"Stacking the Deck"

“Good pilot often is,” she replied, smiling at his recollection.

“Nyet! Would just slow ship. Make even more sluggish,” she countered, quickly and rather assertively, at the offer of programming a delay in the thrusters to bring them back into sync. “We fix properly,” she affirmed, her hands at the console working to isolate the system and the specific thruster that was misbehaving. “Or we smash with big wrench until it work,” she teased with a wry grin, glancing back over her shoulder at LeBlanc as he prepared to make his way aft.

When he came back, some components in hand from the maintenance locker, she brought the Maverick to a slow, steady pace ahead.

“Da. Da. Problem is not localized,” she explained as the diagnostic datastream began to read out on her display. “It is perhaps gel pack, or bad isolinear board somewhere in aft data trunk,” she reasoned, naming the likely culprit for the misfiring thruster. “Are you going… oh…” She paused mid-sentence as she looked back and saw him kneeling, the hatch already open. “…yes, good,” she said, then turned back to the console, a hand on the controls to keep the shuttle on its current course.

“If stuck, let me know. I will hit brakes hard. Jolt you free,” she teased with a smirk.

Iryna smirked a little broader at his warning about breaking systems. A defiant part of her was tempted to call his bluff just to see the annoyance. She thought better of it. He had not bothered her yet, so she saw no need to return the favor. “Da. Da. I take easy on her. No spanking yet,” she mused, her fingers suddenly delicate on the flight controls as she eased back on the RCS inputs, content to let the engineer do his job.

“Percussive maintenance?” she repeated, a short laugh escaping her. “I like this. I will borrow,” she said.

“As for hobbies? Other than flying…” She paused, eyes drawn to a sensor readout from the sciences station to her left, fingers dancing across the LCARS to transfer it to her display. “…ice skating?” She stopped a beat, wondering why that one in particular had come first, then her attention went back to the data. “There is lake behind our home. In winter it would freeze. Very pretty. Like painting.” Her gaze returned to the readings. “I miss gliding across ice. Cold air on legs, in face.”

Blinking out of the reverie, she glanced at the data again. “Ooh! Vot! Smotri! Vot!” she exclaimed, the sensors showing gravitational anomalies consistent with a rogue planetoid.

“Planeta!” she added.

Her fingers went staccato at the console. She transferred more power to the lateral sensor array for a better scan, and banked and rolled the Maverick so it pointed the right way. “Sensors just detect planetoid!” she announced, looking back over her shoulder toward the aft hatch LeBlanc had crawled into, eyes alight, before she turned back. “Very small. Less than six hundred kilometers in diameter,” she explained. “Distance…” She paused, tapping the console. “…twenty-three million kilometers. I am verifying location now.”

“Astrometrics officer will be excited,” she said. - (OOC Notes: Provided translations are as follows; "Vot! Smotri! Vot!" in English is "There! Look! There!" and "Planeta!" in English is "Planet!")

As he reported on the culprit that had caused the malfunction in the thrusters—a degraded gel pack—Iryna deftly entered commands for the computer to scan the rogue planetoid they had just found, on every bandwidth of sensors the Maverick had. “I give them detailed scans to study,” she said as the datastream began to surge in. “They name after me as gratitude.” Her tone was teasing, but serious. “Name for you too, I suppose,” she conceded with a little laugh, glancing back at LeBlanc. “Nakhimova-LeBlanc, planetoid number so-and-so, blah, blah, blah.” She gave a wave of her hand for emphasis, then swapped the display before her back to the flight systems.

“So… what does Mister LeBlanc do when he’s not tinkerer?” she asked, volleying back the personal inquiry from a moment earlier.