Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax
(With thanks to Terri for RPing this conversation with me. Thanks, Terri!--Maer)
Saturday, 27 Aug 2519
Boneyard, Bivouac
Miranda, Blue Sun (Quing Long) system
14:09 hrs, local time
They were nearly a week into repairs after escaping Pala and they'd already scavved a flatbed mule. Rina and Harry had a list of parts they needed and the day wasn't getting any younger. They climbed in and Rina put it in gear, taking off the boneyard several kliks distant. They inspected the various ships they passed and Rina muttered to herself as they went.
"Wrong model....wrong size....too small...Ooh, hey! Over there."
She drove the mule up to the derelict, parked it and jumped out. She grabbed her tools from the back and headed for the airlock.
"Well, you comin'?" she asked Harry over her shoulder.
The question was clearly rhetorical; Harry was not more than three steps behind the engineer. Instead of answering it, she scanned the boneyard thoughtfully. " How much work do you think it would take for that Scarab-class we spotted?"
Rina assessed the woman following her.
"Decent," Rina said, thinking of Nika’s reaction to Harry and Shyla’s leaving. "She'll do ya. Depends on what you want to do." Rina got the airlock door open and waited a moment to let some of the hot stale air escape, then stepped inside. She turned on her flashlight and moved on. " Personally, I like her speed and maneuverability....but we're cargo haulers. Not enough room in the trunk with one of those."
“May I see the list?”
Rina passed over the list, and Harry skimmed it. “That was some landing,” she observed mildly.
“Yeah. It was that or dying, though, so you know which one I picked.”
“If you’d died coming through atmo, it was because your pilot was already dead in the cockpit,” Harry said with a smirk. “That girl can land damn near anything.”
“I’ve noticed that, yeah,” Rina laughed. “I’ve seen her do stuff…. I swear to God, this thing maneuvers like a brick but I’ve seen her make it do things that if I hadn’t been there to see it, I’da called you a liar to your face.
“You should have seen her fly ours,” Harry replied with a faintly nostalgic smile.
“You know… with the right equipment…. And oh yeah, if I won the lottery and got a pony……” Rina laughed. “It would take some time, but…. If we’re going to recover, we’re going to have to do it fast. We don’t have the time. I just hate to see this ship go down.”
“We’ll get it running. Can’t promise it’ll be great running, but it’ll get us where we need to go,” Harry reassured her.
They split up and spent roughly an hour getting their parts and, finishing first, Rina made her way to engineering to see what Harry managed to pull.
“Need a hand with that?” she asked as she crossed the threshold.
Harry lay half under a console, up to her elbows in the guts. “I have a bolt in here that has sheared off and I can’t get it loose!” Harry growled back. The whine of a drill made her pull her head out from under and grin at the engineer.
“A girl and her tools. It's a beautiful thing,” Rina quipped.
Harry moved out of the way, gesturing the other woman to take over. Rina squirmed into place and eyeballed the problem. It required a flex shaft and Rina’s tiny hands; the path to the bolt was very narrow. “Here, hold this,” Rina thrust the drill at Harry. “Squeeze the trigger when I tell ya.” She got the drill in place.. “Give it some juice,” she called. And the bolt pulled free along with the part they needed. “Damn thing,” Rina muttered. “Okay. We done here?”
“I believe so. There were several things on the list that just are not here. Everything has been picked over pretty bare.”
“I had a feeling some of the more common things wouldn’t be as easy to get, actually.”
“We might want to check the hangar bays at the spaceport, too.”
“Good idea. Let’s go.”
They manage to get a few more things off the list from the bays and looking one last time in one of them, Rina said, “You know…. Back when I worked at the garage, the owner had tools that he wouldn’t let me touch. If I were going to hide tools, where would I….? Ah!” Rina walked to a box mounted on the wall and pried it open. “When you have a box on the wall with no pipes running to it, it’s a fake!”.
Harry commented mildly, “If you’d asked, I could have pointed you right to it. You didn’t have tools on your list, though.”
Rina thew her hands wide and grinned. "My mistake--take it as a standing invitation to tell me whenever you spot something like this. I'll be looking for them. Do you want these?" She gestured at the cache.
“You won’t find my kind of tools in that box,” Harry quipped mildly.
“Oh? What kind of tools would those be? Let me guess… small portable and exothermic?”
