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By the time the republic-issue shuttle drops out of hyperspace, Merricat Lasnam already has her round little face pressed up to the transparisteel viewport. It’s only the second time she’s traveled by hyperspace route, but she’s pretty sure- no, she’s positive- that it will never get old. Her breath catches in her throat as the shuttle turns and a trio of Venator-class Star Destroyers loom into view over the cloudy exosphere of the planet beyond. The one in the center- the Liberty, she knew from her excited reading on the inbound flight- grows bigger by the second as they slow on approach, her red control towers glowing like twin beacons against the starry backdrop of space. She'd seen them in holos, of course, but in person the flagship is more than she could ever imagine. Her eyes trace from stem to stern, taking in the turbolaser turrets, the ventral doors running the length of her midline. Five flowing red stripes down the side of the destroyer announce it as a proud member of the Republic’s Fifth Fleet.
And now, it hits her with a surge of anxious butterflies, so is she.
The expanse of the ship just keeps going and going as they drift ever closer, and Merri can’t stop naming various details in her head. By the time her eyes find ion drives she’s giddy, her booted foot bouncing in time with her racing heart. She's here. This is happening. Nothing will ever be the same.
———
‘I’d like to be the first to welcome you to the Civilian Corps of Aviation Mechanics under the 327th Star Corps. I’m Division Chief Hiko.”
Merri tries to focus on Twi’lek in front of her. He’s a massive male, with legs as thick as tree trunks and skin a deep rich green that reminded her of the pictures she’d seen in school of the forests on Kasshyk. His warm Ryl accent is inviting as are the smile lines at the corners of his eyes. The name on the breast of his coveralls reads ‘Andres’.
They’d only just finished general ship orientation. She’d had approximately two minutes to throw her bags in (what she hoped was) her barracks room before the different groups had broken off based on assignments. Andres had met her and two other engineers, both with a solid decade on her, and started the hanger tour.
It’s… a lot. A lot a lot. She knows her supervisor’s still talking, but her eyes are magna-locked on a flight of shiny new ARC-170 fighters just behind him. She can’t help but to scootch a little to the side to get a better look at the closest one- the sleek lines of the fuselage, the ingenious (and downright sexy if you ask her) way their weapons systems are mounted for maximum aerodynamics. It’s absolutely stunning, and she’s not sure she’s ever wanted to get her hands on a ship quite so badly. She can already imagine what her tool box is gonna look like parked back behind one of those fighters. Maybe she’ll even add some gold pinstriping to it, just like the paintjobs on the 170s themselves. Show some Star Corps pride. Her dad would have loved this.
“...And further down we have my girls. The LAAT Gunship- they come in a -c suffix for tank carriers, and an -i for infantry carriers. We mostly run the i’s. Around here you’ll just hear them called Larties. Transports may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re more than just a shuttle- they’re a high-payload weapons platform, and an integral part of the war effort getting our boys in and out of combat zones. As far as I’m concerned, they don’t get nearly the respect they should.”
Merri eyes the big gunships with mild curiosity. The handful of other new transfer mechanics don’t even spare them a glance- Their eyes seem locked on Andres. One asks about how often they were slotted breaks. The other is asking how to handle requests for leave.
Merri couldn’t give one speck of a care about any of that. She was on a real Venator. She was a GAR mechanic. One more step toward Rothana, someday down the line. The rich smell of oil and hydraulic fluid tickles her nose as she does a slow spin, taking it all in. If there was an afterlife, she thinks this is what it must look like.
Though maybe there, her coveralls would fit- she has to stop mid-turn to re-roll the darn things up over her heels again. Nothing ever fit. To be big enough for her ass, it had to be eighty parsecs long. She was used to it, being a stocky five-foot-nothing human woman in a tall sentient’s profession, so she was settling for rolled cuffs and chafing thighs on her first day. Whatever. It worked for now.
