“Ensign,” she called out to the uniformed crew member assisting the transporter chief. “Where’s sickbay?”
The young human woman glanced at Catrina’s uniform colors and looked confused. Catrina could understand her confusion, but simply did not have time to deal with it right now.
“Sickbay,” she repeated, not bothering to hide her harried state of mind.
The ensign glanced over at the transporter chief. He finished checking the status of the controls and then looked up at Catrina. He was large, well-muscled Caitian with amber fur.
“Deck Four.” He announced, as if double-checking against some memorized schematic in his head. “All turbolifts, except from the aft cargo bays, can take you there.”
“Thank you,” Catrina responded, gave the useless ensign a quick glance, and hurried out of the room.
The corridor was filled with crew members busy at their various assignments. She glanced in both directions, knowing that there must be a turbolift access down each of them. The question was: which was the closer one? She would be damned if she was going to ask for directions again.
Basing her decision on nothing more than a quick mental guess, she headed to starboard.
Seven hours to prepare Sickbay for departure, she groused silently, and not for the first time that evening. It was nice that Dr. M’hutta decided to accept a position with the Andorian Science Council, but s/he could have given a little more notice. It was not like when s/he went on personal leave to hatch his/her pods, leaving Starfleet Medical with plenty of warning.
It was not that Catrina was against accepting an assignment aboard a starship again, but she had rather hoped that it might be on a medical relief vessel, or perhaps on some kind of scientific survey. Serving as the Chief Medical Officer on a heavily armed escort-class vessel had been very low on her list of preferred postings. She had seen enough combat duty during the initial Klingon attacks on some of the outer colonies without going out looking for a fight.
She nearly collided with a crewmember in an Engineering tunic, prepared to scold him for being in her way, when she realized that he had halted for a reason. To her mounting dismay and frustration, there was a line of crew personnel waiting to use the turbolift. She did a rapid mental calculation, quickly counting the number of crew members ahead of her, and determined that she could probably take the fourth of fifth car.
For a moment, she considered pushing her way through. She could state loudly that she was a doctor and needed to get on her way. In truth, though, there was no emergency, except for the one going on in her mind, so she settled in to wait with the rest. Unhappily so, but she did.
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