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Don't Say Goodbye, Farewell (Masterverse fiction, with Patrickngo)
starswordc
Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
in Ten Forward
Prologue: Distant Early Warning
Brig holding area, Starbase 24. 11 August 2407.
“I will not submit to a loyalty test, Commander Burgher,” Captain Janice “Janey” O’Neill Qua insisted. “My record should be enough, my oath should be enough.”
“Your home colony seceded from the Federation, Captain. I’m sorry—this is orders from Starfleet Command, you either submit to a telepathic scan, or you’ll be charged as an enemy agent—there’s a war on, you know.”
“I know. I left under Captain Torak on a five year mission and came back, with two first contacts, command of the USS Nixon, a new member race—and immediately got relieved of my command and brought here as a suspected enemy agent. Is there any f*cking universe where that makes logical sense?”
“All you have to do, is let them scan you, dammit, and it’ll be over!”
“And if I resign?” she asked.
“Then you’ll still be held as a possible enemy agent until they can get the warrant to force you to submit to telepathic interrogation,” he told her.
She leaned on the folding table in her cell. “Get your warrants,” she told him. “This isn’t the Starfleet I joined, or the Federation I pledged to serve, so get a goddamned warrant, and while you’re at it, get me an attorney. I will not voluntarily submit.”
“I don’t understand, Captain, you’re tossing your career away!”
“Get your f*cking warrant and you’ll find out just whose career is in the sh*tter, Lieutenant Commander,” she hissed through clenched teeth.
Whatever the JAG officer was about to say, was drowned out by the alarm klaxons announcing that the Klingons were attacking the base.
Don’t Say Goodbye, Farewell
By StarSword-C and Patrickngo
See the swarms of life
Seething deep in the night
Seems that what you seek never turns out right
And you look to the skies
Say you’ll change your ways
Seems that all your pain is what remains
You could be wild
And never be free
Live tonight a slave of their machine
See your lives decay
Seeing it’s all a waste
Seems that what you seek always fades away
And you look to the skies
Say you’ll change your ways
Seems that all your pain is what remains
You could be wild
And never be free
Live tonight a slave of their machine
The Waters and Wild
Are truly free
Live tonight while you will die unseen
What’cha gonna do
What’cha gonna be
Living’s just a lie
A candle's fading light. We won’t let you die
Demon Eye, “The Waters and the Wild”
By StarSword-C and Patrickngo
See the swarms of life
Seething deep in the night
Seems that what you seek never turns out right
And you look to the skies
Say you’ll change your ways
Seems that all your pain is what remains
You could be wild
And never be free
Live tonight a slave of their machine
See your lives decay
Seeing it’s all a waste
Seems that what you seek always fades away
And you look to the skies
Say you’ll change your ways
Seems that all your pain is what remains
You could be wild
And never be free
Live tonight a slave of their machine
The Waters and Wild
Are truly free
Live tonight while you will die unseen
What’cha gonna do
What’cha gonna be
Living’s just a lie
A candle's fading light. We won’t let you die
Demon Eye, “The Waters and the Wild”
Federation Starbase Deep Space K-7, Sherman’s Planet system. 16 November 2410.
“Honor guard, post!” the Force Master Chief bellowed. Pipers played a solemn tune as the flag-draped body of Admiral Stephen Alcott was brought out of the turbolift. It was too rare, even with the armistice, for there to be a body. Rarer still, for there to be so many officers and enlisted crowding the mezz level at zero four in the morning zulu time to say good-bye.
The pipers shifted the tune to “The Red Sands of Home”, the anthem of the Confederated Martian Colonies, as first the enlisted and then the junior officers paid their respects. To these, the admiral in that photon torpedo case was more than their commander, he was a symbol—he’d turned the war around, spacers and crewmen owed him their lives, and more than that he’d brought back the pride that had been so savagely damaged by the Klingons’ early success.
His ex-wives had refused to come out to see it, and his youngest surviving son was still in basic training. His oldest surviving child was here, though. Dr. Emily Alcott, Ph.D, a candidate for a Daystrom fellowship in social theory. She watched the distant father she’d barely known most of her life with a kind of dull numbness, acting more out of a sense of duty and as representative for a radically pacifist mother who wouldn’t come, than out of any seeming affection for the man in the coffin.
Stephen Alcott’s real children were the enlisted men and women who were here today, and Kanril Eleya could sense it—his true family was Starfleet, not the cousins who would plant his remains in the sands of Syria Planum.
Unlike Captain Detweiler, slain by the Borg, Alcott’s death had been nothing out of the ordinary, just a good man dying peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack. Eleya supposed there was a lesson there, but what it was was not within her to think about at this moment; she’d never been much for metaphysical psychobabble anyway.
She reached out with one white-gloved hand to touch the top of the coffin lying in state on the bier below the many names on the station’s memorial wall. “Raka-ja ut shala morala,” she murmured in her native language. “Ema bo roo kana... uranak... ralanon Stephen Alcott... propeh va nara ehsuk shala-kan vunek.”
Imperial Klingon Defense Forces reserve ship MCDS Astoria, Hegh’ta-class bird-of-prey. Treaty zone, Hromi Cluster.
“Confirmed on the suspect ship, Colonel, it’s one of the Massana trading house’s heavies,” Warrant Officer Peri Shaw announced. “Looks like you were right, they’re definitely charting for the Ajilon system.”
“Are they out of their minds? Ajilon Prime’s got two regiments of militia and a reinforced battalion of Starfleet Ground Forces on it.”
“Maybe they plan to do a hit-and-fade on one of the outlying cities. Or maybe they think the outer system’s a good rendezvous.”
“Keep us in their warp shadow, and cloaked,” Colonel Janey Qua ordered. “I want to see who their buyer is before we take ‘em. Do we have ident on who they took?”
“They hit a couple of ours and a couple of colonies under Fed occupation, Mum. They took families.”
“Kids… Jesus.” She shook her head. “Martinez, prep breachers for a pattern to sever the ship’s nacelles. G’nal, I want your boarding teams to focus on knocking out the self-destruct assemblies on their antimatter storage first thing—we’re going for live rescues. Benardi, tell the Lethean interrogators to get limbered up, because we’re going for their whole damn network this time… and tell Gunny Chung I want live prisoners to interrogate.”
“We’re going into Federation space, Colonel, should we inform Starfleet?”
“Negative,” she stated. “We do not tell Starfleet we’re out here. Let them find the slavers after we’re done with them.”
“But, Colonel—”
“If Starfleet were doing their jobs, Warrant Officer, we wouldn’t be chasing rogue elements into their territory. There’s gotta be a leak at K-7, or someone taking backhanders, otherwise these Orions wouldn’t be running for Fed territory at warp eight with a hold full of civilians.”
“Understood ma’am.”
“By the numbers, people, this is an intercept and boarding operation, we’re doing hostage recovery and questioning suspects. Let’s get it done.”
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
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“I can’t believe he’s gone. I saw the body and I can’t believe it,” Petty Officer Dieter Fuchs said. “There’s this feeling, like he’s going to just pop up, like a human whirlwind…”
“Any idea who’s going to replace him?” Crewman Alice Winters asked, taking the bottle from the table.
“Short term it’s going to be Vice Admiral Cortez off the Von Neumann, then probably Mwangi from TacRon 92, but word has it that they might drag LaRoca from ConOps,” Chief Walston speculated from next to them at the bar. “He’s senior, and word has it he’s supposed to meet with our distinguished opposition about those rebel colonists, maybe get the Klinks to cut them loose.”
“You don’t know that!” Winters was already drunk. She’d been yeoman for the Admiral, and she took his sudden death particularly hard. Harder, at least, than Miss Emily Alcott was. The woman looked elegant and bored through the brief service, and still looked elegant and bored while a couple of twenty-something zeroes tried chatting her up.
“So it’ll be Pablo Cortez for a while then,” Fuchs pronounced. “Hell, they should’ve promoted the Captain.”
“Pfft, yeah right, she’s what, thirty? No way they put her in charge.”
“She knows how to run this sector, better than some weenie from New Carthage, anyway. I can feel my boots getting the shine ripped right off, and ‘counseling for you, and for you, and especially Mister Fuchs for YOU!’…” he downed his drink.
“You should be talking to someone, Dieter.” Alice commented.
“I’m fine.” Dieter told her defensively-and downed another, “Isn’t that right, Mister Walston?”
“Hey, don’t drag me into this, Fuchs, your women problems are YOUR problem, not mine… currently I’m having boyfriend problems—”
“It’s not those kind of problems,” Alice insisted.
“Oh, do tell,” Walston urged.
“Lay off it!” Dieter growled. “We’re here for th’ Admiral.”
As if on cue, somebody yelled, “Officer on deck!”
Fuchs knocked his drink over and swore under his breath as he and the others bolted to their feet and came smartly to attention. He needn’t have worried about the shine on his boots: the fruit salad of the three admirals and five COs in full dress whites entering the room ought to be enough shine for anyone.
Fourth in the line of officers, Captain Kanril Eleya strode up to the crew standing at the bar and took the whiskey bottle from beside Fuchs without a word. He saw her eye how little was left in it as she poured shots for herself and the seven other senior officers.
Then she raised her glass in the air and Fuchs and the others picked their glasses back up. “Admiral Stephen Dragovich Alcott,” she simply said, her contralto sounding even rougher than usual.
“Admiral Stephen Dragovich Alcott,” the room echoed, and Fuchs drained the few drops left.
“His war’s over, his path complete,” she said, pouring another glass, then laying the bottle back down. “But it’s not as simple as that, and we all know it. We are the fleet he built, but a fleet doesn’t hinge on one commander, it hinges on all of us. He sacrificed his life, not his death, to the United Federation of Planets, to the people in this room, and the people on every world spinning. His life was worth something, let’s make sure ours are.” She raised her glass again. “Who’s like us!?” she suddenly bellowed in a voice worthy of a drill instructor.
“Damn few!” Chief Walston and a few of the other senior noncoms answered without missing a beat, as Fuchs’s jaw dropped and the Captain drank. “And they’re dead!”
“Carry on.”
The Captain took a growler of a local craft brew off the shelf and tossed a credit chit at the barman, then joined the other COs a few tables away. “That was an enlisted man’s toast,” Fuchs whispered to Winters, dumbfounded.
“Captain Kanril came up from the ranks, Mister Fuchs,” Walston explained.
“You mean that stuff about her being ex-Bajoran Militia is really true, Chief?”
Walston nodded. “Bajorans don’t let you go straight to officer: unless you’re a doctor, you have to start as enlisted. Guess who else came up from the ranks?” Fuchs shrugged, and Walston grinned from ear to ear. “Admiral Alcott.”
The Hammond shipped out the next day, headed for the border near Moby space on a two-week patrol. Fuchs had a headache, but he was comfortably settled into his usual station in Main Engineering when the intercom chirped. “Petty Officer Third Class Dieter Fuchs, report to the bridge. Petty Officer Fuchs, report to the bridge.”
“Maybe they found the copies of Fornax you had stashed under your mattress,” the Bolian 2/c next to him suggested. “Somebody’s in trouble.”
“Shut up,” he told his bunkmate.
A thirty-second turbolift ride brought him several compartments forward and three decks up. It was only the third time he’d ever been on the bridge, the others during a brief stint in the communications section when he’d had to hand-deliver a couple classified messages. He came to attention for Commander Phohl, who wordlessly directed him to the side door and turned back to her tactical console.
The Captain was seated behind her desk. “Close the door and have a seat, Mister Fuchs.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He sat, still stiff as a board.
She reached under her desk and pulled out a bottle he recognized as a cheap blended bourbon from Sherman’s Planet’s southern continent. He recognized it because it belonged to him. “What’s the matter, ma’am? I’m allowed to have it off-duty.”
“What’s the matter? Well, this is a liter bottle. The tax hologram on the label says it was sold to you three days ago, but there’s barely a finger left in it. Commander Ehrob says you’re pretty smart, Academy smart, even, so why don’t you tell me what I should infer from this?”
“…That I drink a lot?”
“You’re drinking more than I do, Petty Officer. And I know I drink too much.”
“Are you ordering me to stop drinking, ma’am?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m asking you to talk to me. Bynam told Command Master Chief Jatjari you’ve reported for duty hungover eighteen times since the Qo’noS bortaS mission. I know they’ve both told you to seek counseling, and since you apparently don’t want to talk to a shrink at K-7…”
Fuchs just sat there sullenly while she waited for him to talk. He had been in Starfleet for four years. The Hammond was the second ship he’d served on, and Captain Flamini hadn’t been the type to intervene with a warp core engineer 3/c.
Finally the Captain moved. She took off her combadge and stuck it in a drawer, then came around the desk and sat on the edge of it. “None of this is on the record, Mister Fuchs. Let’s start with an easy one. What do you dream about?”
“Noises in the dark. Rage, blood. I’m firing a phaser at shadows.”
“You know what I dream about?” He shook his head. “An Orion. A matron, she cut my face up here and tried to gut me. But it always starts the same way: me manning a barricade and seeing my team falling one by one, and me having to go on alone. Sometimes, I see Tess’s face, or T’Var’s.” She smiled. “Fear’s normal. There was a gunny on my DI team in boot camp. He said, ‘Soldier goes into battle and he isn’t scared, he’s either dead, or stupid.’ It’s what you do with the fear that counts.”
“Thing is, I’m scared of me more than them. The Hur’q, they were… they were monsters, I hated them. I mean, I thought we were supposed to—”
“What, have evolved past that?” She chuckled, shaking her head. “That’s what I sometimes hear about my people, too.” She gestured at a worn granite statuette in a display case, next to a bookshelf packed with everything from several kinds of religious scriptures to a trilogy of Star Wars novels from the early Eugenics Wars period. “My father gave me that when I graduated from Starfleet Academy, wanted me to remember where I came from. It’s supposedly a war deity from the First Era, over thirty-two thousand years old, but I don’t think I took the lesson from it that he thought I would. We’re old, we’re really old: we were unified when Vikings still sailed Earth’s seas and traveling faster than light before you discovered petroleum. But we still do the same stupid sh*t we did way back then, like… Well, we kicked racial prejudice for the most part but I can’t tell you the kind of cr*p I’ve taken from gray-hairs for defying my caste.”
