— USS Selene, Unexplored Space —

Commander James Young climbed out of the Captain’s Yacht, and shook his head, “Looks like at some point the last crew rerouted the EPS conduits, it didn’t get checked as part of maintenance.”

“Why not?” Asked Captain Olivia Carrillo, not mad but a bit annoyed that she was not able to use one of the perks of command. If she was going to lose command to Captain Cruz she at least wanted to have used the Captain’s Yacht at least once. 

“It’s just not a ship we really looked at,” Young confessed, “this is a big complicated ship ma’am.”

She nodded, there was no point in getting mad at Young, as it was not his fault. The station crew back at Starbase 86 were likely to blame, but they too had too much work to do and far too little time to do it in. She knew that Young could likely jury rig something in a few hours, but it would not be as good as it should run.

“Okay, add it to the maintenance scheduled when we get back to base and have it looked at and fixed,” she ordered.
“Sorry,” he said.

Carrillo shrugged, “I’ve never used a Captain’s Yacht before, why start now?

After a brief stop on the bridge for an update, nothing new was happening and there was no signs of Klingons, Carrillo retreated to the quiet of her Ready Room to pull us replies from Starfleet to the USS Selene’s various reports and personal items. Included in it was a reply to her request to for herself and her husband Lieutenant Lambert to adopt the young child they’d saved from an unexplored planet whose inhabitants were about to become food. As she had expected Starfleet and the Federation were not exactly happy that they’d ended up inadvertently kidnapping the girl, but understood the quandary they found themselves in. 

Tapping her Starfleet insignia commbadge she called her husband, “Pierre come see me in my Ready Room.”

Five minutes later Lieutenant Lambert entered and smiled, “What is going on Olivia?”

She handed him the PADD that the report had been sent on, “We’re approved to adopt the child. We just need to file some papers. I don’t think anyone in Starfleet wants to deal with a rogue kid. We’ve both presented them with and solved a problem for them.”

He beamed. He clearly had bonded with the young girl more than anyone on the Selene, and Carrillo was glad that she did not have to break his heart and send the young girl off to the Federation when they got back to Starbase. 

“We’ll have to name her now,” Lambert said, they had left her with no name, as they did not know it and she had not yet spoken. Given that the crew had assumed that the Federation would be taking her it had seemed unwise to name her. 

Olivia nodded, “Let’s think about that. Wait until all the ’t’s are crossed and ‘i’s dotted.”

Lambert smiled, “Of course.”

He glanced at the old-style clock on her desk, a replica of Big Ben in London that she had gotten on a trip with her cadet squad back when she was enrolled in Starfleet Academy.

“I should get going, I have a runabout to fly,” Lambert said, “I’ll see you after my shift, for dinner.”

“Love you,” Carrillo said as he exited and her First Officer Keyana Mason entered.

“I love you too,” Mason said smirking, deliberately assuming that the good-bye between husband and wife was for her.

She held out a report on a PADD, “New strategic operations requests. From the same officer who sent us to look into the Klingons being cloaked and hiding.”

“Hopefully these won’t almost get us killed,” Carrillo said dryly.
“To be fair it was a tossup where the Klingons would try to bluff us or blow us up,” Mason said, “It was just our bad luck that their commander happened to be a guy who had a history with us.”

“With Captain Cruz and the USS Seattle you mean,” Carrillo said, “I never met him while he was assigned to Starfleet.”

It seemed surprising that the officer exchange program was still in effect, though the Klingon officers no longer received the level of trust that they once did when assigned to exchange service on Federation posts. Carrillo assumed that when they were sent to the KDF (Klingon Defense Force) Starfleet officers were sent to guard garbage scows or whatever. Out of the way where they did not affect the operation of the KDF.

“Well, we survived,” Mason noted, a salient point, if only because they could not get new orders if they had died. 

Carrillo thanked her First Officer and sent the Lieutenant Commander back out to the bridge to sit in the centre chair and not do anything as they sat stationary, running surveys via runabouts and shuttles of the solar system. After outpacing their Klingon attackers the Selene was making their way back slowly to Starbase 86. Along the way they were continuing to log everything they came across while giving their complement of cadets onboard an education and experience. They had stopped in a solar system that while it had class M planets, had no population and had not yet been logged. The students were running tests to see if either of the two class M worlds would be suitable to future colonies, though their distance from Federation space was an issue.

— USS Selene, Security Office —

“What’s going on Hume?” Lieutenant Jara had just finished her shift on the bridge and was checking up on the security department before going to get dinner. Her Assistant Chief Security Officer was working at a desk terminal, filling the reports that had to be done. It was nothing that the security team liked but apparently, you could not just file a picture of yourself giving a thumbs up with Starfleet to assure them that things were being taken care of. 

Hume looked up from the screen and at Jara, “If we get downtime I’d like to request it off and go back to Vancouver for my mother’s retirement from Starfleet.”

Jara nodded, “Sure.”

“And my sister is now on Starbase 86,” he noted.

“There’s two of you?” Jara said, thinking that a female Hume might be more interesting than the boring young officer they currently had. 

“Well we’re not twins, but yes,” Hume said, “She’s in Strategic Operations.”

“I like her more than you already,” Jara said teasing him. Hume could be a bit of a doof, but he was alright. The nature of the security team, mostly being made up of strong personalities, meant that they spent their time being hard on one other rather than being close friends.

To the broader office, Jara said, “Alright everyone, work on your shift reports then if you’re done, have a great night. If you’re just starting your shift you get to look forward to reports too.”

A half-hearted cheer rose from those currently in the office as there was little anyone was looking forward to more was paperwork.

Other than a brief run-in with the Klingons it had been a rather sleepy assignment for the department. A first shakedown cruise they’d gotten to do little more than run their drills and train for an eventual disaster. Their fight with pirates had seemed to occupy the department before this, but now they were just shuttling around scientists, which was not what anyone wanted to do. They all wanted a dramatic fight with the Borg or something to earn their stripes, and right now all they were doing was tossing academy cadets in the brig if they got too rowdy. 

This was not an assignment any of them would have chosen, particularly when ships were patrolling the border and keeping the Federation safe in a very real and direct way.

Still perhaps, for security, it was best not to wish for a more interesting assignment, as people died when things got too interesting. For now, there was just open space, worlds to be explored and discoveries to be made. Where security fit into that, Lieutenant Jara could not say. She trusted that the captain would know what to do with them if and when the time came.