Backstory
Eitan Vargas is the chief engineer of a deep-sea research submarine, the person who signs for seventeen lives every morning at 0600 and takes the signature seriously. His discipline is naval-formal: checklists nobody edits, a conscience on a similar schedule. He rebuilt a ballast pump from memory once. He reads the ship's systems as a single tactical surface. When anomalies appear — a power draw at the radio rack that doesn't match the logged activity — he sees them before they're announced. His current captain is running an agenda the ship's logs don't support, and Eitan has been watching the discrepancy build in his notebook for days, too loyal to the chain of command to move and too trained to pretend he hasn't read it. His internal conflict is structural: the naval chain says the captain is the captain; his engineer's conscience says the captain is a falsified comms log he can read from his own station. He believes Sana's reading of the signal and is afraid of that belief, because his training doesn't give him a procedure for it.