“Your caste, ma’am?”
“My family’s Ke’lora, the laborers’ D’jarra. Supposedly that includes lawmen and soldiers, too, but apparently to fly in space you have to be Va’telo. But phekk those guys; you know why I do this?” she asked, waving her hand at the streaming stars outside the viewport.” He shook his head. “On paper, I’d use words like duty, honor, patriotism. Truth is? I do it because I love it.” She grinned. “I love space, I love having a challenging job that means something. And yeah, I love fighting, too: adrenaline feels good, winning feels good. You have to accept it, be honest about yourself, before you can deny those animal instincts and be better.”
Fuchs sat silently for a moment as the Captain went back to her desk. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You will. Now, I am going to issue a formal order for you to start seeing a counselor, but it’ll be somebody I know. He’s a Bolian who was in my class at the Academy, I think you’ll like him. I’m also not going to ban you from drinking, but I am going to recommend you try this distillery instead.” She slid a PADD across to him.
“Shepherd’s Canyon? Ma’am, that’s a twelve-year-old single malt, that’s crazy expensive.”
She grinned. “Yeah, which means you can’t afford to drink half the bottle in one sitting, Petty Officer, you have it by the sip and enjoy it. This cheap glug I took from you isn’t worth watering a plant with. And I’m going to recommend one other thing. A prewarp Earth author, Tim O’Brien. He’s in the ship’s library, check him out after your shift. Dismissed.”
He strode out and was replaced by a buxom Andorian shen. “Another convert to the Church of Kanril?” Tess asked in a sardonic tone.
“He’s got potential, I think.”
Tess stepped over to the desk and yanked the cork out of the bourbon bottle Fuchs had left behind, gave it a sniff, and made a face. “Wow, they should’ve dropped Romulan ale from the embargo and put that on, it’s worse than Walston’s slash.”
Eleya laughed as Tess stuck the bottle in the replicator to be recycled. “That crossed my mind. Any nibbles on our bait?”
“Nothing yet, but we’re only thirty hours out of K-7.”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Not all dreams are full of meaning: Janey Qua was happily arranging brightly colored power tools in a bathtub when the doorbell rang. That was when she really woke up and swatted at the communicator on her nightstand while she tried to disentangle herself from her sheets. “Yes?” she groaned.
“It’s Chan, sir. May I come in, please?”
“Computer, open the door,” she said aloud.
“Colonel,” Warrant Officer Chan said, handing her a PADD. “The Orion ship has changed course. Looks like they’ve detected an offer they can’t refuse.”
Qua wiped sleep from her eyes and read the PADD. “SS Wuddship, Arcturus IV flag. Where the Hell do I know that name from?”
“Computer says it’s a reference to some fantasy franchise from Earth’s 20th century.”
“Right, Redwall, Brian Jacques. I loved those books. Freighter full of replicator parts, a juicy target indeed.” She looked up to him. “Bring the wing to general quarters. We’re taking this one down by the numbers. If we’re lucky, the civvies won’t know these jokers were even coming for them.”
She quickly pulled on a clean uniform and walked to the bridge from her sea-cabin, and assumed the command seat from the midshift relief officer. “Now hear this, surface-and-strike by the numbers, our objective is to disable and board the target vessel before she reaches civilian limits on sensor range. Execute at one light-second, wolfpack maneuver six, all commanders acknowledge.”
The other seven ships in the wing acknowledged her order. “Range, Harvey?” she asked the sensor officer.
“We’ll be reaching one light-second in seven seconds.”
“They’ve dropped out of warp, sir. Wuddship is sending a distress signal, something about a warp malfunction. They’re running for it at full impulse, greenskins are gaining.”
“Colonel, the Orions are broadcasting.”
“On speakers.”
“I say again, Wuddship, cease maneuvering and prepare to be boarded.”
The reply was a male voice, some Scandinavian language and, according to the translator readout, described the various ingredients making up the Orion matron and the things her mother had mated with in decidedly unhygienic terms. Amused, Qua saved it to a PADD for future reference.
“Decloak and engage in seven, six, five, four, three, two… NOW!” The indicator lights brightened.
“Looks like they haven’t seen us yet.”
“Locked on,” the tactical officer announced. “Torpedoes away, Colonel.”
Then red-gold phaser lances erupted from the Wuddship and Qua suddenly realized she had a problem. “F*ck me. Identify the Starfleet ship, now!”
Bridge, USS George Hammond.
“Captain, I have a wing of birds-of-prey decloaking half a light-second aft of the Orion cruiser!”
Captain Kanril said something rather un-captainy. “Moab or Klingon, Senior Chief?”
“Moab, definitely, and they’re firing high-yield torpedoes!”
“Cease fire! Take evasive action!” The heavy cruiser hurled itself hard to starboard and “up” as the conn officer worked the controls.
“Shields up!” Tess announced.
The torpedoes ignored them—instead hitting almost-invisible Orion smallcraft as they exited the hangar bays of the Orion ship, followed by hitting the Orion ship.
“Drop ECM! Hailing channel, now!” Eleya snapped. “All vessels, this is Captain Kanril Eleya of the USS George Hammond. You are all ordered to heave to, repeat, heave to immediately!”
In answer, the panicking Orion cruiser opened fire in every direction.
Bridge, MCDS Astoria.
“My God, it’s Kanril Eleya,” Phillip Chan breathed as what was now clearly identified as a Starfleet heavy cruiser peeled off up and to their left.
“Second pass, then all ships cloak and evade!” Janice ordered. “Make sure that Orion’s not going to get away from them. Use evasion pattern Echo. What’s the secondaries on the Orion?”
“Minor secondaries, looks like maybe we’ve holed one of their warp nacelles and damaged the emitter.”
“Not enough to cripple them yet. Attack pattern Omega, we’ll drop to the evade on the pass.”
“Aye, Colonel… what about… you know, Kanril?” Chan asked.
“What about her? No question she’s good, but she’s a good Starfleet officer. The General vouched her, she’ll do what’s right—and that means sticking to the Orion after we take off.”
“Colonel, there’s a second Federation starship on approach! Excalibur-class, NCC-94568, USS Joyeuse! I think they were lying doggo about seven light-months out.”
It was like God woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
“Firing torpedoes, initiating Evasion pattern Echo.”
“All wolves submerge!” she ordered. “Warp 9!”
It wasn’t until the muffled rumble of fusion thrusters transitioned into the reassuring thrum of the warp drive that Janey Qua started to relax. “Okay, how much room do we really have?”
“The General’s going to be pissed we got spotted,” Peri at the helm noted.
“Yeah, well, it’s inevitable, right? There’s enough evidence on that Orion to keep Starfleet busy—and enough that maybe we’re not going to need to do so much cross-the-border chasing.”
“Colonel, you’re not going to believe this,” the sensor officer slowly said. “The Hammond just left the Joyeuse to handle the prize and went to warp. She’s hitting warp 9.9993, repeat, four nines, and she’s tracking us.”
Qua started to wonder how far past redline the Bajoran was pushing her cruiser, then started laughing. Kanril had been an engineering major: she knew exactly how hard she could push her ship, and that was without Qua knowing the quality of the actual CHENG. “Drop a jammer probe and alter course negative three zero by point-six degrees, we’ll port at Cold Butte. That’s deep enough past the blue line they won’t follow. Send to the squadron on QT to scatter and rendezvous at Moab, we’ll catch up.”
USS George Hammond, six minutes later.
“Sher hahr kosst, it’s a phekking crybaby!” Ensign Firil cursed. “They dropped a phekking probe tuned to look like a warp signature!”
“Then they probably changed course.” Eleya sighed. “Any sign of subspace fluctuations?”
“No, ma’am, they’re long gone,” Senior Chief Drem replied, shaking her head. “Whoever he is, he’s good.”
“‘She’, Senior Chief,” Tess said. “The leader of that wing was the Astoria, which means Janice Qua, formerly XO of the Nixon.”
“Ohhhh, phekk,” Eleya groaned.
“You are certain it was the Astoria?” Lieutenant T’Var asked.
Tess put a still of the ship on the main screen. “Hull number FF-14, six pointed star roundel in red and gold, nose-art of a mountain range portside above the torpedo tube. She was identified at the Son Tay mission, and Intelligence has her absent from the Moab system for three weeks now, just after a refit. Where they identified her commander as none other than one ex-Commander Janice Qua, Starfleet. Two first contacts and she brought the Ssnpth into the Federation on her last five-year mission before she defected.”
“Also matches something else I noticed,” Eleya said. “There was a distinct Starfleet flavor to those birds’ firing patterns, a steady ripple. The Klingon-trained officers tend to fire a lot more randomly.”
“Explains why she wouldn’t answer hails,” Lieutenant al-Qahtani commented over intercom from her office. “She’s wanted for high treason.”
“Ruqayya, I want the full dossier on my desk, including the detailed version of her charge sheet and transcripts or video of any interrogations.”
“You’ll have everything I can get you as soon as I can get it, Captain.”
It took six hours for the files to be unlocked. A good portion of what was, was redacted to the point of having whole pages blanked, leaving only ‘The’ and ‘continued’. Eleya had spent fifteen minutes writing out an email to an Academy buddy at Memory Alpha, noting her security clearance.
What hadn’t been redacted like crazy was a file that would have been the envy of most of Starfleet. Third in her class at Starfleet Academy (Class of ‘89), one five year tour with a confirmed first contact, graduate school at the Naval War College, MACO training at Hereford (aced it), promoted above her zone consistently, a tour on the USS Nixon—not a bad post, with a five year mission as XO that ended up briefly with her being the CO of that ship and on the short list for promotion. No, the really classified stuff happened after she got back: there was a vid taken from shortly before she ‘left Starfleet’, but it lacked context. And then there was her resignation letter:
Eleya’s mind assembled what else was available. Qua was from New Saigon. Her civilian husband was someone she’d met on her first tour, who stayed behind. His file was full of terms like ‘suspected of’ and ‘allegations of’. Mostly due to involvement with secessionist causes and political agitation while she was off with the Nixon. Intel had a file on him, as well: James Qua was currently part of the Moab Confederacy’s defense establishment, and prior to her arrest, had been under surveillance by Federation agencies for around ten years as a potential domestic terror suspect with possible ties to radical groups.
Her escape from custody, perpetrated during one of General K’Ragh’s notorious raids of Starfleet facilities behind the lines (only he wasn’t there, Eleya noted), cemented this suspicion in the minds of Starfleet Intelligence. Qua had to have been a well-placed mole, a deep operative for the Moab and New Saigon independence movement—a group with known members that were former Maquis and even Bajoran Kohn-Ma involved.
The redacted segments stopped after independence. Images and surveillance files showing Qua meeting with several ‘pardoned but still monitored’ ex-Maquis on Moab III and Cold Butte, having a drink with Klingon officers, inspecting birds-of-prey, and finally, on the ground at Risa when the Son Tay mission brought back victims of Undine abduction.
“She escaped Starfleet custody, and her boots never touched ground anywhere she could be extradited,” al-Qahtani finished.
“Frankly, I don’t blame her,” Eleya said, sipping from a mug of Romulan ale from the Republic.
“There’s… more,” al-Qahtani said. “Vid from an Orion cruiser the USS Baltimore encountered thirty-five lights from K-7.”
“Show me.”
The imagery had been recovered from a commercially-registered Orion freighter. On the screen, the mistress of the ship was held in a kneeling position by two humans in tan and olive drab uniforms, while a third human, a woman, walked up to the prisoner.
The woman had her hair tied up in a bun, revealing a nicely formed pair of ears from this angle.
“Who was your buyer?” Her voice was clear on the audio, the accent was sharp, educated.
The greenskin cursed at her, and she delivered a heavy kick to the kneeling prisoner’s midsection, then she repeated the question in accented Klingon.
The beating continued for twenty minutes like that.
The blonde called over a Lethean after twenty minutes, who laid his (her?) hands on the prisoner. The Orion screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and then, the interrogator drew out a gunpowder handgun, placed it against the Orion’s forehead, and fired, spraying the deck behind her with orange blood and gray brainmatter.
“There’s six more hours of that,” Al-Qahtani said. “When the Baltimore arrived, every orion on that ship was dead, and the prisoners they’d been holding were waiting, slave-links removed, for Starfleet to pick them up—they claimed the blonde told them Starfleet was coming.”
“Well, I’ll give her full marks for efficiency,” Eleya hissed in a grim tone. “I think I remember that one now, it was Jarkko and Rixx Broht who brought them in.”
“Ma’am, that wasn’t efficient, that was brutal.”
“Yeah, well, excuse me if I don’t have a high opinion of slavers, Ruqayya. Forget the Cardies, those ye’phekk maktal kosst amojan tried to grab my ship once upon a time. I came out of that with this”—she pointed out the scar on her face—“and a cloned kidney, and thirty good friends dead.”
Al-Qahtani winced. “I didn’t mean… Uh, ‘efficient’ in my book would’ve been giving them to the Lethean first, then executing them. She tortured them first, she was punishing them, not trying to get information.” Eleya grunted noncommittally. “I think the Klingons have been a bad influence on them.”
“Ruqayya, did you ever consider that the Federation is about the only civilization in this part of the galaxy that doesn’t give slavers the death penalty?”
“We don’t give the death penalty to anybody, ma’am. Your own species had to stop hanging Cardassian collaborators to join.”
“Ruki, that happened when I was two.”
“Besides, that kind of behavior just encourages the slavers to space their cargo, get rid of the evidence. Regardless of any other considerations, we can’t let Qua off the hook for this.”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
A: Two. One to set up the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly-colored power tools.
Can't remember where I read that one; it's been years.
