Do the Shuffle

Posted on 03 Jan 2014 @ 4:21pm by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ellsworth Hudson
Edited on on 03 Jan 2014 @ 4:25pm

1,026 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: San Francisco Fleet Yards, Earth
Timeline: MD 10 - 1540 hrs

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Ellsworth had dutifully followed up with the dockmaster per Lieutenant Zhao's suggestion, but he'd soon discovered the dockmaster was more like slavemaster and had little else for the young Betazoid to do except haul cargo. More lithe than muscular in both body and temperament, he wasn't too keen on shoving crates around all day with the meat-heads under the dockmaster's authority (even if some of them were cute). So he told the Master Chief Petty Officer the first excuse that came to mind - "I'm needed elsewhere" - and zipped off to the Fleet Yards' commissary for a mid-afternoon snack feeling not the least bit guilty about the white lie.

At the commissary, he ordered an uttaberry custard from the replicator, snagged a seat near the window looking out over the planetary drydock and unclipped the personal PADD from his belt. While waiting for his login to the system to clear through the device, he took a spoonful of the custard but stopped just short of his full lips. The PADD had seemed to explode with messages and notifications, a veritable avalanche of data likely released by Lieutenant Zhao's thumbprint and the clearing of the flags on his file by the personnel officer at Starfleet Command.

Wide-eyed, Ellsworth replaced the spoon in the ramekin and pulled the PADD closer. He scrolled through the messages being displayed with a sense of awe. In that moment, the responsibilities of his position aboard the ship became fully apparent. There were more than a hundred individual messages clamoring for his attention - everything from replacement parts for waste extraction units to a requisition request for a new subspace decompiler. He wasn't even sure he knew what a subspace decompiler was much less how to order a new one.

Near the conclusion of his advanced training in Kyoto, he'd been assigned a mentor from Starfleet Materiel Supply Command. The mentor had turned out to be every bit the young bureaucrat, concerned with procedure and paperwork; however, he'd also been a fountain of knowledge about the responsibilities of a quartermaster and full of the practical advice that basic training couldn't provide. He'd warned Ellsworth that there was a personnel shortage at Supply Command and that his next assignment would be "trial by fire" on a small ship. At the time, he'd suspected "small ship" was code for one of the fleet's clunkers, an old Miranda-class that had somehow evaded refit for the past 50 years.

When his assignment had come for the Galileo, Ellsworth had been surprised and concerned. Successor to the Oberth-class, the relatively new Nova-class ships were technologically sophisticated and probably dealt with a lot of cargo that he didn't fully understand. Even though understanding wasn't necessarily required - he just ordered the power insulators and monitored their stock rather than understood how they protected the ship's subsystems against power drains - it still helped in anticipating the needs of each department if he had some basic competence with the ship's systems.

Feeling overwhelmed, he pushed the uttaberry custard aside and prepared to tackle the seemingly insurmountable task. The best course of action seemed to be to prioritize the work orders since personal requests and redundant equipment requisitions hardly took precedence over restocking the ship's complement of class 1 astrometric probes. But by the time he finished sorting through the virtual mountain of information it became clear that many of the work orders were merely notifications from San Francisco Fleet Yards on restock and resupply while the ship was undergoing its refit. The surly dockmaster he'd skipped out on earlier seemed to be doing the majority of his work for him - funny, that.

With Fleet Yards handling the big ticket items, Ellsworth was left with supplies, provisions and quarters assignments for the ship's personnel. Now that the task seemed a little more manageable, he moved the PADD slightly to the side and took a spoonful of his custard while pulling up the ship's schematics to review quarters assignments. During initial testing he'd shown strong aptitude in spatial reasoning and organization, which ultimately determined his career path; the aptitude was part of a genuine love for organization, so he was looking forward to shuffling people about the ship to accommodate all of the personnel changes. However, before he got too far into the review, he noticed a big problem - a flag officer.

The changes in command structure had been noted in the packet of information forwarded to him upon his assignment to the Galileo but changes in command staff were so far above his security clearance that it had been little more than a footnote. Commodore Saalm vacating the commanding officer's quarters had set in motion a simple shuffle of personnel from one set of quarters to the next - Captain Holliday to the CO's quarters; Commander Blake to the XO's quarters; and Commander Mialin into Blake's old quarters. He'd worry about who moved into Mialin's old suite after he solved the larger problem: where to place the Commodore.

Deck One's VIP quarters seemed like the most likely place for her, but he wasn't about to make an assignment on his own or go marching up to the Commodore and ask her opinion. He was new to Starfleet, but he wasn't that new to it. Besides, those quarters were laid out for visiting scientists, researchers, prominent civilians and diplomats, not flag officers serving as mission advisers; it would need some work regardless. He racked his brain for command information learned during basic training in the (seemingly) distant past - didn't flag officers have personal assistants?

Ellsworth pulled up the recent personnel changes for Galileo and looked up the Commodore's aide, who turned out to be a very handsome petty officer. A few more requests from Starfleet Command's personnel database gave him a location for PO1 Senior Yeoman Oliver Morris. Well, at least I'll have something nice to look at, he thought, finishing off the custard and snagging his PADD on the way toward the commissary's exit.

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PO3 Ellsworth Hudson
Quartermaster
USS Galileo
[ PNPC - Mott ]

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