The tremor was gone.
Marko checked for it first flattened his hand in front of his face in the empty berthing compartment and watched it hold steady, no shake, no drift.
An hour clear of the Tantalus, and his body had finally caught up to the stillness the rest of him had been faking since he stepped off the Raptor.
The Board had gone quiet after the Tantalus.
Not silent he could feel it under his ribs, patient and watchful as ever but hushed.
A structure going still before it shifts its weight.
Bearing sat at forty-eight low enough to ache, high enough to function and the overlay held steady in his peripheral vision, amber wireframe threading the bulkheads around him.
He’d saved the reserves.
Done it in front of Kord, a crew chief, and a CIC net that relayed every word to the people who decided whether a specialist lived or went out an airlock.
The invisibility he’d nursed since the Fall was gone.
Commander Adama knew his name now.
Kord’s case had stopped being theory.
And the Board was waiting for something.
He sat down on the edge of his bunk.
Breathed.
Closed his eyes.
The wireframe didn’t need his eyes.
It rendered behind his lids, clean and exact berthing’s frame, the deck plating, a hairline stress fracture near the forward hatch he’d have to tell Tyrol about tomorrow.
The Read surfaced without him asking involuntary, associative, pulling details into focus near his attention but never the ones he needed.
Except He thought the question deliberately: the fracture how deep?
The overlay didn’t flicker.
It answered.
A cross-section bloomed over the hatch frame, measurement annotations in that clipped teletype font, depth to a tenth of a millimeter, propagation vector, time-to-critical if left unaddressed.
Marko opened his eyes.
The Read held steady, answering what he’d asked instead of surfacing near it.
He stood.
Crossed to the storage locker opposite his bunk.
Thought: material condition.
The locker’s frame lit up amber, every rivet and weld seam catalogued, stress distribution mapped in real time as he pulled the door open.
No fault.
He closed it.
Thought: the hinge.
The overlay tightened to the hinge assembly, showed him wear pattern, remaining service life, the exact moment it would seize if not greased.
Willed.
Not guessed.
Not surfaced by accident.
Willed.
He sat back down.
The Board flickered once, twice, and then resolved into a block of text he’d never seen before not a Read, not a damage report, just words in that flat phosphor teletype that had no give in it and no mercy.
STANDING WATCH ADVANCED.
THE RECKONING IS SATISFIED.
TIER 1: THE FIRST WATCH.
READ: WILLED.
QUERY UNLOCKED.
RESOLVE ON DEMAND.
FIX: FULL DAMAGE CONTROL.
GUIDED SEQUENCE TO COMPLETION.
PLOT: NARROW CONTACT TRACKING.
THREAT ASSESSMENT BASIC.
NAVIGATION: JUMP MATH.
REAL-TIME CORRECTION AUTHORIZED.
COST REMAINS.
BEARING EXPENDITURE PER USE.
THE TELL PROPORTIONAL.
THE FIRST WATCH IS YOURS.
THE RELIEF IS NOT YET IN SIGHT.
The block hung there, amber against the back of his vision, and Marko read it twice to be sure he understood.
Tier 1.
Everything he’d done on the Tantalus the Fix that had walked him through fuel separation like he’d trained for it, the procedure he’d never learned but executed anyway that wasn’t a fluke.
The floor now.
Willed Reads.
Full damage control.
Jump math he could verify in real time the same verification he’d run on Dee’s net when the Monarch’s plot looked wrong.
He could will the Read to answer a question.
The Fix would run to completion under his hands now, not in fragments.
And contacts basic threat plot, enough to know when DRADIS missed something or lied.
The capability sat in his chest like ballast, solid and real, and all he could taste was ash.
Socko, stepping into a security interview and taking heat that should have landed on Marko.
The Adriatic, a hull that hadn’t held, a death he could have prevented if he’d been good enough to see the flaw before the fix went in.
Fourteen days of involuntary Reads surfacing faults he couldn’t safely act on, burning Bearing to keep people alive while Kord built a case and the fleet learned his name.
