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The location of the engines was a room that wasn't nearly as big as the hanger, but still big in its own way. The soft hum of the two turbine engines on either side of the clean metal room was amplified by the high, curved ceiling. The engines were huge, huge enough to require a catwalk around the upper half of the room to get to the top, and long filling up most of the room's length. Men and women in gray jumpsuits were all over the place like ants on a sugar mound, mixing ringing footfalls with the constant noise of the engines.
Jace glanced over his shoulder to see Matt about to form a crick in his neck trying to take the engines in at once. Matt's file had mentioned his skills with anything mechanical. Jace knew the kid would end up loving this room.
“ Don't strain yourself, Lieutenant,” Jace said. “ You'll have plenty of time to get an eyeful. When not on deck at the com or off world with me, this'll be your second station when assistance is needed. And as soon as I figure out which one's my permanent engineer...” Jace was going to get the same crick trying to pick said engineer out of the mess of engineers that were like clones of each other. It also didn't help that he'd totally forgotten what the chief engineer looked like. Although he did know that her name was Christina Evans.
Jace raised his hand to rub the back of his head as he searched and forced his brain to recall. These people really did look like clones. The men all had cropped hair hidden under caps, and the women all wore ponytails. These people needed a life beyond mechanics.
“ You've got a little tech head in you, Matt. Is it really necessary to have this many people just to deal with two engines?”
The response he got was from a rather irate female voice. “ If you don't want two D-47 turbine powered Ovatane fueled drives overloading and blasting you to molecules, then yes it is necessary. It is always necessary in the final phases before launch.”
The source of the voice rolled out from beneath the left engine lying flat on a dolly, another clone with a blond pony tail and gray fatigues, but splotched and stained with grime that also marked her oval, sharp-featured face. She dropped a metal tool that rang on the metal floor, freeing her hands up to wipe them on her fatigues. She sat up quick and rigid as a startled groundhog, wiped her hands again, and pushed off of the dolly that rolled away behind her. She swiped her hands a third time on her thighs and turned to face Jace.
“ These engines are usually good little children but they do have their hiccups and whiny moments. Even more rare are temper tantrums and rarer than that are full blown meltdowns that bend space and time to smash you down to your atoms. When one of these engines was purposefully made to have a meltdown for curiosity's sake, it created a tiny though temporary black hole that sucked in the satellite hovering near by to take readings, so you can well imagine what two of these babies would create if they decided to go bratty on us. And that is why it's necessary to have this many people running diagnostics up to the last minute before launch.”
Jace nodded, and stuck his hands back into the pockets of his jacket. He would have folded his arms, but Christina struck him as the type who would have misinterpreted it as a shown of superiority. First impressions could be finicky in that way. He stepped to the side when a male fatigue clad tech clone brushed by. “ I can dig that.”
The blond woman's thin eyebrows shot to her hairline. “ You'd better. These engines are normally content but a few have had their moments. Are you Captain Quincy?”
Jace rocked back on his heels, then forward onto his toes, back and forth as more tech clones slipped past, brushing elbows and arms. Jace tolerated heavily populated rooms when he had to, but it was those rushing bodies that acted like they owned every molecule of air that made Jace's nerves tingle unpleasantly. There was no avoiding getting in those bodies' way, when in fact those bodies were getting in everyone else's way. The perpetual motion bodies were reason two Jace avoided crowds. Reason one being those unmoving bodies that clustered together blocking pathways and halls like clots in an artery, making a guy feel down right claustrophobic.
“ Either call me Captain or Jace,” Jace said. “ Captain Quincy makes me feel like some damn cartoon character. Are you Evans?”
The woman stuck out her grease free hand, and Jace took it.
“ Yeah, Christina Evans. Your first line of defense between you and bratty engines. And let me tell you now, when it comes to those bratty engines, everything in this room falls under my jurisdiction, so when I start shouting orders to you, Captain, I honestly hope you obey them.”
Jace smiled. “ I like you.” He couldn't help it. The woman radiated the attitude of one who knew exactly what she was doing, what she was talking about, and having had to put up with those who thought they'd known better while in truth hadn't known squat.
Christina gave him an odd look, then shook her head and turned to face the right engine. “ A 'you got it' or 'okay fine' would have sufficed.”
“ You got it,” Jace said. “ Your world, your rules. I won't try to trip them up.”
Christina gave him a suspicious look before finally putting her gaze on her second mechanical darling, and pulling a data pad from her pocket. Her focus wasn't entirely on the pad when she flicked him another suspicious, odd look.
“ No offense Captain,” she said. “ But I've encountered plenty of those who talk the talk but stumble not long after. I'm a bit of a control freak, I will admit to that, but I'm serious. I am not military and when it comes to these engines and this ship, I do not fall under your authority, you fall under mine. And there've been a lot of people – military mostly – who've had a problem with that. They're all nice and polite from day one, but as soon as I tell them to stop pushing the drives to max, they turn it into some kind of a stupid power struggle. Usually it's during some sort of a crisis so I've sympathized with them. That still doesn't make them right and me wrong.”
“ No it doesn't,” Jace said amiably. That earned him another odd look, the look of one trying to decide if she was being patronized. Jace pulled his hands from his pockets to hold them palm out, stemming any further thoughts along those lines. “ Look, we just met, so I have no way to convince you otherwise that when you tell me to jump I will ask you if you'd like back-flips on the side. If it helps, I used to be a pilot, and if there's anyone on a ship who's going to sympathize with you concerning how well a ship runs, it's a pilot. I've had controls buck under my hands and commanders who don't know jack about piloting tell me to ignore it. So like hell I'm going to ignore the paranoid engineer who always has a reason to be paranoid. It's a pilot thing not to be stupid.”
