Marko’s hands sealed the junction box before he decided the work was finished.
He knew this the way he knew the taste of burnt insulation, or the pitch of a bearing three hours from seizing which was to say, completely, and without any memory of learning it.
His hands worked the conduit clips with the casual fluency of a man who’d done this a thousand times, and maybe the body had.
The mind watching those hands had no idea what they were doing.
Galactica’s starboard hangar smelled like hydraulic fluid and floor wax.
Decommissioning bunting hung in careful loops from the overhead, red and blue and older than most of the crew, and the whole deck had the museum-day quiet of a ship winding down to nothing.
Somewhere aft, Chief Tyrol’s voice carried over the tool noise, patient and tired, working the Raptor line.
A normal shift.
The last normal shift this ship would ever have, if you believed the ceremony schedule, and Marko didn’t know enough yet to believe anything.
The box closed under his gloves.
The neural jumper seated with a click he felt more than heard, and his hands were already reaching for the next clip before he’d consciously decided the work was done.
That was the third time in an hour.
He stepped back, wiped his palms on his thighs, and made himself look at the frame two meters off the load-bearing lateral everyone walked past a hundred times a shift because it was just there, bolted and painted and doing its job since before the First Cylon War.
The amber overlay resolved over it like a develop in a chemical bath.
Not a glow.
Not light anyone else could see.
Just a flat phosphor schematic, a technical-manual wireframe that had no business existing outside his own skull, laying itself over the steel with the patience of something that had always been there and was only now bothering to show him.
The corroded starboard weld.
The micro-fracture where the frame met the deck mounting.
The propagation line sketched in fainter amber, showing exactly how the failure would run when the load exceeded tolerance.
And below it, a single line of teletype he had not asked for and could not dismiss: FRAME 14 STARBOARD WELD CORRODED 68% / DECK MOUNT CRACKED / LOAD APPROACHING THRESHOLD Marko blinked.
The overlay waited.
He turned his head.
The overlay faded at the edges of his sight, but it didn’t leave it just stopped insisting, the way a patient watchstander might let you finish your own thought before repeating the warning you’d already ignored once.
“Dabrowski.” The Chief’s voice, close and flat, the tone that meant he’d been standing there long enough to notice you hadn’t.
Marko turned.
Composed.
The old training the training he shouldn’t have and didn’t remember acquiring slid into place like a mask he’d worn for years.
“Chief.” Tyrol had a grease pencil behind one ear and a inspection checklist in his other hand, and the look of a man who’d been riding a deck gang through a decommissioning with nothing but spite and professional pride.
“That box good?” “Seated and locked,” Marko said.
The answer came out of his mouth before he’d decided on the words.
“Starboard feed’s clean.
No resistance.” Tyrol’s eyes tracked over the closed panel, the labeled conduits, the deck around Marko’s boots that had somehow been polished to regs without Marko remembering doing it.
He grunted.
“You get checked out by Cottle after that compartment fire yesterday?” Marko had no memory of a compartment fire.
His mouth said, “Clean bill, Chief.
Just smoke.” “Good.” Tyrol made a mark on the clipboard.
“Finish this frame and then you’re on the main battery coolant inspection with Cally.
I want it signed off before the ceremony crowd shows up and decides our plumbing’s a photo opportunity.” “Copy that.” The Chief moved on.
Marko stood very still and did not look at the corroded frame until Tyrol’s boots had crossed to the Raptor line and the danger of being watched doing something wrong had passed.
Then he looked.
The overlay was still there.
Still patient.
The numbers hadn’t changed.
Sixty-eight percent corroded.
Crack propagation plotted.
Load approaching threshold.
He had no idea what threshold meant in this context, and every cell in the borrowed body knew the frame would fold in the next hard maneuver and take a man’s legs if he was standing in the wrong place when it did.
“Hey, Marko.” Socko Specialist Baird, who’d introduced himself yesterday or possibly six months ago depending on which set of memories Marko trusted leaned against the tool cart with the loose-jointed ease of a man who’d found his angle in life and intended to ride it all the way down.
He had a chit in one hand and a smile that was three-quarters hustle and one-quarter genuine warmth.
“Need a signature before the Chief gets back around.” Marko took the chit.
Two bottles of ambrosia, off-manifest acquisition, dated for three days ago.
His own name was already on the requestor line in handwriting he didn’t recognize as his but which his hand would probably reproduce exactly if he tried.
“You’re covering this how?” Marko asked.
“Got a man on the Monarch who owes me for a relay coupling.
Clean swap, nobody’s books get bent, you get your drink and I get mine and the gods stay happy.” Socko’s grin widened.
“But you blanked out on me mid-shift yesterday, brother, so this one’s a two-jump favor, plus hazard.
Quiet costs extra, and I’m eating the risk out of love.” Marko had no memory of blanking out.
He’d had no memory of anything until forty minutes ago when he’d come to himself wrist-deep in a junction box, and even now the before was a jumbled overlap of two lives that didn’t sit flush.
He signed the chit.
His handwriting matched.
“Appreciate it,” he said, because that was what you said to a man extending credit in a war-time fleet, even if the war hadn’t started yet and wouldn’t for another forty-eight hours and you had no way of knowing that except the sick certainty sitting in your gut next to all the other things you knew and shouldn’t.
Socko pocketed the chit.
“You good?
You got that look again.” “I’m fine,” Marko said.
“Just didn’t sleep worth a damn.” “Nobody sleeps worth a damn on this boat.
That’s what the ambrosia’s for.” Socko clapped him on the shoulder and wandered off toward the port-side stowage, already talking to someone else, the transaction complete and filed away in whatever gray-market economy he was running parallel to the official fleet.
Marko turned back to the frame.
The overlay was still there.
Still waiting.
He reached out with his attention, carefully, the way you’d test ice you didn’t trust, and tried to ask it a question why this frame, why now, what did threshold mean in engineering terms the body knew and he didn’t.
The overlay didn’t respond.
It just held the same data, patient and cold, a watchstander reporting a fact and waiting for the officer of the deck to acknowledge and act.
So he did the only thing that made sense.
He pulled his multi-tool, knelt next to the deck mount, and found the crack exactly where the amber wireframe said it would be.
Hairline.
Invisible to a walking inspection.
The kind of thing you’d miss unless you were on your knees with a glass and a light, and nobody was putting a glass to a frame on a ship being mothballed in three days.
His hands knew what to do.
They pulled a corrosion patch from his belt kit a kit he didn’t remember stocking but which had everything he needed in the order he’d reach for it and started the prep work without consulting him.
He let them.
By the time Cally came by to pull him for the coolant inspection, the frame was shored and flagged for a weld party, and the overlay had finally faded, not gone but resting, the way a system might go to standby when the immediate crisis had been handled.
Marko stood.
Wiped his hands.
Logged the repair on the deck sheet in handwriting that matched the chit and probably matched every other piece of paperwork the specialist called Dabrowski had filed for however many years he’d been on this boat.
And at the bottom of his sight, too faint to read but too solid to ignore, a new line of teletype flickered once and settled: STANDING TO.
Marko didn’t know what that meant.
It went into the same growing pile as the rest of what he didn’t know the body’s trade reflexes, the compartment fire he didn’t remember, the exact smell of Galactica’s recycled air and the weight of every tool on his belt.
He signed off the frame repair, checked his chrono, and followed Cally toward the main battery coolant lines with the certain knowledge that the ship under his boots was dying in a dozen places nobody else could see.
And that whatever had woken up behind his eyes forty minutes ago, it wasn’t going to let him walk past a single one of them.