Cualli resumes eating, feeling marginally better after being able to vent a bit to someone. She listens to the two engineers talk while she eats.
The two start talking about personal lives (at least the Aesthian one does, the other is not keen to divulge anything approaching personal information), and Cualli gradually begins to tune them out. She's eventually snapped back into paying attention when her brain notices the conversation has taken a radically different turn.
: You're telling me you can turn the Sabre into a nuclear bomb?
: No, hardly. There's nothing nuclear about it. The vacuum chamber breaches, air gets sucked into the plasma chamber, it gets superheated and expands, and explodes in a white-hot fireball that's up to 2000 kelvin forty meters from the epicenter.
: And they
didn't go for it?
: Well, the blast radius isn't that large. It would be bad to have one go off
inside their carrier, or directly on the surface, but I guess nobody wanted to be responsible for flying their bomb within 40 meters of an Imperial dreidecker, or trusted their ejection seat to clear the blast.
: Mm. Still, would've been nice to end that
without carpet bombing our own town.
Jaakko wakes up from a nap and looks at the package he had left on his desk. It was sent up from the ground by his father, who within the last weeks had contacted Jaakko again after long years of silence. As far as Jaakko was concerned, the man had come to his senses.
The first package Jaakko received was an engraved 12.7mm casing, chronicling in part the Battle of Taiton. Since then sent up was an engraved metal lighter with imagery alluding to Temple scripture.
Jaakko rights himself and opens the package. Inside is a survival knife, machine engraved, with depictions of events of his career. He is enamored with the artistry and workmanship. He sheaths it, and takes the work of art to show off to Tippy, whom he finds in the mess hall, amongst a crowd of Djuriskas and Mjolnir pilots. Jaakko approaches a few moments after Coma finishes giving Tippy the finger.
"What are we all looking at?"
Pansar repeats the question for Crash.
"Haha, yeah... sorry. I tend to speak my mind. Your face isn't that bad, truthfully. By comparison, nobody else is going to win any contests."
Tippy scans the rest of the table for the new faces if there are any additional and takes a seat.
There is a seat, and the only other new face is the guy sitting across from Coma.
"How long ago did you join up? I've been doing base chores and I haven't been able to catch up on the squadron changes."
: I joined up about a year and a half ago, completed training and was assigned to this unit in March. That'd be... about a month ago?
Poll