Kicks and Chairs

Posted on Tue Sep 13th, 2016 @ 7:03pm by Alika Mahone
Edited on on Tue Sep 13th, 2016 @ 7:16pm

Mission: Mission 2 - Contagion
Location: Bridge
Timeline: MD -01: 1300 hours
1850 words - 3.7 OF Standard Post Measure

"Oh... shit."

Alika stared, dumbstruck at the flight control panel in front of her. She had bumped it. Once. Not even slammed an angry fist on it. Just lightly bumped it. And the whole thing went dark. She had made a mild attempt to fix it herself, but there was little in the way of mechanical knowledge going on in her noggin.

Hopefully the Captain wasn't going to come up and wonder why his pilot had torn open a bulkhead to see what the problem was instead of calling for an engineer. She would have likely blamed the chair she was sitting in, if the excuse didn't sound completely absurd.

"... Oh damn. FINE." After one final kick at the back of her obstinate chair, Alika leaned over to Rueben's (thankfully absent) Captain's seat, pressing the comm button and praying someone was in Engineering.

"Uhm... Hello? Can I get someone to come up and fix a console for me? Please?"

Engineering was quiet for once. Jeassaho and Tabitha were off-shift, and Janet was down on Deck Six, trying to trace the intermittent power spike that some of the backup systems were experiencing. So he had the place to himself, and had decided to get caught up on some of the maintenance that needed to be done here. He had just finished replacing the millionth led in the control panels - well, the fifth anyway - when the comm chirped.

"Bradon," he replied to the very polite voice on the comm. "How can I help you?"

Alika huffed, hands on her hips as she glared at the offending console. "I am having a little trouble with the flight conn. It's... not turning on."

"Of course," he stated. "I think I would prefer you to be able to fly the ship than not. I shall be right up."

After grabbing his tools and the ever-present engineering tricorder, he entered the turbolift on the way to the bridge. He thought back to the people he had met, and he did not think he had met the chief helmsman of the ship. Or if he had, she had not spoken. Because he could not place the voice.

Finally the trip was over. The turbolift doors slid aside, and he took a step onto the bridge. It appeared that most of the crew was either on a break, or the ship was more understaffed than he thought. Then he looked over to the helm... and he stopped. Just for a second. The woman there was frustrated, he could see that. She was also one of the most striking women he had seen in a long while.

"Hi there," he said. "You have need of my services?"

By the time Bradon reached the bridge, Alika had herself perched in the Captain's chair, glaring daggers at the flight control console. Her arms were crossed against her chest as she worked on the pout playing at her lips. That was, until the engineer popped up. A smile appeared, and she bounced up from the Captain's seat instantly. "Yes I do. The conn went out. I don't know how, the Chief before you swore he fixed it pretty well, but I moved weird or something, and it just... stopped working."

"The console just stopped working? Seems to be the norm around here. Did you bang anything with your elbows or knees when you moved?" As Bradon spoke he flipped open his tricorder and began scanning the console's interior. It only took him a moment to determine that the main power coupling that fed the console had come loose.

"The main power coupling has come loose. I am not sure how that happened; those are usually securely fastened. It usually takes a lot of force you knock one of those loose. When you "moved weird," did you hit the console?

Digging a tool out of his tool bag, he slipped around to the front of the console and began to take the front panel off. "It should only take a couple of minutes to get this fixed."

"I lightly tapped the console," Alika replied, exaggerating upon how much she definitely did not 'hit' the console. "It should be able to take an accidental smack or two, though, right? I thought the consoles were built for that."

"Lightly tapped, eh?" Bradon responded with a half grin as he set the panel aside. Plainly visible on the thin metal sheet was the blurred imprint of the bottom of a shoe. "Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me. If something came loose because you kicked the casing, then I'm glad that you did. Because if it could not stand up to your show, it definitely would not have stood up to the ship being knocked about."

"That's a light tap." The youthful pilot retorted, nose turning up like a brattish five year old. "Or light tap enough. Guess I'm glad I did too."

He had been tracing circuits while talking to her, but now his voice faded away as he closely examined a particular section of microcircuits. "Ah hah!" he said softly, probably not even realizing he had said it. For the next few moments, he worked steadily on that section of the guts of the console.

Finally, he leaned back on his knees and with a satisfied grin, he sent power back into the console. For a moment nothing happened. Then they console lit up with the boot sequences of the underlying core software.