She gets lost in the daydream of wrenching as the group moves further down the line. She’ll get her fighter singing so pretty- it’ll be the quickest, snappiest, most glorious thing on the flight line. She’ll prove why she was top of her class. Everyone will-
Claxons scream to life and warning lights flash.
“Heads on a swivel, everyone. Gunship flights inbound.”
Yanked so rudely from her fantasy, she turns with the rest of the orientation group to watch the massive ventral doors split open just outside their secure hangar bay. A slice of star-studded space yawns overhead, and then she hears them- a rhythmic thrum of first one, then five, then an incoming swarm of Larties, their individual engines hharmonizing into a singular, deafening roar.
They drop into the hangar in groups- flights, she knew, usually had seven craft apiece- and though she’d been told the fighting was done down on the planet below, she was surprised to see just how much damage the inbound gunships were still gliding in with.
“They’re tough birds. Casualties are just as high in these as in the fighters, but they come back with more holes in them when they do limp in. Lots of salvage. Lots of repair.”
And lots of paint- while the fighters had mostly been decked out in stripes and geometric blocks of color, the gunships were splashed with designs and figures she could vaguely make out as they went past- lots of lekku and lightsabers, and a whole lot of bright blue. Right, the Jedi for this corps is a Twi’lek, isn’t she. No wonder she’s popular.
The first flight had almost finished making its way to the hangars furthest back along the Venator’s massive flight deck when the alert claxons suddenly changed pitch and intensity, going from obnoxious to tooth-rattlingly awful. She takes half a step back, her head on a swivel just the way her supervisor had demanded- and then she sees it. A Larty was coming in without the rest of its flight, its snub nose almost vertical as it dropped below the plane of the ventral doors. Sparks trail from the repulsor banks on its belly as it suddenly whirls around, spinning like a dancing girl back onto its flight path, engines in full screaming burn as it turns raw momentum into some semblance of control. The wounded craft hits the deck with a horrible screech of durasteel and skids back-end first into an empty bay just across the main flight deck from where the orientation group was frozen in shock.
And then it promptly bursts into flames.
“Oh shit, what do we do?!” The younger of her two coworkers, the lanky Rodian who’d been concerned about his vacation time, looks properly flustered. Andres just snorts and shakes his head.
“Sit tight… and hope you don’t get assigned to that one.”
Merri couldn’t help a little squeak of indignation. She admittedly hadn’t seen much actual flying , but that was insane- absolutely crazy. How had it missed the support pillars? Was that on purpose?! Just before the smoke obstructs her view entirely, she catches sight of a flash of white as it all but freefalls down the side of the gunship to splat on the hangar floor- then another (armor, it was armor, oh stars the pilots!) scrambles down from the other open canopy bubble with only slightly more grace. Then the second grabs the first by his flight harness and drags him away in a frantic tangle of limbs.
She didn’t realize her hands were clamped tightly over her mouth.
“Well, welcome to the front lines of the war, everyone. Good luck. We’ll be getting your assignments out to you shortly.”
—------
“Lasnam, Merricat?”
“It’s just Merri, sir.”
Andres looks up from the datapad in his hands with an appraising quirk of his mottled green brow. “We don’t get too many fresh graduates this far out.”
“Oh? Really?”
Andres stares hard at the datapad in his hand, a deep frown forming as he speaks. “Venator life is not for everyone.” He gives a quick glance up and then picks up another datapad. “You’re not getting home for Life Day. Certainly not making it to date night.”
“Oh-” she swallows down the lump that bobs like a buoy in her throat. “That’s not a problem.”
“I suppose you’re already here, so it’s not like you can go back now.” He slides the datapad across the desk toward her. “Ready to show off that fancy training?”
Merri snatches the datapad up. She's on cloud nine. Her dream is coming true. Everything is-
“A Larty?”
No, this wasn’t right. The pad goes back on the desk. She was supposed to be on fighters. She’d dreamed of being on fighters, worked her chubby little butt off to get her hands on fighters. .
