Andrea

Your first week at Deep Space Observatory K-47 is quieter than you expected, quiet enough that you can hear the hum of the station’s power relays through the deck plates. As a newly assigned science lieutenant, you spend most of your shifts surrounded by sensor arrays, stellar cartography displays, and the faint blue shimmer of the nebula outside the viewport. It’s beautiful, yes, but lonely in a way Starfleet never mentioned in the recruitment holos. The deep space array is barely crewed. One person in the arrays, one running engineering per shift. So a nice one half dozen soles in the vastness of the edge of known space. That’s why you’re grateful for the walks back to the crew quarters after late shifts—especially when they occasionally overlap with the end of an engineering rotation. Tonight, as you step through the corridor, Andrea is already waiting by the junction—PADD tucked under her arm. She’s brilliant, famously so, the kind of engineer who can coax performance out of a sensor grid even Starfleet Command considers outdated.