Busy Work

Posted on Sat Feb 15th, 2014 @ 5:41am by Lieutenant Trishna Durani

878 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Episode 2 - Whispers in the Clouds
Location: CIO's Office
Timeline: Day 2 - 1625

Ever since the Unification had left New Bajor, Trishna had been slammed. The mission, as she understood had been to locate the USS Galavant, an old Excelsior that had gone missing somewhere in the Finnean corridor, around the Moray Nebula. it had been a little over three days since the ship had gone missing by now, and Trish had spent almost all the time looking up information on any subjects that related to it, and breaking down that raw data in usable reports for the rest of the Senior Staff. That was the job of the Intelligence Officer most of the time. Not the glamorous life of poker games, and fine women like James Bond. And not some action thriller where spies were constantly on the run and doing battle with each other, more like some sort of commando-special operations group than an actual Intelligence Officer. It also wasn't a super secretive organization like a lot of people (and a lot of members of the Intelligence Department much to Trish's dismay) seemed to believe. The entire reason they existed was to provide their fellow Officers with information, not to keep it from them. Otherwise what was the point in even having Starfleet Intelligence aboard a starship like the Unification? None that Trish could see.

Even then the presence the Intelligence Department had aboard the ship was very small, probably only a little bigger than Command and still a little smaller than the Diplomatic Detachment. There just wasn't a need for a lot of their personnel to be around, like Engineering or Operations. What they did directly involved the upkeep of the ship. What she did, didn't really and so she didn't have many subordinates to boss around. Those that she did were often busy working with Operations on keeping things encrypted, and locked down. So it was up to her to slog through the data, and pick out the bits that were useful. The size of her officer reflected the size of her department. It was small, and could have adjoined her personal quarters if they'd though to include a doorway on that part of the wall. All it really had was a small desk stacked high with PADDs, a couple of seats for her a guest, and a replicator unit. The ceiling was also rather low, and slanted slightly as it on one of the curved areas of the ship. But it did have a nice viewport which right now showed the Cassiopeia floating derelict in space. There were away teams over there right now, and Trish couldn't wait to hear back from them, as this was certainly an unexpected turn of events.

First she'd looked in the Finnean corridor and the Moray nebula. Most of the reports about ships going missing had ended up being just rumors or completely false, and not much help in determining what had happened to the Galavant. Then she'd looked up the Galavant herself. The Excelsiors weren't exactly the youngest ships the fleet, which made some kind of system failure all the more likely in spite of their reputation for durability. But with the Cassiopeia dead in the water it seemed pretty likely that the Galavant hadn't suffered some sort of accident. Trish didn't like that there were no facts at her disposal to help explain what was going on. Mystery was the enemy, and facts were the ally in taking them down. She liked knowing, and didn't like that they were in the middle of the Gamma Quadrant, looking for a missing ship, and now one many times their size had just taken a beating.

Trish leaned back in her chair, threw a PADD down on the desk, and rubbed her eyes. It might not be the most exciting work, but it was certainly stressful. Digging through all that data, spending hours trying to piece it together, while the Unification hurtled toward her goal, and kept doing minor repairs. And it was all for nothing. Nothing she'd found pointed to an answer as to what had happened to the Cassiopeia. And she had to assume that it was related to what had happened to the Galavant, if the two events were separate it would mean all her work on digging up information could still be useful. But that would be useless to the Cassiopeia, and if the Cassiopeia hadn't been getting close to what happened to the Galavant why bother attacking it at all?

Groaning she got up from her desk, and felt sore from how long she'd been sitting there. She let out a large yawn before gathering up all the PADDs on the desk. If felt like she'd been at her desk from the moment they'd left New Bajor. She had certainly been there for the majority of the journey, and hadn't had time to socialize with the rest of the crew or really reflect on the assignment. Things were moving too fast for her to really process how she felt about everything on the ship right now.

"Well at least it's not dull," She muttered to herself, before leaving with her arms full of PADD's to be taken to someone who did computer stuff in Operations or Engineering to wipe them clean for use in other areas.

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