Repairs

Posted on Tue Dec 19th, 2023 @ 6:42pm by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Foster & Lieutenant Katherine "Kit" Vulpes

2,481 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Raising the Mast
Location: Chief Science Officer's Office
Timeline: Before launch

Matt Foster opened the crate filled with his office things. He had come to the office as soon as he received the message from Ops that it had been delivered. He pulled out a stack of books and set them on his desk. He would sort them later. Next, he took out a number of pictures. There was a picture of him with his family, taken a few years ago during a trip to Nantucket. He reminisced for a moment. It had been a great trip, with his normally dour older brother loosening up and setting aside his political career for the week.

Another picture showed Matt the day after his nose had been broken while sailing through a weather control storm in the middle of the Pacific. His 16 year old face grinned out at him, the bridge of his nose covered with a white bandage, and the rest of his face battered and bruised. He rubbed a finger along his crooked nose. He had been furling a sail on the foremast when the boom had broken loose and smacked him hard across his nose. They’d been more than a week's sailing from the nearest port, and he'd insisted that they continue, leaving him imperfectly healed.

He carefully removed a large framed hologram. It showed a humpback whale and her half-grown calf breaching at the same time. Gracie and her first calf, Harpo. The image was a gift from the Taylor Institute, one of the originals taken by Gillian Taylor herself. He hung it on the wall above the couch.

Now, he took a pair of wooden cases from the crate. The first held a model of the Angelica, the boat he been crewing when he broke his nose. He placed it on one of the shelves behind his desk. The other box contained his grandfather's sextant, a U.S. Navy Mark II that had been made in 1942. With it was a mechanical chronometer of the same vintage. The case had been built to act as a display base for the nautical instruments. He set them up on a different shelf.

As he sat to go through the books, he noticed that the room felt too warm and a little bit muggy. "Computer, set temperature to 22° C and 40% relative humidity," he said.

"Confirmed," the computer replied.

Matt went back to the books. After a few minutes, he realized that the room hadn't gotten any cooler or drier.

"Computer, what is the temperature and humidity in this room?"

"Temperature is 22.3° C. Humidity is 39.72%."

"That can't be right," Matt muttered. He grabbed his tricorder and scanned the room. The temperature was 39.6° C and humidity was 89%. "What the hell?"

"Computer, run a diagnosis of the environment controls for this room."

"Environment controls are functioning correctly."

"Great." He tapped his combadge and said, "Foster to Engineering."

Kit ran a hand through her hair. That was the thirteenth complaint that had rolled in within the last hour. First it was the replicator spitting out doughy bread and raw pastries. Then one of the turbolifts jammed between levels, stranding three passengers until a team could climb down and retrieve them. Now it was threatening to snow in the Arboretum. She had just dispatched a team to handle the pending blizzard when the next call came in.

She glanced around, finding that Engineering itself was almost empty. Kit sighed, tapping the com. "Engineering, Vulpes speaking. What's on fire this time?"

"This is the Chief Science Officer," Matt replied. "The environmental controls in my office aren't responding to commands."

Kit sighed. "Let me grab a bag and I'll be right down." She turned again, as if to let someone know where she was going, but the room was still empty. She picked up a tool bag, grabbed one of the equipment belts and slung it over her shoulder, and strode out of Engineering.

A few minutes and a thankfully-uneventful turbolift ride later, she arrived outside the office. The door opened at her approach and she was hit with the wave of heat and humidity, halting her steps just inside the doorway, flinching. "Ye weren't kidding." She set the tools on his desk, side-stepping the open crate. "If it's any consolation, it's not just you. Somebody poured water on all the Mogwai in the ship."

Matt stared at the casually familiar way the engineer had dumped her tool bag onto his desk. The disdainful look she gave his crate made him feel mulish.

"Mogwai?" he asked, resisting the urge to pretend to understand. "What are you talking about, Engineer...?"

