Katarinov began each cycle the same way, before the galley noise rose and before the first ration fights found their voice. He left Forward Command with the ledger under his arm and the saint-medallion warm against his ribs where it rode inside the uniform pocket. He did not look at the portrait plaques or the glossy contractor safety posters. He looked at the ship.
In The Shaft the air told on everything. Dry coolant tang when a line had been bled too recently. A faint sweet solvent where someone had re-seated a seal and not logged it. He ran his palm along the ribbed bulkhead as he went, fingers finding the weld seams like braille. A patch that should be smooth but wasn’t. A fastener proud by a half turn. The ship talked in little lies and he had learned to hear them.
At Deck 2 the first pressure door took a fraction too eager a bite on the latch. Not wrong. Not yet. He stopped anyway. He timed the close with his wrist chrono and watched the gasket settle. He read the indicator strip, then opened the access panel and checked the hand marks on the torque paint. Someone had tried to make it look untouched. Katarinov wrote the tag number and the shift code in the ledger. No scolding. Just ink. Ink was a kind of justice.
Down toward Deck 6 the lighting changed in bands, contractor white and then the warmer salvaged strips that made people look less sick. Voices carried in the conduit, a whole ship’s resentment bouncing off metal. He did not listen for gossip. He listened for strain in the fans, for a bearing starting to sing, for the thump of a pump that had begun to hit its housing.
At Deck 8 he paused by the offshoot toward the Cold Vaults. The antechamber doors sat quiet, sterile lights locked behind them. He hated that quiet. It felt like buried men. He checked the access log plate on the public side, the last authorized entry, the consumables count stamped and initialed. He forced himself to breathe slow and stand there long enough that his hurry could not pass for diligence. Then he wrote what he’d heard and what he hadn’t, and kept walking.
At Deck 6 the Shaft tightened and the day tightened with it. Carts nosed through on squealing casters. A mother with a child on her hip tried to slip the rail and got shouted at by a pressure-tech with a clipboard. Habitat wanted the corridor open because kids and water drums did not wait on tests. Engineering wanted the junction sealed for a pressure sweep and did not care whose lesson got cut in half. Security stood off to the side, helmets bright, asking for names and badge pings like the ship was a border.
Katarinov stepped into the choke point where the ribs of the bulkhead came close enough to brush a shoulder. He did not raise his voice. He made himself a post. He put two fingers on the tether line and held it like a rule.
Ten-minute windows, he said. Habitat moves. Then Engineering runs its test. Then Habitat again. Security gets eyes, not a toll. No one buys time with rank. No one buys it with contractor tags. He watched the faces as the argument tried to find a new angle and found none.
Bottleneck is where you lose a ship, he told them. Then he started the chrono and made them obey it.
Rations lit the ship faster than any alarm. A runner from Contractor Stores came down The Shaft with a slate held out like a warrant, saying the updated tally superseded the hand-count and that the hand-count was folklore. The labor cook from Deck 7 stood with raw knuckles and a stained apron and said the hydroponic pantry hatch had come up light again, three sealed tins missing and the flour scoop half-full. Voices gathered. Names got spoken in that careful way that meant accusation.
Katarinov did not ask who had taken. He set the ledger on a notice plate and called for the locker keys and a witness from each side. He had the seals photographed, torque paint checked, numbers read aloud. They counted together, under light, until the math had no hiding place and rumor had nowhere to live.
The Cold Vaults tugged at him like an old injury. You did not look and it still hurt. A vendor console on the public side threw up a yellow line, NONCRITICAL, about a firmware mismatch in a pod-support rack. Medical spoke of postponement. Security spoke of keeping doors shut and logs clean. Katarinov had the fault tagged anyway, red strip and date, repair before next wake. He wrote his name beside it. Not menace. A place for blame to land.
By Deck 7 the ship breathed warmer, full of yeast and bodies and old metal. His legs wanted the easy thing. In Komunal Galley 7 a shift lead had his people edging forward, palm out, saying the pump run stole their hour. The line tightened. Hard mouths. Katarinov stepped in like a bulkhead. No shouting. He pulled the posted board down, rewrote the eat order by clock and hazard, pinned it where all eyes could land, and left them no angle but to comply.
In The Shaft a tool cart drifted with the slow stubbornness of dead mass, wheels kissing the deck with every vibration of the pumps. No tether. No brake. A small thing until it wasn’t. It sat half in the traffic line where hands and shoulders had to slip around it, where a stumble in a drill would turn into a cracked visor or a broken finger. The kind of accident that never made the contractors’ reports sound like negligence. Just “unforeseen.”
Katarinov stopped. He did it without drama, as if his body had been built to halt here. He took the cart by its cold frame and felt the weight answer him. He hauled it in to the rail and clipped a tether through the ring, pulled it tight until the slack was gone and the cart was honest again. From his pocket he tore a strip of bright tag tape off the little roll he carried for such sins. He wrapped it around the handle where any passing eye could not pretend not to see it. He wrote in block letters with a stub pencil: SECURED , LOGGED , TIME.
A deckhand hovered nearby, young, with the blank face of someone who hoped the ship would forget him if he stayed quiet.
You. Katarinov nodded at the slate in the deckhand’s hand. Cart number. Location. Now.
The deckhand started to say later, or after the shift, or when the line cleared. Katarinov held his gaze and did not move aside. Procedure was not a suggestion. It was a wall you leaned on when panic came.
The deckhand swallowed and thumbed the shared maintenance board. He read the stenciled number off the cart and typed it in. He added Deck 6 spine, port rail, Junction Four. He hesitated at the “secured by” field.
Put my name, Katarinov said. If it breaks loose, it is mine.
The entry spun through the mesh, slow as a prayer in bad signal, then pinged back shipwide with the little confirmation tone. Only then did Katarinov step away and let the corridor flow again, bodies brushing past the bright strip like it was a warning sign at the mouth of a shaft.
At the next junction the air changed, cooler, tinged with coolant and the thin sour of sealant. A valve panel stood open, its guts exposed, a little forest of lines and labels. A systems tech was there with a tablet braced on his forearm, thumb already moving toward the green ACK as if the ship were a form to be cleared.
Katarinov saw the single confirmation sitting on the screen like a lone bootprint in fresh dust.
Who’s your second, he said.
The tech did not look up at first. Just that small tightening at the jaw. He made a sound that wanted to be an answer. The corridor behind them filled. Boots. Tool bags. A woman with a ration crate huffed once, loud enough to be heard. Someone muttered contractor time.
Katarinov stepped closer and the narrow space accepted him the way a choke point accepts a bulkhead. He did not raise his voice. He simply waited, eyes on the open panel, hand on the rail.
Call it in, he said. Second sign-off.
The tech keyed the comm, voice clipped, gave valve ID and status, asked for confirm. Static, then a tired reply, then the second stamp appeared. Only then did Katarinov move aside. The line flowed again, irritated but intact. Friction spent where it belonged.
A ration-runner came down The Shaft with a crate hugged to his ribs, shoulder turning sideways to find daylight in the line. He smiled as if it were nothing. Priority delivery, da? he said, light, for the laughs that kept fists in pockets. His boots were already past two bodies.
Katarinov put a hand on the crate, not hard, just enough to stop the motion. He looked at the runner and then at the faces watching, hungry for a precedent.
Back to your place, he said. No theater. He tipped his chin toward the notice plate. Log it if it’s medical. Log it if it’s emergency. Otherwise you wait like all of us.
He wrote it plain under the queue order in pencil so it could not be denied later. DELIVERIES WAIT. EXCEPTIONS REQUIRE LOG + TWO NAMES. Not punishment. Light in the tunnel.
On Deck 7 the galley’s overflow corner held its own order. Nadya set the children and the fresh-woken in a tight half-circle and gave them tape and a stub pencil. Names on tools. Dates. A checklist spoken aloud, each step answered back. Before the door they counted heads. After the door they counted again. A man snorted at school rules. She said, mild, it’s not school. It’s air. Repeat.
By end of rotation the corridor boards carried a different handwriting. The old slashes and blacked-out lines were fewer. The soft lies, FIXED, CHECKED, were gone or had two names beside them like ballast. Times sat clean in the margin. Initials. Valve IDs. It cost minutes every hour and men cursed it. But the pressure stayed in the paper, not in faces.
The slate came down in the morning packet like a weight. New tables. New cert gates. Buffers cut to thin air. The language was clean, polite, and hard as a bulkhead. Katarinov stood under the Shaft’s alternating lights and read it once. He did not read it twice. His jaw worked as if he were chewing grit. He could feel the old miner in him wanting to spit and swear, and the shipman in him counting hours and oxygen and how fast a crowd turns.
He took the packet to the public notice plate at Deck 6 where the queue orders lived. Contractor staff waited for him to take it up to Forward Command, to brief in some office with a closed door and a screen that could be edited. He did not.
He tore the seal strip, flattened the sheets with the heel of his hand, and pinned them with the magnetic clamps that had held ration tallies and strike notices back in the enclaves. He wrote across the top in block hand. REVISED COMMISSIONING SLATE. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. Then the dates, the compartments, the cert signatures required. No codes. No abbreviations that only the contractor desks spoke. He copied the line about reduced contingency time and underlined it until the pencil threatened to break.
A young security tech cleared his throat and said there were channels for this. Katarinov looked at him and then at the people gathering, tools in hand, waiting for the shape of the day.
Channels are for water, he said. This is air.
He wrote the addendum beneath the corporate lines, in the same plain ink he used for exceptions. ALL CHANGES POSTED HERE WITH TIME STAMP. ALL DELAYS LOGGED WITH CAUSE + TWO NAMES. NO PRIVATE DEADLINES. NO SIDE LISTS. If there was going to be pain, it would be shared and named.
He stepped back. Men and women leaned in, lips moving as they read. Someone muttered a curse in Russian. Someone else did the quiet arithmetic of missed sleep and extra rotations. The board held it all. Nothing hid behind a polite email or a closed briefing room. The ship took the news the way a tunnel takes a cave-in: with a moment of silence and then the sound of work beginning again, tighter and meaner.
The wake roster doubled and then doubled again, gardens and utilities and any half-trained hands they could drag upright. Deck 8 took it first. People came up out of the Cold Vaults with faces gone pale and blank, moving like they were still in gel. They walked with both hands on the rail as if the corridor might roll under them. Behind them the technicians shuffled in packs, boots not yet used to the ship’s rhythm, carrying tool rolls and insulated cases that sweated onto the deck plates. Med carts nosed through with their soft wheels and hard corners. Ration clerks with sealed bins and clipboards rode the same lanes, counting and recounting, lips moving with the numbers.
In the Shaft the old steady traffic became a series of compressions. A few meters open. Then a wall of backs. Shoulder against shoulder, breath in recycled air, the smell of coolant and stomach acid and disinfectant. Voices rose and fell, not argument yet, just warning. Hold. Pass. Clear. Katarinov watched the flow and saw where it would break, the way a man reads a seam in rock before it fails. He marked the bottlenecks in his head and in his pocket he felt the hard oval of the saint medal, like a weight that would not spend.
The sealed run by the Cold Vaults turned into the ship’s throat. Everything had to pass that mouth. The sterility doors cycled until the motors warmed and the gaskets shone wet under the lights. Each time they broke seal there was a small hiss and a bite of antiseptic that rode the breath. People queued with gloved hands held up like surgeons, badges out, eyes on the panel that did not care about schedules. Contractor security stood off to the side with a handheld verifier, reading seals twice, making a theater of it. Green light. Beep. Pause. Red light. Reset. The pauses were where the anger lived. You could see it in the flex of a jaw, in the way boots tapped the deck, in the way no one looked at anyone.
Crates began to breed along Deck 8. Consumables in sealed foam, coils of tubing, “temporary” modules with vendor tags crossed out and new ones slapped on crooked. Manifests came thin, half fields blank. Katarinov stopped them and made the hands sign: who touched, who carried, where it sat, time and bay. Better ink than fists. Still the stack grew, narrowing the corridor, white and silent like drifted snow.
Medical and security began to move in timed shoves, like a crew on a jammed conveyor. They cut through meal hours and through Nadya’s small lessons without apology. A badge would flash and a gloved hand would point and she’d be told to clear the children back, for safety. Each time she shifted them the corner shrank. Not a precaution. A reordering. The ship making room for the Cold Vaults.
In Cryo Bay C‑3 the support rack console sat in its bracket like a cheap altar, all glass and smudged icons, a panel bolted onto older steel that had once served another ship. The numbers on it looked clean until you watched them long enough. Katarinov watched because that was his work now. Watch, mark, don’t let the ship lie to you.
The wake cycle ticked through its steps. Purge. Warm. Check seals. Confirm O2 mix. A timestamp stamped itself at the top of the checklist and then, on the next refresh, hopped ahead as if someone had nudged the minute hand with a thumb. Four seconds. Six. Then it pulled back, embarrassed, and printed the next line as if nothing had happened.
The tech on duty, young, contractor patch still stiff on his shoulder, leaned in and squinted. He tapped the bezel with a knuckle like you’d wake a lazy gauge. The console chimed. The drift repeated. Not always. Just enough to make a man doubt his eyes.
“Firmware mismatch,” the tech said, already reaching for the clearance menu. He spoke fast, like words could outrun responsibility. “Vendor clock sync gets weird when the rack’s talking to med and security at once. It corrects on refresh.”
Katarinov kept his hands behind his back. He could smell the dry antiseptic and the faint metallic cold that never left the place. The bay was quiet except for relays clicking and the distant pump-thrum through the bulkhead. He looked at the line items. Each step was signed, time-stamped, blessed by procedure.
“How many times today,” he said.
The tech shrugged without looking up. “A few. It’s a nuisance alert. Doesn’t affect the cycle.”
On the screen a yellow triangle pulsed. The tech dismissed it. Logged it as noncritical drift. Mixed-vendor interface. Cleared. The triangle went away and the checklist marched on, neat as a ledger.
Katarinov watched the minute change. He waited for the next lie. Behind the glass of the pods men and women slept with their mouths slightly open, trusting the ship to count honestly for them.
By the gantry the coolant-loop interface valve had a new voice. Not the old steady hiss and the faint moan of flow. This was a thin chatter, like teeth tapping behind a smile, fast and patient and wrong in a way you felt in the bones more than in the ear. Katarinov paused with his palm on the rail and listened. The vibration ran through the metal into his wrist.
A maintenance hand stood there with a tablet, eyes on numbers and not on the thing itself. Flow rate green. Delta‑T green. Actuator response time inside tolerance. The swap tag still hung from the flange bolts, ink barely dry. The hand said the vendor seat was different composite, that the ship was full of mismatched throats and every piece sang its own song. He used the contractor word, normalizing. Settling.
Katarinov watched the valve body tremble in its mount, a fine shiver you could miss if you were in a hurry. He asked for the old part. Told them to bag it, label it, keep it. The hand hesitated, then nodded and marked “within spec” anyway.
Within spec did not mean honest. It meant no one wanted to stop the schedule. He let the chatter go on, but he wrote it down.
Nadya stood with her small line of children and half‑awake trainees at the sterility door, palms on shoulders, keeping them from pressing their faces to the glass. The antechamber light made everyone look sickly. Inside, voices carried through the seal in thin scraps when the intercom cycled.
A medic was talking to someone in security. Not loud. The tone of a person who had said it too many times and still hadn’t been heard. “You can’t keep changing the wording,” he said. “Spasm becomes discomfort. Hypoxia becomes a delay. You make it read clean and then you wonder why the next one goes bad.”
A second voice answered with policy words and tired patience.
Nadya watched the door indicator. Green. Locked. She touched the chalk in her pocket as if it could anchor her. If the log lied, the ship would follow it.
In The Shaft he met Voronin from contractor ops, hard shoes, clean badge, eyes already on the next hour. The man spoke with a calm that was not calm but decree. The wake schedule holds. If it slips, power allotments slip, ration forecasts slip, labor slips. Katarinov asked for a pause to verify the drift and the valve chatter. Voronin said procedure verifies. File it. Route it. Paper first. Doubt later.
The small mismatches lined up first in flesh. Near the Vaults the air carried a cold metallic bite like coin on tongue. A handrail along the antechamber ran faintly tacky, a film where no condensation should live. A junior tech came through rubbing his wrist where a glove seal had cut him in a rushed pass. Nothing failed. Nothing called out. The ship only asked them to agree it was already settled.
The interval came on like a pressure change you felt in your teeth. The ship’s vibration steadied until it was not a complaint but a fact. Pumps somewhere deep aft found a common rhythm and held it. In The Shaft the alternating light strips quit their nervous flutter and burned clean, contractor white beside salvaged amber, and for a few minutes it looked planned. Like somebody had built it that way on purpose.
Katarinov stood near a junction plate where the paint had been scraped off by too many shoulders. He did not lean. He watched the flow. Boots and sock-feet. A woman pulling a child by the sleeve. A pair of welders with their masks lifted like tired faces. A medical runner with a sealed case hugged to her ribs as if it were warm. They moved without pushing. Without the usual negotiations spoken in half-voices. The air carried sweat and coolant and that faint metallic note that never left the ship, but it did not spike sharp the way it did when a valve stuck or a filter loaded.
People stopped at the notice plates. Not to fight over shift bids. Just to read. Fingers traced the stamped ration figures and the scribbled Cyrillic under them. Someone had written a mining proverb in grease pencil and, for once, no one had crossed it out. He saw heads nod as if counting was prayer. The ship asked for nothing dramatic. Just agreement. Just compliance.
He checked the corridor itself the way he checked a man’s harness before EVA. Handholds intact. Tether points not bent. The emergency pressure-door indicator steady. His own fatigue sat behind his eyes like grit, and he let it sit. You could not afford to chase every sensation and call it omen.
A soft scrape came from a panel seam as the hull cooled or warmed by fractions. He listened until it stopped. He kept his hand near his uniform pocket where the brass medallion lay flat against his chest, sealed away, a private weight. The calm had a moral cost. It asked him to believe the logs. It asked him to pass people through a corridor built from mixed standards and promises. He held the moment anyway, because a crew needed to feel one clean breath before the next alarm.
At Deck 6 the corridor tightened the way a throat tightens. A tool cart came through too fast, nose heavy with wrapped couplers and a crate of seals, its handler tethered out of habit. The tether hook bit a ceiling point and held. The cart slewed sideways and locked the lane. Behind it a work shift from habitat, faces soft with sleep and sour ration tea. Ahead of it a maintenance gang heading downshaft, gloves already on, eyes already at Deck 11. They met and stopped. Shoulders touched. Someone laughed once and it died. Voices rose in two languages and then stalled, each man waiting for the other to blink.
Katarinov stepped in. Not between them like a hero. Just into the knot like it was his post. He did not raise his voice. He lifted one hand, palm down, and the nearest bodies eased back from the handholds. With the other he pointed at the right-of-way marks stenciled on the ribbing and the little log tag on the cart’s frame. Logged cargo moves. Unlogged people wait. No exceptions.
He crouched, found the snag, thumbed the latch, and the tether let go. The cart rolled straight again. The lane breathed open. No favors. No contractor badge. Only the rule.
He watched the knot unwind and become a corridor again. The workmen took the downshaft lane as if pulled by gravity, sleeves dark with grease, cuffs stiff with dried coolant. They did not talk much. They held their meal chits and tool tags the way you held a promise you might be audited for later. Ahead, the families bled off toward Deck 7, tins clinking under arms, children stepping wide around the floor ribs like they’d been taught the ship could bite. A pair of old men nodded to him and kept moving. Against them came the medical team, three in clean smocks under pressure jackets, faces set, sealed cases hugged tight to their bodies as if warmth mattered. Their boots placed careful, identical steps. Routine, but the kind that assumed the next door might not open.
In the overflow corner of Komunal Galley 7 Nadya planted her boots as if on a deck that meant to throw her. The faint sway came anyway, cold in her teeth. She did not show it. When the children looked down to their slates she let her fingers touch the wall, then away. She had them speak the list in order. Hands. Seals. Counts. Logs. She corrected soft, iron under it. No close enough.
The last answer comes back to her in one voice, ragged but together, and the checklists sound less like orders than like a rope everyone has a hand on. Nadya slips the chalk into her pocket and looks over them as she would a wake ward. Counting faces. Watching chests rise. Listening for the wrong kind of silence. Far down the spine Katarinov’s cleared lane keeps swallowing bodies and cargo, steady, as if the weld seams mean it.
Order did not arrive with a speech. It was a thin thing laid over the ship like tape over a crack, and you only noticed it when it began to loosen. People left the tables in Komunal Galley 7 and drifted back into The Shaft with their mouths still forming the same words, seal, count, log, as if the syllables themselves held pressure. They tapped their logplates out of habit, thumbs moving without thought, eyes already half elsewhere. The last of the hot-water steam clung to their clothes and went cold in the corridor air.
He watched the shoulders. That was where it showed first. The rigid set that carried drills and fear eased by a degree, like a valve opened a fraction. Faces lifted. A laugh here, too sharp. A complaint there, finally allowed to be human again. Tool tags swung on lanyards instead of being gripped. People started walking two abreast and forgetting they were a bottleneck until someone behind them had to say it loud. The ship answered with its low thrum, indifferent, as if it would not punish them for the small mercy of exhale.
Katarinov stood in the spine where the light changed from contractor white to salvaged amber. He did not step aside. He made himself the mark they had to navigate around, the reminder with a pulse. A young tech came through with a case of valves unsealed at one latch. Katarinov stopped him with two fingers on the handle and waited until the boy looked back. No lecture. Just the latch clicked shut, the case tested, the nod. The boy flushed and went on.
At the notice plates a pair of men lingered, reading shift bids as if they had time now to bargain the week back from the ship. They spoke low in Russian and English mixed, the old mine cadence, and when they saw him they straightened too late, pretending they had only been passing. He let them be. Fairness also meant letting people think they owned a minute of their own life.
Still the thinning continued. Not collapse. Not yet. Just that end-of-drill slack settling into joints, into voices, into the small gaps where a rule could be forgotten because nothing bad happened last time. He kept his hands behind his back, feeling the brass medallion through fabric like a weight that could not be signed off.
Katarinov held The Shaft to its rhythm a few minutes longer as if time itself were another valve to be throttled. A cart came up heavy with reaction-mass canisters, the handler drifting wide to avoid a knot of bodies. Katarinov lifted a hand and split the flow with two fingers, sending foot traffic to the right-hand rail, carts to the left, no argument. Tethers on, clips checked. He made one woman stop and redo her hook where it rode a painted line instead of bare metal. She muttered, then complied. Procedure was not pride. It was air.
He walked the length of a panel run where contractor LEDs bled into salvaged amber and the ribs of the corridor showed their patchwork. Overhead a weld seam crossed two standards like a scar pulled wrong. He slowed beneath it, eyes on the bead, on the slight shadow of heat discoloration. As if looking could keep it honest. He listened for a pitch change in the vibration. Nothing. Still he touched the bulkhead with the back of his knuckles, feeling for warmth, for tremor.
