Reel

Reel couldn’t see the chief’s faces through the glare of the projected map, but she could feel their eyes upon her. The muttering in the room died, and silence took up residence in its place. In that silence, her bold proclamation took on a hollow quality. She squinted into the light of the holo-projector, trying to get some sense of the chiefs’ expressions beyond the vague outlines of broad-shelled forms turned towards her. The rustle and scrape of The Old Bug’s leadership shifting in their seats provided the only hint of their thoughts, and that had an uncomfortable flavor to it.

Captain Arcturus broke the silence. “Thank you, Reel, for your help. Please submit the written report to Yerry by tomorrow.” He reached over to the tabletop and tapped the map off, bringing the overhead lights back up. Reel blinked in the sudden illumination, and at the chiefs coming to their feet. Some of them made for the door while others lingered, talking among themselves and stealing glances at her. Her mother stood in the corner, trying to catch her eye.

Reel ignored her and tried again, turning to her father. “Captain, I’ve done the training simulations for the planetary landers. I can fly them, I can maintain them. By the black, I’ll bet that I could take one apart and put it back together again if I had to!” She spread her hands wide, supplicating. “We don’t have to wait months to train someone else. We’ve got the languages locked down. I could go today!” Her voice echoed through the room, too loud, she knew, but she had to make him listen.

“Absolutely not.” His reply landed like a jab to the gut. “The division chiefs and I will pick emissaries, and we won’t be sending anyone down until we’re good and ready.”

“You said we had to hurry,” she said, her voice thick with accusation. “Now we don’t? Which is it?”

Anger flashed in his eyes, and the scales around his mouth tightened. “You don’t go out into the black without a suit on. Franka needs to run her analysis on the codes. Those landers need to be taken out of storage and checked over. We’re nowhere near ready to go, at least not yet. But if you want to help, you can get the landers ready to fly. I want a complete tear-down, and for you to run a full systems check on each of them.”

He meant it as a rebuke. A “tear down” would take days of concentrated effort on its own. A full system check meant a mind-numbing week of manually testing every piece of the ship from back to front. But for a moment she let herself hope.

“So once that’s done, let me fly whoever you’re sending down!” She pressed. “I’ll still have it done before anyone else can get the training finished.”

The lines of his face hardened still further, as rigid and unbending as Old Bug’s hull. “Reel, this conversation is over. You’re dismissed.”

She knew she should go, but she felt her chance to meet the people she’d been listening to slipping away, that brought on a hot and heady anger. Instead of doing the smart thing, the meek thing, she snapped back at him. “Every moment counts, you said it yourself! Let me fly down, and we’ll save weeks! We can figure out who to approach on the way there, rather than sitting here scared in our shells!”

Too late, she heard her own shout echoing in the stillness of the remaining chief’s abandoned conversations. They waited, watching her, with expressions ranging from scandalized to uneasy. From the doorway, Argo gave a small, supremely disgusted shake of his head, a deep frown creasing his scales. She looked around, and the weight of disapproval, of embarrassment and censure in those gazes pressed in on her. Even her mother wore a look of resignation. It drove all Reel’s bold defiance from her in an instant, and left her feeling ashamed. Had she just yelled at her Captain, in front of all his chiefs? Color rose to her cheeks, and she flushed dark.

The Captain’s voice growled, low and dangerous as an engine out of tune. “We are done here, Reel. Thank you for your…input. You will report to maintenance during your leisure period for the next month. They always need help with areas that need scrubbing by hand. Go.”

She did not argue further, fleeing out the door with her head down. She would rather spend the rest of her life scrubbing than bear the weight of those eyes for another instant.

