Adelie

Adelie turned the laptop to face the table and walked around to take her seat at the opposite end. It wasn't a high-tech video-conferencing setup, but hopefully it would work. The stables were pretty quiet, with Phoebe, Petunia and half the staff already packed up for the day. Qualifying had gone as well as could be hoped, at least.

Sitting at the head of the table meant the others were all staring at her. How did Petunia handle it? She genuinely seemed to like leading meetings, but Adelie could already feel herself getting warm inside her overalls. Stefan sat to her left, frowning slightly, and beyond him, Ches was picking at the edge of the table with long, bony fingers. On her right were Elice, fidgeting at her own laptop, and one of her coders, Tommen, chewing through the tail end of a snack bar.

It wasn't a long table but it was hard to make out the faces on the laptop screen. One was the team's liaison from the McCaffrey's office – Stefan's actual boss, until the big man fully transferred to Tenebrae's employ – and the other was Riaps, the stern-featured lady that Elice had picked to lead the team setting up more substantial IT resources at Tenebrae's new HQ while the core personnel were away long haul for the remaining races.

"Thank you all for staying behind," Adelie began, hoping her voice sounded steadier than it felt.

Ches shrugged. "Not like there's much nightlife we're missing out on."

"What do you mean? The cafeteria food is excellent," Stefan said, and it was only when he chuckled that Adelie realised he was joking. "Please, Adelie, go ahead, the floor is yours."

Adelie acknowledged him with a nod, grateful for the moment to gather herself. "I wanna talk about the model, like, where we're up to with it and stuff. I think we need it to be… better, for the rest of the season, you know?" She was flubbing already, that was a terrible tone to set at the start of the meeting. Trying not to meet the eyes of anyone actually sat at the table, she looked down towards the laptop. "Riaps, is installation going ok for you?"

"Yes, thank you, Adelie. We have all the hardware in place now and our dev environment is ready to go. We should be able to connect live to you for the next race."

"Any problems?"

"Nothing serious, security have been very helpful." She didn't mention that she was working on a Saturday afternoon – at least it was only afternoon, Rindburg time, not evening. "We lost an hour yesterday because we came up a few metres short on Cat-6, but that's the worst of it."

"Cool." Adelie decided not to ask what Cat-6 was. Metres of it sounded expensive, so hopefully the team had paid. "Elice, do we need anything more on our end?"

Elice shook her head. "It was all in the last order. Might grab some spares when I'm back at HQ in the week."

"Okay, good." Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Petra bit the bullet. This was another question for Elice, and she wasn't sure how the other woman would take it. "What's the status on the projection? We haven't been able to use it in races a couple of times now, right?"

"I dunno if it's much use at all yet," Elice shrugged. "We need more data."

"What data do we need still? Are there race types we haven't covered yet?"

"It's not so much that, it's like…" The coder looked at her hand, half-forming a gesture.

"It isn't the type of data, we just need a lot more of it," Stefan said. As always he spoke slowly, his choice of words careful. Sometimes that made him sound thoughtful, but this time it came across as pompous. "The model has proved difficult to adapt."

"What's the problem?" Adelie tried to sound sympathetic. She could see the expression on Elice's face. "We were supposed to have a working model by Wedassal, right?"

"It's not as simple as that," Elice began.

Stefan shrugged, interrupting. "It was optimistic to think that we could adapt to Soot as quickly as to more conventional IL dragons."

"That's not what we promised," said Elice, voice tight. "If it'd just been standard adjustments it'd've taken a week tops. It took longer than that just to get the harness fit."

"I apologise, my intention was not to criticise," Stefan said, which showed more perception than he usually did. "Soot has been a challenge for us all. We should not have assumed it would be simple."

As Adelie groaned internally, Elice replied "I didn't assume anything, maybe you did at McCaffreys-" Someone was speaking from the laptop, and Ches started to say something too. It was hard to hear anyone, and Adelie could feel the meeting slipping out of her grasp.

She scrunched up her forehead for a moment, trying to push away the staticky feeling in her front brain. "Guys? Guys, come on, guys, please?"

There was a moment of silence. Adelie blinked, slowly realising that they'd listened to her and settled. Now everyone around the table was looking at her, and she realised something from the way they were sat. Stefan had come to the team with the McCaffrey's sponsorship, part of the package the company had offered Phoebe. Elice and her team had all been hired by Tenebrae directly, to handle the task of adapting the McCaffrey's software to Soot. She hadn't made the promises she was now being asked to keep.

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They were still waiting for her to say anything. "Let's take a step back, ok. Can one of you explain to me why Soot makes things so difficult? Assume I know nothing about programming."

Elice and Stefan looked at each other. Stefan was working his lips and frowning, clearly wanting to speak but unsure what to say. Opposite him, Elice looked more lost. Her eyes turned to Adelie, then flicked away again when she realised Adelie was looking.

It was Ches who broke the silence, sitting up from his slouch and then leaning forward, looking from Stefan to the laptop. "Question."

"Go ahead," Adelie said, raising her hand in his direction. Ches was the odd one out at the table – besides Adelie herself, anyway. He was a Tenebrae hire, having worked with Phoebe a few years ago in one of her junior competitions, but he wasn't part of the programming team. His training was veterinary, and he specialised in the sensors sewn throughout Soot's harness.

He faced the laptop again. "Sorry, mate, forgot your name." Petra realised he was talking to the McCaffrey's rep. "When you put your model on a specific dragon you calibrate by size, right?"

