Chương 234: 92. Remember to Lock Door 1

By the time Victor reeled us back into the briefing room, one by one, from the zero-G bay, everyone had settled into roughly three categories. First: Harvey. Sweating, the inner collar of his suit still holding a film of trapped heat — and yet his eyes were bright enough to light a corridor, like the Chief Engineer had personally stamped his soul with an approval seal. He radiated a very specific energy: I nearly drifted into a gantry today, but spiritually, I have already naturalized into Engineering. Second: D.

Still breathing. Still talking. Still finding the energy to insist that his mortifying, slow-motion in-place spin hadn't been a loss of control, but "tactical three-dimensional observation adjustment." The fact that someone like him had survived both Security Division and Engineering in the same week probably deserved a commendation from Federal Medical. Third: the rest of us. The normal ones.

Unwilling to admit that for several seconds out there, we'd genuinely lost track of where our heads were, where our feet were, or which direction life was supposed to be pointing. We just wanted to sit back down and quietly take inventory of how much stomach, inner ear, and dignity we had left. Victor didn't care in the slightest that we'd come back looking like laundry that had just survived a spin cycle.

He walked back to the lectern, set the metal flask down with a clean clank — and the whole room straightened up almost on its own. Not out of fear. Mostly because this man had now proven something: the drinking was real, and so was the expertise. A professional who drinks on the job is, in practice, more dangerous than an instructor who only knows how to shout. He swept his eyes over us.

Slightly different from the first scan — less who dumped these non-engineers in my lap, more a grudging clumsy, but at least they didn't fling themselves into open space.

"Critique first," he said. The room went dead quiet. Victor pointed around with the flask, like indicating a pile of parts that had just barely rolled back from catastrophic failure.

"Your biggest problem today wasn't that you didn't know how," he said.

"It's that you didn't know how, and you were still bold about it." D's head dropped immediately. I almost laughed. Yeah. Half that sentence had his name on it. Victor pointed the flask straight at him.

"The one who spun himself like a top." D made a very committed effort to look like he hadn't heard.

"I mean you. Thrusters aren't for performance. Turn yourself into a top out there one more time, and I'll hang you outside the training bay door as a warning sign." One beat of silence. Then Harvey lost it first, shoulders shaking. D pressed a hand to his chest, voice dropping to something like his own eulogy.

"... I never thought I'd live to be officially classified as a top by the Chief Engineer." Roy, beside him, delivered the follow-up without blinking.

"At least this time you weren't a missile." Victor ignored them and moved on to Akari.

"The one who let go of her tool." Akari sat bolt upright, wearing the exact expression of someone accepting the charges.

"Hull tools aren't hairpins. They don't come back on their own." Victor said.

"You got lucky today — someone was close by. Out there for real, that thing comes back around and hits the radar, the armor, or somebody's skull." Akari said, quietly, "Understood." Then Victor looked at Harvey. This time, there was something genuinely close to praise in it.

"Engineering track." Harvey's spine snapped straight.

"Not bad," Victor said.

"At least your brain and your hands are talking to each other." If he'd had a tail, I'm fairly sure it would've been leaving afterimages. Victor snorted and swept his eyes over the rest of us.

"The rest of you aren't useless either. At least you knew to tether yourselves before touching anything. Out there, that already counts as manners."... Engineering compliments, apparently, come with barbs too, same as Security Division. Victor's version, though, felt more like weld sparks. Hot. Precise. He took another drink, then added the rest, slow.

"But don't think that just because you didn't manage to repair yourselves right off the hull today, you're any good. All today proved is that you've finally learned which end of the wrench goes where." Great. That took care of whatever pride was left standing. He finished, glanced at the roster, and started writing pairs on the whiteboard in quick strokes.

"Formal hull-repair assessment. I'm setting the partners." He tapped the board.

"Not so you can bond. Because some of you, put together, double the accident rate on contact." D's head shot up.

"Chief, I feel like that sentence had a target."

"Your entire existence has a target on it," Victor said, not looking up. The room laughed, without much charity. The pairs went up fast. D and Roy. Harvey and Aida. Jess and Lan. Akari and Evelyn. And the last — Victor's marker paused for half a beat, then landed on our corner, easy as anything.

"Hoshino. Kushima. Together." My head came up before I could stop it. Maki, two seats down, gave no reaction at all — just a flat, quiet "Understood," as if last night's shared room, this morning's shared breakfast table, and an entire meal's worth of everyone at that table doing their level best not to combust had absolutely nothing to do with her. That brand of overkill calm is genuinely infuriating. And for reasons I had no interest in examining, my heart still did something completely unnecessary.

Maybe because the work we'd just run together in the engine room had gone too cleanly. Maybe because the feel of being pulled back into working position in zero-G was still sitting somewhere in my nerves. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Or maybe — Never mind. When you've got that many reasons stacked up, it usually just means you don't want to admit which one's real.

