General Ship Inspection Transcript Here
‘Clearance’
Deep Space 13, Deck 11, Event Horizon Lounge
Deck 11 was never quiet, but in the hour before the planned general ship readiness inspection that he’d been ordered to facilitate, Zohl found himself standing near the expansive viewport in the Event Horizon Lounge; watching a slow drift of diagnostic drones flit across the Tykera’s hull. They moved with a patient inevitability, swarming in careful arcs, each one leaving behind a lattice of faintly glimmering sensor trails. His antennae angled toward the glass, but his thoughts sat elsewhere.
From behind came the sound of a mug settling onto a table. Zohl turned, his gaze catching a human captain alone near the seating just past the bar. The uniform was lived-in, not lax; the sort of creases that came from use rather than neglect. A Captain ‘Carter’ ( @ServerHamster ), he would later learn, of the USS Opportunity. They exchanged the polite friction of professional small talk, but it never quite stayed small. Ships, crews, the way duranium alloy in the hull wore its years. Carter had the look of someone who enjoyed the work of breathing new life back into an older ship, despite its weight. Zohl respected that.
By the time Argo’s Strategic Operations Officer Captain Nimitz ( @Nimitz ) arrived, older than Zohl expected, and Romulan at that, the moment had settled him. The inspection would be thorough, but not hostile. And besides, he had work to do.
The Tykera’s decks felt sharper somehow under inspection, like a dress uniform. The turbolift hummed through its stops, bridge, engineering, sickbay, each department bending subtly to the presence of visitors. Officers stood a little straighter, voices clipped to regulation, but there was no performance. Zohl had made it clear in the morning briefing: no rehearsals, no staged displays. What Nimitz and Carter saw would be the ship as she was.
On the bridge, he took them through the forward stations without hurry, letting the room breathe. The conn officer rose from her seat to explain their navigational presets for station approach, her tone crisp but with a quiet pride Zohl knew came from hours of unbroken runs. At tactical, his Lieutenant offered a short, efficient outline of the ship’s readiness posture, fingers never far from the console even as he spoke. For science, tucked slightly off-centre, an Ensign, whose clear explanation of sensor calibration gave away the fact she had been running the array at a higher resolution than protocol required. Zohl did not interrupt, did not fill the silences. He let their words carry the picture: a bridge crew that could function without glancing to him for every confirmation, because the trust had already been earned.
In sickbay, his CMO met them with calm precision, their report delivered like a scalpel cut, clean and without wasted motion. Zohl let his officers speak. It was part of the point.
In engineering, he stood slightly apart while his Chief, ever blunt, explained the ship’s heart in the gruff shorthand of someone who would rather show than tell. The Chief spoke with a certain pride about the “miracle core”, as he insisted on calling it, the system’s adaptive rhythms and its ability to coax more out of the ship than the schematics ever promised. It was the kind of talk that impressed inspectors, perhaps Carter more than Nimitz, yet Zohl knew that no inspection could measure the one thing that mattered more than any innovation in the hull: the crew who kept it alive.
They had kept the Tykera running through more than scheduled refits and hazard zones. They had held her together while her captain had fractured under the weight of his XO’s loss. And they had done it without letting her slide into the kind of quiet neglect that seeps in when a crew loses faith. Whatever skill his Chief claimed for himself, Zohl knew the truth… it was the crew he and Vos had moulded together, each department shaped by years of shared work and earned trust, that gave the ship her edge. A core of people, not hardware, was what kept her from becoming just another well-built hull on a station docket.
As they moved between decks, Carter’s questions had an easy warmth to them. Speaking as an engineer, he seemed very interested in the Tykera’s many ‘novel’ qualities. Nimitz, by contrast, took notes with an economy of motion that suggested he saw more than he wrote, and perhaps was equally weighing not just the ship, but its crew… or perhaps just its Captain.
Occasionally, Nimitz would glance at Zohl for a beat too long before continuing. Zohl knew the look. It was the same one senior officers had given him after Vos’ death, a subtle measure of what might be broken, and whether it could be trusted.
He kept his replies professional, measured. But in the quieter corridors between compartments, he let the smallest hints of candour through. Not about Vos, it hadn’t come up… or at least, he hadn’t allowed it to. Just enough to remind them, and perhaps himself, that the crew’s readiness was not only a matter of systems and solutions, but of skill and ingenuity.
When the inspection closed in the briefing room, they did not leave at once. At Nimitz’s request, Zohl had brought up a set of combat mission reports on the wall display… recent patrol actions along the Tykera’s former route, including a skirmish with Nausicaan raiders and a joint rescue with a Klingon bird-of-prey. He summarised each engagement with the same concise detail he used in his log entries, noting how the crew had improvised under pressure, redirected resources mid-engagement, and turned narrow advantages into decisive outcomes.
Nimitz observed that the adaptability shown in the reports was what he expected to see from a ship entering Argo’s operational theatre. Carter added that not many crews could manage that level of coordination with a ship that possessed such unique systems-engineering factors. Zohl gave a small nod at that, though his expression remained measured, his eyes briefly fixed on the tactical overlay before shutting the display down.
Carter pushed to his feet, resting a hand on the back of a chair. “She’s a fine ship,” he said. “Crew seem steady. That counts for more than most reports admit. Still think you’d give the Opportunity a good fight, if you ever wanted to test that in a simulation.” Zohl allowed the faintest smile, though it was gone as quickly as it came. “We’ll see, Captain.”
Outside the viewport, the drones were peeling away from the ship’s hull, dispersing into the station’s traffic lanes. A soft chime from the wall console cut through the quiet, and Nimitz glanced over from his PADD. “Clearance will likely be granted Captain, I say this informally to you of course,” he said simply, the closest thing to a pass he would give. It would be official in due course, after the routine checks and rechecks all concluded… the Tykera and her crew would be deemed ready for active deployment.
Zohl stayed where he was, watching the inspectors depart. Alone again, he looked out at the stars beyond the station’s frame. They were still there, patient as ever, waiting for the ship to move. He hated standing still like this. Though he hadn’t always been like that… Soon, the Tykera and her crew would meet their renewed mission without hesitation. Whether he would be able to do the same… that was a question he could not yet answer.