Shields? What Shields?

Posted on 21 Oct 2022 @ 7:48pm by Captain Bane Plase & Lieutenant JG Christina Hartley

3,415 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Outbreak

ON

On the bridge, Lt. Vujanic was on duty, in command of the Delta shift, a position that he enjoyed, although he wouldn't tell anyone. The ship was still travelling at warp, with the ship due at their destination in a few days.

With everything running smoothly, Vujanic had just completed a personal log, expecting no issues. Of course, law of averages always said that when everything was running smoothly, something would invariably go wrong when you didn't want it to.

As the Cygnus dropped out of warp, Vujanic raised an eyebrow. "Helm, I do not recall giving the order to drop out of warp," Vujanic said.

"I didn't take us from warp, sir," the helm officer replied. "The command originated from engineering, but I can't raise anyone there."

"Then return us to Warp 5 on our previous heading, at once," Vujanic ordered.

"Aye sir," the helm officer replied. Vujanic waited, and raised an eyebrow. "Ensign, is the parking brake on?" Vujanic asked, a joke he had once heard someone say.

"No sir, I just can't create a warp field. The controls refuse to respond," the Ensign replied. Vujanic raised an eyebrow.

"The source of the problem?" Vujanic asked.

"Unknown, but I'm running a diagnostic," the officer replied. Vujanic nodded; he needed to report this.

"Vujanic to Captain Bane. Apologies for disturbing you sir, but there seems to be a situation in Engineering. We are unable to raise them, but they gave the order to drop out of warp, and we are unable to return to warp," Vujanic reported.

From his quarters on Deck 8, Bane looked up from the book he was reading, about the Maori people of New Zealand on Earth. His tunic was off, strewn haphazarly onto the lounger sofa, Bane himself relaxing on his couch. "Have you sent someone to Engineering to find out what the problem is? Run a diagnostic on the communications," he asked, then chided himself for the last part of that question. If communications were out, he and the Bridge would not be talking. "That is," he corrected himself, "Run a diagnostic on the Helm control subsystems?"

"I am in the process of doing so. Communications is working properly, but I believe that the issue is that they are not answering because they are currently busy. I wanted to check with you first, to see if you had been alerted before the rest of us," Vujanic replied.

Plase rolled his eyes. He was off duty. Everyone on this ship, presumably, knew that during emergency situations, you contacted the Bridge first, then went from there. "No Lieutenant, I had not been notified yet. You are the first." He sat his book down and stood up, stretching a bit. "I will be on my way up in a few. Please have a report ready for me when I arrive." He picked up his tunic, looked at it and figured it was fine, throwing it on.

"Understood, Sir," Vujanic replied, as he went to his work.

Several minutes later, Bane stepped off the turbolift and assumed command of the bridge. "Status, Mr. Vuljanic?"

Vujanic stood from the command chair. "We have received a report from a crewman who has just come from Engineering. The entire shield grid has been taken offline, and the deflector dish is tuned to deflect space particles only. Without the deflector dish, it is impossible to create a stable warp field, and all this was done on the command of Lt. JG Christina Hartley," Vujanic replied.

Bane exhaled loudly through his nose. "Very well. As you were, Lieutenant. I will be in Main Engineering."

"Understood, sir," Vujanic replied, before Bane left.

*****

Meanwhile, in Engineering, Christina was racing through the deck with two engineers besides her, as well as a yeoman taking notes. "I want Junctions 14 to 23 replaced within the next hour," Christina ordered. "And no bullshit about needing more time; I helped build a Nebula Class ship, and if I can get a team of ten to do it in thirty minutes under perfect conditions, a team of fifteen can do it in an hour," Christina snapped.

"Yes ma'am," the engineer replied. Christina was already pissed off, having to have left Kin watching K'tress and reading her a bedtime story, which Christina loved doing, but she needed to make sure the ship was working properly.