“That’s a start,” Harry replied and headed toward the door. “Small, portable, exothermic… let’s not forget razor sharp…”
There being nothing left to be had here, they made ready to leave and Rina cast a longing eye toward one of the huge rolling tool chests. “Not this time,” Harry says mildly. “Later.” Harry and Rina stowed the loot on the mule and put it in gear for Summer’s Gift. Once there, they parked it next to the container they'd winched to the ground, hauled their loot on board and rode the container back to the upper deck.
Shyla Kramer lay on the bridge of the Gift, crammed underneath the sensor console, rewiring the entire thing – the sensors were fried during the landing. At the sound of footsteps in the corridor, she popped her red head out from under and said, “Oh good… come up with anything I can use?”
“Merry Christmas,” Rina replied, holding out a small box of pieces and wiring.
“Excellent! That’s the relay I needed!” the redhead commented. She took the box and dug through it, pulling out a long set of wires attached to a panel. She climbed back under the console to start connecting it to the pieces she’d already got loose.
“Did you save the stuff you pulled?” Rina asked.
“Most of it’s useless.”
“I’ll make a bracelet or something.” Rina started picking up pieces of flotsam off the deck and asked as she moved, “How is he?”
Shyla kept working. “’Bout the same.”
“And how’s she?”
Only then did Shyla pause and there was a long silence. “She’s coming unglued,” she finally said.
Rina swore under her breath, “Damn.” And then she looked at Harry, though her words were for both women. “You know her best. Any suggestions on fixing it?”
Shyla returned to her task, her voice coming from beneath. “Not unless you can wave a magic wand and fix him,” she replied quietly. “Not sure she’ll be able to pull it together until we know he’ll survive.”
Harry said from the back of the bridge, where she’d been silently unloading the larger box that she and Rina brought in, “By the way, you owe me twenty credits, Shyla.”
Rina blinked and stared at Harry. “What?”
From beneath the console, Shyla commented, “Bloody hell.”
“What for?” Rina was intrigued.
“She finally caught a clue,” Harry said simply.
Everything clicked just then and Rina nearly died laughing, slumping into the co-pilot’s seat…helpless.
“She figured out whether to shit or get off the pot yet?” Shyla demanded from under the console.
“No,” Harry smirked.
“Then twenty’s all I owe you yet,” came the amused reply.
In the co-pliot’s chair, Rina nearly burst a seam. “Just remember to invite me to the wedding!” she managed and dissolved into another spate of laughter.
Shyla muttered, “Bloody hell!” again. She was down to stripping wires the now, getting them ready for the needed connections, and reached out from under for the electrical tape as Rina laughed. “Those two are so bloody stupid about each other,” she said from beneath the console, her tone amused and affectionate. “I can’t tell you how many extra landings we had to make just to kick ’em out for a while. I spent three years finding the shortest routes from here to there, wherever we were, just to get them off the ship for a while.”
It was warm on the bridge, the Gift’s life support systems on bare minimum to conserve power and Rina was trying not to melt from the heat and the laughing fit. “Three years??” she managed to choke out between giggles.
“Three years,” Shyla reiterated on a laugh.
“And people call me stubborn” Rina coughed and got a grip, and settled to hear the rest of the story.
“Those two danced… and danced… and danced some more,” Shyla chuckled. Her hands kept wiring, but she shook her head as she worked. “This is after, mind you, Nika was on the ship for … .how long, Harry? Eighteen months?”
“I think about that, yes,” replied Harry calmly.
“She’d been with us eighteen months, still hadn’t really let any of us in, and Harry and I finally took Nika drinking to tell her it was time to commit. Got into a brawl to let her cut loose some adrenaline. When Connelly came and bailed us out of jail, we told ’em not to come back until they sorted themselves out.”
Rina couldn't help it. She started laughing again. It was a welcome break from the unrelenting pressure they labored under and she gave in to it.
From under the console, Shyla snipped something and kept working as she laughed. “It was like watching teenagers court. He’d throw food at her at breakfast, he’d walk by in the hall or on the bridge and pull her hair, they’d play footsie under the dinner table! She’d throw something across the bridge at him!”
“Stop!” Rina grabbed her gut, helpless in her mirth.. “I think I broke something!”
Harry merely shook her head, her smile nostalgic. Ah, the good old days.
“So they come back to the ship,” Shyla laughed from under the console. “and it was pretty darn clear how they’d fixed it!” She added wryly, “And for three years after that – and it’s my own fault, cuz I should probably have relaxed the regs once the war was over, but I just didn’t see any reason before this happened and while it was happening, it seemed like a bad plan to let it play out aboard – we had to take milk runs to make sure we could get dirtside every so often!”
“So was there a pool on that one too?” Rina asked, calming down as she listened to the story.