…

The chief of maintenance was a middle-aged male named Kejew. He stood half again as tall as Reel, with heavy broad shoulders, his arms thickened by a lifetime of physical labor. When Reel went looking for him the next day, his crew sent her deep into the maintenance tunnels beneath the power generator. Dim lighting, hot air heavy with moisture, and the constant low thrum of the fusion reactor two levels up made the narrow passages a claustrophobic place. She found Kejew lying on the back of his shell, his head and shoulders jammed into an open maintenance panel, wearing a pair of coveralls stained so black that they might have started that color. He had his feet braced up against the opposite side of the narrow corridor to hold himself steady. Loud grinding sounds suggested that whatever he was doing in the panel was not gentle.

She hesitated. How did one address a chief prostrate on the floor? He didn’t acknowledge her, or even give any indication that he knew she was there. Should she interrupt him? Maybe not. Every moment that she waited meant a moment less spent on drudgery.

“How long are you gonna stand there?”

She jumped in surprise, nearly leaving her shell behind. Kejew’s voice grated out of the panel, as loud and raspy as whatever he was working on. He grunted, and she heard something in the panel give way with a final protesting screech of metal.

He threw a piece of pipe fitting out without looking, and it clanked off the bulkhead a handspan from Reel’s head. “Hand me a fresh one of those.” A rough, heavy hand emerged from the panel, palm up. Reel grabbed the fitting and glanced around. Next to Kejew sat a box full of spare bits and pieces, all jumbled together. She ran a hand through the box, grabbing parts and holding them next to the mangled chunk of steel he’d thrown out. How did he ever find anything in this?

“Quickly, girl.” The hand opened and closed, showing claws worn flat from use. She grabbed a likely looking piece and shoved it into his hand.

He felt at it for a moment, running his thumb around the inner edge before grunting and drawing it inside the panel. She leaned down to see what he was working on.

Bundles of pipe ran behind the bulkhead. Kejew gave the fitting three sharp twists with his wrench and then brought up the next section of pipe over to meet it. He jammed it home, twisting hard in the opposite direction, the sinews in his forearms standing out under the scales. When it would twist no further, he took hold of the piping on either side of the fitting and pulled, testing it. When it held, Kejew released it with a satisfied huff. “Move left,” he said.

Reel took a hasty step backwards out of his path. He slid out on his shell, grabbing the railing and hauling himself upright with a grunt. Dropping the wrench into the box of parts, he kicked it shut before turning to look at Reel.

“I hear you really stuck your hand in the reactor core at the meeting yesterday.”

She flushed. Kejew had a hard, frank face. Not that he was unkind, but it was a good face for frowns. He wore one now, looking her up and down. She had harbored some hope that word of her blunder might not have spread, but of course he would know. He was a chief, even if he hadn’t been at the meeting.

He went on without waiting for a reply from her. “Lucky for me you don’t know when to quit talking though. I figure you’re just about the right size.”

She blinked at him, nonplussed. “The right size?”

He chuckled and thumped her on the shoulder with a heavy, meaty hand, staggering her. “Follow me and see.”

She had no choice but to trail after him, through twisting maintenance tunnels she’d never had reason to visit before. He carried the heavy box of parts easily under one arm, navigating the turns with the unerring confidence of long familiarity. After a short eternity, they emerged from a service door into the central corridor leading between the bridge and the crew quarters. Reel blinked, startled. How had they ended up back here?

Kejew leaned down and dropped the box of tools and parts onto the deck plating with a clatter, right next to a heavy steel access panel set in the floor. Flexing his fingers, he set his claws into the lip and lifted it out, exposing a cramped narrow space. “Right, in you go.”

She stared at the opening. It gaped like a mouth, dark and foreboding. “Uhm...why?”

“I keep getting reports about gravity in this corridor acting up.” He kicked one of the floor panels. “Best guess is that one of the gravity plates in this section got knocked out of alignment, or a spindle got jammed. Either way, we need to chase it down.”

Reel stared at the panels. There were hundreds of them. “And we don’t know which one it is?”

“Nope. The failure is intermittent.”

“But why am I crawling down underneath it?” Reel asked, gesturing. “Just pull the panels through the whole corridor.”

Kejew snorted. “Just like in the simulation. We could, but that would shut down this corridor entirely, forcing everyone to detour. And we’d have to recalibrate all of them when we put them back. Trust me, this is easier.”

