That was one of my conditions.
The first week, a Vakutan quartermaster tried it out of habit. I looked at him until he corrected himself, and we never had the problem again.
Now I am just Rhyx, which still feels strange in my ears some mornings, like I am wearing civilian skin that has not entirely molded to me yet.
“Rhyx!”
I turn at the shout and catch a crate before it tips off the pallet skimmer. The metal bites cold into my palms through the work gloves. The weight settles into my shoulders and spine with familiar honesty.
Lena Orsik—a human logistics coordinator with a shaved head, two missing fingertips, and a vocabulary best described as educational—storms toward me waving a manifest tablet like it personally offended her.
“If you are about to play hero with my inventory again,” she says, “at least do it where I can bill the drama properly.”
I set the crate down. “It was falling.”
“It was leaning.”
“It was one second from falling.”
“That is still leaning with ambition.”
The dock crew around us laughs. One of the Alzhon welders mutters, “She’s right,” and gets a glare sharp enough to peel paint.
Lena shoves the manifest at me. “Transit corridor four is clogged. Shelter block C still doesn’t have enough thermal panels. I need resource reroute options that do not involve me strangling municipal engineers.”
I take the tablet. The screen is smeared with rain, grease, and Lena’s temper.
This part, at least, I understand instinctively. Bottlenecks. Redundancies. Structural choke points. Routes that look clean on paper and fail the moment actual bodies start moving through them.
The difference now is that the cargo is water purifiers, insulation plating, pediatric med kits, and structural mesh. Thedifference is that when I alter flow, it is to keep roofs over families instead of fleets under fire.
The difference matters enough that some mornings it feels like breath.
“Shift thermal panels off the north reserve,” I say, scanning the route map. “Pull two skimmer teams from secondary debris haul and run them on a staggered relay. Corridor four can’t take full surge traffic, but it can take pulse movement if you stop pretending it is a parade route.”
Lena squints at the display. “That’ll slow repairs at the culvert breach.”
“By four hours.”
“Five.”
“Four if your engineers stop treating schedule estimates like fiction.”
She points at me. “That is exactly the kind of tone that gets people stabbed with styluses.”
“Then they should improve their estimates.”
She snorts. “You are adapting to civilian work in a way I find deeply suspicious.”
“I am surviving it.”
“Same thing.”
She slaps the route revision through and pivots toward her crew, already barking new orders.
I watch the change ripple through the depot. Pallet routes adjust. A loading drone peels off toward the north reserve. Two workers break from debris assignment and head for the skimmer racks. Nothing dramatic. No command deck. No tactical projection hanging over half a fleet.
Just systems moving because someone bothered to look closely before they broke.
