“Dabrowski.” The Chief held out a data tablet without looking up from the Viper he was signing off.
“CIC needs the final damage-control certification for the museum packet.
Walk it up, hand it to Lieutenant Gaeta, do not let anyone give you the runaround about filing it later.” Marko took the tablet.
“Chief.” “And Dabrowski?
Walk straight there, hand it off, walk straight back.
Today is not the day to get noticed.” The warning was clear enough.
Decommissioning day meant the ship scrubbed to museum shine, dress uniforms, speeches, and every officer on Galactica watching every other officer for the career moment that might matter when they all scattered to desk jobs.
An enlisted specialist crossing CIC was a ghost best left invisible.
He took the ladder up.
CIC sat at the heart of Galactica the way a damaged spine sat at the heart of a body everything ran through it, and if it failed, nothing else mattered.
Marko had never been inside.
Deck gang worked below, in the bones.
Command worked here, where the ship’s entire nervous system terminated in boards and screens and the voices that decided what the data meant.
The hatch stood open for the ceremony prep.
He stepped through.
The overlay surfaced before he’d crossed the threshold.
Not a fault.
Not a Read he’d invited.
Just every system in the room lighting up at once, a web of amber tracery that mapped the wiring, the relays, the failing connections the Board saw and the crew didn’t.
The DRADIS console flickered a loose ground Marko could see as clearly as if the panel were glass.
The comms station ran hot on its primary relay and cold on its backup.
The fire-control board carried a hairline crack in a data bus that would outlast the decommissioning by a year and fail the week someone actually needed it.
He stopped just inside the hatch and made himself not stare at the map only he could see.
“Help you, Specialist?” Lieutenant Gaeta.
Tactical officer, precise and territorial, looking at Marko the way an officer looked at enlisted men who’d wandered into officer country without an invitation.
Marko held up the tablet.
“Damage-control cert for the museum handover, sir.
Chief Tyrol sent me.” Gaeta took it, scanned the summary, and pointed toward a file queue near the commander’s station.
“Dump it there.
Someone will file it.” “Chief said hand it to you, sir.” “And I’m telling you to leave it in the queue.” Marko set the tablet in the wire basket Gaeta had indicated and stepped back.
The overlay stayed live, threading every board in the room, and he forced his eyes to track like a man who saw consoles and officers and nothing else.
Near the communications station a woman in petty officer’s pins ran three boards at once with the same calm efficiency Marko had seen in good damage-control leads no wasted motion, every hand where it needed to be.
Her boards were clean.
No flicker, no hesitation.
She worked like someone who trusted the equipment under her fingers and knew to the second when trust was misplaced.
The overlay sketched her station.
Primary relay running past rated temp.
Backup relay cold.
The same pattern as every other aging board in CIC, the same slow failure mode that would mean nothing until the hour it meant everything.
She glanced up.
Caught him looking.
Marko shifted his attention to the hatch and moved.
“Specialist.” He stopped.
Turned.
The petty officer gestured toward the DRADIS console.
“You hear something?” The question landed wrong.
Too specific.
Too direct.
“Ma’am?” “You moved like you heard something off.” Her voice stayed level, curious, not accusing.
“I’ve been running this board for two years.
If something’s about to fall out of it, I want to know before the Commander’s speech.” Marko’s pulse stayed even.
His face stayed blank.
The overlay painted her boards in amber and the lie came out in the same flat declarative cadence he’d use for any other technical answer.
“Ventilation cycle, ma’am.
Blower on the overhead.
Sounds like a loose mount.” She listened.
Looked up.
The blower ran the way all decades-old blowers ran low hum, faint rattle, could mean a loose bolt or could mean nothing.
“Huh.” She turned back to her boards.
“Thanks.” “Ma’am.” He made it two steps.
The overlay snagged.
Not on a board.
Not on a failing relay or a cracked frame or any piece of hardware the Read had ever flagged.
On a person.
Marko’s vision greyed at the edges.
The amber web collapsed to a single point of focus, a wireframe sketch trying to resolve over a Raptor crew standing near the port-side ready board.
Pilot and ECO, both in flight suits, both prepping for the ceremonial flyby.
