The shuttle continued to move to the liner. Seabourne flipped the vessel, nose-to-tail, to expose the rear back door to the dock. Proximity alarms sounded as the vehicle continued to back up.
"I think at this point, the more chaos, the better. Plus, you never know when being in a hazmat suit comes in handy. You can pull a lot of Rheinlander Fire Drill shenanigans in one of those, you know."
The peeps continued to get louder and more frequent.
"Well, either they open up or we risk damaging two orbital ships. And if I know the current watch officer of the Orlando, they'd rather open up the door and see what's going on than incur the extra damages to keep her out of the luxury fleet. The refurbishing is behind schedule as is. Seems they can't even define what state of matter some of the stains are, let alone what solvents should be used to remove them. Always a party aboard an orbital vessel."
The alarms were suddenly replaced by a calming three tone sequence as familiar mechanical whirring and clunks confirmed that Orlando was infact bringing the shuttle in for a dock. Some more mechanical sounds confirmed that the two ships had an airtight connection as the vacuum indicators cycled to green.
Huh, that worked. If I ever meet the watch officer, I'll be sure to thank whoever he/she/it is. With those clamps in place, we're firmly in Eris's hands now, the only way out is up, and by up I mean that way... ish... to the big chair. Those clamps can only be undone from Orlando's bridge. Fortunately, that's where we're heading anyway. Now, you take the pillow case and the magnet, I'm going to make some foie gras, as it were.
Seabourne opened the cage and extracted an agitated goose-like creature. It's long, emerald green neck flopped furiously in the captain's hands as he wrangled the bird's body between his legs. With the animal sufficently pinned, he began to force feed the creature the mayonaise.
"Oh, don't look so concerned. They're migratory and fatten themelves up all the time, though admittedly mayonaise has a rather interesting interaction with their lower digestive tracks. If you'd be so kind as to put a timer for 10 minutes on whatever timepiece you carry..."
A whoosh on the other side of the bulkhead revealed that Orlando had opened her set of doors. A serries fo clangs and shouts revealed that they wanted the shuttle to do likewise."
...and if you could open the door and see to our guests. I'll need another, oh, 30 seconds here.