“Fall short of expectations?” The knowing look he gives her makes her feel like a brat, but it’s just not fair.
“Not exactly what I hoped for.” She tries to fight the slump in her shoulders and infuse some enthusiasm back into her voice.
“Well, Lasnam, we all gotta start somewhere.” He nudges the datapad toward her again. She picks it up slowly and looks down at the file. “You've been assigned to Argora Flight as the primary for Argora Six. Hope you’re ready to hit the ground running because the Oola Gida is a little crispy.” Merri’s jaw drops. Andres glances again at the other datapad with a frown. “And she just lost her mechanic.”
Merri can’t quite bring herself to meet his eye. Andres’ chin dips a little, his hefty lekku swaying behind his shoulder. “Hey kid, I promise it won’t be as bad as you think. And… you should be all right handling the pilot.”
The comment almost goes over her head. Almost. “The pilot...?”
The lekku-swishing stops. “Yeeeah. You’ll be fine. He’s just…”
“Just… what?”
“He’s… a little bit… much. You’ll see soon enough.”
—------
“Who the hell are you?”
It’s not the question that hits Merri wrong. It’s an honest one. She’d probably wanna know who the new boots under the bird were too if she’d been on the other side of the creeper.
So no, it’s not the question that gets her- it’s the tone and the shock of having her repulsor creeper forcefully dragged out from under the larty that does it.
Her eyes aren’t ready to adjust to the harsh overhead lighting. It’s like staring into a pair of twin suns. She resorts to her coverall-covered arm to shield herself. Whoever is standing over her doesn’t seem to be in the mood to wait. She can hear the harsh masculine huff, low and irritated, almost a growl. Whatever, they could hold their steelies for two karking seconds. The galaxy wouldn’t end because she needed to blink for a minute. Except… maybe it would? Her assailant seems to think so. He knocks a plastoid boot against the creeper. Merri’s jaw clenches, “Can I help you?”
Normally she’d make a joke about her attitude being related to her height. It’d get a laugh. She’d always had a pretty good sense of humor. Being five foot nothing, she’d have never made it out of the mechanic shops back home if she couldn’t handle being picked on just a little but none of this is going like she’d dreamed and her patience is spread thin to the point of transparency.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. She was supposed to be with the fighters, not being slotted into the vacancy the Oola Gida’s former mechanic had left by going on leave and sending a ‘Dear Andres’ message after his departure.
She hadn’t seen the backside of her eyelids since she’d left Coruscant. She’d heard the Liberty’s mess hall was passable, but she hadn’t a moment to try it out. Stars, she’d barely seen the inside of the fresher to empty her bladder before starting an emergency shift on Agora’s flight line and a ship that looked, at the moment, more like charcoal than metal. She was allowed to be a little grumpy about it, all right?
“Pretty sure I asked who you were first.” The edges of a well-loved set of Phase One clone armor come into view, its white all scuffed with black and yellow pinstriping that had honestly seen a better day or twenty.
“I’m the new mechanic.”
Another disgruntled sound and a twist of the mouth showing too many teeth. “Where’s Simmons?”
Really? Not even a ‘hi how are you?’ She tips her head off the back of the creeper to look at her handiwork. A mess of wiring hangs like viscera from the belly of the ship. She really needed to get back to it. “I hear his sister had a baby or something.”
A pause. Gotcha. “Wait. Really?”
“Yeah, apparently the baby lost its legs and arms and now it's just a stump but he and his wife are taking care of it.”
The clone looks aghast, “I-”
“It’s fairly happy I hear and-” she stops mid sentence and snorts at the clone’s look of abject horror. “I’m kidding! Look, I really have no clue. They don’t pay me to pass along information. All I know is he’s not here now and I am. And if you don’t mind…”
Merri moves to scoot back under the Larty and continue her surgery on the open maintenance hatch, only to be slid back out before her tits have even cleared the ramp housing. That damn boot rests at the end of the creeper again, his arms crossed over his chest.
