Incursion Vector

019

[▲] INS Robert A. Heinlein, Caminha Waypoint

It took nearly eighteen hours for the entirety of the Tiaha Migrant Fleet, comprised of nearly five hundred battered and bruised ships none of which were less than fifty years old, to complete a single waypoint jump.

For Keiji and Flight Methuselah that meant two eight-hour shifts in the cockpit on patrol broken up by two hours of downtime on board the Sirocco when the Cusith joined them with the middle waves. They were not permitted to venture beyond the flight deck and its remarkably cramped squad room, but a few designated personnel brought them food and drink in the form of hot, sweet tea and dried goat meat. All the rehydration stations were still broken from the EMP blast and subsequent pounding the ship had taken, with everyone available to repair them instead focusing on the weapons and maneuvering systems. Keiji had really been hoping for a huge cup of coffee but Leo informed them that welcoming guests with tea was an ancient tradition among his people. All in all it was a lot more laid back than the tea services he had been forced to attend as a kid, and with a lot more friendly chatting. Vic in particular seemed thrilled at the change in surroundings; Keiji got the feeling the pilot really didn't get out all that often.

The Sirocco was a decommissioned Alkonst-class strike carrier identical to the INS Frank Herbert, so the design wasn't completely foreign to the wing—though the number of colorful rugs in the squad room and a complete lack of tables and chairs did take some getting used to. That Calli remembered the layout of her first University Frigate perfectly helped, particularly when she decided to spend her downtime helping the deck crew repair the hangar doors and launch bulkheads. She appropriated Leo to translate, having determined that things would go much more smoothly if the guidance came from an Arabic-speaking male—not that Leo was in any way unwilling to be her talking puppet in order to get one of the ships in his home fleet back into working order.

With some jury rigging by Nim, whose ability to bypass hardwired safety systems on the centurion ship probably should not have surprised as many people as it did, as well as some extra hands from the rest of Methuselah, the Sirocco's hangar bay doors functioned perfectly and all the bulkheads on the launch deck were again able to be secured against the vacuum of space by the time their second shift came up. It was by no means perfect—nothing beyond the flight deck was in remotely good shape—but it was much safer for the crew now that everything between the bridge and the engineering decks no longer had to be evacuated just to launch fighters into space without exposing personnel to vacuum.

Keiji noticed their work seemed to have eased the distrust between the wing and the crew of the Sirocco. Even though most of them didn't speak Standard fluently and even seemed a bit intimidated by the armed-and-armored Marines, the captain of the ship, introducing himself as Abu Adel Khalis ibn Hamid, made it a point to thank him for his squad's assistance when they launched for their second shift to rejoin the Heinlein. With some quick coaching via private com to Leo, Keiji managed to avoid a cultural incident by graciously thanking Captain ibn Hamid for his crew's hospitality instead of saying that helping to fix the Sirocco had been "no big deal." Evidently it would have been quite offensive to neglect the thanks and he was happy to have avoided screwing that one up.

Once the balance of the fleet along with the Agamemnon and Heinlein made it through to Caminha, both Flights Methuselah and Errant returned to home base for an arbitrary twelve hours of standby while the jump to Arnarson Waypoint was calculated. Though with the Heinlein and her massive computing banks in the sphere the jumps for every ship could be calculated in half the time, most captains of the major ships in the area decided that twelve hours would be a good break to allow the Tiaha fleet to continue with its on-the-fly repairs.