"Vulpes," she said with a chuckle. "Kit Vulpes. And sorry. Mogwai are a--a myth, I guess. Relatively harmless creatures, unless you feed them after midnight or get them wet. Once you do, you now have a Gremlin." She pulled several diagnostic tools from her kit. "I'd say it feels like the Arboretum in here, but right now the Arboretum looks like a Christmas postcard."

She stepped to the computer console on the wall, tapping at the LCARS interface, and soon the screen reflected a long scrolling list of code. "How long has it felt like a sauna in here?"

Matt thought about it for a moment.

"I'd say maybe 20 minutes or so," he replied. "Gremlins? I didn't know engineers were so superstitious."

"Since when have you ever known sailors *not* to be suspicious?" Kit gave a wave at the items on his shelf, her fingers tapping away at the LCARS screen. "We're all just space sailors out here. You watch the crew long enough and you pick up on all their little superstitions and good luck charms, the little things they play with in their pocket, the way they spin a ring on their finger or tap the same spot on the doorway every time they pass through." She gave a shrug. "I've got a balmy breeze in your office, snow on another deck, and the replicators throwing out raw food, all on my first day? I'd invite one of those Earth Popes aboard with a bucket of holy water if it meant nobody else gets stranded on a turbolift today."

"Yes, I suppose sailors can be a superstitious lot," Matt replied. "However, Victory is a new ship, and new ships always have issues that need to be addressed. There's no need to ascribe such problems to some supernatural agency when plain old entropy will do just fine."

He went back to the desk and continued sorting the books. As he placed them on the shelf, he said, "When I was first assigned to the Grissom-B, which was also fresh out of Spacedock, people kept hearing strange noises in the port after section of deck 4. The story started to circulate that it was the ghost of Captain Esteban, back from the Mutara Nebula, haunting the ship."

He went back to the crate for more books. He chuckled. "Turns out it was a faulty pressure control valve. It was replaced, and what do you know? The 'ghost' was gone."

Kit smirked at him over her shoulder. "So you're telling me that you're willing to take a banana on that pretty little ferry of yours?" she asked, gesturing with her chin at the shelf of pictures he'd already unpacked.

Matt frowned at the engineer. It took him a moment to decide which part of her comment demanded response more, the insult to , or the banana non sequitur. He chose both.

"Angelica is a schooner, not a ferry," he said at last. "I know it's difficult for a layman to tell the difference. And while I fail to see the relevance, yes, I would take bananas on board her."

Kit smirked. "All boats are called ferries where I hail from." She tapped several times on the scrolling code, highlighting several sections. She brought up a keyboard on the LCARS display and started overwriting the code. "I grew up in a coastal settlement on my colony, Commander. My father felt owning a little ferry was, as he would put it, a waste of time and resources." She gave a shrug. "Doesn't mean there weren't those willing to show a girl a good time out on the water." She crossed the room, snagging a couple of tools from her kit and began removing one of the wall panels.

Matt removed the last of the books from the crate and placed them on the shelf. As he broke down the crate, he said, "I grew up in a coastal town myself. My grandfather taught me how to sail the old-fashioned way, with no modern equipment. I used that sextant and chronometer to navigate a cruise around the world."

"Sounds like you and your grandfather would have fit right in back home," Kit said with a chuckle, though the humor seemed less genuine. "Antiquated technology was the rule. The weather control systems, however, were a..." She shifted the panel down with a clang. "...necessary evil." She knelt, pulling a diagnostic tricorder and beginning a scan. "If I can be honest, I can't say I miss having to pump my bathwater from the well and heat it over the fire."

Matt folded the crate into a flat package which he stored in the small closet in the head adjacent to his office.

"Grandfather was a very modern man in most respects," Matt said. He sat down behind his desk. "He retired from Starfleet as an admiral, after all."

He watched her work for a moment, then looked at the items on his shelf. He rubbed his crooked nose. "I have weather control to thank for the breaking of my nose, in a manner of speaking."

