“It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”
“Honor is a big word,” Harold said mildly. “I just fix what’s broken.”
They descended through the ship’s interior—bright corridors and narrow stairways, the smell of recycled air and steel and the particular antiseptic cleanliness of a military vessel that had people living inside it. As he walked, Harold trailed the fingertips of his free hand along the metal walls. It was a subtle gesture, barely noticeable, but Johnson watched it and understood instinctively that Harold wasn’t doing it absentmindedly. He was reading the ship. Feeling for temperature differentials, for the ghost of vibration in metal that should have been thrumming with life.
The propulsion control room was a cathedral of red warning lights. Every monitor displayed a variation of the same message—critical pressure loss, turbine start failure, safety lockout engaged—a visual symphony of failure that had been playing on loop for seventy-two hours. Three exhausted engineers looked up when the door opened. Lieutenant Commander Davis, who had barely slept since the ship went dark, took in Harold’s worn jacket and leather toolbox with an expression hovering between skepticism and despair.
“Who’s this?”
“Harold Miller,” Johnson said. “He’s here to help.”
Davis rubbed his eyes. “With all due respect, we’ve got too many people analyzing the same data already. One more set of eyes isn’t going to change—”
Harold had already moved to the main console. He stood before it, not touching anything, simply looking—his eyes moving across the displays with a speed that surprised everyone in the room, faster than anyone expected from a man his age. He studied each readout, each warning, each failing metric with the focused attention of someone who had learned long ago that the instrument panel tells you what the ship is experiencing, not what’s causing it.
After several minutes, he turned to Morgan. “I need to see the engine room.”
They descended two more levels, the ambient temperature rising, the noise shifting from the hum of auxiliary systems to something heavier—the breathing of a ship’s infrastructure still functioning around the silence where her main turbines should have been roaring. The engine room itself was vast and dim, the great turbines standing like sleeping giants surrounded by complex networks of piping that ran in every direction overhead and along the walls, an industrial nervous system holding its breath.
