Kellen's Arrival, Part I
Posted on Wed Mar 26th, 2014 @ 8:23pm by
Mission:
New Frontier
Location: Starbase 80, Deck 70
Timeline: D3, 1300
Several dozen Operations personnel had boarded Sovereign-class USS Bellerophon at the final waypoint, and now they filed up one of the Deck 70 gangways, not far ahead of Eliana Masters. There had been too much make-ready activity during the three hours between moorings for any of the column's officers to encounter her, prepared as they must be to integrate with the eighty-two-member Advance Relational Supply Unit emplaced aboard Starbase 80 two weeks earlier. The new group represented the second part of the second wave of rotation assignees, with several more to arrive during the coming weeks; once the total number was large enough to support a full-time operational installation unit, the ARSU would be withdrawn.
At the head of the column came permanent COO Lieutenant Commander Kellen, along with adjutant lieutenants Tana and Riis. They were followed by fewer than a dozen junior lieutenants and ensigns. A couple dozen chiefs and their enlisted charges brought up the rear. It made for an animated group, but as they entered the gate, most of them quieted down long enough to get a good look around at the boarding area's wide and relatively tranquil concourse. There were not so many lights on as there would be under ordinary circumstances, nor so many transient personnel.
They were intercepted at the gate by the acting Officer of the Deck, as well as a few advance technical specialists on reserve liaison officer duty. Here they were signed in. Lieutenant Riis promptly resorted the Operations personnel from a handful of crew members arriving to join other base departments. A warrant officer from the 405th whisked Masters away. Meanwhile Kellen and Tana were greeted by none other than Lieutenant Solene Wyclef, thirty-three-year-old head of the ARSU. She had journeyed down from Operations Center to greet and brief them personally.
The two officers had spoken more than once during the preceding week, and Wyclef did not need to explain herself or how important her work was to the recovery of the starbase. ARSU had come in behind the initial Marine Expeditionary Unit, and was largely responsible for organizing the auxiliary power management and resupply effort that had made everything happening now go as smoothly as possible. Wyclef worked very close to the tip of the spear, and thus would be responsible for bringing Kellen and his several section leaders up to date on the conditions of the base they stood to inherit. That made her for at least the next several days his essential focal point officer.
“I'm sure we will all be very grateful for your help, Wyclef,” said Kellen, with some gravity. While advance units like ARSU specialized in managing critical situations such as the one in which 80 now found herself, even specialized Operations crew members habitually thought of themselves as the men and women behind the curtain, and not always closely considered. A sober word of praise could go a certain distance.
“Sir,” the lieutenant responded politely, her handshake appropriately supportive. She was as tall as him, cocoa-complected, and with that enviable firmness of good genes and uncomplicated motives. Her accent was difficult to place; she probably came from a colony.
At the entrance to a cargo transporter bay on the other side of the concourse, a supply chief was supervising a handful of crewmen in the organization of any number of hard-shell cases for delivery. They were equipped with a couple of repulsorlift sleds, but judging by the amount of materiel they had to manage, there were not quite so many Operations personnel yet as could readily be spared.
“We must be pulling you away from something more important,” Kellen observed, as Wyclef shook hands with Lieutenant Tana, a male Bajoran about her own age.
“Not at all,” Wyclef replied. “We had a few volunteers, but I haven't had occasion to come this far down in several days. It's good to get a break, especially now, with the number of transports coming in. There's an APM terminal not far from here, sir – a short-cut. I'll brief you on the way.”
Kellen nodded, then paused as two of the senior-most NCOs, both men around forty, appeared out of the confusion of bodies. One was human, pale and mostly bald, a quiet-eyed New Zealander; the other a big and burly Trill, stubborn, dark-haired.
“Ah,” said Kellen. “Lieutenant, here's Dick Daphne, senior supply management – he'll be acting chop, once your lot moves out – and Palkh, the new Maintenance Section leader. Fellows, this is Wyclef from good old ARSU. I guess you'll be seeing a lot of each other. Oh – and here is Lieutenant Riis. She'll be an AOO like Tana, here.”
