Surveying the Damage
Posted on 01 Jun 2023 @ 9:25am by Commander Calliope Zahn & Captain Corvus DeHavilland
Edited on on 25 Jun 2023 @ 10:54am
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Captain's Readyroom, Pathfinder
Timeline: MD09 0750 following "Subspace Fissures and Other Marital Problems"
2684 words - 5.4 OF Standard Post Measure
It didn’t feel right to be standing where she was, watching the stars sweep past the viewport, enjoying the pensive silence of her ready room when only a little while ago they’d been in a fight for their lives. She’d made the difficult decision to eject the core, knowing that it would mean that they couldn’t escape. It meant that would have to fight with what they had left and, if they were lucky, they could get out of there. At least far enough away that the Theseus could come back for them - or the help they had sent for could find them.
But none of that had happened. They’d been saved at the last moment from a hopeless situation by an unqualified legend of Starfleet and she couldn’t say a thing about it. If she was honest, she could hardly believe it had happened at all - everything had happened so fast. From their unfathomable rescue to the arrival of Captain Bowdler and their immediate departure. So fast she didn’t have a chance to process it and was still struggling to.
The office door chimed.
“Come in,” Corvus said, her tone far more brusque than she really intended to be. Her mind was simply off somewhere else and the interruption wasn’t all that welcome. Normally she didn’t show such an emotional reaction, but things weren’t normal.
Calliope stepped into the Captain’s ready room and noticed as Corvus turned that she had just been gazing out the view port.
“Still wishing you’d gotten a ship Command?” Calliope asked, uncertain how to read the look on Corvus’ face. Reflection or frustration? Maybe something of both.
Corvus shook her head as Calliope came in, and the door closed behind her, “Maybe I should have stayed on the Praetorian,” she sighed in greeting.
“Yeah, too late for it now,” Calliope said, having had to get herself to stop wishing she’d never taken Corvus’ offer either. She was far past it, but she knew the feeling well. “Our old ships have sailed.”
“I don’t even know where to start,” DeHavilland shook her head, pacing back to the viewport behind the desk, resisting the urge to fling the contents of it on the floor. The adrenaline had now long since wore off. She swept her hands through her hair, drawing it over her shoulder and then turned back, managing to craft a reasonably passable game face. “Did you have something to report?” she asked.
“Damage control is completing the initial overall systems’ report and the gross estimated repair timeline. I have the early numbers, if you want to go over them. Unless you want to review it yourself.” Calliope had no emotion in the statement. She’d just accepted that it was how Corvus had dealt with reports and organization on the way to Korix— without her. And maybe she preferred to do the same now as well. Before Korix it had irked her a great deal. But in the light of everything else, she wasn’t interested in making anything about it anymore. All she could do was offer.
“Ensign Tilmer is managing the damage control teams?” Corvus asked immediately. Bowdler might have scrubbed their logs, but she wasn’t about to forget Commander Quinn’s actions anytime soon.
“Yes.” Hell yes, she refrained from adding. “But I’ve asked Lieutenant Haille to make himself available to Tilmer as well. The Ensign had some mediocre reviews in simulation and by Wiser’s accounts I would never have predicted his competence. He seemingly out performs himself when the pressure is on, though." Calliope had to give him credit, since he came through on both the emergency transport and in outfoxing her husband. “My feeling is just that his department was poorly managed in the mission preparation, which led to him slacking off and challenging the lack of direction.” In short, he’d not been properly overseen by Quinn, and that was no surprise.
“I think Mr. Tilmer has brought quite a bit to light,” Corvus growled with frustration. She certainly didn’t expect her crew to be all yes men and women but she at least expected that they would follow Starfleet ideals. That they would be willing to sacrifice, according to their oath, for the greater good of others. If they couldn’t, well then they didn’t have a place amongst her crew. To her mind, Quinn had self-identified himself as unfit for her crew. She just had to figure out how she was going to manage to do that, now that the incident that created the current situation never ‘happened’.
Calliope took her own turn staring out the viewport at the warp trails, trying to stay cool on the topic and not get her blood pressure up again. “Lance belongs in the lab and the lecture hall, where he can be the smartest person in the room. He can’t make difficult value judgments that are beyond the numbers.”
