At the Amusement of the Elements

[NDak 0]

The hum of the eight Oppenheimer-class fusion plants beneath her was somehow relaxing, even if she knew that they could easily spell her quick and rather bright end should a malfunction occur. Perhaps because they provided a lower, deeper vibration than the Artificial Quantum Singularity units she'd become accustom to on Romulan Warbirds, or perhaps because they'd recent finished bringing three of them back on line after several weeks of extensive repairs; the middle-aged Romulan female smiled as she leaned back into her chair in the small office that she occupied just off to the right of main status board and let the subtle vibrations work lose the tense muscles in her back.

 

Since coming aboard nearly eight-month prior, part of the Federation's attempt to more closely involve non-Starfleet personnel in the operation of the Allied Camelot Station, it seemed like this was the first time Erei'Riov Akal t'Faelo could simply step back and not worry about the Elements crashing something down upon her for their sheer amusement.

 

At first it had been conflicts with her staff, most of which was Federation. They neither trusted or liked her; and while the latter was more of a perk, the latter was imperative to running a well-honed department, especially since she might be asking them to put their life on the line any time they were sent to do repairs to systems like the EPS grid or the notoriously fickle Reactor 7. In the beginning she'd tried to ignore their stares, the little comments she'd hear them making, but when one of the humans, a Lt. Commander Ferris Gaunchar had outright countermanded her orders in front of the staff, she'd had enough.

 

On Romulan ships, it was an unspoken rule that annoying either the Chief Medic or Chief Engineer would have some very unpleasant consequences. The haughty, arrogant and pig-faced human had found out all to late about this rule, however. After she'd finished ruining his romantic dinner with one of the females from the science department with a slight reprogramming of his replicator unit, she couldn't help but giggle when she'd heard he would be late to his duty shift after an incident involving a malfunction of his sonic shower. That, along with a rather serious threat she might have made regarding emasculation of the officer in question, had mostly brought an end to the friction between her and the staff. They had learned to respect and trust her decisions, while she'd learned to respect, if not privately snicker over, their backwards thoughts and tendencies.

 

Granted, that was when the Elements decided that Akal could not have a stress free moment and caused four of the eight fusion reactors that powered the behemoth station to unceremoniously die. She privately joked to her colleagues that had they at least exploded with even the tiniest bit of grandeur, or at the least caused some hideous benign growth to from on Gaunchar, she wouldn't have minded as much. But no, they just died. Deader than door knobs with no apparent reason.

 

The lack of half the stations power generation had caused a number of issues, and a number of angry customers. Perhaps the Elements were trying to teach her a lesson in customer service? She could only conclude that if so, they needed to go straight to hell. She was an engineer, not one of those all to bouncy humans in the communications department who seemed far to excited to connect her with the Romulan homeworld when she called home.

 

Her staff had spent nearly two whole months rebuilding the reactors in question, she'd waited anxiously on the morning of start-up. She was actually so confident in the repairs that she'd invited Admiral Day and Commander Blair down for the start-up ceremony and brought along several bottles of ale from her personal stores to commemorate the job well done.

 

The Elements would have none of it. They'd flipped the switch and nothing happened. She sighed, brief memories of her first romantic encounter popping into her head. After apologizing to the brass for dragging them down and taking up their time, she and the crew drowned themselves in the ale.

 

After several weeks of slamming their heads against bulkheads, a little green ensign from some planet she couldn't even begin to pronounce found the cause—a faulty control sensor in the emergency management system. Why Starfleet would have constructed their control network in such away that a sensor on a system not even on-line could cause a complete failure in half of the reactors was beyond her, but the little green boy (she was pretty sure he was boy) had been proclaimed a hero and won himself a bottle of best ale she could get her hands on. She saw him crawling his back to his quarters later that night, so she assumed he enjoyed the bottle.

 

So it had been three days since they brought the reactors back on-line and nothing had broken, yet. Perhaps she'd finally atoned for whatever offense she'd made against the Elements, or they'd simply lost interest in her. Either way, she was rather happy to have the peace and solitude, and the back massage from the reactors was rather pleasant too.