Space Engineers- Drift by H W Dante

Author:H W Dante [Dante, H W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14: Salvage Op

Of course Marek had seen female engineers before; space engineering was by no means a “male only” career.

Marek was more caught off guard by her appearance than anything else; he had expected to see a rugged face behind the imposing visor of the EVA suit, not the soft features of the female engineer.

A few strands of the female engineer’s dirty-red hair had escaped her ponytail and were flatted against her forehead with sweat. Her deep-brown eyes strongly contrasted her vivid hair, and her dark brown eyebrows completed the striking look. Her light skin showed no signs of extensive makeup, with grease and carbon marks acting as her blush.

“Sorry, I was just-” Marek stammered out. “I wasn’t expecting a-”

“Woman?” she answered with a confident smirk.

“Well, yes, but-”

“Don’t worry about it; I get that a lot,” she said, helping him to his feet and brushing some dust off of Marek’s EVA suit. “Comes with the career choice I guess.”

“What? Being a pirate?”

“No, Icecap; being an engineer,” she corrected. “I graduated top of my class with multiple other women and still took slag from male engineers when I got jobs they wanted.”

She was right. Marek had seen firsthand throughout his engineering classes how much differently the men treated the women who were pursuing the same goal as them. It never made much sense to him. The women in his classes often did better than the men, so why were they consistently talked down to? Marek always looked at it with the mindset of “if you can do the work, you’re welcome here,” but not every engineer shared that open-mindedness with him.

“I don’t imagine you get a lot of trouble aboard the Phoenix; her crew looks pretty varied,” Marek noted.

“Perks of a pirate vessel,” she stated with a smile. “The captain is mostly to thank for that; he’s pretty serious about the ‘equal rights and respect’ thing around here.”

The female engineer glanced at the cargo shuttle Marek had been working on.

“You do nice work; clean welds, even lines. I saw you troubleshoot that conveyor issue; a sorter mix up isn’t the easiest to pin down, especially with this rat’s nest of a conveyor system. Smart thinking putting that construction component in there to see where it ended up.”

“Thanks,” Marek added, now feeling slightly less embarrassed about his fall. “You knew that was the issue?”

“Nah, had my suspicions, though,” she replied. “What was with the whole ‘falling down’ thing? I saw the ion thruster flash, but you had your visor down, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Marek sighed. “I’m sorta out of it after all I’ve been through. The inertial dampeners caused it to fire off and spook me.”

She laughed a bit as she replied, “Makes sense; you should head back to the engineering quarters for some quick R&R.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Marek said as he approached the cockpit of the cargo craft. “But I’m just about finished with this job.”

He palmed the control panel and brought up the list of ion thrusters attached to the ship.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.