Chapter Eight, Pt III
"L-Leo, I, ah, don’t know if it’s appropriate to ask this," she said, still having trouble actually calling him by name, "but I really want to know."
Here it comes, the Big Decider. Conscience or Regulations, he told himself, and was not disappointed. "Go ahead and ask, Andrea."
"Well, I was wondering about the punishment detail you set me," she began, surprising him slightly with the angle she took. "Although double shifts is a hardship for me even if I do manage to train myself to fall asleep instantly, without an official reprimand in my file the duties you’ll have me do can only help my career." She paused to look him right in the eye. "Why did you do that? You could have assigned me all sorts of crap details, and yet you gave me this. Why?"
Bates sighed inwardly. She’d seen through it all right, but what he said was, "I’d hardly call a two week punishment shift under Commander Donally’s personal tutelage as an easy time of it, Miss Brown. You will be worked very hard indeed and expected to know all the procedures and details of each station’s subsystems by the end of the first week. I personally think that this will serve to make you a far better officer than scrubbing the photon tubes with a toothbrush ever will, don’t you think?"
She looked confused by that, seeing the sense of what he’d said but not getting the answer she’d expected. "Uh, aye sir," she replied quietly, then went on to say, "About my actions during the incident, Captain, I’d just like to personally assure you that it was not my intention to break or subvert the chain of command."
"I realise that, Lieutenant," Bates said, slipping back into the safety of formality. "That is why there is no official reprimand in your file, and why you’re not an ensign right now."
"I was just trying to do the right thing!" she blurted out.
Another sigh from Bates, this time an audible one. "I know, Andrea, I know. But you ignored the regulations to safeguard a friend. An admirable quality, but it wasn’t your place to do so. You have to learn that the regulations are there for a reason."
"How do you do it, sir?" she asked urgently, needing to know. "How do you balance doing the right thing against following the regulations?"
"Why do you believe they are separate, Andrea?" he asked back. "There are those who put firm faith in the wisdom of the rule makers and believe that following the Regulations
is the right thing to do."
"Not all the time, sir!" she almost pleaded. "Ted didn’t deserve to get--"
Bates cut her off gently. "Yes, Andrea, he did."
She wavered, altered her stance. "Well, yes, he deserved to be taken to task, but that’s what I did! I’m 100% sure he’d never have let it happen again after the way I chewed him out. I wasn’t protecting him from the consequences of his actions, sir, I was waking him up to them! Why did Commander Donally have to make such a huge deal out of it and demand he be punished further?"
"Andrea, Commander Donally did nothing more than the regulations demanded of her."
"But--"
"
Listen to me!" he commanded her. "The commander was quite within her rights to expect the resolution she got out of it, and you have to realise that. What you also have to realise is that there are a lot of different command styles out there that you could encounter in the course of your career, not all of which you’ll agree with, but as long as they have the Regulations to back them up they are all just as valid as your own."
As Bates paused there to let that sink into his young officer’s mind, the young officer herself was grappling with this inevitable changing of her perceptions. Andrea, for her part, felt that this speech was all too familiar. She did realise, now, that Bates was right. What’s more, that people who fell back on the Regs for everything likely had a
more valid command style, as seen by Command themselves, and that didn’t sit well with her. She’d have to start refreshing her memory on the Regulations, the better to know which ones she could bend or break and get away with.
Regulations be damned, she thought in defiance.
I’m going to follow my own conscience, otherwise how can I look myself in the mirror each morning? Bates watched Andrea’s face as his lesson finally sunk in, seeing comprehension but also a stubborn determination forming behind her eyes.
I know that look, he thought to himself with equal parts of pride and frustration.
I’ve worn it myself countless times. But here and now is not the time for a Lieutenant JG to be deciding this. "Andrea, I can see what you’re thinking and you are right. It’s just the wrong time for you to be thinking it." She looked up in surprise at his words, and he continued. "These are the issues that a commander grapples with, sometimes daily. In your situation and at your age, my first instinct in dealing with what Johnson did would have been to chew him out, too. However, as a command officer, I know that what he did was serious enough to warrant following through on.
"It does look like you have good judgement, but when it comes to the regulations,
you need to follow them. Chewing someone out is a privilege given to senior officers who have done their time and earned their rank by gaining the experience with which to make fully informed choices. You don’t have that experience and as a result you opted for an informal reprimand instead of following procedure because you were swayed by your own identification with the culprit.
