Dahmnait Oland

Boarding School (Part 1)

Dahmnait Oland came of age in a golden era of exploration and scientific discovery for the Federation. It was an era of peace with the Klingons and Romulan isolation, while the Federation still turned a blind eye on the atrocities of the Cardassians. Seemingly unlimited resources were available to research being conducted by Oland’s parents. They largely kept to themselves on Iadara Colony’s moon outpost, where Oland’s parents were studying sleep disorders.

Their living quarters and laboratories on the outpost offered comforts that could normally only be found on Earth, not so frequently in the borderlands. Oland was born into a family of ideals: family dinners, if infrequent, were a time to opine the virtue of public welfare, epidemiology and safeguarding society. Despite all of these ideals in favour of community betterment, Damhnait Oland was enrolled in boarding school on the surface of Iadara as soon as she had some semblance of independent capacity.

The summer before Oland began her freshman year at Starfleet Academy, she waited to tell her parents about her acceptance until she was recalled to the outpost for the solstice celebrations. When she told her family over dinner, her brother shrugged at her indifferently, her father whispered that he always knew she would, and her mother took another drink and said she would accept Damhnait’s life choices.

Boarding School (Part 2)

Upon reflection in the decades of counselling sessions since attending Starfleet Academy, Oland has never managed to fully unpack the memory archaeology of understanding her original inspiration to join Starfleet. Her only clear memory was winning a contest at school, by designing a shuttlecraft space-frame, and how she might prolong that feeling of victory by majoring in aerospace engineering. Later, counsellors have suggested the influence of Oldand’s family –and their selfless pursuit of public health and safety– created biases in her judgement that caused her to favour a Starfleet career. On the darkest of nights, though, Oland does remember spending hours upon hours studying the lush Starfleet dormitories and comparing them against the sleepy campuses where her parents had gone to university.

Although Oland began her studies in aerospace engineering, her research into developing technologies at Starfleet R&D inspired a shift to a bio-electronic engineering major. Wanting to avoid a lifetime in laboratories like her parents, Oland studied advanced starship operations throughout her four year stay at the Academy. Immediately after graduation, instead of pursuing a starship assignment, Oland began a four-year degree in xeon-medicine at Starfleet Medical. The possibilities opened up by the development of bio-neural circuitry seemed endless and Oland set herself the challenge to unlock them all.

Lower Decks

As a lieutenant (junior grade), Oland’s first assignment was to the Avalon Fleet Yards as a computer systems officer. Specializing in bioneural circuitry, she was immediately put to work in the construction of Intrepid-class starships, all of them piloting bio-neural gel packs in their computer systems. Upon her promotion to lieutenant, Oland was assigned to one of those starships, the USS Viking. Oland soon learned that she had learned nothing at all. She succeeded in her time aboard Viking through a combination of luck, an open mind and an irreverence for the “right way” to do things. Through the crew losses caused by the Dominion War, Lieutenant Oland was quickly promoted to Assistant Chief Engineer and then Chief Engineer.

Taste for Command

Lieutenant (junior grade) Oland had sworn she would never become a bridge-dweller. She wouldn’t forget her roots and she couldn’t see much value in working more than a dozen metres away from a warp core. She had no interest in the stress and the pressures that came with commanding the livelihoods of others.  However, what she didn’t yet have was the perspective of how long life could be and how very long a career could be. With decades to fill, the challenges of an engine room became predictable and blasé. Especially after coming of age in the Dominion War, maintaining a warp core in peacetime was something she could perform in her sleep.

Although Lieutenant Commander Oland never quite went looking for a promotion, she jumped at any opportunity that crossed her field of vision. She progressed through positions of increasing responsibility. From the Deputy Director of Logistics aboard Douglas Station, which lead her into the Director of Shipyard Operations. Shipbuilding for the Romulan supernova rescue armada felt like the ultimate purpose of her lifetime and then after the disaster on Mars, rebuilding Starfleet for its own defence proved just as meaningful. Captan Oland felt a certain symmetry in her career when she was assigned back to the Avalon Fleet Yards, first as the Chief Engineer and then the Commanding Officer of Hemmer Station. Some part of her assumed that would be her zenith until 2401 when she was promoted to the Avalon Fleet Yards’ Yard Command as the Commander of Planetary Assets.