At last he keyed the plate and signed off the traffic window. The corridor did not stop. It went on without him, running on habit and the thin hope that habit was enough.
Nadya wiped the board with the heel of her palm until the polymer squealed and the chalk dust smeared into a gray skin. What would not lift she crossed through with a hard line, as if striking a name off a roster. The chalk went back into her pocket by habit, thumb rubbing it once like a worry-stone. The corner still looked claimed. Not officially. Nothing on this ship was official for long. A strip of scrap plating leaned against a crate with a sing-song tool-count rhyme scrawled in block letters, the kind that made little mouths move even when they were tired. Beside it a child’s airlock cycle diagram sat too neat to be an accident. Under that, half a list: who to tell first, who not to wait for. She left it where it could be seen.
The small rituals took hold again like hands on a rail. Mugs queued at the hot-water unit. Tokens were shown and returned without theater. People spoke softer, as if loudness spent oxygen. He saw eyes go to posted rules and not away. Protection, not leash, Nadya always said. It worked only while adults stayed in the open, countable, answering to the same line on the log.
When the duty board rolled and voices went flat with the next item the old belief sat there like a tin cup on a rail. No one gets quietly written off. It held on trust, not readouts. Proof was always delayed, always partial. In the narrow space between confidence and vigilance he felt the ship breathe. A routine task lit green and went onto the schedule.
The scheduled wake cycle began on time in Cold Vaults C‑3. On the consoles the standby gray bled into active color and thin bars climbed by degrees, each step signed off by software that did not know it was borrowed, patched, argued into cooperation. Relays clicked in the racks overhead. The heaters engaged in measured increments as if they were still in a lab and not bolted into a ship that had already learned to make do.
Katarinov stood just inside the sterility antechamber with the inner door sealed behind him. He kept his hands to himself. Procedure. The air was dry enough to sting the back of the throat and carried that antiseptic cold-metal smell that made the place feel like a morgue pretending to be a nursery. A contractor medic worked the primary screen. Someone from security watched the access log like a catechism.
He read the numbers anyway, the way he’d read seam lines on a cut rock face. Power draw stable. Coolant pressure nominal. Chamber temps rising on the planned curve. The wake-room dispensers began to pre-mix electrolyte solution, their tiny pumps whining. Thermal blankets sat stacked, still folded, waiting for bodies that would soon shake under their own skin.
This was the part the company liked. Clean checklists. Green icons. A wake on schedule meant a report that looked like competence.
Katarinov’s gaze moved from arc to arc. Pod identifiers marched down the screen in a tidy column. Some of the names he recognized, people from the old enclaves, families that had taken votes by lantern light and kept their promises. He felt the weight of that in his pocket where the brass medallion warmed against his shirt. He did not touch it.
The system spoke in its own clipped language. Status pings, acknowledgments, auto-corrections. Fans spooled. A valve somewhere hissed and settled. The contractor medic said nothing. No one did. In a place like this silence was also procedure.
On the far arc a strip of pods showed a flawless ramp. On the nearer arc a warning blinked, firmware handshake mismatch, then cleared itself before the eye could hold it. A second later it returned, shorter, like a nervous tic in a man trying to stand straight. The indicators stayed green. The numbers kept climbing as if nothing had happened.
On the left arc the ramp held like a taught line. Each pod climbed through its degrees with a steadiness that could be mistaken for proof. Green stayed green. The heaters pulsed. The coolant loop answered with a clean pressure trace. It was the kind of graph a manager could staple to a report and call it a day.
On the nearer arc the console threw a handshake warning (vendor ID mismatch, bus arbitration delay) then wiped it away with an auto-note: CLEARED. The medic’s cursor paused a breath and moved on. There were always artifacts in a ship still being stitched together. Katarinov had seen instruments lie politely in mines until the roof came down.
He leaned in without crossing the sterile line, eyes narrowing on the microtext in the event log. The fault had no bite to it. No alarm tone. No red. Just a brief blink like an eyelid twitching. Yet the cleared stamp bothered him. Resolved by what. By who.
He looked at the two arcs side by side and felt the old instinct for bad seams. Perfect on one side. Nervous on the other. The kind of difference that gets men killed when everyone is tired and counting on green.
Within the minute it came back. Same line, same polite phrasing. Cleared. Then it returned sooner, as if the machine had lost patience with its own answer. The timestamps closed up, beads on a string drawn tight. The status bar never wavered from its calm blue assurance. RESOLVED. RESOLVED. A word that meant nothing without a hand on a wrench.
Katarinov watched the cadence and felt the hair at the base of his neck lift. He’d seen a pump cavitate like this in a flooded heading. No scream, only a rhythm that changed until metal gave. The log filled with small events that were not supposed to stack: arbitration delay, retry, vendor handshake, retry. The system kept signing its own work, quick and quiet, like a man forging a foreman’s name.
The watch tech toggled between thermal ramps and loop pressures and pulled a summary dump. No hard-red. No rising klaxon. The permission chain in the access log read clean as a prayer. Only a comms timeout between the two controller stacks, stamped as transient, auto-patched at the interface. Green boxes everywhere. A silence that meant the machine was answering itself.
Katarinov came past the antechamber on his rounds and heard it in the tone of the system. Not in sound but in repetition. ALL CLEAR. CLEARED. The same clean stamp laid down too often, too fast. He stopped with one hand on the cold jamb, not crossing the line. He keyed the corridor comm. Put a pair of eyes in C-3 now. Auto-resolve means no one has bled for it yet.
The wake arc should have climbed like a tide. Slow. Measured. Every degree bought with amperage and coolant and a nurse’s patience. Instead one pod broke rank. On the board it was only a thin white trace that should have been smooth. It rose a fraction above baseline and then fell back as if a hand had come down on it. A check valve in the body of the system. A hesitation. Then it pushed up again, too soon, not matching the neighboring pods that held their obedient line.
Katarinov leaned closer without stepping past the sterility tape. The glass of the antechamber door had a film of old disinfectant and the light made everything inside look flatter than it was. He watched the numbers rather than the chamber. Numbers did not lie, they only got arranged into lies.
Pod C-3-14. Temp: 31.[^2] to 31.[^5]. Then 31.[^1]. Then 31.[^6]. The setpoint unchanged. The controller insisted it was within tolerance while it did the same wrong thing twice. A heater duty cycle spiked and dropped. The coolant return temp lagged by a beat like a man answering late. On the flow line the delta-P showed a constriction, not enough to throw hard-red, just enough to make the system work harder and call it normal.
Across the arc a second pod followed the first, not as sharp, like a man in a crowd taking the cue. The rest stayed steady, their traces clean, and that was worse. One bad seam in a hull will teach you where to look for the next.
He listened for the audible alarms that were supposed to come with any deviation that mattered. There was only the soft relay-click and the dry hiss of conditioned air. In the bay beyond, frost began to feather at an insulation seam, a pale bloom where the jacket should have stayed dull. It made no sound, just the quiet proof of cold moving where it had no business.
Katarinov keyed the comm low. “Hold wake progression. Manual verify loop C return flow. Now.” His thumb stayed on the button a second longer than needed, as if pressure could be put through words.
On the console the stacks did not speak in voices but in integers that would not settle. The heater loop demanded a clean ramp, a measured climb in tenths, as if the ship were still in a brochure. Beside it a safety routine posted HOLD in the same pale font used for reminders to wash hands. It held for three seconds, cleared itself, then threw HOLD again, as though it were waking from a bad dream and forgetting why. Ramp. Hold. Release. Ramp. Each reversal drove the duty cycle up like a man stomping a pedal in panic, calling for more amperage, more discipline from sensors already reading dry air and cold metal.
A mixed vendor handshake fought in the background, timeouts, retries, an auto-patch that closed its own ticket. Green status flags stayed lit while the command history filled with contradictions. Katarinov watched the time stamps stack too close together. Procedure said trust the interlocks. His body said the interlocks were the thing failing politely.
He traced the logic chain with a finger on glass he would not touch inside. Whoever wrote the arbitration code had assumed good faith between parts. Metal did not do faith.
The coolant loop answered the wrong way, like a man trying to save breath by breathing faster. Pump speed stepped up, then stepped again, hunting. Upstream pressure climbed in clean numbers and the pipes took it with a muted tremor. Downstream the return went thin and slow, the temperature lag widening by fractions that meant tissue and time. The circulation display could not decide what it was seeing. NOMINAL. Then INSUFFICIENT. Then back, as if the word could push fluid through a choke. A map of arrows brightened and dimmed, routes rerouted by software that did not know there was nowhere left to go. The system kept correcting its own corrections, making more heat to answer a lack of cold, pulling against itself until the loop began to sound strained even through the bulkhead.
At the interface manifold the valve that was signed off as temporary sat in the line like a bad promise. Its bore had pinched down to a mean throat. The actuator answered late, stuttering, and the seat carried grit and old sealant that no checklist admitted. Flow went stringy. The pumps leaned harder. The whole bank began to fight itself, heating to chase a cold that could not arrive.
The air went so dry it bit the back of his throat. Cold began to walk off its proper surfaces and take up residence where no cold belonged. Frost wrote itself in pale lace along insulation seams, around conduit collars, at bolt heads that should have stayed dull. It spread fast, thread by thread, as if the ship were exhaling winter through hairline gaps.
The status board kept its face. A grid of green. Clean lines. A warm-up curve smooth as a teaching diagram. It offered him order the way a contractor offers a signature. Ink on paper, the problem moved somewhere else. The coolant return delta narrowed on one channel and widened on another and the controller chose whichever story suited its own math. A vendor tag blinked in one corner, then vanished under an auto-refresh. The system would not admit contradiction. It painted over it.
He leaned in until his breath fogged the edge of the display and the glass went cold under his palm. The numbers beneath the bars were not holding. They were separating. Fraction by fraction at first, then more. One readout said the pods were coming up through safe bands. Another said the loop was starving. The interface listing showed both as VALID. Two brains in one body, each swearing the other was dead.
Behind him the room answered with sound. Not the alarm yet. Not the proper thing. Just the thin hiss that said something was moving where it should not move. A vent cycling. A relief valve hunting. Metal working itself in small complaints. The dry air scraped at his throat and he tasted antiseptic and cold iron. The ducts exhaled a faint chemical sweetness, coolant trace, and it raised the hair on his arms like a warning given in a language older than any protocol.
He checked the physical gauges because he trusted steel more than firmware. The manifold housing carried a cold sheen that should have been elsewhere. A film of frost at the flange bolts, bright against dull metal. He watched it creep, slow but certain, like a tide. The board kept green. The board did not have skin.
He looked to the pod arc through the gantry lattice. The casings were slick, beaded where they should have stayed dry. A chamber lamp blinked once, went steady. A seal line ticked: one sharp, patient sound. It was the kind of sound that told you a thing was holding because it had not yet decided to let go. He reached for the manual override cover and his fingers found the screw head already cold enough to bite.
The alarm did not declare itself. It worried at the air in small, embarrassed sounds. A chirp, then nothing. A relay clicking like a nervous tooth. The indicator strip above the door flicked amber for a breath and went back to green as if ashamed. It was a fault that refused to become official.
Katarinov held still and listened. In drills the sequence was clean. Local trip, verify, isolate, escalate. Here the loop kept restarting, each attempt cut off mid-sentence. The contractor logic wanted a consensus before it would speak loud enough to cost anyone sleep and reports. Meanwhile the metal did not wait for agreement.
He watched the panel and his own hands at the same time. The green lights gave permission to stand down. His skin said otherwise. The hair on his forearms stayed lifted in the dry cold. A pressure gauge needle trembled in a way the screen did not show.
He thought of how men die in mines. Never from the big noise first, always from the small changes ignored. Half-warning meant half-action, and half-action was how you bought a casualty. He reached for the intercom anyway.
From deeper in the bay a thin, continuous hiss came on, not the clean bark of a programmed purge but a sustained bleed like a man whispering through split lips. It did not rise and fall. It did not apologize. It simply went on, drying the air until his tongue stuck to his teeth and his eyes wanted to water but could not. The draft carried that hospital antiseptic and the raw cold behind it, a smell that belonged to opened chambers and skin that should still be asleep. It seeped into the antechamber seams, found the door gaskets, and laid a faint rim of rime where warmth should have held. He could hear the valves hunting without committing, the small click and answer-click. Evidence, arriving steady and late.
Above him the gantry took the change in temperature like a living thing and spoke it back in a slow complaint. The rail shifted by hairbreadths and the sound traveled, muted, through the ribs of the bay. On a panel seam a pale wetness flashed where none belonged. It beaded, went dull, and set into a hard glaze, frost blooming on the warm side of insulation.
One pod answered him with a small, rhythmic ticking at the seal ring. Not alarm. Not purge. A workman’s sound. Heat fighting cold, pressure leaning on a gasket that was never built to negotiate. The tick tightened into a sharper click and he watched the frost line at the seam quiver and settle, quiver and settle, like the chamber was taking shallow breaths it could not afford.
The first hint was wrongness in the numbers. Not a spike. Not the honest red of a failed pump. A thermal rise on Bank C that walked upward in a clean slope, as if someone had drawn it with a ruler. Gentle. Scheduled. And beside it a pressure drift that belonged to a hand on a bleed screw, slow and stubborn, the kind of loss you could hide in noise if you wanted to. The two traces together did not exist in any drill script. They could not. A drill was theater. It had beats. It announced itself.
He read the slope, the rate of change, the lag between sensor clusters. He did not look for the one number that panicked people. He looked for the way numbers leaned on each other. Bank C warming in a pattern consistent with a wake ramp, yet the chamber manifold pressure sagging as if mass was leaving the system. Warm-up should tighten seals, should stabilize. Pressure should sit. If pressure moved it should move the other way, a small swell, a controlled vent and then a return. This was only down. Down and down without the expected correction.
He thumbed through the repeater screens with a gloved finger. Oxygen partials steady. Power draw on the cryo bus climbing but not enough to justify that temperature rise. Coolant return temperature flatlined, too even, like the sensor was reading a loop that wasn’t connected to anything real. Interface valve status: OPEN on one page, UNKNOWN on another. He felt his jaw set. Temporary on paper meant permanent in metal, and metal did not care what a contractor had promised.
He pulled up historical cadence from the last commissioning wake. The drift didn’t match. The rise didn’t match. The lag was wrong by seconds that mattered. He could almost hear a valve hunting, clicking itself into indecision, not failing spectacularly, just failing to agree.
He knew the sound of a drill the way miners knew rock song, by the echo and the aftertaste. This had no echo. This was the ship doing something it had not admitted to doing.
He checked his pace and did not slow. In The Shaft you learned to move like water through a choke, not to announce yourself as a rock. He caught a handhold with one hand and held his body steady against the ship’s low, constant shudder. The repeater screen was mounted too high for comfort. He read it anyway, eyes hard, taking the stream as it came.
People watched for single numbers. Green or red. He watched the slopes. He pulled trend lines out of noise the way you pulled ore from slag.
Bank C temperature was climbing in a clean ramp, a polite waking curve. Beside it the coolant loop demand spiked and waited. Nothing answered. Return flow stayed thin, almost flat. Two modules, two makers, each insisting the other was real. One shouting warmth. One begging for cold. And between them an interface valve reporting itself OPEN in one register, N/A in the next, as if the ship could vote on physics.
He toggled the time window shorter. The delay between command and response widened by fractions. A fraction was enough.
His thumb hovered over the lockout command. If he killed warm-up outright and they were already past threshold, he could freeze a body mid-return. If he let it run and coolant never came, the seals would lift and the bay would drink air. He tasted copper and kept breathing.
Katarinov thumbed the intercom stud and dropped to a narrow maintenance channel the contractors didn’t bother to monitor unless something bled. His voice came out flat and spare, the way you spoke over drills and funerals. “Deck Eight, hold nonessential traffic. Clear the Shaft junctions. No carts. No visitors. Medical to C‑3 triage, now. Bring warming blankets and airway kits. Assume partial pressure instability.”
He did not frame it as request. He did not say please or wait for a name to answer. The ship had too many authority ladders and none of them reached down fast enough when metal decided. In his head he marked the seconds it would take for bodies to move and for corridors to clog, and he cut that future off at the source.
He ran the math in his head the way you ran a drill face. One pod waking wrong meant lungs pulling hard at thin air, oxygen draw spiking, the bay pressure dipping faster than the monitors admitted. Hypoxia did not announce itself. It just took a minute and then it took a life. He thumbed the brass saint through cloth once. Procedure. Then his hand went back to the rail and stayed there.
At the C‑3 antechamber he hit the panel hard enough to make it answer. Access log. Time stamps. A string of quiet entries marked TEMP in corporate shorthand, as if ink could turn a valve into a plan. He scrolled for flags, for hands in the system, while the hiss beyond the inner door sharpened to a thin, angry whistle. He sealed his mask, watched the sterility light blink like a conscience, and ran the shortest safe cycle anyway.
Katarinov bent in to the console until the glass threw back his own eyes. The thermal map was a smear of color, contractor-bright, made to look comforting. Greens and blues with little islands of yellow where bodies were supposed to return. But it was not a scatter. It was a rhythm.
He dragged two fingers across the pane and called up the manifold overlays. The readouts stacked in columns. Pod identifiers. Inlet temperature. Return temperature. Flow rate. Oxygen draw. Chamber pressure. The numbers should have been independent, each pod its own small coffin with its own small sins. Instead the same rise and stall walked down the list like a chant. Warm. Pause. Warm. Pause. Every third pod on the arc, then the next arc, then the next. Too clean. No human hand made an error like that. Human error was crooked.
A hiss sounded again beyond the inner door, not loud, just constant, and it made his jaw tighten. He watched the coolant return line on the screen jump in little sawteeth, the way a pump looked when it was sucking air or starving. But the pump status stayed green. Vendor logic. Someone had paid for a green light and got it.
He pulled the time series and compressed it, a minute into a strip. The curves rose together and sagged together. Not one failing, but several being pulled by the same throat. He imagined a line of miners in a shaft breathing off one regulator and the first man coughing meant the last man was already dying.
A small part of him wanted to believe it was just sensors lying, a calibration drift, some idiot in commissioning leaving protective film on a probe. But the pattern repeated when he switched to raw voltages. When he cross-checked against chamber pressure. When he matched it to oxygen demand. It was the same signature written in different alphabets.
He reached up and toggled the view to physical routing. The system lagged, then complied, and the manifold diagram resolved in hard lines. He felt, without naming it, the place where the ship was about to decide who it could afford.
He let the chamber warnings roll under his thumb. Local alarms. Seal microfracture risk. Skin-temp deviation. Corporate phrasing that made a drowning sound like a weather note. It was noise meant to keep a man looking at the wrong coffin. He killed the popups and went to what mattered.
Loop schematic. Not the pretty overview, the maintenance layer with its ugly joints and part numbers. The line came up in thin white strokes against the dark, running like a vein along the arc of pods. One supply path. One return. And between the plant and the first branch a block of fittings stamped with three vendor marks and one hand-written tag that said TEMP in grease-pencil.
He pulled the live deltas onto the drawing. Pressure in. Pressure out. Flow demand. The numbers bled down together, not at the pods, not at the branches, but upstream where nothing was supposed to fail because nothing important was supposed to be there. The delta across the interface valve collapsed as if a throat were closing.
He watched the loop try to feed everyone and feed no one.
The console offered him SAFE WARM‑HOLD in a calm font, as if naming it made it true. He opened the command log and the lie unrolled in plain time stamps. Two stacks talking over each other. One vendor module throwing a fast-thaw directive: push heat hard, don’t let ice crack seals, don’t let tissue shear. The other answering with a throttling order, pinching flow as if coolant were rationed and the loop were a pantry. Each cycle the same: heat request, flow limit, heat request escalated, flow limit tightened. A deadlock dressed as prudence. Neither would surrender control because neither was written to admit the other existed. The ship was arguing in code while people slept inside glass.
He dropped into the valve’s telemetry, past the pretty status flags, into the motor traces. The adapter section with the grease‑pencil TEMP tag sat there declaring NOMINAL, position steady, limit switches clean. But the actuator current climbed in hard peaks as if it were pushing a door against a boot. Return temperature rose with it, slow and inexorable. Half‑seated in metal. Fine in logic.
He ran it forward without drama. One choke point, one loop, many sleepers. The math said they would all enter the same narrow country between cold and alive: temperature climbing, coolant not carrying, oxygen timing sliding out of phase. He watched the trend lines tilt and settle as if choosing. The interface stayed NOMINAL. The corridor filled with quiet death while the system reported steady hands.
At the sterility lock the two contractor guards stood like posts set in poured resin. White hoods up, gloves on, badges bright as if that mattered. Their hands hovered near the touch panel but did not land. The status strip above the seam held mostly green blocks in a neat row. One amber that blinked without committing. No red. No hard siren. Just that soft chime that could mean anything on a ship built from other people’s promises.
Katarinov came up the corridor with the console slate under his arm and the medallion warm against his ribs from the run. He could see the rime creeping along the lower edge of the inner door where it met the frame. Not a lot. Not yet. Just enough to tell the truth the indicators would not. Frost wrote its own report in a language older than any firmware.
The guards glanced at him and then away, eyes returning to the green as if green were law. One of them spoke without raising his voice. Procedures. Sterility. Authorization. He said the words like he had been taught to say them when something went wrong but not wrong enough to be his fault.
Katarinov put his palm flat on the outer casing. Cold came through the polymer, steady. He listened. Past the hum of pumps he caught a hiss, thin and continuous, the sound of a seal working too hard. He pictured the pods inside, three arcs of glass and metal, people with their mouths taped or tubed, bodies trusting that the ship knew how to keep a schedule. Warming without flow. Waking without air.
“No clean alarm,” the guard said again, quieter, as if confessing.
Katarinov looked at the lock log on his slate. Time stamps stacking. Requests pending. Nobody answering because nobody wanted to own the decision. The ship’s half-finished charter made cowards of men.
He stepped closer to the panel until his breath fogged the faceplate. “Green does not mean safe,” he said. “It means blind.” He held the slate up where they could see the trend lines and the actuator current spiking like a heart in panic. “You wait for red, you’ll get bodies.”
The guards did not move. Their fingers tightened on nothing. Behind the door the frost thickened, quiet and patient, and the lock remained sealed as if cleanliness were a higher form of mercy.
Medical should have been here. The wake roster said so in neat type, like paper could breathe for you. But the ship had scattered them. One corpsman was down the passage in the triage nook with a fresh wakee folded over a basin, eyes rolling, the room turning on him like bad gravity. He held the man’s shoulders and spoke soft, counting breaths, and the monitors there took all his attention because they were real and loud and already failing.
The senior medic stayed on comms, voice tight, insisting on a pause and review, asking for contractor confirmation, for sterility signoff, for the kind of certainty you could file afterward. The system didn’t hear him. Firmware did not respect rank. It warmed what it had been told to warm and it choked where the metal choked.
