| A Side of Work With Your Gossip |
| Summary: | Raf's arrival on the deck ruins a perfectly good gossip-swap. |
| Date: | 2041.04.22 |
| Related Logs: | None. |
| Players: |
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| Hangar Deck - Port — Midship — Battlestar Cerberus |
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| Post-Holocaust Day: #54 |
| The single largest rooms on the Cerberus are the hangar decks. Each flight pod consists of two stacked landing bays with adjoined decks and hangars, which along with computer-assisted landings results in a faster Viper recovery rate. Mirror images of each other, these two huge areas are located on the flight pods. The inboard sides of the deck, closest to the ship's main hull, are lined with parking and maintenance bays for Vipers and Raptors based aboard the battlestar. The outboard side of the deck contains the launch tubes used by the Vipers for standard deployment. Huge blast doors seal the deck into four sections, each one containing an elevator that leads up to the flight deck directly overhead. The fore-most section contains an elevator system that leads towards Aerospace Fabrication. |
| Condition Level: 3 — All Clear |
He's bright! He's orange! He's Tyr! He's Tyr! He's — working on Trask and Evanderus's banged up Raptor, the frameboard out on his work bench and his eyes squinting through his glasses and goggles. Sodder! Sodder! There goes something fixed.
Tisiphone neither rolls down stairs, nor under a chair. She does, however, sign in for her two (2) allotted hours of Light Deck Duty, shrug into a somewhat smock-like overcoat that's not nearly as fabulously orange as a true deckie's attire, and fetch herself some goggles and ear protection. This done, she gives the room its first (visual) sweep of her shift, looking for obvious Things What Need Done.
Bannik just at that moment glances up, noticing Tisiphone-the-half-a-deckie. He raises his hand, waving her over. "Tisiphone! Sir!" The 'sir' is because lurking petty officers may hear him. But he's apparently got things to impart and is looking for someone to impart them to.
Well, she's on-duty. On-light-duty. Ish. And so is the fabulously, enviously orange Bannik. Tisiphone will endure the 'Sir'. She lifts a hand to him before pushing herself into motion, crossing over to his location with long, brisk steps. "Crewman." Look at how dutiful and duty-like she's being. "Got something for me to do that isn't sweeping?" Because she's done a lot of sweeping, these last two weeks.
"Yeah. Can you help hand me some of the stuff I need while I work on this board here?" Bannik gestures to the circuitry in front of him. But that, clearly, isn't why he asked her over here. "Have you heard about those missions they're sending out to Leonis?"
"Yeah, you bet." Tisiphone steps up and gives a glance about for the Necessary Bits that might need to be handed over as she works. After two weeks and change, she's getting a passing familiarity with the various small tools around the deck — they're the sort of thing she was able to fetch for the deckies with only 1.5 working arms, after all. "I saw the last AAR," she says, as she collects some spare solder, a case of electronics screwdrivers, and some fussy-nosed pliers. "Boots and Bunny. Eight Basestars, I think they reported? Sounded pretty hot."
Bannik has a standard tool kit out on his work bench out, so if Tisiphone has done this before, well, she should be able to do it again. "Can I get those tweezers, please?" asks the crewman, then moving on to his more pressing concern. "Yeah. No kidding. And I've heard that the Old Man is going to send us right into them. Some sort of offensive operation or something. Right into all eight of them." A vague sound of worry is in his voice.
Tweezers. Tisiphone promptly hands them over. She's been a quick study around the deck, all told. If you discount the one afternoon where she beat a fellow pilot across the face with her cast, spit at his feet, and stormed out, she's been a model lackey. (Such a tiny issue, that.) Not a peep of protest about taking orders or instructions from non-coms, which may have been unexpected. "Is this where I start hearing Boots calling me a idiot, and the Chief peeling another strip of hide off your back?" she asks, keeping her voice down a bit. It seems the safest place to start.
