Embedded Files
“Captain’s log, Stardate 498567.45. After three months of retraining and relaxation, t’ crew o’ t’ Psycho has received a new posting. Not, I might add, to a starship. It would seem that Starfleet has finally realised that we’re not t’ most sensible people to put in command of a starship. No, our new posting is to an old Cardassian mining outpost orbiting the planet Bagel. It was formerly known as Terkey Knorr, but Starfleet, with its usual flair for the dramatic, has re-christened t’ station Deep Space Thirteen. End log entry.”
Olding sat back in his office chair, and considered the decor. Everything aboard DS13 appeared to be done out in shades of brown. Something would have to be done about that, he promised himself. Unfortunately, repainting the station was a long way down the list of things to be done that Olding had tacked up in Ops. Things like rebuilding the life-support systems and debugging the computer had to come before Olding could have his office in a pleasing apple green. He came out from behind his desk, and peered out of the window of his office at Ops.
The Operations centre was a mess. Repair crews, nominally led by Chief Stark but in reality co-ordinated by Barfoot, were working like slaves trying to repair the essentials, but that meant that cleanliness, along with the debris, was dumped straight out of the nearest airlock. Hill was leaning by one of the consoles, mopping his brow. He had originally been as happy as a pig in muck, when confronted by the sight of several hundred computers all in pieces, but he was discovering that there was, after all, too much of a good thing. Mr Bleep clanked by, and Olding remembered all the fuss there had been rebuilding him.
During the crash, Stark had used Bleep to close a hatch by shoving him though the open hatchway. This had resulted in the extreme heat melting the android’s legs off, and causing a fair bit of damage to his torso as well. For a long time, they had kept getting the error message ‘Unable to read device: legs. Please check legs are attached and connections are linked.’ Finally, they had got Bleep operational again, but he now had a pronounced limp, due to Hill accidentally fusing his right knee joint. Olding stepped out of his office, to see if he could get some sort of meaningful status report.
He walked over to join Hill, who was tapping something into a console.
“How’s it going, Commander?”
Hill looked around, bleary-eyed. “We’re getting there, sir. I’ve managed to get life support under control. It’s going to be a while before we let anything dock here. Oh yeah, we’ve also managed to get the runabout pads on-line.”
Starfleet had assigned them three Danube-class runabouts, the Ooze, the Piddle, and the Amazon. Wall was ecstatic, even though he hadn’t been allowed to fly any of them yet. No-one had been able to drag him away from the runabouts, though. He just sat there, gazing at them with an enraptured expression.
Damerell was less enamoured of his new job. As navigators were no longer needed, he had been retrained as an operations manager, and so was now technically responsible for overseeing everything that went on in Ops. That could be the reason why he was currently banging his head against his console.
Olding climbed into one of the lifts that were, in his opinion, decidedly unsafe as they didn’t have doors, and pressed the button for the Promenade.
The Promenade was scarcely better than Ops. The deck was covered in rubble, and all the shop units were empty of both customers and shops. All, that is, except for one. Fred’s Bar had neatly transplanted itself from the Psycho to DS13. In fact, in many ways, the atmosphere of DS13 was more suitable to Fred’s establishment than a starship. Already, Olding could hear the distinctive strains of ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ coming from inside the bar.
Hurrying on, Olding tripped over a portion of bulkhead that had somehow parted company with the rest of the wall. That sort of thing was worrying.
He paused by the Infirmary. Jackson had managed to recover most of his tools from the ship, and was casting a critical eye over the existing facilities. From the reverential way he had laid out his knives and saws on a table, Olding decided it was safest not to go in.
Next door to the Infirmary was the counsellor’s office. Counsellor Hill had also been retrained to fulfil a new role aboard DS13. She was now both counsellor and security chief. Olding couldn’t help but wonder what sort of effect this was going to have on her patients.
As he passed her office, the counsellor stuck her head out of the door and said, “Morning, Captain. How’s things going in Ops?”
“Good mornin’, counsellor. Things are goin’ fine, thank you.” Olding wasn’t quite sure of the counsellor. She was always so jolly. He could only assume that she hadn’t really adjusted to life with this crew yet.
The counsellor went back inside her office, and Olding walked on. He couldn’t get much further along the promenade, however, as the corridor was totally choked with debris which Barfoot had swept up. Olding wandered off towards the Habitat ring, but was stopped by Damerell.