“That is not the kind of officer I want under my command,” Corvus declared emphatically, heaving a profound sigh as she folded her arms across her chest. “But with whatever… whatever the hell that was with Captain Bowdler, I don’t have a damn leg to stand on anymore,” she confessed. “Lance was injured on the shuttle, I can hide behind that for the duration of our return to base. But once we’re back to OC, I’ll have the Admiral to answer to. I can’t simply toss him aside. Which is exactly what I want to do.”
Calliope put a hand through her hair. How had everything gone this sour? On the one hand she felt like she should be pointing out to Corvus how she’d played fast and loose with their marital situation, trying to make everything better for them, only she’d been forcing the square peg that was Lance into the round hole that was the role Covus imagined him to be a fit for. But Calliope had wanted a shared home life so bad that she had been willing to ignore her own misgivings when she should have known better since Corvus’ very first call concerning the assignment. She could have discouraged Lance from leaving Daystrom. But that was also a ship that had long since sailed.
“He never wanted to be on the Station,” said Calliope transparently, while letting herself sit, though perched in a respectful posture on the edge of a chair. She was too worn through to keep to her feet much longer. “He’s only been going through the motions. He knew I couldn’t live in a long-distance relationship forever. I just didn’t know he’d be this unfit for the field. You wanted him and his big brain so much, and I thought I could just… run interference with everyone he crossed until we could work something else out. Maybe an R&D role in a new sister department or— it doesn’t matter any more.” She’d been sleepless over it so many nights, hatching ideas involving opening up entirely new departments on the station. Now, as of the past half an hour, she knew Corvus wouldn’t want him in any staff roles at all, existing or newly fabricated. And she wasn’t sure she did either. “I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it the past months, and that was my own damn fault, twenty years in the making,” She said, referencing the Vamiraxil and the consequences. With her recovery and removal from station executive officer, she hadn’t been able to influence manifest decisions. “And still, when we get back to the station, I won’t be in his Chain of Command. You’ll have to suss it out with Thad. Somehow. Without Thad knowing why.”
Corvus chuckled darkly, “Keep this secret from the man who has made his career on secrets?” She was just now starting to realize just how big of a mess she had found herself. Thad. Sepandiyar. Even MacTaryn, once he caught wind of how badly Finn was injured. Their only hope being that everyone kept their mouths shut, and that the recovery of a dead Pyrryx would be enough smoke to hide the truth.
Finn. That brought to kind a whole other quagmire, one she’d put aside for the moment but felt surging back. Part of her wanted to be angry with him for going around her, but the after-the-fact more logical part of her mind was coming to the stark realization that he’s done the only thing she’d left him the choice to do. Her own indecisiveness had caused it. The question now wasn’t so much the professional, but the personal. Had her lack of self awareness and assertiveness, something she had well in hand in her job on the Praetorian, cost her the first real chance she’d had at finding something remotely close to a romantic connection? Had, after all this time, she finally let that guard down only to squander it immediately?
“Did I ever tell you about that time Intel tried to get me to run a black op?” Calliope deadpanned. When Corvus looked at her to prompt the rest of the story, Calliope just smirked. It was a joke. Or was it?
Calliope’s cuff twittered with an update and she opened the holographic display. “Casualty reports. Want to start with the good news?”
Corvus leaned heavily against the edge of the desk and just nodded.
“No fatalities.”
The Captain simply nodded still, not ready to celebrate a victory.
“The bad news? No fatalities yet. We have three critical. Major Wallace, from the Sunrise survivors, was recovered in bad shape after tangoing with the Pyrryx on the surface. He’s in surgery now. Quartermaster Dasha was badly injured in a structural failure when she cleared the aft of deck eight. She’s also in surgery. And Ensign Jup, with extreme plasma burns to the head and torso had to be put into stasis. We don’t have the resources to determine his outcome at this time. Medical is hoping Doctors on the station will be able to determine more. Those are our worst cases. There are Twenty-one other injuries and conditions of varying types and degrees.”
“I’ll speak with Captain Callum. We’ll need Corduke a bit longer,” Corvus spoke up finally. Not that she didn’t trust their resident Doctor, but if she’d have suspected this level of injury she would have insisted that Doctor Mazur come along. Frustrating as the woman was, she was a superb Physician with lots of experience in the field. They were going to need Doctor Corduke’s experience to supplement their needs here.
