A Curious Enrollment

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After Atticus Segami added the final touch to his Starfleet security officer uniform, a single pip on the collar, he rubbed his right cheek where a bruise was forming. The shaking of the ship during the battle had caused his head to hit a wall.

 

It would seem odd for someone to change clothes at this precise moment but the Ensign’s civilian attire was now stained with another crewman’s blood and he was about to go on duty.

 

He breathed in deep, sighing to himself as he realized what a quandary he was actually in. Stuck on a ship he wasn’t supposed to be on, with a crew he didn’t know, racing away from an enemy that had nearly blown them all into a billion bits.

 

When Atticus had made all those requests for a transfer on the USS Shanghai to be placed on a vessel “in a more eventful region of space”, this isn’t what had immediately sprung to mind. He’d read up on the Excalibur, one hell of a ship, truth-be-told. It was a Sovereign Class, the cream of Federation engineering. Beyond its class it also had a reputable CO and had been in service too short a time to get rickety but long enough to work out all the kinks and teething troubles. The best part, the cherry on the cream pie, was that it would be on the front lines, where the action was, not like other starships wandering around the Alpha Quadrant like an elderly groundskeeper looking for rodents.

 

But where was he? On “The USS Morningstar”? Heck, he hadn’t even heard of it before he’d stepped on to it. Might as well have been “The Good Ship Lollipop”. Sure it was a pretty sweet intrepid class with plenty of sharp teeth to bare but it wasn’t what he’d been promised in the brochure.

 

Apparently Excalibur had gotten its own pointy teeth kicked-in pretty badly and the crew had been hastily moved onboard this girl to keep the Federation flag flying high in the Gamma Quadrant. The whole area seemed to be going to hell in a hand-basket now that the ‘glorious and all powerful’ Dominion was falling apart, leaving Starfleet to keep things peachy. Sometimes Atticus thought that the entire universe would be better off if someone permanently sealed that damned wormhole off for good and let the animals tear themselves apart on the other side. It would save a lot of time, effort and would just feel satisfying to know those founders were getting their comeuppance.

 

But of course that wasn’t the Starfleet way at all was it?

 

Atticus frowned at his own thoughts. He had never remembered being this callous or cynical in the past but then he shrugged it off as yet another one of those character traits the symbiont inside him picked up from a previous host. One day he’d have to learn to get used to it. Three years of his new life and Atticus was still giving himself the occasional creeps. The life of a joined Trill could be disconcerting sometimes when you came to grips with the idea that many of your choices could be guided by the opinion of someone who’d been dead for decades.

 

Ensign Segami stepped out of the room he was in and walked quickly down the corridor. Soon he could take his place as a security officer on this vessel. Though until the scheduled time of reporting for duty to Liuetenant Commander Graham in five minutes, Atticus would still remain as he had been ever since his transfer away from the USS Shanghai. “A wandering officer”, as it could be called. Red tape and regulations were a nuisance but to cross them often caused a lot more headache in the long-run than it was worth.

 

Since the very first moment he’d boarded the Morningstar, Ensign Segami had been running around, lending a hand wherever he could but only in a minor capacity since he officially didn’tbelong to the ship’s roster yet. He’d had no authority to touch any of the computer consoles nor did he have a commanding officer to give him any specific orders. This meant that during the recent firefight, he’d been acting only on his own initiative, moving supplies where needed and helping bloodied injured officers to sickbay and though it was a service, ultimately it felt quite ineffectual. Now he could get back to doing the things he loved to do.

 

Always anticipating a future of working in the field, Atticus Segami had played close attention to every lesson they taught in the academy but he found he had a natural affinity with security work more than anything else, demolitions in particular. Before his joining with the Segami symbiont he’d wanted to go straight into that goldshirt department but afterwards his goals changed. He decided that his first assignment should be something that would break him into starship life in general rather than anything else, regardless of any previous desires. So, for the past three years, Atticus had worked every one of the Shanghai’s bridge positions that he could get his hands on just to get a feel for it all but though it was illuminating, a part of him needed to do what he originally wanted to do. He wanted to work security and feel the thrill of firefights, the tension of an investigation, the adrenalin rush he’d personally get from deactivating a hostile explosive device or setting one up for an enemy to walk into. In five minutes he’d get to be a part of that life. In five minutes he’d be sworn into a new crew.

 

The only problem was, he wasn’t sure if the Morningstar would still be around in five minutes.

Edited February 12, 2006 by Images