“Easier for who?” Reel grumbled, eyeing the gap. She wasn’t sure that she’d fit.

“Not you, that’s for sure!” Kejew bellowed a laugh and slapped her on the shell. “Here, you’ll need these.” Rummaging in the box he’d brought along, he handed her a lamp with straps to secure it around her head, a wrench, and an electrical meter. “Get in there and work your way from the bridge down towards the crew quarters. Open up each one, check to make sure the spindle is moving freely and that the reservoir lines up right. Check power levels with the meter–you remember how to do that, I’ve seen your simulation scores. Then seal it back up and repeat.”

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She took the tools reluctantly. “Maybe I should go run the simulation again first, just to make sure.” It wasn’t one she’d run multiple times, since it didn’t involve flying.

“Nice try. I know you’ve got it all in your head.” He tapped his own implant with a blunt claw.

She sighed, pulling on the headlamp. If it would have saved her from crawling into that hole, she’d have rushed back to the Captain and begged for forgiveness. It would be a tight fit, even for her. She dangled her legs in first, sitting on the edge and adjusting to the peculiar sensation of being half in and half out of gravity. Since the gravity plates only projected fields of gravity “up”, the space beneath them was weightless. So as she lowered herself into the hole, she had to push down off the lip as gravity assisted her descent less and less. Her shell scraped on all four sides as she went, and she grumbled the whole way down.

Several layers of material made up the deck. First, the deck panels themselves, simple steel over support struts. Beneath those sat the gravity plates, matched to each individual panel. Bundles of wires ran along the struts, splitting off one at a time to feed each individual plate so that if one went down, it didn’t take the whole grid with it. That left a very narrow space for Reel to work in. She hesitated, eyeing the gap, floating in the hole with a loose grip on the railing at her side.

“How do I do this, exactly?” She called up.

Kejew’s rugged face appeared in the gap, a slight smile on his lips. “Lay on your back and slide in. You’re weightless, so moving around should be easy.”

It was not, she soon discovered. Weightless she might be, but the space was so tight that it made it hard to breathe. Navigating to the bridge end of the corridor required her to haul herself along by grabbing at the struts, pulling herself hand over hand. The motion wasn’t steady, and she bounced her shell off the ground and her nose off the support struts with every tug. With a start, she realized she wasn’t even sure she had gone the right way.

“Where am I starting?” She yelled back up at Kejew.

“Here!” He stomped on the deck plating, not too far off from where she’d stopped. Reorienting herself as best she could, she scraped through the narrow space to the spot he’d indicated, headlight bouncing the whole way. She heard him clomping away as she arrived, and then the sound of the access panel dropping back into place echoed through the deck. It plunged the crawlspace into blackness, broken only by the tiny light of her headlamp, and she felt her scales spike up. It made sense to close it, to keep someone from falling in on accident or something, but the thought of being trapped in here made her uneasy.

There wasn’t any help for it though. Pushing her discomfort aside, she cranked up the brightness of her headlamp and got to work. She found she could lock herself in place by pushing her knees up against the support struts. That pushed her shell “down” into the rough steel beneath her. The position strained her thighs, and she wobbled on her shell, but it would work well enough. The coveralls proved their worth too, keeping her from scraping her knees raw on the plating. That problem solved, she closed her eyes and mentally summoned the checklist for gravity plate maintenance.

The implant fed it to her, as fresh as the day she’d taken the training. Step one: Disconnect power to the plate. Easy enough; she pulled the plug free and let it drift on its wire. Step two: disconnect the bottom faceplate. Four bolts with heads that she hoped matched the spanner Kejew had given her held the bottom of the plate in place.

The gravity “plates” were really more like flat, square boxes, with plain steel faces and inset sides. She groped along the inside edge of the nearest side, found the bolt, and brought the wrench up to it.

