Sandwiches, Sheep & Seagulls
Posted on 02 Jul 2023 @ 7:00pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Chief Deputy Marshal: Ridge Steiner - FMS
Edited on on 08 Jul 2023 @ 8:11pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: USS pathfinder - MessHall & Holodeck
Timeline: M3 D12 1200HRS
2984 words - 6 OF Standard Post Measure
With the plan in place and everyone briefed on what wasn’t being said, Calliope had found the rest of the return ride less eventful. For the most part she spent as much of the day away from her quarters as possible. Almost all of her meals were in the messhall or her office now. With her supplement drink ordered and a pile of nachos on hand, she scanned the room for a friendly face. She settled for Steiner although he looked not so much friendly as frustrated and distracted, his brow creased and half his sandwich gone untouched, likely for a while..
“Something on your mind?” She asked as she put the tray down, inviting herself to his table at the quiet corner booth. He’d probably been trying to avoid too much notice in the secluded spot.
“Huh?” Steiner looked up, momentarily unaware somebody had joined him, then seeing Zahn “Oh, hey Commander. Yeah…” He sat up straighter and focused, bringing his thoughts back to the present.
“Anything I need to know about?” She slurped the nearly newtonian liquid. “Personnel trouble?”
“Not exactly.. Well not Starfleet personnel” He began “Seems there might have been a Federation Marshal on Korix…”
Calliope’s face quirked with a question. They hadn’t picked up a Marshal. And there hadn’t been any rumor of one to her knowledge. She sat up, concerned. “Did we miss someone on the island?”
“Not a living survivor, but maybe a body,” Steiner replied. “Only found out yesterday, right here in fact, I had lunch with Chief Xeri and her kids…” He related the story they had told him of a Marshal being brought to their camp.
“… except until we are back in comms range I can’t verify anything,” he finished off. The inability to check the story out was gnawing on him.
Calliope’s lip twisted in thought all the while as he recounted the strange and terrible events, told to him second hand. She could understand how it would leave more questions than answers, and just as the Marines couldn’t be stopped from recovering their lost brother come hell or highwater (and facing literal incarnations of both), she expected Ridge was taking the idea of a lost Marshal personally. “Tonight, we might be in relay range. I can set a quest ping and have the system notify you as soon as comms are detected. We’re not allowing general system use for the rest of the crew, but Senior Officers are cleared.”
“Just need to contact one of my Deputies, they can access the eF-eM-eS personnel records and see if they can find this guy, if he actually exists” he threw out the caveat for his innate caution in accepting uncorroborated evidence, but within himself he believed it was true, the details were too much to be a concoction or misidentification.
“If he does, then that opens up a whole lot more questions.” He pushed his sandwich around with a finger tip. “And I want answers…” He was getting his mind into this, it had only been a few weeks since he had been pulled off the case he had worked for years. The transfer to Obsidian and all that entailed had distracted him from brooding on his removal. But now he had another investigation to focus on and the delay in starting it was just making him all the more intent on solving it.
“I imagine if there’s answers to be had, you’ll find them. And that you’ll let me know if there’s any way I can help with getting them. I’ll probably have some time on my hands again.”
“Oh?” Steiner let go of the mystery of Cubo for a moment, he took a bite of his roast beef sandwich.
“I don’t think I made it clear when we shipped out on the Pathfinder. I wasn’t Corvus’ First Officer on the station at the time. I was only brought on as such for the Pathfinder’s mission.”
“What do you do for a day-job then?”He asked, hurriedly wiping mustard off his chin with a napkin.
“I was on a forced medical leave. Recovering from a Vamiraxil complication. My old… prescription.”
“Prescription?”
“I was on it since highschool. I was supposed to be off it since Academy.” She stirred the sludge that was her penance. “After some contraindications.”
“That for the -” he waved his hand around a bit, miming wafting air currents “- pheromones?”
She nodded. “Yeah. For that. I wanted a career. It felt like I… it doesn’t matter.” She shifted to an uneasy smile. “I was trying to stay on it, and there weren’t always ethical ways to. So. Corvus had invited me on as her Executive Officer, and then had to remove me. I was in recovery and on some special assignments and some of my own follow up investigations surrounding the attack on OC. Admiral Sepandiyar assigned me to this mission, but. I don’t think Corvus really wants to work with me again. I can’t blame her. “
“She didn’t object though” Steiner pointed out, “Don’t know the Admiral, but if he trusted DeHavilland to lead this mission, then I’m pretty sure he would have given her the veto on you if she wanted. And I don’t think she would have any problem telling him that. So she clearly allowed you here, even if it was his suggestion initially. That’s got to mean something, right?”
