Noah grunted, wiping a smear of black grease from his forehead with the back of a hand that looked far older than his forty-five years.
He tossed the rag onto the metal grating and stared at the vibrating monitor of the diagnostic tablet.
In the modern age, the art of shipwrighting had died, replaced by modular assembly and soulless fabrication.
Noah knew this better than anyone. He was a relic in a department of software specialists... a hands-on engineer who could listen to the hum of a turbine and tell you which bearing was a millimeter out of alignment.
It was a lonely existence. The younger engineers, fresh from the academy with their clean fingernails and tablet styluses, looked at him like a dinosaur.
He stood in the auxiliary engineering bay of the USS Vengeance, a sleek, stealth-guided destroyer that felt more like a floating office building than a warship.
He was supposed to be supervising the final pressure tests, a task that amounted to watching a digital bar turn from green to red.
"Readings look optimal, Chief," said Miller, a twenty-something kid who looked like he'd blow away in a stiff breeze. He didn't even look up from his screen.
"Efficiency is up three percent."
"The vibration in the secondary pump is off," Noah muttered, his voice gravelly from years of shouting over diesel engines.
"It's got a harmonic shudder. Can't you feel it in the floor plates?"
Miller rolled his eyes, a gesture he thought Noah didn't catch. "Sensors show green across the board, Chief. It's just the new composite hull settling. Don't borrow trouble."
Don't borrow trouble. That was the mantra of this generation. Don't look under the hood if the light isn't blinking.
He leaned against the cold steel railing.
He felt a profound sense of obsolescence. What was the point of all his years of knowledge, of understanding the soul of a machine, if the machine was just a disposable circuit board?
He was considering retiring. Maybe buying a small trawler, fixing it up, and disappearing off the coast of Maine. Just him and the Atlantic.
The ship lurched.
It wasn't a wave. Noah knew the difference between the roll of the sea and the buck of a wounded beast. This was internal.
A violent shudder that slammed Miller against the console.
"What was that?" the kid yelped, dropping his tablet.
Before Noah could answer, a low, groaning shriek echoed through the hull. Then came the hissing.
The terrifying scream of high-pressure steam escaping containment.
"Main seal!" Noah roared, his lethargy vanishing instantly. The muscle memory of two decades in the darkest bowels of Navy ships took over.
"The bypass valve is stuck!"
"The... the system says it's sealed!" Miller stammered, his face draining of color as the temperature in the room began to spike.
"The system is a liar!"
Noah shoved past the kid, moving with a speed that belied his age. He scrambled up the ladder toward the manual override wheel.
The containment alarm finally started blaring.
Miller was frozen. He was staring at the doorway, where a jet of white steam was beginning to curtain off the exit.
"Get out!" Noah screamed down at him, his hands gripping the scorching hot iron of the valve wheel.
"Miller! Move your ass! Seal the bulkhead behind you!"
"I... I can't..."
"Go!"
The kid scrambled, slipping on the grating, and dove through the hatch just as a pipe burst five feet to Noah's left.
The explosion of noise was deafening.
A wall of superheated vapor slammed into Noah, knocking the wind out of him. He gritted his teeth, the pain instantaneous and blinding, but he didn't let go of the wheel.
If he didn't close this valve, the pressure spike would blow the main turbine. The ship would be dead in the water, drifting into the path of the incoming storm, with three hundred souls on board.
He hauled on the wheel.
He thought of the clean, sterile reports Miller would write. He thought of the admirals who cut the budget on the valve gaskets to save a few pennies.
Noah slumped over the railing, his strength evaporating along with the steam. He looked down at his hands; they were raw, ruined things.
The heat in the room was absolute. He couldn't breathe. The oxygen had been displaced.
He slid to the floor grating. He was dying. He knew it with the clinical detachment of an engineer assessing a catastrophic failure.
"Damn cheap... alloy..." he wheezed.
He had saved the ship. He had saved the crew.
