Hard to Get: Quitting Time
Posted on 25 Sep 2024 @ 10:16pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Edited on on 08 Jan 2025 @ 5:22pm
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: Valus Six, Norvex Colony, Starfleet Enlistment Office
Timeline: (Concurent with OC current events)
2028 words - 4.1 OF Standard Post Measure
The Starfleet recruitment center on the corner of Hadwick and Ohnche’datch Streets was situated between The Big Deal party supply store and the empty rental property with the sun-bleached and crackle peeling SPACE AVAILABLE signs. Everyone inside the center was closing up shop. All inquiries had been answered, all the physical activity tests administered. The travel orders and recruit uniforms for the day had been distributed. All that was left to finish was the end of day logs which four recruiting staff were diligently filling out, confirming their entry data and locking it into the system.
There was an insistent ring on Jacinta Zahn’s comm link, but as she didn’t recognize the routing number she closed the link so she could focus on her virtual paperwork. She shook her head as she read out the caller ID. “Don’t know nobody name of Marshal.” She muttered. She had plans and needed to close up her station before someone invented some targ-shit reason preventing her leaving on time.
Latching the door to the clinic hall, an elderly Bolian man named Hodge looked to be permanently squinting through advanced lenses (half blind after surgery had kept him from losing his vision completely). Re-pocketing his access chip and straightening his collar on his doctor’s coat, which hung loosely around his slightly hunched form, he then switched a cane into his right hand and picked up his well worn doctor’s kit in the other. Doctor Hodge never left it behind in the center, instead taking it faithfully along to and from the public transit station each day. Jacinta was only glad the doc didn’t insist on driving himself.
Ol’ Hodge Podge should have retired probably decades ago, but for some folk, their work routine seemed to be the glue of purpose holding them together. That’s how it seemed to be for Hodge, although no one was really sure what his after hours life looked like, aside from possibly a drink on his porch, watching the neighborhood go by– whatever he could see of it going by, at any rate.
She did know, however, that weekends could find Hodge volunteering at the clinic in town. Jacinta had found that out years and years before when her then teenaged daughter Calliope had tried hoverboarding down Lenderman’s Lane and gone clear off the side of the old gravel pit dig. Hodge had patiently picked out each tiny pointed stone and disinfected her daredevil child’s wounds. The incident never seemed to have slowed the girl down, Jacinta thought with a shake of her head and no little pride.
As he passed the workspaces, haphazardly designated by pre-dominion war modular furnishings, Doctor Hodge nodded to each recruiter in turn and regarded each in his mild mannered voice. “Chief Keldo. Chief Dankowitz. Chief Zahn. Lieutenant Vekner.”
Lieutenant jg Kevin Vekner was the youngest in the center, but as the only Commissioned Officer among them, his name was on the recruitment center’s placard (pasted over all the previous ones), the place otherwise running on the experience of the NCOs.
No one resented having Vekner to take the heat whenever Starfleet had some improbable new recruitment directives that made a conflicting mess of things or there was another system failure on the much outdated computer system which ended up eating some important record entry. Vekner thought he was in charge so they let him go on with that delusion. He’d get promoted somewhere else soon enough and they would get to try and strip his name off the plaque to replace him. Then they’d have to break in a new upstart administrator… maybe someone they’d only just cleared the recruitment orders for months before, at the rate they just kept assigning ’em younger and younger.
Now Jacinta’s workstation rang with a call from the same weird routing number and someone named ‘Marshal’ again. It seemed whoever had her personal commlink had her place of work, too. “G’damn robosalers.” She muttered as she blocked the number, the irony of herself as a recruiter complaining about a solicitor completely lost on Jacinta.
Ever unhurried as he was, Doctor Hodge made it outside and stopped in front of the plate glass window to give a tip of his head to a passerby, a fellow who looked to Zahn to be a plain clothes cop. Besides his proper and alert posture, tidy haircut and clean shave, he had a pair of aviator sunglasses tucked in his shirt pocket, a flashy belt buckle and she could see the shape of a holstered phaser filling out the jacket. She shook her head. Why bother being undercover when you were that obvious? The officer loitered on the walk after the exchange of pleasantries with the old Bolian gentleman.
As Doc Hodge hobbled out of view on the walk outside, Jacinta peered beyond at the opposite side of the street. Another storefront directly across the way faced them, the tinted windows emblazoned with the rope and anchor iconography of the Starfleet Marines. Once upon a time, the two recruitment offices had shared a space, but the Marines liked to brag that they had meritted a recruiting office completely apart from the Naval office, seeing as they had so many more recruits to process.
Damn Marines and their constant flexing.
Jacinta slurped down the remainder of her drink from her dented Starfleet insignia tumbler, the stylized badge on it hailing back to pre-dominion years, when she herself had signed up. Of course, she had access to stacks and stacks of new fleet paraphernalia, more than could ever be contained in the storage closet, and which were stacked in crates here and there throughout the office. All of it was meant to be passed around at career fairs, community days, and event corner stands in exchange for a signature– after which the poor underaged signatory would be bombarded until they were 100% convinced of their career in Starfleet, seeing as the kid would be steeped in the images and slogans until they’d gotten the message through their thick adolescent skulls. They were Starfleet. They only needed to be told.
