PrincessColumbia

  Space combat, Diane mused, was nothing like they showed on Star Trek.

  As the Joan of Arc weaved through and around pnetary bodies, the Roadrunner pursued in great parabolic arcs that were designed to approach their ship to expose as many of the cruiser’s weapons to the interceptor as possible. Of course, interceptors were designed to take on heavy hitting ships like cruisers, so whenever the two ship’s flight paths crossed, the helmsman simply turned the Joan of Arc so that the wedge-shaped ship was pointed directly at the Roadrunner, thereby minimizing the avaible targeting area. This did mean that they couldn’t bring their heavier weapons to bear, but if the combat kept up for long, the Joan of Arc would damage the other ship enough to cripple it through sheer attrition.

  Jace was impatient enough to take a risk, however, “Tactical, I want a course plotted where we treat the Terran ship like a pnetary mass.”

  When the other bridge officers flinched, Diane leaned forward and said quietly, “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” replied the captain, “That we’re going to use maneuvering as though the Roadrunner is a very, very small pnet, including using things like slingshot maneuvers and pulling a starfury.” This st reference Diane at least understood the abstract of. ‘Pulling a starfury’ was short-hand for using the ck of directionality in a zero-gravity environment to fully flip a ship without altering its trajectory or speed. It was suicide with a rger vessel as the mass still needed to be hauled in a torque-generating rotation that could fracture the hull if done too fast. But on a smaller ship, like an interceptor-css that was maybe three times the size of the Dragon’s Daughter, which was itself only a bit rger than a runabout-css shuttlecraft? The maneuver could be done, but it’d leave the ship vulnerable unless the enemy weapons were taken care of first. Jace continued, “We couldn’t do it if we were in a cruiser, and it’ll take us really close to their weapons, but our size and speed should give us the advantage we need.”

  “Just don’t bang up my new ship too much,” compined Diane with a smile and a nod.

  Jace winked at her and started giving orders, “Keep us at red alert, Helm, hard to port, give us a trajectory that will come at ‘em like a baseball to the face. Tactical, give me a status on those weapons.”

  The tactical officer’s voice crossed the bridge in the manner of someone desperately seeking to not deliver bad news, “Sir...we don’t have energy weapons.”

  Everyone whose attention wasn’t focused on the task of keeping them ahead of their pursuer was suddenly paying tactical very close attention.

  “Say that again?” Jace asked skeptically.

  “We’ve got the slugs, the bearings, and the macron canon, but all the energy weapons are reading offline and refusing to clear the pre-fire testing.”

  Jace frowned and Diane could see him running his tongue along his teeth behind his cheeks in some sort of tic. He tabbed one of the buttons on the arm of his chair and called, “Engineering, what’s going on with the weapons?”

  A young woman’s voice came through the speaker on the captain’s chair, “Every solder on the energy weapons bank melted! It’s substandard solder that wasn’t rated for this kind of job!”

  Jace’s left eyelid twitched, “...eta on a repair?”

  “I’m short staffed, captain! We’re supposed to get the rest of the crew tomorrow after WE’VE TESTED EVERYTHING BEFORE DOING SOMETHING STUPID LIKE GOING INTO BATTLE!” An accent Diane couldn’t pce started overtaking the normal North-American English intonations the woman had been using up to that point. “I can keep the engines going or I can fix the damn solder joints!”

  Jace’s frown deepened, “What’s wrong with the engines?”

  “Oh, nothing that a normal shakedown cruise wouldn’t have found and been able to handle so we could fix the intermix and tune the dampers once we got back to port nice and safe, you know, SHAKEDOWN CRUISE STUFF!”

  If the situation weren’t so dire, the chief engineer’s ranting at the captain would have been funny. “I’ll go down there,” said Diane as she took off her jacket and stowed it in the secure cubby built into her commander’s station, “I’ve soldered a joint or two in my time.”

  Jace immediately looked at least a little relieved, “Thank you commander! Y’hear that, J’Jesi? Help’s on the way.” He clicked off on the comms link and nodded gratefully to Diane, “To use the somewhat archaic term, godspeed, Commander.”

  “God’s speed is always welcome, captain,” she answered with a wry grin as she stepped through the hatch to the rest of the ship.