Their absence spread like a fog. It gave everyone else cover. No medic in the lock meant no one had to step over the line. No clear owner, no dirty hands. The bay waited behind sealed doors while responsibility circled outside it, careful as men around a live wire.
Two technicians hung at the Deck 8 junction like men waiting on a verdict. Their tool cases floated half-open on tethers, sockets and seals glinting in the corridor light. They spoke in low voices, making a ritual of choice. Pop the service hatch, vent the antechamber, step into sterile and own whatever spores and blame came with it. Or stand where the rules said to stand and keep their hands clean and their names off the report.
Through the small window the consoles threw pale text in stacked columns, mixed-vendor logs layered on logs, timestamps out of phase. Nothing that read like truth. But the frost did. It crept along insulation seams in a thin white blush where it should have stayed dry. You could feel it in the air, the wrong cold, as if the ship itself held its breath.
Inside the Cold Vaults the numbers quit being abstractions. On one pod the perimeter gasket turned milky, swelling as if it had been bruised, and a corner lifted and chattered under load. The chamber chased itself (pressure up, pressure down) never long enough to trip a hard fault. Next to it an O₂ line walked downward in polite steps, each one answered only by a thin advisory tone lost in the console’s chatter.
The Shaft took on a sound you felt more than heard. A thin hiss, steady as a lie, and beneath it the wet click of relays hunting, cycling, finding nothing. Men and women shifted in place, eyes down, hands on straps and tool tethers. Procedure held them like a collar. In those narrowing minutes there was movement everywhere and no one on a valve, no one on a manual release, no one close enough to make the first act that could not be undone.
Katarinov reached the sterility lock as the inner door decided to be neither open nor closed. The indicator bar strobed amber. Somewhere in the bulkhead a relay chattered like teeth. He set his palm on the cold frame and felt the vibration through his glove, the cycle hunting for a condition it could not satisfy. He did not swear. He did not rush it. He shifted his stance instead, broad in the passage, shoulder to jamb, making his body the simplest obstacle in the system.
Footsteps gathered behind him. Breath and fabric and the small metallic clink of someone’s tool lanyard. The hiss of the lock pulled people forward the way a fire pulls eyes. He turned his head just enough to see them without giving ground. Faces from Deck 7 and 8, some half-dressed, one in a contractor vest with no cap. A medic’s sleeve patch. Two men with sleep-stiff posture, awake too soon for the day, staring past him as if they could stare the frost away.
He raised one hand, flat, not a gesture for debate. A stop sign in a tunnel.
“Hold,” he said. Not loud. Finished.
They checked themselves, momentum dying in their boots. Someone tried to speak. He cut it off with a look that said: you can talk after we live.
The lock clicked again and paused. The screen flashed a sterilant pressure warning in blocky vendor font. He read it, then the small line beneath, the one nobody reads until it matters. Cross-contamination risk. Manual override available. Authorization required.
He leaned closer to the intercom grille, kept his mouth near it so the system could not pretend it didn’t hear.
“Cold Vaults C-3 antechamber is under control,” he said. “No entry. No exit. Clean-suited pair to Deck Eight junction, now. Bring sealed wipes, spare filters, and a tether reel. Medical stays with the wake-room. Security keeps The Shaft clear.”
He hooked his fingers under the edge of the saint-medallion in his pocket, not pulling it out, just feeling its weight like a rivet set right. Then he looked back at the crowd and let his voice turn from instruction to law.
He said it plain, like reading a gauge. “This is the boundary. The antechamber stays sealed.” He lifted his hand again, palm out, and held it there until the first man’s boots stopped sliding forward. “No one crosses on instinct. No one just checks a pod. You want to be useful, you stand where I put you and you keep your breath to yourself.”
They shifted, the sound of cloth and impatience. Someone behind him exhaled a laugh that wasn’t humor. He let it die in the metal.
He pointed with two fingers, assigning without asking. Two to the bulkhead corner with tethers clipped. One to the notice plate to pass word down The Shaft. The contractor in the vest he sent back a step, away from the seam, like you’d move a cigarette from an oxygen line. The medic he kept close, not for authority but for hands.
“You don’t touch that inner door,” he said. “You don’t lean on it. You don’t breathe on it. Sterility and pressure are not opinions.”
The crowd found its shape. A line, a gap, a held distance. He felt the ship’s thin air as a ledger. Rules were what kept it balanced.
He bent to the intercom panel and keyed the channel the way he’d key a lock. No names. Names turned into favors, into arguments, into dead minutes. He called by designation, the ship’s dry language that didn’t care who thought they were brave.
“Clean-suit detail. Pair Bravo. Suit check and seal integrity. Stand by at C-3 outer mark. Wait for my word.”
Static. The faint pump-thrum under it. He held the transmit, listening, eyes on the strobing amber as if staring could shame it into honesty. Behind him someone shifted, eager, hungry to be first through. He did not look back.
“Repeat,” he said, slower. “Bravo pair. Full seal. Filters seated. No shortcuts. Hold at C-3.”
A click. Then the reply, clipped and compliant. “Bravo copies. Standing by.”
With his free hand he struck the manual plate beside the hatch until the latch caught and he swung it over to CONTROLLED ACCESS. The word sat there like a welded sign. He pointed to the corridor rail and ordered a tether point set, hard and low, an anchor for boots and for manners. Two bodies on it, he told them. No bunching. No surging. Hold the line.
Only when the perimeter holds in muscle and habit does he ease half a step off the centerline. Enough to read the lock lights. Green stutters, amber steadies, the cycle counting like a bad heart. He palms the hold-switch and keeps the chamber in its narrow band. Outside, the half-moves die. Waiting becomes a task. Hands hover ready, eyes on indicators, no one crossing until his word makes it lawful.
Katarinov raised his voice once. Not loud. Just enough to shear the talk into pieces and let the pieces fall. It was the voice he’d used in shafts when the roof creaked and men wanted to pray or run. Here there was no roof, only metal and cold and a door that did not care.
“Hands,” he said. “Show me gloves. Seal kits. Patch plate. Tape. Wrench. Cutter.”
They lifted what they had like offerings. He did not thank them. He counted. He pointed. His finger moved down the line as if selecting tools from a rack.
“You. Left glove missing. You’re out. Stand back. Don’t argue.”
A contractor tech started to speak. He cut him off with a look and the man swallowed it. Katarinov took the patch plates from two teenagers with too-wide eyes and put them into the arms of an older woman whose hands did not shake. He pressed the plates against her chest until she understood they were hers to guard, not to show.
“Two on the tether,” he said. “Not three. Not one. Pair stays paired. You drift, you both drift. You breathe, you both breathe.”
He hooked the line himself to the rail. Hard check. A tug that made the metal sing. He nodded to Bravo pair as they arrived, suits still clean, faceplates clear. He tapped their shoulder seals with the back of his knuckles, a miner’s superstition turned into inspection.
“Lock wheel,” he said. “Kuznetsov. You do not spin it fast. You feel it. Quarter turn. Wait. Quarter turn. Repeat it back.”
Kuznetsov’s mouth worked. “Quarter turn. Wait. Quarter turn.”
“Console,” he said. “Petrovna. You read what it says and what it does not say. You call out changes. You do not fix. You report.”
A young man lifted his chin. “I can go in. I’ve. “That is also work.”
He made them echo their tasks, one by one, until the corridor had a pattern to it. The wanting in their faces did not leave, but it found a wall. Procedure. Fairness. The only things between fear and a stampede.
He leaned in close to the diagnostic glass until his breath fogged it and the cold took the moisture back. Vendor tags blinked in different fonts like arguing voices. One board spoke in contractor English, another in clipped numerics, and the bridge module in between carried an old Cyrillic service stamp that should not have been here at all. He read what he could. He trusted what he could not.
The sound cut through it. A thin hiss, not the broad rush of a dump, but the hungry, constant pull of a line going lean. Like a lamp starving in bad air. His jaw tightened.
“Find the drop,” he said.
No speech after. Just the assignment. He pointed down The Shaft toward the Deck 8 junction and then to the manifold map taped to the bulkhead with two strips of gray seal tape. Two suited crew stepped out on the tether, boots careful, hands on handholds. He watched their posture, the way they kept spacing, the way they checked each other’s seals without being told.
He kept his own hand on the bay control, knuckles white, holding the cycle in the narrow safe band. He would not let the system hurry itself into heroics. Not today. Not on his watch.
With the pressure trend confirmed he killed anything that wanted to think for itself. He thumbed the cancel and watched the next wake step gray out. Another tap and the nonessential valves went to lockout, icons turning hard red one by one. The bay did not like it. Alarms began to layer, polite at first and then insistent, as if sound could repair a leak.
“Manual clamp,” he said.
A tech hesitated at the liability of it, eyes already on future forms and signatures. Katarinov kept his gaze on the line graph and the slow, ugly dip that meant breath bleeding into hull spaces no one could reach. He keyed the override anyway. The act felt like putting his hand under a roof crack to hold it up.
The system shuddered, steadied. Not fixed. Not forgiven. But held.
He spoke the oxygen numbers like he was dividing хлеб at a table. Wake-room volume. Current flow. CO₂ rise. Minutes to the next top‑up if triage pulled hard. He made them repeat it so nobody could pretend they hadn’t heard. “No crowding,” he said. He put two bodies in the antechamber, shoulders square, turning back the curious and the shaking before warm breath and panic spoiled the air.
When the line quit its freefall and began to answer like a tired animal, he set them into a hold. One set of eyes on the gauges. One pair of hands on the clamp. One voice logging time, valve state, and who touched what, for the hearings to come. He said, low, “One recovered does not buy us five dead,” and the bay went still under it.
Nadya did not ask what had failed. Questions made heat and time bleed out. She moved through the wake-room like it was a classroom after an earthquake, counting what remained and what could be made to serve twice. Blankets first. Thin gray thermal sheets, four in a stack, corners curled. Heat packs in a bin with a cracked lid. Electrolyte sachets, stamped in three languages, some swollen from age. A cup rack with two clean cups and a dozen that wanted scrubbing. The dispenser hissed and clicked and pretended it was stable.
She laid everything on the bench in a line that matched a hand. Left to right. Reach. Tear. Press. Then the next. She did it without looking at her hands, because her eyes stayed on faces and breathing.
From her pocket she took a strip of tape, the cheap cloth kind that stuck to everything except what you wanted. She tore it with her teeth. She marked the bench. WARM SIDE, she wrote with a stub of pencil she’d stolen from a lesson kit. CLEAN SIDE. The words looked childish against the steel. The act was not. Stations made people behave.
Blankets on the warm side, folded to the same size, edges aligned. Heat packs beneath them, so the next hand found warmth before it found argument. Electrolytes on the clean side, fanned like cards. She tore open three sachets and staged them, powder ready, so no one had to fight their own shaking fingers. She set the cups mouth-down in the only dry patch, then slid a cloth under them to catch the condensation.
She tested the dispenser flow with a quick fill and dumped it. Too cold. She ran it longer until the temperature climbed into tolerable. Not comfort. Tolerable.
Someone stirred, throat working at air like it was thick soup. Nadya stepped in close, blocked the sightlines to the seams where frost crept like lace. She put a cup into a palm and closed the fingers around it. One-handed. Efficient. “Sip,” she said. “Breathe. Squeeze.” Then she reached back without turning and the next blanket came into her hand like it had been waiting there all her life.
She took the first one by the wrist. Not tenderness. A check. Two fingers laid to the artery, counting the stubborn beat, feeling the stutter of cold. The skin had that cryo look, waxed and thin, with a tremor running under it like a cable under load. She watched the shake travel to the mouth and back, measured it in her head as if it were a number on a board.
“Look at me.” Her voice stayed small so it would not carry into the antechamber and bring more faces. The waker’s eyes skittered toward the seams where frost had silvered the insulation and made the room look cracked. Nadya shifted her shoulder and took that line of sight away. She did it like moving a child from a broken window.
She put the cup into their hand and closed the fingers for them. “Sip.” She waited for the swallow. “Breathe.” Slow, through the nose, out through the mouth. “Squeeze.” A simple pressure against her palm to prove the hand was theirs and under command.
Again. The same three words. Again. Until the darting stopped and the eyes stayed on her face, anchored there like a tether point.
Two more of them tried to rise like the pods had lit a fuse in their spines. It was panic and pride both. Nadya was there before the tilt became a fall, her hand at a shoulder, her forearm across a chest, steering the weight back to the bench in one practiced motion. She eased them down, not gentle, not rough, just final. Blankets came up and over, edges tucked hard at the throat and along the ribs where heat fled fastest. She sealed them like cargo.
Her own head swam, a cold flash behind the eyes, but she widened her stance and let the deck take it. She leaned in close and watched their pupils track. “Name,” she said, like roll call. “Where are you.” Not a test. A rope thrown across dark water. She listened for the right words and the breath between them.
A contractor medic drifted toward the console, eyes hungry for numbers. Nadya stopped him with a flat palm to the chest, not hard, just absolute. Hands stay on people, not screens. The man blinked like he’d been struck. She pointed without looking. You. Open the electrolyte packs. You: stand there and speak what you see. Nausea. Shiver. Confusion. Say it out loud so it can’t be misplaced.
At the dry hiss of a valve one of them jerked like struck, eyes wide, breath clawing. Nadya stepped in and made the world small. Hand on the mug. Fingers close. Feet flat on deck. Count with me. In. Out. She lifted her own chest on purpose so they could copy it. The others watched her like students in a drill, and the room held its shape while the bay found its rhythm.
Katarinov listened to the bay the way he’d listened to rock. The hiss in the lines. The slow, wrong tick of a relay. The breath of people trying not to make noise. He did not look at the pods first. He looked at the doorway and the antechamber beyond it, where The Shaft would feed them bodies and opinions until the room broke.
He stepped forward enough that his shoulders blocked the sightline and he raised one hand, palm out. Not a plea. A stop sign.
“This is refuge,” he said. His voice carried in the hard surfaces. “Not a front line. Nobody wins points in here.”
A contractor suit started to answer him, mouth already shaped around authority. Katarinov cut him off without heat. “No arguing in the antechamber. You want to speak, you speak in the corridor where there is air to waste. Here we do procedure.”
He pointed, not dramatic, just precise. “No rushing the pods. No quick look. A quick look becomes five heads. Five heads becomes ten. Then you have hands on seals and breath on filters and the room goes sick. You want to help, you do what you’re told and you do it clean.”
A murmuring rose, the old sound of crews when they smell a decision they don’t like. He let it exist for a beat. Then he turned it.
“Fairness is simple,” he said. “Everyone gets air. Everyone gets time. Everyone gets a turn. But only if this room stays controllable. If you crowd it, you steal from the ones on the benches. If you freeload heroics, you buy yourself a story and sell us a casualty.”
He looked past the people to the pods, frost dull on the seams, and he spoke like reading from a posted notice. “We stabilize. We triage. We log. We move one at a time. You touch nothing you weren’t assigned to touch.”
He nodded toward the doorway. “And if you can’t follow that, you wait outside. Not punished. Just not inside.”
He made a scaffold out of people. Not speeches. Not hope. He took the tethers from the wall rack and snapped them into the anchor eyes until each click sounded like a counted ration. He walked the room once, measuring clearance with his shoulders, and then he broke it into lanes. Two to a lane. One mover with hands that could lift and not panic. One spotter with eyes on boots, hoses, clip points. No drifting. No crossing. The path between wake-room benches and the consoles he kept clean as a mine haul road, nothing left to snag a sleeve or a line.
He held up a strip of tape and tore it with his teeth and laid it down in hard, straight marks. Here you stand. Here you pass. Here you stop.
His fingers pressed the brass saint through the cloth of his pocket. A habit and a check on himself. He spoke the rule as if posting it on steel.
“Gloves on before rails. Gloves on before seals. If your hands are bare you do not touch. If you touch bare you leave.”
Simple enough that no one could later say they hadn’t heard.
The clean crew he had left he used like structure. Not a show. Not a cordon with weapons. Bodies in sealed hoods and taped cuffs set shoulder to shoulder at the mouths of the pod arcs, faces turned inward so they could see hands before hands reached seals. A living bulkhead. Quiet. The kind that makes a man stop without being ordered.
When someone came forward with a question that was really a push, Katarinov did not meet it head-on. He angled them off with work. You. Wipe that console edge again, slow. You: check the gasket kit, count it out loud. You: stand here and watch for fog on the visor, report it. Everyone got a task or they got turned away. No argument, no crowding, no heat. Only motion with purpose.
He put numbers to breath and light. Door cycles logged on the wall plate. One in, one out, like shift change. He trimmed the wake-room vents to a steady pull and called the power draw by console, no indulgence, no spike. A hard cap on bodies in there, and he made them hear the why. Not punishment. “So we don’t make two emergencies.”
Minutes counted themselves in the hiss of valves and the small clicks of relays. Frost stayed, stubborn as guilt, beading along the insulation seams, but it did not run. The consoles held their numbers. No new siren rose, no seal shrieked, no boots tangled in hoses. People moved where he’d cut the lanes, slow and exact, breathing measured, eyes avoiding each other in the thin, brittle quiet.
The panic did not announce itself with shouting. It came in the soft physics of a crowd. The corridor outside the sterility doors tightened as bodies found each other and forgot space. Boots nudged forward in little involuntary increments. A shoulder brushed a panel. Someone’s tether snagged and another hand caught it too fast, a small jerk that traveled down the line like a twitch.
Faces floated behind visors with the same look miners got when the rock sang wrong. Eyes fixed on the frost that had crept along the seams and pooled in pale veins. Men and women leaned to see it better, as if the pattern meant something, as if it could be read like a shift chart or a debt. A murmur rose, not loud but edged, syllables clipped, the old ship dialect thick with loanwords and prayer. Kholod. Bad sign. Someone said the contractors would seal the bay and write them off. Someone else said no, that was rumor, but their hand was already hovering over the release latch.
The latch itself became a kind of temptation. A simple lever. One motion and the door would cycle and the waiting would end. Katarinov saw the way fingers flexed inside gloves and knew what would happen if one person took it. The whole line would surge on instinct. Sterility, pressure, oxygen budget. None of it would survive a human stampede.
Inside the wake-room the trouble wore a different face. Not anger. Not politics. Pure animal return. A sleeper, skin mottled and wet with thaw-sweat, got off the bench and did not understand where they were. Their knees made a careful wobbling arc across the deck. They reached out and put a palm against the nearest pod casing. The metal took the heat and gave back cold. The sleeper pressed harder, forehead almost touching the curve, sliding their hand along it as if searching for a handle.
Their mouth worked around a name that did not come out right. They kept moving, dragging themselves toward the next pod, the way a half-drowned person crawls for a door that used to be home.
Katarinov stepped into the swell of bodies and it drew back as if it had struck a bulkhead. He did not raise his voice. He let it sit low and carry, the way a foreman talks under a failing roof. He named rules the way you name tools you cannot do without. Single file. Tethers on the rail. Visors sealed. Gloves on. No one crosses the yellow tape without a log entry and a wipe-down, not for a look, not for a hand on a pod.
He pointed and made people into positions. You, latch watch. You, med kit. You, count the cycles and read them back. No volunteers. Volunteers drift when fear comes. Assigned hands held.
A man with red eyes tried to edge past the line, lips moving fast in a language half prayer, half threat. Katarinov blocked him with a shoulder and a flat palm to the chestplate. Not violence. Weight. Procedure.
“Break protocol,” he said, “and you’re out. I don’t care whose blood is in there.”
He watched their hands. He watched the latch. He watched the air numbers. He made the corridor smaller by making it simple.
A voice broke from the line, sharp with the kind of love that turns to orders. My wife is in there. My boy. Open it. Now. The words came out like a wrench thrown at a valve, meant to make something yield.
Katarinov did not flinch. He kept his eyes on the latchman’s gloves and spoke to the whole corridor, not the man. Fair is fair, he said. Air is numbers. Contamination is numbers. The ship does not care whose family is named loudest. Nobody buys a breach with grief and calls it duty.
He held up two fingers. One voice. One action. You talk over me, you lose your slot and you go to the back. He let the sentence sit, heavy and plain, until breathing slowed enough to hear it.
Nadya moved among them as if she’d done it in every storm. She did not argue with fear. She dressed it. Blanket corners tucked tight at the throat. Spout to lips, two swallows, not more. Her hand under a wrist until the tremor eased. She kept their gaze on her, not on the consoles, and she kept saying the same small order like a stitch: Breathe. Sip. Sit. Wait. Follow the tape.
The corridor took on a work cadence. Outside the seal, bodies held to rails and tape, counted and recounted. Inside, the wake-room stayed tight, a small ring of blankets and breath. Fear did not leave. It got boxed up. Fingers unclenched. Boots stopped hunting for purchase. Questions came in low, answerable pieces. In that shaved-down quiet the hard option quit being sacrilege. It became procedure.
He met Nadya’s eyes through the glass and the harsh white of the bay. There was no room for debate in that look. Not with the pumps hunting and the humidity dropping and the frost webbing out along a seam that had no business sweating. She gave him the smallest nod, jaw set like she was biting down on something that would not go away.
Katarinov turned back to the console. His fingers were steady. Not brave. Just trained. He keyed in his badge and then his thumbprint, the two-factor lock that made a decision a record. The interface lagged on the contractor firmware, a stupid pause that felt like an argument. He did not let it become one. He selected the half-initiated sequence and drove it into manual hold. HOLD ENGAGED. A yellow banner strobed. A warbling alarm rose and he acknowledged it, one tap, not the long press that would make it quiet and make men later say they never heard. He wanted every ear to remember the sound.
The bay answered him. The overhead strips dimmed down to a cold twilight. The pumps shifted pitch, a deeper thrum like an animal dragged back by its chain. The dry air took on a sharper bite of antiseptic. Condensation along the pod’s service lines hesitated, then stopped moving. The half-wake hung there, neither birth nor death, an ugly middle that the manuals did not describe in any human language.
He watched the numbers climb and settle. Partial pressure. Loop flow. Thermal delta. All of it in ranges that meant nothing until they failed. On the other side of the barrier a face pressed close to the glass, eyes wide, mouth working without sound. Katarinov did not look away from the readouts long enough to be recruited by it.
Behind him someone made a small, broken noise, half prayer, half oath. Nadya murmured to the roused, low and firm, and the room held. Katarinov rested his palm on the console as if it were a steel rail in a shaft. Not for comfort. For ownership. He had stopped time for a body. He would not pretend otherwise.
He spoke each action into the air like it was a drill and not a decision with a face behind glass. Quarter-turn on Valve A. Confirm seat. Vent line bleed to twenty millibar per minute. Hold there. Watch the loop. He made the numbers public. He made them a chain around everyone’s wrists so no one could later say it happened fast or it happened in private.
The contractor tech at the viewing port stopped breathing right. Frost had crawled across the edges of the pane in fernwork, beautiful in a way that made you stupid. The man’s gloved fingers hovered over the latch like he could pull the whole ship open and let mercy in.