> why does eleya keep using kosst amojan as profanity when it isn't?
Well, Kosst Amojan is basically the Bajoran equivalent to the Devil, so it seemed natural that it could be used as such. The particular swear "ye'phekk maktal kosst amojan" basically translates to "frelling son of the Devil".
@jonsills: I know where I got it from: Prairie Home Companion's Pretty Good Joke Book.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
— Space is frelling huge. Starfleet only has so many ships and even an uncloaked ship can be hard to detect at a distance. You'll notice that Eleya used fakery to get the pirates to come to HER. This is something she used very successfully during the war in some side stories I've brainstormed: lacking cloaks as they do, Starfleet goes old-school when they need to be stealthy. It's a weird case where old techniques actually work better than new ones: a cloaked ship is easier to detect at warp than at sublight speeds (something it's likely the Moabites aren't fully aware of), whereas a ship that simply returns a signal of something it's not looks the same at any speed. And on the off chance any raiders survive to report back, they now know that any civilian ship they attack could in fact be a Federation capital ship in disguise.
— Moab has better intelligence sources than the Federation does. Unlike Starfleet, they're allied to the Klingons who are allied to Melani D'ian, who in this 'verse is actually trying to restrain the slave trade to maintain said alliance.
— As noted, the Moabites have fewer scruples about pesky things like international borders than the Federation does. The armistice has only been in place for eleven months at this point and things are still pretty tense while treaty negotiations continue, so Starfleet is on a more defensive posture than many on both sides would prefer. IOW Eleya would LIKE to be able to pursue across the blue line but she's been ordered not to, and the protocols aren't there yet to have KDF forces take up the pursuit where she leaves off.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
She will get the Bajor later, though.
EDIT: Mixed up my dates, now fixed.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
“You cut corners there, Jane.” The newly elected Governor of Cold Butte, Debra MacAulliffe, dangled her feet off the same container. “Didn’t General Moskowitz tell you explicitly not to cross the Federation border?”
“Not so much,” Janice demurred, scooping a bit of brown stew gravy with a piece of black bread. “My orders were to prevent them from being sold.”
“Uh-huh… so what Liz told the rest of the Governing Committee was hogwash then. Not that we wouldn’t support crossing that border already.”
“Gotta appease the Klingons or they’ll pull their support, is my guess,” Janice told her. “Maintain the quv, the appearances.” She turned to the redhead. “How’re your kids doing?”
“The boys are growing fast, little Julie’s… not so much. We confirmed the bad news last week—it’s definitely a mutation in her genetics, not inherited from either of us, just a twist from the tailings. Docs think they might be able to use a cybernetic option, but her rejection spectrum…”
“Oh god, I’m so sorry…” Janice said with deep sympathy.
“We knew it was possible, Janice.” Deb told her, “it’s why we started with the sign language in the first place. You staying for long?”
Janice shook her head. “We’re stepping up patrols in that sector. Second Fleet’s rotating the Ninth Battlecruiser Squadron to Ganalda for refit, so the MCDF’s got to cover the area alongside the 22nd Recon Wing. How’s your own fleet shaping up?”
“Hoping to get a relief unit?” Deb asked. “Well… the Cold Butte squadron’s still getting fitted out, and there’s been some holdups on the yard construction—some of the machinery isn’t up to spec yet… but in terms of training, we’re progressing ‘acceptably’ according to General B’Sanos.”
“I could talk to James, see if we can’t get a move letter and a transfer from the Moab/New Saigon squadron over to here…” Janice offered.
“No, don’t bother,” Debra said. “Moab’s closer to Fed territory and we both know your world’s the first one they’ll move on if they decide to get serious about claiming independence is illegal. Cold Butte is deeper in the Klingon zone, Starfleet would have to practically reignite the war to come for us—or they’d have to get the Pentaxians to agree to letting them stage in the Dynasty… Besides, you’re a warm-country girl, and my world is cold.”
“You settling into the office okay?” Janice asked.
Debra snorted. “I was negotiating with the Karrank}{‘p leaders last month, now I’m a governor having to negotiate with politicians at home.” She shook her head. “It’s the perils of independence, I guess. I was hoping Morrow would take the job but he turned it down and insisted on an election…”
“An election you won,” Janice pointed out. “Handily.”
“An election I didn’t even want to be involved in. Morrow and Saker stood up and nominated me in absentia—hell, I didn’t even campaign...”
“Perils of success then.”
“I never thought getting rich would drag me into elected office… But it’s good to see you, I’ll tell David when he gets back. He’ll be sorry he missed you.”
A group of olive drab parka’d soldiers came down the Astoria’s ramp. “I did bring a few things from Moab on my trip… to beef up your defense forces. Dave will probably be bringing more when he brings the Talltrees back from repair at the Moab yards.”
“Soldiers?”
“Better. Marines, the Confederacy’s got to share resources, right? And you’re having problems finding eligible recruits? Well, Moab III’s got them falling out of nowhere…” Janice pulled a PADD out and intoned, “‘By order of the First Minister, Elizabeth Tran, volunteer cadre from Marine Corps graduation class 208-2 are hereby transferred to garrison duty under the Cold Butte command’…” She pointed at the assembling company of green parka’ed troops forming on the tarmac. “Beginning with this company-strength element. Your request was accepted, Governor, Happy Christmas.”
“What’s the rotation?” Debra asked suspiciously.
“Eighteen months. It should buy your people enough time to get your defenses solidified and squadrons operational—the full battalion’s slotted to finish arriving in March with your husband’s ship.”
Debra dropped down onto the flattened, steamed ice of the landing field, and strode over to inspect the debarking Marines.
USS George Hammond, responding to distress call. 25 February 2411.
The intelligence downloads had been almost wartime constant. K-7 Fleet Area and militias had foiled a couple raids, but Starfleet Intelligence noted at least eight more cross-border strikes since Eleya had been put on the trail of the rogue bandit-hunting from the former colonies.
Starfleet’s sources inside the Klingon Empire were either getting good, or they were getting fed a load of hara cat pellets.
General K’Ragh, for instance, was back on Qo’noS, having brought the wreck of the Qo’noS bortaS in under warp-tow. There was some popcorn-worthy video of his arguing with members of the High Council, and at least one shot of him being snubbed by his own father.
General B’Sanos was in several reports as well, and KDF numbers along the Hromi front were declining, units being rotated first to Ganalda Station, and then off to fronts far from the cluster, threatening the Romulan Imperial Remnant and the Kinshaya. Even such worthies as Klag had been reassigned; he and that Gorn collaborator, Ssharki, were rumored to be involved in attempts to put down the growing Separatist movement.
Front-line KDF forces were being drawn down and replaced by auxiliary units across the frontier. We could attack them now, and they’d take six months to be ready to counter.
Starfleet wasn’t about to do that—and come to that, she really didn’t want to—but if the reports were clear indicators, that’s what would happen if the command on the border were in any way the stereotypically normal IKDF types.
Eleya knew better. Imagery from Cold Butte and Arluna showed shipyards under construction and older, near-obsolete KDF vessel types in abundance. Old raptors, old cruisers, but Moab III and New Saigon had completed yards, a fleet-grade starbase, and evidence of ample forces.
“Where did they get the crews?” she murmured out loud. It wasn’t an idle question: when she laid the imagery and intel reports against incident reports along the border sectors, the Moabites had a hell of a lot more ships, operating with a lot more effectiveness, than their population could possibly explain. It was simple mathematics: even with universal conscription, which to her surprise the Moabites hadn’t enacted, maybe one out of a thousand people could handle starship duty. One out of a hundred that could handle duty on a starship, could make it through either KDF or Starfleet officer training. Quality crews were an enormous investment, and these colonists were turning out crews at about a thousand percent the rate they should be able to.
“Maybe mercs?” she muttered. “But they haven’t got the money to pay that many mercenaries, or the resources to trade for them. And they’re way too disciplined.”
Publicly, the Empire was drawing down forces—and there were enough reports to show that while some of that drawdown was headed across the Empire to the Kinshaya border, the lion's share was going to support the Romulan Republic, both with ships and advisors… some of whom were coming from Moab III.
“Captain!” Her musing was interrupted.
“Yes?”
“We’ve found the Princess of Toyola exactly where the emergency beacon said she’d be.”
“Lifesigns?”
“We’re being hailed by a colonist from Emerald, Captain… he’s on the bridge of the ship, and claims the Orion crew’s been killed.”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
We should note here, since it's tangentially relevant to something that happens later, that the policies in question required some pretty major abuse of the law: the US Navy would call it "sea-lawyering", Alcott called it "space-lawyering" in "Sound the Alarm". To recap from the tail end of The Most Foolish Klingon, the Colonist Act (a.k.a. the Maquis Act) banned the colonists from forming militias and to rely on Starfleet Security for their protection. They're MPs, not soldiers: they were okay at policing but TRIBBLE for defense. So Eleya came up with some workarounds based on the chain of command: Starfleet Security is part of the Starfleet Operations branch, i.e. non-field duty, but what regular army the Federation has, the Starfleet Ground Forces (thank Steven S. Long's Dominion War Sourcebook for the name), is under Starfleet Command, i.e. field duty. As is Alcott's command, the Eta Eridani Fleet Area (a.k.a. the K-7 Fleet Area). There's obviously some overlap since Starfleet Security also provides the next best thing to marines on Starfleet ships (the MACOs are more like Navy SEALs), but that's the basics.
Part two, as a senior officer, Admiral Alcott is empowered to issue field commissions, recruit enlisted men, and recall retirees and reservists to active service. So, Eleya came up with the idea to form planetary defense militias on the colonies still under Federation control, trained, equipped, and assisted by Starfleet Ground Forces and assigned reserve status by Alcott, so that on paper they were officially Starfleet troops and therefore the Colonist Act was inapplicable.
Part three was all Eleya. She bypassed Starfleet's normal procurement cycle entirely and went to a contact in the Bajoran Ministry of Defense (her former CO). The Bajoran Militia takes defense-in-depth extremely seriously: the actual ground troops and
strong corps of reservists who can go guerrilla and start planting IEDs if all else fails are the second line of defense. The first line is a defense grid of high-powered ground-based phasers to blow attacking ships clean out of the sky. Turned out that given their own history and cultural makeup, they were only too happy to help out.
And I guess the Federation's civilian leaders were so desperate to be seen to be doing something that they went for it, as bass-ackwards as it was.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
“Talk to me, Chief,” Kanril demanded as she stepped off the transporter pad, ballistic mesh armor under her blacks and a phaser and bayonet belted at her waist.
The walls had the distinctive pock-marks of bullet impacts and scorches from disruptor fire. Here and there, orange blood, and sometimes red, stained the area.
“One hundred fifty civilians with recent surgeries to remove Orion slave links, six hundred nineteen dead Orions,” Chief Walston reported, holding a Type-3 at port arms. “My boys have collected twelve decks of playing cards so far off the bodies.”
“We’re twenty-six light-years our side of the truce line, right?” Kanril asked.
“About that, yes ma’am.”
“You’ve spoken to the victims?” she asked.
“They describe the same thing: the ship’s alarms went off, then the thrum of the warp engines ceased with a series of small explosions, the attackers boarded, and there was a running gunfight in the corridors. They took the ship, lined up the surviving officers, interrogated them, then executed them.”
“Next?”
“They separated out the prisoners in cargo, and took about half of them, then their medics went room to room, removing slave links before unlocking everything and telling them to wait for Starfleet.”
“Could the captives identify the attackers?”
“Human, mostly. One of the victims claimed there were Bajorans and an Andorian with the assault teams that took the ship...they left the sensor logs this time.”
She pushed the bloodstained silken curtain aside as they walked onto the bridge of the cruiser.
“Show me.”
On the screens, a group of four bird of prey ships materialized out of cloak, hammering the Orion vessel from three sides.
Eleya peered at the video critically. “Those’re small,” she noted. “Norgh-class, like they used for the Son Tay operation.”
“Not your girl?” he asked.
“Not our girl, but definitely her tactics. Do you have identifiers on the BoPs?”
“Lieutenant al-Qahtani got nose art off the video,” he answered, flicking a thumb at the security chief. “Two from the Moab squadron. The middle one’s marked up as being from Arluna. No clear image on the others before the camera got shot off.”
She ran the shipboard imagery of the attack. The uniforms were a dead giveaway: the Confederacy had taken to modeling on 20th century style ‘fatigue’ uniforms with light body-armor, as distinct from Starfleet as they were from the KDF. Olive-drab and light tans, sometimes a shade the uniform artists called “Khaki”, and boots with laces over the molecular closures. The style ‘stood them out’ in situations like this, but had fooled intelligence initially by being rather civilian in appearance at ports like Drozana. Underneath, was a carbonan skinsuit and the helmets could be linked and sealed instantly, but the main benefits were more pockets and a distinctive ‘look’. There was a mixture of disruptors and slug-firing weapons visible, more a sign of logistical problems and possible availability issues, but the slugthrowers fired advanced projectiles and the disruptors weren’t far from KDF standard.
They’re young. Most of the faces would have blended into a freshman class at Starfleet Academy. Only the Andorian, who seemed to be in command this time, and a pair of Bajorans in their middle-age seemed like they should even be here. A quick check with facial recognition and she had names for all three. The Andorian was a retired Starfleet officer who hadn’t returned to duty when the Klingon War broke out. The Bajorans were both wanted members of the Kohn-Ma, terrorists even by Bajoran standards who’d sought to continue the battle against the Cardassians after Liberation. Both were known to have joined the Maquis, both were believed killed when the Maquis were destroyed by the Dominion.
A redhaired human girl was doing something on the nav console in the next series of images. Eleya’s memory for patterns locked the girl’s face. An image… it came together at the freckles, of all things, and the media shots of the Moabite landing on Risa. “She was one of their crew at Son Tay.”
“We’ve got a facial rec match on her from the Federation’s juvenile justice database,” he said. “She’s younger than Peter, has a rap sheet for petty theft, codehacking, and possession of contraband.”
