Faster Than the Speed of Water [Back Post]
Posted on Thu Sep 7th, 2023 @ 10:29pm by Fleet Captain Maxwell Culver & Lieutenant Dovenice Nyx
1,840 words; about a 9 minute read
Mission:
Short Treks
Location: USS Intrepid: Main Engineering
Timeline: MD31: 2200 hours
With the ship launch just hours ahead of them, there was one place Max not only needed to see, but wanted to see. On the Seabase, the natural use engines fit into a small room and a long tunnel. On board the Intrepid, engineering took up three decks. A new tricyclic warp core provided the power for the ship to slip easily into warp 9.99.
Stepping through the massive double thick, double doors, Max’s eyes slid up and down the trio of glowing warp tubes. He hadn’t realized, but he let out a low whistle.
It wasn't instantly clear where the officer had come from. One moment, Max was alone with the ambient hum of engineering, the next instant a grinning engineer was at his side. "It is a lovely site, isn't it? You'll have to come back to check out the scene when the ship is goin' fast."
“Lieutenant Nyx,” Max responded, looking down to the woman, he had a full foot of height more than her according to her personnel file. “Captain Max Culver, but don’t stand too hard on tradition. Gods know, I don’t.” He smiled, not really sure how to greet the joined Trill - the El-Aurians were all hugs and kisses, as the crew would soon learn.
Max’s eyes returned to the thrumming core, relatively quiet now, but soon to be bursting full of all the rage and power of matter and antimatter. All racing through the M/ARA.
"I should have come up to the bridge when I heard you were boarding," her phrasing nearly sounded like an apology. She folded her hands behind her back. It was a move made awkward by the data spanner she was still holding. "I did see the notification of your arrival." There was a "but" due in her sentence; however, she was not a person who would make excuses. "I was busy," she admitted. "You're here now... and you know my name, so you've reviewed my records. Any questions?"
Max hoped his new engineer wasn’t going to let nearly every sentence end with an unsaid ‘but’. He certainly hoped he wasn’t making her feel edgy. “Let’s start again. Hi, Lieutenant Nyx, I’m Max. I’ll be your commanding officer. Please, feel free to call me captain, cap, cap’n, or Max. So long as we’re not heading for a warp core breach, then you can call me ‘boom’.” He mimicked an explosion with his hands.
“As for questions, there’s a million and there’ll be time to answer them all. For now, let’s start with you. Do you prefer Nyx as most joined Trill go by the symbiont’s name, or something else?”
He hoped adopting a more relaxed attitude might disarm her ‘red alert’.
"Nyx is fine. My given name is Dovenice," she pronounced it doʊ-ˈven.ɪs. "But most people call me Dove, like the bird on Earth. Really, I don't mind what you call me as long as you don't call me late to dinner."
Max nodded, an old human joke. Maybe he should have offered a handshake. “Well, Dove, tell me what made you stay on after the shakedown cruise? Not that I’m unhappy to have an original engineer stick with the ship. Feels lucky in some way…”
"My ego benefits from being in a place where I feel I'm needed and wanted. Rumor has it, you need a Chief Engineer. And I'm sure you'll want me as Chief once you see my assets - my educational assets," she added clarification after a pause and a Cheshire smile. "One of my specialties is propulsion systems and I like to travel. Being assigned to a moving ship suits my lifestyle. And if you're into superstition, my dad used to ruffle my hair for an extra dose of luck when I was a kid. You could consult him to see if it worked?"
“I think you’ll find we’ll have enough time in space, and planetside, to determine if superstition and luck are on our side? Maybe we should drop a replicated rabbit’s foot for the on the warp core for luck? Or should it be three?” Max chuckled.
She considered this momentarily. "I also specialize in replication technologies and I have never found a way to program items imbued with luck so you'll need to find an original lucky foot or trust in my team to keep the warp core a happy soul. Hopefully, that's okay?"
Max’s face puzzled for a moment. “Not sure any lucky rabbit’s feet made it out of the twenty first century. Besides, I prefer to rely on the skill on my crew and their department head.
“YOU seem very confident to do the job and Starfleet has confidence in you as well. As such, and we’ll keep this secret between you and I, I will be putting my utmost trust and respect in you, Dove.”
"Those are words I can live by," she nodded in satisfaction while looking out to the engineering bay. "You're bringing a big portion of the crew in with you? What are they like?"
