"Factors"

[Kansas_Jones 0]

USS Agincourt NCC-81762

“Factors”

Kansas eyed the chrono in her office; she still had thirty minutes, and then was due in the main gym for a sparring match with one of the marines. The feline hadn’t even looked at the joint department training roster to she who she would be paired with. She wanted to be surprised; surprises kept you from getting complacent.

 

What she didn’t like was the looming extraction mission. Go in, get the missing Umbara general from the Selshan captors, and get out. Easy. Right.

 

The impromptu meeting in the NNC had blown apart some concerns, and revamped others, but so many more factors needed to be considered by the departments that were to be involved in the extraction. The Caitian rummaged around on the desk, locating the padd that contained her definite mission notes.

 

Most likely, if deployed, the security team would act as a backup for the marines. The goldshirts would be outfitted with phasers, the protective phaser vest netting graciously shared by the sharks, flashbangs and gas grenades, with the possibility of no frags. Frag grenades, as a general rule, made Kansas nervous when a mission went down on an enclosed space such as a starship. Grenade goes off, bulkhead goes boom, the protective forcefield delays, and then you get sucked out into space. Not the best way to go down, no it was not.

 

The security officers would be using the standard phaser rifle, but JoNs was also hedging toward nixing the standard and assigning the energy assault rifles instead; the assaults had the stopping power and range of a projectile shotgun, and could be very useful for close quarters combat on a ship.

 

Personnel wise, JoNs was planning on taking part in the mission. She wasn’t the Agincourt’s CO, XO, or Second Officer, and therefore she was in the clear to share the risk with her people. Black-Knight would be tapped to participate; she trusted the junior lieutenant to have her back during the deployment. She was also considering Master Chief Keltex as well – she had observed the elder Klingon during ship based training drills. Wow. Don’t get in his way or his line of sight. Period. Another solid option was Midshipman Tuttle, with that strategic ops background of his.

 

The Caitian’s thoughts went sour as she again pondered recent events within the security department. Cadet O’Brien was way to green to bring on an extraction mission, and she really didn’t want the man who had yelled ‘marine scum’ to be working with the sharks right now. The extraction would be volatile enough, let’s not have the teams volatile as well. Lieutenant junior grade Nimetti was currently confined to quarters due to his in-attentiveness on his last TAC stint; if she did need to pull him for SitRep tracking duty, she prayed to the gods he didn’t get distracted again so she wouldn’t need to seriously hurt him.

 

Calm. Happy thoughts. You are not an annoyed feline. Ignore the command ulcer.

 

She took a sip from the mug containing rapidly cooling hot chocolate – chocolate. The gods gift to the universe – and thumbed the padd scroll key, switching over to the actual tactical schematics recorded from the Selshan ships. This was the hard part.

 

Entry point? Extraction point? Shuttle? Transporter? They needed internal and external scans of the Selshan target ship. Oh sure, scans could be taken, but invasive scans tended to set off alarms. And the bottom line was that the Selshan crew would know the ship better then the sharks and barnacles.

 

Sciences, engineering, security and medical would need to combine forces for this. Medical needed to figure out some kind of baseline reading for the Umbara physiology, so the team could track General Birdie. Security needed to access the current TAC scans of the Umbara ships, and try and get more details. Engineering and the Sciences could further extrapolate based on their own readings and specialties. All the departments would be called to pool resources for the extraction mission on the target ship - assuming the captive general was not moved to another ship or even a ground location, perhaps in the middle of the skirmish.

 

Gods, this could all turn into a real mess.

 

With an annoyed shake of her head, the lieutenant commander banished those thoughts and cleared her mind. That was enough mental tactics planning for now; she needed to change and get in a mind set for her training appointment with the mystery marine. She rose from the desk and then exited the offices, heading to her quarters to get changed and pick up her gym bag.

 

Kansas was pretty confident she could handle whoever she had been paired with.