He laid it out as he saw it. “If she removed you she probably had no choice, and the Admiral putting you back in play lets her have you back as part of her team, without having to contravene her earlier decision” He applied investigators logic to the facts as she had told him.
Calliope chuffed at that. “She wouldn’t have contradicted him. Sepandiyar puts her off her balance. But then it seems like everything does since she took this Command. She’s not the confident Corvus I used to work with. More reactive than anything.”
“Been quite a lot to react to” he pointed out “Not sure how anyone can plan for the last few days…”
That was fair, Calliope thought as her mouth was full of nachos, thinking. Although that was how they were taught to expect things in command. She listened as she ate.
“Even if she accepted you on sufferance, she did not have to assign you command of the Away Team, both of them, to the station and the planet; First Contact with a new species, and all that” Steiner pointed out over another bite of sandwich “She could have just made you Officer of the Bridge or whatever, kept you busy doing nothing, while still following the Admiral’s orders. She didn't do that…”
“She tried,” Calliope said around her food, her voice low, not interested in making it a public conversation. “She gave me none of the Pathfinder’s preparation before launch, she didn’t accept my insistence to leave ‘certain persons’ off the roster, she did all of the inter departmental reporting with me in add on, when it’s supposed to be the other way round. When I took the initiative to organize the Away Mission on Korix, she tried to undergear us. If I hadn’t made other preparations, we wouldn’t have done more than look at a couple feet of water and then had to turn around. I don’t know if it was intentional or subliminal, but she didn’t actually want a first contact. She wanted to do the bare minimum to answer the distress signal by the book. She really wanted a reason to leave.”
Steiner shrugged “You're a Command Officer, you’re trained to review leadership decisions, but instead of second guessing DeHavilland's every move, maybe focus on the fact that she did put you in command of the Away Teams, she trusted you with those roles, the Admiral didn't make her do that…”
“Yeah, well.” She put some more chips in her face to keep from saying somethings she might regret about Corvus and her token good graces and what she felt Corvus could do with them.
“Anyway with a couple of her other senior staff doing dumb things I’d think your performance was above average,” He tried, then nearly bit his tongue as he remembered she was married to Quinn. Now that was an unlikely couple, the zero-personality Engineer and her…
Calliope pushed him the salt and held out a wrist for him to rub it in her proverbial wound. “Go on.”
“Err.. that Marine” Steiner replied, ignoring the salt gesture
“Oh the Marine.” Calliope snarked at the pivot. “Which Marine?”
“...who took his team skydiving…” he said “Not sure that was all part of the plan”
“It’s true. That’s not usually how you dispatch marines, through the airlocks,” she agreed.
“Way I hear it, he did his own despatching, without DeHavilland’s knowledge”
Calliope continued to take extra precautions to speak at a private volume. “I got the report from Lt Haille. Finn did what she couldn’t. Probably for the same reasons she was inadvertently undermining our away mission. Hesitation. Fear of putting her personnel into danger.”
“Just saying, compared to others you did everything as asked..”
“Oh, Finn’s not in any real trouble with her.” Calliope wasn’t going to spell out why to Steiner. “Besides, I don’t want to build a career ‘compared to others’ coming up short.” Calliope huffed and sat back twisting a napkin in her hands. “DeHavilland has an excellent first officer on the base. After everything I’ve done, I don’t even chart next to Zayne’s reputation. I don’t need to get into some kind of spitting contest, measuring up against other officers.”
“You beat yourself up like this regularly?” Steiner asked “Or is this a special occasion?”
She smiled in defense. “Every day is ‘special’ since I took the call to OC. There’s nothing for me when we get back to port. They’ll muscle Lance out of the job indirectly if they have to. I don’t have to have his IQ to know that the first thing he’s going to want is his old lab back at Daystrom. And there will be plenty of brass eager to overlook practically anything to get him back at the R&D blackboard. I wish I’d never asked him to leave Sol in the first place.” She threw down the napkin beside her plate, and tried to wave it all off. “Sorry. My therapist is also out of comms reach. I guess I’ve been hurting for a friend to talk to, either way.”
Steiner had heard the talk about Quinn’s insubordination too. The way it sounded, the man had deliberately refused to follow Dehavilland’s direct orders during combat and consequently been removed from his position. He was not sure, but Quinn should probably have been lined up in front of a Courts Martial, not getting some cushy research job. Even if Zahn was not responsible for her husband’s actions, it still must be causing her considerable stress and probably some embarrassment too, both publicly and privately no doubt. No wonder she was looking close to tears.
“Sounds like you’ve a lot going on” he said kindly “You got half an hour to spare for some fresh air?”
“I have some time, yeah.” She said a little carefully.
