Chapter 3: Thirty-Three — Part 1
The deck hit my face on jump twenty-two.
Not gracefully. Not a controlled fall. My legs buckled mid-stride, and I went down hard — palms skidding on steel, knees cracking against the cargo hold floor, the shrapnel in my chest reminding me with a bright spike of pain that I was a dead man walking on borrowed time and alien scaffolding.
"Cole!"
Petra Dunn's boots appeared at my eye level. She grabbed my arm and hauled me upright with the efficient roughness of someone who'd been hauling things all her life.
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding through your bandages."
She was right. A dark stain had bloomed through the front of my uniform, left side, where the deeper shrapnel wound sat against my lung. Twenty-two FTL jumps in — every thirty-three minutes, like clockwork — and the exertion had reopened what Yusuf's stitches could barely hold together.
"I said I'm fine."
"You said that eight jumps ago. You were lying then too."
She deposited me against a cargo container and shoved a canteen into my hands. The water was lukewarm and tasted like recycled everything, and it was the best thing I'd ever put in my mouth.
Around us, the cargo hold operated on the ragged edge of functional collapse. Refugees had stopped sleeping in clusters and now slept wherever they dropped — standing, sitting, curled against the decking in fetal positions. The thirty-three-minute cycle allowed for no real rest. Just enough time to start drifting off before the alarms blared, the FTL drive hummed, and the universe folded again.
[HOST STATUS: DETERIORATING]
[INJURIES: AGGRAVATED — SHRAPNEL MIGRATION: 0.3MM]
[SLEEP DEPRIVATION: 36+ HOURS]
[RECOMMENDATION: CEASE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY]
The system was getting more coherent as it recovered, but its advice remained spectacularly useless. Cease activity? The fleet was being chased through space by machines that wanted to wipe out the species. There was no ceasing.
How much energy do you have?
[SYSTEM ENERGY: 18/100]
[REGENERATION: IMPAIRED — 0.5/HOUR]
[CRITICAL FUNCTIONS ONLY]
Eighteen. Up from twelve, but still barely enough to keep me alive. I filed the number and focused on the present.
"How's the count?" I asked Dunn.
She pulled out her data pad without sitting down. Standing was how she operated — motion, task, next problem. Rest was something that happened to other people.
"Supply usage is up forty percent since the jumps started. Water reserves are adequate for six days at current consumption. Food for four. Medical supplies..." She trailed off. The silence said enough.
"Vasquez?"
"On the bridge. Hasn't come down since jump eleven."
"And morale?"
Dunn looked at me like I'd asked about the weather on Caprica.
"People are terrified, exhausted, and watching their children sleep on a cargo deck while robots chase them through space. What do you think morale is?"
Fair enough.
The jump clock mounted on the cargo bay wall read 00:28:14. Five minutes until the next jump. Five minutes until the Cylons appeared on DRADIS again, right on schedule, because somehow they kept finding us and nobody knew how or why.
But I did.
The Olympic Carrier. It's the Olympic Carrier broadcasting their position.
The knowledge sat in my gut like a stone. In the show — the episode I'd watched on a couch that didn't exist anymore — the Olympic Carrier went missing during one of the jumps, reappeared hours later claiming engine trouble, and was shot down by Galactica's pilots because they couldn't risk it being a Cylon trap. Which it was. Nuclear warhead aboard, aimed at the fleet.
That was coming. And right now, all I could do was haul cargo and try not to bleed to death.
"Cole."
Dunn's voice pulled me back. She was watching me with an expression I'd started to recognize — part suspicion, part assessment. Petra Dunn didn't trust easy, and a man who came back from the dead and immediately threw himself into work was the kind of anomaly her brain couldn't leave alone.
"You should be in medical."
"Medical's full."
"That's not what I asked."
I met her eyes. Held them. Cole's face, my intentions.
"I'm more useful here than on a gurney."
She weighed that for two seconds. Then she handed me a fresh manifest.
"Bay four. The hydraulic loader's been acting up, and Marsh is getting the blame for it."
"Marsh?"
"Alec Marsh. Engineer. He's good, but the crew's been looking for someone to kick and he's the easiest target."
I took the manifest and headed for bay four.
[Cargo Bay Four — Jump 24]
I heard the crowd before I saw it.
Voices — tight, aggressive, the particular frequency of people who were scared and needed someone to hurt. A circle had formed near the bay's primary loading zone, where a squat yellow hydraulic loader sat dead on its tracks, one arm extended at an awkward angle like a broken limb.
At the center of the circle stood a man in oil-stained coveralls. Mid-twenties, wire-rimmed glasses, the kind of frame that suggested he'd been skinny before the apocalypse and was getting skinnier. Alec Marsh. His hands were black with grease, and his face had the rigid blankness of someone who was terrified but refused to show it.
"—third time this week! Three breakdowns, and every single time it's your frakking repair job that falls apart!"