“There was no betting on that one! Are you nuts?” Shyla called out. “Everyone could see it was a matter of time. The pools didn’t start until they got back from that one, cuz we weren’t initially sure if it was just a one-time thing, you see.” Shyla had stopped working by now and just lay on the floor reminiscing. It felt good to remember, to be able to think of Brian without the hard knot of fear and worry in her gut. And based on what she’d seen so far, Rina was the person who needed to know a lot of this.
Harry continued unpacking and sorting with a smile.
Shyla finally backed out from under the console, her copper hair mussed and looking quite at home on the floor of the bridge as she leaned against the console support. “When they got back, they were still doing this crazy flirting thing – yanking her braid when he passed her in the hall, stealing her towel when she’s in the crew shower. Or you’d find them in a corner necking and have to pretend you didn’t see it when you went by. It was …. Annoying as hell, but hysterical too.” She shook her head, her smile nostalgic.
Harry started to laugh. “Remember the day we told them to work it out?” she asked her captain. “I ever tell you exactly what was going on that day?”
Shyla and Rina turned their attention to the Asian woman. “No,” Shyla replied with a grin. “You told me it was getting serious enough we needed to get ’em groundside for a while, that’s all.”
Harry set the components in her hands down and reached for a rag to wipe her hands on, her expression indulgent. “I came around the corner from the radio room and he had her pinned up against the bulkhead. They were a hair’s breadth apart, and she was looking up at him with The Look.”
“You never told me that. I would not have bet a hundred credits against them all settled with kids and crap,” Shyla groaned. And then she looked at Rina. “This woman knows people like no one knows people. Don’t bet against a sure thing.”
Harry affected an entirely innocent expression and Rina laughed. “That’s why she didn’t tell you, she wanted the money! Devious. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Shyla and Harry shared a look and the captain then looked at Rina once more. “So… you can see why we’d be curious about this thing with your doctor,” Harry said mildly.
Rina drew in a deep breath and pursed her lips. So this was what the women of Harbinger were concerned about. “I don’t like to pry,” Rina began, “but I think it’s a matter of mutual give-and-take.”
Shyla smirked. “That always worked for Nika,” she commented. “Nika and Brian kind of go in cycles. We had those three years there…. God help us… we couldn’t take a run straight from Georgia to Red Sun so we had time groundside. The longer runs we took – by the time hit the end, I was ready to space the two of them, the tension was so thick.” Harry chuckled, and Shyla continued, “After that, things settled down. And they’d go in waves…. Some runs, we’d set down and they’d take off for three or four days and we wouldn’t see them. And other runs, one or the other would just take off with someone else. Never seemed to bother either of them.”
“Never thought I’d say this, but maybe long-distance relationships just plain work for some people,” Rina commented.
Harry tilted her head and murmured, “You’d know.”
“Yes,” Rina replied mildly.
“It wasn’t a question,” Harry commented.
“And mine wasn’t quite an answer, was it?” Rina said back.
Shyla considered it. Then: “Get to see him often?”
“Not as often as I’d like, but yeah. The past year has been good for that.”
“So he doesn’t crew aboard your ship,” Shyla stated matter-of-factly.
Rina’s voice was quiet when she answered,“Not anymore, no.”
A look that passed between Shyla and Harry, and Harry merely nodded. A man who was no longer aboard would explain most of what she saw in the relationship between Rina and Nika, but something was still off.
“Hey, look,” Rina said, irritated at the silent communication. “If there’s something you want to ask me, just ask me.”
Harry considered her words and replied carefully. “There is something between you and Xiao Mei that … concerns me. She does not let people close, Rina, and I see that though your crew has begun to cement with her, there are still…. Moments. As if she expects that the two of you will not be friends any longer.”
It was the most Rina heard from the woman at one time in the whole two weeks they’d been acquainted, and she sat still and listened as Harry continued.
“It is unlike her to be so uncertain once she considers someone ‘hers’.”
Shyla remained silent, watching Rina carefully.
Rina sighed and said, “Then let me clarify a few things.” She chewed on the corner of her lip, trying to put words together without baring her soul. She hated dealing with touchy issues. Because I’m pretty damned inept at it.
Shyla piped up into the silence, “We’re not asking you to tell us your personal business, Rina.”
“Well, it’s not exactly personal if it’s something I already share with Nika, is it?” Rina asked, exasperation making her brusque.
“The disconnect is the only part we’re concerned about,” Shyla said.
