At each threshold I stopped and submitted to the flotilla’s favorite sacrament: the screening. A marshal with a sleep-smeared visor held out the scanner wand as if it were a censer. My wrist tag chirped its conditional clearance in the flat, offended tone of low battery, and the turnstile accepted me with the reluctant click reserved for people who might become a problem later.
“Satchel,” the clerk said, though I was already unbuckling it.
I laid the contents out on the inspection plate in the order that reassured them most: sealed reagent ampoules first, then the polymer note-sheets, then the improvised assay strips in their waxed sleeve. The assay strips were my constant humiliation. Official lab stock came in embossed cartridges and was treated like scripture. Mine were cut from salvage chromatography paper and dried over a heater coil, functional in a way that made administrators nervous.
“Count,” the clerk instructed. He wore an oversized sash that should have belonged to someone with authority and a spine-tunnel office, not a man stationed at an infirmary hatch with a stamp pad. The sash kept slipping off his shoulder; he adjusted it each time I moved, as if the fabric might wander into illegitimacy.
“Twelve nitrate,” I said. “Eight aldehyde. Six particulate binding. Four pH.” I held them up, one by one, like a child displaying teeth for inspection.
He pressed his dull stamp onto my transit chit. Ink that never quite dried, leaving smudges on my fingertips to match the ones I earned honestly. The stamp read: PERMITTED. WITH OBSERVATIONAL LIMITS. Under it, in smaller type: UNAUTHORIZED CONCLUSIONS VOID.
He glanced at my hand where the chemical burn was still pink along the knuckle. “Consultant Aurelia,” he said, performing courtesy in the way clerks performed everything, “you are reminded that findings require Registry harmonization prior to dissemination.”
“I am reminded daily,” I said, because that was truer than I liked.
He leaned closer, lowering his voice as if secrecy made the warning kinder. “Seasonal cough. Do not draft panic.”
I resealed my satchel with measured care. Panic was, unfortunately, a variable I could not control with assay strips.
Inside the infirmary proper I reverted to my most efficient mode: economical motion, minimal eye contact, maximal compliance. The intake ledger sat on its pedestal like a shrine, its polymer pages already warped at the corners from too many anxious hands. I did not ask how many were sick; that question always earned a theatrical sigh. I asked for bunk identifiers, time-stamps, and whether the fever marks were new or merely newly acknowledged.
A nurse, unbadged, therefore unofficial, pointed with the tip of her pen, as if touching the wrong line might trigger an audit. I copied the numbers in my own hand, careful to make my script legible enough to be admissible if I ever had to argue for power draw or access.
Then I watched what everyone else treated as decoration: the condensation traps along the bulkhead seams. Clear cups, meant to reassure the eye, quietly collecting the flotilla’s breath. The patients watched me watch them and looked away, embarrassed, as if moisture were not evidence. I loosened one trap’s collar a quarter turn and listened for the soft complaint of pressure imbalance. It answered. Quietly. Predictably. Like a clerk denying you while stamping yes.
The air was more candid than any bulletin. It had a faint, metallic bite at the back of the tongue, the signature of scrubber media pushed past its polite service interval, plus a sour note of coolant that no one would admit to smelling. When I inhaled through my mask I could feel the resistance change in tiny steps, like valves deciding whether to cooperate. Along the vent lips and trap rims, a powder-fine grit had begun to settle in crescents, obedient to airflow patterns that should not exist on a stable loop. I did not call it sabotage. I did not call it failure. I translated it into the only language that moved power and doors here: “Observed particulate accumulation at condensate collection points; likely system-side contamination pathway; recommend log access for harmonization.”
Families handled illness the way they handled everything else: as paperwork. Coughs were itemized, breaths timed against the second hand of a ration-clock, children’s names offered up with the same dulled resignation as water chits. I answered in approved cadence, symptom onset, duration, exposure, docket, precise enough to satisfy a clerk’s ear. If I sounded like a bulletin, no marshal could accuse me of drafting panic.
When the queue-line stalled, some fresh crisis pulling the official hands back into triage, I worked the edge like an unlisted subcontractor. Swab. Label. Seal with borrowed tape that still carried somebody else’s stamp residue. I kept my satchel half-open, tools visible, posture deferential. Attention on Civitas‑IX is a net; I learned to let it slide over me without catching.
I re-entered the stream of bodies and clipboards as if it were a test run with a stable protocol. Not because the protocol was stable, but because pretending it was kept me from improvising in ways that would later be classified as “unlicensed action.”
“Sample request,” I said, at a volume calibrated to carry without sounding like a speech. “One respiratory swab, one condensate scrape, one waterline wipe. Voluntary, with witness.” The last word mattered. In Civitas‑IX, reality required a second set of eyes before it could be filed.
A man with a ledger sash drifted toward me on instinct, like bureaucracy had its own gravitational field. I nominated him with a nod. “Witness: Clerk: name and docket, please.” He looked briefly offended that I did not already know, then softened when I held out my polymer sheet already formatted: boxes, lines, the flotilla insignia watermark I had copied by hand badly enough to be legal.
I set the sheet flat on a crate so no one could accuse me of steering a thumbprint. “Consent: thumb, here. Counter-signature: witness, here. Time stamp: local cycle, to the minute.” I kept my fingers spread and visible. The burn on my hand pulsed under the glove, an unpleasant metronome that kept me honest about how much I had mishandled lately.
The patient extended her hand. She hesitated, then pressed her thumb down with the careful pressure of someone used to ration seals. Her child watched as if a medical act and a legal act were indistinguishable. On this hull, they mostly were.
I performed the swab with the same dryness I used when describing pump output: rotate, withdraw, cap, seal. The witness leaned in at the sealing step, hungry for procedural climax. I let him see the lot number I had scratched onto the tube. Improvised, yes, but traceable.
When I scraped the vent trap, the grit came up too easily, like it wanted to be collected. I did not narrate that. I wrote: “Condensate particulate present; quantity sufficient for assay.” Then I returned the sheet for the clerk’s counter-signature before anyone could decide my evidence was merely a rumor with gloves on.
I kept my phrasing inside the approved rails, not because I believed the rails led anywhere safe, but because anything outside them could be reclassified as “personal inference.” Every observation became conditional on something external: “consistent with,” “in excess of,” “as reported by duty log,” “pending confirmatory assay.” I measured in units the Registry liked (milliliters, cycles, breaths-per-minute) because numbers, unlike fear, could be stamped.
I asked for time marks down to the minute even when the clocks disagreed between hulls. I wrote both: local cycle and spine-tunnel standard, bracketed, with an asterisk noting drift. If I couldn’t obtain a signature, I logged the refusal as an event, with witnesses named, so the absence would read like data rather than defiance.
It was a small form of camouflage: if my sentences sounded like a clerk drafted them, clerks stopped listening for heresy. Panic is contagious here, but so is procedure. I leaned on the second one like a handrail and hoped it held.
Each swab and condensate scrape became a domesticated fact as soon as I pinned it to polymer. I wrote in the Registry’s preferred dialect of reality: hull code, deck letter, vent ID if I could find the corroded tag; “odor: saline-metal with phenolic edge” in the tiny box reserved for anything that might be called subjective if it overflowed. Visible particulates got their own line. I copied the scrubber bay’s cycle status exactly as posted, including its optimistic phrasing and missing decimals, and I noted that it was “reported” rather than “observed,” which is the difference between evidence and a punishable opinion. Then I boxed everything, initialed, and left no blank spaces for someone else to improve.
Then the procedure fractured at its seams, the way an over-tightened fitting fails: not with drama, but with a thin, betraying hiss. A woman in the queue fought her respirator seal with hands that had already done too many cycles of work and too few of sleep. Her fingertips skated on the rim; her tremor made the gasket mis-seat. The child beside her drew in, and the inhale went sharp, counted, wrong.
I did not raise a hand for a marshal or draft a requisition that would die in Seal Hall. I stepped in as if checking her mask for compliance, let my shoulder become a temporary privacy screen, and slid my last spare gasket from my pocket. One press, one twist, the seal caught. She gave a single, silent nod. I returned to my polymer sheets like an obedient instrument.
My satchel was the sort of order that only existed because I had built it with my own hands and then feared losing it. The outer flap closed with a scavenged buckle stamped “TABULARIUM. Inside, everything had a place in the way a bureaucracy insists everything has a form: humidity-sealed packets of assay strips arranged by expiry date that was mostly aspirational; two coils of translucent tubing with their ends heat-crimped shut like they were evidence; a cracked hand pump that wheezed as if personally offended by continued use; and a row of vials nested in foam that used to cradle someone’s luxury spirits.
The labels were my small act of obedience. Tight block script, all caps, no flourishes: HULL 6 / DECK C / CONDENSATE TRAP; SPINE-TUNNEL GRATE / RESIDUE; “BLANK” for controls I seldom had enough reagents to run. I wrote in the flotilla’s approved grammar (codes, timestamps, observed conditions) and only allowed myself one extra line in pencil on the back when something smelled wrong in a way the Registry did not have a box for. PENCIL, of course, being the illegal medium of people who wanted to erase themselves later.
There was no single instrument that would have made me credible. Instead I carried a dozen compromises. A cut syringe body for pipetting. A folded square of filter media as a makeshift particulate pad. A strip of foil with a scorched edge for quick flame tests when I could steal a minute near a galley vent. Enough to catch a trend before it turned into a headline. Never enough to make a captain surrender a supply locker or a clerk unlock a log.
The satchel’s weight was reassuring until it wasn’t. It pulled at my shoulder like a reminder that I could prove many things to myself and almost nothing to anyone who required a seal-press imprint to believe in air.
I could read the flotilla’s air the way some people read faces. The residue on a trap screen told me whether we were chewing through scrubber media or just recirculating our own damp breath; the sour bite that clung to a filter pad told me when something organic had started nesting where it had no permit to be. Condensation carried its own signature, slicks, crystals, a faint metallic sweetness that did not belong in anyone’s lungs. I did not need a committee to tell me that CO₂ breakthrough feels different in the back of the throat than a seasonal cough. My own body had become an uncredentialed instrument.
What I could not do was make that legible to anyone whose belief required an inked docket number. A clerk could stamp “NOTED” on my findings and thereby render them harmless. A captain could smile and call me thorough, then lock his access hatches “pending review.” Even Flaviana’s authority had edges: she could quarantine a person, not an infrastructure.
Insight, without a seal, was only private worry dressed in clean handwriting.
Proper analysis meant more than my improvised strips and offended hand pump. It meant heat. It meant spin. A stable draw long enough to run a heater block through a proper ramp and keep a centrifuge from stalling mid‑cycle like a sulking child. Those were not tools so much as declarations, and declarations required allocation.
Allocation meant a chit, a docket, a counter clerk with clean nails asking why a “technical consultant” needed eighteen uninterrupted minutes on a high‑load socket. Allocation meant my name entering the same ledger column as welders, cooks, and anyone else who ever tried to borrow more power than their rank justified. The Tabularium liked power the way it liked movement: measurable, billable, and suspicious when it was quiet.
I could almost hear the questions forming, and I could not afford to give them a timestamp.
The proof I needed lived behind polite barriers: scrubber efficiency curves, maintenance bypasses, anomaly flags that never made it into the bulletin summaries. All of it flowed through the Tabularium’s trunk line, where every query acquired a device ID, a timestamp, and, if you were unlucky, a marshal’s curiosity. I had neither the credentials to pull it nor the anonymity to ask.
The linkage I needed, shipment manifests cross‑indexed against the first cough reports and the exact decks where scrubbers began to “age”, sat in the Archive Bilge, under polite waterline humidity and impolite locks. Nothing moved there without dual authorization: two signatures, two seals, two liabilities. I could obtain neither without announcing, in triplicate, that I already believed someone had poisoned us with paperwork.
I kept to routes that did not merit a stamp: service ladders with rungs polished by a thousand unrecorded errands, cable crawls that smelled of warm insulation, the narrow backs of infirmary vents where the air was supposed to be clean and mostly wasn’t. If I was seen, I was “checking seals.” Everyone accepted seals. Seals were a religion on Civitas‑IX.
Sampling, I discovered, was bureaucratic behavior with gloves on. I bled condensate from trap lines the way a clerk bled testimony from a nervous petitioner: slow, without drama, letting the line speak until it could not. A twist of a purge screw, a held breath as the first cloudy drop fell (never trust the first drop) and then the clear fraction into a sterilized cap I had re‑baked in a cookware tin when nobody was watching. The cap clicked shut with the small satisfaction of a completed form.
Swabs went into waxed sleeves, sleeves into a zip pouch, pouch into my satchel against my ribs where it would warm and not freeze‑fracture on a cold deck. Every container received its due: time in flotilla cycle notation, hull name, deck, valve code, and the kind of terse description Registry clerks pretended not to admire. My handwriting was the only luxury I allowed myself, tight, legible, difficult to dispute. If someone later told me I had misread a valve plate, I wanted the ink to disagree on my behalf.
The corridors helped. In the humid junction boxes, labels blistered and peeled; I copied them anyway, tracing the ghost of a code like it was scripture. In a vent chase behind Infirmary Three, I found a maintenance bypass clamp that had been seated a fraction too eagerly, leaving a crescent of mineral crust. I scraped a sample into a cap and reseated the clamp exactly as I found it. I was not here to repair; repairs required authorization. I was here to make the universe, briefly, measurable.
When footsteps approached, I became uninteresting. I wiped my gloves as if I had finished nothing, tucked the satchel close, and looked like the sort of person who would apologize for taking up air. That, on this flotilla, was as good as a permit.
At each oxygen station I presented myself with the same phrase, “routine verification under consultant remit”, as if repetition could substitute for authorization. The attending techs would nod, half relieved that I was not there to ask for parts they did not have, half wary that my satchel implied paperwork. I let them keep their dignity. I did not touch their control panels. I watched.
The pump cycle was always a small liturgy: intake whine, pressure rise, the brief lull where everyone pretended the numbers meant safety. I waited through the lull and leaned to the vent lip with my strip and my own lungs held in reserve. The official display, when it existed, read cleanly enough to be stamped. The air did not. The gradients were wrong. Freshness pooling where it shouldn’t, heaviness lingering in corners like unfiled complaints.
In the stale pockets, beneath the bleachy tang of overused disinfectant, there was a faint bite of acid. Not dramatic, not cough-invoking on the first breath. Just enough to tell me neutrality had been negotiated away.
I didn’t argue. I wrote the drift, the valve code, the cycle mark, and I left before anyone could decide my silence was an accusation.
My assay strips were meant to reassure. They were small, obedient rectangles that usually went from nothing to a polite color that could be logged and forgotten. Here they darkened with the stubbornness of a grievance. CO₂ climbed in the hour after a filter-change stamp: after the seal had been pressed, after the clerk’s signature had sanctified “fresh media.” In vents that should have tasted like new scrubber resin, I caught particulates on the adhesive slides, fine as ash and too uniform to be honest dust.
Condensation traps, when bled, left a faint greasy meniscus that clung to the vial wall. Not the stringy slime of ordinary biofilm; this was slick, as if someone had taught the water to carry oil.
My burned hand protested each recheck. I ran the same line twice anyway, because one bad reading is a mistake, and two is a policy.
I cross‑referenced by necessity rather than privilege. Symptom onset came from whispered bedside histories traded for spare gasket tape; shift assignments I copied from rotas posted like prayers; water draws I inferred from the length and mood of ration‑chit queues. When I stitched it into a timeline, the clusters hugged shared plumbing and air exchange, not kin groups or market days. “Seasonal cough” could not survive my arithmetic.
By the end of each circuit I had what bureaucrats call “internal coherence” and what my chest called dread. The worst pneumonias clustered along the same distribution loops across hulls that officially shared nothing but despair. I translated that pattern into a neutral, petition‑ready summary: numbered observations, tolerances, dates, no verbs that implied intent. I did not write the conclusion my data kept trying to stamp.
The more hulls I cleared on my route, the less my notes behaved like independent findings and the more they behaved like one bureaucratic form that had been copied badly and distributed everywhere. The particulate slides looked identical under my improvised lens: the same fine, too-regular grains that caught light in a way honest corrosion never did. When I rinsed them off with reclaimed water, they did not smear like soot; they broke cleanly, as if manufactured to fracture.
The CO₂ breakthrough curves were worse. In each compartment tied to the same maintenance loop, the graph repeated with a discipline that would have impressed a clerk: stable for a short, blessed window after a filter-change stamp, then a predictable climb that ignored occupancy and shift schedules. I began to time it without meaning to, two hours, four, eight, watching the numbers rise as if they were responding to an instruction I could not see.
And the condensation residue. In one trap it could have been an anomaly, a technician’s careless hand, a bit of cooking oil carried by a vent backdraft. In five, ten, it became a signature. The meniscus clung to polymer like a bribe: thin, persistent, hard to scrub out without solvents we could not authorize. I took to lining vials in my satchel like contraband evidence, each one labeled with a location code and a date, as if the labels could protect me from what the contents implied.
At some point the overlaps stopped feeling like a gratifying convergence and started feeling like I was tracing a finger along a fault line that someone had already painted over. Every time I found the same profile again, same grit, same curve, same slick residue, I heard the quiet click of a seal press in my head. Not as reassurance. As warning.
I drafted my comparisons in the driest phrasing available: “recurrence,” “correlation,” “shared infrastructure pathways.” I left “counterfeit” and “sabotage” in the unsaid margins, where they nevertheless took up most of the page.
Once my notes started agreeing with each other, the flotilla’s small talk developed a new feature: omissions. People still spoke when I entered a compartment, but the sentences became modular: subjects removed, verbs softened, responsibility filed under “ambient.” A cough was no longer “from the filters,” it was “from conditions.” A missed maintenance stamp became “a scheduling variance.” When I asked for dates, eyes flicked not to me but to the nearest bulkhead node, as if it might invoice them for specificity.
In queue-lines my name began to travel ahead of me, not as accusation, simply as a warning label. I would hear it clipped short ”: and then the speaker’s mouth would close like a hatch dogged in a hurry. A marshal at a junction would straighten with professional boredom and place one hand near the seal on his holster, the gesture of someone who had been instructed to notice me without ever admitting it.
And the same places surfaced in every lowered conversation, recurring with the insistence of hazard signage. Not directions. Not advice. Coordinates for where curiosity gets processed.
Seal Hall was always spoken first, not as a place so much as a procedure with walls. To enter, you divested yourself of anything that could remember: unregistered readers, improvised sensors, even a pen whose metal clip might be “noncompliant hardware.” A clerk in a sash would accept your questions the way a medic accepted sputum, gloved, labeled, filed for later confirmation. They indexed curiosity into categories that sounded harmless until stamped: “maintenance variance,” “air-quality inquiry,” “suspected contamination pathway.” Permission there was not a concept; it was a laminated chit with an expiration hour, a seal impression you could feel with your thumb, and the humiliating knowledge that without it you were not a person but an unprocessed request.
Then there were the trunk-line taps where any telemetry request became a formal petition to be observed. I could feel the audit logic idling behind the bulkhead, waiting for a query to justify itself. A simple pressure log could be refiled as “pattern-seeking behavior,” stamped, indexed, and carried after me like a movable docket from hull to hull.
And then the Archive Bilge: spoken in the same tone people used for anesthetic stock, a thing you did not mention unless you had an authorization number already memorized. Supposedly it held the flotilla’s true maintenance ledgers and bilge-sample jars, sealed against “misinterpretation.” In practice it meant my conclusions could be technically correct and still unofficial, because the instruments that would convict them were filed under dual-signature and delay.
I kept my posture narrow on purpose. In Civitas‑IX, body language counted as an unfiled statement, and unfiled statements attracted marshals the way warm condensation attracted mold. So I made myself small in the approved dimensions: chin tucked, shoulders rounded as if I were apologizing to the air, satchel hugged tight to my side like a ration tin. My hands stayed occupied, assay strip in one, polymer sheet in the other, because busy hands read as “work,” and work was the closest thing the flotilla had to innocence.
My badge said TECHNICAL CONSULTANT in block ink with a faint smear where someone’s thumb had tested the stamp’s integrity. I treated that laminate like a pressure seal. A seal holds because you do not test its limits; you do not worry it with clever leverage. You do not ask it to accommodate your full weight.
There were ways to speak that let a clerk’s eyes pass over you without catching. I learned to trim my language until it fit preexisting categories: “routine verification,” “variance reconciliation,” “scrubber-media lot trace.” I could say “CO₂ breakthrough” if I paired it with “expected under load” and “calibration request.” I could not say “failing” unless I wanted to see my name appended to a memo about morale contamination.
Even my sampling had to look like housekeeping. I cut condensation from a trap and called it “moisture management.” I swabbed a cough-stained grate and called it “particulate characterization.” The difference was not scientific; it was administrative. One phrasing led to a quiet nod and a stamp. The other led to questions about who had authorized me to notice.
So I nodded at the right moments, accepted the delays as if they were weather, and wrote everything twice: once in clean petition language for counters and seals, and once, small, coded, for myself, on the back of polymer where my ink-stained fingertips could find it later.
In each infirmary queue I ran the same arithmetic, as if my mouth were another instrument requiring calibration. Numbers were admissible; motives were contraband. I could place a strip against a condensate smear, read the color change, and state “elevated particulate load” with a straight face. I could not say “someone diluted the media” without my badge turning into a liability tag.
So I spoke in maintenance units. I requested “scrubber cycle reconciliation,” not “why are people coughing.” I asked for “filter-lot cross-check,” not “who profited.” When a nurse leaned in and whispered that the night cough sounded different (wet, deeper) I wrote “symptom variance by watch” and pretended that was emotionally neutral.
Petitions had to sound like they would end in a broom, not a tribunal. “Calibration” implied consent; “inquiry” implied blame. Even my urgency needed a filing code. I learned to stack my concern inside acceptable nouns and let verbs do as little as possible.
A question shaped like an allegation would outrun me through the spine-tunnel, gaining stamps and enemies with every bulkhead. Pathogens at least needed air. My words only needed ears.
I had already seen what the flotilla did to a person who “warned” without a docket number. First, the small frictions: a turnstile that used to blink green held on amber until a marshal wandered over, polite as a form letter. Then the missingness. Ration chits that somehow failed verification, tool checkouts that became “pending review,” messages that returned stamped UNROUTABLE as if the network itself had developed a conscience. Doors did not slam; they simply began to require an escort, and the escort began to take notes.
Civitas‑IX did not need proof to discipline someone. It needed a classification, something it could file and circulate. “Panic instigator” was a convenient code: broad, sticky, and self-justifying. Once affixed, it made every breath you took look like an unauthorized broadcast.
The temptation was to state it in the plain, unfiled way my tongue preferred: media degradation past bulletin tolerances, CO₂ breakthrough arriving early, condensate carrying grit that did not belong in a closed clean loop. The case read infrastructural, not “seasonal.” But in Civitas‑IX, unsanctioned precision translated as accusation. Data without a counterstamp was just another story, and stories were contraband.
So I kept myself in the category they tolerated: useful implement, soft voice, correct forms. I carried urgency like a contraband blade (wrapped, unshown) until I could sheath it in sanctioned armor: seal-press imprint, dual signatures, a chain of custody that survived gossip. Without that, any conclusion of mine was just airborne rumor, and the Registry had protocols for neutralizing catalysts.
A sealed runner from the colonist infirmary stopped at the edge of my bench space with the rigid posture of someone who had borrowed authority for the walk and intended to return it uncreased. He kept his hands folded at his belt as if my work surface were not a table but a spill zone. Between us, the air stank faintly of oxidizer and warmed polymer: the honest smell of improvised lab work, which the colonists treated like a moral failing.
