Steel and Silence

The war makes heroes out of pilots and ghosts out of engineers.

We keep the Atlas alive while she pretends to be invincible. Her bones are steel thicker than most colony walls, her heart a tangle of fusion throats and tunnel drives that could crack stars if they coughed wrong. She’s a carrier, a city in armor, and she’s bleeding in places most people never see.

I work in the belly, the part of the ship where the air smells like copper and coolant and the gravity always hums wrong. Down here, we don’t see the stars. We see conduits fat with fire and coolant pipes trembling like veins under stress. When the Atlas took her last beating near Vega, half our primary array fried like an overcooked ration pack. Three interceptors burned up before we could cycle redundancies. Their pilots never had a chance.

Every time I rewire a junction, I see their faces. That’s the curse of engineers: we know exactly how death travels through the hull.

Today was long. We replaced three fusion moderators, each the size of a interplanetary transit and twice as ornery. Took twenty of us in exosuits to shift them through the lattice crawl. One slip and you’re paste against a bulkhead. My apprentice, Daren, almost lost his hand when the cradle slipped. He tried to laugh it off, but I saw the white under his fingernails when we finally locked the brace. He’s too young for this. So was I once.

The captain came down mid-shift. Dressed in her duty uniform of the day, not with a retinue — just her, sweat on her neck from climbing into the this remotely located area of the engineering decks. She touched the scarred plating like it was holy. “Can you hold her together, Chief?” she asked.

I said, “I can hold her. Question is: how long do you want her to sing before she screams again?”

She smiled like she’d expected that. Maybe she had. She left us with a crate of fresh coffee packs, the good kind from Hallmark. Bribery and faith taste the same in a war.

We run diagnostics at shift’s end. The numbers look clean, but numbers lie. They always lie. A ship tells you what she really feels in the shudders between vectors, in the hiss of a vent that won’t stop whining no matter how many times you bleed the line.

I’m writing this on my rack, still smelling of grease and fear. The Atlas is quiet now, docked at Helena Station over Pittman, but silence isn’t peace, it’s a throat clearing before the next scream.

Tomorrow the fleet sails again. And tomorrow, the Atlas and I will hold together until one of us doesn’t.

Title: Engineer’s Log – Steel and Silence
Journal of Chief Technician Lena Morek, MDF Carrier Atlas, Pittman System

End log.