Bridgebuilder

"I am sorry... It is meant to determine what?" Carbon stopped yanking on the chunk of instrument panel she had unscrewed from the frame and looked back at Alex, who was explaining what Amalu had told him last evening.

He had waited for a bit of confirmation on exactly what the fuck the marines had been doing before talking about it with Carbon because... Well, it had some connotations and he wanted to have what Williams could wring out of her team on hand before any supposition started flying. "If it's ethical to have sex with another 'non-human' entity. It's kind of funny though, they were using it to insult each other - basically going around arguing none of the others could pass it themselves."

Every now and then Carbon would look at him in a very particular way when he brought up things Humans did that were far outside of her life experiences, a mix of mortified and aghast. That's what she was doing right now. "Did... it is only four questions, correct? How could - Well. Insults. I understand, enough."

"I'm assuming they all passed. Couldn't get sent here without passing them." It stood to reason, anyway. They'd have to be old enough and capable of communication to even join the military. "Just not for that purpose."

"Yes, it is so." She finished pulling the monitor free and handed it back to Alex, peering into the darkness behind the console with a flashlight. She hummed once and then started unscrewing the next monitor over.

"So you just want me to hold on to these?" That was kind of what it felt like he had the room to do right now. Sure, with the seats pushed back there was room for two in the front, particularly with one being about 75% of human size, but then you started crawling around in there and she was basically already at the middle of the instrument panel.

"There should be a pad and paper in the tool bag. Just label each part and set it aside. That was the left Primary Flight Display." She did not look up from her work to say that.

Alex found a pad of post-it notes and a pen crammed into a side pocket of the tool bag. "Port."

Carbon shook her head. "I do not believe there are any cargo handling systems onboard."

"No, it's the port side on a ship. Left is." Hell, had he been saying that without them understanding him so far? He was sure that they had said port and starboard several times - maybe his Immersion Translator had been translating with context clues? Could it do that? "You know, when you're facing forward."

Carbon glanced over her shoulder at him, eyes crinkled with amusement and a little smirk on the corner of her mouth.

He stared back at her as he peeled the note off the stack and slapped it onto the PFD. She had just put one over on him. A little joke, and it was comprehensible.

Alex had never been more proud. "Ah-hah. Nice."

"Thank you." She pulled the screen out and handed it back to him. "Port Navigation."

"Port Navigation." He echoed back as he wrote the next note. "Been working on your repertoire?"

"Perhaps? Having the opportunity to view a wide variety of Humans interaction with each other while not being..." She stopped talking, craning her neck to look into the area behind the instrument cluster once more. Humming again. Carbon picked up a Human-made set of Augmented Reality goggles and held them up to her face, double checking the wiring schematics. "While not drowning myself in work, is giving me a better understanding of Humanity in general."

Alex recognized that she had stopped herself from saying something in particular there. What, precisely, he wasn't sure - and with the door open and Linda Zheng in the Hanger as well, he wasn't going to ask. That felt a bit too personal. Tonight, instead.

He glanced out the window to check on Zheng. She was still over by the Falcata's, tapping away at a tablet and using the scanner drones to verify the grav cycles were also shipshape. "I'm glad to hear that. You seem pretty happy working on all this stuff out here."

Wherever here actually was.

"I am surprised to find that I am, yes. The work may not be as rewarding as some other things I have done in the past, but we are working towards a larger goal." She moved her attention to the Flight Management Display, almost directly below where the Navigation screen had been.

It was weird to be talking to her like they were just coworkers. Not that he would have talked to any of the other people on the expedition like this, exactly, but it still felt a little distant. Not quite like how they had talked when they had returned to McFadden station. More like how they had communicated back on the Kshlav'o before he had kissed her.

At least he was falling back to a reasonable part of their relationship to emulate. Mostly. "That's good. I can't wait to find out what's up with these controls and get back in the sky, even if this might not have the range we need to go anywhere useful."