My bench was a drift of necessity: a hand pump cannibalized from a scrubber cartridge, three vials with mismatched caps, a strip of indicator film pinned under a magnet, and my field sheets (polymer slates) stacked with the corners precisely aligned to pretend I had any control over the situation. My fingertips were ink-stained where I had re-etched a note too hard and melted a groove; the burn on my left hand throbbed each time I flexed, an unhelpful reminder that chemistry is not impressed by fatigue.
The runner set down a narrow directive strip as if it might contaminate my tools. Not on the cleared patch of bench, of course. On the edge, where the surface dipped and everything wanted to slide toward the deck. He didn’t look at my samples. He looked at my unsealed devices, at the unregistered tubing, at the absence of a clerk’s countersignature on my existence.
The strip was colonist stock: clean, stiff, with the microtext band that made forgery expensive. A fresh seal impression sat at the top, still slightly tacky, the wax-polymer composite catching lint from my bench like it resented the company. The order was phrased in the clipped, bloodless dialect of emergencies: present at the Quarantine Pontoon within the hour for “infrastructure-source investigation support.” No salutation. No rationale. No space for my signature: only acknowledgement, which is bureaucracy’s way of saying consent is redundant.
I read it twice anyway, because anxiety prefers repetition to creativity, and because I could already hear the subtext: speak through approved channels, or be reclassified as a problem with symptoms.
The seal at the header was new enough to behave like a living thing. When I lifted the strip, it tugged at the grit on my thumb and came away with a faint thread of lint, as if even colonist wax wanted to take a souvenir from my bench. The impression was crisp and the microtext band around it made my eyes water if I stared too long. Expensive urgency, in other words.
The directive itself was a single paragraph, engineered for compliance: present at Quarantine Pontoon (Lazaretum) within one hour of receipt for infrastructure-source investigation support. No diagnosis code. No named incident. No list of materials to bring. Just the kind of language that pretends the absence of detail is a kindness, when it is actually a muzzle.
The phrasing had been shaved down to the bone: no conditional verbs, no “requested,” no “at your discretion.” Even the courtesy particles had been removed like excess packaging. It read like a hatch cycling: either I moved through it on schedule, or it would close and become my fault.
I read the directive again, but not for meaning. Meaning was a luxury item, like intact gloves. I read for leverage: the issuing office code embedded in the header microtext, the timestamp down to the minute (Registry time, not deck time), and the blank countersignature fields that said dual authorization required without ever admitting it. There was a clause about “failure to comply constituting obstruction of emergency health measures,” which is how they laundered coercion into procedure. Another line prohibited “public speculation,” defined broadly enough to include breathing near the wrong person. The runner watched my eyes track the text, as if comprehension itself needed witnessing. I folded the strip along the seal, careful not to crack it. Evidence mattered more than dignity.
I slid my polymer sheets into their sleeve and cinched the clasp until it clicked like a clerk’s stamp. The vials got their caps tightened with my right hand only; my left stayed flat, burn-side up, as if pain were a spill hazard I could post a sign for. I bled the hand pump once, then latched the bench lock (careful, deliberate) like an audit was already counting my absences.
I tucked the sealed strip into the inner pocket of my coat where my notes lived, letting it scrape my knuckles like a reminder. The corridor bells chimed the half-mark: spine-tunnel schedules did not care about medical emergencies, only about who had paid for priority air. I stepped off my bench platform and merged into the flow, calm in the specific way of someone entering an unrequested jurisdiction.
The strip’s weight was wrong for a favor. Favors were flimsy: handwritten addenda, unsigned “verbal allowances,” the kind of indulgence that could be denied later with a shrug and a missing page. This was an instrument. The polymer was thick enough to qualify as a small blunt object, edges heat-sealed so no one could shave off a corner and claim it had “always been partial.” The Registry sigil sat in the center like a coin pressed into bread, then, because power is never content to be singular, overprinted by Lazaretum’s antiseptic blue banding. Two authorities, one captive body.
I turned it in my fingers and found the embedded thread, a pale filament running through the laminate the way veins ran through cheap manufactured meat. It had a faint sheen, not decorative, but the sort of sheen that suggested it would remember being touched. The header text carried its own quiet violence: TEMPORARY JURISDICTION TRANSFER: as if I were a container on loan, stamped and rerouted through a different bay.
Below that, my name in Registry format: family identifier first, then given, then the consultant classification appended like a warning label. *TECHNICAL. The strip smelled like the Lazaretum even out here: antiseptic and warmed plastic, as if it had been stored beside sterilizers to keep it obedient. There were fields I wasn’t meant to notice: a small set of time blocks, prepunched in twelve hourly increments; a line for revocation authority; an emergency override code in microtext tight enough to be read only by machines or people with too much patience. The only thing missing was any pretense that my consent mattered. It was permission written as custody.
I adjusted my grip so my burned hand didn’t smear anything. The last thing I needed was my own skin oil voiding a document that had more rights than most of the families I’d sampled. When my thumb dragged across the thread, it gave a barely perceptible resistance, like sealing wax resisting a stamp, and then, against every expectation of inert plastic, the surface warmed and woke.
My thumb dragged across the embedded thread and the laminate stopped behaving like laminate. It took my heat as if it had been waiting hungry in a drawer: a quick warmth under the skin, then a second, more intimate sensation. My pulse translated into a soft, bureaucratic flicker. I felt absurdly flattered and immediately insulted. The strip did not greet me. It sampled me.
A faint prickle crawled along my thumb pad, the way a low-voltage tester kisses damp metal. Somewhere inside the thick polymer, a temperature gradient resolved itself into permission. The capacitive map of my fingerprint rose in invisible relief, not as an introduction but as an affidavit: this body, this exact skin, present and compliant. The thread remembered the pressure points, the slight tremor from fatigue, the thin film of antiseptic I’d rubbed on the burn. It translated all of it into an assumption of consent.
I held my hand still, because stillness reads as cooperation, and watched the strip’s surface glaze and clarify, like fogged glass deciding it had enough data to become transparent.
A narrow window resolved in crisp block script, the kind clerks favored because it left no room for handwriting and therefore no room for mercy. Twelve (12) hours of sanctioned transit, counted in hourly perforations like a ration strip, began ticking the moment the laminate decided my thumb was me. Below it, corridors and hatches were enumerated in a list that read like an anatomy chart for a patient who never volunteered: Spine-Tunnel Segment C, Intake Airlock, Triage Walkway: each permission paired with an equal line of denial in smaller type. May pass when escorted. May not linger. May not access auxiliary bays. The map was less a route than a fenced artery, and I could feel, in the neat symmetry of allowed and forbidden, how thoroughly my movement had been pre-argued.
Beneath my name sat the classification, bolded as if emphasis could turn insult into policy: TECHNICAL CONSULTANT , CONDITIONAL. Not a title, a tether. It made my training sound like a tool issued from stores and my judgment something that could be revoked with a clerk’s sigh. I could almost hear the return stamp: consultant, used, sanitize before reassignment.
The final line sat at the bottom like an afterthought and still managed to feel like a hand on the back of my neck: UNDER LAZARETUM JURISDICTION. Not “admitted,” not “assigned”, jurisdiction, the word they used for confiscated cargo and detained persons. The system had already slotted me into quarantine’s inventory, tagged and timestamped, and all that remained was for my feet to agree.
Flaviana’s addendum arrived as a second sheet welded to the first by sheer force of punctuation. It was written in that Registry legal dialect that turns breath into a regulated substance: clauses nested inside clauses, each one numbered as if the paper itself expected to be cross-examined. The opening sentence defined my task as technical assistance under emergency health authority, which sounded generous until the next line clarified that assistance meant a resource temporarily seconded, with no implied right to speak.
The word conversation did not appear anywhere. In its place: PUBLIC SPECULATION, capitalized, pinned down, and given a definition broad enough to include facial expressions. Public speculation, per the addendum, was “any etiological conjecture, provisional correlation, or informal remark pertaining to source, vector, culpability, or deficiency of life-support systems” made “outside approved clinical routing.” Etiological conjecture was not a hypothesis, not even a mistake; it was an event category.
Then came the trigger condition: public speculation “constitutes incitement potential” and “shall be subject to disciplinary logging.” I liked the phrasing shall be subject, as though the log were a weather system we all lived under, not a person with a stylus and a grudge. Disciplinary logging would be copied to the Registry Marshal chain and, by implication rather than promise, could justify “widened screening operations.” The addendum didn’t say mass screening the way a human would; it said “expanded precautionary triage,” which is how you describe dragging whole families through Intake Airlock and pretending it is kindness.
A final paragraph offered the only courtesy: if I required access beyond my stamped route, scrubber intakes, waterline manifolds, Archive Bilge correlates, I was to submit a request “without delay” and “without dissemination,” and await response. It was, in essence, permission to ask for permission, provided I did not sound like I was already right.
The directive’s real mechanism was routing. I was permitted to think in public only after my thoughts had been laundered through colonist channels. Every hypothesis, however provisional, however plainly labeled working, was to be entered as a formal note, assigned a docket number, time-stamped to the minute, and countersigned by a colonist clinician before it could be repeated to anyone with a pulse and a job title. Captains. Clerks. Deck medics. Even the grandmother who ran the unofficial cough-syrup kettle in Spine-Tunnel Three: all of them counted as “unauthorized recipients” under the same sentence.
They even specified the format, because of course they did. Samples had to be logged against chain-of-custody tags; interpretations had to cite instrument serials, calibration state, and “confidence bounds” as if uncertainty itself were contraband. Recommended interventions were not “do this now” but “proposed actions pending authority concurrence,” which meant that urgency would be expressed as a checkbox.
I understood the intention: contain panic, protect command. I also understood the side effect: if I found the fire, I was required to file it.
The penalty ladder was laid out with a kind of tender, murderous clarity. First breach: INCITEMENT NOTATION, as if you could annotate a human being the way you annotate a misfiled ration chit. Second breach: NETWORK AGITATION, the phrase they reserve for faulty repeaters and unauthorized prayer circles. Either designation, the addendum noted, “authorizes initiation of flotilla-wide respiratory screening protocols without further notice.” No hearing, no captain consult, no mercy clause: just a switch thrown somewhere behind Tabularium counters and a wave of marshals shepherding coughing children through checkpoints. It was an elegant mechanism: punish speech by manufacturing symptoms, then call the punishment “precaution.” My compliance was not requested; it was pre-priced.
Cooperation was not offered as partnership but as the single narrow gangway between us and indiscriminate containment. If I withheld a finding, delayed a report “pending verification,” or pursued a parallel line of inquiry outside her routed notes, Flaviana would simply draft an expansion order: suspicion-based transfers, whole compartments reclassified as exposure risks, sealed and towed to Lazaretum on probability alone: no cough required, just a signature.
The last line was the actual instrument. My twelve-hour access chit did not expire by clock but by conduct: VALID DURING COMPLIANT SERVICE. A deviation, defined, helpfully, as anything they disliked, authorized immediate revocation without appeal or explanation. One clerk’s thumb on a switch and my hands would be empty again, while the flotilla filled the gap with rumor, and rumor, as ever, fed the Lazaretum intake.
I held the twelve-hour chit under the Lazaretum’s intake corridor light strip until the polymer warmed against my thumb and the ink’s microfibers threw back their oily, compliant shimmer. The colonist seal was embedded the way they embed instructions into equipment labels: not to inform you, but to make disobedience feel like a mechanical fault.
I read it once as text. I read it again as threat assessment. A third pass was for the clause that mattered because the flotilla teaches you early that the hazard is never in the bold header. The hazard lives in the subordinate phrases, the ones clerks can point to later with clean hands and regretful eyes.
The chit did not say permission in any honest register. It said escort, scope, route through designated officer, and then the soft-click wording that turns a scientist into a leash: VALID DURING COMPLIANT SERVICE. As if compliance were a measurable reagent. As if they could titrate my integrity in milliliters and suspend it when the solution turned inconvenient.
Beyond the clear panel, the Lazaretum breathed in controlled gulps. Negative-pressure tents flexed like lungs that had learned to be afraid of air. A nurse in a respirator pushed a cart with the same careful ceremony the Tabularium clerks used when wheeling seal presses to a new counter. Different tools, identical posture: incident management as civic ritual.
I rotated my burned hand, feeling the sting where I’d splashed reagent in haste, and tried not to let it show. The chit’s edge was sharp enough to remind me that even paper-equivalent can cut if you keep worrying it. I imagined dropping it, watching it slide into a floor grate, and the sudden, effortless way I would become unauthorized matter.
At the far end of the corridor, a marshal watched me the way you watch a valve you don’t fully trust: not hostile, just prepared to act if the gauge twitched. I folded the chit precisely along its issued crease, because the flotilla expects its documents treated better than its sick, and stepped toward the airlock before my reluctance could be logged as delay.
My jaw locked into the expression I reserve for reading casualty tables: flat, unornamented, and meant to keep my mouth from producing opinions. I ran the numbers anyway. In flotilla social arithmetic, a colonist stamp on your movements is not a credential; it is a charge code. It invoices you for every hallway you pass, every door that opens too easily, every time a marshal’s gaze flicks away because you now belong to the category of “managed persons.”
There would be the framing, too: my work routed through colonist phrasing until the findings no longer sounded like mine. “Observed” would become “reported.” “Possible contamination pathway” would become “unverified allegation.” Anything inconvenient would be retitled as “pending further clinical correlation,” which is bureaucratic pidgin for set aside until it stops being useful.
And then there were the captains. They do not need evidence; they need a story that keeps their decks calm. “Consultant” already reads as “collaborator” to anyone who has ever watched the Tabularium reclassify a neighbor with a stamp. I could feel the suspicion accruing in advance, like rust on a hinge you have not yet touched.
The other ledger column in my head populated itself with the speed of bad arithmetic. Intake screens tightened (one more question added, one more threshold lowered) until “cough” became “flag,” and “flag” became “hold.” Breath-sick children, still warm from sleep and panic, were triaged under UNCERTAIN EXPOSURE as if uncertainty were a pathogen you could isolate with canvas and duct seals. Whole family units went as bundled cargo: wrist-tags, ration chits voided, bedding left behind because bedding is “porous material.” They were escorted across the leeward tether in that careful, official silence that means everyone has been instructed not to call it removal. No one could name a source with a signature the Registry would recognize, so the Lazaretum received bodies in lieu of proof.
I pressed my burned palm flat to the chit until the pain sharpened into something useful, a calibration point for my steadiness. This was not a request for findings; it was a transfer of custody. Whatever I concluded would be repackaged as colonist directive, signed over with a clean seal. Whatever I failed to say would be tallied later as negligence, as if silence were an active contaminant.
I drew one controlled breath, the kind you take before opening a contaminated vessel. The chit folded along its crease with surgical neatness; I made it small enough to hide, but not to lose. In my head I queued requisitions: condensate swabs from the intake line, sputum plates, scrubber-cake scrapings, and, nonnegotiable, the Archive Bilge distribution logs. I was rehearsing conclusions in stamp-safe phrasing when a shift of air at the corridor edge cut the list short.
Junia detached herself from the corridor’s edge-shadow the way a loose fastener detaches when the vibration finally finds it: without drama, with inevitability. She wore the technician’s unhurried gait that reads as authorized even when it is not, boots landing on the deck plates with just enough confidence to discourage questions. Her cloak was patched in three different fabrics that all pretended to be the same black; cable loops rode her ribs like ribs, and a thin coil of fiber peeked out as if it had ideas of its own.
Her eyes did not go to me first. They went up, left, and then to the little blister of a ceiling repeater mounted above a junction panel. Painted the same institutional gray as everything else, and therefore invisible only to people who did not need it. A marshal stood beneath it with a bored, planted posture, hands folded over a baton he would insist was ceremonial until it was not. Junia clocked him in a single glance that took in his insignia strip, the angle of his holster, and the fact that his eyelids were heavy from dark-cycle duty. Her expression stayed mildly disinterested, the face you wear when you have been sent to check a faulty relay that everyone has decided is “nonessential” until it fails.
She slid into my walking line as if she had always been there, and for a half step I felt my shoulders try to square themselves into official configuration. Consultant posture, chit-ready. Junia’s presence made that instinct look faintly ridiculous. She smelled of solder flux and recycled air, a comfortingly nonmedical scent in a corridor that already tasted of antiseptic policy.
Her fingers brushed the seam of her cloak, a movement that could have been habit or signal; she didn’t produce any tool, only the suggestion that she could. The repeater above us clicked once (either a routine handshake, or a reminder that the corridor was listening) and Junia tilted her head, as if hearing a draft through the bulkhead.
When she finally looked at me, it was with the frank assessment of someone who measures risk in packets and patrol intervals. The marshal’s gaze slid across us and moved on, satisfied by her pace and my stamped silence. Junia kept her mouth closed until we were a few meters past the repeater’s shadow, and even then her lips barely moved, as though sound itself required a permit.
Junia kept her voice in the bandwidth of private mistakes. “Your sampler,” she said, not looking at it, as if naming it might wake it, “still broadcasts its device ID when it sniffs for a gate. It’s polite like that. It will ping the first ‘clean’ turnstile you walk through, and the Tabularium will treat that ping like a confession.”
I had filed my sampler under “instrument,” but her phrasing made it sound like a person with poor impulse control. My thumb found the edge of my burn through the fabric of my pocket and pressed until sensation became data.
“The Registry’s audit filters have been tightened,” Junia went on. “Not officially. Officially, everything is stable, scrubbers are nominal, and nobody is stealing anything. Unofficially, the clerks are starving for a trigger they can stamp into a cause.” Her mouth tilted, dry as recycled paper. “Unregistered sensor traffic is a fine meal. They’ll quarantine your kit on principle, then quarantine you for having the kind of kit that needs quarantining.”
Over her shoulder, the corridor remained calm in the way a queue remains calm: enforced, conditional, and listening. Junia’s fingers hovered near the seam of her cloak, ready to become a solution. “So,” she finished, “we don’t let it ping clean.”
Before I could assemble a response in stamp-safe clauses, Junia’s knuckle landed lightly on the edge of Flaviana’s chit where the ink seal still looked wet with authority. The gesture was not reverent; it was diagnostic, like checking a gauge that lies only when it matters.
“Use this,” she murmured. “Not as an invitation. As a costume.”
In her proposal, I became “medical support under Lazaretum directive,” a phrase broad enough to swallow my sampler, my questions, and any sins committed in the name of containment. Junia, meanwhile, would be “communications escort,” the sort of necessary nuisance assigned to keep quarantine traffic from choking the trunk line and making the Registry look inefficient.
It was a fiction with the correct signatures. On Civitas-IX, that counted as truth.
Junia sketched the mechanics with the impatience of someone explaining gravity. She would let my sampler attempt its polite handshake, catch it mid-reach, and reroute the greeting into routine telemetry bursts, temperature deltas, scrubber cycle counts, pump hysteresis, then pad the whole stream with dull life-support packet chatter until it resembled the flotilla’s normal, obedient pulse. The Registry would log compliance and taste nothing.
In the span of one breath, my mind ran its petty arithmetic: a flagged sampler becomes a flagged investigator; a flagged investigator becomes a convenient justification; a justification becomes a manifest with names I would recognize. Containment, as practiced here, always found the softest bodies first. I gave Junia a nod calibrated to minimum drama and maximum consent, and shifted half a step behind her.
Flaviana held the stamped chit out as if it were both instrument and muzzle. Her glove was immaculate; mine was not. The polymer sheet flexed once between us, catching the overhead strip-light and reflecting it back with the flat confidence of authorized paperwork.
I took it with two fingers (thumb and forefinger, like a contaminated swab) and brought it close enough to read without theatrics. The seal press had left a raised ridge that my fingertip could feel through the ink stain, a tiny topography of power. The header was written in the colonist register: DIRECTIVE: LAZARETUM SUPPORT / CONDITIONAL ACCESS GRANT. Beneath it, in smaller text that assumed I would behave like a person who did not need to be reminded, were the conditions.
Twelve hours. Not a shift, not a day: twelve hours, as if pathogen cycles respected administrative convenience.
Escorted access at all times, including transit through the spine. The escort listed was not a name yet. Only a slot designation, COMM-ESCORT (TEMP). I pictured Junia’s face when she saw herself converted into a bracketed necessity.
Findings to be submitted through colonist channels. Not “shared.” Not “discussed.” Submitted, as if my work product were a ration chit and Flaviana the only dispenser.
A further clause, more decorative than enforceable but present for the comfort of those who believed paper could cauterize rumor: public speculation regarding source vectors to be treated as incitement under emergency health authority. The flotilla had many crimes, but “incitement” was the one with the best legs; it could walk anywhere and arrest anyone.
I read the fine print twice, because once is how you miss the hook, and twice is how you learn which way it turns when it catches. On the second pass, the words did not change. They merely settled into their places, like a mask seated over a face you still needed to breathe through.
I lowered my gaze to the counter. Arguing would have been an emotional expenditure with no reimbursement line.
I signed where the line told me to sign, not because my name carried weight here, but because the Registry liked its world annotated. The polymer receipt was slick under my fingertips; the ink on my pads smeared into the signature the way fieldwork always smeared into bureaucracy: evidence of labor treated as poor hygiene. When my burned hand flexed, a clean sting snapped up the tendons and tightened my mouth for half a second. I let the expression die before it could become a statement. Pain, like dissent, was something they archived if you delivered it neatly.
The clerk’s stylus hovered as if waiting for a flourish. I gave none. My letters stayed narrow, properly aligned, the sort of compliance that could not be accused of sarcasm. I pressed just hard enough to leave an impression through the sheet. My small, physical proof that I had been here and had been made to agree.
Then I slid the document back across the counter with two fingers, keeping my palm lifted, keeping my pulse off the record.
Without breaking stride, I put a neat fold into the chit, one crease, then another, until it became a rigid little brick of permission. I slid it into the collar seam where the stitching had already learned to hold secrets, the sort of place a marshal’s casual search would “fail” to notice if paperwork went missing in transit. My burned hand complained at the motion; I recorded the complaint and filed it under Not Now.
Then came inventory. I patted pockets in the order the Registry preferred: visible first, then plausible. Unregistered scalpel: out. Glass ampoule of precipitant: out. A coil of wire Junia had insisted was “just in case”: absolutely out. What remained could be spoken aloud without irony tools that looked like obedience even when they weren’t.
Junia shifted in close with the casual authority of someone who had rerouted a hundred arguments without raising her voice. She angled her shoulder between me and the nearest marshal, turning my path a few degrees until I was no longer aimed at the biometric turnstiles but at the exit lane. Her eyes made a quick, contemptuous circuit of the ceiling taps along the comms trunk. An unspoken reminder: behave, you are recorded.
I followed because I could calculate consequences faster than I could tolerate them. Compliance was not agreement; it was triage under fluorescent lights. If I refused a stamped directive, Flaviana would not lose sleep. She would widen the screening rubric, add a symptom here, a contact category there, until “precaution” meant half a deck on the Lazaretum. And suspicion always found the penniless first.
The spine-tunnel contracted a fraction at a time, ribs of salvaged alloy drawing closer until I had to angle my shoulders to avoid brushing condensation-slick cable runs. Every few meters a laminated notice insisted, in three languages and one pictogram, that “UNESCORTED TRANSIT IS A VIOLATION OF ORDINANCE 4.[^12],” as if the tunnel itself were likely to forget its own geometry and let me wander off into unfiled space.
Junia moved ahead with the casual certainty of someone who had already bribed the idea of a checkpoint. She kept her utility cloak open just enough to show the correct category of tool loops (communications, not medical) and that distinction apparently mattered to the people who stamped our existence. I kept my sampler tucked close under my sleeve like a guilty limb. The thing was not large, but it had weight in the wrong way: a density of consequence. A “handheld sampler,” on the wrong side of Seal Hall, became a “device,” and a “device” became a “registered asset,” and a “registered asset” became an invitation to be audited until the end of our shared oxygen.