They were joined by the Andorian lieutenant, attractive, ambitious and usually severe.
“Gentlemen, Lieutenant,” said Wyclef politely, to similarly murmured responses. “I know you want to get your sailors billeted. The personnel terminal is just there. Maintenance is just beginning work on the mess decks now, so we're keeping everyone near their own department centers, which means you'll want to head up to Deck 13. The day shift Officer of the Deck ought to be Chief Th'Veren, your Transport senior, unless Logistics has drawn him off. Lead lieutenant is Choi, the CIC. I know he'll need to meet you as soon as possible, Dick. They'll get you squared away with the Administration Section up there, Riis – for now that's Losobol and Juergessen, who'll both fall under your COC. Their section wing is up on 12. It's a warren up there, just to warn you. I brought you a mate for guidance. She's right over there.”
“All right, I'll see to it,” Riis acknowledged, and with a nod of confirmation to the other officers, she excused herself to oversee the column's safe situation upstairs.
Daphne and Palkh might have gone, too, but Kellen held them aside; as two of the most experienced E-8s in the new department – at least for the present – they would need to hear everything Wyclef could tell them, and as soon as possible. The success of Operations, and Starbase 80 generally, would be determined in large measure by how quickly the senior NCOs in particular could make their sections and crew members efficient. Wyclef would appreciate this, as ARSU was not designed for contingency management, and there were a number of other installations in the sector competing for the fleet's attention in the aftermath of the Kzinti conflict.
“Right, then,” Wyclef said briskly. “If you'll follow me to the APM hub, sir. Gentlemen. It's just this way.”
Large installations with mixed military and civilian populations required comprehensive mass-transit systems, and Starbase 80 was no exception. Under ordinary operational conditions, the personnel transporters would have sufficed to take them upstairs; at the moment, however, there were only a limited number of transporter chiefs available, and priority was being given to those personnel working from the station's normally scheduled Plan for the Day. While the arrival of Bellerophon had certainly been expected, and Kellen, as a senior staff officer, might easily have commandeered the nearest pad for his own use, he also understood the necessity of following Wyclef's lead, and motioned the other three to follow. There would be plenty of opportunity to rely on real short-cuts once things were up and running normally, and once his status had been accepted and approved by the no-doubt harried men and women of ARSU's Quartermaster section.
It was also an opportunity to get a good long look at the base, which was surely what Wyclef had intended. Kellen, a natural bureaucrat who liked to keep abreast of everything, could appreciate that, as well as the lieutenant's seeming lack of officiousness in the face of a more senior officer's arrival.
As they headed for the transport hub, he noted again that this, the enormous Deck 70 main concourse, was remarkably subdued. Only a few dozen personnel were working here, and most were uniformed in mustard yellow, just like them, though some were armed security personnel. The rest appeared either to be support technicians attached to the 405th Tactical Airlift Group or, in a few cases, enlisted specialists from the Logistics and Materials Department. There were very few commissioned officers around, it seemed. At the moment, Kellen himself might be the senior-most officer on the deck.
“Would you like me to brief you now, sir?” Wyclef offered, catching his curious expression.
“Why not,” replied Kellen approvingly. “I understand the base DFO was actually aboard our transport, so I won't bother to ask who's in charge around here. I say, where are we storing Flight Ops at the moment, Wyclef? You mentioned departmental hubs – they warned us that much of the place was well and duly stripped, and that the unrestricted lines had caught it worst of all.”
“Aye, sir, most of their support is working out of 14 for the time being,” Wyclef agreed. She walked fairly quickly, but so did the others, and none of them was weighed down by many personal effects. “Right below us. Transport auxiliaries may actually be remanded from Bellerophon, along with those from another Sovereign-class, coming in with CO and some Command staff. Right now it's DFO, CLO and CMC all the way down the line. CSO is inbound. MEU is down to twenty P. We should be up to approximately two hundred security personnel within the next seventy-two hours – probably less.”
“Do they make the largest company after us?” Kellen asked innocently, refastening his uniform jacket. He knew that his own group put the departmental complement up to around three hundred officers and enlisted, with something over four hundred by the end of tomorrow.
