Come Fly With Me

Posted on Sat Dec 24th, 2011 @ 9:51pm by Lieutenant Colonel Damian Highsmith & Petty Officer First Class Tanner Willeg

3,949 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Mission 78 - Colonial Uprising
Location: Shuttle Bay Sixteen/Outlying Space
Timeline: 2100 Hours

ON:

Damian has been working late and had just finished some rather tedious paperwork when something dawned on him: he needed to finish some more flight hours in order to upgrade to a senior level pilot. He rose from his chair and proceeded to lock his office. He opened a flight schedule on the PADD that he had handy and noticed that the only shuttlebay that wasn't being used was on Deck 150. Activating a site to site transport, Damian rematerialized in the shuttle bay. Looking around, he saw several of the training shuttles, one of which was making an odd sound almost like it was attempting to start up- and failing. He walked over to the shuttle as it came to rest again and rapped upon it with his fist.

For the life of her, she couldn't figure out what was wrong. She'd read the entire flight manual for this shuttle from start to finish... with the exception of that whole section on basic safety precautions. What would the proper safety precautions for a shuttle be, anyhow? Do not intentionally crash? Tanner was pretty sure she already knew that much. What she didn't know...was how to make the damn thing fly. Glaring down at the awful machine that refused to work, Tanner narrowed her eyes, and scooted out of her chair onto the floor.

Obviously, if she was doing everything exactly as the manual said, and the machine was working properly, then it should work. And she had done just as the manual said, but still... it made that hideous clacking noise. That was not a normal noise for a shuttle to make. There had to be something wrong with the starting system. Had to be. There was no other explanation for...

The sound of knuckles cracking on the shuttle's hull had Tanner's head cracking against the console. "Son-of-a... head of a horse's... rat-bastard..." Rubbing the back of her head, Tanner pushed the button that would open the shuttle's door. "Whoever you are, you'll have to go away. This shuttle's broken," she shouted.

Damian quickly climbed aboard and chuckled slightly. He noticed Tanner on the deck of the shuttle trying to fix what she thought was wrong Damian moved to the engine controls and tapped in quick strokes to shut them down before they overheated and potentially singed the deck. Kneeling down, he looked and saw that Tanner was now peering into the innards of the console, trying to figure out what was causing the malfunction.

"You know the engine core revolution frequency was a little high and the inertial dampeners weren't disengaged, hence the clacking." Damian said nonchalantly as he looked at the displays again.

"Do you follow me around and wait until I crawl onto the floor or something? You never appear when I'm standing... in a perfectly respectable position like a normal person." Tanner frowned up at the man. "And there was absolutely nothing wrong with the revolution frequency. This engine can handle it. It would've been fine." So she'd completely forgotten about the inertial dampeners. Staring at the console in an attempt to see whatever it was that Damian seemed able to read with such ease, Tanner crossed her arms. Who needed inertial dampeners anyhow? Maybe she'd just take them out of the ship. And if momentum sucked the brain out the back of her skull... well... okay, so maybe inertial dampeners were kind of important. Stupid training shuttle.

Damian chuckled again "Where would the fun be in that?" he sat in the instructor's seat and pointed to the readouts that showed the core revolutions including the temperature readout, which had turned from a dark red to a royal blue, which denoted that the engines were cooling. He put his hand on Tanner's shoulder. "You have to remember that this is a training shuttle, it is the absolute bottom line. It can't take much abuse, especially when it comes to it's engines-" he stopped as he anticipated Tanner's response. "-and no, you can't modify them." he said in a tone that suggested finality.

Tanner's head tilted. Sharp response, emphasized negative, and a pitch that'd dropped a couple notches below his normal register. The familiar sound of "Colonel Highsmith" when he was not to be argued with. Tanner took it as the sound of a challenge being made. "I'm perfectly capable of modifying them. You gonna stop me?" Modifying, yes. Flying... a work in progress. A very slow-going work in progress that would be much quicker with an instructor rather than an instruction manual, and since she had less than twenty-four hours to learn how to fly a shuttle... Tanner settled into the chair and sighed.

Damian leaned over and kissed Tanner gently on her cheek and then proceeded to explain the controls. "First, you need to check out your engine console. You've got your master power, throttle, heading and rudder control, and autopilot. You also have your altimeter for atmospheric flight and your pitch and yaw indicators. Now you can also switch to Hands On Throttle and Stick or HOTAS interface if you want to get old fashioned and feel the shuttle. Any questions?" Damian asked.

Listening carefully, Tanner tried to remember if she recognized any of these things from the instruction manual. She wondered if she ought to be taking notes. Power, throttle, heading, autopilot....self-explanatory. Atmospheric flight. Was there flight that wasn't atmospheric? Either you were in the atmosphere or a planet or the atmosphere of space, but there was always an atmosphere of some kind.

