"Sleepless on Republic"

[Guest Fiona Weber]

A yawn escaped Fiona, and then she rubbed at her eyes.

 

It wasn't as if she could sleep. Oh no. Oh-three-thirty, for an alpha shift officer, was far too early an hour to expect sleep. And it wasn't as if she could just stare at the ceiling -- she may as well have been doing things if she was going to be an insomniac.

 

She didn't used to be. Yet another not-really-a-malady that had crept up by her "old" age of thirty-four.

 

But at the moment, she seemed to have an affliction that was more annoying than mere insomnia. Yes, Fiona had diagnosed herself with acute insomnia, aggravated by mid-grade boredom. Her snake was asleep. Not a book could capture her interest, holovids were dull and lifeless, and she'd already gone for two "corridor jogs" that night alone. Her quarters were tidy, her paperwork was done, her medical journals were read...

 

Fiona returned again and again to what she usually came to when boredom was becoming dire: Work.

 

She was going over some interior scans of Engineering -- and Lieutenant Johnson's most recent duty logs. Correlated with Jax-Robinson's (she really needed to settle on a name for her to keep going with, and considering her objections to "Mrs. Robinson", that epithet wouldn't work...) reports, Fiona was looking through scans of some crates Johnson had delved into. Crate one -- nothing. Crate two -- nothing. Three, four, five, six, seven... nothing.

 

Eight, on the other hand, either missed sterilization in the transporter room or just had a curse put on it -- Weber found six different strains of virus lurking in the contents -- seemingly innocent stembolts. An order for decon and a reminder to Johnson to drink extra fluids later, she was happy enough that she'd conquered the Kamaraazite flu. She'd even gone so far as to have enviromental controls for the Johnsons' quarters' block rerouted so that it'd all go through a filtering process before recycling to the rest of the crew. She, for one, didn't particularly feel like sneezing up to forty times in a row.

 

Clearly, a major crisis had been averted.

 

And if that was what passed now for a Major Crisis, Fiona had the distinct feeling that not only was she grasping at straws, but she'd fallen on desperate times.

 

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

 

Shut up.

 

Conscience -- three times in a day. In the past, that probably meant the world was close to ending. Another side-effect of old age, she decided, and one she liked even less than boredom or insomnia.

 

She waited a little while longer, staring numbly at her console as if it might suddenly come to life or provide some sort of entertainment. Of course, it didn't, remaining inanimate. Lights then dimmed, Fiona tried going back to bed. Naturally, that didn't really help, but it was a bit more calming than her after-hours efforts to save the ship from a practically harmless viral infection.