Breakfast of Champions

Posted on 15 Apr 2022 @ 3:16am by Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius

2,749 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 18 - Cold Station 31
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 2, Mess Hall
Timeline: MD 08, 0808 hrs

[ON]

Gamma shift had just concluded and Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius couldn't be happier. He was used to the routine by now; working late nights while the primary shift personnel slept, and having to take care of tidbits of missed maintenance and lazy reporting which was occasionally dumped on his lap to clean up. But in recent days since departing Regula I, none of those inconveniences had cropped up. Maybe it was the urgency of the new mission. Maybe it was the new captain. Or the brief shore leave they'd undertaken to recharge the crew's mental power cells. All Lamar really knew was that the flight control department was running smoother than he'd ever seen. It pleased him greatly...almost as much as the large plate of bacon, eggs and biscuits he held in his hand.

The mess hall had mostly emptied out fifteen minutes ago but there were a few stragglers and fellow Gamma shift personnel cycling in to get a hot breakfast. Most of the tables were occupied, and being the sociable person he was, Darius found the closest table to the window and headed for it. A teal-collared science officer was already sitting down in one of the chairs. He recognized her from their late-night bridge duties which they both shared during the ship's long journey to Regula I. Ullsman, he recalled to himself. "Morning. Can I join you?" he spoke, standing in front of her table.

The ensign gave a half hearted wave of the hand "Please do." She responded, tiredness clearly audible in her voice. Sofie was sat with a mug of coffee which until Lamar had come over she had been staring into with deep intensity for minutes now. She was exhausted from a morning of Tarin's nonsense and it showed. "Looks good." she said idly, nodding in the direction of the pilot's breakfast.

"Breakfast of champions," he winked in agreement, settling into the chair across from her. Cutlery and napkin in hand, he laid out his utensils while casually glancing up to the woman. He couldn't help notice a sense of fatigue emanating from her. "Everything okay? Want a biscuit?" he offered. She didn't appear to have any food in front of her.

"Not really hungry today." She shrugged and took a gulp of her coffee. Her lackluster appetite had hardly been helped by the change in morning routine and as delicious as Lamar's breakfast looked she couldn't imagine stomaching a bit of it. "I'm alright its just this new captain... She's a bit intense eh?"

He started to fork scrambled eggs into his mouth with surprising speed. "She's different, yeah," he admitted between chews. "...What do you mean 'intense'?"

"You were on the bridge when we left the starbase right?" Sofie asked then after just a moment corrected herself "No, of course, that would have been Lieutenant Shizn... Well did you hear about what happened with Ensign Mimi?" She drank some more of her coffee as she waited for Lamar to finish his mouthful.

Lamar narrowed his eyes slightly in thought while taking a crispy slice of bacon and biting off the end. Ensign Mimi? The Nekomi? His brain raced to put the pieces together but came up empty. "No." He looked to the science officer with concern. "Was it bad?"

"Yeah, well, at least Commander Tarin thought so. You know how most of the crew had been pulled out of bed that night? Well when we were leaving dock Mimi-" Sofie cut herself off, something out of the corner of her eye, a member of the crew she didn't recognised, maybe one of the people who had joined at the station. She tightened up suddenly wary. A moment passed. She looked back at Lamar and something in her mind clicked "Do you ever think much about that first day we arrived at Latari?"

He was caught slightly off guard by the question. His chewing slowed. Just when she'd started to tell an interesting story about the feline Ops officer, suddenly they were talking about the colonies. It seemed like so long ago in his mind. Had it been three months? Four? Six? His perception of time had become warped during the journey, because some days, Galileo's battles with the Tholians felt like they'd happened only weeks ago. "Yeah," he admitted. "Not all the time, but enough. You?"

"A lot," Sofie admitted "Its been on my mind a lot. With the new crew we took on from Trial..." Lamar had been on the bridge too, maybe he understood, probably a better chance than anyone else. It was clear from how she was talking that this had been gnawing at Sofie for a while, her voice quietened and she leaned in over her coffee "We were on the bridge when their ship was destroyed right? We're... somewhat responsible?"

Lamar had been there. At the helm, working maneuvers and coordinating firing patterns with tactical while they'd engaged in ship-to-ship combat with the Tholians. The visceral memories of that day started to return. "I remember it all," he answered, looking down at his eggs and stabbing them with his fork to bring another bite to his lips. "But it's not our fault. It's just war. It ain't pretty. 'Could've, should've, would've'...easy to think about it like that after the moment." He chewed and looked back up to her.

