Working Security – 21003.01

By Lieutenant Ptaka

There is no better job than working security, although most people wouldn’t agree with me.

“Who wants to be in security?” they ask.

Usually they will answer their own question with such enthusiasm that it’s impossible to get their attention to answer “Me!”

“It’s dangerous” they say “It’s always the security guy that gets killed on away missions!”

Actually we’re in no more danger than anyone else, statistically slightly less if I’m honest. It’s true that more security officers are killed on away missions than any other discipline, but this is a misleading statistic, you have to do the Math.

That’s right, security officers can do Math.

It’s like this; your typical team is usually made up as follows. First there’s usually someone from the command team. Regulations state that ideally this is not the captain, but on our ship it usually is. The arguments I’ve heard about that! But I digress, in addition to the leader you get specialists according to mission profile. You know the sort, scientists, engineers, doctors, tactical officers, and sometimes even a counsellor. The numbers vary quite a bit and you rarely get them all at once. But there is always at least one security guy, often two which pushes up the total number of missions we attend and therefore our casualties on away teams. So the question we should really ask is:

On any particular away mission is a security officer more, or less likely, to survive than his teammates?’

It may surprise you that the answer is less, but it shouldn’t. We are danger professionals, we have the skills to face difficulty head on and survive, and that’s not something you can say about the majority of nerds in the science department.

But it gets better, if we look at total casualty figures rather then just away missions, the stats change once again. In star ship combat it’s our engineers who generally suffer the worse casualties. It takes a lot of engineers to run a star ship, and at any particular time these are concentrated in the relatively small area, an area that is nearly always a priority target. They burn like match wood poor things… I’m so glad I’m not an engineer.

Even if you talk our enthusiast out of the ‘dangerous’ angle they will continue to deride the profession.

“It’s boring!” they say.

I disagree, its complex, challenging and you get to move around a lot and speak to everyone. The other professions spend most of their time stuck in one room, studying their consoles. Sure you get some guard duty sometimes, but we get to know everything because people take us for granted. There’s even some console work, but it’s real work, nobody is going to ask us to do something ridiculous like turning the sensor array into a giant magnetic pulse generator.

If you somehow manage to communicate your own pride in your job, our security denigrator is still not finished.

“No one respects security! It’s a dead end job!”

That would be why more of us end up in the command chair than any other discipline I suppose. As for respect, I don’t really get why people think that. The crew love us; I get doors opened and lifts held for me all the time. Folk are always happy to see me about; I guess it makes them feel safe.

There are the marines of course, those Jar heads just don’t know how to respect anyone, but that’s OK. When it comes to brig time it’s the marines who do more than any one else. I try not to take it personally though. Their job consists of endless training and drill for assaults that very rarely come. To be honest I’m not sure why we have them on the ship at all. Security would definitely be able to provide a more efficient service on most occasions. The one time we do get on with marines is during enemy boarding actions are going on. It’s always good to have some muscle bound thugs to attract the enemy’s attention.

I have fought off several such boarding actions myself. It can be quite exciting on a ship this size, the enemy get all over the place, even inside the Jeffries tubes, but there is no escaping me on my own turf. I track them down… and then pounce! Quite often I will bring them back alive for the Chief’ to interrogate, but the rest of the time it’s just a corpse I return with, you can’t just leave them lying around.

The chief is fair, he always gives praise where it’s due… and a saucer of milk if I’m lucky. Yes it’s a fine life working security on a Federation Star Ship!