Everyone does their part

Preface

Everyone does their part is a piece of player-created fiction written by Casiella Truza. Originally published on the blog Ecliptic Rift.

Everyone does their part

Lyncyne leans into the spanner as she fastens two panels together. Small conduits to protect control lines and transport coolant run across the engine she has started to cover. The roar of impulse engines firing up echo through the hangar as hefty Brutors wrestle machinery into place, but the noise doesn’t appear to distract her in the slightest. The capsuleer who flew this Claw had quietly explained the goals of his next sortie, and so the mechanic felt she owed it to him to ensure that the polycarbon engine housing didn’t come apart during maneuvers.

That had happened to somebody else in their wing last week, actually, when an overheated microwarp drive had come apart on the pilot. A Wolf assault frigate in the same squadron had managed to finish off the enemy Retribution from the 24th Imperial Crusade before it could take full advantage of the mishap. The mechanic responsible took a very long walk out the airlock the next day, and everybody else in the maintenance hangar worked well into the next shift in order to check and double-check the equipment.

Of course, Lyncyne hates the hours and feels like she’ll never get the grease completely off her hands. But she has listened to the pilots or space traffic controllers as they told ale-fueled stories of Amarrian industrial transports and starbase reactors exploding. She knows of the Crusade pilots and commanders introduced to their vengeful god earlier than they’d anticipated. Every day, at mess, she sees the dull eyes of the Starkmanir busboys and cooks working in the cafeteria as part of the Tribal Republic’s re-integration program. Sometimes at night, she thinks back to the girl in her second-year mechanics class who’d taken an assignment to an agricultural world somewhere in the low-security Hed constellation. Her transport never arrived, and while the Tribal Liberation Force had little to say about it, everyone assumed that one of the raiding parties had destroyed it — or, worse, captured it.

So now, in the hangar, perched on the cowling of a pod-pilot’s interceptor, she focuses tightly on rigging the bolts, the housing, and the conduits. Everyone does their part.