Departmental tour. (Part I of II)

Posted on Tue Jul 30, 2019 @ 2:54pm by Lieutenant JG Leonora Dell & Lieutenant JG Erich Hartmann

1,164 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Doors of Perception
Location: DS5
Timeline: MD10 1000 ~ 1400

[ON]

When he left Soran's office, a girl so young she could have been mistaken for a cadet was waiting for him. Claude took him over. "Leonora, Lieutenant Eric Hartmann. Lt Hartman , Lieutenant Leonora Dell."

"Pleased to meet you sir." she said, holding out a hand. The movement made the blonde ponytail she wore high on her head start to swing. "Very pleased indeed."

“Sure thing.” Hartmann said, returning the handshake. “But we are the same rank, so no need for the formalities. You are my illustrious predecessor, eh?”

"Not so sure about that." Leonora said, starting to walk towards the turbo lifts. "Things are pretty much just hanging together."

Erich’s brow creased in thought. “Give me the bottom line up front Leo...May I call you that?...how bad are we, where are we supposed to be goal-wise, and what have we tried already that hasn’t worked?”

"Well, its mostly specialist technicians here, and a handful of ensigns. The big project is a proper overhaul of the Computer Core. A few months ago a test of the AHD platforms went wrong, and the to stop it they ended up having to smash a lot fo the core. All essential and most non-essential funcitons are back. But we're running at half speed most of the time."

Erich murmured an acknowledgment. “Okay. First things first: show me where we work. Take me to every team that falls under our umbrella, no matter how small. I want to see their faces and shake their hands and they mine. Afterwards, we’ll hash out some ideas over an early dinner, and call a staff meeting tomorrow at 0900. Thoughts?”

"I hope you like walking." Leonora entered the lift. "Deck three."

The came out into a small central area, circular in nature, with a set of stations laid out in a circle at the centre of it. "Primary sensor array. Its getting a lot of work at the moment. Science is scanning that planet like they need to do it to breathe. There's at least three of us covering it, but it looks like they're all doing checks. Decks 1 to 10 are all sensor arrays of one sort, so we try and keep numbers down so it doesn't fritz the readings too badly. Any questions?"

Hartmann had none, but loitered long enough to see and chat with the crewmen. He asked only briefly about their work, keeping the interrogatives to personal facts like family, etc.

“Lead on MacDuff.” Erich said, hoping the young woman caught the reference.

"Computer Core." She said, and they were whisked away, arriving a minute later. The computer core took up all of deck 15, and most of deck 16. They entered on the upper story, lined with banks and banks of server racks, bio-mimetic gel pods and its filter system, and row on shining row of isolinear rods.

"We've got a real mix of legacy system running on isolinear Chips, and the upgraded parts running on gel." She headed out of the lift, and into the core, heading towards a darkened section. "This is the last spot of damage, we're still waiting repair it. The accident with the AHD systems meant Darson and The old CIO took out most of this area. We've got only fragments of data left, and trying to piece them together to find out what happened has been tying up us, Intelligence and Security, for the last few months."

“Do we have a going theory?” Hartmann asked, his gaze focused on the damaged spot in question.

"Nope." Leonora admitted. "Whoever did it put it so far in we had to trash the hard ware, so I'd say it was someone who really knows what theyre doing. And could disguise it well enough our scans never saw it."


“Alright. Have the teams make a complete estimate of repair times of all systems. I’d like the estimated times to assume they committed all repair teams to the task. Also, I’d like recommendations as to the order of said repairs. Thoughts before we move on?” The German said, stopping occasionally to mentally search his notes.

"I'll send you the schedule were working too now. That has all those details on. Mostly its trying to replace and then upgrade to the gel. Just to do the core requires more than for a sovreign class, and we then have to upgrade the rest of the station. As we're mostly functional, we're kind of down the list for new supply, and the replicators are having a hard time getting it to stay stable. Its too close to living."

Erich wanted to test his now de facto number two. “Assume I did not show up: you are king for a day, what would’ve been your most likely course of action for these repairs?”

"I'd carry on through the schedule. We do what we can, and reroute the rest. As long as everyone's still breathing, everything else can wait." Leonora started walking back to the turbo lift.

“Hmm.” Erich said noncommittally.

Leonora gave him a nervous look. "You'd do something else? Deck 63"

Hartmann shook his head. “No. Plans are good, but it’s good to have back up plans. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, my father said.”

Leonora laughed. "Yeah. Aint that the truth. Though in our case it might be 'Everyone has a plan until they crack the casing.'" The doors opened. "Secondary Operations. Technically the entire station can be run from here. But mostly its used to keep an eye on the power network, since we're so close to engineering and the main jennies."

“How many personnel assigned here daily?” The German inquires.

"Nearly 50. Four shifts of twelve. Its going up though. Now we have an orbitsl position to maintain, there's a lot more draw on everything. Kivan has his hands full."

“I’d like to augment the shifts by at least 10 percent,” Hartmann said, “in case of emergencies. Please prepare the current duty schedules and any vacant positions and we’ll discuss it with our CPO.”

"Yes, sir." Leonora made a note.

And so it continued. Tractoring on Deck 76, Industrial replication on 134, secondry computing on 150, Cargo tranporters on 374, Primary SIF generator on deck 579, Auxillary ops on 650, on and on, Crew quarters, civilian quarters, shuttle bays, backup comms, waste recycling, shield generators, Engineering, maintenace, secondry sensors, emergency power relays, AHD storage pods...

"And our grand finale," Leonora said after three hours, "VPOD. Visual Projection Observation Deck. Do you get vertigo, or agoraphobia?"

“Let’s find out together.” Hartmann jokes, his tone as dry as a good martini.

"Well, you can't say you weren't warned." The Turbo lift came to a stop and opened out into a small circular chamber that had a small circular hole in the floor and a ladder going down. "After you."

To Be Continued...


Lt JG Leonora Dell
Operations Officers
DS5

&

LT JG Erich Hartmann
Chief Operations Officer
DS5

 

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