At the last junction before the leeward perimeter, the tunnel lights changed. Civitas-IX favored sodium gloom and patchwork glare; here the luminance was flat and clinical, as though illumination were a regulated substance issued per square meter. A guard in an Aegis sash watched us pass with the expression of a man assigned to measure compliance rather than prevent harm. Junia flicked her fingers against the comms node set into the bulkhead: an idle gesture, but my peripheral vision caught the tiny status LED shifting cadence. She had said she could hide my sampler’s ID inside legitimate medical telemetry bursts. I had believed her because disbelief was an additional task.
My hand, the one with the mild reagent burn, stung when the air’s humidity dropped. The tunnel fans altered pitch, turning the flotilla’s familiar rumble into a narrower, more purposeful drone. It was the sound of a jurisdiction changing hands.
By the time the pontoon umbilical came into view, the condensation on the cable runs had thinned to a dry sheen. The air changes in layers: first the familiar brine and hot metal, then a hard, scrubbed chill that strips moisture from my mouth and leaves me swallowing against a sudden, papery tightness.
The air changed in layers, each one a signed order I had to inhale. First came the flotilla’s usual mixture, brine, warm metal, and the faint sourness of too many bodies living too close to their own machinery. Then, without any visible threshold, it cut to something scrubbed and deliberate: a cold that had been filtered until it felt thin, as if the oxygen had been reviewed by committee and approved only in its most compliant form.
Moisture vanished from my mouth mid-breath. I swallowed and found my throat had gone papery, like polymer sheets left too long near a heat vent. Even my tongue felt like an unfiled document. Junia didn’t react, which was the only reason I didn’t cough out of spite. She angled her head toward a vent grille and made a small, practiced adjustment to the line of her cloak, keeping her face out of the direct draft. I kept my burned hand tucked close to my body; the dry air worried the raw skin with a clean, efficient sting.
The fans here did not merely move air. They imposed it.
Underfoot, the deck changed character in the way a clerk’s handwriting changes when a supervisor leans in. The flotilla proper tolerated improvisation: plates of different ages, rivet patterns that didn’t agree, a geography of repairs you could read like gossip. Here the plating became uniform, factory-flat panels set in obedient rectangles. Each one carried a stenciled hazard code and a maintenance interval in tiny, unarguable font. The seams were caulked and then wiped clean of excess, leaving no room for grime to argue its case. Even the scuff marks looked disciplined, as if boots had been issued a permitted angle of approach. I found myself shortening my stride to match the grid, which is how you could tell the jurisdiction was working. Cleanliness, I thought, enforced by geometry and threat.
The flotilla’s usual noise, pump thrum, distant bargaining, the irregular clang of work, thinned as I approached the pontoon umbilical, as if someone had routed the city through a muffler and filed the remaining sounds under MEDICAL. In its place came a regulated draft and the disciplined hiss of valves cycling on schedule, a mechanical breathing that did not invite participation so much as compliance.
The negative-pressure caught me by the cuffs like an impatient clerk, drawing my sleeves inward and lifting the short hairs at my hairline in a steady, bureaucratic insistence. It was not strong enough to drag me, only to remind me where “in” was, and that “out” required permission. Each inhale landed with a faint resistance, as if my lungs were being metered.
Under the hard white strips of light, hierarchy became a uniform you could inventory at a glance. Colonist med-tags hung in clean laminate at throat level. The tags caught the light and returned it like they were authorized to reflect. Their wearers stood inside the taped corridors rather than behind them, bodies placed where the tape implied they belonged: not in queue, not in doubt, not in the statistical pen where everyone else waited to be converted into a form.
The tape itself was a kind of jurisdictional border, thin, adhesive, and absolutely believed in. Refugees clustered on the wrong side of it with the resigned posture of people awaiting a stamp. They held ration chits and complaint slips, and they kept their hands visible the way you did around marshals and hungry dogs. A few had improvised masks pulled up too late, the elastic biting into cheeks with that amateur geometry of panic. When a child coughed, the nearest adult made a small lateral shift, as if contagion respected polite distance.
Inside the lines, the colonist staff moved in short, economical arcs, always at right angles, like they had been trained by a drafting program. Their gloves stayed pristine until the moment they touched something, and then the glove became evidence and was discarded with a clean snap into a marked bin. Even their clipboards looked sterilized: edges unchipped, seal impressions crisp enough to qualify as a signature.
I checked my own hands out of habit. Ink stains, field grit in the cuticles, a faint sting where the chemical burn had decided to keep me honest. I tucked the sampler closer to my ribs and tried not to let my shoulders announce that I was carrying an unendorsed object through an endorsed space. Junia drifted a half-step ahead, casual as a maintenance note, her patched cloak an offense the lights pretended not to see.
A colonist orderly glanced at my throat, not my face. I felt, briefly, the absence of laminate there like missing paperwork. In this corridor, identity was worn externally, and anything unworn became suspicious by default.
At each turnstile the guards performed readiness the way clerks performed civility: as proof you belonged on the safe side of the tape. Their cartridges were seated with that factory-click certainty, bright polymer collars unscuffed, as if ammunition could be audited by shine. Visor seals sat unbroken, the little tamper threads still intact, a visible promise that the air inside their helmets had never had to negotiate with anyone else’s breath. Even their gloves looked exempt from labor: no creases at the knuckles, no salt bloom, nothing that suggested hands had ever carried a crying child or a leaking canister.
They did not watch for weapons so much as for deviations. Faces, yes, but in the manner of someone reading gauges: looking for the needle that trembled. A blink too long, a swallow that arrived out of schedule, the tiny dilation when you saw a marshal’s shoulder patch and remembered what it could authorize. When Junia drifted through, they tracked her cloak like a spill you could not legally mop.
When my turn came, I kept my posture square, my breathing metered, and my sampler pressed into my side like contraband paperwork. The turnstile’s sensor chirped once, polite, inconclusive, before deciding I was someone else’s problem.
Clipboards moved through the corridor with more authority than most people. They passed hand to hand in a practiced relay, no pause long enough to suggest ownership, no grip loose enough to imply doubt, each board’s embossed seal flashing under the strip lights like a credentialed eye-blink. I watched signatures accumulate in neat columns and felt the quiet violence of it: ink as containment, boxes as borders. A board could halt a stretcher, reroute a family, or upgrade a cough into a detention, all without raising a voice. The staff did not argue; they only pointed, and the point landed where the seal said it could land. Every time a clipboard turned, the air seemed to shift with it, as if the decision had mass.
Refugees gathered at the tape as if it were bulkhead plating: a line of adhesive deciding who could breathe in which direction. Bodies stacked into queues with ledger logic: elderly forward for sympathy, young men spaced to look harmless, mothers angled so children were visible but not pleading. Conversation compressed to murmurs, not for courtesy, but because volume could be classified as “agitation” and stamped accordingly.
Every stop demanded a calibrated pause. Long enough that inspection became a foregone conclusion, short enough that you couldn’t lodge a question. Stamps came down with administrative finality; scanners skimmed wrists, chits, and pupils; each beep translated flesh into a line item. Even a cough had a checkbox. The corridor didn’t move people forward so much as it reconciled them, one accounted breath at a time.
Junia did not look like someone about to commit a minor felony against the Registry’s definitions; she looked like someone waiting for a gasket to cool. Her gaze ran the line in measurable intervals. Marshal: eyes down, thumb on baton strap, glance up every seventh stamp. Clerk at the high desk: left hand hovering over the seal press as if it might bolt and run, right hand already inked, attention flicking between the queue and the oxygen-sat readouts. The cadence had a waveform. Junia read it the way I read a spectrograph. By the absences.
“On my heel,” she murmured, not turning her head. Dialogue on Civitas-IX was a request for classification. Brevity passed under most thresholds.
We moved when the marshal’s prosthetic knee squeaked; the sound reliably coincided with his reflexive look down, irritation taking precedence over vigilance. Junia timed us into that irritation like a filing slip into a binder. We became, in posture and pace, an extension of the process: not petitioners, not patients, not anything that required a checkbox. Scheduled maintenance, she had said once, and I understood it now. If you walked as if you belonged to a routine, the corridor accepted you as infrastructure.
My sampler sat heavy against my ribs, strapped beneath my coat with its polymer sheath still tacky from my burned hand. Officially it was a “device.” Officially, devices past Seal Hall were contraband unless declared, tagged, and throttled. Unofficially, everything here ran on devices; they just acquired new nouns. “Reader.” “Monitor.” “Clinical adjunct.” Language was a smuggling route.
Junia used bodies as cover without touching them, sliding us behind a stretcher at the exact moment a clerk leaned forward to squint at a pupil-scan and the queue exhaled in sympathy. We took that shared breath and spent it as concealment. I kept my shoulders loose, face blank, eyes on the floor tape as if I had been taught obedience by the same manual as everyone else.
When a marshal’s gaze finally swept our direction, Junia let it meet her back, casual, uninteresting, then broke it with a purposeful tilt of her chin toward the intake sign, as if reminding him of his own posted instructions. He accepted the prompt like a stamped form and looked away.
At the scanner arch the air changed. The arch itself was an argument in metal: curved ribs, a status panel that never displayed verbs, only compliance states. Junia paused half a step short of it, as if waiting for the apparatus to remember we existed.
Her patch rig stayed hidden under her cloak, but her fingers moved with the quiet certainty of someone tightening a known bolt in the dark. She keyed into the trunk-line’s medical channel on the sliver of bandwidth reserved for “continuous clinical welfare,” which meant: no one asked questions unless a colonist badge did. The next authorized telemetry burst came through. Routine vitals from the intake cots, the flotilla’s collective pulse rendered as packets.
Junia rode it.
I felt nothing physical; the system did not reward honesty with sensation. But on her tiny diagnostic screen, the sampler’s identifier flickered like a guilty thought, then dissolved as she laced it into the noise floor: one more harmless irregularity in a stream full of human ones. To the arch, my sampler became mundane spillover: the bureaucratic equivalent of lint.
We stepped through while the panel remained politely indifferent.
I kept the polymer sheets pinned flat to my sternum under my coat as if they were part of the lining, not a portable history of everyone’s airways. My burned hand stayed rigid at my side, fingers slightly curled so the blistered skin wouldn’t catch on fabric and betray me with a reflex. Pain was a kind of disclosure. Here, any involuntary expression could be translated into a form: REASON FOR INJURY, SOURCE, WITNESS, LIABILITY.
When a clerk’s voice snapped my attention (more a summons than a question) I answered in the flotilla’s safest dialect: clipped, regulation-complete, emotionally sterile. “Technical consultant. Conditional access. Under medical directive.” No embellishment, no narrative hooks. If I gave them a story, they would improve it, stamp it, and use it to move me somewhere I did not want to go.
The clerk’s eyes snagged on my CONDITIONAL sash tag and then, with the same professional thoroughness, on the way I held my left hand too still. Stiffness was an undeclared variable. Before it could become a question, Junia fed him a harmless sequence: “Case 3Q-19. Destination: Lazaretum intake: code grey.” He relaxed into filing. Thinking, here, was an unpaid hazard.
The final checkpoint obligingly coughed up a transit slip: warm polymer, fresh ink, the sort of permission that pretended it was a gift. Junia took it mid-print and kept us moving, shoulders angled so no one could find the extra second required to request “secondary verification.” Behind us the intake airlock cycled with a reprimanding hiss, and the pressure shift flattened sound into an official quiet.
The inner latch released with a flat, indifferent click: no ceremonial groan of old hinges, no negotiation in the sound. The door simply complied, and I stepped through as if compliance itself were a floor.
The Lazaretum side of the airlock smelled of oxidizer and antiseptic, the kind of cleanliness achieved by burning the margins. Negative-pressure fans drew the air away from us with a steady hunger, and the little hairs on my forearms leaned toward the vents as if the machinery had opinions. On the flotilla proper, jurisdiction was a rope game: captains, marshals, registrars, all pulling. Here the rope ended at a power feed and a medical seal.
A strip of hazard paint on the deck marked a boundary that did not need guards to be real. Past it, my transit slip stopped being a permission and became a liability document: evidence I had entered a space where “detained” was a medical verb. The signage was generous with instructions and stingy with comfort: KEEP MASK ON. DO NOT TOUCH TENT SKINS. REPORT COUGHING. REPORT NON-COMPLIANCE. Each imperative had a blank space in its shadow for a docket number.
Junia’s presence shifted beside me, cloak muffling its own hardware. She had the posture of someone who could walk through a restricted corridor by pretending it was beneath her attention, but even she did not test the lines painted on the deck. Her hand drifted once toward my coat pocket, not touching, as if reminding the sampler to remain hypothetical.
A medic in a respirator watched us from behind a clear partition, eyes magnified into patient suspicion. An armed guard stood offset, not aggressive, simply present. An appendage of policy with a pulse. Somewhere deeper inside, a pump cycled and a monitor chirped in a tone that sounded unreasonably cheerful for a place that processed the unwanted.
I adjusted my grip on my polymer sheets and felt the burn on my hand flare, a brief, private protest. The fans did not care. The seal-tags did not care. In this jurisdiction, empathy existed only if it could be entered into a log.
I registered the posture shift the way I would register a pressure gradient: not as emotion, but as a measurable change in how bodies occupied space. On the flotilla proper, people announced themselves with volume. Here, voices fell into clipped exchanges, as if syllables were rationed and audited. Every sentence sounded like it had been pre-approved by a committee that feared adjectives.
Hands hovered near clipboards and seal-tags the way deckhands hover near railings in heavy roll. Prepared to steady themselves against liability. Even impatience took the shape of procedure. A medic’s gloved fingers tapped a form twice, not to hurry me, but to remind me that time belonged to the form, not to my lungs or my questions. A guard shifted his stance, and the motion was less about threat than about keeping the corridor’s geometry correct: two meters clearance, line of sight to the intake, no clustering.
Junia kept her gaze unfixed, the practiced look of someone who knew cameras preferred attention. I found myself matching the local dialect: minimal movement, maximal compliance. It was oddly comic, in a dry way. Like watching fear pretend to be administration because administration was the only sanctioned way to admit fear.
The captains’ informal economy, favors traded for fuel tabs, threats delivered as “advisory counsel,” exemptions shouted loud enough to become temporary law, thinned here like oxygen in a bad seal. On the flotilla proper, a name could pry open a gate if it was spoken with the right mix of desperation and entitlement. In the Lazaretum corridor, names became entries. An exemption became a contraindication. A threat became “behavioral escalation” with a tick-box beside it.
Containment rules did not bargain; they iterated. Timelines arrived pre-stamped, already late, and offered no narrative beyond compliance windows: SCREEN, ISOLATE, OBSERVE. Even sympathy had to be routed through a form, and the form required a witness. I found myself missing the captains’ crude honesty: at least a shouted bribe admitted it wanted something.
Oversight, I discovered, was not a single ceiling but a set of opposing bulkheads. The colonist medical protocols pushed from ahead, clean, absolute, and phrased as if oxygen itself required authorization, while the Registry’s expectations pressed from behind, invisible until you tried to move and felt the audit teeth. Both chains stood ready to name the outbreak, assign a culprit, and circulate a version of truth that kept their seals uncracked.
I squared my shoulders and did what I always did when I was afraid: I made a diagram in my head. Not of people, but of permissions, choke points, and failure modes. Authority flowed here like contaminated condensate. If I wanted Archive Bilge access without triggering a siren of audits, I would have to phrase my need as their own risk: reportable, containable, stampable.
Junia tilted her chin toward the intake lane, indicating the personnel rather than the signage. The printed directives were plentiful (laminated, color-coded, and worded with the sort of optimism only a committee could sustain) but the actual control surface was human.
The orderly at the head of the line had the posture of someone who had been standing since a previous calendar. His tabard hung wrong at one shoulder where the seam had surrendered. A stylus was tucked behind one ear like a promise he could not afford to keep. He held a clipboard as if it were armor and used it mainly as a table for his thumbprint reader, which flickered between green and tired amber.
He did not watch the ledger. He watched bodies.
His gaze tracked cough cadence the way I tracked pressure drops: frequency, depth, delay between spasms. When someone tried to smooth their breathing into something acceptable, he waited for the lie to fail. He noticed the shoulder hitch that preceded a wet cough, the shallow inhale that meant pleuritic pain, the way a child’s steps shortened when their mother’s hand tightened. He let three people through on the strength of their paperwork and stopped the fourth because their gait had turned into a shuffle that no stamp could explain.
Once, he lifted his eyes long enough to glance at my hand, bandaged where I had annoyed a reagent, and then at Junia’s patched cloak. The glance was not suspicion so much as inventory. In the flotilla, people cataloged each other the way we cataloged parts: by utility, by risk, by how hard they would be to replace.
Junia’s mouth barely moved. “He counts symptoms,” she said, as if that were an unofficial job title. “Ask him the right question and he’ll answer. Ask him the wrong one and he’ll route you into a form until you die of compliance.”
The orderly called the next number in a voice scraped thin by recycled air. The line advanced by half a meter. I felt the air here push against my skin, negative pressure pretending to be mercy. I adjusted my grip on my sampler (an object that, according to any honest inventory, was absolutely a device) and followed Junia’s nod toward the only person in the lane who still seemed to be paying attention.
The nurse at the cart moved with the clipped economy of someone who had learned to do three jobs while pretending it was one. Her respirator was tight-sealed and over-scrubbed, straps biting into the fabric of her cap, the clear shield filmed at the edges where breath met plastic and lost. She did not look up at the line except in brief, procedural flicks, the way a clerk checks a seal impression: confirm, dismiss.
What held her attention were the swab kits.
She unstacked them in short, irritated bursts, reading each label, then the lot code printed in smaller ink beneath: codes meant for internal reconciliation, not for patient comfort. The labels said one thing; the lot plates said another. She made a quiet sound through the respirator, not quite a sigh, not quite a cough, and began re-stacking as if order itself could disinfect.
A handful of kits were moved to the side, not discarded: quarantined in miniature. She kept them within reach, as though someone might demand them later and she intended to be ready with an answer that did not implicate her.
It was the kind of meticulousness that only blooms when a problem has been noticed and officially unnamed.
I watched them the way I watched a failed seal on a reagent canister: not for the catastrophic rupture, but for the minor misbehavior that announced an invisible pressure gradient. The orderly’s attention kept sliding off faces and onto wrists, chits, and the faint adhesive ghosts where old allotment stamps had been peeled away. He let a ration family pass, then stopped a solitary man whose chit was immaculate but whose pulse made a small, visible argument at the throat. Paper could be forged; perfusion was less cooperative.
At the cart, the nurse’s gloved fingers paused over certain swab batches as if the polymer labels had turned warm. She checked lot codes twice, once with her eyes and once with the kind of hesitation that was a private alarm. Without ceremony, she shifted those kits aside, still “in inventory,” but no longer in circulation, creating a quiet quarantine inside the supply chain.
Junia kept her voice in the range that passed as background machinery. These were the workers who detected repetition the way a sensor detected drift: the same cough presenting twice under different names, the same hull’s swabs always “misfiled” at the handoff, the same kit counts shrinking between cart and counter. Their notes did not become incidents; they became fatigue, and then silence.
I adjusted my posture into something that read as compliant on first glance: shoulders squared, hands visible, tone pre-filed. No demands, no accusations: those triggered forms, not answers. I drafted questions like narrow requisitions: “For reconciliation only, what lot codes are you sidelining?” Confirmation, not confession. If procedure started to listen, I could plausibly be “assisting inventory integrity,” and everyone could keep breathing.
The inner door closed like an eye deciding it had seen enough. Its petals irised inward with the polite precision of well-maintained machinery, then met and held. A thin seam of light pinched out, and the chamber gave a clipped hiss as it began to reconcile pressures.
I felt it first in the soft places that never signed permits: behind the cheekbones, along the Eustachian tubes, a slow insistence that my body was now subject to local standards. My sinuses equalized in reluctant increments, as if they wanted to file an objection and could not locate the correct counter. The fans overhead shifted pitch (negative-pressure drawing, not merely circulating) and the air took on the Pontoon’s characteristic mixture of antiseptic and damp polymer, the smell of cleanliness performed under rationing.
Junia stood half a step behind my shoulder, where she could plausibly be “escort” and not “associate.” Her gaze flicked once to the ceiling grille and once to the corner lens. I did not look. Looking read as curiosity; curiosity read as intent; intent generated paperwork. I focused on the floor markings: yellow chevrons for “stand here,” red for “do not cross,” and a white rectangle labeled in block script as if language could substitute for a barrier. The flotilla loved a boundary you could stamp.
My handheld sampler sat in my bag with the bland innocence of contraband. There was no room here for improvised tools that did not exist on someone’s manifest. In the spine-tunnel you could negotiate, barter a delay, trade a favor for a blind spot. In this vestibule, negotiation would simply be categorized as “noncompliance” and routed into a holding pattern with a serial number.
The pressure finished its arithmetic. The hiss ended. Silence did not arrive; it was replaced by the steady inhale of the system, the sound of authority breathing through ductwork. I reminded myself to keep my face neutral, to let my hands hang open, palms visible. An offering to procedure. This was not a corridor you walked through. This was a form you entered.
The guard at the threshold raised one gloved hand. Palm outward, the universal sign for “halt” and “submit to categorization.” The weapon was slung in the manner of someone instructed to appear nonthreatening, which only highlighted its weight and proximity. His respirator grille flattened his voice into official monotone, as if the words were not his and he would not be held personally liable for their effects.
“Pontoon intake protocol. All persons. All effects. Subject to inventory.” A pause, timed to the cadence of stamping. “All entries recorded to Pontoon log. All removals require seal verification and counter-sign.” He said it like scripture, or like a warning printed on a solvent bottle: not negotiable, only survivable through correct handling.
The negative-pressure fans took his exhale and carried it away before it could become human. A small lens above his shoulder watched without blinking. I felt my bag become an argument waiting to happen; my sampler, an unlicensed noun.
He angled his head fractionally, expecting declarations in the approved sequence: name, hull, purpose, sponsor. Even my silence felt like a missing field.
Junia slid forward the way a signature slides across a line, smooth, inevitable, already halfway approved. She kept her hands open and low, palms a little too empty, and offered the guard the mild expression of a person delivering a routine correction to a mislabeled cable run. “Escort for technical consultant,” she said, tone pitched to the Registry’s favorite frequency: useful and nonthreatening. “Clinical tasking, time-sensitive, sponsor on file.”
The guard did not accept or reject. He simply rotated his wrist and brought the scanner up, a blunt wand with a status strip that stayed stubbornly amber. The beam licked across our belts, then paused, waiting for the world to arrange itself into fields. His head angled a fraction: declare. In order. Do not improvise.
I gave him my details in the flotilla’s most comforting ritual register: name, hull of assignment, conditional access category, clinical purpose. “Sampling adjunct to respiratory assessment,” I added, as if the phrase itself carried a seal. I offered serials that existed, bag, polymer sheets, reagent ampoules, and did not volunteer that the sampler had ever spoken on a network. His eyes ticked from the raw chemical burn on my hand to the hard case at my hip, and I did the same arithmetic, faster.
Junia tried for a minor deviation. Something small enough to fit between regulations like a shim under a loose bolt. The guard’s reply stayed perfectly unheated. Exceptions were not adjudicated at intake. Exceptions were processed. Any dispute, clarification, or “special case” was routed to Compliance Documentation, stamped, copied, and queued. He could initiate the packet immediately, he assured us, with the gentle menace of offering a chair.
The handheld scanner chirped once at my offered wrist chit; the attendant did not look up, only rotated the screen so the red indicator faced me like an accusation with a serial number. The device was a battered clinical unit (scratched bezel, misaligned casing seam) yet its verdict was pristine. A single tone, a single color, and the conversation was over before it began.