Bannik isn't even a non-com. He's a non-non-com. But it seems like the War is making everyone grow up fast, so even the just-out-of-A-school-for-two-months Bannik is learning how to be a little bit more confident around the Deck. "No. I don't think so, at least. But I heard it from this guy on the Obs Deck, one of the Quodel guys, that the Old Man's looking to get us into the fight. And why go out to Leonis if it's not going to be there?"
"It was that fat frakker, wasn't it? Cigar? In love with the sound of his own voice?" A contemptuous eye-roll accompanies Tisiphone's questions. "If you had to ask me…" She shifts, glancing about for a moment before she continues. "I think there was something at the Anchorage that's got them wanting to check out Leonis. Is it something worth dodging eight Basestars for?" Her mouth purses up. She seems very dubious that it could be.
Now /that's/ an interesting idea. Bannik's eyes light up at the possibility. "Well, you know," says Bannik. "They jury-rigged all those turrets and stuff all around the Anchorage. Maybe it really was some sort of top-secret base; do you think they might have some sort of R&D project down on Leonis that would …" His voice trails off. "But if it was just an extraction, why send the whole fleet? Why not just a Raptor or two with Marines?"
'The whole fleet.' Insert one bitter twist of mouth here, Tisiphone glancing away until it's smoothed over again. "I don't know," she says. She doesn't specify which of Bannik's questions it answers. "The Cylons destroyed the upper decks, then came back to finish the job. There was /something/ there they didn't want anyone finding. I guess- I mean, my bet's that it pointed to Leonis, and the Admiral decided it's worth dodging Basestars for. There's…" She hesitates for a moment before continuing. "There's no way Command's sending us in there for some sort of wanky oorah revenge." She doesn't sound as confident of this as she's trying to.
Bannik takes those tweezers that Tisiphone handed him to gingerly lift up a fried chip from the frameboard. "Man, the Cylons frakked up this bird," he laments, his eyes downcast. "Better than it not coming home at all, at least." He tosses the burnt chip into the trash and then hands back the tweezers to Tisiphone to put back. "Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it's not like we can take the Cylons on all by ourselves. We had a hard enough time repelling /boarders/ much less a /Basestar/. Hades, we lost four Vipers just taking on those turrets." A Deckie's lament.
Tisiphone replaces the tweezers before turning back to Bannik. She starts to slouch her hands down into her pockets, winces faintly, and decides to fold her arms across her chest, instead. "Yeah. I heard that was a bit of a mess," she says, carefully neutral. "Did they send you over to the Praetorian for staging, or were you just here to cry at what came back after?"
"I was helping patch up CIC when the bent birds came back; I got to run down and see how bad it was. So I'm doing double-shifts, eight in CIC and eight down here trying to get things together. We're busy enough doing routine maintenance without a full compliment, but with all the bent birds coming back?" Bannik shakes his head. "Chief's going to go gray well before his time. But I figure we're all taking some hard bumps. Pilots will get better at engaging the Cylons. And we'll be able to tighten up our routines down here." Always something optimistic to say. "Can you hand me that baggie over there? That's the other new chip for the board."
One (1) anti-static baggie procured by Tisiphone, and handed delicately over to Bannik — after giving it a curious peering-at, naturally. Electronics are so not Her Thing — interesting but mostly unfathomable. "How's CIC coming along? They've got the last of the injured folk back out of the Chapel, finally."
"It's coming," says Bannik. "But I admit, I don't know much of the big picture up there. I just clock in with the Petty Officer and do what I'm asked to help out with. I'm just extra hands up there, not really in on the Big Picture." He stifles a yawn with his sleeve and then opens the baggie to take out the chip with his gloves. "How are the pilots doing?"
"I was only up there for a few minutes, just after it- all happened. It looked pretty rough." Tisiphone gnaws at her bottom lip for a moment, mouth twisting around as she considers her next words. "I haven't really talked to anyone about it," she finally says. "It's a little awkward both ways, you know? Grounded pilot trying to chat up about the last op. Like a fired coworker asking you about office politics."
