Ground work

Posted on Fri Jul 31st, 2020 @ 8:49pm by Lieutenant Commander Peter Carter Jr & Captain Mikoto Misaka
Edited on on Sat Sep 19th, 2020 @ 7:00pm

2,018 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Cleaning Up

Carter and what seemed like a third of the ships company were on the surface stripping the remains of the Enterprise D. So far they were 3 days into the work and they hadn't found anything out of the ordinary. Carter, McDowell, th'Tezh and the team leaders were in the operations tent finishing up a briefing, when Pete's comm badge chirped. =A= Ermania to Carter =A=

"Okay folks, so far so good, let's try and keep it this way. Dismissed." Pete said breaking the meeting up. After the tent cleared out a little. =A= Carter here…

"Lieutenant, the Captain said you wanted to know when the civilian personnel arrived in the system. They came into sensor range about 5 minutes ago, and should be in orbit in shortly." Pete didn't recognize the voice, on the other end, but he always was lousy with names.

"Understood, have their manager meet me here, and we'll go from there."

"Roger that Lieutenant. Hold it, the Captain is asking for an update." The voice said.

"Tell her slow, but progressing. So far nothing we hadn't anticipated. We should have our first loads of recovered parts coming aboard shortly. Anything else?" Pete asked, Misaka seemed to be checking in on him every other hour, annoying but understandable.

"No Lieutenant. Ermania out. =A=

"Still slow huh…" Mikoto huffed as she sat behind her desk in the Ermianas ready room. Since arriving at the planet, she had been caught up in plenty of paperwork. The occasional visit to the planet had been nice, she herself had been down to the Enterprise several times now.

"Bridge to Captain Misaka. The Civilian contractors are here. They're meeting with Lieutenant Carter on the surface" the voice through her comm badge reported. Tapping it she replied. "Understood. I'll join them". Standing up she left the paperwork behind and stepped into the turbolift en route to the transporter room.

Carter was standing in the middle of their makeshift compound just watching things happen when he saw the Captain transport down. "Morning ma'am."

Mikoto smiled as she stepped into the tent. “Morning Lieutenant” she said in response. “I thought that I’d drop by and meet this new civilian contractor with you. It's best that we brief him together since security needs to be upheld throughout this operation” she explained simply.

Pete gestured towards the operations tent and the both headed inside. "Understood ma'am. You'll need this." He said, handing her a hard hat. "By the way, I know things are progressing at a snail's pace, but there is a reason for that, two actually. I couldn't calculate how fast things should be moving, because neither of us knew how many civilians were going to be here. So I calculated without them. The other reason is we've truthfully only been at this since yesterday morning."

Before Pete finished his thought the tent flap opened and in walked a woman who he'd guess to be in her late 30's. She was dressed in a three quarter length sleeved greenish grey jumpsuit. "I was told I could find a Pete Carter in here." As she turned to close the flap Pete caught the hard to miss spots of a Trill.

"That'd be me. And to whom do I have the pleasure …." Pete didn't finish his question before she cut him off.

The woman walked in proudly. “I’m Chelia” the Trill woman said. “I’m here on a Civilian Contract from Starfleet to assist in the salvage of this vessel” she explained simply. “Who is the officer in charge of this place?” she asked. Her speech was a little rough, she was obviously not trained to the same standards as the Starfleet crew.

“That would be me,” Mikoto said stepping forward. “I’m Captain Mikoto Misaka of the Federation Starship Ermiana” she held out a hand. “Welcome to Veridian Three Chelia”.

The Trill woman nodded as she shook the Captains hand. “I understand why you’re here. This is after all your ship, and we know that there’s stuff on this ship you don’t want touching”

Carter could feel a knot forming in his chest and she'd only been here two minutes. "Correct. Anything special will be handled by our people, and I have two dedicated teams for that." Pete said as he half sat down on a table. "For security reasons, I'll be diving up your people amongst our teams that are working in other areas. Now for my own edification, just how many people did you bring?"

“We’ve got a team of just over a hundred engineers, as well as three salvage ships in orbit” Chelia explained to him simply. “It's not as many as I’d like to have rounded up, but they’re all hard workers”

Pete had to try hard to stifle his surprise, this would increase his force by two thirds. He'd be able to split his teams in half to double the working teams. "I have no doubt of that. As you can see we've set up a camp here so we don't have to be transporting people constantly. I hope you were prepared for such a situation?"

“We’ve seen worse,” Chelia said. “Although, we’re glad to be working on something which is relatively intact” she explained to him. “We have our own tools too, so there’s no need to train us in those fancy Starfleet tools. Sometimes a good old hammer and crow bar will do the same job”

"Understood." Pete thought to himself, 'and I'm old school at times'. "Just so you know up front, we are reserving rights to certain equipment and parts. Anything that's beyond repair, or what we don't need is all yours. Is that an accurate statement Captain?"

