Marko was halfway through a valve inspection when he saw her again.
Sharon Valerii.
Boomer.
The Raptor pilot whose crew had crossed his path on decommissioning day, carrying wrongness he couldn’t place.
She was coming up the hangar deck with a clipboard, looking for someone, smiling at a joke Cally had just made.
Ordinary.
Friendly.
Well-liked.
Wrong.
The word surfaced in his gut a crack finding steel, not loud, just there, undeniable.
Marko’s hands stilled on the valve housing.
He didn’t look at her directly, but the overlay was already threading her into his attention, amber edges creeping into his peripheral vision like it had been waiting for this.
He’d felt this before.
Decommissioning day, the Raptor deck, a Read that had snagged on her and refused to resolve.
The same amber flicker, the same gut-deep pull toward a fault he couldn’t name.
He’d let it go then, written it off as nerves in a dead-end posting.
But the fleet was running now.
The thirty-three-minute clock was live.
And if there was a fault he could name, a threat he could read, he couldn’t afford to pass it.
Marko let the overlay pull focus.
The Board bloomed across his vision, amber teletype threading through the hangar’s frame and finding her like a targeting solution.
He pushed a Read at her same cold query he’d pushed at frames, hulls, drives.
Same demand for an answer.
The overlay stuttered.
It never failed.
Never errored.
It stuttered, like a transmission cutting in and out, and the wireframe around her went strange too bright in places, too dim in others, edges that refused to cohere.
Marko pushed harder.
The Bearing drained cold from his chest to his fingertips, a tide pulling heat out through his knuckles.
His ears rang thin, distant, the pitch of a cable under too much load.
And the block came.
DATA WILL NOT RESOLVE HARD RETURN WHERE NO RETURN SHOULD BE Not an error.
Not a refusal.
Recognition.
The overlay knew her.
Knew what she was, or close to it.
And it would not give him the word.
Marko’s vision fogged at the edges.
The Tell, creeping in.
He blinked hard and pulled his attention back, but the wrongness stayed, louder now for having been touched.
Five meters away Boomer was still smiling, still talking to Cally, completely unaware she’d just become the one thing a system built to read faults could not parse.
His jaw ached.
He’d been clenching it without noticing.
He could taste copper at the root of his tongue where he’d bitten down too hard.
“Dabrowski.” The voice came from his left, low and unhurried.
Marko turned.
Sergeant Kord was standing three meters away, one hand resting on his sidearm casual as a man leaning on a railing, but with all his weight behind it.
His eyes were on Marko, not the pilot.
“Sergeant,” Marko said.
His voice came out level.
The fog was still there, a haze at the corners of his sight, but his hands held steady.
“You need something from Petty Officer Valerii?” Kord asked.
“No, Sergeant.” “You were looking at her.” Marko met Kord’s eyes.
The hunter’s face was calm, curious, patient someone who already knew three ways to verify whatever Marko said next.
“Thought I recognized her,” Marko said.
“Raptor crew.
Decommissioning day.” “And?” “And nothing.
I was wrong.” Kord’s expression held, but his center of gravity settled half an inch a hunter pocketing a round that hadn’t yet found its target.
“You’ve been on your feet a long time, Specialist.
You look tired.” Not a question.
An observation, the kind a hunter makes when he spots a tremor in the brush.
“Eighteen-hour watch’ll do that,” Marko said.
“It will.” Kord’s hand stayed on the sidearm.
“Chief Tyrol’s looking for you.
Said something about a coolant line.” “Copy that.” Marko turned and walked toward the tool racks, feeling Kord’s eyes on his back the whole way.
He kept his gaze forward.
No need to look again.
The wrongness was lodged in his gut now, cold and immovable, and the overlay had given him exactly nothing he could act on.
Recognition, not proof.
A wall, not a door.
He found the coolant line two bays aft, a split gasket weeping blue fluid onto the deck plate.
Simple fix pull the clamp, swap the ring, torque it down.
Any specialist could handle it blind.
Marko worked it slowly, letting his hands do the job while his mind sat with what the Board had just told him.
HARD RETURN WHERE NO RETURN SHOULD BE.
The overlay had never refused him before.
It had withheld, sure locked capabilities behind thresholds he hadn’t crossed yet, left gaps he’d have to grow into.
But this was no lock.
This was corruption, a Read that touched a living surface and came back wrong, and the wrongness had a shape to it.
Recognition.
The Board knew her.
Or knew what she was.
And it refused to resolve the data refused the word he needed, refused to turn dread into a name he could say aloud or a fault he could shore.
Marko tightened the coupling and tested the seal.
It held.
Blue coolant beaded at the joint, quivered, stayed put.
He straightened, wiped his hands on his thighs, and let himself think the thing he’d been pushing away.
The overlay could read a frame about to fail.
A drive about to burn.
A hull about to breach.
It could thread a fix through vacuum and across another man’s hands.
So what did it mean that it looked at a smiling, well-liked crewman and returned corrupted data?
What did it mean that the corruption felt like recognition?
Marko had no answer.
The Board wasn’t offering one.
And the dread sitting in his chest had nowhere to go, no action he could take, no hatch he could seal or frame he could shore.
He could not airlock a woman on a feeling.
Could not report wrongness without proof.
Could not even push the overlay again without burning more Bearing and getting the same unresolvable stutter.
He’d just learned the one thing Dead Reckoning couldn’t do.
And it was aimed at people.
Marko walked back toward the berthing.
The hangar hummed around him, familiar and wrong at the same time, tylium-stink and hot metal thick in the back of his throat.
Somewhere behind him Boomer laughed at one of Cally’s cracks warm, human, ordinary.
The overlay held the corrupted return on his sight a half-second too long, amber edges lingering an afterimage of a signal it half-remembered and could not explain.
Then it faded.
The hangar lights took back their ordinary color, flat and institutional, and the world was just a ship again.
Marko kept walking.
The dread stayed.