“Give me five minutes and meet me in the Holodeck” he said cryptically, got up, tossed his plate in the recycling and left.
Steiner's lunch booth now having become hers, Calliope worked a little more intently on finishing her shake.
The last time she’d been on the holodeck it was to direct exercises for the ensigns on the crew. She’d given Steiner his five minute head start and then caught up to him in the corridor. They didn’t say anything in greeting, though she gave him a nonverbal nod before proceeding.
Steiner arrived and advanced on the door, it opened to display the bare grid-lined squares of the compartment. He pulled a data chip from his pocket and slid it into the panel, tapped in a couple of commands and the empty compartment transformed into a broad open expanse of long gray-green grass and heather, tipped with tiny orange flowers. The terrain rolled away into the distance, rising upwards to a low rounded hill, with a rocky outcrop at the summit. On the right it dipped downwards in a shallow valley, a rocky stream meandered through it, tracing its way out of sight. Overhead a pale blue sky was flecked with wind-blown clouds and a breeze rippled through the grass, the air was fresh, cool and wholesome. A worn path led along the ridge towards the hill top.
“Moray Hill, New Caledonia” Steiner explained “Rod and I grew up here, with our Grandfather. We’d come up here for a day’s hiking. Always liked the air, seems, fresher somehow.” He gave a small smile and set off along the path, “Come on then, we should make the top in twenty minutes.”
Calliope didn’t appreciate the view right away. The knowledge of having entered a holodeck often spoiled the otherwise perfect realism of such scenes for her. But the activity itself was real, her leg muscles beginning to feel the burn of use. After a while of looking out over the meadows and squinting at the sun, she’d entered into the suspended belief required to overcome the cognition about spectacles and innate questions of authenticity and for all practical purposes, the scene was real.
Steiner did not speak, just let her enjoy the stroll, as he did himself. He had had this program for many years, for most of those it had been a frequent way to gather his thoughts and work through difficult cases, just letting the breeze blow the clutter away. But now he had to think hard to recall the last time he had used it though, it had been a while and he idly wondered when he had got out of the habit. Maybe three years at least, probably not since he started at Durham Colony and his last case. He thought about that for a while, just breathing in the air and the view, letting his frustration over not being able to make progress on the unknown Cubo drift away on the breeze. I’ve missed this he thought to himself.
As they went on, Calliope shed her duty jacket and left it behind. She started to walk less along the middle of the path and to prefer climbing over loose stones and picking tall grasses in her hand, just to brush the fuzzy ends through her fingers and then idly pull the grass seed off and scatter it as they went.
Steiner noticed Zahn had wandered off and was happily collecting things. He smiled to himself and strolled along contentedly.
At the base of the hill the path gently zig-zagged up the slope to the summit, it was not steep and easily climbed. The grass and heather petered out, replaced by moss and lichen covered rocks and crested over in a flatish plateau perhaps thirty meters across. The panorama spread out around them, behind was open land, grass and heather, valleys on each side led to fields and crops. Beyond the summit, the ridge led down to a rocky headland that jutted out into a dark green sea. Dotted along the ridge was a flock of woolly sheep, picking their way amongst the rocks, nibbling on grass and heather, a couple looked up at them curiously, then went back to grazing. In the far distance, seabirds swirled over the headland. The breeze was stiffer here, it carried the faint tang of ocean salt and the occasional cry of a bird.
Steiner sat on a rock and breathed in the air, waiting for her to catch up. “Much preferred this walk to clambering up that damn mountain on Korix,” he said wryly, then just sat quietly, enjoying the familiar view. Letting her do the same.
“A little less… weather.” She agreed. The distant ocean was very different than the sickly scent of the Korin tide carrying toxins, overbloom, and corpses.
As they sat, her head felt like it stopped wheeling. Maybe the walk had gotten enough oxygen to circulate to take the strain off. Instead, now her heart ached watching the sea birds whirl over the water. There was a sad poetry in the gull cries that she couldn’t put words to. She pulled her knees up to her chin and just let tears run silent tracks, and allowed the breeze to dry the saltwater trails.
Steiner saw the tears but pretended not to notice or intrude, Right now, maybe she just needs to let a few things go he reasoned.
Ten minutes later, when he saw her cheeks had dried and she seemed composed again, he stood up, took in a long deep breath and gave her a grin. “Alright, enough peace and fresh air, lunch breaks over. I guess it’s time to go back to doing what we’re good at.”
She pushed the hair out of her face as she stood. “Yeah. Let’s get to it.”
“Computer! End program!” Steiner announced and they walked back towards the door as grass faded to decking under their feet. He stooped and lifted Zahn’s jacket on the way, holding it out to her as they exited.
