| Prepare | A route walked; a vestibule stocked shipward | Takes the canister through the sleeve | Spend capacity on his air and a reserve |

**Open the direct run.** Restore power and bypass the isolator contact, as the closed exploration rules describe: one relay-family part, left in the fixture. Cheap in oxygen, short in exposure, and it shortens the run inward for as long as that relay stays seated and the feed holds — retrieving the part recovers it and removes the shortcut, per the closed rules.

Its cost is that it does the one thing he asked the player not to do. What that opens is bounded, and the design should know it even though the player does not: the section's contents join the direct run's varying population and hazard state, exactly as the exploration rules already allow any run to vary. What was isolated is not settled here, and Dorn cannot tell them — he says only that he does not know whether his reason still holds.

**Take the long way.** A longer service route that stays in vacuum and leaves his seal intact. It needs no capability the player lacks: the suit's baseline cutter releases jammed manual bolts, and each pressure door is then hand-cycled as a world-time action. Dorn travels on his own canister. The cost is a longer path, more personal oxygen and canister capacity, and repeated door operations in the open — but it keeps the relay part in the player's rig instead of leaving it in a fixture, and the boundary he drew stays drawn.

Before anything begins the player has to prepare. A full canister goes into the refuge's equipment sleeve from the corridor, so Dorn can take it and connect it without cycling the personnel lock — his air arrives without spending his shelter. Then the player walks a route they have actually traversed and stocks a fallback: a small pressure vestibule immediately shipward of the exposed junction, with a reserve canister sealed into its cradle. That preparation is the real cost of either choice, and it is spent whether or not the crossing succeeds.

If the crossing breaks down he cannot return to the pocket, which no longer holds air. He continues shipward into the prepared vestibule and closes its door behind him, on his canister's emergency margin, and waits there on the staged reserve — which is why stocking it was not optional. A second attempt starts from the vestibule, not the vented pocket, and needs fresh air, the next segment rechecked, and a new fallback stocked further shipward. Repeated interruption costs real supply and moves him only between refuges the player actually prepared: no hidden timer, no free immunity.

*Sent* means he has physically crossed the ship's airlock and it has closed. A request, a radio confirmation or a crossing in progress is not sent, and only then is he a colony member.

Death is resolved by phase, not by one rule. **Before departure**, Dorn is still waiting in his original sealed refuge and the next attempt begins where the first did. **During transfer**, the pocket is already vented and he is at the prepared fallback, which the next attempt must reach with replacement air and a route checked again. **After Sent**, he is aboard whatever happens to the astronaut. The astronaut's own equipment follows the ordinary cache rules throughout. Phases and supply costs are Systems' to state in Rescue Rules.

**Capability.** He is a pressure-tech's partner, and his trade attaches to gear the design already has: aboard, he services the canister-packing gear the compressor head feeds, so that more of each canister's charge is usable. *(Proposed new mechanism.)* Two things it is not. It is not a retroactive claim that equipment has been quietly degrading — no earlier article establishes a maintenance tax, and none is being added. And it is not the whole of what the brief means by colony upgrades: it is one person's trade, and the wider colony contribution is undecided and not settled here.

It is not preferred here for one reason that holds: it makes his safety depend on companion behaviour that no written scene can establish. It is *not* rejected for reducing him to a follower — an escort can preserve a person's stated preferences and reciprocal action just as well, and saying otherwise would be a caricature of the alternative. The chosen structure spends the player's understanding rather than their escorting, which is a preference about emphasis, not a claim that escort denies agency.