Katarinov stepped close until his shoulder nearly touched him. He set his palm flat on the bulkhead beside the port. Not a comfort. A brace. Steel acknowledging steel. He kept his eyes on the pressure trace and kept talking. Ninety-six. Ninety-five point eight. Steady. No surge. No drop. If it drops we vent. If it surges we isolate.
The tech’s hand lowered. The tremor bled out of it, slow as heat leaving metal.
Nadya moved among the newly roused the way she moved between desks back in the makeshift classroom. No hurry, no softness that could be mistaken for permission to fall apart. Blanket tucked up under the chin. Cup to the mouth. Fingers around it until the shake found an edge and stopped. She named what came first so fear had less room to breed. Cold in the teeth. Ringing in the ears. Skin too tight. Normal. You are here. She traded their spinning questions for small work. Count your breaths. Keep your hand on the rail. Feel the metal. Say your name once. Then mine. When one of them lurched toward the pods with a wet, animal sound in the throat, she stepped in close and turned them with her shoulder, not forceful, just certain, and put a task in their hands like a rope. Hold this. Stand here. Stay with me.
The bay’s tone shifted toward something accusatory. Light drained to blue. Fans rose in pitch. The antiseptic on his tongue went to metal, like blood on a tool. It would read as abandonment if you let it. He didn’t. He tightened the line. Door cycle stayed locked. Sterility green across the board. Wake-room oxygen feed capped hard, a ceiling that felt like punishment until you did the arithmetic.
For a span of seconds the bay went dead-still. Not peace. The kind of quiet you get when a machine is deciding whether to kill you. A life hung there, half-called back, and the living had to sit on their own hands and call it mercy. Nadya kept them working small. Katarinov kept the numbers in the open, spoken like oaths, so later no one could bury this in contractor words. No speeches. The rule settled anyhow: fatigue is not permission.
Katarinov thumbed the triage locker latch and felt the cheap spring give. The door swung on a tired hinge and the smell came out, iodine, plastisol, that thin hospital-clean that never quite covered the ship’s own breath. He did not rummage. He worked it like a checklist, hand in, eyes on, voice low and level so it carried to whoever was listening in the bay and beyond the partition.
Two med-kits. Factory seals intact, corners scuffed from being slid in and out. He set them on the counter with a dull clap, spaced apart like markers. One sterile burn sheet, still in its stiff pack, the paper crinkling when he lifted it. He held it a moment, looking at the date stamp, then laid it flat.
Electrolyte cartridges. Half tray. The rest were empty slots with their little retention clips still snapped shut, as if the missing weight had been a clerical error and not a theft. He tapped the tray with a knuckle. “Half,” he said. Not complaint. Fact.
He reached deeper and came out with blankets, the warmed kind that held heat without power once they were charged. There should have been more. The ones remaining had a sheen to them where coolant mist had kissed the weave and left the fabric clammy, suspect. He rejected those without ceremony, letting them fall back into the locker as if they were already contaminated. The few clean ones he folded on the counter, crease to crease, square edges aligned. He stacked them as if neatness could become a barrier against panic.
In the corner a tech sat with forearms wrapped in gauze, skin angry red beneath. The awakened crewman watched the movement with a drifting, baffled focus, lips working around words that would not come clean. Katarinov kept his shoulders between them and the open locker. Procedure was a kind of shelter. Fairness too. If there was not much, then everyone saw what little there was.
His fingers brushed the brass saint-medallion through the uniform cloth as he closed the locker. He did not take it out. He did not pray. He just felt the weight and kept counting what remained.
Nadya came in on his left and did not ask what he wanted. She looked once at the counter and then began to move things with the calm of a woman laying out lessons for children who would test every edge. The two med-kits went first, squared to the lip so the seals faced out. The burn sheet beside them, flat, date stamp visible. The half tray of electrolyte cartridges she set dead center like a verdict, the empty slots turned outward. The warmed blankets she stacked last, folded tight, the clean ones only, their corners aligned so there could be no argument later about what had been usable.
No words. No accusation. Just the removal of fog.
Her fingers still had that chalk economy to them, the habit of making a board tell the truth even if the mouths in the room would not. She left a gap between each item, a space to count, a space to see. Then she stepped back and held her hands at her sides, eyes tracking the tech with the bandaged arms, the confused wake-up, the doorway beyond the sterility partition.
Katarinov watched her work and felt the pressure in his jaw ease and harden again. Order did not make more supplies. It made theft harder. It made lies heavier.
The consumables rack told the quieter story. It stood there with its neat geometry, as if order could absolve it. Katarinov ran his thumb along the retention clips where sealed IV coils were meant to sit. The clips were closed. The slots were clean. No torn foil, no cracked caps, no drips dried to amber. Just absence, squared off and decided. He let his hand rest on the metal a moment, feeling the cold through the glove, and took the count again like he might find a coil by force of will.
“Two coils missing,” he said. “Three flush lines. Sterile packs.” His voice stayed level.
He watched faces, the small betrayals: eyes dropping to the floor, a throat working, a stillness too practiced. Nadya’s gaze stayed on the rack, unblinking, as if pinning the truth in place.
He turned from the pretty lies on the console to what would not flatter him. Manual valves, knurled and scarred with old torque marks, threads rough but true. You put a wrench on them and they answered or they didn’t. A portable O₂ analyzer with a cracked screen blinked tired digits all the same. He flagged them primary. Not good. Just honest. Hardware that failed where you could see it.
He took inventory of people last. Parts lied. Scripts lied with their green checkmarks. Flesh did not. The tech with the bandaged forearms could still brace and hold a line, eyes clear enough to read a checklist aloud without drifting. The wake-up could follow simple orders in the gaps between fog, hands trembling but obedient. He counted himself last. The medallion in his pocket weighed like a rivet. If the system would not keep them safe then procedure would, and witnesses.
Katarinov made himself take the bay the way he’d take a hull section on paper. Not as a room. As a set of conditions. As a failure chain waiting for a hand to start it. He stood still and let the place speak in numbers and small hurts.
Air first. It tasted thin and scoured, like a mouth rinsed too hard. The dryness rasped the back of his throat even through the mask seal and left his tongue feeling filmed, as if the air had been stripped of anything that carried warning. No sour sweat. No faint rot of damp insulation. No honest reek of plastic warming where it shouldn’t. Just antiseptic and cold metal and that blank, clean absence that made him uneasy. A room meant for bodies should smell of bodies. It should confess.
He watched the O₂ analyzer cycle and did the subtraction in his head. Partial pressure acceptable. CO₂ low. Volatiles nominal. Nominal meant nothing when you could feel your own mucus drying. He noted the humidifier line, the condensate trap, the tiny bead of ice at a coupling that should have been merely cold. He followed it with his eyes to the drain and pictured it clogging when someone ran in panicked and kicked the hose loose.
Light next. Not just illumination but how it cut distance and depth. The gantries threw thin shadows across the pod arcs. The shadows lay where boots would land when gravity shifted and a man reached without looking. The contractor LEDs were too bright, too sharp. The salvage strips were tired and amber. Between them the floor became a map of false steps.
Temperature. His skin felt it through fabric and seal. Cold pooled at the seams and the warm patches sweated, making the metal slick. Frost at one joint, bare steel weeping at another. Uneven control meant uneven timing. It meant one pod waking late, another thawing fast, and someone rushing to make up time.
He marked in his mind the corners where a stretcher would jam, the clearance under the racks, the handholds that were polished by fear. Where men would trip when they hurried. Where procedure would break if the room encouraged it.
The light in here did not merely fail. It contested itself. Contractor-white snapped on with a hard edge that made every surface look freshly cut and every face like it belonged on a poster. Then the salvaged strips took their turn, amber and tired, as if someone had hung old mine lamps in a clinic and called it comfort. Back and forth. A quarrel in photons.
In that stutter he watched color lie. Cheeks went ash, then pinked, then ash again. Lips darkened, then seemed fine. The mottling on the wake-up’s hands could be shock or it could be the lamp changing its mind. He pictured a medic glancing up from a monitor and missing the moment cyanosis became real because the room had trained the eye to doubt itself.
He tracked the cycle time by breathing. One, two, three: white. One: amber. Irregular. Not a simple ballast fault. Two systems not agreeing on who owned the ceiling.
He marked it as a hazard the way he marked a loose rung: not dramatic, not loud, but waiting for haste. A room that will not hold steady will make men move too fast to pin down what they are seeing.
He walked the arcs slow, shoulders brushing cold air, and held his hands up like a man feeling for current. The back of his knuckles hovered a finger’s breadth from the pod seams. Not touching. Just close enough to let the skin tell him what gauges lied about. He’d learned in rock to read what did not want to be read. The face of a wall that looked sound until you found the damp, the hairline crack, the place the heat ran wrong.
Here the story was temperature. One joint wore a rind of frost like hoarfelt, white and stubborn. The next joint sweated bare metal, beads gathering and sliding in thin tracks. Cold held where it should have been carried away. Warmth pooled where it should have been spread. A loop not sharing load, modules arguing over who owed what. Seams. Always the seams.
Nadya went still, head tilted, hands slack at her sides, listening the way she listened when a classroom quieted for the wrong reason. A valve hiss dragged on past cutoff and did not decay clean. Relays answered with clicks that almost made a rhythm and then slipped it. The pump’s thrum thickened, dropped, found itself again. Like it knew it was being watched.
They did not need the consoles. He tapped two knuckles to a sweating joint, then pointed along the gantry where the frost clung wrong, marking it in the air like chalk on stone. Nadya answered with the bay’s language: hiss too long, click late, thrum that dipped on the half-beat. Between them a map formed, quiet and exact. Holding, yes. Like a tired crew on a rope: only because someone refused to look away.
Katarinov looked at bodies first. It was habit and it was arithmetic. Who could still walk, who could still think, who could still hold a line when the bay went sideways again. The cryo tech sat on the edge of a crate with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow like a man readying for work, except the work had already taken its cut. Both forearms were red and rising, the skin blotched where it had kissed the rimed cable. Blisters were lifting in clear domes. The man kept trying to flex his fingers as if movement could argue the pain away. He would not look at them for long. Pride and shock. Dangerous mix.
The awakened one lay half propped under a foil blanket, face waxy with cold that had not decided yet whether to leave. The eyes blinked slow, lids heavy, pupils hunting like they were reading a sign in smoke. When he spoke it came out thick and wrong, syllables dragged and stuck, and he would lose the thread mid-phrase and stare at nothing, mouth still working. His hands worried the air, twitching, opening and closing without command. Fine tremor. It wasn’t dramatics. It was the small motor truth of a nervous system coming back online badly.
Katarinov watched the hands because hands were what failed first in a tight compartment. A trembling grip on a latch. A delayed release on a tether. A glove not seated because the fingers could not feel the seal. Those were not injuries you wrote up clean on a contractor form. Those were the ones that turned a correction into a second emergency. He saw the tech reach for a rail and miss it by a thumb’s width, correct, miss again, and finally clamp down with a grimace that was almost a laugh.
He spoke without raising his voice. Sit. Keep your arms still. Don’t touch anything cold. He pointed, assigning without ceremony. One person on blanket and fluids. One person on the antechamber lane. No crowding, no heroics. He kept his own hands behind his back for a moment, thumb pressing hard through fabric against the brass medallion, as if to remind himself that procedure was not cruelty. It was how you kept the next body from joining the count.
Nadya moved as if she had a whistle in her mouth and a roster in her hand. Not fast. Not frantic. Just everywhere at once. Her eyes took counts the way he did: distance to the pods, hands on rails, masks seated, straps lying flat. She touched no one unless she had to. A finger to the air. A palm held out. Two people eased back without argument, shamed by the quiet more than any order.
She leaned to a young contractor with a hood half sealed and said it low, almost tender: voices down. Lanes clear. The words were simple but they carried the old lesson. In a tight place the first danger is not the leak. It is the crowd that comes to look at it. Confusion sets like frost. Fear follows it, hard and bright, and then bodies drift toward the door because doors feel like exits even when they are only choke points.
Katarinov watched her build space the way you crib a wall in a bad seam. Not to make it comfortable. To keep it from taking men.
The consoles kept their calm. Green bars, neat text, the contractor script stepping through its checks like a man reading prayers from a card. COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY. It sat there bright against the dull wet shine on the insulation seams and the thin rime that had no business reforming so fast. He listened to the bay instead. A valve gave its hiss late, as if it had been thinking about it, and the sound carried too long in the sterile air. The numbers said stable. The room said drifting.
Katarinov held the two versions in his head and weighed them like ore. One was official and weightless. One had bite. He had seen gauges lie in shafts when a line was pinched between systems and each end swore it held. Safe, the screen told someone. Safe enough to stop watching. That was how you got bodies.
He pulled the access trail up and ran it line by line the way you run a finger along a weld. There were blank spots where the system should have been dull with certainty. Restricted entries with no stamp. Door cycles counted but not owned. The alarm queue showing clean until minutes after the frost and the tremor were already in the air. Not a slip. A shape. If the record lied, it was another breached line.
The threat took its true shape in his mind, plain as a bad joint in a drift: an interface seam. One contractor’s sensor feeding clean numbers into another man’s controller that could not hear the warning, and both of them signing off while the room went wrong by degrees. Nadya named what followed. When the ship lies, men improvise truth. They rush the door. They carry spit and panic into the antechamber and call it help.
Katarinov did not watch the console. He watched the room, the way the frost lay on a seam like ash and the way the dry air bit the back of the throat. A mine teaches you where failures live. Not in the beam that snaps clean. In the joint where two men swear their bolts meet and neither one owns the gap.
He walked the arc with his hands. He put his palm to the pod casing, to the manifold, to the feed line coming through the bulkhead where the insulation was patched in three different materials and none of them matched. He followed the run to the sensor block and read the tiny stamped labels. One vendor. Then another. Then a harness spliced with heatshrink that had been cut and re-cut, each cut a decision made under schedule.
He had the tech read back the last alarm list out loud. He had another pull the manual gauge and call the numbers. The two stories did not line up. One claimed clean. One had a tremor in it.
He stopped at the antechamber threshold and made it a border. He pointed with two fingers, not dramatic, only exact. Past this line is cold and sterility and procedures that keep people alive. This side is traffic and breath and hands that have been on rails and ration lockers. He let the crew see it like a chalk mark on stone.
“No crossing without check,” he said. “Call and response. Name, role, purpose. Repeat it back. If you can’t repeat, you don’t enter.”
He looked at the consoles, the soft lights, the temptation to grab a screen and make it obey. “No one touches a panel until we assign hands,” he said. “One speaks. One moves. One witnesses. We do not trade places without saying so.”
A young contractor in a clean jacket shifted as if to argue. Katarinov did not raise his voice. He only held the stare, the stubborn miner’s patience for unsafe talk.
“We find the boundary,” he said. “We mark it. Then we work it down.”
He went to the primary console and did not sit. He stood over it as if it might buck. The screen offered its calm green status bars, the smug line that said the wake routine had completed. He ignored it. He opened the contractor menu tree with two deliberate taps and called up the script by name, the one that had run blind through the alarm delay. He read the header, the vendor tag, the last execute time, and then he killed it.
Disable. Confirm. A second confirm that wanted a password. He gave it. His hands were sure though his shoulders ached.
Then he reached under the panel and found the physical interlock, the old lever that did not care what the software believed. He pulled it down until it clacked home. A light went amber. Remote restart rejected.
He tore a strip of red tag tape from the roll, wrapped it across the access seam, and wrote in block letters with a grease pencil: MIKHAILOV. TIME. DO NOT RESET.
He spoke without heat, for the room, for the record. “We are not debating software. We are stopping it.”
With the bay quieted he split the work into two tracks and named them aloud so there was no drift in it. Care and control. He set the steadier tech at the body with hands washed and sleeves taped, warming pads staged, burn gel and gauze laid in order. The checklist came off Katarinov’s mouth like bolts counted into a bucket. Rise the core temp slow. Check capillary return at the nail beds. Pulse, pupils, skin tone. Dress the forearms without tearing what the frost had already taken.
He put another tech on the room itself. Atmosphere mix. Pressure trend. Power draw across the racks. No one was to “help” by dimming heat or cycling fans to quiet an alarm. Stability first. He wrote the assignments on paper and made each man sign.
Nadya came into the wake-room like a post set in rock. She knelt where he could see her and kept her voice down in the dry air. Name. Where you are. Whose ship. Breath in, breath out, count with me. She made his hands work under the blanket, fingers opening and closing, simple proof. His eyes snagged on the hard line of her braid and held. She did not hurry him. She gave the body something it could win at.
He opened a paper log and laid it on a clean tray as if it were a tool. Wrist chronometer to the page. Every action took a time, a name, a signature: valve positions, alarm mutes, sedative milligrams, core temp in tenths, skin color noted plain. He told them no talk in the bay. No guesses. No corridor verdicts. Only containment. Only custody. Only a normal that could not be revised.
Katarinov took the ship’s delay tables from memory and ran them like a haulage plan. Light-time out. Light-time back. The corridor to any authority was not a corridor at all but a long pipe full of echo. He could picture the message leaving the Kamen Prospect, a neat packet of numbers and injured names, and then the long dead drift before anyone with a title read it. In that drift bodies either mended or failed. Men either slept or got loud. The ship either learned or lied.
He did not hate the contractors for it. Hate was wasted heat. He understood incentives. A boardroom far away could accept a casualty as a rounding error if the report came wrapped in compliance language. A diagnostic script would declare green while a man’s skin went gray. By the time an outside reply arrived it would be a polished thing, full of procedure, telling him to do what he was already doing. Or worse, it would ask for more data, more forms, more time.
He opened his parallel record and wrote it in the same hand he used for valve states. Constraint: external intervention not an operational variable within survival window. He underlined survival window and put the hour estimate beside it. He was careful with words. Complaint could be argued with. Constraint could only be met.
He listened to the bay. The soft hiss of a regulator. The click of a relay dropping load. The small wet sounds of dressings being unwrapped. Those were real. Those answered to hands and torque and attention. The comm console was a comfort object and comfort was for later, when the numbers turned kind.
He kept his face still as he wrote. The saint-medallion in his pocket pressed the cloth like a coin set against skin. He did not take it out. He did not look for help that could not arrive. He marked the ship as closed system and he treated the truth the same way: sealed, accounted, and carried by whoever stayed standing.
He ran the idea of escape like a drill run to the end of the corridor. Count assets. Count doors. Count the air. There were no spare pods sitting idle like mercy. The Cold Vaults were the Cold Vaults and everything else was bunks and storage and half-finished classrooms with dust in the vents. Sterile volume was a certification, not a feeling. You could not tape plastic sheeting and call it clean. Not with frost in the seams and spores in the filters and blood on a glove.
Power margin was worse. Spinning up a substitute vault meant heat and compressors and monitoring load, and load meant a theft. If it did not come from reaction mass it came from lighting, from gardens, from pumps that kept CO₂ down where people could sleep. He pictured the board of breakers. He pictured the dimming lamps and the way men start to talk when lights go thin.
Moving the injured would only add interfaces: hands on rails, gaskets, latches, seals that had not been cycled enough to trust. Every transfer was a new seam and seams were where errors hid. He shut that door in his head. He made the bay the world. Small. Governed. With names on every action.
With rescue reduced to a radio prayer and retreat to a fairy story, he turned to the only lever left: the ship’s own fear of failure written down. He did not name it sabotage. He named it interface. Vendor A to vendor B, a seam of code and fittings where responsibility went thin. He listed the delayed alarm. The access stamps that vanished. The script that sang green while a man’s skin went blotched and cold. He wrote it in the language that could not be laughed off in a briefing: mismatch, latency, log overwrite, nonconforming firmware. Not politics. Safety. Liability in clean numbers. People could ignore pain. They could not ignore a fault that might kill throughput and void a contract. He would make it impossible to file away.
Nadya stood in the wake-room and read faces the way she read children after a drill, counting who was loud and who had gone inward. Panic wanted a corner. Shame wanted the floor. She denied them both with sequence. Water first. Blanket. Name. Date. A simple question that could be answered without thinking. Hope here was not a feeling. It was steps that repeated until breath evened and hands stopped shaking.
Katarinov measured hope in responses, not prayers. A valve that answered on the first command. A hand that stayed on the rail when told. A log entry signed and time-stamped and not “auto-cleaned” by some contractor script. He broke the bay into small duties that could not be faked: eyes on gauges, gloved fingers on seals, no talking unless it was a number. If discipline held through the tremor, he could drag the fault into daylight.
They kept him in the chair as if the chair were a dock cleat and he a line that wanted to run. Tether on the waist. Ankles hooked under the rail. Hands open on his thighs where everyone could see them. His skin held that wrong color, a bruised bloom under the surface, and sweat stood on his lip though the room was cold enough to sting the nostrils.
Katarinov watched the clock in the corner of his eye and the man’s eyes in the center of it. The eyes slid off faces and came back with a delay like a bad feed. He did not let the room fill with voices. Too many words became a wave. Waves knocked people over.
Nadya knelt so she was level with him. Not looming. Not pleading. She held the dispenser cup with both hands so it did not shake and she spoke as if counting bolts into a tray.
Sip. Small. Hold. Swallow.
Warm electrolyte, not sweet, just salt and metal. Blanket over shoulders, then another, folded tight at the chest so the heat stayed where it could do work. Her thumb pressed the inside of his wrist, feeling the jump and stumble of the pulse, and she did not flinch when his gaze snagged on her braid like it was a rope to climb.
Name.
His mouth worked. A sound came out broken and slow.
Where are you.
He tried to stand anyway, like the body remembered a drill and the head had not signed off. The tether took him. The chair screeched. Katarinov’s hand went to the shoulder and held, firm and flat, no wrestling. He leaned in close enough that the man could smell the oil on his uniform.
Sit. Breathe. Look at her.
Nadya did not raise her voice. She narrowed the world to a few safe objects. Cup. Blanket. Face. The rest of the bay could be an ocean of steel and frost for all she allowed it. The next minutes were a gate. On one side: confusion with a leash. On the other: panic, flailing arms, torn lines, alarms earned the hard way. Katarinov counted each swallow like a pressure reading and waited to see which way the gate swung.
Nadya kept the first hour small. She built it out of commands that could be obeyed without memory. Sip. Breathe in through the nose. Hold. Let it out slow. Say your name. Say where you are. Again. The cup rose and fell on a schedule like a pump cycle. When his eyes drifted and came back late she did not scold him for it. She called it what it was.
Slur increasing on consonants, she said, plain as a gauge reading. Color still mottled at the hands. Cap refill delayed.
The words cooled the room. A patient. Not a threat. The men near the door stopped shifting their weight as if they might have to pin him down. Katarinov watched the shoulders loosen and he marked it as a kind of stabilization too. Procedure was not only for machines.
Nadya adjusted the blankets, tighter at the core, looser at the throat so he could swallow without fighting cloth. She checked his pulse again and named its irregularity without fear. Each repetition bought minutes. Minutes made space for decisions.