Jacinta still preferred the sweatshirt, throw blanket, knapsack, and the mugs she’d garnered when the Fleet had got its hooks in her, back in ‘56 when she’d enlisted on Terra Nova. The new stuff could go to the kids. Starfleet wasn’t the same as when she had enlisted, if she were asked to be honest, which she generally avoided being in her pitches. Times were different. That was just a fact. Better? Worse? Who was she to say? Better to let the kids get out there and figure it out for themselves.
Her eyes flicked back up from her logs to the SF Marine recruitment office front again as one of the Marine recruiters was checking out. The Marine, a short woman with her hair in a severely tight ponytail that looked to likewise be the reason her lips were puckered so tight, strode to the last of six hoverbikes angle parked on the curb: the Marine Recruiters’ own lil’ fleet, as it were. Although lil’ miss ponytail was first to check out for the day and speed off down the street, Jacinta knew her fellow green-collars would be close behind.
Putting her head back down into her console, Jacinta plugged away faster on her entries, closing out another dialog box with a stylus signature, and scanning her imprint chip to certify the log.
She was nearly ready to check out of her console, when CPO2 Leandra Keldo passed Jacinta Zahn’s desk. Jacinta gave the barest of looks, the sidelong tracking motion of her eyes over emphasized by her eyelash extensions. To anyone else the simple act of walking by might have seemed inconsequential. But Jacinta certainly didn’t miss it. Leandra had to walk a zig zag direction through the layout to pass her so closely, and that meant that it was intentional. Leandra wanted Zahn to notice.
Decisively, Leandra picked up the stylus by the hyper-glass board in the meeting corner and marked out her daily and weekly totals in big, juicy, round digits.
Chief Zahn let her eyes roll all the way back to her own console.
Leandra had landed the assignment to Ottogan High’s Career Fair and she had Ottoganian teens practically lining up for weeks after. Jacinta never, ever, went to Ottogan. Not since she’d moved out of that district.
“You’ll be needin’ the boost jus t’ try an’ keep up. An after? Your rolls aaaaall gonna up and dry out,” Jacinta would say, feigning sportsmanship as her motivation for bowing out of the biggest recruiting scene of the year. She’d never tell her real reasons for letting Leandra have the leg up. Even all these years later, Jacinta still felt that she owed her daughter solidarity for what she’d gone through in their old neighborhood. Those people, everyone who had taken part, everyone who had looked the other way, everyone who had mischaracterized her kid, everyone who had tried to make excuses and pass off the blame? They and everyone they were related to, they were dead to Jacinta. The Ottoganian burrough could get lasered off the map in a neat triangle by a crystalline entity for all she cared. Buncha toxic self important rotten melon lickers.
Leandra could keep her lead. It was end of day, and end of week, and Zahn had a whole string of parties, bars, and jam scenes lined up to go to in order to forget this slugmire. Starting right about… now.
She closed out the last dialog box and snapped her console closed, her false nails carefully angled up, even in her rush.
Another hoverbike roared to life, and Zahn's head shot up as she checked again. The bike she’d been keeping tabs on had already pulled out.
Targ nuts.
As she stood to pull on her red accented leather jacket, she wondered if she could still spot him if she hurried. He couldn’t have forgotten, could he have? They had plans for heaven’s sake.
She’d barely gotten around her desk when Vekner, of all people, cut her off.
“Chief Zahn, we’ve got to talk–”
“Yes sir. First thing next week!” She said brightly, pressing past him.
The junior officer hadn’t grown enough of a spine yet to stand between Chief Zahn and her weekend plans and she was quickly past him. Vekner lightly jogged behind her, but the flashy sixty something woman was already out of the door, and he knew he wasn’t going to catch her. Hell, he couldn’t even get her to follow the dress code.
“Chief Zahn?” A stranger surprised her as she ran out onto the sidewalk. It was the undercover fellow, still loitering.
“Make it quick, man,” she said, a smile blossoming on her face as she honed in on the direction of a familiar roar approaching from around the block.
“Apologies, I need a minute of your time, Chief.” He seemed to be reaching into an inner jacket pocket, maybe to pull out a padd or credentials. Jacinta wasn’t entirely sure. She tried to hear him out as she got her second arm into her leather jacket and zipped it closed, pinching the pull between her fake nailed fingers. “There’s a growing security concern and you’re–”
He was drowned out by the deafening rev of a hyper clocked hover drive as a bike pulled up beside them.
“You ready?” shouted the heavily mustachioed Sergeant, his helmet visor up. “Or you need me to circle the block again, Starfleet?”
Hoisting herself up via a foothold, Jacinta jumped on behind him and grabbed up her own helmet waiting for her. “Lock an’ load, ya’ ol’ cannon cocker!” She slapped down her visor and held on.
And with that, the bike peeled off, leaving a man on the street between two recruitment centers, showing a five-pointed star to no one.