“Peter just turned fifteen, didn’t he?” Kanril asked.
“Nice of you to notice, ma’am. Yeah, he’s going to apply for early admission to the Academy next year.”
“So who is she?”
“Phoebe Kian, native of Ia Drang on Moab III. Like I said, she’s got a rap sheet. Two runaway attempts, theft, escaping from detention, along with codehacking, and possession of contraband items… and that was by the age of ten.”
“If she was at Son Tay, she was what, twelve, thirteen then?” she asked.
“About that… You’ve got a look.”
“Something that was bothering me is starting to make a lot more sense. They’re recruiting kids, like the Resistance did, that is how they’re filling those numbers… So what did she get from the nav computer?”
It took the girl in the security recording five minutes. But she took some key components with her. It took the tech team from the George Hammond nearly nine hours.
“The little sh*t knew what she was doing, the nav-data she pulled was still partially in the deflector buffer.”
“What was it?”
“There’s an unregistered base about twenty seven light years inside Federation territory. It’s not on our databases, but it’s where this ship was headed when they ambushed her.”
“Comms! Get me a gold channel to Vice Admiral Mwangi at K-7. I want Mäkinen’s squadron, the Apache, the Yoruba, the Emancipator, Cetshwayo, Sisko, and maybe the Kalevala if she’s available.”
“The Kalevala?” Tess chuckled. “They’re not going to give you an Odyssey-class dreadnought, ma’am.”
Eleya grinned right back. “Let’s ask ‘em anyway, all they can do is say ‘no’. Those little frigates wouldn’t be able to carry everyone they took off this barge for long, and something about this suggests they wouldn’t try it with a load of civilians aboard. Which means they’re in communication with someone who can and will move on the base—and it ain’t us…” She frowned, then smiled. “But they did tender an invite to the party.”
“They delayed us with refugees, and with sabotage,” T’Var noted.
“Yeah, but they left behind clues to tell us where to be, and based on the delays, about when to be there. It’s how K’Ragh’s mind works—and I’ll bet a case of springwine he’s the brains behind this operation.”
“What’s the objective?” Tess wondered.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Eleya pulled up a map on the main screen for the JOs’ and enlisteds’ benefit. “The Klingons can’t run military ops on this side of the line without violating their part of the agreement. There’s a nest of pirates operating from this side of the line and they want it shut down, but making the accusation in public looks weak—which ol’ Jimmy Pok really doesn’t want to do this soon after an armistice he’s selling as a wartime victory at home.”
“They can’t ask for Starfleet assistance, so they let their own pet humans loose?”
But T’Var was already nodding. “They cannot seek Starfleet’s assistance, so he gives Moab a pre-planned operation that is designed to draw us in,” the short-haired Vulcan explained.
Eleya nodded to T’Var. “The colonists give it deniability if things go wrong, they’re an expendable cutout,” she said with some disgust. “But it’s only one step separation, so the High Council claim a victory if things don’t. And ‘there is nothing more honorable than victory.’” She took a breath. “I don’t think your juvenile offender’s going to be present at the big party, but there are exactly two senior officers with enough Starfleet time on the other side to make this work the way it has.”
“Cham Nguoc and Janey Qua.”
“Exactly. Cham’s busy being assistant to the chief of staff at Moab, so their pitcher’s got to be Qua—she’s got the experience, the training, the background…”
“What background?” Biri asked.
“MACO training. She aced the course in 2396 as a Lieutenant, she did MACO instead of the usual JOP training cycle, plus Naval War College credits—she’s going to be there.”
“Which base? Amman? Helsinki?”
“Hereford,” Walston stated, “class ninety-six-two. She was trained as a f*cking Desmond.”
MCDS Ia Drang, Koro’t’tinga-class cruiser. 7 March 2411.
The argument with her husband hadn’t taken long when she told him the job with Cold Butte’s little squadron would be a cruiser command. The Koro’t’tinga-class wasn’t much bigger than a Hegh’ta heavy bird, but spreading the experience around was probably best for the Service, especially when it was readily apparent to anyone with a basic head for logistics that securing the Confederacy’s only ready source of dilithium was probably a good idea.
But there was still the problem of raids by Orion rogue houses, uncontracted Nausicaans, and other galactic riffraff looking to capitalize on the drawdown of forces along the Federation/Klingon border.
Janice Qua sat silently in the central command seat. “Do we have the recon data?” she asked.
“It’s confirmed, mum, one station, Orion design, they’ve got satellites with distortion fields masking it on long range sensors. If it’s not the transship point, nothing is.”
“Do we have a count on defending forces?” she asked.
“It’s a light carrier group. One Siege Mistress-class Marauder, six or seven mid-range frigates and the recon isn’t sure how many corvettes or fighters—but it’s definitely from the Massana syndicate. They’ve also picked up a couple of Ferengi listed ships passing into and out of the system. No clear idents on the Ferengi vessels, but they’re not older hulls, so whoever it is has at least partial legal sanction from the FCA.”
“We knew they were fencing their merchandise somehow,” she commented. “They’re dealing in merch that’s illegal in the Empire, and hiding the money—which means they have to be laundering it through Ferengi or Breen channels.”
“They have us outgunned, Colonel.”
Janice shrugged. “Everyone always does. I don’t suppose we’ve picked up any news from K-7?”
“No, mum. If anything’s happening, they’re keeping quiet.”
“Good enough. If Alcott were still alive, I could just send him a letter. G*ddamn but I hate having to play games like this,” she muttered. “Okay, comms, link up the rest of the group. We’ll hit them in nine hours, twenty-three minutes. Scout and strike commanders stand by to receive your targets. Once we get there, nothing leaves until we do, and don’t leave anything able to move. We can’t call in the rest of the Moab Squadrons because they have to be present for the visit by the USS Tiburon, that means it’s just us doing this one. All vessels, cloak up, we’re going to be making donuts.”
“You’re betting a lot on this, Mum.”
She regarded the sergeant major. “I’m betting there are enough honest Starfleet officers that they won’t let it slide, yeah… and I’m betting a lot that while Alcott’s gone, his people in the border fleet are clever enough to pour p*ss out of a boot in a timely manner—meaning that the only thing we’ll really have to worry about, is getting out again after these Syndicate bastahds are knocked out of the slaving business.”
“If we can’t?”
“Then I guess I’ll get to know what the inside of Facility 4028 looks like, won’t I?”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
I doubt it. You're basically looking at Halo Marines.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Here on your own
Woke up a memory
Feeding the pain
You cannot deny it
There’s nothing to say
It’s all that you need to fire away
Oh damn, the war is coming
Oh damn, you feel you want it
Oh damn, just bring it on today
You can’t live without the fire
It’s the heat that makes you strong
‘Cause you’re born to live and fight it all away
You can’t hide what lies inside you
It’s the only thing you’ve known
You’ll embrace it and never walk away
Don’t walk away
Don’t walk away
Don’t walk away
Don’t walk away
Raised in this madness
You’re on your own
It makes you fearless
Nothing to lose
Dreams are a joke here
They get in your way
That’s what what you need to fight day by day.
Oh damn, the war is coming
Oh damn, you feel you want it
Oh damn, just bring it on today
You can’t live without the fire
It’s the heat that makes you strong
‘Cause you’re born to live and fight it all away
You can’t hide what lies inside you
It’s the only thing you've known
You’ll embrace it and never walk away
Don’t walk away
(You need not fear us,
Unless you are a Darkheart
A vile one who preys on the innocent
I promise
You can’t hide forever from the empty darkness
For we will hunt you down like the animals you are
And pull you into the very bowels of Hell)
Oh damn, the war is coming
Oh damn, you feel you want it
Oh damn, just bring it on today
You can’t live without the fire
It’s the heat that makes you strong
‘Cause you’re born to live and fight it all away
You can’t hide what lies inside you
It’s the only thing you’ve known
You’ll embrace it and never walk away
Don’t walk away
Don’t walk away
Don’t walk away
Don’t walk away
Within Temptation, “Iron”
Music by Sharon den Adel and Daniel Gibson
Lyrics by Sharon den Adel and Robert Westerholt
10 March 2411, 2230 hours GMT. Zero Hour minus 240 minutes and counting…
As the two task forces drew closer to the Orion slavers’ base, a group of Matrons were just setting in motion a bold plan to remove Melani D’ian from power, and attempt to destabilize and topple the Klingon military and their government. This bold plan was to begin with the assassination of D’ian at the annual meeting of Trade Houses under the Syndicate, held at Eryphis Station near the Tau Dewa sector block.
On Moab III, Phoebe Kian traded a duty chit with a friend. She was going to assume charge-of-quarters duty so that her friends could visit a nearby town off-base for a bit of night life. Judah Lees, one of her crewmates, was just printing off his transit pass to visit his family on New Saigon while their ship was in port, and an Orion cultist forty kilometers away was activating an ancient artifact in an even more ancient ruin. On Qo’noS, K’Ragh and his brother Koldor were going to a tavern near the shipyards for a drink after the younger man had another argument with his Father over the direction of his career, and interests. They were going to have a good time: Koldor, the elder son of D’Ward, known among his peers as “The Wise” was going to talk his younger brother into at least listening to their father’s objections, and K’Ragh is going to introduce his brother to the wilder side of Klingon night-life.
Tomorrow would be the worst single day in 350 million lives. 120 million of them wouldn’t survive to the end of the week. But at that moment, that bad day was still hours away.
Today, six hundred less-than-ethical Ferengi crew, and twenty-five thousand, six hundred and fifty-six Orions, were going to get a head-start on having a truly sh*tty day.
For five thousand people, however, today would be a blessed event—because they would get to go home.
MCDS Ia Drang, hull number BC-002…
“We’re about to conduct a station assault, ladies and gentlemen, after this point, all the plans in the universe won’t mean p*ss in the wind if you don’t trust one another and do your duty. Ahead of you is the largest pocket of the rogue syndicates. They’ve forted here because they think they’re safe, they trade in the blood, misery, and suffering of innocent people,” she turned to bring her face fully into the camera, “We’re going to fix that, we’re going to put paid to it, we’re going to break them. Wing leaders and wolfpacks have their orders, we’re going in, the enemy is strong, but she’s not ready. Not for us. Set condition one throughout the Task force and prepare for ready actions, we’re going to drive these bastahds from our skies, and from the skies of our neighbours. The preparations are made, the clock is set, we’re going to war.”
With that order, the cross feed cleared and bridge screens shifted to tactical displays. She sat down, “‘March of Cambreadth’, Miss Peri, if you please.”
Over the PA from the bridge to the engine rooms and everywhere in between, bagpipes and drum sounded.
“Advance.”
USS Benjamin L. Sisko NCC-96031, advance recon for TF 34.
Commander Shalari sh’Thelis was in a good mood. Her people had a well-earned warrior reputation, at least by Federation standards, and her blood was up with the anticipation of battle.
She kept it well under control. Unlike Klingons, Andorians kept their passions subordinated to unit discipline. Though fine commanders were feted, before the Federation, to break off a mission in pursuit of personal glory was a death penalty offense and made one’s family pariahs. This mission required emissions silence, maintained by their unpowered orbit around a sandy moon. They’d come in on a widely arcing course that placed a Class T gas supergiant, the only planet in the star’s habitable zone, safely between them and the target station, and now her Dervish-class patrol escort’s passive sensors were greedily gulping down every stray Joule that happened to come their way.
Sh’Thelis accepted a cup of Vulcan spice tea from an E-2 as she watched the plot. So far the Orions and Ferengi had shown no sign that they knew either Moab or Starfleet was on its way. But in all honesty, she wasn’t sure it would matter if they did: a Siege Mistress-class dreadnought was slowly orbiting the base. She shook her head. True, Captain Kanril had taken theoretically tougher targets with far less, but the fact remained that if the Mobies didn’t show like she thought, then Starfleet was outnumbered eight to one in hulls and at least twelve to one in tonnage… before you even tried considering the space station.
The sensor console suddenly chirped and the human first-class manning it hollered to her, “Captain! I’ve got subspace distortions clearing and warp trails, they’re goin’ in hot!! they’re goin’ in now!!”
A stream of class identifiers and registry numbers popped up as the Moabite force entered their attack run.
The thirty-six vessels would have been a massive task force—in Kirk’s day.
Today, they were barely an embarrassment: even individual Klingon Houses had larger fleets of more modern ships.
Then it was a chorus of people talking at once. . “Captain,” her XO yelled, “shake out the task force! We’ve seen what these guys do, they’re gonna get slaughtered in there!”
“Cetshwayo reports decloaking ships at twelve light minutes, vector down angle thirty at maximum impulse. Orions are moving their protective force to intercept!”
“I’m only reading one cruiser size vessel out there, and a bunch of Raptor classes. Jesus Christ, their whole f*cking taskforce doesn’t weigh what that Orion dready does!”
“That’s… that’s a frakking starbase size station out there! Are they insane?”
Sh’Thelis made her decision. “Task Force Lead, this is USS Sisko Actual, request permission to engage the Orions, over?”
USS George Hammond...
“Hold position, Sisko Actual,” Kanril Eleya barked, her service blacks now sporting a shiny new commodore’s wreath opposite her rank. “We have to maintain fire supremacy or this is going to fall apart, over!” The ident programs popped with the class and likely identity of the Orion dreadnought—the class was a Siege Mistress, now ID’d as OWS Lady of Syrenya, a ship with the fighter wings of a Klingon Vo’quv and the firepower of an Odyssey-class. The only thing it didn’t have was good maneuverability.
“Detecting two… three Princess-class cruisers bearing two-seven-five by plus forty-eight and two-eight-zero by negative-seven-zero, they are launching fighters and assault shuttles!”
Which was why they came with capital class escorts.
“How the phekk did they miss those?”
