angel of the morning :: corpsekkuno

i

"Someone is fucking with us," I mutter angrily to myself. "And I swear I will find the sorry son of a bitch if it's the last thing I do on this godforsaken ship."

"They always go for Lights, don't they, Sir." The voice was breezy with a chuckle following the brief, mellowly statement. As blithely passive as the joke was, the Irish man was right: Lights were a painfully easy target, and it was enough to get the ship in enough of a tizzy that I had to be sent down to talk to the electrician configuring the panels in Electric. Being second in the chain of command on this deteriorating spacecraft is becoming less and less rewarding.

Too preoccupied with the thought of too low a paygrade, I brush off the informality of the address and let autopilot engage. I stop, turn, and we salute each other before we continue on our way south.

Our flashlights illuminate the ground before us as we're engulfed further into the darkness of the darkened ship. The soft clicks of the heels of our shoes on the aluminum flooring underfoot echoes throughout the corridor, the unsettling nature of the quietness around us just beginning to permeate our rough exteriors.

"Were you sent by someone to accompany me?" I ask, hoping that my gravelly voice would be just enough to fill the void. To my dismay, it isn't.

"Yes, sir," McLoughlin replies in his naturally cheerful tone. "Senior Master Sergeant Wang gave me direct orders to report to Electrical and aid in whatever task you need me to do." His smile seemed to lighten up the surrounding area.

"Senior Mast..." I trail off, mumbling to myself. "Toast? Why would he give orders to a Staff Sergeant? Direct ones no less? Isn't that too trivial a task for such a high ranking officer? Why wouldn't he notify me first?"

"Sir?" The Irish man questions, unable to make sense of my incoherent murmurings. I wave it away and continue to walk in silence, once again questioning the sanctity of ranks in this hellhole as well as solidarity in communication.

Upon entering the room, I see a man crouched in front of the Lights panel in orange construction overalls, a white long sleeve Tee, and some black boots with patches of the tar-like grease covering different parts of his body. He talks in a soft voice to himself, saying what he was doing with his hands as if narrating for some invisible student.

"And if we switch this one—yep!" The Lights flickered on, but my eyes remained on the boy in his garish orange attire while McLoughlin utters praises under his breath. The boy begins to turn around as he pulls the gloves off his hands by the fingers.

"Oh, Jesus!" He startles when he finally sees us. "I-uh...I didn't know you guys were standing there." His eyes dart quickly from me to my junior, then to his gloves. My gaze stays on him, though, a slight scowl on my lips and my eyebrows furrowed in disapproval; my own father's signature look.

From the corner of my eyes, I see McLoughlin motioning slightly for the boy in front of us to do something in the friendly manner that comes all too naturally to him. I sigh inwardly, losing all hope that he'll ever get promoted to anything higher than Staff Sergeant with that motherly attitude.

"I-I'm Thomas," he stammers. "But my friends call me Sykkuno, and I-"

"What's the deal with the Lights?" I abruptly cut him off, wanting to get out of the musty room as quickly as possible. "Why do they keep shutting off? Is there a way to prevent it?"

"W-well, that's the thing." His averted eyes are steady on my ribbons, somewhat inflating my ego just a bit. "We've put in a few preventative measures, but nothing seems to be helping.

"Whoever is doing this has advanced knowledge of how this ship's wired. Nobody has been in or out of Lights, and we've got that in written statements from the guards we had posted outside this room." The boy seemed to grow excited talking about his job, seeming much more confident when elaborating on topics he knew much about.

He finally shifted his tangential gaze to meet my stoic one, and immediately his submissive demeanor returned. My eyes softened ever so slightly at his adverse reaction; he was just a civilian, after all.

"So this means..." McLoughlin trails off, softly urging the boy in orange to finish the thought.

"So, uh, this means that whoever is doing this has to be using a remote of some sort that's somehow connected to these Lights panels." Without looking away from my face, he added, "and the consequences could be dire if we don't find the culprit."

"What do you mean dire? Isn't that a little dramatic?" The foreign feeling of confusion oozed from my questions. I hated it.

"Well," he looked up at the ceiling as if calculating the degree of seriousness of this situation. "No. Let me explain: Lights are just the first move. If our culprit starts to better understand how this ship functions, this could mean they might sabotage our Communications or initiate a Reactor meltdown, the latter posing as an incredibly dangerous problem."

"Oh, geez," McLoughlin exhaled. "How do we tell Senior Master Sergeant Wang? He thought it was just an electrical problem. What'll he do when he finds out there's a rouge airman?"

Ah, the questions of the hour. The truth is that I don't know, and I wouldn't even know where to begin to try and come up with an answer to either question. As far as I know, I'm a dead man walking because I'm the poor soul that'll have to tell my commanding officer that he, basically, let a traitor on board.

"Ugh," I audibly groan. This is a joke. I'm a joke. Now I understand why the grunts say the Air Force is the weakest link; it's just an elaborate circus act up here.

"I can, um, tell Senior Master Sergeant Wang about this," the boy piped up. "I mean, I c-can if you need me to."

I open my eyes to look at him. The blush thrown against his angular cheekbones emphasized his brown irises as they moved from me to McLoughlin and then back to me. Strands of his whispy hair stuck out in certain places, cowlicks, and my strange urge to tell people of their unkempt appearance was oddly suppressed. The way he looked, with grease smeared on his nose and overalls half-tucked and half-untucked in his shoes, seemed to just fit.

"You want to tell him?" McLoughlin's shock was evident, but I didn't blame him because that made two of us. Sykkuno shyly nodded in accordance.

"Well, if you need me to. I wouldn't want to put you guys in the hot seat. I'm just an electrician anyways, not like you guy with all your ribbons and such," he makes a slight nod to my chest.

"I mean, if you want to and you're ready, let's go." McLoughlin takes him by the arm and leads him to SMSgt Toast's office without another word. The boy stumbles along behind him, glancing back to me, where I remained stationary in my spot, following them with my eyes and not wanting to give in to the very, very subtle tender feeling welling up in my chest.