Marae shakes her head. “But the engine is only a part of the ship. We have to focus on Godspeed as a whole.”

I wait for her to continue as the engine churns noisily behind us, the heartbeat of the ship.

“There are many things wrong with Godspeed; surely you’ve noticed.” She frowns. “The ship isn’t exactly new. You know about the laws of motion, but have you studied entropy?”

“I… um.” I glance around at the other first-level Shippers. They’re all watching me, waiting, and I don’t have the answer they want to hear.

“Everything’s constantly moving to a more chaotic state. A state of disorder, destruction, disintegration. Elder,” Marae says, and this time she doesn’t stutter over my chosen name. “Godspeed is old. It’s falling apart.”

I want to deny it, but I can’t. The whirr-churn-whirr of the engine sounds like a death rattle ricocheting throughout the room. When I shut my eyes, I don’t hear the churning gears or smell the burning grease. I hear 2,298 people gasping for breath; the stench of 2,298 rotting bodies fills my nose.

This is how fragile life is on a generation spaceship: the weight of our existence rests on a broken engine.

Eldest told me three months ago, Your job is to take care of the people. Not the ship. But… taking care of the ship is taking care of the people. Behind the Shippers are the master controls, monitoring the energy sources applied to the rest of the ship’s function. If I were to smash the control panel behind Marae, there would be no more air on the ship. Destroy another panel, no more water. That one, light. That other one, the gravity sensors go. It’s not just the engine that’s the heart of the ship. It’s this whole room, everything in it, pulsing with just as much life as the 2,298 people on this level and the one below.