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.

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.