60-Valkyrie’s View: A Year Among the Stars
February 29th, 2552 Heart to Heart
Tow Truck Driver/Lab Rat/mechanic’s apprentice – Katherine ‘Kat’ James Reporting
It was after my third training run of the day while I was waiting for Flight Ops to decide what monkey wrenches they could throw my way when I caught sight of Dancer. Betty Jean Cartanzki— I kid you not – I’d go by Dancer too if that were my name. Hell, they call me Convict 237 and I answer to that.
Dancer was watching my training runs. It was the first time I actually got to talk to her. She knew that I was on her team and since we’d have direct contact after her first landing and I’d be working on her ship, I guess she wanted to know who she was working with.
She was doing everything a test pilot is trained to do – focus on the mission, focus on the ship – took me a while to realize that she was nervous about the whole thing. Truth be told, I’d worry about her if she wasn’t at least a little nervous.
I was about to leave her to her thoughts when she asked. “How long have you been flying?”
I laughed. “Whenever I can since I was seven.”
That broke the ice. I forgot how it felt to just… hang out with pilots. Yeah, you have a lot of Type A personalities, but you also have people who understand that not flying, is an awful lot like dying.
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