When one heads perhaps one of the most massive ministries to grace the galaxy, and commands a warship of similarly awesome scale, there can be no shortage of tasks to be completed or orders to be issued. The bridge of the Ruthless, with rows of stations and an army of officers to staff it, was a bustling center of activity, and saw more action than almost any other like it in the fleet. One would think that such a center of action would never become dull, yet for communications officers, not only was this hellish place dull, but its ineffable dullness threatened to dull that which had not been dull before — including the often-sharp officers themselves.
Quenthal, Xertaza's chief communications officer and one of her most trusted lieutenants, manned his ever-important station with unceasing vigor despite this boredom, directing, delegating to, and commanding thousands of subordinate communications officers, all of whom were essential for the exchange of information across the Ruthless and with other vessels. These critical people worked in the equally vital communications room; if the bridge was the brain of the Ruthless, the communications room — itself an isolated section of the bridge, led by Quenthal from afar — was its beating heart. As it turned out, a heart's job was repetitive.
His uniform spotless, his desk perfectly organized, his hair neatly styled in a way that straddled the line between practical, professional, and banal, while his mind was well-disciplined and effective, it was clear to any who saw him that Quenthal treated his post, his ship, and its captain, with the respect they deserved — and with the attention they needed. While his department was the backbone of the entire ship, Quenthal, disciplined and irreproachable, was the backbone of his department. Such was his self-control that he hadn't even tasted alcohol for years — something almost unprecedented in modern human society.
Being a comms officer had taught him the importance of protocol in communication, and with human society being founded on communication, Quenthal was of the mind that protocol was essential to society — this earned him the loathing of many who worked under him, and occasionally even the temporary dislike of his family on Retharxia, but it also kept the ship running. His effective — if not adored — leadership style, combined with his profound personal prowess at the job itself, allowed the Ruthless's efficiency to become the envy of even much smaller vessels. With the right information reaching the right people at the right time, how could this not be the case?
In front of Xertaza's desk, and flanking Quenthal's own, were two empty workstations for the chief engineer and chief scientist respectively, though these remained unused: the two did not have to be on the bridge to accomplish their tasks, and, as they disliked or annoyed each other to varying degrees of intensity, they often seized upon this fact to work within their respective, distant sections. The chief engineer of the Ruthless was a woman named Farlina, an undisputed — and extremely arrogant — genius. When she wasn't working to maintain, improve, or, on a whim, completely reinvent the ship, and she wasn't drinking or seeking to annoy someone with what she kindly referred to as "witticism," she was inventing and perfecting various pieces of equipment for use across the Empire. Quenthal, however, either couldn't see past the "extremely arrogant" part of her personality, nor could he even acknowledge the "genius" part, for he saw in her nothing but spite, carelessness, and ignorance; he found that tolerating her was almost as difficult as tolerating his endlessly monotonous job. On the other hand, Farlina herself drew great pleasure from watching Quenthal fume and squirm whenever they were in the same room.
The chief scientist of the Ruthless, on the other hand, was slightly more agreeable, if an extreme oddity: Elthinar, a robotically augmented, scientifically-brilliant man, was possessed both of a nigh-psychopathic personality, and a ruthless determination to accomplish his work, though both of these were uninteresting when compared with his utterly baffling appearance. This appearance had a tragic history: Elthinar had an unfortunate early history with the chemical sciences, and had lost more than half his body as a direct result, though instead of replacing his legs and arms with a new, factory-grown set of biological appendages and organs, he saw the injury as an opportunity to improve things. That day, he designed, built, and then applied robotic versions of his former limbs — versions he deemed superior — to himself, along with a few additional augmentations. In the end, Elthinar had acquired not two new legs, but nine; he had also seen to it that his partially-melted face be entirely replaced with an almost unmoving metallic one, bearing four additional, enhanced robotic eyes, some modern, scientific sensors, and a more extensive suite of implants — the resultant creature looked more like a metallic spider than a human. Similar extensive operations had been carried out across whatever else remained of him, and such was the extent of the damage and subsequent modification that there was scarcely a pound of flesh remaining, save, of course, his — albeit extensively modified — brain. While the man-machine hybrid unnerved any non-Kalithiharian who looked at it, and though he definitely had some trouble riding cramped hyperspheres, Elthinar claimed he was more agile than ever, and that his ability to both think and perform scientific analysis was much improved. Xertaza hadn't been one to question an indisputably brilliant scientific mind, especially when doing so would waste valuable time that could be spent ordering that brilliant scientific mind to study this, or analyze that. Quenthal, being surprisingly conformist for a senior officer, agreed wholeheartedly with this stance, even if it did conflict with some of his other principles of regularity.