"Yeah? That sucks. You'd think that they'd be there for you rather than tossing you out. I mean, Hades, who knows when they'll be the one grounded? Enough of them are sure getting shot up out there. But I guess it's why I'm not cut out to be a pilot." Bannik places the chip down on the frameboard where the busted chip came out. "I don't have the lack of empathy and feeling of invincibility needed to hack it."
"It's not like /that/." Tisiphone, of course, goes to bat for her fellow pilots. "It's just awkward. Talking to someone who's grounded, you start feeling like maybe it could be you. You know?" Hard to feel invincible when you're talking to a compatriot who's obviously /not/. "There's… they've got five, nearly six weeks of flying together now, that I haven't been there for. Seven, before I'm back in." Realizing she's starting to sound a little sulky, she clears her throat lightly and gracelessly changes the topic. "You, uh. You see the final salvage manifest from the Anchorage? Looks like you guys will be strapping all sorts of shit to the Raptors."
"No kidding! Tactical nukes, even." Bannik shakes his head. "I'll be doing a lot of work with that, I imagine. Avionics handles weaponry, so I guess I'll be pulling out the manuals and learning about all sorts of new fitting points and all of that." He sighs. "Didn't think I'd be tossed into the deep end so quickly, but I guess we all have, huh?"
"The longer this all goes, the harder it is to imagine what should've been. What- we were all expecting." Tisiphone jostles bony shoulders in a light shrug, and rocks back on her heels for a moment, balancing wobblingly there. "Tyr, are you ever pessimistic? Ever? You'd find the good side in a Cylon, I swear." Screaming in out of left field.
That comment stops Tyr cold, his hand loosely around the soddering iron to take another shot at the frame board. "Sometimes," he admits, finally. "Sometimes, when I'm in my bunk and I can't get to sleep or when folks come back from an op, or that sort of thing." Like when the ship is boarded and hundreds of folks die. "But I take all of those worries and those sorrows and those pains and I just lift them up out of me and I give them to the Gods, because the Gods'll know what to do with them even when I don't." His smile is small, wan, as if he's sharing something sort of personal for the first time. "And then I go back to it, because if I didn't do that, I'd just toss myself out a launch tube because it'd be too much. And honestly? You guys need me here to take care of the birds you bang up."
Sleet-blue eyes light with a sort of warm sorrow as Tisiphone listens to Bannik's words, her head canted slightly. "Aw, man," she murmurs. It's got the sound of someone sorely tempted to coo and fondly pinch another's cheek. Thankfully, perhaps for both involved, the moment passes to a wide but crooked grin. "I'd be real sad if you ever weren't here, Tyr. You ever start feeling like the airlock's a good idea, you come talk to me." The 'I'll kick your ASS for it,' remains unspoken.
"Will do, Tisiphone. Promise." Bannik smiles, the twinkle in his eyes still visible behind his glasses and goggles both. "And you ever feel that way, you come see me, too, huh? Deck's here for the Air Wing. I'm slowly learning that it's more than birds we've got to bend out." And so he leaves it, transitions with: "Wonder what they're going to end up doing with those civilians on the port-side. Background checks must be done soon."
Now /here's/ something Tisiphone knows an immediate answer to. Or, at least, she thinks she does. "They've moved the Raptor folks into the Viper berths," she says, rocking back onto her heels for a fresh round of wobbling. "So the old Raptor berths are empty. I bet they're going to start moving them in there." There's a poorly-concealed grimace of distaste at the thought.
"No kidding?" Bannik furrows up his brow as he sodders on the new chip onto the frame board. "Well, that doesn't seem fair. We enlisted folks, who are doing stuff for the ship, are still in our racks in a big room, while the civilians who aren't doing anything are getting the semi-private Ratpor bunks." He sighs. "I'm not saying they need to sleep on cots, but I figure we ought to get the better quarters first, you know?"
"Racks in a big room?" Tisiphone seems a little puzzled by this. "Dude, have you seen the size of the Raptor and Viper berths? We're not chilling out in some sort of boudoir compared to the enlisted folks. I mean, I understand why you might like to think that, but. /So/ not true."
