Free Troy Rising 2 - Citadel by John Ringo Page B

for terrestrial landings which very few of the coxswains on the Troy had ever done. For Dana it was just another damned thing to check. Not to mention the “useless as tits on a boar hog” as AJ had pointed out, landing jacks.
    Then there was the airlock. Airlocks for more or less Terran sized sophonts, which included Glatun and Horvath, were fairly standardized across the local arm. The airlock was essentially two hatches with a space a bit shorter than the width of the Myrm between. A squad of Marines could stack up in the space to do an entry.
    The hatches were fairly conventional steel with a high-tech sealant and fairly normal wheel-latches. They had to be authorized for opening from the engineer of the boat and checked for closure. The detectors were futzy as hell. And you wanted to make sure the hatches were sealed before you went into the Black. Most of the time, if there was time, the engineer would get out of the flight compartment and do a manual check. Especially if Marines were the ones doing the closure.
    Searchlights, shields, double four-terawatt lasers for close-air support, which took up most of the powerplant's output when used, avionics, more super-conductor relays than a terrestrial power-plant, the boat's engineer had to know all of it well enough to, at least, detect faults and report them for repair. In general, with the lack of higher support due to the way the Navy was growing and the lack of bay space on the Troy, most repairs took place in the bay with ENs, Engineer's First Class, and EMs, petty officer Engineering Mates, sweating and cursing in suits.
    To make full rate, an engineer apprentice was required to demonstrate that he or, in Dana's case she, could just locate and analyze faults, not repair them. In a suit, in microgravity, in vacuum, in the dark.
    And they had to meet minimum standard capability as coxswains in case the cox was disabled during an “evolution.”
    “Checks completed, EN,” Dana said, straightening up and trying to keep from rubbing her back. Checking the gravitics mostly meant bending over for hours. The one good thing about Jablonski was that he barely seemed to notice her as a girl. “No faults detected.”
    “Check completed, aye,” Jablonski said, making a notation on his pad. “No faults detected, aye. Good check.”
    “Good check, aye,” Dana said.
    “Break it down,” AJ said. “We have mandatory flight fun time this afternoon.”
    “Flight fun time” translated as physical training. There was a basketball court and a gym. Dana spent most of her work-out time in the gym since there wasn't a good gymnastics set up.
    She'd been a cheerleader in high school but mostly she'd been into the gymnastics. If she hadn't “blossomed” a bit young she might have made the pros. It was one of the reasons she was ahead of the curve for training in microgravity. With enough time on parallel bars, micro wasn't a really big issue. She still wasn't good in micro, but she could manage simple tasks.
    “Break it down, aye,” Dana said, gathering up the tools and carefully stowing them away. The stow point for the boat's tools was to the starboard side of the flight compartment, just to the side and aft of the engineer's station. Over the compartment was a post-production welded on set of clamps with a crowbar installed. The second day she'd been working on the boat, AJ had come in with the crowbar, the clamps and a laser welding set and grimly welded the crowbar into place. He hadn't said anything about why but it wasn't until the crowbar was in place that Twenty-Nine was listed as flight-certified.
    She'd wondered about the crowbar—it wasn't part of the standard tool-set and it seemed to hold some particular significance—but she hadn't asked. There were no stupid questions, but she had learned that there were answers you only got at a certain point in your training. She suspected the Significance of the Crowbar was one of them. She'd figured out some of the