"This altimeter..." Tanner tapped on it to make sure she still remembered which one it was. "In words that make sense. This is going to tell me..." Thinking she might've actually figured it out, she squinted at the gauge, "if, let's say, I need to abandon ship... whether I can just pop the hatch and jump or if I need an EVA suit?"

Damian nodded "Pretty much but remember, anything above 10,000 feet you'll need to grab an EVA rig." He motioned to the other areas on the console. "These will control your maneuvering thrusters and running lights will be over in your lower left corner. This button will switch to manual and HOTAS interface depending on which way you slide the indicator." Damian finished and slid the area on the console and toggled the HOTAS stick.

Considering she was a person who spent a great deal of time in, around and under machinery, one might think that she'd be able to pick up the operations of what appeared to be an over-sized video-game with ease. Not so. Tanner pointed at what Damian continued to refer to as the HOTAS. "Hands on... throttle and stick." Thinking it through, as though the name had clues hidden within it, Tanner frowned. "Tell me what I want to hear. Tell me it's like a straight drive, and it's used to shift the power systems." Staring at the stick, as though hoping could somehow make it true, Tanner glanced up at Damian, "that's not what you're gonna tell me, is it? You're going to tell me you use that thing to steer. And...that I can't replace it with a wheel."

Damian nodded "Exactly. Now your environmental controls are over to your right. Those control everything from cabin temperature to firefighting measures. You can also depressurize the cabin if you need to but those aren't important." he said as he turned back to the flight controls. "You ready to fly?"he asked her playfully.

Did people actually manage to pay attention to all of those gauges at once and still have enough left to watch what they were heading toward? It didn't seem possible. There had to be a trick. Something to tell you what the gauges were telling you without actually looking at the gauges. Tanner jumped, "did you just say firefighting measures aren't important?" Suddenly, Tanner began rethinking that decision to skip the safety precautions section.

But then... She wasn't about to chicken out. Sucking in a breath, gritting her teeth, Tanner nodded seriously as she reminded herself that it'd be fine. She didn't need some flimsy gauge to tell her there was a fire... and she could put a fire out on her own. "Ready."

Damian smiled "Good" he leaned over and kissed Tanner again "You'll be fine. Now I'll show you how to leave the docking bay. Tapping the communications button, he opened a channel to the the Starbase Flight Control.

"Starbase Control, this is Training Shuttle Marine Two requesting permission to depart."

The starbase responded "Marine Two, there's no flight plan on file for you. Do not depart. "

"Starbase Control, authorization code Highsmith -Alpha- Echo-Zero."

=Marine Two this is Starbase Control, you are cleared to depart. Safe travels.= The channel closed. Damian set the heading and then strapped in, his hands off of the HOTAS control.

"It's your ship, take us out." Damian said, sitting back in the instructor's chair.

"My ship is a lovely place, where the nice people in operations worry about things like the environment and temperature, and the only time I have to deal with a fire is if someone spills coffee on a plasma conduit." Nonetheless, Tanner grabbed hold of the controls. The shuttle took a nose-dive, Tanner closed her eyes, pulled up... While it wasn't the best way to find out that the controls of a shuttle were counter-intuitive, it was perhaps the quickest way. Pull up...go down.

Readjusting both her mindset and the shuttle, Tanner managed to end up somewhere above where she'd started. "You don't have to tell me, damnit" she snapped out, despite Damian's calm demeanor. He was sitting beside her acting as though nothing in the world were wrong. It was pissing her off. Once she got the shuttle level, Tanner made a huffing sound. "Well?" Raising a brow, but refusing to take her gaze off the dozens of gauges in front of her, Tanner kicked Damian's chair. "Besides over-adjusting, what did I do wrong?"

"Well, it seems like you self inverted the controls. HOTAS is simple, you pull up and the shuttle goes up. You push down and we're going to dive. Other than that, you're doing fine." Damian said with mock shock in his tone. "Now set a heading 090 degrees at full impulse for 2000 kilometers. Then we'll test some advanced maneuvers."

090? Tanner stared out the viewer for several long moments. She could make it make sense. The numbers were just there because somebody made them up, and they did it the way they did so that it'd make sense. So it couldn't be that hard to figure out, right? It was a direction-- so it was somehow spherical. You had forward, back, right left, up, down and all angles in between. So if 090 were an angular degree, it'd be a quarter of a revolution, which would be...

It could be a quarter revolution in any direction. Taking a deep breath, Tanner sat still as she tried to figure out the riddle. What else had revolutions and angles? A combustion engine's running speed was measured in revolutions per time. But the revolutions began at the top... Stand to the left or right, turn the engine on it's side and the top of the engine was still the top of the engine, even if the top appeared to be the bottom. So what was the standard 'top' of space?