"They're officer quarters. They've got to be better." Bannik seems to take this on faith. He's an enlisted. She's an officer. She's got to have better digs. "I mean, at least you're not sharing with hundreds of people like I am. Just saying." He nods over to her and then turns back to the board. Sodder. Sodder.
"Dude, I'm telling you." Tisiphone has the crooked grin of someone about to share an unfortunate bit of truth. "I've seen the Marine berths, I've seen the Officer berths, and the ones you really want are the Marine berths. They've got double-sized lockers and everything. They're all the same, otherwise. Same damn racks, same damn tables and chairs."
Bannik is still skeptical. It shows in his eyes. But they're /officer/ quarters in /officer/ country. Clearly, Bannik thinks the hallways are lined with gold up there. It just sort of how it works. "If you say so," he says finally. And then he looks down at his handiwork. Frameboard! Fixed!
Generally the hangar bays are locations where one should walk, and not run. They are full of delicate, if not *explosive* materials, and anyone so foolish as to horse around within them should expect stern a stern-talking to. Raf, apparently, does not care. A handheld diagnostics computer under one arm, he jogs his way merrily down the raised catwalk; suddenly, a hand shoots out to grip the handrail of the stairs leading down to the main deck. Still gripping the rail, he *hops*, using the fulcum to swing around in mid-jump, and slides his way down atop the rail. Not Officer behavior, no sir.
"Come by sometime. Poke your nose in. I'll show you, Mr. Doubtful," says Tisiphone to Bannik, still with that crooked grin. She's wearing a somewhat smock-like overcoat that's not nearly as fabulously orange as the Crewman's, signifying her as Temporary Deckie. "I don't know what you've heard about pilots, but you won't get shot, skinned and eaten for taking a look in on us." She is all-wise, all-knowing Ensign, after all.
"Well, maybe I just will, then." Bannik smiles over at Tisiphone, the banter lifting his spirits. And so is all right with the world, until — "Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. No." Bannik may be just out of A-School, but that means every lesson he learned about Deck safety is still fresh in his mind. "Get my back." He doesn't even wait for an acknowledgment. He just begins heading off towards Raf. "Sir! Sir! Sir!" He's shouting across the Deck, trying, trying hard, to get Raf to slow his pace.
"Huh…?" It does in fact take several shouts for Raf to even begin to become aware someone is talking to him. Thankfully, he is headed generally toward the parked Raptors, or who knows if he'd be aware of Bannik at all. The panicked Crewman's shouts do cause him to slow, and he begins looking over himself, as if maybe his shoe was untied or something. "What's up, dude? Is my flight suit unzipped or something?" he asks innocently.
Tisiphone, Fearsome Officer-Shaped Backup, follows after Bannik with her hands slouched down into her pockets. As the pair come to a halt, the Ensign apparently content to stay a pace back and to the left, the Crewman will hear a not-particularly-bolstering sound — that of an amused chuckle. "Sir," she greets, dutiful-sounding despite the grin. There's even a salute thrown in for good measure. She's still enjoying being able to salute again at all. Ensigns and their perversities.
"Is there a fire on the Deck or something that I didn't hear about?" Bannik draws himself up, channeling indignant righteous anger in a way that only an eighteen year-old can. "You're /running/ across the Deck! With — what's that? A diagnostic computer? If you fell, I'd have a diagnostic computer to fix in addition to all the Raptors you guys keep banging up! And it'd be hard, and just a little bit ironic, too, because how do you run diagnostics on a diagnostic computer?" So maybe it's not the best dressing-down ever. But he's young. He's practicing. "You could get yourself killed! But more importantly, you could get /us/ killed, and I rather like us more than you!" He looks over his shoulder at Tisiphone. Some help she is.
