Prankin'

Posted on Thu Dec 31st, 2020 @ 7:29pm by Lieutenant Kiam Aax

Mission: 28 Days
Location: Main Bridge, Deck One
Timeline: Mission Day 8 at 1025

The Ulysses was home... but it was seldom one that was glacial. It wasn't a snowglobe, it was a hive. Its minds were like fireflies, bits of golden presence, stationary or moving. And like fireflies, one could choose to watch it or let it zip past. Eighty-two life forms. Eighty-two glowing presences. For the last hour, most of them had gone. They were planetside, they were on the Starbase. So it was, comparatively, quiet.

The hum of the turbo-lift was gentle, well lit in the cool whites of the Ulysses internals. Kiam Aax would have normally gone planetside. She seldom liked to pass up an opportunity for shore-leave- especially after such a long trip from Proxima to Denobula. A starbase, a world was more fireflies- bigger hives. Kiam wasn't in the mood for that at the moment.

The turbo-lift swayed to a decelerating halt and crested. Its doors hissed open.

There was darkness. Not complete darkness, but as close as one usually saw. Kiam felt the presence of the spanner in her lab coat pocket, feeling its smooth, machined shape and the rubbery exterior of the handle grip. Her glance right cast to the closed door of the Captain's Ready room. Then she passed the dedication plaque of their home. Onward, to the Edge. Doctor Neil Degrasse Tyson. July 1996, Earth. Hayden Planetarium. It was there, in aged copper embossing on the 11x14 plaque. Everyone on the Ulysses knew the words. It greeted them all with the Starfleet delta at the entry of the shuttle bay door. The Federation lived it.

Kiam passed it and stepped onto the Bridge.

Condition Gray. Low power mode. Standby. The languid pulse, glow, and ebb of the alert status was the intermittent flash of white on the occasional console. Kiam eyed one on the Mission Operations console behind the Captain's chair. When her eyes fell on the chair, a smile crawled at one corner of her mouth. Like a child sensing the cookie jar was within reach- and no parents were in sight- Kiam ushered herself toward the chair. Her eyes flicked briefly to open space in the main screen, one dominated by the cool grays and ambient lights of Starbase 15. A pair of faintly yellow dots flitted in view, so small in the background beyond them: work bees.

Kiam crouched and pulled the spanner from her pocket. She nibbled her lip. A nibble became a chomp of concentration on the pink plushness. "Let's see...." she mused just above a whisper. She was no engineer, and part of her just repelled at anything too technical. It was soulless. But she at least knew what direction to point a spanner. Her black eyes feel- with a chuckle of controlled glee- at one of the calibrating nodes on the underside of the chair.

Kiam pressed the key on the spanner and blue-white energy reached for the bolt. It connected. The node around illuminated with ticks of numbers. Kiam pulled out her tricorder from her other pocket and used a breast to awkwardly tug it open, her dominant hand unyielding on the tool. Her tricorder chirped to life and she knelt it on the deck plate. She pulled the sensor probe from its housing. It too sung to life in its pulses. She scanned the node and then set the probe aside. It started to roll.

"Bakka," she hushed, eyeing it as it stopped about half between Helm and the Captain's chair. Kiam twisted back and eyed the data on her tricorder. She allowed another impish smile. "OK.... let's see...." She carefully lowered the spanner to eye level without breaking beam contact. She had to study the schematics for a moment and then finally felt confident enough to stretch for her tricorder. She picked it up and cycled through the interface. She paired to the spanner. Her tricorder, usually displayed in medical symbologies, twisted its nature to show the schematics and wireframes of the Captain's chair. All the numbers were 0.0. Marked as nominal. Kiam chose her target...

Horizontal tilt adjust.

She raised the left side of the chair's balance by fifteen degrees. The low whine of hydraulics adjusting the chair's tilt was faint in her ear. Then, with a click, the glow of the spanner was off. Kiam pocketed it. Then she sat up, bum off her heels, and climbed into a stand. She retrieved her probe and slipped it back into the housing of her tricorder. She pocketed it too.

The Betazoid smiled to herself and stepped away from the chair. She ventured back the way she came, taking the corridor off the Bridge, past Neil Degrasse Tyson's quote, past the door of the Captain's Ready room. She turned into the turbo-lift and smiled. "Deck three."