Breveted

Posted on 18 Oct 2018 @ 4:33pm by Staff Warrant Officer William Griffin & Captain Harvey Geisler

2,530 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Fractured
Location: Main Engineering
Timeline: MD2 || 0930 hours

It had taken longer than Harvey had hoped to ascertain the full status of the crew. From radiation treatments to tending to actual injured, the crew lacked the proper focus to examine the ship and determine its true state of readiness. As a former medical professional, he knew the health of the crew was paramount, even over the health of the ship. After all, what good was the Black Hawk if there was no crew to care for her?

Yet, how well could the ship truly be cared for if her Chief Engineer was missing? Lieutenant Hawthorn was among those unaccounted for when the crew was reunited. Nearly forty members of the crew had been lost since entering the zone, and the events in the nebula had practically wiped out the chain of command for both the Engineering and Operations departments. One would have expected to choose Lieutenant Junior Grade Kemm, the one who came up with the nucleonic particle theory that saved them all. Had the Kelpian had the proper leadership experience, the Captain certainly would have considered it.

No, with the engineering crew in disarray, he needed a proven leader, one who could organize and mobilize, to pull the team back together. Harvey stood in engineering, watching the operating warp core pulsate with energy. He listened to it carefully, as if he were listening for its thoughts on its next master. The Captain ultimately decided that the smooth rhythm accounted for enough solace to confirm his feelings.

The Captain tapped his badge. "Captain Geisler to Warrant Officer Griffin. Report to Engineering."

After assisting with putting the ship back together into one timezone, Griffin had gone back to his quarters to catch up on some much-needed rest, have a shower and eat. A few hours later found him back in the maintenance hangar. He was short staffed, many of his people were injured, sick or resting, but most of the fighters were in reasonable condition, anyway. He looked up from the eps junction he had been working on and tapped his comm badge. "On my way, Captain."

There wasn't a huge distance to travel between the fighter maintenance hangar and main engineering, so it only took Griffin a few minutes to make the journey. The first thing he noticed was the lack of Chief Engineer, he had been saddened to hear that the man he had just began to call a friend had somehow vanished in the incident. Accidents happened in Starfleet and death was part of the job, but to simply vanish into time seemed sadly pointless.

Griffin spotted the captain standing by the island and made his way over. "You wanted to see me, Cap'n?"

Harvey, still focused on the warp core, turned at the sound of the voice to see the Warrant Officer standing there. "Mister Griffin, thank you for coming. I need to speak with you for a moment." He gestured that the man follow him to the now-vacant Chief Engineer's office.

Uh-oh was the first thought that popped into his mind, he wondered if one of the officers he'd upset earlier (or was it later... or had it even happened? Time stuff was the worst!) had gotten back to Harvey, but then why in Engineering and why not the XO? All of this passed in and out of his brain in the time it took to say "Aye, sir." He followed the captain into the chief's office.

Harvey entered the office first, having to enter in an override code to gain entry. He did his best to ignore Hawthorn's belongings for now, but he couldn't help but ignore a bottle of some sort of liquid peeking out from a drawer. "Seems like you fared pretty well during the incident," Harvey stated, not really knowing what else to describe whatever level of hell everyone had visited recently. Before waiting for an answer, he moved over to the desk to get a closer look at the bottle.

Griffin saw Harvey trying not to look around the office at all Reggie's random stuff and found himself doing the same thing. He spotted the bottle at the same time the captain did and couldn't help but grin, wondering if it was another bottle of that antimatter bourbon the man had made.

"I did my best, sir." He grumbled his reply, "all I did was follow instructions."

Having registered the other man's response, the Captain pulled the cork out of the bottle. He brought it underneath his nose only to sharply recoil his head backward instantly. It was obviously alcohol, of some form, but its strength was unlike anything Harvey had ever experienced. "Wow," Harvey muttered, placing the cork back in the bottle and setting it on the desk.

Looking back up to Griffin, Harvey recomposed himself and continued, "Follow instructions?" he asked.