I adjusted my grip on the polymer sheets under my arm, as if better posture could improve my risk category. “That must be a contamination artifact,” I said, keeping my phrasing in the Registry-approved conditional. “I have handled reagent salts. I can provide chain notes for. She tapped twice. The scanner chirped again, not for me but for the system. Somewhere, a log accepted my presence like a stamped petition: received, filed, nonnegotiable.
I watched her hands more than her face. She wore double gloves, the outer pair marked with an inked grid of previous tallies. She reached for a strip of thin polymer, preprinted with the Lazaretum seal, and I had the absurd thought that the bracelet looked like ration-control: except here the ration was time and freedom.
“I am a technical consultant,” I said. I tried not to emphasize the word technical, because emphasis invites auditing. “Conditional access privileges. My work is on outbreak source identification.”
That finally earned me a fraction of eye contact. Not interest: triage. She angled the scanner toward the sheets I carried. “Unregistered items past Intake are contraband.”
“They are field notes,” I replied. “Non-transmitting. No power draw.”
She made a small noise that could have been agreement or boredom. Then her fingers closed around my wrist with practiced firmness and turned it, exposing the chit barcode as if I were a crate in the cargo manifests. My skin still tingled where the chemical burn had half-healed; the pressure made my composure wobble.
Behind me, the queue shifted. Someone coughed into the kind of silence that gets labeled. Overhead, a fan unit strained, cycling the air with a rhythm that implied nothing was ever quite clean enough. I had come in expecting to argue for samples. Instead I was learning the Pontoon’s first lesson: the scanner didn’t ask why; it only authorized what would happen next.
The flag moved through Intake like a dye front in a clogged filter: invisible until it reached a threshold, then suddenly everybody behaved as if it had weight. The attendant’s hand dipped into a tray of presealed bands, thin polymer, Lazaretum insignia, microprint warnings in three languages and one pictogram, and snapped one around my wrist with the same finality as a hatch dogged shut. It bit down, self-locking. My reflex was to ask what parameter had tripped it, but the room was already narrating over me.
“Red: Civitas consultant chit, Aurelia, ” she read my code aloud, not to inform me but to feed the recorder perched on its bracket like a bored witness. The recorder blinked once, a tiny bureaucratic eye. Another attendant, without looking up from her clipboard slate, assigned me a cot number that sounded like a storage location. “Row C, frame fourteen. Seventy-two.”
I started, “I am here to. Two steps to the side, a marshal lifted my polymer sheets as if evaluating contraband by thickness. The process did not pause to accommodate questions; it merely rerouted them.
Two places ahead, a father tried to bribe the machinery with narrative. He held his child, small, boneless with fatigue, so the bracelet scanner could see the wrist. “It started after the allotment swap,” he said, voice careful, as if carefulness was a valid currency. “The water tasted like pennies. The old ship physician said keep her on dry rations. She reacts to algal binders, she can’t have. She reduced him by increments. “Age in months.” Tap. “Temperature.” Tap. “O₂ saturation.” The probe clipped on, indifferent as a seal press.
He kept offering causality; she kept asking for thresholds. Each time he said why, she replied with how much. The child’s history became a column, and the column decided their next seventy-two hours.
The triage clerk interrupted only to perform conversion: panic into temperature, grief into saturation, anger into respiratory rate, and any story at all into an exposure window with an approved unit. When the father insisted on context her stylus hesitated for the span of one breath, then resumed its tick-mark march, as if the pause itself had been logged and dismissed.
The hierarchy clarified itself in layers, like sediment in a sample jar: not captains over clerks, not medical over Registry, but protocol over person. The screening flag was not a warning; it was a timer that had already started. Seventy-two hours, pre-allotted, pre-stamped. Leverage existed only as data that nested cleanly into their boxes. Numbers with units, samples with custody. Everything else was classified as noise.
I stepped into the triage lane with my polymer sheets tucked under my arm like a credential, which (on this pontoon) might as well have been a confession. The queue was arranged in compliant geometry: three abreast, half a meter apart, wrists forward for scan, mouths covered unless instructed otherwise. Someone had chalked “KEEP SPACING (AIR COUNTS)” on the deck plates, and the lettering looked fresh enough to still believe in obedience.
My brain did what it always does when confronted with a variable-rich environment and no time. It tried to make it a study.
I stopped at the first family with synchronized coughing (mother, two adolescents, a grandmother whose breath came in shallow, wet fractions) and I aimed my stylus at them like a probe. “Onset time. Specify in ship-hours. First symptom?” I asked. “Exposure interval: last potable refill, last allotment swap, last time you changed filter media. Any known scrubber drop events on your hull within the previous eight cycles? Any odor change, acidic, metallic, algal?”
They stared as if I had requested a permit in a language only clerks spoke. The mother opened her mouth to give me something human, how the cough started, how the nights had sounded, but I kept handing her boxes. “Quantify fever. Highest recorded. Any cyanosis? Any blood in sputum. Yes or no.” My tone was correct: formal, neutral, sanitized. My cadence was not. It landed like inspection.
A boy tried to answer in stories. I trimmed him into numbers. In the corner of my eye I saw the triage clerk’s seal-press stamp a chit and the stamp sounded like a door locking.
The grandmother’s wristband flashed amber; the scanner chirped its small, triumphant noise. I heard myself add, “Prior immuno prophylaxis? Any scrubber cartridge substitutions? Counterfeit media is common on the western lash.”
That was the point at which the air changed. Not chemically: socially. The coughs continued, but the lane tightened around me as if I’d introduced a contaminant that didn’t have an approved code.
I pivoted from the coughing family to the nearest uniform with a clipboard, one of Flaviana’s nurses, shoulders up around her ears, mask string biting into skin, and I did not perform the social courtesy of introducing my purpose. I simply spoke as if issuing a requisition. “Provide baseline vitals for the last six intakes. Temperature, saturation, respiratory rate. Note deviations from protocol.” My stylus hovered, ready to capture obedient numbers.
Her eyes did a quick, involuntary triangulation: me, my unsealed polymer sheets, then the guard posted at the bulkhead like a punctuation mark. When she looked back, the fatigue in her gaze had thickened into something less soluble.
“We do not ‘provide,’” she said, clipped enough to fit on a form. “We submit. With chain.”
“As submitted, then,” I corrected, because my brain will always attempt compliance before apology. “Were peak-flow measures recorded? Any spirometry surrogate? Even improvised, ”
A short laugh escaped her, humorless. “Peak-flow,” she repeated, as if tasting an extinct luxury. “On a pontoon where cutting tools require a license?” Her chin lifted a millimeter toward the guard. “Anything you touch becomes ‘tampering’ if you can’t quote the handoff code.”
Trying to be efficient (my preferred moral), I stepped out of the lane and toward the specimen rack as if it were merely another benchtop in another lab where urgency functioned as authorization. The swab trays sat in neat, refrigerated tiers, each nested in a clear pouch with a custody strip and a hanging seal tag that fluttered with the pontoon’s draft. I saw the next tray I wanted, throat, nasal, paired, already labeled in a hand I didn’t recognize, and my fingers moved before my brain filed the correct request.
My burned hand hovered at the latch. The latch did not acknowledge me. The seal tag still bore another officer’s stamp, crisp and unbroken, like a polite refusal in polymer. I felt, in the small pause before contact, how easily “clinical urgency” becomes “attempted access.”
The lane recalibrated around me. Talk fell away into the hiss of masks and the soft-click of scanners. A guard took one economical step that redefined my shoulder-line as “not through,” and a medic lifted her palm. No shove, no drama, just a procedural stop-sign. I halted with my burned hand suspended, absurdly mid-efficiency, and understood: haste here was not diligence. It was circumvention.
The medic’s reminder struck with the weight of a cited subsection: any unrequested contact was not “help” but “tampering,” and the log would staple my identifier to it whether or not my intent contained malice. I withdrew my hand as if from a hot plate. Then I forced myself into the slower rite, request, witness, handoff code, learning that competence here required translation into procedure to be legible.
Flaviana arrived with the quiet inevitability of an escalator handrail: you did not notice it until you leaned wrong and it was already there, guiding your posture back into something acceptable. She stepped into the narrow seam of corridor between me and Intake without haste, as if she had merely adjusted her route to avoid a spill. Her uniform was too clean for the Lazaretum. That, I learned, was not vanity; it was an argument.
“Consultant Aurelia,” she said, using my conditional title like a gasket. Soft enough to seal, firm enough to keep pressure where she wanted it. Her voice did not rise. It did not need to. In a place that ran on clipped oxygen and extended forms, volume was amateur authority.
She didn’t look at the guard first. She looked at the scanner’s status light, at the seal tag that had refused me, and then, only then, at my burned hand hanging there like an unfiled addendum. The corner of her mouth made the smallest motion that could be interpreted as sympathy if you were desperate for it and as admonition if you were not.
“This is a custody-controlled rack,” she observed, with the same tone one might use to note that the airlock was, in fact, an airlock. “Unauthorized contact triggers an integrity review. You do not want an integrity review.” The last sentence had the mild cadence of advice. The content was a barricade.
Around us, the lane resumed its breathing. Someone’s scanner chirped; a respirator valve clicked. The guard did not retreat, but his shoulders unhooked half a degree, as if Flaviana’s presence had converted a potential incident into a teachable moment that would not require paperwork. Provided I accepted the lesson.
She angled her body so I was no longer facing the rack but facing her, a subtle reorientation that read, to witnesses, like compliance. I felt my cheeks warm, not from shame exactly, but from the comprehension that I had almost become an entry in someone else’s report: “attempted access,” “tamper risk,” “recommend restriction.”
“Your work,” she continued, “will proceed through request and witness. I will not have the Pontoon’s findings impeached because you were…efficient.” The word landed dryly. Then her gaze flicked, briefly, to the medic’s lifted palm and the moment reset itself into procedure, with me neatly returned to my proper lane.
She did not “grant access” so much as she parceled my usefulness into approved units. “Respiratory swabs,” she said, as if reading an inventory line item, “for panel run. Comparative against our Pontoon baseline set. No novel assays without incident command annotation.” Each phrase came with an implied stamp: ACCEPTED, CONDITIONAL, DENIED BY DEFAULT.
A tray appeared at her gesture: pre-printed labels in Lazaretum format, a bundle of sterile sleeves, a seal press whose insignia carried more authority than my credentials. I understood the theater and the physics of it: if my data could not survive a challenge in Seal Hall, it might as well be superstition.
“For environmental correlation,” she continued, “you may draw condensate only from mapped waterline drips.” She held up a small diagram on polymer, the approved points circled in bright, officious ink and tagged with numbers that looked like ration chits. “Do not improvise your own sampling sites. That becomes an infrastructure incident.”
Her courtesy stayed intact. The perimeter of her permission did not. Anything beyond it, she implied, was not science. It was jurisdiction.
The conditions arrived as a recited checklist, delivered with the serene menace of someone who had never lost an audit. Every tube pre-labeled in Lazaretum format, date block, hull code, patient token, witness initials, before I so much as cracked a sterile sleeve. Collection observed by assigned staff who did not blink, seal verified against a control impression, custody logged at every handoff as if microbes respected handwriting. My hands, suddenly, were not tools but liabilities that needed countersignature.
Within that chain I was permitted to touch, to aliquot, to read a swab as evidence instead of rumor. Outside it, my access did not become “denied”; it simply ceased to exist in any ledger that mattered. Data without stamps was just my private anxiety in a tube.
I asked, as neutrally as I could manage, for the environmental system logs. Scrubber cycles, pump downtime, any timestamped anomaly I could pin the spread to. Flaviana’s politeness did not vanish; it simply hardened into policy. “Those records require dual authorization,” she said, and then the phrase that functioned like a seal press: “pending incident command review.” Neat. Final. Immune to questions.
No one said “no.” They let the word die on their tongues and kept their eyes on their counters, on their gloves, on anything that was not my request. I recognized the procedural tactic: access delayed until it became irrelevant, then recorded as “awaiting review,” compliant in ink. Flaviana’s concession was real, swabs, condensate, all properly witnessed, but it was also a curtain, drawn smoothly over the door I actually needed.
I revised my intake questions the way one revises a failed assay: change one variable, observe the system’s behavior. The first patient I approached had the hollow, watchful stare of someone already counting breath like ration chits. My trained instinct was to ask for onset, for exposures, for who else in their bunk row had coughed. Instead I nodded toward the counter and said, in my most Registry-safe register, “For intake swabs on a flagged screening, which form number controls labeling and retention? And where is the primary custody ledger physically stored during dark cycle?”
The effect was immediate and, in its way, obscene. The attendant’s shoulders loosened. A clerk who had been avoiding my gaze looked up as if I had finally spoken a known language. Grief had no routing code; procedure did.
“LZR-12,” the clerk said, tapping a laminated index strip. “Addendum B if the patient is transferred off-hull. Ledger is in the seal cabinet, bay three, unless Incident Command calls an audit hold.”
“And witness requirement?” I asked.
“Two initials at collection. One at handoff. No family witnesses.”
Of course. Families lied; staff were accountable. I wrote the numbers down on my polymer sheet, ink catching in the grooves my own old notes had left, and asked for the next piece of the machine. “Who is authorized to countersign if the assigned observer is reassigned mid-collection? And what is the acceptable delay window before a swab becomes ‘informational only’?”
The clerk blinked once, calculating whether I was dangerous. “Shift medic or duty marshal. Thirty minutes from seal break.”
So the story had a half-life, not in biology but in administration.
When I finally did ask a patient when their symptoms started, I waited until I had the correct boxes to trap the answer in. Even then I kept my voice measured, because anything human in this place had a way of becoming unofficial: easy to pity, easy to lose. Procedures, at least, left tracks.
I took a blank polymer sheet and treated it like a live specimen: uncontaminated, properly oriented, and useless unless sealed. The Pontoon had an idiom (risk tiers, containment yield, audit defensibility) and if I spoke it cleanly, doors did not open, but hinges sometimes stopped squealing.
I drafted a petition that never once used the words “children,” “families,” or “please.” Instead I wrote: Purpose, targeted sampling to classify outbreak vector; Scope, swabs, condensate, and adjacent manifold residues within Lazaretum jurisdiction; Handling conditions: sealed chain, dual witness, cold storage allocation, destruction hold pending review. Each clause was a little raft built to survive the whitewater of Incident Command edits.
I cited the screening statute by number, the one that turned a flagged cough into automatic detention, and I framed my work as compliance support: reducing false detentions by improving specificity, increasing containment efficiency by identifying shared infrastructure sources. It was the same argument my mouth wanted to make, translated into something that could be stamped without anyone admitting empathy.
When I finished, I left a box for countersignature large enough to shame whoever tried to dodge it.
At the sampling table I stopped pretending my original protocol would survive contact with Lazaretum. The surface was scored with old blade marks and old arguments; the air tasted faintly of iodine and damp polymer. I rewrote my labels while the swabs were still drying, assigning each specimen a dual identifier: patient code for the human variable, tent manifold code for the shared infrastructure, with both chained to a single transfer sheet that could not be “separated by accident.” I required time-stamps to the minute and made the attendant read the clock aloud, because memory is pliable but ink is stubborn. It was not pedantry. It was pricing future confusion high enough that no one could afford to misplace my work without leaving a receipt.
I recruited redundancy without calling it that. One orderly watched me seat each cap and press the seal strip until it squeaked; a nurse witnessed the handoff and wrote the time with the kind of irritation that meant she would remember doing it. When a duty marshal asked if I mistrusted his bay, I kept my cadence officer-clean: “Two signatures reduce rework and preserve quarantine capacity.”
With Junia’s dry, under-the-breath taxonomy of “helpful counters” versus “document sinks,” I split my petition like a controlled culture: one copy logged at Pontoon intake, one routed through medical stores (where shortages force attention), and one sealed into my own field folio. The plan stopped being sampling and became obligations so any “misfile” required someone to overtly break procedure.
I halted at the discard bin because the Lazaretum made waste look ceremonial: a lidded mouth with a red stripe, a posted directive about “biohazard disposal compliance,” and a marshal who watched it the way clerks watch stamp pads. A stack of specimen sleeves lay on top, half-slid as if someone had changed their mind mid-throw.
The seal impressions were crisp, correctly oriented, and still had that faint warm-smell of pressed polymer. The time-stamps were plausible. Minute marks aligned with the triage rush I’d just walked through. It was, in other words, competent work in the only language this place respected.
The batch code was the problem. One character. A hull prefix that should have read CIV-IX had been etched as CIV-XL. Easy to do if you were exhausted and the etcher’s auto-complete had the memory of a bored clerk. Small enough to pass in a hurry; large enough to detonate later when review compared the chain sheet against the intake ledger and found an impossible hull. An entire shift’s specimens would go from “evidence” to “mystery meat,” and the illness would keep its polite anonymity for another cycle.
I did not say “wrong,” because “wrong” is an accusation, and accusations trigger defenses, and defenses trigger delays. I said, evenly, to the nearest attendant: “Hold disposal pending reconciliation.”
The attendant blinked as if I’d spoken in a foreign dialect. A nurse in fogged visor turned her head. The marshal’s gaze moved from the bin to my hands as though my ink stains were contraband.
I lifted the sleeves with two fingers, careful not to smudge the etchings, and let my eyes do what my mouth was not yet permitted to do. CIV-XL. Same seal. Same time. Same patient codes I had heard called out: only now unmoored from the only anchor the Tabularium would recognize.
If they went in that bin, the outbreak would get a free amnesty stamped in red.
I requested the tray the way one requests a fire door to remain shut: not dramatic, not negotiable, just aligned with posted directives. “Hold disposal pending reconciliation.” I kept my hands visible and my voice in the same neutral pitch the clerks use when they mean to be unmemorable.
Ink had soaked into the creases of my fingertips from the morning’s notes; it made my gloves look dirtier than they were. I used that, too. Scientists are allowed to be obsessive if they sound like they are saving everyone paperwork. I laid the sleeves flat, rotated them until the seal impressions faced the same direction, and began cross-checking.
First: intake ledger sequence, the stamped string every sleeve should mirror if the universe had any respect for custody chains. Second: the etched hull prefix and patient code, which were clean, legible, and unfortunately married to the wrong hull identity. Third: the triage queue printout pinned to the board with a clip that had been bent into resignation. Times matched. Names matched. The line of provenance held. Only the header didn’t.
I did not say “someone mis-etched.” I said, to no one and everyone, “This batch will fail audit unless we reconcile the hull field before disposal.”
The supervising nurse drew herself up, visor flashing dull light, and I could feel the reprimand loading behind her teeth. Fatigue makes everyone territorial; procedure gives them something to defend. I met it with the flotilla’s approved dialect. “Supervision acknowledged. Custody variance identified. Remedy available without invalidation.”
I pulled a blank polymer strip from my folio, the kind that survives humidity and indignity, and etched one sentence in block formal: Correction Notice, Batch Header Field Reconciliation. I cited the custody clause by number, not because I enjoyed it, but because numbers are the only authority that doesn’t sleep. I framed it as shift protection: no fault assigned, no disciplinary trigger, only compliance restored before audit.
Her shoulders lowered by a fraction. Calculation replaced offense. The tray stopped being “discard” and became “processing” again, quietly, as if it had always been.
The reward arrived in the only currency the Lazaretum respected: un-ruined paperwork. The runner’s hand paused mid-swipe, and the “VOID” stamp hovered, undecided, before being set aside like a weapon denied. Downstream, a clerk compared my correction strip to the chain sheet, then nodded and accepted the batch as continuous. I watched the seal press bite clean.
When the queue resumed its slow, resentful crawl, the nurse who had loaded her reprimand like a syringe slid a spare seal strip toward me. She kept her visor angled elsewhere, as if eye contact would constitute a confession. I pocketed it without ceremony; gratitude is not an approved form.
Flaviana offered no praise. She amended the ledger with a hard, economical stroke, then addressed me afterward as “Consultant”, clipped, deliberate, and therefore binding.
Junia held herself at the intake bulkhead the way a competent stain holds to fabric: apparently accidental, functionally permanent. The relay housing was open on her side, a narrow wound in the pontoon’s wall where the comms conduit met the intake’s screening terminals. One hand disappeared into it up to the wrist, fingers doing the small, practiced movements that read as “maintenance” to anyone with authority fatigue. The other hand rested on her thigh as if she had all the time the Lazaretum would never admit to having.
Her posture stayed slack, but her attention was a metered instrument. Her quick eyes ticked over badge colors, colonist white, registry slate, ship-crew green, unmarked, and then over the order in which those badges were recognized. Not allowed. Not even refused. Recognized. There is a difference here, and it decides whether you are a person in a corridor or a problem in a tent.
I watched the choreography from my own sanctioned square of floor and tried to pretend I was only counting sample vials. Two marshals at the inner hatch let a colonist medic through on a nod, no scanner sweep. A registry clerk with a slate sash got the courtesy of a delay. An argument conducted in low voices behind a visor so that the queue could learn nothing from it. A ship captain’s mate in green was sent to the side rail with a soft hand and a hard phrase: “Hold pending verification.” A woman with no badge at all was processed immediately, because “immediately” is what you do to something you don’t intend to litigate.
Junia’s gaze followed the hands, not the faces. Who touched the tablet. Who signed. Who avoided signing. Who touched a sleeve when they spoke, as if that small contact could rewrite a directive. She counted the spoken-to, those granted explanation, and the processed: those granted only outcome. Each time the intake seal press hissed, her eyes flicked to the header field on the strip, like she was watching a pulse monitor that could also ruin you.
The relay, I realized, was only half the device she was repairing. The other half was the room.
Junia did not look up from the relay wound. Her mouth barely moved, as if the air itself was audited. “This raft does two jobs,” she murmured. “One: keep people breathing. Two: decide whose fault it is they stopped.” A screwdriver clicked once, a neat little punctuation mark.
I kept my eyes on my vials. A scientist staring at a comms tech is a suspicious shape here.
“The second job wins, if you let it,” she continued, voice flat with the kind of humor that can pass as fatigue. “You put the wrong hull-code in the exposure column, and suddenly your samples aren’t evidence. They’re a confession. You put the right name under ‘source’ and the patient becomes a pretext.”
A marshal walked past; Junia’s tone did not change, but her words shortened. “Don’t argue bedside. Argue chain. Everything that matters travels by header fields.”
I understood then why Flaviana’s courtesy had been conditional, why the void stamp hovered like an execution stayed. The pathogen was moving through ducts and waterlines; blame would move faster, through forms, and it did not need oxygen.
Junia didn’t gesture with her hands (hands are incriminating) but tipped her chin toward the intake counter where the paper-equivalents lived. Two stacks sat in disciplined proximity: Registry seal strips in their stiff, numbered sheaths; medical screening cards in softer polymer, preprinted with symptom grids and detention checkboxes. Parallel chains, both claiming to be “custody,” neither acknowledging the other until a person with a sash decided they intersected.
I followed the invisible geometry. A swab could be a specimen on a clinical card or “material of concern” on a registry strip; the same tube, two destinies. One stamp meant treatment, the other meant inquiry, and inquiry here was a form of quarantine with better lighting.
Junia’s eyes flicked to the seal press. “First stamp wins,” she breathed. “Second stamp edits history.”
Junia distilled it into the only dialect that never gets challenged here: procedure. The Registry doesn’t need to cure anyone; it needs an incident number, a ledger trail, a narrative it can audit and punish. Medical doesn’t need consensus; it needs compliance, a directive chain tight enough to seal hatches. Both sides will seize “authority” by being first to write the outbreak into existence.
Her last caution stayed practical, not theatrical. A locked hatch is honest; it draws crowds, petitions, and someone important to say no in public. But a requisition slid into the wrong tray, a date “normalized” to match a shift log, a signature held until the sampling window expires: those are quiet denials. Here, the battlefield is header fields, and truth is the first casualty.
I assembled the packet on the fold-down bench of my assigned cubicle, where the air tasted faintly of recycled bleach and someone else’s despair. The polymer sheets were already scored with old duty stamps; I wrote across them anyway. Ink takes on anything up here if you press hard enough.
