Showing Tells

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"You're real quick with your hands for a kid, 'anne, you know that?"
"I'm glad you think so." Harriet's reply was a little slow on the draw, a moment late to recognise that Reyes was talking to her. She wished he wouldn't abbreviate her cover name - perhaps her new name, period - like that. "It's Arianne, though. Only Paps called me Anne."
"Crap, I'm sorry."
He looked away briefly, but she kept her concentration on the open service panel in front of her. "Well, I've gotten the EMI shield off of the controller boards, and the clips are off from them. That's the first steps done, right?"
"Right." He nodded. "So right now you're just going to pop those boards out and stick 'em to one side."
She took a breath. It was hardly a taxing or intricate manoeuvre compared to anything she had learnt back on Onyx, but there was still a haze of apprehension around doing this with the civilian man crouched by her side. But a smooth click had the PCBs come loose from their bracket, and Harriet set them down on the deck between them without any trouble.
"Sweet. Then we can get the power inverter out and swap in our new one."
Harriet leaned forward a touch, reaching out with one hand to grasp a clip before sheepishly realising it wasn't there. "Are these not - do I not need to get it out of the clamp first?"
"Yeah, but you undo it from where it attaches to the housing." 
"Huh." Her puzzled expression betrayed her. "I've always undone them from-"
"From the unit itself? Funny, it's only Greenan's J-series that are set up like that, and I don't think those get used anywhere other than Oonskie ships. Need to handle higher power loads for all their big guns and that." He stopped himself, mid-thought. "You said you knew all this from - your folks were machinery haulers, right?" 
"Oh. Yeah." Out of the hundred white lies she'd told to get this far, she never expected this to be the one to trip her up. "Well, they were til the Navy seized our fleet, at least. They... I dunno, they probably wanted a more robust power setup when we were mag-clamping Warthogs instead of JOTUNs." 
"Uh-huh." Reyes didn't look entirely convinced. "Well, that there's what you want to be undoing." He tapped one side of the conduit enclosure, just a few inches to the left, with his tool. 
"Thanks." Harriet immediately set to work, brow furrowing a little in concentration. The wingnuts took just a few moments to unwind, and once they were done the whole thing came out with a satisfying snap. Then for the replacement. "Are all the ones we have here like this?"
"Everything here, at least, yeah." He nodded, diverting his eyes away from her handiwork for a moment. "All we have around are PF-19 units, or the CoRED versions whenever we can get a hold of them."
"They work the same way though, right?"
"Yeah, mostly. We tend to have some more issues with power ripple when we've got the knockoff parts installed, but it's nothing our grid isn't good for. And most of the time they last longer and- wait, I - stop-!"
She froze, startled.
"Jesus, Ari, don't do that! You almost-" 
"-what?"
"You have to have the controllers back in before you slot the inverter back in. Removing the inverter trips off the safety regulator, so that's a full load surging through the contacts once you swap that thing back in. Shock you to a crisp if you're not careful."
The girl looked curious, raising an eyebrow at him. "Am I not being careful?"
"I, you're - it doesn't matter - you don't just-" He paused, for a second to steady himself. "You always make sure you've got a protection circuit engaged before work at something handling this much power, ship or soil. It costs you like two seconds, it's never worth the risk to skip that out - not unless, shit, you're being shot at the whole time or something." 
"Well. You never know." For a few moments Reyes thought that she was joking, but her face told him that she meant the words in earnest - or at least that she was too busy in concentration reaching for the controllers to acknowledge her own humour. In a few moments they were safely slotted back into place, and she turned her attention back to the inverter. 
Two hands gripped either end of the device, and with a firm grunt and a shove it was sat back in its socket. Her movements were sharp; the whole thing was done quickly, but it was rough, crude. The last crew chief Reyes knew would've struck him from the books for treating gear like that, but he stayed silent. If nothing else, it was difficult to get new crew when even the Inner Colonies were burning, but that didn't mean that he couldn't-
"All done?" Harriet looked up at him, gently patting the now-shut panel beside her.
"Yeah, that's all I told Janah I'd be walking you through tonight" He nodded. "Go fill your belly and get some shut-eye, 'anne." Reyes decided he needed to take a look over the handful of docs the young girl had provided when signing on. Something didn't seem right.
"Arianne." Harriet decided she needed to take a look over the plans and schedules of their next stop. She'd let him learn too much. 
"G'night, chief."
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