Asking for Permission (Sort Of)

Posted on 18 Oct 2018 @ 6:50pm by Lieutenant Commander Camila Di Pasquale & Commodore Harvey Geisler

3,145 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Fractured
Location: Main Armory
Timeline: MD2 || 1000 hours

Having tended to the lack of leadership in engineering, Harvey departed, now intending to head for wherever Lieutenant Di Pasquale was. There was so much to do as they all continued to pick up the pieces after their tango with the space/time continuum, but the most important thing on Harvey's mind was to shore up the command structure of the Operations department. If Harvey had any worries about his ship, it came down to both Engineering and Operations. Neither department had had solid leadership since the new ship was commissioned, and Harvey had little choice but to continue assigning a new person to the department head position until someone just stuck.

Or found a way to stay out of trouble and alive...

Like Engineering, his options in Operations were extremely limited. The staff was inexperienced, not to mention lacking in leadership. Were they in Federation space, Harvey would just find replacements. That, sadly, was not an option, forcing him to look inward and from other departments to find a capable leader. Harvey felt he had little choice in the matter except to confer with one of his senior officers.

"Computer," he called out, walking to the turbolift. "What is the location of Lieutenant Di Pasquale?"

"Lieutenant Di Pasquale is currently in the main armory," the computer responded.

"The armory?" Harvey murmured. He wasn't sure which was more depressing, the fact that it surprised him that she'd be there, or the fact that he, for half a second, couldn't remember where the armory was. Harvey arrived at the turbolift and instructed it to take him to the security complex.

In the Armory, Camila yanked at a Type III phaser rifle that had gotten jammed behind a bench. "When I find the person who didn't secure you properly," she promised it. "I'm going to beat them with you." She gave another fierce yank and managed to pull it loose and held it up triumphantly.

Behind her, the door opened just in time for the Captain to see his Chief of Security assume her triumphant pose as if she had just finished a marathon. "Going hunting?" Harvey asked of the Lieutenant as the doors closed behind him.

The ombre haired Security Chief spun around and lowered the phaser rifle at the last second so it wasn't pointing at the Captain's or his direction. "Sorry, Captain," she said a bit sheepishly. "I had to yank it from behind a bench. What can I do for you, Sir?"

"At least it only disappeared behind a bench," Harvey observed, taking a look around the armory. At least one room aboard the ship looked like it had seen better days as of late. "I heard you had a taste of command recently."

Camila sat the phaser rifle on the bench she had rescued it from and gave him her full attention. "Not much," she said. "Just a little acting XO work. I don't plan to make a hobby of it. How was your trip?"

Harvey grunted, folding his arms in front of him as he started to walk around the room, visually inspecting the rifles and other arms charging in their racks. "You ask it casually like it was a vacation, Miss Di Pasquale. Though I don't think I'll ever miss anyone as much as I did during our adventure."

"Would you prefer that I rant and rave or maybe curse in Italian?" she asked calmly despite the urge to do what she just offered. "I made sure that Joey was safe the entire time we were together, too. Except the one time when we tried to use the runabouts to move the ship."

"And I appreciate that," Harvey said, turning to face Camila. "You'll never know how much I appreciate you keeping her and the twins safe." As he fought the horrible images of her skeleton clutching the twins on the bridge, Harvey looked away and back to the rifles. "I understand it was the attempt to move the ship that led to our eventual return. There's something else I appreciate, as do nearly five hundred others."

"I don't do it for the appreciation, but I'll accept it," Camila said. "And it's changed my view on things a bit. I don't actually want to die in battle or my sleep anymore." She stopped, surprised that she had admitted it to anyone, let alone say it out loud to another living person.

Harvey paused, a bit surprised by the comment. Scuttlebutt had suggested Camila was good friends with the bottle and rather antisocial lately. Perhaps her statement indicated that that time was at an end. "Old age it is then," he confirmed, turning to her once more. "I know it'd been a little less than a day since we've been reunited, but how's the department?"

She was relieved that he didn't comment on her slip but kept her face as neutral as she could. "Considering we're down another eleven personnel who didn't return, I'd say it's in decent shape. I'd like to start doing battle drills at all hours just to keep everyone sharp. I have a good Assistant Chief and she can handle things well when I'm not on duty."

The Captain smirked at the mention of her Assistant Chief. "Actually, Miss Parks is part of the reason I'm here," he confessed. "You seem quite confident in her abilities."

"She's young and excitable, but I think she'll turn into a fine officer some day," Camila said. "Not that she isn't now, but she doesn't have the seasoning we need out here."

"Oh?" Harvey asked in a tone that was both inquisitive and slightly disappointed.

"She's just a little too eager to please," the ombre haired woman said. "I appreciate initiative and I know you do. It's not enough to put on an evaluation, but she won't be one of those fast rising officers in my book." Like me? she internally judged herself. Not hardly. "She has the potential once she boils it down a bit and then focuses on it."