First I indexed the assays the way a Registry clerk expects reality to be indexed: sample ID, location code, collection timestamp down to the quarter-watch, handling chain, reagent batch, and my own conditional-access signature so there was no procedural excuse to treat it as contraband science. I included the control swabs, blank waterline draws, unused filter shavings, my own sleeve cuff, because the Tabularium respects boredom masquerading as rigor.
Then I built the crosswalk table: symptom onset windows mapped against shift rosters and ration issue days, with a column for hull-supplied pipeline segment. The pattern was not subtle. Unfortunately, subtlety is what gets approved. So I formatted it like an audit-prep memo, not a warning.
My mild chemical burn protested every time I flexed my hand to seal another page. I wrapped it in gauze, then continued, because pain is not a recognized petition attachment.
The request section was a single paragraph, deliberately unpoetic:
I did not write “counterfeit.” I did not write “sabotage.” I did not write any captain’s name. I wrote “material provenance verification,” which is Tabularium for “I am asking permission to be right.”
At the bottom I added a compliance note, power draw minimal, no unregistered devices past Seal Hall, findings to be routed through authorized channels, because in Civitas-IX the truth requires a stamped escort.
I tuned my phrasing the way I used to tune a gas chromatograph: small adjustments, watching for the point where the machine stops screaming and starts producing usable lines. The Tabularium has habits, and one of them is that it hears blame as noise. So I did not offer it noise.
Every sentence was built to imply diligence without implying fault. Not “your scrubbers are failing,” but “observed efficiency deviation from bulletin baseline.” Not “someone swapped the media,” but “verification of material provenance under routine variance controls.” I used “infrastructure-linked exposure vectors” because it sounds like something a committee can approve without feeling personally indicted.
The appendices did the accusing for me, quietly. I laid out the decay curve on scrubber output against quarter-watch timestamps, then overlaid onset clusters by ration allotment day. I included a binder signature spectrum from filter shavings and a matching polymer peak from waterline biofilm scrapings, with error bars wide enough to look humble and narrow enough to be inconvenient.
Even my uncertainty was bureaucratically formatted: “confidence interval,” “recommended next record set,” “audit trail completeness.” If they wanted to deny me, they would have to deny arithmetic.
Forelock Gate did not throw a tantrum. The turnstile read my conditional access, decided I was not a smuggled appliance, and let me through on a sigh of pneumatics. I slid the packet across the counter with both hands, as if it were fragile culture media and not paper-equivalent plastic with the emotional weight of five hulls.
The intake clerk flipped through just enough pages to confirm it was boring. Boredom, here, is authentication. His seal press came down with a dry click that sounded indecently final, then he tore off a narrow tracking strip and handed it to me without making a face.
It was the first numbered promise I’d received in days, and it implied the machine could still be made to move if you spoke to it in its own small, stamped language.
While my petition sat in some intake tray, I recalibrated my map with the only data stream not routed through seal presses: a whispered, careful confirmation from Lazaretum. A junior medic said the same hull cluster was saturating their cots, and their intake timestamps marched in lockstep with my ration-cycle marks. Arithmetic, unfortunately, does not require authorization.
Buoyed by that small, obscene click of approval, I drafted an addendum so narrow it could pass for housekeeping. I asked for only issuance batch codes, replacement intervals, and the last three variance notes: no names, no hull tallies, nothing that would force a conscience to wake up. I framed it as “schedule reconciliation” and “stock rotation verification,” the sort of request a clerk can stamp while thinking about lunch.
I stopped behaving as though stamped access were the only species of legitimacy available in the flotilla. If the Tabularium would not lend me its seal presses, I would manufacture my own bureaucracy with a pen tip and an unromantic sense of time.
In a service corridor outside Seal Hall, close enough to smell the overlit paper-dry air, far enough to avoid the turnstiles, I laid three polymer sheets on a crate lid and drew a table by hand. Columns for neutral sample identifiers, origin point, collection method, time mark, handling notes, and witness. It was not elegant, but it was defensible. The Registry understood tables. The Registry respected rectangles.
I assigned each vial an ID that did not imply guilt: CND-1 through CND-12 for condensate, WTR- series for ration spigots, SCR- for scrubber intakes. No hull names. No captain names. Nothing a clerk could interpret as an accusation and therefore a personal risk. Each entry got a time code keyed to ration-cycle bells, because bells were the only clocks everyone heard. I wrote in formal phrasing, because even my rebellion had to be filed in their dialect: “field-captured,” “transient custody,” “sealed at point of acquisition.” I initialed every line with ink-stained fingers that were still faintly tender from yesterday’s reagent burn.
For seals, I used what I had. Strip of tamper tape scavenged from a medical pack. A dot of red lacquer from a cracked indicator vial. Over each cap, I drew a thin alignment mark that would not survive casual curiosity. If anyone opened a vial and pretended they had not, the lie would be visible even to a tired person in bad light.
The comedy of it was that it calmed me. Anxiety, when forced into rows and headings, becomes a checklist. And checklists are how you keep a flotilla alive when the official records insist nothing is wrong.
With Junia’s directions and a dockhand’s moment of selective blindness, I turned a neglected service alcove into a laboratory that would have failed any inspection on principle. The optics were scavenged from a broken periscope unit: two lenses that still agreed on what “in focus” meant if I bullied them with tape. The heater block was a cracked galley element that ran either lukewarm or vindictive; I chose “consistent enough” and recorded its tantrums as temperature variance.
I ran the condensate trap swabs in sequence, three hulls, three collection times, three sets of hands that had sworn they’d “barely touched anything.” I preferred chemistry to testimony. A small volume, a quick solvent pull, a heat-assisted separation that was more persuasion than method, and then the color shift and tackiness that had become familiar in the wrong way.
Each sample produced the same stubborn, mucous-like metabolite profile. Not the scatter you see when people cough into shared air. This was repeatable. It had ratios. It had a supply chain.
I followed the metabolite ratios the only way they made sense: upstream, toward where the air was supposed to be corrected before it ever reached lungs. The scrubber intake baffle on the nearest service run was filmed with the usual grey fuzz, salt, skin, whatever the flotilla sheds when it pretends to be sealed. I logged its location by tension-cable number and ration-cycle bell, then set a clean polymer shard under my thumb as a catch tray.
A careful scrape produced more than dust. Fine flecks clung to the edge, pale and slightly elastic, the way binder does when it’s been asked to behave like structure. In a properly manufactured medium, binder stays married to fibers; it does not go wandering.
Under magnification the fragments were embarrassingly uniform as if milled on purpose, not chewed up by time and humidity.
To argue counterfeit media, I needed a cartridge I could weigh, flake, and shame against the published spec sheet. I asked Junia softly, in the tone reserved for unfiled favors, if her private mesh included anyone who handled “waste” as a routine and not a confession. No device request. No counter ticket. Just a name that would not make a clerk curious.
Junia did not “introduce” me so much as aim me like a tool. A dockhand with a grease-smeared permit sash palmed a spent filter cartridge and gave me the sort of look that priced my ethics in minutes. In the alcove’s dim, I slit the casing along a seam, took two interior swabs and a thin binder shave, then pinched it shut with salvage tape. I logged the return time to the bell. Denial, in this flotilla, was a form of documentation.
Livius did not block me like a door; he blocked me like signage. He became an instructional poster for good conduct, strategically placed where the most eyes could certify it. I began to notice him the way you notice a leaking valve only after it has been tightened for display: always in the traffic lanes, never in the corners.
In the spine-tunnel he timed himself to the ration-cycle bell, so the corridor was full of stamped chits and the particular desperation that makes people look up. He lifted crates with the careful strain of a man demonstrating usefulness, not need. He did not bark orders; he offered assistance. “Hold that end,” he said to a marshal with the intimacy of shared hardship, and he thanked him by name as if names were currency he could afford to spend. The marshal, flattered into legitimacy, forgot to watch the hands.
Near the inspection queue he positioned his prosthetic leg so the serial plates caught the overlights. The effect was not pitiable but it served as a reminder: refugee, damaged, still standing. He spoke quarantine the way Flaviana did, with the same vocabulary and fewer sharp edges. “Containment protects all hulls,” he said at exactly the moment a coughing child was turned back from the front rope. Heads nodded, because agreement is easier than thought and he made it sound like procedure instead of sacrifice.
I watched him echo directives before they finished traveling down the corridor, as if his mouth were an auxiliary repeater for authority. He praised “compliance” loudly enough to be overheard and criticized “panic” softly enough to be plausible deniability. People left his radius feeling scolded and grateful at the same time.
What made it practiced was the absence of improvisation. He never spoke when a clerk’s recorder light was on unless the sentence could be quoted without risk. He never touched a form unless the angle invited witnesses. He made himself a public argument: that he was orderly, cooperative, and therefore incapable of the kind of sabotage I was implying without ever saying so.
When the ration-cycle bell stopped summoning bodies, he arrived as if called by absence. The threshold of the ration office framed him in overlight: clean cuffs, open hands, that practiced half-smile that made refusal feel like a personal failure. He did not enter with urgency. He entered with entitlement disguised as patience.
He waited until the last chit was torn and the last argument had found a different corridor, then leaned toward the intake counter and spoke in the low register reserved for “administrative hygiene.” The clerk, an older man with ink cracks along his thumb, made the mistake of meeting his eyes.
Livius asked for a booth, not as a demand but as a convenience, as if he were protecting the clerk from noise. The side booth door sealed with a soft gasketed sigh. Through the polymer pane I saw Livius tilt his head, sympathetic. I did not hear the full sentence, only the key stamps of it: “security-sensitive,” “captain review,” “chain-of-custody,” and, like a blade under cloth, “liability.”
The manifests became not records but weapons: something to be “held” until a superior mood allowed them to exist. I felt my access privileges shrink without any form being denied.
The clerk’s shoulders rose a fraction, as if he’d remembered his spine was an auditable asset. His expression stayed neutral but his hands stopped wandering. He aligned my petition stack to the counter’s etched ruler and began stamping with a sudden, devotional precision: date, hull code, intake seal, receipt copy, registry copy. Each press landed square, no smears, no wasted wax, the way people write when they know the ink will be read aloud.
He did not deny anything. Denial would have required a reason and therefore a trail. Instead he rerouted. I watched him lift my pending requests and slide them into the gray tray marked “Secondary Verification,” a category that meant “later” without specifying the decade. On the routing line he added fresh initials (someone I had not met) then sanded the corner of my urgency into process.
A notice printed itself onto my queue slate before I reached the tunnel: REGISTRY ADVISORY, REQUEST STATUS ALTERED. My standing petition for ration-pipeline logs had been reclassified to Restricted-Access Handling, dual-authorization required, with an added annotation to my conditional privileges: SCOPE REVIEW PENDING. It read like a courtesy and functioned like a quarantine cordon. Even my questions now required containment.
The retaliation arrived with the speed of an automated courtesy. My bench lights dimmed mid-spin, the centrifuge dropping to a sulky crawl, and my slate flashed a red-banded notice: POWER DRAW ANOMALY. A compliance check, politely phrased and functionally absolute. My heater block was throttled to maintenance wattage; incubations became prayers. Any attempt to override would not read as urgency. It would read as misconduct.
Junia intercepted me at the spine-tunnel junction where three hulls met like misfiled forms. Corrugated bulkheads, directional stencils, and the usual bottleneck of bodies pretending not to be a queue. She arrived too quickly for the pace the signage permitted. Her patched cloak snagged a cable tie, tore free, and she did not slow down to apologize to infrastructure.
Her breath was tight, controlled the way technicians breathe when they are trying not to transmit panic in their lungs. She took my elbow (not intimate, not rude, the exact pressure of a marshal redirecting traffic) and pulled me into the lee of a conduit column marked LIFE SUPPORT: DO NOT LEAN. We leaned.
“Don’t open your slate on the trunk,” she said. The words came clipped, as if every extra syllable incurred a tariff.
She produced a palm diagnostic, its casing shaved of any registry tag, and tilted it so only I could see. A log scrolled in narrow green bands: trunk-line sweep initiated from Tabularium; tap modules deployed in stagger; signature match parameters updated. It read like a hymn to paranoia. Somewhere between the lines were the only nouns that mattered: UNREGISTERED DEVICE ID, and beneath it a time stamp that matched my last trip along the scrubber serviceway.
A single “chirp,” the log called it: one handshake packet, one polite hello from a device that should not exist. In the Registry’s language, a chirp was not an error; it was evidence of intent. I stared at the signature hash, trying to convince myself it could belong to any of Junia’s handheld relays, any scavenged diagnostic, any forgotten toy with a battery. The hash was too clean. Someone had turned on something with purpose, near the air scrubbers, and then turned it off fast enough to pretend it had never been there.
Junia’s quick eyes flicked past me to the tunnel mouth. “They’re not just watching,” she said. “They’re doing a sweep. Hunting one footprint.”
I nodded, because my throat had gone bureaucratically dry. My hand, still tender from the reagent burn, curled uselessly at my side as if pain were a permit I could present.
Junia did not soften it for my benefit. She drew the situation as if it were a budget line item, the kind you could initial and later claim you never approved.
“I can keep your pulls masked,” she said, tapping the palm diagnostic with a grease-dark nail. “I bounce you through my mesh. One hop looks like noise. Two hops looks like a commuter. Three hops starts to look like a person with somewhere forbidden to be.”
Her mouth twisted the way it did when she found a joke in a catastrophe. “Audits don’t catch criminals. They catch patterns. Every relay I use to hide you becomes a dot they can connect. And when Tabularium wants a head, they don’t take the consultant with conditional access. They take the unregistered operator with a closet full of ‘unnecessary’ hardware.”
She angled the screen toward me again: device IDs in a column, timestamps like ration chits, neat enough to be incriminating.
“If they clamp down,” she went on, “they’ll seize my handhelds, throttle my repeaters, and call it ‘stabilization.’ And then the skiff crews lose their timing. No quiet water runs. No night docking. Just extortion in daylight, with marshals watching and captains taking a percentage.”
I listened without bargaining, because bargaining implies I had alternatives. My mind kept trying to draft arguments anyway but none of it would reimburse her when the marshals came with polite gloves.
So I narrowed it until it could pass as procedure.
“Junia,” I said, keeping my voice in the Registry’s approved temperature, “I am not requesting open access or exploratory pulls. One discrete query only. Scope-limited. No attachment downloads. No side channels.”
I forced my burned hand to unclench, as if relaxing the flesh would relax the situation.
“I need the ration pipeline identifier feeding the current spike clusters, and the destination hull list tied to that pipeline for the last two dark cycles. That is sufficient for a preliminary infrastructure-vector memo. Without it, they will classify this as behavioral noncompliance and start moving families to Lazaretum as punishment dressed up as care.”
Junia stalled with the practiced stillness of someone counting exits. Her gaze ticked from the corridor cameras to the red maintenance lamps that marked the scrubber serviceway like cautions on a form. “They don’t sweep this hard without cause,” she muttered. “And that chirp: could be bait. Make independents flinch.” Then, with a resigned exhale, she started re-routing, thumbs blurring over a patched handheld, stitching a one-use mask designed to fail politely after a single query.
The pull arrived as a thin, late burst of metadata, one ration-chain label and a fan of delivery nodes, and they aligned with the worst decks with the ruthless symmetry of a well-kept lie. Junia cut the route on reflex and scoured the relay cache until it was clean enough to swear over. Still, her mesh gave off a faint audit-flavored wobble. I sealed the identifier in my notes and pivoted toward paper: stamps, signatures, and persuadable hands.
I drafted the petition the way you dress a wound you’re not allowed to name: clean, narrow, and with language that implied I was grateful for the opportunity to bleed properly.
FORM 17-C, “Confirmatory Chain-of-Custody Review (Scope-Limited),” accepted a maximum of three technical justifications before it began to treat you like a person with opinions. I kept to the allowance. Item one: observed scrubber efficiency deviation beyond bulletin tolerance, expressed as a percentage and a variance band, no adjectives. Item two: clustered symptom onset across non-adjacent hulls, presented as timestamps and deck codes, with an attached note that correlation did not constitute attribution. Item three: materials-compatibility verification, because “counterfeit” was an accusation and “substitute media” was, apparently, a category.
I chose every verb with the caution of someone carrying open solvent. “Verify,” “confirm,” “reconcile.” Never “investigate.” Never “trace.” I wrote that a review of custody and substitution authorizations would “support confidence in ongoing infrastructure integrity,” which was bureaucratic for please let me prevent you from quarantining children for the crime of breathing.
My burned hand still objected to existence. The glove rubbed the blister edge each time I pressed the stylus to polymer. I paused to let the sting settle into something I could file under background noise. If the Registry had a stamp for pain, it would require dual authorization and a witness.
At Forelock Gate the queue advanced in inch-measures, a slow migration of packets, chits, and eyes kept deliberately forward. Overhead, the intake cameras blinked their little red patience. A marshal recited entry rules with ceremonial boredom: no unregistered devices, no raised voices, no unscheduled requests.
I rehearsed my cadence while I waited. “Requesting review.” Breathe. “Confirmatory only.” Breathe. “No operational disruption.” The words had to be flat enough to pass as compliance, but precise enough to catch on whatever internal hook kept this flotilla from tearing itself apart.
When my turn came, I placed the petition packet on the counter with my good hand and held the other still, as if motion alone might be construed as intent.
The clerk I’d patched up last week stood behind the counter with the posture of someone trying to make his lungs smaller. His lips had the chalk tint of people who are pretending their air is optional. He did not look at my face; he looked at the petition packet as if eye contact could be logged and requisitioned.
His fingers moved in the tidy, inefficient choreography the Tabularium trained into everyone: align, tap, square. Then, with a motion so practiced it read as accident, he nudged something toward me at the counter’s edge.
A folded distribution stub. Not a full ledger page, not an authorized extract: just the kind of tear-off you’d call a “routing remainder” when asked why it existed at all. It slid under my packet like a misfiled receipt someone was too polite to correct.
I kept my face neutral and my pulse internal. A marshal two stations down was pretending to read, which meant he was listening.
The stub carried node codes in the ration-chain format, a date range that sat squarely across the first symptom spike, and, in the signature block, two clean blanks that looked less like omission and more like intent.
In the margin, in the same thin clerk-hand used for queue corrections and ration disputes, someone had written: SUBSTITUTE MEDIA AUTHORIZED. The words were boxed, administrative, and therefore more obscene than any whispered accusation. Beneath it sat a registry code I did not recognize, too long for a deck office, too clean for a captain’s workaround, and beside that, a seal impression so pale it could have been a ghost of compliance. Not absent. Present, but under-pressed, as if the signer wanted the gesture on record without the pressure that made it real.
The implication settled with unpleasant elegance. No theft to prosecute; an approval to cite. And approvals, when inconvenient, get routed upward into dual-authorization corridors where my “conditional access” status couldn’t even pronounce the hallway name without inviting a review of why I was walking toward it.
I did not let my face do anything registrable. I asked, in the tone reserved for lost chits, where the two missing signatures would ordinarily resolve, Seal Hall ledger, or Bilge copy. His answer arrived too quickly: routine reconciliation delays, backlog in duplicate entry, nothing to trouble a technical consultant. His knuckles went white around the stamp handle. A marshal’s gaze found our counter on the beat between my words.
In a maintenance alcove that smelled of warm insulation and old salt, I copied the unfamiliar registry code onto a fresh polymer strip, etching hard enough to feel it in my burned hand. I slid the stub out from under my petition packet and pocketed them separately, like segregating samples with suspected cross-contamination. The stub was not admissible proof. It was proof-adjacent. Sufficient to justify deeper access, sufficient to get me audited if found too soon.
By mid-cycle the flotilla’s paperwork acquired a new layer, the way mildew acquires a surface: quiet, inevitable, and somehow already old. The first copy I saw was tacked beside the water-chit window where people normally taped missing-child notices and instructions for de-salting condenser pans. It was headed in the Registry’s most soothing typeface and bore a seal impression crisp enough to make my burned hand itch in sympathy.
PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT NOTICE.
Not my name in the header: of course not. It addressed “all technical consultants operating under conditional privilege,” which is bureaucrat for anyone we might want to blame later. The body text was a perfect specimen of bloodless harm. Unauthorized sampling. Procedural contamination risk. Inflammatory inference. The words had the careful spacing of an antiseptic wipe: clean, disposable, and meant to be used on someone else.
It did not accuse me of falsifying data, because that would require someone to argue with my data. Instead it treated my work as a hygiene problem. It implied that collecting a swab without the correct counter-signature was not just an infraction but a hazard, a vector. The irony sat so neatly in the paragraph breaks I almost respected it.
The distribution was what made it lethal. Captains received it with their fuel ration summaries; quarantine officers with their shift rosters; registry counters with the day’s stamp-calibration log. It arrived on official polymer, not copied, not whispered, and therefore it traveled faster than rumor. Rumor must be repeated. This only had to be posted.
A clerk I had previously coaxed into retrieving an air-scrubber maintenance page glanced at it, then at my hands, and slid her drawer shut as if the notice were contagious through proximity. Farther down the spine-tunnel, two marshals stood beneath a bulletin board pretending to study a safety diagram while watching who stopped to read.
The notice ended with a line that was almost funny in its restraint: “All queries are to be routed through formal petition channels to prevent record contamination.”
Even my future questions were being quarantined.
Within hours I could feel the corridor climate shift: not in degrees, but in etiquette. The queue-lines tightened. People stopped making eye contact the way they did when a marshal walked by, except no marshal had to be present anymore. The Tabularium had done what it always did best: it had turned a person into a procedural risk.
At Counter Nine I asked for a distribution pull on the suspect filter lots and received, with immaculate politeness, a reference number, a receipt stub, and an estimated response interval of “six to nine cycles pending reconciliation.” The clerk said it as if announcing tide tables. When I asked if an interim view was permissible, she consulted a laminated directive, new ink, still stiff, and read aloud that “conditional privileges do not extend to unsupervised ledger exposure.” Her hand hovered over the stamp like it might bite.
No one said no. They said not yet, and attached a tracking code to my request the way you attach a tag to a specimen jar before you seal it.
The notice hadn’t outlawed my work. It had defined it as a contamination pathway. Anyone who helped me would be leaving their fingerprint in an audit trail, and fingerprints, here, were a kind of confession.
The Lazaretum intake routine altered as if someone had re-written a form while everyone slept. No bulletin, no posted directive. Only a new choreography at dark cycle: arrivals broken into staggered segments, escorted by different hands, routed through an alternate airlock order that kept them out of the usual narrow choke points. The same bodies, the same coughs; different cots, different bay partitions, different triage tags clipped in slightly different places. The tags still bore numbers, but the numbering now reset mid-sequence, as though “operational optimization” required amnesia. By the time I cross-checked ration-pipeline timestamps against intake screens, the identifiers no longer aligned. Nothing was missing in a way one could accuse. Everything was rearranged in a way one could deny. My last workable chain of correlation simply stopped having links.
Junia did not bring me a message so much as a rumor with a clean chain-of-custody. “Not from him,” she said, which meant it was from him. It had been permitted to reach me by way of mouths that owed favors: if I would clarify that my filter-media linkage was speculative and submit all findings in Registry-approved phrasing, access could be arranged. Help, shaped like a gag.
Inside the Tabularium the machinery of inevitability began turning with the soft, steady violence of a stamp press. Somewhere behind Seal Hall glass, a clerk assembled my “compliance review”: my sampling rig’s device ID not filed in triplicate, a requisition lacking the second signature, a chain-of-custody verb not matching Quarantine lexicon. Each infraction was nothing; together they became a clean refusal, prewritten, formatted, and waiting for my name.