“Sir, we have a message from Bagel. Their religious leader, the, uhh, the Kaiser, wants to meet with you.”
“Does he? Well, tell him he’ll have to wait.”
“It’s a she, sir. And she was most insistent.” Damerell had a hunted look. “Please go, sir!! She threatened me with eternal damnation if you didn’t meet with her soon!!!!”
Olding raised an eyebrow. “Mr Damerell, do you actually believe in t’ Bagellian religion?”
“No, but…”
“Then why are you worried about threats from her then?”
“Well, I just don’t want to be caught out on a technicality.”
Olding groaned, and stalked off to the runabout pads.
--
He found Wall inside the Ooze, Blu-tacking the green fur trim into place. The fluffy dice were already up.
“Mr Wall, I want you to fly me into a close orbit around Bagel so that I can beam down.”
Wall looked very disappointed. “Can’t I fly you all the way there, sir?”
“That… won’t be necessary. Just take me into orbit. That’ll do for today.”
“Oh, alright then.”
Olding sat down in the right-hand seat, whilst Wall powered up the runabout’s systems.
“Ops, this is the Ooze, requesting permission to depart.”
Hill’s voice came over the intercom. “You want to do WHAT?!!! Right, okay, now, we’ll just go through this one stage at a time. Now, raise runabout pad A…” The runabout slowly rose on its pad towards the upper hatch. “Now, what comes next?”
“Try opening the hatch,” Wall said in a strained voice, eyeing the decidedly closed hatch that was getting closer to the runabout’s outer hull very quickly.
“Good point, well made!” Hill replied. “Opening hatch.” The hatch slid open, and the pad came flush with the outer hull.
“Ooze, you are cleared to depart.”
Wall grinned, and fired up the thrusters. The runabout leapt off the pad, and careered past one of the upper pylons with inches to spare. Olding let his breath out in a long, shaky sigh.
“Now, just take us into orbit gently, Mr Wall.”
Wall’s grin lessened a bit, but he complied, and soon the Ooze was in a close parking orbit over the planet.
Olding entered the co-ordinates for his beamdown point, and set the transporter to ten-second delay. Then, he stepped up on the pad, and said to Wall, “Stay here until I get back.” Then, he dematerialised.
--
Back on DS13, Stark was handing out home-baked chocolate chip cookies, Hill was throwing a class four wobbly over the tactical console, and Damerell was waiting outside the counsellor’s office with no little trepidation. He was sweating buckets, and trembling like a jelly on drugs.
When the counsellor opened her door and said, “Hello!”, he could only manage a high-pitched, “Morning,” in reply.
“Come in,” she said.
Damerell counted to ten, and then followed her into the office. When he got inside, it was to see the counsellor sat on the edge of her desk, cleaning a phaser rifle. Damerell screamed and dived behind her couch.
“Is there a problem?” the counsellor asked pleasantly.
“I’m not coming out until you put that down!!!!” Damerell quavered.
“What, this old thing?” Counsellor Hill asked. “Well, okay, if it makes you feel any better.”
She put the rifle back on its rack behind her desk, and Damerell slowly emerged from behind the couch.
“Why don’t you just lie down there,” she said, waving at the couch.
Damerell warily lay down on the couch, darting suspicious glances towards her as he did so.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s start with fear.”
“What?”
“What are you really afraid of?”
“Captain Olding,” came the response.
The counsellor laughed. “Yes, right, but what are you really afraid of? You know, death, or torture, maiming, burns, that sort of thing.”
Damerell thought about it for a moment, then said, “Captain Olding.”
The counsellor allowed a brief frown to cross her face before slapping on the pleasant smile again.
“Look, what I’m interested in is what really frightens you. You know, you’re being chased down a dark, damp corridor by a Klingon with a large, sharp knife with the blood of your best friend on it. That sort of thing.”
“Yeah, I suppose that’s pretty scary, but the only thing I’m really afraid of is Captain Olding.”
“What? You have to be kidding.”
“No. You know…” Damerell’s face screwed up as he struggled to contain himself. “…When he looks at you, and his eyebrow goes up, and he points at you, and then… and then…” Damerell tailed off, lost in a world of his own.
The counsellor leaned forwards, curious. Still nothing from Damerell. She pushed her face right up close to his, and squinted deep into his eyes, trying desperately to find signs of intelligence.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
The counsellor was knocked backwards. Climbing back to her feet again, she asked, “What the hell was that in aid of?”