A much longer turbolift ride later, Bane stepped off it again and into the controlled chaos that was Main Engineering. To be fair, it had been quite a while since he had been down here, and got several strange looks from techs running to and fro. Spotting his prey standing near the Main Systems Display Board, Bane walked over to her, picking up some of the orders she was giving. He had to say her name three times before she turned to him.

Christina heard Bane finally, and turned around, although she had to check on the systems. "Captain, sorry for the mess," Christina said, walking to a control panel. "We didn't wake you, did we?"

Before Bane could reply, an engineer reached Christina with a PaDD. "No, not good enough," Christina said. "Replace the primary junction, and reroute power via the tertiary junction until it's done," she ordered.

Bane watched the interaction. He was thrilled that she had taken command here, and that her people were already following her orders. Still..."May we talk in your office, Lieutenant," he said, using her rank instead of her last name, her first name, or even the familiar between them as a note that he was very much here on business, and here as her Captain and Captain of the ship.

"Captain, can we walk and talk? Right now, we've got a major problem," Christina replied, grabbing a repair kit. "JENKINS! I TOLD YOU TO REPAIR SECTION 5 TEN MINUTES AGO!"

"SORRY BOSS, WORKING ON IT," Ensign Jenkins called back from the upper deck.

"I'LL HANDLE IT," Christina told him. "Captain, right now, the last Chief failed to notice a bad EPS relay, and it's now infected most of the damned relay system in the shield grid," she explained.

Bane stopped her. "Look, this is your show down here, Lieutenant. However, you should let Crewman Jenkins handle it. You empower your people by letting them do things."

"I know, but I want to make sure it's done quickly, without Jenkins being overwhelmed. Right now, we're working overtime to get the ship working properly, before the mission. If I'd noticed this before we left, I'd have fixed it then," Christina said, looking at another report. "I can give you the full report now, if you like," she offered.

"That is not what I am here for, though" he said, the two stopped and standing largely in the way of everyone scrambling around trying to fix the ship. Several of them notably had their ear cocked to what the Captain was saying to their Chief. He had given her the opportunity to have this discussion in private, but she had declined, so he had obliged. "Whenever you stop this ship, or do anything that will take the normal operation of this vessel out of the equation, you -must- inform the bridge before you do it. If it is an emergency, then as soon as you do it. I need you to understand that the Bridge should not have called me asking what was going on this late, and that I had to make a trip to Main Engineering to find out what is going on. Do you understand?" He was not yelling, but his voice was such that it was quite clear he needed this to be understood, and to never happen again.

"I understand," Christina confirmed, not a hint of a smile on her face. "It won't happen again. Permission to speak freely, sir?" she asked, wanting to explain.

Glad that she understood, and with the expectation this would never happen again, he relaxed. "Granted."

"I'm sorry that I didn't contact the bridge, or you, before taking the ship from warp, sir," Christina said. "But I'm not sorry I did it, because if we hadn't, we'd have lasted maybe another hour before the shields fully failed, to the point where even space dust would have torn us to shreds. You wanted me as the Chief Engineer, and I want a word with you about that anyway, but right now, my primary concern is making sure we won't be picked apart by particles of space dust smaller than sand," Christina said.

Bane listened closely, then responded. "As admirable, and indeed as warranted, as your actions were, that does not negate the fact that you failed to follow standard procedure and let someone know," he emphasized. "As I pointed out with Crewman Jenkins and letting him handle whatever it was he said he could handle, and you overriding him, I believe in empowering the officers and crew under my command. I will never question yours, or anyone else's, judgment when it comes to the safety and well-being of the people on this ship, and the ship herself. Again, you just need to tell someone once you've made the decision. In this case, you should have contacted the Bridge. This whole situation would have been avoided." He hated having to chastise someone, and hated even more that he was doing so in front of the entire Engineering Department, but he had tried to avoid that. He felt he had lost the game on several fronts at this point; first with even having to have this conversation, having it in front of others, and finally, for potentially hurting the feelings of his god-niece.

Christina nodded. "Understood, sir," Christina said. "I admit, I hope this situation never happens again," she added. She shot a glare at two engineers who were being nosy as to what was happening, with both of them quickly heading off to work. "If I may report fully?" she asked.