The look shifted from odd to assessing, then after a moment to grudgingly partial acceptance. “ You say that now...”
Jace clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels. “ Then I make the solemn promise that if I go back on my word, you have complete authority to kick my ass.”
Jace's comment just barely got a smile out of Evans; a small twitch of a smile that didn't last long, but still the outcome Jace had been pushing for. He wanted his new crew to feel relaxed around him, and to know right off the bat that they could trust him, though he was well aware the latter was going to take more than a day. In Christina's case probably longer. Engineers and commanders/captains were notorious for not getting along. Except for those commanders/captains who had been former pilots. Jace had witnessed both sides of the relationship. Commanders bossed people around. It was the pilots and engineers who held life in the palm of their hand. No one but a pilot or engineer truly appreciated that.
After several seconds of neutral silence, Jace brought his hands back around and clapped them together. “ Well it was nice meeting you, Evans. I'll leave you and your buddies to your diagnostics. Dinner's in four hours, so don't be late. There's people to meet as well as to assure that we're not going to get sucked into some invisible black hole. Not that it can actually be promised but it never hurts to try.”
That earned him the final odd look of the day (he hoped) from Evans. Jace just shrugged. “ I tend to be unnervingly honest, or at least that's what most people say. Come on, Lieutenant. Time to move in.”
They left Christina still staring at Jace as though he'd sprouted two heads.
......................................................
Jace had to hand it to Colonel Simmons – the man knew how to pick a restaurant. The launch window was eleven hours away, making this evening something that needed to be appreciated. It was tradition for all newly formed BP crews to have a last planet side meal before they were made subject to everything and anything that could be freeze dried. So no mess-hall meals tonight. Tonight was all about eating the good stuff.
The restaurant was located in a mountainside resort over looking the island all the way to the ocean made black and silver under the light of two moons. A massive observation window created a backdrop of starry sky and plant life swaying in ocean-scented breezes. Sections of wall not used for the window were half-buried behind potted plants and crawling vines. The restaurant's theme was tropical but was best known for serving just about every kind of food throughout the Milkyway, including that one Osek dish that served live Kre'eta beetles which were known to bite you before you bit them.
Simmons had reserved the private section of this restaurant – a comfortably sized room dominated by a table able to seat twelve. The room was located where the observation window curved toward the mountain. On the opposite wall was a mural of the island between two potted plants blooming with bright yellow flowers.
Everyone was just getting seated when the final member of Jace's crew arrived – his medical officer, Morgan.
Morgan walked in dressed completely casual in a much nicer tropical shirt, Khaki pants, and dress shoes. He lifted his arms on entering and seeing Jace's bewildered but ecstatic face.
“ Thought I'd make an entrance,” he said, and leaned over the table to clasp Jace's hand. Everyone sat, orders were taken, and food arrived not long after.
“ So what're you going to name your bird, captain?” Simmons asked as he sawed off a chunk of sirloin.
Jace opened his mouth, and immediately clapped it shut. “ Uh...” He looked to the others for ideas.
“ Most of the good names are always taken by carriers,” Izzy said.
“ And they're always Greek,” Blackfeather added as she twirled linguine on her fork. “ I could suggest some good Native American folklore names.”
“ How about Nordic?” said Christina. “ Vikings were pretty kick butt, I'd bet they had some killer names.”
“ If you can pronounce them,” Izzy muttered under his breath.
“ What about an animal?” Matt said.
Jace glanced around the room in search of some quick inspiration. Not that he was particularly suspicious but it was said to be bad luck flying a ship that had no name. But neither did he just want to slap whatever name popped into his head. A ship's name had to say something about the ship, what that ship was like, what it did. Names from Greek mythology were highly coveted among carrier captains and transport companies. Carriers took names like Hercules, and transports (especially commercial transports) gentler names like Persephone.
Needless to say, A ship as wicked bad as a Phantom would be named The Persephone when hell froze over.
Jace glanced behind him out the window, then down at his jacket draped across the back of his chair, the one his buddy had given him as a going away present when Jace had joined the UTD. As a teenager, him and that buddy had attempted the band thing. Jace might not have had any skills with a piano, but he knew how to handle the drums. Their band had been called Slipshot and their logo had been a dragon. The band barely lasted a year, but the logo had stuck around as a tattoo on his buddy's arm, then spray-painted onto the jacket for reminiscent's sake.
A black dragon surrounded by a halo of light, in a circle of dark blue barely distinguishable against the black of the jacket.
“ How about Black Dragon?” Jace said. He looked up to see everyone staring off thoughtfully before nodding their heads in agreement.
“ That fits,” Alice said before taking a bite of linguine.
Simmons inclined his head. “ Black Dragon it is.” He then raised his glass, and waited until everyone had done the same. “ To the success of the Black Dragon, and the well being of her crew.”
“ Amen,” everyone said.
Jace grinned and dug into his salmon. His bird had a name. It was ready to fly.
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Date: 2007-01-02 02:16 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 05:28 am (UTC)From:Coolness
Date: 2007-03-06 02:01 am (UTC)From:Oh and I'm doing your John centered torture challenge :) but I won't be posting on FF.net until I'm done writing it.