Lost in a Sovvy

Posted on 12 Oct 2016 @ 12:26am by Captain Nathan Cowell MD & Lieutenant Claire Annette

Mission: Prelude; Breakfast at Curmudgeon's
Location: Various
Timeline: MD -2: 1400 Hours

Walking along the promenade of the starbase, Claire was wearing a purple lolita dress and had her earbuds in listening to a remix of Rick Astley, Randy Rhodes, and Sovek of ot Lute with a hint of DJ Milkface. It was an interesting mix, to say the least. But what held her attention now was a Sovereign class starship visible through the nearby porthole. That was the new ship she was assigned to. Her leave was over anyway, so she made her way to the docking ring, the remix ending about half way. Tucking her earbuds away and adjusting the strap on both her guitar case and her duffel, she pulled out her PaDD and handed it to the security person at the airlock.

He glanced at her. Then to her Padd. Then back at her. His stoic demeanor was a credit to his job. He gave Claire a salute and let her pass. Returning the salute, she wondered if he'd be one of the people working for her or if he was station security. Oh well. At least she had a room assignment now. And it was close too, or so she thought. She ended up wandering the halls for at least twenty minutes trying to find her room and when she finally found it, there was an engineer inside working on the replicator. He took one look at Claire, muttered something, and went back to his repairs.

Claire wasn't about to distract him further so she headed to the bedroom and changed into her uniform. By the time she was done, the engineer was gone and her replicator was flashing red. Even she knew that meant it was broken. Sighing heavily, she armed herself with a pair of PaDDs and headed to the bridge.

Soon she was stepping off the turbolift out onto the fanciest bridge she'd ever been on. Seriously, this put the Sanity's End with its therapy couches to shame. At least the Ready Room was well marked. Garnering some odd looks and even a double take from the duty officer, she tapped the door chime and waited.

"What?" came a rather grumpy voice from behind the door.

The Lieutenant sitting behind the CONN console looked over at the woman standing in front of the Captain's door and gave her a sheepish grin, "That's his way of saying come in."

Giving the Lieutenant a smile and a nod, she headed into the office and offered a salute to the man behind the desk. "Sir, Lt. Annette reporting for duty."

Captain Nathan Cowell, as he almost always was, sitting reclined in his chair, his feet resting comfortably on top of the surface of his desk. It was oddly devoid of any PaDDs or decorations, nothing between the Captain and his relaxed positioning. The door swooshing open only coaxed his left eye open, the other one didn't seem willing to open at that particular moment.

"Albino, eh?" was the first words out of his mouth before his right eye lazily slid open, "But it looks unnatural. You must be from one of those damn irradiated colonies out there. Got your pigments blasted away. Explains why you look just a shade above transparent."

Nathan pulled his legs off the table, and looked as if it were a complete chore for him to do so. Once his feet were on the ground, Nathan spun himself around so as to look slightly more interested in her existence than he had a moment prior, but only slightly. He indicated for one of the chairs sitting in front of his desk and waited for her to make any move toward them.

Dropping her salute and moving to sit in the (hopefully) offered chair, she offered him the PaDD with her orders, "Yes, sir. That's exactly it. Lost them at eight years old as a hostage and vowed to dedicate my life to the same causes as those that rescued me. To uphold the law, help people, and butt kickings for goodness."

Nathan took the PaDD, glanced at them just long enough to make it look good before tossing them on the table, "So you're security because of a childhood trauma, guess that fits well enough. Back in the day I saw a lot of kids take up a gun and hand out justice on the business end of it. Most of them got shot eventually... some of them more than once. Pulled a lot of slugs out of a lot of people's asses because they just couldn't let things go. Couple of them out of my own ass, to be honest, but that's beside the point. The point is, kid, you gotta know when to give up the ghosts and move on with your life... or some other inspirational shit like that. So, is this your first department head posting?"

Claire grinned slightly at the 'inspirational' comment, "And that's why I'm in Starfleet rather than wasting my time with a now corrupt... Never mind. Yes, I was an Assistant Chief on a floating sanitarium and the Chief should have been incarcerated there, but this is my first full department head position. I suppose I should ask what your expectations are, but I think a better first question would be how I can make your job easier with my skill set."

"I'm pretty easy to please, really," Nathan said as he leaned back slightly, "You do your job and do it right the first time. I'm not saying you got to be perfect, but don't come to me with every excuse you can think of as to why it wasn't you it was Crewman Snuffy over there. I've heard every excuse there is before humans even left their own solar system the first time. And anyway, I haven't got a damn clue what your skill sets are, Starfleet Personnel is about as useful as a toilet that's out of order, so you're going to have to lay those out there if you want me to tell you which of them have merit."

"Then let's see which ones I can remember off the top of my head," Leaning back in her chair a bit, her eyes shifted up and left as she remembered the last several years, "I have a black belt in three martial arts, I'm a registered security instructor, I've managed security drills, I've planned several successful rescues, I'm good at security paperwork, I press my own coffee, I've assisted an engineer with the disarmament of several hundred torpedoes, I've practiced restraint while someone intentionally projectile vomited on me rather than in a toilet, and I've taken bridge duty several times without blowing the ship up."