Blink. Blink. Lt. Cortez stares owlishly as if the words coming out of Bannik's mouth were in some foreign tongue that he can't comprehend, and so has no idea how to respond. After a moment, he slowly looks left and right; maybe he's checking to see if it's possible he's not the target of the shouting. "But… uh… I didn't fall, man. And the computer's fine, it's in my hand," he says, as if this explained *everything*. There is a slight pause, and then he adds - barely above a whisper - "Besides, I'd have to be standing on that rail when sliding, to even have a chance of falling." Because that makes it so much better.
Behind his goggles and glasses, Bannik blinks once. He blinks twice. It's as if he doesn't quite know how to process that response. So he just continues on. "And the shirt! Sure, your /flight suit/ is flame retardant because of all the hard work we do checking and rechecking it, but your shirt sure as Hades isn't! And so let's say the shirt catches on fire!" This might have gone more into rant than dressing down at this point. "It catches on fire. Whoosh!" That's the sound of flames, in case you were wondering. "And you won't burn because of the flight suit, but your shirt's on fire, and you'll panic, so you'll run around, and then, if one of the Deck folks doesn't hose you down with a fire extinguisher, you might run smack into some ordinance and then ka-pow!" What's that, you might ask? "The whole Deck goes up. All because you're stylish!"
Some help she is, indeed. Tisiphone at least has the grace to look sheepish when Bannik shoots that sidelong look at her. She clears her throat a couple times, pointedly looking down at her booted toes, then straightens again with a more neutral expression, grin-warmth still lingering in her eyes. "Sir. I'm sure the Crewman's concerned about you setting a good example in front of…" she starts to say, but then Bannik's off to the rant-races. Her expression is pure 'oh, frak, totally gonna laugh here'; she half-turns to check on a whole bunch of nothing directly behind her, forcing out a couple coughs to try and keep the laughter away.
Raf just starts to laugh. It's a little laugh at first, and then builds itself up as he leans over to brace himself against a nearby forklift. "Oh, no, man, you got it all wrong. The shirt, it goes on *under* the flight suit if I'm actually flying. Right now, I'm just *moving*. You wanna worry about flammable attire on the deck, man, sure… but I have it on good authoirity that there have been people on this deck in officer's uniforms, and I'm pretty sure those things are… well, they're probably not fire redardant, you know?" Raf answers back, though calling his response an 'answer' is probably a severe stretch. It would not be a stretch, however, to assume that Raf has probably practiced this manner of aggravating non-response, given his reputation as someone who gets yelled at by superior officers. A lot.
"Well. Well." Bannik sputters. Point, that. "Okay. About the shirt." Some of the air comes out of his attack at that. Wuff. "But — the running. We need all the diagnostic computers we can get at this point. Okay?" Please? "We have a lot of diagnosticing to do."
Another couple throat-clearings and Tisiphone's triumphed over her potential fit of laughter. She turns back to the showdown between deckie orange and flammable floral prints, hands slouched back down into her pockets. Safer to stay silent, for now.
Righting himself now that the laughing fit has passed, Raf gives Bannik a solid 'thumbs-up' gesture. "You got it! No running, sorry about that. I was just… excited, you know," he says, a wide grin suddenly appearing on his face. Definitely a gentleman of mercurial moods and inexplicable happiness. "I wanted to get a dump of the ECM data from Harrier 307. Maybe see if there was anything… you know, cool… they mighta overheard at Leonis. But maybe didn't catch at the time, what with angry Raiders trying to kill them. You think the data's been moved to storage yet?"
"All right. Uh. Thank you. Sir." Conflict resolved. Pride preserved. We're good. Bannik moves on. "Uh. Gosh. I don't know," confesses the techie. But the idea of more information to gossip about seems intriguing to him. "I guess we could take a look?"
"Angry Raiders and /how/ many Basestars?" mutters Tisiphone, as the conversation comes 'round full circle. "I'm gonna grab a smoke." Self-declared Ensign Break Time. "I'll catch up with you in ten." This to Bannik. To Raf, there's a, "Sir," before she heads off toward the stairwell, aka Approved Smoking Area.