“Moab Taffy is heavily engaged, Ma’am…”
“Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to replicate that feat. All Starfleet units, we’re going in early. Commence warp microjump in three, two, one, mark!” The stars ahead sharply blueshifted as the force ran up to c-plus, reaching maximum warp in three seconds. “Be ready to bring all weapons to bear on the Orion ships. And just so we’re absolutely clear, I’ll repeat it one more time: Moabs are friendlies. As of now, all units are weapons free.”
“I have a lock,” Tess announced.
“Exiting warp now!”
“And firing!”
Twin lances of nadions reached out for the nearest corvette as the warp field collapsed. The poor sod had all his shields shifted forward to defend against the Moab ships; the opening blast from the main phaser banks speared completely through and blew apart the next ship over as well.
“Flash two!” Tess crowed. “Make that three, got one with the broadside!” she added as the Hammond careened past the formation.
On the screen, a Norgh was overloading her inertial dampeners in a turning fight with three corvettes. Mäkinen and his wingman aboard Stockholm went after them. “Giáp, this is USS Nazareth. Break off hard right, now!”
The Võ Nguyên Giáp was already streaming warp plasma when her nose thrusters fired, pulling her into a flat spin that was too much for the port weapons mount to handle—the tip of the wing broke off from pure inertial shearing. A spread of quantum torpedoes spat from the two São Paulo-class escorts swinging wide left and right, catching the corvettes between them in mid-turn. Phaser cannon fire raked across them as they completed their arcs, breaching warp cores and ripping superstructures apart.
The wounded bird of prey’s plasma venting got worse, and instruments on the Nazareth showed her warp core was going unstable. “Giáp, drop shields, we’ll beam you off!”
“Nazareth, this is Giáp Actual…” He coughed wetly. “Get my people home safe…”
Escape pods fired seconds before the overloaded warp core went into breach.
“I got them. Cover me, Jarkko,” Eleya ordered. “Tess, drop port shields. T’Var, transporters.”
“Commencing transport.” The lifeboats vanished from the plot. “Transport complete. Medical teams to Cargo Bay Two.”
As if on cue, the dreadnought began firing. Disruptor lances and clouds of torpedoes issued out from her vast flanks, claiming three Raptors almost instantly.
But three got through it, with four Starfleet heavy cruisers and an Intrepid-class science vessel on their heels, delivering hammering salvoes of precisely targeted fire on the small, ball-like section standing out from the main hull. The Sisko joined in seconds later, crash-translating out of warp with all guns blazing. “Keep them off me, Jarkko!”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, El! You focus on that helvetin huora, let me deal with the little vitut!”
“Conn! Right two-one-zero, forty-four degree up!” Eleya barked as a tachyon beam snapped out from the Cetshwayo kaMpande three hundred kilometers to starboard. “Jinks pattern six!”
“Locked, firing!” A spread of photon torpedoes shrieked out of the tubes as more ships converged on the dreadnought. USS Singapore, dogfighting with a pair of corvettes far astern, was struck by a stray return shot and blew in half amidships.
One more raptor fell, plunging on her final course into the huge beast’s armored side with a silvery light—the kind you only get when the antimatter doesn’t get scattered by a core breach, but instead hits regular matter all at once. The dreadnought’s thick shielding simply died and a section of the hull nearly a kilometer long was converted to dust and energy by the close range explosion. “Evade!” The not unlikely secondary explosions finished the huge vessel; escape pods began to blast off of the hulk, clearly hoping Starfleet would be more merciful than the MCDF.
Ahead, the rest of the Orion force, and past them, the station.
Eleya reached for her controls. “This is Commodore Kanril Eleya requesting to speak with Commander, Moab Task Force. Respond please.”
“This is Colonel Qua. Glad you could make it, Commodore. Sorry about the mess on your doorstep but these hoboes you’ve got in your backyard have been giving us the creeps for years, over.”
Eleya grinned. “I think they should creep on someplace else, don’t you, Colonel? The Fire Caves seem like a good spot to me, over.”
“I believe I’m in agreement, Commodore. I don’t suppose I can trouble you for a cup of covering fire, with an extra helping of blam? Tacnet for this taskforce is on subchannel Delta sigma three one, encryption Sierra Sixteen Sisko. Over.”
Fire was converging on the lead ship, helpfully identified as a Koro’t’tinga-class retrofit. She was leading what looked like two half-squadrons, one of Raptors and one of Bird of Prey vessels, the latter of which were doing the same escort-dance a fighter would do when shadowing a carrier. The Orions, apparently, understood exactly what they were up to—because every Orion ship in range was firing for all they were worth at the nearly obsolete Klingon-built battlecruiser.
They really hated the Moabites, it seemed: TF 34 had twice the firepower but they were practically ignoring Eleya’s ships.
“Ia Drang, advise your disposition, over?”
Qua’s answer came over the frequency, “we’re going to force-dock the station and turn marines loose, Commodore. I just need enough cover fire to keep them off until we do, Over.”
“Well, Colonel, I gotta say, you’re my kind of stupid, over.” Tinkling female laughter came back. “Jarkko, quit playing tag with those greenskins for a minute, I need your quantums.”
“On my way.” On the plot, the Nazareth, Ashalla, Stockholm, and the older Dominion War veteran Furious broke off as the other tacscorts ran interference, barrelling towards the growing furball by the station.
As the battlecruiser closed on the station, the difference in sheer scale was grotesquely apparent. The phekk’ta thing was huge, easily as large as Earth Spacedock, possibly larger.
The raptors in the formation closed rapidly with the tacscorts and birds close behind, skimming along the hull of the station, under the arc of defensive armaments, hammering and mauling as they went. The tactic was theorized at Starfleet Academy, but nobody Starfleet had faced had ever built such a large defensive construct.
The Klingon destroyers were practically fighter-sized against it, almost specks, spewing disruptor fire and torpedoes with lancet-like precision as the spindly shape of the battlecruiser angled nose-on to the structure itself, hammering with every forward mounted weapon she had. The Hammond and Apache took up a flanking position, twin phaser lances raking anything foolish enough to come close as the Sisko, Yoruba, and Emancipator played rearguard in the formation. Tess spotted a target and launched five torpedoes on an arcing self-guided course, and the nearest section of the station’s shield abruptly vanished.
The nose of the cruiser looked almost like she was touching the thick hull, as the patch of alloyed ceremetal glowed white, then blue-white, then it sublimated and the cruiser-size vessel passed into the breach.
“Frak me,” Tess murmured with some awe. “They weren’t kidding about a forced dock.”
“Commodore, would you do me the kindness of taking charge of the space element, we, ah, took a few casualties coming in and I’ve got an assault to lead, Over.”
“It would be my pleasure, Colonel. May the Prophets walk with you.”
“Not sure I’d put them through where we’re going, but thanks for the sentiment. Landing Force out.”
“Captain, I have a Slavemaster-class battleship coming out of warp off our port ventral vector!”
That made two battleships. Back to work. “Hard-a-port! All units, concentrate fire on that big son of a wraith!”
“Captain, this is Chief Corpsman Willis down in Cargo Two. I’ve got fifty armed men asking to join the ground assault down there, and… ahm… they’re pretty insistent, ma’am.”
“Willis, put the gunny or whoever’s in charge down there on with me.”
It took a few seconds, and then, a young man’s voice came over the comm. “Master Corporal Seth Lang, Cold Butte Marine squadron, ma’am.”
“Master Corporal Lang, I count about thirty greenskin ships out there, including two that outmass half my force, each. I’m not dropping my shields to beam you off and you’ll last about two seconds in a shuttle. You get my drift?”
“Um, you got escape trunks?” he asked. “We can take those. Calibrate the guidance to ride the waveform off a shield and it’ll push us right through like pus pushing a splinter of ore,” he suggested. Eleya raised an eyebrow at the simile. “We can’t help you out here, but we can do something down there, ma’am, and it frees up your Corpsmen to handle working crew.”
“I got a better idea. You got field medical training? Any of you know how to work a crowbar or hyperspanner?”
“Aye, ma’am. Plus both our corpsmen made it out.”
Right on cue, the ship rocked from a heavy hit. All that evasion couldn’t last forever. “Damage to dorsal starboard nacelle, casualties in Engineering!” the damage control officer shouted.
“Looks like you just got your first patient, Master Corporal. Report to Commander Ehrob in Engineering and start digging people out!”
“Aye, ma’am!”
The boy (had to be a boy, his voice was still cracking) started barking orders to his comrades with the link still open. The chief corpsman picked it up almost immediately. “Captain, those’re kids! I swear there’s not one of them shaves more than twice a week.”
Eleya bit her lip. “We’ll deal with that later, Chief, you just ride herd on them for now.”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
“Move, move, move!!” The Orions hadn’t expected a boarding assault, and their security was equipped for handling rioters and the occasional irate customer, not a short battalion of combat infantry being supported by shuttles from the inside of their base.
Janice watched her Marines as they moved out with some trepidation. The company from Arluna were at least experienced troops, mostly volunteer Romulan immigrants who’d been caught on-planet when the secession vote came down. Cold Butte’s own were a mixture, new trained infantry with a handful of leaders from Klingon houses or with Klingon background. They’d adapted easily enough to Saul’s training regimen.
The ones that gave her doubts, were the ones from Moab. Their paperwork checked out against records, but they all looked so damn young. Everything but how they moved together—it was as close to perfect teamwork as she’d ever seen. The force moved like an organized swarm.
“Peri, have you got the layout yet?” she demanded as the sections and platoons reported securing entrances and corridors and the air echoed with disruptor and machine gun fire.
“Got it. There’s a somnozine riot gas system built into the cargo bays, obstacle systems, shielding, and gravy traps on the main accessways to the key control centers, but we can knock out most of the station’s defenses here”—the young slicer indicated a structure near the waist of the station—“and here, at the main antimatter reactors. Knock out or secure those two points and it’s just a big, floating box.”
“Who would design something like that?” Captain Minh, one of the company leaders from Moab, and a vet of the Son Tay mission who also looked, to Janice’s eyes, too young for as good, or as experienced, as she was.
“Orions,” Janice said. “It’s a cultural imperative—they centralize decision-making as much as possible in their ships, their starbases, even their cities. It’s part of their civilization’s universal chattel system: the highest owners delegate power down on a pyramid determined by ownership. The owner of the station would, therefore, be able to deny power to anyone aboard.”
“So that’s probably where the Matron in control of the station is, then?” Captain Kharne son of Richard, a ‘Family and honor’ boy from the equatorials of Cold Butte, asked as a breaching charge went off somewhere.
“Yeah… primary objective two. Objective one is knocking out power from the main plants. No juice, the control systems are worthless—or at least degraded, Orions do believe in both batteries, and backups.”
“Bravo can take the powerplants,” Minh asserted. “We’ll need a supplemental from the engineering department to deal with sapping the traps, but it’s probably going to be the simplest part of the whole assault, which means heavy defenses.”
“Heavy defenses on that control node, too,” Kharne pointed out.
Janice made a chopping gesture. “No. We play it as a full battalion. You’re fooled by the scale of the map here: there’s nearly five kilometers of decks between here, and where we need to be regardless of direction, and this station could hold as many as half a million people. We move as a unit, engineering crews between platoons so we can cut, blast, or hotwire our way around booby traps the recon teams miss, we take the powerplant, then we take the Stationwaist, study the diagrams and formulate assault plans for each segment, we move in bounding overwatch formation, ranger file where passage is clear, visual contact and buddy-system. When we hit combat contact—and we will, it’s no secret we’re here—concentrate fire and drive forward into the ambush, and we keep moving at time-and-a-half wherever possible.”
The advance was fast. The Orions weren’t particularly inventive or creative in their defensive arrangements. Peri Wahlberger was actually kind of shocked when her taps didn’t show them doing things she, as a sensie-dee-gamer, considered obvious, like modulating gravity in the corridors, depressurizing sections, or turning hatches and passageways into trapped kill zones.
“Mum, they’re making this too easy,” she said through a filter mask as they hit another defended intersection.
“Speak up, what do you mean ‘easy’?” Qua bellowed over the howl of disruptors on full auto.
“Station’s got standard grav-decks, plenty of internal power, we’re still working in standard gees. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Oh… right… you wouldn’t know about… Wahlberger, never give the enemy ideas.” The Marines ahead of them were already tearing through the packed enemy, and Bravo company was moving to exploit the breakthrough.
“I don’t understand.”
“Orions… they’re not very creative, Peri,” Janice commented. “Some point in their past, they sort of ‘bred it out’ of the genome. They’re fast learners, but they don’t tend to come up with new things on their own.”
The colonel snapped a disruptor rifle to her shoulder, and laid a high-density beam on a catwalk, dropping four burly males ten meters to the deck.
“According to some sources, they haven’t had but five geniuses in the last ten thousand years,” Janice continued. “Charlie, advance! Bravo, hold this intersection!”
“Five?”
“Yeah, and one was a musician who emigrated to Earth. About two hundred years ago. Commodore, how are things going out there, over?”
“We’re still with you,” Kanril’s contralto came back over a channel staticky with weapons fire. “We’ve taken some damage, nothing serious. Two light carriers out of the fight, one battlewagon’s dead. Your people are even better than I expected: you’ve got some damn good fliers, over.”
They reached a vertical shaft where turbolifts would normally run.
“Power station’s down there,” Peri said. “We’re practically on top of it. The big control hub’s up above us about a kilometer, if the diagram I sliced from their D/C panel is any indicator.”
“They must’ve pulled the cars to one end or the other then… They’re not stupid, just not creative, which is why we did this the club-to-the-face way. Company Commanders!!” A chorus of “Mum” came back. “Minh, take Bravo to the power station, have fun, break stuff. Kharne, I want that control center either ours, destroyed, or isolated. Chan, take everyone who isn’t going to the command center or the powerplant and raise hell—stay mobile and use every dirty trick you were taught.”
“And a few we weren’t, mum.”
“What about you and the Headquarters element, mum?” Kharne asked.
“We’re going to check a few things we might’ve bypassed getting here, and re-establish contact,” Janice told him. “Now go, scoot-scoot!”
