“Rings and gods help me…”

Dwasina Roix flopped back on her overstuffed couch, letting her body ragdoll into the memory foam core and her breath heave out into one long sigh.

Thirteen days ago Captain Misty Jemison officially took a medical leave retirement from Starfleet after a forty seven year career that included twelve years of command, nine on the USS Calistoga. The announcement, in the middle of a blackout, with worries rising from all over the sector hit the crew by surprise.

Well, surprise was a light way to put it, Dwasina had to block out her innate empathy as the crew reeled as if they had been collectively struck in the gut. Captain Jemison had been their friend, their leader and practically their mother for the better part of a decade and the crew adored her. No one saw the cracks forming behind the Captain’s well practiced facade…

No one except Dwasina Roix.

Ever since that mission to Anteroo, that second contact clean up mission where the much bigger, badder, better USS Klinsmouth had declared this the perfect place to start a colony. The mission where all the Calistoga had to do was assist Starfleet engineers to remove the Zircosian freighter that had gone astray and crash landed into the small planet’s ocean. You know, one of those ‘simple, easy’ missions that all of a sudden rears its ugly head and gives you lasting consequences that never quite heal? Sunk under a mass of protective water, no one could clearly read the amount of radiation the warp core was giving off until it was near enough to the surface to be read – and to affect people. Captain Jemison was meeting with the head of the engineers on the recovery rig when the freighter was being extracted. What should have been a simple, safe meeting, with a routine extraction, where all the safety measures were followed was thrown off by a completely unexpected chaos.

Radiation flooded the area.  The meeting room was locked down for the safety of the occupants, which delayed the medical response. Thirteen experienced Starfleet engineers, one project lead and Captain Jemison took a severe dose of radiation poisoning. After two weeks of the best medical care in the sector, she was cleared for duty again and things returned to normal.

Except they didn’t.

Headaches, memory loss, reduction of emotional control. All things Captain Jemison confined to her ready room, might have hidden from her senior staff, but could not hide from her Betazoid executive officer.

Dwasina had encouraged her to take leave and seek treatment for over a year, and it was only one diplomatic faux pas in the Drenlier system where Mindy actually started to listen. Still, it carried on for far too long and Dwasina regretted that she didn’t take stronger actions sooner.

But finally Captain Jemison admitted that she couldn’t face whatever was coming. She no longer had the energy, the mental clarity or the emotional control to face a truly dangerous threat. She had to retire.

It was at the worst time.

Dwasina had completed the charade by giving Captain Jemison the heroes send off she deserved. But she never told the crew how weak, how injured, how… damaged… their captain had been before the final decision to retire. The crew was confused, resentful even.

Ten days ago Starfleet Command assigned Commander Ishreth Dal, some Andorian hazard team leader to the USS Calistoga. No one on the ship had heard of him. But he was arriving tomorrow.

And she somehow had to get the crew to accept the fact that Captain Jemison stepping away was a good thing, that Captain Jemison couldn’t lead them against whatever they were facing and neither could Dwasina. They needed this new person. They had to accept this new person.

Hopefully this guy would be decent to work with, otherwise the crew of the Calistoga was going to throw him out an airlock and call it an accident. If they lived that long. She had just seen the word Vaadwaur flash across her reports and was bracing herself for the worst.

Sighing she tried to relax. She needed sleep.  Tomorrow was going to suck in every way possible, and the last thing she needed was to be sleep deprived when facing it.