Never Ending Repairs

Posted on Thu Aug 20th, 2020 @ 7:04am by Petty Officer 3rd Class Sam Saghir & Lieutenant Commander Finnley Keating VII & Lieutenant Commander Thy'lissa Shan

Mission: The Shadow of Arachne
Location: Engineering
Timeline: MD-03 after "Through Fog & Fire"
1664 words - 3.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Warp drive is still down, QSD isn’t working, multiple EPS conduit ruptures, I’m pretty sure I saw a grav plate failure warning….Finnley’s brain was rambling through all of the systems that still needed to be repaired. Her head was still spinning from being thrown across the room earlier, limbs were infested with conduit shrapnel and she had just spent the last few minutes crawling around in a jefferies tube to keep the ship from detonating, but on the plus side the ship hadn’t exploded.

She drew a deep breath and made eye contact with Sam, “You ready to go?” There were a million other systems that needed to be repaired and Shan would be arriving in engineering any minute now so she needed to get moving again.

Taking a deep breath, Sam nodded. Truth be told, he’d be ready to go wherever Keating wanted to send them, and he hadn’t exactly missed the opportunities for a few discreet sideways glances at the Lieutenant. Athena was certainly shaping up to be well out of his comfort zone, and he had very little technical training in the first place to be of much use to Keating. In the momentary calm, he felt the anxious knot of realisation in his stomach.

They made their way out of the jefferies tube, more slowly than when they had entered. There were a lot of repairs that needed to happen, but at least the ship wasn’t going to detonate on its own anymore. Upon exiting, Finnley headed back to the main console, took note of the systems that needed to be repaired and mentally jotted down a Bolian Lt.Commander working on one of the consoles. She didn’t remember any Bolian Lt.Commanders assigned to engineering, but there were too many other things to worry about at that moment.

Finnley noticed someone entering engineering and looked up. It was Shan. “Injectors are out of alignment, QSD is still down, multiple EPS conduits are fried, impulse engines are barely functioning, and we have anti grav plate failure warnings for multiple decks,” she gave Shan the latest, “warp drive and QSD aren’t going to do us much good out here anyways so I recommend we start with getting the impulse engines back to full power and making sure the grav plating doesn’t fail. What do you think?”

"Good work getting things under control, Lieutenant," Thy'lissa nodded, her antennae darting around. With all the chaos, there was a lot of sensory input that under other circumstances might have thrown her off her game. However, being an engineer at heart she was much more at home in this environment than most. "The Captain will want tactical systems prioritised. That means impulse drive but also shields and whatever weapons we can give him. Send a team to phaser control on Deck 8. Meanwhile you and Mr Saghir get to work on the engines. I'll get a damage control crew on the environmental controls."

Sam nodded at the Andorian Commander as his name was mentioned, he turned around to grab a repair case from the wall whilst she continued to give orders to Keating, as he turned around he bumped into someone and apologised. A Bolian, odd he thought that a blueshirt commander would be in main engineering, but he supposed it was all hands to it at this point.

“Understood,” Finnley replied. Tapping her combadge, “Paxton, Smith & Kimeron, head to phaser control on Deck 8 and see if you can get the weapons working.”

She chuckled and raised an eyebrow as she turned to face Sam, “Are you ready to get your hands dirty?” They were both already more beat up and grimy than either of them had been in a long while, but being on a ship that’s about to explode tends to have that effect on people. “We’ll start with the primary drive coil,” he said as she grabbed a repair kit.

Sam grinned at Keating, "the dirtier the better, ma'am" he replied with a wink, suddenly drawing back into himself as he realised how he'd just spoken to an officer. "Uhh...." departed his lips involuntarily as he followed, gratefully, the behind of the beautiful Lieutenant. As he crouched into the tube, Sam looked behind him, there was just 'something' out of place with this Bolian officer. He couldn't place it, but he just seemed out of place, they caught eachother's glances momentarily and Sam hastily looked away, embarrassed to have been caught staring at a senior officer. His suspicions were dismissed as quickly as they came, who after all was he to be questioning who what or why a senior officer was doing anything.


