(It is just like having that irritating balance and decorum race of blowing your own little soap bubble with little puffs of air to push it across the girl’s gymnasium for elementary science class. If you mixed the bubble solution well enough to get a bubble, you pretty much just have a bubble and no one’s is enough better than anyone else’s to matter. So it is just luck and patience that determines who can get it the farthest before it pops. But as a moderately competitive girl, you also know you should take your turn at the end of the gymnasium away from people who might walk into your precious little bubble and away from the drafts by the doors that might pop it prematurely by pushing it back into your face, just as a completely random example.)
So, once Chief explained the whole laser qualification test to me, I looked up when the winners had tested for the last decade. Chief had already marked off the obvious bad test dates with high-predicted sun spot activity and the like. I went back through my files from the heliophysics classes. I found the most perfect day possible. I admit, if only to you, that it took me a solid week of all my off watch time and even included one day in port when I could have gone off on liberty but didn’t. Don’t tell anyone about that. I pretended to be sick. It isn’t done to not leave the ship at every conceivable opportunity, no matter how dirty and scary the liberty planet is. I mean it; don’t tell. I stayed on board and ate real food that I had stocked up on when I went down the day before. I pored through the ship’s computer database, put in some inter ship library loans, and found the relevant data maps. It was all completely open source stuff that you just had to know to look for. I found a day with the least change in any of the targeting factors, and we scheduled it. Chief must have made the division take apart those laser mounts down to lug nuts and circuit boards and rebuild them. (I don’t think the guns actually have lug nuts or circuit boards anywhere in them, but I’m sort of afraid to ask for fear that Chief will make the guys tear them down again just to let me see some tiny nano-scale lug nuts somewhere in the molecular circuitry.) But however he did it, the guys had those lasers functioning perfectly, and when they did the day’s firing run, we scored the highest in the last five years. Six years ago, a new construction ship with the laser system install engineers still onboard did better, by a little. We still have several months yet in the award cycle year for the Fleet Gunnery Award, so someone could still beat us. But for the moment, your sister is the division officer of the Best Laser Crew in the Grayson Space Navy. The whole ship just thinks I’m some kind of psychic since I insisted on that date for the range and wouldn’t change what I wanted no matter what. None of the department heads ever asked me why that date was best beyond the obvious low sunspots, so I never went into the details of explaining. Claire knows, of course, but she’s keeping quiet. And the XO figured it out, I think. After the results came in from the range, he asked if I had studied under Prof. Sharpely at Saganami Island. That was the heliophysics professor. Prof. Sharpely was semi-retired and didn’t teach anything else. The XO doesn’t seem to be telling anyone. I think the captain knows too, because he has been laughing when the XO rags on my department head about my woman’s sense and wants to know why my boss can’t pull of stuff like that with his other divisions.
It has been a good day. Chief is the best. My guys are ecstatic. I wrote up a bunch of personal awards for the sailors who Chief said have been doing particularly well or did a lot of extra work for laser mount system groom before the test. That was Claire’s suggestion. The XO approved every award, and the captain gave out the awards in a full ship ceremony just a few hours ago.
Yours,
Cecelie
* * *
[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]
[December 1921]
Suleia,
We had to put in to a Masada station today. It wasn’t the planet itself, of course. It’s just a miserable excuse for an orbital yard to pick up some parts from the Manty post and drop off a few Manty ship riders we had been carrying. It was a complete disaster. This is still supposed to be a Star Empire of Manticore protectorate, but unfortunately they let some Masadans run parts of the station.
I didn’t cry in public. I want credit for that first. And second, do not let the Moms know that there has been any crying what so ever. I don’t want to hear it about all the better career options they’ve got for me. I signed a contract. I have to live with it, even if sometimes it is awful. That is extremely important, and I can’t underline that enough, Suleia. You can never ever cry in uniform or let any of the uniformed guys see you red-eyed. Please send eye drops, by the way. I had a stock of them from Saganami Island, but after this visit, I need more. I can’t get them from medical, because then I would have to explain why they are needed. I don’t think covering up embarrassing emotions which if seen limit my ability to do the job would be something this man’s navy would be willing to subsidize anyway. Naturally, the ship’s store does not carry anything that can be gotten from the medic.