The sketch stuttered.
Tried to lock.
Failed.
Tried again.
The overlay had never done that.
Systems, hardware, failing relays those were its domain.
Not people.
Never people.
Marko stopped walking and made it look like he was checking the hatch clearance.
The sketch kept failing, a loop of attempt and collapse that felt less like error and more like recognition struggling against static.
The Board was trying to tell him something and couldn’t lock the signal.
CONTACT DATA WILL NOT RESOLVE.
The block vanished.
Amber tracery collapsed to nothing just CIC again, consoles and voices and the hum of old hardware.
Marko’s hands were steady.
Breathing controlled, heart rate barely shifted.
He turned toward the hatch and walked, pace even, face blank, a specialist who’d delivered an errand and had a deck to get back to.
Behind him the Raptor crew laughed at something one of them had said.
Ordinary.
Human.
Warm.
The corridor outside CIC was cooler and quieter and Marko made it six steps before he stopped and leaned his shoulders against the bulkhead.
CONTACT.
Faults, damage, failing relays that was what the overlay tracked.
In the handful of days he’d carried it, never once had it labeled a person as contact.
And the corruption that refusal to resolve meant the Read had tried and failed, which meant the failure was the answer whatever it couldn’t parse was what it needed him to notice.
He tested the recall.
Tried to summon the block back, tried to query what the overlay had attempted and why it had flagged two flight-suited officers as a return.
Nothing.
The Board was silent.
Marko pushed off the wall and headed down the ladder.
The ceremony would start in thirty minutes.
The deck gang had inspection in twenty.
He had no name for what had just happened, no frame that fit, and no way to ask the one system that might answer without exposing the fact that he’d just spent two minutes in CIC staring at boards and people like a man reading something no one else could see.
It took its place beside the rest of what the overlay did and never explained the old name it shouldn’t know, the combat warning it had issued sixteen hours early, and now this: a contact that wouldn’t resolve, sitting exactly where two members of a Raptor crew had stood.
Tyrol was waiting at the base of the ladder.
“Clean?” “Handed off to Lieutenant Gaeta, Chief.” “He give you any mouth?” “No, Chief.” Tyrol’s look said he didn’t quite believe that but wasn’t going to press.
“Get your dress grays on.
Inspection in fifteen, ceremony in thirty, and if any of my people look like they just climbed out of a bilge I’m gonna have questions.” “Chief.” Marko made it back to berthing, pulled his dress uniform out of the locker, and started the mechanical process of making himself look like a sailor who belonged at a ceremony instead of a man who’d just had his overlay try to tag a person as a threat.
Socko leaned in from the next rack over.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, brother.” “Long morning.” “Uh-huh.” Socko tugged his own uniform straight.
“That’s the same face you had after the coolant call.
You do your trick again?” “What thing?” “The thing where you hear something nobody else hears and it turns out you’re right.” Socko’s grin was too sharp to be entirely friendly.
“That thing.
The one the Chief’s decided is a feature and Cally’s decided is you making the rest of us look slow.” Marko buttoned his jacket.
“I delivered a tablet to CIC and walked back.
No hearing.
No thing.” “Sure.” Socko smoothed his collar.
“Just so you know, the people who are good at the thing and pretend they’re not?
Those are the people everyone watches.
You want to be invisible, brother, stop being right where people can see it.” He clapped Marko on the shoulder and headed for the inspection line.
Marko followed.
And as he fell in with the rest of the deck gang, dress grays crisp and face shut tight, the last thing he let himself think about was the way the comms petty officer had looked at him not suspicious, not curious, just noting the deckhand who’d moved like he heard the ship and the way the overlay had tried and failed to resolve a Raptor crew into something it recognized.
The ceremony started on time.
Adama’s speech lasted four minutes short, precise, the kind of address that made you remember why you’d signed on.
Raptor flyby went off clean.
And when Marko stood in the hangar afterward, watching the crowd filter toward the mess for the reception, the overlay flickered once brief, unbidden, already fading and painted a single amber return over the place where the Raptor crew had been.
A hard return where no return should be.
He blinked and it was gone.
// FIELD BRIEFING Update cycle: 7 chapters every 10 days.
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