Italicized
Posted on 19 Sep 2021 @ 7:40am by Lieutenant Commander Lance Quinn (*) & Commander Calliope Zahn
Mission:
M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Obsidian Command - Lower Habitat Ring
Timeline: MD10 Evening
2429 words - 4.9 OF Standard Post Measure
Despite a few minor setbacks around availability of time and resources, the QND project was coming along at...a pace. Maybe not quite fast enough for Lance, but certainly given the time and effort he had already expended, it was moving forward. He could have added a few more staff to assist, but he felt as though Commander Zayne wouldn't approve of it. Not that Lance couldn't have adjusted the engineering roster had he needed to. But no - this needed to remain a little less public for the moment.
The former runabout didn't really look much like a runabout anymore. Since the visit of Lt Elli-Navine it had become essentially a duranium-alloy frame, housing nothing except for roughly a third of the prototype engine and a containment pod. The state of the floor hadn't changed all that much though; pieces still littered the place, half-discarded and forgotten.
In a moment of quiet contemplation, as he had been mentally making calculations and permutations, he had stopped by the piece of hull plating that remained on her flank. The name Calliope proudly emblazoned there, the only indication of her name. He let his fingers rest on the cold metal, deep in thought.
"Lance? Are... are you there?"
Calliope stood in the entry, looking into the shuttle bay from the hall. For over a week she had waited for him to finish work and maybe catch him for dinner before she was bound to check back into her room in the medical ward. But he never showed. The first couple of times she guessed he'd maybe been held up with something important. She knew first hand how wrecked the Station had been, and being operational wasn't going to negate all of the maintenance that it needed updated on.
As time wore on, she'd felt guilty about the day she'd been on her own adventure with Kensforth without telling Lance ahead. So when he didn't show up the entire rest of the week, Calliope didn't ask the computer where he was right away. Maybe he was angry with her, she imagined. She'd grown nervous and guilty. To busy herself in those lonely evenings over her dinner, she started focusing on a new project, something she thought might help them. When her project began to take shape, she finally did ask the computer where he'd been. Curiously, every single one of Lance's evenings had been spent in this bay.
Calliope clutched a stack of colorful paper leaflets to her heart and took one step inside. Everywhere there were stripped down parts, materials and gear. It was far more than an average shuttle refit. Every other shuttle had been cleared from the small bay. There was only the one shuttle, which stood as a frame, the skeleton backlit by intense work lamps on the other side. Calliope circumnavigated the deconstruction carefully, here and there relying on her cane. Though she was doing her best of late to only use it as temporary relief, in this chaotic maze that looked to her like an exploded diagram had landed on the floor, she was being a little more cautious in her navigation.
"Lance?" She quested again. Again, there was no answer but as she rounded the nose of the craft, there he was, alone, standing beside the ship, one hand against the hull, and looking to be a million light years away in his mind. She stood and waited, afraid he was purposely ignoring her.
"Oh!" he realised with a start that he wasn't alone. He whirled in surprise when he recognised the voice, too. "Calliope...you're..." he glanced at the shuttle almost guiltily, subconsciously using his body to shield his work in progress from her eyes. "I wasn't expecting to see you here." It was better than saying 'this is a private project space' at the very least. He was afraid to let that slip; to admit that he was enjoying having his own quiet world where he could focus all of his time and energy into something he could actually fix.
"Maybe I should have called." She'd intended to surprise him with her plans but now tucked the brochures inside of her jacket. She was the surprised one. The shuttle was strange. Clearly it was the chassis of an Arrow class. She bit her lip thinking of the one she and Kensforth had totaled only a few days ago. In this one, several main systems were completely disconnected and something quite alien to her was taking shape in the open guts of the vessel. She squinted curiously, uncertain why Lance seemed to shield the thing, impossible though it was to hide an entire shuttle behind one's back.
Calliope moved forward, awkwardly picking her way between beam work lying on the deck, then examined the nearest open side.
"The plasma conduits... are they different? Narrower maybe?" She tapped on one of the conduits. "Is that an ultra high density magnetic conduit casing? I've never seen that used in space craft before. Just lab applications."
"It's..." he wanted to wince as she touched various things. "It's experimental. Very early prototyping. Complex."
Calliope looked down to her own toes for a moment before finding Lance's eyes and trying on a smile that came out sadder than she intended. "You've been busy in here," she said softly, carefully. She didn't want him to feel as if she were accusing him of being absent. But as soon as she said it she was afraid he might interpret it that way. "It's alright. I understand. I haven't made things pleasant. Look... I've been working on something too."
Busy was right. He'd spent many waking hours in this room. Thankfully the environmental controls had been tweaked to reduce the smell. He opened his mouth to chastise her for working when she was supposed to be in recovery, but paused. Was that the right social convention in this situation? Perhaps he was supposed to take interest in her project. Clearly that would require him to divert his attention and thought away from the shuttle...
Pivoting on the foot of the cane, Calliope looked for an open workspace. "I just need a little table, or a big crate or something..." There was a display where Lance had various plans and pads laid out and she angled towards it, the Shuttle behind her now. "If you don't mind me borrowing this for a moment?"
"That's-" again he cringed and let his shoulders drop a little. "Fine. Let me..." he almost forced his way in to ensure that his system wasn't too badly affected. He was trying not to let his frustration show - badly - but had managed to bite his tongue so far. Semi-impatiently he watched to see what she was wanting to share.
