Second Hand Space Ship

Posted on Mon Nov 26th, 2018 @ 2:17am by The Narrator

Mission: S1E1: Welcome Home, Now Go Away
Location: Life Boat, half way between Carpathia and Canopus Station
Timeline: MD1 11.00 AM

Puck Harrison was grateful for many things. Replicated sweet and sour chicken. Environmental controls that worked without fail. And the assuredness that being a Chief Petty Officer with a specialisation in medical cryogenics would see him quietly fill out his 20 years in service and get out Scott free.

Then came the Long Jump Project, a crazy Rish captain, some aliens called the Myriad and then no more sweet and sour. Just sour. And dust. And sand. And dusty sand and sandy dust-

How had it stained the upholstery in the lifeboat? HOW?! Hermetically sealed was a tale of tall fiction in regards to the pompous escape pod/shuttle mix. Lacking the anti-matter reactor of a true interstellar craft, but hardier than a shuttle had any right to be, the Life Boat was a ship designed to survive getting blown up. It had been loaded with medical supplies, it even had a pair of auto doc capsules that could perform feats of surgery from the minor to the complex. It had also been spotlessly clean.

After two weeks of being 'impounded' as goods needed for the commonwealth, along with the three nurses and single junior doctor Dr Kal and Captain Remas had shoved out the door. Well, Puck was feeling a little prickly about the terms of his employment.

"Ya know..." he said, leaning back into the acceleration couch he lounged in. "I bet if you hail them again, they'll pick up this time. Even money after the last dozen times."

Bahat Riya, the Bajoran woman at the helm, gave him a sidelong glance. "I brought you with me because they're less likely to fire on me if one of their own people is aboard. That's true whether you're awake or unconscious. So by all means, run your mouth." She shifted in her seat so that he would have a better view of the phaser in her left hand.

For all her posturing, she knew that she was only marginally in control of this situation. When the crashed colony ship Acheron detected the incoming Starfleet starbase, it had set off a flurry of debate about the appropriate response. While the captain of the Traveller had assured them that they'd been shot down by accident, and that Starfleet remained committed to their defense, it was hard to argue with the fact that they'd been shot down by a Federation vessel. Some of the survivors believed that the starbase was going to enter orbit only to finish the job. Riya thought that total destruction was unlikely, but she couldn't rule out a hostile response. As a colonist with extensive experience working with Starfleet, not to mention a background in fighting for hopeless causes, she'd been "volun-told" to take the life boat and investigate.

"What can you tell me about the starbase?" she asked the ungratefully still-conscious noncom. "Who's in command? What will they do if I dock before we establish communications?"

"Well..." Puck said, sucking a breath through his teeth. "Given my extensive knowledge of cryogenic medcine, and those three years I spent in San Fran doing med school to make ma' proud, I can tell you this. It's a Starbase. Some will be in command. And I ain't got no clue lady."

Bahat's eyes narrowed and her eyebrows met in an angry scowl. He held up a hand.

"Look, I'm just a Chief working a shift! I got shuffled down to your little Planet Nevada holiday camp cause your ship has a metric ton of colonists on ice. What do you want me to say? That Cap'n Remas likes to shoot the breeze with the working man and spill Eyes Only secrets?" Puck furrowed his brow at her. "And I ain't being rude just cause you keep waving that phaser at me. Had one of those too until your militia grabbed it off me. As far as I know, the original plan for the Long Jump Mission's was to start off with a starbase. They had to settle for you and the Traveller. Save money on the yellow cubes they put in the replicators to make banana pudding."

He reached out slowly and tapped a few buttons on the console, and the canopy of the Life Boat lit up with a computer-generated image of the oncoming Starbase. It looked like a flattened flower pot nearly 4KM across from side to side, but even as Puck manipulated the controls something seemed...off about it.

"Is it just me or does it look like it's missing all its lower half?" he said, the colour draining from his face. "I mean you're cheap civilian sensor array pegged it as a Starfleet facility right? Cause last first contact we had was nearly our last."

Bahat leaned in and examined the display, her frown deepening. "This is coming straight from the life boat's scanner. What you see is what you get." She manipulated a control and the image rotated and zoomed in on the underside of the squashed saucer. "I don't see any blast marks... Maybe something went wrong with their jump here."

