Chapter Seven
“You’re kidding?” she asked of Doc in regards to the tale he was presently spinning. They were eating in the captain’s mess this evening as they had every couple of weeks since the Essex left on her current deployment. Unlike the other mess halls aboard ship, this one was catered by the Essex’s galley staff; the meal being that of a pasta dish with heavy sauce along with a salad with Caesar dressing. Served family style from the center of the banquet table, it appeared to be one of Thorton’s attempts to recreate a family environment among his top officers while light years away from his actual family.
“He’s not,” said the captain. “Trust me.”
“Five steps out the door, then wham, nose dive to the deck face down,” the doctor said. “He’s lucky everyone was at battle stations or else someone might have seen him.”
“And you didn’t even try to stop him?” Yang asked, stifling a snort or two. The engineer could have easily heard Parker’s story in the past, but she appeared to not let any foreknowledge of the outcome enjoy hearing it once more. In Dumont’s experience, Yang cared little for what used to be called spoilers on Earth.
“You usually don’t last long threatening to strap a vice admiral to a bed when you’re fresh out of Starfleet Med, particularly when said vice admiral was in charge of five sectors.”
“So then you dragged him back into sickbay when he was out cold and then strapped him down,” Thorton pointed out with a sly grin, sounding like he had heard this particular tale before as well.
“Fortunately he was in no condition to protest,” Doc replied wryly. “He awoke a few hours later after the battle was over. He wasn’t happy but later conceded if there was anything I needed from him, all I had to do was ask. Cashed that chip in as soon as I could.”
“What was the favor?” asked Dumont.
“Transfer to the starship Faraday once my tour was up. Spent a few years out along the frontier just before the war with the Klingons broke out. It was fun while it lasted.”
“Really?” That border conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire occurred over twenty years ago; Dumont was only in grade school back in Belgium when that happened.
“Once the Klingons started charging across the border, Starfleet pulled the plug on all long-range missions of exploration, recalled anything that had phasers and photon torpedoes installed,” the doctor explained. “By the time we reached the war zone, three sectors had been invaded and the fleets we were supposed to reinforce were flying in our direction and not towards the front with their tails tucked between their legs like my grandad’s Rottweiler. After the armistice was signed, I decided I should probably spend a few years back on Earth before heading out there again.”
“And then you showed up on the Potemkin,” Yang pointed out, “and proceeded to drive anyone you met there completely insane.”
“Oh come on, Cass. Captain Tagawa thought I was a saint; it was the two of you she was worried about. Along with Kelly.”
“I guess I should consider myself lucky that she didn’t have an aversion to fraternization among her crew, Doc,” Thorton remarked. “I know Charlie probably should.”
“So what’d she send you, Sean?” Yang asked eagerly.
“She sent you something over subspace?” Dumont asked in disbelief. She was fully aware that the captain was married and had a daughter, including the fact that the mother of said daughter was also a former shipmate of the other occupants of the captain’s mess. Having little experience with let alone inclination to deal with children, though, made her curious about the prospect of a child sending a message from Earth to a starship hundreds of light years away.
“Charlie didn’t send the message; Kelly did after getting coerced into doing it,” the captain explained. “And it wasn’t much; it was just Charlie showing off a few pictures she drew.”
“You should print them out, Sean,” said the engineer. “Frame and hang them up in your quarters.”
“I don’t exactly have a personal freezer unit to pin them on.”
“Oh come on, put it on those blank walls of yours.” Dumont found herself smirking. She had served under a few captains of various ships during her career, but Thorton was the first one who was married and a father of a child. Even though she had no urge to start one for herself, she had for the past three months found herself entertained by her captain’s family life; it was indeed a rarity in Starfleet. “Make Magda do it if you’re pressed for time. How many kids Charlie’s age get to say that their drawings were hanging on starships hundreds of light years from Earth?”
“At least three more, Cass,” Doc said wryly. “Not that they really were awed by it all that much; mine all grew up and decided Starfleet wasn’t their thing…”
“Your daughters aren’t interested in Starfleet?” asked Dumont. Again, while these dinners were akin to a family meal, the first officer still felt she was the newcomer and her experience the best thing for a new arrival to a family dinner to do was listen and not say much.
Parker took a long drink of his water. “No. Not that I’d oppose them joining, Exec, it’s just that…well, I think the whole following in your parents’ footsteps as a career choice is a tad outdated.”
“And if Charlie decides to join?” Yang asked with a smirk fired towards Thorton.
The captain, however, didn’t reply right away. After sipping his water, he finally stated, “That’s her choice, Cass. Well, it will be, but both her parents being commanders and above might make it harder for her to resist.”
“Or it might make it easier to enlist and become a non-com just to piss you two off, Sean,” quipped Parker.
