Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[SabrinaPandora]

There was no room on the tiny Oberth class to go running, so it was treadmill running or nothing. Instead Talla just resorted to locomoting the corridors and climbing up and down the access ladders between decks. There were no weights to lift, so she had taken to piling lazy crewmen onto the temporary cots that were so abundant and using them for squats, curls and leg presses, just adding more layabouts for a better workout.

Access to a computer had granted her a roster of the ship’s complement, including the TAD (Temporarily Assigned Duty) statuses of the crew who were destined for Starbase 42. And that was where she had dug up the name and likeness of Captain Santra Arron. Most of whose service jacket was classified, Talla noted.

Onboard the USS Tim Allen Captain S’jet was in command. But bound for Starbase 42, at a crux point of galactic politics, Captain Santra Arron was to be her superior officer. The man in charge. The boss. The top of the chain of command. The man whose personal safety was one of her primary goals. She had already misstepped with him and no one knew her here- no one knew her capability nor her history, save Zuub.

It would be wise to seek out and report to her commander, given that while he knew her name, he didn’t know her. So it was time to find out if she had been assigned to someone worthy of her skills and dedication, or another commander who would view her as a disposable resource.

Time to play the dumb little alien and see the reaction it offered.

The Mess Hall: simple food for simple folk. Unlike most ships that bore more of a military leaning to their designs, the Oberth class had been functioning since the heady time of Captain Spocks hey day, when exploration and scientific research was the order of the day. So instead of a separate mess for officers and enlisted, there was just the single space where any member of the ships company could replicate a slice of home for their dining pleasure. The USS Tim Allen’s replicators were not state of the art, nor were they in particularly good repair given the surplus of Engineer’s on loan from the Corp of Engineers. But as the Smurf entered the mess hall she saw an elderly looking Bajoran carrying a cup of tea from a particular dented looking replicator tray to one of the furthest tables in the hall.

Collar colour was red: check.
Number of pips on that collar were four: check.
Missing one ear: probably but two out of three made for odds a Ferengi would have a fit over.

Bold would be too stride up and sit. Anxious alien would be to come to salute. Zuub would probably stride up and strike up a conversation- confident, but a bit beyond her conversational skills Talla suspected. Perhaps a compromise of styles- time to try something new.

Making her way hesitantly to the table where the elderly Bajoran had settled. Antennas leaning in to lead the way, the little lieutenant stepped into his field of vision and stammered a bit, accidentally. Though she was trying new tricks, old habits died hard.

“Cuh-captain Santra Arron?” Talla P’Trell stammered hesitantly, then her brow furrowed and her antennae came forward. “May I have a word with you? Speak with you, may i speak to you please?”

Maybe not so new an approach after all, she sighed internally.

For a moment the Bajoran merely sat there. In fact he sat there for quite while, reading the padd he had in hand and sipping from a cup of very weak looking tea. In fact it looked less like tea and more like faintly coloured water with steam rolling from its surface. Eventually something caught his eye and he suddenly noticed her, head snapping up as he frowned at her for a moment.

“Yes?” he said in a neutral tone.

All of that time had of course given Talla P’Trell plenty of time to amp up her own anxieties and second-guess her decision, but she’d held her ground this far, and she was determined to see this through. Snapping to attention Talla spoke up, trying to sound a little less squeaky perhaps and failing miserably.

“Lieutenant Talla P’Trell, chief of security and tactical, Starbase 42 reporting in... sir?” It was less a statement and more a question by the end as the surprisingly small Andorian stood before him, sweat beading on her brow as her antenna seemingly wandered, as if looking around the room.

Arron raised an eyebrow at her, his eyes twitching to and fro as he followed the fevered twitching of the antenna. After apparently not getting the answer he wanted he set the cup of tea down, and made a rolling ’onward’ gesture with it as though to prompt her to use her words. Given the speed of that gesture she’d best use a lot of her words in as short amount of time as possible.

“I am... I wanted to meet with you, Captain Santra Arron. I am to be your security chief, and I thought- um, you might want to know who i was. Or that I will work very hard,” she rushed the next bit out, clearly nervous. Superior officers always made her nervous, and this was not going well again. Even Talla’s limited social skills could see that. “I am... I have concerns about the station’s safety, and yours, Captain Santra Arron.”

That habit of using full names and titles had stuck with her, the mnemonic device she had maintained through the years too remember whom she was talking to at any given moment. At least she didn’t speak in third person.

At that Arron let out a snort of a breath, and gave a wave of his hand as though dismissing her worry with as much thought as waving away a fly.

A little smile settled onto her face, and she broke her rigid militaristic stance to take a step forward, then to lean on the table peering at the one-eared Bajoran as if she were studying an insect on a slide. The antennas focused forward while those large polar blue eyes narrowed.

“That is who you are, then? I see.” Leaning back to resettle her weight on her feet again, the little alien cocked her head to the left slightly and regarded the old monster. “I am dismissed, I think?”

