Chapter 8: Questions Without Answers
The cargo office door sealed behind us.
Dunn didn't sit. She stood across the narrow room — three meters of deck plate and recycled air between us — and waited. Arms at her sides, data pad on the desk, nothing in her hands. The stance of a woman who had decided to get the truth and was prepared to wait as long as it took.
"Talk."
I leaned against the bulkhead. Bought myself two seconds by rolling my neck, feeling the vertebrae pop. The shrapnel scars under my uniform pulled with the motion — a reminder that this body had almost died, and the man wearing it had been improvising ever since.
"The water recycling improvements. The allocation data requests. The trade agreement with Demetrius." Dunn's voice was measured. Factual. She was laying evidence, not making accusations. "You started positioning three days ago. Before the fleet alert. Before anyone outside Galactica's engineering crew knew there was a problem."
"I started improving the Cybele's water infrastructure because—"
"Don't."
One word. Flat. Final. Dunn's conviction score was seventy-one out of a hundred, and every point of it was in that syllable.
"Don't give me the logistics speech. Don't tell me you 'read patterns' or 'noticed inefficiencies.' I've been running supply chains for twelve years. I know what pattern recognition looks like, and I know what foreknowledge looks like. You've been preparing for a water crisis that hadn't happened yet. Either you're the luckiest officer in the fleet, or you're hiding something, and I don't believe in luck."
The silence stretched. Outside the cargo office, the sounds of crisis management filtered through the door — voices, boot steps, the sharp tone of someone relaying rationing orders. The Cybele was adapting. It would survive. But inside this room, my cover was taking its first real hit.
Options.
One: lie. Tell her I intercepted a garbled communication from Galactica and inferred the rest. Plausible but thin, and Dunn would check the comm logs.
Two: stonewall. Refuse to explain, pull rank, remind her that operational decisions don't require justification. Effective short-term, but it would destroy the trust I'd spent ten days building.
Three: partial truth.
I exhaled. Pushed off the bulkhead. Met her eyes.
"I pay attention to things other people don't."
"Cole—"
"I'm not done." My voice dropped. Not commanding — quiet, the kind of quiet that makes people lean in. "You're right. I positioned for this. Not because I knew Galactica's tanks would blow, but because I've been tracking fleet-wide vulnerability points since the day I could stand upright. Water. Food. Medical supplies. FTL fuel. Every critical resource this fleet depends on, I've mapped the failure scenarios."
Dunn's expression didn't change, but her weight shifted — a millimeter, forward, listening rather than judging.
"The water system was the weakest link. Forty-nine thousand people, sixty-three ships, and one centralized water supply running through Galactica with no fleet-wide redundancy. Any failure — mechanical, sabotage, accident — and the entire fleet goes dry within a week." I spread my hands. "I didn't know when it would happen. I knew it would happen. And I decided to be ready when it did."
The quiet that followed was different from the confrontational silence before. This was assessment. Dunn processing, weighing, measuring the gap between what I'd said and what she believed.
"That's not normal logistics thinking."
"No. It's not."
"Normal logistics officers file reports and wait for authorization. They don't build shadow supply chains and barter engineering services for water futures."
"Normal logistics officers aren't responsible for five hundred people during an apocalypse."
"You're not responsible for five hundred people. Vasquez is."
"And Vasquez is on the bridge taking credit for improvements she didn't make while her crew runs on coffee and fear." The words came out harder than I intended. I reined them in. "Petra. I'm not running a scam. I'm not stealing. I'm not undermining anyone's authority. I'm building something — a network, a system, a way to see problems before they arrive and position solutions before people start dying."
"Building what, exactly?"
The thing that saves humanity when the official leadership fails. The thing that catches what falls through the cracks. The organization that, in twenty-five chapters, will have contacts on every ship in the fleet and intelligence that rivals Galactica's CIC.
I couldn't say any of that.
"I don't have a name for it yet. Right now it's me, some data pads, and an engineer who can build water recyclers from dehumidifier parts." I paused. Let the self-deprecation land. "I need people who notice things. People who can run operations without needing someone to hold their hand. People who care more about results than credit."
Dunn's eyes narrowed. Not with suspicion — with recognition. She'd been described. She knew it.
"You've been recruiting me since the rotation schedule."
"I've been earning your trust since the rotation schedule. There's a difference."
"Not as much of one as you think."
The echo of her own words from five days ago. She caught it. The corner of her mouth moved — not quite a smile, but the permission for one.
"What do you need?"
Three words. Three words that changed everything, that drew a line between before and after, that transformed Marcus Cole from a lone transmigrator faking his way through an apocalypse into the leader of something — fragile, tiny, barely real — but something.
My voice cracked when I answered. Just slightly. A fracture in the composure I'd been building since Day Zero, small enough to miss if you weren't looking.
"I need someone who knows this ship better than anyone. Someone who can manage supplies, people, and information without drawing attention. Someone I can trust to tell me when I'm wrong."
"You'll be wrong a lot."
"I know."
"And I won't sugarcoat it."
"I'm counting on that."
Dunn looked at me for a long time. Long enough that the passive scan cycled twice, registering shifts in her emotional state — calculation to resolution to something quieter, something that might have been relief. Twelve years of running supply chains for people who didn't appreciate it, twelve years of filing reports that nobody read, twelve years of watching incompetence rewarded while competence was exploited.
Someone was finally asking her to do what she'd always been capable of.
She extended her hand.
Her grip was stronger than mine. Calloused palms, short nails, the hand of a woman who'd been hauling cargo since before the Colonies had a name for Cylon.
"If you get me killed, Cole, I'm haunting you."
"Noted."
She released my hand. Picked up her data pad. The crisis hadn't paused for recruitment ceremonies, and Dunn wasn't the type to let a moment linger past its usefulness.
"The Demetrius trade agreement. I'll transmit it within the hour. Orlov's XO owes me from a supply dispute two years ago — he'll push it through."
"Good."
"And Marsh?"
"He's building recyclers. Two more by end of week."
"Bring him in formally. If he's doing organization work, he should know he's doing organization work."
She was already managing. Already structuring. Already being exactly what I needed her to be. The system registered the shift in my peripheral vision:
[RECRUITMENT COMPLETE: DUNN, PETRA]
[LOYALTY BASELINE: 52/100 — CONDITIONAL]
[AUTHORITY POINTS GENERATED: +5]
[ORGANIZATION STATUS: 2 MEMBERS — ACTIVE]
The fleet alert tone pulsed through the bulkheads — a second announcement, details on rationing protocols. Dunn moved toward the door.
"Petra."
She stopped.
"I can't save everyone." The words came out rougher than I planned. Something behind them — something old, something that belonged to a man who'd watched this story play out on a screen and done nothing but eat takeout and change the channel. "But I'm going to try to save more than I should be able to."
Dunn held my gaze for one beat.
"Then stop talking and start working."
She was gone. The cargo office felt larger with just me in it, and smaller at the same time.
Outside, the fleet was rationing water. Inside, an organization with two members and zero reputation had just been born.
The door opened again. Dunn's head appeared.
"Fleet alert just updated. Military expedition launching from Galactica. Raptors, mining equipment, heading for a reported ice concentration. If they find it, rationing eases in seventy-two hours."
They'll find it. I know they'll find it. Because this is the episode where the fleet survives.
"Good. Let's make sure we're positioned to help with distribution when the water arrives."
Dunn nodded and disappeared.
I sat down at the cargo office desk, pulled up the fleet roster, and started planning.
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