Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 21:53:08 GMT In: alt.startrek.creative From: "Jay P Hailey" JayPHailey@comcast.net Title: Star Trek: Outwardly Mobile Author: Jay P Hailey (JayPHailey@hotmail.com) Series: MISC - TNG OCs Codes: None Part: 14/335(?) Rating:[PG] Archive: Fine with me, just tell me where. Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Star Trek. I claim Original Characters and Situations for me. Webpage HTTP://jayphailey.8m.com The Voyage of the Harrier By Jay P. Hailey And Dennnis Washburn Flagg attempted one of our odd "Red-Shirt" programs in one unpleasant incident. Even our security department, which hated the name "Red Shirt", called the programs that. When Stephanie Anderson had come aboard she had immediately reorganized the Security Department. The Security Officers were now deployed in groups of four. Each group trained together and stood duty watches together. They started to develop group identities and tactics that set them apart as individual teams. It made the Harrier's Security Department seem more ragged than average. They were not. They were racking up better reaction times in drills. Some of the drills were useless to run. The new groupings made such incidents hard to run and easily defeated. Another thing that had made a big difference were Ensign Bruce's weird holodeck training exercises. A given group never knew what to expect on the Holodeck. They only knew that they were expected to cope with it. There were locked door mysteries that would have challenged Sherlock Holmes. There were hideous dungeon crawls. There were fast paced action adventures. There was even a big Broadway dance number that the Security Team had to try to fake their way through. Because of all this, some teams had taken to carrying odd equipment and devices while on duty. I overlooked a certain amount of this. Knives, tools and odd weapons would make it harder to second guess what the Security Department of the Harrier was capable of. Occasionally I had to call them on stuff that was too outrageous. Over all I was happy with them. Lieutenant Anderson would occasionally admit to being satisfied with them for today. Flagg thought the idea was interesting and asked to be allowed to try out the program. I authorized this and asked Ensign Bruce to develop a scenario suitable for Flagg. Ensign Bruce must have been rushed, because several software glitches resulted in Flagg being locked in an alpine survival scenario for a couple of days. When we finally got the Holodeck opened and shut down, we found Flagg. He was ragged and suffering from exposure. When he left the Holodeck, he walked out on his own two feet. He thanked Ensign Bruce. I think the maniac enjoyed himself. -*- About a week later I was in my office, studying the endless supply of reports and useful bits of information that Starfleet kept heaping on my desk. I was relieved when the bridge called. "Captain, We have an incoming message. It is priority one." Spaat said. He was usually the Helmsman, but today he seemed to be the senior officer on the bridge. "I'll be right there." I said. I gratefully left the heap of reports and articles behind me. When I got to the bridge, I noticed that the senior officers seem to have picked that time to congregate on the bridge. Normally, when a starship was moving towards a set destination and nothing seemed to be happening, you would not find all the senior officers on the bridge. The senior officers would take turns standing watch, ready to call the rest of us if something happened. The only exception to this procedure was the Captain. I could come and go from the bridge as pleased me, and stay for as long as I found necessary. There would always be an "Officer of the Bridge" present. It was his watch and another officer would relieve him when his watch ended. The reason for my absence on the watch rotation was quite basic. I was always on call, without fail. Nothing I ever did was sacred. For that reason, standing a watch myself would be considered redundant and abusive of the time that circumstances had allowed me. This time as I arrived on the bridge, nearly all the senior officers were there. They were almost loitering. The efficiency of the ship's grapevine surprised me, yet again. As Captain I was frequently the last to hear the gossip of the ship. I didn't like it, but it was part of the mystique. Gossiping to the Captain was imprudent. Almost no one did it. I said "What's the status of the message?" Stephanie Anderson took over her station from the crewman who was there on her off duty shifts. She reported. "Message received and intact. It's awaiting your order to decode." "Very well," I said "Put it on the main view screen." The screen opened up with the carefully designed logo of the United Federation of Planets, and then switched to a view of an Admiral I had not met. He was a humanoid. His nose seemed to have a Bajoran like ridge, although the shape was different. He was a grizzled veteran. His gray hair was cut short and he had some scars visible. Despite this he seemed to be a forceful man. He got right to business. "Is this thing on? All right." He held up a PADD and read the official orders. "This is