Max looked down at Dove, with a smirk he answered, “I’m getting to know my Executive Officer, she’s newly assigned. The rest of them are…a lot like me. We don’t stand on tradition, Dove. We are a team, if a not a little like a dysfunctional family at times, but we know how and when to zip that up.” ’At least, I hope we do by now,’ he thought to himself.
“Once you get to know them, I’m gonna guess you’ll find they’re not very much like any other crew in the Starfleet,” he added.
"I do look forward to meeting everyone," Dove replied. "Anything I should know before I do?"
“I’m just getting to know the XO, Commander Lorut, but she’s been punctual, professional, if not a little excitable in her job. Commander Chet Ripley looks, sounds and acts like a teddy bear. He’s 2XO and he’ll be leading the night shift. He’s probably in the chair now. Lieutenant S’tera is your science officer. Typical Caitian, right down to their lovable cantankerous attitudes. Lieutenant Aurora is our Chief of Cetacean Ops. She’s half Klingon, half Aquadian and a bundle of excitement for almost everything. Doctor Greene is our CMO, a very cerebral and hard to spook kind of figure. Seems like he’s got it all in the bag sort of guy. Lastly, our Chief Counselor, Rena Campbell. I think I literally wouldn’t be alive without her. I certainly lean on her, probably, too much.
“There’s a few other characters you’ll run into at helm and navigation. The blue koala is a grumpy little bastard, and most of the female crew don’t particularly care for him. If you see the dinosaur in uniform, he’s one of our scientists. Oh! We’re taking our version of the holo-doc. Triton Seabase will just have to get used a new copy.”
Max smirked as he leaned against one of the sleeping consoles. “What else did you want to know?” he asked with a chuckle.
"How about a bit about yourself? How long have you been a captain, sir?" Dove asked.
“I’m El-Aurian, so if we hit it off, we may meet each other again and again throughout your symbiont. Our average age can range from nine hundred years to as much as two and a half thousand years.” Max smiled inwardly as he considered that possibility, a life-long friend in the Trill.
“As for being a captain, I’m fairly new to the big chair. I captained the USS Cuxhaven for a short time and spent eight years in the second seat. From my perspective, why rush to the captaincy?
“It wasn’t long after the fleet encountered the new, human synths, the crash of the Borg ship and the Romulans that Starfleet rushed me into command of the USS Columbus, an Inquiry class starship, to confront the Romulan fleet at Coppelius. Obviously, nothing happened there.
“When the Romulans of Water Home decided to sit down and start a diplomatic outreach, I felt compelled to apply to the position on Triton Seabase. I thought maybe we could make a difference here, but now that’s all changed. I’m here to command the Intrepid.”
El-Aurian, Dove considered. As far as she knew, she hadn't met an alien of that species yet. "Where do you call home when you're not working for Starfleet?"
Max didn’t know Dove well enough yet, but she would see Kaitos before too long. “I’ve spent more time on Earth than anywhere else,” he said, a small white lie. “So I suppose that’s home? I don’t know…wherever my feet land at this point, honestly.”
She gave a small nod, "That makes sense - especially for a Starfleet officer... Earth becomes the homebase for a lot of people."
Max nodded. “Especially true for a people like mine, those without a home because of the Borg. Hopefully, we won’t be seeing much more of them any time soon.
"Last year’s attack on Earth seems like their last ditch effort. Desperate even, working with renegade Changelings,” Max answered. He had no love for the Borg.
Hesitantly, Dove nodded, "Yeah..." She didn't really have anything to say about the Borg or their operations.
Max could tell he had made the Engineer uncomfortable. He touched the device at his hip without activating it, his own permanent, personal reminder of how close the Borg would always be. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Perhaps I should let you get back to work, we have a big day tomorrow,” he suggested, giving her an out of the polite talk they were sharing, which had taken a dark turn because of him.
She brought the spanner up from where she was holding it behind her back, "Yeah, I have a bit of work to finish up before I'm ready to call it a night. It was good to meet you, Captain." Dove offered her free hand for a shake.
Max shook her hand, a very human gesture they had picked up from their time on Earth. “Very glad to have you aboard, Dove. I’ll be seeing you around the ship, I’m sure.” He smiled and offered her a nod before leaving.
Hopefully, he hadn’t made an ass of himself when talking about the Borg. They were still, literately a part of him. A part he used when needed, but a part he also hated, because as long as it still functioned, there were still Borg somewhere in the universe.
He didn’t have to activate it to know it still functioned.
RSS Feed