The tier had come from that.
From loss and sacrifice and a law the Board had clawed into him the hard way: the fix must hold, or the Reckoning takes what’s left.
This wasn’t a reward.
It was a promotion ground out of bodies and suspicion, and the weight hadn’t stopped accumulating.
His focus caught on the final line.
The relief is not yet in sight.
He understood that, too.
A watch wasn’t a shift you finished and walked away from.
You held your station until someone came to relieve you and the Board had just told him, flat and cold as a casualty report, that no one was coming.
The First Watch was his.
However long it ran.
However much it cost.
He sat there in the quiet berthing compartment, alone, hands on his knees, and let the weight settle.
Tier 1.
Willed control.
The power to read what was breaking and fix it, to see the dangers DRADIS missed, to verify jump math and guide a repair through to the end.
Everything he’d wanted since the Fall the ability to do something with the gift instead of watching it surface faults he couldn’t safely touch and it tasted like ashes and salt, a wound that sealed but never stopped aching.
The hatch cycled.
Socko stepped through, saw Marko sitting there, and stopped.
“You look,” Socko said carefully, “like a man who just got promoted and demoted in the same sentence.” Marko almost smiled.
“Something like that.” Socko crossed to his own bunk, dropped his tool bag, and studied Marko with the same evaluating eye he used on grey-market trade goods.
“Tyrol says you’re off rotation twelve hours.
CIC says you saved the reserves.
Kord says you did work you were never trained for and he’s writing a very thorough report about it.” “That sounds right.” “You gonna tell me how you knew that procedure?” “No.” Socko nodded, unsurprised.
He sat on the edge of his bunk, elbows on his knees, and the mercenary patter dropped.
“You changed, brother.
I don’t know when.
But you’re not the guy who kept his head down two weeks ago.” Marko looked at him Specialist Deval Baird, who’d taken heat in a security interview and called it a no-charge favor, who ran the fleet’s grey market and priced everything except loyalty and the invoice metaphor landed hard.
“I’m not,” Marko said quietly.
“You gonna tell me what you are now?” “I’m the hand on the fix,” Marko said.
It was the closest he could come to the truth.
“When something’s breaking and the book doesn’t cover it, I’m the guy who finds the door it does.” Socko absorbed that.
Nodded once.
“All right.
And Kord?” “Kord’s doing his job.” Marko met his eyes.
“He’s right that I look like something worth watching.
He’s wrong about what.” “That gonna be enough to keep you breathing?” “I don’t know.” Socko huffed a short laugh, bitter and fond.
“Honesty.
I appreciate that.” He stood.
“You need anything cover, a story, an invoice I can call you say the word.
No charge.
Genocide discount.” The warmth in it, dry and real, hit harder than Marko expected.
“Thanks, Socko.” Socko waved it off and headed for the hatch.
Stopped.
Looked back.
“Whatever you are now, Dabrowski don’t let it eat you.
We need you functional.” The hatch cycled shut behind him.
Marko sat in the silence, and the berthing compartment felt larger without Socko in it emptier, the kind of quiet that presses against the ears.
The Board flickered once, a single amber pulse, and went still.
Tier 1.
The capability he’d burned two weeks and a friend’s risk and a clawback to survive, now indexed and formalized and his to carry.
No one was coming to relieve him.
The Board had said so.
He stood.
Stripped out of his coveralls.
Lay down on the bunk Kord had searched and found nothing in, because there was nothing to find except a man with a gift and a wound and a weight that never eased.
Closed his eyes.
The overlay threaded the berthing compartment, amber and patient, showing him stress points and fractures and the material condition of every frame within twenty meters.
Willed, now.
Not involuntary.
Not surfacing by accident.
His.
Marko breathed, and the First Watch settled onto his shoulders the way a damage-control harness did familiar weight, built to carry, designed to hold until the job was done or the structure failed.
He didn’t know which would come first.
He kept the watch anyway.
// FIELD BRIEFING Update cycle: 7 chapters every 10 days.
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