  It took mere minutes to reach engineering, the throbbing red lighting of the red alert keeping steady time as she moved. There was the occasional creaking and rocking as the ship was stressed in ways it had literally never seen before, but it wasn’t until the doors to engineering hissed open that she was able to take in the state of a ship that hadn’t passed its final stress tests.

  Exposed raceways cris-crossed the ceiling in a byrinth of cabling and tubing. Pipes left finished but exposed until the final fit was able to be finished post shakedown stood out starkly on the off-white walls that were missing many of the signs and belling that would be a hallmark of completed engine room. Ducting wasn’t secured, panels on consoles weren’t closed, and the normal noise shielding over the reactor core was absent. Joining the cacophony of an operational interstelr engine was what sounded like thousands of small alerts, chirps, and arms that were creating a caterwauling chorus of chaos. It was like walking into a wall of sound.

  In the midst of it all was a woman from a species that Diane hadn’t yet seen face-to-face in the game; a Crotuk. Given that she was the only woman in the engine room, Diane presumed this was J’Jesi. The engineer was frantically working at the main console for the engine, clearly making frantic adjustments to systems that were well beyond Diane’s limited knowledge in the field of energy generation for an FTL-capable starship.

  Diane doubted the woman could hear her own heartbeat over all the noise, let alone register her presence in the engine room, so rather than try and ask how she could help she found the nearest source of noise and looked for a way to stop it. Fortunately, it was a fairly simple switch to acknowledge the audio portion and leave the alert light blinking (both, she was surprised to note, more mechanical in nature instead of any sort of computer interface). The next was a simple voltage control regutor that was indicating a tripped circuit, so Diane double-checked the system bel (food synthesizer) and simply shut off the entire console. Arm after bleating notification after buzzing speaker, Diane dashed about the room to silence the madness.

  Finally, the only audible alerts were from the engine console, so Diane hustled over to finally address the reason she was down in engineering in the first pce. Before she could do more than open her mouth to talk, the other woman snapped out verbally, “If you turned off a critical system I don’t care if you’re a Commander or my commanding officer, I’ll skin you alive.”

  Diane snorted, “The only systems I turned off were the non-critical ones like the food synth system. Everything else I just turned off the noisemaker.”

  The woman gnced back over her shoulder, her eyes sweeping the room, before turning back to her work, not even bothering to look at Diane, “Well, good. That just means if something’s wrong I just have to break your nose.”

  Diane grinned, “Fair enough. I’m here to get the energy weapon’s systems online, whatever that requires. What do you need me to do?”

  Engineer J’Jesi pointed to a console connected to an electricity flow panel whose primary access panel had been ripped open to reveal a bank of wires, a good half of which were sagging out of the cabinet, completely disconnected. The remaining were barely hanging on, the solder appearing to be the consistency and viscosity of honey.

  Diane flinched, “Yikes! Something to report to Katrina...where’s the tools?”

  J’Jesi finally turned to address Diane directly, “You know how to hot solder?” Diane was strongly reminded of a Klingon character from Star Trek: Hegemony. B’enna Torres was a half Klingon, the result of the rape of a human woman by the character’s Klingon father. As a result, her Klingon brow ridges were smoothed and her teeth more in line with the norm for humans. She still had a temper and pretty much the only person that could ‘tame’ her was Janeway, and their retionship had been written such that there were quite a few rumors that they were supposed to be far closer than the more apparent mentor/mentee retionship that came from the more literal reading of the script.

  This woman was entirely Crotuk, nothing ‘half’ about her. Her forehead and a good portion of her skull were highly reminiscent of the ‘turtle-head’ appearance of the Klingons in the tter half of the Trek series, but where said fictional race had a more human-like appearance to the lower half of their face, Crotuk had a wide jaw with tusks that jutted out from their mouth. Their shoulders were broad and heavily muscled, and where Morvuk muscuture was designed more like a hybrid of simian, reptilian, and feline, Crotexian morphology seemed more along the lines of ‘wall of muscle.’ The engineer was shorter than Diane, to the point where she’d have to use a stepdder to avoid craning her neck, but she was so heavily ‘built’ that she probably weighed as much as the taller woman.

