Building A Better Tomorrow

Posted on Fri Sep 13th, 2019 @ 7:51am by Captain Benjamin Ingram Dr & The Narrator & Lieutenant Commander Mara Ricci

Mission: S1E4: Upon A Darkening Tide
Location: Landrsfell, Carpathia
Timeline: MD01 1045

The Cargo Crawler's dropped Melin and the Cardassian Lu'kat off at the edge of town, and then began the slow drive around to the far side of the Acheron. During the drop off Ingram and Coordinator Babbish had ended up in another Crawler, and had left Mara alone with the driver.

"So..." he said, as he carefully guided the large eight-wheel crawler around a dune, skirting the township and the crashed colony barge. "...you're not from around here are you?"

The driver turned and smiled warmly at Mara.

"Sorry, a terrible conversation starter," he said apologetically. He held out a hand to her, keeping one on the controls. "Alex. My name is Alex."

"Mara," replied the engineer with a good-natured roll of her eyes. "I always prefer what's your favorite root vegetable? Carrots, by the way," she added.

"Carrots...those are the red things that grow on vines right?" Alex asked with a smile as he returned his hands to the controls. "Didn't see many of those growing up on Pallendrom, too water-intensive. Now red snappers, those we had in abundance."

"Orange and in the ground," Mara corrected his description of carrots. "Really good with a sweet glaze or just some butter and salt. Red snappers are fish, right? I'm not too familiar with fish; I'm allergic," she added.

Alex let out a laugh, an honest and friendly sort of thing as he turned to look at her.

"Well...I've never heard a red snapper referred to as a fish. But it would go lovely with a sweet glaze and a little butter. I'm always told it has the texture of crab, but the taste of beef," he said by way of explanation. "It's a bug. About the size of a dinner plate, very easy to cultivate on a few greenhouse leavings, and very high in proteins and carbs. Excellent frontier food. I remember, as a kid on Pallendrom, at Landing Day festivals I'd get a Hopper Burger. Hot sauce, warm bun. Do you mean to tell me that Starfleet has yet to expand your pallet to the colonial fare?"

"I tried Gagh once," Mara replied. "Trying to show up a Klingon who was grossed out by cooked meat. It worked, but now I think his family has a blood fued against mine."

"Well, then I insist you try a Hopper Burger whilst you are here on Carpathia. The Acheron came down with a lot of supplies, some advanced some basic. Turns out growing bugs in a desert is pretty easy, and not as energy-intensive as a replicator," Alex noted. The cargo crawler wound slowly around another dune, and then dog-legged back towards the far side of the Acheron.

From this side the ship looked like it had been taken to the breaker's yard. Plastic tarps had been bolted over exposed deck's and hatches, but a lot of the port side hull had been tripped back until the meat of the starship could be seen. The partially exposed spherical containment vessel for the Acherons antimatter reactor could be seen being picked over by techs on grav harnesses and lines. Ahead of them a pair of Starfleet Arrow class Runabout's sat on their landing gear, themselves covered in awnings like tents with thick power cables snaking out from them and back to the ship.

"We're using the Runabouts as generators until the main reactor can be safely brought back online. From what I heard something cracked during the landing, caused the entire thing to scram before it had a chance to go critical," Alex mused as he moved the crawler into a parking spot next to the other one. He reached up and touched the scarf around his neck. "Want one? Winds can kick up the dust and sand easily enough?"

"Probably not a bad idea," admitted Mara. "When the locals offer something practical, I tend to accept."

"A Starfleet officer willing to take a suggestion that didn't come from their vaunted educations, pinch me I must be dreaming," Alex said with a chuckle. He reached into the storage bin behind the seat of the crawler and pulled out another scarf, this one made of bright orange parasail silk. He handed it to Mara. "Though, to be fair you are a lot more friendly than the Starfleet Border Patrols. How far have you been posted from your homeworld before this mission?"

