Ferret Girl

***This is a 4-parter that I wrote a while ago. And since there are no werewolves or anything really fanciful in it, then the interaction of the protagonists sets this into the Romance category. It's relatively short and I hope, entertaining to the reader.

There's a tad of what might be termed technical stuff in this one chapter, but that pertains to the vehicle - both in the literary and literal sense.

Other than some of that, this is all uh, ... fictional. I'm sure that there likely are people with these names someplace, but in the context of this tale, the ones here are imaginary and all of that.

I hope you like it. 0_o

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Kate picked up her brand new little notebook PC and got up from her table in the crew and passenger lounge. She noticed the gaze of a few of the off-duty crewmembers on her, but it didn't bother her, because they didn't bother her. Most of them had been friendly and very helpful to her. Only one had bothered to give her a try. Even that had been only a half-hearted attempt, full of the machismo that she'd expected anyway, and she'd smiled at him for it.

A girl of her size didn't get to hear things like that half as often as she'd have liked to.

She'd reached out to run her fingers through his hair for a moment as she smiled. It was a gesture on his behalf, since she'd known that there were others watching to see the effect of the pass that he'd made.

"You're a very handsome man and I've very flattered, Ricardo," she said genuinely, "but I really don't think that you've thought this through, unless you're just hopeful to get a little lucky. I'm on my way to a long job, and I have a lot to do to get ready for it. I don't have much time for luck like that with someone as nice as you."

He'd smiled then, knowing the kindest brush-off that he'd ever experienced when he heard it. He took her hand and kissed it before walking away.

It made Kate sigh after he was out of earshot. She was a lot taller than he was, not that it meant all that much to her here, but she'd seen the pale band of skin on his finger and she wasn't about to play that game, as good-looking as Ricardo was. It was a little sad though, she thought, as she considered the lost opportunity. She didn't know what was waiting for her where she was going and it had been a while for her.

She walked out onto the deck and found as good a spot for what she wanted as she thought was possible here. She was very careful about it as she sat down on the huge hatch cover. The heat of the metal from the sunshine came to her through the seat of her jeans and she was glad that she'd thought of wearing them for this. Sitting on the hot hatch cover in her bikini would have fried her ass in a heartbeat.

She opened the notebook and pressed the button to boot it. She looked around. There wasn't anything else to be seen out here, nothing but flat ocean as far as she could see. As she waited, she thought back to what had brought her to this place. With a smirk, she thought that what had brought her here was her whole life. This was going to be the strangest job that she'd ever taken.

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Total blackness.

It was what she'd woken up to with a sore neck, back, hip and if you counted all of the lesser pains, it was a long list. Kate Perkins tried not to move for at least the moment as she worked through her own personal inventory. She tried flexing her fingers and toes to start, nothing ambitious, and then she graduated on to the larger bits. Several parts and sections of her body reported back that they were in pain from things which were sticking into them -- oddly shaped and hard things poking into her back and such.

Or maybe that was her back. She couldn't tell anymore.

Kate thought back, remembering that she'd come to the museum open house to help out. The daughter of an old soldier, she'd been fascinated for almost all of her life with the type of armored scout car that he'd driven when he'd served. Her questions as a girl had brought only his gruff answers at first, along with a lot of shrugs as though there hadn't been much to it. But young girls have a way of wrapping their little fingers around the hearts of their fathers and he gradually came to tell her more as time went by. That's how she began to learn about the Daimler Ferret.

She'd learned from him what a real ferret was. When she'd asked, he'd given her that shrug of his and said that it was an animal, a type of weasel. The Daimler Ferret was an armoured car; sort of a rather small tank, but with wheels instead of tracks. He'd thought about it then and smiled as he looked at young Kate.

"I've never really spent a lot of time thinking about it," he said, "but now after all of this time, I see the reasons for the name. A ferret is a curious little thing, yeah? Always poking around, and it's quick in its movements. The Ferrets we drove in the army were used for recce a lot of the time, reconnaissance. They used us to poke 'round looking for the enemy. A Ferret has weapons, but it can't take on a tank -- well, the earlier ones anyway, and after bumping into the enemy, we'd have to dash away, screaming over the radio where we'd found them. Nowadays they've got satellites for that."