  Beyond the obvious differences, the Crotuk seemed to be built simir enough to humans that one could easily slip into an avatar of one without having to re-learn how to interact with their environment. Two arms with human-proportions, two legs that operated exactly like a human’s, and with a set of secondary sex characteristics that it would be a reasonable guess to say that J’Jesi was a female of the species. Of course, given they were trimorphic and Diane was an example of appearances being deceiving, she wasn’t sure she could trust that assumption quite yet.

  The engineer was wearing the station’s standard uniform, but her long bck hair was done up in dreadlocks and interced with what appeared to be animal bones. It reminded her somewhat of an old sci-fi series from the te 20th to early 21st centuries. What’s the race named? Yawt-cha? Yoot-cha? Predators. The fact that the smaller woman’s face seemed to be split down the middle by some sort of flesh seam almost made Diane expect her lower jaw to split into two. Since that would have made speaking English impossible and the engineer was not using a transtor (the fact that her accent was sneaking through was proof of that), Diane decided the apparent split was simply for aesthetics.

  Diane shrugged, “I’ve assembled a kit or two that required soldering and messed up enough to know how to do it right.”

  J’Jesi nodded, her expression masking her emotions behind a business-like demeanor, “Alright, toolkits are stowed over there, wear your safety gear or I’m kicking you out whether you’ve done any repairs or not.” She pointed to a firmly tched cabinet on the wall and returned to her work.

  Diane was moving before the engineer had finished talking and opened the cabinet. She donned a pair of the insuting gloves (obviously meant for a suit, but she’d worry about why they were separate from the set ter), a pair of safety gsses, and an M300/2 toxic environment mask. As soon as she slipped the mask over her face and the gsses over her eyes, she was surprised by a HUD dispy appearing on the gsses.

  Pairing...

  Enviro-mask found, pairing complete.

  Controller computer found, pairing complete.

  Ear protection not found, skip? (yes/no/retry)

  She gnced around the cabinet and found several pairs of what she’d taken for simple noise-dampening earmuffs. Slipping those over her head, she said, “Retry,” and the HUD readout continued.

  Ear protection found, pairing complete.

  Nodding, she grabbed a kit clearly belled ‘Electrical’ and ran over to the open panel. As she approached the exposed wiring, a color-coded wireframe overyed the entire assembly. A bright red line that dropped from one side of the panel down into the deck was (Diane would put good money on) the electrical mains. She could see the main breaker had already been shut off, probably by J’Jesi when the connections had begun melting.

  Diane flipped open the smaller panel that covered the column of smaller circuit breakers that ran the height of the wiring panel and saw that none had tripped. Of course, she thought, If the solder’s melting point was below the tripping point, the shoddy soldering job would have acted as its own breaker, cutting the circuit by virtue of melting. She quickly flipped all the breakers to the ‘off’ position and then levered the mains breaker to ‘on.’ Not the safest way she could have done it, but this was battlefield conditions and being able to solder a fix and then flip a single switch to get at least that one gun working was better than waiting until the entire board was done and then testing each circuit as though this was a clean room back at the station.

  She opened the kit and was a little taken aback at the size of the tools. She had a small soldering kit for her models in her apartment when they required some electrical wiring connections to a PCB or LED bulb, so her soldering iron was like a fat pencil with a guard to protect her fingers from the hot part of the device. Her soldering wire was a thin spool of tin, silver, and zinc that could fit in the palm of her hand. The soldering gun in this kit had a wedge tip that was as big as her thumbnail and the solder material was a box of thin metal rods that were the length of a rey baton. Shaking her head, she grabbed the solder gun and pulled the trigger and was about to look for the trigger lock to let it heat when the HUD reported the tip had already reached operating temperature. She released the trigger in surprise and the tip cooled almost as fast. Wow! Future tech FTW, I guess. Putting the now cooled gun on the deck, she grabbed the first wire bundle and was pleased to see the HUD light up with an indicator of which terminal they went to. She pulled, pleased to feel a little give in the cabling and ensured the ends still fit in the metal loop. Nodding in satisfaction, she grabbed the solder wick (which was in copper mesh pads that looked more like narrow hot-pads, the kind used in the kitchen for pulling hot dishes out of the oven), and the gun and got to work cleaning the contacts.

