Alex Dalton was not a happy camper. The day after the big clean-up project upstairs, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the newly refurbished Banshee fighter hangar surrounded by incomprehensible tech manuals, arcane tools, and half the disassembled innards of her new F-61 Banshee's quantum generator. The starfighter loomed above her, its lower maintenance hatch open and dangling wires and leaking hoses. She held what she had tentatively identified as a 'self-sealing stembolt' in one hand while half-heartedly flipping through a manual in the other trying to figure out where to put it.
"This bites!" she grumbled unhappily, throwing the stembolt into a box that was already overflowing with other bits of engine she had failed to identify and reassemble, and carelessly wiped her greasy hand on her uniform overalls. "I'm a fighter pilot, not some brainless mechanic, dammit!"
"Better not let any of the ground crew engineers hear you say that," advised a voice sagely from behind her. "Otherwise the next time you take your plane out you might have a mechanical 'accident'."
Alex turned to find Max Vasser standing over her, arms folded across her chest, a none-too-sympathetic expression on her face as she contemplated her charge. "Yes, ma'am," she said glumly and turned back to her tech manual. After a moment though, she screwed up her courage enough to turn around again and complain. "I just don't understand why I have to learn this stuff," she said, shaking the manual in her hand as evidence. "I mean, we have our ground crew and everybody to keep our fighters in top working order. That's their job. Our job is to fly the planes and kill the bad guys! I don't need to know this stuff!" she said in a huff, tossing the book to the deck. "This is just stupid...." But even as those words escaped her lips, she caught the look on Max's face and felt her resolve erode under that caustic stare.
"Tell me...," said Max, adopting her dreaded 'lecturing-the-dumb-rookie' voice. "The next time we're forced to make a hard landing on some deserted alien planetoid, who's gonna fix our planes? You planning on cramming your ground crew into your bomb bay? We're on our own a lot -- we have to be self-sufficient. Commander Carter is the boss, I'm the muscle, Beckett's the eyes and ears, Schmidt's the brains. Guess what that makes you." She intensified her stare, demanding an answer from her recalcitrant pupil.
"Grease monkey," sighed Alex in resignation. She stared with loathing at the box of mismatched stembolts. She knew she'd lost this argument. Worse, she knew Max was right. She was doomed to a life of menial labor.
Contrary to popular opinion, Max wasn't completely without compassion -- she just chose to display it only at strategically opportune times, and this seemed like one of those times to her. She stepped around the sulking Alex and reached down into the box, withdrawing the piece Alex had most recently consigned there. Bending over to peer into the fighter's open underbelly, she pulled aside some of the dangling wires and hoses and snapped the stembolt into place where it belonged.
Alex just sat staring for a moment, stunned, not willing to believe it had been so easy. She leaned closer, checking exactly what Max had done. She'd spent the better part of the last hour trying in vain to find where that stupid component went, and it turns out she had been trying to fit it in a totally wrong place. And upside-down.
Max straightened up and smiled. "There. That'll get you started," she said. Then, pointing to one of the myriad tech manuals lying beside Alex, she offered one last piece of advice "Use this one instead of the one you've got there," she suggested. "It'll be a lot easier." With that, she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Alex alone again to contemplate her new role in the group.
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