His answers had both satisfied Kate and stoked her curiosity at the same time. Her father didn't have any photos of his days back then, but one day, they'd been out Christmas shopping for her Mum together and they'd wandered into a bookstore looking for the romantic novels that she liked to read now and then. They'd already bought her gift, but her Dad always had always liked to get her mother a few things at Christmas back then.

Like a lot of married women, Kate's mother didn't think that she was particularly hard to buy for, and like a lot of married men who love their wives dearly, her father thought that his wife was very difficult to buy gifts for, so he always felt a little better if he had a few things for her just in case, actually frightened a little to trust in his own ability to get her only one large gift and know that the woman who meant so much to him would be happy.

While Kate poked around the shop, her father's eyes fell on a small pocket recognition book about armored fighting vehicles, and with a quick glance through, he noted that the Ferret was well-represented, so he'd added it to his purchases and Kate had been none the wiser until Christmas morning.

That little book instantly became his young daughter's most cherished possession though she drove him a little bonkers with her incessant questions and her Mum was a little alarmed that Kate wasn't all that interested in more feminine toys for a girl her age. The truth was that Kate could handle playing with dolls and such, and she wasn't terribly interested in guns, but Ferrets, well, ...

She remembered sitting with her father and asking him questions like, "Why don't we buy one?"

He replied that they weren't for sale to regular people and at 5 tonnes and up, they weren't really like a normal car and they drank petrol faster than she could drink her warm milk - which she ought to be doing so that she could get to bed.

"Where's the windscreen, then? All I see is metal. I can't see the driver at all," she said.

"Well if you could see him, then you could shoot him, couldn't you? And that would be the end of a Ferret."

He pointed to her book, "The driver sits here, and up to a point, the metal skin is bullet-proof. If they're not in action, the driver can open a hatch right here to look out, but it's not like driving a regular car, Love. It's like trying to see through the screen of a telly that's never big enough. You can't see everything, but you can see enough to drive.

If they're in action, the driver closes that up and then he sees through three little periscopes, here," he pointed with the end of her pencil, "there and there. The places to look out of then are even smaller, but they are fun to drive. The steering wheel slopes backward -- just in the opposite way that the one in a car does."

As fate and luck would have it, when Kate was a teenager, she'd shelved her love of Ferrets in her room for a time. The books that she'd found gathered a bit of dust beside the plastic models that she'd built over the years. But her interest was rekindled at least somewhat the day that she'd been looking through a used book store and had stumbled upon a more or less complete service manual set for a Mark 2 Ferret and she'd scooped it up. She'd spent hours with her Dad poring over the manuals. It brought them even closer together and helped them both a little to get past their grief.

Her mother had died of a sudden illness the winter before, and she still lived with her Dad, who made his living as an auto mechanic, and that had determined the next turn that her life took.

His Katy loved to work on motorcars.

She'd been in a coffee shop one Saturday, getting her Dad and herself sandwiches and cups of take-out tea when a young man had tried to pick her up. Kate was only mildly interested in the boy, but much more so in the army reserve uniform that he wore. They dated awhile, but it didn't last long. Terry kept trying to get into her pants, and that was rather nice to her way of thinking, but they were doomed from the start because of Kate's constant stream of questions, and from him, she learned of the reserve regiment only a bus ride away.

When she'd asked, Terry had said that he was a tanker, and she took that to mean that he was in a tank unit. She found out about their next duty weekend and went to see for herself. To her surprise and joy, that unit was equipped with Ferrets, not battle tanks. She expressed an interest, and that took her love affair with the armoured car to the next level.

She used her sweet looks to get to actually touch a Ferret, and that led to her career as an Army reservist. Because of her resume and the aptitude that she'd shown the recruiters, she became one of the very few females in an active role as a mechanic, after she'd indicated clearly that she wanted no part of the admin or clerical roles that they'd thought to offer her. Not long after her basic training was completed, the unit transitioned to the Mark 5 Ferret, the last of the line and the most advanced, though it was coming out of service with front line units.