"Do not get too excited yet. The scans found a few nose ribs with what I feel are an unacceptable amount of stress microfractures, though they appear to be within spec for the part. I suspect the wing was bumped at some point in time during production or shipping." She had the FMD off already, handing it back to him. "Port Flight Display."

"Seriously? They dropped it? Taking a star off the review for that." Alex dutifully filed this third screen away with a fresh sticky note slapped down on the glass.

Their conversation was ended by the sound of someone approaching the Corvin. Zheng, as a quick check verified. She came about halfway up the steps, again, apparently unwilling to ever come all the way inside the ship. "Hey, guys. Sorenson. Could I borrow the Lan for a minute? I've got something weird I'd like a second set of eyes on."

"Oh, sure. Feel free." It was going to be days before this was fixed anyway, so what was a quick break?

Carbon had been using the AR goggles again. She stuffed them into a pocket and slipped back around the Pilot's seat. "Of course, Linda. What's up?"

Oh, sure. She got to be on a first name basis and even got contractions worked into his wife's speech patterns. Alex bit his tongue, literally. He would not be getting mad over Carbon doing a good job with their cover. Maybe a little hurt. Just a little.

He was the only one Carbon called Pilot, at least.

Zheng finally stepped all the way into the shuttle, holding her tablet up so both of them could see. "So, I was looking at the scans on the engines, right? I'm running them both at the same time because I've got enough drones, and immediately I notice this has the Type 1 fuel mix chamber. They're visually different, it's a solid 5cm taller."

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Carbon nodded at her, just as lost as Alex looked. Neither of them fully understood what they were looking at. "And this is incorrect?"

"Yes, very. I was part of the team overseeing the retrofit of the last several hundred Falcatas to the J spec. They should not be here, particularly not on these. They're both H variants, which came from factory with the Type 2." Zheng was emphatic about this being... incorrect. The most intense Alex had seen her, not that they'd been working together very long.

Alex looked to Carbon, eyebrows raised. "I'm going to bow out here, this is past my pay grade."

"So these were downgraded? Is there any particular reason that might have chosen to do so?" Carbon was also grasping at straws, for the moment.

"They shouldn't have been able to, my team fully phased out the Type 1. I had heard all parts specific to it were retired from stores, the files for printers deprecated. The 2 was better in every metric. But here it is, with the wrong number of injectors." She flipped to a different page, this scan viewed from the front. "You can see there's an array of eight here, which is standard on the Type 2, but it should only have four. There's only four inlets. Somebody slapped the injector ring from the 2 onto it and mounted extra parts."

"Are they more injectors?" Carbon asked, a little cautious now that Zheng seemed to be jumping the gun here.

"Ah, no they appear to be power cells in a shell that makes them look like the injectors." Zheng shifted the view on the scan, four of the eight cylinders glowing. "I thought it was maybe some kind of power enhancement, but they're not wired to anything. They're just hidden in the engine."

"Any idea how big those are?" Alex wasn't that familiar with scanning small stuff. He was a big picture guy. Stars and planets.

Zheng turned the tablet back to herself, zooming in a few times and shifting through the scan types. "I think they're actually the same unit that powers the e-suits."

Alex did not look at Carbon, though he was alarmed enough to do so. He did not blurt out anything related to the extra items that had come through in the shipment the other day. He kept a nice, confused look on his face. "Huh."

"That actually sounds quite unsafe. We should see about removing them for now. Likely it would be best to store them in the secure cage. Would you show me the scan of the container they are hidden in?" Carbon asked as she handed Alex the AR headset she had been wearing and ushered Zheng back out of the Corvin.

Alex got the indication that he should continue working on the controls problem, while she went to deal with the mystery power cells.