Griffin stifled a grin at the captain's response to the bourbon. He remembered drinking the stuff with Reggie, how it had burned all the way down, and understood the natural response perfectly. It took him a second to settle his mind back to the present. "Yes sir," he began to clarify, "someone way smarter than me left an encoded message in the antimatter explainin' how to build the nucleonic particle generator, I just build the thing an' turned it on, sir."

Harvey nodded, folding his arms in front of him. "I'd honestly classify it as luck myself," he mused. When he reviewed the same plans, it had come with a disclaimer that the idea could not work out, leaving everyone stranded to fend for themselves. "Course, I would have loved to have seen what Hawthorn would have come up with. Do you consider yourself to be imaginative, Mister Griffin?"

Griffin was beginning to get an inkling where this particular conversation was headed and he didn't know how to feel about what he suspected was happening. "Imaginative?" He mused, his bass voice grumbling in his chest, "I guess I can be when the need arises, sir. Not like Lieutenant Hawthorn, I wouldn't ever've thought of distilling bourbon through a used warp injector casing," he nodded at the bottle on the desk, "but I'm a Starfleet engineer, sir, creativity's a requirement."

The Captain grunted, glancing down for a moment at the now-named liquid. What his officers did in their spare time wasn't his concern, but if the ship's vital innards were being abused in the process then he might have to look into it. At least the ship was still in one piece. "You may have heard the scuttlebutt. Lieutenant Hawthorn seems to have joined Lieutenant T'Pai in whatever void is claiming my Chief Engineers."

"I'd heard, yes sir," Griffin replied, frowning down at the bottle as if it was to blame for the vanishing and wondering at how casually the Captain seemed to be taking the disappearance, and as far as he was concerned, probable death of Reggie Hawthorn. The captain was, he suspected, being professional about it. Griffin took his cue from that, refocusing on the CO and making an effort to wipe the frown from his face. "He'll be hard to replace, sir. There's not many men came out of that mold."

Another grunt came from the Captain. "There's more than just a broken mold here, Mister Griffin. We're stuck behind the zone's barrier without any chance of resupply or replacements. Engineering took a massive hit between the incident and then the intruders who gunned down eight engineers on their own. If we're going to keep going, and we have no choice but to, we've got to stabilize the department quickly."

Griffin did frown then, "I'm aware, sir." He grumbled at the Captain, deciding in the moment to take the initiative and make the point he guessed the Captain was leading up to. "Engineering's a mess and we're in a bind, but there're still good people down here. I'm guessing you're gonna ask me to take the lead, and if that's the plan then I'll give it all that I got." He paused for breath, trying to gauge the captain's reaction. "There's no reason we can't get done what needs to be done, Cap'n."

Instead of a grunt, the Captain offered a smile. He hadn't yet made the offer, but seeing how the Warrant Officer predicted where Harvey was going, he knew he was making the right choice. "Good," he declared. "The department needs leadership experience above all, which is certainly among your many qualifications. If it helps, just think of the 'Hawk as a large fighter."

"A very large fighter," Griffin grumbled deeply, shaking his head, his put-on attempt at consternation somewhat ruined by the smile on his face. It didn't last long as he refocused on the task at hand. "About leadership, sir. I know there's precedence, but it ain't the norm to have an enlisted man in charge of a department. I'm guessing that I have authority over all the officers in the department, but there might be some friction. Do I have permission to bust heads," he paused, grinning for a moment, "so-to-speak, to snap 'em into line if I have to? I wouldn't wanna be up on charge for insubordination 'cause I told a junior lieutenant to get their head out of their ass."

"As a senior officer, you'll have my support, as well as the XO's," Harvey answered. "I'm not interested in micromanagement, so how you run the department is up to you. Just make sure tasks get done, and you keep the complaints to a minimum, you won't have to worry too much. As for the rank, it is possible for a Warrant to have officers under his command. If it helps though, add this to your collar." With a smooth motion, Harvey produced a small box containing a second hollow pip and tossed it at the other man.

