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Shuttle One

"Trip..." Archer tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. When the engineer said he was going to check the weapons, he hadn't said he was going to physically inspect every last piece of plumbing in the shuttle!

"Almost there, Jon..." Trip's voice came out of the floor panel half his torso was sunk into. "Hoshi, d'you mind showing the light in that direction? Yeah... there!"

There followed a groan, a series of muffled half-curses, and finally a triumphant, "There! I've got it!" before the top half of the Engineer emerged from the open trap.

Trip wiped his forehead with his sleeve, spreading another streak of sludge spread across the shiny fabric. He looked down and chuckled at the state of his dress uniform. Hopefully they'd had time to change before the ceremonies. "Yes, Captain?" he looked at Archer.

"How much longer?" Archer barely kept the irritation out of his voice.

"That was the last one. Now we can proceed with the tests," Trip answered, accepting the wrench-like tool Hoshi silently proferred back to him.

"Tests?! What tests?" Archer snapped back, "Haven't we spent enough time already?!"

"We need to test," Trip said firmly. "I have to make sure there are no gaps in the duodecaido -

"We don't have time for this, Trip," Archer growled.

Trip glanced at the chron... it'd be days of digging inside the weaponry circuits already. With his luck, the festivities would be over before they got out. This was not how he wanted to spend his time planetside. That got him annoyed.

"What d'you have me do? I'm doing the best I can here!" he protested, "We need to make sure we don't have a fault in one of the outside lines and I have no real diagnostic tools except for this!" he waved the tool in his hand, raising his voice, "And we only have one! While Eeyao's trying to digest us every few hours! Perhaps it's him you should talk to!"

"How about you skip the testing, that's what!" Archer was getting annoyed as well, "Stop acting as if we have all the time in the world!"

"Skip the testing?!" Trip nearly sputtered with outrage, "Why not open the hatch and let Eeyao get a bellyful while you're at it?! At least we won't be stuck inside this tin can any longer!"

"It's not a tin can!" Archer shouted. Nobody called a shuttle a tin can, other than landlubbers without any appreciation for the beauty of flying crafts.

Hoshi rolled her eyes inside her head. Bad enough she was stuck here with the two of them and no showering facility, now they had to go at it like a couple of rutting bucks. "Gentlemen!" she said forcefully, in a voice high enough to stop them.

That did the trick. They stopped, looking at her. Hoshi used the opening, "We do have time to spare, Trip's right," she turned to him, "but, Trip, we're almost out of regular emergency rations. All the rest are vegan."

"What?!" Archer whirled on her.

Hoshi shrugged, "Don't ask me why, I just checked the rest of the supplies, it's mostly vegan."

Archer turned on Trip, eyes narrowed, "Your wife!" he exclaimed.

"Hey!" Trip protested, "I had no role in this! You're the one who asked her to oversee emergency supplying!"

Archer couldn't deny that. He turned back to Hoshi, "Are you sure? Did you check everywhere?"

Hoshi nodded. "I'm sure. I was hoping for something along the lines of sushi myself... I took a deep dive to the bottom of the storage. We have a couple of days of meat protein. And then it's all vegan."

Archer looked at Trip, "How extensive do the tests need to be?" His voice was no longer belligerent.

The engineer was rolling his tongue in his mouth, thinking. "Well, everything looks whole," he finally said, his voice normal, "once the order hits the distribution server... there's only a couple of nodes..."

"What are we going to use to run the tests?" Hoshi interrupted? "What if that thing doesn't like it at all?" She addressed the Captain, "We have no idea how big it is or what it's capable of."

"We're counting on it not liking it, Hoshi," Archer pointed out.

Trip had a faraway look, "Hoshi's right, if we don't hit the target we could get Eeyao really mad... All I can do is serial node-to-node testing with some redundancy. But we'll be sacrificing accuracy..."

Archer sighed, "How bad?"

"Broad side of a barn," Trip replied.

Archer looked over his shoulder through the shuttle window at the distant grinding plates. "Just means we'll have to get close enough-," he started.

"- but not so close we could get caught in the explosion," Trip finished for him.

Archer nodded in return, "Do what you have to do... We need to hit the target."

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