So he did. The AR goggles were pretty neat, and he took it slow so as to not damage anything further. Alex had ripped most of the console apart before the goggles flagged a plug on the wiring harness that ran into the primary control conduit as being wrong. It was the right shape, but a centimeter too long. The gob of amber impact resin on the top of the bundle of wires was also flagged as potential damage.

It didn't look damaged, but he pulled the cable anyway. There were a few IC's hidden inside the resin, wires running into the plug. He labeled it and put it in the stack of parts, and made note of which one it was so it could be inspected later.

Just to cover his tracks, he pulled a few more cables, too. None of them looked strange, but at this point it was paranoia time, all the time, so he had no idea what 'enough' would be like in this situation.

Carbon looking a little more worried as she popped back into the Corvin for more tools was a pretty good place to stop, though. He followed her out, a bit curious as to how they were doing, anyway. The cowling was off one of the Falcata's, heat shielding stripped off and set aside, the grav cycle looking more like it was being operated on than being investigated. "So what's the verdict?"

"We are about to find out." Carbon used the spanner she had collected from the shuttle to unscrew one of the fake injectors, the top coming off after a few rotations and clattering onto the floor. She carefully pulled it free. "It is a perfectly normal looking power cell."

Zheng leaned over her, head tilted to the side. "Oh, a RGM-3. That's not the unit in our e-suits."

That was good, a little tension out of them moment.

Zheng then finished her statement. "That cell is used in sub-two ton powered armor and shipboard point defense weapons."

"That sounds dangerous." Alex exhaled slowly, watching Carbon move on to the next fake injector. "Maybe we should send them back through the portal, or put them in the lake."

"No, they're perfectly safe. If they were dangerous they wouldn't put them in suits." Linda Zheng did not get what he was talking about, and that was fine.

"Ok. Well." Before I say anything I'm not supposed to, "I'm going to go back to working on the controls. Pretty close to having the whole thing emptied out. Hate to think I'm gonna have to pull the primary conduit."

Alex mostly just sat in the back of the Hokule'a and drank a coffee from the little dispenser by the head. It needed calibration too, but it was close. Then he spent way too much time thinking about how much he was not enthused about any of this and how much he'd like to just cut his ties with this disaster and step away... But he knew Carbon wouldn't. She saw a way to save her people here. The other Tsla'o would still be here, as would all his fellow Humans who probably didn't have any idea what was going on in secret, either.

This culminated in him grabbing a pair of cutters and snipping the entire plug off the cable, resin encased chips included, and pocketing it. It was spiteful. Probably not stupid, given that he'd already unplugged the cable. He'd give it to Carbon tonight.

But now, it was lunch time. Almost. Sitting around and sulking about all this suspicious shit in his shuttle and hangar was not helping him. He needed to clear his mind for a minute, and what better way than food?

"I'm gonna hit the mess, do you two want me to bring anything back up?" He inquired as he pulled his jacket on, Carbon still working on the first engine.

"I don't know. I'll figure it out later. Thanks though." Zheng waved him off.

Easy enough. "Lan?"

"Could you see if there are any of the beef frankfurter meals left?" She extracted the fourth cell from the engine and dropped it into a parts tray with the rest of them, then looked at him over the top of the seat. "If they are not available, message me and I can order something from here."

"Uh, yeah, will do." He briefly wondered how she could do that, but probably had elevated credentials with the mess. More responsibility, less chance she'd order a meal and then just forget about it, or do something stupid like flood the queue.

The cold air and quiet helped almost immediately, too. Alex didn't want to stroll on down to the mess with the wind chill biting his face. He hustled, and walked into a mildly chaotic scene.

A couple of the marines were laughing. Crenshaw was red-faced and stammering out an apology that Alex only caught about half of. Very generic 'I didn't know!" sort of stuff.

They were all sitting at the same table as Sergeant Zenshen, who looked very amused at whatever had happened. "Oh no, my fuckin' heart is going to explode or something!" She said as she crammed two chocolate donuts into her mouth at the same time. "Somebody think of the children!"