El could always tell when Lt Green came to visit when she was in the machine shop. The light from the main engineering area dimmed to a point that it was noticeable in her space. Lt Green filled the doorway quite a lot. Not content to have the materials lining the corridor on F Deck from the Vulcan containers Lt Green wanted them stored in her maintenance shop. To say it was cluttered was no small thing. She had taken great pains to organize things before even starting on the project of sorting out the stuff and seeing whether they worked. At Lt Green’s ‘suggestion’ she enlisted another engineer to help her. El had picked Rosa-Maria, plucking her off of Beta Shift to help her these past couple of weeks.

To say that it was a challenge was no small thing. Rosa had pushed her, wanting to do more. El thought she had something to prove but Rosa didn’t see that. Perhaps El was wrong, but the crewman was working to impress. El had taken the time with some ‘girl’ talk to learn some Spanish from her. It didn’t seem that difficult a language and had a certain romantic quality to it that appealed to El, but the ‘lessons’ were in between the work at hand. El sought to be methodical about the work which did not seem quick enough to Rosa, and so the push had come.

“What have you got?” Green asked. “Any luck with the Vulcan equipment? Can we use any of it without remedial Vulcan language courses?”
His tone, at least to El, had some impatience in it. True, they had kept him waiting while they checked and double checked the equipment. Without Rosa, El could have worked more efficiently and made conclusions faster, though there were clashes of methodology. “Mostly, Lt,” she answered.

Gesturing to the far wall where plasma welders sat. There were 4 of them. “Sir, only 4 of the 10 welders were salvageable. Three without much more than cleaning and some PM. The fourth needed more work and we salvaged bits from the other six to get the fourth going. Suggest that we store two in E-Deck cargo bay and retain two for use. The straps for the backpack style use needed supporting. Once back to a port we should add padding to them. What there was was crumbling leaving the metal mesh support. We’ve improvised but it needs more custom work.” She paused, took a breath and then walked Green over to a space between storage racks. On the wall were attached two obvious charging units, more elegant in appearance than their own surrounding equipment. “Of the five chargers only two were working, hence our thought to only have two units running at a time. All but one of the cells were good and we have them stored here.” Above the chargers in three neat rows were attached the cells against the bulkhead. Under these chargers and battery packs sat two of the plasma welders, hanging on hooks. The other two were separated and were squished on a rack on the far side.

Green looked at them, taking one of the cells. “They do make them look prettier,” he commented before sliding it back into its slot. “Move one of the two packs to the storage closet inside the unassigned space on B Deck so it is near in case we need one fast. The other can be in storage.” Tapping the battery packs he said, “Move four of the power cells there as well but leave the chargers here.”
“I’ll have Rosa move them,” El said.
Fingering along the strap of one he said, “Nice work on these. No, on second thought, take the spare one meant for storage and use that as a training unit. Get proficient in it then get a course set up for the rest of the engineers to use. Have Seaman Morales help you with that training. I want that set up within the week.”
“Of course, Lt,” El said.
- El, Eng