The tech sat with sleeves cut back and teeth set hard. The skin along both forearms was waxy-white in bands where the cold had kissed through the glove and then gone red at the edges, angry and swelling. Katarinov had them run lukewarm rinse until the heat stopped biting and the tremor in the man’s hands eased. No heroics. No snow tricks. Clean cloth, dry, then sterile wrap laid flat without pulling the tissue. He started the clock in his head and on the board.
He put a runner on the corridor for proper dressings and antibiotic gel from triage, signed for, not borrowed. He made the log entry himself: time, deck, pod line, cause, who saw it. Two witnesses, names spelled out. It would not be filed as clumsiness later.
Katarinov cut the wake schedule off with a flat hand. No more pods for one full shift. He did not argue with the console that said green. Green meant nothing now. He put two bodies on the thermal trunk and two on alarms, walking the lines by touch and meter, calling numbers out loud, writing them twice on paper and board so no vendor script could bless a failure.
Katarinov kept the number to himself. Twenty-four hours. One day of running on guesses and borrowed green lights before tired hands began to call it normal. Missing timestamps. Alarms late by minutes. A thermal seam that lied with perfect logs. By then they either owned the interface, manual checks, named signoffs, paper trails, or they admitted the price schedule was flesh.
Katarinov took the wake work out of the Cold Vaults where the doors and the quiet made it easy to pretend a checklist was a private matter. He brought it into The Shaft where the whole ship had to pass it to get anywhere, where a cart wheel squealed and someone always watched. He found an old notice plate with the paint worn off and a seam of weld that looked like a scar. He set a board to it with bolts long enough to bite the ribs behind the paneling. You could not tear it down without making noise.
He wrote the headings himself in block letters. Not the vendor names. Not the firmware revision numbers. Three things. THERMAL. ALARMS. CONSUMABLES. Under each he drew lines with a straightedge and a grease pencil. The kind of pencil miners used when paper was damp and hands were dirty. The board smelled faintly of solvent and metal filings.
He made the Cold Vaults a place where bodies slept and woke. He made The Shaft the place where the ship decided if that waking was deserved.
People tried to bring him their language, their screens full of green lights, their confidence. He listened and he shook his head. He had seen interfaces lie. He had seen a “ready” icon mean only that some contractor had coded the word. Temperature was not a word. It was a number that held steady or it did not. An alarm was not a checkbox. It was a circuit that screamed when it should and stayed silent when it must. Consumables were not a reorder in a system. They were what a human needed on the deck when the pod opened and the lungs remembered air.
He set the board at shoulder height so no one could claim they missed it. He positioned it under alternating lights, white contractor glare, then the warmer salvage strip, so the ink looked different as you walked past, forcing the eye to adjust. He posted the watch-count beside it and left a space for names, not titles. If a patch or a bypass was used he required a tag, a date, an owner. Temporary things killed ships. Invisible things killed crews.
He wrote the rule beneath the headings in smaller hand. DVOYNOY KLYUCH. Two keys. It was not poetry. It was custody. Each line took two initials from two different hands, one from med, one from engineering, and the board stayed naked until both bodies were there in the corridor with their sleeves rolled and their fatigue showing. No remote sign-off. No voice on comms saying yes. No captain’s nod standing in for a pulse check.
He watched the first attempts at bending it. A senior tech with a reputation tried to run the numbers alone, confident, impatient. Katarinov let him talk and then pointed at the blank square and said nothing. The silence made the point.
He knew how corners got cut. A tired nurse boxed in at shift-change, a wrenchman wanting to clear a queue, a friend saying just scratch your mark and go. He made it so there was no alone. If one domain was missing the pod did not get power. If they wanted to argue they had to do it in The Shaft, where every passerby could see the empty boxes and understand what empty meant.
He set a cadence for it the way you set a pump rhythm or a drilling pattern. Same order. Same marks on the watch. At first bell they took thermal. Not the summary. The raw number and the drift rate. At second bell they tripped alarms by hand and listened for the right scream in the right place. At third bell they counted consumables with fingers, not inventory screens. He wrote the times down in the margin and made the ink part of the work.
He told them that if the marks wandered the work would wander with them. A missing timestamp was not clerical. It was a hole in the tunnel roof. A skipped box was a silent failure waiting its turn. Deviations had to look like deviations. That was the point.
Any patch at a contractor seam got a tag you could not ignore. Bright plastic, riveted, not taped. OWNER and EXPIRES BY, watch-count in thick ink, and his rule that the name was a body, not a department. When the count ran out the seam went bad by definition. No arguments, no green status. If a pod was queued it waited. Let them curse. Let them fix it.
He tied the ritual to shipwide notice, not private logs. The board got filled where boots and carts passed, then shot on a cheap cam and pushed to archive with the day’s wake roster. No one could later say they never saw the boxes empty. By the time a pod took power there was a common record, and beside it a quiet list of what still didn’t earn trust.
The consoles in C‑3 could not keep their story straight. One screen flagged a heater bus overdraw, another swore the draw was nominal. The pressure graph twitched like a lie detector and then smoothed as if nothing had happened. Vendor firmware talking past vendor firmware, each warning stamped with a different clock. Katarinov watched the green lights hold and felt no comfort in it. Green was not proof. Green was permission to stop looking.
He told the techs to leave the displays up but to treat them like weather. Advisory only. No wake signed on console color. If the machine wanted to argue it could argue into the air.
He laid out the fallback in plain words and made them repeat it back. Three readings, every cycle, no exceptions and no “we were busy.” Line temperature at the manifold with a hand thermometer, not the pod’s sensor. Draw on the heater bus with a clamp meter, not a software estimate. Pressure drift over five minutes with a watch you could hold in your fist, not a trending page that refreshed when it pleased. Write the raw number. Write the time. Initial it with a name that could be found.
He did not ask permission from medical or security. He notified them. If they wanted the wakes they wanted the work.
They started with the next scheduled thaw. He stood at the threshold of the sterile antechamber, shoulders squared in the suit’s collar, and listened to the callouts carry in the dry air. Forty‑two point one at the line. Seven point eight amps on the bus. Delta zero point zero three over five. The pencil scratched. The paper took the mark without arguing.
When the numbers disagreed with the console he did not negotiate. He wrote CONSOLES DISPUTED in block letters and flagged the pod as hold. Someone protested about the roster, about costs, about a contractor deadline. He looked at them and said procedure was cheaper than a funeral and that was the end of it.
Later he pinned the sheet where everyone had to pass it, and the ship learned a new kind of truth: one you could smudge with a thumb.
By the third day the tool lockers outside C‑3 looked less like storage and more like a shrine to doubt. Same kit, every shift, hung in the same order. Hand thermometers taped to lanyards so they could not wander. Clamp meters with fresh cells sealed under a strip of date-marked tape. A cheap stopwatch clipped to a stained clipboard, the kind you could drop and still trust. If a piece was missing you did not borrow. You stopped and you wrote MISSING in the margin and you went and found it like you’d find a lost child.
They did the readings standing close to the cold metal, breath quiet in the dry air. One hand on the manifold, one on the page. No muttered numbers. Call it out so the room could hear and so the next crew could say you lied. Temp. Draw. Drift. The pen dragged and left its small groove.
The locker door carried a simple rule in Cyrillic and English: If you can’t repeat it, you don’t know it. And the board in the corridor waited for names.
They added a sound to the checklist because the ship still told the truth through metal better than through screens. A valve on the manifold. Hand on the handle. Open a quarter turn and start the watch. Count to ten in your head, slow and even, the way miners count a roof bolt seating. Listen. The hiss should come immediate and full, a clean white rush. Not a whisper. Not a stutter. If it came thin or late you closed it and you did not argue with anyone about schedule. You wrote HOLD in red and you wrote why. The tech beside you signed, the witness signed, and then the owner got named on the board in The Shaft for follow-up. No ghosts. No “system glitch.” Names.
They pulled a heater mat off an obsolete cargo warmer, the kind meant to keep crates from sweating, and rewired it to a dedicated breaker with a manual timer that clicked loud enough to shame a man. It became a warm-up pad for the jumpy lines. Thirty seconds dwell, then off, no bargaining. Katarinov marked a hands-off boundary in tape. Past the line, nobody touched. Panic loves extra heat.
Nadya brought the dots like chalk marks from a lesson. Small adhesive rounds, red blue yellow, pressed at each connector pair and again on the paper log beside the line item. No faith in port maps that changed when a vendor patch blinked. A tired hand could match color to color and know. Katarinov watched them do it, silent, and wrote her name as owner of the standard.
The shift ran its full length and the ship did not cry wolf once. No bright banners blooming on the consoles. No alarms that arrived like anger and left like embarrassment. The screens sat there with their green confirmations and the line stayed flat and clean and it felt, to his surprise, like labor, not luck.
Katarinov walked the spine from Deck 11 down toward the habitat junction and listened with the old part of him that still lived in a shaft on a windy planet. Pump thrum. Fan whine. The tick of the new timer relay somewhere behind a panel, loud as a metronome set for a man’s conscience. Metal told him what it could. The rest was names on paper.
At every board the rows were filled in neat. Initials. Times. Dot colors checked off in a hand that had to belong to a body. He watched people pass it and slow without meaning to, eyes lifting from their boots to the sheet and then to each other. Like they were waiting for the old disorder to jump out of a seam and demand blood. It did not. They kept moving. The line of backs in the corridor looked less hunched, less ready for a blow.
In Komunal Galley 7 the air was wet with breath and boiled water and tired starch. The samovar unit steamed and for once it did not run dry between meals. Someone had topped it off. No call made. No argument about whose job. A small thing. The kind of thing that meant the ship still had a we in it.
Katarinov took a dented mug, did not sit. He watched the notice board through the open hatch where it could be seen from the tables. Boring, it looked. Quiet. He knew how dangerous boring could be when it came from ignorance. This boring came from work. He felt the pressure behind his eyes ease a fraction.
He reached into his uniform pocket and touched the brass medallion through the fabric. Cold. Real. He let it go and went back to the corridor, to read the initials again, as if he could keep the ship honest by looking at it.
Mid-rotation the traffic in The Shaft thickened and thinned in pulses as crews traded places at the junctions. A junior tech, thin shoulders, hair clipped close, hands still too careful, came up on the board and slowed. Yellow dot on a coupling where the scheme said blue. Not loud. Not flashing. Just wrong in the small way that turns into a bigger wrong when nobody admits they saw it.
He looked once at the console readout. All green. Vendor firmware happy. He could have walked on and nobody would have stopped him. Instead he reached for the paper log clipped beneath the plate and ran a finger down the row until the colors and initials lined up. The ink was fresh. The times made sense. The dot did not.
He called it in without drama, voice low so it would not become theater. Katarinov came down the corridor with the same steady gait he used for drills. He pulled the access panel and found the adapter sleeve. Commissioning stock, swapped in a hurry, keyed to fit but not to match. It would have sealed. It would have lied.
They replaced it. They signed. The ship stayed quiet.
Katarinov said nothing that could be mistaken for a prize. No hand on a shoulder. No speech to turn work into a story. He came in, ran his eyes over the coupling and the new sleeve, felt the torque with two fingers like a man checking a beam in a wet tunnel. Then he took the paper log and wrote his own initials beneath the junior tech’s, blocky and mean. He stamped the time. He underlined it once, as if the ink could hold the ship to the moment.
The corridor carried it anyway. Not hero talk. Not luck. Just that the board had caught a lie the console didn’t know it was telling. A quiet fix. No argument. No red arrows. No report drafted to satisfy a contractor’s hunger for clean numbers. Just names, and the ship staying whole.
In Komunal Galley 7 the break came and went like a bell you don’t trust. Steam rose off the hot-water unit and then rose again, steady, as if the ship had always been generous. Someone had topped it up. No one asked whose shift it was. The courtesy sat in the room heavier than any address. A few laughs ran the tables, thin and tired, because nothing had failed.
Later in The Shaft he watched it happen without ordering it. People came through with tool carts and ration tins and slowed a breath at the board. The columns were straight. Times. Initials. No red circles, no crooked arrows, no panic art. A man near the junction said, If it’s green, check it twice. Like a cough. Others kept moving, heads dipping once. Boring, and held.
The new wake window sat on the board like a clean square of light. Names queued. Hours boxed. A narrow margin for triage staff, a wider one for power draw, all of it tidy enough to make a man trust it if trust was what he was hungry for. The contractors’ console at the Cold Vaults antechamber obligingly backed it up. STATUS: GREEN. All channels nominal. Their green was a kind of promise.
Katarinov did not take promises from screens.
He stood with one hand on the rail and watched the feed the way he’d watched damp rock in a bad seam, waiting for the small change that meant the whole face would come. The console gave him summaries, percentages and pass/fail gates, and he pushed past them into the raw channels. Vendor tags didn’t match. Firmware timestamps were out of family. He read it anyway.
Most lines lay flat as a held breath. One did not. It was the oxygen partial-pressure sensor on arc two, a channel that had been quiet for days. It wandered. Not a spike. Not a glitch you could blame on noise and sign off with a shrug. A slow slide, ugly because it was patient. A number that stayed inside tolerances if you glanced once and stayed inside if you only ever glanced once.
He called for the trend overlay. The tech obliged, eyes flicking to the green status as if to confirm reality. The overlay came up and the line told the truth: a steady drift, minute to minute, like a valve that wasn’t seating or a calibration that had learned the wrong lesson.
He felt the old stubbornness rise, the one that had kept men alive in shafts where the air lied. Procedure was not paperwork. Procedure was memory you could share.
“Hold the window,” he said. No volume to it. Just weight.
The contractor liaison started to speak, schedule, resource burn, downstream impacts, and Katarinov cut him with a look, not anger, just refusal. He reached into his pocket, touched the brass medallion through cloth like a habit against panic, and pointed at the drifting channel.
“That’s not green,” he said. “That’s time.”
Nadya felt it before anyone named it. Not fear. Not drama. The old cold pinch behind the ribs that came from watching a chart go green while a body stayed wrong. She had seen tolerances blessed by committees who never stood in the wake-room with a towel and a bucket and a shaking hand on a stranger’s shoulder. Acceptable. Nominal. Words that meant the paperwork survived.
She stepped closer to the console and kept her voice soft so it would not turn into a signal flare. “Show me raw. Trend, not summary.”
The tech hesitated the way people do when they want permission to obey. The contractor’s status pane glowed clean and cheerful. Nadya did not look at it. She looked at the numbers underneath, the stubborn little pulses that machines could not prettify without trying.
The overlay came up. A line that should have sat like a quiet horizon was walking. Slow. Patient. A drift that hid inside the fence if you only checked once. She watched it long enough to see it keep its intention.
“That’s the kind,” she said, almost to herself. “Quiet failures.”
They tried to make it a clock problem. Power draw graphs. Staffing rosters. Quota language with polite teeth in it. The liaison kept his body turned so the techs and medics could see, as if witness itself was leverage, as if a captain could be shamed into arithmetic. Katarinov read the move and denied it.
“Not here,” he said.
He took them out through the antechamber and into The Shaft where the air was warmer and the walls were ribbed with old work. Sound still traveled but the corridor kept people moving; it would not hold a crowd. He walked with his hand on the rail like it was a rule.
They started again. He did not raise his voice. He did not bargain.
“Procedure over schedule,” he said. “Every time.”
He scrubbed the wake cycle with a single command and spoke the words into the log himself. No “pause.” No “monitor.” No soft language to keep investors calm. “Wake is canceled. Drift unresolved. Do not proceed.” The acknowledgment pings came back one by one, like bolts seating. In the quiet after, he felt the rule harden: almost was just delay dressed up as mercy.
At the cross-check board in The Shaft he takes the stub pencil on its string and writes slow, block letters that cannot be argued with. Time. Deck. His initials. Then the reason, plain as a bruise: drift unresolved. The graphite shines in the warm striplight. Boots slow. Eyes lift. No one jokes. They read it like a ration count and a prayer and keep walking.
Nadya took the corner of Komunal Galley 7 the way a miner took a dry niche in a wet tunnel. Not by asking. By arriving with what was needed and making it useful before anyone could name an objection. Between meal shifts the tables were wiped, the samovar hissed to itself, and the wall plating stood bare except for old tape scars and a fading ration notice. She put her palm to the metal. Cold through her skin. A steadiness in it.
She drew a line with chalk as if it were a seam marker. Then another. Boxes. Arrows. The simple shapes first. The ones a child could hold in the mind when the lights went. Hazard icons, done fast and clean. A flame. A hand with a slash through it. A pressure symbol that looked like a mouth clamped shut. Radiation trefoil. Biohazard. She wrote the shipboard words beside them in block letters and then in Cyrillic underneath where it fit, not for nostalgia but because half the mouths on this deck still thought in those sounds.
She did not call it a class. She called it a wall you read.
When the first kids drifted in, she put the chalk in a small fist and let the child trace the trefoil until the fingers remembered the curves. She pointed to the airlock icon and made them say it out loud. Not airlock like a door. Airlock like a rule. Two doors. One open at a time. She tapped the drawing twice with the chalk. If you forget, you die. Quietly. With no drama to warn the next person.
A couple of tired adults slowed with their mugs. Katarinov passed once on the way through, saw the wall, and did not stop. But his eyes took it in the way he took in a pressure gauge. He noted who lingered and who looked away.
Nadya kept the chalk moving until the bulkhead looked like a map of dangers made honest. Survival grammar. The kind you carried in your head when alarms failed and the ship stayed polite.
Nadya took them into The Shaft in a single-file drift, palms on the handrail, no running, no talking over one another. Katarinov watched from a junction mouth and let it be hers. Procedure did not have to come from his throat to be real.
She stopped them at a weld seam where two hull sections met and the bead sat proud like a scar. She made each child touch it. Not for comfort. For anchor. This seam will still be here when the lights go and the screens lie. She pointed at the junction plate stamped with a contractor code half ground off and told them the name they would use anyway. Old Plate. She had them say it, then turn away and find it again by counting paces and handholds.
Further down the striplight that always flickered threw a weak pulse over their faces. The kids laughed once and she cut it with a look. Flicker means power. Power means air. You notice it. You report it. She walked them past the notice boards and the graffiti proverbs, past the warm patch where coolant lines ran close behind skin, and she taught them to read the ship the way miners read rock.
By the time they reached Deck 7 West the sign was only confirmation. The route lived in their bodies.
In the off hours when the decks were between shifts and The Shaft had the thin hush of a tunnel at stope change, she put them to the panels. No touching. Hands behind backs. Faces close enough to smell warm polymer and old coolant. She told them the ship talked even when it was polite. They stood and listened until their impatience burned off and the pump rhythm came forward like a heartbeat. Count it. Again. Say it under the breath. Too fast is hunger. Too slow is choking. The vibration that lived in the rail, the faint shiver in the deck plate, the way a normal load sat steady in the bones. Then she changed one thing (made them step a meter, made them listen again) so they learned the difference between their own noise and the ship’s strain. Katarinov, passing, heard them counting and did not correct it. He only watched who could tell when the cadence was wrong.
She turned airlocks into counting, into a drift-game with palms on rails. How many from the galley to the Cold Vaults. Where you turn at Old Plate. Which door is sterility and which is pressure. She made them point out tether eyes, the ones you grab when gravity goes mean. They answered laughing until she stopped them. Say it clean. In order. In panic you name the sequence and the naming makes room for breath.
One of the small ones asked her why the bad things didn’t scream. Nadya crouched so her eyes were level and she told him the ship was like a man who wanted to keep his job. It failed polite. Green lamps. Clean numbers. A quiet drift in a pump beat. That was why you did not trust “normal.” You proved it. Sight. Sound. Route. Again.
Katarinov set the tool bag down in the gutter of The Shaft and looked at the tag on the isolation valve like it was a lie somebody had told him to his face. Routine swap. Two bolts, a quarter turn, purge, reseat. The contractor tech had the new seat in his palm already, gloved and impatient, eyes on the green status lamp as if the lamp had a mouth.
On the bulkhead beside the junction plate someone had screwed up a sheet of laminate with a grid burned into it. Blank squares. No logo. No printed blessing. Just the hard geometry of accountability.
Katarinov put two knuckles to the board. Tap. Tap. The sound carried. A few heads turned down the corridor. The tech waited for the command that would let his hands move.
Katarinov did not give it. He leaned close enough that the oil-and-ozone smell cut through the recycled air. He said, quiet, clipped. Procedure.
They stared at the board. The squares sat there like empty bunks.
Someone muttered that the log was in the console. Katarinov’s eyes did not leave the grid. Console logs could be edited. Consoles could be locked behind access. This wall was public. This wall had witnesses.
He waited. Not a show. A stoppage.
A runner went off down the spine, boots soft on the deck ribs. The Shaft held its breath in the way a crew does when a man with command authority decides that time is less important than correctness. You could feel the irritation, the old habit of getting it done and arguing later. You could feel, too, the fear beneath it. The ship was new and its systems were patched like a miner’s lungs. Small mistakes here didn’t stay small.
The runner came back with a stub pencil, chewed at one end. Katarinov took it and wrote the date and time in block letters. He handed it to the tech. Your name. Then another. Witness.
The tech hesitated, then printed his letters hard enough to score the laminate. Another crewman stepped in, signed, and only then did Katarinov nod once.
Work resumed. Quiet. Different. As if the corridor itself had been given a rule it could enforce.
It moved through them the way a good caution moves in a pit. Not shouted. Passed hand to hand. A pencil found its way to a pocket. A man who never wrote anything without a foreman over him began to write anyway. At junctions in The Shaft they slowed a fraction and their eyes went first to the squares, to the blunt grid of names and times. The old question, who cleared it, fell away. It had always been a question shaped like a favor. Now it was: what does the board say.
Rank still mattered when alarms went and doors had to be shut, but in the ordinary hours proof began to weigh more than a strip of authority on a sleeve. You could see it in the way hands hovered before a panel. In the way a crewman would call another over not to witness his courage but to witness his work.
Even the contractor specialists came around. At first they acted put upon, as if asked to confess. Then they started offering their sign-offs early, eyes averted from the green lamps, like men caught trusting something too easy. The board filled. The ship learned to demand its own receipts.
Nadya took what he’d done in The Shaft and made it ordinary. She pulled the small ones and the new wake-ups through the habitat loops in pairs, hands on rails, eyes up. She made them stop at every placard and read it out loud, ship English with the old words tucked in, zamok, otsek, until the letters meant doors and pressure and not just paint. She had them count airlocks the way miners count timbers. She made them stand still and listen. Not for alarms. For the baseline. The pump beat that said air was moving and water was honest. Then she’d have them listen again at a junction where a bearing was starting to go and ask them what changed. She told them bravery was cheap. Correctness cost attention. Quiet was not peace. Quiet was where failures hid.
The saying lodged in them like a hand signal, not a hymn. In the galley queue a man would murmur it over the stew steam. At an airlock a woman would say it to her partner and touch the latch twice. Green meant nothing alone. It meant check the gauge, check the seal, check a second set of eyes. And it meant you did not send anyone back into harm because the numbers behaved.