She sits up fast enough to make her head go a little fuzzy. “I don’t know who you think you are-“
“I’m the karking pilot.This is my ship.”
It’s a fight to keep her face straight and not allow her mouth to shape into a surprised ‘O’. Later she’ll eat a piece of chocolate out of her stash as congratulations.
“Pilot,” she begins after a moment. “You’ve got issues.”
He snorts as if she’s said something funny. She hadn’t meant it to come off that way. She tries to push the creeper back again but he makes a show of his boot kicking the safety lock into place. The thing doesn’t budge.
“Fine. Maybe you’ll be interested to know why you crashed?”
He visibly bristles. “Listen here, New Blood, I floated her in.”
“And I’m Senator Amidala.”
“Maybe if she was shaped like a porg. Are you even tall enough to ride this ride?” A muscle in his jaw ticks. He doesn’t have room to talk. He looked like someone had taken a clone and put him in a dehydrator- while he had the height of the rest of the pilots and troopers she’d seen milling around the Venator, he lacked the overall heft to his body and fullness in the face. His armor even looked smaller, somehow. He reminds her of the knock-off pocketbooks you could find on some of the more questionable levels of Coruscant. Close to the real deal but absolutely, noticeably, not. “She took fire. It blew the repulsors.”
She doesn’t even fight the roll of her eyes, “Repulsors don’t blow. Your shields were still up.”
“Fire. Fight,” he grits between clenched teeth.
“Annnd you lost fire supp and your forward regulators.”
“I was there. I know.”
“The repulsors aren’t on the same circuit. You got bigger problems.”
“Looking pretty small from where I stand.”
Even though she’d been of the same mindset he was when she’d first started to triage the situation, she wasn’t about to tell him that. It hadn’t been until she’d popped open the forward compartment panel and wiggled herself half inside to begin her damage report that she’d found the real answer. She’d heard a sound and turned her head and screamed like a shriek-hawk as the culprit made itself known. The thing had looked at her with its black beady eyes and promptly bit down on the wire cluster held between its not-at-all cute claws. The damn creature lit up like Life Day fireworks, and she’d never hated her boobs as much as she did in that moment- she’d panicked and gotten stuck, too frantic at the sight of rapidly roasting rodent to remember to squish them down enough to fit back through the tiny access panel.
Merri’s eyes narrow- if he was going to make it difficult, she could work around him. She doesn’t look back over her shoulder as she shimmies from the creeper to the ground. The rolled sleeves of her coveralls, always too long, slip over her elbows and promptly unravel down to cover her hands. She takes a moment to push them back up. She ignores his noises of annoyance as she belly crawls back to her previous spot under the Oola Gida and grabs the larger issue he didn’t think existed in a gloved hand.
“Listen, when I say-“ whatever he’s about to snark at her is cut off by the wet plop of the dead creature she tosses at his feet. It’s head rests across the top of his boot, staring up accusingly. It’s greasy, nearly the size of a bolo ball with fur that was somehow both oily and charred. It’s mouth is seized open. The sharp yellowed teeth in its maw mock the growing snarl on the pilot’s face. The smell of burnt hair and something distinctively rancid makes her stomach flip.
“Is that a-“
“Rous? Yeah, I’m not sure how long you had this bird on the ground, but you picked up a few passengers and they are having a field day in the wiring.” Merri pushes up off the deck and straightens up to her full height. It’s less than impressive, barely coming to his shoulders. She has to look up to stare the clone pilot down- but stare she does. He blinks back, his stupid ornery face still stuck in its seemingly perpetual snarl.
She takes a moment of distraction to calm her nerves, wiping her grease stained hands on her coveralls. “Unless you feel like playing nursemaid to a nest of new baby rouses next time you take off, I’d suggest you let me work.”