If the approaching station didn't have all of its superstructure, maybe their communications array wasn't offline, maybe it was missing. Or maybe the crew was somehow incapacitated by the long jump. Given that the station was on a ballistic course towards her new home, she hoped it wasn't that. "Can you reconfigure our transmitter to Starfleet combadge frequencies? Send a general hail that way."

"Done and...done. Repeating your last hail now," Puck said after tapping in a few commands into the computer. There was more silence, the open comm channel sporadically burping with static from cosmic rays. "You know, this takes any longer to work we could just tap on the windows of that thing. Ya know, you could cite them for speeding in a populated planetary system. Or littering, or-"

"Commander Ingram here. And before you get started I want to know what you bloody well think you're doing using an encrypted emergency frequency."

The voice chirped up from the console, and for a second Puck thought he'd gotten a direct line to an ancient drama holo-program. Because the voice sounded like it could belong to either the lord of the manor or an especially feared head waiter. Could go either way.

Bahat raised her eyebrows at Puck before she addressed the voice. They were off to a roaring start. "When an unknown force doesn't respond to repeated hails, it becomes an emergency," she said evenly. "Commander Ingram, please state your intentions."

"Hails? We've not been recieving any-"

There was a commotion of voices from the other end of the comm link, along with the muffling effect of a hand being placed over a com badge.

"You know, this reminds me of subspacing the folks back home on Thanks Giving. They pick up, they start to argue, and if I hear something being pitched across the room with legally defined intent to harm, I'm liable to get misty-eyed with fond remembrance." Puck said with a wistful sigh.

"...ahem. Unknown lifeboat, please deviate from your current course. You're currently entering our orbital insertion path, and given we have a limited motive force we are unable to give way. Though I would like to think given the fact Canopus Station outweighs your craft by a factor of magnitude, that is obvious. As for my intentions as Commander of this station, performing an orbital insertion burn that doesn't leave half the hull burning up in the atmosphere of the gas giant. Following that, beginning the work of establishing a permanent foothold here in Messier 4 that doesn't reek of rank amateurism."

Bahat held the communication and looked at the noncom in amazement. "They weren't paying attention to their hails and we're the amateurs?" When Puck started to open his mouth, she held up a finger. "That wasn't an invitation." She took a deep breath and turned the system back on. This was going to be delicate.

"Given that our last point of contact with Starfleet was to be shot down, killing numerous colonists and stranding us here, I'm sure you can understand that we're skeptical of your professional abilities and goals." She made her tone as casual as she dared. "We have several Starfleet... guests with us on the surface now, and I'm sure you wouldn't want them to come to harm during your approach. We share that goal. Perhaps I can come aboard to... assist you in your insertion burn."

Puck was making vigorous cutting throat hand gestures by the halfway point of that statement. But given he was literally and figuratively not in the drivers seat for this one, his ashen face just fell further and further.

"That's...very gracious of you," Ingram's voice buzzed from the console. "I, of course, welcome you to Canopus Station as a representative of the civilian colonial administration. I'm having one of the STC staff here send you an automated docking beacon that should slave the lifeboats guidance systems to the stations. We'll have you docked, and get all of this sorted out to the satisfaction of all concerned. Ingram clear."

As if on cue half the lights on the console in front of Riya winked out, replaced by the glowing reassurance of the shuttle's autopilot. Then the comm line flatlined, cutting off the other end of the conversation. Ahead, a dull unilluminated grey disk was beginning to grow in size as they neared Canopus.

"I should have scanned you for a traumatic brain injury!" Puck's pent-up rage and panic burst from him like water from a broken pipe. "ARE YOU CRAZY!"

"Everyone has a part to play in what happens here," Bahat said, doing her best to keep her voice level. "If Commander Ingram thinks that we're going to roll over just because he wears a Starfleet uniform, he has another thing coming." She gave Puck's somewhat disheveled uniform a pointed look, but let the comment hang.

Privately, Riya reflected that making veiled threats to a Starfleet commander hadn't been high on her list of life goals when she came to the extragalactic cluster. Then again, spending twenty years fighting an occupation's worth of Cardassians hadn't been high on her list either.

