The Grand Tour: Marines

Posted on Fri Mar 26th, 2021 @ 9:22pm by Major Hailey Weston & Captain Michelle Bartlett

Mission: Arriving
Location: Marine Deck

"Marine Deck." Jason called out as the elevator began its descent. "Time to see a little more of your ship, I think."

Michelle had been in awe of the corridors and how much more... attractive the ship looked than other Federation starships she'd been on. "You really have to wonder what the designers were after with this. It makes everything that came before it look antiquated."

"You can say that again." Jason replied. "It's like someone served too long on one of those ancient ships we still had in service before the Dominion War and went with something a little nicer."

"Agreed." Michelle replied. "So... what's been new with you? I hadn't heard from you for almost a year before you reached out to me."

"Not a whole lot." Jason replied. "Laura is back at Earth... She got homesick and wanted some time with family. Things are still fine there, but... She gave the Delta Quadrant a go and couldn't, I guess."

"Well you can't really blame her there." Michelle replied as the turbolift arrived on the proper deck. "I hope I wasn't too patronizing in the transporter room. Lieutenant Levine seemed rather quiet."

"You need to give them all time." Jason replied. "Don't forget, this only happened a week and a half ago. Christ, Starfleet Security is still investigating. They'd all be rather back at that planet, probably some would rather we torpedo it from a standard orbit."

"I hope that's not our FIRST set of orders." Michelle said.

"Absolutely not." Jason said. "I'll be honest with you, I haven't even heard what your orders might be yet. The powers that be out here know that Reynolds was one of our first Captains out here and this ship was his baby. It's going to take some time for the crew that served with him to adapt. But they will."

"I hope you're right." she replied.

The Marine standing sentry came to attention as the Commander and Commodore arrived and reached behind his back in a very snappy motion to key the door open before returning the hand to his side. Inside, there were several Marines in discussion with each other and one, a Trill with Gunnery Sergeant stripes and chevron rank insignia glanced over and snapped to the others, “Officers on deck.” The hubbub stopped instantly and the rest of the troops came to attention as the Trill quickly strode over to intercept the officers and brought her hand up in salute, “Sirs, Gunnery Sergeant Ami Rori.” It was a straight forward introduction, “I’m understanding you’re here to see Major Weston? Currently, she’s up in sickbay but I have Lieutenant Jesco here or I could request her return if you’d prefer?”

"As you were." Michelle called out. "Sickbay?" Michelle asked. "Is she alright?"

Her hand dropped, feet went shoulder-wide and both hands came back to the small of her back as the rest of the troops went back to what they were doing, Ami nodded, "Yes, ma'am, she's perfectly all right. Along with being the senior Marine officer on board, Major Weston is also the senior ranking doctor on the ship with the death of Commander Evans. Because of that, she splits her time between here and there and generally has me watch over the troops in her absence. Lieutenant Jesco is... A bit young."

"Might be best to meet the Major then. I can wait." Michelle said. "Besides, I'm sure she'll want to get this sort of thing over with. How is the unit holding up?" she asked, curious as to how the marine detachment was coping. Even for marines, all this had to be exceptionally difficult.

“Losing the Colonel was a pretty big loss, ma’am,” Ami admitted, her hands behind her back waggling twice to get the attention of one of the corporals, with a single finger waved in a small circle twice in the signal to get the Major here. That worthy excused himself and took a few steps to a terminal, while Ami didn’t even skip a beat, “To say we weren’t ready to go down and ‘respond’ to the assassination of the away team would be a dramatic understatement. Sort of an affront to our honor to just sit back and take it, but the Major and I understood why we couldn’t. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, ma’am, as I’m sure you know from her personnel file,” The Gunny was pretty sure the new CO hadn’t actually seen it yet, but this was the polite way of glossing over that probable(but not certain) fact, “The Major has been in some interesting situations when she was in command of a Raider team.”

"A Raider team?" Michelle asked. She had noticed on the Major's service record that there had been some considerable achievements in her career, but she had not quite gotten to that part of the record when the ship arrived. "I'll have to ask her about some of those." she added. "It's a very tragic loss.... And it never should have happened. And... I couldn't have blamed anyone for wanting to avenge the away team to be honest. How long have you served here, Sergeant?"

"On the Wellington, ma'am?" Ami asked, then answered the question, "About eight months. Gunny Bertram was due for a routine rotation to another ship and I came aboard as his replacement. I've been one of the troops for the last sixteen years... This time." She shrugged with a smile, "I've been in various military posts for about half of the last five centuries overall."

"Five centuries?" she said, looking at the Trill. "All that time in military service? Your symbiont must know what it wants." she added. "And eight months here.... Have you liked it so far?"

The Trill shrugged, "It's definitely been easier than my last assignment, ma'am. Rori keeps telling me that I'm taking it easy now, he's sort of a risk taker, you know.. As they get older, symbionts really do get settled in their ways and he's always been the fly by the seat of your pants type. But when you're nearly seven hundred years old? Don't get him started talking about the past, you'd die of old age."

"But, Rori, like you Ami, is worth his weight in gold pressed latinum." A voice came from behind Michelle and Jason and a marine uniformed woman with starling blue eyes stepped around, a medical caduceus paired with the golden oak leaf of a Major on the collar, "I do apologize, Captain, Commodore, I wasn't expecting you two to come down here any time soon and I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." Her voice was silky smooth, the words of being surprised not being backed up by her expression or tone of voice, in fact she had a smile on, "If you'd like, I could take you on a walkthrough of the section and answer any questions you may have?"

"No worries." Michelle said. "I hope I didn't take you from anything urgent in Sick Bay?" Michelle asked.

