By the time Amelia ascended the ramp, Sienna was at the top, about to descend when she seemed to decide instead to wait up there for her. Now that she was closer, the smudges of grease, dirt, and grime on her tank top and exposed skin were much more apparent. Her thick pants were likewise smeared, and a wrench hung by a loop on the side of her left thigh. The self-proclaimed ship captain was pulling a pair of work gloves off as she watched Amelia walked between the two heavyset hydraulic pistons that had lowered it to the ground on her way up the ramp and into the ship.
"That's one way to put it," Sienna replied with half of a smirk, shoving her gloves into one pocket. Lifting her PHC again, she made a few gestures in the air above it with the opposite hand, calling up a slowly rotating holographic representation of a
maintenance drone with a command interface alongside it. Tapping the air around it, she gave the unit several remote instructions, then closed the display and looked back at Amelia. "This way," she told her, nodding over her right shoulder, and led her into the ship.
The pair walked through the inner airlock door at the top of the ramp and into a circular corridor, their boots clanking loudly on the metal plated floor. At regular intervals around each wall of the passageway, simple metal rungs were affixed as handholds, presumably for use in a zero-G scenario. Insulated cables and conduits ran along the walls semi-regularly, as if they had been hung as an afterthought by someone with better things to do. Set in the ceiling were nondescript lamps protected by sturdy-looking metal cages. Some of the light fixtures gave off a strong white light, others more of a tired yellowish color. A few of them flickered occasionally, indicating an electrical fault or a dying light source. In many ways, the interior felt more like an abandoned bomb shelter or derelict industrial building than a starship.
They followed the circular hallway just a few feet to the left from cresting the ramp, where the bulkhead toward the forward section of the ship opened up, revealing a curiously shaped hallway expanding off of the main corridor. A row of six seats, their upholstry stained and cracked with age but their attached safety bars and restraints in suprisingly decent condition, lined the right-hand wall, fastened securely to the floor. A nearly semicircular segment of the wall on the left jutted out three or four feet, set in the center by what appeared to be another airlock door with a control panel alongside it. Judging from the fact that the panel appeared completely deactivated, there was no power to that section of the ship. The letters "ESC PE OD" were stencilled above the door in Nepleslian, worn away by the relentless passage of time. On the far wall a short flight of three steps led up to a windowed hatch, set above the other visible doors by at least three feet. One could catch a glimpse of an exterior canopy through the window on the hatch, indicating it led to the cockpit, which was confirmed by a similarly faded stencilled label next to it reading as such. In the corner just to the right of that hatch was another one in the right wall, with no window, although another stencilling said "F RW D AINEN ANCE."
"Cockpit's through here," Sienna said, climbing the steps and twisting a metal handle set in the wall next to the hatch on the forward wall. With a loud clank, the locking mechanism released, and the door retracted to the side with a whoosh. "Ship's computer is in there," she added, pointing to her right towards the other door nearby, "but most of the connections you'll need you can access from here." Stepping into the cockpit area, she beckoned Amelia to follow.
Just inside the door the women were beset on all sides by computer consoles, exposed insulated wires, and display screens, most of them two-dimensional monitors. The floor was elevated high enough so that Sienna had to crouch to fit inside. Just to the left of the door, in the floor, a circular panel was pulled out and set aside, exposing a cluttered array of connections and blinking lights, their wiry tendrils plugged into everything in each other, running to and fro and out of sight in all directions. Forward from the elevated platform, an armored bubble canopy provided them with a panoramic view of the station's docking bay, its "nose" roughly eight feet from the cockpit entrance. Two command couches sat below the platform, depressed back down about three feet from where they stood, far enough down that climbing in and out of them would apparently require the use of a handrail set in the ceiling right where the platform dropped off. Each of the couches were claustrophobically pinned in by volumetric and monitor deisplays, all powered and in diagnostic mode, while a large three-dimensional astrogation projector loomed between the two. What appeared to be flight controls were set around the seat on the right, and much of the comms and navigational equipment was concentrated to the left.
"This ship's computer is an ancient piece of crap," Sienna continued. "I don't even recognize the manufacturer, so good luck finding any specs or anything useful. You'll just have to figure it out, and the damn thing is wonky as all hell." She snorted and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I can't figure out what the hell is wrong with it; it keeps rebooting itself, shutting down sections of ths ship, or tripping diagnostic alarms when there ain't nothin' wrong. The equpiment up here is mostly new, though," she added, motioning towards the control couches up front, as well as the monitoring stations around them. "Almost all of it is Origin and Emrys tech, less than a couple years old. I've got too much on my plate to keep fightin' with this junk, so if you can take a crack at it, it'd save me a lot of headache."
The sound of approaching treads on metal could be heard out in the main corridor as Sienna squatted down in front of the circular access panel. "Most of your relays go through here," she explained, waving towards the access hatch with a limp flick of her wrist. "Anywhere you want to tweak or test the interfaces, this is the place to start." She craned her neck to see out into the hallway, towards the origin of the sound. The maintenance drone had rolled up to the bottom of the stairs, grinding to a stop, and began to softly beep at a regular tempo. Sienna turned her eyes back to Amelia. "That drone can give you another set of hands in the computer room if you need it," she concluded. "It responds to verbal commands, so just talk to it like you would anyone else, except maybe use smaller words. And it's gonna tell you some inane stuff, because it takes everything this ship's POS computer tells it literally. Got any questions?"
