Page 18 of Fated to the Dragon Alien
Cerani tilted her head. “Different how?”
“Context translation. I give you a mechanic’s report—partial Axis-standard. You translate and summarize it. Then we talk solutions.”
“You want me to fix something?”
“I want to know your ideas. You see things from the shaft floor. I need that view.”
Cerani narrowed her eyes, but took the tablet again. Her fingers moved across the screen as the lines of text pulled up. She read fast. Faster than some supervisors he’d trained in decrypted report systems.
“You wanted a real mechanic?” she said, tapping one display. “Because this says the west sector suits are failing at the thigh seal joints. Thirteen unique reports…” Her finger paused on one passage. “What does this say?”
He leaned closer. He could catch the scent of her hair, if it weren’t for the EP suit. “It says, ‘all the reports were flagged, but dismissed.’”
Her lips pursed. She frowned at the screen and read on. “This says the repair queue updates when a shift completes quota.” She looked up at him. “But, Stavian, how can miners complete a quota if they’re too sick to mine? They’ll never get new equipment.”
He shrugged. “I’ve petitioned for new suits—twice. They won’t send them.”
“Why not?”
“Technically, deaths are still under the replacement threshold. Messy as it sounds, as long as corpses aren’t piling in the lift every cycle, Central doesn’t care.”
Cerani looked away but didn’t say anything. Her jaw locked.
“The knee and elbow seals degrade fastest,” he said. “Then the mask valves. The EP suits weren’t made for extended exposure.”
“Yet here we are.”
He looked around the alcove. The walls were scratched from years of unsupervised maintenance—old tool tags, grease marks, melted patches from weld jobs. This place mirrored the entire mine: patched together and barely holding.
“You think I haven’t tried to push back?” he said quietly. “I’ve sent override requests, sabotage claims, high-priority burst alerts. They delay. Always. Sometimes I think they want the suits to fail.”
Cerani didn’t speak right away. Then she said, “Then stop reporting the truth. Lie. Tell them you’re getting zero yield because your suits are collapsing too fast to maintain output.”
“They’ll just send more prisoners and threaten to send guards from Combat Holdings. If you think things are oppressive now, wait until there’s two hundred soldiers here toput pressure on the miners.” He shook his head. “What survives pressure is given more pressure.”
“Okay.” She splayed her hands. “Even small changes could make a difference, and if you can push one through in the name of efficiency, that would be something. Like the lower knee brace. They could be easily reinforced,” she said.
Stavian leaned forward. “How?”
Hope sparked in her eyes. “I’ve looked closely at them. The seal points are too thin for the amount of time we spend on our knees scraping crystal. They’re shaped for up-and-down movement. That’s not how we work.”
He crossed his arms. “Show me.”
She tapped through the tablet until a rough sketch loaded—hand-drawn overlays on the existing brace schematic. “You’d need to reinforce here,” she said, pointing to the outer lateral band. “Add a double layer here and seal the seam. That’s where it wears down.”
He stared at the diagram, amazed. “You did this from memory?”
She shrugged. “I’ve worn the same model for almost forty cycles. You start noticing patterns of wear after a while.”
“No one in Maintenance flagged this.”
“No one in Maintenance wears one for a whole wake cycle,” she said.
Something shifted in his chest—respect and something deeper. She wasn’t guessing. She understood the system and knew exactly where it failed.
“You think you could do the same with the breathing valves?” he asked.
She didn’t blink. “I already did.”
