Marko had fought fires that ended.
He’d worked fires, floods, decompression drills that ran long enough to test a crew’s nerve.
They all ended.
Someone called secure, the klaxons went silent, and you cleaned your tools and went back to whatever passed for normal.
This one didn’t.
Galactica ran dark and the net kept screaming.
Frame 29, hull breach.
Frame 64, fire in the galley.
Ordnance storage, smoke.
The jump drive, something wrong with the FTL that Marko couldn’t hear clearly through the static but knew meant the ship’s one way out was compromised.
DC Central cycled through them in order of lethality, and Tyrol’s gang moved like a pack of dogs following the scent of death.
Marko moved with them.
His gloves were still scorched from the magazine.
The cold behind his eyes had settled into a constant low ache he had no time to answer.
“Dabrowski.” Tyrol’s voice cut through the noise, flat and certain.
“Frame 29.
Breach team’s stuck on a seal that won’t take.
Go.” Marko went.
The breach was small a fragment punch, the kind of hit that killed you slow if you let it breathe.
The team had the plate up but the frame was torqued, the bolt-pattern off so the seal wouldn’t mate.
Three men stood around it arguing about shims while air hissed past into nothing.
The overlay lit it before Marko’s eyes even focused.
Not the frame the deck beneath it, buckled in a way that threw the whole assembly out of true.
Fix the deck, the frame seats, the seal takes.
“Jacks under the deck plates, four points.” He pointed without looking at who he was pointing to.
“Pull it level, then the seal.” One of them a corporal whose name Marko didn’t know stared.
“The deck’s not the problem, the frame’s bent” “Deck first.” The corporal opened his mouth, looked at Marko’s face, and shut it.
They pulled the plates, set the jacks, brought the deck back to true.
The frame settled.
The seal took on the first try.
Marko was already moving before they finished torquing it down.
The net lit up again.
Frame 64, galley fire spreading to the vent trunk.
Tyrol sent Cally and Socko, but thirty seconds later Cally’s voice came back tight and fast: “Chief, it’s in the trunk, we can’t get ahead of it” “Dabrowski, 64.
Cally, he’s coming to you, do what he says.” Marko’s gut twisted.
He hadn’t asked for this.
Tyrol was pointing him like a weapon at every fault the book couldn’t answer, and the Board was feeding him solutions faster than he could pretend they were luck.
He ran anyway.
The trunk fire was already cooking the air when he got there.
Cally had a hose on it but the angle was wrong she was hitting the burn, not the fuel.
Socko had a vent override panel open and was staring at it like the schematic had been written in ancient Gemenese.
His Board showed him the trunk’s full run, the burn climbing, the two side-feeds that were feeding it faster than Cally’s hose could kill it.
“Socko, pull feeds six and nine.
Cally, hose on the low port, not the trunk.” “Which ones are six and nine?” Socko’s voice, no jokes in it now, just a man trying not to die.
Marko reached past him and yanked the two toggles the Board painted amber.
The trunk starved.
Cally’s hose hit the port and the fire folded in on itself, choking.
It took another two minutes to kill it completely, but the moment it turned was the moment Marko had bought them.
Cally came off the hose with her face soot-streaked and her eyes too bright.
“How’d you know which feeds?” “Schematic’s on the panel.” “I was looking at the schematic.
I didn’t see” “It’s there.” Marko turned before she could finish the question.
His hands were shaking.
He made them stop.
The Board flickered.
FRAME 29 HOLDING.
FRAME 64 SECURED.
CASUALTY ASSESSMENT INCOMPLETE FLEET-WIDE DATA PENDING.
Fleet-wide.
That was the word that sat wrong.
Not ship-wide.
Fleet.
Marko found Tyrol near the CIC access, talking to a lieutenant whose uniform was clean enough that he hadn’t been anywhere near the fires.
The lieutenant was talking about “radiation hot-spots on the Colonies” and “waiting for QRF response” and the look on Tyrol’s face was the look of someone standing where a floor used to be.
The lieutenant left.
Tyrol stood there.
“Chief?” Marko kept his voice low.
Tyrol didn’t turn.
“The Colonies are gone.
All twelve.
We’re it what’s left of the fleet, maybe fifty ships, maybe fewer.
No reinforcements.
No fallback.” He could have been reading hull-pressure off a gauge.
Numbers.
Facts.
No room for anything else.
Fifty billion people.
Marko tried to fit that in his head.
The number was too big.
It slid off, refused to mean anything.
Then the overlay flickered again, and he saw it.
A manifests scroll just a fragment, civilian ship registry, names and berth assignments.
It wasn’t even clear which ship.
The Board sometimes pulled data he hadn’t asked for, pieces of the net it thought he needed.
