New Chief In Town

Posted on Sat Dec 8, 2018 @ 4:39pm by Master Chief Petty Officer Thomas Barnes & Lieutenant JG Zander Devereaux & Lieutenant JG Gefel

Mission: On Slippery Ground
Location: Main Engineering
Timeline: MD 1 || 0900 hours

Barnes entered Main Engineering through the large entrance doors. He'd been here several times before, but never as the Chief Engineer. In this moment, the massive room seemed different to him. It was both larger, and smaller. Yet, the massive engines seemed to glisten and sparkle, as if the previous owner had buffed and waxed the mighty machines before handing off to the new owner.

Of course, Master Chief Barnes still regarded the Commodore as the owner. He was merely the technician that got paid to play with all of the nice toys.

A rather short stocky human with hair that was longer than regulation, but pulled back and tied, approaches the man that just came in. So far, Zander had been running ragged doing one check after another since finding out yet another Chief Engineer had decided to leave the ship and had no time for anything or anyone else getting in his way. "Who are you, what are you doing here, and why am I the only person who seems to be doing anything?"

Tom was a bit surprised at the outburst, especially since it was coming from a Lieutenant JG. While the Master Chief was lower on the rank ladder, his new position elevated him well above the officers in the department. Yet, he could not help himself from wanting to have a little fun with this. Tom moved to a nearby console to summon a yeoman. "Do you always greet visitors to Engineering in this manner, Lieutenant?"

Zander started to say something else, then stopped. "Depends on the day and how fast they want something done. If it's today and now, then yes. Since you aren't shouting and making demands that even Montgomery Scott couldn't pull off, then maybe I can help you."

Tom grinned at the response. "What if I told you that Engineering only has three hours to perform a stem to stern inspection of the transwarp drive based on its recent prolonged use?"

"I'd ask who you are and what you were drin...." the shorter man started before a Bolian male appeared in a gold uniform and frowned.

"Devereaux, didn't I tell you an hour ago that I wanted the diagnostic started while we still have time?" he asked.

"As well as checking all the EPS conduits, crawl through three hundred meters of Jeffries Tube, check the crystal matrix and to not leave my coffee cup on the pool table. Who is this, though?" Zander jerked a finger at Barnes.

Gefel looked at the Master Chief. "That's a good question. I'm Lieutenant Gefel, the Assistant Chief Engineer. Can I help you?"

Tom raised an eyebrow. He understood that while there were thousands of people on board the massive Triumphant, he would at least have expected that the crew have a cursory knowledge of the ship's senior staff. That would have to be corrected before the next mission, whenever that was. "Master Chief Tom Barnes," he answered, still omitting his transfer for now.

The Bolian looked at the human and gave a curt nod. "Of course, Master Chief," he said as his memory recalled that the man was the Chief Operations Officer. "Is this a requirement for Operations that we weren't aware of?"

"Operations? What are they doing sticking their noses in Engineering more than usual?" Zander asked before getting a withering glare for the Assistant Chief.

"Go make sure the lubricant solution for the tools is adequate for the upcoming job," Gefel told the man, wishing he'd go away.

Go lube yourself, Zander though. "Aye, aye." He turned and started to walk away.

Perhaps it was time to no longer keep the engineering staff in the dark, especially since this Lieutenant Devereaux displayed a hefty amount of disrespect for the Assistant Chief. As for the disrespect showed to Tom, he was used to such things from an officer looking down on an enlisted man, no matter if a lieutenant had been out of the Academy for two years and the Master Chief already had twenty years of service himself.

"No, no," Tom replied to Gefel. "This is most certainly an Engineering matter. Came straight from the Commodore himself, only to be executed through the Chief Engineer."

"Chief Engineer?" Gefel looked a bit surprised. "Our Chief Engineer requested a transfer after we returned from shore leave." A board in his head lit up and he looked at the human again. "I take it that you're no longer the Chief of Operations...but the Chief of Engineering now, Sir?"

Tom smirked before replying, "Did you expect another nameless lieutenant to pass through here for another blip on their resume? And yes. The Commodore appointed me just a few minutes ago."

"Well, the way things were going..." Gefel trailed off. "Congratulations on your promotion, Master Chief. Would you like a tour or for us to get started on the transwarp diagnostic?"

"Let's start with the diagnostic," Tom said, gesturing to the nearby pool table. "We've got just a few hours to get this done. You're more familiar with the engineering duty roster than I at the moment. Who can we pull to help?"

"There's Petty Officer Barrows, Devereaux and about a dozen others we can spare at the moment," Gefel said as he pulled up the roster. "We can pull more from other departments as needed, and possibly scare of up some cadets that are onboard."