“So what did Irina end up going with for her major, just out of morbid curiosity?”
“Pre-law from the last message I received. She’s thinking about getting into colonial affairs.”
“Fun,” Thorton remarked. “Needy colonists on one side, micromanaging government officials on the other.”
“What can I say?” the doctor commented. “She gets her desire to put herself through unbearable situations from Natalia. Must be a Russian thing.”
“I guess you must have done something really bad to make her practically shove you down the gantry,” joked Yang before turning her gaze to the captain. “That just leaves figuring out what you did to poor old Kell to get her to agree to let you go play space cowboy for five years.”
“Starship command doesn’t come along all that often,” Thorton explained, adding for most likely the executive officer’s benefit, “I was in command of a frigate out of Starbase 8 where she was the base’s executive officer. Then one day I get a call from Starfleet Command about the Essex during a layover. Kelly almost looked like she was going to slap me in the back of the head for even thinking about turning down the Essex.”
“Would you have turned it down if she wanted you to, sir?” Dumont found herself asked.
The captain did not respond right away, as if the question had never occurred to him and he was only just now mulling a response. For the first officer with no familial ties to consider, there wouldn’t have been any hesitation or second thoughts about accepting command of a starship like the Essex. When the nearly last minute offer to serve as exec was given to Dumont, she was serving in the same position aboard a scout vessel and accepted almost immediately, but then again she had to since by the time the various transports and shuttles got her back to Earth mere hours before the Essex’s launch. Even if she had months to decide, she would have accepted immediately anyway.
“If he did, I would have slapped him in the back of his head,” Yang said with a cheeky smirk. “Then I’d be stuck at ASDB trying to make that damn whale with three nacelles work.”
“That’s assuming you wouldn’t have been fired by now,” Doc said wryly. Dumont knew the engineer’s previous posting was at the Advanced Ship Design Bureau, which as the name implied was responsible for creating new vessels for Starfleet. While Yang hadn’t said much about the last project she had been working on prior to being named chief engineer of the Essex, it was clear that she wasn’t particularly happy about it.
“Considering how I walked in on her not two minutes after she snapped that pesky nacelle off of a display model in front of a commodore, she probably was,” Thorton said with a grin.
“For all you know, I finally got it through his thick skull and he was about to promote me,” Yang said before sticking her tongue out.
“Then you wouldn’t be flying out towards what I like to call ‘The Boonies,’” commented Doc.
By this point, most of the dinner set out before them had been consumed. Thorton held up a glass of water and took a slow sip. “I suppose in regards to your last question, Exec, if my wife believed I shouldn’t have taken this assignment, then I wouldn’t have. Marriage and career are both about trade-offs.”
“And in Starfleet sometimes the trade-offs involve really big ones with warp drive attached to them.” Dumont found herself quietly nodding in agreement. The balance of career and family was always a tricky one and while the first officer didn’t have the latter, she’d been around enough people who did to get a sense of what it was like.
“But, we’re out here now,” Thorton said, “and if the ETA from the bridge was correct, we’ll be entering the frontier tomorrow morning. It’s kind of what we all dreamed of when we signed up, isn’t it? Heading into deep space; setting foot on planets that no one has before.”
“Assuming you passed the physical for landing party duty,” Yang said dryly.
“He did,” Doc remarked and Dumont wondered if that constituted a violation of doctor/patient confidentiality. “Although I think it’s probably wise for him to go on a modified diet.”
“So you keep saying,” Thorton remarked defensively. “Does this at least pass the muster?”
“I would have gone with a tossed green salad with a vinaigrette, but that’s a matter of personal taste. I was referring to other meals. You ask me, too many people these days treat breakfast and lunch as glorified snacks or excuses to splurge depending on what day it is.”
“Not all of us sit at a desk all day during our duty shift, Doc. We’ve got to take what we can when we can.”
“I could always install a tray table on your chair, Sean,” the engineer suggested sarcastically. “Maybe a cup holder for your coffee, too.”
“How about you start with seatbelts, Cass?” Thorton remarked with a grin.
“What about a chair for me?” Dumont found herself asking. While she had yet to experience any issues without having her own seat on the Essex’s bridge, she imagined that it might become problematic in the future. During red alerts, certainly, but even back or leg strain from just standing there during condition green after months in space.
“What am I? An engineer or an interior decorator?” Yang asked with a mischievous grin.
“Definitely not a decorator; I remember that apartment you wrecked in Oakland,” commented Parker wryly. The others, even the captain, shared a light laugh. He placed his napkin on the dining table and stood up. “Well, it was a fun one, but I best be getting back to sickbay before turning in.”
“And I’d better check in on the kiddies in the engine room,” the engineer added as she too rose from her chair. “Can’t have tomorrow’s big to-do ruined by a last second malfunction.”