Damerell was shaking visibly. “I’m sorry,” he quavered. “I was just, just, remembering what happened the last time he, he…”
“He what?”
“He gave me an order!!” Damerell broke down into helpless tears.
The counsellor was at a bit of a loss. She handed him a hanky and patted him absently on the shoulder. “There, there, never mind.”
Damerell sniffed noisily.
--
Olding had been kept waiting by the Kaiser for the best part of an hour now. He drummed his fingers against a railing impatiently. Finally, the Kaiser herself appeared from behind a pillar. Olding flatly refused to be impressed by her effortless glide as she wafted into the room, robes trailing.
“Welcome to Bagel, Captain Olding,” she intoned.
“Mornin’, lass,” Olding said.
Suddenly, and without warning, the Kaiser’s arm shot out and grabbed Olding’s ear and began to twist.
“OW!!!! GIT OFF ME WOMAN!!!!!!!!” Olding screamed as pain engulfed his ear.
The Kaiser twisted harder. Then, suddenly, she let go of his ear. Olding rubbed it tenderly.
“What did you do that for?” he gasped.
“You have a fascinating pagh, Captain.”
“What? I don’t play golf!” Olding replied irritably.
“No, Captain,” the Kaiser said. “Your spiritual field is very strong.”
“Is it? That’s nice,” Olding said, trying to keep at least some of the sarcasm out of his voice.
The Kaiser suddenly winced in pain, and fell to her knees. Olding didn’t bother to help her, thinking that it was only fair after what she had done to him. Suddenly, her pained face cleared, and was replaced by a beatific smile.
“What’s wrong with you now, woman?” Olding asked.
“I have just had a vision bestowed upon me by the Prophets.”
“T’ Prophets?” Olding said.
The Kaiser switched into sermon mode. “The Prophets guard all Bagellians, Captain Olding. They have protected us from harm since time immemorial.”
“In that case, how come you’ve just spent t’ last fifty years under Cardassian occupation?”
The Kaiser’s face clouded over. “We don’t like to talk about that.”
“Hmm.”
The Kaiser motioned to Olding, and glided down the corridor. Olding hurried to keep up with her. She led him into a very dark room, with dripping water all over the place. In the centre of the room, was a large box.
“Open the box, Captain,” the Kaiser said.
Olding wasn’t certain how safe this would be, but, stepped forwards and opened the box anyway. Green light washed past him, and…
--
He was back in the academy. He was in the main lecture hall in the Pavel Chekov Memorial Building (which had always confused Olding, as at the time when the building had been built, Chekov wasn’t actually dead). A wave of realisation hit him. This was the day when he met Wilhelmina Gates for the first time. Olding shuddered as he saw her coming towards him.
“Hi, handsome,” she said.
This time around, Olding was ready for it. He knew not to respond this time. Last time, it had taken him weeks to get over the embarrassment. Instead, he just stood aside, and watched as she draped herself over Cadet Cholmondely-Smythe. Olding then began to count. As he reached five, Cholmondely-Smythe pinched her bottom. Gates jumped away, straight into Olding’s arms.
“Mornin’, luv,” he said.
“Hi,” she said, and batted her eyelashes at him.
Olding pointed at the bar. “Do you want a drink?”
“Thanks.” He guided her over to the bar, and ordered a lime and brandy for her, and an orange juice for him. Knocking back the orange juice in one go, Olding decided to skip the formalities. After seventy-odd years of the Nexus, he was getting heartily sick of visions and hallucinations, and was determined to knock this one on the head.
“Look, lass,” he said. “Here’s t’ situation as it stands. Three hours from now, we’re goin’ to sleep together, you’re goin’ to get pregnant, and I’m not going to find out about it until much later in life, when I will then watch our son get killed by a Klingon soldier, okay? But don’t worry about it, because you’re not actually real.”
That didn’t stop her from slapping him, though, and that was certainly real. Even the revised version was embarrassing. Olding was really quite glad when the hallucination ended.
--
He blinked as the damp room rematerialised around him.
The Kaiser smiled serenely, and said, “The Orbs are very powerful, Captain. There used to be nine of them, but the Cardassians stole the rest. And now, we come to the real reason I brought you down here. That vision I just experienced concerned you, Captain Olding.”
Olding stifled a snigger.
“The Prophets have picked you to be the next Emissary to our people. You will find the Celestial Temple, and communicate with the Prophets. But beware, for from the Celestial Temple will come danger!”