<fade Tis for RL>
"That would be *awesome*. See, I got this theory, right? I figure the Cylons probably don't use like, *normal* IFF signals, but probably have a header and footer on all their comm traffic that functions as one, which is why they're so damn sneaky. Maybe I can figure out a way to fake that header. If I can decrypt it," Raf explains excitedly, waving his free hand about to emphasis just how amazing it would be if he was right. As Tis meanders away, he waves a hand. "Hey… Money Shot..?" he greets, sounding a little unclear on if that's her call sign or just a joke he overheard.
"Oh. Uh. What makes you say that, sir? I mean, about their comms traffic. I admit, that's a bit out of my league, but did you figure any of it out before?" Bannik seems to be probing a bit, asking for things like 'evidence.' How strange.
It's a funny thing: when talking about work, Raf's mind seems to sharpen, and his tone shifts from the airy 'dudespeak' he normally engages in. "Wellllll," he ventures hesitantly, "It's not like I have confirmation or anything. But looking over the recordings, whenever we've had a big flight of them, they show up on the Dradis no problem, right? But in small numbers, they've snuck up on us a couple of times. Thing is, even when they're running silent in multiple wings, they're coordinated. An IFF signal has to be pretty loud or it doesn't do the job. So… I figure they're masking their comms as part of the background noise - sounds just like solar wind - and they bury the IFF in that."
"Do you think it's maybe computer networking among them?" wonders Bannik, furrowing his brow and trying to now engage with the ECO now that he's had his freakout moment and it's passed. "Like, they're all running on the same network and that's what's keeping it concealed somehow?"
Raf runs the back of one hand under his nose, eyes focusing on one of the raptors in the distance. "Yeah, that's my guess. Constant data streaming from all Raiders, but with clever enough masking that it's a bitch to pick out from everything else. I dunno, did you see Doe's tapes from the Leonis mission? If each one of them could share telemetry with the others, that would explain how they were able to pull that amazing full reverse turn in tandem. Each one could use targetting data from another one, too. Make for a hell of a way to kill-pocket our Vipers. Which they seem to do a lot."
"I admit I didn't take a look at it. Usually not my area, sir," confesses Bannik. "But you know who you might want to talk to about all of this communications stuff? Specialist Viae up in CIC is a wireless person and she might have some insight to offer you."
"Oooooooo. Reaaaally?" Raf intones, definitely intruiged. "I think I might hafta do just that. I'm just really frakkin' tired of having these little buggers pop out of the woodwork without even having the decency to FTL in around us. They do that, I don't feel so bad about being surprised. But having 'em show up from the black? That's just messed up, man." He stops short, scratches his head, and looks at Bannik more fully. "So, Crewman… What *is* your area of expertise? Cuz I got a question about Raider engines, too. But I don't know squat about engines in general."
Bannik laughs softly. "I'm an avionics tech," explains Bannik with a small smile touching at the sides of his lips. "So I do computers and stuff. But I know a little bit about the Heavy Raider engines. I'm overseeing the whole project, trying to coordinate things."
Lips pursed, Raf nods a few times. Folding his arms over his chest, he emits a few soft 'hmm' noises, and then speaks again. "So hey, if that's the case, that's good. Do you know what the spectrograph readings for the Heavy Raider engines look like? I figure they're different enough so that even if the Cylons don't snag our comms or IFF signals, they can find us pretty easy. I figured that maybe we could re-tool a few Raptors with masking systems on the engines, so at long range maybe they'd have a harder time spotting us. Like if the Heavy Raiders have a higher boron content in their reactions, we could put a boron injector in our own engines, so the spectro would look more like theirs."
"Ah. Well. Petty Officer Damon is looking into the nitty-gritty of things," explains Bannik, processing this new bit. "So you could ask him. Our initial examination suggests, actually, that they're pretty much like Colonial engines. I mean, a lot more fuel efficient? But still pretty similar in design. The other stuff is just alien to us so far."
<OOC: This is as far as my log caught. There may be more if Raf or Bannik was logging it!>