“Wait until you’re my age, Cass. You won’t even trust the ‘kiddies’ to check someone’s tonsils.”
After exchanging pleasantries, Parker and Yang departed, leaving the captain and first officer alone. This of course wasn’t the first time they were alone in the same room together, of course; their first meeting took place in private aboard an orbital office complex in Earth orbit and they routinely had one-on-one meetings during the day. However, Dumont couldn’t recall a time they were together in a semi-social situation by themselves.
“So how much of that last science brief did you get through?” Thorton asked after a momentary bout of silence, referring to various items of scientific interest that had been sent to Dumont over the course of the day.
“Not a lot,” she admitted. “I only had a few minutes to spare during my lunch break to skim the summary. Like you said, I’m lucky I get a chance to eat anything during it.”
He let out a bit of a light snort. “Yeah, I can imagine. Seems like I had more work to do as first officer on the Potemkin than I do now. Captain Tagawa called it ‘delegating.’”
Dumont smirked. “You could always reverse delegate, sir.”
“And you could always wait until you get a ship of your own so you can start delegating there,” he countered, taking a bit more food for himself, almost as if he feared this was the last enjoyable meal he’d ever have for the next five years. “I bet this is certainly is different than your last posting, isn’t it?”
Prior to serving on the Essex, Dumont’s last assignment was as first officer of the Endurance, a surveyor whose primary mission was to investigate planets that had been already discovered and given a thorough once-over by starships. She merely smiled for a moment and another moment passed in silence. “It had its moments.”
“So…how are you settling in?”
“Sir?” she asked.
“You’ve only been here a few months so you haven’t had the same amount of time to adjust as the crew had during the refit. You didn’t help me build this crew; Commander Cox did. I should have asked sooner but it seems like we only talk about the ship and crew when we’re in private.”
“I see, sir, and I think I’m settling in well, though the demands of the job obviously don’t give me much time to myself.”
“Other than the seven hours you get inspecting the inside of your eyelids,” Thorton remarked with a smirk. Dumont was lucky to get six most days. “The point of these meals is to give us a chance to discuss things outside of our duties. Bear that in mind for next time, Astrid.”
“Of course,” she commented, not recalling if he had ever referred to the first officer by her first name in the past. Dumont certainly didn’t have the gall to try the same with her commanding officer. “Sir…I know this isn’t exactly in keeping with your suggestion, but I have a question.”
“Now’s the time to ask ‘em.”
“Why was I your second choice for first officer?”
Thorton chuckled weakly, commenting, “I guess I asked for that one when I encouraged you to be more forthcoming. To answer your question, Commander Cox had experience as a science officer and later first officer aboard a cruiser. Aside from his obvious bad judgment in terms of recreational activities, he was the top candidate for a starship posting.
“That said, you are just as qualified, Commander. Captain Rashid’s message to me recommending you for the job was so glowing I should have had Thalla tested it for radioactive contamination. Cox might have had more experience, but you’re both good leaders. And what you lack for in your managing a large crew on an extended deployment, you make up for it with your time surveying planets out on the frontier. And as I know too well, the unexplored sectors can pose risks as severe as parking a ship in the middle of the Romulan Neutral Zone.”
“Personal experience, sir?” she asked.
“More or less,” he replied. After a pause, he continued with, “I can understand why you might feel slighted for being first runner up for this job, Astrid, and it’s my fault for not telling you all this sooner. But you are ready for this; you are my choice for my first officer. If anything, Cox’s accident proves that I was wrong to select him over someone like you. Doc pointed out to me earlier that there’s a difference between a risk taker and a thrill seeker. Cox was clearly the latter and what happened to him gave me a chance to take a mulligan and pick someone better suited for the assignment. That someone is you.”
Dumont found herself smiling warmly at that. If nothing else, Thorton was a skilled orator. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Good.” They finished what little was left on their plates in silence and in under about five minutes. Thorton lightly tapped his napkin against his mouth and stood up. “I should probably finish up the briefs and then figure out what the hell I’m going to try to force down my throat just to be compliant with Doc’s recommendation.”
Dumont did the same, suggesting, “You could just have him prepare a dietary plan for you.”
“As a starship captain, I’m trained to always find alternatives,” he noted as they exited the captain’s mess. “If I can get around Doc being my personal chef, so much the better.”
“You never know, he could secretly be a five-star chef,” she explained with a grin.
“Better not let him hear that; it will go to his head. Good night, Exec.”
“Good night, Captain,” she replied and they both went down separate corridors, though Dumont cast a look over her shoulder at Thorton as he vanished around a corner of the corridor. Their day ended much in the routine fashion it had began, like almost every day for the past few months since the Essex began her mission save for the pep talk. Not that she needed it; after all, Dumont barely had enough time in her busy day to think about anyone other than herself. For the most part…