"Gamma quadrant," replied Mara, accepting the scarf and attempting to wind it like his. She managed a close approximation, which made her quite proud. This is the result of engineering school and several years of continued education through employment, she thought with a grin. "I hesitated to take this assignment," she admitted, "but in the end, the chance of a new adventure won out. That and the unknown alien technology angle, of course."

"You mean those white bone marble things? Prior devices? Things like that?" Alex said thoughtfully. "Heard you Station folk had a run-in with one on the opposite side of the planet. Glad there are none near here."

“Yeah, he’s the reason I’ve got this prosthetic,” she said irritably, holding up her left arm. “But yes, devices never seen before. I have a lot of experience deciphering unknown tech. I couldn’t resist checking out some more.”

Tag if anything

The outside air rushed into the crawler cab like the breath of a angry dragon, sucking the moisture from the skin with an almost possessive bent. The other Crawler's were pulling up alongside, their drivers and crews getting out as a pair of large construction mech's lumbered forward. The bright yellow Catapillar P-9000 power lifter's trundled forward on four stocky legs, each ending in a wide weight-distributing pad. The two pilots of the mech's moved them from the ground, guiding them with careful and extremely graceful gestures of their hands.

One of the mech's made an odd waving gesture with its long load baring arm as Alex raised an arm, waving back to the operator. He shouted something in a language the UT didn't pick up on, a babble of words that sang of spice and alien uniqueness. The nearest mech controller responded, and began to lead the lumbering machine around to the back of the Crawlers to grab one of the CFI Replicators.

"Deni," Alex said, pointing to the mech pilot. "She's crew boss of the construction guild, think chief engineer of the settlement only without the fancy rank. Want me to introduce you to her?"

"Engineers never pass up the chance to confer with one another," Mara replied. "At least those of us who can admit we don't know everything, yet."

"Remember where you were when you said that," Alex chuckled. He led Mara around to the back of the crawler, where the bright yellow mech was beginning to line up its two manipulator arms on either side of the large industrial replicator. Deni, as Alex had called her, stood on the tail of the flatbed walking around and making gestures with her right arm. As she did so the right arm of the mech moved with exaggerated slowness, mimicking some but not all of the gestures as it's connecting arm mated seamlessly with the load bearing support on the replicator.

"Hey! Deni, got a second?" Alex shouted over the hum of the mech's fusion power plant. The woman held up her right hand, and tapped a plastic brace wrapped around her wrist and the first knuckles of her fingers. There was a hum as the mech powered down, warning strobes flickering on redundantly in the harsh morning sun light.

"Do I have a second?" Deni asked aloud, her Federation standard heavily accented with cardamom and turmeric. She was dressed in a faded violet jumpsuit, the fabric crisscrossed with gold thread work down in intricate weaves. A bindi of gold dotted her caramel coloured forehead, and she looked down at Alex and Mara with a scowl. "To speak to one of the fuck wits from Starfleet? Why I have all the time in the world to hold their hands and assure them that the air conditioning will be back online the moment I get the antimatter reactor back online. I have all the time in the fucking world to tell them that, of course in the meantime baking their pale spacer flesh a healthy brown with this overabundance of solar radiation."

"She speaks like a Klingon sailor, but underneath all of that she's a sweetie," Alex said as an aside to Mara.

Perhaps it was Deni’s blunt honesty that had Mara beaming at her as she approached. Perhaps it was the fact that Mara found her beauty in contrast with her words. Perhaps it was amusement and excitement at meeting another Engineer. Whatever it was, Mara liked her. “Mara Ricci,” she introduced herself. “You seem to have very good control,” she added with a nod to the mech. “I don’t think I’ve seen anybody handle one of those quite so deftly.”

"Fourteen years working assembly mechs at Calisto Shipyards in the Jupiter luna system. Miss step, mistake, and suddenly you're an exploding meat pinata. I'd challenge you to make a house of cards using Tiny here, but I know Starfleet teaches rules not finesse," Deni said, eyes narrowing. She looked over her shoulder and shouted something at another sand scarf clad worker. She unbuckled the control bracelets from her forearms and tossed them to the new person.