Enough of the small checks caught enough of the small lies in the system that the ship began to carry itself different. Like a crew that has felt rock shift underfoot and not died. They grew cautious and communal and they wrote it down. The rituals looked slow to anyone counting minutes. They made a steady weight against shortcuts, especially at the wake racks. And if something slipped now it slipped where every eye already lived.
In Cold Vaults C‑3 the wake cycle finished with the wrong kind of quiet. No celebratory chime, no staff banter, no breath let out. Just the soft tick of relays and the dry hiss of a valve closing on itself. Katarinov stood by the antechamber rail with his hands on the cold metal, watching through the inner window while the last numbers crawled on the console. The pod’s status line went green as if it meant something final.
The lid unsealed with a lazy lift. A rim of white mist rolled out and fell in sheets. The sleeper sat up too fast, as if he’d been shoved from behind, shoulders hunched and jaw working. Teeth chattered hard enough to make sound in the still room. His eyes were open but not on anything. The face had that waxy color you see in men who’ve been under too long, as if the blood had to remember where to go.
Along the collar of the suit the seal line should have been warm last. Instead it was mottled, angry, frost-burn blooming in a crescent. The skin there looked cooked and frozen at once. The sleeper’s right hand pawed at it, clumsy, searching for pain to confirm he was awake.
The bedside monitor began to argue with itself. Heart rate spiked, dropped, spiked again. Oxygen readout flipped between two sets of numbers like it couldn’t decide which body it had clipped onto. Temperature blinked and then defaulted to a vendor logo. A warning tone sounded once and then cut out, as if someone had pulled the sound from the machine.
Katarinov stepped in, slow, keeping his boots off the sterile line. Procedure said wait for medical. Procedure also said do not let a waking man tear his own airway tube out in confusion. He’d learned in mines that you don’t get to choose your emergencies. You just choose what you can live with afterward.
He looked to the gantry lights and the frost staining the insulation seams. Mixed systems. Patchwork. Interface faults hiding under clean labels. The ship was new and already it was lying.
“Easy,” he said, low, more to the room than to the man. “Sit. Breathe.” He could feel the saint-medallion in his pocket like a weight he’d borrowed from another life. The console kept flashing. The sleeper kept shaking. The quiet held.
Nadya was already inside, hair pinned tight, sleeves rolled as if the cold could be argued with. She did not wait for permission. She took a thermal blanket from the rack and threw it over the man’s shoulders with practiced economy, tucking it down like sealing a hatch. She pressed the electrolyte nozzle to his mouth and made him sip in small measured pulls. Not comfort. Function.
“Name,” she said. “Say it. Where are you. What is this place.” Her voice stayed soft but it carried the edge of a rail you grip in spin. She put two fingers to his wrist though the monitor insisted it was reading him fine. The pulse under her touch did not match what the screen claimed. Nothing matched. The oxygen number climbed while his lips went pale. The temperature held steady while the frost-burn spread like a map.
She turned to the triage nook. It was set up, stocked, tagged, ready like a photograph of readiness. The console behind it kept throwing vendor splash screens and contradictory flags, as if the ship could not decide whose truth to use. “Stabilize, then review logs” was a nice line on paper. Here it was a joke. Without clean data you could not prove the man was failing until he did.
Contractor security came through the antechamber before Katarinov could get a second med tech on comms. Two of them in hard shells, visors down, boots loud on the grating like they owned the air. One carried a plastic case of printed tags and seals. The other had a handheld reader already awake and hungry. They did not look at the man in the pod. They looked at the console bank, the ports, the maintenance gantry numbers. They spoke in clean phrases about protocol and exposure and liability.
A strip of adhesive tape went up across the deck like a line in dust. Badges were scanned. Names recorded. The inner door was set to restrict. The room’s sound changed. Care became custody.
“Back,” one told Nadya. “Nonessential.” Like her hands weren’t the only steady thing in there.
They pulled people apart like contaminated parts. Med tech to triage, maintenance to the wall, the corridor watchers sent back into The Shaft with hands up and mouths shut. No comparing notes, they said. Audit integrity. A seal went over the console ports and a custody form over the screen. Even the error trail became classified. The sleeper was walked out shaking, flanked, tagged, treated like evidence that breathed.
Word still ran ahead of seals. It moved in whispers down The Shaft, in ration lines, in tool carts stopped a second too long. A wake went bad and they taped the floor and called it integrity. By the time the restricted notice appeared the crew had done the math. If only paid eyes could look, then any name could be next and the truth would come after the burn.
The seal on Cryo Bay C‑3 made the simple things illicit. A blanket was no longer a blanket. It was a numbered item on a chain, signed out with a stylus that lagged and a look that said don’t lose it. Electrolyte packs went the same way, counted, stamped, slid across a counter as if they could be pocketed and sold for passage. The wake-room carts that used to sit fat with spare sleeves and tape and the little comforts Nadya insisted on were stripped to the ribs. You could see the empty brackets where things lived. A cart half-dressed looked like a patient already bled.
Katarinov watched them take the “universal” sensor leads: the ones every tech kept coiled in a back pocket because the vendors never agreed and the readings never matched. They swept them up like contraband wire. Into clear bins with foam cutouts. Into evidence numbers. A man in a visor read each coil into his handheld as if the ship would lie to him unless it was inventoried.
It changed how people moved. A med tech came to the antechamber with a hand out and the wrong form and got sent back with nothing but a signature line to chase. A wake cycle needed salt and heat and somebody’s calm voice and instead it got delays. You couldn’t improvise. You couldn’t borrow from the next cart. You couldn’t do what miners did when the rock shifted and the list did not cover it. You waited.
In The Shaft the talk picked up a new edge. They said care had become property. They said if they could lock blankets they could lock truth. Katarinov heard it all without turning his head, hearing the pump thrum under it like a warning.
He kept his saint-medallion pressed flat in his pocket and held to procedure because procedure was all that still belonged to everyone. But he could feel the ship’s margin thinning in small, stupid ways. A strip of cloth. A packet of salts. A lead you could have swapped in thirty seconds, now boxed and sealed while a person shivered on the other side of the door.
The diagnostics began to wander. Not by leaps. By a tenth here, a jitter there, a number that held too long and then fell away as if it remembered late. Mixed firmware and bargain sensors had always argued, but the crew had made a language out of it. Swap a lead, tap a connector, take a second reading and trust what repeats. Now the leads sat in foam like museum bones and the consoles took turns lying.
Katarinov watched techs do what frightened people do when tools are taken. They stopped touching. They started documenting. A man who used to crawl under a rack with a lamp and come out with an answer now stood upright, hands visible, composing an incident memo in a slow, careful voice so the recorder caught it clean. The bay filled with that kind of silence. The kind that means nothing is being fixed.
The quickest repair had become a meeting. Panel access requested. Escort assigned. A window offered between shift changes when security was not busy elsewhere. The ship did not wait for windows. The ship just kept running and the numbers kept drifting, and every drift became another file instead of a correction.
Paperwork ate the hours the way rust ate a bolt. Two hours on the schedule for life‑support interface checks and he got ten minutes of supervised looking. Gloved fingers hovering over a latch while a contractor guard watched the hands and not the gauge. The rest was forms. Names, badge codes, serial numbers. A statement of intent before a panel could be opened. A statement of completion after it was shut. Every tool accounted as if the ship itself might steal.
Filters came due and stayed in place. Extended pending review. Not because the media still had life but because pulling it meant chain‑of‑custody, sealed bins, a witness signature, storage tags, and someone to babysit the scrap. No one had that time. He watched the clock and listened to the pumps and felt the calendar slipping out from under procedure.
The knock-on triage bled into habitat the way a leak finds seams. Garden trays went without recalibration. Nutrient lines stayed on yesterday’s settings because no one had an escort to open the panel and no one wanted to start a file. Little anomalies that used to be corrected by habit were logged to monitor. Air scrubbers ran past spec. Water reclaim came off a shade dirtier. The ship kept breathing and so did they.
They pulled Semyon off the racks. The calibration keys rode on his belt like a priest’s relics, the only thing that could make contractor firmware and salvaged boards speak one language. Now he stood in a clean vest beside sealed bins, a witness with a tablet, signing that others did not touch what they could not fix. Men watched and understood. The ship had chosen paper over breath. The question went down The Shaft like cold: when the next system stutters, who is allowed to put a hand on it.
Nadya’s roster did not empty all at once. It thinned the way a deck drains air through a bad gasket, one name at a time until the pattern could not be denied. A pencil line through a child’s slot. A new notation in block print she did not recognize. TEMP REASSIGN. RUNNER. PRIORITY.
They said it was temporary. They said the internal comms were being “permissioned” until the audit cleared. They said the kids were small, quick, and less likely to ask for access codes. She watched them stand at the edge of the galley tables with their lesson slates tucked under one arm and a paper envelope under the other, waiting for a gap in foot traffic like miners at a lift gate. Some were still chewing. Some had not eaten at all.
Katarinov saw it in The Shaft. A boy with his hair shorn uneven, cheeks raw from recycled air, jogging against the flow with a pouch on a neck cord. The child’s eyes flicked to the overhead cameras that didn’t always work and then to the adults’ hands and belts. He moved like he’d been taught to keep to the seams.
They came back late. Always late. Breathless, damp at the collar, smelling of coolant and fear. They repeated what they’d heard in the doors and antechambers, adult phrases dropped like tools.
Chain-of-custody, one girl said, as if it was a game rule.
Restricted logs, a younger one echoed, trying the words on his tongue. He smiled because smiling was what he did when he didn’t know if he was in trouble.
Another, older, said quiet and flat: Don’t put it in writing.
Katarinov asked where they’d been made to wait. The answers were vague, trained into vagueness. Outside Deck Eight. By the sterility doors. At a panel with a red seal. In a corridor where a guard stood with his back to them and did not look down.
It was not the running that worried him. It was the lesson. The ship teaching children that speech was contraband and paper more dangerous than failure.
In the wake-room outside C‑3 the air was too dry and too clean and it made the throat ache. The newly thawed sat under blankets like men pulled from a river. Then they tried to stand. They moved out through the sterility doors and into The Shaft with that wrong-footed gait Nadya knew. A pause. A blink that did not finish. Hands sliding to the ribs of the corridor as if the ship were pitching when it was not. One man stopped and stared at a warning placard until his lips shaped the words without sound. Another made it three steps and folded, not dramatic, just the body deciding. He retched thinly into a bag and held it away from him as if ashamed of its weight.
A medic walked the line with a scanner and a roll of triage tags. She spoke low and did not look up. Dehydration. Sleep debt. Anxiety response. The tags were neat and bright. None said what Nadya heard in the wet swallow and saw in the tremor that came after. Cryo complication required a contractor sign-off. Without it the word did not exist. The ship had learned to rename injury until it fit the ledger.
Nadya caught the medic at the edge of the triage nook where the light went flat and the air smelled of alcohol wipes. She spoke low in Slavic, the way you spoke when you wanted the truth to stay between ribs. The medic did not answer in kind. She kept her voice even, contractor-neutral.
Within expected variance, she said. Post-wake tremor, vasospasm, transient confusion. It’s in the packet.
Nadya asked about the tags. About why the same hands kept shaking and the same mouths kept swallowing against nothing.
Reporting will be consolidated after review. Her gaze slid, quick and guilty, to the camera dome above the corridor seam, then back to Nadya’s face. Don’t use terms that force escalation, her eyes said.
Keep the cohort calm, she added. Keep them seated. Keep them quiet.
In Komunal Galley 7 it goes from rumor to noise. The woman is talking and then her hand lets go. The dented mug jumps, rings the table bolts, rolls. Tea runs in a thin brown sheet and steams. Her fingers are wax-pale and held half curled. She tries to smile. The smile breaks. Her jaw chatters. The medic comes in brisk and clean. Cold exposure, stress. Warmth. Electrolytes. Nothing to see.
They listened past the medic’s words and heard the shaping of them. Careful not kind. At the tables the talk tightened into one blunt thing: if it is nothing why can’t they name it, why can’t it go in the log. By the next meal men and women traded wake dates and pod numbers in low voices, scratching them on ration chits, on napkins, on sleeve cuffs. A ledger without seals. Trust bleeding out of the terminals and into hands.
The notices went up in the ship’s off hours when honest people slept and the lights in The Shaft ran to their dim cycle. By the time Katarinov came through Deck 7 the bolts were already set. Contractor placards, white plastic with black block letters, fixed to the bulkhead where the lesson rota had been taped for months. No committee stamp. No labor council countersign. Just authority declared by font.
TEMPORARY STORAGE, DO NOT MOVE.
He stopped and read it twice as if repetition might change the meaning. The adhesive around the edges still shone wet. It gave off a sour chemical breath that cut through the galley’s yeast and hot-water steam. Someone had scraped away the old tape ghosts but you could still see the rectangle of cleaner metal where Nadya’s schedule had lived. Days. Names. Rotations of children like shift assignments. All of it replaced by a warning like they were marking a spill.
Across the corner they had stretched cargo mesh from deck to overhead conduit and cinched it with yellow ties. A numbered seal hung on the clasp, a cheap little tag with a barcode and a serial, swinging slightly in the ventilation draft. Inside, stacked tote crates and foam-wrapped canisters, unlabeled to anyone without access. The space was not full. It was claimed. The message was not about storage. It was about who could move what, who could ask, who could look.
Katarinov’s jaw worked once. He kept his hands down. Procedure first. No point giving them a picture of him tearing it free. He watched the traffic around it instead. People passing would slow without meaning to, eyes skidding off the seal like it was a camera lens. A woman with a ration tray paused, then kept walking, shoulders drawn tight. Two contractor techs came through with a cart and did not look at him at all.
He thought of the Cold Vaults doors and their own seals and the way a seal could turn a common corridor into a border. He touched the saint-medallion through his uniform pocket, not for comfort but as a check that he was still himself. Then he looked toward the mess hall corner where the children’s benches had been. Fewer feet could fit there now. Less air. Less quiet. Another small room taken, and with it another piece of the ship’s promise.
Nadya keeps the hour as if hours still mean something. She draws her lines on a scrap of polymer with the stub of chalk she refuses to stop carrying, white dust on her thumb. She calls and they answer. Numbers, then names, then a miners’ proverb about lamps and mouths. The children say it soft at first. She makes them say it again. Rhythm like a handrail.
The galley will not hold quiet. Voices rise at the far tables where ration chits are spread like exhibits, where someone’s wake date is spoken aloud and then corrected and then accused. A spoon strikes a mug and the sound runs down the bolted table like a warning. Plates scrape. A chair kicks back. Someone laughs once, sharp and mean, and the laughter is taken up as proof of something.
Nadya lifts her hand for silence and does not get it. Her mouth moves and the words fall into the clatter. The children’s eyes slip past her shoulder. They watch the adults’ faces the way they should be watching the chalk marks. Small backs draw tight. Arms fold. They begin to mimic the set of jaw and the narrowed gaze, learning the ship’s new lesson without being taught.
The “temporary” took weight and edges. A contractor runner in a clean vest came in with a tablet held like a shield. He spoke to Nadya without looking at the children. Said sorry, said policy, said just until the audit clears. The words had the smoothness of a seal. He pointed two tables deeper into the galley, into the traffic lane, nearer the memorial plaques where the names watched over every meal. Farther from any bulkhead a map could be taped to, farther from a corner that could be made into a room by agreement.
Nadya’s face did not change but her jaw set hard enough to see. She nodded once. Procedure, she said. Then she gathered them up, chalk, scrap sheets, the one battered primer, moving the children like evacuees, careful with shoulders, careful with dignity, as if the floor might tilt and spill them.
In The Shaft the shift boards had always been loud with pencil marks and small bargains. Now there was one sheet, pinned through the corner hard enough to bruise the composite. NO MORE WAKES UNTIL WE SEE THE LOGS. The cold came not from the words but from the hand that made them. Men and women read it and moved on without speech, eyes averted as if already counted.
The ship’s shadow ledger flowered in every seam. Pod numbers inked on ration chits. Wake dates cut into tool tags with a scribe. Symptoms passed hand to hand in low voices, traded like stolen cigarettes. Each scrap made a heavier truth. Contractor placards multiplied where lesson rosters had hung. Nadya’s tables crept deeper into the din. Hope itself felt boxed and labeled, set aside until permission.
The slowdown did not arrive as a banner or a shouted vote. It came like grit in a bearing. A tool drawer left unlocked and then found empty. A torque wrench signed out under a name that did not match the hand that carried it. A suit seal check pushed to after meal because the tech was suddenly assigned to “inventory reconciliation.” A requisition stamped PENDING with no timestamp and no accountable queue. All of it ordinary on paper. All of it arranged.
Katarinov walked the spine and read it in the gaps. He’d commissioned enough patchwork rigs to know what accident looked like and what intention looked like. Accident was messy. This was neat. This was denials that forced men to shrug and go back to their bunks and tell themselves the work could wait. A kind of training. Making delay feel natural. Making authority feel like a request instead of a directive.
He pulled the checkout log at Deck 11 and the clerk slid the screen away with two fingers, polite as a banker. Access tier, she said. Contractor compliance until the audit clears. He watched her eyes flick to the camera dome that was dark half the time. He watched the way she kept her voice flat so it could be repeated later without sounding like fear.
In the corridor outside, two laborers sat on a coil of tether and ate in silence, boots braced on the ribs of the bulkhead. When he passed they did not rise. Not insolent. Simply finished with ceremony. One of them said, We do not wake more people into lies. Not loud. Not for the record.
Katarinov kept his face still. He felt the medallion in his pocket like a warm coin. Procedure was a rope you held when the shaft went black. But procedure required hands. He could command schedules, sign authorizations, threaten confinement. None of it turned a missing wrench into metal again. None of it made a man volunteer his skill when he’d decided the ledger was crooked.
He went on, counting the small frictions stacking like ration tins, and he could already feel the ship’s work slipping out of rhythm.
It landed where no siren lived. Not in the drive or the hull or the lights that made men look up. It landed in the soft systems that could be bled slow. Scrubber cartridge rotations that could slip a day because the gauge still sat in the green, coolant-loop walks postponed because the lines felt cool to the touch, calibration pulls on the cryo-support racks deferred with a note that read WAITING ON PART CONFIRMATION though the part was a gasket you could cut from sheet stock if you were allowed the drawer.
The ship went on breathing by habit and stored margin. Pumps kept their rhythm. Fans kept their indifferent roar. That false steadiness made talk sharper. Contractor staff pointed at stable readouts and said the corridor gossip was hysteria, that trending tables proved compliance, that audits required discipline. Down-deck hands said the tables were dressed like a corpse for viewing, that numbers could be smoothed, that a sealed log was not a log but a story told by someone with a quota.
Katarinov watched the intervals widen between tasks. He felt the air, dry as paper, and did not trust it.
A contractor supervisor came down The Shaft with a tablet and a face like poured wax. He spoke of efficiency. He cut names from the checklist with his thumb. One tech per rack. One witness. Logs viewable by need-to-know. Questions routed upchain, answers later. Time saved, he said, as if time was a bolt you could tighten.
The labor crew did not shout. They opened the manual like scripture and began to read it aloud with their gloved fingers on the lines. Every step called and answered. Every torque verified by a second hand even when the spec did not require it. Every sign-off demanded twice, once for the system and once for the conscience. They moved slow as grief. The window shrank. The ship kept breathing on paper.
Katarinov stood in the pinch point and heard it again, the same rot-word passed hand to hand: acceptable risk. In Forward it meant keep the report sealed, keep the metrics clean. In the Ring it meant let the wrenches sit and call it conscience. He saw then it was not a fault. It was jurisdiction. Who chose whose air was counted and whose water was written off.
The warning lights stayed dark but the margins began to talk. Trend lines quivered in the consoles like bad hands. Filter mass and water draws would not square no matter how they were tallied. The cryo verification list grew teeth, names piling without initials beside them. Katarinov watched it and felt the ship leaning toward a place where politics would be argued in thinner air and the first true alarm would find every tool untouched.
Katarinov felt it before it had a name. The Shaft had its own weather. You could hear it in the wheels of the tool carts. The same men who shoved a load like they were driving a drill string now let it drift, hands light on the rails, eyes elsewhere. Someone laughed too loud and it died midbreath when a uniform came into view. In the junctions the talk went flat and ordinary, like a board scrubbed clean. Even the call-and-answer on routine lists came back wrong. Not refusal. Not open defiance. A soft postponement. Later. After shift. After word comes down. After the logs.
He did not wait for the first punch or the first locked hatch. Incidents were what contractors used to make a story. One sick tech, one missing seal, then a report that made it all personal and small. He knew that trick. He had seen men buried twice: once under rock and once under paperwork.
He went to the commissioning binder and opened it with hands that did not shake. The language was dry, old as any mine rule, and it still had teeth if you spoke it in the right place. Emergency-procedure clause for cross-deck hazard review. Mixed representation required. No single chain of custody for life-support interface faults. Witnessed access to logs when there was credible risk to crew safety. It was all there, printed by people who imagined liability more than lungs.
He keyed the announcement without flourish. Not a speech. A notice with times, stations, and the words mandatory observers. He made sure it went to labor boards and contractor channels alike. He copied it to the public plates. He put his own name at the bottom where blame could find it.
Then he stepped into The Shaft where eyes could count him. He wore his duty jacket, collar fastened, hands empty. He did not send a runner. He did not ask security to escort him. He walked like a man going to look at a crack in a beam before the whole roof came down, and he let the ship see that the procedure was not a weapon held in the dark. It was a lamp, and it burned whoever stood under it.
He took The Shaft like a man taking the long run of a tunnel after a blast: no hurry, no pause that looked like fear. His boots made the same dull report on the ribbed decking all the way down. At each junction the crowd was already there, pretending to read shift bids, pretending to wait on a cart that was not coming. He did not give them a speech. He nodded once and asked for the hard parts.
Which flange. Which firmware revision. Who last pulled the panel. Which locker tag showed red and still got signed green. Names, times, bay numbers. He made them point with fingers, not with anger. When someone spoke in generalities he held up his hand and made it small again. Specifics.
He carried a slate and an old stub pencil because electronics died at the wrong moment. He wrote slow. He put a name beside a claim and had the speaker watch him do it. Then he read it back in the same words, clipped, so there would be no room later for misheard, mistranslated, exaggerated. It felt like tallying bodies after a cave-in. Counted. Witnessed. No one left as rumor.
The petitions came in like parts pulled from a locker and laid on a table. Bent grievances and clean ones. Near-misses with dates scratched in. Ration tallies that did not add. Denials of access stamped with contractor codes and no names. He took them as he took any fault report. He flattened the paper with his palm. He asked for the incident number or he wrote one and made two witnesses mark it. He demanded chain-of-custody for the cryo logs and life-support interface reads, who touched them, when, under what authority. He built a roster for joint verification so no one could later say they were not there. When voices rose he did not rise with them. He said it once, the same each time. On record or it did not exist.