The marshal didn’t so much beckon as allocate me. Two fingers, flat as a clerk’s stamp, indicated the black floor mark in front of Seal Hall Intake: an inlaid square of resin that said, in several languages and one universally understood posture, STAND HERE TO BE PROCESSED. I stepped onto it. He adjusted my position with the same attention I used when centering a sample slide, guiding my heel half a width back until my boots aligned with the square’s edges.
I became a demonstrative exhibit.
His visor was up, so the queue could see he was a person and not a policy. That was generous of him. He raised his voice just enough to clear the counters, the turnstiles, and the low grind of the air exchangers.
“State your name for the record.”
“Aurelia Senn,” I said, and watched a scribe’s stylus pause as if my consonants needed authorization.
“Hull affiliation.”
“Civitas-IX, Spine-Tunnel service annex. Assigned as technical consultant.”
He made a small show of checking my wrist band, though the band was already broadcasting. The delay was procedural theater: a moment to let the queue lean in and decide what category of offender I was.
“Access class.”
“Conditional,” I said. I could have added the clause, conditional under Medical Advisory Charter 4, subsection provisional, but the word itself was sufficient to sour the air. Conditional was flotilla pidgin for not ours.
He repeated it back as if it were a confession. “Conditional. Noted.”
My hand still stung under the gauze where the reagent burn had kissed through; I kept the fingers curled, ink-stained tips hidden like contraband. Behind him, the Seal Hall doors stayed shut with their polite, hydraulic patience. Biometric turnstiles blinked green for people who had never been asked to recite themselves.
The marshal tilted his head toward the waiting crowd, letting them hear my classification settle onto me. My pulse stayed steady, because my pulse had learned that steadiness was its only permitted form. The humiliation was not in the denial (denials were a common weather here) it was in the forced recital, the public labeling, the quiet insistence that the square on the floor was the only place I was allowed to exist.
He accepted my polymer petition with the careful politeness reserved for things that might be evidence later. The gloves made a faint squeak against the sheet as he lifted it, as if even the friction needed oversight. He did not look at me first; he turned the document outward, angling it toward the queue so the header could do its work. My stamped request code, the thin red band denoting medical relevance, the two provisional seals that meant I had followed every gate’s etiquette without being allowed through.
There is a particular humiliation in seeing your compliance displayed like contraband.
He tapped the top line with one knuckle, slow enough for anyone watching to read along. Then, in a voice pitched for public consumption, he asked as though making idle inventory: “Did you author these assertions independently?”
Independently. As if I had improvised the flotilla’s oxygen chemistry for sport. As if data only became dangerous once a conditional person touched it.
“Yes,” I said, because truth is the only thing we’re permitted to offer without a permit.
He nodded once, satisfied, as if the question had already done the denial’s first half.
He read my petition the way a butcher reads an animal: selecting the cuts that would bleed most in public. “, scrubber efficiency decline of twenty-two percent within three cycles, ” he announced, and did not bother to include the calibration notes or the caveat about clogged reagent lines. He let the number hang. In the queue, someone shifted; a baby started to fuss, as if on cue.
“, symptom clustering across three primary hulls, including Spine-Tunnel junction traffic, ” he continued, pausing to glance up through the overlit hall as though he expected faces to turn toward me with the correct expression.
Then: “ .” Restrictions landed like a ration cut. His eyes lifted again, politely inviting outrage to form its orderly line.
I started to say that the figures were sampled, cross‑checked against three intake manifolds, and adjusted for the scrubbers’ known drift, but he raised two fingers. An air‑seal in miniature. “Statement noted; no argumentative commentary,” he recited. Then he resumed, inserting “alleged” before every measured value and “proposed” before every mitigation step, until my petition read like a charge sheet.
He concluded with the question that was not a question: “Are you requesting operational authority absent command endorsement?” He let the phrase settle as if it had weight enough to pin me in place. When I answered, he did not record the words. He set my polymer sheet down at the clerk’s station with a small, terminal pat, an administrative full stop, offering the room the inference that I was not submitting evidence. I was presuming rank.
The clerk’s mouth tightened, not at the numbers but at the header block where my designation sat like a stain that had soaked through the sheet. His finger came down on the line as if it were a leak he could isolate by pressure alone.
“Technical consultant: conditional access,” he read, softly. He did not read it for my benefit. He read it the way a seal press reads wax: to determine what it is allowed to become.
He traced the dash with a nail, and the motion was almost tender. I watched the ink-stained pads of my own fingertips curl against my palm to keep from reaching for the petition like it was something alive that might flinch. Around us, Seal Hall did its usual imitation of order: the steady click of turnstiles, the sigh of a stamp lever returning, the slow choreography of people pretending not to listen because listening unpermitted is a kind of theft.
He didn’t dispute my figures. He didn’t ask how I compensated for scrubber drift, or whether my sample jars had been heat-cycled. He didn’t even perform the courtesy of doubt. Instead he brought the sheet closer to his face and, with the practiced efficiency of someone trained to spot fraud, checked whether my permit band color matched the designation.
A marshal behind him shifted his weight; the armored sole made a small complaint on the deck plating. I registered it automatically, the way you register an alarm light you cannot afford to ignore. A second clerk at the adjacent station stopped stamping long enough to look in my direction, then resumed with exaggerated attention to her own queue, as if my situation were contagious.
The clerk exhaled through his nose, a controlled venting. “Conditional,” he repeated, and only then did his eyes travel down into my calculations, briefly, almost begrudgingly, before snapping back to the header, as if the title line were the only legitimate measurement on the page.
His fingertip remained planted there, pinning my work in place while he decided what kind of person I was allowed to be.
He rotated my polymer sheet with two careful fingers, as if the data itself were fragile, and held it at a slight cant until the overhead strip‑lights skated along the surface. The numbers flared white for a moment, legible all the way down the queue channel. It was an efficient maneuver: my petition ceased to be a request between desks and became a notice pinned to me.
“This document,” he said, still not looking at my face, “is not submitted under command endorsement.” He paused on the last word as if it were a gasket missing from a seal. An absence that made everything downstream automatically noncompliant.
A marshal’s visor shifted, tracking the angle of the sheet. I could feel the room accept the framing. In Seal Hall, visibility is a sanction; anything that can be read can be judged, and anything judged can be filed.
I had written the header correctly, stamped my own designation in the proper field, even used the approved vocabulary for uncertainty. None of it mattered. By lifting it into the light, he made the defect structural and public, a matter of architecture rather than evidence.
Then he let the polymer hover there, long enough for the implication to settle into the air like disinfectant.
Without contesting a single figure, he began to recite the boundary as if it were a safety brief and not a dismissal. Conditional access, he informed the counter-space, permitted observation under escort; it did not permit synthesis across hulls. It permitted sampling in situ; it did not permit attribution of source without a commanding officer’s narrative tag. It permitted reporting of measurements into the intake queue; it did not permit conclusions, recommendations, or (his eyes flicked to the phrase he liked) policy inference.
Each clause arrived cleanly, enumerated, a set of bulkheads welded around my work while it was still warm from my hands. Competence, reclassified by definition into trespass. I could almost hear my data being filed into the category of “unlicensed concern.”
He tapped once (sharp, deliberate) on the status line, as if my rank were a contaminant he could localize by contact. Then he reached for the seal block with the unhurried certainty of a man performing hygiene. The stamp came down with a dry snap: INSUFFICIENT CAUSE. The ink bit into the polymer and held, centered and unavoidable, a wound you could not rinse, only file.
Before I could request review or clarification, he bent and added a secondary notation in cramped, beautiful clerk-hand: FINDINGS NON‑AUTHORIZED FOR POLICY INFERENCE. It was the sort of phrase that did not accuse; it reclassified. The hall accepted the translation at once, my measurements were now mere commentary, and the denial landed as a ruling on my jurisdiction to assemble reality, not on its accuracy.
Junia was stationed in the back row as if she had been filed there by a clerk who disliked her handwriting. The overlit ceiling panels washed the hall into one approved pallor everything reduced to a single administrative color that made it hard to tell who belonged and who was merely tolerated.
She shifted her weight once, heel to toe, a controlled adjustment that did not advertise impatience. Then she arranged her hands where the marshals could catalog them without effort: visible, palms forward, fingers spread in a posture that said no tools, no weapon, no argument. It was the kind of compliance that cost her nothing mechanically and everything socially; a small concession shaped like self-preservation.
A marshal’s attention snagged on her the way lint finds a hook. His eyes traced the cable loops stitched into the lining of her patched cloak. Loops any communications tech would consider as ordinary as pockets, and any Registry man could interpret as intent. The gaze dropped to her hip pouches, paused at the fasteners, and lingered as if his stare alone could open them. I recognized the inspection pattern: look for the unregistered device, the private relay, the hidden coil that makes someone independent in a city that charges rent for every watt of autonomy.
Junia answered the scrutiny with stillness, not innocence. She did not tug her cloak closed. She did not raise her chin. She simply held her body in the quiet shape of “not worth the paperwork.” Her eyes were trained somewhere safe and useless: an old seam in the bulkhead plating, a rivet line, anything that implied her mind was not routing signals behind her face.
In that moment she looked less like an ally and more like a person who had run the cost-benefit calculation a thousand times and learned which variables got you audited. The hall was full of people pretending not to notice, because notice was participation, and participation was a stamped form you could not later withdraw.
My eyes did what they always did under pressure: inventoried exits, counted uniforms, located the one familiar shape that might anchor the room back into something human. They landed on Junia.
She was only a profile at that distance: jaw set as if she had bitten down on a remark and chosen to keep it, lips neutral, the small muscle near her ear working once and then going still. Her gaze was nailed to a seam in the bulkhead plating, a long, stupid line of rivets that had never saved anyone’s life. It was the kind of stare you adopt when you cannot afford for your eyes to be evidence.
I waited for the tiniest acknowledgment: a flick up, a blink in my direction, the infinitesimal tilt that says I saw. Nothing arrived. The blankness was too clean to be indecision. It read like a protocol she had rehearsed: if Aurelia is being corrected in public, become furniture; furniture does not get audited.
The hall’s noise continued around her, queue‑murmurs and stamp‑snaps, but Junia made herself administratively absent. The absence, I realized, was not neglect. It was a decision executed without ceremony.
At the side counter, a junior clerk leaned toward an older one and let a sentence fall like a slip of carbon: “Unregistered kit in Seal Hall is an invitation.” It was pitched for plausible deniability. Too low for the petition queue, perfectly audible to anyone who had ever soldered a repeater on borrowed power. The older clerk did not look up; he only flexed his stamp hand as if warming the muscle.
Junia’s swallow was small and visible. Her fingers found the edge of her patched cloak and drew it inward, not to conceal the cable loops, everyone could already catalog them, but to adopt the room’s preferred silhouette: narrow, still, without angles a marshal might interpret as reach. Compliance here was not a moral posture. It was a chassis configuration.
When the marshal pivoted me toward the exit channel, Junia’s body replied before her face did: a half-step forward, cloak shifting, as if the humane reflex had fired. Then she caught the biometric lane and arrested herself short of its sensor posts. The gap between us filled with stamped shoulders and compliant backs. Practical, cruel arithmetic: no shared threshold, no linked device IDs, no audit trail shaped like my name.
Later, in the spine‑tunnel, the city’s lungs, boots and ration carts churned up a constant draft of sweat, disinfectant, and boiled algae. Junia slid into my peripheral like a shadow that knew the patrol cadence. She did not look at me. “Trunk‑line’s hot,” she said, comms‑shop clipped. “They’re tagging traffic, logging proximity. Anyone seen close gets a sweep.” Her last words fell softer: “I can’t take a device audit.”
The marshal kept his voice at training‑film smoothness, each syllable shaped like a posted notice. “Consultant Aurelia Venn,” he said, using my full registry string as if it were a handrail, “this channel is for cleared circulation. You will proceed to public corridor and refrain from further attempt until proper cause is established.” Not until I was calmer, not until it was safe. Until the form agreed I was allowed to be right.
He did not touch me. That was the artistry. Instead he moved as people do in narrow berths when they pretend not to crowd you: one step ahead, one shoulder turned, taking the air you might have used. Each time I angled my gaze toward the counters (toward the petition rack, the seal presses, the older clerk’s stamp hand warming like a muscle) his posture adjusted by degrees. A politely placed elbow. A shift of boots. A new “clear line” that happened to be the only line with empty floor.
The Seal Hall is designed for visibility: overlit benches, glassy partitions, all the surfaces easy to sanitize and easier to witness. He made it feel suddenly private, which meant the opposite. When he blocked my sightlines he was blocking everyone else’s, too, rewriting the scene so I was not a person being refused, just an administrative unit being rerouted.
I found myself doing compliance math without choosing to. If I stopped, I created “obstruction.” If I raised my voice, I created “disturbance.” If I asked for the refusal in writing, already in writing, already stamped, I created “looping.” He offered small options like kindnesses: “Keep to the right.” “Mind the sensor posts.” Instructions for my own safety, delivered with enough courtesy to make any resistance look irrational.
His badge caught the light when he turned, the flotilla insignia crisp as a fresh seal. I watched it because it was easier than watching the faces in the queue‑lines. People who had never read my petition still learned its outcome from my trajectory. I had arrived as “technical consultant,” and I was leaving as a moving warning placard.
At the first turnstile my pass chip chirped the way it did for approved flow: then corrected itself mid-note and threw a hard red glyph across the reader plate. The symbol was not dramatic so much as categorical, a neat little geometry that meant conditional privileges do not self-propagate. The people behind me pretended they had always been studying the floor seam.
The marshal didn’t even glance at my wrist. He had already seen the failure in his head, as a line item. From a pouch at his belt he produced a thin strip of override film, translucent as old skin and printed with microtext I couldn’t read without a lens. He laid it over the reader with the gentle pressure of someone sealing an envelope: no hurry, no anger, no argument offered to attach myself to.
The lock yielded with a hydraulic sigh. It sounded uncomfortably like access being rescinded in reverse. “Stay within my lane,” he said, still using the training-film register. Not a threat. A routing instruction. As if I were a misaddressed package and the system was doing its best.
Each threshold made me perform the same minor liturgy of denial. I presented my wrist. The reader tasted my chip, hesitated, and bloomed that tidy red geometry that meant access does not inherit. The marshal’s override film followed, laid down with an almost tender press, as if he were patching a leak rather than escorting a person, and the gate relented on a long, damp sigh.
It would have been easier if anyone had been openly hostile. Instead the queue-lines supplied their own discipline. People with ration tins nested in their elbows and bedding bundles tied with cable watched the red flash, registered my name-string in the corner of their eyes, and then looked away with practiced innocence. The shame didn’t live in the alarm. It lived in how efficiently it spread, one averted glance at a time.
At a side counter a clerk I hadn’t addressed (one of the auxiliary stamp-hands who lived off other people’s problems) leaned into her terminal and keyed a sequence as if swatting a fly. She never asked my name; the hall already knew my wrist. On the public display my status line revised itself by one word: CONSULTANT excised, RISK inserted. My identifier slid, tidily, into a flagged queue: MOVEMENT REQUIRES HANDLER PRESENT.
By the time the air shifted from Seal Hall’s dry, overlit glare to the public corridor’s recycled damp, I had been converted into freight: escorted, annotated, and rendered legible as an administrative irritation. The marshal paused as if to offer me dignity. “Clear passage,” he said, and the courtesy landed like a seal imprint (clean, quiet, and designed for permanence) on whatever part of me still believed my work could outrun procedure.
The corridor’s light was too even to negotiate with. It came from long ceiling strips rated, I assumed, for clerical morale: no shadows to hide in, no corners to lend a person the dignity of partial disappearance. It made every smear on the polymer walls explicit, every scuff where boots had taught the deck plating its hierarchy. In that illumination I felt like an exhibit that had been misfiled: an object shelved under the wrong regulation code and now awaiting corrective paperwork.
I slowed anyway. The handler’s boots were a few paces behind, dutiful as punctuation, but he did not hurry me. That was its own kind of message: we have time to be seen doing this. I set my breathing to measured counts, the way we did in training modules when a scrubber alarm went off and panic would have wasted oxygen. In for four, hold for two, out for six. It was ridiculous to treat my lungs like a life-support system I could audit, but the body accepts procedure more readily than the mind.
Past a junction, a wall display looped the day’s bulletins in soft fonts: quarantine compliance reminders, ration amendments, a congratulatory note to Seal Hall for “processing improvements.” The humor of it arrived late and dry in my throat. Improvements. I had been processed.
At the far end, a queue split around a water-chit kiosk. People’s gazes approached me, made contact with the marshal’s insignia, and rerouted. No one wanted their name-string near mine in the public record. A child stared until her guardian turned her shoulders with a hand that was gentle and absolute, the way you rotate a valve you cannot afford to shear.
I checked my own posture for signs of guilt and found only fatigue. My palm throbbed under the glove; I could map my pulse against the sting with clinical precision. It did not help. The corridor stayed bright, orderly, and indifferent, as if it would keep accurate minutes of my humiliation for the Archive Bilge I was not permitted to see.
Under the glove, the chemical sting kept time with my pulse, steady as a metronome no marshal could confiscate. It was petty, but it was mine: a private metric that I had spent this cycle doing work while others performed authority with clean hands and louder breath. The burn had a precise edge, alkali flirtation, not a full breach, and I cataloged it the way I cataloged everything lately, as if naming a thing could prevent it from being reclassified.
The faint tang of reagents clung to my sleeves despite the corridor’s damp. I caught myself flexing my fingers, testing for stiffness, as though tendon and polymer glove could still translate intent into data. Ink had ghosted into the creases of my fingertips, stubborn as a residency stamp. It occurred to me that my hands looked like contraband: marked by study, marked by contact, marked by having touched the wrong surfaces.
I had brought evidence in quantified rows and coherent assumptions, and I had been answered with a single word in block capitals. The flotilla did not dispute my method. It simply refused to recognize it as cause.
I tried, in the silence between footfalls and bulletin loops, to declare my function the way a clerk declares an intake class. Technical consultant. It sounded like the top line of a requisition with all fields below it struck through. Scientist. A label for equipment the Registry will not power. Caretaker. A role with no ration code attached, useful only until it complicates a ledger.
On Civitas-IX, identity was not a matter of competence; it was a matter of witnesses, stamps, and where your name-string sat in the day’s queue. I had just watched an airtight petition become “insufficient” by the simple act of being read aloud in the wrong mouth. The system did not need me to be correct. It needed me to be classifiable.
The thought arrived with the kind of unwelcome clarity I usually reserved for assay results: restraint was now a weakness the system could grip and steer. Evidence could be queued indefinitely, stamped “pending” until it spoiled. Uncertainty could be treated as misconduct. Allegiance, though. Allegiance was immediate, legible, and conveniently transferable, even when it quietly ate at the shared air and water like a slow solvent.
I let the engineered shame move through me like recycled atmosphere. I kept what it couldn’t strip: anger, but banked; resolve, but properly filed. If Seal Hall would not authorize me into the Archive Bilge, I would reconstruct the truth from what seals could not fully police: condensate, biofilm, filter grit, lungs.
At the spine-tunnel junction I stopped as if the pause had been scheduled and posted. Above me a direction placard tried to be authoritative through a failing backlight: arrows for BENCH ALLOCATIONS, QUARANTINE INTAKE, LEeward ACCESS: letters flaking where too many hands had used it as a map and a prayer. The light stuttered in bureaucratic rhythm, bright enough to read, dim enough to pretend it had not.
Two corridors opened like a choice on a form with mutually exclusive boxes. To starboard lay my assigned bench space: a strip of composite table, one functioning tap of deionized water that sometimes lied about being deionized, and the thin, paperlike safety of being “useful” to people who enjoyed stamping me. That route smelled of hot plastics and sanctioned work: predictable power draw, predictable oversight, predictable limits. I could go there, sit down, and draft another petition in the approved structure: background, justification, risk mitigation, requested authorization codes, signature lines for people who would never sign. I could keep my conditional access intact the way you keep a cracked vial intact: by not touching it.
To port, the leeward decks. The airflow shifted as if the ship itself exhaled reluctance. The pressure differential carried a taste: solvent, old disinfectant, and the metallic sweet edge that meant someone had been coughing long enough for blood to become an ambient contaminant. Curtains, I knew, were hung down there. Not for privacy, but for narrative control. Fabric was cheaper than doors and better at hiding numbers.
A pair of marshals passed without looking at me, boots steady, batons clean. Their indifference was not mercy; it was categorization. In the Registry’s eyes I was already processed: petition submitted, petition denied, person redirected. If I walked back toward my bench, I would remain an irritation filed in the correct drawer. If I walked leeward, I would become a discrepancy.
The placard flickered again, and for a moment both arrows seemed to point the same way. I felt the pull of the safer corridor like gravity, soft, constant, persuasive. I also felt, beneath it, the harsher pull of necessity: the sick did not have the luxury of waiting for the lights to stabilize.
I did the arithmetic the flotilla loved: permitted actions minus prohibited actions, multiplied by the likelihood of an audit, divided by how much shame I could tolerate before I began to pre-emptively obey. Conditional access meant I could requisition a hand lens but not a log; I could request power draw but not schedule it; I could submit a petition, but I could not choose when it would be read, or whether it would be “lost” into a drawer that only opened during convenient disasters.
A petition could be delayed for three cycles without being formally denied. Six, if a clerk cited backlog. Indefinite, if someone attached the word “security” like a seal that made all arguments unclean to touch. During those cycles the sick would continue inhaling whatever was in the ductwork, and the children with narrow airways would continue turning ordinary coughs into rationed breaths.
Compliance, I realized, was not a path to information. It was a subscription service: pay in patience, receive more waiting. The sum never changed. Answers required contact with things the Registry couldn’t stamp: condensate on a bulkhead seam, grit in a filter cradle, spit in a cloth.
The recollection of my petition being lifted with two fingers, like damp contraband, like something that might stain the marshal’s gloves, tried to harden into caution. Caution was the Registry’s favorite byproduct: clean, stackable, self-administered. I did not indulge it. I took the moment apart the way I would take apart a failed assay: identify the reagent, the contaminant, the applied pressure, the expected reaction. The humiliation was not a verdict on my competence; it was a calibrated force meant to redirect my feet.
So I refiled the priorities. Ledgers could be altered, stamps could be denied, briefings could be “restricted for order.” Condensate could not be bribed. Biofilm did not respect rank. Evidence lived in seams, filters, breath. If they would not grant me cause, I would obtain it.
I checked my pockets with the detached thoroughness of a triage chart: two capped vials nested in foam, a swab I’d improvised from sterile polymer wrap and a wire spine, a thumb-length strip of indicator film, and the provisional badge seal. Useless for doors, occasionally useful for discouraging reflexive baton work. Then I took the corridor that smelled worse. Bad air, at least, told the truth.
As I walked, I drafted the consequence pathway with the same neat arrows I used for contamination maps. Unsealed sampling would be reclassified as “theft of controlled material.” Inquiry would become “interference with quarantine order.” A raised voice would justify the next stamp: DETAIN. I accepted it without ceremony and kept my pace bureaucratically calm, already indexing likely runoff points, condensate pools, and a labeling scheme robust enough to survive a clerk’s cross-examination.
I kept walking toward the curtained decks with the measured pace of someone who had been issued a tasking memo, not someone about to start a mutiny. On Civitas-IX, posture was a form of paperwork. If I looked like I belonged in the corridor, people supplied answers; if I looked like I had opinions, they supplied marshals.
The curtains were not fabric so much as policy made visible: salvaged thermal sheeting hung on cable ties, stamped with fading hazard chevrons and hand-lettered reminders that “UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY = SANCTION.” The air changed a half-meter before the first seam. Less salt-metal, more warm plastic and breath. Somewhere behind the barrier a pump stuttered, caught itself, stuttered again, as though negotiating with its own fatigue.
