[Witches' Horses] Witches' Horses
Title: lightning in the dark
'Verse/characters: Witches' Horses; crew of the Bogoroditsa
Prompt: 79D "fuck"
Word Count: 2125
Notes: Several days later than I was hoping to post this . . . (stupid balking engineer. Stupid elbow.), this is a different angle on the events here. I find the contrast between the two inappropriately hilarious. >.>
---------
The spare parts fund hadn't stretched as far as anyone had hoped--though Dima had managed to get about five parts for the price of three--so Ilya had been spending his spare time refurbishing what they had available. So far this trip had had a lot of time going spare; they'd been running a grid search pattern for almost a week with no more results than the remains of a military heat-decoy and a twisted shred of metal about the length of Katya's foot that nobody could identify. Katya, after several hours tossing out more and more ridiculous ideas, had eventually given up and put the shard into the bin of scrap metal to be used for forging more parts.
Ilya had stopped listening to the ideas around the time she'd wondered if it was the remains of one of Saint-Ilya's chisels. Knowing Katya she might well have eventually progressed to one of the Thunderer's shoes or something. She tended to get creative with nothing much to do, and there was currently a lot of nothing to do. He'd even found time to flush the air ventilation system.
Once he finished being disgusted at the record of how many colours Katya had dyed her hair in recent months--many--and how much of his own hair wound up in the vent filters despite the efforts he made to contain it, he'd fed the resulting mare's-nest of fibers into the organics recycler. He flushed the entire system again, just in case, changed a couple of worn filters, and then closed the access panels up. He'd left two notes about it; one for Fyodor, to let the night engineering shift know what the day had gotten up to, and the other for Katya, with a preliminary write-up of what chemicals she was exposing herself to on an opportunistic schedule.
Fyodor had handed over a reply note from Katya with his stack of activities the next morning. "You two really arguing over her tea?"
"You ever read the information label on one of the bottles?" Ilya shot back as he flipped through the stack to make sure there wasn't anything he needed to ask about before Fyodor went to bed.
"Nope," Fyodor replied, yawning. "Just like I don't read the label on the kasha. There's more important things to worry about."
Ilya thought about saying something unkind, but bit his tongue and hooked his morning tea-mug onto the wall by one of the primary heat exchanges to stay warm instead. "Sleep well, Fyodor."
"Have a good day," Fyodor replied, and took himself off to the sleeping quarters. Ilya waved an absentminded acknowledgement, mind focused more on the mental list he'd drawn up of what needed rebuilding. And what--or who--he could scrape up for company. He diagnosed better in isolation, but worked better in company, even if it was a distant, staticky Church-choir channel playing in the background.
Out this far from Vladimir's roads--funny how 'civilisation' could shift from the crowded atmospheres of a city like Tver or Tula to Vladimir, which, while big, wasn't even as big as Saratov--he didn't have the option of the choir. He barely had the option of human company; the Captain had drawn up the cycle long, leaving Ilya and Fyodor to flip for who got engineering days, while she, Katya and Dima carried out the other duties on the horse. He'd already gone a couple of days without seeing the Captain at all and Dima and Katya only when they wandered down to engineering or came across him elbows-deep in a system and biting off curses in a hallway.
Katya was out; the time she'd left the return note implied she'd be getting up sometime in his afternoon. Fyodor was definitely out. Which left him the Captain--probably heading to bed sometime in the next few hours--and Dima. Who would probably be getting up sometime in the next few hours. Both of whom would probably be passing through the kitchen.
Ilya reached over, snagged the toolkit he'd need for the current mobile project--turning two old air filters into one ice filter--and reached for his mug. He'd be able to work on--
A spark flew between his bare hand and the mug. He jerked away just in time to watch a much bigger electrical charge arc between the engine and the open door leading out towards the kitchen, zapping the panel hard enough the door slammed closed.
Then the lightning started.
In and amongst the screaming--most of which wasn't human--he found he'd never been more grateful that Fyodor hadn't yet bothered with the new style in tethers. The whole set, everything available anywhere in the Bogoroditsa--including her emergency supplies--was rubber-dipped cording and thick plastic clips. No metal, nothing to ground a spark or a flash.
Katya yelled something through the audio system at him, her voice still sleep-thick, but another arc flashed between the breaker panel box and the system speaker closest to his head and he couldn't hear a thing she was saying.
