Hardware, Software, it's all 'ware, isn't it?

[Dratai]

Davos Base

Adelaide Richter

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It had been a while since she was properly inside the meat of even a ship, not for lack of doing her work, but because her work was the parts that usually went inside, reachable only via debugging terminals and connected via wires. Optronics may be the most useful thing, but were neither foolproof nor always robust.
And she needed robust.

Adelaide, minus the big scar on her face, was an otherwise pretty average looking lady, she could really fit into any crowd but this one on Davos base, among both the full on pilots and the spanner-equivalent weilding wrenchies. The gun at her hip was a bit of an ill fit even for someone who generally looked like she was judging everyone.
And yet, here she belonged. Buried in a pile of civilian technology from gallic markets, everything from personal communications devices to personal computers, terminals, and whatever passed for radios in this day and age.

A whole workstation for herself and then some, rather than the corner at the back, in the digital troubleshooting shack somewhere on Pacifica.
She was dismantling half of dozens of similar devices, and the other half was left running, poked at occasionally, connected to other devices physically, poked and prodded and generally being used to figure out what made them tick.

In one corner of the workroom she'd set aside was a table with rookies being inflicted with less used- but still important knowledge among any shipbuilding outfit. Especially one that flew and fixed their own, from signaling arrays to radars to the ever important black box, in case of critical failure. Or enemy fire. Everything was good data and it took people to know what to do with it, not just put the result together after the data was organized and analyzed.
But to her knowledge there weren't enough Unioners to pull away for her project at this time, so the higher ups had roped several rookies into it, likely the same sort as her, quiet, intense, and maybe a bit too geekish for even other experts to socialize with on the regular.

In yet another corner, a row of survey probes, the kind of tech you'd really never see in most instances, here though, left over from an expedition and ready to be made into sensor arrays and comm relays in the future. Valais was proving challenging to get stable communications through, not to mention interface with gallic comms, and for her intents? To listen to anything passing through the vicinity, sure, a secure channel might be garbled but nothing is foolproof.
Adelaide still needed someone to take the measurements of the area, she didn't quite have the expertise for that, but someone was likely to arrive eventually. So she focused on other things.

And right now, those other things was trying to make things work without permission.
A bit of cursing and a shake of the hand, something still carried charge, sparks had flown briefly. Discard, new hand terminal, unscrew, unfasten, dismantle, scan, and poke around. Repeat.