Admiral Bach of Starbase Ninety Four, to Captain Hailey on the USS Harrier. The stardate is 44947.3. Prepare for new orders. The new orders are these. You will move to the location of Deep Space Five and investigate the loss of contact with that station. Render all necessary and prudent aid, as specified in standard operational procedures. Investigate the cause of the loss of contact. Remedy if possible. Report all findings to Starfleet Command." He put down the PADD and looked into the camera. "We are aware of your current mission, as of Stardate 44940.4. This mission is suspended until the orders I have just given you are satisfied. Your authorization code is delta gamma 99428. A data file of relevant information follows this message. Good luck, Harrier. Starbase Ninety Four out." I looked at Stephanie. "Did we get the file?" "Yes, Captain." She answered. "Okay, everyone. Let's get to work." I said. "Helm, set course for Deep Space Five and engage." Li'ira and I split the information packets up and assigned different officers to familiarize themselves with the details. We would put it all back together during the Senior Officers' briefing. -*- In the briefing the picture became somewhat more clear. Deep Space Five was a science outpost run jointly by the Federation and two other races. One of the other races was the Ugohaid. They resembled four and a half foot tall raccoons. They even had the gray fur and the black mask markings across the eyes. They were very organized and militaristic in nature. They had an alliance with the Federation that included extremely strict rules of contact and interaction with the Ugohaid and the Liook Sujan. The Ugohaid were not above using violence to enforce this treaty. Although the Ugohaid had been invited to consider joining the Federation, they had declined. They seemed to feel that the effort of joining the Federation would distract them from their primary goals. One of the primary goals of the Ugohaid was to serve the Liook Sujan with all due respect and reverence and to ensure that every one else did, too. The Liook Sujan were an odd race in the galaxy. They were silicon based life forms. They were utterly incapable of movement by their own power. Essentially the Liook Sujan were large sentient boulders. They thought very slowly, very deeply and very profoundly. The Liook Sujan had vast psionic powers. They were telepathic. This was their principal form of communication and was said by the humanoids of the Federation who contacted them to be very disorienting. The Liook Sujan had even more mysterious senses, involving time and space. Discussions on these subjects with the Liook Sujan were very odd and philosophical. Evidently they had a hard time communicating the impressions these senses gave them. It was like describing color to a blind man. The Liook Sujan, being silicon life forms, were distantly related to computers. With this in mind a Federation engineer had tinkered together an interface for the Liook Sujan to work through a Federation computer. The Liook Sujan thought that this was fun and clever. The Ugohaid thought that it was disrespectful and sharply limited this activity. Deep Space Five was established to study a dark matter nebula near the edge of the Ugohaid territory. The nebula broke several rules for nebulae and was endlessly fascinating to astrophysicists. The Liook Sujan had suggested the joint station to study the nebula. They said even their strange senses were clouded by the nebula and that they were curious. The Ugohaid viewed the suggestion of the Liook Sujan as a distasteful duty. Again the Ugohaid had established strict rules of behavior and stood ready to enforce them. Several Liook Sujan were gently moved with earth moving equipment and transported to the space station. The station itself was a standard Federation design, modified for Liook Sujan and Ugohaid use. Once the station had been emplaced, it became the central contact point for the Ugohaid and the Liook Sujan. According to the information given to us by the Admiral, the station had stopped responding to calls and had disappeared from sensors. The Ugohaid were in an uproar. The Liook Sujan were unable or unwilling to comment. Our course from Minos Korva to Earth had made the Harrier the nearest Federation starship. Our Science Officer, Tillean Darvon Ahk said during the briefing that the dark matter nebula baffled her. It was mostly composed of monatomic debris. It was mostly hydrogen, but then everything was. There were other minerals, too. All in single atoms. All cold. Tillean informed us that there was no conceivable reason for all those atoms to be drifting around free like that, as cold as they were. The temperature of the cloud was near zero Kelvin, except near the center, where a perfectly normal type M red dwarf star burned away. Along with the strange material that made up the nebula, there were odd gravometric anomalies inside the cloud, where cold hydrogen, silicon, iron and oxygen hid them from view. It was all very odd and mysterious. Now something had apparently happened to the space station. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). 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