Calliope shifted uncomfortably with a sense she was imposing or unwanted just as she'd feared. "I was thinking, even if everything had gone to plan, and the power came up without any hitches or attack parties, and I never had any complications... I mean, under even the best of conditions, maybe..." She didn't know how to say what she wanted to say and struggled for a moment. "Maybe we wouldn't have been quite able to make these changes anyway. I mean, it's been fifteen years and we've always done life together in bursts. We've practically had our own entirely separate lives. Maybe it was expecting too much to upset that pattern."
"Perhaps." His eyebrow raised, questioning where this line of conversation was going. Perhaps she wanted more distance between them again? "Do you have a solution to your hypothesis?"
Reaching back into her jacket, she pulled the brochures out. Using the computer and a replicator program, she'd made them up herself just as she'd always made travel brochures for their trips. She'd always generated more places and points of interest than they could possibly see in a couple of weeks, but then they would pick between them, or one place would lead to some other adventure or idea beyond the agenda. But she always began with brochures. The ones they went to would eventually end up in her scrap books.
Calliope started laying them out on the worktable. Each one was for something on the Promenade, or a natural wonder in the Loki system, or a point of interest in Kalara or one of the Oasis towns, or a guided tour. After she'd filled the table she extended him the rest of the stack in her hand.
"Let's do things the way we're used to a while. Let's go on a trip," she said. "A trip to Obsidian Command."
He was curious, and uncertain. He couldn't help but run his fingers along the unfinished hull of his prototype. Leaving it for even a few days felt...uncomfortable. It wasn't finished. It was still broken, and he needed to fix it. Fix it - like he needed to fix Calliope.
Calliope interpreted his expression as hesitance and pressed her pitch a little further. "I'll still have appointments and I know you'll only be able to beg off so many hours of work, and you obviously have something going on here—" She gestured around the bay in general. "But maybe just weekends and a couple half days, and a mid day break here and there. We can try lots of things, get to know the place like it's a destination. I mean. It is a destination, really."
As Lance shuffled through the leaflets quietly, Calliope couldn't help but continue talking. She'd felt so badly the need to talk to him that now that she was started, it sort of poured out of her. "Every time we traveled, I would think about how the world we were visiting was home to someone else. To them it was nothing new. It blew my mind sometimes, meeting people so comfortable with their home world that they'd never even traveled it. Some barely even had left a few miles outside of their birth town. they lived in these fantastic places, but took it for granted. To them, it was just home." She picked at the corner of an advertisement for a guided tour of Obsidian's caverns. "For a long time I didn't really feel like I had a home. Just my assignments, my quarters, my crewmates. That was the closest thing, but still.. not a home. I spent a lot of time always looking forward to our next rendezvous. Spotting you at whatever spaceport connection we'd arranged? That was always coming home to me."
Her impassioned speech probably would have touched most hearts. Lance, however, was a little less easily melted. He was a man of logic and practical science rather than simple platitudes. And yet... He finally allowed himself to lock eyes with her. Calliope Zahn. The only woman who ever managed to penetrate his peculiar outer shell and reach the icy cold center. "Do you...feel able to travel?" he asked softly.
Calliope brightened as Lance seemed to be warming to the idea. "I think I can give day trips a try. And if I'm having a difficult time on any particular day, we can stick to visiting something new right here on the station."
"I am sure I can schedule a day away from the station. Combine it with a run for supplies." He felt a little guilty that in his mind he was still thinking about the project beside him, when the one in front of him was just as important. No - more important. "Or just take the entire weekend."
"I'd love that." She wanted to close the last space between them and hug him, but she also was afraid to over do it, right then. Instead she began to recollect the leaflets, stacking them neatly again. "I'll leave these with you. To pick what's most interesting to you." He knew the drill. They would both rate what was most interesting from the lists and then begin with attractions they both had chosen, to be followed up by attractions that topped the list for either one of them, stretching both of their interests for one another's sake. She tapped them together, finally, making the edges and corners all aligned again. As she did, a familiar word caught her eye on one of the display padds Lance had reordered to make room for her presentation. Her own name. Only in italics. Her head cocked and she looked back over her shoulder, directly at the hull plating of the shuttle. There was her own name in two foot tall letters.
Lance had his back turned, shuffling the leaflets into a haphazard pile near the rest of his work. It felt strange leaving them there, considering whether he would actually get to looking at them or whether the rest of it would consume his mind instead. When he turned back, he followed her gaze and fell sheepishly silent, waiting to see what her reaction would be.
The lettering was old and appeared scuffed and altered. He couldn't have named it after her. It had to be some silly coincidence. Not wanting to seem self centered by reacting, and worse yet being wrong, she committed the registry to memory instead. It could be looked up later. "Huh." She mused after a lengthy pause. Any personal project of Lance's had to be centered around experimental propulsion. "She's meant to break some records, isn't she?"
He hesitated again. Calliope was not meant to find out about Calliope yet. It was like being caught with your mistress, in a strange sort of way. "Not yet," he said softly. "She needs...to be fixed, first."
She wasn't sure how she felt exactly, some how both honored and jealous at once. But it was something he needed right now. At least.... Maybe Lance wasn't done with his passion and there would be new wall cases full of recognitions. As long as she stayed out of his way. "I'll leave you to it, then," she said quietly. Calliope resumed carefully picking her way around the parts back the way she had come.
She needs to be fixed, he repeated silently as Calliope left. He watched her go and then turned back to his workspace. On one side, the pile of pamphlets she had left him. The other, his scattered schematics and designs. With a sigh, he picked up a plasma recoupler, knowing that he still had a lot of work to do if the Calliope was going to fly again.