Olding nodded, a little taken aback by that last pronouncement.
The Kaiser pushed the box containing the Orb into his hands, and said, “Return to your station, Captain Olding. You have much work to do.”
Struggling to tap his comm badge, Olding said, “Beam me up, Mr Wall.”
--
The flight back to DS13 was a silent one, with Olding studying the Orb in the back of the runabout whilst Wall sat in the front and wondered what had come over the captain. They landed on Pad A without a hitch, and this time Hill remembered to get things in the right order. Hill came to meet them as they exited the airlock.
“How did your meeting with the Kaiser go, sir?”
“Um, well, er…” Olding still hadn’t got over his spooky experience on Bagel. He needed some time alone to think about this.
Handing the Orb to Hill, he said, “Mr Hill, Mr Wall, I want you to compile a list of all unusual phenomena within Bagellian space over the last few millennia, and see if you can find some sort of correlation between them.”
Hill and Wall exchanged glances.
“Well, go and get on with it then!”
Olding stalked off to his office, leaving the other two staring bemusedly at his retreating back.
--
It took them several hours, but, amazingly enough, they pulled it off. After several long arguments with a bored librarian on Bagel, Hill and Wall managed to obtain a list of unusual phenomena from the Bagellian archives. The difficult bit came when they had to try and find any sort of link between them. Hill had printed out lots of copies of starmaps of the system to work with, but that didn’t seem to help Wall too much.
Hill had had to hold himself back from assaulting Wall when the helmsman had handed him a scrawled-on map and said,
“There it is!!”
Hill had read off the co-ordinates, and said wearily, “According to this, you have placed this Celestial Temple in the downstairs loo of the Indian takeaway opposite Bradford Town Hall!!! You imbecile!!!!!!”
“So, you don’t think it’s right then?”
“No, Mr Wall, I don’t think it’s right.”
--
Wall had left in a huff at that stage, and Hill, sensing the rise in IQ in the room, had taken advantage of the fact to put together a reasonable guess as to the location of the Celestial Temple. It was those co-ordinates that he handed Olding.
“It’s somewhere in the DeLorean Belt, sir.”
“Hmm.” Olding studied the padd. He had had quite a while to think about this now, and his mind was made up. Who believed in all that mumbo-jumbo anyway?
“Mr Hill, come wi’ me.”
They left his office, crossed Ops, and boarded the turbolift. Olding looked around Ops. Some of the mess had been cleared up, but it was still a tip.
“Mr Damerell, you have Ops. Computer, runabout pad A.”
They arrived at the pad to find Wall sitting on the starboard nacelle of the Ooze, muttering to himself. “Shift it, Mr Wall,” Olding said. “We’re takin’ t’ runabout out.”
Wall brightened up. “Great!!” he said, and opened the runabout door.
“No, Mr Wall,” Olding said, “We’re takin’ t’ runabout out,” and he indicated himself and Hill.
Wall’s face fell.
“Go and make yourself useful in Ops, why don’t you?” Olding said.
Wall stomped off, and Olding and Hill entered the Ooze.
--
Wall arrived in Ops just as Stark succeeded in reviving Damerell.
“Does this happen every time he’s left in charge?” Stark asked.
“Afraid so,” Wall said.
He turned on the viewscreen, and watched as the runabout moved away from the station, and headed towards the DeLorean Belt.
“What’s going on?” Damerell asked.
“I wish I knew,” Wall said.
Work in Ops stopped as everyone clustered around the screen, watching the Ooze carry out a standard search pattern. Everyone was shocked, then, when space suddenly opened up and swallowed the runabout.
“Red Alert!” Damerell called. A few sirens warbled, then died, and a couple of red tracer lights flickered arthritically.
“What just happened?” he said.
Stark consulted his console. “I have no idea! No, wait, someone called Red Alert!”
“I meant, after that!”
“Oh. Sorry, dunno about that.”
Wall was still staring gobsmacked at the screen. “Do you think Starfleet’ll believe us if we tell ’em what just happened?”
“We’re not going to tell them,” Damerell said. “They’d have us for breakfast!!”
“I take your point,” Wall said.
Stark, who was still staring frantically at his console, scratched his head and said, “I think that was a wormhole.” A sudden silence descended upon Ops.
“A WHAT?!!” Damerell said.
“A wormhole,” Stark repeated. “That’s the right term, isn’t it?”