Jess, sitting diagonally ahead, didn't turn around when the pairing landed. But I clearly saw her shoulder line shift. Small movement. I knew what it meant, though. It meant she'd filed it away. Victor didn't care about the currents running under his roster. He flipped the board, walked back to the lectern, and pressed the marker to the fresh side. Two words. Arc Welding We were finished. Just looking at those two words made my palms start sweating on behalf of my future self.

Victor turned back to us, tone as casual as if he were announcing he was going downstairs for a paper.

"I won't make this one hard on you. Engineering isn't something you can force just by wanting it badly enough, or learn just because someone yells at you until it sticks." The room actually eased up at that — visibly. Hearing a professional monster admit that some things can't be beaten into you counted, for a group that had spent the past few days getting systematically destroyed by Tobita and Takenaka in two entirely different styles, as a genuinely rare flicker of human decency. Then Victor tapped the board.

"So this time, the assignment's simple." Here it comes. Whenever an instructor says simple, what follows is never something a normal person would call that. Sure enough.

"Vacuum extravehicular arc welding," Victor said.

"Everyone runs the machine at least once. Quality's graded separately." The room went still. D frowned first.

"Why welding?" Good question. I wanted to ask it too. We'd just spent the last hour tumbling through high-temperature superconductors, zero-point lattice stabilizers, FTL drives, and fusion boilers. Pivoting straight to welding felt like listening to the Captain lecture on fleet doctrine for an hour, and then having him hand you a roll of tape and say, here, patch the wall first. Victor looked at D and gave an answer that was pure Engineering Division.

"Because when the ship's got a hole in it, you'd better at least know how to close it." Half a second of silence. No one had anything to say back. Because the logic was too clean to argue with. You can get away with not following high-temp superconductivity. You can get away with not knowing the FTL drive's full official name. You can even get away with not being sure whether some of the materials jargon is technical language or an incantation. But if the hull actually opens up, you need to know what to grab.

Victor looked satisfied with the specific flavor of our silence — the I want to argue but he's completely right kind — and took another drink before continuing.

"Task's simple too. Each pair gets a mock outer-armor panel, one standard crack, and a vacuum arc welder. Two to a team — one holds, one welds. Switch off. Ugly welds are fine. Burning straight through is fine, too — just don't weld your own hand into it." D raised his hand.

"Chief, with respect — is 'burning straight through is fine' really the standard we're going with?"

"What's not fine," Victor said, "is you hearing 'burning through' and still having the energy to ask follow-up questions. Better you burn through a training plate than burn through the Yukikaze." Too reasonable. Reasonable enough that I didn't even want to hear it. Harvey, meanwhile, had shifted into an entirely new gear. If the engine-structure lecture earlier had been him coming home, then hearing there was live vacuum-welding practice was like someone had taped his dream job listing straight to his face.

Aida looked at him, tone deeply complicated.

"The face you're making right now looks like someone just proposed to you."

"This isn't a proposal," Harvey said, with total sincerity.

"This is a skill unlock."

"That's worse," D muttered. Victor ran through the process, then listed the safety points one by one. Torch grip angle. Spark scatter direction in a vacuum environment. Visor shade calibration. Clamp placement. Preheating the crack edges. Short pass, pause, fill. Don't mistake a pretty spark pattern for skill. And, in zero-G, don't hit the thrusters one extra time just because you think you look cool doing it. By the time he finished, I had exactly one thought left.

Victor Borodin was a man who'd somehow crammed looks about to pass out and explains things like a built-in teaching module into the same body. And the longer you listened, the more unnerving it got. Because he wasn't being clear to show off. This material had simply lived in his head long enough to be as automatic as breathing. Before the practical started, Victor was considerate enough — or Engineering-Division enough — to give us a demonstration first.

He suited up, stepped up to the mock plate, movements unhurried, almost lazy. Then the torch lit, and something in him switched over completely. The pirate energy, the booze, the slackness — none of it disappeared. It just got buried under something else. Fluency. Precision. The specific quality of someone who's done this so many times his wrist doesn't need to think about the force anymore. Sparks flared, short and sharp, behind the tinted visor.

The torch ran along the crack edge at a steady pace — unhurried, unwavering, no flash — laying down a thin, hard, calm line across the metal, like stitching a seam. When he finished, the room was quiet. Even D had nothing to say. Because nothing needed saying. You'd seen the gap. That was enough.

"Get it?" Victor flipped his visor up. No one dared say no. The problem, as always, is that understanding and doing have never been the same verb. What happened next proved it fast. D's grip angle was wrong from the first pass. The sparks flared and he flinched back on instinct, nearly re-staging his zero-G top routine from that morning.

"Don't dodge!" Victor barked from the side.

"You're scared of sparks — the ship's not going to heal itself just because you are!"

"I'm not scared, I'm just—""That's called instinctive surrender!" Roy, holding the clamp on the other side, wore the expression of a man who'd made peace with everything.

