Multi-Tasking

[Rhan K'hal 0]

Multi-Tasking

A Rhan K’hal Log

 

Rhan was doing what he was the best at, multi-tasking. With a ship-wide catastrophe on their hands, Engineering was up to its exhaust ports in repairs. Medical was patching up the latest round of “crew thrown hither and yon.” Science was napping and not causing any more problems. Security was largely providing pack-mule services or holding toolboxes for the engineers. Operations, of course, was assisting all of this while trying to re-stack the cargo crates. Again. So, as he conducted the frenetic opera, he turned his mental “we have not experienced a major incident in XX hours” back to zero.

This whole ordeal, debacle, crap-fest (see thesaurus for more options), was, in his mind, becoming rather routine. The Excalibur seemed to be a magnet for mania, and while that annoyed him considerably the first two missions, now he simply thrived on it.  The command staff seems to have learned that the more they stayed out of his fur, the faster things got done.

Captain Swain was off, hopefully sleeping. Augustin was in the center seat. The Security Chief puzzled him, as he almost seemed a non-entity aboard. Even when he made an appearance for briefings or for the rare duty-officer shift he seemed to exist almost in another quantum phase; passing through but causing no ripples in the air. Though, thinking it through, he rather liked that; remembering the usual chest-thumping, I am Thor, God of Thunder, kind of personalities he remembered from security cadets back at the Academy.

Commander Hawthorne was, of course, riding herd on Engineering. He wondered what had prompted her elevation to the Executive Officer’s position when she so clearly hadn’t let Engineering go, and by the looks of things wouldn’t before the 25th Century arrived. Any time the ship got dinged up (or more often, beat to within a few centimeters of collapse) she would spring into Chief Engineer mode. Not that she ever approached a dereliction of duty in regards to the XO position (a multi-tasking feat he could appreciate), but he still couldn’t figure out why she’d let go of something she loved doing so passionately. All for what was, in effect, a paperwork job. Whether he ever found out he knew one thing: when she was in this mode, stay out of the way.

As he continued to work mostly on his extra-large PADD (he’d nearly had to steal it back from Swain earlier, but was saved by the Captain’s manners breaking through the fatigue), he allowed his mind to continue to roam on the personalities around him, how he’d improve bridge design if he ever got the chance, and Excalibur Bad Luck™.

Considering EBL™ and the current condition of the ship, he wondered if repair was even possible, or desired. The Akira Class, even now with the Excalibur variant, was a good one, but Starfleet was pumping out new classes as fast as they could build them. A few invasions back-to-back will do that, he supposed.  Most of the new offerings sported new technologies created in response to the Dominion War. Some other technologies were even attained by the Excalibur-B's time in the Gamma Quadrant.  

He’d gotten a peek at one of the new Luna Class ships, the Ganymede, back at the station before they’d left for this cluster-bang of a mission. From everything he’d seen and heard about the class, Starfleet had learned its lesson in streamlining, and the Ganymede showed it. He wouldn’t mind one of those at all. Oh well, they had to get their current collection of spare parts back to Federation space first, not necessarily an easy feat. He was sure that Commander Hawthorne & Co. would make sure the interior didn’t turn into the exterior, and he’d do his best to make sure everything in the interior kept moving toward order from chaos.