Stardate: 70917:2218
Title: Shift Change
Author: Marc Remmick
Time: During/After 'Lessons from Childhood'
Scene: USS Horizon


The Gamma Shift had just come on duty, and Lieutenant Remmick was far too edgy to take any time off. He'd sat in his cabin for fifteen minutes, staring at the casual disarray of a single man's room, and then come back to Engineering, where his personal brand of professional enthusiasm was becoming a personal burden to co-workers, senior and junior alike.

Far be it from the Chief to dismiss a commissioned officer for no valid reason - instead, some rapid duty exchanges took place, and Remmick found himself 'kicked upstairs', to the showy but ultimately irrelevant position of Bridge Engineer. Unless you were the Alpha Shift officer on the Bridge - and that was usually a senior Lieutenant, if not the Chief - you had next to no authority from the basic console that represented the flight deck's link to the engine room. It was widely agreed that manning the Engineering Station was slightly more demanding than monitoring the Life Support Auxiliary System.

Remmick realised this about halfway to Deck One, when the glamour of a Bridge assignment wore off and stark reality sunk in. The last time he'd been on the flight deck, he'd been nearly hallucinating from sleep deprivation, and had attempted to chew out the Captain. Instead, he'd been given the most polite dressing down he'd received in his life and been all but thrown back down the turbolift.

Thankfully, the Captain and most of the senior staff were down on the planet. A senior Ops lieutenant sat in the center chair, and nodded politely to the engineer. Marc paused, nodding back uneasily - still getting to grips with the whole socializing concept - and moved quickly to the Engineering station, to the far right of the viewscreen. He cast one glance at the sight of a starry blackness rising over the half-crescent planet they orbited, took a deep breath, and turned his attention to his console. It would be hard for a Starfleet officer to have a problem with a view of space...

But he seemed to be managing it quite well.


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Lieutenant J.G. Marc Remmick
Engineer
USS Horizon
NCC-72400
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