Shouting, nearly screaming, completely unable to tell if the audio system was even working let alone if the all-system toggle he'd just slammed with his fist was active, "Turn it off, get it all off, everything you can reach run!" then slammed the toggle closed again, hit the raiders-aboard overrides for good measure.
He couldn't even get close to the breaker panel, even with the gloves: looking at it felt like looking into a lightning storm's heart, at the Thunderer's eyes--
He cut off that thought before it could get much of anywhere and started hitting what of the emergency switches he could actually get at, slapping with open palms, even kicking at the mains in the partial seconds between strikes. The lights cut out in a burst of white shattering shards--he instinctively ducked, covering his head with his arms, but forced himself up again as the emergencies kicked on in response. The main engine access panel was right there--
Then, suddenly as it'd begun, the lightning stopped. Everything stopped, even the overhead emergency lighting browned down to a dim twilight grey. Ilya caught himself wondering if that burning smell was his hair or insulation. It wasn't his gloves, he knew as he pulled his hands out of the panel, used one to switch his tether from the floor to the scaffolding by the engine panel. After another second of wondering, he reached up and checked, running his gloves over his head until he was reasonably sure it wasn't him at all. In the middle of trying to work out which insulation section he was smelling, he felt the tether pull at his hip. He was rotating in relation to the panel, opposite to where he'd expected the emergency coils to point.
Then he noticed that there didn't appear to be any active emergency coils, and winced.
He wasn't sure if the retching noise nearby was a broken machine or a human, but he really wished it would stop. With the gravity off, he could actually feel the horse tumbling gently through the black. It was worse--much worse--than staggering home drunk because no matter what he grasped his inner ear still protested that 'down' was moving.
Taking several gulping breaths, tasting ozone and trying not to choke, Ilya reoriented himself to the panel, snagged a hand-hold to anchor himself that way, then reached out with his free glove and carefully toggled on the intra-horse audio system. When it hissed static but didn't spark or crunch in response, he said "Where is everyone?"
For a few terrifying moments all he heard was the pops and pings of cooling metal, a retching noise in counterpoint to the one nearby, and something groaning deep and low. He drew breath to call again--
"Saddle," came the Captain's voice, hoarser than usual, like she'd been shouting, "and there's a lot of smoke up here. Is it safe to turn on the vent?"
"You think smoke's bad, I'm in the kitchen and the lights aren't even on," Katya replied, audibly sick to her stomach but reaching for her sense of humour with both hands. "Last I saw I was somewhere near the stove, but I lost my grip somewhere in there. I'm all right, but for all I know I'm clinging to that light spar on the ceiling."
"Cargo's dark, too," Dima chimed in as Fyodor groused that he was trapped in the sleeping quarters but had gotten to the environmental overrides anyway.
"You're not going to like the job I did on the panel, Ilya," he added. "Natalia Ivanovna, go ahead and try the vent. With everything else off, worst it can do is spit sparks at you."
'Or catch fire without the fire suppression system running,' Ilya amended silently, biting down on the desire to pray. He didn't want to die like this. Nobody wanted to die like this, not even the Thunderer's maddest devotees. This was the way a rusalka story started, the way Thunderer stories sometimes ended, when He forgot to stay young and humans paid for it.
The comfortable background hum of a fan kicking on was as sweet as anything he'd ever heard. Even the first successful design he'd ever got going the way it was meant to hadn't been this wonderful.
Under that relief, he thought he heard someone muttering a thank-you to the Thunderer, but the Captain's brief, heartfelt thank-you to God was louder and clearer, all but singing a praise. "Smoke's clearing," she added, "but without the mirrors on I can't see how badly mangled anything up here is."
"I'll check the fuses down here, first, then let you know what to try," he replied, switching hand-holds along the face of the engine, then tried to open the breaker panel. Tried again. Frowned.
"I'd really like to be able to see what I'm clinging to," Katya put in plaintively, which in other circumstances would have merited a told-you-so about her bad habit of not using a tether. As it was--
"All right. We're going to try for the lights, first, then the doors--sorry Fyodor--then the gravity."
"At least there's a sleeping bag and the banya reserve handy if you take too long about it," Fyodor replied, cheerfully enough. "Want me to swap the air system in here back to passive?"
"No, keep it isolated--we need to get the lights back on and clear any fire hazards," Ilya told him absently, trying to prize the breaker panel free with glove-clumsy fingers, then paused. "--You smelling smoke?"