“All right." Rina took a deep breath and began. "Mike told me a little about a run he made with you during the war…” Even as Rina began to speak, her very first word made Shyla and Harry both grimace with the ‘oh good God’ face. Rina caught it and said, “Yes… that Mike.”.
“And he is yours,” Shyla responded with a wince. “Oh Lord…”
“Yes,” Rina said. “But it’s a matter of timing and that may explain everything.”
“It doesn’t matter… he is yours,” Shyla said. “That one word was all it takes. We understand the problem now.” She smiled faintly. “The advantage of having a decade on a ship with the same women is knowing them well enough that three words or less will usually explain things.”
“Well, can you give me the three words to make her believe that it’s just not a thing between us?” Rina asked crossly. No, I don’t do the interpersonal crap well at all.
Harry shook her head. “It is not what you think.”
“So what is it?” Rina asked, puzzled. Nope. Not well at all.
Harry stood terribly quiet for a long time and finally said quietly.. “I am assuming the two of you have had the conversation of ‘she doesn’t want your man’ and ‘I never thought you did’, but no further.”
Rina nodded. “I can’t get beyond that conversation with her, no.”
Shyla shoved her hair back and rested her elbows on her knees, sharing another look with Harry about it. Finally she nodded to the other woman and began to speak.
“The first time we met Michael Carter, we extracted him under heavy fire,” the captain began. “Nika was… all of 22? 23, perhaps. It was really her first time in that situation. I don’t think we’ve ever flown that close to the ground – I swear we weren’t more than five feet off the ground.”
“That sounds like her,” Rina said with a smile, confident now she was back on familiar ground.
“You have to remember what kind of ship Harbinger was,” Shyla said. “Fast, sleek, agile.”
“Don’t remind me, I don’t want to be jealous.”
“Well, now you have to imagine,” Shyla continued with a smile, “the speeds we can reach in atmo, and Nika taking that ship at top speed along a riverbed at five feet off the deck. No lie, I think an Alliance soldier pissed on the fin as we passed him.” She chuckled. “There was a lot of adrenaline, obviously.”
“And a lot of puke on the deck too, I’d bet,” Rina said knowingly.
“Nah, we got rid of him fast,” Shyla snickered.
“Let me guess, eggs and bacon for breakfast?” And the thoroughly disgusted expressions on both women’s faces set Rina to laughing again. “Idiot,” she sobered and said in reference to the person who puked.
“When Carter asked for an assistant, she volunteered,” Shyla said quietly.
“Good cop, bad cop?”
“Good cop, WORSE cop,” Shyla said grimly. “It was unexpected, and completely out of character for her – she can be wild and reckless, but offering to play this game was… different. She was supposed to be a whipping boy, not an active participant. By her own report, she wanted to play a bigger role.”
Rina paused, knowing what the job entailed. “That is out of character for her.”
Shyla smiled faintly. “She didn’t know how to handle the adrenaline. Those three years of dancing with Brian were, at least in part, her way of blowing off the spare adrenaline – it had to have somewhere to go, which is one of the reasons I tolerated it. In this case, … she volunteered to be worse cop. Maybe it was a lark, I don’t know.”
“And?” asked Rina quietly.
“And… our medic put sixty-two stitches in him,” Shyla said flatly.
“Then what?”
“There were amenties I didn’t know my ship was offering,” smiled Shyla faintly, watching Rina closely.
“I can imagine,” Rina said unperturbed and nodded, thinking of what she knew of the job and letting the missing pieces fall into place.
Harry finally spoke. “It was the first time she’d ever made a choice that took her outside her own morality.” She paused. “This conversation is difficult. Carter gave her something important that day. She was horrified by what she’d done and by her own responses in the aftermath. He was able to show her that actions don’t make the person or change who they are – sometimes you make the best bad choice you can, because there are no good ones.”
“Mike does that.” Rina nodded. “He’s got the knack of pulling things out of people. And giving something back.”
“I think she watches you because she does wonder if it’s going to come between you.”
“No!” Rina’s reaction was immediate and sincere: Absolutely not.
“It’s not me you have to convince. My guess would be that their meeting when you rescued him—and yes, we know he was aboard long beyond Deadwood—was awkward in the same way that Brian was awkward on the beach. If I am not mistaken, Carter would have been very uncomfortable with the idea that you and Nika were friends. It was a pivotal moment in her life, but she would not have expected it to be such for him, and she would not have expected anything of him except respect and … perhaps acknowledgment that they were not strangers. And if he acted as most men would and avoided her, that would have thrown her.”
“At the time, I thought it was for a different reason.” Rina considered and nodded slowly. “But… you’re right.”