  A few minutes ter, Jace’s voice came over the comms apparently built into the ear protection, “10 minutes to engagement, how long until we get those guns?”

  Without stopping her work, Diane said in a no-effort ‘scottish’ accent, “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, captain!”

  There was a pause, then, “...did you just quote Star Trek at me?”

  Diane finished with the first solder joint, passed the solder gun to her left hand, and flipped the circuit switch for the run she’d just finished. She read the bel, “You’ve just proved you’re a man of discernment and taste, captain. Sierra-Foxtrot-Papa-1-Alpha should read hot.”

  Another pause was followed by, “Tactical reports starboard forward point-defense ion array is at 25%. It’s a good start, but we’re going to need the bigger guns first.”

  “Yeah, sure, when you can tell me which of these leads is for the bigger guns...” she was interrupted as the HUD suddenly lit up four of the cabling and solder points. “...never mind, seems our ship’s computer is ahead of my question. Working on those now, I’ll have at least one for you by the time we reach engagement.”

  “You’re my boss, so I can’t yell at you for this,” quipped Jace, “But we kinda need all four.”

  “Do I need to get my union rep for this conversation?” answered Diane as she began cleaning the first of the highlighted solder points.

  Jace just snickered and cut the connection.

  It took a little bit for her muscle memory to transte from working on the tiny scale of a model build to the rge gauge high-cap cabling the ship used, but she completed the first solder in half the time it took her to complete the first. “Why are we using solder joins anyway?” she asked nobody in particur.

  To her surprise, J’Jesi answered, “What do you mean?”

  Diane gnced over at the engine intermix console to see the other woman barely gncing away for a moment before returning her attention to the readouts on the screen. She tossed the remains of the solder rod she used for the first two joins, it was short enough she probably wouldn’t be able to complete the third join with what was left and still retain the use of her unburned hands. “I mean,” she said as she picked up the next rod in the box, “Why use solder joins? Why not a coupler? Or a twist of some type? Or loop and screw?”

  “It’s because we can pack a ton of solder and wire on the ship for cheap. Any other kind of connector would take up too much space and be too specialized. We can use solder and wire in just about every electrical system on the ship.” The Crotuk woman cursed and smmed the palm of her hand against the monitor for the console as Diane cleaned the solder point for the third circuit, then resumed her work on manually adjusting intermixes, “Bigger ships can carry more specialized parts, we can’t.”

  Diane just said, “Ah,” and resumed her work.

  She had just completed the third circuit and got confirmation from the bridge that the gun was live when Jace jumped on the line, “Hey boss, we’re down to a minute, how are we coming with that fourth gun?”

  Diane let a quiet “Shit...” slip before biting her tongue and grabbing a solder wick pad and jamming the solder gun against the fourth join, “You’ll have full guns, just make sure we don’t get blown up.”

  “Alright, we’re going to use ‘em, thanks boss.”

  “Thank me when we’re through with this.”

  She growled and dropped the solder gun in the toolbox and jammed the stripped cable through the join and grabbed an unused solder rod. She didn’t bother with trying to actually solder the connection, she just jammed the rod through the same hole as the cable, used her Morvuk strength to twist the rod and the wire together, then bent the rod to wrap around the join. She flipped the terminal's breaker to 'on,' gripped the edge of the panel with one hand and the sck cable with the other, and pulled the cable taut to make the connection as complete as she could, counting down the seconds.

  She didn’t need the bridge to call down that they were engaging in the battle, the status lights for the main guns and the one point defense ion canon all lit up and the rather shoddy connection she was maintaining through tension and wishful thinking began arcing with electricity as the throughput couldn’t make it through the solder at the rate the system was shoving power into it. The circuit breaker for that gun tripped a few seconds before the engagement ended, as evidenced by the cessation of power drawn to the other active guns.

  Grimacing at the melted sg that had resulted from her attempt at getting the fourth main energy gun operational for that engagement, she picked up the solder gun and another wick pad as she said, “Engineering to Bridge, we’re obviously still here so we clearly survived, what’s our status otherwise.”

