Marko crouched beside a valve junction three decks down from the hangar, tablet in one hand and a torque wrench in the other, working through a maintenance checklist that should have been routine.
The air in the reclamation plant tasted of chlorine and hot rubber, sharp enough to sting the back of his throat, pipes and pressure tanks humming their constant filtration rhythm around him.
The Read surfaced unbidden, same as it always did now amber overlay flickering across the pipe assembly, settling on a compression fitting two joints down from where he was working.
Wrongness.
Not a crack.
Not fatigue.
Something else.
Marko set the wrench down and shifted closer, fingers tracing the fitting’s collar.
The metal was cool, the seal intact to visual inspection.
The pressure gauge read normal.
But the Board’s attention stayed fixed, patient and certain, and the wrongness tasted deliberate.
He pulled the fitting.
The seal came away clean.
No visible damage.
But the gasket inside sat cocked at a shallow angle, compressed unevenly an installation that would hold under normal flow and weep slowly under peak demand.
Sloppy work, at first glance.
Until you noticed the angle was too precise to be accidental.
Marko turned the gasket over in his palm.
Nothing in his hands gave him away.
Someone had done this on purpose.
The Read pushed deeper, tracing the assembly’s history backward this fitting, serviced when, by whom.
The overlay flickered, data surfacing through association, hardware pulling memory the same as skin pulled heat.
Three weeks ago.
Routine inspection.
Signed off.
Logged.
And then the trail went cold.
Not missing.
Not absent.
Cold the specific corrupted static the Board returned when it hit something it had no grammar for.
The same wrongness he’d felt on the contact plot during the Cylon attack, the return that had read like a person-shaped hole.
Marko’s chest tightened.
He stood slowly, scanning the compartment.
Empty.
The hum of pumps and the distant clank of the ship’s frame settling.
He activated the maintenance log on his tablet and pulled the service history.
The signature was there.
Clean.
Procedural.
A name he’d seen on a dozen other logs, competent and unremarkable.
Sharon Valerii.
Boomer.
Marko stared at the name.
The Read pushed against it and returned nothing not error, not confirmation, just the same flat wrongness that made his teeth ache.
He scrolled back further.
Two months of water-system logs.
Boomer’s name appeared four times, all routine work, all signed off without incident.
The Board’s attention snagged on one of them a pressure-sensor calibration, logged correct, that read to Marko’s gift like it had been tuned a quarter-degree off spec.
Small enough to pass inspection.
Large enough to matter under load.
Deliberate.
And the doer-trail corrupted exactly where her name sat.
Marko’s mouth went dry.
He had no way to prove this.
The gasket in his hand was evidence of tampering, not a saboteur.
The corrupted Read was his alone invisible, inadmissible, a certainty that would sound like paranoia if he opened his mouth.
And the Blind Spot meant he couldn’t trust what the Board showed him about her, because the one thing he knew for certain was that his gift lied about Cylons.
Boomer wasn’t a Cylon.
No chance.
She’d flown rescue missions, bled for the fleet, bunked three decks over and laughed with Tyrol’s gang.
The detector didn’t exist yet, but if it did she’d pass, because she was human and the wrongness Marko felt was his own sight breaking against something it didn’t understand.
Or she was exactly what Kord hunted, and Marko’s gift had just handed him a name he’d never be able to speak.
He closed the log.
Replaced the gasket with a fresh one from his kit, torqued the fitting to spec, and logged the repair as routine wear.
The Board’s overlay flickered.
REPAIR CONFIRMED.
HOLDING PROVISIONAL.
DOER UNRESOLVED.
TAMPER-CONFIDENCE 0.91.
AFFECTED JUNCTIONS: 4 OF 1,247 SURVEYED.
Four out of twelve hundred.
Marko stared at the amber block.
The numbers sat cold and exact small enough to hide, large enough to cripple the system under peak draw.
The fix would hold because he’d done it right.
But the doer walked free, and the next tampered fitting was already waiting somewhere in the miles of pipe that kept fifty thousand people alive.
He packed his tools.
Checked the compartment one more time.
The water system hummed, clean and functional, its sabotage invisible to anyone who didn’t carry the gift that saw it and the blindness that hid who.
Tyrol’s voice crackled over the comm.
“Dabrowski, you still in the plant?” Marko keyed his headset.
“Finishing up, Chief.
Replaced a gasket on junction fourteen.
Logged.” “Good.
We’ve got a coolant leak in Bay Two when you’re clear.” “On my way.” The line went dead.
Marko stood in the empty compartment, surrounded by pipes that fed the fleet’s most critical resource, carrying proof of sabotage he couldn’t name and a saboteur his own sight refused to show him.
Raise the alarm without a name and he’d trigger panic rationing violence, witch-hunts, fear that turned a fleet on itself.
Stay quiet and the tampering would escalate, the water crisis the Board had just showed him landing exactly as someone had designed it.
And the one person the trail led to was either innocent and his gift was broken, or guilty and he had no way to prove it that didn’t rely on the overlay he could never explain.
He left the compartment.
Sealed the hatch.
Walked toward Bay Two with his tablet logging routine maintenance and the wrongness sitting in his gut like a stone.
The Count was ticking.
He could feel it now same pressure as that first corrupted contact on the DRADIS plot.
Something hunting him through his own Reads, learning his shape every time he used the gift near something it could see.
Patient.
Methodical.
And if it could corrupt his sight on a person, it could hide in plain sight forever, sabotaging the fleet one quiet fitting at a time while Marko watched and knew and had no words that wouldn’t sound insane.
There was no in-between with a weld, and there wasn’t one here.
The fix held.
The doer walked.
And Marko carried the weight of what he’d buried, knowing the next time the Board marked a repair PROVISIONAL, it would be because he’d chosen restraint over the truth, and the fleet would bleed for it in water or air or whatever system someone decided to break next.
The corridor was cold.
The ship hummed, spinning up for the next jump.
Thirty-three minutes and counting.
Marko kept walking.