[centre][h2]Sumiye King – Acting Chief Engineer[/h2][/centre]

Sumiye hadn’t had many dealings with the captain prior to this; as a senior engineer she was fairly high up in the ships hierarchy, being nominally in charge of maintenance for the entire back quarter of the ship more or less, but as a civilian on a military vessel her place in the chain of command had always been a little fuzzy and there had simply never been a need for her to speak directly with the person in charge of it all. She answered to the chief and the chief answered to the captain; even after two and a half expeditions on this ship that layer of separation had kept their paths from crossing all too often.

It meant that Sumiye didn’t have much of a read on Captain Almira going into their meeting, with only the things Chief Gottfried had told her of the woman to base her opinions on. The chief had always had a… colourful way of speaking and a habit of blowing things out of proportion after a few drinks, so she was never really certain how much of what he had told her about the woman was true. She still wasn’t certain but there was one word that Gottfried had kept coming back to when describing their captain, a word that came up again and again any time he spoke of her and after speaking to the woman for barely ten minutes Sumiye was beginning to see why.

Almira [i]was[/i] quite eccentric.

With a sigh Sumiye pulled the portable screen out of her overalls and opened up a voice call to her acting Senior Engineer down in the engine section. [color=fff200]“Just so you know, those [i]safety checks[/i] take eight hours to complete and we’ve only just restored coolant flow in that part of the ship. I’ll give you what I can, but I’m going to recommend shutting it down again after this.”[/color] This all seemed like a bit of an overreaction for a bunch of over-sized lizards, even if they did look shockingly like something out of old fairy tales. An order was an order though and this one came directly from the captain.

The device connected and the image of a red-haired woman a few years older than Sumiye was appeared on the screen. [color=fff200]“Farris, spool up the reactor for a test run. Thirty… no, just twenty five per cent should do, no need to risk redlining it. Divert as much of the output as you can to the weapons batteries when you can.”[/color]

[@Kumbaris]