Bane nodded, which was the other side of the proverbial coin of him coming all the way down here. "I'd like that very much."

Christina nodded as she was handed yet another PaDD. "Perfect, that's what I like to see Melissa," Christina said, smiling at the engineer, just as Ensign Jenkins handed her a PaDD. "Okay, that's the readings I want. Check the secondary processor chips, chances are there's gonna be a trace of the feedback there," Christina said.

She sighed and looked at Bane. "Wherever you got the replacement EPS relays and conduits from didn't check them fully under stress, and missed something big. Turns out, during the last repair and refit, one of the relays had a malfunctioning microprocessor in it, which caused a feedback virus. It was minute, and easily missed, but a thorough scan would have caught it. I mean, I'd have expected such a scan done on any part, but maybe I'm anal retentive that way," Christina said, grabbing a PaDD from the side and calling up the reports.

"Two hours ago, Ensign Anders noted that one of the replicators had slightly misheard an order. He made a quick note, but didn't give it a priority since the replicator worked on the second try, and thought it was just his fault. The second I saw the report, just before I was about to put K'tress down to sleep, I knew it was something else," Christina explained.

"A...replicator report of something extremely trivial made you think it was something else?"

Christina nodded. "It did. When I was helping repair the USS Lexington five months ago, they were having similar issues due to a faulty relay. I saw the report, and so ran a scan, hoping it was just a basic issue, but I came down when I noted it wasn't the audio receptor sensors going wrong," Christina explained.

"Huh," Bane said, the gravity of the situation coming to a full on realization for him. "Bless the Prophets then, Christina. A luck of the draw, literally could have saved our lives. A chance encounter on the Lexington which led you to diagnose an issue here. How long has this been a proverbial ticking time bomb?"

"Three weeks, at minimum. Until we track down the source, we won't know, but we need to replace the entire shield grid's EPS relays. Soon as we caught it, we locked it down, but it had spread to the shields. Replicators are isolated, and I've got teams replacing the isolinear chips in them. This will take us about twenty hours, at minimum," Christina replied. "I don't know who the engineers handling this were, but they were idiots for not checking fully. Reminds me of the Sentinel when I was ten."

Plase thought for a moment, ignoring the comment about the Sentinel. "You have 45 minutes to get the navigational deflectors back online so we can get back to warp. Our mission is a peaceful one, and with a society that is almost four centuries behind us. The risk is negligible without shields." He looked at her. "Can you make that happen? Then you will have all the time you need to run diagnostics and change out affected components, even rebuild whole subsystems, if necessary."

"We need three hours, minimum, to get the deflectors online. That's our first priority, and once we've got that done, we'll be able to get the rest of the shields repaired whilst at warp," Christina replied. "We need to replace the junction relay in section 25 Alpha, and that's a big job, I've got four people on it, and I can't do more because they won't be able to do the job properly."

The Captain was an Engineer himself, though long were the days gone that he actually had to do any Engineering work. His expanding waistline held true testament to that. Still, he knew when an Engineer was building in time, and this was one of those cases. "Two hours, not a minute more. Make it happen, Lieutenant."

"Captain, I'll try, but I never pad my timescales. I've never actually understood why some do; I prefer the work done. If I can get it done in two, I will, because I might be able to spend some time with Kin before bed," Christina said, as she signed off another report. "If you have a few moments, you're welcome to come and see the replacement of section 24 gamma, that's the last one before we can start on 25 alpha," she added.

Bane held up his hand, a gesture familiar to Bajoran custom that he would pass. "No, thank you. I would only serve to be a distraction and would likely get in everyone's way. I am confident in you and your team to get the job done. Remember, next time you make a command decision, let the Bridge know. I will back you up, but we have to follow procedure, ok?"

