Marko stood third in line with the rest of the deck gang, tool bag at his feet, watching Tyrol work his way down the starboard damage-control stations a certification list three pages long, every item on it designed to be signed off without anyone actually opening a panel with the kind of tired efficiency that said the Chief had done this same dance twenty times before.
The Chief would call the station number, a specialist would confirm green status, Tyrol would log it, and the line would shuffle forward.
A formality.
The ship was being mothballed in eighteen hours; nobody wanted to reopen anything this close to the ceremony.
Cally was ahead of him, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
Socko leaned against a stanchion to Marko’s left, eyes half-closed, conserving energy the way a man did when he knew the day would be long and the work would be boring.
“DC-7, fire suppression.” Tyrol’s voice carried flat down the passage.
“Green, Chief.” Cally didn’t even glance at the panel.
Tyrol made a mark.
“DC-8, pressure integrity.” “Green.” Mark.
The line shuffled.
Marko kept his gaze on the decking and his radius pulled in tight, because the overlay had a tendency to surface when he wasn’t controlling his attention, and a systems cert was exactly the kind of environment where every piece of hardware in sight would light up if he let it.
He didn’t let it.
“DC-9, coolant monitor.” His station.
Marko stepped forward, glanced at the panel temperature nominal, pressure nominal, the little green ready-light exactly where the cert expected it and opened his mouth to call it green.
Amber flickered at the edge of his vision.
He hadn’t invited it.
Hadn’t narrowed his focus to ask.
But the wireframe dropped across his sight anyway, tracing the coolant line back through the bulkhead to the feed conduit, highlighting a seam identical, to his actual eyes, to every other seam on the ship.
The sound of it landed wrong.
Not the panel the pipe behind it.
A resonance his ears weren’t picking up but his hands knew anyway, the way a wrench knows when a bolt’s stripped before the threads give out completely.
Stress fracture.
Six inches back from the monitor mount.
Small.
The kind of thing that would pass certification because it wasn’t critical yet, and by the time it became critical the ship would be a museum and someone else’s problem.
Except he could hear the man behind the hatch.
Marko’s hands stilled on the tool bag.
He checked the panel.
Checked the Chief.
Checked the certification checklist that said this station was supposed to be a thirty-second formality, and felt the old rule settle into his spine: you don’t pass a known fault.
“Chief.” His voice came out steady.
“I’m hearing something off in the coolant feed.
Resonance doesn’t sound right.” Tyrol’s stylus stopped moving.
He looked up.
“The panel’s green, Dabrowski.” “Yes, Chief.
Panel’s fine.
It’s the conduit.” Marko tipped his chin toward the bulkhead.
“Could be nothing.
Could be a stress point.
I’d want to look before I signed it.” Cally turned around.
Are you kidding me right now was written across her face in block letters.
Socko didn’t open his eyes, but his mouth twitched.
“Brother’s got the ear,” he said to no one in particular.
“Hears things.” Tyrol studied Marko for three seconds that stretched.
Then he stepped forward, pulled a small inspection scope from his belt, and popped the access panel beside the monitor mount.
The scope’s light traced back along the conduit, and Marko watched Tyrol’s face go from skeptical to flat to resigned annoyance.
“There it is.” Tyrol pulled the scope back, closed the panel with more care than he’d opened it.
“Hairline fracture, right where the mount joins the feed.
It’d hold for now.
Wouldn’t hold forever.” He logged something on his slate, then fixed on Marko the steady appraisal of a chief petty officer filing a name under reliable.
“Good ear, Specialist.” Marko nodded once.
Didn’t say anything.
Didn’t explain that he’d heard it with hands that weren’t his and knowledge he shouldn’t have.
The overlay faded, and he was alone in his own sight again, watching Tyrol mark the station for a weld party that would have to happen before decommissioning, knowing he’d just traded invisibility for being right.
“DC-10,” Tyrol called, moving on.
The line shuffled forward.
Cally caught his eye half irritation, half something she hadn’t decided on yet.
Maybe respect.
Maybe just the suspicion that he was making the rest of them seem slow.
Socko’s eyes were open now, tracking Marko with the lazy interest of a man updating his internal notes on what people were worth.
Marko picked up his tool bag and followed.
The cert took another hour.
