It felt like things were falling apart.

Leaving Bagathon was quite hectic even excluding the circus of surveilling da Silva’s cargo check. While Robert and Nikolai returned to the ship an hour before take-off, the Chief Engineer was distracted and ended up putting Irene in charge and going back to their personal quarters. In the following days, Nikolai got better, which gave Robert such a burst of productivity, he ended up poking his nose into every little structure Irene put up over the past few years and wrecked most of them with new ideas and random upgrade plans. 

She cried herself to sleep three nights in a row. Everything seemed impossible and she felt useless and powerless. What was the point of delegating when Robert could just barge in and say ‘this is all wrong, let’s change it’ and then everyone else would agree despite the proposed changes being worse than what they were working towards initially. When she tried to protest, he chuckled and patted her on the back, and murmured: “Come on, this is what we were putting off, right?”. Yes, he was. But since then, Irene assigned a team to it and even booked dock time on Jeph. Now, they would have to cancel it because the hover upgrade would be instead done in-transit, using their maintenance bots.

Then, there was the suspicion that da Silva still smuggled in something. They acted so smug and mockingly official during her inspection, she could swear they were hiding something. It was no longer in the cargo bay, but it was somewhere, she could feel it. The idea of bringing it up with Robert or anyone else made her sick. This would be called paranoia. At best, she would be dismissed. At worst, she could get demoted.

Finally, a week into the hop, Robert was seen starting a fight with Andrade after his shift. This was unheard of. Irene didn’t care about what happened and all the gossip around it. But the Productive Robert was gone and the Grumpy Robert returned to his corner of endless WIPs while Irene was left to juggle all the new groups who had a million of justified questions as their plans were not properly thought through. 

Which meant everyone was pissed off with her once again.

They were a day away from dropping near Colossus, and Irene got out of her bed with grim determination. If everyone already hated her for things she hasn't done, she might as well lean into it. She still had a couple of hours before her shift, so she started with an extra minute in the shower, then braided her hair in a bun and wrapped a headscarf (black with a shimmering sheen) around it as tightly as she could. She needed it to stay in shape despite anything. She had her usual breakfast but took a cup of red juice instead of hot brew. And a spicy roll. She didn’t skip the prayer, but she went for a shortened version instead of the full morning routine, promising herself and the spirits that she would make up for this before sleep.

She descended to the Ninth deck and then immediately into the service stairwell leading down to the cargo bay. If da Silva had a right to make her life hell, she might as well return the favour. 

Irene stepped down from the ladder and found the shaft door closed. It should not have been shut while there was a person inside. 

(Cargo bay was the largest space inside Hopestar; theoretically, there were dividers that deployed in emergency, but most of them had to be powered down because of the palette arrangement. Currently, they had a whole shuttle that sat between three sectors so the only divider that would rise would be the one near the engineering workstation. If anyone wasn’t at the station, they would instead run to the maintenance shaft and find safety there. The good part about large spaces was that it took some time for the air to completely vent out.)

She used her access to override the lock. It caused someone to yelp on the other side, and Irene stepped through to find two people right by the door: da Silva and Grav Ramírez. Despite commendable attempts at acting casual, it was clear they had been making out.

Irene pursed her lips to fight rising embarrassment. Her first reaction was to feel bad about intruding. She stomped it away; while Ramírez could be anywhere he wanted, da Silva was on shift. And their job function didn’t include kissing. And yet, the Grav Engineer was the one who looked guilty.

“I see you are busy, da Silva.” Irene said evenly, trying to come off neutral.

“As busy as a cargo engineer can be in subspace.” They murmured in response, a smirk on their face. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I will be going now.” Grav Ramírez muttered and stepped towards the door.

Irene put a hand in front of him, met his gaze and slowly spoke: “I have no pretensions about your presence here. It is your rest period, and you are allowed to spend it anywhere you have access to and with anyone you choose.” Then she turned to the other person. “But Mx da Silva, as the Chief Cargo Engineer, during the first shift, should be either at their station or inspecting the current cargo configuration.”

“Certain configurations have been inspected.” Da Silva giggled, making Grav Ramírez blush even brighter.

Without breaking eye contact, Irene raised her interface and tapped it with her thumb. “Strike one on your performance evaluation.”

They groaned and raised their hands in exasperation. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you can’t be serious!”

“There are no rules about swearing so I won’t count this as strike two. I am nothing but fair, after all.”

“Does it mean I can go now?” Grav Ramírez asked in a small voice. Da Silva threw him a glare of betrayal.

Irene nodded and even smiled at him. “Of course. See you at work.”

Grav Ramírez fled.