One of her favorite vedeks had been fond of saying that the Prophets' plan for Bajor was like a tapestry viewed from behind, with each of their children only a single thread. With their limited perspective, ordinary people only saw the frayed, knotty fabric, not the beautiful picture they made together. This doctrine was the only way Riya could justify the horrors visited upon the children of the Prophets, and so she clung to it now, as she had for decades. For now, her part in the tapestry was to stop these Starfleet interlopers from running roughshod over the colonists they'd marooned so far from home. Prophets willing, the thread of her life wouldn't run out for a while more.

And if they weren't willing, well, she still had her phaser.

"You're crazy! Look-at-it!" Puck said, waving a hand out of the viewport as the now dish sized space station continued to grow. "That is a Stardock class facility! That is home and port to 70 thousand Starfleet personnel! And a good chunk of them aren't gonna be wearing the black and grey of this here uniform. Oooooh no! No! They are gonna be wearing Marine battle rattle, and they will make you eat that phaser! Or they'll just blow us up BECAUSE YOU TOLD HIM YOU HAD TAKEN HOSTAGES!"

Puck took a breath, eyes wide enough to show the whites.

"...And this don't bother you?" he said in a voice two octaves shy of full-blown hysteria.

"Hostages? Who said anything about hostages?" Bahat scratched her chin with the hand that held her phaser. "Besides, he wouldn't fire on us while you're with me. You're an essential part of the Starfleet family, aren't you?"

As much fun as it was to rattle her traveling companion's cage, his words did give her pause. She hadn't realized how many people would be assigned to the station. Then again, surely they wouldn't have crammed them all in to just the section that was here, now, and surely they wouldn't have sent the full complement in the first large-scale test of such a new technology. Would they? No, he was surely exaggerating to scare her. Start with seventy thousand, cut it down to a third of that in this portion, round down to account for an intended ramping-up one they were established... she figured there couldn't be more than twenty thousand.

To be fair, twenty thousand was significantly more than the five hundred colonists who were currently out of cryo-sleep. But that was a problem for Later Bahat.

"You told him you had guests. And you said it just like this. You sounded like a public housing hood talking about how if I don't hand over my replicator chit there'd be concequences," Puck said with a groan. The station was now taking up the majority of the viewport now, and the large lettering along the domed flank proclaimed to all 'CANOPUS STATION'.

With a shudder the lifeboat shifted course, arcing away and then back towards the top of the dome. Here at the top was the command levels and the minor small craft shuttle bays. You didn't want to have to keep opening and closing the big doors to let a shuttle in or out. Holographic landing beacons strobed ahead and to their sides, guiding them into the shuttle bay.

The empty shuttle bay. Well, empty save for the three shuttles and tug's secured firmly to the deck with straps and tie downs.

"I vote we stay in here, let the Marine's cut the doors off, and surrender vocally and loudly right before they shoot us to death," Puck said in a rapid exhalation.

"Do you sincerely believe that the kind of people who would cut open a life boat with phasers blazing would hear you surrendering and respect it?" Bahat asked with genuine curiosity. She looked over at him, back out at the shuttle bay, then back to him. With a quiet voice, she offered, "If you like, I can stun you now. You'll wake up in half an hour and can come out then." She didn't add that by then she would either be shaking Ingram's hand, in the brig, or dead. It seemed redundant as their life boat settled onto the deck with surprising tenderness.

The landing pad the lifeboat settled onto, designed for a Runabout to park on, slowly rotated in place as though slotting the little ship back into a departure position. It also hid the main entrance to the shuttle bay, where no doubt Starfleet's Misguided Children were filing in.

"No. No I wanna have a split second of seeing you realise just what a huge mistake you've made. I wanna meet St Pete with this big ass grin on my face," Puck said, turning his acceleration couch around, and facing the rear of the lifeboat. A noise came from the bulky egress hatch, as the physical locks were disengaged one by one. Puck's face scrunched up into a look of terror, and a little mewling meep left his lips as the door swung open...

"HI!" a voice so bright it nearly seemed to sparkle said from the wall now filling the lifeboats door. The owner of the voice stepped back, and a tall alien in a Starfleet uniform leaned down to peek into the lifeboat. He was felinoid, but whereas a Catian was streamlined and look fast, this one looked more leonine with a ruff of fur that framed bright green eyes. He waved his big hand at them, a smile showing off an unsettling amount of sharp teeth.

"My name is Keth, and I'm your welcoming committee!" he said cheerily, before adding. "Welcome to Canopus Station!"