Kate devoured every scrap of information that she could get her hands on and after the Ferret was finally out of service a few years later, so was Kate. But by that time, she'd become something of an authority on all things Ferret. She was active in several re-enactment groups and had a line on where to get most sorts of spare parts for the things. Ferrets were highly sought after by collectors and somewhere in the process, most of their owners would end up speaking to Kate Perkins for her advice and technical knowledge.

And that led to her part-time job at the museum out at the same base where she'd served so long. When she wasn't working at her father's garage, having long since gotten her license for it, she was wrenching on armored vehicles. The Ferret was long out of the inventory now, but the museum had several, one each of all of the important marks in at least presentable and displayable condition. Her personal favorite was the Mark 5, obviously. It was the last and best-developed of the line, beginning in service long after her father had left the army.

Altogether, there had likely been very near to sixty models and variants of the thing. Some were flat topped, most had hand operated turrets where the commander could stand up inside and if things got sticky, he could work the machine gun there. The Mark 5 had a turret also, but it was low and flat, being an odd sort of shape. It had to be, since it mounted a remotely operated gun now as well as the sensor systems of the modern and continuously evolving battlefield.

In the final model, the old Ferret had gotten its teeth at last, since it mounted a launcher on each side, and in each one there slept two Swingfire missiles. The Ferret still had to be wary of bumping into main battle tanks, but at least it could kill them now too.

The museum had three examples; one on display, one for parts, and one operational one - 'Farley'. Farley had been out for the show on display both days of the weekend along with a few other fighting vehicles on the lawn. Kate had stood by Farley all day, dressed in surplus Army coveralls and answering questions about the Mark 5, where it had served, what its weapon systems were and what they were used for, the kinds of threats that it could engage and what it had to stay clear of on the modern battlefield - things like that.

At the museum show that Saturday, every now and again Kate had fired it up and swung the powered turret back and forth, working the Swingfire launcher tubes up and down as she laid the cross-hairs of the sight onto one of the 'gate guardian' tank hulks off toward the base entrance gatehouse. Now and then, if she'd found that she had an audience which looked large and interested enough, she'd take out the remote sight unit and target other features in the distance while the folks watched the launcher tubes lock on from the signals of the handheld unit that they'd been slaved to.

A woman had asked what the purpose for that had been back in the day and Kate had smiled as she explained.

"The Ferret has always been used in a more or less reconnaissance or scouting role, and could never engage targets much more dangerous than soldiers out in the open. It could never survive a direct engagement with any sort of tank or heavily armored vehicle by itself. This version allows the Ferret to remain hidden out of sight, like behind a copse of trees or a low hill and from there, it could kill main battle tanks without revealing itself using its Swingfire missiles, and the Mark 5 Ferret normally carried four of those. This one has none in its tubes.

The Swingfire missile has a range of 4 kilometres and is optically tracked via the camera in its nose. The operator flies the missile using this joystick on the controller here and it is wire-guided. The missile is capable of up to a ninety degree turn just after launch, allowing it to be launched upward from behind cover and then turning to ride its targeting signals to the target. It flies at a speed of 186 metres per second or well over 600 kilometres per hour, carrying a 7 kilogram High Explosive Anti-Tank warhead.

Depending on where they were hit, main battle tanks of today might survive that, "Kate smiled, "maybe.

Tanks built up to the mid 1980s would definitely be in trouble and would not want to engage a Ferret with Swingfire capability unless they knew that they had a first-shot advantage. Of course in a shootout out in the open, the Ferret would lose unless it got the first hit.

For smaller and closer threats, the turret mounts an L7 Belgian-made 7.62mm machine gun which is remotely controlled and sighted and again, the one here is deactivated. The turret can rotate 360 degrees, and the main body mounts 6 smoke grenade launchers, three to a side to generate a smoke screen to hide behind. The tactic wouldn't work well on the battlefield of today because of the type of targeting systems currently in use, however there are smoke grenades available which are partially effective against infra-red radar and laser sighting systems.