"Not only that, but you only saw those lives nebulously, the danger to them as an abstract
thing that was bad. The consequences to Johnson’s career were more real and immediate to you than those lives, and in that you were dead wrong. Until you actually have those people under your command, with their lives as your direct responsibility, you cannot make decisions that affect them directly like the way you decided yesterday.
"
That is why the regulations exist: To train young, inexperienced officers who encounter situations that they are ill-equipped to handle--even if they don’t realise it themselves--to pass it on, up the chain of command to those officers that
do have the experience to make that decision. When you screw up in your duties--and don’t kid yourself, it
will happen--and you’ve gone by the book, you can look your CO in the eye and tell him so: ‘I did was I was supposed to do, maybe more, and it still didn’t work’, and they will be satisfied with that. If you have the right kind of CO, they may even go over it with you to figure out why it went wrong and what you could have done--if anything--to make it come out right. If you go off on your own and it blows up in your face, that’s it. You’re history, out of the Fleet, and maybe into a penal colony depending on how serious it is."
He stopped there to assess her reactions and saw that he almost had her. He just had to find one last telling argument--and suddenly he knew just what to say.
"Andrea, you may be out of the Academy but you are by no means finished your learning or your training. I don’t mean technical advancements and new policies either. I mean your junior years of active duty are non-stop training for gaining your own command, be it a division, department, ship, base, or whatever. Think of it as a constant assessment that, if you fail it, forever denies you an independent command. You have to see how things work from
all angles to be a good commander, not just your own views. Once you have your grounding in the Regulation way of doing things Starfleet will be far more willing to cut you some slack for your more out-of-the-box methods--if they work--as long as your judgement has been proven sound. If you go all loose-cannon on them right from the start and are deemed wrong too many times, Command will be unwilling to trust you with anything more than your own console.
"The higher-ups recognise instinct and intuition as valuable and sometimes necessary traits in commanders and they will back you up if your instincts prove sound. That is what you must develop, Andrea. You have the potential, just make sure you learn from all sides and don’t believe that the sum total of your knowledge on a subject is the be all and end all of it. Keep an open mind."
Andrea had went back to hugging her knees as the captain talked, his words sinking in and being absorbed hungrily by her mind.
So that’s what it’s all about, she thought to herself, feeling gratitude that the captain had seen fit to explain all this to her. She didn’t doubt his word, though she was honest enough to realise that the same words coming from Donally would be met with far more scepticism.
Admittedly, I don’t believe the XO would ever take the time to explain this to anyone. She doesn’t believe in the flip side of what the captain is saying, and so doesn’t think that such an explanation is even necessary. But the captain sees potential in me! she cheered herself on with a large dollop of excitement.
He’s letting me in on the secrets he’s learned himself. He’s safeguarding me! she realised in a sudden burst of insight.
He’s using his own experience to recognise something in me that he wants to see grow. He prevented me from taking any official censure and used my punishment as a way of helping me in my career by developing new skills! The realisation gave birth to a huge burst of warmth for her captain, that he would do this at all, either for her or any other officer he felt worth the effort. It must have shown on her face as he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands with a real smile on his face. "That make sense to you, Andrea?" he asked.
"Yes sir," she replied with a genuine smile of her own, and managing to say ‘sir’ without feeling hopelessly formal about it. "Thank you, Captain, for taking the time to explain this to me. I really appreciate it, and I’ll remember what you’ve said."
"Good, I’m glad to hear it," Bates replied, then checked his wrist chrono. A slight, wry expression contorted his features as he did. "Well, our little chat overran the time I allocated to it, but I’m glad it did. I have to get back to running my ship now, Andrea. You still have almost an hour before your next shift. I suggest a final trip to the Rec. Room as it’ll be the last time you’ll see it for two weeks."
She grimaced slightly, but acknowledged the truth. "Okay, Leo. And again, thank you," she said as she pulled herself forward off her bed and stood beside him. They stood eye to eye. On an impulse, she offered him her hand. Bates grasped it immediately in a firm but restrained grip.
Clearly, a man in control of his strengths, Andrea thought with an internal smile.
"I look forward to seeing you on my bridge, Lieutenant," he told her.
"Aye, sir. I look forward to being there."
The captain left her quarters and she watched him go with a comforting thought.
No matter what else happens on this cruise, I now know its going to be a lot of fun, and very... educational.
She grinned to herself, then hunted around for some shoes so that she could enjoy her last off-duty moments for some time among her friends.
The End...For Now!
Topic: First Steps (Read 18830 times)