Kit rocked back on her heels, turning. She tilted her head to one side, studying his face--perhaps far longer than was comfortable. "Aye, I see it now." The lilt in her voice was...different, and had an accent that was a bit hard to identify. "Did you run afoul of a Mogwai? Or lose a fight with your pretty little ferry?"

"More the latter, I should think," Matt replied. "We'd stopped in the Galapagos to top off our supplies before heading out into the Pacific. Our next stop was Kiribati, a trip of about 12 days.

"I don't know how things work with your colony's weather control. On Earth, they try to redirect storms when they can, rather than dissipate them. The open stretch of the eastern equatorial Pacific is one of the places storms are directed to expend themselves, and a week into the crossing, we ran into one. Heavy winds and a lot of rain."

Matt reached over and grabbed the model of Angelica. "I was furling the foresail when the boom got loose." He tapped the part on the model as he spoke. "It hit me square in the face. Hurt like hell, but I got that sail furled and properly tied down. To this day, they still call Angelica's foreboom 'The Mattsmacker'."

Kit chuckled as she fastened the panel back onto the bulkhead, crossing back to the office's LCARS screen. "Usually storms were redirected to dump snow on the mountain range. Kept a steady river running through the agricultural quarter that we could strategically flood with a solid melt twice a year. Besides, Pa said the snowcaps made things look postcard-perfect." She gave a hint of a smirk, which only seemed to lift the right side of her lips.

"When I was seven, the system caught a Mogwai and dumped a foot of snow on the settlement instead of the mountain range. My brothers and I thought it would be a bright idea to climb the evergreen in the backyard. I, of course, had to outdo my elder brothers and climb higher in the tree...and I did..." She shrugged. "Slipped on a wet branch. Hit the ground on my left side. Broke my wrist, my arm in three places, my collarbone, four ribs, and nearly shattered my jaw." She gave the unsmiling side of her face a tap. "I had Starfleet Medical remove the plate and screws once I joined the Academy. They couldn't seem to do much for the smile, though."

As she began tapping on the screen, the humidity in the room lessened, though the temperature remained warm. Kit gave a gesture with her chin at one of the clusters of holographs sitting on his shelf. "That your clan?"

"You've got me beat there," Matt replied. "I've only broken one bone at a time. Yes, that's my family. Mother, father, brother, and sister. I'm the middle kid. My brother is older than me. He's a politician representing the Pacific Northwest at the North American Regional Congress. He keeps trying to get me a job in the NA government, as if I didn't already have a career in Starfleet."

There was a flicker of something across Kit's face and she turned back to the LCARS screen, picking her way through the code and making a few more adjustments. "I think that's pretty typical of older brothers. Mine were never that great at listening, either." A few more taps, and a cooler burst of air came from the vents above them.

Matt sighed with relief. "That’s better," he said. "Oh, my brother listens. He's a politician, after all. He just thinks that his opinions are more important." Matt tapped the Nantucket holo. "He wasn't like that during this vacation, which is why we all look so happy."

Kit gave a wry smile. "I understand how that is. Family is...complicated sometimes." She gave a cluck of her tongue, and a few more taps returned the LCARS screen to its default. "That should do it. I get the feeling you aren't the only one this Mogwai will affect, so I should probably get all of this into a report for my staff." Kit stepped to his desk and began to stow away her tools.

"Of course," Matt replied. "I imagine you and your team are quite busy. Thank you for fixing my little problem, Lieutenant."

"Far busier than I hoped to be in my first week at the helm." Kit smirked as she zipped up her tool bag. "Never a good time when the Chief is out making house calls."

"I suppose it's better to work out the kinks while still in Spacedock," Matt said as he returned the model of Angelica to the shelf. "Rather than when on a .ission in deep space."

He adjusted the other items while he said, "I've got to set up meetings with each member of my staff."

Satisfied, he sat at his desk and called up the list of the members of the Science Department. "Good luck with the rest of your repairs."

Kit nodded and gave a little wave as she left the office.

 

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