Marae holds her hand out, and Second Shipper Shelby automatically passes her a floppy already blinking with information. Marae swipes her fingers across it, scrolling down, then hands it to me. “This past week alone we’ve had to perform two major fixes to the internal fusion compartment of the solar lamp. Soil efficiency is way below standard specs, and the irrigation system keeps leaking. Food production has barely been sufficient for over a year, and we’ll soon be facing a shortage. Work production has decreased significantly in the last two months. It’s no small thing to keep this ship alive.”

“But the engine,” I say, staring at the floppy, full of charts with arrows pointing down and bar graphs with short stumps at the end.

“Frex the engine!” Marae shouts. Even the other Shippers break their immobile masks to look shocked at Marae’s cursing. She takes a deep, shaky breath and pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“It’s fine,” I mutter, because I know she won’t go on until I say this.

“Our duty, Elder, is clear,” Marae continues, clipping her words and holding her temper in check. “Ship over planet. If there is a choice between improving the life aboard the ship and working on the engine to get us closer to Centauri-Earth, we must always choose the ship.”

I grip the floppy, unsure of what to say. Marae rarely reveals what she’s feeling, and she never loses control. I’m not used to seeing anything on her face beyond calm composure. “Surely we could make some sacrifices in order to get the engine back up to speed… ”

“Ship over planet,” Marae says. “That has been our priority since the Plague and the Shippers were developed.”

I’m not going to let this go. “That’s been…” I try to add up the years, but our history is too muddled by lies and Phydus to know exactly how long that’s been. “Gens and gens have passed since the ‘Plague.’ Even if the ship is the top priority, in that amount of time, we must have come up with some way to improve the engine and get us to the planet.”