El covered a small yawn with the back of her hand as she walked into engineering. Inhaling the machine oils made her feel more like home and, for a moment, rejuvenated her. She could see three engineers. One was nearly swallowed up from the secondary life support unit. Tools were laid out to one side, a panel to the other. She didn’t know who that was. Facing away from her was a trim man with shaggy blonde hair. Dorian. For whatever reason she just wanted to ruffle his hair. It was so .. ruffle-able. He was watching some gauges. Over by the Cochrane was Rosa-Maria, who, at that time broke the relative silence, by calling out, “Dorian, output levels since entering this space have been off by 1.105%. It ranged from 2.118% at its peak but settled back to current 1.105.”

Dorian ran his hand through his hair. “Confirmed. My guess is the coil may be just out of alignment and needs a reconfig.” Rosa-Maria gave a noncommittal grunt in reply.

“Hey,” El said, breaking any further comments.

Dorian turned. “Well if it isn’t our happy wanderer. Chief is doing okay?” El suppressed a frown. What about me? she thought. “Not heard but the away team has found something big down there. Some big machine that might be causing this. That’s as much as I was able to eavesdrop. But be ready in case the chief needs you to beam down a spanner to throw into the works there.”

She paused. “Look, I can help with the coil if you like. Oh, and the Captain would like a status report on things. I think she was hoping we’d found an avenue through this spatial soup we’re stuck in.”

Dorian shook his head. “That was Alpha shift working on that. We’re just fixing what they didn’t do here on Gamma.”

El could hear Rosa-Maria mutter something under her breath in what sounded like Spanish but too low for her to catch. Not that she was in any way fluent in it, or even nominal. It was a ‘nice’ language. It sounded dreamy and many of her romance novels had people from those regions in it. “Where would we be without you then?” she said. She had hoped that they would know more, though she also knew that pass on material was often a need to know and some shift leads only delivered a minimal amount to get them through the shift. Her sigh hid a burgeoning yawn.
- El, Eng