"I was in charge of the shields, protecting both us and Trial." She stated it as if it were a fact in obvious contradiction to what Lamar was saying. The memory was foggy to her, she'd pushed it down and put up fences to protect herself from those few days but in flashes she could still see that science consolse, still hear the voice of Plumeri over the comms saying he'd take her for coffee. She looked down at the coffee she was drinking, she'd never used to drink this stuff, she'd changed a lot. "If it had been a different science officer... It should have been. I don't know why they still let me near the bridge."

He creased his dark eyebrows, wondering how a different crew member at her station would have made a difference under the impossible circumstances they'd encountered. "You did the best you could. Right?" he genuinely asked. He didn't see a reason for any culpability on her part. "It's not like you're some kind of undercover Tholian agent who sabotaged our defenses..."

"No, I guess not!" Sofie half laughed, the laugh had a bitterness to it though. It would almost have been better if she had been, at least then she would have succeeded in something. "No, I'm just incompetent." She admitted "Not very good at any of this. First mission out of the Academy and I'm on the bridge in the middle of a losing battle, I was panicking. And so all those people died, and the ones that didn't..." She glanced around again, scanning the room for unfamiliar faces "Well now they are here with us."

Forking more eggs into his mouth at a rapid pace, the conn officer continued listening. Offering a helpful ear to his fellow shipmate was the least he could do, and though he wasn't a counselor with sage advice, he empathized with her. Lamar placed his fork down on his plate then wiped his mouth clean with his napkin. His dark brown eyes stared into Sofie's gray ones while he recalled an old story from memory.

"I remember my first deployment as a private...straight out of the enlisted Marine academy. Kind of like you," he gestured to her with a small smile. "Back then it was '74. Middle of the Dominion War. Our battalion had been sent orders to capture a ketracel production facility on this planet out in the sticks in the Gamma Quadrant. LT-2190. Class-L, marginal atmosphere and not a lot of native life. So our drop ship and escort deploy through the wormhole and we make it to the surface. All 350 of us."

He glanced up at the window behind Ullswater and briefly stared at the stars streaking by. "We get there, and it takes us four days to locate this compound. Intel was off by almost a hundred klicks. We're trucking through all these primal forests and wetlands, hauling our packs and gear. Embracing the suck, you know?" he shook his head. "Eventually we find our objective. Prep the assault teams and move into attack formations. Then we went, full sprint with photon mortars covering our advance."

Darius grabbed another biscuit and bit into the soft buttery bread. He chewed for a few seconds before swallowing. "We didn't know about their 'houdinis' - those AP mines that phased in and out of subspace. The entire complex was ringed with them. We lost a third of the battalion to them on the first charge. Lost another quarter to their reinforced trench positions. By the time we breached the facility, we were down to a hundred soldiers. Then we went CQB. It was bad. Lost another 20 in corridor firefights."

As grim as the story sounded, Lamar managed to maintain a positive inflection. "Eventually though, we took it. Captured that f--ing compound and shut it down. Sent samples back to Starfleet HQ and blew the facility before we were extracted." He bit into his biscuit again. "...I guess what I'm trying to say...is you didn't fail. None of us did. Sometimes shit just....happens."

Sofie's mood soured even further as Lamar's story of war and death continued. She drank her coffee and listened through but the conclusion didn't work for her. She was instantly poking holes in the narrative, eager to maintain her seething self pity "From what you say the intelligence was wrong. Someone further up the chain didn't do their job right, something had to have gone wrong for that to happen." She let out a sigh and shook her head in a small but jerky motion "No, here I was the one managing the shields of both us and them, my job was to make sure the ship didn't blow up. I can't absolve myself of any blame just by saying shit happens. I was meant to make sure shit didn't happen!"

He could hear the anger in her voice. Was it anger? Remorse? Bitterness? He wasn't a counselor. Didn't know a damn thing about psychiatry or diagnosing emotional states. But what he did know - what he could sense because he'd been there - was that feeling of guilt. Looking down at his plate, he dropped the last bite of his biscuit then returned his eyes to hers. "So...what, you want to confess all your mistakes to Starfleet Command? Tell them you killed a bunch of people then ask them to court-martial you for incompetence and send you to a penal colony for rehab?" He gave her a hard, stone cold stare. "Will that make you feel better? C'mon now..."