Looking down at the little box with the black hollow pip in it, Griffin was stunned. He hadn't expected anything that had happened in the last few minutes. First being given command of an entire department, something most Warrant Officers could only dream of, and then being promoted, too? He wondered for a moment what deity he had inadvertently pleased to be so lucky. "Well, I'll be..." He looked up at the Captain and caught himself, refocusing on what he should have been doing. "Thank you, Cap'n. For your trust, and for this." He brandished the box and hesitated for a moment... searching for words. "Whatever I did to earn all this, I'll be damned sure to keep doin' it, sir, you ain't gonna be disappointed."

Harvey smiled at the man's confidence. "Excellent, Staff Warrant Officer." Harvey's smile faded once he realized how clumsy that felt rolling off the tongue. "Though, if it's all the same to you, I'll stick to either Chief or Mister Griffin. Now, I know the 325th's going to take a hit with losing you. I don't suppose you have a recommendation on your replacement?"

Griffin frowned for a moment, the twin realizations not only that he was going to have to leave his people in the 325th fighter wing and of the awesome responsibility he'd just been handed were beginning to shake him. Daunting was the word that fit most aptly. The Chief pushed the butterflies and the nerves away to focus on the question at hand, he didn't have to think hard about who he would choose to replace him, a name came to him almost immediately, "Chief Petty Officer Slyvia Remara. She's crew chief of bay four and my defacto number two. She's the one I call on to run things when I'm not around." He explained, "she knows the job and I trust her."

The smile Harvey wore widened as the man took pleasure in the fact that he too was considering Chief Remara for the position. "Excellent," he confirmed. "Then the 325th remains in good hands. I trust this may actually yield to a new and fruitful relationship between engineering and the squadron."

"That'll happen for sure, sir." Griffin grinned at the CO, "though my boys and girls might be a bit upset that Engineering's stolen me away."

"Given time, I'm sure they'll come to understand," the Captain attempted to assure the new Chief Engineer. "Who knows? Either they'll get you back someday, or you'll have a whole new career in front of you."

"They'll get over it, sir." Griffin smiled at the Captain, "as for the future, there's not an engineer in Starfleet that doesn't dream of being a chief engineer some day. It doesn't happen to many enlisted men and I'm gonna grab it with both hands."

Harvey chuckled as he gave a final nod. "I'll send someone to tend to Hawthorn's effects." He paused and considered the fact that the personnel storage lockers were about to be a bit fuller than normal. Such was the tragedy of venturing into the final frontier. "In the meantime, the first priority needs to be assessing the ship. We took damage, and we're still flying at warp. Repair options are limited, but we need to lick our wounds at some point."

Griffin filed the office and Hawthorn's effects squarely into the 'things to think about later' box in his mind. Priority one, now that it was his wheelhouse, was to get the Black Hawk a checkup, stem to stern. "We'll start with a structural integrity review, then primary tactical and propulsion systems, and work our way down from there." He told the captain, "I'll need ops to inventory all the spare parts and resources we got aboard, gotta know what's in the medicine cabinet."

"And that one's next on the list," Harvey stated. "Engineering wasn't the only department to lose an entire command structure. As soon as that one's sorted out, I'll have Operations work closely with Engineering to get that all sorted."

Griffin felt a pang of sympathy for Harvey, the man had a lot of his plate and, Griffin imagined, an endless list of things to do. Yet he seemed to be handling it with ease and grace, even though the engineer was certain that was far from the truth. He resisted the urge to reach out and put a hand on the CO's shoulder, all he could do instead was to deliver his absolute maximum effort without reservation. "I'll get started right away, captain. We'll get the 'Hawk squared away." Was all he could offer, as gruffly as always.

"Then I'll leave you to it, Staff Warrant Officer," Harvey said with a nod, using the man's new rank for the first time. "If you can get me an update by the end of the day, I'd appreciate it. If there's nothing more, Chief, I'll see you in a while."

"Thank you, sir. I'll get it to you," Griffin grumbled, and then Harvey was gone, leaving the large engineer standing in his office feeling like he'd just been beaten by a whirlwind. It took him a minute, but then he stepped out into engineering. "All right, everyone, gather round!" He boomed...

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