Touching the controls, a star chart appeared, and Tanner pointed, "lookit!" It was exciting to know that there were pieces she already knew, and where there were pieces, they could be made to fit together. "Okay..." Staring at the screen in disbelief, the flight-challenged betazoid looked up. "You don't have to know which way 090 is, you just push the key for it?"

Mouth agape, Tanner grumbled, "what happens if this isn't working, the wiring gets fried and the screen blows up? What happens if you have a real pilot instead of an engineer, and you can't fix it? Are you telling me that the people who fly these things don't actually know which direction is which? They just push a key and the computer tells them which way to go?" Glancing from the screen to Damian and back again, Tanner's brows furrowed as she continued to mull over the massive problems she saw in this way of doing things. "What would happen if... instead of actually learning the properties of engine systems, I just took something in need of repair, punched all the problems into a computer program and let it tell me what was wrong? You can't do that! It's just... It's... It's..." It'd be much easier to come up with whatever word was stuck in her head, if she could just move. But she couldn't get up and walk around, pace back and forth, and she was afraid to take her hands off the damn controls, so she couldn't even move her hands around unless she wanted the entire ship to go along for the ride. "Tell me how to find the answer without just asking the computer. If I'm going to..." Pausing as she finally came up with the answer that'd been sticking at her, Tanner interrupted herself. "Lazy! It's lazy." Nodding toward the controls, Tanner sighed, "so how do you know which way is which?"

Damian laughed "You're lucky that I'm both. Now, remember your basic geometry with angles and such? Just apply that to the direction that you're heading in, like port or starboard. For example, One-Eight-Zero degrees in any direction would be the complete opposite direction. Zero-Nine-Zero is a directly to the right or left. Now try setting a course, Zero-Nine-Zero degrees starboard with engine revolutions of One-Eight-Zero." Damian explained.

"That's it?" The answer seemed far too easy, and altogether too subjective. "First... Why don't they just say 'turn ninety degrees'? And Second, how does anyone find anything that way? What if you're going the other direction and the third star on the left according to... whoever, is actually the seventh star on the right from where you're at?"

Pausing to set the course and speed, the shuttle took off. Tanner seemed to hardly pay attention to her own actions as she continued rambling, "There should be a set standard for these things. I'm going to send a message to whoever's in charge of it. Is there a chief of..."

The shuttle stopped after 2000 kilometers, and Tanner jumped before remembering there wasn't anything wrong and the shuttle was only doing as it'd been programmed to do. "A chief of cartography? Is that who's in charge of those things?"

Glancing over at Damian, Tanner got the distinct impression that the Colonel was laughing at her.

As Tanner looked over, Damian was indeed chuckling. He moved to cover his mouth but it was too late and she noticed.

"He's got the rulebook shoved up his ass and no sense of humor." The statement crept into he mind unbidden, though she could no longer remember who had uttered the words or why

'I wonder if she realizes that I'm only trying to help.' Damian thought as he looked over at the console to make sure that all of the readings were in the green.

Black eyes blinked, as Tanner studied Damian for a moment, then, without explanation of where the change of topic came from, stated simply, "you have a lovely sense of humor."

Damian smiled, showing his teeth "I know." he said with a hint of smugness in his tone. He leaned back in his chair and watched.

"You do realize that-" he stopped and pointed at the star that Tanner referenced and saw the Heads Up Display flash. "you can set courses visually as well. It's not that hard." Damian tapped another star and tapped a green prompt which plotted the optimal course to both stars, which happened to be an ellipse. He stuck his tongue out slightly at Tanner. He had to admit that she was developing into quite the pilot, she just needed to stop resisting and asking why and start to get acquainted with the ship she was flying. Another question popped into Damian's head: Why the hell was Tanner so interested in flying all of a sudden? From what Damian gathered, she hated anything that didn't have to do with fixing something. So he made the foolish choice of asking.

"Now, why might I ask are you so interested in learning to fly? I thought you hated it." he inquired gingerly as he leaned over the controls again.

Even now, sitting behind the controls, Tanner couldn't see the allure. You got on a shuttle or ship and went from one place to another, whether you were the pilot or not. And when you reached your destination, you'd accomplished nothing more than having gotten where you're going. Depending on the distance, you could do the same thing by walking, yet nobody seemed to be thrilled and enamored with walking around all the time. It seemed to her that there was no result. When you'd finished flying, there was nothing to point at and say, 'I did that. I made that. I made that move, made it turn, made it work when before it was useless and broken. I built that.' There was nothing progressive in flying, nothing about it that improved the world. It was simply a way of getting from one place to the next.

"I wouldn't say I hate it. More like... I don't understand it. I'm learning, because..." What could she say? She couldn't tell him she'd offered to be a co-pilot despite knowing nothing about being one. "Well... I wanted to learn something new."

