FourtyTwo
Expendable
Bingelly
Dyelli Beybi
SonnetNSunbeam
Auragreedia
Redking0380
cosmiccowgirlFihlyn Numosath
ESS 3822-01
“Mr. Lockman, Ms. Sokolova - it is a good day to see you both, yes?”
Fihlyn offered an energetic wave with a gloved hand as she entered the hangar. A stack of tablets was awkwardly cradled against her chest with her other arm. There was a deliberate spring in her step; the Quessir made a point of greeting the crew with enthusiasm whenever she saw them in the morning. It was said that a friendly start to the day led to better team cohesion, after all. Each of her heavy footfalls rang against the metal deck, and the wheeze of her suit’s compressors occasionally betrayed her presence. Subtlety was not one of the suit’s design priorities.
“I see that good progress is being made on your shuttle?” Fihlyn inquired, peering curiously at the scattered detritus and tooling that lay around the two humans. “I am glad that you were able to recover it. Attempting to land the ESS thirty-eight-twenty-two, dash-zero-one on a poorly surveyed planetary body would have been…” She paused for a moment, frowning as she tried to think of the right word in the Edenite tongue. “...unfortunate?”
Fumbling briefly with the tablets that she’d brought with her, the Quessir continued excitedly.
“I do not mean to interrupt your work, but I have made progress on an expedited training program for piloting the ESS thirty-eight-twenty-two, dash-zero-one. With so few of the original command crew remaining, it would be prudent to have redundancy for piloting and navigational needs.”
Managing to get her glove-constrained fingers around the top-most tablet, Fihlyn offered it to the pilot.
“I decided that the first chapter of the course should focus on general vocabulary and terms related to piloting this class of vessel. Much of it should be easy review for you, I am sure, but there will still be a test…once I have finished writing it.”
Turning to the ranger, the Quessir’s smile wavered slightly.
As much as she appreciated the star charts that the woman had provided, she had still not received a satisfying answer as to how she had acquired them. The priestess had vouched for the Edenite, which had been enough for Fihlyn to put her initial concerns aside. And yet, there was still a sense of lingering unease. Fihlyn knew enough to recognize that the star chart she’d presented was supposed to be classified. That meant either that the woman had acquired it through illicit means, or that she was involved with a part of Eden’s security apparatus that Fihlyn would have preferred to have kept at a comfortable distance.
“You are doing well, Ms. Sokolova?” Fihlyn asked, doing her best to keep any hint of suspicion from her voice. “I never properly thanked you for providing your star chart during our departure. It is very detailed. There are records of systems that I did not realize Eden had ever surveyed, even remotely.”
Virginia Sokolova, Fihlyn Numosath, and John Lockman
Ginny was pouring over the drawings when the Quessir approached, John able to sate her technical curiosity "Progress might be too strong." she says with a curtness that probably wasn't intended to be impolite. "Lot to go over." she wasn't one to write a manual, but she could read them.
When Fihlyn asked, she gave a reflexive "Good." which probably didn't track well to her bloodstained coveralls. "I'd say thank the people that came before, I just copied them down from old archives." she says obliquely. "The map's a few centuries out of date, but its better than nothing. most Fed charts I've seen are corrupted to near-unusability."
"Then it is truly a gift from the ancestors, and certainly better than nothing." Fihlyn replied, though her smile wavered slightly at what she took to be Ginny’s evasive response. Still, she kept her tone warm. "Perhaps I may ask for your advice when consulting the chart? Some of its terminology is archaic, and it would be helpful to have someone with experience with archival Federation charts."
There, an olive branch! It would not do for Fihlyn to harbor undue suspicions of her crewmates, not when their journey had only just begun.
She stepped closer to the ship's engine, peering down at the exposed components. They reminded her faintly of a reef after a storm, with detritus scattered about in the currents. While she wasn't helpless with a toolkit, this level of maintenance and repair was beyond her.
She watched the pair at work with wide-eyed curiosity as they sought to resuscitate the battered craft. She felt a small, unexpected stab of jealousy. Being able to fix something sounded like it would be therapeutic right now, but that was not where her skillset lay.
"There was an engineer among the survivors, yes?" Fihlyn offered, trying to think of some way that she could be helpful. "A Mr. Lopez? Perhaps he has useful insights for the repairs?"
"Maybe" John conceded as he touched up a spot weld. "But I'd rather not have a jarhead start crawling through my next gen system thinking that a MVC-8658 is the same as a MVC-7290." A beat of silence punctuated by the clanging of the pair.
"Perhaps, you could grab something from the replicator for us though. I'm sire miss Ginny has the specs already measured."
"I can sit down with you on it, lot to get done, better to know where we're going, the parts can wait ." She offers simply, seemingly the ins and outs of repairing a starship were much more mundane to the Ranger "You ever do interstellar?" She asks, perhaps a little patronizingly.
“Parts can wait…” John muttered; still partially within the engine. Half under his breath.
Fihlyn perked up as John suggested she could assist by retrieving parts from the replicator. She understood, of course, that it was a simple task, one either of them could have completed far more efficiently themselves. Still, she welcomed the opportunity to contribute, even in a small way.
That brief spark of excitement dimmed when Ginny redirected the conversation toward the navigational charts, brushing past the matter of replacement parts entirely.
