2013 Gold Merit Award Maintenance as Usual

[Tachyon 0]

 

“Maintenance as Usual”

Cdr. Scott Coleridge

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It wasn’t that Scott disliked covert missions. It wasn’t that Scott had anything against them. He just found them taxing. They took a lot out of him, physically and mentally and ethically. Some people were built for infiltrating the enemy or even combat. Scott wasn’t such a person. His first starship posting had demonstrated that.

 

At the Academy, a battery of tests determines where you’re sent after you graduate--if you graduate at all, that is. Some of these tests are obvious: psych evals, Kobayashi Maru simulations and the like, emergency drills, survival training. Some are sneakier: the spy planted as a roommate, the recommendations of instructors, performance scores on the Academy lounge pinball game. Everything is supposedly taken into consideration. Still, mistakes are made. People test well but then crumple under the real pressure aboard a starship.

 

Scott’s experiences hadn’t been awful. But the near-fatal encounter with a wormhole had left a bitter taste in his mouth. He had seen the opportunity for the relative safety of Aegis and leapt at it. Now, all these years later, the station moved halfway across the quadrant and attacked more times than he would like to count, Scott was wondering if that had been such a good call.

 

He hadn’t left, though.

 

Adam approached Scott with a grim expression and a PADD in his hand. “Latest projections from the most recent upgrades to the replicators. It’s … not good.”

 

Scott took the PADD and skimmed the results before handing it back. He swallowed the bitter taste of disappointment and bit back the retort he was going to make--they had enough on their plates as it was. “Reroute some of the resources devoted to the sonic shower upgrades. We need the replicators more. Put the showers onto the Delta-list, right above the turbolift speed improvements.”

 

“You got it.” Adam hurried away to make the changes on engineering’s big board of priority upgrades. It was usually busy but seldom cluttered; on a station of Aegis’ size, upgrades were a way of life for engineers but were just maintenance as usual.

 

He hadn’t left because, despite everything, Aegis was still a home. A starship is always moving; by definition, it goes to new people. New people come to Aegis. All Scott had to do is walk down the midway to see the truth of this.

 

With the influx in refugees, the station was getting even busier despite its relatively remote location. It wasn’t just the refugees themselves; entire industries were booming. Refugees mean new customers, new subscribers, new cult members. Entrepreneurs, salespeople, and even cult leaders were all making their way to the station to pitch their tents and offer their wares.

 

“Commander?” asked a lieutenant whose name Scott could not recall. Were they really making them that young these days? Wait, when had he gotten old enough to ask that question?

 

“Commander?” the lieutenant repeated nervously. “The diagnostics on the new fusion generator have come back. The control rods on the first injector port are faulty. We’re preparing a replacement batch, but I’ve had to take it offline for now.”

 

Scott had returned from their mission only to find engineering in a state of controlled chaos. With Jorahl and Nijil consumed with other matters, he had decided to throw himself into more mundane aspects of station operations. Not only was it a necessity, but it was something he rather enjoyed. He relished in the normalcy of it all, the predictability of the day-to-day needs. And those needs were mounting by the day now: an influx of new people meant new demands placed on older systems that had, let’s face it, already been strained beyond capacity. Clever just-in-time solutions that Scott and his colleagues had implemented a few years ago were now bottlenecks that would have to be rethought and reworked in order to prevent total chaos from taking over.

 

The day-to-day had suddenly become one of the biggest challenges of his career.

 

Scott had experimented with Borg technology and built a quantum communications device. He had recently helped to infiltrate a rogue station bent on wreaking havoc. He had, though he wasn’t proud of it, dabbled in time travel. None of it compared to trying to get the plumbing working properly on a station that combined the worst components of Federation, Klingon, Cardassian, and Ferengi design philosophy. You did not want to see some of the bizarre pipe arrangements on record.

 

Scott blinked, realizing the lieutenant was still waiting for an answer, or even an acknowledgement. She was, he noticed now, trembling slightly. He wondered if he had really become so fearsome, or if she had recently had a run-in with Jorahl and met with his disappointment. Or maybe some of Jorahl’s icy exterior had rubbed off on him over the years.

 

“That’s fine, Lieutenant ... um …” Help me out here.

 

“Curtis, sir.”

 

“Curtis, right. These things happen. Just make sure you realign everything properly.”

 

Lieutenant Curtis seemed to start breathing again. The tension drained from her body; she looked as if she had just been given a reprieve. “Of course, sir.” She sped away to do whatever it was she had to do next to avoid drawing the ire of her superiors. Such was life in the busy environment that was engineering.

 

More people coming to Aegis also meant more demands placed on engineering’s other service: starship repair. The station’s location was more remote than most, and Starfleet didn’t have enough ships to patrol the region effectively. As a result, pirates had become increasingly bold, setting upon lone merchants and even picking off weaker parts of convoys bound for Aegis.

 

Those who survived such attacks continued on towards the station, determined to recoup their losses somehow, and they naturally expected the Federation to repair their ship out of the goodness of its heart. Scott didn’t mind the repairs all that much, but the increased workload alone, even with a shipyard to help shoulder the burden, was beginning to wear him and the rest of the crew out. Any much longer like this, and they would all be as nervous as Curtis.

 

Scott glanced at his console, where he discovered, to his surprise, that he had begun a wishlist. Right at the top was, “More personnel”, followed quickly by, “Reprogram the defence grid to create a time dilation field around the station so that time passes more quickly within the station than outside it.” One of those was possible. The other would require a lot of whinging and hand-wringing in front of senior staff. It might just be worth it though.

 

Another voice now begged audience. “Uh, Commander, you better take a look at these readings.” Urgency in the air now, Scott suppressed a sigh and swung himself out of his chair and in the direction of the voice. He had, what, three or four hours left on duty?

 

Time enough to put out a few more fires, maybe even start some of his own.