[Story] Black Sheep

[Dartz]

I think I write too much.

Mel's Captain talks about her 'uniqueness' and how she's not as 'graceful' as her sisters.

Oh Mel, what can I say about Mel... she's always been different compared to her sisters. Not bad in a way, just different. She's got spark, she's got spunk, she's just plain fun to be around in her own way. Worrying at times, when you think that she's the ship, but refreshing compared to some ship AI's who just take themselves too seriously.

Mel, nobody ever calls her Melchizedek unless they're annoyed with her, was delivered a month late. She had an accident during construction on Hephaestus and one of her wings was destroyed. They had to use a wing from OV-216 to repair it.

That meant Mel was woken up in the workbay, not by her actual first crew, but by a technician listening to some Maiden on a stereo he'd rigged up in the cockpit for his own enjoyment. She just came into being right behind him.

Her first words were “I like that, it has a nice rhythm,”

Needless to say, the technician left a brick in the cockpit. Seriously, one of the funniest biomods I ever heard of. The thing with the Shuttles is, they aren't supposed to wake up like that. They're supposed to be woken by the Commander of their first crew, and with another of the Shuttles on the radio. It's supposed to be a very special ceremony. Endeavour was planned to be there for Mel, but she was still two weeks away.

So then, right from millisecond one, Mel was going to be different. She pretty much hoovered up the poor tech's MP3 player, before spreading herself out onto the Interwave to find out what this ‘Heavy Metal' thing was. By the time somebody qualified to actually handle an emergent AI had appeared, Mel had already decided on her avatar; a rough looking, teenage metalhead girl. She had the Maiden T-shirt, dyed hair half-tangled, baggy cargo pants and a jacket that made me jealous. She had piercings on her ear, she even had the metal-clad boots to complete to effect.

When they finally got Discovery around to greet her into the world, she was headbanging with the best of them, and flat out refused the wear the traditional shuttle-AI uniforms. They rushed me and her hired crew out to Hephaestus... I'd just taken the job the day before.... and got us all together for the official naming ceremony, a sort of 'welcome to the family' occasion. It was pomp and ceremony, with visiting dignitaries and they even had Dizzy out to give one of the speeches.

She's talking about the legacy of manned spaceflight, the history the Space Shuttle represented, and how Mel was a part of that legacy. It was all profound and memorable stuff.

Mel interrupted her halfway through with a loud, lazy “Bo~oooring.”

You could've heard a pin drop.

Then the laughter started. It set the tone for the future. After that, Mel was always going to be the black sheep in the family.

I doubt she really understood the concept of disrespect at the time, and Dizzy didn't bear a grudge really. Not for long anyway. But that's who she is really, that's who she became. Rather than being a custodian of the Shuttle legacy, she wants to be her own person with her own identity. More power to her I say.

Of course, we did have her teething troubles. At first, she didn't know where the line was. There were things we'd put down to kids being kids, and things which you just do not do. The worst one, the absolute worst one was on her acceptance flight. That was the only time anyone ever really got angry with her.

The shuttles are some of the most heavily tested spacecraft in Fenspace; they each have to meet ‘dane airworthiness requirements, jump through a number of hoops, and finally demonstrate that they can still perform unpowered re-entries like the old orbiters. That test has to be flown by an original shuttle astronaut, a veteran pilot, so it's a genuine test flight. We were all geeking over having a real hardtech astronaut aboard, someone who'd actually been up here before the ‘wave.

We strap up and angle in for re-entry the old fashioned way, with a burn from the maneuvering engines. It's going well and it's pretty exciting to watch out the window, when we notice that the elevon trim was getting unbalanced. Playing it safe, the astronaut called for a powered abort back to orbit before the damage got too severe to start actually setting alarms off and become dangerous.

Mel refused the command, insisting there was nothing wrong, that she could finish the test. We were watching this trim indicator going towards one degree. We both lost our shit with her... as far as we were concerned, her pig-headedness was going to get us all killed. She just kept assuring is that it wasn't a problem and that her internal thermal sensors were still well within bounds.

It levelled out at 1.9 and stayed there through the rest of the re-entry. We'd been halfway through figuring out how to bypass her controls while she was arguing with us that none of her internal sensors were showing anything abnormal, and we tried to get her to understand how she was being a complete and total idiot by ignoring a critical indicator because nothing else was wrong.

It was a very quiet, and undamaged, shuttle that landed at Canaveral.

The ‘problem' turned out to be the replacement wing taken from 216. It had some slight production differences from Mel's original, causing her to tend to turn right a little in atmosphere.

We really considered removing her from the ship's systems at that point and getting her replaced. Go find her own body where she won't be able kill people. I can understand some youthful hotheadedness in wanting to pass the final test ‘now', but it's things like that that get people killed.

It was only Discovery that kept us from going through with it. I still don't know what exactly Discovery told her, Mel refuses to talk about it, but it was enough to make her actively search her entire test crew out and apologise in person for being so stupid. We held a meeting to decide her fate, whether we'd be happy to fly with her again or not. In the end we figured it was a case of lesson learned and clearly learned well.

Mel's still immature compared to her Sisters, but nowadays, I'd trust her to the ends of the ‘verse and back. She makes mistakes, she learns, she becomes a better person because of it. Her sisters might be teachers and educators, but Mel is a learner. That's her big strength.

