Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 01:44:03 -0500 (EST) In: alt.startrek.creative From: brightfame66@webtv.net (Robert E. Morris) Title : Ascendancy Author : Rob Morris Contact : brightfame66(at)webteevee(dot)net Archive : www.southroad.com/brightfame Series : The TOS-based AU, The Ancient Destroyer Cycle Type : Origin story (Admiral Brock Cartwright) Characters : Cartwright and family, members of The Order Part : 2/5 Rating : PG13, for sinister implications Summary : Monsters, as they sometimes say, are not born. They are made. ---------------------------------------------- Ascendancy by Rob Morris 2249, Starfleet Academy The next few years at the Academy would be very different. The preparation year would be gone and done with. The courses would take only four years instead of the current seven. Cadets as young as sixteen would be admitted, down from the theoretically already-mature twenty-one. Class groups would move in separate years, rather than the massive septennial graduations and introductions. At the time all these had been instituted, it had all seemed neccesary. Yet those had only been tweaks of existing policies. These newest ones would be the most radical changes since Fox Mulder founded the Academy in 2013, desiring that humans should be ready for the first contact visionaries like him saw as inevitable. The story went that after he and his legendary partner spent all of 2012 waiting for some unknown event to occur, they chose to push their fellow humans to become the visitors rather than the possibly visited. What had been the means to forge a group of dreamers coherent enough to bring others around to their way of thinking had at last become a going concern that needed to produce a lot of professionals on a constant basis. This first lot of this new group would produce a legend as no other. In fact, that man's father now taught a history class attended by Third-Year Cadet Brock Cartwright. "...and it remains one of the great mysteries of space travel. While it seems certain that Admiral Peter Augustus Stiles and his fleet went down for the count, the fate of Captain Jonathan Archer and the Enterprise NX-01 is just a big riddle. It was last seen heading into a volley of fire from three to five Romulan ships, each enemy vessel shuddering as their primitive light-benders malfunctioned. No trace was found of that seminal ship and its crew of standards." George Kirk (Since his eldest namesake son now insisted on being called Sam, he no longer bothered with either his middle name or 'Senior') was on leave from Starfleet Special Services, an on-call branch of the service meant to be first to a disaster scene, anywhere in the quadrant. One such event was soon to come, on the world called Tarsus Four. Despite his reputation as a man of action, he tended to enjoy teaching these history classes. Widely seen as a maverick for his opposition to the sometimes-isolated social club known as Admiralty Hall, he was naturally a favorite of most cadets, but certainly not all. "Cadet Cartwright, may I have your judgement on the events of the Romulan War and its defining impact on UFP Era One?" UFP Era Zero was defined by most as stretching from First Contact with Vulcans to the signing of the Federation Charter. Era One was marked by the final Kzinti expansion efforts, the Romulan War and the development of the failed 'Space Eddy' technology meant to 'sweep' ships over vast distances unthinkable by warp limitations. The losses of such ships as SS Valiant, The Terra Ten, USS Archon, USS Horizon and the Vulcanian Colonial Service helped push this along. When several advanced probes outfitted with varying levels of this tech also vanished, it was finally decided that at no time should the means of 'getting there' vastly outstrip the support structure needed to get them back again. Era Two was marked by the long period of brief, deadly hot wars between the Federation and the increasingly belligerent Klingon Empire. According to most, they were now living in Era Three. Its end would be marked well in history. "Well, Commander Kirk--if the Rommie War had been a school project and I were its professor--I'd be forced to give it an incomplete." Kirk nodded. "Explain. And its Romulan War. Diminishing our enemies' names both causes us to underestimate them and diminishes us through pettiness." Cartwright fought off a sneer. This was prime villain number one in his eyes. True ringleader of the space bums that kept his father away. "Well, that's part of the incomplete, then, isn't it? We call them Romulans. But we lack any real intelligence about them. A lack of proper research. Add to that, no conclusive end to the thesis. A lack of follow-through. Just a shrug and a weak-kneed willingness to let someone else complete the project on some vague someday. This, even though it may be far too late. In this, I must render a failing grade to the student, the instructors and the institution they all served." Was there anything of Tomas in this young man, George wondered? "Some projects demand such limits, Cadet. The lack of research and follow through