Failure

Posted on 23 May 2018 @ 9:31am by Staff Warrant Officer William Griffin

1,284 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: The Search Begins
Location: Support Craft Maintenance Hangar
Timeline: MD2, 1100 Hours

The drill that had turned into not a drill had, in the words of his father, put the tribble in the grain bin. His well-organized fighter maintenance bay had momentarily been turned into a circus. With half the bays on simulation mode and the other half on active, he'd had to split his teams and it had taken all morning to get the operation back into something approaching normal.

Griffin bit his tongue, holding back a curse as he watched a crewman pick up a phaser capacitor with her bare hands. If the thing had been charged the girl would have been dead, rapidly and painfully. He hadn't taken a step forward to yell at the young woman when her crew chief started in on her, Griffin heard "... kind of stupid, careless 1st-year cadet do you think..." before he turned away, confident the girl would learn her lesson. He made a mental note to include scheduling further safety training in his next crew chief briefing.

A familiar klaxon began wailing its warning and the fighter elevator began descending, a still-hot fighter sitting on it. Griffin frowned, another consequence of a half-baked panic about a pair of frigates that hadn't even stopped to bother the Black Hawk, or so scuttlebutt said. He tapped the console in front of him, assigning the fighter to bay two and notifying the crew chief that it was coming to him.

He watched the fighter descend, it's cockpit standing open and empty, the unknown pilot having already left for wherever pilots went to when they weren't flying. The running joke was that they weren't really living unless they were flying, and they simply sat in their cushy pilots' quarters like switched off robots, waiting for the next chance to be alive. It wasn't a very funny joke, but it persisted none-the-less. The fighter hit the deck, and was automatically slid across the deck on a localized anti-gravity field into bay two, where the crew chief and three crewmen were waiting.

The crewmen were pushing the maintenance platform into place before the fighter had stopped moving and as soon as it settled they were scrabbling up to inspect its systems. Below, the crew chief was logging in to the fighter's computer core to download the information contained within, which would help to highlight any issues and be added to the flight record of the craft.

He watched as the crewman reached down into the access port for the ventral thruster, his voice caught in his throat and his hands reached out from fifty meters away as if to stop the boy. He heard himself roaring "NO!" at the same time the boy screamed and fell backward, tipping off the platform and disappearing from view.

Half the people in the hangar had turned to look at Griffin as he roared, the other half had focused on the scream, people gasped, screamed in fear or empathy, people froze and some people, Griffin among them, were running at full tilt towards the bay, even as the boy was falling. He made the fifty meters in ten seconds flat and slid to a halt next to the man, boy. Child. The crew chief was already there, on the other side, trying to calm the kid down.

Griffin was more practical. The kid's hand was practically gone, burned into a charred black lump of carbon up to the elbow, like a wooden match that had burned out. Jackson... his name came to Griffin in a flash, Brian Jackson, crewman apprentice Brian Jackson, fresh out of the academy, twenty-one years old. He was screaming, his incoherent wails filling the hangar. There was nothing that could be done, here. He tapped his comm badge.

=/\= "Griffin to sickbay, emergency transport, crewman Jackson's badly burned."

He got the acknowledgment and the creams dissipated abruptly as the crewman dematerialized. Griffin knelt, for a moment, looking at the space where the boy had been, then cast his eyes upwards at the crew chief. The pain in the man's eyes almost, almost stopped him as he pushed himself upwards to his full height, staring down at the man from six feet above.

"What." Griffin paused, mentally cutting out several curses that came to his tongue unbid. "Have you been doing in your safety training, chief? How the hell could a crewman that's been aboard for six months JAM HIS GOD DAMN HAND INTO A HOT THRUSTER EXHAUST PORT!?" Almost, he reached down to grab the man and shake him, but as the chief's dismay turned to fear and then to anger, he pushed himself up to match his boss, although his head only reached to Griffin's chest.

"This is not my damn fault!" The chief spat back at Griffin, "the kid KNEW what he was supposed to do, I TRAINED him, shit, he should have learned that much at vocational school! You CAN'T blame me for that kinda stupidity, chief Griffin!"

"I can and I will," Griffin snarled back, angry but calm. "You're his crew chief, you're responsible for everything that happens in this bay. But," Griffin was forced to pause, closing his eyes for a second to bite back some of the anger, "I'm the maintenance chief, it's as much my fault as it is yours. It's our job to teach these kids to do their jobs, and that includes safety."

"So what next, chief?" The younger man asked, some of the anger fading from his eyes, Griffin could see the grief sweep right back in, like a tidal river on the turn.

"We get back to work," he growled, turning to look at the crowd that had gathered around the scene of the accident, he raised his voice. "We get back to work! There're jobs to be done and I want 'em done! I want 'em done the right way! If I see one more person hot-doggin', skippin' safety procedures or doin' anythin' that isn't a hundred percent by the book, I will bust their ass! One accident is one too many an' I do NOT want to transport any more of our people to sickbay! So be careful! Watch out for yourself an' watch out for your teammates! NOW MOVE!"

He watched a moment longer as his people scrambled back to their bays and stations, then turned to the crew chief, still standing forlornly in front of him. "Mr. Baker, I'm not blaming you personally, I hope you understand that." He growled, resting a hand on the man's shoulder. "But as senior men, it's our responsibility to keep these kids safe and we both failed in that. All we can do now is do better, an' I know I can trust you to do that. We need this fighter ready for ops, take T'kara from bay four and get it done."

"Aye, chief Griffin," Baker growled back, Griffin wasn't sure if it was anger he heard in the man's voice or some other emotion, but all he could do was let it go, for now. He lifted his hand from Baker's shoulder and turned away, again resisting the urge to curse.

"Chief Remara," he called to another crew chief, currently running the empty bay four. "Take over, I'm goin' to sickbay. Put T'Kara on two and have Jenkins help out on six."

The man nodded his acceptance and Griffin made his way out of the hangar. It wasn't until the turbolift doors slid shut behind him that he finally gave in to the stream of curses that had been building in his brain, venting loudly into the empty lift before snarling "sickbay" at the computer. He'd failed. He'd failed his team, he'd failed the kid and he'd failed himself. Again.

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