Mikoto nodded. “Indeed. Plus, your crew will not be allowed near any of the Starfleet issue equipment. The last thing we need is for this ship's weapons or sensor equipment to go missing” she explained simply. “Lieutenant Carter has a full list of sensitive areas and equipment we don’t want civilians near. This ship was the flagship, there’s plenty of technology on here that was installed prior to its destruction that was experimental and powerful. We can’t have any of that falling into the hands of the Romulans, or The Dominion”.

Pete had to bite his tongue, he'd said as much without going into detail. "So if you'll the first hundred people either transport or shuttle down, and we'll get your part of the camp set up. We can start assigning them to teams tomorrow morning."

“That we can do,” Chelia said simply. She tapped the badge on her chest. “This is Chelia. Prepare to start bringing people down. As soon as I’m done here we’ll be working to a schedule from Ermiana's Chief Engineer”. She then turned and looked at Pete. “Well then Pete, it seems that we’re working under you now. You’ll have to highlight where you want us, and what you want us doing” she glanced over at Mikoto. “We don’t want to break anything that Starfleet loves so much…”

Pete just nodded and handed her a hard hat. He stepped over to a table with a built in display. Over the next hour he explained everything they had completed the day before and what they had in mind. Chelia quickly grasped what was going on. "The biggest problem is she's sunk into the ground at an odd angle. So safety harnesses are a must or you'll find yourself tumbling down a corridor. We already had that happen once. Luckily they landed on somebody's mattress."

A smirk emerged on Chelia’s face. “Well, considering most of this ship is the right way up. They must have been in a damaged state. Either that or they really really wanted something else” she explained. “But, don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll be fine."

Carter glanced over at his Captain, apparently the truth about the Enterprise's end wasn't common knowledge, and for every reason he could think of it'd stay that way. "Well, that covers it from my end. If there's nothing else. I'll let you get your people settled in and what not." Cehlia just nodded. "Captain, you said something about wanting to have a better look at their bridge. We could head there now if you like." In truth Pete just wanted to get her outside.

“I’ll be heading there now,” Mikoto said she gave a nod to Chelia as she turned on a heel. She picked up on his intentions, it wasn’t obvious to most people but she did pick it up. “Lets go” she said. “Miss Chelia, it was a pleasure to meet you."

The three exited the tent, Chelia went one direction, Carter and the captain the other. They headed for a parked Argo nearby and as they climbed in Pete asked. "Permission to ask you a frank question ma'am?"

“I had a feeling you wanted to,” Mikoto replied as she crossed her arms. “I’m guessing something about these civilian contractors,” she asked.

"Not exactly." Pete said as they sped off towards the saucer section which was about a half mile from the camp, so they had a couple of minutes. "I'm sorry for the way this is going to come out. I don't pay much attention to FNS, unless it's the sports scores, and the Ferginar stock report. When the big D went down last week, I don't remember hearing much about it, but just what were the civilians told? I may or may not have looked at a security report or two that I shouldn't have, but she went down trying to stop some madman from destroying half of this sector if I remember right."

“Not an awful lot,” Mikoto said. “The news of the Enterprise being destroyed was only a brief headline news. It seems that Starfleet didn’t want to focus on it. It was announced, but luckily no one was killed so it didn’t make breaking news. They’re due to launch a new Starship Enterprise within the year, however even I don’t know all those details” Mikoto paused as she looked across at the wreck of the ship. “It seems as if they are watching what they broadcast, especially with recent threats and escalations in the region”

"That explains a hell of a lot." Pete said, letting out a deep sigh as they pulled up to the edge of the 10 mile long scar the saucer section created. "Thank you Captain. What Chelia said back there really threw me, and I wasn't going to sleep tonight otherwise. And I've got too much work to do for that."

“I think she’s just being honest. She seems a rather down to Earth person…” she looked at the surroundings “No pun intended…” she paused losing her train of thought for a moment. “But I think she’ll be a valuable asset”

"Initially I would have argued with you, but I think you're going to be right." Pete said getting out of the Argo. "I don't think you actually wanted to see their bridge did you?" He said pulling a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, the sun bouncing off the hull was almost blinding him.

Mikoto smiled. “Oh I don’t know...” she replied. “I know it's pretty much the same as ours, however it's something that I would like to say I stepped upon.” she explained. “Just a quick visit is all I need”

Suddenly Mikotos comm badge chirped. She tapped it quickly.
=A= Misaka here =A=

"Captain, we've got a problem. Lieutenant McDowell has been badly injured whilst preparing one of the runabout cargo modules. It seems as if they had some technical problems."

Mikoto sighed. They needed their pilot. "I'm beaming back up to deal with it." She replied. She gave the chief engineer a nod before heading back towards the designated beam up site.

Posting by

Captain Mikoto Misaka
Commanding Officer

Lieutenant Peter Carter Jr
Chief Engineer

Chelia
Civilian Salvage Contractor

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