Sofie shrugged, the kind of shrug that communicated very clearly that she really couldn't care much less about what happened to her anymore. Maybe she did want that, she didn't know what she wanted but trying to carry on like nothing had happened was certainly not it. "Wouldn't happen anyway right? Its all classified, all secret. Starfleet has swept our mistakes under the rug all in the name of Genesis. There will be no closure, no justice for the families of the dead." There was silence for a moment between the two of them, she could feel Lamar's stare but she couldn't bring herself to lift her eyes up from her coffee mug "You were there too, how do you do it, how do you not feel bad?"

Glancing to the side of their table and away from her, he pondered the deep question. Lamar didn't have all the answers. He could barely cook for himself even in his late 30s. Thank God for replicators and the mess hall. "I don't know the specifics about what happened there or our orders. I'm just a chief warrant officer...they don't let me into the officer briefings. But it's a small ship and people talk. Sometimes I listen." He returned his brown eyes to her. "I think you have to believe in what we're doing here; have that trust in Starfleet and our institutions. Otherwise it all falls apart, right? Maybe we lost thousands but saved billions. I don't really know."

"Don't believe everything you hear." the ensign half mumbled. She herself remained sceptical of what she had heard of the story the Tholians had weaved for Captain Saalm and so too was she sceptical of the benefits of their actions. Whatever the truth was it seemed the known facts could do little to console her out of this despondency. She pulled herself together a bit, shuffling in her seat to a less slouched position "I don't know either, really. I suppose we just have to find some way to keep going and I guess I'll have to keep looking."

He subtly shook his head and gave her a confidential grin. "Why are all you eggheads so curious about everything? You want to explore the galaxy and find all these long-lost secrets of civilization. You want to terraform planets, go into subspace, do space walks on comets...what is it about scientists? Because me? I used to just see rocks in space, and as long as there's no Klingons of Jem'Hadar there, just move on to the next one. Now I get to fly in between the rocks."

"It's mean to be fun." Sofie responded bitterly "Finding new things, advancing knowledge and all that. It was meant to be fun and good and we'd all be happy." she shook her head "That's what they convinced me of when I joined Starfleet, voyages of exploration and stuff. Not this mess." She glanced down towards the last remaining morsels on Lamar's plate "Are you done?"

Lamar didn't have much left on his plate. And now, what little remained he questioned finishing. The science officer's pessimism had played a subtle role in that. He shrugged and pushed his plate forward then dropped his napkin atop. "You're too young to sound so jaded," he bluntly said to the ensign. "If you don't embrace this chance, Starfleet's going to chew you up and spit you out."

She gave him a curious look. She didn't know exactly how old Lamar was but he didn't look all that much older than her and the patronising comment did nothing but make her further bristle "I'm old enough to know that the people who lost their lives in that battle aren't coming back. Starfleet chewed them up and they died far from home over meaningless nonsense. Starfleet failed them and so did we." With an accusatory glance and a finger pointed in the direction of Lamar's unfinished breakfast Sofie gestured for him to leave "I think we're done here."

He resisted the urge to say something back to her. He could read the room well enough and her demeanor didn't reveal any hints that she desired his continuing company. Her words solidified the sentiment. Gathering his tray with his hands, Lamar stood from his seat at their table. "Have a good day, sir. Counseling's down on Deck 3," he said before walking away to the protein recycler.

Sofie watched him go, inside her that swirling maelstrom of bitterness, uncertainty and fear was no calmer for having spoke to someone, no amount of talking could still those waters. When he was a few steps away she called after him "She fell asleep by the way, Ensign Mimi." She doubted he needed his question answered but it would have been rude not to "That's what all this nonsense is about with the alcohol ban and such... Captain knows we're useless."

Slowing his pace for only a couple paces, Lamar's ears registered the science officer's words. Useless, huh? He didn't turn his head or deviate from his destination. Instead, he sighed and shook his head. Officers falling asleep on watch; borderline mental breakdowns in the mess hall; a new hard-charging CO...the ship's morale wasn't good. It was going to be a difficult week. For all of them.

[OFF]

--

CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Saalm]

Ensign Sofie Ullswater
Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

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