"The main parameters are weight and wingspan, yes," came the scratchy voice from the speakers.

Stefan said, "It is a little more complicated than that."

"But that's basically it, right?" Ches turned to him. "So you set Soot up as a really small stellar drake, right?"

"Well, that was the package that we started from, but-"

"So the problem is that Soot's not a stellar?" Ches' bluntness didn't sound deliberately aggressive, but Adelie couldn't see Stefan's face clearly to see how he was taking it.

Not wanting to let it get out of hand again, Adelie said, "Ches."

"Hm?" That seemed to distract him a bit, his flow thrown off.

How to keep him from getting back on Stefan's case? "You're losing me. Can you go over it again, please? Step by step?"

He nodded. "Sorry, thinking out loud, but it fits what we see. Stellars are nimbler than solars, but less stamina, less wing strength. If Soot was like that but more smaller, it'd be even less stamina, but he's way tougher than the curve."

"Yeah, we can't just scale down the way they were expecting when they made those promises." Elice slouched back in her chair again, drumming her fingers on the corner of her laptop.

"We didn't know-" Stefan began, defensively.

"Guys, Stefan," Adelie jumped in, then realised she sounded too urgent. "Let's just forget about what was or wasn’t promised, ok? What do we need to do to fix it? How is Soot different? Ches?"

The vet tech pressed a finger to his lips, then put his hand back on the tabletop. "Like I said, he's got massive stamina. Top speed's bad, but he can go flat-out for miles. The mobility's impressive, obviously, some of that's Phoebe's skill but the gyro's off the charts sometimes. Bigger dragons'd snap a coracoid doing some of that stuff."

Adelie blinked. The bone Ches had just named was deep in the structure of a dragon's shoulder, not out along the wing. A coracoid fracture wouldn't just end a dragon's career, if it happened in flight the dragon would likely fall straight out of the sky.

She was about to ask whether there were any extra checks they could do on Soot's skeleton when Tommen spoke up from beside Elice. "What about temperatures? That's what we're actually struggling to model, aren't we?"

"Yeah, he was super hot down in Anatolia, he doesn't take the heat well." Ches said, shaking his head slightly.

"He struggled when he was cold at Wedassal, too," said Stefan. "Lunar drakes come from high in the mountains in Norda, inland Ura and the like. Solars and Stellars originate further south."

"His colouring could be the problem." Ches sat up straighter. "Gold and silver reflect sun well, cut heating, he's almost matte black."

Elice also sat forward, pulling her laptop around to start typing something. "Is he skinny enough that he sheds heat fast when it's cold? Could be under a tipping point?"

"Would that help to explain his stamina?" Stefan looked at Ches. "My fear is that it might hide problems we're used to spotting through temperature."

Adelie felt herself losing the thread again. There were shared assumptions underpinning what the team were talking about that she just wasn't familiar enough with. Something had fallen into place, though. The tension that had pressed on the first part of the meeting was gone, and interrupting now might throw that all off again.

She sat there, trying to follow things. Was it really ok for her to be this lost? Elice was typing fluently as she talked, arcane computer symbols spraying up on her screen. Tommen had produced his own laptop, and periodically Elice delegated some incomprehensible math task to him or Riaps. Stefan and Ches batted ideas back and forth with the McCaffrey's rep, a cascade of dragon names and old historical references.

For the most part, none of them spoke to her. Ches asked a quick question about Soot's food, and Adelie couldn't remember the numbers. She caught herself fidgeting, checking her watch, forced herself to sit still. She couldn't leave, she was chairing the meeting. She wished she could leave.

The McCaffrey's rep apologised that he had to go. Adelie managed to thank him for coming, her head swimming. The team barely broke stride in their debate. Elice's screen showed a wireframe lozenge, its lines and vertices changing colour as it swelled and stretched and shrank. Riaps was screensharing a huge grid of numbers, and some dry quip from the tinny speakers brought a roar of laughter from Stefan.

That was so unexpected that Petra almost toppled off her chair. They really looked like a team working together, just not one she was part of. They were supposed to be her team, weren't they? On the other hand, she was their manager. Maybe it was ok if she wasn't in on the joke. Hopefully one of them would explain later.

The frenzied debate lasted another full hour, and by the time anyone explained anything to Adelie, her stomach was growling. She still didn't follow all the details that Elice and Ches tried to pour over her, but they had some new ideas for how to improve the model and that was the important thing. Elice shut down the video call and handed Adelie her laptop back, still talking constantly back and forth with Tommen.

Adelie went to her bag to put the laptop away and realised Stefan had followed her. Ches was already out of the stable, the door swinging shut behind him. Arms feeling suddenly heavy, Adelie faced Stefan. She had to crane to look him in the face, but all she read there was uncertainty.

In his characteristic, achingly slow speech, he said, "Adelie, I wanted to thank you, uh."

"Thank me?"

"When I upset Elice…" He faltered. "And she started to blame me… um. And then Ches too…"

"What do you mean?" Adelie frowned up at him. The meeting was a bit of a blur.

"Thank you. I know I was out of line, but you spoke up, and they didn't yell at me." He straightened up a bit, making himself even taller. "I do not think I would have been able to help as much as I did if you hadn't said something then."

"Oh." Blinking and trying to find two thoughts to rub together, Adelie said, "Thanks. I mean, I'm glad. I don't think they meant anything bad by it, though…"

"I think you are right, but at the time it felt different." He shrugged. "Thank you. I'm glad we could have such a productive meeting."