SD 242303.05 | CEO LtCmdr Ava Lee | "Bumpy Ride" Part 2

Posted on Tue Mar 7th, 2023 @ 4:29am by Lieutenant Commander Ava Lee

920 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Genesis
Location: En route to Cold Station Theta

"Well, that should just about do it." Commander Muran said, getting to his feet again from his knees with a grunt, dusting his hands off on his worn coveralls. They had rerouted power to the warp drive hours ago, so at least the tug was moving along toward their destination again. Ava looked around the crawl space area they were in and scratched her head, bewildered at him, exclaiming they were even close to done.

She had bit her tongue most of the night, but working alongside the Lurian engineer had been a frustrating experience, to say the least. If she wasn't so vested in getting off this cargo tub and arriving at her new assignment as quickly as possible, she would have spewed a month's worth of criticism of just how poorly this ship was being maintained.

Ava was not a good judge of the age of Lurian, but Muran had at some point in the evening that he had to have had four decades of experience on her. She looked from her diagnostic to him and back again to all the redline objects on her screen. "You cannot expect to leave things like this!?" She swiped a sweaty tendril of hair away from brushing her cheek.

He sauntered his bulk over to her and picked up the PADD, moving it back and forth a few times until his site adjusted to the text, "Ehh... this is only like this cause that other power coupling is still offline." He pointed to one issue. "This system I don't need online at all, it's pretty much an as-needed system." He shrugged, not seeing a problem with the Christmas tree jumble of lights on the screen.

Ava's eyebrows went up, and she nodded slowly. Whether it was her lack of sleep, frustration about the lack of maintenance or sense of organization here, or just complete lack of respect of the most basic of Starfleet standards on this cargo hauler, she could no longer hold in her thoughts, "The transporters!? The TRANSPORTERS... are not a critical system?" She shook her head, astonished, "That is most definitely a critical system that should probably be working before we call it quits.

Muran sighed and put a heavy hand on her shoulder, "Look kid, you do what you want here. I guess I'll figure it out after you've left, but even my second stomach is empty at this point. I need to get some food and some sleep. I am not as young as you. These things are important to me." He chuckled as he picked up some of his tools and put them into a bucket, "Think about this. When we are at warp, can we really use transporters?" He shook his substantial head, "Naw, not on this old tug. We don't do all that fancy stuff your new assignment does. We're just a tug, hauling cargo. If we need transporters, we don't need warp. Flip a routing channel here, turn this one down there, easy peasy."

He moved towards the ladder to get out of their maintenance space, offering a last bit of advice, "You can't stress so much about the rules. Sometimes these things don't always follow the rules. If things always worked how they were supposed to, what do they need us here for?"

Ava thought that was a really weird thing to say, but as she got back to work, trying to fix anything she had time to, her brain went over it a bit. She could never be this lax on any ship she was the chief gearhead for, and she knew that but he wasn't wrong about a cargo hauler, not likely needing much in the way of transporters while at warp.

Ava and her spanner worked until she couldn't get any more work done without the benefit of new parts and an additional power supply unit this hauler was missing. She cleaned things up pretty nicely for the limited resources she was working with. One of the main things she'd spent her time on was balancing out the power around all the EPS conduits to get a more efficient system running. She had replaced any relays that were indicating a short window until they failed. Those that had spares anyway. Ava also made a parts list that Muran might consider putting in a requisition for if he felt giddy about getting things back to normal.

By the time Ava had packed up her tool kit and crawled out into the floorplate in a corridor, daylight hours had arrived at ship time, and the lighting was a bit brighter than she'd expected to see. Someone was walking by pushing an antigrav pallet of goods toward one of the cargo pods. "Did we get to the station Ensign?" She asked, dusting herself off as she closed the access hatch, "Oh yeah, at least an hour ago now."

Ava closed her eyes, swallowing a curse before opening them again, hauling off to her temporary quarters to get off this tug as fast as she could. Her bags were easy to grab as she was mostly packed. Ava brushed her hair again, got out of her coveralls, and was somewhat surprised her uniform still looked halfway decent. Halfway decent was about ceremony grade for any decent engineer, after all. She didn't want to give her new Captain any false impressions that she would like like a spic and span bridge officer too often.


LtCmdr Ava Lee
Chief Engineer
USS Vindicator, NX-78213-F

 

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