Minor Glitches

Posted on Fri Jun 17th, 2011 @ 8:48pm by Captain Benjamin Byrne & Lieutenant JG Elizabeth Jones

Mission: Kingdom Come
Location: USS Endeavour - Main Engineering
Timeline: MD07 1035hrs

"Lieutenant," Benjamin called out, as he stepped through one of the many doors into the central engineering hub of the starship, which housed the warp core and was the most common place the ship's new Chief Engineer could be found. "Why is it taking so long to track down all of these minor glitches?"

More repair needs kept flooding in from different departments around the ship. Sensor arrays needed realignment, eps wave guides needed syncing, SIF field generators needed recalibrating, and the gravity on deck 18 section 5 needed adjusting so that the officers assigned there could keep their feet on the ground. Having just completed the next round of assignments to her engineering crew, she silently stood at the situation table fuming how command could allow the ship to leave without tiding up the loose ends. She was thus in her own mind when the captain's voice range out over engineering.

Controlling her emotions more then she wanted to, she responded to the question "sorry about that Sir, replacing the entire EPS grid caused a number of gremlins to pop up in the system. I think we have most of the common ones figured out and should get them all resolved within 48 hours. Is there something specific I can help you with?"

"I could point out quite a few specific items, Lieutenant, but I'll save you that headache for the moment," Benjamin commented, moving over towards her. "For now though, I'll settle for our guests not having to eat rations for fear the replicator will produce sludge for them, and the ability to dispose of the ship's dirty laundry through those same replicator systems."

Liz quickly checked her PADD and frowned "Sorry Sir, it seems someone overlooked the replicator system in the pre-launch checklist. I will make sure to get on it personally and have it fixed within the hour sir" Liz stood at attention awaiting a response from her CO.

"Good, thanks," Benjamin responded. He had the feeling that it had been pretty easy to overlook that system, based on the fact that Engineering was still very busy getting the ship back up to standards even now. "What other little niggles are still persisting?"

"We still have some alignment issues with the shield grid, one of the phaser arrays are still offline, turbolift 4 is having issues going above deck 10, and internal sensors are not functioning appropriately on deck 21 section 10. We also have some power output problems to basic functions on a few decks, including the lights in the main shuttlebay. One of the forward torpedo tubes won't respond to our commands either, and just to make it more interesting section 7 on deck 6 keeps shutting off the gravity so anyone walking through there when it does enters zero g." Liz did not like having such a large to-do list and liked even less telling her Commander of the engineering problems.

"On the plus side, we have been able to increase deuterium and antimatter injection effectiveness by 15% during some repair work we did on the assembly" she said trying to smile.

"Well, at least that's something," Benjamin said, as he reached up to rub his forehead, clearly dismayed at the long list of faults still with his ship. "How long is all of that going to take to repair?"

Calculating the average time it would take to repair all the systems and adding a few hours for anything that might come up "About 20 hours captain to get everything up and running." Liz could sense the captain's uneasiness, "I will do all I can to get the visible system glitches resolved first and then do the others."

"I'd appreciate that," Byrne said, nodding his thanks to the engineer. Whilst he was frustrated with his own position, he knew how trying hers must be - so much work to complete with everyone hassling her whilst regular duties ship-wide were going on, and it all started from day one of her new assignment. Lowering his hand from his forehead, he turned to head back the way he had come. "Keep me informed."

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Captain Benjamin J. Byrne
Commanding Officer

&

Lieutenant JG Elizabeth Jones
Chief Engineer
USS Endeavour NCC-86105