“I can make that arrangement.”
“What about Major Finn?” she asked. “Any of his Marines? Injuries there?”
“Yeah, they have a separate casualty list, being updated live now. I know Tahriik went down to get his shoulder seen to. Parveaux with a spinal injury, coming out of the diagnostic chamber, looks to be the most severe, but has a good prognosis. He’s likely going to be laid up while they culture him new vertebrae in the bio lab.” Considering the sudden death they had seen on the security footage of a Pyrryx rearranging a Vulcan, it sounded like a lucky stroke. “Then a number of shrapnel and laceration injuries.” Calliope scrolled a little faster. There were more injuries being logged than there were Marines sent by both ships. Of course they made sure to spread out the hits between them. “A number of phaser wounds, some concussions. Scrapes, sprains and breaks. Most of these are walking-wounded and carried themselves into sickbay. Major Finn is on this list. Multiple wounds.”
“But nothing critical for Major Finn… or the others?” Corvus asked, hoping that she had added the ‘others’ in a not so obvious way even though that was the way it had played across her mind. She still wasn’t fully absorbing everything and would need more time for that but she was hopeful that by the time they returned home she’d have her arms around her own emotions.
“Finn was triaged as serious, but not critical. They assigned him a bed and he’s on a monitor.” She only answered the question about Finn, sensing it was really what Corvus was getting at. Calliope was too tired and emotionally spent herself to care what feelings were behind it. So what if Corvus wanted to kiss Finn’s boo-boos? She twisted her fingers and the display over her arm mirrored for Corvus to see the patient details. “He’s on a heavy painkiller. Obviously Parveaux is in ahead of him. You want to go down, check on the scene in Sickbay? I can man the bridge a while longer, get us back into an organized shift change.”
Calliope’s mind started the requisite operations task lists that had always been her bread and butter of management: Start picking up the myriad pieces... Coordinate after action reports with Faye, her counterpart on the Theseus, considering everything they’d have to manage to keep the black ops black, right down to giving a talking-to to every crewman who might have looked out a viewport at a subspace rift or an Odyssey without a registry number. Run stress fracture structural repairs and account it to a firefight, somehow without lying. Get the delegates properly seen to. The Delegates. They’d witnessed the Alabama as well. Did they have any notion at all what the subspace rift was? The core… Plug the Korinn core back in and reassign it to a different analyst. The list was quickly snowballing. Actually, she could do without Corvus on the bridge for a spell and get caught up with the rest of the bridge crew as to what happened while the Acamas had been out. She closed down her holo display and waved dismissively. “Anyway, It’s always good for morale if the captain does a round in sickbay after an engagement.”
Corvus put her fingers through her hair at the scalp and rubbed for a moment, letting out a sharp breath of air. “The last place I want to be is anywhere but the bridge,” she replied, as that was truly her gut reaction. “But you’re probably not wrong,” she added. “You’re probably not wrong.”
Hard as it was for her to accept, she was starting to come to grips with the harsh reality that she wasn’t going to be able to hide her indecision behind the decisiveness of someone else. She was Captain. This was her command, and she had to make the decisions. Hard decisions, sometimes, but decisions nonetheless. She needed to take the same sage advice she’d given Ensign Wiser. But that decisiveness was only one side of the proverbial coin that was being in Command. The other side being the political side. The shaking hands and kissing babies aspect. Calliope was on the money; despite the mountain of things that needed her attention on the bridge, being in Sick bay to check on the wounded and injured was exactly the kind of thing a good Captain would do. It’s what her Captain would have done.
“I’m going to wash my face.” Calliope said, standing again. If she did anything more than that to clean up she was fairly certain she’d pass out. It was better to stick with momentum, pour some raktejino over it, and plan her collapse into a nap for after. By ship's chronometer, it was just coming around to O'eight hundred. Some morning. “Let me know when you’re headed below decks, Captain. If there’s nothing else for the moment?”
“No,” Corvus answered, “Thank you.”
“Of course, Captain.” Calliope made a polite deferring nod and saw herself out.