Nathan gave the woman an appraising look for several moments before speaking again, "I've been bled on, puked on, pissed on, and even shit on by patients over the centuries. You live long enough, it'll happen to you at least once as well if you have kids. But getting back to the point, you have some impressive skills. I'd almost say you're up there with our last First Officer... but not quite. Those are some big damn shoes to fill, and I don't think that woman left them around to fill. For the time being, until I can brief everyone properly, here's what I want you to do."

Captain Cowell pushed himself away from his desk and walked over to the window facing Starbase One, "We're about to go back to a place I didn't much care for the first time around. Last time we were there, a lot of good people died because they just weren't prepared for it. I don't like repeating history, never have. What you need to do is get every swinging dick under your command ready for a full on war, because there's no telling what's waiting just beyond the next ridge, if you catch my meaning. I want every man and women you've got proficient in every form of ass kicking you can think of. And I don't just mean phasers and phaser rifles. Borg don't give you much of a chance with energy weapons, so I recommend you pull a page out of the history books and find you some guns and train with those too. Bullets don't register with those mechanical bastards and if we run foul of one of their cubes, I don't want to loose a single body to them. Lost enough to them assholes as it is."

Claire was quite for a bit while those words sank in. Eventually she spoke up. "I have training in the use of casters - short range slug throwers that use explosive rounds. Perhaps those could come in handy as well. I'll make sure that everyone aboard at least gets familiarization training with a range of weapons and I'll have the armory start replicating firearms."

"Hopefully we won't need them, but I'll be damned it I get caught wishing I did. Better to have and not need," the Old Man said before turning back toward the woman, "Anything else you wanna ask, since you seemed full of questions just a little while ago, or was that enough to overload your brain for the time being, there, sunshine."

"I'll need command authorization for the armory to replicate gunpowder so we have something to shoot in those firearms," Claire stood and made a few notes on her second PaDD, the gears already turning in her head, "And I'd like to request a shipment of bladed weapons from a dealer on the station. I'd like to see how they deal with a claymore or a lirpa."

"I wouldn't recommend anything longer than a Mek'leth, to be honest," Nathan pointed out, "The Borg don't exactly give you a lot of real estate to play on. Even most corridors on this ship would restrict your movements with something that big. If you want stopping power with a blade, go with Mek'leths, maybe a long dagger... a K-Bar would ruin a drone's day in a heartbeat. But you'd need a few anatomy lessons before you could make that work right. But I'll leave it to you to work out the kinks. And you already have authorization, sunshine, you're the Chief of Security. Comes with the job."

"Good point. Shorter blades it is." Claire continued making notes. "One more request, Captain. Please don't call me sunshine. That's the one thing I fear. I'm sure you can understand why."

Nathan chuckled at the woman, "You know, the sun ain't nothin' to be afraid of. There's actually one or two procedures that can be done to fix your sensitivity to light without you having to give up that pasty white complexion you're so fond of. If it interests you, I can either point you to them and you can take them to sickbay, or hell I can even do it myself. Won't hurt me a bit, either."

"Be that as it may, I've had three separate procedures and none of them lasted more than a year," Looking up from her PaDD, Claire sighed softly, "But it would be nice not to get a sunburn if I go to the arboretum. If you have something I haven't tried and I can skip the SPF 500, I'll try it."

"Two or three things that might work, not the least of which is a trick I learned from the very bastards I can't stand in the first place. There's a gene therapy that will actually help your skin reflect the ultraviolet spectrum rather than absorb it. You could also go with the nanoprobe therapy, let them repair what gets damaged, but that requires a lot of injections and at least one surgery to put the nano-replicator in your body. There's also another one that I can't recall of the top of my head... but those are the two that usually don't fail to work. Just depends on you really. But as your physician, I would recommend you take time to think about it, rushing into either one of those treatments carries a fair bit of time investment," Captain Cowell said before flopping back into his chair.

"The procedure I had done was a sub-dermal refraction something or other. It dissolved," Claire looked back down at her PaDD and stared at it a moment, deep in thought, "I'll consider those options though. Thank you."

"That's what I'm here for, kiddo," Nathan smiled, "Leading the way doesn't always have to happen on the bridge of a starship, sometimes it's just as simple as giving someone something to think about they hadn't before."

The Old Man slapped the table out of nowhere, "You've got plenty to do and a lot to think over. How about you got take care of what I just threw at you, and if you want to talk more about the other stuff later on, I'm usually either here, the bar, or my quarters. The computer knows how to find me."

"Yes sir. Thank you." Recomposing herself, Claire nodded to the Captain again and headed out of the Ready Room.

Nathan leaned back in his chair again once the woman had left and threw his legs back up onto the desk. Without another word, the Old Man closed his eyes and went back to his nap, content that he'd made sunshine's day.