They made their way back into the jefferies tubes and down a level to the primary drive coil access hatch. “It’s going to be a tight squeeze in here,” Finnley observed as she opened the hatch, “but we need to get inside and repair the damage before we reinitialize it.”

"Oh that's no problem..." Sam said with a voice which suggested he wasn't paying attention, as he peered down into all manner of unholy messes; components and machines he probably hadn't even heard off were set out in a small crawlspace which he could barely angle his head to see into. He had no idea what any of this stuff was, let alone recognise any of the damaged components, and yet here he was fixing a starship. "No problem at all....."

Was it just her or did Sam sound distracted? She wondered as she squeezed through the hatch. “Hand me that parametric scanner,” she said once inside, “I need it to realign these coils.”

Sam looked at the array of tools in the kit open on the floor in front of him as he knelt, he wouldn’t know a parametric scanner from a self sealing stem bolt if his life depended on it. He held his hand over a tool, thought better of it and picked the one next to it; he handed it to Keating and hoped for the best.

Finnley grabbed the tool and did a double take. This is not what I asked for she thought. “Are you okay down there Sam? You seem distracted. Also, this isn’t a parametric scanner, it’s a decoupler. Look for one with a squarish head and a longer handle.” she said, trying not to sound too annoyed but the cramped area was getting hot and she felt like she was going to pass out if she didn’t get out of there soon.

“Um...” came a terrified murmur from Sam as he inwardly chastised himself for not picking up the first tool he’d gone for in the first place. Looking like an idiot in front of this woman was not good cricket. “Here” he said, passing it to her; “you ok Lieutenant?”.

“I do believe I asked you that first, Petty Officer,” she replied as she grabbed the correct tool from Sam, wiped the sweat from her forehead and started working to realign the coils. Truth be told, Finnley hated to admit to any sort of weakness so she didn’t want to talk about how she was feeling at that moment. “You seem distracted, what’s on your mind?”

Sam took a second to reign in the flirtatious comment which nearly escaped, “nothing really...” he lied, “it’s just this is all a bit much, isn’t it?”. Sam had served in space since technical training, but nothing like this had ever happened. He was feeling a bit out of his depth, to say the least.

“Done!” Finnley squeezed back out of the access hatch, drenched in sweat. “Now we just have to equalize the torque buffers, recalibrate the impulse response filters and purge the impulse reactor. Then we should be able to reinitialize everything and we’ll be in good shape.” She said with a grin before turning her attention to Sam. She had ignored his question, but was pretty sure he hadn’t heard a word that was just said either so it didn’t matter. “Why don’t you head to deck 8 and help with the phaser repair? You can report in to your lieutenant on the way if you haven’t already since the explosion. I can finish the repairs from here. Maybe you can take care of whatever else is on your mind along the way also.”

“Yes ma’am” he replied, somewhat disappointed to no longer be sharing the hot cramped space with Keating. Crawling through the tubes and back out into engineering he realised that he actually hadn’t checked in with his Lieutenant since the explosion. Walking back through engineering he noted that there was a relatively lesser amount of chaos; a couple of engineers were being tended to on the floor at the sides of the main work area, and various piles of debris had also been pushed out of the way to the sides. Rounding a corner his thoughts came to an abrupt end, and he flailed for the toolkit dropping from his hand as he collided with someone else rounding the corner In the other direction. “Oop sorry” he said, taken aback by the sudden collision; he looked up to see who he had collided with just in time to see the visibly anxious face of that Bolian Commander again; “hey!” The senior officer snapped at him, shoving Sam back into the wall, “just you...! You watch....you just watch where you’re damn well going!” The Bolian shouted at him, as Sam stood back in surprise. The Commander hurried down the corridor and Sam, a young man well out of his depth, stood dazed at the encounter...

A JP between

Lt. Cmdr Thy’Lissa Shan
Second Officer

Lieutenant Junior Grade Finnley Keating
Assistant Chief Engineee

P.O.3 Sam Saghir
Intelligence Crewman.