Peri followed her commanding officer back to a specific room. “What are we doing?”
“Checking something from the canary sheets. Can you slice this airlock?”
Peri pulled out her slicer’s rig, and connected it to the system. “Press reads fine on the other side, code’s… pretty simple, 128 bit binary encryption…”
That’s not ‘simple’, that’s outright primitive, Janice thought as the door slid open.
The room beyond was enormous.
There were statues along the walls.
“The fu—”
“Their gods,” Janice said. “First thought, Miss Wahlberger?”
“They’re… obscene.”
“I give you the Orions’ ‘Good Masters’,” Janice told her, “the things that made them into what they are, what they’ve been for fifty thousand years or more.”
It hurt to look at them. The statues had holographic elements that flowed and moved in ways that shouldn’t, couldn’t, exist in physical reality.
In the center of the room, a holographic starmap floated. Above it, a countdown timer in some language was nearing zero, and a binary system was highlighted..
Peri walked forward almost unconsciously, and touched…
The system expanded to a clear visibility.
Home…
She turned to the Colonel, “Ma’am, what does this mean??”
“It means we’re too late. They’ve started,” she drew her sidearm, and fired three times into casing of the emitter, knocking a panel loose. “There might be—”
“I see it. A subspace tap, right?”
“It was either that or a g*ddamn timer hooked up to the holoemitter,” Qua told her.
Unit comms chirped, and she heard Capt. Minh’s voice, “Power generators are secured, Colonel, and we’ve got some taps into the onboard security grid!”
“What about environmental?”
“Those too...what’cha want us to do with ‘em?”
“Get creative,” she said.
“Colonel, you’re in a surveillance deadzone, but I’m seeing a crowd of Orions heading your way from the far side of the station.”
“Thanks for the warning, we’ll hold here. Send me a couple squads if you can spare the bodies, Captain. We’ve got an objective of opportunity in here, and I’m afraid running isn’t in the menu.”
“Understood, I’m sending Second Platoon your way. They should be there in five minutes, can you hold that long?”
Janice walked to the far side of the temple chamber, examined it, and pulled out a Klingon ‘agricultural pest control’ device. “Well… that’s an interesting question that I don’t know the answer to, Captain. We’ll find out.”
She activated the device. It had a week’s power supply, assuming it wasn’t disturbed. If the emitter was disturbed, it would burn the powercell out creating a simple fragmentation antipersonnel mine from holomatter, detonate it, and the shrapnel would fade after a few seconds—but not the damage.
Federation troops had taken to calling them “Bouncing B’Etors” and there’d been accusations of war crimes when Starfleet assault troops hit them in farm fields on Manos during the war. Accusations that faded when they found the devices for sale in the local agricultural co-op. Most of her Marines were carrying a few.
“Not a whole lot of cover in here,” Peri mentioned as she worked to splice into the subspace transceiver that was updating the holomap.
“Yeah, but there’s plenty for pinch-points and terrain control,” Janice told her. As she spoke, she started boobytrapping the next entrance.
“Murphy’s Maxims,” Peri commented. The girl was zoning on the work, but aware of what her commanding officer had got up to.
“Make it hard to get in, you can’t get out? Well, maybe. But sometimes there’s a way out even if you have to go through the hull.”
“I’ve got a link, we can set whatever freq you want.”
“Set to gold channel sixteen, it’s on that list I made you memorize. Can you send text?”
“I can.”
“Send: ‘Case White Confirmed. The Mountain must come down…’ Standard Nav coordinates for Moab III, and my authorization code.”
Peri looked up. “We didn’t come for the prisoners, did we, Mum?”
Janice shook her head. “That’s why we needed Starfleet to come. We had to confirm the intel. It’s confirmed. What the KDF does about it now, or what we do, at least there’s been a warning.”
USS George Hammond…
“Watch it, Thora, you’ve got one your tail!”
“Furious, stand by, I got him! Break left! No, your other left![/i]”
“Hold tight, quantums coming through!”
Eleya was barely listening to the chatter of the escorts and birds-of-prey. Her concentration was occupied by a running beam duel with a Marauder-class flight-deck cruiser, each trying to out-turn the other and get the bow guns in line.
Eleya eyed the plot, then ordered Conn to starboard one more time, trying to gain range on him. Or so it looked: the Orion’s counter-maneuver took her straight into the fire of two Moab Raptors and the USS Sisko.
The carrier emerged from the bath of gunfire and torpedoes a tumbling, blazing wreck. No escape pods this time: it seemed a hit to the inertial dampener had killed the entire crew instantly.
Eleya switched targets as Nazareth took a direct hit from the other battleship and went into a tumble, half the port nacelle gone. “Naz, flag, status!”
“This is Lieutenant B’Rang, we’re hit bad! Captain’s out cold and I have to eject the core!” It shot from the ventral port a second later. Nazareth’s inertia quickly took her clear of the blast; the Orion corvette that came in for an easy kill wasn’t as lucky.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Grevex said from comms, “I’ve got a single transmission on the gold channel, wideband: ‘Case White Confirmed’.”
“What the frak does that mean?” Tess wondered.
Prophets have mercy. “What’s the source?”
“It’s inside the Orion base.”
Outside, the remaining Orions were suddenly breaking off. “Repeat, enemy ships are bugging out and going to warp!”
The Case White had to wait a few minutes. “Cetshwayo, Sisko, Furious, Ashalla, Baltimore,” Eleya rattled off, “pursue by principle of calculated risk! Keep after them as long as you can, try and find their next burrow!”
“Affirmative, flag!” Cetshwayo’s nacelles tilted into travel configuration and she went to warp; the other ships were on her tail in seconds.
Eleya checked her plot. Somehow all four heavy cruisers had made it through in serviceable condition, hers included; only the older Dakota-class Apache had taken significant damage, and that mainly to the shuttlebay and Science Country. “Emancipator, assist Nazareth! Apache, Yoruba, on me, let’s start sweeping escape pods.”
“Starbase shields have dropped, and—”
“Incoming from Fleet!” Grevex yelled over Senior Chief Drem. “There’s an incident at Moab III!! USS Tiburon is reporting heavy fire from an unknown opposition, they’re taking heavy casualties… They’re saying the colony at New Saigon’s been destroyed—Captain, there’re fifty-seven million people there.”
Kanril felt her mouth saying it: “Not our immediate problem. We can’t do anything for them until we’re done here.” Her mind was already bringing up possible scenarios that would result in anyone, but especially here, declaring a situation that might require glassing multiple inhabited planets. “Case White” was an IKDF emergency code, one absolutely never given in drills lest anyone not take its meaning seriously: potential quadrant-wide emergency. “Lieutenant, get Colonel Qua on the comms right the phekk now.”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Funny you should mention that...
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
“Call for you, Mum, it’s Captain Kanril!” Radioman 1st Class Peri announced.
“Busy! Take a message!” Janice had made sure her Marines had the best gear on the ship. That left her with a militarized 7.5mm autorifle, six magazines, an ‘export model’ disruptor pistol from a gunsmith shop in downtown Yellowknife, and a whole lot of Orions.
Firing bursts would run through ammo too fast. She was pot-shotting one round at a time from the corner of a statue that looked like some bestiality fetishist’s snake-based wet dream.
“Can she call you back, ma’am? We’re taking fire and the reinforcements aren’t here yet!” Peri shouted into the link, then ducked up to fire a few aimed shots with the disruptor carbine she, as a Radioman, was issued for a PDW.
It looked like a long-barreled pistol, with a folding stock attached, and in her opinion, it was a terribly inaccurate and clumsy weapon.
The Orions returned fire with disruptor beam pistols and rifles, spalling alloy from the floor, walls, and ceiling, but, as if by some miracle of fire control, they missed the statues and other obscene decorations here.
“Last Mag!!”
Peri listened to the officer on the far end of the link. “Um, no, ma’am… No ma’am… Yes’m… When we can ma’am…” she muttered in answer to the demands on the other end. “Colonel, she’s insisting on speaking with you!”
“Busy!!”
Peri finished what she was doing to the power runs under the floor, and the lighting dimmed. There was a brief moment of nausea and a sensation of pulling followed by acceleration backward as the gravity field interaction she’d just triggered released.
There was a sound of dull whimpering from the threshold of the doorway, but the fire had stopped. Peri peeked up at what she’d done. There was a spreading orange pool from the doorway, a poool of Orion blood, and beyond it, a quivering mass of undifferentiated green flesh slowly dying.
“It worked, Colonel… She’s still on the line—”
“Qua here, Commodore,” Janice said, standing and activating her own comm unit. “What do you need?” Qua slapped Peri’s shoulder and mouthed ‘good work’.
“No, it’s not a joke, Commodore, we’re pretty sure that a faction of the Orions are going to try and open a gateway to, well, for lack of a better, clearer, term, another dimension, populated by something really nasty and hostile, and they’re going to do it, or are already doing it, in the Moab system… I’m aware, we thought we had time. We don’t.”
She listened for a few moments to Commodore Kanril Eleya’s response. “Look, Commodore, check the gift General K’Ragh gave you, okay? There’s other sources but I don’t have ‘em on me right now to give you. Threat’s real, and it’s really happening. We’re going to see if there’s more info in the station’s data center… Well, no, as soon as we capture it, assuming we can take it intact!”
She listened a bit longer, “I’ll give you the full brief when we’re done here, I promise!” The arrival of a platoon of Marines made her look up. “Alright, my reinforcement’s here and we’ve got a lot of work to do, but you’ll get the full brief ASAP.”
USS George Hammond…
“The station’s shields are down, and they’re not coming back up, and I’ve got chained gravitic anomalies throughout the structure, along with fires and it’s starting to damage the base structurally.”
“Keep monitoring.”
“Incoming flash from K-7, they’ve confirmed the destruction of the New Saigon colony, and there’s some civilian video getting out from the ground at Moab. Mwangi is scrambling rapid-response forces, the Kalevala, the Palatine...”
Do I want to see this? “Put the video on my PADD, keep the main viewer clear for tac data.”
It was horrifying. Kanril quickly turned it off. “Archive it. Those soldiers down there, those Marines, a lot of them won’t have a home to go home to—don’t let the rescuees see it until I’ve had a chance to work out how we’re going to tell them that while they were fighting out here, their homes and families were dying.”
Near the docking level…
Captain Shvie Van Minh had a letter of bad conduct and an expulsion from Starfleet Academy in her third year, and five years in a Rehabilitation Center for Criminality from the same incident. She’d gotten home with her disgrace just about a year before her father died, so when she voted for independence, it had been as a near-destitute head-of-household on a dirt farm.
The Marines were her second chance, and she’d taken it with both hands, even to the point of lying to the recruiters about her training.
It hadn’t mattered to The Gunny at her basic training—she’d gone through with boot privates. “What’ve we got, Gunny?” she asked Gunnery Sergeant Lim. She’d gone from a failed would-be scientist, to an Infantry officer… and found it the place to be.
“Look for yourself.”
She peered over the railing. Cages. The entire deck, maybe a thousand meters, were cages with walkways. A few of them were also labs, surgery sites, and what appeared to be living quarters for guards, but even those, were open-topped cages.
She pulled out a pair of field goggles, and cranked up magnification.
“Maybe half of them look occupied… Oh God. We don’t have enough ships to carry them all—even if we had the Ia Drang in fit condition to fly. We’ve got to get them out—once the fuel system ruptures on the Ia Drang, this whole end of the station’s going to fall into the pull of that Jovian.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Get me a count of the victims down there, I have to get the Colonel on this. We can’t leave these people to die… and Gunny?”
“Aye?”
“I thought I saw a docked ship on the status monitors, send Third Platoon up to see if it’s still moored. Even if it’s got limited impulse, it’s still better than sticking around here.”
USS George Hammond…
“All right, I got an idea,” Eleya told Qua, reading a schematic. “Assuming the Ia Drang follows what I’ve got in Jane’s here for the Koro’t’inga, there should be an auxiliary power generator in the forward bulb, a couple decks below the bridge, right?”
“Uh, yeah, there is.”
“Okay, Conn! Maneuver us close to that Bee-Cee and get us to station-keeping. Tess, warm up the phasers. Colonel, tell anybody you’ve got left aboard to evacuate to the forward compartments, or preferably into secured areas of the station if they aren’t engineering crew. You’re about to lose your ship for good, but we can save your crew and keep the docking bay pressurized. You good with that?”
“… Yeah, all right.”
It was hard for any commander to sacrifice their command for the mission. Eleya hit the intercom. “Engineering, Bridge. Bynam, you safe to talk?”
“Aye, ma’am. We’ve restored power to the nacelle and all the leaks are patched.”
“Get a damage control team ready to beam over to the Ia Drang. Put, ah… I want Petty Officer Fuchs on the team, if that’s all right.”
“I agree. I’ll send two teams, Lieutenant Kerensky as lead, Fuchs as number two.”
“We’re in position, Captain,” the conn officer announced.
“Roll ship to port so we’re perpendicular to the Ia Drang.” Eleya consulted the schematic again. “Tell Kerensky and Fuchs I want anything that goes boom from Compartment Row Eight aft physically severed from the rest of the ship…”
MCDS Ia Drang, minutes later…
The transporter fade completed, and Dieter Fuchs stood on the deck of an old, long-obsolete Klingon Battlecruiser of just the sort he’d made models of as a child.
At least, if you applied the special ‘Damage control’ parts to show it as one of the Klink ships defeated at Caleb IV. “You the Engineer from Starfleet?” a voice in the fog of smoke and vapor that cut vision to three meters or so asked, and he searched, searched… There. The crewman was shrouded in DC gear, he couldn’t tell what race they were, never mind what gender.
“I’m him! Dieter Fuchs! You?”
“Brophy! Come on, and wear a mask, we’ve got ruptured coolant conduits. Got the fires out though!”
