Helping Hands

Posted on Tue Nov 14th, 2023 @ 8:41pm by Lieutenant Commander Finnley Keating VII & Lieutenant Alexis Ryan

Mission: Character Development
1869 words - 3.7 OF Standard Post Measure

"You've worked in engineering before, right?" Finn walked up to Ryan, skipping formalities and point blank asked the question. She'd heard rumour and looked up the woman's profile to find that she had a knack for software. Sturgis had a knack for that too but he was preoccupied with other repairs and Finn felt she could use an extra hand.

Glancing up from central terminal in the middle of the Science Division's main hub, Alexis didn't try to hide her momentary confusion, though it may have veered more towards incredulous amusement if she'd realised that an entire computer science degree had been reduced to merely 'a knack for' in the anecdotes of an institution that did currently seem to be doing its best to push other aspects of her training to the forefront. At the very least, she was used to her specialisation catching people unaware whilst she wore blue; it was, in many ways, a very shoe-horned fit.

"Welcome back," became her first response, without a lot of scope for additional acknowledgement. Ryan was aware of all the officially announced aspects of Keating's recent absence, which didn't amount to much, and could marshal just enough empathy not to feel compelled to ply the woman with questions. Instead, every bit as inclined to view work as perfect respite, Alex moved immediately onto the query at hand. "I've dabbled a bit." The twinkle in her eyes may have been lost on the other Lieutenant.

"Care to lend a hand then?" Finn tossed a PADD towards Alex with a smile. "My hands are full with physical repairs and normally I'd look to Sturgis or another engineer next but everyone is hands full working other tasks. I need someone that can reprogram the fuel distribution system while I'm simultaneously making the repairs to the lines that got damaged."

A slight wince from the Science Chief held a glimmer of apology. "You know, it might not seem like it but we did try not to multiple the amount of pieces we brought her back in." Offering a wry smile, Ryan closed down the file she'd been working on and straightened, turning towards the engineer with both palms held aloft as if in surrender. "I'll do you one better and lend you both."

Finn shrugged before beginning the quick jaunt towards engineering. "It doesn't bother me, the more pieces there are the more I get to repair which keeps me nice and busy. Besides, I once ejected a perfectly good warp core so I try to keep the judgements to a minimum. Usually." She smirked. "So tell me why you have this reputation for engineering and software, yet you're wearing a blue shirt?"

"It probably all started with the computer science degree I left the Academy with." Now privy to the Lieutenant's inner-take on her qualifications, Alex sounded just as amused as promised. "Heavily flavoured by the undergraduate detour I took into bio-medical when I flirted with the idea of specifically working on prosthetics. Turns out I like a bigger playing field." Having fallen easily into step with the engineer, Ryan glanced sideways with raised eyebrows and added, "Not to mention, Athena already has a thriving Engineering department and yet someone seems to have installed a revolving door in the Science offices. I strongly suspect they nudged me sideways again because wearing blue on a warship is a whole different ballgame."

"Makes sense." They arrived at a main junction point for the fuel distribution system right outside of engineering and Finn quickly opened a hatch to crawl inside. "This is it. You reroute and I'll manage the repairs. You'll have to program the stop gaps within the lines to close on lines 12 and 8 but maintain an active feed through the main junction point that connects right before it at junction bravo. Then have it reroute in a different direction without overloading the system. Once I'm done with these repairs we can route it back through. Think you can program the computer to do it without blowing us up?" Finn smirked.

Ryan offered a wry hitch of an eyebrow. "Why do I get the feeling," she said, already moving to take position, "that you're secretly hoping the answer to that is no? Shoo." A dismissive wave of her hand gestured towards the open hatch. "I'll map this sequence in the time it takes you to clip on a safety harness." The Lieutenant's eyes lifted as a pointed deadpan before she flipped her eyepiece into place and shook her head. "I have zero expectations that you'll bother with one, don't worry."

Finn chuckled and started crawling, considering the fact that perhaps she should get to know Ryan more. She appreciated the banter. Besides it was always good to know those that were well rounded enough to help out in a pinch.

It only took a couple of minutes for Finn to reach the junction point. "Let me know when the routing is in place for me to break into lines 8 and 12."

Having unintentionally turned it into a competition, Alex took a moment to curb her initial desire to declare herself ready several seconds before she technically was. Youthful exuberance would have once prompted her to push the boundaries that way but it seemed one risk too many to expect Athena's systems to maintain enough predictability for pre-emptive strikes. She shook her head in mild amusement, expanded the display to a magnification that allowed her to fine-tune an intended safety buffer, and then waited the proverbial count-of-ten to see if the reroute intended to misbehave before they'd even disconnected anything.

