The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls Part 3

Posted on Mon Nov 2, 2020 @ 3:27am by Lieutenant Kivan Ta'Gas & Lieutenant Roden Serav
Edited on on Mon Nov 2, 2020 @ 4:09am

1,092 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Things Past
Location: Engineering
Timeline: back post, in arcadia ego MD09 14:00

[ON]

Lieutenant Serav stared at the readouts. His fingers danced across the console as he brought up the overnight reports from the night shift. He paused briefly to return a salute from a crewman. Though they had had a brief introduction at the department meeting, Roden had kept it brief and avoided one on one discussions. A pointless diversion when there was so much work ahead of them. He frowned at one of the crewman apprentice's report on micro fractures discovered on a section of internal bulkheads. The fact that it hadn't been addressed immediately, and the crewman had finished their shift on time was beyond his understanding. He made a note on the personnel file and raised an urgent work order before moving to the console next to the entrance. Here was an interface shell with readouts on the fusion reactors, studying the balance of output compared to the power distribution requirements set by the Operations team. He quickly became lost in the figures, simulating spikes and lulls in usage to test the expected operational parameters of these aging but well-maintained reactors.

Newly-minted Full Lieutenant Kivan Ta'Gas was beyond pissed. It hadn't even been a full week since he had received his promotion to Chief of Operations for the station when he already had more on his plate than he had anticipated. When Captain Soran had told him that he would have to handle both Engineering and Ops for the time being he believed that he had things under control and could take care of things until support staff had arrived.

But then he woke up to his access being denied to numerous Engineering systems. Systems that the day before had registered completely fine. However, now he could not obtain access beyond simple "view-only" status. He figured the root of the problem was due to someone screwing around with the system and triggered an administrative lock-out.

As he turned the corner, he saw the form of an Engineer that he did not recognize. "Hey! why are you screwing around in my system?!" The Cardassian-Bajoran shouted from afar to the back of the individual.

Roden turned his head away from the console with a raised eyebrow. He saw a young Lieutenant with somewhat Cardassian features, slightly shorter than him, and an irritated expression on his face. "Lieutenant Roden Serav. Chief of engineering." He spoke in a clipped, calm tone and gave the young Lieutenant a moment's regard. He turned back to his console, and tapped a few keys to continue his work. "Anything I can help you with?" He asked without looking away from the console.

"You're the new Chief of Engineering?" He asked, somewhat upset that he had not been notified that a new Senior Officer had arrived and had apparently already began to assume the duties of the department. "So that explains my access being blocked." He added.

"Yes, you can help me by explaining why you are viewing the fusion reactor power output distribution logs. I've already got my team scheduled to deal with that later tomorrow." He said, somewhat taken aback by his own mentioning of the phrase my team. He was already beginning to become accustomed to establishing a line of distinction.

Roden faced the young Lieutenant and then motioned to join him a the console. "Just landed today. Lieutenant Ta'Gas I presume? Operations? Appears that it was an automated system that locked you out once I took charge of the department, you should have your access restored now." He stepped aside slightly to show the readouts and the last few commands he'd entered. "I'm pairing up the distribution patterns," Roden pointed at one section of the screen. "With the output across reactors. There are some efficiency gains we can make by re-balancing between these sections. That's assuming current usage continues, I'm happy to write an algorithm that responds to Operations' requirements across the distribution networks."

"It's Kivan, Lieutenant Kivan" The Operations Chief corrected, as was Bajoran custom. He leaned closer and reviwed the console. "There's no need," He replied.

"The current output readings are only at this level because entire sections of the station are offline due to the massive power loss we experienced." Kivan said, the station-wide powerloss had been responsible for nearly 300 casualties. "The only way we've been able to stablized the distribution matrix is by shutting down low populated areas of the station and diverting that power to the heavily populated areas. If we tried to evenly distribute power the reactors would not be able to handle the stress and we'd have microfractures throughout the primary reactors." He replied.

"I've been able to keep things together via duct-tape for awhile." He said, recounting the number of tasks that had to be placed on the backburner due to lack of manpower. "And that's not even beginning to think about the various teams that are on the planet's surface doing who-knows-what." Kivan said.

"Understood Lieutenant, this isn't a criticism. I'm here to work, and I can at least take the engineering side off your plate. I've worked on a research station before, and a base this size needs both of us, and I suspect more crewmen than Starfleet will ever give us."

"More crewman. . ." Lieutenant Kivan signed wearily. "We're a starbase on the fringe of Federation space. We're always at the bottom of the list in terms of supplemental crew." He grumbled. "We have to work with what we've got until new bodies slowly trickle in here." He added as he updated the console.

"Plus, we're still trying to sort through the random outages fro the sections of the station affected during the Cardassian's impromptu protest." Lt. Kivan said. "Supposedly it was just the civilians, but their outbursts seemed too well-coordinated to not have some support from the Cardassian' Security Units." he added.

"We saw combat against the Cardassians," Serav's tone was on the edge of anger, eyes staring back across time as he remembered. "Their capacity for subterfuge is limitless. I'll take a look at the data," He spoke as he started tapping away at the screen. "I wrote a subroutine a few years ago that was based on some intel we'd received on the Obsidian Order's common exploits list. We might be able to build a faster diagnostic pattern if you show me what you've found so far..." The two officers focused on the console, immediately losing themselves in the work ahead.

[OFF]

A post by:
Lt. Kivan Ta'Gas
Chief Operations Officer
DS5

&

Lt. Roden Serav
Chief Engineer
DS5

 

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