There is a kind of record a ship’s doctor hates to write, because writing it is the moment a thing stops being a wound and becomes a fact. This is that record. It is short. The man it concerns is alive, and talking, and will fly a desk and a sim and an easy hop again. What he will not do is the only thing that ever made him Salazar.
Determination
| Field | Finding |
|---|---|
| Patient | Lt. Salazar, flight officer, ISV Lodestar |
| Mechanism | Inertial/drive shock — extended redline past human tolerance during the Spindrift extraction |
| Injury | Vestibular damage + fine-motor impairment (tremor, balance, the body-trust a combat pilot flies on) |
| Survived because | Strapped into the flying chair when the shock hit |
| Command/advisory fitness | Retained — may command, coach, advise, fly low-risk |
| High-performance combat flight | TERMINATED. No expected recovery |
The doctor’s note
He saved everyone he went in for. I need that written down first, because the rest of this page is going to read like a punishment and it isn’t one — it’s a bill. He flew past what a body can take, and a body that flies past what it can take does not get to choose which part it keeps. He kept the people. He paid with the hands. There is no version of this where he gets both, and he knew it going in, and he went in anyway. That is the whole of him on one page.
He’ll rage first. Then he’ll go quiet. Then, when he’s ready and not one hour before, he’ll teach the kid to fly the war he can’t. Do not rush him to the teaching. The grounding is real and it is permanent and he is allowed to grieve a thing that isn’t coming back.
In The War at the Door, Salazar’s hands are the core body-cost of the book — the price of the routing that put him in the chair, the proof that the golden age’s best can be spent — and the reason a younger pilot has to become something he never wanted to be.