He then closed it without comment when nothing sufficiently witty came to him. Preceded by the two security officers, he entered the airlock and boarded the shuttle.
The security officers busied themselves with stowing their gear and checking that the rest of the interior items in the shuttle were secured for launch. Hawkes slid into the pilot’s seat with a practiced ease that made Rusty wonder just how many times the man had done it. He secured his safety harness without even looking at it; his hands automatically make the necessary adjustments and closures.
Rusty waited until Hawkes finished securing his harness and had begun the preflight checks before climbing into the co-pilot’s seat. He dropped into clumsily, demonstrating none of the grace that the Tactical Officer had, perhaps even deliberately. Shifting his buttocks, he tried to find a comfortable position.
“Damned things are never wide enough,” he muttered. He uttered it loud enough to be heard, but the only reaction that he managed to elicit out of Hawkes was a slight movement of the lieutenant’s eyes in his direction for the briefest fraction of a second. There was no disruption at all in the man’s motions as he checked the controls and status displays.
The thick padding of the seats had actually been engineering to provide a high level of both protection and comfort. Protection, for shuttle could be battered by atmospheric effects or just simple g-forces. Comfort, because one could spend a very long time seated in one, particularly if you were piloting alone.
None of this was of particular comfort to Rusty as he fumbled with his own harness. At first, he was certain that he had managed to hopelessly tangle himself in its straps. The results of his efforts so far seemed like the attempts of an inept and drunken alien spider to spin a web around him.
He gave one the buckles an experimental, and mildly annoyed, tug. As he expected that it would, the snarled straps of the harness dropped free. More deliberately this time, he fastened the harness around him. Other than for a somewhat involuntary grunt when he secured the belt across his thick chest, he said nothing.
Settling back into the chair, he waited, and then grimaced when Hawkes’ eyes pointedly fixed for a moment on the other preflight checklist fastened within the copilot’s bulkhead alcove. Grumbling subvocally, he reached for the hardcopy sheet and began to review it.
Behind him, the two security officers finished their inspection and secured themselves into seats mounted into opposite bulkheads so that they faced one another. Glancing at them in the mirror that showed him the interior of the cabin behind him, Rusty wondered for a moment if the two of them might now pull out a deck of cards to pass the time until there was actually something useful for them to do.
With an only mildly guilty start, he became aware that Hawkes had completed his part of the preflight check, had returned his checklist to its storage alcove, and was watching him with cool expectation.
“Yeah, yeah,” he murmured, and completed the last of the items on his checklist.
Before returning it to its alcove, he turned to Hawkes and offered it to him.
“Want to check my work?”
Hawkes continued to regard him with an icy detachment that, in anyone else, Rusty would have interpreted as disdain. For Hawkes, he decided, it just meant that the Tactical Officer was not in any way amused by his actions.
So a typical day . . .
“I trust that won’t be necessary.”
Rusty chortled softly to himself and slid the checklist back into its compartment.
“Ready when you are,” he told Hawkes, settling back again into the seat.
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