"Now, Deni play nice. Mara here is the Chief Engineer for Canopus Station," Alex said in a guarded tone.

“She’s not wrong,” Mara muttered with a grin. Finesse was something that could only be learned by doing. Therefore, nobody could teach finesse.

"So? Am I suppose to be impressed that Babbage isn't here trying to put his head up her ass because the Fleet leant us some rink-ee-dink Runabout's to power the colony?" Deni frowned as he jumped down on the truck bed to stand on the sand with them. "Speaking of, where is Babbage? I need to shout at that asshole about his plans for stripping superconductive cable out to the Acheron to begin wiring up the town."

"Making nice with the Station CO," Alex said, making a gesture with his hands. It was like he was rubbing the wrist of his other hand, but with a larger grip like he was rotating a thick band around it. Deni noted the gesture and smiled, bobbing a fist up and down.

If Mara saw the gestures, she did not comment on them. Instead, she opted to turn her attention to Deni. “I don’t think I’d take that house of cards challenge,” she said. “I’d need a month straight with that thing in order to even be halfway to half as good as you are with it- and that’s practicing every waking moment. Nah, I’ll leave that to you.”

"Good, I'd hate to have to clean Tiny's leg actuators of all of the bloody junk you'd leave in there," Deni retorted. "I apprenticed with the guild on Calisto for seven years and didn't get near a Mech rig until I was 25. I got my masters certification about the same time I signed up for the Acheron Colony. So I appreciate you knowing that you are not even in the same hemisphere as my skill level. Or even the skill level of my lowest mech jockey."

She walked to the back of the now empty cargo crawler, and gestured to the two other Mech's now moving the CFI replicators off the trucks and away towards the shadowed flank of the Acheron.

"My crew is the best on this world or even high orbit. We all chose to come out here to make a world we could be proud of, and the first thing we have to do is repair the damage your Starship did to us," she pointed to the Acheron. From this angle the rear of the bloc,y rectangular vessel could be seen, along with the blast damage from where the Travellers phaser canons had snipped off the barges stardrive section. "We were lucky the reactor was manned with people who knew what the fuck they were doing, scrammed it ten feet from the dune field so when the reactor containment bottle breached it was cold and not filled with fusion byproducts. Or else this would be a glass parking lot."

Deni turned on Mara,

"So you can go back to Landersfell, or Canopus Station, but there is no zoo here full of poor people who need your help. We all the help we'll ever need," she said with real fire in her eyes.

"I believe it," replied Mara solomnly. "However, as you say, it was our starship that did this. No matter that our people weren't in control of it at the time, that still makes us liable. Therefore, we're here to make it right as best we can. Even if I'm only qualified to work in sanitation down here, I intend to put in my fair share."

Deni spent a second looking at Mara as though she had mortally insulted her family going back several generations. She then spun on one booted heel and socked Alex in the shoulder.

“I don’t like her,” she growled and stormed off towards the lumbering form of Tiny and the other big mechs.

“Yeah...got that,” Alex said, rubbing his shoulder.

“But if she’s staying-!” Deni called over her shoulder, throwing a hand up in a dismissive gesture. “-the Green House team have trouble getting their mineral water pumps working! Put the Space Princess there if she wants to get her finger nails grubby.”

“You know...that went better than I expected,” Alex said once Deni was well out of ear shot. “I had even money she was going to use Tiny to chase you around.”

Mara shrugged. “I like her,” she said with a grin. “Anyway, the water pumps? Where would I find those?”

"Greenhouses are on the other side of the Acheron. We can go through the ship, it'll be quicker than going around," Alex said, rubbing his shoulder enough that the collar of his scarf came down, revealing the intricate ink work etched just below it.

"Ooo, nice tattoo," commented Mara. "Going through the ship would be more interesting, too. It's been awhile since I saw a non-starfleet ship."

Resettling the scarf, Alex smiled and gestured towards the opening flank of the Acheron.