Quoted By:
The <span class="mu-i">Magellan</span> stands tall at 8.2 meters, and clocks in at 23.7 tons. She’s heavy, but she isn’t slow, and handles like a dream under the ocean. Maggie’s ready to go, missing only the harpoons for the wrist-mounted gun, and the fuel cannisters for underwater welding. As it should be, due to the potential of fire hazards.
Yours isn’t the only PUEXO deployed to the Duck. But the space that would normally house a Mark 3 HRCL-019 <span class="mu-i">Hercules</span> is conspicuously empty. The only other pilot on the rig, one Reggie “Strongman” Park, is on the other shift, and is presumably five hundred meters down. A fairly decent enough man, if somewhat overly horny given his frequent visits to the temple of Ishtar.
Hopefully McGuire won’t work him too hard in your upcoming absence. Park’s an adherer of “work hard, play hard”, and with a pilot’s salary, those poor girls are gonna be walking funny for the next few months.
Digressing, it seems that the old girl’s alright. A handful of engineers and mechanics look at you curiously, before returning to their work. None of them stop you as you come in for a closer look. You might not know all of them by name, but they sure as hell know about the debt-slave pilot, and his security clearance to the bay.
Thumbing through the maintenance logs, you’re more pleased than annoyed at the state of your PUEXO. What could be fixed, has been fixed. Issues such as unbalanced gyros, unaligned valves, loose screws, unresponsive subsystems, and a particularly nasty instance of bad cable management. Not so much with long-term issues that you’ve had for the last few weeks, stuff that requires specialized equipment to patch up that’s been in backlog for months.
Case in point, a hydraulics injector with a microtear. There’s only so much that tape and glue can do to fix it, short of ordering a new part. And even with the part in question, there’s certain tools, equipment and skill that an engineer needs to install them. The Duck, for all its amenities and advancements, has no shortage of the former and the latter, but a painful absence of proper PUEXO maintenance equipment.
Not that you blame McGuire and the overseers. PUEXO maintenance is already a nightmare as it is, considering the parts and old facilities have been out of commission for the better part of nearly eighty years.
You catch the attention of one of the engineers, who hurriedly runs towards you. “Is there a problem?”
Plenty, but nothing this one can do to fix them. “Did you see anyone coming in here? Any…unauthorized personnel or people that shouldn’t be here?”
The mechanic, whose overalls read ‘Spalding’, shakes his head. “No. The only people allowed access are department heads, pilots, and workers.”
Comforting, but you aren’t finished. “How about the workers already in here? Any…” How the fuck do you put this politely. “…who was the last person to work on my <span class="mu-i">Magellan</span>?”
(cont.)