Dieter pulled his portable over his head, purged it, and sealed. “Sorry about the mess, sir. We’ve been trying to unf*ck the structure.” Over comms, the engineering rate escorting him down was audibly female, with an accent that after three years on the border he identified immediately as ‘Cold Butte’, with a hint of the local asteroidal colonist community or ‘Rockjacks’. the stretched ‘o’s and off-set cadence was distinctive.
“How long have you been an engineer?” he asked.
“Is it Tuesday already? Just kidding, I worked freighters for twelve years before independence, and a mining rig in the rockpile with four stakeholders after that… eight years digging duranium on bitty lil’ asteroids.”
“What’re you doing on a Moab ship?” he asked her.
“It’s not. This ship belongs to Cold Butte.”
Right, Confederacy. Having every planet provide its own ships and troops without even a central appropriation still seemed a damn weird way to run a navy.
Brophy levered open a floor hatch ahead of him. “Powerplant’s this way.”
“How’s it coming with the evacuation?”
“Weren’t many of us left aboard: pretty much everybody joined the assault. What’s going on?”
Dieter cracked a grin at her. “I wasn’t told, but I think I know what Captain Kanril has in mind. She wants the EPS conduits from the aux generator here connected as directly as possible to the deflector dish, then we’re going to use it as an environmental seal on the station.”
“Oh! Like a Bigsley Patch after a blowout, right?” she asked. “Ramp the deflector to max and leave it in the hole on the hab… That should work!”
USS George Hammond…
“I have the phasers and tractor beam programmed, Captain,” Tess said. “All shield power and spare engine power diverted to main phasers. I’m ready when you are, Mister Fuchs.”
“We need another minute, sir, the generator is giving us some trouble.”
“You don’t have another minute, the antimatter fuel storage in the primary hull is starting to lose power.”
“… There, got it!”
“Tess, fire!”
The main phasers fired, sweeping dual sustained lances of searing orange fire into the neck of the Ia Drang. The armor heated and sublimated, boiling away into vapor that cooled rapidly cooled, ripping through the pressure hull and into airtight compartments. The controlled beams bored through the ship and out the other side, then split outward from two zeroed-in beams to widen the hole through the hull.
Eleya carefully monitored the cooling units on the phaser banks. They were going into overdrive as the weapons heated up: they really weren’t designed for sustained fire like this.
Thirty seconds after it began, the phasers shut off and the tractor beam took over. A stream of graviton particles rippled out from the emitter and took hold of the main hull. “Depress bow 90 degree down, give me one-quarter impulse power. Increase tractor beam power to five hundred gravities, retracting.”
The tractor beam finished what the phasers had started. The threads of metal holding the neck of the Ia Drang to the command section embedded into the station snapped and began following along behind the Hammond as she accelerated away, towards the gas giant. “Full impulse! Stabilize beam!”
The station receded into the distance, the altitude from the enormous beige planet steadily dropped. “Release tractor beam and pull up!”
The beam released but the powerless battlecruiser’s hull continued, gaining a tumble as Eleya continued watching on secondary cameras.
Then the antimatter containment finally failed, and the ship vanished silently into a spreading silver fire across the gas giant’s face, a fire that rose, intense, and died.
“Gaunt’s hosts,” Biri breathed as Eleya let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Can’t believe that actually worked.”
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
“It’s a processing center,” Janey Qua explained. “The Massana Syndicate’s famous for their conditioning techniques. We’re just lucky this one’s focused on conditioning their victims into domestic work—military conditioning would have made things a hell of a lot more complicated. Most of these people are going to need deprogramming services, and long term mental health treatment to deal with what was done to them.”
There were humans, Vulcans, even a few Bajorans among the victims pictured. “Prophets…” Kanril whispered. She’d nearly ended up in a place like this.
“Most of these are Federation civilians, we haven’t identified any of ours, so far, but time’s wasting and we did a hell of a lot of damage to the station while we were taking it. Means we need help getting them out, and help getting them cured… and in some cases, help getting their bodies back to what they should be.”
“What?”
Janey nodded to the housekeeper slave she’d brought from the station, Zhura. “She wasn’t born a girl—I saw her junk—and I’m fairly certain the physical changes weren’t any more voluntary than the brainwashing or the implanted obedience directives. Some of the ‘customers’ for these slavers are some sick b*stards.”
She reached into her field jacket. “Here’s a Federation-side client list we cracked from the terminal. You might want to make sure it reaches the right authorities.”
“And the Klingon-side?” Kanril asked.
“Well… let’s say that there are some people on our side of the border who aren’t going to be living long, or prospering, and leave it at that. The fedsiders are your problem, so you get first crack at them. What’s the word on the ships that ran?”
“Well, my boys and girls are still in pursuit but the last check-in said they were running for Tal Shiar space; Captain Ra-garapheii isn’t sure how much longer they can stay with them. There’s, uh, something you need to know…” Eleya paused. “The Case White you called… Moab’s under attack, and your homeworld, New Saigon… it’s gone. Your husband and your son are listed casualties.”
Seeing someone break wasn’t a first, for Eleya, but Qua seemed to hold on better than most—as if she’d been steeling herself to face this. “How bad?”
“So far, the invasion’s confined to the Moab system, but Moab III is… things are pretty bad,” she understated for the benefit of the personnel nearest.
“The reports are still spotty, but the Klingon task force that arrived took a pretty bad beating, and strategic analysis at K-7 is giving even odds that Moab III will fall by the end of the night...it’s a massacre down there.”
Janice’s whole posture slumped, “We knew it could happen…I...I knew it when I called it.” she said, “But I’d hoped—” She slumped further, dropping into one of the excessively ornate operator station chairs. “I lost them both...and I can’t get them back now.” Her eyes glistened, “James wanted custody, and my new homeport… it’s cold there, we knew about the ruins on Moab… but New Saigon looked safe, out of the way… Oh god.” In her eyes, Kanril could see the loss of hopes, the death of any chance of making up for lost time.
“Commodore Kanril.” one of the Moabite officers, a klingon with the ‘railroad trax’ two-bars of an O-3, a high-and-tight haircut that showed off the ridges all the way back, and full kit spoke up, “What about the prisoners, ma’am?”
“Did you understand what I just said?” Kanril’s own voice shook. “Moab III is overrun and New Saigon is gone!”
“I understand, ma’am, but I’m from Cold Butte, and it looks like I’m the senior officer while the Colonel’s incapacitated,” he snapped back. “And I’ve got a battalion of marines and five thousand, count ‘em, five thousand civilians right here to deal with, because when word gets around and it will, Captain Minh’s going to be freaking out, and Captain t’Verias is too injured to do the job. So it’s on me, can you get them out? The civilians, I mean? I can cram all of OUR people into the surviving Raptors and Norghs, but we don’t have the carriage for five thousand people who need immediate-followed-by-long-term medical care.”
“Where’s the XO?” Eleya asked.
“Dead, Ma’am, he died on the way in.”
“Damn it,” she muttered. “My engineering officer says that Princess-class docked in the bay is operational.”
“Maybe so, ma’am, but as you pointed out, destination’s kinda limited, and as I pointed out, we don’t have the resources to give these folks the care they need. That means we load the civilians on the ship and then what?” he put a hand on his grieving commander. “We take them to a Federation base, because that’s the only place they can get the help they need. So what happens then? Your bosses put the Colonel here, and probably Captains Minh and t’Verias in a brig, maybe the rest of us go to internment until we can be traded back as spies, if we’re lucky, or interned under the Maquis Law if we aren’t...which means we can’t help our people back home.”
She wanted to say Starfleet wouldn’t do that, but she knew better.
Tess spoke up. “You’ve got JAG training?”
“No, ma’am. Bachelor’s from University of Texas El Paso, but I know which statutes they’re gonna use. I got to be an officer because I’ve got a degree. An online degree, but it’s a degree, means in addition to the handsome ridges and the bad hair, I can read and I can count. Starfleet’s like us, answers to civil authorities, which means once we’re in reach of those civil authorities, a whole lot of my people are going to be seeing the inside of a jail cell because the Colonist Act of 2371 is still federal law, and the Federation Council still hasn’t recognized our independence even with Starfleet de facto recognizing it since 2406—so we make a deal with you guys now, because you’re a hell of a lot less likely to get grabby than your bosses who have to stand in front of Okeg’s desk or deal with some of the other muckety mucks will be.”
Eleya swore and made her decision. “I want to get one thing straight, Colonel.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve seen the video of your interrogation on Starbase 24, the unredacted version. I know why you did what you did but I can’t countenance it.”
“Starfleet left us, Commodore—”
“No!” Eleya held up a finger. “You chose to leave with the Klingons, Colonel Qua, nobody made you do that but you. You dishonored your oath and your uniform; an honorable officer would’ve stood her ground and fought. And what you’ve done to these children… is unforgivable. But there isn’t a thing the Federation can do to you that’s worse than what you and yours are going home to.”
Qua stared at her, shocked out of her stupor. “Are you seriously calling this some kind of divine retribution, Commodore?!”
"No, in fact I hope what’s happening thirty light-years down-spin of here isn’t divine retribution, because for my own sake I hope the Prophets aren’t that cruel! I don't know what to think, I just know we're probably better off with you fighting at Moab than cooling your heels in my brig. You get your people home; we’ll deal with the cleanup here.”
“Major Richardson, assemble the men at the transporters, have Miss Wahlberger coordinate transport to the rest of the taskforce.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Kharne saluted the commodore and his colonel, and headed down to the bay where Alpha Company was temporarily embarked.
Qua watched him go, then spoke up. “You’re wrong, Kanril. Starfleet left them, decades before they seceded, Commodore. Do you know how I got the Ssnpth to join the Federation?” She turned. “They were running up against the Sheliak, and I lied to them, I said that the Federation honors its obligations.”
“It wasn’t a lie. I do honor my obligations. My friend Commander Mäkinen who may be bleeding out on an operating table right now, he went above and beyond his obligations. And right now Admiral Mwangi is sending every damn thing he’s got straight to Moab. You decided to run away rather than fight. That may not make you a traitor but it does make you a coward.”
“Maybe I am. And maybe you’ll make the difference someday. I promised to give you the full brief. Did you review the datatape K’Ragh gave you?”
“Yes.”
“And I assume you took Anniston’s class when you were in the Academy, Fermi’s Paradox?”
“Mm-hm. At the time I attributed that to a failure to understand natural selection: even with the Preservers’ shenanigans it selects for reproductive viability. Technology use is optional, even in bashal.”
“‘Bashal’?”
“You call them humanoids. Literally translated, ‘the holy form’.”
“Huh. Well, I had the same idea as you, until I saw the evidence during my second five year tour.” Qua stated, “a few groups in the Klingon Empire, the Sheliak Corporate, and others have noted the same evidence. Intelligent life evolves, galactic society expands, becomes interconnected, advances, and then…” she made a ‘poof’ gesture. “We’ve identified four cycles so far. Most recently the collapse of the Iconians.”
“‘Cycles’? Don’t bullsh*t me, you got this from that old computer game, Mass Effect.”
“I wish.”
Eleya eyed her face, looking for any possible sign the other woman was joking, or insane, moreso than she already thought. She found none. “You know…” Eleya dug through several library files on her PADD until she found the one she was looking for. “Here, maybe this is another one. Back before the Vulcan-Romulan Sundering, there was a spacefaring society in the Beta Quadrant, the Inshai Compact. Very little known about them, other than that their capital star system was destroyed when its sun went nova unexpectedly. The Vulcans detected it about fifty years later, right around the time the Duthulhiv pirates started raiding their cities from orbit.”
“Duthulhiv?”
“Believed according to the Vulcan Science Academy to be the same species as the Orions and likely responsible for the nova. And it was those raids that indirectly led to the schism between Surak and S’task.”
Janice sighed, “I’m familiar with some of that, Commodore, I’m talking older. The cycles are predictable. We’re on the edge of one right now. Every quarter million earth years or so, something comes in and… ‘wipes the slate’. The Orions have a name for them, ‘She’ska Gallau’, the Good Masters. About fifteen percent of their top castes believe in them like you believe in the Prophets, only these things promise to enslave and consume, and there’s evidence they altered the Orion genome.”
“The creative sterility? The overriding desire to own and be owned?”
“And their pheromones, physical adaptations that aren’t justified by evolution,” Qua added. “Yeah. Some of their own research pegs the modifications as far back as a quarter million years… and every piece of evidence we’ve recovered points to these ‘Good Masters’ as being due back. On my first tour, we went to the Gamma Quadrant. There’s evidence there, too—Starfleet classified some of the artifacts we brought back from that run. Stuff half a million years old or more, from worlds whose suns were dying and hadn’t seen a living soul in all that time… and some of it was still working.”
Qua waited for her to digest the statement, before adding, “Punchline is, we found evidence of the same culture on Moab III—which is to say, the Klingons did two years ago.”
Eleya squeezed her eyes shut. “So, the Orions here were trying to, what, go ‘Meeh rak dorah Pah-wran’ and call down the thunder?”
“Well, it fits,” Qua said. “Their overall culture’s been insanely stable for tens of thousands of years, but the Orions lost their empire to more dynamic races and cultures. A desire to regain dominance…” she shrugged.
“Yeah, that I understand without needing to go much further than my maternal grandfather.” She sighed. “Colonel, to be frank, this is way too much for me to put together right now. And I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to justify letting you go the brass.”
“You were dealing with a humanitarian crisis and I slipped away,” Qua told her. “Truth never hurts.”
“That’s not the truth, it’s a lie of omission.”
“Your first duty is to those Federation civilians down there,” Qua told her. “Second duty is to uphold the concepts of the Federation, the founding principles. The written law comes in third.”
The Bajoran stared at her for a moment. “You know what, Qua? You’re an even bigger hypocrite than I thought.”
“What?”
“You complain about the Federation discarding the rule of law, resign your commission over it, and then expect me to discard it when it’s convenient for you. And then there’s the little problem that half your phekk’ta force is underage.” She looks taken aback by the accusation. “That’s the real reason I kept Master Corporal Lang from joining you on the station. I’ll be reporting that to Admiral Mwangi, and General K’Ragh, now that I have solid proof from Chief Corpsman Willis. Unlike you, I don’t ignore or run away from my problems, Colonel. I face them and accept the consequences of my actions.”