Or tried to. There wasn’t space to turn the wrench freely. All she could manage was a quarter turn before the tool’s handle clanked against a vertical beam. “Oh, come on.” She muttered. “Kejew! There’s not enough room down here to actually do this!”

Silence answered her. Piqued, she focused on him in her mind and the Link clicked as it took hold. “Kejew! Where’d you go?”

“Back to work, of course. I’ll come back when you finish up for the day.” The thought came through tinged with amusement.

“Well, we’ve got to rethink this. There’s not enough room down here for more than-”

“About a quarter turn of the wrench, I know.” Kejew cut her off. “Don’t worry, I won’t forget about you. Try to get through a dozen or so of them, okay?”

“A dozen?” She complained into the dim confines. “At this rate I’ll be lucky to get through half that many!”

“Just do your best then.” He sent, far too cheerily. “See you in a few hours!” Without another word, he severed the Link. She spluttered in the near dark, incensed, until her implant pinged her to remind her that item two on the checklist she’d started was still waiting for her attention.

It took her four times as long as it should have to get the bottom faceplate removed. She had to tuck the bolts into the pouch at her waist as she went to keep them from drifting off. When she managed to work the plate free, it smacked her right in the nose. She turned it over, wincing, to expose the magnetic spindle and motor on the other side. They both looked fine to her. The dial that indicated gravity setting was in the right spot, and when she spun the spindle with a claw, it rotated smoothly in its housing. Idly, she wondered what would happen if she ran it backwards, and got a warning tingle from her implant in response.

She reconnected the power, tested the speed of the magnet and the motor, the power in the cable, and ran through all of the other half dozen items of the checklist. It ran perfectly, so she wedged it between two struts to her side so she wouldn’t lose it and turned to the Dark Liquid reservoir.

The second key component of a gravity plate was an opaque tank, bolted directly into the upper faceplate as a solid piece to keep it from moving. There were valves she could open, but she remembered from the simulation that if she did that she’d just spew Dark Liquid everywhere. Then she really would have to pull the plates from above, since getting a replacement tank down here would be impossible. So she left the valves alone, tapping at the reservoir’s side with a thick claw. The tank was in zero gravity, like everything else down here, but it had a pressure gauge on one side. The levels were in the green, so unless there was something wrong that wasn’t covered by the simulations, this plate was good to go.

One down, at least a hundred to go. Putting it all back required laboriously tightening the bolts with one hand while holding the faceplate in place with the other. Her legs burned from the effort of holding herself steady, and her shell itched where it pressed against the floor. She had just tightened down the last bolt when she heard footsteps coming. No surprise there, since the corridor was a busy one; what was surprising was how clearly the voices reached her. Hark and Roddel, immediately recognizable.

“It hurts pretty bad,” Hark complained.

“Then go see Vorona.”

“I can’t, I’d have to explain how I burned myself.”

Roddel laughed. “Just bring her some food you’ve toasted, I’m sure she’ll understand.”

Reel plugged the plate she’d been working on back in, hurrying to get it powered back up before they arrived. Having one plate down wasn’t a big deal, but stepping unexpectedly into a spot with no gravity could trip them or throw them off balance. She listened to them pass by overhead, pondering. She’d have to yell a warning if she heard someone coming while she was in the middle tearing one down.

Hours later, Kejew returned. She’d managed to check over eight of the plates, and she stared glumly at the expanse of corridor as she clambered out of the access hole. She’d be at this for weeks, at this rate. Exhausted, she staggered back to her bunk and fell asleep.

The work kept her very, very busy, which was the only good thing she could say for it. After her gaffe at the meeting, Arcturus had pulled her from any further surveillance work on the humans. She spent all day working on the landers, and then spent every evening checking the plates, hollering at people to be careful as they passed overhead. She wasn’t sure which was worse: the drudgery of the gravity plates, or the torture of spending all her time working on the craft she wanted so desperately to fly.

