YE/D05 & 06 - Science Labs

[Paul]

==

[Riley Wright]

== Post-Mission ==

== Ensign T'Varen - NRC ==

Ensign T’Varen arrived at the Yeager’s science labs with quiet precision. The doors parted as she approached and sealed again behind her with a muted hiss.

The compartment was compact and purpose-built: workstations laid out for efficiency, equipment strapped down for shipboard motion, displays streaming diagnostic ribbons and sensor summaries in steady, unemotional lines.

Vulcan—unmistakably, at a glance. The restrained geometry of her features. The controlled neutrality of her expression. Ears tapering to a disciplined point—neither exaggerated nor softened for human comfort. Her dark hair was practical, pulled back and secured with nothing loose enough to catch on cabling or instrumentation. Nothing ornamental. Nothing accidental. Even stillness, in her case, had purpose.

She wore the sciences division uniform as regulations intended—pressed, precise, unadorned. Yet there were tells that didn’t belong to the lab.

She moved like someone who respected blind angles.

Not theatrics. Not paranoia. Habit—subtle and ingrained. She paused at the threshold just long enough to register exits, lanes of movement, the placement of bodies and equipment, then committed deeper into the room without ever obstructing an active station. It was the kind of awareness that came from a primary track that hadn’t started in research.

As she stepped in, a smaller deviation surfaced.

Midshipman Riley Wright hadn’t appeared in the corridor, nor at any junction T’Varen had passed. The last assignment record she’d reviewed placed Wright here. Under normal circumstances, a greeting would have been… probable.

She filed it away without allowing it to touch her expression.

Deviation from expectation noted. Cause undetermined.

Lieutenant Commander Arwen Qi was easy to identify as the senior presence. Not by volume or performance—by the way the room subtly arranged itself around his workstation. He occupied the primary console at a slight angle to the displays, posture balanced in the particular way of someone long accustomed to cramped workspaces: comfortable, not careless.

Trill—unmistakably. Dark brown spots traced along the sides of his face and continued down his neck, briefly visible above the uniform collar when he shifted. And there were other markings too—ink rather than pigment—glimpses of tattooed script along his forearms when his sleeves rode back with movement. The sciences uniform was worn correctly and kept neat, but it read as working attire, not something curated for inspection.

T’Varen approached without cutting through anyone’s active lane and stopped at a respectful distance. Hands folded behind her back, spine straight without stiffness, gaze steady.

“Lieutenant Commander Qi,” she said, voice calm and precise. “Ensign T’Varen reporting as ordered.”

She let the silence stand—acknowledgement on his terms, not hers.

Then, with a smooth, minimal motion, she produced a PADD and extended it. The display had been arranged with clinical efficiency: transfer orders to the USS Yeager, current clearances, departmental acknowledgements, and a concise service history—most recently the USS Erebus, a small-crew posting where adaptability wasn’t optional.

Security qualifications sat prominently among the entries, flanked by secondary certifications that made her placement in a lab less anomalous than it might first appear.

T’Varen did not comment on any of it. She simply offered the documentation and waited, expression unchanged.

Authority acknowledged. Parameters pending.

“I am prepared to receive department orientation and begin any assigned priority,” she added. “If calibration work is pending, backlog triage is required, or there are irregularities needing initial review, I can start immediately at your direction.”

She fell silent again—attentive, composed, ready to move the instant she was tasked.

== Tag Qi ==

[Arwen Qi]

The Yeager’s Science Lab was impressive, but it wasn’t home yet. Qi had been spending too much time on the Bridge to properly leave his mark. On the Geronimo, the pile of PADDs on his desk had been infamous. He knew that some of the ensigns took bets about how many there would be at the start of each shift.

The mountain, as they’d come to call it, contained a variety of distinct biomes, which changed with each passing day. A novice hiker could get lost for days in post-war Gamma Quadrant poetry, never realizing that they’d made a wrong turn at sensor diagnostics. As chaotic as it had seemed, it wasn’t clutter. A clean desk was like a sheer cliff face looming stoically above his head — the scattered thoughts around his workspace gave him a trail of landmarks to follow.

Qi’s gaze swept over a report of spatial anomalies in the Wairara system. He nodded, planting a flag in that thought before returning to the task at hand. His workstation aboard the Yeager was more of a bluff than a mountain, though it still would have earned him a stern warning on most ships. Thankfully, he had some leeway in his own lab.

“Lieutenant Commander Qi, Ensign T’Varen reporting as ordered.”

An unfamiliar voice pulled his focus. He turned in his chair to greet it. She was Vulcan, somewhat severe. There was a certain elegance in her rigid posture. Qi didn’t detect any nerves at all. He rested his elbows on his desk, smiling warmly as she handed him a PADD.