"Okay," Christina confirmed, nodding. "Soon as we can get back to warp, I'll let you and the bridge know when we can resume warp," she promised, accepting a PaDD from another engineer. Even when talking to the Captain, she was multi tasking and getting the job done. "Okay, get your team to the primary replicator control system, and see if we can find out how it got there," Christina said. She then looked back at Bane. "The weird thing is, whilst I never had to deal with emergencies like this at Utopia Planetia, I still prefer to be here, on a ship," she said, with a small chuckle.

Plase knew exactly what she meant. "I know the feeling very well. I have been offered a few times now to get into the Admiralty, but I am exactly where I am supposed to be, out here on a starship," he said, his eyes going upwards, his hands out, referring not just to this room or to the ship, but to space. "There is always something to do, something new to see, and to make a real difference."

Christina nodded. "You're not wrong," Christina agreed. "Oh, can I speak to you in private quickly?" she asked, indicating her office. "Personal matter."

Now she wanted to talk in private after getting a dressing down in front of her people? "Sure," he said, gesturing for her to lead the way. He had never been to the Chief Engineers office before.

As soon as the two of them were in Christina's office, out of sight, Christina looked at Bane. "Permission to speak freely again?" she asked.

Bane nodded. She didn't need to ask again, since she had asked only a few moments ago, and the permission still stood. "Yes, of course. What you got?"

Christina then teasingly hit him in the arm whilst smirking. "You jerk, did you have any idea how I looked when I met Commander Larsen? Dropping the whole Chief Engineer, and a promotion, on me? Did you have a camera recording my reaction or something?" she asked, with a small chuckle. "Did Dad put you up to surprising me? Or was that a Bane Plase original?"

Rubbing the spot she had hit, he smiled back. "Oh, that was all me, love. I knew the moment Admiral Savok helped me get you aboard here that I was going to make you Chief Engineer and make you a Lieutenant. When you asked me on subspace, I had already made that change on the roster for the ship, and had put in your promotion paperwork. It was accepted rapidly. So, you're welcome. Oh, and Larsen told me you opened and closed your mouth several times when he dropped that information on you. He said you looked like 'a fish out of water," he told her, then mimed what Erik had shown him. It was quite hilarious.

"I'm so glad I could amuse you," Christina replied, rolling her eyes. In that moment, all thoughts of the previous chiding and trouble was gone; right now they were uncle and niece. "I was expecting to be an engineer, not the chief, and not a Lieutenant either. I guess this is Karma for surprising Kin as well. That was a reunion full of tears," she said. She hugged Bane, smiling. "Thank you, for getting me here," she said softly.

Plase put his hand on her arm. "No, thank you for being here, Christina, and thank you for being in my life all these years. I couldn't imagine it without you, and that is the Prophets honest truth." He switched gears, his hand falling back down to his side. "I need to get back to bed. Please let the Bridge know when we are able to get back to warp. We have somewhere we need to be."

Christina smiled. "Likewise. I can't imagine my life without you being a part of it," Christina said, favouring him with a look of adoration and familial love. He had been a part of her life for so long, she couldn't remember him not being there. She was also thankful that he'd always be there for her. He'd been there through her transition, through her low times, and through the high times.

The two smiled at each other for a few beats before Bane broke the silence. "I need to get back to bed. I'll see you later," he said. He was about to say he would see her at the staff meeting, but that had already happened, then was going to say that he'd see her on the Bridge, but unless there was a Yellow or Red Alert, there was no reason for her to be there; her spot was here in Main Engineering. Being the Chief Engineer. Like she deserved to be. Like Bane's position being on the Bridge of a Starship, Christina's was to be at the heart of the ship, in Main Engineering.

"Sleep well, Uncle Plase," Christina said. "I'll send you a full report once we've finished repairs," she promised. There wasn't anything else to say for the moment; Plase was tired, given how late it was, she wasn't surprised. She was tired as well, but as an engineer, she was used to very late nights, especially when she had a deadline. She needed to get the job done, and she wasn't going to let her uncle down, not now, not ever.


OFF

A JP by

Lt. JG Christina Hartley
Chief Engineer
USS Cygnus

&

Bane Plase, Captain
USS Cygnus, Commanding

 

RSS Feed