Da Silva watched the engineer go then locked eyes with Irene, a smirk back on their lips. “So, did it feel good ridiculing me in front of someone else? Satisfied?”

“I will be satisfied once we finish going through this list without any other strikes.” Irene raised her interface and mastered the best ‘politely curious’ face she could.

They had a short staring match until, finally, da Silva rolled their eyes and sighed heavily. “Fine. If this will get you off my ass.” They turned around, crossed the little room and stepped into the cargo bay proper. “Behold! The only place on Hopestar where everything works fine even though it looks like I’m doing nothing!”

She didn’t let this comment get under her skin. “I have a list of regulations we’ll be going through, in order. These are things always checked during certification.”

They snorted and looked over the shoulder with a grimace. “Nobody ever inspects us in the SOI. And Otsut rules are much more reasonable.”

“True, but we have to be ready anyways. And as you said, everything works fine, so why worry then?” Irene finally smiled too.

And so they went around the cargo bay, stopping at every service panel, every monitoring interface, every clamp node. The strikes piled up like pancakes at the cafeteria. But each time, da Silva had a sensible excuse for why the SOI regulation was either harmfully excessive or outright wrong. Most of the time, Irene agreed with their assessment, though not out loud. But other things were treated carelessly; currently, they were not issues, but potentially could become ones. Necessary procedures were moved from take-off to subspace time; emergency tools were stored in boxes instead of being fitted to their places on wall panels; a big number of palettes’ locations didn’t match what was marked down in the cargo manifest. Irene added a strike for each of these mismatches.

As much as they tried not to show it, da Silva kept giving her a stink eye each time Irene tapped her interface. By the time the whole evaluation was done, Irene was openly grinning. She could see now why people tended to be absolute assholes: there was pleasure to be had in it.

“Thirty two strikes,” she announced playfully. “Eighteen of them are from the mishandled manifest.”

“And?”

“I am sure Robert will be surprised to see such incompetence.”

The annoyance on da Silva’s face slowly turned into a nasty smirk. “Oh? And he would listen to you?”

Irene forced her smile to stay. She would not give them the satisfaction of hitting the sore spot. “If not to me, then to Seidel or Kamenev as I intend to send this report their way too.”

“Will you now?” Their smirk widened and they stepped close to Irene, their faces a few inches apart. “I’d be curious to see you actually manage that. Knowing full well that kicking me off the ship means I would be homeless, jobless, and penniless. You would probably feel so happy you ruined someone’s life over a petty grudge. And it would not haunt you for the rest of your life.”

They stepped back, having read fear in Irene’s eyes and basking in it. “But even then, Hoffman will look at all these ‘strikes’ and see how inconsequential they are. How none of what is done ‘wrong’ here affects Hopestar negatively. How half of them are me having actually improved the times of on- and offloading. And how every complaint you have about me arose just because I don’t grovel in front of you because of your job title.”

Each word felt like a slap, but Irene was too far into this to back down. She straightened and glared at them. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try to turn reality on its head to suit your needs. Safety problems start from small things like this. If you are too lazy to address them, you are not cut out to be a chief!”

“It’s not your job to decide that.”

“Well, maybe I’ll make it my job!”

Da Silva bared their teeth in a disdainful smirk. “I see we finally expanded the Hopestar triad - Engineers, Stewards, and Pilots are now joined by a one-person Police Department.”

Irene’s eye twitched. She had to take a moment to slowly inhale and exhale. Finally, she hissed: “You are wrong. About me. About your achievements. And about what Hopestar is. You are the one who turned my concern into a personal issue.”

Before they had a chance to reply, Irene waved at the grav net they stood next to. “Prove me wrong! Not in smartly woven lies but in actions! Prove that you can be a chief! Show me that you can actually do all this stuff you explained to me earlier! And I’ll be gone and focusing on parts of my job that are more crucial than risk management!” She took a deep breath and opened the schedule board on her interface, then dragged da Silva’s token into several new spots. “I will come tomorrow before the drop. And then again on Colossus before the take-off. And then every day after that until I see something changing.”

She grit her teeth, held their glare and finished: “You can attempt to further try my patience, but it will be on you when the fate of one human being will stop outweighing the risk they cause to the whole ship.”

She turned on her heel and walked out of the cargo bay without waiting for any reaction. She was done, she was tired, she was ready to finish her day and curl up in her bunk.

She still had a whole shift to go through.

Irene was 5 minutes late at her station but Robert didn’t notice, being elbow deep inside a broken air filter. Grav Ramírez raised his eyes at her when she walked by. She smothered the guild that arose from seeing the worry in his eyes. He wasn’t in trouble but if he thought he was, she didn’t care. Maybe it would teach him to finally take her seriously. She was done playing nice.