emeralddodge:

Commander Hollander walked up to the generator and patted it appreciatively. “I never got to see the engine room on the Taft, being in the air wing and everything. We always wondered what you nerds got up to down there.”

“We were refining uranium,” I said, my hands on my hips. 

Commander Hollander blinked. “Really?”

“No. We nerds were completing a series of highly-complicated procedures designed to ensure that the uranium within the two nuclear reactors was bombarded with the correct amount of neutrons, thereby making sure that we didn’t kill everyone within five hundred miles. When we weren’t doing that, we were studying how to do that better, so your butt had the power to fly planes. What were you doing?”

Ugh, aviators. Every single thing about them had always stuck in my craw, from the way that virtually all media about the Navy acted like they were the only people aboard a carrier, to the way they strutted around the ship like they owned it. And now here I was, dead and still somehow in an engine room, listening to the aviator who’d killed me call me a nerd. In my space. In my domain.

Commander Hollander sighed. “Remember to call me sir. I was providing air support for operations overseas, Petty Officer. Let’s not play this game. I came down to get to know you all a little better, since we’re spiritually connected.” He patted the generator again. “Like this. This engine has, what, eighty thousand horsepower?”

“That’s a generator, sir.”