And for what? So they could continue to pilot a soulless plastic tub across a database of an ocean?
The bitterness welled up in him, sharper than the pain of his burns. He had spent his life keeping machines alive that didn't deserve the effort, serving masters who didn't know a piston from a propeller.
He wanted to build something real. Something that mattered. Something that could look the ocean in the eye and not blink.
Is this it? he thought, the darkness creeping into the edges of his vision.
A life spent fixing other people's mistakes?
The darkness swallowed him whole. There was no tunnel of light, no choir of angels. Just the silence of a shut-down engine.
He floated in the void, weightless, stripped of his pain and his weary body.
He waited for judgment, or oblivion. He didn't believe in much, but he believed in the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. His energy, his will, his sheer stubborn refusal to let things break... it had to go somewhere. And then, he heard it.
He heard the creak of timber. It was a sound he had dreamed of but rarely heard in the age of steel.
Noah tried to gasp, to ask where he was, but his voice was a weak, pathetic cry.
"He's a loud one, Captain," a gritty voice rasped.
Noah felt himself being lifted. The sensation was terrifying... he had no control over his limbs.
"Is it a boy?" A woman's voice. Weak, exhausted, but with an edge of steel to it.
"Aye, Martha. It's a boy."
Noah's vision cleared just enough to make out the face of the giant holding him.
The man had a scar running from his ear to his chin. He wore a heavy coat with brass buttons that were green with verdigris.
"Let me see him," the woman commanded.
The giant handed Noah over. The movement was rough, lacking the delicate care of a modern nurse.
Noah was bundled into a scratchy woolen blanket that smelled of wet dog. He looked up into the face of the woman holding him.
She was young but looked aged by sun and salt, her hair a tangled mess of red curls plastered to her forehead.
She looked down at him.
"He's small," she whispered, a hint of disappointment in her voice. "Runty."
"He's alive," the bearded man grunted, turning away to pour a dark liquid from a bottle into a tin cup.
"That's more than the last two."
Noah's mind reeled. Rebirth. It had to be. He retained his memories, his understanding of hydrodynamics, his knowledge of steam and steel... but he was trapped in the body of a newborn.
And judging by the surroundings he was a long, long way from Norfolk.
The bearded man took a swig of the drink and wiped his mouth with a dirty sleeve.
"What do we call him? Can't just call him 'Boy' until he's old enough to swab a deck."
The woman touched Noah's cheek. Her finger was calloused, rough as sandpaper. "We call him something strong. Something that won't break."
"Alexander," the man suggested with a sneer. "Like the great king."
"No," the woman said sharply. "Too fancy for a pirate's whelp. He needs a name that can survive the sea."
She looked deep into Noah's eyes. For a second, Noah stopped his internal panic and held her gaze.
He tried to project his intelligence, his will. I am an engineer, he tried to scream. I can build you an empire.
But all that came out was a gurgle.
The woman smirked. "Look at him. staring back like he knows the price of tea in China. We'll call him Drake."
"Drake," the man grunted. "Fitting. A dragon or a duck? Time will tell."
"He'll be neither," the woman said, pulling the scratchy blanket tighter around him.
"He'll be a survivor. He has to be. With a father like you, owning nothing but a leaking sloop and a half-mad crew, he'll have to fight for every breath."
The man laughed, a harsh, barking sound. "Aye. The Black Gull ain't much, but she floats. Mostly."
The woman, his new mother, handed him to a younger girl standing in the shadows, a servant or a cabin girl with fear in her eyes.
"Take him, girl. Put him in the hammock. If he cries, give him a rag dipped in rum. I need to sleep before the tide turns."
The girl took him, her hands trembling. "Yes, Mistress Martha. Come here, little Drake."
As he was carried away to a swaying hammock strung up in the corner of the dank cabin, the bearded man raised his cup in a mock toast.
"To the new powder monkey," he laughed. "May he live long enough to earn his keep."