I let my eyes do what my mouth could not. Vents: three along the upper run, two patched with gauze filters that had the fibrous look of “temporary” becoming “permanent.” Drip lines: a thin trail along the right bulkhead where condensate had found the path of least resistance and turned it into a small, glistening map. Water points: a ration spigot recessed in a wall niche, its seal ring chalked with mineral bloom, and a catch tray that had been wiped in circles by someone too conscientious for their allotment.
I adjusted the polymer sheet against my forearm and pretended the mild chemical burn was merely an inconvenient annotation. In my head I ran the contamination pathways the way clerks ran statutes: recycled water into biofilm, biofilm into aerosol, aerosol into lungs already rationing oxygen in an 78% world.
A woman in a respirator watched me through the curtain gap, waiting for the moment my visit became real. I made it bureaucratic instead. “Technical hygiene verification,” I said, voice flat, as if that phrase came with an embossed seal. “I require only visual assessment and a small residue sample for comparative assay. No names recorded. No adverse entries generated.”
I made every ask sound like it had already been approved by someone with a sash. “Routine hygiene verification,” I repeated, varying only the deck code and the implied authority. People did not like giving away water; they liked even less giving away something that might be construed as evidence. So I traded in currencies that were not chits.
From my kit I produced a single reagent strip: half a centimeter of dyed polymer that looked official enough to be valuable and cheap enough to surrender. I let them watch it blush faintly when touched to the spigot’s catch tray, as if the strip itself were a clerk stamping their compliance. “Preliminary indicator only,” I said, because understatement was the flotilla’s safest promise. “I will provide a summarized result to your deck lead. No individual attribution.”
They brought me milliliters like contraband: ration runoff pooled in dented cup-lids, condensation teased from cold bulkhead seams with a fingernail and transferred to a folded foil corner. I accepted each offering with two hands, as if receiving a form, and I labeled the containers with a steadiness that suggested procedure rather than desperation.
The burn on my hand objected each time I asked my fingers to become instruments again. It was not dramatic pain. More the persistent, bureaucratic reminder that I had violated a handling protocol and my skin intended to file a complaint. I did not grant it a hearing. I braced the polymer sheets against my thigh, using the fabric as a stable writing surface the way we used bulkheads as tables when tables became “nonessential furnishings.”
Timestamp first. Deck identifier second. Source notation in clipped shorthand that left no room for poetry: SPIGOT-TRAY, COND-SEAM, RUNOFF-CUPLID. I kept my language audit-proof. “Collected by undersigned; transferred directly; container unbroken.” If someone later read these notes with hostile intent, I wanted them to find nothing but procedure.
I sealed each milliliter with whatever Civitas-IX allowed me to call “standard”: heat-pinched sleeve ends flattened with a solder tip, thread ties knotted twice and logged once, a dab of maintenance wax pressed like a tiny, unofficial seal. Then I nested the containers into my pouch in numbered sequence, barriered by clean polymer scraps, so no later audit could accuse me of cross-contamination or, worse, missing provenance.
I did not permit myself the comfort of an unexamined premise. The cough could be air-handling drift, waterline carryover, or the indecent partnership of both. So each droplet I pocketed became a claim that could survive scrutiny: measurable, comparable, repeatable. Evidence first; inference only after the pattern held across hull codes and timestamp bands, not merely in my nerves.
At Forelock Gate the air was hotter, as if the Registry Barge exhaled irritation through its intake hatch. A petty clerk (rank sash too clean for the job) stood behind the counter with a seal press in his hand. He did not use it. He displayed it. The brass head hovered over the permit pad like a threat of punctuation.
“Unaudited sampling,” he recited, not to me so much as to the space between us, where procedure lived. “Clause thirteen, subsection, ”
His eyes kept skittering past my shoulder to the queue. Coughs traveled in little clusters, indistinguishable from the usual sounds of waiting except for the wet persistence of them. A mother shifted a child from hip to hip; an older man clutched a ration chit so tightly it creased. The clerk let the noise become part of his argument, as if misery were an approved lever.
“You will present a captain’s letter, or a sealed health directive,” he said, lifting the press a fraction higher, “or you will cease collection pending audit. Registry does not accept improvised containers.”
I set my pouch on the counter and opened it with exaggerated care, the way one handles anything that might be called contraband by someone with a stamp. My conditional access badge followed. Front side up, so he could not pretend he had not seen it. Then the kit: sleeves, threads, solder tip, the small solvent vials that looked suspiciously like indulgence.
“Technical consultant Aurelia Venn,” I said, keeping my voice in the flotilla’s preferred register: flat, certified, uninteresting. “I am documenting chain-of-custody for environmental and biomedical screening relevant to active respiratory spread. Samples are already logged by timestamp and hull code. My containers are sealed to prevent cross-contamination; I can provide method notes upon request.”
He made a small sound that could have been contempt or hunger. “Method notes are not authorization.”
“No,” I agreed. “Authorization is authorization.”
I slid a blank refusal form across the counter. “If you intend to deny passage of the kit or to order cessation, please record the refusal in writing, with your name-stamp and time mark. I will not barter for compliance.”
The seal press paused midair. Behind me, someone coughed hard enough to bend over. I did not turn. I let the clerk decide whether he wanted his procedural purity attached to that sound.
I laid my conditional badge on the counter as if it were a reagent label. Face up, aligned to the edge, impossible to “misplace” without theatricality. Beside it I arranged my kit in inventory order: sleeves, ties, solder tip, solvent vials, the polymer note-sheets scored with my cramped handwriting. It was a small parade of improvised legitimacy, the kind Civitas-IX pretended not to need until something went wrong.
The clerk’s eyes tracked the items with the proprietary interest of a man cataloguing infractions for sport. He did not touch anything. Touching would have made him responsible.
“State purpose,” he said.
“I am documenting chain-of-custody for environmental screening,” I answered, each word clipped to fit inside a form box. “Samples are sealed, logged by hull code and time mark, and stored to prevent cross-contamination. Method notes exist and can be filed.”
His mouth tightened. “Without seal.”
“Without your seal,” I corrected, still calm. “Not without a seal.”
I slid a refusal form forward, pre-signed only with my name line left blank for his. “If you intend to bar passage or order cessation, record it in writing with your name-stamp and the current time. I will not convert public health into a private transaction.”
He offered me the sanctioned escape hatches in order, like a man reciting emergency signage. A captain’s letter: any captain, he implied, if the ink was dark enough. A stamped “consultant extension” that would, conveniently, require an escort to the Seal Hall and a processing delay measured in shifts. Then, quieter, the universal solvent: a “consideration” to correct the queue’s attitude toward my problem.
I declined each with the same cadence I used for titration counts. “No captain will be permitted to purchase precedence in a shared outbreak.” Pause. “No extension request can precede evidence.” Pause. “No consideration is compatible with chain-of-custody.”
His nostrils flared as if I had insulted the seal press itself. I kept my hands flat on the counter, where he could see I was not reaching for a wallet or a weapon.
I named the consequence, not the sin. “Screening flags are already being interpreted as detention warrants,” I said. “If we stall sampling until paperwork is satisfied, we will produce a flawless ledger of ignorance. Administrative neatness will be mistaken for causality while the actual source keeps circulating through waterline and scrubber returns.” I kept my tone clinical, as if describing corrosion rates.
I proposed a substitute procedure that could survive an audit and, more importantly, produce data. Witnessed collection in the public corridor, under the intake camera’s indifferent eye; duplicate aliquots, one retained in his custody drawer with a tamper tie he could initial; a receipt noting hull code, time mark, and volume to the milliliter. It left him two options: facilitate containment, or sign his obstruction.
In the borrowed galley nook, the flotilla’s domestic economy stared back at me: a sink with a persistent cough, a kettle that whined at low voltage, and a counter scarred by a thousand rationed meals. It was not a laboratory. It was, however, a flat surface with a drain and a power stub. Both of which the Registry had already stamped as “communal,” which meant no one could claim I had trespassed for private advantage.
I began by converting what was present into what I needed, and by naming it in the only language that makes improvised work defensible: inventory.
The narrow clear tubing Junia had pulled from a dead dispenser manifold became capillaries once I cut the ends square and rinsed them until the water stopped tasting like old adhesive. I wrote it down as: Capillary conduit, reclaimed, internal diameter approximate; pre-rinsed; assigned to sample contact only. A salvaged heater coil from a broken ration-warmer became my controlled hotplate, provided I fed it through a dimmer salvaged from a lamp and watched the current like it was a temperamental patient. I logged: Thermal source, variable; calibration by boil-point of brine at local pressure. I did not trust any instrument that could not be described to a clerk with a stamp.
For plates, I used the polymer sheets I normally etched field notes into. They took ink, resisted most solvents, and, more importantly, could be sealed, hole-punched, and archived. I marked gridlines with a grease pencil, assigned each square a code, and annotated in the flotilla’s favored triplicate phrasing: hull code, time mark, collector, observed condition. My burned hand stung when I pressed too hard, which at least ensured my handwriting stayed small and unambitious.
Every piece of scavenged apparatus received a temporary designation and a custody note. It felt faintly ridiculous to bureaucratize a kettle and a length of tube. It also meant that if anyone later alleged I had “manufactured findings,” I could, with perfect calm, produce a list of mundane objects and the exact sequence in which I had turned them into evidence.
The ration residues were not generous. Each dispenser gave me a smear of dried film: what the queues left behind when the last allotment chits were surrendered and the tap was wiped with a sleeve. I scraped each sample onto its own marked square, let the ambient heat drive off the remaining water, and then began the only ceremony the flotilla respects: a split with witnesses, into fractions with names.
I introduced a measured volume of improvised polar solvent (distilled condensate spiked with a registry-approved alcohol ration) until the film softened. The soluble portion bled into the liquid with reluctant clarity. What refused to move, I chased with a nonpolar draw: scavenged machine oil solvent cut down through repeated evaporation until it stopped smelling like engine bay. Two fractions per hull, three hulls, plus a blank from my own rinse water so no one could claim I was merely exciting the kettle’s personality.
Junia watched the door. A junior clerk watched my hands.
When each fraction settled, I pipetted duplicate aliquots into punched micro-pouches, folded the seams, and sealed them under clerk-issued tamper tape. He initialed across the joins like it was a peace treaty. If anyone later alleged swapping, they would be accusing their own stamp.
The “donated” canister sat on the counter like a polite bomb: clean seal, fresh serial strip, no ration-stain patina. I treated it accordingly. With the clerk watching, I pierced the lid with a heated needle and vented the headspace through a trap I’d built from tubing and a cold mug of brine: condense first, inhale never. The first breath out of it was sweet in the wrong way, like new plastic trying to pass as nothing at all.
I ran the same solubility split, same volumes, same logged timings. At room temperature it behaved innocently, refusing to confess. Under controlled heat, a tacky precipitate bloomed at the meniscus, clear, stringy, and stubbornly cohesive. Biofilm makes threads; it does not make adhesive. I noted it with the kind of neutral phrasing clerks respect: Thermal-dependent binder precipitate observed; consistent with synthetic polymer media, not organic accretion.
I wicked each fraction onto my marked polymer plate, drew the solvent front with a grease line, and let capillary stubbornness do the work the Registry would call “separation.” Under Junia’s repurposed inspection lamp, once meant to spot counterfeit seals, the tracks resolved into bands. One in particular fluoresced a faint, confident blue: the same binder signature in all three hull residues and the canister, differing only by how hard it shouted.
I laid my fluorescence bands beside my triage sheet and did what passes for romance on Civitas-IX: aligned columns. Deck identifiers, access-line numbers, symptom onset counts, oxygen complaints, all reduced to neat ticks. The blue binder band intensities climbed exactly where the coughs did. I drafted a method note in Registry format so any auditor could rerun it and fail to argue.
Junia did not need a clock to tell time on the Tabularium’s trunk. The network had moods, and today it had the clenched, punctual temperament of an auditor with fresh ink. The dead seconds (the little slack intervals where traffic breathed between sweeps) had thinned to almost nothing. Packet polls marched in neat files. Reconciliation pings came early. Even the background chatter sounded disciplined, as if every device on the flotilla had been told to stand straight and present its serial number.
She sat with one earbud in, head tilted the way she does when she is listening not to words but to absence. Her patched handheld relay lay open on my counter like a compliant patient, its casing peeled back to show a grafted board and a coil of wire that had once been part of a cooking timer. She made no dramatic declaration. She simply exhaled, once, through her nose, an expression of professional displeasure, and tapped her fingernail against the housing in a slow, metered count.
“They’re tightening,” she murmured, as if describing weather. “Audit cadence is up. Tap’s hungry.”
I kept my hands busy with my plates and notes. Bureaucracies do not like being observed observing. “Define ‘tightening,’” I said, because precision calms me even when it cannot protect me.
Junia’s mouth pulled to one side. “Scheduled sweeps are closer together. Device-ID reconciliation’s no longer every quarter cycle; it’s biting every eighth. That means I have” (she listened again, eyes unfocused) “one usable gap before the next sweep stamps the path and asks who taught the packets to walk funny.”
Her fingers moved with quiet certainty: a reroute, a mask, a decoy handshake that would look like a bored maintenance rig checking its own pulse. I watched the signal graph on her scavenged display flatten into something deliberately uninteresting. No spikes. No curiosity. A transmission designed to be overlooked by a system that punished personality.
“After this,” she said, not looking up, “we either stop asking questions or we start getting names attached to them.”
Junia lifted her relay like it might bite, then cradled it with the careful disrespect of someone handling contraband in plain sight. She did not go for a full pull; that would have been theatrics, and theatrics get stamped. Instead she built a single probe packet the way clerks draft denials: narrow, compliant, and technically true.
“Maintenance metadata,” she said, and if you listened without context it sounded like boredom. On her scavenged display, she toggled fields until the request looked like a routine health-check a Registry-approved rig might send in its sleep. No manifest contents. No names. No destinations. Just time blocks, shipment windows aggregated to a dull blur, and the associated life-support event flags that the trunk logged automatically whenever someone leaned on the scrubbers the wrong way.
I watched the routing path draw itself as a dotted line across her private mesh: handheld relays in skiffs, a repeater patched into a galley vent, a dockside antenna that “forgot” to authenticate. Each hop was chosen not for speed but for forgettability.
She thumbed the send key during a slack interval so thin I could feel it close, and then held perfectly still, listening for the audit sweep to notice the question and decide it deserved a signature.
The return came back like a ration chit that had been chewed, stamped, and handed to you anyway: partial fields, truncated identifiers, but the time blocks were legible. A repeating sequence of shipment windows, the same offsets, the same little stutter where a scrubber bypass alarm had been acknowledged and cleared, again and again, across hulls that had no reason to share a heartbeat. That pattern was not evidence you could frame on a bulkhead, but it was enough to ruin someone’s sleep.
Junia did not savor it. She went pale in the way a competent person goes pale and immediately broke the path into unrecognizable segments. Headers peeled, metadata shaved down to bare necessity, the residue ricocheted through two decoy nodes that would later “confess” to being test rigs. The Registry tap, hungry for a signature, was fed a phantom endpoint and left chewing air.
Junia slid me a wafer-thin extract on polymer, like a ration chit you could hide under a thumbnail. No flourish, no heroic narrative. Just a handling note in her tight hand: ORIGIN PATH OBFUSCATED; CONTENT INTACT; CHECKSUM PRESERVED; DO NOT REQUERY. She added, verbally, “If you decorate it, it stops being useful.” I logged receipt time and sealed it under my sample ID.
I treated Junia’s telemetry like a corroborating appendix, not the spine of my petition. I indexed its checksum against my sample labels, then mapped the timestamp stutters to deck-cluster onset dates with margins noted in plain language. Assumptions: trunk flags reflect actual bypass events; limits: partial fields, unknown upstream edits. I pre-answered the audit’s favorite hymns, provenance, alteration risk, and why coincidence was statistically rude.
Livius presented himself at the threshold of the screening alcove as if he had been scheduled: coat brushed, voice calibrated, prosthetic gait tuned to “minor inconvenience.” He carried no escort because he did not need one; his hull’s reputation did that work. The air behind him still held the faint warm-iron smell of a crowded deck, but he behaved as though we were all standing in the dry overlight of Seal Hall.
I did not stand. Standing turns meetings into contests. I remained at the narrow table where my samples lived, each pouch nested and labeled like an argument that could be refiled. In my hand I held the packet. Polymer sheet, wafer-thin chromatogram strips heat-tacked to a backing, and the time-block alignment printed in a font that clerks trust because it hurts to look at.
His eyes went to the packet with the reflex of a man who knew where the soft parts of procedure were, and then failed to find them.
“Doctor,” he said, using the wrong title with deliberate politeness. “If this concerns my deck, I must insist on reviewing the handling conditions. Uncontrolled humidity invalidates. “Same solvent front, same chamber, same hour. Witnessed.” The witness signature was a bored deck marshal’s, the kind Registry loves because it is functionally resentful.
He pivoted, the way captains do when the first plank is solid. “Field chromatography is notoriously. “Blank run, negative. Reagent lot recorded. My hand burn is on file if you require proof of reagent strength.” Dry humor is unwise with captains; it comes out anyway when I am tired.
His composure tightened. “Chain-of-custody can be… embellished. Samples travel through hands.”
“Seal integrity documented at each transfer,” I said, and tapped the sample IDs: my numbering, his handler’s seal impression, the time stamp, the receiving counter’s initials. Each objection he tried to lodge arrived a half-step late, as if he were arguing with an older copy of the meeting.
For a moment, he looked at the chromatograms the way people look at a verdict they cannot appeal. Then his gaze rose to mine, searching for fog to retreat into, and finding only paper-thin polymer and my neat, unromantic handwriting.
I did not accuse him. Accusations invite theatre, and Livius was a man who could stage a mutiny out of a misplaced verb. I opened my logbook and read, line by line, as if I were a clerk reciting a cargo manifest to a bored audit panel.
“Unsolicited transfer, container class: sealed canister, polymer-laminate, volume twelve liters. Delivered by: Handler C. Nemer, cargo hull crew, bearing Captain Livius’ seal plate impression: partial crest abrasion noted. Received at screening alcove counter two. Logged under my consultant access, conditional, witness: Marshal Daro.” I let the names sit in the air like damp laundry.
Then I placed the canister’s chromatogram beside the ration residue strips from Decks 4, 7, and 7A: the ones with the worst cough rates and the lowest scrubber tolerance. The solvent fronts marched the same distance. The same pale band, same ugly shoulder at the polymer additive that should not have been there if the media had been honest.
I did not say “counterfeit.” I said, “Signature match.” And I read the word “donation” exactly as it appeared on his handler’s transfer chit, neither scornful nor grateful, just documented. The paper did the redefining for me.
Flaviana watched from the doorway with the stillness of a person who had already written the order and was merely waiting to see which name to type into the blank. Under that gaze, Livius tried a gentler register. He spoke of “stabilizing morale,” of charitable surplus “set aside for the sick decks,” as if contaminated media were a civic donation and not a vector. He even smiled, briefly, the public captain smile designed for queues.
I did not argue motive. I slid Junia’s telemetry fragment into view like an annex: trunk-line time blocks, shipment handoff, then the scrubber bypass alarms: three short spikes in the exact movement window his canister would have crossed the spine-tunnel junction. Coincidence was no longer available. If he insisted on it, he had to choose between negligence and sabotage, and the Registry only tolerates those as charges, not explanations.
Flaviana stepped fully into the alcove and made the space feel like an annex of the Lazaretum. She did not address him as captain. She addressed him as a variable. “Cooperate under medical authority,” she said, “and quarantine remains clinically indicated, deck by deck. Resist, and your hull is designated noncompliant risk; containment expands accordingly.” It was triage policy spoken aloud, not bargaining. Behind him, listening bodies turned paperwork into a public cost.
His eyes flicked once to Flaviana, then to my chromatogram, as if weighing which document would bruise him less. He chose the bruise he could frame. Livius signaled, curt, and two handlers brought forward the remaining filter lots. Still banded, still stamped, now suddenly “available.” He named the route and the hands it passed through, but only after I wrote the condition: his crew exempt from blanket quarantine, unless clinically flagged.
I arrived with my hands full in the most literal, least heroic sense: a sealed sample tray nested in shock foam, a roll of chain-of-custody tags already pre-numbered, and a short petition-form brief clipped to a polymer board. The tray had the Registry’s preferred geometry. Rectangles within rectangles, nothing that could be accused of improvisation unless you looked at the solder scars on my improvised heat sealer.
The tags were the important theater. Each one carried an origin hull code, deck coordinate, collector identifier, timestamp block, and the signature line that makes a human being into a traceable event. I had learned, over the last week, that data did not become real until it had a place to be stamped. So I gave it places. I tied my own name to every sample like an anchor, and I left no gap for someone to claim “unverified handling” and drop the whole matter into procedural compost.
I did not offer a speech. Speeches trigger counter-speeches, and then you are no longer discussing oxygen or biofilm; you are discussing who gets to speak and under what authority. Instead I presented the petition-form brief requesting only “clinical containment action pending audit review.” No “emergency seizure,” no “investigation into sabotage,” none of the words that cause captains to become martyrs and clerks to start filing objections in triplicate.
I chose Flaviana’s vocabulary on purpose: implementable actions, measurable thresholds, reversible steps. I wrote in the same register she used when she turned people into patient categories. Not because I liked it, but because it would pass through her hands without snagging on pride.
When I slid the brief forward, I kept my burnt hand behind the tray. It was not relevant evidence, and I could not afford to become a symbol. Only the samples were allowed to be dramatic. The rest had to look like routine. Routine is how you move a flotilla.
I laid out the comparative results the way a registry intake clerk lays out a dispute: sequential, labeled, and impossible to pretend was “interpretation.” Three hull-residue chromatograms, each lifted from ration-cup dregs and pipe-thread scrapings, were printed on the same polymer sheet and aligned to a common solvent front. I had drawn the baselines in a ruler-straight hand, because apparently even molecules are expected to stand at attention in the Tabularium.
Then I placed the “donated” canister’s trace beside them. The peak pattern was not merely similar; it was embarrassingly identical: same shoulder on the primary polymer fraction, same minor peak that only shows up when the binder was cured too hot or cut with something cheaper. Different collectors, different decks, different days. One signature.
Finally, I slid forward a correlation table that did not use adjectives. Deck coordinate, lot code, reported symptom severity index, scrubber load at sampling time. The clustering formed a neat bruise over the decks supplied by the same stamped codes. Even a captain could read it. Even a clerk would have to.
Junia’s work arrived the way contraband always does in Civitas-IX: folded into legitimacy until it looked like it had been there all along. A thin printout, edges misaligned as if from a public terminal, appended to my packet under the harmless heading “supporting operational context.” It carried only what the Registry pretends not to fear. Those windows, when overlaid against my lot distribution times, lined up with the same obedient precision as the chromatogram peaks.
There was no device identifier, no route trace, no operator name. The query origin had been sanded off like a serial plate. It did not cite the Archive. It did not need to. It simply let the machinery confess in its own clipped, audited language.
I translated the chemistry into directives that could be executed by tired hands on tired decks. Lot identifiers in question were to be impounded at every intake counter and tagged “hold pending solvent confirmation.” Waterline valves were to be set to route through segments verified by negative polymer signature. Treatment stayed in place unless O₂ saturation dropped below 92% or fever held above 39°C for four hours. Then detention criteria applied.
I anticipated the Registry’s reflex: stall until the crisis aged into “normal operations,” and call it prudence. So I wrote the story for them in their own stamped grammar. Every transfer step enumerated. Every cup sealed, labeled, and countersigned with witness initials that could be verified by bored marshals. Reproducibility notes included, down to solvent lot and ambient humidity. If they denied it now, it would not be “interpretation.” It would be procedure chosen against recorded risk.
Flaviana took my chain-of-custody packet in both hands as if the polymer could harbor intent. The tent light on the Lazaretum made her gloves shine; the rest of her was matte discipline. She did not skim. She read in that slow, surgical way that made even my own sentences feel like they were under anesthesia.
