Tallera tapped away on the tactical console on the USS Shepard’s bridge, making sure that all the settings, sensitivities, and touchpad shortcuts were to her liking. She’d spent the morning running diagnostics on the ship’s phaser arrays and torpedo pod, and everything had gone swimmingly in that way that only a brand-new ship could. Hopefully these weapons would actually get a chance to make themselves useful, unlike those poor neglected phasers on the Achana. Tallera hadn’t even gotten a chance to blow up an errant asteroid.

She continued adjusting her settings, then returned to her main menu, and then slammed her fist against the armrest.

“God DAMN it!” she shouted, causing the nearby Rysana to jump. “Why does this console keep reverting back to Operations? It deletes my workstation settings when it does that.”

“Probably because a lot of Federation captains like the Ops station being there, Tallie,” the Andorian replied with a wry smile after taking a moment to recompose herself. She’d been fiddling with the Science station, making sure it was transmitting data to the Med Center correctly.

“That’s stupid,” Tallera said as she started the process of swapping it back to Tactical. “Why would anyone want the Ops guy next to the Helm Officer? They have nothing to do with each other. Helm and Tactical need to be synced up more than almost anyone else.”

“Most ships in Starfleet aren’t primarily for fighting. On a Exploration or Engineering Corps vessel, it’s good to have Ops right in front of the captain.”

“The Shepard isn’t either of those, though.”

“The software guys installing the LCARS OS probably didn’t think about that.”

“Yeah, that figures,” Tallera sighed. She’d always disliked programmers back in the Academy. They always seemed to be the type to think that just because they understood one complicated thing, anything else must be simple to understand, and therefore beneath them.

“Hey, you saw Vic’s new cat, right?” Rysana asked from her seat along the side of the bridge.

“No, what’s a cat?”

“Oh, you gotta go check it out. It’s this cute little furry animal from the Human homeworld. Vic, Dreval, and I were playing with it earlier down by our cabins a few hours ago.”

“Huh. I bet that was fun,” Tallera responded, doing her best to present a carefree attitude about the situation. In truth, it bothered her enormously that none of her friends were living on the same deck as her. While she’d managed to nab some nice quarters near the galley with a private bathroom, she hated knowing that she was just far enough from Dreval, Rysana, and Vic that it would be easy for them to forget about her.

“Yeah, sorry you missed it,” Rysana continued. “I think it was when you and Zelenko were working on moving that Runabout? I’m sure you’ll have a chance to see the little guy soon, Vic won’t shut up about him.”

“Then I look forward to meeting our newest crewmember,” Tallera smiled.

After a few minutes of quiet working, the bridge turbolift swished open. Tallera turned, expecting to see Zelenko… but was met with the sight of a tall human male with broad shoulders, a dark complexion, and a goatee.

“Uh, who’re you?” Tallera asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, hey there, sorry for dropping in on you two,” the man said with a wave. “I’m Ensign Calvin Mackenzie, the new Flight Control Officer. Call me Mack.”

“Lieutenant Vahl,” Rysana said, standing up to shake Mack’s hand. “I’m a nurse, so this’ll probably be the last time you see me up here for a while.”

“Nice to meet you,” he replied with a warm grin.

“Tallera,” Tallie said with a slight wave. “What are you doing here? The full crew isn’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow.”

“Ah, well, It turns out I’m the only officer getting transferred here that was already working at Starbase Bravo,” Mack said with a shrug. “I’ve been cutting my teeth as a shuttle pilot for the last month, and I guess this is where they decided to put me on my first real assignment. I introduced myself to Commander Zelenko yesterday, she gave me clearance to hop on since I was already here.”

“You’re one lucky bastard, aren’t you?” Rysana chuckled. “Getting on the ship before everybody else like that.”

“Well, not before all of you!” he smiled back. “I heard y’all have been working with Zelenko personally for like three months now. That’s crazy, I’d kill for some one-on-one bonding with a CO like that.”

“Yeah, it was pretty cool,” Rysana replied. “We got to rough it out in a Raven corvette. However, you’re gonna have to let Tallie here tell ya about that, because I just finished with this console and gotta go work on crap at the health center.” She got up and headed for the turbolift. “Nice meeting you, Mack.”

“You too, Vahl!”

