"What the hell, Tomlinson?" the Commander says, as Stacey staggers out of the ship's hangar, the rookie's nearly-unconscious dead weight hanging off her from the arm slackly draped across her shoulders. "You were due back six hours ago! This was a routine training flight, and you bring her back under emergency tow? What happened?"
Stacey wets her lips, and carefully lets the drowsing rookie down onto one of the bucket seats bolted to the wall. "Went smooth as silk, until it didn't," she croaks, and scrubs her hands over her face. "Kid's a natural; no ego problems or kneejerk inhibitions about being PilotWebbed. Real slick touch with the Morph."
Most people wobble like they're re-learning to walk, when they first get a fifty-tonne biomech and radiotelepathy link grafted to the back of their mind. This kid flexed cautiously, like riding a bike after years without, and then shifted the sinewy mech through its configurations like she'd been doing it for years: flight shape, scout shape, combat stance, idle.
"Noticed some minor articulation irregularities when we got out to the gas giant, so I figured we'd set down, do a couple bonus surface manoeuvre drills, and run her through field diagnostic proc," Stacey says. She feels as tired as the kid is, and preemptively tenses over the next thing; "Full Moon Exposure."
"Ah, shit," the Commander says. "Did you—"
"Kid just found out the hard way she's got the were trait," Stacey says, and bites her lip.
"Shit." The Commander balls her fists, jerkily paces a few steps, then makes herself stop and jams her hands in her pockets.
"My fault," Stacey says. "Should have spotted it from the morph problems."
She doesn't say: the kid's a natural. First time, with no warning, and she overrode her Morph's sense of shape completely. Full-on wolfshape. Full-on deep dive into the canoid mindstate, too, grabbed onto Stacey hard through the PilotWeb to ride through having her mind unexpectedly pop inside-out, turn into an entirely different kind of sapient. Didn't panic, because she had Stace, because she had pack to help her ride it out.
"It's nobody's fault," the Commander starts, and Stace laughs shakily.
"I'm the one with experience," she says. "I should have — I went deep wolf like a goddamn puppy. You're gonna have to check the logs, because I'm frankly fuzzy what-all happened there. Played chase, I think. Dug a big hole in the regolith."
She kinda remembers that, matching wagging tails as they gleefully kicked mountains of dirt out together. Big energetic puppy game of bitey-face. Curled up in the hole they'd dug and napped in a heap.
Stacey is supposed to have more of a handle on it than that. In canoid-state, she's not the same, but she still understands job. It's just — it takes a different kind of discipline, like that, to stay on job, and the rookie sucked her right under along with her and it all went out the window as totally as if it had been Stace's first time.
"You remember the Reavers," the Commander says. "You remember how we left the Reavers. Pack fucks up mech companies—"
Pack cuts across command hierarchies, and almost all other human loyalties.
"I don't want to have to fire her," and the Commander stops at Stacey's flinch. "Oh, fuck, Stace, it's six, seven hours since her first-ever fucking shift and I already can't fire her without firing the pair of you as a unit?"
"I'm sorry," Stacey says miserably.
"You're the only friend I got to keep from that clusterfuck," the Commander says. "I don't want to lose you over this."
"We'll make it work," Stace says. "I'll train her. We'll make it work."
The Commander gives her a long, eloquent look. "Kid needs to sleep it off," she says eventually. "Go tuck her in. Go — cuddle puddle. Whatever you need to do."
Stacey nudges the oblivious kid into draping her arm back over her.
"Stace," the Commander says. "I know it's not your fault. Or hers. I'm — just gonna be mad at the world, for a few days, I think. Let me have that, okay?"
"Whatever you need, Roz," Stacey says, and gives her a helpless, tired grin.
"Oh, god, not the smile," the Commander says, shading her eyes. "I'm being mad over here. Go. Git."