Engineer-Prime Brackett

Before the commission, Engineer-Prime Brackett taught at the Confederacy's mechanic academies for thirty years. Every Confederacy engineer under fifty learned from one of her manuals, and remembers a teacher who would not let a student touch a tool until the drawings were fluent.

What the academies did not advertise was the range of the studying. Combine armor patterns. Collective neural lattices. Dominion void-shield geometry. She collected drawings, stress data, and failure modes until she knew some foreign ships better than the crews who flew them. On the Gearbreaker she uses it the way a repair technician runs an autopsy backward: the joint where the spars meet the hull, the seam where a casing runs thinnest, the one fastening whose loss jams a bay door in the middle of a launch.

The crew named the ship for the work. She does not destroy an enemy hull. She breaks the specific part it cannot do without, one placed shot at a time, and lets the rest follow. What the academies also do not teach: the Gearbreaker's central axle was forged a million years ago, taken from a crater the Steam houses fought a six-year war to keep. The fragment is why Confederacy boilers run the way they do. She will not yield it intact.