Harry smiled faintly. “She’s getting past it. … and if she didn’t have such good friends, we would be taking her with us.”
“So what’s your verdict?”
“You’ll do,” Harry replied mildly.
“That’s high praise,” Shyla laughs. “I didn’t get that for six months.”
Rina considered the risk entailed…and decided to go with it anyway. “You got an open mailbox where I can leave messages? Keep you informed?”
Shyla laughs again. “Well…. We used to!”
“Oh hell. I’m sorry.” Rina facepalmed: You idiot! “You want to take back your assessment of me, Harry?”
Harry merely went back to sorting equipment without another word.
“Ultimately,” Rina said, addressing the unspoken question hanging between them. “I want her to be happy.”
Shyla merely smiled. “She’ll get there.” Though sadness tinges it. “Not if he dies.”
“God, no.” Rina crossed herself reflexively, an unconscious measure of her worry.
Shyla says softly, “I can’t believe it went so wrong. So stupid!”
“I am reasonably certain the drugs slowed his reaction times. Gô should never have had the drop on him.”
“More to the point,” Rina said grimly, nailing both women with a frown. “Why wasn’t Gô affected the same way if that was the case?”
Shyla’s brows shot up and she looked startled. It never occurred to her to wonder. Yet another thing to ask about.
“You should keep Xiao Mei away from him,” Harry said calmly.
“I’ll go check,” Rina said, running several bloody scenarios through her head as she rose.
“You should keep away from him too.”
“Is she always this annoying?” Rina asked Shyla, looking at the captain.
“Oh, more,” Shyla assured her.
“Oh god… you mean she’s always right?”
“Pretty much.”
“I don’t think I can get the Gift off the ground fast enough,” Rina muttered, getting out of there to go check on their prisoner in the building outside.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“He still breathing?” Rina asked Jake when she got there.
“No one’s been in all day.”
“Don’t tempt me. Nika’d have my balls for breakfast if I hurt him.”
“That’s surprising,” Jake commented, leaving it at that.
Prison for Mifuni was a walk-in freezer, the compressor running to provide atmo for breathing and with the coolant bled off so as to keep the man from freezing to death. Rina glared at Mifuni through the viewport of the door. They'd taken everything out of there the bastard could use to kill himself or escape, but it didn't take too much imagination to see him hanging like a side of beef, cut and bloodied as Reaver bait...
That's it. Time to go.
Rina thanked Jake and returned to the Gift.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
She could hear Shyla and Harry talking as she approached the bridge and their conversation ceased as she crossed the threshold.
“Don’t stop on my account,” Rina sighed and dropped into the co-pilot’s chair.
“We were discussing what to do next. So here’s the bottom line,” Shyla said. “We’re most likely coming off-planet with you, because Brian needs care and we don’t have the luxury of waiting to salvage two vessels. If he lives, we’ll be coming with you; we need more skills than the two of us together possess to manage to get another ship spaceworthy. If he dies…” Shyla trailed off and sighed heavily. “I’d like your help to get another one off the ground. Between us, we can fly it to somewhere and get crew.”
Rina considered it. “It’s probably doable. We won’t know for sure until the time comes.”
Shyla nodded. “We had thought before Deadwood that she’d be coming home soon. Another visit or two. Deadwood changed some things. This, of course, changes everything. So if she’s staying, we want to be sure that her relationships here are solid. It’ll be the only thing that pulls her through… especially if he dies. Because her relationships with your doctor and your Companion are not…”
Rina snorted gently.
“What?” Shyla asked.
“He’s such a priss,” Rina chuckled, meaning Christian.
Harry speaks up again and says mildly, “Perhaps you’re not viewing him in the correct context.”
“Trust me, I thank my stars every night that I haven’t.”
“Might cure what ails you,” Harry comments.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Rina asked, eyes narrowing, all trace of levity gone.
Harry very calmly looked at Rina with an expression of ‘I know you’ll hate this’ – “It means that maybe you should consider taking advantage of the more platonic aspects of his training to get past what the man who was not Michael Carter did to you.” She knows Carter would not have hurt Rina in the ways that she’s been hurt in the past. “I do not suggest that you take him to bed with you, but that you take advantage of his training in simple touch – brushing of the hair, a massage after a hard day – and let him help you get past your aversion to being touched. Take back your confidence in your self. He will be your friend without going beyond the wrong lines. And your Mike may appreciate the benefits as well.”
Rina drew breath to argue, then paused. “It’s good advice. We’ll see if I take it.”
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