First Time on Bridge

Posted on Sat Jul 18th, 2020 @ 2:38am by Ensign Lucas Miles

Mission: Shore Leave
Location: Bridge
Timeline: Current

[Bridge]

The command centre of the Independence was bigger than Lucas had expected. Not only was it big, it was pulsing with activity, which perhaps was to be expected of the nerve centre of the heavy cruiser.

Lucas straightened his tunic as he stepped off the turbolift nodding a greeting here and there to officers who caught his eyes. He wondered what they were thinking. He was after all a new face on the Bridge. He was assigned to the graveyard shift. When on duty and not on the Bridge, he would be working with the greasehands in shuttle bay to get Chief ch’Thranne’s shuttle project off the ground.

Not bad for an Ensign fresh out of the Academy, John thought. But he was also not just an ordinary Ensign. Over his nearly three decades of life, Lucas had accumulated a considerable amount of flight time. It was no exaggeration to say he probably had the most flight time of any pilot on this ship.

Although, to be fair he had not investigated the accuracy of that.

While it may be true that he likely held a formidable record in terms of flight time, it was only because of his unique history prior to joining the Academy. Unlike most of his Academy peers, Starfleet was not his first career. As a matter of fact, Starfleet was his third career.

His first career was as a junior bureaucrat on Bajor, where he was born and raised before he decided to follow in his father’s footstep in the civilian merchant freighting. He had served four years as a pilot in the Earth Cargo Service. He had clocked some serious flight time at various points of his life flying around the galaxy in his father’s freighter.

About the one constant in his life from his teenage years was flying.

Perhaps given that context, it was no surprise that he had been given important tasks on board the Independence.

Regardless of the reason, Lucas thought, he was happy to sit at the helm of an Achilles class vessel, even if it was the graveyard shift. He had never flown an Achilles class before, and he was excited about the prospect of finally crossing this starship class of his rather long list of starship classes he has had the privilege of flying.

So far, he was on number twenty-three.

Reaching the helm station, he nodded at the Ensign he was to relieve as the latter logged off. Lucas immediately took his seat and logged himself into the system. By now he was intimately familiar with the Independence’s engines although he suspected his familiarity with the ship’s interface would take some getting used to. He began his first task by quickly reviewing the logs from the last shift, scanning for anything pertinent.

There was nothing unusual given that the ship was maintaining geosynchronous orbit around the planet Risa. There was not much for a pilot to do in such instance as the computer handled the ship’s movements, which were only slight course adjustments. In such instances, the pilot was nothing but a glorified pair of eyes to monitor the computer’s autonomous actions.

However, for Lucas, this relatively quiet period was an excellent opportunity to test the ship’s reaction control systems. He deactivated the auto pilot and took manual control of the ship’s reaction control systems.

He wanted to get a feel for the ship – to get a better sense of the latency between his action and the ship’s response. Each ship was different and adjusting to this latency would be crucial to his ability to effectively pilot the ship.

It was also an opportunity to actively pilot the ship rather than supervising the computer doing it.

He also took the opportunity to familiarize himself with the controls of the ship, checking the status of key systems and subsystems. He was pleased to see everything was in the green. This ship was tightly run, he mused.

After a few minutes of deep diving into the ship’s controls, Lucas looked up from his console, a wide boyish grin on his face. “Piloting an Achilles class vessel…add that as number twenty-four and cross of the list” he stated under his breath so that he was the only one who could hear himself.


Ensign Lucas Miles
Flight Control Officer
USS Independence