[Sinclair's Workshop — Day 40, 0800]
The camp outside the tarpaulin was close to unworkable in the way a machine becomes unworkable when you feed it three times its rated input: not broken yet, but straining at every joint. Mecha Station survivors had come in on foot through the previous afternoon, Bellamy's escort of twelve covering forty kilometers in fourteen hours. Two hundred and eighteen people who did not understand why the camp looked the way it did — small and hand-built and nothing like what any of them had been told to expect. The Farm Station stragglers found in a valley two kilometers south had added forty more.
Four hundred and nine residents now. The shelter network had been designed for a hundred.
Which was why Sinclair had been welding since Day 38. Which was why the workshop smelled the way it smelled when Ethan ducked under the tarpaulin curtain — hot metal and solder flux and Ark-grade welding compound, sharp enough to taste at the back of the throat, honest in the way that open air made everything honest.
Wick and Raven were already arguing.
"The pressure differential at the coupling is unacceptable." Wick held a schematic that had been corrected in at least three colors. He was twenty-two, broad-shouldered from years in Ark maintenance conduits, a welding scar on his right wrist that was industrial grade, not amateur. "If the membrane degrades at operating temperature, the hydroponic loop loses feedback and we're on manual calibration every six hours."
"It won't." Raven did not look up from the bench. She was torquing a connector fitting with a wrench deliberately one size too large, the fit calibrated for exactly the clearance she needed. "Degradation coefficient at operating temp is point-zero-three. That's not a failure mode."
"At launch conditions—"
"We're not launching anything."
The wrench seated. She set it down. Picked up the next fitting.
Ethan set the supply manifest on the corner of Sinclair's bench.
"Morning."
"Mm." Raven.
Wick turned. He had the attention of someone who had heard a name more times than it had been explained. "You're Cole."
"Yes."
"Sinclair mentioned you." His eyes moved over Ethan with the quick assessment of an engineer reading an unfamiliar component. "Said you prepped the landing zone three days before we touched down."
"Several people prepped the landing zone."
"He said 'several people' the way people say it when they mean one." A pause. "You're seventeen."
"Eighteen in December."
Wick looked back at the schematic. Made some small internal adjustment. "The hybrid project. Raven's right on the membrane — I'll grant her that. But the bracket tolerance is wrong."
Ethan opened the manifest. The materials projections were in the second section — construction tier, composite and lumber requirements, labor hours. All preliminary, all unspent. All contingent on a CPE construction authorization that had been denied twice this week on budget grounds, which was the problem that would matter in forty-eight hours and did not yet feel urgent to anyone but him. He circled a line.
"What spec is the coupling on the bench?" he said.
"Alpha Station standard."
"And the bracket drawing?"
A pause.
"...Mecha standard. Third-deck conduit callout." Wick's voice carried the particular tone of a man who already knew what was coming. "The nominal dimensions matched on paper—"
"They match on paper. Not in practice. Alpha and Mecha third-deck ran different nominal since the Year 78 retrofit. Check the actual component, not the drawing." Ethan set the pencil down. "Write the dimensional deviation report before my 1400 assessment."
Wick was quiet for four seconds.
"You knew that," he said.
"Sinclair ran a tight shop."
"I've worked for Sinclair for six years. I didn't know that."
"Ask him about the Year 78 retrofit. He'll explain it once." Ethan folded the manifest. "The report by 1400."
He turned to the equipment rack.
Raven's hand was extended over her shoulder — not looking, just holding out a tool. One of three that Wick had built from salvage and labeled in his own shorthand, a calibration probe without a standard name because it had no standard parts.
Ethan took it.
"Resonance coupling key," he said. "Phase junction calibration, radio array."
She turned.
The half-beat was short and very specific — the same duration as the pause that happened when a circuit yielded results outside the expected band and the engineer's instinct stopped at understand it before reaching fix it. Her eyes moved from the probe in his hand to his face. Read something there. Held the read long enough to have content.
Then: "Yeah, no," and she turned back to the bench and held out her hand.
He set the probe in her palm without comment.
Sinclair came through the back curtain. Broken arm in the sling, fabrication log in his good hand, the controlled economy of movement of a man managing a fixed injury and a full schedule. He looked at Ethan, at Wick's schematic, at the manifest.
"Dimensional problem," Ethan said.
"He used the Mecha third-deck callout." Sinclair looked at Wick. "Year 78 retrofit."
"...I know now."
"Third time is on you." Not unkind. The register of a man who had said this sentence before and expected to say it again. He looked at the manifest in Ethan's hand and then, deliberately, to the room at no one in particular:
"This is the kid I had on logistics when the descent window called. Kept the signal files. Made the corridor call. You want to know why the landing zone was prepped — ask him what his father did for a living."
Wick put down the correction stylus.
He did not ask immediately. He filed it the way a careful person filed anomalies — for later, when there was time to retrieve them properly.
"Report at 1400," Ethan said, and left.
---
[Central Fire Pit — Day 40, 1930]
The story had propagated by noon. Not by repetition but by reference, the way useful designations moved through communities looking to categorize what they hadn't yet categorized. Wick said "Sinclair's logistics kid" at the water station. Three Mecha survivors who'd been wondering why a teenager ran food distribution repeated it to their bunkmates. By evening meal it was shorthand. By the ledger entry Wells made during ration count — Logistics Lead (Apprentice, Sinclair/3rd Deck) — it was record.
Kane found him at the fire pit.
Not by accident. Kane moved through the camp with the systematic efficiency of a man building a dossier, and the pattern of his evening had been: Abby at the medbay, Wells at the quartermaster station, Sinclair at the workshop, and now here. He sat on the log across the pit without asking and accepted a mug of nettle tea from Harper, who had learned to have tea ready for anyone who sat at the fire because Harper had learned that people talked more when their hands had something to hold.
"Your father," Kane said. "Third-deck logistics. Which station."
"Mecha." The answer Sinclair and Ethan had agreed on, because Mecha's manifest records were partially corrupted in the crash. "He floated three years ago. Unauthorized resource allocation — he gave surplus to a family on the lower decks."
A pause. Kane turned the mug.
"Sinclair vouches for your training."
"Yes, sir."
"Sinclair's opinion carries weight with me." Another pause. "It doesn't explain everything I've seen in two days on the ground. But it explains more than it did this morning."
He set the mug down. Stood.
"The four unauthorized housing claims in Sector C," Kane said. "I'd like them resolved by morning. Not by force. By negotiation, with Wells's ration schedule as the incentive framework."
"They'll be resolved by morning."
Kane looked at him for a moment with the same banked unanger he had used at the wreck site, the expression that meant I am building the file and this item has been entered.
He walked away.
Ethan finished his ration. The grain was slightly less bitter than it had been last week — Monty's herbal compound, traded for a second audio modulator, making small improvements to the communal flavor of survival. He noticed it. Filed it in the category of things that cost very little and mattered more than they should.
[+50 XP — Cover story laundered and registered]
Across the fire, Raven held her mug in her right hand the way she held mugs when she was thinking about something other than the conversation she was having.
He looked at the fire.
The work continued.
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