"Focus. If that hole's still open when we're done, you're what I'm patching next." Akari's weld looked like abstract art. Evelyn stood beside her, using a perfectly level voice to walk her back, inch by inch, toward something a human shipyard would actually accept. Jess had steady hands but wanted to move too fast, nearly dragging her bead sideways — Lan cut in immediately, cold as ever.

"You're closing a crack. Not signing your name." The entire bay had the energy of a highly technical disaster in slow motion. And Harvey — of course Harvey was glowing again. Not the flashy kind. The kind where one look tells you the person genuinely has a feel for it. Right stance, right angle, right pauses. By the time it was Aida's turn, Harvey's coaching from the sidelines had already started developing the unmistakable undertone of a junior chief engineer. Victor watched him, visibly pleased.

"Engineering track," he said.

"Good head. Hands aren't bad either. Didn't waste the material on you." Harvey looked about one breath from leaving his own body entirely. I was fairly sure that if someone offered him a transfer to Engineering right now, he'd get down and kiss the hull. When our turn came, I was still trying to decide who should go first. Maki looked at me and, perfectly naturally, held the torch out.

"You first."

"Me?" I raised an eyebrow.

"That much trust in me?"

"Not trust," Maki said, flat.

"Judgment."

"What's the difference?"

"If you go second, you'll have watched too many people fail first, and you'll overthink it."... Damn it. Accurate again. Accurate enough that arguing back would've just made me look stubborn.

"You are genuinely annoying sometimes," I said, taking the torch.

"You figured that out yesterday."

"So today's a review session?"

"Reinforcement." I nearly laughed out of pure irritation. The most infuriating thing about working with Maki is that she usually names exactly how you're about to mess up before you actually do it. The most useful thing about it is exactly the same. I steadied my breathing, dropped the visor, and lined the torch up against the crack edge. Beside me, Maki locked the plate down, rock-steady. Her voice came through the comm a little lower than usual. A little closer.

"Don't rush it. Watch the pool."

"I know." The sparks flared and I still flinched. Just barely. Just barely was still enough for her to catch.

"Hold."

"You don't need to say that like I'm about to crash the ship."

"Drift your hand any further and this plate's mood is going to be about the same as a ship going down."... Perfect. Only she could turn arc welding into a personal insult on behalf of the metal. I laughed anyway — and my wrist steadied because of it. Short pass. Pause. Fill. Short pass. Pause. Fill. The first bead wasn't pretty. Honestly, a little ugly. But it didn't wander, it didn't burn through, and I hadn't flung the torch away like a startled cat.

"Acceptable," Maki said.

"That a compliment?"

"That's a fact."

"Are you ever going to learn to just say something nice like a normal person?"

"If you want a lie, I can try."

"... Forget it. Pass." When it was Maki's turn, I finally understood what I'd been watching all day. Her hands were steady. Not Harvey's finally-on-home-turf steady, not Victor's old-monster steady — something quieter than either. Clean, contained, almost no wasted motion. The torch moved, and the bead laid itself down along the crack, slow and even. I held the plate for her, watching those hands move through the glare inch by inch, and had a thought that was entirely inappropriate for the moment.

If she weren't this irritating on a regular basis, she'd probably be a lot scarier.

"What are you looking at?" Maki said, without lifting her head — like she already knew I'd drifted.

"You."

"That's a dangerous answer."

"You asked," I said. Maki made a low, noncommittal sound and, for once, didn't push back. Which somehow knocked my pulse off-beat worse than if she had. When we finished, Victor came by, gave the panel one look.

"Usable." Out of his mouth, that was basically a Security Division stamp of approval. By the time the welding session wrapped, I didn't feel like I'd finished a class. I felt like I'd fought a small war — against metal, sparks, booze fumes, gravity, and my own dignity, all at once. When Victor finally called it and told us to clear out, the whole room wore some version of the same expression. Tired. But something actually stuck. And you really can't judge a man like that off the flask alone.

Harvey was clearly the last one who wanted to leave. Victor actually flagged him down and spent a few extra minutes going over material stress and bead angles with him. Harvey listened like he was receiving scripture, spine so straight he looked one word away from saluting. D watched the whole thing, sounding thoroughly world-weary.

"First time I've ever seen someone finish a class and let their soul get poached by Engineering, completely willingly." Roy nodded beside him.

"And the poaching looks like it's going well." Maki and I walked out slowly. The engine room's roar was still there, but after the class, it didn't land the same way it had that morning. That morning, it had been pressure. Now it sounded more like something huge and hard and indifferent — but something we'd at least started to get a map of. Before we crossed back into the upper decks, I glanced sideways at her. She hadn't talked much to begin with. Now she was even quieter. And it wasn't just fatigue. I could tell.

That weight from earlier was still sitting on her. Not from the welding. Not from zero-G. From further back than that. Your family's products. Very durable. Though the Kushima kid doesn't seem to recognize it. Victor's cut hadn't been heavy. But it had landed exactly where it was aimed.