“I doubt very much you were missed in the first place.” he said simply, taking a sip of his tea. He then frowned, settling the tea cup back down onto the table before looking at her again with a scowl “I am without a doubt what the humans call a bastard. I am also a type 1 personality, with an IQ in the 186 range of the scale if we’re comparing brain pans. I am on a variety of medication, most of which I brew myself: mostly homeopathic remedies, uppers, downers. I rarely get to play with the really enlightening stuff. I have taken lives, I have saved lives. I’ve murdered, and in rare moments of brilliance I lifted the death sentences of thousands of people in a single stroke. I have pushed the boundaries of medical science and understanding so far past the bleeding edge I often forget the basics of first aid, much in the same way that I no longer have the mental steps in my mind as to how to start a fire with but a stick and some twine.”

He picked up his tea cup, took another sip, and then re-examined her as she appeared to still be staring at him somewhat blankly.

“You are superfluous.” he said simply “A security chief for a way station in the middle of no where between two very interesting places. Are you here to secure Federation interests in the Shoal? No. Because the Federation has no interest in The Shoal apart from the publicity of reopening one of its Warden Stations in an area of space best described as ‘psychotic’. The only other reason you could officially have been sent is for my own personal security. That is unlikely as I have survived nearly twenty years off of Bajor without one single assassin or disgruntled follower of the Prophets from finding me. The only other thing you could be here for is not my security, but my protection as resource: which would require you to have been read into my file and my work.”

He turned back to his tea with a slight smile on his face.

“And if you’d been read into my file properly…” he said with a grin “...You’d not breath the same air as myself without being thoroughly vaccinated against all creatures great and small. Accidents in the lab, especially in my lab, tend to be...’grabby’.”

Nope. This was not her commander. Most definitely not. There was nothing here.This was quite likely the reason she was here- to protect the rest of the station from him.

Decompression happened. Talla would wait and see for now.

“I see. I am s-sorry to have bothered you, sir,” the little lieutenant stammered, though the bashful eyes and the stammer were all effect now, a habit she just let run externally by itself. Inside she was surprisingly calm, having arrived at some conclusions of her own, and having felt out the command. In only the span of three minutes she was reasonably confident that this was no command officer... this was something else, though she was very much not sure what. But a doctor. Very definitely one of those probe and dissect and carve doctors she knew quite well. Not a leader of men or anyone worthy of her loyalty. She gulped nervously, all too convincingly. It was an old habit, after all.

“If you were sorry you’d not have interrupted me.” he said simply, picking the padd back up. He started to gaze into its screen once more, before noticing she was still standing there. He slowly set the padd back down, and looked at her once more “I understand very well that you are officially assigned to the station as its chief of security. I officially recognise that. I also officially recognise the fact that I do not believe we will need one. Alas, I have been trying these last 20 years to get Starfleet to listen to me on a number of fronts, so why should staffing my station be any different? Do your job as you see fit, and I will probably rubber stamp every suggestion you make.”

He took a breath, and then added.

“But screw up once...well,” he said with a little shrug, “I am sure there are plenty of roles in the galaxy for an Andorian with your grab bag of social disorders and physical deformities. Who knows, maybe Dr Zuub is in need of a pet? She seems the type not easily satisfied with a run of gerbils to play with. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my tea is cooling and I have important work to be carrying on with.”

Calm inside, twitchy outside, she had been fine until the mention of the doctor, then she had blanched. A... pet? The antennas had inadvertently shot up in alarm. Surely... no, that was just not... maybe? That did not seem right, surely he was just trying to say something mean, that was all, just to get to her. Nervously she nodded and spun in an about-face not unlike a toy soldier, and marched briskly out of the mess hall, though she marched into the kitchen, not out to the rest of the Tim Allen proper.

Petty Officer Second Class Matowski had learned not to try to stop the martial midget from coming and going, as she had explained it in detail after he had tried to grab her arm and explain that he couldn’t let her hang out in the freezer. Which had resulted in Lieutenant P’Trell’s careful explanation of her need for a cool space while holding him in an excruciatingly painful hold with two fingers. Now he tried very hard not to notice the angry alien’s comings and goings as she yanked open the freezer door then entered it, shutting it behind her.

Because after that conversation, Talla P’Trell needed somewhere cold and preferably dark, so that she could hyperventilate and weep like a child in private. Talla did not know why she was here. There was no one to lead her, and the one connection she had made was now in doubt in her mind. Zuub did not see her that way, did she?

Perhaps. Perhaps she did after all.

There were no friends or allies for her out here, no one whom she could trust. Though McCray- at least, Talla assumed it had been McCray- must have sent her here for some reason. But with no explanation, no clue of what to do, and after having met the man in charge who did not care if the crew lived or died... She knew that dead cold look in his eyes- over twenty years of law enforcement taught her to recognize the eyes of a monster, and he was one who would kill everyone without hesitation. Possibly for fun. Setting her back against the wall of the freezer, Talla P’Trell slid to the floor, sobbing gently.

At least when she was alone, Talla was allowed to be afraid. Right now she was very afraid and very alone, and in her frozen solitude she cried.



Unknowingly Santra began to smile for no good reason, as though somewhere in the twisted weave of the world as he knew something he deemed right had come to pass.