was dictated by a peace treaty paid for in dearest blood. The student found the project too much to be borne. The instructors found it an unfair burden on the student. The institution felt it was a waste of resources. Besides--have we heard from the research subject in the last eighty years?" Jumping the metaphor track back again, Brock Cartwright was having more and more trouble fighting off that sneer. "They came out of nowhere once. They'll do it again. Mark me, this so-called Third Era Of Near Space will be marked at its end by the all debts being called in. The Romulans, who we just let drift off and plan their next go at us. The Klingons, whose home sector we had taken before withdrawing in the name of peace-making! They don't even have words to fit that term in their primal jabber tongue! The Orions, to whom our patrols are just another source of slaves and extortion barter, as they dance and glide around them. Your student will get a passing grade, Commander, when he is able to review his many subjects--in a decidedly posthumous--if not a pathological light." In one of that universe's more bitter ironies, George Kirk would never hold his grandson Peter, not yet born. Brock Cartwright would, just before casting him to the ground and kicking his bloodied form with a tritanium-laced boot. But George had held Brock, when he was new, as Tomas Cartwright had held Sammy and Jimmy, and as he would hold Peter twice, the second time leading to his death at Brock's hands. Any such tenderness on any level was not even a memory, then and there. "Cadet Cartwright, please stay after class." George Kirk was just past his fifty-second birthday, going on his twenty-ninth, as some cadets, many of them female, were wont to say. There was a reason for this, but a kept-after Cadet Cartwright saw only a broken-down, worn-out old man, the avatar of a dead ideology that need only be staked through. "Brock, once upon a time, racism such as you just exhibited was so commonplace, it was like air itself. Then, a few started suggesting that this air was poisoned--polluted, and making us as a species weak. When this thinking began to take hold, some of a more bigoted bent rebelled and defended their rudeness and discourtesy by claiming the mantle of honesty. 'Do you want me to be dishonest about my feelings?', they would ask, and eventually, they pushed things very far. Finally, a movement meant to combat this itself lost sight of its goals, and rebelling against it became yet another excuse for 'shooting from the hip' and 'telling it like it is', or 'calling it as I see it'. Some called this, as always, well-intentioned, sweeping movement for 'political correctness'. The stereotype became that of a radical professor making a martyr out of a student determined to say that the moon was the sun. Well, no go. From now on, in this class, I will correct your facts--and that's it. So go on, bold rebel. You rave and rant--and I'll teach a class. I know who I'd listen to." The contempt now nearly blatant, Cartwright rose up and shook his head. "You're the worst of all. We know all about you, Commander Kirk. Born in 2195, child of Hunter J. and Kelley Sallarman Kirk. Born aboard the Enterprise, NCC-01, the second ship to bear that shame. Your parents were meddlers, too, weren't they? Claimed to have discovered the fabled tenth planet. Then--the ship finds itself in Jupiter's gravity well. Only you escaped--unharmed and unchanged, so they thought. Instead, as you grew older, you found that the works of Shaw, Nietchze, and Wylie applied to you. You were an overman, in every respect of the word, with powers unimaginable. And you are in that a perfect representative of what I have to get rid of in this fleet. For what good is supreme power without the willingness to truly use it?" Cartwight left to meet with 'vacationing' Professor John Gill, secretly the Master Of The Terran Order Of The Ancient Destroyer. George Kirk remained, his eyes briefly glowing red as he ached to show the young genocidal bigot and all like him what supreme power could really do. Just as his resolve began to weaken, a news prompt activated the vid-monitors. **TARSUS FOUR : SAVAGE CRISIS OR INSANE COLONIAL GOVERNOR?** George left immediately, since both his son Jim and the in-laws he loved like his own parents were among those in peril. But since Governor Kodos of Tarsus was a member of The Order, other subjects concerned John Gill and his favorite student. "Thank you, sir. It certainly helped to put my thinking back on track. Yeats was a superior poet." Gill smiled at Cartwright, sporting for this night's meeting an authentic 20th Century Nazi SS armband. "Glad to hear it, Cadet. 'The Second Coming' has always been among my favorites." TBC.... -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Stories Only Forwarding In the Pattern Buffer at: http//trekiverse.crosswinds.net/feed/ Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASCL/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:ASCL-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! 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