The Hard Truth of Serving

Posted on Wed Jan 2nd, 2019 @ 10:06am by

696 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: The Emerald Road
Location: CEO's Office
Timeline: Heading Back Home.

The mood was miserable as James sat at his desk in his office reading the names of those members of his team that didn't make it back. Some were his friends, others were damn fine engineers, some were good at what they did for not long being out of the Academy. He'd spent the better part of several hours writing letters to the families of those lost, he felt he had to since he was the one that ordered them to board that ship. He didn't blame the marines, the Colonel or Major for them being killed, from all accounts the fighting on board was chaotic and though everyone on board knew that in any battle casualties happen.

He'd sent the final letter to the Commodore, no doubt he would do something as the Commanding Officer of the vessel they served on, James just felt better if he added something himself since he worked with them to go along with it.

As much as he wanted to contact Tiffany and Kelly, duty demanded he do the letters first. He owed it to the fallen officers and ratings. He hoped they were ok, that no hard came to them in the ship to ship battle. While damage reports seemed light to moderate at best, sometimes its not the battle that kills or harms but the subsequent reaction to it.

As he sat thinking, he couldn't help but wonder that in all the days in his 4 years of Academy life, through all the classes, hearing the stories and stars of Starfleet, he didn't think he'd see a day like this.

He wondered on the state of the Dreadnought since he was pretty sure that every branch of medical, science and engineering had crawled over every square foot of the ship because of that organism. He honestly was not looking forward to seeing what all those people had done to the ship, it was all well and good to put the ship back together but it was a fine tuned machine, tinkered, minute adjustments, tweeks and edits that made it run just right. No doubt all gone since they had to install a whole new nacelle.

"Sir.."

The single word jolted James back into the now, not even realising that he'd wondered off, eyes open and bizzarely unable to think of what he was thinking of to cause such a state. "Uh..." James shook his head. "Yeah, yes, sorry. What is it?" Looking at the door to see Ensign Jarred Omar, one of the original Indefatigable crew standing at his door.

"We managed to fix the EPS junctions on 6 and 7. 10 should be done within an hour. The phaser array will need a yard, three of the emitters are fused with two of them discharging into the surrounding bulkheads, partially melting them. Will need to extract the section entirely."

Which James knew, was a yard job.

"Ok, thanks for that." He adjusted his submitted damage report accordingly with the new time estimates and send a requisition request for some yard time. He honestly expected the very yard they boarded the Indefatigable to still be vacant, she was a test bed ship after all so all of the gear, equipment and such would be ready to re-board her once they arrived. He was pretty sure though that there would be a few ruffled feathers at returning the shiny ship with a few scrapes and bruises upon her.

"Can you pass the word along that everyone's doing a good job and that despite whats happened, the ship held up because of the effort they put in to keep her fighting." James knew it was not entirely accurate, there were more on board the ship than engineers but when the damage starts to mount up, its the engineers that leap into action.

If anything this mission taught him that danger doesn't discriminate, Red, Blue, Green, Yellow uniforms it doesn't matter, it targets everyone. It also showed him that perhaps he put too much time into his job, even at home he would be thinking about it instead of shedding the engineer skin at the door and simply being James for Kelly and Tiff.

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