The shuttle had been late. Taking leave hadn't exactly been Fendric Masaryk's idea after he finished up his familiarization tour on several other ships in the region. It'd been foisted upon him by the full retrofitting of 122 EACS's whole flight line.  And since they'd be down for at least several days, Fendric had no desire to sit around doing nothing at all. It baffled him, however, that they'd take an entire squadron to full stand-down, just to do a total refit of the whole unit. It just wasn't done. Every time ships had gone in for retrofit or refurbishment, they'd kept at least a few of the squadron's aerospace fighters ready for launch, at least until the first ships (or, in this case their replacements) returned from the machinist's shop. And while that was the colonel's prerogative, the pilot decided, it didn't mean that the man stepping out of the shuttle had to like it any.

The hanger was large enough, and would have felt spacious were it now crowded by the oppressive busywork of the mechanical crews trying to fix up the Sabres with such haste. The fighters, in Masaryk's opinion, should have been ferried over in the conventional way - flown in, jump-rings piggybacked around them. Especially if it left [i]Heart of Valour[/i] unable to maintain its own picket.

It didn't take long however for Fendric to feel a little more at ease as he saw the throng congregating around a particularly tall, white, Isorlai. It didn't take much for him to realize what was going on.  He approached the collection, looking to those on his left as he settled at the rightmost end of the line.  Tucked under his arm, papers instructing him here, to 122 Expeditionary Aerospace Combat Squadron after a term of leave on the surface that had served as a fine capstone for a few weeks on another ship, running EW drills on some of the larger ships in the flotilla. Cross-training, mostly for familiarization more than actual expected usage of the systems, on warship detection and warning systems helped greatly in allowing Fendric to understand the strengths and weaknesses and capabilities of his own . Since it was generally acknowledged (though many of the contractors would balk at the notion, since they always proclaimed to make the best equipment in the universe) that most opposition ships had similar sensor capabilities, knowing the limits and capabilities of one's own ships ensured he'd be able to find the chinks in an opponent's sensor array.

"Ma'am, Colonel Bellioch, reporting as instructed."