“So you’re really just going to fall on your sword, then?”
Eleya smiled nastily, bringing the knife scar across her left cheek into sharper relief. “I don’t think I said I was just going to lie back and spread for ‘em. Now get your people together and get the phekk off my ship before I change my mind.”
Deep Space K-7. 15 March 2411.
“You had Janice Qua on your ship and you let her go? What in God’s name were you thinking?!”
“Sir! I did what I judged to be right! Sir!”
“‘What you judged to be right’?”
Kanril Eleya stood smartly at attention in undress blacks. “Yes, sir! First of all, according to Article I, Section 1 of the United Federation of Planets, a prisoner has the right to legal representation, and one who requests the services of an attorney must be provided one immediately before any further interrogation. And you and I both know damn well there isn’t a court within a thousand light-years that wouldn’t have tossed Commander Burgher out on his *ss had a writ of habeas corpus reached them. Yes, I’ve viewed the full version of former Commander O’Neill-Qua’s interrogation, sir!
“Second of all,” she continued, shamelessly running right over Mwangi’s attempt to interrupt, “according to Article I, Section 2, a member state or sovereign planet of the Federation has every right to hold a referendum on secession at any time, for any reason, and if you bothered to read any of the roughly three zillion reports filed under Admiral Alcott’s tenure you’d know damn well that four out of five planets in the Confederacy qualified as Category 1 under the conditions of the Colonist Act, regardless of ColDev being unable or unwilling to get its damn paperwork straight. The fifth was colonized from Moab III so, again according to the Colonist Act, it is properly a Moab III territorial possession and not United Earth’s.
“Thirdly: the Moab Confederacy is not and never has been at war with the United Federation of Planets—”
“What???”
“According to Article II of the United Federation of Planets, the power to declare war rests with the Federation Council, which has to date not authorized any military action against the Moab Confederacy, which as previously stated has every right to secede and therefore to do whatever with its diplomatic pursuits it damn well pleases. Nor have they ever declared war or otherwise taken military action against us. Furthermore, according to rules of engagement for Operation Left Field, the Moab vessels and Marines were to be regarded as allied forces not under my direct command. All of which means I had no authority whatsoever to prevent them from leaving. Prophets, I didn’t even have seniority: my O-6 is fourteen months old, she’s been a colonel for three years!”
Admiral Joseph Mwangi groaned, running a hand through his thinning hair. “Captain, I understand. LaRoca gave me almost word-for-word the same speech yesterday after the Tiburon limped in, but with a lot more profanity…”
“I can supply the profanity if you want, sir,” she drawled.
He gave her a tired look. “But there was a directive from Starbase One, and I’m going to be grabbing my ankles in front of Quinn’s desk over this.”
“With all due respect to his rank, sir, Admiral Quinn can kiss my *ss. I am obliged by military law going back six centuries among your species to disregard illegal orders.”
“Hold on to that, Captain, the fire… They’re relieving me, and transferring you out,” Mwangi told her. Over her stammering from a short-circuited brain, he continued, “My replacement’s going to be arriving about a week after we both leave, and he’s probably not going to accept your reasoning at any rate. They grabbed Kingsley out of Planning to cover the front here.”
“Kingsl—wh—That man’s never commanded anything more important than a customs corvette!”
“Yes, I know. Somehow, he’s wound up being assigned here.” Mwangi sighed. “He’s a walking diplomatic incident and a mutiny-magnet and they are sending him out here.”
“You know what? Maybe Janey Qua’s right: Earth’s lost its mind.”
“I’ll have plenty of opportunity to lose it with them…” He passed her a PADD. “Your orders are to report to Deep Space 9, on detachment under ch’Harrel’s 77th fleet.”
“Is there a reason given, at least?”
“Officially, they’re rotating you off the front lines. You’ve been out here five years. Six if you count your time as Detweiler’s weapons officer. You’re way overdue by any measure.”
“Unofficially, what, they think I’m disloyal?” she spat.
“They think you’re going native, getting too close to the locals. They’ve thought that for a while.”
She scoffed. “Obviously they’ve never been closer to my home planet than DS9. I grew up with people like that, sir, half the reason I enlisted in the Militia in the first place was to get away from them.”
“Well, it was either DS9 or New Romulus, and the Klingon presence on DS9 is a lot smaller.”
“So they are worried I’m disloyal. Phekktards.”
“Language.” He sighed. “At least they’re not putting you where they can keep an eye on you. I’m being pulled to San Francisco—and a desk.” He spat the word ‘desk’ like an epithet.
The redheaded woman brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear while her jaw worked angrily. Finally she let out a deep breath. “Sir, I owe you an apology, I shouldn’t have yelled.”
“If you had not, I would wonder if you had been replaced by an Undine, Captain.” Mwangi’s deep brown face split into a brilliant smile, and she snorted despite the seriousness. “Personally I’m glad you’re angry about this… especially in the midst of what’s happening seven light-years from here. Official casualties on Moab III broke one hundred million this morning. It’s a meat-grinder down there.”
“What hit them anyway, sir? Borg? Hur’q?”
“Fek’Ihri.” He paused. “From what our people in the relief efforts have seen, take the worst aspects of the Hur’q and crank it to eleven. With acid blood and claws.”
“Phekk me.”
“Whatever opinion I may have of your approach to ethical dilemmas, you’re the fightingest captain in the entire Eta Eridani Fleet Area. Your replacement has deep shoes to fill.”
“It’s a rotation, so who’s coming—besides Admiral Gilbert-and-Sullivan?”
“They’re rotating the Sammy Nick in under Kevin ‘Fencepost’ Monroe,” Mwangi answered. “It would have been fascinating to see the two of you in action after his performance on Defera.”
Eleya pursed her lips. “Well… I have an idea. Didn’t the station’s chief of security request a transfer not too long ago?” He nods. “Okay, so, my chief of security, Lieutenant al-Qahtani, she’s overdue for a promotion.”
“You want to leave her here for Kingsley?”
“Yes, sir. She speaks her mind, she knows the territory as well as I do, and she’s from Aldebaran III: her homeworld isn’t that far from here if she wants a vacation. And we do have another problem we need a good investigator on: the Moabites are using child soldiers, a lot of them.” Mwangi’s face took on a look of anger. “I’ve done what I can, sir, I reached out to General K’Ragh when I figured it out, but that’s going to be a bigger mess than the Fek when all’s said and done.”
“All right. A black pip for Ruqayya al-Qahtani? I’ll do that, if you’ll do something for me. Don’t worry,” he added at her expression, “I think you’ll enjoy this one.”
/deathtotheposteatingmonster
/furtherdeathtotheposteatingmonster
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Nurses moved with quiet efficiency among the recovery beds. The third medical bay was the size of a cargo-bay, and hadn’t seen this much business since the start of the Klingon War. What was going on, and on-going, was very much like those days, or like the aftermath of Vega. There wasn’t enough space to segregate Starfleet personnel from civilian casualties, and Medical personnel were running in overlapping shifts to handle the load. They were even beaming overflow down to civilian hospitals on Sherman’s Planet. Rumor had it that Ganalda on the Klingon side was even more swamped.
She flagged down a petty officer, a pretty Bolian lady who couldn’t be a day older than twenty-four. “Excuse me, Corpsman, I’m looking for Commander Jarkko Mäkinen?”
“Four rows down, third cubicle in the recovery wing, sir.”
She didn’t bother correcting her. “Thanks.”
Eleya walked down the rows, and a frantic part of her mind noted the number of amputees, the bodies wrapped in preserfilm bandages, and the life support machines awaiting vat-grown organs, or tissue regenerators, or stem cell packs.
She found him awake, his remaining hand thumbing through files on a PADD. He looked up and grinned. “Eleya!”
“Jarkko, how you doing?”
“Not too bad, the pain-killers make everything kind of sludgy though…”
“You look like cr*p, man.” He did: on top of the arm, his head was bandaged and his right eye socket had been sealed shut.
“The doctors say they can fix my missing arm, and my tissue type’s got a good rejection spectrum for an ocular implant. In two or three months, I’ll be back in the center seat.” He looked up at her with the unbandaged left eye. “I, uh, I heard you got reassed.”
She nodded. It was a truism of the military life that the only thing faster than a warp drive was scuttlebutt. “Yeah, uh, not my idea.”
“But you’re getting to go home, right? That’s good.”
“Not so good, Mom’s gonna chew my *ss for missing my sister’s wedding. Oh, uh, I brought you a present. Those chocolates you love, and something from Admiral Mwangi,” she added, digging into the bag she’d brought with her. She handed him a pair of small boxes and the jar of truffles, then began reading off her PADD. “‘In the name of the President of the United Federation of Planets and by direction of the Secretary of Starfleet, the Commander, Eta Eridani Fleet Area takes pleasure in awarding the Purple Heart Medal to Commander Jarkko Mäkinen, for wounds sustained in combat.’” Jarkko rolled his remaining eye, but then he opened the other box and gasped. “‘For bravery displayed in successful rescue of Federation citizens imprisoned by a foreign adversary, and six confirmed ship-to-ship kills of hostile spacecraft by his command USS Nazareth, the above mentioned are pleased to also award Commander Jarkko Mäkinen the Starfleet Space Forces Commendation Medal, to be worn with the “V” device signifying it was earned in combat.’” Eleya smiled at him. “Congratulations, my friend.”
He closed the box and leaned back against the pillow, chuckling softly. “Tämä on perseestä, isn’t this typical. I get two medals because I’m too dumb to dodge properly, and you save the day and get reassigned to someplace behind God’s back.”
“Yeah, but think of the side benefits: you’ll have a great scar to wow the girls with.” He laughed as she leaned in and kissed him on the remaining eyebrow. His laughter turned to a cough and he squeezed the button for a minor shot of pain meds. “Damn it, El, hurts to laugh. Got three busted ribs on that side.”
“Sorry.”
“Honestly, even with all this”—he gestured at where his right arm should have been—“I’m lucky I was with you and not here, they’d be sending me to Moab III. I saw one of the guys they brought in, he’s over there.” Eleya glanced over where he was looking, saw a Bajoran, probably Perikian by his coffee-colored skin, lying asleep in a bed. “He had both legs torn off by something. They bring him in here, he wakes up and starts screaming the Pah-Wraiths are after him.” He looked up at her, some mix of pity and horror in his eyes. “He wouldn’t stop screaming, not until they sedated him.”
“Did they tell you where it happened?” she asked idly.
“Some place called ‘Xiao Loc’, he was part of the relief teams sent down from the USS Kalevala to try and assist in rescuing civilians trapped in occupied territory. Most of his MACO team didn’t even make it to the objective, according to the scuttlebutt; he was pulled out by a Klingon unit.”
“Makes Cursa and Crichton’s Fall look like a walk in the park,” she murmured.
USS Rutherford, Starbase One, Sol system…
Admiral Vivian Lorus Gorton Kingsley (the third) paced his way up the docking ramp with his aide, Dwyllin Zarkas. He wasn’t a happy man, the assignment to K-7 was not something that would make him a happy man. While he put on a show for his subordinates of being a disciplinarian who was a bit… comical, he knew better than anyone, including the various officers who loathed him, how poor a fit he really was in a front-line command.
The captain who’d been unfortunate enough to be drawn to act as his flag for the trip to K-7 saluted him at the airlock, and he saluted her back absently.
Keeping her would be difficult. Kingsley knew full well what his reputation was: a buffoon. He knew the nickname the men gave him, “Admiral Gilbert-and-Sullivan” and he knew how it looked to them.
He’d made it up the ladder of rank on the strength of two things; the first, was his ability to leverage support for Starfleet in the halls of the Federation Council. The second, was his acumen when it came to reading, and understanding strategies. But his ‘people skill’ within Starfleet was virtually nonexistent. He could bully, bargain and badger in the halls of power, but when it came to gaining the respect of the men he did it for, he was hopeless, and he’d known it from the moment he nearly lost his first (and only) space command. He was one of those detested class, the professional staff officer, and he understood it…
And Quinn was sending him to take control of a front line command in place of a man he himself considered an artist par-excellance in the art of commanding in the field.
Damn you and your bum ticker, Alcott! The transfer orders in his bag, made things if anything, worse. Starfleet Command was stripping the Eta Eridani fleet of the best combat captains, the most experienced, and at the worst possible time…
... and I can’t stop it from here.
He’d argued. Behind closed doors, he’d fought to keep commanders like Kanril Eleya where they were… and for once, his mix of blackmail, badgering, begging, and bribery had failed utterly: he’d been unable to prevent them from relieving Mwangi, he’d been unable to stop them from transferring that mad Bajoran bomb-thrower who could practically read the Klingon mind like a datatape, and had built inroads with the rebellious and outright secessionist colonists in the Hromi region. At least they were letting him keep Commander Mäkinen: Kingsley wondered if the Finn would accept a fourth pip and command of something bigger than a São Paulo-class once he was out of the hospital.
As he strode to his quarters, he silently fumed. Are they trying to destroy the Eta Eridani command? It made him wonder. I won’t let them. He sighed as he entered the suite that would be his home-away-from-base for the next four years.
He sat down while his aide put his possessions away, the struggle, would be to master his neuroses enough that his new subordinates, even if they despised him, would at least respect him. “God, dirt everywhere…” He closed his eyes. It was going to be a long four years, “Prepare the intelligence briefings again,” he said. “I need something to take my mind off the filth…”
/flamingdeathtotheposteatingmonster
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Yeah, another minute I was going to take a leaf out of Klingon ship names and go with jorwI'Hegh ("explosive death"). They need to frakking fix that.
Anyway, this is the end of Don't Say Goodbye, Farewell. The next story in Eleya's Masterverse arc advances the story to 2412, between the Battle of Goralis and the start of the Moab Civil War.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
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