Lieutenant Esa Kiax - Just another day at the office

[Jarred Thoran]

Nothing quite like reading about the daily grind of an Operations Officer. Great work @Esa_Darkkdust

((Bridge, Deck 1, USS Atlantis))

((Final Day of Shore Leave))

 

Even as the excitement, heartbreak, arguments and joys of Shore Leave began to draw to a close, there was still a reasonable level of ‘holiday buzz’ around the crew, even as they prepared to depart for their impending assignment. Nobody was really any the wiser about what Starfleet had in store for the intrepid crew of Atlantis, except maybe the Intelligence folks, who had probably intercepted every transmission between Starfleet and the Captain by now, despite it being Esa’s job to route incoming signals around the ship.

 

After her conversation with Ishka a few days ago, and no doubt her subsequent conversation with Alex, Esa had found herself posted to the Alpha shift every day for the next month. It was pleasant to not have to constantly swap between the three. Keeping to a routine and forcing her body clock into a normal pattern would certainly do her mental health a world of good. 0700 to 1500 every day, without fail. Esa took pride in the fact that she had been put on the Alpha shift. It made her feel that little bit closer to being chief, without actually holding the title. It also served to keep the cacophony of personalities in her head in check, as the day shift was notoriously busy with so many departments requesting operational support from Esa and the team.

 

She had, much to her dismay, started her day by receiving a request for a janitorial team to make their way to the bathrooms on Deck Ten. The communication had gone something along the lines of a foul stench emanating from one of the pair toward the fore of the ship, just behind the torpedo launch bay. Naturally, this meant a whole world of problems for Esa, who had to report the issue to Engineering, as there was likely going to be fallout in the waste processing and water treatment areas as well. It simply wouldn’t do to have a sewage explosion so close to their departure date. Fortunately, only a mere half-hour later, the janitorial staff had reported that it was simply a blocked lavatory, and that the issue would be fixed as soon as the air purifiers had a chance to work their magic. This would, however, prove to be the most interesting thing that would happen for the next few hours.

 

With many of the ship’s departments working to finalise their prep work before departure, the number of physically actionable requests dwindled steadily toward the middle of the morning, with the majority of requests around this time relating to power management, and system upgrades. The main computer core had to be taken offline for a short while (much to the annoyance of Engineering, as their usually quite responsive secondary engineering core had become bombarded with requests), as Esa had received yet another new LCARS revision from Starfleet. This one was only minor in terms of feature updates, with the bulk of updated material pertaining to bug fixes and UI improvements. Esa was unsure how people on later shifts would react when the layout of their console had changed while they had been sleeping, but it was nothing the seasoned computer engineer couldn’t handle, and the update went by smoothly and quickly. Not only this, but holodeck time requests were still coming in to be allocated amongst the crew, with much of Holodeck 1’s timetable for the day booked up wall to wall; The Marines were using their holodeck down on deck 13 for training scenarios today, so Esa had been unable to assign any overspill from the leisure use decks on deck 6 to it. While all this was happening, Stellar Cartography were fighting it out with Astrometrics over use of the sensor suites, as both were trying to update their star charts and navigational data at the same time; and Evie was asking for yet more power to be routed to Science Lab 01, no doubt to facilitate the development of her AI into the Electronic and Cyberwarfare suites. The proposals that she had looked at seemed to be solid, which wasn’t a surprise, seeing as the woman held four degrees in the subject, but she had advised her to hold off any further integration with the ship until she had had a chance to review the specs with the Captain. Alas, he had been far too busy meeting the other heads of departments to deal with her at the time, so the request had gone unanswered. Esa didn’t mind, but Evie had given her a substantial dressing down for her incompetency and lack of effort. Evie’s words had been quite harsh, but her bark was far worse than her bite, and the threat of having an official complaint written up about Esa had gone unactioned.

 

A few times the mundane routine interactions with the ship had been interrupted by new crewmembers transferring aboard, having finished their meetings with the Captain and XO, now coming straight to Esa for their new quarters assignments. Having never been an enlisted, Esa sometimes wondered what it was like meeting a new roommate for the first time. This was quickly followed by a request to have someone from Logistics help move their belongings from the cargo area on deck 8 up to their new homes. A few departing officers and non-coms were also making several requests of the logistics team, who were obviously in high demand today.

 

Around the middle of the day, mere minutes before Esa had planned to take a quick break to grab some lunch, the quartermaster from the armoury on deck 4 had reported a series of missing explosive charges from one of their storage lockers, and was demanding an explanation. Esa had to explain to them a number of times that they had been taken by the marines for the boarding drill, and were due to be returned at some point later today. Evidently, with the shakeup in the Tactical/Security departments, a few memos had missed their intended recipients. She was still kicking herself for not managing the communications better surrounding the drill, but the thing had happened so quickly that she had little time to inform the right people of the prep work. No doubt Esa would be apologising to Maddi for that one when she got home later tonight. Finally, a good ten minutes of explaining later, Esa managed to flag down a passing colleague to man her post while she grabbed a sandwich. That was the one downside to working the Ops station; The need for it to be constantly manned meant there was very little in the way of flexibility when one needed to take a comfort break.

 

After a quick 30 minute lunch break, Esa was back on the bridge, this time dealing with the request from engineering to divert power away from the main navigational deflector so that they could perform a diagnostic and alignment pass. Naturally, this took priority over the science labs use time, so she had assigned them the secondary deflector while the engineering crews worked. She was met with a less than favourable response to this, as one of the labs had been using it to project a tightly focussed energy beam onto some nearby graviton particles as part of an experiment they were undertaking. Naturally, the need to get the ship ready for departure took priority, and Esa apologised for spoiling their results. She always took the blame for scheduling errors, though most of the time it wasn’t her fault. People liked to have someone to complain to, or about, and as she was the one making the decisions it made sense for it to be her.

 

The remaining two hours of her shift were spent overseeing the delivery of a new spare warp core into the storage tube that ran between decks 10 and 15. The freighter captain had offered no explanation as to why they were receiving a new core, only that a request had come in and his job was to deliver it, not ask questions. Esa had little choice but to agree, instead wondering why the Captain, or Engineering, for that matter, would have put a request in for such a thing. What did their assignment hold in store for them that necessitated such a piece of equipment? Once the delivery and install had been finalised, Esa handed over to Fiorr, who was on the Beta shift for the next few days, and bid him farewell. While on duty, she had managed to slot some R&R time in on Holodeck Two for herself, and planned to spend the rest of the afternoon giving Ishka’s spa recommendations a whirl, before dinner with Maddi. Travelling via her quarters to get dressed, she flopped down on the bed for a moment to deflate, letting her arm hang down to pet Lyra, who was a welcome presence in what had been a rather busy, stressful day. Her small face looked up at Esa, her dark eyes regarding the Trill. She offered a small bark to draw Esa’s attention whose response was to invite her up for a cuddle.

 

Esa: You have no idea what a day I’ve had today. You know, I envy you sometimes, Lyra. Not a care in the world…

 

Lyra let out a small woof in response, seemingly in agreement. Esa laughed slightly and replaced Lyra on the floor so that she could change.

---

 

Lieutenant Esa Kiax

Comm/Ops Officer

USS Atlantis – NCC 74682

Community History Team Member

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