“There’s more…” the disgust in his voice quickly morphs back to scorn, “Look, no one touches my girl without my consent. Greasy stink-rats or not.”
Merri sighs as the pilot doubles down.
“Flyboy…” Merri points at the pilot with her hydro spanner and then taps her chest with the tool, catching the flick of his eyes to her coveralls. “Mechanic. You make sure the ship gets back. I make sure the ship can leave again. Right now she’s parked, so she’s my ship”
His head cocks to the side as he stares down at her. With every passing second Merri swears she can hear the first rous’ mate making a bigger mess of the central wiring harness- a happy little nest to pop out a swarm of ship-devouring hellspawn.
“Are we done, Pilot ?”
“Are you kid-“
“Fitz! Chow?” Merri looks past the newly named pilot as he turns his head. A pair of similarly accented clone pilots hover just in the hanger. One uses a foot behind him to hold the doors open. They’re oblivious to the proverbial pissing-match their buddy has engaged her in.
The pilot- Fitz, she commits the name to memory- sighs deeply as if the offer of the mess is the final straw in the long list of hardships he’s faced today.
“Look, just… don’t touch the paint job, ok?”
It’s Merri’s turn to study him. She lets the silence draw like she’s rolling his demand around in her head until the fingers at the end of his crossed arms begin to tap against his armor. Well, that didn’t take long.
“Fine.” She pops a lazy salute. “I won’t mess with your colors.”
Fitz nods once and turns to meet the other clones at the door. The pair glance around him and Merri makes a point to wave and smile. Their matching looks of concern are easy to read.
“Hi! I’m Merri! I’m the new mechanic!”
Fitz turns back. It’s only one of the other clones' hands grabbing his arm that seems to stop him from storming back “You’re not my new mechanic!”
“Sorry ‘bout your luck! I live here now!”
“If you think I’m letting a porg in coveralls work on my girl…”
His friend hisses something in his ear. He’s forcefully dragged through the door but she can hear him before the door whooshes shut.
“Fine, three porgs!”
Merri lets a harsh breath blow past her lips before she nudges the dead rous with the toe of her boot. The least he could have done is taken the stinking thing to the compactor hatch. The smell hits her again and she fights back the gag it triggers. Whatever. It wasn’t going anywhere now. It had taken every ounce of spite she had to pick up and chuck it at his feet in the first place. The droids could do it.
She jams her hand into the lock mechanism as she drops back onto the creeper. It hisses then floats free. Merri glances up at her new charge, The Oola Gida . She stands out in the row of LAAT/i. She’s well loved, but her history is on full display.
Deep scars etched into her doors and below the pilot's bubbles show that she’s never been afraid of a fight, and had come home after her fair share of them. The tips of her downturned wings, nearest the ground and the box, gleam with bare metal, the paint rubbed off just a few inches back, both above and below.
Unlike her wings, the art on the paneling of her nose appears to have been freshly touched up with an artist's fine eye for detail. Merri has seen nose art, but this one ranks up there with the best of them. She may not have seen the 327ths general in person yet, but it didn’t take first hand experience to recognize her- her blue saber ablaze, leaping into battle beneath the cockpit on the front of the ship.
Merri was certainly no artist. The best she’d ever been able to throw together was a barely passable stick figure her father had kept in the middle of their fridge until the flimsi had fallen apart. That being said, even she could appreciate the careful brushstrokes that flowed without end from one sinuous limb of the Twi’lek Jedi general to the next, her saber somehow seeming to glow against the plain grey of the hull, the way the artist had lovingly added a spark of life to the general’s eyes.
With a sigh for the work ahead, she wiggles back into place on the creeper. Back under the ’Gida, Merri begins tracing wires and tapping different pathways into a small data controller. She lights one system after another, adjusting voltage to keep the risk of fire down but catch the culprit in the act,“Alright big girl, whadda ya say we take care of your rodent problem.”
——-