"No," Fyodor replied. "I've got lights, no coils, no power on any of the doors, even the manual overrides, and the air system's off, but no smoke."
Sketching an unwilling, thankful cross over himself, Ilya grabbed a second anchorpoint and kneed the panel hard enough his leg was still smarting when the latch finally gave. "Boje moi," he muttered involuntarily when he got a look inside the box. "That's a lot of black and yellow fuses."
Remembering the conversation, he raised his voice slightly to reach the audio pick-up without looking at it. "Try kicking your air on, Fyodor, but don't put it back on the passive exchange. We may need you to flush some of the other compartments. Dima, where in cargo are you?"
"Tethered between backup ice and cargo two," Dima said. "Real wet down here--ice may have gone."
Everyone swore.
"Could be worse," Dima said when the last of Fyodor's mat--which Ilya barely understood and hoped neither of the women did--faded from the channel. "No smoke."
"Bite your tongue, Dima," Katya scolded. "That's just asking for it."
"You seeing any light down there Dima?" Ilya interjected, starting to swap out blackened burnt-out fuses for their meager supply of spares and praying he'd run out sometime in the yellows, instead of the blacks.
"Might be emergency lights over towards cargo one," Dima allowed. "Might just be my eyes--pretty dark down here."
"Working on it," Ilya said, swapping out one last fuse and then carefully cycling three breakers over, one after another. "Better?"
" . . I'm Vanya Sleeps-on-the-stove," Katya muttered. "That's appalling."
"Get off the stove, Katya," the Captain intoned calmly--Ilya could hear Fyodor in the background trying not to laugh-- "find a tether, and start checking over the kitchen. Dima?"
"Ow."
"If you can see, go looking for the source of that wet," she continued.
"Find gloves first if you haven't already," Ilya added. "I really don't want you popping another breaker right now."
"Got gloves. Need a minute for the afterimages to fade. Got the mains and the emergencies, Ilya."
"Really?" Ilya squinted at the board. "It's labeled just for the emergencies. Sorry."
"'s nothing. Letcha know what I find."
"Thanks," Ilya replied automatically. "Captain, you can try the primary mirror system now--"
'Verse/characters: Witches' Horses; crew of the Bogoroditsa
Prompt: 79D "fuck"
Word Count: 2125
Notes: Several days later than I was hoping to post this . . . (stupid balking engineer. Stupid elbow.), this is a different angle on the events here. I find the contrast between the two inappropriately hilarious. >.>
---------
The spare parts fund hadn't stretched as far as anyone had hoped--though Dima had managed to get about five parts for the price of three--so Ilya had been spending his spare time refurbishing what they had available. So far this trip had had a lot of time going spare; they'd been running a grid search pattern for almost a week with no more results than the remains of a military heat-decoy and a twisted shred of metal about the length of Katya's foot that nobody could identify. Katya, after several hours tossing out more and more ridiculous ideas, had eventually given up and put the shard into the bin of scrap metal to be used for forging more parts.
Ilya had stopped listening to the ideas around the time she'd wondered if it was the remains of one of Saint-Ilya's chisels. Knowing Katya she might well have eventually progressed to one of the Thunderer's shoes or something. She tended to get creative with nothing much to do, and there was currently a lot of nothing to do. He'd even found time to flush the air ventilation system.
Once he finished being disgusted at the record of how many colours Katya had dyed her hair in recent months--many--and how much of his own hair wound up in the vent filters despite the efforts he made to contain it, he'd fed the resulting mare's-nest of fibers into the organics recycler. He flushed the entire system again, just in case, changed a couple of worn filters, and then closed the access panels up. He'd left two notes about it; one for Fyodor, to let the night engineering shift know what the day had gotten up to, and the other for Katya, with a preliminary write-up of what chemicals she was exposing herself to on an opportunistic schedule.
Fyodor had handed over a reply note from Katya with his stack of activities the next morning. "You two really arguing over her tea?"
"You ever read the information label on one of the bottles?" Ilya shot back as he flipped through the stack to make sure there wasn't anything he needed to ask about before Fyodor went to bed.
"Nope," Fyodor replied, yawning. "Just like I don't read the label on the kasha. There's more important things to worry about."
