Getting the Ship Ready

Posted on Thu May 23rd, 2024 @ 9:45pm by Commander Jon Kia & Lieutenant JG Alicia Santos & Lieutenant Commander Maxine "Max" Lewis

813 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Beginnings

Alicia frowned at the computer terminal display and swore under her breath for what seemed to be the hundredth time that day. Aggravated, she stabbed the controls on the terminal controls and rechecked the display. When she saw no change, she swore again, this time loud enough to be heard.

"What's wrong, lieutenant?" Max asked as she breezed over to where the engineer sat. Glancing over the young woman's shoulder, she in turned frowned at the display and muttered. "What in the hell?"

"That's been my problem, Ma'am," Alicia replied as she ran her fingers through her hair. "The primary power transfer conduits and the primary lines themselves are operating perfectly, but the secondary systems show nothing. It's like they're not even online."

"Well, I think we need to call in an expert on the systems on board this ship," Max said. She had only been aboard ship for a few hours, and still trying to get used to some of the newer systems and the interface. Reaching out to the communications system, she tapped the controls.

"Engineering to Commander Kia, you're requested to advise in engineering," Max said.

Jon groaned as he heard the page. He was on deck six, checking the power monitoring controls for the main deflector. It had already been checked, but since the Eclipse would be departing soon, he wanted to be sure. Once the ship left orbit, it would be expected to be operating normally as any other star ship. Unfortunately, the engineering systems had been a plague since the shipyard had released the Eclipse, and guess whose job it was to fix.

Grumbling, Jon double checked the monitors for the deflector, nodded as he locked out the system, then turned and headed towards engineering. It was a short trip, since he hadn't been too far away. Five minutes after being paged, he walked into engineering. "Alright, who broke what?" he growled.

Max glanced up towards the commander and fell into a modified parade rest stance. It was sometimes better to err on the side of caution when dealing with new department heads, specially when you were about to tell said department head that someone had recently broken their brand new star ship. "Sir, the secondary power lines and their corresponding systems are not online or responding to commands. Lieutenant Santos and I have been trying to figure out the problem, however we seem to have an issue in trying to sort the systems out," Max reported.

"Ok, let me take a look," Jon said as he leaned over Santos and stared at the monitors for a moment. After mentally thumbing through the endless list of things he had corrected over the past week, he made a low growling noise in the back of his throat and reached out to tap in a command. "Who in the hell reset the systems to default?" he asked as the computer pinged a response to his command query on the monitor.

Max frowned, puzzled. As far as she knew, all of the systems on board should had already been set to the standard Starfleet coded default settings. "I'm not sure, Commander," she answered quickly. "Was the system not set to default before?"

"The new software coding was written so that the secondary systems can't be activated if the primary systems are still online and receiving power," Jon said. "It was a screwball coding mistake that I've been waiting for a patch for for over a week. In the meantime, we had a personalized setting in place that bypassed the original coding programming. Someone went in and reset the whole damn thing back to default."

Alicia frowned briefly as she keyed in a command. Glancing at the readout screens, she shrugged. "Whoever reset the system either didn't log into the system or the login was deleted when the system was reset," she said. "We could do an investigation to find out who might have done the reset."

"I'll leave it to Commander Lewis to conduct that investigation," Jon said as he tapped in a command series. "Ok, I've reset the entire system back to the customized settings and set up a lockout code that will require either myself or Commander Lewis to override. If anyone tries to reset the settings, they'll have to have one of us present or hack into the computer. If anyone goes hacking into my computer system, I'm having someone written up on charges."

"Understood," Max said, raising an eyebrow.

"Understood, Sir," Alicia said, her eyes widening just a bit while keeping her face turned towards the console. Clearly, the chief ops officer was serious about no one messing with the settings on the ship.

"Alright then, I'll leave you two to finish checking the power and propulsion systems, I've got a glitch on deck four to track down," Jon said as he started out of engineering.

 

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