“Both Flight and Logistics are far outpacing station Ops, actually,” Wyclef replied, with a shake of her head. “They are running the unit a bit ragged, sir, I can tell you, and if Bellerophon is putting in long enough for auxiliary remanding, I'm thinking that you might want to put in a small reserve request yourself. It wasn't so much the Kzinti, really, as the original fleet withdrawal. We talked about that. As I mentioned already, we've only just started restoration and resupply on the mess decks. Some sections are actually bivouacking on the Promenade for now – it was CAC HQ for the Marines and is still in good order, relatively. EV is solid up there. You just need a good Maintenance Section, most of all. Berthing, food services, sanitation.”
“We brought thirty chiefs and specialists with us, sir,” said Palkh. “We'll have a hundred permanents by midwatch tomorrow, or thereabouts. Who's the ARSU deckplate leader? That still Carmarthen?”
“It is,” Wyclef confirmed.
“I won't ask about Admin,” said Kellen. “What about Services?”
Wyclef frowned a little. “Station Engineering is running pretty light. Too light. There are a few times as many from L-M out here as there are actual deck monkeys, and it's only a senior lieutenant running the show. They say he's on permanent rotation. I guess he must be, but I don't really get it. He's young. Vulcan, I guess, but young. Sharper's his name. Don't ask me.”
“Interesting,” Kellen said, sharing a look with Tana and the chiefs. “Well, there's always something going on, isn't there. It just wouldn't be Starfleet without a googly or three.”
“He isn't bad,” Wyclef amended, noticing their looks, “as they go – the most important reactors are online – but he's fairly understaffed, and we keep pulling off what few dedicated Systems personnel we have to help him. I think Logistics must be absolutely swamped. All they have time to talk about are shuttles and docking facilities. You'll probably want to meet with Sharper about staffing sooner than later, sir. It might be a second, third order of business. If I may say so.”
“Naturally,” said Kellen lightly. He gave Tana another look – this time to make a note. “We'll do it today. Who's the CIC again, Wyclef? Choi, I think you said?”
She nodded, perhaps a little pleased that he was paying attention. “That's right, Choi, sir.”
They arrived at the large mass-transport terminal. There were actually four mag-lev lines available here, though only the two nearest the concourse were in use, and only one APM was in the station. Here as everywhere else there were only the barest number of personnel around, and out of them only one, a Transport Services Specialist, was actually assigned to work there: a crewman with skin two or three shades darker than Wyclef's. She could not have been much more than eighteen, and when she realized who they were, she drew herself up very erect, looking almost alarmed.
“Good afternoon, Crewman,” said Kellen lightly, seized by his usual desire to take his own people off their guard a bit. He offered a hand. “Andy Kellen, Chief Operations Officer. I guess you're working for me.”
“Sir, aye sir,” said the girl. She looked at the others. All of them but Wyclef had nearly twenty years of experience in Starfleet, and were looking at her. “Chief. Chief. Hello again, ma'am. Sir.”
“We'd like to take a ride in one of these,” said Kellen, indicating the lone APM waiting in the station. There was no specialist manning it, they could see. “I take it this one must be off duty. Can we expect the functioning version soon?”
“Oh – aye, sir,” she answered, resting her hand on her console. “It'll just be a moment – it's already been called. We had a patrol unit, sir. Welcome to New Frontier, sir.”
“Thank you kindly,” Kellen said, with the same gravity. To Wyclef he said, “Why do they call it that again? I must say, I rather liked the old name – and this system is quite a settled one, isn't it?”
“It is, aye, sir,” Wyclef agreed. “As for that, I am only a poor ARSU lieutenant, and shuffled around at random. I can't tell you very much about OBSCOM's vision for Starbase 80. To us, this is just one more battered starbase they asked us to keep from falling out of orbit. I'll probably forget about her the day I leave.”
“Is this one any worse than others you've worked on, Wyclef?” asked Tana.
She thought it over.
“There may be a little more hair to clean out of the drains,” she observed dryly, with the barest shadow of a smile.