Ilya thought about saying something unkind, but bit his tongue and hooked his morning tea-mug onto the wall by one of the primary heat exchanges to stay warm instead. "Sleep well, Fyodor."
"Have a good day," Fyodor replied, and took himself off to the sleeping quarters. Ilya waved an absentminded acknowledgement, mind focused more on the mental list he'd drawn up of what needed rebuilding. And what--or who--he could scrape up for company. He diagnosed better in isolation, but worked better in company, even if it was a distant, staticky Church-choir channel playing in the background.
Out this far from Vladimir's roads--funny how 'civilisation' could shift from the crowded atmospheres of a city like Tver or Tula to Vladimir, which, while big, wasn't even as big as Saratov--he didn't have the option of the choir. He barely had the option of human company; the Captain had drawn up the cycle long, leaving Ilya and Fyodor to flip for who got engineering days, while she, Katya and Dima carried out the other duties on the horse. He'd already gone a couple of days without seeing the Captain at all and Dima and Katya only when they wandered down to engineering or came across him elbows-deep in a system and biting off curses in a hallway.
Katya was out; the time she'd left the return note implied she'd be getting up sometime in his afternoon. Fyodor was definitely out. Which left him the Captain--probably heading to bed sometime in the next few hours--and Dima. Who would probably be getting up sometime in the next few hours. Both of whom would probably be passing through the kitchen.
Ilya reached over, snagged the toolkit he'd need for the current mobile project--turning two old air filters into one ice filter--and reached for his mug. He'd be able to work on--
A spark flew between his bare hand and the mug. He jerked away just in time to watch a much bigger electrical charge arc between the engine and the open door leading out towards the kitchen, zapping the panel hard enough the door slammed closed.
Then the lightning started.
In and amongst the screaming--most of which wasn't human--he found he'd never been more grateful that Fyodor hadn't yet bothered with the new style in tethers. The whole set, everything available anywhere in the Bogoroditsa--including her emergency supplies--was rubber-dipped cording and thick plastic clips. No metal, nothing to ground a spark or a flash.
Katya yelled something through the audio system at him, her voice still sleep-thick, but another arc flashed between the breaker panel box and the system speaker closest to his head and he couldn't hear a thing she was saying.
Shouting, nearly screaming, completely unable to tell if the audio system was even working let alone if the all-system toggle he'd just slammed with his fist was active, "Turn it off, get it all off, everything you can reach run!" then slammed the toggle closed again, hit the raiders-aboard overrides for good measure.
He couldn't even get close to the breaker panel, even with the gloves: looking at it felt like looking into a lightning storm's heart, at the Thunderer's eyes--
He cut off that thought before it could get much of anywhere and started hitting what of the emergency switches he could actually get at, slapping with open palms, even kicking at the mains in the partial seconds between strikes. The lights cut out in a burst of white shattering shards--he instinctively ducked, covering his head with his arms, but forced himself up again as the emergencies kicked on in response. The main engine access panel was right there--
Then, suddenly as it'd begun, the lightning stopped. Everything stopped, even the overhead emergency lighting browned down to a dim twilight grey. Ilya caught himself wondering if that burning smell was his hair or insulation. It wasn't his gloves, he knew as he pulled his hands out of the panel, used one to switch his tether from the floor to the scaffolding by the engine panel. After another second of wondering, he reached up and checked, running his gloves over his head until he was reasonably sure it wasn't him at all. In the middle of trying to work out which insulation section he was smelling, he felt the tether pull at his hip. He was rotating in relation to the panel, opposite to where he'd expected the emergency coils to point.
Then he noticed that there didn't appear to be any active emergency coils, and winced.
He wasn't sure if the retching noise nearby was a broken machine or a human, but he really wished it would stop. With the gravity off, he could actually feel the horse tumbling gently through the black. It was worse--much worse--than staggering home drunk because no matter what he grasped his inner ear still protested that 'down' was moving.
Taking several gulping breaths, tasting ozone and trying not to choke, Ilya reoriented himself to the panel, snagged a hand-hold to anchor himself that way, then reached out with his free glove and carefully toggled on the intra-horse audio system. When it hissed static but didn't spark or crunch in response, he said "Where is everyone?"
For a few terrifying moments all he heard was the pops and pings of cooling metal, a retching noise in counterpoint to the one nearby, and something groaning deep and low. He drew breath to call again--
"Saddle," came the Captain's voice, hoarser than usual, like she'd been shouting, "and there's a lot of smoke up here. Is it safe to turn on the vent?"