Her eyes moved down the stamped headings (SOURCE, HANDLER, TIME-LOCK) then halted at the witness block. The pause was so precise it might have been an instrument check: initials confirmed, second set confirmed, third set confirming the second set because I had learned, belatedly, that “credible” in Civitas‑IX was a quantity you achieved by repeating yourself in approved formats.
I watched her mouth for disapproval and got none. No tightening, no small smile of approval I could later cite, no sigh that would tell me whether I had guessed right about the contamination path. The only reaction came when she reached my control list: blanks I had filled with negatives. Negative cultures, negative volatile residues, negative anomaly in the baseline scrubber effluent. Redundancies that cost me two chits of power draw and a mild burn on my hand when the reagent valve stuck.
She turned the final sheet over, verified the seal impression, and aligned the corners so perfectly that the deck’s slight flex threatened to offend her. Then, with the same economy she used to pass a scalpel, she slid the packet back across the table.
“Your handling is adequate,” she said, and even that sounded like a classification, not a compliment.
I placed my fingertips on the top page, feeling the faint ridge of the witness stamps. It occurred to me that I had just submitted myself for inspection the way we submitted water filters: wrapped, labeled, documented. The packet returned to me had the same weight as before, but the room felt newly measured, as if her silence had issued a permit with invisible ink.
Flaviana made the boundary a matter of record, not mood. She did not offer me a sash, a clipboard insignia, or the ceremonial phrase that would let a clerk file me under “staff” instead of “problem.” There was no verbal endorsement to be overheard, no public nod that could be replayed in the rumor-market as proof she had taken a side. In Civitas‑IX, words were contraband unless stamped.
She pulled a preprinted status slip from a folder, CONSULTANT, CONDITIONAL, already dated, already narrow, and amended nothing. My name sat where it had sat yesterday, bracketed by the same access limitations and the same implied liability. The only new ink was her signature in the authorization margin, clipped and decisive, like she was sealing a hatch rather than elevating a person.
I understood the tactic with a kind of reluctant admiration. By refusing me promotion, she denied everyone the argument that I had been “bought.” She kept the chain-of-command pure on paper, and still, without admitting it aloud, she made room for my work to move.
Flaviana did not ask me what I thought it meant. She asked me what I could touch without starting a tribunal. Her questions came like intake forms: which system logs, which access tier, which valve banks, which decks had shared manifolds, which dark-cycle hours had seen pressure dips. Each answer she accepted only if I could anchor it to a containment justification: exposure reduction, crossflow interruption, triage prioritization. Anything that smelled like investigation she shaved off with procedural shears. No “source of counterfeit media,” no “culpable parties,” no “Archive Bilge correlation” unless it could be labeled as a time-sensitive hazard review. I watched my careful causal chain collapse into a checklist. It was infuriating. It was also, in her hands, executable.
The dual‑authorization order appeared on her tablet like scripture rendered in registry pidgin: CLINICAL NECESSITY, TERM: 72 HOURS, SCOPE: CONTAINMENT PRECAUTIONS. It listed access points as if they were organs, scrubber intake housings, waterline sampling ports, manifold pressure logs, the Lazaretum’s intake registry, each numbered, each with a rationale bracketed in sterile language. My conclusions were rewritten as precautions, actionable without admitting interpretation.
She signed without ceremony, then pressed the flotilla seal into the polymer until the embossed crest caught the light like a bruise. A runner was summoned (one of hers, masked, eyes tired) assigned as my second authorizer by name and badge code. No pep talk, no trust. Just rails: CLINICAL NECESSITY, DUAL KEY. Within them, doors would open; outside them, alarms would sing.
I slid the dual‑authorization slip into a waterproof sleeve as if it were a culture plate: valuable, fragile, and liable to be ruined by a careless thumbprint. The polymer was still warm where Flaviana’s seal had been pressed. It smelled faintly of disinfectant and hot stamp wax: officialdom’s preferred perfume.
Seal Hall tried to pretend it was not a ship: polished counters, the soft threat of biometric turnstiles, clerks who smiled with only the muscles required by procedure. I turned my back on all of it before my face could mirror theirs. The paperwork had done its part. Now I needed air that had not been filtered through etiquette.
In the spine‑tunnel’s draft I stopped by a service alcove and performed an inventory, not because I distrusted my memory but because the flotilla trusted only lists. Two packs sterile swabs, sealed and dated. Polymer note‑sheets, corners dog‑eared from being erased and rewritten too many times. My improvised reagent rack, hand‑labeled in cramped block script, balanced to ration‑weight, each vial measured against the day’s allowance so no one could accuse me of “unaccounted draw.” One chipped pH strip case, one hand lens, one folding sample punch. Gloves: three pairs, one already compromised at the wrist where my chemical burn made me careless.
I checked the badge code on the authorization again. CLINICAL NECESSITY. Seventy‑two hours: a generous sentence, in flotilla terms. The corridors beyond the junction forked into deck names I could recite like anatomy: intake manifolds, wet storage, bunks stacked too tight. I chose by sound. Where the cough was loudest, where it traveled in clusters and then went quiet in exhaustion: that would be my laboratory.
I tightened the sleeve strap around my forearm so it was visible but not flaunted. Then I set my kit into the crook of my good hand and walked away from the counters and their clean lies, toward the damp decks where contamination did not care what your stamp said.
On the first walkway where the air tasted faintly of wet metal, I stopped and made a small performance of compliance. Not for pride. Compliance was simply the only language the flotilla trusted in crowds. I taped a polymer sheet to a bulkhead with ration‑seal adhesive and wrote the protocol in block capitals: POINT ID, LOCATION, TIME STAMP, INITIALS. I numbered the valves and manifolds as if they were petition clauses. Two bystanders were drafted as witnesses, their names recorded with the same gravity as reagent lot numbers.
I spoke in the Registry’s calm register: “Sampling will occur at fixed intervals. Chain‑of‑custody will remain unbroken. Any deviation will be logged as incident.” The words did what words always did here: they bought me thirty seconds of stillness.
My hands used the time. I wiped condensate off an intake valve until the metal squeaked. I backed a coupling off with a borrowed wrench, eased out a gasket cracked like old skin, and seated a new cut from my own sheet stock, punched to size. Controlled contamination meant this: touch only what you have labeled, cap what you have opened, and leave the system cleaner than you found it so no one could accuse your data of being your crime.
I worked the decks the way I worked a bench: no flair, no conclusions that could not survive being repeated by someone who disliked me. At three junctions the waterline smelled sweeter than it should. The posted scrubber efficiency claimed seventy‑eight percent; the condensate capture at the outflow, weighed on a ration-scale, argued for something closer to sixty-four. Near Return Vent 3B, families had stacked their bunks like sandbags against cold drafts, and my CO₂ badge tag chirped there more often than procedure would approve. I wrote each finding as a numbered clause with timestamps and witnesses. Rumor I could not file. Names I would not write without logs.
A deck boss in a brass‑tag sash tried to steer me toward “approved cases,” meaning bodies that could be counted without implicating valves. I showed him my slip, not as threat but as boundary, and flagged a runner to countersign as second authority. “Quarantine thresholds apply after measurement,” I said. Then I filed a narrow draw: ten minutes of manifold pressure and scrubber differential: nothing political, just readings that could condemn a whole hull at once.
By end-cycle, the corridor that had been a reliable theater of wheeze and panic went oddly ordinary. After I flushed the scrubber loop and replaced two counterfeit-looking media pads with cut stock, my handheld readouts stopped alarming every third breath. People noticed before I said anything: fewer sudden sit-downs, fewer hands clawing at throats. Deck crew began copying my checklists onto their own sheets and, quietly, asked how to file measurements as maintenance. So nobody got stamped for Lazaretum.
Junia did not treat her mesh like a miracle; she treated it like a contaminated line that had to be flushed before anyone drank from it. I watched her squat in the dim service pocket behind a comms repeater, cloak pooled around her knees, and lay out her handhelds in a neat, almost surgical arc. Each unit got a glance, then a thumbed sequence that made the casing lights wink in a language I did not speak.
“Inventory,” she said, not to me exactly, but to the habit of being overheard.
She pulled up the relay roster and began cutting it down. Unknown IDs: anything that had joined during the last two dark cycles, anything that responded too quickly, anything with a manufacturing prefix the flotilla did not own: vanished with a flick. To an outsider it would have looked like paranoia. To me it looked like epidemiology: isolate, trace, break the chain.
Next came rotation. She rekeyed handshakes, not with the lazy periodicity crews preferred, but on a cadence matched to patrol rotations and Registry audit windows. Every key change was timestamped in her own ledger, not as a confession but as a control. She salted the handshake headers with short-lived tags so a tap could record them and still be useless by the time anyone tried to replay.
Then she wrote her rule. Not on the trunk-line, not where a clerk could staple it to a reprimand, but on the private crew band that only skiff hands and service runners used. One line, plain and unromantic:
NOTHING ROUTES UNLESS IT CITES A SOURCE LINE AURELIA CAN REPRODUCE: SAMPLE ID / INSTRUMENT READOUT / WITNESS STAMP.
A few replies came back in the rough shorthand of tired people: complaints about delays, jokes about my “holy numbers.” Junia let them sit. She answered once, clipped: “You want speed, go yell into Tabularium. You want it to be true, you wait.”
It was, in its way, the strictest kindness I had seen on Civitas‑IX: a network that refused to carry rumor, even when rumor would have been easier to sell than oxygen.
I took the Registry intake form, the one designed to make suffering legible to clerks, and cut it down until it could survive grease, salt air, and a person who was coughing too hard to argue. One packet per case, polymer thin: symptom onset in cycles, not “recently”; deck and berth by stamped grid, not “near the port bunks”; scrubber cycle time at first wheeze, because timing was the only honest witness; water‑chit batch code, because contamination likes paperwork more than it likes people.
I built it so a deck boss could complete it with a nub pencil and a witness stamp, then fold it into a pocket without it becoming a confession.
Junia watched me number the fields and muttered, “You’re turning breath into a requisition.”
“Breath already is,” I said, and slid her the second sheet: a transmission schedule keyed to patrol rotations and the Tabularium’s throttle moods. Each hull got a narrow window and a fallback band; nothing long enough to look like a broadcast, everything long enough to be counted. “Send in these slots,” I told her, “and the trunk-line will think you’re boring.”
The first advisories left Junia’s mesh like maintenance bulletins, not sermons. I wrote them in the Tabularium’s favorite grammar: numbered steps, measurable endpoints, and no adjectives that could be accused of panic. Flush valve sets C‑2 and C‑3 for three minutes, log turbidity against a blank polymer strip, and do not “improve” the procedure with faith. Isolate filter media with the same counterfeit serial pattern, too-clean embossing, misaligned prefix, and bag it as evidence, not trash. For cough profiles that stayed dry, afebrile, and synchronized to scrubber cycle dips, we marked “monitor in place” with a recheck interval, so families were not marched to Lazaretum on suspicion alone. Deck crews complied because the tasks were finite, the tools were common, and the instructions sounded like something a competent person could actually complete.
Tabularium noticed the absence the way it noticed everything: by subtraction. Petition bundles thinned; the argument volume in Forelock Gate dropped; marshals stood with nothing to glare at. Then the sanctioned intake began receiving my packets, boring, identical, infuriatingly legible. Time-stamped to cycle, berth-grid precise, witness-stamped, cross‑hull comparable, and, most offensive, quiet. Clerks complained about “off‑counter routing.” Their summary metrics, against habit, improved.
Flaviana never blessed our off‑counter routing in so many words. Instead she reclassified my numbered sheets as “temporary clinical guidance under incident conditions,” stamped a narrow dual authorization, and pretended that made them hers. She then timed Lazaretum screening to Junia’s relay cadence (short bursts, predictable gaps) so queues stayed flat. Supply carts began arriving on the worst decks like coincidence, not invitation.
I watched Flaviana’s directives propagate the way pressure equalized in a sealed tunnel: fast, impersonal, and indifferent to who was standing closest to the seam. A marshal would bark a phrase; a clerk would translate it into stamped categories; a deck runner would repeat only the verb. “Screen.” “Isolate.” “Hold.” The line adjusted its behavior without understanding why. People stopped touching rails, stopped sharing cups, stopped breathing too close to one another in the way you do when you are told (officially) that your lungs have become a public interface.
Her procedure covered what the Tabularium loved: inputs, outputs, liability. It did not cover what parents asked when they leaned their heads together over a child’s blanket and spoke into the fabric as if cloth could muffle the Registry.
How long did a cough count before it became an “episode”? One night cycle? Two? Was a cough that only came after scrubber change a symptom or a schedule? What color meant “report” versus “rinse and wait”? They described sputum with the same careful vagueness as people describing contraband: “clear,” “like rust,” “like the sea when the bilge stirs.” They asked whether fever after a filter swap was coincidence, or whether the filters were doing something besides filtering. They asked what to do when a child’s breathing whistled only in the dark cycle, when the pumps were louder and the air tasted of hot metal.
Flaviana’s line-workers had no sanctioned language for that. Their forms had boxes for temperature thresholds and oxygen saturation; no box for “my daughter coughs when the lights flicker,” or “my son sleeps with his mouth open because the air hurts.” So the questions pooled at the edges of the queue, whispered and re-whispered until rumor achieved the density of fact.
I found myself doing what I had pretended I could avoid: answering in units. “Count the intervals.” “If it’s green, report.” “If the fever coincides within one hour of a scrubber dip, log it; do not assume.” Precise phrasing, softly delivered, as if the correct interval could keep them out of Lazaretum as effectively as any stamp.
On the worst decks I was stopped less by rank than by being, inconveniently, memorable. A woman with a ration-bundle on her hip caught my sleeve and said, not unkindly, “You’re the water tag.” That was what my little strip of cleaned polymer had become: a crude label knotted to a misplumbed valve so nobody “fixed” it back into poisoning mode. I had tied it on with scavenged wire and the sort of stubbornness that passes for authority when you lack an actual sash.
The valve itself was unremarkable. Two turns too far and it bled gray into the drinking line. I had left a sheet taped beside it, edges curled from humidity, thresholds written in plain units and unromantic verbs: RINSE 30 sec. DO NOT DRAW if odor sharp. REPORT if turbidity persists >2 cycles. No blame words. No “sabotage,” no “negligence,” no “unauthorized adjustment.” Just numbers that could be repeated.
So people began repeating them. They did not ask for my permit. They asked if the tag still meant what it said.
Each time I explained, I felt my own outline sharpen. Not a person, exactly: more a set of annotated margins the decks could consult. I would point to the grit caught in a rinse cloth and state, in the dry language of thresholds, why a rise in particulates meant the scrubber media was shedding, not “just dust.” I would say that a filter batch could fail without anyone intending it, storage humidity, binder ratios, counterfeit mesh, and watch suspicion loosen its grip by a fraction. Then I would do the other, more dangerous thing: align two reports from separate hulls and name the implication. Same whistle, same hour after changeout, same taste of hot metal: shared infrastructure, not isolated weakness. People listened with the steadiness of those signing nothing, and still granting consent.
The stamp on my slip continued to declare CONDITIONAL ACCESS in chipped blue resin, as if my status were a stable chemical. My own ledger had stopped tracking inclusion. It tracked returns. Verify the valve. Re-run the rinse count. Cross-check the scrubber dip against reported wheeze. Correct quietly before a rumor ossified. Warn in units, not lullabies, because rationed air and water were already arithmetic.
When I faced the counters again, those overlit altars of forms and seal-presses, I stopped mistaking belonging for a sash. It was the opposite: being answerable while officially unclaimed. My figures would either keep a child on a bunk with a cup of clean water, or sign them into Lazaretum airlocks. No title cushioned that. Only my thresholds did.
I asked for a blank petition packet the way one requested potable water: without drama, with the presumption that refusal would require paperwork of its own. The intake clerk’s eyes flicked to my CONDITIONAL stamp and then, inevitably, to my hand. The mild burn had blistered into an official-looking injury, proof, if nothing else, that I touched the systems I spoke about.
“Packet class?” he said, already reaching for a stack that would be wrong.
“Inter-Hull Health Infrastructure Variance,” I replied, using the exact phrasing I’d heard Flaviana weaponize. “With dual authorization fields. And the seal taxonomy appendix, revision current.”
That last clause earned me a sigh and a drawer. He slid over a thin polymer booklet stamped with the flotilla insignia and the kind of reverence reserved for things that prevented arguments. Seal families, sub-seals, acceptable ink viscosities, prohibited abbreviations. In Civitas‑IX, the difference between aid and arrest could be whether you wrote “scrubber” or “air remediation unit.”
I did not improvise. I did not plead. I composed.
On a bench beneath a wall placard listing Petition Rejection Reasons (a genre of literature), I drafted in their cadence: Scope of Request; Definitions; Risk Controls; Non-Interference with Registry Operations; Power Draw Limits; Data Handling and Audit Accommodation. I built my sentences like gasket stacks. Where my own instincts wanted to write, People are coughing because the system is failing, I wrote instead: Observed respiratory symptom prevalence exceeds baseline by measured factor; correlated deviations in scrubber differential pressure indicate probable media degradation. Where I wanted urgency, I offered compliance: All sampling will occur within approved hours; no unregistered devices will enter Seal Hall; all outputs will be duplicated to Registry ledger format within twenty-four hours.
I requested, with maddening politeness, the correct seals by number and category (Public Health Emergency Addendum, Technical Inspection Rider, Temporary Log Access) so a clerk could not hide behind taxonomy. If they rejected it, it would be on substance, not syntax. And substance, I intended, would corner them.
I made the substance impossible to argue with. Not righteous. Just complete. I laid out a table with sample IDs that matched the tamper-evident tags on my vials, deck and sub-deck coordinates down to the corridor junction plates, and scrubber-cycle timestamps pulled from the maintenance dials I had photographed under witness. Each row carried the small humiliations of rigor: ambient humidity at collection, reagent lot numbers, dilution factors, and the exact duration my improvised incubator held temperature before the power dipped.
For every assay result, I added a cross-reference to something outside my own hands. Two signatures where I could get them: a deck marshal who liked rules, a pump tech who liked not dying, a clerk who liked stamps. Chain-of-custody notes read like contraband manifests, sealed at 19:[^40], transferred at 20:[^05], stored in cold locker C with latch seal intact, because that was the only language the Tabularium trusted.
Rumor needed gaps. I left none. If they wanted to dismiss me, they would have to do it in ink, against their own witnesses.
In the Recommended Corrective Actions section, I stopped speaking in causes and started speaking in freight. I ranked the air loops by measured symptom load and differential-pressure drift, then attached a replacement priority keyed to existing ration manifests so no captain could claim surprise. Loop C on Hull Seven first; Loop A on the spine-tunnel second; the rest staged by sealable pallet count, not sentiment. For dark cycles, I specified a temporary bypass: isolate the worst return ducts, run scrubbers in short high-draw pulses inside approved hours, and vent through auxiliary plenums when queues were thinnest. The cleaning protocol was deliberately ration-neutral so families could disinfect their own rails and bunks under supervision instead of being “preventively” marched to Lazaretum.
I routed the packet straight to Flaviana’s threshold, not because I trusted her, but because the Tabularium trusted her signature more than my burn-scarred hand. I offered her a containment plan that read like obedience while tightening her numbers into something true. She struck phrases, reordered steps, added cautionary prefaces. I accepted every edit that moved language, not measurements.
With the two seals finally inked, I translated Flaviana’s polite containment prose into verbs. I stripped every clause down to an action, a tool, a clock, and a signature line, then posted it where notices were already expected: ration queues, pump rooms, turnstiles. Junia ghosted the same map through her mesh in “maintenance advisories,” so even the coughing decks received instructions that looked audit-proof and felt doable.
I drafted the flow map the way I used to draft grant diagrams: one page, no mercy, every arrow earned. The difference was that here a mislabeled junction did not cost reputation; it cost breath.
I did it from memory because memory was all I was authorized to carry. Sample results were in my fingertips: spore-load on the return grilles, the pH drift in the potable line, the trace binder in the “new” filter media that behaved like ground tire. I laid a polymer sheet on the mess table, weighed its corners with ration chits, and took out my stylus like a scalpel.
First I drew the spine-tunnel air loop as the Registry taught it: approved icons only. Intake fan as a three-blade stamp, scrubber bed as a crosshatched block, return ducts as double-line arrows with pressure tags. Waterline beneath it, not because the manuals paired them, but because my numbers did. I used the potable symbol (droplet inside a square) then broke it into the actual route: reclaim tank to UV throat to distribution manifold, with the unofficial taps marked in pale gray so I could deny seeing them.
At each convergence I wrote what the flotilla respected: valve ID, seal class, authorized hours for high-draw pulses, and the exact filter swap pattern that minimized backflow. I annotated filter lots by stamp format, Tabularium hex codes versus hand-punched refugee plates, because counterfeiters always forgot bureaucracy’s little cruelties.
When I finished, the page looked like an evacuation plan for invisible passengers. It was not elegant. It was legible to a deck boss who had never met a microscope and did not intend to start now. I added one final box in the lower margin: “If symptoms rise after compliant swap, suspect upstream contamination. Escalate via dual seal.” It was the closest thing I could write to a warning without being accused of writing a story.
I carried the sheet through a corridor where foot traffic never thinned, between the water-chit counter and the scrubber maintenance hatch, because nothing on Civitas‑IX was more persuasive than being unavoidable. The noticeboard there was already layered with ration revisions and disciplinary bulletins, each one crisp enough to cut you. I chose the one patch of exposed composite beside the official seals, set the map flat, and drilled two bolts through its corners with a borrowed hand tool that still had someone else’s registry tag on the lanyard.
The polymer flexed once, then held.
I added my own additions as a narrow strip along the right margin, as if I were merely clarifying approved procedure. Swabs: return grilles only, four finger-widths above the condensation line, bagged dry, time-stamped in local cycle. Cough clusters: logged by bunk row and pump-shift, not by name, because names turned data into trials. Valves: seal 3B at the manifold, 2C at the reclaim throat, and do not “crack for pressure relief” unless you enjoyed feeding mold.
If a filter lot number did not match its stamp format (Tabularium hex where a hand-punch should be, or vice versa) stop the swap, quarantine the media, and escalate via dual seal. I wrote it small, precise, and impossible to misread.
Flaviana arrived the way authority always did on Civitas‑IX: without hurry, with witnesses. Her boots made no sound over the corridor grate, but the nearest queue still tightened as if noise were optional and compliance was not. She stood square to the board, read my arrows and small warnings in the same blank concentration she used on a wound, and did not look at me.
For a long moment she gave me nothing. No praise to weaponize, no doubt to exploit. Then she took my stylus, turned it so the tip faced her like a scalpel, and added three lines beneath the existing seals in her hard, upright hand:
“CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. COMPLIANCE AUDITED BY MEDICAL.”
Her initials followed, neat as sutures. No mention of counterfeit lots, no implied culprit, just a frame that compelled valves to stay shut and mouths to stay calm.
Junia appeared only as a ripple at the edge of my vision: cloak, cable loops, the practiced stillness of someone who lived in blind spots. She took two photographs of the map, one for clarity, one for redundancy, then, with a few thumb-strokes, stripped the device trail down to static. The advisory went out under her mesh’s “verified” header, routed to skiff crews and the cough-heavy blocks, with quiet instructions: spare chits, spare media, before screening patrols found their reasons.
By the next watch the corridor still reeked of disinfectant and recycled brine, but the sheet had stopped being “my map” and started being a tool. Fingerprints smudged my margin notes; someone had added time stamps in clerkly pencil, then corrected them with a heavier hand. A short, orderly line formed: not for rations, for once, but to hold filter lots up to the stamp format and compare. Mounted, sealed, transmitted: shared infrastructure.