No Time to Waste

Posted on 26 Aug 2022 @ 7:30pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Edited on on 26 Aug 2022 @ 8:55pm

Mission: M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Pathfinder, gym & XO office
Timeline: MD05 ~2100 HRS
1147 words - 2.3 OF Standard Post Measure

After training sessions and talking with Lt. Haille over dinner, Calliope had found her way to the exercise equipment. She'd been nervous about working up a sweat within a relatively small enclosed area, but went ahead anyway and discovered, to her great relief, that the place was entirely hers. Setting some music on her earbuds, she stretched and then biked a while and got her heart rate up, before finally cooling down and pulling and pushing some smaller weights and resistance bands. She was relying on the number of reps rather than risking hurting herself. But the whole time, what Calliope really wished for was a pool. Aside from maybe yoga, she'd made more progress swimming than with any other physical activity.

But without even needing to ask the computer, Calliope knew the two holodecks were tied up with constant training, scenario runs, and science and tech modeling. Ensign Wiser had holed up in one of them, working on reviewing the playbacks of his team dying over and over again. If the kid could see for a moment past his own self, he'd be able to score his team properly and get some sleep. Maybe Corvus would actually follow up with him. Calliope wasn't sure.

Once her career had taken off, Corvus never did like being saddled with junior officers. She wasn't as harsh as Lance about it, she just preferred someone else handle the kids. But Calliope knew that the quickest way to set someone in the junior ranks straight was a visit from the Commanding Officer. Marcello Wiser was getting too comfortable with her already, Calliope suspected, picking right up where he'd left off before her removal. He was always asking for permission to speak freely, and maybe she was too quick to grant it. Conversely, Calliope wasn't willing to have the kind of heart-to-heart that she suspected Wiser needed. He always started awkwardly gushing and ruining the moment when she opened up or tried to engage with him personally in a teaching moment.

Calliope rubbed her neck and sighed, knowing a solution for the problem, but also knowing it was closed to her for good.

If Corvus didn't follow through with him, Calliope worried she would have to think up another approach. Hopefully he'd at least finalize his score sheet for the exercises by tomorrow morning and not take all night torturing himself. She considered going back and kicking him out, but decided Marcello needed the chance to really beat himself into the holodeck grid-wall until he had his epiphany.

Had she been on the station there were always open holodecks and holosuites (which tended to have a much broader array of programs and holo novels available for purchase or subscription). But the little Pathfinder's two holodecks being occupied meant she had to forgo her daily swim and the relief from gravity and full muscle workout that swimming provided. Every lunge, every lift, she wished she could have taken a refreshing dive and been dripping from the pool water instead of drenched in her own sweat. Her joints were screaming at her about the same time a couple of Finn's Marines filed in to the gym for their routine treadmill runs. Of course, she thought to herself, *they* would keep their physical routines up even on an away mission scramble.

Between the pain and their arrival she decided it was her cue to leave. She toweled her neck off, nodded at them both as they gave their respectful "Commander" addresses, and kept moving, hoping whatever pheromone cloud she left in her wake wasn't enough to inspire any more competition than usual between them before the air recyclers handled it.

And then she had a decision to make. Either head back to her office and work herself to sleep trying to catch up on more vital reports and updates and preparations for the morning... or trust that each department she'd already met with would manage their own presentations well enough to begin tomorrow, and scope out her own quarters instead.

Her feet found her back in her office before she'd actually decided, and she looked around at the standard issue furnishings while she went for a glass of water from the replicator and threw the work out towel in with the empty glass to go back to whence they came as replication storage. She picked up her data cuff and put it back on her wrist, about to call up the department reports and see where everyone's status was. But her hand sort of wavered and hung in the air instead, reflecting... For months, she'd wanted so badly to get back to work, back to serving to the capacity she felt called to. Now that she had this shot again it was tempting to put her claws into the job and hold on like it was some kind of rodeo ride on the back of an unbroken Sargh beast— so tempting to make it her only focus, everything she was about. Her hard won identity.

She looked down at her travel bag. It wasn't standard issue. Knowing their marriage would be negotiated around their careers and involve much travel, for their honeymoon she and Lance had purchased a whole luggage set on earth that fit within fleet storage parameters. The bags didn't stand out exactly, but they'd reused them on so many trips that there was wear on the corners and smoothed out parts in the texture. The luggage had all the bumps and scrapes to attest to time. Was the little gouge in the side pocket from the spaceport belt on the shores of Trill's Violet Sea? Or was it from the time on the flight back from Bajor, at that unfortunate layover on Tellar when that Tellerite porter kicked the bag and Lance had *words* but it only seemed to encourage the Tellerite to be ever more accommodatingly belligerent, raising Lance's ire and inspiring new creative insults until Calliope had been in stitches.

Calliope ran her fingers over the imperfection of the flap and started to unfasten it to take out her hygiene kit so as to clean up in her office bathroom. But she'd barely gotten the kit in her hands when she paused, bit her lip and then put it back.

With a little triumphant heft, she shouldered the bag and went to the door, dimming the lights and leaving the office. Her body ached, but with her decision, her heart suddenly felt right. Lighter. She even felt a little bounce in her toes. The work would be there in the morning and the Pathfinder would traverse the same number of light years with her on the office sofa as it would cover with her tucked into Lance's arms.

Whatever the future held, there wasn't any more time she wanted to waste apart from what really mattered.