Brawn
Posted on August 17th, 2011 by Kuari

They were hidden, the captain said. The lighting across the ship was very low, illuminated more only in the areas a lot of work was going on, and that included Engineering. Kuari craned her long neck upward, gazing up the height of the warp core. It was ominously dark and silent, and she realized just how comforting the core’s perpetual glow was, how comforting its permeating hum when felt from the farthest reaches of the ship.

After blowing the Assault Bay doors, Kuari had reassigned herself and several brawny marines to Deck Fifteen, where a torpedo had shattered apart two seams in the hull behind Holodeck Three. The crew on that deck had just barely been saved by emergency containment fields, Kuari’s primary concern being their Chief Medical Officer in Sickbay down the corridor. Had their ablative hull improvements not warded off further damage…

Kuari was sure the fields wouldn’t have had enough power to contain a wider gash in the hull.

Men grunted, putting their backs into moving the heavy debris and clearing the way for repair teams. At one point, Kuari hauled one end of a crossbeam behind her shoulders and struggled to drag it to the wall and out of the way.

Eventually, the self-powered, containment-grade field generators were brought in, and with most of the rubble cleared out of the way, the repair teams had set to work. Kuari reported in and was reassigned. She climbed down a deck to Engineering while the rest of her team remained behind to assist on Deck Fifteen.

Something Kuari knew not what had burnt out and needed replacing, something caused by a short in the electrical, and a small engineer with a loud mouth was directing crewmen in what to pull apart. When Kuari arrived, she jumped in and began helping to lift things. Her energy was spent, having put all her efforts into physically manipulating broken pieces in the wounds of their ship. She wasn’t alone, however. A great many people moved more slowly, slumped over, leaned on things, and showed other signs of exhaustion.

Eventually, she was directed to a ceiling panel. Apparently the lifts were all in use, and the sooner this piece was replaced, the sooner they could get Warp Drive online.

She turned and cocked her head to get a good look up at the dead warp core with one eye. Their ship was a “sitting fuck” she had heard it referred to by Harper. Kuari called it “caught with a wing cramp”. She really, really missed its light and vibration.

She really, really wanted it turned on.

Kuari growled and snatched the bundle of cable in her mouth, bounded to an open space on the deck and beat her wings.