoyed them, too, like her insistence on structured meal times, for one. She wasn't naïve and admitted she could be doing more adapting herself.
Cameron had complained about her insistence that they all sit down to eat meals together instead of just grabbing nutrition cubes whenever they felt hungry. "It's inefficient," he'd said flatly. "I could maintain productivity and adequate nutrition with standardised food supplements."
Tanya had been tempted to feed him some of the original food cubes Sage had provided during her early workshop days. The flavourless protein bricks that made military rations seem gourmet by comparison. The memory was enough to twist her mouth into a wicked grin. The threat alone had been enough to get him to the dinner table.
They were making progress, though. It might have been slow, but patterns of understanding were forming among all the normal adjustments to cohabitation. Tanya found that as long as they were discussing technical problems, talking to Cameron was easy. His shyness disappeared when explaining crystalline functions or dimensional coordinate processing, replaced by genuine enthusiasm and surprising humor. She had come to enjoy those conversations, and she could tell Cameron had as well.
She also got along well with Janet when they shared stories of past experiences. Janet's tales of frontier exploration made Tanya's own adventures seem tame by comparison, while Tanya's accounts of farm life and university apparently fascinated someone who'd spent most of her life moving between star systems.
Everything came to a head during a power outage caused by an experimental beacon calibration test malfunction. In the absolute darkness of deep space, their patience was tested.
"Well, this is exciting," Janet had said when the lights went out, her voice too chipper for the pitch-black room. "Who wants to play 'find the emergency equipment in complete darkness'?"
"Emergency lights and power should have kicked in automatically," Tanya said, her voice tight as she groped her way to the manual panel. The Vanguard wasn't supposed to just die. There was backup upon backups designed by master builders.
"Unless the circuit's been physically cut," Cameron answered. He was trying to find his flashlight on his comm device.
"Great," Janet muttered. "So we're not only blind, we're also dead in the water. Fantastic."
Tanya ignored her and pulled open the emergency housing by touch, fingers running along the breakers. She found the right sequence, flipped them and nothing happened. Her stomach sank.
"Breaker six should have restored emergency lighting," she said flatly.
"It should have," Cameron agreed, voice unusually sharp. "Something's preventing the circuit from connecting."
Janet shuffled toward the floor, fumbling for her own flashlight. And pointing it at something and trying to make it out.
"What was that?" Tanya demanded.
Janet's voice was sheepish. "Uh…tool. Looks like the spanner I was using earlier."
Cameron's flashlight flickered on at last, revealing the spanner jammed against a junction box. Burn marks laced across the casing where it had shorted the coupling.
"You left it there?" Tanya's voice went icy.
"No, I left it up here," pointing to a ledge above the junction box. "It was only because the ship lurched when it lost power that it ended up there," Janet shot back, heat rising in her tone. "Maybe if this ship wasn't designed with breaker boxes right under workstations—"
"Don't blame the ship!" Tanya snapped. "You don't just leave tools lying around to rattle into critical systems. That's basic discipline."
Janet crossed her arms. "Basic discipline? Says the woman who spread her work across our entire dining table like it was a lecture hall. Not everything has to run on farm rules, Tanya."
The words stung, but she wouldn't admit that. "This isn't about rules, it's about safety. If you can't handle keeping track of your gear, then maybe frontier improvisation isn't good enough in a ship like this."
"Better than pretending everything can be solved with colour-coded tool racks and chore charts!" Janet shot back, her voice climbing.
The air between them bristled, both glaring in the dim light of their flashlights, voices overlapping.
"Stop it," Cameron said suddenly, louder than either of them expected. The sharpness in his tone froze both mid-retort. He looked pale under the emergency glow, but his eyes were hard.
"We don't have the luxury of fighting over this now," he said, each word measured. "If we can't even keep power on, then none of this matters. We will be dead without life support"
Tanya's fists clenched at her sides. She wanted to argue, but Cameron was right. Janet looked away, jaw tight, arms folded.
They got the power back within the hour, rerouting around the scorched junction. The silence afterwards wasn't comfortable. it was brittle and tense.
Later, Tanya found Janet in the gym lifting and dropping weights with more force than necessary. For a long moment, Tanya just watched, chewing on her pride. Then she sat down on the machine next to her and started her own workout. "You were right," Tanya said quietly. "I was being a bitch. I'll try to ease up." Tanya had been reflecting on herself over the last few hours, and came to that conclusion. She had let having Sage in her head go to her head.
Janet let out a sharp breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, then finally looked at her. "And I'll try not to booby-trap the power grid with spanners," she admitted. The corner of Tanya's mouth lifted. It wasn't full forgiveness, but it was a truce.
Testing continued, and the chaos slowly gave way to something resembling order. They were hitting the correct solution nearly nine times out of ten now, which was impressive by any practical standard, but still far from the reliability needed for a production system. For Tanya, though, the real victory lay in what the failures were teaching her. Each misstep forced her deeper into the underlying dimensional principles, sharpening her grasp of patterns she'd only half-understood before. She'd hoped Sage would step in and guide her through the harder leaps, but instead, they lingered at the edges, silent more often than not. Educational mode, he called it. Annoying mode, more like it, leaving her to stumble until she learned to walk without his hand.
Between the testing and getting on each other's nerves, there were also the food negotiations. Tanya's attempts at "farm-style" cooking it was simple, nutritious, minimally seasoned, and had been systematically modified by Janet's frontier-honed ability to make anything palatable by just throwing spices at it until it tasted nice. Cameron's preference for efficient nutrition delivery had been overruled by both of them, though they'd compromised by letting him supplement meals with protein cubes when he was too focused on work to appreciate actual flavours.
"You realise we're three people who can create and fly a spaceship, and we are arguing about dinner preparation," Janet had observed during one particularly elaborate negotiation about vegetable seasoning.
"At least we're good at arguing," Tanya had replied, which had somehow struck them all as hilarious.
The serious conversations had emerged naturally from these lighter moments. Cameron's concerns about government seizure of their technology, Janet's worries about corporate exploitation, and Tanya's determination to maintain independence regardless of outside pressure. They didn't resolve these larger questions because there weren't clear resolutions available, but talking through them had helped establish that they shared similar values about responsible innovation and ethical development.
By the time they prepared to return to Eden-Five, something fundamental had shifted in their dynamic. The daily friction points remained like Cameron still forgot about dishes, Janet still borrowed tools without returning them, Tanya still insisted on structured meal times but these had become the kind of manageable irritations that people who cared about each other worked around rather than serious conflicts.
When they finally made it back to Eden-Five, they had become something closer to friends than colleagues.