He stepped up on the foot and knees of the machine and leaned forward so he was balanced. “Let's see,” he said, grabbing her restraints and tugging. “Aye, you've got three centimetres give in each direction. There's a trick to it.” His hands went around her hips firmly and he looked at her. “Now hop.”
Stephanie was stunned for a moment and just stared.
“I won't hurt ye, now just bounce on yer heels.”
He was every bit the trainer, no sign of the man who had teased and flirted with Ashley for almost a year could be found. She hopped on her heels and he guided her so she fell back into the back and upper leg braces.
“See how that works? You jump a little as though you're throwin' yourself on yer back. Now you let the straps tighten again and you'll be right in there, no slack, no delay in the suit's response,” He tightened the safety belts and looked at her.
“I see,” was all Stephanie said as she looked back at him. She just stared into his light grey blues and started leaning towards him, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to close the few centimetres between them and her communicator vibrated against her left wrist. She ignored it, closed her eyes, and touched her lips to his.
For a moment there was no response, then one of his hands was cupping her cheek, the other was on her hip and Frost was kissing her. She pulled her arms out of the armour's sockets and wrapped them around his neck. The comm buzzed again. “The transmission watch you ordered turned up something Chief Vega, you should see this right away,”Andy Killbourne, one of the communications crew reported.
She pulled away from Frost hesitantly and replied; “Be right there.”
Frost let her go and leaned back, holding himself up by gripping the shoulder guard of the suit. “Looks like they need ye,” He said quietly before lowering himself down.
Stephanie undid the restraints and climbed out. “I'm sorry,” she apologized quietly as she looked around for people who might have seen. Two of the security personnel on shift were in sight, but they were facing away. It looked like they had seen it happen, but didn't look on out of respect. The rest of the trainees were several meters behind the armoured suit. They must have seen. This will be all over the ship by night shift. She thought to herself as her cheeks flushed.
“Don't be. If I'd have known I woulda done somethin' about it a year ago, prolly even further back. If I'd known a week ago then-” he said quietly as he picked up her boots, gun belt and coat.
“She's going to find out.”
“Aye, and she's one with a temper,” he nodded.
She stomped her feet into her combat boots and fastened the clasps. “I'm on shift. You have trainees.”
“Aye, long day ahead,” he handed her gun belt to her.
“Talk after?”
“Don't think I'll get away from Grace,” he shook his head sadly. “If I'd have known,” Shamus Frost apologized quietly.
“Me or her?” Stephanie whispered the question and immediately hoped Frost didn't hear.
If he did, he didn't give her any response.
She looked at him lingeringly for a moment and had never seen him so softened or disappointed then flicked her gaze to the rows of gunnery crewmen and women just meters away. This was her fault, if she had just shown up in the security office early instead of taking a side trip. Stephanie pressed all her disappointment down and straightened up. “Ride 'em hard Chief,” Stephanie said loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Aye!” he replied enthusiastically before turning his attention to the gunnery crew.
Stephanie turned away and finished putting on her long coat as she made her way to the large express lift that would take her down to the middle of the command deck.
The Engineering Control Centre
“Welcome to the control centre Captain,” Liam said as he watched a trio of holographic displays. They were detailing energy distribution across the ship, the status of the five reactors that were online and emitter performance across the hull. The rest of the oval shaped control room had stations for at least a dozen other technicians. At that time there were only four, each monitoring repairs and directing operations in different sections of the ship.
The walls above the terminals were transparent, providing a view of six of the reactor enclosures. They were cylindrical, polished metal containers with large cables extending out of the top. Fuel was at one time fed from the bottom, where the containment and feed adaptation compartments were. The diverse energy reactor assemblies, called DERA for short, could use almost anything to produce massive amounts of energy, but more dense materials or fusion were preferred. Whenever the type of fuel changed the reactors had to be adapted, and the engineering staff performed that work on the deck below. Recently materializers were installed to produce heated plasma for the fusion process, along with hydrogen cell backups in case there was little power to use for the materializers.
Chief Grady kept his engineering deck clean, and it was surprisingly quiet throughout. “It's about time I visited your office,” Captain Valance smiled.
“Well, this saves me from sending my report in. I'm happy to announce reactors seven and eight are ready, we can start using the scoops to collect pretty much anything and feed it straight into them.”
“Those are the reactors closest to the engines.”
“They are. If you can manage to park us near a sun, pretty much any sun, we could charge up our power reserves in the space of ten minutes.”
“How are our power reserves doing right now?”
“Still charging, sixty one point three percent. It'll take another two hours and seventeen minutes to get us to full. This uranium is trash, to be honest. It was material stripped out of old nuclear warheads. Given the choice, I'd rather use hyper dense ergranian to line a reaction chamber and draw power from fusion. We'd start producing several kilos of dense ergranian per reactor per day.”
“We have some?”
“Someone started growing some under engineering, close to the primary capacitors.”
“How long ago?”
“About thirty one years. We have about eight hundred square meters of it insulating engineering from the hangar decks. It would take one reactor about two days to supercharge a block of the stuff and make it so dense enough to protect and cultivate in our reactors. Then we can start using it to augment production with mass materializers, enhance our fighters, the Triton's armour plating, build new, harder protective suits for the gunnery loading crews. There are a lot of other uses, but those are the ones that seem to stand out on the request list.”
“That's incredible.”
“Ergranian metal is the most complex materials hulls are made of. The only known organic steel in the universe. The drawback is you can't materialize it, but if you have some to augment a materializer manufacturing process it speeds production up and allows you to materialize harder metals using much less energy.”
“I know, I wonder where it came from?”
“The molecular stamp says it was originally cultivated from the Blue Belt by Freeground.”
“Well, Wheeler was associated with them somehow. Sort of tarnishes my mental image of them. You have my go ahead on making dense ergranian metal and converting the reactors.”
“Thank you Captain, fusion will eliminate the problem of waste disposal. Instead we'll have tons of dense metals after a couple weeks as a byproduct.”
“How long will the reconfiguration take?”
“Depends on the reactors condition and on how easy they are to decontaminate. Shouldn't take more than a couple days, but we'll have to be in a pretty safe spot and entirely replace a lot of the internal irradiated hardware. Only reserve power will be available.”
“I'll find us a safe place after this pickup.”
“Moving on then. We need to test them, but the shields look ready. I'm also sending people out to replace those hyperspace emitters that don't register. After looking things over, I'm pretty sure they're actually gone. Must have happened during a battle that wasn't logged in engineering. Other than that, maintenance teams are finishing repairs on our mass materializer in hangar three and other internal combat damage the security teams found when they were doing their sweep,” Liam reported proudly.