Nononono please don’t make me hold a conversation alone with a new person, Tallera silently pleaded to her friend as she stepped onto the lift and vanished from sight.

Shit.

“So, Tallie, was it?” Mack said as he strode in front of the Captain’s chair and took a seat at the helm.

“Tallera.”

“Ah, got it, so – oh, wait, you’re the Romulan, aren’t you?” Mack asked, his smile growing wider and more eager. 

“Yyyyyep,” Tallera said with a forced smile. She figured that she’d be greeted with this quite often in the coming days. “Romulan Republic Exchange Officer, at your service.”

“Wow. That is so cool. I can’t wait to tell my dad, he saw you guys fight during the Dominion War. Said those warbirds of yours are really something else.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty neat. My parents fought in the Dominion War too, actually.”

“Oh yeah? Where’d they see action?”

“I dunno. They died when I was young.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s alright. Still have my Grandpa.”

“Cool. Coooooool…” Mack said, drumming on his console with the tips of his fingers. “Did you lose your parents when Romulus… uh, sorry, that’s not my place to ask.”

“It’s alright. And yeah, I did.”

“Ah.”

They sat in silence for a moment, Mack still drumming his fingers on his console as he tapped at the screen a few times.

“Hey, you like sports?” he asked. “There’s a couple cool leagues here in the Federation.”

“Not really, sorry.”

“Ah. Hey, no worries. To each their own and all that.”

“Mmmmm-hmm.”

Tallera wanted to die.

“Where are you from?” she asked, desperately trying to break out of conversational gridlock. Oh, how she wished Rysana was still here.

“Earth. City called Philadelphia, it’s part of the Northeast Corridor megapolis if you’ve heard of it. What about you?”

“I live on New Romulus, in the Vastam mountain range. My grandpa helped set up a little town there.”

“Ah. So, not much like Philadelphia then, I guess,” Mack said with a forced-sounding chuckle.

“Not really, no.”

“Hmmm. Cool cool cool,” Mack said again, then began fiddling with his Helm console. “Man, I’ve been killing to fly a full blown ship for months now. This is gonna be great.”

“Were you hoping to get a ship like the Shepard?” Tallera asked, hoping that she may have finally found some commonality between the two of them.

“Well, I try not to put all my hopes in one kind of ship, keep an open mind and all that.”

“I can respect that,” Tallera responded.

“But I have to say, this one is pretty great. Brand-new, small enough to be fun to fly… and the position of its impulse thrusters have some really cool effects on the spaceframe. I’m dying to pull a 180 by splitting the throttle.”

“What’s splitting the throttle mean? We don’t use that phrase in our Navy.”

“High power differential thrust,” Mack replied. “Y’know, cranking one impulse to max while the other idles, it makes the ship perform a sharp yaw turn. It’s great in combat, and Reliants like Shepard are perfect for it since the engines are so far apart.”

“That sounds like a great way to wind up in an uncontrolled spin,” Tallera said with a raised eyebrow. “You’d need two massive inverse power shifts one after the other at very precise intervals. That’d wreak havoc on the EPS systems, especially during combat. It would just take one conduit failure and you’re a helpless, spinning target dead in the void.”

“That’s why you gotta be a good pilot,” Mack smiled.

“Or an arrogant one. The thrusters are far apart to increase normal-yield differential thrust performance, not to split the ship in half performing a stunt.”

“I guess we’ll just have to leave this little disagreement to the Commander’s discretion, then,” Mack shrugged with a smile, not seeming to take Tallera’s remarks personally.

“I suppose so,” Tallera said, then rushed through a few final checks on her console before shutting it down. “Well, I’m done here. I’ll be down on deck four if you need me.”

“Oh. Uh, alright,” Mack said with a shrug, then continued working on his own console. “Nice to meet ya.”

“Likewise,” Tallera said with a nod of her head, then did her best to look like she wasn’t leaving in a hurry. She let out a deep sigh of relief upon entering the turbolift. 

Well, that certainly hadn’t gone as well as her introduction to Dreval. She hated meeting people one-on-one for a reason; the minute you don’t have anything in common, everything just becomes an awkward slog until one of you can find an excuse to leave. And Tallera was pretty sure that she and the new pilot had very little in common.