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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/daecrist on 2025-06-27 02:38:13+00:00.
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“Hand me the polarity reverser,” Harath said, holding a meaty hand out from under the transport ship he was currently working on. It wasn’t quite as sexy as working on one of those fighter bombers, especially after I’d seen some of them in action.
Sure, I’d seen them in action doing a dive trying to blast me out of the galaxy, but it was still a sight to behold watching them doing their thing.
It wasn’t the same as space combat. Space combat was never anything like how it was depicted in the movies. Or in holo entertainments. Or in VR games.
They always showed people getting hit with massive broadsides. Ships really getting up close and personal, and always flying on the same plane. for some reason. Like every combatant in the history of history, alien or human or otherwise, had all agreed that we were all going to fight in the same two-dimensional area.
No. Ship-to-ship combat was usually something that happened at a great distance. The kind of stuff where you could only see the ship you were fighting in a holoblock. If they were getting in close enough that you could see them as more than a point of light off in the distance? Then you were in trouble.
The time I let Varis and her ship get in close enough that she could launch boarders, both times, was a good proof of that rule.
“Are you sure there’s a polarity reverser in here?” I asked, looking at the pile of tools next to me.
“Of course there’s a polarity reverser in there,” he grunted. “Why wouldn’t there be? It’s one of the most important things when you’re working on a ship.”
I looked up at the transport, and then over to a bomber sitting a ways away on the massive landing pad. Yeah, watching one of those screaming in in a terrestrial setting where you were really up close and personal was a totally different experience. I shivered as I thought about seeing them moving in, and I was thankful for the shielding technology that kept us safe.
"This isn’t like the time you sent me on a wild goose chase all over the building trying to find self-sealing stem bolts?”
He appeared out from under the panel that he’d been working on and hit me with a gruff look, but there was a slight twinkle of amusement there as well. Harath was one of those people who went through life looking gruff at anybody and everybody, which had a lot of his technicians stepping lightly around him.
Sequel trilogy. If I actually worked for the guy then I might be stepping lightly around him as well. But I was in a weird liminal space where I didn’t quite outrank him since I was outside the rank structure in Varis’s military, but at the same time I was banging the boss so he had to be nice to me.
“No, this isn’t like the time I sent you after self-sealing stem bolts,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head. “That one was pretty funny.”
“Oh, yes, that was absolutely hilarious,” I said, finding the polarity reverser and handing it over. “Reminds me of a joke we had at the Academy. Some of the NCOs would send cadets off, telling them they needed to find flight line.”
“What’s flight line?” Harath asked, sliding back under the transport.
A buzzing sound filled the air as he used the polarity reverser on something in there. I wasn’t sure what he was working on or what he was doing, and he wasn’t telling today.
“It’s a joke that goes all the way back to the days of winged flight,” I said. “They used to send people for prop wash, too, but antigrav kinda rendered that joke obsolete.”
“Winged flight?” he said, chuckling. “I have some fun playing with those. It’s still something we do for fun around here. Do you humans not do that?”
“Oh, we still do that,” I said. “But in this case, flight line refers to a thing and not something you can requisition. That’s part of the joke.”
“Pointless and amusing,” Harath said with a grunt. “Sounds like the pranks we pull.”
“What is a self-sealing stem bolt anyway? What does it do?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he said, his voice going up to a roar for a moment. “Nobody knows what a self-sealing stem bolt is! Nobody knows what they do.”
“Very funny,” I said, my voice flat.
“It’s very funny if you’re the one sending somebody off to look for the damn things,” he said. “Not so funny if you’re the one doing the looking.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
I wasn’t immune to a good prank myself. I’d sent more than a few people off looking for flight line in my own time. Mostly back when I was still on carriers. Back before I got kicked out and I found myself on a cruiser in the CCF instead.
I looked around the upper hangar instead. We were off in a little corner of the place. Near one of the spars that connected to the building proper. It was nothing but open air and the shimmer of a shield keeping people from jumping out of those open-air connections all around us.
Though I suppose it was more to keep the empress and her fighters from getting in. She’d still been sending the occasional raid this way. Varis insisted it was her way of trying to get her attention. I wasn’t so sure about that.
The attacks seemed pretty realistic, but so far her highness hadn’t sent anything that was actually enough to get through the defenses on Varis’s building. So maybe she was right when she said the empress wasn’t actually serious about her attacks.
Yet.
Which seemed ridiculous to me. Both the empress attacking Varis to get her attention and Varis refusing to acknowledge the attacks aside from launching the occasional fighter wing to get rid of them.
Another one of those finer points of livisk culture I just didn’t understand. It seemed like the human equivalent of not answering a communication and hoping the problem would go away if you didn’t talk to the person on the other end of the line.
As far as I could tell, that had never worked for anybody in the history of two-way communications. Maybe in the very ancient days of humanity when you could literally pick up and move to a different city a few hundred miles away or something and nobody would be able to find you, but it didn’t seem likely these days.
“So if Varis hosts a grand ball or something, do the people park up here, or do you send them to the hangar down below?” I asked.
“Why are you asking about a grand ball?” he asked.
“It’s something that Varis has been talking about,” I said, figuring a little lie wouldn’t hurt. I didn’t even know if they called it a grand ball. That was something I was cribbing from earth culture and stories of the kind of fancy party full of rich people I’d never get invited to.
There was a pause from Harath. If it’d been Arvie talking to me then I would’ve thought I’d confused him. Maybe I had confused him by asking him about something outside his wheelhouse.
Harath didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who spent a lot of time thinking about social engagements.
He slid out from under the transport craft and hit me with an odd look. A look that had me worried I’d taken things too far.
“A grand ball, huh?” he said. “She’s been talking about that?”
“Yes?” I said.
“Not a Grand Gathering?”
“Sure, that thing. The Grand Gathering,” I said.
He stared at me for a long moment. Then grunted and shook his head. But not without hitting me with the barest hint of a smile at one corner of his mouth.
“We park everything up here,” he said. “The bigwigs don’t want to go into the lower levels. Why do you ask?"
“I was just trying to figure out the logistics for something like that,” I said.
“Logistics? It’s just a big party,” he said.
“I mean it seems like it could be a potentially dangerous situation. A bunch of rich and powerful livisk all gathering in one place? With how much y’all love to fight each other?”
A large gathering of livisk all hanging out in one place seemed like the kind of thing that would be ripe for exploitation. At least that was the hope me and Arvie were working on. I just hoped I wasn’t laying it on too thick with Harath.
“I don’t know about that,” Harath said.
“Come on,” I said. "Your empress is literally throwing her military against the building killing them to send a message to Varis. You can’t tell me nothing ever happens when somebody is at one of these Grand Gatherings.”
“People come to those things under a shield of peace,” he said.
“And that works?” I asked.
"Well, nothing’s going to happen to anybody because of something that happens to their ship, at last,” Harath said with another one of his grunts. “We go over everything and give it a nice clean. Do a quick inspection. Make sure everything is good as new.”
“You’re allowed inside the ships?” I asked, genuinely surprised. Plans swirled in my head.
“Not inside them, no. Nobody would trust somebody like that. Even under shield of peace. But we go over everything on the outside and give an inspection report to the people flying their ships.”
“Oh, so the people flying the transport ships are there with them?”
“Of course not,” he said. "They have their own party they go to. Those things are parties on top of parties on top of parties all the way down the building with everybody getting a chance to enjoy themselv…
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