Manning his post dutifully even as it became indescribably boring, Quenthal found his heavily implanted mind being bombarded with a flurry of priority messages from various fire-control centers; Xertaza had ordered that all stations report their battle-readiness, and those that dealt with the ship's massive armament had passed these checks with ease. Relaying the message to Xertaza herself, Quenthal noticed that if the Ruthless and other Tehkria-class were to have a chief gunnery officer, such reports would, possibly, be slightly easier to manage, though he decided moments thereafter that the Empire's military theorists must have known what they were doing when they struck that role from humanity's proudest ships. The lack of a chief gunnery officer aboard the Ruthless was no accident, for such a post was arguably not practical: a Tehkria-class was so titanic that a single officer stood no chance of managing it all, while modern gunnery officers worked better in more decentralized groups regardless. Adapting to these realities, rather than having one chief gunnery officer for the entire vessel, each side of the warship had its own room of over fifty weapons experts who would control firing solutions for that flank of the ship, all of whom were coordinated, when necessary, by a specialized gunnery group of Quenthal's own communications officers. Due to the ludicrous number of turrets on the vessel and the similarly immense quantities of experienced officers required to direct them, in total, the Ruthless had more gunnery officers than some frigates had crew members.
These officers, however, were only as good as the turrets they aimed; Xertaza, seemingly opting for long-range destructive power, issued a sweeping order to her ship's engineering department that instant, stipulating that all plasma turrets were to be replaced with nuclear and coilgun equivalents instead. Quenthal, whose adept mind distributed the direct order in moments, saw that the deadline was set at a mere three Galactic Standard days, across the entire ship. This surprised him immensely: on a ship of hundreds of thousands of turrets, such a task seemed utterly impossible, even with the navy's focus on adaptability and easy replacement and exchange of parts and weapons on the fly. Xertaza, instead, seemingly placed faith in the fact that her engineer Farlina was not one to fail an impossible challenge. Though Quenthal utterly detested Farlina, he had to admit that her determination — be it determination to get work done, or to aggravate him — was impressive; while Xertaza had selected her as her engineer specifically in part due to her brilliance and skill, the true reason she had been picked over all the other exceptionally qualified candidates was her refusal to see any task as impossible, rather, she simply deemed tasks of greater difficulty as more enjoyable to vanquish.
Nevertheless, his blood simmering at the mere thought of the perfidious witch, Quenthal quickly returned to his other duties; having seen to it that others would see to the retrofitting of the Ruthless, Quenthal turned his thoughts to other matters, while Xertaza turned her attention to the perennial captain's task: getting the ship moving somewhere important. Xertaza soon ordered the Ruthless into the Remnant and set its course for Retharxia, the planet with the largest police presence throughout the entire galaxy, the world that hosted Quenthal's family, and the place which Xertaza had made the de-facto capital of her vast ministry. Delighted at the thought of returning to the world, Quenthal happily relayed the order to the Ruthless's piloting section, and as the vessel got underway, his thoughts finally turned to that most blissful of places: home. Of course, the decision was strategically sound — if the galaxy were to be threatened, Xertaza wanted to be in the presence of friendly forces that were under her command, for not only is there safety in numbers, but there is additional safety in being able to command these numbers. The world, essential to Xertaza's operations, gained additional protection from Xertaza's presence, and Quenthal, whose family inhabited the same world, could not be happier with this fact. Indeed, if Terilan's expeditionary fleet uncovered a threat as potent as the Military Council seemed to fear, Retharxia, and Quenthal's family, would need this protection.