That doesn't mean she immediately became a model space citizen. Just ask the Magnificent Midnight. Putting those two in the same area of space is just asking for trouble. It's not how I wanted to meet Benjamin Rhodes that's for sure. Eventually we just agreed to pay for our own repairs rather than try figure out which one of them was at fault.

They love ‘roughhousing' and a fully laden Shuttle roughhousing with a Blackbird is a sight to see. The whole thing's a bit like watching a rhinoceros chase after a cheetah; there are some things which just should not be possible in a sane universe, but somehow it's happening all the same.

Mel can gimbal her engines, all three of them. Mel takes turns around asteroids at full throttle with the back end swinging around in a zero-g imitation of a powerslide with all her OMS thrusters firing at full power just to keep her going in the right direction. It's a hell of a ride.

She gets on well with the Blackbirds. She likes racing against them and provided nobody's in danger we let her get on with it. She gets sulky otherwise. So when she asked us if we could enter a full blown official race.... it still took a lot of convincing to get us to go along with it.

We eventually entered her in Fides 500 and remarkably, didn't come last. That's a bit like pickup truck racing against a field full of Ferrari's. We lost the horizontal stabiliser and an OMS thruster in the process, but kept going doggedly to the end. Mel toughed it out to the checkered flag, earning herself the sportsmanship prize, which was conveniently just enough to cover the damage. We took the opportunity to get a high powered radio antenna fitted when she was being repaired, and set up our own lightspeed radio station.

It really is a point of pride for her that she's done so much, compared to her Sisters. She's even been used on full military missions for the Panzer Kunst. They originally bought her as a utility craft, just to let them get places without calling in outside help, but she's found herself genuinely doing near everything you could imagine.

Most Zwilniks think twice before firing on a shuttle, because welll... it's a Space Shuttle. Shoot one down and all of Fenspace would likely turn against you and hunt you down. That didn't stop some from taking pot-shots, but playing with Midnight taught her how to jink and dodge with the best of them. Of course, we do get criticised for it.... there're a whole group of Fen who think using a Space Shuttle for military missions is somehow offensive to ‘The Shuttle Legacy' or whatever. People seem to forget, the whole reason the original orbiters were so big was because of military demands. All the sensor gear fitted for exploration is pretty handy to have on a high-speed reconnaissance pass and that cargo-bay can carry a lot of equipment, with a very quick deployment time.

What we normally end up doing however is providing a secure cargo transport. The Panzer Kunst already did secure courier trips, we just expanded it to larger cargoes. A pair of armed Kunstler aboard provide the protection. Anybody thinking they can pick us off is in for a nasty shock. It's a surprisingly good business; Mel's already paid for herself despite being less than a year old. These days, people like their security.

But that's not to say we're stuck in-system. Mel really has done everything. James Cameron hired us for a run out to Pandora. We called it an exploration mission, but it really wasn't. We weren't treading new ground, we rocked up into orbit and sent down a few ground launches with Cameron and Paxton getting about on foot while Jet Jaguar did some aerial work. Mel's own experience landing at Grunthal and her practice with Midnight meant she came into her own flying down into canyons.

Of course, the reason everybody remembers that trip is Nostromo. We damn near ran into the thing. If we hadn't have lost an engine on the way out of the solar system, we probably would've smacked right into the thing and become just another missing ship in the black. Mel was sulking about being on a bo~oooring exploration mission when we just start slowing down into a gravity well and then Bang!, there it was large as life, a big fat Gas giant out in the Oort cloud.

We ended up spending two days hanging around before Mel could be convinced to leave. Who do you think the first person she told about her little find was...

When she made it back to Fenspace, the first person she contacted to brag about it was Discovery. I'm Mel's Captain and I don't even know exactly what goes on between those two, though I've had to listen to the consequences of some of her pranks more than once.

I'm pretty sure Mel looks up to her as some sort of aunt, or big sister. I like to think the feeling's somewhat mutual. Sure the little sister irritates the hell out of her bigger and more mature elder, but so what? That's what sisters are supposed to do, right? Disco's still there for her in a pinch, and I know Mel would return it. We're already planning on a mission together to Sirius next year with her, and Mel's already looking forward to it.

Before that happens, she needed her first overhaul. She put up more launch and re-entry cycles in her first six months than her sisters did in two years and the original Graces did over their entire pre-wave lives. She's kept right down the bottom of a gravity well too so that takes it's strain on her spaceframe.

We pulled her into drydock at Hephaestus, and the engineers started crawling all over her, measuring, analysing, discussing and eventually passing judgment. A short man, with a grim look about him just huffed. How could we treat a grace so badly, it was a Space Shuttle not a truck.

Mel just glared at him, hands on her avatar's hips in full blown pout.

“I'm no Grace, I work for a living. I'm a truck that's aiming high,”

Y'know, I think she's right about that. Some of her sisters are little more than status symbols picked up by a few wealthy fen who want to bask in the light of having their own personal Space Shuttle. Even those who supposedly work at research or station supply are really more ambassadors and figureheads. They're symbols of exploration as much as they are working craft. Well, that's my interpretation, I'm a little bit biased.

Mel on the other hand, she's out there doing damn near everything that's asked of her and more, and doing it all with aplomb. She's not weighted down by the pressure of living up the legacy of her ancestors, or by trying to be someone's symbol of the future, she's making her own name and doing her own work and doing it well.

She's a tough girl. She's a teenager. She still screws up every now and then. She can be a real pain at times but, you don't want a boring ship, do you? Because most of all, she's our Mel and we love her to bits.

EDIT: Just a few changes based on comments.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?