—- Oasis, Unexplored Planet in Gamma Quadrant —-

Lieutenant Leylani Aka activated the hover lift on the cargo box. The large, and presumably heavy, box lifted easily off the ground. Normally, she would use magnets or beam the cargo from place to place on the Adelaide, but with teams spread out over the planet, she was having to deliver items to field research stations. The Adelaide’s unexpected landing, to avoid conflict with Dominion ships, had turned into a research field trip. They’d remained planetside longer than anticipated, spidering out to study the ecology. 

She maneuvered the box into a stack with three others and approached the shuttles, which had been unloaded from the ship and were now sitting in a field nearby, used to taxi crew from location to location.

“… I’d have really liked to have tested us against those Dominion cruisers,” Lieutenant Thomas Winfield, the Chief Flight Control Officer, was saying to another pilot, leaning against one of the shuttles as Aka approached with her floating stack of cargo. “I mean, nobody wants to reopen the war, but watching some of the slick moves the Defiant pulled off, I’d like to see what the Adelaide could do…”

Though she didn’t outrank him, the proximity of Aka caused him to straighten up, adjust his uniform, and stop talking about dog fighting with the Dominion. He flashed an easy smile and nodded at his fellow pilot, who wandered off.

“You need a lift?” Winfield asked.

“I need a Rudolf to help fly my sleigh of gifts for the good little boys and girls,” Aka joked.

Winfield looked at her blankly, “I don’t get the reference.”

“Santa Claus, old Earth custom,” Aka said, not remembering that her fellow human had grown up on starbases and had never learned about the quaint customs of their shared home world.

Winfield shrugged, he helped guide the cargo into the nearest shuttle got into the pilot’s seat. Strapping himself in he began the pre-flight checks, he nodded as Aka took the seat to his right, “Might not be Randal the Santa Claus, but I hope I’ll do.”

Grinning at how wrong he’d gotten the old Earth superstition Aka nodded, not correcting him. She was not on a quest to ensure everyone knew the Earth-centric references. She made a mental note not to refer to Santa around him again, not that she was constantly doing so, and belted herself in.

— USS Adelaide, Bridge —

The main bridge was quiet. With the ship landed, there was far less to do than there typically was. There was a smattering of science officers using the sensors for various studies of the planet they’d come down on, and one navigational officer keeping an eye on the sky for any signs of trouble.

Mostly, though, Commander Sok was able to do his reading. He read the various scientific studies that the crew were engaged in, as well as any that had been downloaded from the Starfleet network before the USS Adelaide had gotten too far from the communications network. This far out their communications had to relay through other ships, or would take days. So unless something was vitally important, he’d wait until they were back in Starfleet space to read it. It was quiet and he liked that. Becoming captain of the Adelaide, in position if not rank, had meant less time for his studies and less focus on keeping up with the scientific community.

Using the main view screen he was reading through a fascinating paper on cellular division in low gravity when his first officer Lieutenant Commander Victoria Hume entered the bridge. She glances at the Bolian who was using the scanners to examine the spread of a particular algae on the southern most continent and then nodded at Sok.

“Captain we’ll be ready to depart in two days,” she reported.

“I’m a commander,” Sok pointed out, gesturing to his pips, finding it hard to believe that the woman could not see them.

“Naval tradition on Earth means you’re the captain of the Adelaide and we’ll call you captain even if you’re not ranked up yet,” Hume was explaining as Sok raised his hand to cut her off.

“Yes, yes,” he had heard all this before. It just seemed like a startling inaccuracy to present this fiction. It was also Andorian tradition to complain about how hot the surface of Vulcan was, it didn’t make it accurate. If he was captain, he might have more independence, and not have so much of what his staff was dictated by either Captain Carillo or Captain Radak, who ran Andromeda Division. 

He did not smile, nor make any external emotive showing to place his first officer at ease. He was not interested in the social obligations that (mostly humans) had for being a captain. He was only really interested in the research that the USS Adelaide was doing.

“Make sure all teams get what they can gather in the final forty-eight hours, and update the Andromeda on our expected launch window,” he said. That was the thing that he found most effective about command: being able to offload the lesser duties, freeing up his mental bandwidth for science. When he actually got to do science.

It was two days later, almost to the hour, that Commander Sok was seated in the Adelaide‘s central chair as a now bustling bridge went through the motions to lift off. The commanding officer, and still chief science officer, since he had not had time to replace himself, watched as the crew hurried about. The jolt of the ship pushing off from the planet’s surface was negated by the ship’s dampeners. 

“I’ve never actually done this in real life,” Lieutenant Winfield said from the conn. It was not much different than the simulations, though the comment made a few of his fellow crew look up concerned.

“It seems you are capable lieutenant,” Sok said evenly.

“That’s a compliment,” Lieutenant Edward Krisham translated from the flat tone of the Vulcan to the rest of the crew. 

Sok glanced at Krisham and nodded. The pair had served together long enough that he had learned to value the chief counsellor as a kind of go-between, personalizing him to the rest of the crew. He trusted the human to do that, and in turn, the lieutenant had repaid his trust by helping Sok navigate the tricky social situations that he was, at times, unaware of.

“The Andromeda has passed us by now,” Winfield observed. 

The larger ship had not had to hide from a Dominion patrol and had cruised further on its mission as an envoy to planets in the region. 

“Catch up to it,” Sok said, “full speed, we are tasked with being the forward vanguard. Keep scanners on, though, we’re still a science ship.”