Nothing untoward blew up.

"Proceed with caution," she spoke into the comm. "If we're lucky, she'll forget to be contrary for once, though I do have my eye on some potential strain right out of chamber. Watch your temperature levels and keep me posted."

"Oh, she's never contrary unless you've managed to piss her off," Finn said as she got to work with the repairs. "Though, by the look of it, I imagine you all did your best to leave her in a bad mood." Finn chuckled and finished the repair one one of the lines. "8 is done, the temps are starting to rise. Can you adjust the programming to funnel some of that strain into the newly repaired line?"

"I daresay," Ryan replied, somewhat distracted by the elevated complexity of redistributing flow whilst maintaining a virtual tourniquet, "she was less impressed that the sudden shift in leadership left Ensign Fenn theoretically poised to inherit seniority if the house of cards fell the wrong way." The tongue in cheek remark, altogether too close to gossip to be anywhere near the Science Chief's normal style of banter, would have been instantly recognised by those who knew her best as a deliberate attempt to brush aside the elephant in the room whilst not falling for the trap of ignoring it entirely. Keating's situation was relatable, even if Alex didn't really know many intricate details. "Though I suppose I did park bits of her in radiation clouds intentionally."

Finn laughed and tapped the side of the bulkhead as if the ship itself were an old friend. "I guess I owe the old lady one for making her deal with Fenn without backup. Sounds like you owe her one too for a poor parking job. Maybe when we're done here we can hit the bar and make a toast to pay penance." This sort of conversation mixed with elbows deep engineering work was exactly what she had missed. It felt good to be back in the swing of things, at least mostly.

The silence that followed was not intended as criticism for the idea, still companionable enough to translate as a genuine lapse in attention to focus on a more pressing matter. In this case, it was the continued insistence of a random fluctuation right out of the fuel chamber that was proving difficult to pinpoint. Brow furrowed in concentration, Alex quickly remapped an alternative sequence to compensate and hesitated as the flow stabilised for only a few seconds before the discrepancy re-emerged. "You might want to hit pause and come and take a look at this," she cautioned. "Anterior injectors are registering back-wash. I am not seeing," the Lieutenant added, cycling through a magnified display, "any obvious blockage though."

"I can't exactly put a pause on this..." Finn noted with a very small sense of concern in her tone. "I'm almost done with the last line. If you can hold it together for another three minutes, I think we'll be ok." The last line provided a challenge with the back-wash causing more turbulent flow but Finn said a silent prayer and hoped that they could hang on.

"Oh boy."

It was a moment of muted exclamation that remained under Alex's breath but the flurry of activity it preceded made it far more obvious that the simple maintenance issue had now become decidedly spicey. With discrepancies in the flow distribution threatening to throw the entire system into overload, the only available immediate fix was to track the pressure manually and shunt each valve as required, rerouting the fuel through an endless succession of improvised bypasses that was far too reminiscent of one of the ridiculously archaic games on the console in the main student lounge of the Academy's Science building. It was a memory Alex could have done without; she'd never been able to pass the final level.

"Almost there," Finn called through the comm line. She only needed a few more seconds, though those seconds seemed to take hours. Then finally, the last line was repaired. "Done! You can return the routing to it's default programming, it should be good from here." Finn wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead and started the crawl back to the entrance of the jefferies tube.

The lack of immediate response betrayed an ongoing focus that didn't leave a lot of room for congratulatory relief. With all the relays operational, some of the threat of overload had passed but Ryan wasn't so easily placated. With the fuel distribution network restored, she turned her attention to the elusive suggestion of a secondary issue much closer to the tank and barely glanced up as the engineer emerged.

"Injector sequencing is out, the posterior array is sluggish. I think," Ryan reasoned, narrowing down the focus of her data collection, "it's worth getting a team to check for blockage or damage, I'm not seeing anything in the operational coding. Could be a valve, or one of the injectors got knocked out of its housing." Straightening up, Alex shrugged her shoulders at her colleague. "It's not a significant delay right now but..." She left her sentence unfinished, finding no reason to lecture a competent engineer on the hazards of a catastrophic cascade caused by the slightest of initial faults.

"Agreed, I'll get a team down here to do a more in depth inspection before the day is over." Finn smiled. "I do believe we made a good team. If you ever want to trade in that blue shirt for a gold one you just let me know..."