The days blended into each other, as boring as they were identical. A week into it she finished checking the fiftieth identical gravity plate, when the sound of her name broke the monotony. She perked up, listening, not certain if she’d heard it right. Footsteps echoed down the corridor, maybe four or five sets. She strained to listen and caught it again.

“…first lander should be ready in a few more days. Reel has been working diligently on it,” Beno intoned in his deep, strong voice.

A raspy growl answered him. “She still thinks she’s going to get to fly one, I’ll bet.” That was Argo.

Yerry chimed in. “And why not? Captain, I looked at her scores, and she has a knack for flying. High marks across the board, and she went back and did them all again in her free time.”

Pride swelled in Reel’s chest, until Argo snorted. “There’s no way that girl should be allowed down planetside. I can think of a hundred different ways her stubbornness might ruin everything.” There was a pause, and Reel pictured Argo giving the Captain his signature sidelong glance. Her own face flushed with heat at the words. “You should have sent her back to Efreet for initial training. You should have…”

“Enough.” The Captain’s voice bit right through Argo’s complaints. “I have no doubts at all about her flying ability, Yerry. But Argo is right, she’s not a good choice for this job.”

Another female voice piped up. Crisp and quick, Reel recognized Franka from the meeting. “Well, her suggestion about the codes was a good one. That showed more wisdom than I would have expected from her.”

“That was cleverness, not wisdom,” Argo objected. “The girl is plenty bright, no one’s saying she’s not. But that’s not the issue.”

Captain Arcturus ignored that. “Franka, you mentioned the codes. You have something for me there?”

“Yes; a complete ranking of every country, based on raw average computer time needed to break their codes.” There was a note of pride in Franka’s answer. “There were a few hiccups; I thought it would be the Americans, because they have a couple of codes the computer couldn’t crack.”

“They have codes the computer couldn’t break?” Argo sounded impressed. “Their own computer technology must be incredible.”

“That was what I thought.” Franka agreed. “But it turns out the ones the computer couldn’t crack weren’t codes at all. They were entire languages, but so infrequently used that there isn’t enough raw data to process them. So I discounted them from the test, and when I did that, the results changed.”

“So who is it, in the end? Who has the best computers?” Arcturus asked.

“The Germans, followed by the British and then the Americans.”

There was a moment of quiet as they digested that. Reel held her breath, thinking about what she knew of the Germans.

They were a smaller country, especially compared to America or the Russians. Yet they had managed to overrun several larger groups in the ongoing conflict, and were holding Britain and America at bay. That made sense to Reel. If they had better technology, they should be winning. They might be eager to make a trade for anything that would further that advantage…

Franka went on, growing more excited as she spoke. “Better still, we know exactly how and where to approach the Germans. They have a research site on their northern coast where they’re working on chemical rockets, of all things. Our engines would bypass the need for such volatile systems, so I’m sure they’ll be amenable to a deal.”

“Perfect.” Arcturus said, pleased. “Keep looking at other options, but let’s plan on that as our first choice. Yerry, how long until we have a couple more people ready to fly those landers?”

“A couple of months, minimum. Sir, are you sure we couldn’t send Reel with a couple of older hands along to do the talking…?”

The conversation paused, the group falling into silence as her father considered that. “No,” he said, and Reel thought she heard regret in his voice. “There’s going to be a lot of dangerous thinking on this trip…What if she becomes Stricken, or worse? We’d need a backup pilot…No, she hasn’t proven to me that she’s up to such a task.”

Reel sagged. The others muttered their assent, and Argo went so far as to say, “She probably never will be. She hasn’t been trained properly…” No one spoke up to defend her. Not Yerry or Franka, not even her father.

Was that how they all truly saw her? Even Franka and Yerry? Thousands of extra hours on the simulations, and it still wasn’t enough to prove her worth?

She’d worked so hard. Tears threatened, welling at the corners of her eyes, and she dashed them away as best as she could in the narrow confines. More followed, hot and angry, pooling at the corners of her eyes in the lack of gravity.

They wanted proof that she was up to the challenge? Fine then. She’d give them proof.