In Komunal Galley 7 Nadya held a small square of order against the press of bodies and crates. The schooling corner had been eaten down to a bench and a strip of wall. She set them to drills like muster. Names first. Then steps. Then timings. Soft voice, no slack. Older kids took posts, water count, blanket check, door manners, so the newly waked had something to do besides shake and listen.
By end shift the ship carried two instincts in its ribs. Lockdown. Slowdown. Men stood with arms crossed and tools hanging heavy, and he could feel how quick a wrench becomes a weapon. But there was paper now. Claims written. Numbers. A witness list that crossed decks like a tied line. He’d spent his last easy goodwill. Nadya kept the small ones close. In the mess a public screen blinked, slipped to a maintenance window. He knew that channel. Not yet fenced.
Katarinov saw the wallscreen hiccup and drop into a contractor service pane. Plain monospace. Bare lists. No logo. No blue lock icon. It was like finding an unlocked hatch in a pressure zone. The nearest contractor supervisor was already angling in, hand out, mouth forming the words for policy and permissions.
Katarinov stepped in without hurry. He put his shoulder between the man and the console. The galley noise thinned around it. The hot-water unit hissed and someone’s spoon scraped a mug and stopped.
His fingers touched his uniform pocket by habit, the brass weight of the saint-medallion there like a bolt head you could worry with a thumb. He didn’t take it out. He set his palm on the console rail instead, flat, claiming the metal as if it were a handhold in The Shaft and a fall was waiting.
“This stays open,” he said.
Not a shout. Loud enough to carry. The words were clipped, the way you spoke when you were reading off a tag on a valve and you wanted no mistake.
The supervisor blinked at him. “Chief, that window is, ”
“Commissioning protocol twelve, subsection three,” Katarinov said, eyes on the text as it scrolled. “Interface faults. Mixed-vendor life-support adjacent. Any crew-impact anomaly triggers open review when delay increases risk. This is not a contractor-only box while we are eating under plaques.”
He nodded once toward the wall of names. Men and women lost to mines and cold vacuums and one bad seal. The memorial didn’t argue.
A few laborers had stood. Not in threat. In attention. Nadya was at the edge of the tables with her chalk-stained fingers curled around a mug, watching the screen like it was a lesson board someone had tried to erase.
Katarinov lifted his palm just enough to key the menu deeper. Time stamps. Wake-cycle entries. Fault flags with short codes that meant blood pressure drops and frost burns and a pump that lagged before it caught.
“We do it by the book,” he said. “With witnesses. Right here. Anyone who wants to close this window will state their name and their clause.”
He did not raise his voice. He did not look for allies with his eyes. He kept his body where it belonged, between the console and the impulse to slam it shut, and he named it like he was calling a tool from a rack.
“Emergency-procedure authority,” he said. “Commissioning protocol twelve. Subsection three. Crew integrity and life-support interface faults.”
The words landed clean. Not politics. Not accusation. A label on a hazard drum. He tapped the timestamp line with one knuckle and scrolled slow enough for anyone standing behind him to read.
“This space is a temporary review floor until the anomaly is categorized and the risk cleared. Komunal Galley Seven. Open hearing. Recorded.”
A mug paused halfway to a mouth. Someone’s chair legs stopped squealing on the deck. The room shifted forward in small movements, like men leaning in to watch a gasket seat. They listened because it was procedure, because it sounded like steps, not a demand for loyalty.
He added, measured, “No one is being charged. No one is being protected by silence. We keep the ship whole by the same rule for all hands.”
He let the silence do work. Faces turned from bowls and trays to the service pane’s bare lines. He spoke to the room like he was laying out a brace plan, nothing heroic in it. Only load and failure.
“We have two paths,” he said. “Raw facts in the open now, or rumors later. Rumor turns to hands on collars. Hands on collars turns to airlocks watched and doors sealed. Sabotage stories feed crackdowns. Crackdowns feed sabotage. We break that loop here.”
He tipped his chin toward the plaque wall without naming a single dead. The names were enough. Men lost to bad seals and bad orders and to someone deciding a report could wait.
“No whispers. No saints and villains,” he said. “Only the record, and witnesses.”
He told the tech at the wallplate to mirror the pane to every live public screen in the galley. Not later. Now. The index came up raw: time stamps, subsystem tags, door access entries, wake-cycle notes. No color, no gloss, no “summary.” Contractor staff started in about restricted diagnostics. Katarinov didn’t turn. He said restrictions don’t outrank survivability, and survivability doesn’t outrank chain of custody.
He made it formal and human at once. He called for witnesses, one from contractor command, one from labor decks, to stand under the lights where every eye could hold them. He pointed to two steady hands and named them scribes. Write every line that changes. Time. Who did it. Why. “By the book,” he said again. “And no one walks out carrying the only truth in their pocket.”
The contractor supervisors moved like men practiced at ending things. Calm hands. Calm faces. They spoke in the soft register used for onboard announcements when the water is thin and you’re meant to accept it. Private report after analysis. Proper channels. They said it like a seal you could press onto the air.
Behind them their aides gathered tablets and coilcords. A chair leg rasped on the deck. Another. The sound carried down the galley like a tool dragged along a pipe. Bodies shifted. People made room without meaning to. Exit lines formed. Not running. Just taking the available path before it closed.
Katarinov watched the flow start. He saw who was already on their feet and who stayed seated but turned their shoulders, ready. He saw the labor hands stiffen as if a foreman had stepped into a break room to count heads. Old work reflexes. Old injuries.
The labor tables went quiet in a bad way. Not respectful. Calculating. It was the kind of quiet that comes before a scuffle, before a stoppage, before someone decides the only leverage left is to make a machine hurt. A low murmur rose. Little phrases he knew from the shafts. They will bury it. They always bury it. Someone said rations. Someone said a name of a boy who came out of a pod shaking and never stopped.
A woman laughed once, short and wrong, and it died on her tongue.
Katarinov felt the room split along an invisible seam. Contractor cloth and clean badges on one side. Work-worn sleeves and patched boots on the other. Between them the tables like barricades. Above them the memorial plaques. Brass and plastic. Names without rank. Death without paperwork.
The supervisors kept talking as they moved, as if motion itself was authority. Their lead lifted one palm in apology, already halfway turned. We’ll brief command. We’ll convene the right technical group. We’ll protect the integrity of the data.
Integrity, Katarinov thought. Meaning: out of sight. Out of reach. Out of the only place where fear could be made to stand still long enough to be measured. He shifted his weight and the saint-medallion in his pocket pressed cold against his ribs. He did not touch it. He watched the exits, watched hands near door controls, watched the moment the ship could decide it was two ships.
Katarinov did not lift his voice. He spoke the way he spoke when a fire alarm was real and you had seconds to decide if you lived. Flat. Procedural. He let the supervisors keep their calm and he named the motion underneath it.
“This is an adjournment without record,” he said. “It is a walkaway dressed in polite language.”
They started to protest, to explain the sensitivities, the liability, the vendor requirements. He cut none of it with anger. He cut it with citation. Commissioning charter, emergency clause, critical-system review. The words were not for them alone. They were for the room, for the people who needed something hard to hold.
“Until primary logs are secured, review stays in public session,” he said. “That is not my preference. That is the clause.”
He looked past the clean badges to the doors, to the hands that wanted to touch controls. He felt the ship’s old habits in the bodies around him, the drift toward sides and exits.
“No one walks out with the story,” he said, and it sat down between them like a steel bar. “We secure the truth first. Then we argue.”
He put a frame on it while the heat was still in the air. Not a speech. A roster. He pointed and named a contractor specialist as timekeeper and then a deckhand from the labor tables, so no one could say later the clock belonged to one side. He had them state their names and badge numbers. He made the scribes write it large where the whole galley could read. Two runners next. Chosen from different decks. Their badge numbers called out, repeated back, logged. He set a handoff chain like a relay in a mine: Deck 11 console to runner, runner to witness, witness to screen tech. No private stops. No pockets. Every transfer spoken aloud and answered. The room’s anger had somewhere to stand.
He bought minutes the way a miner buys air: by sealing what can leak. He called a temporary halt on all noncritical work orders. No discretionary maintenance. No shift reshuffle. No quick wake-cycle prep done in a corner. Until the telemetry dumps were on the screens and checksum-verified in front of everyone. Not punishment. A procedural brace, clamped on hard, so no faction could peel off to plan.
The attempted adjournment did not end. It congealed into a pause he could enforce. Contractor staff, sensing the room had turned protocol into a ring, stopped pleading rank and began fighting over terms. Critical. Noncritical. Raw. Redacted. Who touched what and when. Katarinov let the argument burn narrow and contained. The galley stayed one piece long enough for footsteps to come back down The Shaft with proof.
The runners came back sweating, hair damp at the temples, their lanyards swinging like pendulums. One carried a small gray drive case with two tamper seals, red wax over the latch the way the old shaft bosses used to do on blasting caps. The other had a brick of printouts hugged to his chest, the pages still curled from heat, toner smell cutting through cabbage and recycled air. They set both on the table Katarinov had marked with a strip of tape. No one touched. Everyone watched the seals.
Katarinov leaned in until his breath fogged the plastic. He read the numbers on the seals out loud. The timekeeper repeated them. The deckhand witness repeated them again, louder, and a scribe wrote them where the room could see. It was tedious on purpose. It made theft and “misunderstanding” into a public act.
Nadya moved before the contractors could start their objections. She had chalk dust on her fingers like a tic. She stepped to the public screen and took the corner pane with a hard swipe, overriding some bland corporate bulletin. A security man half rose. She did not look at him. She keyed in the first file header, and the screen filled with columns and a blocky time bar.
“This,” she said, and her voice stayed gentle because the children in the overflow corner were staring, “is the window. Shift marker: Blue-3 to Blue-4. Cold Vaults bay C-3, rack arc two. Pod nineteen through twenty-four.”
She pinned the timeline to the top so it could not scroll away. She added a second line beneath it. Wake order, med check, valve open command. Names appeared where names belonged. Badges. Console IDs. No one could hide inside the word incident.
Katarinov felt the room tighten around the data like a clamp. It was not anger now. It was attention. The kind miners give a cracked beam before it comes down. He watched faces track the time stamps, counting seconds, swallowing. He kept his hands flat on the table until the urge to grab the drive passed. Procedure first. Always.
She did not preach. She taught. She pointed at the first block of numbers and gave it a name the room could use. Two vendors. Two interface tables. Same port labels, different meanings. A map drawn by one hand and read by another. The console thought it was telling the pod to open a purge line and it was nudging a standby bleed. On the screen the command flag went green anyway. It looked clean. It was not.
She moved to the next trace. Valve timing drift. Milliseconds, small enough to hide inside the word tolerance. A slow lag in the actuator response that the contractor chart still colored amber, acceptable. But the lag stacked across three cycles and the purge arrived late, and late in cryo is not late, it is wrong. She tapped the timestamp where the waiver note appeared. A human signature, a checkbox, a short comment: “within spec.”
Then the handoff. Sensor A to Sensor B. The numbers stayed calm because they were true numbers about the wrong state. Stable pressure, stable temp, because the sensor was still reading the pre-purge chamber. She drew a line with her finger between two columns and made the lie visible.
Nadya did not leave the data as a wall. She broke it into questions like rungs. What changed. Firmware pushed to the cryo console at 03:[^12], revision tag that did not match the rack controller. Connector map swapped in the interface table, same labels, different pins. She circled it and made them say it out loud. What it caused. Purge came late and the readout stayed calm because it was reading the wrong cavity, a false-stable that looked like mercy on a chart. What we verify. Hands on metal: manual valve response test with stopwatch, cross-sensor comparison against an external probe, independent checksum on the firmware image pulled from the sealed drive. Who signs. Medical. Engineering. Watch lead. Three names, three pens. Each line a gate. No gate passed, no wake scheduled.
The warmth in the galley turned. Not softer. Useful. The shouting found a ledger to live in. Men and women who’d come to name a culprit began naming tasks. One offered to pull last month’s calibration stickers and photo them to the board. Another, grease under his nails, asked for a stopwatch and a witness for the valve test. A ration clerk volunteered to log every consumable draw so no one could hide theft inside shortage. The contractor people tried to cut in with thick words. Nadya only looked at the screen. Asked them to put a finger on the line.
When she comes to the last gate, who signs, and who watches, the room has a single diagram in its head. Not rumor. Not faction talk. A chain with links numbered. The display holds the remedy as well as the wound: which valves must be timed by hand, which sensors must be cross-checked, what checksum proves the image is true. And there it is, the pinch point. The pages that matter sit behind restricted logs and locked firmware, and now everyone understands why that lock is power.
Contractor security came in on the galley’s warm air like it was smoke and they meant to choke it. Three of them in clean gray with the corporate patch still sharp. They took the space by the public screen and stood shoulder to shoulder. Not looking at the memorial plaques. Not looking at the tables. Looking at hands. Looking at who might reach.
The lead man held his badge up as if the plastic itself carried law. He spoke in those smooth phrases that never named a person. Medical privacy. Vendor intellectual property. Chain of command. Each one an excuse with a lock inside it. He said the restricted logs were patient records. He said the firmware layer was sealed under warranty. He said the display could show summaries but not raw. Like a priest offering scripture but not the book.
Katarinov watched faces change as it landed. Not anger first. Calculation. Men in work suits with tendon scars and women with ration ink on their fingers hearing the same thing: You are to take it on trust. You are to restart a machine that can kill your sleeping with nothing but a corporate chart and a promise.
Behind him someone laughed once, short and ugly, and then stopped. A mug hit a table. The sound ran the length of the room. Nadya’s chalk stayed between her fingers like a small weapon with no blood on it.
The security lead nodded toward the screen. You can have the checklist, he said. You can have the gates. You cannot have the key. He kept his tone level, like he was talking down a child near an airlock.
Katarinov felt the old mine-rule rise in him, the one that said a tunnel does not care about your badge. He didn’t step forward. He didn’t touch the screen. He looked at the man’s boots on the galley deck and then at the hands of the people around the tables. He heard the room take its breath and hold it, waiting to see if the ship would be run like a workplace or like a pit where men died quiet so the numbers stayed clean.
Katarinov did not take the bait and start naming valves and tolerances. He let the engineers keep their words for later. He put his own weight on the thing under it. Who gets to see. Who gets to decide. He spoke as if reading an emergency card, plain enough that even the tired could follow. Without raw access, he said, every wake cycle is a молитва with a wrench in the hand. You can call it procedure but it is only faith dressed up in checkboxes.
He told them he would not let procedure be turned into a club. Not for the contractors to beat the deck crews quiet and not for the deck crews to beat the contractors out of fear. Procedure was a bridge or it was nothing. If the ship was going to move again then the audit would happen where the ship lives. In the galley. On the public screen. With witnesses who eat the same ration and breathe the same air. Objections could be spoken and entered, time-stamped, signed. Not whispered into a private log. Not buried under a performance summary. He held his hands open as if to show he carried no tool but the rule itself.
Security said precedent as if it were a hull crack. If raw logs went up here, it would go up everywhere. The vendor seal would be broken. Contracts would bleed. He spoke of liability and proprietary layers and the risk of a crowd mistaking noise for diagnosis. Katarinov let him finish. He could feel the room tilt toward the easy answer, toward taking the screen by force and calling it justice.
He gave them a harder one. No copies. No personal slates. No off-ship distribution even in message drafts. No hands on consoles except assigned tech under camera and council eye. But full read access in scheduled windows, on the public display, time-stamped at the moment of view. And a written register of every line still withheld, who ordered it, and why. Signed. Posted.
He set it down as a trade with edges you could cut your hand on. Restart in stages. No leaps. Each checklist gate met in order and only once. Each gate witnessed and signed by a mixed council, med, contractor tech, labor deck, and an educator to translate the failure into plain steps. They would stand there for every wake cycle until revalidation. The ship moved only to the last verified line and stopped.
The bargain put bodies where rumors liked to live. Badges opened the sealed pages only when the mixed council stood shoulder to shoulder, breath fogging the same air. No private slate glow, no pocket copies. The big screen carried the raw lines as they were, not softened. Objections went into the register aloud, stamped and signed. The fight moved off permission and onto requirement.
The screen took the room’s heat and gave it back as light. Lines of uncompacted telemetry scrolled up in hard columns, no smoothing, no friendly colors. Pressure ripple maps overlaid the pod arcs like bruises on a body. Valve-cycle counts climbed in tight ladders, some rungs too close together, some spaced like honest work. Thermal gradients lay across the chambers in thin bands, the kind you saw on hull plating after a bad weld. Cold where it should be warm, warm where it had no business.
Katarinov stood with his shoulders squared and his hands still, as if motion might make the numbers lie. The old miner in him listened for the sound behind the sound. The galley’s clatter died off. Mugs paused half-raised. A chair leg stopped scraping. It went quiet in the way a tunnel goes quiet when the rock speaks and everyone understands it at once.
He watched the faces take it in. Contractor staff with their neat collars and defensive eyes. Labor deck men and women with grease under the nails, counting cycles like they counted rations. Med techs blinking too fast. Nadya near the edge of the screen, braid tight, chalk-stained thumb tucked into her fist as if she could write the truth onto the air if the display failed.
The data was ugly but not random. That was the dangerous part. Patterns you could follow meant someone could be wrong on purpose or wrong by habit. The ripple maps showed repeat spikes at the same minute offsets, clustered around handoff points: where one vendor’s control loop ended and another began. In the valve logs, a set of chambers hunted, opening and closing as if searching for a stable line and never finding it. The thermal traces lagged behind the commands by a few seconds, then surged past, like a burn after numbness.
Katarinov felt his jaw tighten. Incomplete governance. Incomplete documentation. Whole lives stacked in cold metal. He kept his eyes on the time stamps. No poetry in it. Only record. He could feel the room’s anger looking for a target and he could feel, underneath that, the older fear: that the ship could not afford the truth.
Katarinov did not argue the meaning of anything that was not in the columns. He lifted his hand and set two fingers against the glass like a datum point. He tracked the time stamps down the scroll and spoke in the same clipped cadence he used for airlock calls. Here. Here again. You see the handoff. Vendor A control loop drops its flags and Vendor B takes the line and the jitter starts, a small wobble that grows teeth. The numbers did not get afraid on their own. They were being told something different.
A contractor tried to reach for interpretation, load transients, acceptable variance, but Katarinov cut it off with process, not anger. Define fault. Define threshold. Show it in the manual or in the commissioning addendum. If it is not written, it is not permission. If the alarm repeats inside the same window twice, it triggers a hold. If a valve hunts past its cycle count, it triggers a hold. If a thermal gradient crosses the red line, it triggers a hold and a human check, not a remote clear.
He kept his finger on the time. He made the room look where he looked. No one won by volume. Only by proof.
Nadya moved to the screen like she belonged there. Not in front of Katarinov, not behind him either. Beside the plots, close enough to lay a fingertip on a spike without smearing the glass. Her voice stayed small so the room had to lean in.
She took the contractor language and broke it into steps you could teach a child in a corridor. When this pressure line climbs past the mark, you stop. You do not argue. When the same alarm repeats in the same window, you do not mute it, you recheck the seals and log the hands that touched them. When this temperature drifts while the command stays flat, you assume sensor error until a manual gauge agrees.
Heads nodded. The anger did not die. It changed shape. Men started asking where the gauges were stored and who had keys.
With the raw lines up like a wound you could not dress, the talk shifted. Names were written under tasks, not under blame. Three wake cycles back, audit each handoff log. Count the consumables against the requisitions and the trash. Pull the manual gauges, lay them on the ports, read them in front of witnesses. Dissent stayed. It was pinned to the plot it challenged and signed.
A habit took the room by the throat and made it stand up. Numbers came up on the screens and were read out like roll call. Thresholds got circled in grease pencil on a printed strip and taped where hands could not miss them. Objections were spoken once and written down, name to line, time to line. Truth quit being a memo. It became work done in public.
The antechamber cycled with a patient mechanical indifference. Doors dogged. Valves hissed. The air changed its taste from galley warmth to dry antiseptic and cold metal. Katarinov watched the gauge needles settle and did not let his eyes go first to the frost on the inner door or the silhouettes of the pods beyond. He went to the board.
It was a slab of polymer bolted to the bulkhead, meant for sterile notices. Someone had wiped it clean and ruled it with tape. Across the top: POWER BUDGET. Under that: STAFF ROSTER, names in block print, command and labor mixed on purpose. Below: CONSUMABLES, each item tallied twice, once by contractor hand and once by a hand that had grease under the nail. Syringes. Warm blankets. Electrolyte packs. Seal gel. Spare O‑rings. The kind of small things that make a wake cycle either routine or a funeral.
At the bottom were the abort thresholds. Circled in red grease pencil. Pressure delta. Temp drift per minute. CO₂ rise in the wake room. A hard line for each, no language like “as needed,” no room for interpretation. Katarinov read them out in the same tone he used for fire drills and hull-breach response. Like he was reading a manifest.
He made it call and response so the words couldn’t float away. “Abort delta P.” A tech answered with the number. “Confirm.” A labor rep answered. “Recorded.” Someone at the back repeated it, a beat late, to prove he’d heard. Katarinov moved down the list. Power margin. Staffing. Sterility seal integrity. Manual gauge availability. Each item spoken, each answer attached to a mouth.
He watched faces as they answered. People who wanted to be seen complying. People who wanted to see who would flinch. He kept his own face still. Procedure was the only bridge they had that didn’t require trust.
When the last threshold was spoken and the last confirmation came back from the far tables, he put his thumb on the saint-medallion inside his pocket through the cloth, not to pray, just to remember weight. Then he nodded once toward the inner door and signaled the cycle complete.
Inside C‑3 they took their marks without being told twice. It looked like a drill but the stakes stripped it of theater. Contractor tech hunched at the console with his sleeves rolled and his jaw tight, fingers hovering as if the keys could bite. At the access log a labor rep set his pen down beside the timestamp strip and kept his eyes on the door seals, not on the tech. The medic laid out triage in a narrow lane of light, blankets stacked, airway kit open, ampoules counted and recounted, so no one could later say they meant to.
A second pair shadowed every hand. When a latch was turned, another hand pointed at it and spoke the number and the state. When a seal gel tube came out, the cap was shown, the lot code read, the squeeze witnessed. Nothing moved without a mouth on it.
Nadya stood off-center where she could see the three arcs of pods and the faces behind the masks. She listened to the console prompts and gave them back in plain ship talk. What the line meant. What it could do to a heart. What a bad frost pattern looked like. She made the sequence a shared timetable, so tension had somewhere to go besides rumor.
They started the wake like a burn plan, not a miracle. Ramp. Soak. Stabilize. Each word said aloud, each word answered back, so no one could later pretend they thought it meant something softer. The console threw its thin light across masked faces and the pod arc lay in its frost-hush.
On the second minute the temperature trace twitched: a hair outside the expected drift. No one moved to cover it with a story. Katarinov held up his hand and the room obeyed. Redundant feed was called. Numbers compared. The variance got written on the public screen with a timestamp and a short note: HOLD. VERIFY. TEARDOWN LATER.