Another Quessir might have noticed the subtle shift in the color of Fihlyn’s scales, even through the distortion of her visor. The brighter hues that had accompanied John’s request faded to something more muted before she could fully conceal her disappointment.
For a moment, a familiar frustration tightened in her chest.
She told herself that no offense had likely been intended. Even so, this was far from the first time an Edenite had questioned her qualifications, whether directly or otherwise. She had learned to let such things pass without comment, but the sting never fully dulled. If she had been a human or a kiel, would Ginny have thought to ask the same question?
"I have been certified by the Board of Astronavigation, yes." Fihlyn replied, offering what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Beneath the surface, her stomach twisted. The words felt more fragile than she would have liked, because Ginny had touched upon a doubt she had not entirely put to rest herself. "But...this is my first interstellar posting." She would have preferred to leave that unsaid. Omitting it, however, would have been dishonest, and she could not allow herself that comfort. Hoping that she wouldn't cause her new crew to doubt her capabilities, the quessir quickly added with a newly nervous smile, "I am well versed on the theory, however."
Ginny picks up on Fihlyn's mannerisms naturally enough, her focused directness softening slightly with an unspoken apology. She turns to bark at John "Look, you'll have your new fabs done before we're in the next atmosphere, need her to get us there first."
Refocusing, she'd gain a hint of a smile "Translation is always exciting. And theory should be enough to manage." he voice carrying a low rasp that made it sound less friendly than intended. She turns to the floor, digging through her pack "Take a seat and get comfortable." she offers nonchalantly. If she was bothered, it wasn't obvious to the Quessir. Drawing out her handheld projector, she clicked through with her fingers to project out the same map she had loaded to the nav computer.
"Figure what you learned is probably similar to Fedstand, maybe garbled up a little through a few centuries of practice." She snaps the focus of the projection, the soft blue light flickering against her red hair to Eden. Zooming in, it pulled up a system map, marking the ship on the way to the Solar-Eden L4. "The Society keeps to it pretty religiously, but survey data this old is going to have some minor corruption."
A yelp as John withdrew rapidly from the engine. Shaking a hand while muttering curses under his breath.
“Of course the backup power system didn’t turn off. Why would that system not turn off when I want it to?” He trudged off into the shuttle’s open bay. Banging and the sound of tools ensued.
Emerging seconds later and stopping by the projector in the way back to the engine. Lessons of his childhood and the academy floating in his mind.
“Wouldn’t there be some problem with drift ?”
“Fortunately, the gods made the stars with motions that are straightforward to predict.” Fihlyn’s tore her gaze away from the star chart to respond to the pilot. She was smiling, pleased to be more in her element. “While the stars have certainly moved, a good telescope and time is all that we need to make corrections.”
Fihlyn shrugged as she added, in a tone that could only be described as carrying some ironic amusement, “Not so much with hyperspace. Physics becomes much more difficult with the extra dimensions.” The quessir waved her hands, as if to accentuate her point. “Much more noise. Much more randomness to estimate.”
"Lot of protocols in chart databases for that, should be up to date." her eyes give a little more hesitance "Little inaccuracies that can pile up, but nothing that should make it unusable." She seems entranced by Fihlyn's description "Could never really wrap my head around the numbers stuff there."
"'Should' being the operative term..." John plodded off to the hangar's replicator. " Do we even have the legs for this course? Or do we have to leapfrog?"
Kim shrugged as she squatted down to grab an armful of brush. “We are all out in a desert with just our prison clothes on, left abandoned by the ship transporting us to another prison camp,” she said. “We’re all just surviving, unsure what will happen if we’re found by the locals.” She stood back up.
“Though I imagine that giant lizard is probably not going to be of much to us.”
“I imagine any way out would require a lot of money which we don’t have,” Kim responded, wiping part of her face with her left sleeve. “Unless help of any sort comes quickly, we’re stuck in this place for some time and I don’t have high hopes of a quick way out.”
“A colony ship is especially well-suited for a voyage of this length. The equipment on board was originally intended to found an entire settlement, after all.”
Fihlyn’s smile wavered slightly. She had been buoyed by Ginny’s response and did not want to dampen the mood in the room.
“Although, our supplies are not limitless. The original expectation was always that colonies would not go long without resupply.”
In truth, that was one of the reasons she expected to spend so much of her time studying navigational charts. Plotting a route to a distant star was difficult enough on its own. Finding stop-over locations where they could pause and resupply was an additional challenge on top.
But that was a concern for later.
“Right now, the important thing is that we have a safe path out of the system,” she continued, gently shifting her tone. “We will make it. One step at a time.”
For a brief moment, she hesitated, then chose to lean into optimism more deliberately. Edenites often missed the subtle shifts in a Quessir’s scales, and she had learned that humans responded better to clearer expressions.
She set her expression into a broad smile and then raised both of her hands with their thumbs pointing towards the ceiling.
“We are off to a good start in our attempt to survive, yes?”
"A better start when I get this thing working." John, having spent Fihlyn's explanation at the replicator, plodded back with an armful of prospective components.
Ginny would look over to John with a small grin before looking back to Fihlyn, she was much less expressive on a good day, without scales for emphasis "We'll be well off, managed to load up a lot of supplies, the bigger questions are about where we end up." She begins walking toward the door, batting her hand
"Lets make sure you can get us wherever that ends up being."