"I see," he remarked, continuing to look at his Chief of Security. "And here I was coming to talk to you about considering her for Chief of Operations."

"Wait..what?" Camila did a double take at him. "You're taking another of my Assistant Chiefs?" she asked. "No, no, it's fine. I'm used to getting everything dumped on me and having no relief when I need it."

He briefly considered pointing out that Camila had departed before Joey had been reassigned and promoted to Intelligence, but that would have been completely out of line and juvenile. "You've never asked for relief," Harvey observed. "Also, you might have lost eleven people yesterday. Engineering and Operations lost nearly twenty, including all of the leadership structure. Until we can finish our mission in the zone, we're all going to have to sacrifice a bit more until then."

"What I said was uncalled for, Captain and I retract it and apologize," the Security Chief said and wondered if she actually had to ask for relief. She put the thought out of her head with an internal sigh that nearly manifested and tried to organize her thoughts. "Put her where she's needed, Sir," she said finally. "I'll have to just delegate a bit more to the other officers in Security and see what I can come up with. Currently, there's no one that I can put in the position once Parks vacates it."

"Sounds to me like it's an opportunity for someone to rise up," Harvey observed. "After all, most of us wind up inheriting promotions these days before they're due. I seem to recall an eager security deputy once..." his gaze trailed back to the rifles around the room. "For the most part, she turned out all right."

Camila smiled. "Funny, I seem to recall a Security deputy being thrust into the position after the old Chief shot you and turned out to be Consortium. Ask not what your ship can do for you, but what you can do for your ship. As for being alright, well...you're more lenient on me than I am."

Harvey nodded, considering his own hell that he'd recently walked through. "We are our own worst critics and enemies," he stated. "Of course, that never compares with a Lieutenant Commander firing his phaser as his Captain point blank."

"That's not being your own worst enemy," she said, remembering how she had pulled her own phaser on a Chief that she had barely gotten to know. Now it seemed like a century ago with all that had happened before. "That's being a traitor and he deserved what he got."

"I wasn't referring to Del Rosario," Harvey remarked, looking back to Camila and approaching her. "At least not as one's worst enemy. We all keep things private and choose not to let others into what's going on, only to find out we've hurt those around us more than we've hurt ourselves."

"I'm afraid I don't follow, Sir," Camila responded. "I wasn't aware that incident happened, but I can only imagine." Not that she had to with the hell she had went through multiple times since she had been aboard the Black Hawk and still had nightmares about.

He slightly lifted an eyebrow and curled the left side of his lip upward, not in a smile, but in an expression of surrender. Perhaps he wasn't the one that was following her, or maybe it was lingering effects of the concussion messing with his thought processes. "Point is, we're human. Fallible. Liable to make mistakes. Don't punish yourself for them."

Looking around at the rifles again, he added, "You know, in light of recent events, we need to consider some redundancy in our lockers. Power cells lost their charge over a couple years, and that's an extreme scenario, I know, but we should reevaluate what we store in the lockers. I'm not sure what that would look like, but perhaps you or members of your team might have some ideas."

The sneer - or what looked like a sneer - threw her off, but he was a Captain and allowed to do that. She listened to what he said about redundancy and thought for a moment. "We could store portable power generators in areas to charge phasers, Sir," she said after a moment. "They wouldn't be able to charge much at once, but it would be better than needing a phaser and not having one."

He nodded as an act of confirmation, satisfied enough with the concept, and he'd leave her to handle the execution of it all with the appropriate departments. "The drills are an excellent idea, especially since we've been boarded twice in the last thirty days. I'm also willing to entertain thoughts on keeping vital areas secure. I understand in one of the timelines, we lost an entire engineering crew because it was undefended."

"Permission to speak freely, Sir?" the Security Chief asked.

Harvey wasn't in the mood to simply deny such requests. They'd all been through a terrible ordeal, and he'd be remiss if he didn't allow the crew a chance to vent if needed, should this be such a time. "Go ahead."

A veritable barrage of rage wanted to bubble free of her lips but she restrained herself with a titanic effort of will she didn't know she had. "I feel each and every one of our losses and my heart goes out to their families, Harvey," she said softly, but her eyes hardened. "But if you had approved all the Security protocols I've submitted twice, it would have been a lot less to mourn."

The Captain raised an eyebrow. He wasn't present during the second incident, but the first one he recalled all too well. "Need I remind you that with the first event, the ship was lifeless. Protocols couldn't have meant anything when that happened."

"Maybe not, but there has to be a way to fix that," she said and fought against the rising tide again. "Maybe the generators can be placed throughout the ship to activate if the power goes out again. I know that my measures may seem extreme, but damn it, I'm tired of seeing my fellow officers die because I get blocked in trying to do my job by the very person that I'm sworn to protect above all else."

