The Approaching Dread

[BNai Summers 0]

Her fingers felt slippery against the shiny black surface of the Ops console. They’d spent the last twenty-two hours hurtling toward Camelot just to turn around and wait the last thirty minutes for the enemy to come to them.

 

It wasn’t the first time she’d been in battle. During the war, she’d had two ships blown out from under her. She’d learned not to get too attached to any one vessel or its crew. Her specialization choice in shakedown operations during officer candidate school made it easy to avoid such bonds. Just get them ready and send them along.

 

As she glanced around the Morningstar bridge, it struck her that she didn’t consider the faces as part of some “other” crew. Part of it was that she’d stayed with Morningstar through a longer shakedown than most ships. Part of it was that, until the assignment of the Excalibur people, the ship had been running with less than a skeleton crew.

 

She still barely knew any of them. The incident on Al-Ucard had given her a chance at action, but had largely fixed itself. She enjoyed occasional banter with Graham, but she’d made no friends off the bridge. She wondered if her Deltan heritage affected how the others perceived her. Or maybe how she acted toward them?

 

Behind her, Admiral Day sipped from his cup, coolly waiting the fate that warped toward them. He was here with them, instead of the relative safety of a ship like Yorktown. The others sat poised, ready the defend the station against the coming threat.

 

Her console twittered, alerting her to yet another uncoordinated shift in the power balance. Engineering had a tendency to make input changes in the EPS grid without advising Operations, but she did her best to monitor them. Unconsciously, she smiled. Each department tended to think they owned the whole ship. How many inquiries from sickbay had she responded to during the battle? None of them wanted to miss a chance to do their part.

 

A blinking display caught her attention, shunting those thoughts aside. It was time to do her part. “Admiral,” she reported aloud, “lateral sensors are detecting weapons fire and energy spikes aboard the Dominion dreadnought.” A sense of dread started to fill her at the report.

 

Behind her, she heard the clink of a cup being set down.

Edited February 15, 2006 by BNai Summers