Nightingale

FIVE

Leon clambered down the ladder; cool against his palms, Prissy following after. The whole place seemed to vibrate with a faint hum, a constant reminder that nothing was at rest. A faint drip, drip, drip somewhere out of sight. 'Condensation near the engines' Leon told himself. Prissy jumped the last two rungs, thudding onto the mesh grating that was the floor. A drip of sweat made its way down the side of her face from her brow, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.

'Never been down here,' she said.

'I have once, the main database is this way,' he replied, gesturing to a corridor with a faint orange glow to it. They began to move down it, a jet of steam from a pressure valve startling Prissy. All of the walls were covered in pipe work, valves and cogs, wheels and channels, it somehow felt alive, biomechanical. 'Biomechs would love it down here, the damn heathens' Prissy thought to herself.

'They didn't exactly make this the greatest looking place in the ship did they?' she mused.

'We're technically in the inner workings of the ship, I bet you're internal organs aren't as pretty as your outside,' Leon answered.

'Did you just call me pretty?'

'I'll leave that up to your imagination. It's a left here, if I remember correctly.'

          The dripping began to get louder, and Prissy saw it was dripping from one pipe to another, where it was instantly vaporising from the heat of the pipe below. Prissy reminded herself that they had to maintenance all of this in a few hours, and only now began to see what a nightmare task it would be, the place was a labyrinth.

          The pair took a set of stairs down, holding onto the handrail on the way down. It was a ways back up to the main decks for support, and they didn't want to suffer an accident down here. Not to mention that someone would have to clean up the mess. Another jet of steam, and to Prissy's nostrils it smelled faintly of oil. She made a mental note to suggest that some sealant might be needed on that; she was no mechanic but was pretty sure that gas smelling of oil should not be venting into the walkways.

          The two of them walked out into a large room, where two covered pods hummed loudly.

'Those are Nightingale's engines,' Leon said, raising his voice slightly to be heard. Inside were two balls of raw energy, the very essence of all things, permanently kept spinning, releasing their power to propel the vessel throughout the stars, or even, as it was at the moment, the absence of stars. Prissy looked through a gap between the pods and saw a flight of stairs leading to a balcony, meshed together, a crude but effective latticework. Upon the balcony, against the walls of the room, were several screens.

'Are they the main databases?' she enquired. Leon nodded.

'That's them, you go on up and start having a rummage for the footage. I'm going to have a quick check of the engines and make sure they're ok.' Prissy turned sideways to move between the engine pods, a faint heat warming her, and made her way up the stairs. She went to the engine at the far end of the walkway, starting to sort through the menus and look for what she wanted. Leon, down below, scanned through detail after detail on the Halo-Cores for each engine, making sure his ship was in pristine condition.

Jenny was down in the testing area, cleaning up a few XF-50 Alphas. Her polish was running low, her hands getting a good workout from polishing the weapons. They needed to be as clean as could be to ensure nothing went wrong. The plasma-guns, firing green plugs of energy, were known for their efficiency, but anything could go wrong. Even a state of the art ship like the Nightingale, could possibly have its little glitches. She took one of the guns, and put it out in front of her, eye in the scope. The crosshairs moved, juddered, and then focused in on the target at the end of the hall. She exhaled slowly, calmed her nerves. All this crap with the hologram wasn't going to put off the best shooter in the Celestrian Exploration Unit, no sir, that was not going to happen.