"Give it a moment or two and then let's be sure you can get yourself logged in successfully. When you do, please run a level four diagnostic on it for me," Bradon said as he started to put the panel back on.

Flopping herself back in the pilot's seat, Alika tapped the edge of the console until it sprang to life. After inputting necessary information, she quickly set to work on a diagnostic. The sooner this was done, the less likely Rueben was going to hear about his pilot wrecking havoc on his bridge. "... Looks like everything's in order so far."

"Excellent." Bradon moved to the Navigator's console, logging into the maintenance side of things. "Might as well check things out while I am here," he said as he instructed the console to run a level three diagnostic. "We're going pretty much in a straight line, aren't we?" he asked Alika innocently as the console blinked off.

"Kind of." She hadn't remembered the thought, seeing as her console was out of her control. "I think there was a turn I had to make somewhere, because I know we're not facing where we're supposed to go yet. We've got a couple of Starfleet bases we have to dodge along the way..."

"Relax," he said as he let out a grin. "I switched Navigation over to another station before turning this one off. It'll only be a little while before it's back online. I won't go anywhere until then, anyway. I was getting tired of what they did to this ol' girl." He looked up at the bulkhead overhead as he said the last.

"Anyway," he continued. you fully online over there?"

Alika squinted at the screen skeptically, frowning when she realized it had sprung to life and seemed to be functioning normally. Tapping at the screen, she tentatively called up her usual programs. "It... seems alright. Everything seems to be working, at least... What'd you mean by what you said, though? You were getting tired of what they did? Who's they?"

"They," Brandon practically growled, "are the idiots who decided to turn this ship into a garbage scow. Instead of doing things the right way, they just ripped systems out piecemeal to make room for more cargo. Power junctions left open where couplings had been removed, items jury-rigged instead of taking the time to do it right..."

Bradon was interrupted by a chirp from his comm. "Bradon here," he said, acknowledging the call.

"Excellent." Go ahead and bring it up."

"Will do." The comm chirped again, then went silent. He turned back to the diagnostics he had been running, then turned to look at Alika.

"Systems are nominal," he said to her, "and your console is back up and running. So there's only one thing left to do." He moved over to stand next to her.

"Would you mind standing up for a moment?" he asked.

Alika cluelessly did as she was asked, hopping up to sit on the console behind her. She frowned as she did. "Hey, I didn't kick the chair yet. IT should be working... I guess kinda fine. It lets me sit in it."

He knelt beside the station, grabbed one of his tools from his belt, then began to loosen the chair's floor anchors.

"Oh, hey now, what're you doing?" the youthful pilot hopped from the console. Even if she didn't like her chair, she was attached to sitting while she was in the pilot's seat. "Why're you unbolting that?"

"Why?" he responded, just as the door to the turbolift arrived, letting out a crewman pulling a large crate using an anti-grav unit. "You wanted a new chair, didn't you?" he asked Alika with a wide grin on his face.

She looked between the chair and the crate a couple of times, uncertain as if this was truly happening. When she brought it up at the meeting, Alika didn't have a mission to receive a more comfortable chair in mind. It just felt weird not having... anything to bring to the meeting at all.

As the gears worked in her head, a smile crept on her features, and a small "thank you" escaped from her throat. "This is so sweet! I honestly did not think this was gonna happen until we earned some revenue doing... I don't know what, actually..."

"You would be surprised at the oddities that have turned up in storage, Alika," Bradon said as he helped uncrate the new chair, then packed up the old one before beginning to install the new one. It only took a few minutes to get the new chair in place.

"There. That should do." Bradon stepped back and looked everything over. "This is one of the newer models of bridge chairs. Not sure what it was doing in a crate marked "farm equipment."

He turned to Alika and swept his arm toward the chair. "Care to give it a test run, m'lady?"

Alika didn't hesitate, flopping herself back into the seat, readjusting herself to get comfy. A couple of bounces and a 360 spin in the chair later, she was beaming up at Bradon. "It's perfect!"

"Excellent!" Bradon gathered his tools as she settled back into her station.

"If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know."

"I think we're set." Adding an extra bounce, the pilot jumped up and offered the engineer a giant hug. "Thank you! You're the best, Chief!

OFF:

Bradon Gordon
Chief Engineer
SS Mary Rose

Alika Mahone
Chief Pilot
SS Mary Rose

 

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