"You think smoke's bad, I'm in the kitchen and the lights aren't even on," Katya replied, audibly sick to her stomach but reaching for her sense of humour with both hands. "Last I saw I was somewhere near the stove, but I lost my grip somewhere in there. I'm all right, but for all I know I'm clinging to that light spar on the ceiling."
"Cargo's dark, too," Dima chimed in as Fyodor groused that he was trapped in the sleeping quarters but had gotten to the environmental overrides anyway.
"You're not going to like the job I did on the panel, Ilya," he added. "Natalia Ivanovna, go ahead and try the vent. With everything else off, worst it can do is spit sparks at you."
'Or catch fire without the fire suppression system running,' Ilya amended silently, biting down on the desire to pray. He didn't want to die like this. Nobody wanted to die like this, not even the Thunderer's maddest devotees. This was the way a rusalka story started, the way Thunderer stories sometimes ended, when He forgot to stay young and humans paid for it.
The comfortable background hum of a fan kicking on was as sweet as anything he'd ever heard. Even the first successful design he'd ever got going the way it was meant to hadn't been this wonderful.
Under that relief, he thought he heard someone muttering a thank-you to the Thunderer, but the Captain's brief, heartfelt thank-you to God was louder and clearer, all but singing a praise. "Smoke's clearing," she added, "but without the mirrors on I can't see how badly mangled anything up here is."
"I'll check the fuses down here, first, then let you know what to try," he replied, switching hand-holds along the face of the engine, then tried to open the breaker panel. Tried again. Frowned.
"I'd really like to be able to see what I'm clinging to," Katya put in plaintively, which in other circumstances would have merited a told-you-so about her bad habit of not using a tether. As it was--
"All right. We're going to try for the lights, first, then the doors--sorry Fyodor--then the gravity."
"At least there's a sleeping bag and the banya reserve handy if you take too long about it," Fyodor replied, cheerfully enough. "Want me to swap the air system in here back to passive?"
"No, keep it isolated--we need to get the lights back on and clear any fire hazards," Ilya told him absently, trying to prize the breaker panel free with glove-clumsy fingers, then paused. "--You smelling smoke?"
"No," Fyodor replied. "I've got lights, no coils, no power on any of the doors, even the manual overrides, and the air system's off, but no smoke."
Sketching an unwilling, thankful cross over himself, Ilya grabbed a second anchorpoint and kneed the panel hard enough his leg was still smarting when the latch finally gave. "Boje moi," he muttered involuntarily when he got a look inside the box. "That's a lot of black and yellow fuses."
Remembering the conversation, he raised his voice slightly to reach the audio pick-up without looking at it. "Try kicking your air on, Fyodor, but don't put it back on the passive exchange. We may need you to flush some of the other compartments. Dima, where in cargo are you?"
"Tethered between backup ice and cargo two," Dima said. "Real wet down here--ice may have gone."
Everyone swore.
"Could be worse," Dima said when the last of Fyodor's mat--which Ilya barely understood and hoped neither of the women did--faded from the channel. "No smoke."
"Bite your tongue, Dima," Katya scolded. "That's just asking for it."
"You seeing any light down there Dima?" Ilya interjected, starting to swap out blackened burnt-out fuses for their meager supply of spares and praying he'd run out sometime in the yellows, instead of the blacks.
"Might be emergency lights over towards cargo one," Dima allowed. "Might just be my eyes--pretty dark down here."
"Working on it," Ilya said, swapping out one last fuse and then carefully cycling three breakers over, one after another. "Better?"
" . . I'm Vanya Sleeps-on-the-stove," Katya muttered. "That's appalling."
"Get off the stove, Katya," the Captain intoned calmly--Ilya could hear Fyodor in the background trying not to laugh-- "find a tether, and start checking over the kitchen. Dima?"
"Ow."
"If you can see, go looking for the source of that wet," she continued.
"Find gloves first if you haven't already," Ilya added. "I really don't want you popping another breaker right now."
"Got gloves. Need a minute for the afterimages to fade. Got the mains and the emergencies, Ilya."
"Really?" Ilya squinted at the board. "It's labeled just for the emergencies. Sorry."
"'s nothing. Letcha know what I find."
"Thanks," Ilya replied automatically. "Captain, you can try the primary mirror system now--"