“Not at all, ma’am, I’m up there mostly to keep an eye on the junior officers and to keep the Major paperwork flowing through like it needs to be as well as to handle problems that arise. Nothing that was pressing in the slightest.” Hailey shrugged using only her eyebrows.

"In that case, I'd love a look around here. So... you specialize both as a marine and a medic? Must have been a lot of studying."

“Not a medic, ma’am, I’m a fully trained doctor, MD and all, though admittedly I specialize in trauma medicine. I am, in fact, part of a project for the Corps to see if having an all up doc out on the front lines makes a difference in a special operations team, though now I’m posted to a ship for... Other reasons.” The last few words were bitten out, even as she gestured their direction towards a large open area with training mats, “It did require a lot of studying and a few additional years at the Academy but I’m fully licensed to take you apart and put you back together if the need comes up.” She paused for a half moment, “This is one of our primary hand to hand training areas, Ami’s one of the instructors, I’m sure you know that unlike Security officers, we tend to be used in more aggressive situations where the need for mayhem is required. While we are effective in non-lethal scenarios, we are better than Security in assaults and aggressive defense. The Federation Council was under the impression that we were anathema to the direction the Federation wants to go, but the Borg incursions and the Dominion War effectively killed their plan to disband the Corps.”

"It usually just takes one change of events like that, doesn't it?" Michelle said. "We don't need any of this.... Oh. Wait." she added with a chuckle. "Seems a universal thing with any bureaucracy... Although, I'll do what I can to make sure you don't have to take me apart. How long have you been aboard?"

"Just over a year, as of last Thursday, but I really didn't feel much like celebrating at the time." Hailey sighed, "I get this feeling that I was about to be transferred out, but can't prove it one way or the other. Now, unless they bring in another officer, they'll keep me here for a while longer. Second Lieutenant Jesco is as green as you can get. But I do have some very good senior NCOs to help keep him from tripping over his own bootheels." She smiled slightly, "I wouldn't mind delaying that movement off the Wellington for a while longer, that's for sure."

"I may have to meet Mr. Jesco." Michelle said with a smirk. How bad could it really be? she thought to herself. "You were the Marine Exec before, no?" she asked Hailey. From what she'd seen so far, she had no reason to think that Hailey needed to be transferred anywhere. Plus really, the fewer changes the better at the moment.

"Yes, ma'am, I was posted here specifically for that position. Before that, I was the CO of a special operations team for two years." Hailey had continued them on through a door into a holodeck area that was configured as a firing range, "What we have here is our firing range that we can reconfigure into a small tactics training center to practice assaults, especially into close quarters combat. The range can simulate targets up to five kilometers out so that even our sniper training can be performed here. We train not only with phasers, but also ballistic slugthrowing weapons. With the potential Borg threats and other unknowns, being proficient with both energy and physical weapons really does make a difference." She gave a conspiratorial smile, "How are your weapons skills, Captain?"

"It's been a while" Michelle said. "But... I might still have it. Do you have an assault rifle laying around?"

Hailey chuckled at the request, "What sort of Marines would we be if we didn't have a few of those here and there? Gunny?" She winked at Michelle, a different sort of smile on her face even as Ami brought over one of the weapons that was along the back wall behind a sliding wall, "We've been able to replace the standard pulse rifle with a hybrid model. It has a pulse phaser emitter, but includes a nine millimeter rifled round with thirty-round magazine, single, burst or automatic fire, but I don't recommend the last." The Trill woman handed the rifle to the CO.

"I think I'll give it a go. Might pass on the automatic fire though. I barely passed phaser training at the academy, but... there's a science officer joke in there somewhere I'm sure." Michelle added with a smirk. She looked at the weapon, rather impressed. And a hybrid? Guess you have to make do out here....

"How do you get a science officer to hit a target?" Hailey's sly smile turned into a wide grin, "Simple, of course, you bring the target to them!" It was a pretty bad joke, but most of the ones she knew were like that, but she brought up a holo-target at ten meters away in the range, "No, but seriously, these are all dialed in and you're welcome down here whenever you want. Just ask any of the troops to spot you just to be safe, we've been accident free for over a year now."

“I may take you up on that.” Michelle replied. She got into position, pointed the rifle at the targets and began firing. What little phaser training she remembered came back to her as she got the targets right where she intended. Not quite in the middle but close enough. “Better than I recall!” She said, lowering the weapon.

Even as the rifle began to lower, Hailey's hand dipped and in a quick draw had a pistol out and aimed, her right foot dropping back about six inches to strengthen her base. The first shot rang out just as it came up and she controlled the recoil with just the one hand as the other came up to cup the bottom of the handle and another nine shots came within the next five seconds. The target, being peppered with Michelle's shots, lost its center into a small ragged hole about the size of an old fifty-cent piece. "You're not bad for being out of practice, ma'am." She said, even as her hands automatically ejected the magazine in her own pistol and reloaded.

“Thanks! I’m shocked I didn’t trigger an alert on the bridge!”

"Down here, we send enough fire downrange that if alerts were set off whenever we took some shots, no one would ever get any rest." Hailey laughed, "It was far easier to set this compartment as an exception to the sensors and just do all our shooting in here. You can feel free to take advantage of our hospitality any time, Captain."

Michelle chuckled a little. "I look forward to it. If there's anything I can ever do for you... Let me know. Following the change of command, I'll be asking to meet with senior staff. I hope I'll see you there." she said.

"Of course, ma'am, I wouldn't miss it." Hailey gave a half-bow in acknowledgement of the politely worded order.

"Thank you, Major." Jason replied. "I'll be seeing you soon."