Marko kept his head down, called two more stations green without letting the overlay surface, and tried very hard to look like a man who’d gotten lucky once and was now back to being ordinary.
By the time Tyrol dismissed them, the Chief had logged six stations for follow-up work, and only one of them had come from a call that shouldn’t have been made.
“Dabrowski.” Marko stopped.
Turned.
Tyrol was standing by the DC locker, stylus still in hand, studying him a chief reassessing a tool he’d underestimated.
“You worked damage control before you signed on?” “Civilian side, Chief.
Fire, flooding, structural.
Different systems, same problems.” “Yeah.” Tyrol tapped the stylus against his slate.
“Well.
You hear something else, you call it.
I’d rather pull a panel for nothing than sign off on a fault.” “Understood, Chief.” Tyrol grunted and turned back to his checklist.
The conversation was over.
Marko walked away with the knowledge that he’d just been categorized, logged, and filed under the kind of specialist a chief kept in mind when the hard calls came around.
It was the opposite of invisible.
He made it back to the head, splashed water on his face, and stared at his reflection Dabrowski’s reflection, the face that still didn’t feel like his until the cold soaked through and the overlay stayed gone.
Then he dried off, checked his watch, and headed for the mess.
Socko caught up to him in the passage.
“So,” Socko said, falling into step.
“The good ear.
That something you do, or something you are?” Marko didn’t look at him.
“I stopped a fault from becoming a problem.
That’s the job.” “That’s the job everybody else walked past.” Socko’s grin was audible.
“Which means you just made the Chief’s list, brother.
The short one.
The one that gets called when something’s actually on fire and he needs hands he trusts.” “Great.” “It is great.
That list comes with perks.
Also comes with a target, depending on who’s looking.” Socko patted him on the shoulder.
“You’re doing that thing again where you’re good at something and you wish you weren’t.
I’m just saying, if you’re gonna be good, be good enough that people owe you.
Otherwise you’re just making enemies for free.” He peeled off toward the mess line, leaving Marko standing in the corridor with the certainty that Socko had just described the next six months of his life in two sentences.
It stayed quiet after that.
He ate, logged his post-cert shift assignment routine maintenance, nothing urgent and tried not to think about the shape of the thing he’d noticed when the Read had traced the coolant system back.
Redundancy.
Or the lack of it.
His old life Kowalski’s life, the one the overlay remembered and Marko didn’t had built systems with backups.
Parallel feeds.
Fail-safes that meant a single fracture didn’t cascade.
Galactica’s damage control network was clean, efficient, and built like a ship that expected to take damage and keep fighting.
But it didn’t double up.
A coolant line was a coolant line.
If it failed, you rerouted or you lost the system it fed.
There was no second line waiting.
It wasn’t wrong.
It was just a different shape of right, the kind of engineering that came from a world where weight and space were the constraints, and redundancy was a luxury you couldn’t afford.
He set it aside one more thing that didn’t match the pattern his hands expected and told himself it didn’t matter because the ship was going into mothballs and none of this would be his problem in twenty-four hours.
He believed it right up until 1900 hours, when he was alone in the berthing space, stowing his gear, and the overlay surfaced without permission.
No wireframe.
No highlighted fault.
Just a single line of amber text, printed across the bottom of his vision in the same clipped watchstander’s cadence the Board always used: SET MATERIAL CONDITION ONE.
Marko froze.
Material Condition One.
Full combat readiness.
Sealed hatches, damage-control parties standing by, the ship buttoned up for action.
He glanced around the berthing.
Empty.
Quiet.
The ship creaking gently the way old ships did, the ventilation cycling through its routine hum.
Nothing that looked like a threat.
Nothing that felt like an emergency.
The overlay flickered and went dark.
Marko sat down on his rack, heart rate controlled, breathing steady, and stared at the space where the block had been.
He tested the recall tried to summon it back, tried to query what it meant, why now, what it thought was coming.
Nothing.
It was gone.
He lay back, folded his hands behind his head, and told himself it was noise.
A glitch.
The overlay surfacing fragments of old protocol from a life he didn’t remember, throwing up readiness calls that didn’t apply to a ship on the edge of retirement.
He told himself that right up until he fell asleep.
And when he woke sixteen hours later to the sound of the action stations klaxon and the ship’s XO screaming CONDITION ONE over the 1-MC, the first thing he thought cold, clear, and certain was: It knew.