However, naturally, Quenthal's work did not end there. Firmly secured within his digital reality, he sat motionless behind his digital desk, his hands, interfacing with the thing through a physical connection, were planted firmly atop the device as he monotonously sorted through tens of thousands of minor alerts and other communication-with-bridge requests — things that lesser communications officers deemed important enough for his attention. Scanning hundreds of thousands of textcomms and discarding or relaying nearly all of them with a few thoughts — thoughts which would have been effortless, if they were not so tedious — Quenthal did his dull job with exemplary speed and skill, though it brought him no joy.
This had not always been the case. Quenthal had been fascinated with textcomms since before he had joined the military, for textcomms were far more efficient than talking, but they could also accurately share everything from heartfelt thoughts of love to something as callous as a termination of employment. Not only were textcomms communication turned into an art form, but their efficiency allowed them to completely usurp speech in everything from group work to fighting a battle, where spoken words, being slow to share information, were scarcely used at all. With his long-held and perhaps not-unfounded belief that the success of a society depended on its ability to exchange information, and with his utter fascination at how effectively the Empire managed this flow of data with textcomms and quantum communication, Quenthal taking part in facilitating this flow of data had always held a special place in Quenthal's heart; now, having taken part in it, he could certainly say that it was a noble undertaking, even if it was not a rewarding one.
Being fascinated with efficiency in communication, Quenthal, wherever it was socially acceptable for him to use textcomms, did so. When communicating in a more casual setting, however, speech — with its ability to convey tone without the supreme intimacy of opening one's thoughts to another — was most often used; Quenthal, being a communications officer, had to use plenty of both. Constantly. For years on end. Despite his initial adoration for communication in all its forms, Quenthal had quickly begun to feel like a purposeless cog in a taken-for-granted machine that would, unquestionably, be better off automated. This last thought forced Quenthal to shudder, for, concerningly, it made him feel like a Kalithiharian.
The next moment, Quenthal's implants sent a minor shock of recognition through his system as a new array of medium-priority messages arrived. Taking a moment to think, Quenthal responded courteously to a message from the ship's medical department, promising, in a response defined by concision, that he would organize the acquisition of some more supplies as soon as possible. He was never idle. Communications officers were widely envied by other, more combat-oriented roles during times of prolonged peace, as it was thought that they were always occupied with interesting work whilst the rest of the ship was adrift in a sea of inaction, though, of course, such envy was entirely misplaced. Quenthal and the other communications officers were occupied, but with work that was even more mind-numbing and omnipresent than the much-loathed idleness which dominated the rest of fleet life. Doubtless, any of them would prefer inactivity and lack of work to their current tiresome duty, the entirety of which revolved around sorting other people's mundane issues and sending them to those most qualified to deal with them, relaying status reports to other officers, or, occasionally, the slightly more interesting distribution of orders across a ship or fleet. Of course, it could only be so interesting to tell a fleet to move to x coordinates in y formation so many times, but the rest of the navy, convinced that someone with a non-scientific role had to be enjoying themselves, chose to envy the comms officers regardless.
Quenthal's role was similar to others in one respect: like most officers aboard a warship, his job became much more interesting during a battle, where he had to relay tactical information and orders at incredible speeds to great numbers of recipients; the danger and importance of his job culminated in a certain intoxicating thrill that made the endeavor worth it, despite the potential for his own demise. Sadly for Quenthal, he had only been tested in actual tense conditions once in his life before, and that was when he was coordinating damage control after an emergency Remnant breach — for twenty hours straight. Not exactly heart-pounding fleet action, even by his low standards.
As he endlessly continued his monotonous work,another textcomm, another order, directly from Xertaza herself, reached hisimplants — this one demanded that he demand a status reporton Farlina's progress with her current task. Not wasting a nanosecond, Quenthalquickly dispatched the request to engineering and continued with his other,unending work, only ceasing when, a minute later, his implants helpfullyreminded him that he had not yet received any response from the Ruthless'sengineering division. In that moment, Quenthal vigorously sighed, cursed, andplaced his face in his palm; he knew what this meant, and it made him want tothrow himself out an airlock. He quickly came to the unpleasant conclusion thatin order to acquire his status report, he would have to visit the engineeringdepartment in person — an unpleasant conclusion, not because he detestedwalking, but because that would require getting closer to the lair of the cronemany referred to as "Farlina."