  The HUD on her safety gsses lit up with, Outgoing comms: Bridge, just before she got a reply from Jace, “Starboard shields took a hell of a beating but held, we’re probably going to have to put in for repairs if they manage to overload her, we managed to hit them with a good amount of grapeshot and slugs and those three main guns did their job...what happened with number four? We only got about half the shots from it as the rest.”

  Diane grimaced as she discarded the now saturated copper mesh and picked up another. She’d probably soak half the avaible wick after that stunt. “Did the shots you got out of it do what we needed?”

  Jace’s clearly hesitant reply sted long enough that Diane actually got the entire contact cleaned before he said anything, “It did enough, why?”

  “Let’s just say what I did to give you those shots should never be repeated. When’s the next engagement?”

  Another pause, then, “Tactical says a little over ten minutes. They’re making their turns tighter than projected and burning extra fuel.”

  Diane nodded to herself and said, “I’ll have that fourth gun for you and see what I can do about the rest of these point defense arrays, too.”

  “Try to do the starboard ones first, they’ll be needed to stop the kinetic rounds from the cruiser so they don’t take down the shield.”

  “Will do, get my ship through this, captain.”

  “Aye-aye, boss,” he replied before breaking the connection.

  Once she finished the main canons, she took a moment to figure out how to get the HUD to show the connectors by array before getting the other three ion canons of the apparent SFP1 array. She was surprised when she heard someone say, “...you really do know what you’re doing, fuck ups that worked out notwithstanding.”

  Diane startled a bit, somehow managing to keep her hands from twitching as she was soldering. She finished the connection and turned to see J’Jesi watching her with a pensive expression. Realizing the chief engineer had used the safety gear’s comms to talk, making it sound like the voice was coming from all around her, she just nodded and turned back to her work, “I may not be good enough to run an engine room, but I know enough to do this at least.”

  There was a moment of quiet between them before the Crotuk said, “You know, you’re not what I expected.”

  Diane put the finishing touches on SFP1? and flipped the circuit breakers for the rest of the array before she answered, “Oh? What were you expecting?”

  As Diane began work on SFP2A, J’Jesi replied, “Another Earth-raised spoiled brat of a Lost.”

  Diane blinked in surprise as she wicked away the waste solder, “Another? You’ve experienced more than one?”

  J’Jesi uttered a word that sounded like it might be a curse in a nguage Diane didn’t know before answering, “My st job was with a Noidarian. Ze kept expecting everything to be handed to xim on a silver ptter.”

  Diane paused in her soldering and turned back to the Crotuk in confusion, “...you’re not Earth-raised? That’s a human expression.”

  “I was raised on a colony world near the path of the March,” grunted J’Jesi, “It’s pretty small, just a registry number on the map, and I was the only Crotuk kid in Terran space when the war ended. Even the Empire didn’t take their kids back.” Diane could hear a definite undercurrent of bitterness in the other woman’s voice.

  Diane grimaced and turned back to her task, “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t mean much coming from me.”

  J’Jesi’s derisive snort stung Diane’s ears, causing her to flinch slightly, “So long as you give me a couple days to find a new job before you kick me off the station, you can apologize for the Matriarch’s Pgue for all I care.”

  Diane finished with SFP2 before turning to face the engineer, who was intent on the screen in front of her, “Why would I kick you off the station?”

  “Everyone knows your parents were killed in the March.”

  “...and?”

  The engineer finalized something on her board and leaned back in her chair, giving Diane a gre that couldn’t have more loudly said “Are you stupid?” even if she’d been holding up a sign. “Everyone knows your Morvuck parents were killed in the Crotixian March.”

  Diane dropped the solder gun in the toolbox and stood, pulling down her ear protection and lowering her face mask so both rested around her neck. “Were you there on the front lines gunning down Morvucks when the March passed through the colony worlds?”

  J’Jesi scowled, “No, I was stowed away on my father’s scout ship when it was taken down by a Terran ship. It crashed on the pnet they were orbiting for the battle and everyone said it was a miracle I survived. I was the only one because I hid in a storage locker near the engineering spaces that didn’t get used much.”

  “How old were you?”

