“For the love of all that is holy,” Evan Malcolm muttered as he looked out of the glass canopy of the inspection pod upon his greatest work to date.

“Sir?” the young ensign beside him asked. The young man had been assigned as his pilot for the day, freeing him up to conduct an actual visual inspection of the ship. What he lacked in years and experience he also lacked in understanding that sometimes an engineer wasn’t talking to a person, but the twisted and maligned nature of the universe as a whole, intent to ruin someone’s day.

And that nature had a name. A name that every engineer learned and loathed for its ability to summon chaos. To rend a perfectly fine day into a shitstorm. To turn what was supposed to be a perfect inspection into even more work.

Murphy.

“Stop the pod,” Even grumbled as he moved in his seat so he could directly up. “Back us up about ten meters.”

Right there on the underside of USS Republic’s saucer, standing out as if it was highlighted in red, encircled by flashing lights and neon arrows pointing at it, was the target of Evan’s rapidly forming foul mood. One of the external hull panels, a large ten-metre square piece of plating, was not the same colour as the rest of the ship’s hull.

“Fucking seriously,” he muttered again.

“I don’t see it,” the ensign said, following Evan’s gaze and on inspection staring right at it too. “Wait…” The boy squinted, squinted some more, and then relaxed his eyes. “Is that panel a different colour? Geez, subtle isn’t it?”

Subtle wasn’t the word Evan would have used. Obvious. Apparent. Conspicuous. A glaring mark on the hull of the ship he was still the construction supervisor on.

He sighed, a finger jamming down on a comm button on the limited console before him. “Jamieson, Malcolm here.”

“What’s up Commander?” the husky yet feminine voice on the other end answered. She was, like him, still heading Republic’s construction team, but bound to actually be aboard the ship when it finally left port. Unlike himself, she was actually looking forward to active duty aboard a starship.

“Saucer, ventral, fore starboard quarter, section twelve and thirteen,” he said after glancing at his console, confirming the location of the offending panel in question. “Got a hull panel that needs repainting.”

“One second.” He could hear tapping on a keyboard from her side. “Got it. It’s scheduled for repainting this afternoon in fact. Looks like Marcus spotted it yesterday.”

“And of course he didn’t tell me or leave a note,” he complained.

“If he had I’d have reported him for being an imposter,” Jamieson quipped. “I’ll speak with Gonrel and see if they can’t push the repainting up the schedule.”

“Don’t bother,” he conceded. Murphy would win this round. For now. “We’re not due for a final flag inspection until tomorrow afternoon and every inspection this week has been either on time or delayed. It would take a perfect storm for it to happen a full day ahead of schedule.”

A full day, that would by that afternoon, become two full days. With a missive from her desk, Admiral Tau had issued additional leave for Orbital Assets. And naturally the construction inspectors had been the first in the queue to take a day or two off, to rest their weary and world-worn, chair-bound backsides upon the beaches of Avalon II while those who worked for a living carried on with the duties set upon them.

And so, as the world spun beneath them and time passed on, Republic eventually came under the meticulous and relentless attentions of Captain Andreus Corrin. A man who had never in his ten years as an inspector passed a ship on its first inspection. Who had always found a fault with a ship, somehow and no matter how small, that he could use to delay certification and mark it against the ship’s construction supervisor. ‘Why,’ he had heard Corrin lament a few years ago when he had been in Jamieson’s boots as an assistant, ‘you modern construction crews can’t finish a ship by the time of first inspection I will never know. I know I never had to have follow-up inspections when I supervised starship construction.’

“Where’s Marcus?” He found himself asking out of the side of his mouth at Jamieson as he waited for Corrin to cross the shuttlebay from his shuttle.

“On leave, just as you wanted,” she reassured him. “Everything, and I mean everything, is sorted. He fails us, I’m spacing him, you and then myself.” Her levity was not appreciated and the grumbling he issued told her so.

Hours later, or an eternity in a bureaucratic circle of hell from which the likes of Andreas Corrin had slithered out of and then back into, Evan Malcolm sat himself down at the bar in the senior officer’s lounge aboard ship. He and Jamieson had done the impossible – appease the Chthonic deity responsible for allowing a ship to be certified as ‘complete’ on the first pass. Murphy, the god of mischief and engineer’s ulcers, had obviously decided to spend their day elsewhere as well.

Which meant something, somewhere, was either going to or about to go horribly wrong.

But it was a problem for another day. Right now, was a time for celebration. He and Jamieson both sighed in relief at the same time, sharing a brief chuckle afterwards.

“Barkeep,” he said, attempting to invoke the holographic barkeep into existence. Republic didn’t have a full crew yet. Didn’t even have full stores. But in lieu of that, both the Agora and the Pnyx, the two main lounges, did feature holographic staff. If somewhat limited in features and capabilities, they were capable of, as advertised, attending to the needs of the social space’s patrons.

“Barkeep,” he repeated when nothing happened.

“Seriously, this is our glitch?” Jamieson exclaimed as a ghostly apparition started to take form behind the bar. It wasn’t the seconds-long activation of an EMH or a holodeck character. This was slow, blocky, snapping into and out of existence. A garbled and tortured utterance accompanied its brief existence before disappearing back into nothingness.

“Who was responsible for installing the bar?” Even uttered, defeat in his voice. It wasn’t a line item in the inspection, but he was damned if he was going to hand this ship over to its eventual commanding officer with a broken holographic barkeep.

This ship would be perfect.

His ship would be perfect.

“Who cares right now,” Jamieson answered as she got to her feet, rounded the bar and pulled out two chilled glasses from behind the bar and promptly went about filling them with a golden lager. “You did the fucking impossible today Evan. To Corrin and his Never Pass First Inspection, may it rest in peace.”

He took up his glass, rocked his head side to side and answered her toast with a clinking of glass and a sip of beer. “You know, this means we’re no longer Orbital Assets anymore. We’re Republic crew now.”

“This day just gets better and better,” she replied. “Aren’t you currently the senior most officer aboard ship as well?”

“Just until the executive officer gets aboard. We’re apparently going to have to go pick up our captain as well.” Republic was being not so much rushed into service, but rushed or outright ignoring the pomp and ceremony of commissioning. The slip space was needed, the ship was complete, and there was no need to sit around, to wait for people to move around and assemble when the duty station could move around and pick them up after all.

“So, until whoever they are shows up, that makes you the captain right?”

“No.” He said it as a declaration to the universe. He had no desire or intent to command a starship at all. He was only going on active field duty for experience, to get time as a chief engineer before returning triumphantly to his passion of construction. This new assignment was merely a career progression formality. “No,” he repeated as Jamieson smiled at him.

“Captain Evan Malcolm,” she said, from her lips to Murphy’s ears. “Got a nice sound to it.”

“I hate you,” he muttered, before starting in on his beer properly.