This one was noise until he saw the berth count at the bottom.
Forty-two thousand, seven hundred eighteen.
Souls aboard at last muster.
And beside it, updated two hours ago: nineteen thousand, three hundred eleven.
Revised down from forty-two thousand.
Twenty-three thousand people gone between one count and the next.
One ship.
Not a battle.
A triage.
The number was small enough to be real.
Marko looked at it until the overlay cleared.
When he blinked the afterimage away, Tyrol was watching him.
“You good?” “Yeah.” The lie came out steady.
“What’s next?” “Next is we keep this ship alive long enough to find the rest of the fleet.
Adama’s looking for the President, for any command structure that’s still breathing.
We’re running dark, minimal power, jumping every thirty-three minutes because that’s how long we’ve got before they find us again.” Tyrol’s voice was still level, but his hands were working, opening and closing on nothing.
“Condition One stays set.
We don’t stand down until” He stopped.
There was no end to that sentence.
Marko nodded.
They went back to work.
The casualties came in waves after that.
A coolant line fracture that Marko traced to a stress-point three frames away.
A jammed hatch Tyrol sent him to because “you’ve got a feel for the ugly ones.” A power relay that was feeding wrong and the Book said replace but Marko said bypass-and-reroute and it bought them another six hours before they’d have to burn parts nobody could replace.
Every time, Tyrol pointed him at it.
Every time, the fix landed.
And every time, somebody watched.
By hour eighteen, Marko was running on nothing.
The Bearing leak was constant now, a cold tide behind his eyes that never quite drained before the next tasking hit.
He’d stopped counting the fixes the Board tracked them, and he moved.
And then there was the coolant seal.
The starboard launch tube’s secondary coolant line, frame 13.
It was leaking slow, but if left alone the tube would be down inside a day.
Cally flagged it, and Marko went because Tyrol sent him and because stopping had stopped being an option hours ago.
The seal itself was a simple swap.
Wrong size in inventory, but there was a workaround a gasket patch that would hold if you seated it just right.
Marko did the work fast, hands certain, the Board guiding him through the tolerance stack like it always did.
It held.
Pressure came back clean.
He signed it off and moved.
But six hours later, alone in the berthing compartment with the ship still running dark and the gang scattered across a dozen frames, the Board flickered unbidden.
CASUALTY RE-ASSESSMENT: FRAME 13 COOLANT SEAL BORDERLINE.
GASKET SEATED UNDER LIMIT.
ESTIMATED HOLD DURATION: INCOMPLETE.
Marko stared at the block.
He’d tested the fix and it had held clean.
But the overlay was saying something else now, something it hadn’t said in the moment the gasket sat at the razor-edge of tolerance, and whether it would hold through the next jump or split under pressure was a question the Board left open.
He couldn’t tell which.
The Board offered no countdown, no failure date.
It left the line sitting there, cold and factual, and then it did what it had never done before.
A second block, lower, different format.
An old format.
Not a diagnostic.
Not a repair order.
A record.
PRIOR INCIDENT LOGGED COMPARABLE GEOMETRY: COMPARTMENT 7 FLOODING, STRUCTURAL SEAL FAILURE, 2042-11-18.
MANUAL SEAL, GASKET WORKAROUND.
CASUALTY COUNT: 1.
RESOLUTION: HATCH SEALED.
The date was wrong.
The compartment number was wrong.
The ship there was no ship, just the implication of one, somewhere else, some other time.
Something in him locked up, valve-quick and just as involuntary.
That was the old life.
That was the man behind the hatch, the name that had stopped, the sealed hatch, the name on the other side, the debt he carried as a standing order never to cut corners on a seal again.
The overlay had no reason to know that.
No reason to log it here, now, in a format that looked like an after-action pulled from a database that shouldn’t exist.
He blinked and the block was gone.
The berthing hatch cycled.
Socko came through, soot-streaked, carrying two trays of something that smelled like it had been food once.
“Got you the mystery protein.
Don’t ask what it was, I’m not sure it knows.” Socko dropped one tray in front of Marko and sat.
“You look like hell.” “Eighteen-hour watch.” “Everybody’s pulling eighteen-hour watches.
You look worse.” Socko ate without looking at the tray, pure fuel.
“Chief’s got you on every bad call now.
You know that, right?” “I know.” “That’s gonna be a problem.” “I know.” Socko gave him a long look, the kind that said he wanted to ask a question he already knew wouldn’t get answered.
Then he shrugged and went back to eating.
Marko looked at the tray.
He wasn’t hungry.
He ate anyway, because the alternative was sitting still, and sitting still meant thinking about a casualty log that had pulled a name from a world that didn’t exist anymore.
The first day of the end of the world, and the shift never ended.
They just kept moving.