The sequence resumed only when the line came back true. Procedure held them like a rail in a bad corridor, not to punish, just to keep them from slipping.
The pod vented with a thin sigh and a spill of warmed air that smelled of plastic and old breath. The sleeper came up coughing once, then again, and the monitor lines steadied like they meant it. Triage worked the checklist where all could see: pupils, tremor, swallow, hydration. Nadya kept her voice low, anchoring him in small facts. The contractor signed. The labor rep signed. Katarinov signed last.
When the last traces leveled inside tolerance the room let go together. Hands eased on mugs. Backs came off their braced angles. A laugh broke and died as if it had spoken out of turn. Nadya rewrote the sequence clean on the board, each step numbered, a blank beside each for faults, objections, better ways. Katarinov told them to duplicate the raw log now and post it untouched before any man could prettify it. No speeches. Just the weight shifting off fear and onto work, one wake proven and the next already held to the same light.
Cold Vaults C‑3 reopened on a cadence that felt like penance. Power came up in measured steps, breaker by breaker, with the readbacks spoken plain and slow so anyone standing under the dry lights could follow. The antechamber stayed a choke point by choice. Boots stopped on the threshold line. Gloves were checked for pinholes. Seals were wiped and then wiped again. Two people signed each other’s work. Names were read out loud and answered out loud, like roll call before a shift drop. A laminated checklist hung beside the console and a second copy lay on a steel tray, the paper version for anyone who mistrusted screens.
Katarinov stood half turned, one hand on the bulkhead as if he could feel the ship’s pulse through the ribs. He watched the small rituals accrete into a barricade against the old habit of “good enough.” He knew how a man could skip a step and still look competent. He knew how the lights could stay steady while something ugly grew behind a panel.
The first sound was not the hiss of nitrogen or the click of relays. It was the scrape of pens and the soft throat-clearing of people who had agreed to be counted. A contractor tech recited firmware versions. A union rep repeated them back. A medic called out temperatures, and a garden worker wrote them down because hands that never touched a cryo console still breathed the same air.
In the arc of pods the frost stains looked like old bruises. The gantry lights made everything flat and honest. A warning label in English had been overpainted with block Cyrillic: НЕ ВЕРЬ ТИШИНЕ. Don’t trust the quiet.
Katarinov kept his brass medallion pressed in his pocket with his thumb until the edge bit. He did not say much. He did not need to. He held the line where procedure met mercy, where one more signature might mean one less body carried out under a thermal blanket. When the final seal was verified he nodded once, not permission but acknowledgement, and the room moved together: citizens of a machine that could not be allowed to forget them.
The bay fills the way a settlement square fills after a siren. Not with mouths open for a show but with people who understand the ledger is shared. They come through the sterility doors in pairs, slow, faces bare of bravado. A garden tech stands shoulder to shoulder with a medic, hands still smelling faintly of nutrient slurry under the alcohol wipe. A rations clerk with a tablet and a grease pencil posts beside an EVA lead whose suit scars are older than this hull. A labor council rep takes a place where contractor staff used to stand alone, and the contractors do not wave them off. They make room.
No one is called extra hands. That language is gone. Each person is counted like a spare seal in an airlock kit. Redundancy against habit. Redundancy against fatigue. Redundancy against the quiet little choice to skip a confirm because the schedule is biting.
Katarinov watches the line form at the console and he notes who reads and who listens. He watches the eyes track the same numbers. He does not raise his voice. He simply stays until the last person understands they are not here to be reassured. They are here to witness.
They lay the work out where it cannot hide. The console feed is thrown up on a scarred public panel bolted to the wall, big enough that a man at the back can read it. Codes come up in contractor shorthand and someone, usually Nadya or a rations clerk with quick hands, turns them into ship talk. Brown alarm. Grey drift. Red stop. The translation is spoken, then written on the board in grease pencil and time-stamped on paper. Nothing that can be erased with a reboot.
Katarinov watches the small choices. The temperature ramp, the anticoagulant window, the valve order. He treats each one like a weld in a pressure hull. Not craft, not preference. A load-bearing decision with names attached.
The threshold into the wake-room became a square with rails. A call, a hand, a confirm. Three voices for one act. Katarinov made them speak the patient’s status plain, like a vote taken in open air, awake, hypoxic, bleeding, stable. No soft words. No contractor gloss. Questions rose without clearance. Objections were written and time-stamped before anyone touched the next latch, because later was the graveyard of good men.
When the cycle closes the air in the bay does not turn sweet. It turns workable. They stand down the way a crew stands down after a fire drill that found real smoke. The last checklist is copied by hand, twice, and signed, one set sealed for Cold Vaults, one carried to The Shaft and pinned where gossip used to live. The margins stay open on purpose. Amendments are not insult. They are law. If they will live by machines, then the machines will be run like a public thing, in light.
Katarinov takes the route to C-3 the way a man walks a seam he does not trust. Not fast. Not slow for theater. He keeps one hand on the rail where the paint has worn to bare alloy. The Shaft is awake around him. Carts, boots, the low quarrel of pumps. He does not look for eyes. He looks for panels.
At the first junction box the old habit rises in him. Open it, read it, solve it, move on. He stops. He calls two people forward who have no reason to be there except that they breathe the same air. A garden tech with nutrient stains on her sleeves. A junior comms runner with a split lip from last week’s drill. He points with two fingers, like counting.
Name it, he says.
They blink at the latch as if it might bite. The garden tech clears her throat. Seal failure. Condensation in the connector. A short to chassis. The comms runner adds: bad firmware handshake, false green, alarm suppressed. He makes them say how it would show up in a body. Slow wake. Shiver that won’t stop. Confusion. Bleed under the skin like frost.
He does not correct them. He makes them open the panel and touch nothing until they’ve called out the power state and tagged it. He makes them read the label that was half torn off and write it again, clean, in block letters. Then he makes them close it and test it with a second meter. Two instruments, two witnesses. No faith in a single needle.
Down the corridor there are more. A pressure door actuator that chatters when it should seat. A purge valve line with a clamp set backwards by someone in a hurry. He does not reach in first. He waits. It costs time. It costs patience. It buys a kind of calm the ship never had when competence was private property.
At the antechamber he takes out the paper log and sets it on the wall brace. He draws a simple column. Panel. Risk. Mitigation. Names. He does not write rank. He writes who stood there and spoke in the light.
He catches himself reaching, the old reflex to lean in and make it right before anyone can see the wrong. He lets his hand hang at his side. The crew watch him. They want the quick fix. They want the story where one man knows and the rest just survive it.
He turns his shoulders so the open panel is not a secret. He says what he sees. Not theory. Not blame. A nicked insulation sleeve. A connector seated proud. A tie too tight where vibration will saw through in a month. He names the hazard and makes someone else name the consequence. He makes them say it in body terms. Heat. Cold. Pressure. Blood.
You, he says, and points with the same two fingers. Tell me why it failed.
They stumble. They guess. He does not rescue them. He waits until the right words arrive or the wrong ones are corrected by another mouth. Then he nods once, like stamping a permit.
At the log he draws a single mark beside the speaker’s name. No rank. No favor. Just witness. And at the end of each fix he asks again, quieter. What did we learn. Who can repeat it.
When the mouths start, thin jokes, rolled eyes, the old line that the schedule is the law, he does not raise his voice. He lets the silence lengthen until it is heavier than their impatience. Then he slows his hands. He makes them read the step aloud. He makes them point to the valve, to the breaker, to the tag, and say what it does and what it costs if it lies. Time, yes. But also skin and lungs and memory.
We have time, he says, because we will make it.
He does not argue motives. He does not trade pride for pride. He trades in procedure. If a fix cannot be explained to a tired person at three in the ship’s morning, it is not a fix. If it cannot be repeated by another set of hands, it is not approved. His authority becomes a gate you can see through.
Nadya takes the wake-room the way a foreman takes a safe corner in a bad shaft. She drags the bench to face the screens. She draws a sequence on the board with ship-chalk and numbers it. Call. Response. Hands on the rail. Eyes on the readout. Say it back. No skipping because the pod looks fine. She makes the medic and the contractor tech recite the basics until their faces go blank and the words turn into muscle.
They set it up so skill can travel without them. Nadya’s lesson sheets get cut down, sealed in laminate, clipped to console rails where cold fingers can find them. Call-and-response printed in big type. Katarinov stops issuing orders like passwords. He posts them in plain words on the plates in The Shaft and leaves a blank line for amendments and names. Knowledge becomes a ration shared.
The word normal thins out in his mouth until it means nothing. It had been a sound you could lay over a headache. Lights steady. Fans turning. A green line on a screen and a tidy checklist signed at the bottom. A person could pretend that was a promise. Now he reads it like paint over rust.
He walks The Shaft on a slow watch and sees how the ship tries to soothe itself. Contractor LEDs burn clean and white, no flicker, like a staged sunrise. Under them the seams are still there, the welds from three different yards, the gaskets cut to fit by hands that never met. He stops by a utility panel and lays two fingers on the latch. The metal vibrates with pump load. It always did. Only now he hears it as a question.
A junior tech tries to hand him a console report. Closed ticket. Firmware updated. He does not take it right away. He asks which vendor wrote the patch and which vendor wrote the sensor driver it sits on. The tech blinks, embarrassed, then angry, then tired. Katarinov waits. In the pause the ship’s hum becomes a kind of testimony.
He makes them pull the panel. He makes them find the interface where a new board meets an old harness and the connector is half a millimeter proud. He makes them name what could happen. Phantom alarms that train you to ignore alarms. A heater that reads warm while it cooks a sleeping person’s veins. A valve that reports closed while it leaks you dry into the walls.
He does not call it sabotage. He calls it unknowns. Unknowns are honest. Unknowns can be shared.
In the Cold Vaults an access log prints clean and perfect, but he watches the hands that use it. He watches Nadya stand with a blanket over her forearms like armor, watching the numbers, forcing the call and response, not letting a smooth interface turn into permission to hurry. Procedures stop being theater. They become a way of not lying to each other about risk.
A stamp is just ink. A closed ticket is just a file put to sleep. He watches how men used to lean on those things the way they leaned on a rail in low g, letting it take their weight. Not anymore. If a module is provisional then it is not a shameful word you whisper to keep the schedule. It is a condition you keep in your mouth until it tastes like metal.
He starts requiring the weak points spoken. Not in a meeting where words go soft. At the panel. With the cover off. With the harness in your hand and the connector counted and the torque called out. Name the vendor boundary. Name what firmware talks to what sensor. Name what happens if power sags two percent in the middle of a wake cycle. If you cannot name it you do not sign it.
They begin to carry lists of unknowns like ration cards. Posted where anyone can read them. Not to scare people. To stop the old habit of pretending. A green line is not safety. It is only a screen that has not yet learned how to tell the truth.
Deck-line status quits acting like gravity. A title printed on a badge does not move anyone anymore unless the body wearing it is there in the cold light with the cover off and the smell of hot insulation in the air. Katarinov watches a contractor supervisor try to settle a dispute with rank alone and sees the old reflex in the crew. Eyes down, mouths shut, waiting for the order to become fate. He breaks it. He asks for the explanation, slow and plain, with hands on the rail. If the expert cannot teach it, then it is not expertise the ship can afford. If a decision cannot be witnessed at the panel, it is treated like a rumor. Authority becomes a thing you carry in your palms, not in your signature.
Quiet work no longer buys you praise. A job done with the hatch shut and no witness is treated as open, not from fear but from memory. The hidden shortcut is how a body gets priced into the schedule. So he insists on hands present, names spoken, tools laid out where anyone can count them. If it cannot be shown, it is not finished.
They quit saying all green like it was a prayer. The boards start carrying honest colors. Amber for things not understood. Red for things no one will touch until parts arrive. In the galley and in The Shaft they speak the unknowns out loud, names and numbers, so no man can hide behind a report. Safety becomes what you can point to, open, and teach.
It starts as a rule pinned to the notice plate in The Shaft with three signatures under it, command and labor and med. NO SOLO HANDS ON CRITICAL. The letters are blocky and plain. Not a threat. A fact like pressure and fire.
Katarinov reads it twice anyway. He watches men stop and read and keep walking slower, as if the corridor itself narrowed. He thinks of all the places a lone body can lie with a spanner in his hand and nobody knowing what he touched last.
They make it practical. A second person is not there to argue. He is there to see. To say the numbers out loud when the gauge needle shivers. To call out a torque value before the wrench turns. To put a finger on the line tag and speak it so the wrong valve does not get the mercy of a tired hand. The watcher signs after. Not before. The ink is not ceremony. It is accountability that can be traced when the alarms come.
The first shift hates it. It doubles the time in the tight places. It steals sleep. It makes small men feel like children. A contractor tech complains about inefficiency and Katarinov tells him the ship has had enough efficient deaths. He does it without raising his voice.
Soon it spreads where rules usually don’t. Firmware patches in comms. CO₂ scrubber cartridge swaps. Reaction-mass feed checks. If you touch it and it can kill the ship, you do it with a witness. Two sets of gloves in the panel light. Two bodies braced in the same vibration.
The log changes. Not just work orders but names of people who learned. Who watched and could now do it. The watcher is taught to ask why, because a witness who cannot question is only furniture. Katarinov keeps his saint-medallion in his pocket and his other hand on the rail, listening to the call-and-response of readings like a litany. The ship begins to sound less like a factory and more like a crew that intends to arrive.
In Cold Vaults C‑3 they stop talking about throughput like it is harvest. The schedule stretches until it looks like mercy. Pods are opened slower, hands washed twice, seals inspected under lamp and then under thermal. The checklist grows teeth. New lines in hard print: confirm vendor code. Confirm firmware rev. Confirm heater loop pressure before and after. Say it. Have it said back.
Mixed diagnostics used to be a private language on a screen. Now it is read aloud in the dry air where anyone can hear it. Numbers spoken like coordinates. A second set of eyes on the arc graphs when they stutter. Someone takes photos of the console with a stamped time and the pod ID and pushes them into the log. Not as proof for command. Proof for the next exhausted shift that will come in with salt on their lips and a headache from the pumps.
Katarinov stands in the antechamber with his gloves tucked in his belt, watching the ritual of it. He hates the waste of hours and he hates the old way more. Speed is how authority hides. Proof is how the ship remembers.
In The Shaft the plates turn from soft talk to hard record. Tin boards scraped clean and ruled with tape into columns. DATE. SYSTEM. STATUS. OWNER. WITNESS. NOTES. What failed is written plain. What is still provisional is marked so in ink you cannot smudge with a sleeve. Interface quirks get named like bad weather, CO₂ manifold B to vendor rack D runs hot under load, don’t trust the green light alone. Missing parts are listed with their true lead times, not the hopeful ones, and the bins they should have been in. Beside it, a roster: who is cleared for EVA, who can flash firmware without bricking a node, who has bled in the Cold Vaults and knows the signs. Entries stay up until replaced, not torn down to soothe anyone.
Katarinov puts it into writing, the kind that binds. No critical log is valid until ink crosses lines so skill cannot be kept like a ration and traded for favors. After any action that could kill air or heat or wake, he orders a teach-back. Two minutes. Say what you did. Say why. Make the words common.
Nadya takes the wake-room like it is a classroom that can kill you. She drafts helpers from galley and garden, the steady ones, and sets them to blankets and electrolytes and the consoles. She makes orientation a drill: read the screen aloud, write the fault, mark the time, call for a second witness in a voice that stays flat. Knowing, she tells them, is not a perk. It is air.
The first weeks grind like grit in a bearing. The antechamber to C‑3 grows a constant tail of bodies, boots planted on deck tape, faces turned toward the red access lamp as if staring could hurry it. The line is quiet but not calm. People hold their own clipboards now. Some are scavenged, some printed off a contractor stack and relabeled in thick marker. The paper smells of solvent and nervous sweat. The pens go missing and return with chain lanyards like tools.
Katarinov walks the choke points and counts time the way he used to count air. He watches the clock eat a shift in five-minute bites while the ship keeps moving and the pumps keep thudding. He hears the mutter: we are losing hours we do not have. He hears the other mutter too: we are buying hours we cannot afford to lose later. He does not answer with speeches. He answers by standing there until the next signature is made in the right box, until the witness prints their name and not just a slash. Procedure becomes a kind of ration, parceled out and argued over.
Wake-cycles become events instead of tasks. They draw staff from gardens, from galley, from maintenance that already ran lean. Blankets, saline, heat packs, the little inventory of what keeps a body from breaking when it comes back. Each cycle comes with a list and a list of the list. Power draw logged. Consumables logged. Faults logged even when no one wants to see them.
Contractor schedules, once posted like commandments, start coming down with corrections taped over them. The calendar stops being a private instrument. It becomes a board in The Shaft with hands on it. People point. People contest. “You can’t call it delay if you never wrote the risk,” someone says, and someone else answers, “You can’t call it safety if you never wrote the cost.” Katarinov watches the argument thicken into policy. He feels the ship learning a slower metabolism, painful and necessary, like a broken man relearning how to walk without hiding the limp.
The contractor techs went rigid under the new bodies in the bay, shoulders squared, hands clean, voices clipped. They narrated their work like a recital, pointing at cables and valves as if the air itself was the examiner, and each pause to answer a question landed on them like an insult. Their eyes kept sliding to the clock. Their pride was in speed. Their anger was in being slowed where the forms could see it.
On the labor decks the bitterness cut in the other direction. Men and women who had hauled reaction mass and patched seams were told to stand and watch, to be the second set of eyes, to put their names beside a contractor’s. But no gloves were issued for cold fittings. No meter was handed over. No hours were carved out of shift. Observe, they were told, and then go make quota.
It turned into a hard phrase in The Shaft, passed mouth to mouth between notice plates and tether rails. If you want my name, you want my training. If you want my witness, you give me the tools to witness. Otherwise it’s just a way to spread blame until no one can breathe under it.
Katarinov did not soothe them. He made the nuisance into law. A rota went up on the plates in The Shaft, names in two columns, primary and witness, stamped with times like shift bids. The bay got a window-clock and within that window a second set of eyes was not courtesy but requirement. If a man could not say back, in plain words, what a valve did or why a line was purged, then his pen stayed capped. No signing in fog. No signatures as insurance.
It dragged. Everything else took the drag too. Maintenance slots slid into one another, meetings ate sleep, tempers rose and fell like pressure. But faults quit happening in corners. A bad connector became a story with steps, a lesson with initials beside it, and the ship began to remember aloud.
Nadya takes the bottleneck and makes it a lesson you can eat beside. In the galley corner she runs five‑minute drills between ladles and ledger talk. Mock logs passed hand to hand. A vocabulary strip taped under ration numbers: purge, seal, witness, fault. She makes them practice the hard sentence (Need another set of eyes) until it comes out flat, not sharp. Extra bodies become ready hands. The question turns to preparedness.
The talk did not die. It hardened. It climbed out of mouths and onto paper. Men argued with fingers on the postings, not in corners. Whose signature meant command and whose meant only witness. Who got the first hours on a meter and who waited. Access was no longer a favor. It was earned in daylight. Delays were counted like rations, weighed against the old hunger for someone to blame.
In The Shaft Katarinov stopped where the traffic pinched. A conduit access panel jutted out at shoulder height and the pass narrowed to one man at a time. Beside it a strip of salvaged warm light had been smeared with thumbprints and coolant dust until it glowed like fat on stone. People drifted around him without looking up. Tool carts scraped. Someone’s boots rang hollow over a seam plate. The ship’s vibration never quit.
Nadya was there at the notice plates. No ceremony, no throat-clearing for attention. She held a fresh sheet flat with the heel of her hand and set the top edge against an old screw line as if the metal itself were a ruler. The paper was new but the corners weren’t allowed to be careless. Tape came off her wrist in measured lengths. She squared it. Pressed it down. Smoothed bubbles with two fingers until the page lay honest.
Katarinov watched the headings go up in plain words. Not codes. Not contractor abbreviations that made a man nod while his mind stayed blank. Step numbers. Verbs you could not hide inside. Check temperature. Confirm seal. Bleed line. Record reading. He saw the second lines under each one, smaller hand, different ink. Witness name. Posting point. If drift then stop. If drift then call. The kind of instruction that admitted the universe was always trying to slip a knife in.
Two deckhands slowed, read, and moved on. One came back, traced a line with a grimy fingertip like he was counting stitches. Nadya didn’t lecture. She just stood close enough that no one could pretend they hadn’t seen. Her braid was tight. Chalk dust still lived in the seam of her pocket. Teaching by presence. Governance by refusing to let the work be invisible.
Katarinov felt the old urge to take the sheet down and rewrite it himself, to own it so no one else could ruin it. He kept his hands in his pockets. The brass medallion pressed warm against his fingers through the cloth. He let her tape hold. Let the list belong to the corridor and not to an office.
A man asked, low, who signs where. Nadya pointed to the witness column without looking at Katarinov for permission. Katarinov nodded once anyway, not for them but for himself. The paper trembled in the ship’s hum and did not tear.
The checklist read like a man speaking to another man in a loud room. No acronyms to hide behind. No contractor patter that made the work look finished before it started. Each line was a verb you could do with your hands. Warm the line. Confirm the seal. Bleed the valve. Take the reading. Write it down. Beneath every step a second sentence sat like a brace under a beam. Witness: name and station. Post: plate number, Deck 8, Shaft junction. If drift, stop. If drift, call. If drift, do not compensate to make the graph pretty.
It took the superstition out of the Cold Vaults. It made error a thing you could point at instead of whispering around. A reading was not a private fact held in a console. It was a public weight, hung where anyone could see it shake. The paper carried the idea that numbers moved because systems moved, because welds and firmware and tired hands all had their say. It did not promise safety. It promised that no one would pretend.
Nadya came back with a second pen, the ink darker, stubborn. She did not correct the list so much as thicken it. Under the plain verbs she wrote the plain reasons. In shipboard English that carried the Slavic bones. Because cold metal lies. Because seals look clean when they are not. Because you will want to hurry and the pod will punish you for it. She added translations where contractor terms still clung, and she crossed out euphemisms until only the thing remained. The cautions were short. Not prayers. Not blame. A small why beside each step, the kind that stops a rumor from growing teeth.
She wrote in The Shaft with traffic sliding past her shoulder. When someone paused she lifted the pen and waited, like a teacher at a board, inviting the question to be asked out loud.
Katarinov took the pen and put his name down first, block letters, no flourish. Then he stepped away from the plate like it could bite, and said the next line was not for rank. Not for title. For liability. He called a maintenance tech, a medic, a galley rep. Each came in, shoulder to shoulder, and signed. Each hand made the work real.
The sheet trembled on its screws with the ship’s low, ceaseless shudder. Around it the corridor went on: boots and toolcarts, valves breathing, voices carried thin by the ribs of the spine. But he did not read the quiver as a warning anymore. He read it as witness. A thing that would not be allowed to happen quiet. Not here. Not again.