"Whomever we can spare," Tom said, taking a look at the roster over Gefel's shoulder in an attempt to learn a few names. "We're performing this check based on our recent prolonged use of the system. Simple diagnostics aren't going to cut it. Some elements, like the PTC's, are going to have to be manually inspected."

"We'll get it knocked off in no time, Master Chief," the Bolian said. "Should I call in Beta Shift so we can get it done faster? That would give us an extra sixty or so personnel."

Tom nodded his head. "Them and every FTL specialist we have on the other shifts. I don't want to chance overlooking something because some petty officer on the graveyard shift neglected to share a little tidbit."

"Noted, Sir," Gefel said. "I'll have everyone in here in ten minutes. Devereaux, get your teams ready yesterday!" he called out to Zander who wasn't far away.

The short stocky Engineer's demeanor seemed to change and he did about face. "I'm on it," he called over his shoulder before he tapped his combadge and started bellowing orders to the damage control teams.

Tom left the delegation to those who knew better for the moment. This was an excellent opportunity to get to know the personnel involved with the critical systems, so he would do his best to use this time wisely. "One thing I did notice during our use of the transwarp drive was after the second day power levels were starting to fluctuate."

He called up the records on the pool table before using a hand gesture to stretch out a three-foot timeline with the holographic generators. "Here," Tom emphasized, highlighting the moment where the power levels started to look like a two-point-oh on Earth's Richter scale. "We stayed within nominal thresholds in the beginning, but you can see by the third day, there seems to be a sort of breakdown."

Gefel joined the human at the pool table and looked it over. "It's still within tolerance levels, but the main problem seemed to be that we were running it steady the entire time. We've never done that before, so we're going to have to take it offline completely, dismantle it to get to the areas noted, then fix it and bring it back online. In three hours."

Tom shook his head this time. "Disassembly's not an option. Transwarp still isn't in full deployment, and if something goes wrong, I don't want to have to explain to a flag officer why it's not available. Besides, I don't think any of us have any ideas where the fluctuations were coming from. Taking it apart without a dedicated starbase support team is asking for more trouble than what we can afford. Let's inspect what we have first, note anything that's out of the ordinary and go from there."

"We actually have a two person team of transwarp specialists here for events like this," Gefel said. "However, they're Bynar and don't really like it when anyone else is around them while they're working."

Of course they were Bynar, thought Tom, finding a moment of frustration, but being wise enough to keep it internal. "All the more reason to handle something like that at a Starbase. Let's have them handle the heavy stuff, and let's distribute teams throughout the drive. I want preliminary reports at the top of the hour."

A second team of Engineers began to come in the main entrance, some of them looking groggy but all of them were ready to business. Zander came up with his team while Gefel called the Bynar.

"Everyone, this is Master Chief Barnes," Gefel told the newcomers. "He's the new ChEng and our job is run a full check on why the transwarp core was fluctuating during the second day of our trip and why it broke down on the third day. We need to fix it and fix it now."

The Bynar showed up and looked around before going up to Barnes. "Are you saying"
"That the specified"
"Output of the transwarp"
"Drive is showing abnormalities"
"And breakdown?" They asked.

"Abnormalities, yes," Tom confirmed to the Bynars. "Had we actually broken down, we would have come to a full stop mid-flight. I have it on good authority that the Commodore wants to use the drive again soon, so we need to figure out what went wrong and address it."

"We will run"
"A diagnostic on"
"It and determine"
"The cause and how"
"To repair it."
"Master Chief." The Bynars assured him before beginning to speak rapidly in their own language as they conferred on the steps they were going to take.

Though he had prior experience with Bynars, Tom still couldn't help but follow their speech patterns like the ball in a game of ping-pong. "Excellent," he told them at last. "Snap to it."

They headed off to the transwarp drive and Zander came up to him. "Until the initial diagnostic gets done for preliminary results, what do you need me and my team doing, Master Chief?"

"Physical inspections along the PTCs," Tom confirmed, drawing a finger along a few of the lines on a Triumphant schematic. "And the cooling blanket. I want to make sure the materials weren't fusing and leading to overheating."

"I'm on it like a officer on shore leave," the stocky Engineer told him before he whistled for his team before sauntering over to the replicator and requested a double Raktajino, double double.

"All right," Tom said, keeping the full transwarp schematic up. "Let's get going." Now that the details had been delegated, Tom planned to go on a personal tour of the transwarp drive, getting to know it and the personnel under his command. This was certainly going to be more exciting than Operations.