Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax

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 is 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.