Ferrets have always relied on their relative high speed to survive, since they can run at 93 kilometres per hour on their large tires which have a "run flat" capability so that even if they are shot out, you can still get home. The vehicle is an all-wheel-drive type and while uncomfortable cross-country at high speed; it is about twice as fast as a main battle tank."

"You certainly know quite a bit about Ferrets," a man said.

Kate grinned, "Thank you. I used to work on them as a mechanic in the reserves and my father drove an early Mark during his service. That's how I fell in love with them," she said, "I have my own now. I call this one Farley Ferret and it belongs to the museum. My own is named Fanny, and I take her to shows. She's a Mark 5 as well," Kate smiled, "but Fanny is an Ex-Australian Army girl and she's in desert paint."

"You own one of these?" the man asked, a little shocked.

Kate had nodded, "I've wanted one forever and when I had a chance at one that I liked, I blew my savings account to bits. It's taken me two years to get her looking good and overhauled, but it's well worth it to me."

Farley was kept in one bay of the shop undergoing restoration and was about 96% complete as a drivable example. Kate's job at the museum got her the use of its facilities and that allowed her to keep Fanny in fine shape. Kate had been the project lead on Farley's restoration. With her father's knowledge and advice along with her "wrench" background, she'd been a natural, and the curator's trust in her was absolute.

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So was the darkness around her.

She reached for her left front pants pocket and jammed her hand in deep, looking for the thin LED flashlight there. Pulling it out carefully, she remembered what had happened, but tried not to think about it as she pressed the flat button to turn it on.

She was sprawled uncomfortably in one place and jammed even more uncomfortably in a few others inside Fanny's interior. Kate wished once more that she was a thin little thing, but nature hadn't been that kind. She wasn't unattractive, she knew, but lanky people always seem to fit tight places like this better than the, ... well, her last boyfriend had called her "juicy".

It had made her laugh a little at the time and she'd just left it at that. She'd complained about it once to her Dad, and he'd just laughed and told her that she was a beautiful young woman -- who just happened to be built for larger men, that was all.

There had been a lot of her father's love in the statement, but like about anything that he said to her, it also contained a grain of truth. Kate might not be a thin little thing, but she was in fine shape, and she was fairly strong and stood an even six feet tall. Her reply to her Dad was that she was an Amazon and they'd just laughed about it together.

"So is this your way of telling me that you fancy women?" he's asked, "I think there was supposed to be some of that to the legends."

"Sod that," Kate had laughed, "I like men. I just can't seem to find many that I like, that's all."

Her Dad had nodded, "I understand, Katy. But if you can stand a little advice from your old gaffer, you ought to maybe spend a little less time working under Fanny's bonnet and cast your eyes around, yeah? I can tell you that it gets harder and harder to find somebody every minute, the older that you get."

After the show was over, Kate had promised to lock everything up, but she told her boss that she wanted to do a little work on Fanny and he'd agreed. So she'd changed out Fanny's oil and oil filter and had then gotten out her paint kit and had carefully applied a caricature of a humanish-looking ferret girl flexing the muscle in her bicep with a saucy wink onto both sides of the turret. Nothing large or garish, they were just a tasteful little touch indicating her pride in herself and her Ferret. She'd stood back to admire them, both sides, and had then gone to the lunch room to retrieve her small cooler from the fridge there. While she was at it, Kate looked around carefully and seeing no one about, she walked back to the service bay where Fanny sat and climbed in to lock herself inside, carefully dogging the hatches.

Kate had a little ritual that had to do with Ferrets. A couple of years before, she'd been sitting in the driver's seat of the museum's Mark 3 and had looked down for some reason. What she saw made her reach for her little flashlight, and after a good look, she pulled out the seat to do a proper clean up job under it. She'd found an old condom just peeking out under the edge of the seat cushion, obviously used long before. Despite being a bit grossed out over it, clean ups like this were a part of her job. She just wondered about it, that was all.