Damian couldn't sense anything off with Tanner's statement, as odd as it sounded because, as everyone knew, there was nothing wrong with wanting to learn a new skill. He adjusted their course to account for the spatial drift. After a few moments of silence, the shuttle came to a stop. This was uncomfortable to say the least- Damian was not one to simply let silence pass, he had to fill it, whether it was with words or with actions and his rudimentary flight lessons obviously weren't going to cut it. He put his hands in his lap and locked his eyes forward.

There was Damian: the guy who once laughed over being mistaken for a science officer; he drank clear liquor watered down with ice, but didn't normally drink; he told Tanner often that she worked to much; he hated crowds, but loved good conversation.

And there was "The Marine": the guy who spoke in clipped tones or not at all; he stared in silence until the scrutinized person broke down; he didn't believe there was such a thing as working too hard; he was relentless and unforgiving.

Though Tanner knew it bothered Damian to be called "The Marine," there were times, such as this one that she couldn't help but think of him that way. As he was, eyes forward, hands folded, Tanner couldn't help but wonder that anyone could sit, even lean back in a chair, yet appear to be at attention. Just seeing someone so still was enough to make the betazoid itch.

Sitting as they were, Tanner decided it'd be safe to release the controls. Leaning back, she placed her hands in her own lap, picked a spot on the top of the shuttle and stared at it.

After twelve seconds of unbroken stillness, Tanner pushed to the edge of her seat, turned toward Damian, leaned forward and placed a hand on either side of him. "If this is some lesson about patience... or communing with the shuttle or something..." she shrugged, as if to say, 'that's not gonna happen.'

Standing, Tanner stepped aside and waved a hand toward the chair she'd vacated, "have a seat."

Damian immediately sat in the pilot's seat and strapped in. He tapped his fingers lightly against the HOTAS stick. As an idea popped into his head, he opened the computer interface.

"Computer, switch to tactile interface for advanced maneuvers and locate audio file Sinatra 2-1." Damian said, smiling. He and Tanner both had a soft spot for Frank Sinatra, even though he was hundreds of years old. A moment later, the song "Come Fly With Me" started to play over the audio system. Damian looked over to Tanner and smiled deviously "You may want to strap in, this could get complicated fast."

Tanner raised a brow. Strapping in wasn't exactly what she'd had in mind. Taking Damian's hand, so his arm no longer barred her way, she turned and sat in his lap. She shifted, scooting forward in the seat, and settled between his legs in order to let him see over her head. Placing her hands over his on the controls, Tanner tilted her head back until she felt her forehead brush under his chin, "let's go."

Damian's smile grew wider as Tanner sat in his lap. He moved slightly to become comfortable in the seat and tightened his grip on the stick as he felt Tanner's hand slip over his. Damian pulled the stick upward and slowly pressed the throttle dial upward with his thumb. This caused the shuttle to fly upward at an angle of about 65 degrees, Damian put his hand around Tanner's waist and held her tightly as he did a barrel roll and sent the shuttle upward again to execute an Immelman turn. For a moment, they were flying upside down, Damian executed another roll so that they were no longer inverted, causing them both to experience a moment of weightlessness, Damian felt himself rise from the chair for a moment before he landed again, his arm holding Tanner's waist more tightly than before.

As the shuttle shifted, Tanner instinctively tucked her legs under the edge of the chair and leaned back. Feeling Damian pull her in, she decided flying might not be entirely pointless after all. "Which one of those gauges tells you exactly how far it is to Acapulco Bay?'

Damian pointed to the course progress gauge which showed their estimated time of arrival to a specific destination and current coordinates. He tapped the Heads Up Display and readied it for voice input.

"Calculate Course for Acapulco Bay, Sol Sector." Damian ordered, a few seconds later, the computer had calculated three courses to the center point of the city. He then pointed the map in the other side of the viewport.

"And that one points to Acapulco Bay with room for pit stops." he said, smiling. He kissed the top of Tanner's head gently turned them around to head back to the starbase.

---------------------------------------------------

"I think I get it. The thrill of speed and being in control of a machine that could kill you or something." Jumping down from the training shuttle, Tanner still thought you could feel the speed more effectively in an argo or a skimmer. As for control, there wasn't much, if anything, that could compare with holding an engine in your hands. Still, she didn't have to prefer it in order to do it.

Damian thought that she had nailed it on the head. "It's more fun when you get the hang of it. It just takes time." he said with a shrug. He put his hand around Tanner's waist "Now, did you want to head back to your place or mine?" he asked, a devious note creeping into his voice.

"Enlisted." When the comment was met only with a blank stare, Tanner rolled her eyes. "NCO's get the wonderfully diversified experience of shared quarters, Colonel." Raising a brow, she added, "which translates to yours."

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