The speaker was a deckhand. Big. Bald. Red-faced. He had six inches and forty pounds on Marsh, and he was using all of them.
"The loader's been running triple shifts since the attack," Marsh said. His voice was steady, but his fingers kept clenching and unclenching at his sides. "The hydraulic seals were designed for—"
"Save the tech talk! We've got refugees who need these supplies moved, and your piece-of-shit repair is the reason they're not getting fed!"
A murmur of agreement from the crowd. Heads nodding. Someone in the back said, "Should've left him on Picon."
Marsh flinched. Small — a tightening around his eyes — but there.
The system flickered:
[PERSONNEL SCAN: MARSH, ALEC]
[ENGINEERING: 78/100]
[STRESS RESPONSE: WITHDRAWAL]
[CURRENT STATE: FLIGHT-OR-FREEZE — 8 SECONDS TO SHUTDOWN]
I stepped into the circle.
Not between them. Not in front of Marsh. I moved to the loader itself, put my hand on the hydraulic arm, and looked at the joint where the seal had blown. Fluid coated the deck plates beneath it in a dark, viscous puddle.
"This is an H-4 series loader, right?" I addressed the question to nobody in particular, but my voice carried enough that the circle's attention shifted.
The bald deckhand blinked.
"Yeah. So?"
"H-4 hydraulic seals have a service life of eight hundred operating hours. That's standard Colonial specs." I crouched — slowly, because my chest protested every inch — and pointed at the blown seal. "This loader's been running since the attack. How many hours is that?"
Silence. I waited.
Marsh answered, voice cautious.
"Forty continuous. At three times rated load capacity."
"Forty hours at triple load." I stood. Looked at the deckhand. "That's the equivalent of a hundred and twenty hours of standard operation. The seal isn't defective. It's exhausted."
The math did what I needed it to do. The crowd's anger stalled against numbers they couldn't argue with. The bald man opened his mouth, found no comeback, and settled for a scowl.
"So what do we do about it?"
"We replace the seal." I picked up a rag from the loader's maintenance kit and wiped hydraulic fluid off my hands. "And we rotate loader usage so no single machine runs to failure. Marsh, can you rig a replacement from the spare parts inventory?"
Marsh stared at me. The rigid blankness had cracked into something cautious and confused — gratitude trying to figure out if it was safe to exist.
"I... yeah. Give me twenty minutes."
"Good. Everyone else — bay three has a functioning loader. Use that while this one's down."
The crowd dispersed. Not happily, but without violence. The bald deckhand threw one last look at Marsh, spat on the deck, and left.
Marsh didn't move. He stood next to the dead loader, grease-black hands hanging at his sides.
"You didn't have to do that."
"It was true. The seals are rated for eight hundred hours. You can check the manual."
"I know the manual. I wrote the maintenance schedule." He adjusted his glasses — a nervous tic, the kind of gesture that had probably gotten him mocked since grade school. "What's your name?"
"Cole. Logistics."
"Logistics." A pause. "Since when does logistics know H-4 hydraulic specs?"
Since about ninety seconds ago, when the system auto-retrieved the data and I pretended I'd always known it.
"I read a lot."
Marsh didn't look convinced, but he had a loader to fix and a reputation to rebuild. He turned back to the machine.
"Thanks, Cole."
"Just get the loader running."
I left bay four and nearly walked into Petra Dunn, who was leaning against the bulkhead outside with her arms crossed and an expression that said she'd been watching the whole thing.
She didn't speak. Just looked at me, then at the dispersing crowd, then back at me.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." She pushed off the bulkhead. "Bay three needs a recount. You coming?"
The jump clock read 00:04:32.
I braced against the bulkhead, one hand pressed against the cold metal, and watched the DRADIS repeater screen mounted high on the bay wall. Green sweep. Clear. Green sweep. Clear. Green sweep—
The alarm blared. Red icons bloomed on the display like tumors. Cylon contacts, multiple, bearing down on the fleet's position with the mechanical patience of predators who never needed to sleep, eat, or doubt.
"All hands, brace for FTL jump!"
The drive spooled. The universe folded. Thirty-three minutes.
I pushed off the wall and headed for bay three. Behind me, Marsh's tools had already started clanging against the loader's innards. Across the deck, Dunn was on her radio, coordinating the next supply distribution.
Somewhere out there, past the DRADIS range, past the jump coordinates, the Olympic Carrier was falling behind.
I knew what came next.
Author's Note / Support the Story
Your Reviews and Power Stones help the story grow! They are the best way to support the series and help new readers find us.
Want to read ahead? Get instant access to more chapters by supporting me on Patreon. Choose your tier to skip the wait:
Noble ($7): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public.
Royal ($11): Read 17 chapters ahead of the public.
Emperor ($17): Read 24 chapters ahead of the public.
Weekly Updates: New chapters are added every week. See the pinned "Schedule" post on Patreon for the full update calendar.
Join here: patreon.com/Kingdom1Building