Interesting background. More varied than most, he thought, skimming the document. His lips pressed together thoughtfully as he passed the security qualifications.

“Welcome aboard. Happy to have you.” Qi said, his voice soft and confident. He was in his element here. He placed the PADD between them gently, focusing on the person in front of him rather than the words on the screen.

“I am prepared to receive department orientation and begin any assigned priority,” she added. “If calibration work is pending, backlog triage is required, or there are irregularities needing initial review, I can start immediately at your direction.”

Qi smiled, his dark eyes glittering. He was glad to hear that his new assignee didn’t mind routine work — those tasks made their research possible — but he wouldn’t learn much about her based on how she formatted a data chip.

“I’m sure we’ll have plenty of that,” he replied, “but let’s start with something a little more exciting. We just collected a ton of data from the Wairara system: astrometric, biological, linguistic — take your pick. What field draws your interest?”

He shifted comfortably in his chair, studying her.

== Tag T’Varen ==

[Riley Wright]

== Ensign T'Varen ==

T’Varen did not respond immediately. The question was framed simply, yet preference implied personal inclination, and inclination was rarely operationally relevant. She evaluated before answering.

Her gaze remained steady on Lieutenant Commander Qi while her thoughts aligned in structured progression. Astrometric modeling offered defined parameters: gravimetric fluctuation curves, stellar drift projections, plasma displacement vectors. Biological analysis introduced broader tolerances. Linguistic interpretation required extrapolation from incomplete cultural context. Of the available options, astrometrics provided the cleanest foundation for hazard prediction.

“Astrometrics,” she said at last, voice even and measured. “Specifically, any irregularities within the system’s gravimetric harmonics or stellar drift patterns.”

Her posture remained aligned, hands folded behind her back.

“If the Wairara system generated significant data volume, a mass displacement or subspace distortion event is statistically probable. Structural instability would precede secondary biological or environmental disruption. Establishing drift deviation baselines would therefore provide the most reliable predictive model.”

Her eyes shifted briefly to the bluff of PADDs on his desk before returning to him. The stacks were uneven, layered without discernible indexing structure. Several leaned into one another at inefficient angles; others remained partially open, suspended between review and archival.

She assessed without haste.

Retrieval dependent on positional memory increases error probability over time.

Proximity suggested priority. Orientation suggested recency. The system relied on cognitive mapping rather than formal classification. While adequate under immediate recall conditions, it lacked redundancy safeguards. If interrupted, displaced, or replicated by another officer, integrity would degrade rapidly.

Scalability: limited. Transferability: minimal. Audit resilience: insufficient.

The method functioned. That was observable. Function alone, however, represented baseline competence—not optimization.

Efficiency without structure is temporary.

The critique did not surface in her expression. Cultural variation did not exempt a system from analysis. It simply contextualized it.

“My Security training favors environmental threat modeling,” she continued, tone unchanged. “Structural instability precedes cascading failures. I would begin by isolating sensor discrepancies requiring manual override confirmation. Automated filtering systems frequently suppress statistical outliers that later prove operationally significant.”

Her gaze remained steady.

“Once drift models are established, I can cross-reference biological or linguistic findings to determine correlative impact and risk projection. That sequencing reduces analytical contamination between datasets and preserves interpretive integrity.”

She inclined her head slightly—acknowledgment, not concession. Silence followed, deliberate and controlled, as she awaited directive parameters.

== Tag Qi ==

[Arwen Qi]

“My Security training favors environmental threat modeling. Structural instability precedes cascading failures.”

Qi followed the Vulcan’s gaze to his collection of PADDs. He nudged Romulan cryptography into a sturdier position underneath Navajo code talkers, preventing a small cascading failure of his own. He guessed that his system horrified her though, to her credit, she didn’t show it on her face.

“I would begin by isolating sensor discrepancies requiring manual override confirmation,” T’Varen continued. “Automated filtering systems frequently suppress statistical outliers that later prove operationally significant.”

His hand went automatically to the flag he’d just planted in spatial anomalies, then followed the trail down to sensor diagnostics. He handed the stack to T’Varen, along with a history of local star charts, for good measure.

“See how far you get with this. I’ll check in on your progress at the start of tomorrow’s shift,” Qi instructed. “Though I’ll caution you against reading too deeply into sensor discrepancies. Keep in mind that the ship is literally mashed together from spare parts. It works somehow, but it’s a miracle that both sides go to warp at the same time.”

He let the thought breathe for a moment, confident that he’d made his point. Any officer serving on the Yeager would need to be comfortable with some amount of mess.

“Can I ask, by the way,” He said, putting both elbows on the desk between them, “why the department change? Not just for my own curiosity, but so that I know what kind of work you’re interested in.”

== Tag! ==