Interview for an engineer

 “I have a question, if I may?”  Threndall was looking around the engine room a little wide-eyed and, being a native of the Oatmaker worlds, that meant that it had eight of them, two on stalks, that were staring.

Kimbull, mostly human with a little bit of doubt on his mother’s side of the family, stuck his thumbs in the pockets of his overalls and nodded.  “Normally we ask for questions to be kept to the end,” he said, “but there’s a lot going on in here and I’m not surprised you have questions.  Go ahead, but remember that we’ve only got an hour for the interview and the HR folk do insist that I do their questions too.”

“Right, yes,” said Threndall.  It was three metres tall though its eyes ranged from one metre above the floor to the two stalks that emerged from the top of its body.  Its head, for want of a better term, was a roughly egg-shaped mass that housed its mouth and olfactory sense buds that stuck out of its torso and could move up and down the full length of it.  Four limbs also had the freedom to slide around its body and could extend to nearly three metres in length as well, but they were currently tidily folded up against its body.  Instead of legs and feet it had many cilia that rubbed against the floor and, given enough friction, could move it as fast as a sprinting human.  Its exposed skin was a pale green, shading through turquoise into blue in places, but much of it was wrapped up in a sari-like fabric that twisted around it and had holes for arms and eyes to poke through.  “I noticed that the engines are baseline human tech—“

“Good for acceleration,” said Kimbull.  “I love me some Derlethian tech but their engines would leave a grandmother screaming for you to get on with it.”

“I don’t really understand that metaphor,” said Threndall trying to sound polite.  Humans were known to use facial expressions a lot to convey information but they seemed to have trouble reading the equivalent muscular variation that the aliens of the Oatmaker worlds used.  Someone had tried to explain it to Threndall as being like trying to understand thirteen different kinds of shrug, which really didn’t sound that difficult.  “But the fuel lines and containment seem to be Aldebaran. Is that normal?”

Kimbull puffed his chest out, alarming Threndall momentarily.  When he didn’t attack, Threndall relaxed a little but remained wary.  “That’s our little experiment,” he said.

“Oh no!”

“No, it’s fine, we do these kinds of things all the time,” said Kimbull.  “I mean, you don’t make progress if you don’t tinker with things, do you?  And on a long voyage everyone needs a little project on the side for when there’s not much else to do.”

“But these are the engines!”  Threndall’s voice got deeper as it got more agitated and already the deck was thrumming in resonance.  “What if they break?”

“Then we fix ‘em,” said Kimbull.  “It happens, and you have to expect that.  I mean, what starship have you ever been on where there’s no breakdowns now and then?”

“All of them!”  Threndall’s eyes were as wide as they could get and were sliding up its body to the top, which was an Oatmaker way of showing distress.  The eyes on stalks were waving around as though caught in a severe wind.

“Really?  Bloody hell, how do you manage that then?” Kimbull sounded sincere to Threndall, which only agitated it further.

“By not tinkering with the engines mid-flight,” it said, its voice almost at its lowest bass.  It practically buzzed.  “By following the manufacturers guidelines on what to combine it with.  By valuing safety over speed!”

“Sounds dull,” said Kimbull after a moment’s thought.  “And what happens if you get pirated?”

“You contact your insurers!”  Threndall’s voice was so deep it was sepulchral and Kimbull wiggled a finger in his left ear as though trying to hear better.

“Right,” he said.  “Sure. But this is a human starship, right, and we get sent on the interesting missions.  The stuff where no-one’s ever gone before—“

“Or will ever go again!”

“— maybe.  Depends what we find there, really.  But yeah, we have to be able to react to new situations and you can’t do that if everyone knows what you’ve got and how it performs.”

Threndall waved all four of its limbs at the Aldebaran fuel lines.  “Those things are intended to push starship four times the size of this,” it said.

“Right, and our engines are built for speed.  We reckon we can probably double the warp speeds if we get it right.”

“If?!  IF!!”  Threndall’s thrashing limbs narrowly missed a passing engineer, and Threndall suddenly noticed that everyone else in the engine room was human, and it tried to calm down.  It was very, very hard to do.  “You could blow the whole engine up!  You could rip a hole in the fabric of space-time!  You could evert a gravity well if it goes wrong!”

“Done that,” said Kimbull.

“What?”

“Everted a gravity well,” said Kimbull.  “We were on the Princess Monocle when that happened.   Shook us all up a bit, I can tell you.”

“And what happened?  Were you all court-martialled and demoted?”  Threndall’s voice was as deep as it could go and from the look of concentration on Kimbull’s face it was clear he was having trouble understanding the words.

“Ah, no,” he said slowly as he puzzled the words out.  “We passed it on to the weapons division.”

Threndall just stared, all eyes now as high up as they would go and hurting from the strain.

“Your government is buying about sixty of them,” said Kimbull.  “As a deterrent, I hear.”

Threndall said nothing; there seemed to be nothing left to say.

“So,” said Kimbull.  “You seem a bit excitable, but I don’t think it’s a big problem.  Do you want the job or not?  ‘Cos if you do we’ve got to get through the HR questions as well.”