  Her scowl deepened, “Nine in Terran years.”

  “No other family?”

  J’Jesi shook her head, “My mother and carrier were killed early in the war and we were cast out from our cn because my mother was supposed to marry a war chief from another cn.”

  “I was nine when my parents died,” said Diane, “And my friends on Mortan dug up the registry of deaths a bit ago and discovered I had no existing cn or family name.” The Crotuk looked up in surprise, so Diane continued, “The Lost are victims, and me bming you for a war that cost you your parents would be the height of idiocy. I may do stupid things,” she smiled wryly as J’Jesi gnced over at the circuit panel Diane was supposed to be fixing, “But I’m not an idiot.”

  J’Jesi nodded and stood, tapping a few more buttons on the engine’s console before moving to the supply closet to get herself some safety gear, “C’mon, let’s finish those repairs to the guns before the next engagement. I might even be able to work on the shields if we finish quick enough.”

  Diane fitted the facemask back on as J’Jesi put on her own ear and eye protection, “Don’t you need to babysit the engines?”

  The engineer fit her own mask over her face and her voice came through Diane’s ear protection, “Not at this point. Most of what I was doing was teaching the engine’s A.I. not to screw up the intermix just because it hadn’t seen what the engine was doing before.” She sighed as she pulled a spare solder gun from the top shelf of the supply cabinet, having to step on the bottom shelf to reach it, “Freshly installed system A.I. are like babies, of course it hadn’t ever seen a ship’s engines in the middle of battle.”

  Diane’s eyebrows went up as she picked up her solder gun again, “We’re not installing an existing dataset when we put the fresh A.I. in?”

  J’Jesi spent the next several minutes until the ship’s next engagement expining the issues with new A.I. and how matter-antimatter intermixes worked, a lot of which was either technobabble or went over Diane’s head. They managed to get the solder joins connected and the panel closed up before moving to the shields, which had been weakened but held thanks to the additional support of the point-defense cannons.

  While she functioned as a wrench-monkey for J’Jesi, she also learned why the ship wasn’t rocking and shaking about like happens on so many sci-fi shows when they were hit by enemy fire. Apparently, that was an affectation from the days when ships were bound to the ocean and atmosphere and had no energy shields, so people would expect a ship taking a hit to be shaken around a bit. The energy shielding on a ship was designed to absorb energy, if they were feeling tremors or taking physical damage that meant the shields had failed in some capacity and something was impacting the physical structure of the ship.

  I guess the devs wanted the ‘hard sci-fi’ angle, she thought as she listened to the engineer talk about force regutors and projector arrays, Of course, it makes sense given everything else they’ve put in the game. No transporters because that’s almost a handwavium technology, FTL that has requires an actual navigable path instead of the common perception of just pointing a ship in a direction and hitting ‘go,’ no multiple periodic tables full of exotic matter to allow for near magical sci-fi effects.

  And yet the game was fun and engaging, interesting enough that even a non-gamer like Caitlynn would want to hop in the game and spend subjective months doing what amounted to a second job, just in space. A space-job. I guess everything really is cooler when you add ‘space’ to the beginning of it.

  After twice more watching as the weapon’s systems indicator arrays lighting up like Christmas trees and putting out more metaphorical fires with the various systems in engineering, Jace’s voice came over the PA and their safety gear headsets, “Stand down from red alert. Repeat, all hands stand down from red alert. Remaining at yellow alert, Commander Somni’els, please report to the bridge.”

  J’Jesi pulled herself out from under the console she was working on (the life support, which had apparently suffered from a simir inferior soldering issue as the weapons, just in one of the control modules instead of the entire array), and smiled challengingly at Diane, “I guess the battle’s over and we won. You’re not so bad for a spoiled Earth lost.”

  Diane pulled off her gloves and returned the smile over her face mask, once again hanging from around her neck, “And you’re not so bad for an insubordinate, mouthy engineer. I can see why Jace picked you for the position.”

  J’Jesi snorted in amusement, “Get the hell out of my engine room before I throw you out, Commander.”

  Diane chuckled as she finished returning the safety gear to the cabinet before doing as the engineer ‘ordered.’

  PrincessColumbia