Page 175 of Every Almost

DON’T GET ME WRONG

The Canoplyn Gliderrescue was Charlie's fourth mission, and the first one where she didn't have to remind herself to breathe during the shuttle take-off.

When Charlie first saw them, she felt she had found her spirit animal. The creatures were massive and heartbreakingly beautiful, with wingspans wider than the shuttle bay. Their translucent membranes stretched between elongated forelimbs. What Charlie couldn't get over was that those membranes caught thermal currents and turned flight into something close to music.

However, the three they were rescuing had been found in a decommissioned research facility on a moon the Coalition had flagged for environmental cleanup. Gratefully, someone had called Admiral Vondra to send the Emberkind out before the cleanup. The crew discovered the Gliders in enclosures too small, with their thermals gone cold and their wings folded in on themselves trying to maintain a temperature they could live through, looking like origami left out in the rain.

Charlie's job for this mission was to contain the environmental for transport to the Emberkind. Essentially, the same job she'd completed for the Aetherfin. This job, or something similar, was one she'd done three times now. She knew the protocols, knew how to calibrate the atmospheric seals, and knew exactly which pressure tolerances the shuttle bay could handle during reentry.

Funny how over two months ago, Charlie had been the human they picked up on the side of the galaxy highway who didn't know which panel opened the airlock. Now, she was the engineer crawling underneath a containment unit, rerouting its thermal regulator because the factory settings were calibrated for a species half this size, and not set to adjust for the thin membranes on the Gliders' wings.

"Wickett," Torvax's voice came through comms from the bridge. "Captain wants you to adjust the thermal gradient to compensate for the wing membrane?—"

"Already on it, Commander," Charlie answered, pulling herself out from under the unit. She went straight to the console and checked her readings. Something didn't look right. All the numbers were correct, everything would work as it should, but Charlie felt that the default timespan to change the temperature for the Gliders wasn't slow enough to really remove any chance of panic for the creatures. Their shuttle trip back had more time than was programmed to temperature change. So why had it just been set to the default?

Immediately, Charlie knew the answer. Cael. Most likely, he just left it at what was passable, instead of thinking through what would happen on the ground.

So, Charlie opened up the code and data and did something she wouldn't have two months ago. She overrode the standard gradient curve and programmed a custom one, tapering thetemperature change across a longer window. Sure, standard protocol would have worked. Cael's plan would have been okay.

But frankly, hers would work better. And the Gliders would be happier.

"Wickett," Torvax's voice again.

"Yes, Commander?"

"Captain wants to know if you changed the gradient curve."

A beat of silence on comms.

"Yes, I did, Commander."

"And we want to confirm you're seeing the same readings we're seeing up here. Are you showing a 98.7% adaptability rate, compared to the 89% showed in the data earlier?"

"I can confirm, Commander."

The lines went quiet again.

"Good call, Wickett," Reyna said, her voice coming through comms.

Charlie felt those three words in a way she didn't expect.

"Thanks, Captain."

Suddenly, Tavi was standing at the side of her console, grinning at her.

"That's strike one, Spark Plug."

"Strike one for what?" Charlie asked, but Tavi was already walking over to Maren's console, laughing quietly to himself.

Back on the Emberkind,Maren appeared by the console stations. She'd been assigned to help Charlie log the rescue parameters for the new Canoplyn Glider habitat setup.

Charlie pulled up the environmental readings from the rescue on her console. "Maren, you're about to be a lifesaver. I was told you can help me with schematics?"

"That's correct."

"That's such a relief. Okay, so then I need the exact atmospheric composition from the original Glider enclosure, the full numeric value of the adjusted gradient I programmed during the transfer, and the readings from the first hour in the new habitat. Do you have those from the shuttle logs?"

Maren sat down at the adjacent console. Her eyes moved across the data, and Charlie witnessed the action behind Maren's eyes. A shimmer of light, subtle at first that then turned into a cascade of iridescent color rippling across as Maren's Eye Shimmer activated. Finally, it brightened, and Charlie watched Maren's eyes capture and keep light in a way that made them look like they contained entire galaxies.