With a Flick of the Wrist

Posted on Tue 27th Jun, 2017 @ 2:58am by Lieutenant Ricardo Shepard

655 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Unity Week
Location: Deck 101
Timeline: MD 01, Early Morning

"Come on blast you. Why won't you turn on?" Rico stated to himself as he struggled with turning on the power at a junction box.

The Chief Operations officer wiped the sweat off of his brow and taped his comm badge. "Shepard to Quinn. Are you tied up on anything right now?" he asked.

The petty officer looked around at the mess she'd just cleared up. "Nope," she answered cheerfully. "Free as a bird. What can I do ya for?" She dropped the last tool back into its slot on her belt and stood up, stretching the kinks out of her back as she waited for the answer.

"Do you mind coming to deck 101, section J? I could use a hand with something." Rico was getting more and more frustrated with himself as he continued to mess with the junction box.

"On it, boss." From where the Systems Specialist stood, it was faster to open a Jeffries tube and slide down a few decks than to take the lift, and that's what she did. At the other end, she popped out near Section K and made quick time to the ChEng.

"What's up, Sir?" she asked, eyeing the junction box and the other engineer's disheveled appearance.

Shepard looked up and smiled when he saw Quinn making her way down the corridor. "Hello Quinn. I was hoping you could help me with this junction box. For some reason I can't get the power to this junction box to come on."

Rico stood straight up from leaning into the junction box. "What did y'all do to my station while I was gone?" he asked while giving a slight chuckle.

"Just about wrecked it, Sir," she answered cheerfully. "There were some spooky things going on, power fluctuations and the like. I guess you heard about the gruesome discovery hidden behind a bulkhead? It messed up a lot of power charting for a couple of days. We had our hands full, but it shouldn't be acting up now. Can you tell where the problem is?"

"I heard about the bulk head incident. Nasty stuff." The Chief Operations Officer slid his tool kit that was on the ground next to the junction box over to Quinn. "OK, I think one of the power relays is faulty. Can you check on that while I re-modulate the plasma converter?"

"Can do, Sir." Jin-Kyung slipped a Isolinear Degeneration Compensator and a multiphasic modulator wrench out of the kit and then removed the cover over the power relay module, she reflected that her boss had been somewhat sparse with comments about his recent mission. "Did your away mission go as you expected?" she asked, knowing that nothing ever went as expected.

Shepard took out his tricorder and began running scans of the junction box. He heard Quinn's question, but didn't know how much he should tell her about what happened.

"Everything was fine until the end," he said in a somber voice. "You don't have the clearance to get the details of the mission, but let's just say that I hope Starfleet never pulls me again for a mission like that."

"I'm sorry it didn't end well," Quinn commiserated as she checked the output on each Gravimetric Pulse Coil in the module. "I know you had high hopes for the mission. My halmoni* used to say to hope for the best and expect the worst."

Determining which gravimetric coils were malfunctioning took very little time, and Jin-Kyung worked quickly to snap the offending bits out of the system. Snapping new ones in took even less time, so it was only a few comfortable minutes of silence before it was back together.

"Sir, if you'd bring that scanner over here and check my work, I think I can put the box back together and get on to the next emergency on the list." She grinned at him.

*Korean for grandmother or woman acting as grandmother

 

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