Harvey was not tall by any sense, barely hitting six feet in height. He never slouched, never hunched; yet in this moment he found a way to stand up straighter. Usually when he allowed others to speak freely, he was prepared for cheap shots, low blows and lots and lots of emotion. Her statement had struck him like no others had before. "Death is not something I welcome, and it is certainly something I grew tired of long ago, Lieutenant. And, yes, the measures did seem extreme at the time. We're Starfleet. We're supposed to be boldly going where no one has gone before, acting out of curiosity and applying the scientific method, rather than living in fear of what could be hiding under the rock in front of us."

The Captain sighed, bowing his head and bringing a hand up to rub the bridge of his nose while the other hand moved to plant on his hip. "How many times have Starfleet ships been boarded by alien life who managed to circumvent all security protocols?" he asked rhetorically. "How many of those encounters actually turned out to be peaceful? And of those, likely all of them would have turned sour if they were immediately beamed to the brig? Now, I'll look at those protocols again, so long as you keep in mind our mantra."

"I understand, but on the other side of that credit chit is the number of encounters which have turned out to be hostile," she pointed out. "We can boldly go wherever and I'll follow you there until my dying breath, but I won't at the expense of others. The protocols won't be invoked if they're friendly, but how many friendlies come in firing their weapons and trying to take over the ship? I'm not a paranoid person by nature, but the Gamma Quadrant has taught me that there's more hostile races here than there are friendly ones. Ones that can even turn our own against us."

"The Klingons were hostile until we found ways to work together," Harvey pointed out. "I'm not saying the Dominion or the Guardians are the next Klingons, and we have to remember that we are the intruders here in the Zone. The more militaristic we appear... the more authoritarian... the less we represent the Federation, Starfleet, and the ideals both were founded upon."

"Yes, we did find a way to work together, but our first contacts with them were bloody and violent," the Chief started, then stopped when she felt an intense desire to grab the man by his collar and headbutt him. "You know what, Captain? You're absolutely right. I hereby officially retract any desires to continue on this vein. I did find something of interest in the computer, though."

She went to a console and pulled up information on what looked like schematics for a firearm dubbed the Type-1 Non Lethal Variant Pistol. "According to the specifications, it can fire transponder tags, a quick hardening foam or a energy net to incapacitate enemies."

Harvey couldn't help but wonder if he'd pushed too far. Emotions were running high aboard the ship. One always expected to die either of old age or as result of fighting, but never from unexplained occurrences like quantum filaments spreading the crew out through time. He worried not just that he'd pushed too far, but also that he was starting to alienate his Chief of Security. If an opportunity arose later to dig deeper into the matter, he most certainly would.

He approached the screen to inspect the readout. "Interesting," he said after a moment. "Can you arrange a demonstration?"

"Sure, as soon as it gets made," Camila said in a neutral voice. "It's just schematics right now. I'm not even certain who put these here as it's a relatively new ship. I'll get my armorer on it immediately."

He nodded. "I also understand that the intruders were last seen in the brig prior to the return." The Captain either hadn't received a report on it, or had received it and hadn't read it yet. Given recent events, he hadn't put much stock in keeping abreast of paddwork. "Do you know if their bodies came with us?"

"I'm uncertain if Lieutenant Parks filed that report or not, Sir," the ombre haired woman said as she settled into the numbness that was overtaking her. "However, none of the Brig officers reported seeing anyone in the Brig in this mornings reports."

The Captain nodded once more. He had suspected as much, though he also suspected that the incident would cause him to spend at least another week with the Department of Temporal Investigations upon their return. "Let's see what we can find out. Anyone can find a ship in a nebula, and the fact that we remained undisturbed for so long is a miracle. I'd like to know anything and everything we can if possible."

"I'll look into it, Sir," Camila responded. "However, it's highly unlikely if it occurred in a future time."

He frowned this time, though he wasn't surprised with the response. There were no records to review, just eyewitnesses, and that list was already limited. "Let me know when you can have that device ready for a demonstration," Harvey said, "along with a revision on those protocols. Anything else we need to discuss?"

"I will," she said. "Not that I'm aware of at the moment, Sir."

"Then I'll leave you to it, Lieutenant," Harvey stated. "I hope you find a satisfactory deputy soon." He was sorry that he needed to shift Parks over to Operations, but it's what the ship needed most of all. With that, he turned and departed the armory.

After he left, she grabbed the Type III rifle off the table and yanked the power cell out of it, then began to strip it while cursing in Italian under her breath. If he wanted to go that route and leave the ship and crew unprotected, she would document it and submit a full report to the Task Force Commanding Officers when they made it back from the Zone along with every incident that had occurred as a result of him not implementing her security measures. She stopped and shook her head. "No," she said aloud to the uncaring room. "I'll do exactly what he wants and then see how well he likes the results. If he doesn't, he can do it himself."

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