“How did you figure that out?” Wall said.
“Um, well, I sort of thought that it looked like a wormhole.”
Barfoot looked over Stark’s shoulder, and said, “This isn’t right. Wormhole readings usually fluctuate more than that.”
Damerell could feel a headache coming on. It was techno-time. “Is that really significant?”
Barfoot shrugged. “It could be. These readings are very consistent. It could be that we’ve just found a stable wormhole!”
The rest of the crew looked at him blankly. Barfoot tried to explain. “Look, wormholes usually only last for a few hours, if that, yeah? But this one seems to be capable of staying around for a lot longer than that. Got it?”
Still they looked blank. “Look, um, well, it’s very important, okay?”
Damerell nodded dubiously.
“So what do we do about it?” Damerell asked.
Barfoot’s enthusiasm faded somewhat. “Ah, well, I don’t really know. I guess we’ll have to wait ’til the captain comes back.”
Damerell leant against the table. “Well, at least we can hang on for a while without anybody noticing.”
--
At that point the comm channel bleeped. Wall turned it on. An admiral’s face stared from the main screen.
“This is Admiral Kowalewski at Starfleet Command. Sensors have just detected the opening of a stable wormhole close to your position. Claim it for Starfleet immediately!” The channel clicked off before anyone could reply.
“Okay,” Wall said. “Now what?”
Everybody shrugged. Damerell thought for a second, then said, “Why don’t we just move the station closer to the wormhole?”
Even Wall laughed at that one.
Damerell was puzzled. “Why can’t we?”
Wall stopped laughing long enough to say, “It’s a space-station. They’re not well-known for their manoeuvring capabilities.”
Damerell looked disappointed.
Then, Barfoot said, “Well, actually, we could. If we were to generate a warp bubble around the station, we might be able to lighten the station enough for its existing thrusters to move it to the wormhole.”
“How do we do that, then?” Stark asked.
Barfoot scratched his head. “Well, think of it as a Baked Alaska. The station is the ice-cream inside, right. The warp bubble is the meringue keeping the ice-cream from getting melted, or, in our case, blown apart.”
“Right! Got it!” Stark began to tap in commands rapidly into his console.
Two seconds later, he stood back and said, “Warp bubble generated.”
Barfoot passed out.
Damerell turned to Wall, and said, “Activate thrusters.”
Wall sat down at the appropriate console, and fired up the thrusters. With a shudder, the station moved.
Damerell grinned smugly.
--
Olding and Hill were astounded by the inside of the wormhole. It was a bizarre maelstrom of lights and sounds that buffeted the runabout severely. Then, about halfway through, there was a sudden flash of bright light, and the wormhole disappeared.
Hill turned to Olding and said, “I don’t think we’re in the Alpha Quadrant anymore, Captain!”
Olding was consulting his monitors. “There appears to be an atmosphere formin’ outside the ship. Hmm.” He stood up, picked up a tricorder, and opened the door.
Outside the runabout was one of the worst places Olding had ever seen. Hill, on the other hand, seemed at home in the nightmare world.
“Nice, isn’t it?” he said.
“Are you kidding?” Olding said. “It’s horrible!”
Before they could carry the argument on any further, an Orb appeared from out of nowhere, and scanned them.
Hill said, “That’s not very friendly, is it?” Then he disappeared. A few seconds later, so did the planet.
Olding was immersed in pure white light. “What’s goin’ on?” he asked no-one in particular.
Then, Damerell appeared out of nowhere. “What are you doin’ here?” Olding asked him.
“Curious,” Damerell said. “The life-form speaks.”
“I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?” Olding said.
Damerell continued calmly. “It now seeks to prove its strength through issuing primitive threats.”
Olding was confused. This was definitely not his Operations officer.
Stark was next. “What manner of being are you?”
“My name is Captain Christopher Olding o’ t’ United Federation of Planets. Who are you?”
Stark and Damerell looked at one another, and the scene changed. Olding was back on the bridge of the Psycho. He glanced around, and quickly realised that the crew could not see him.
“What is this?” he asked.
“This is what we do not understand about you,” Hill said, rising out of the centre seat. “We cannot understand the meaning of this. This is a part of the other being that accompanied you into our home.”
Olding harrumphed.
“Why not ask him about it?” Hill looked sheepish.
“We tried. All he said was ‘Aaaaargh!!!'”
“Oh. Right.” Olding said.
--
DS13 was moving quite fast now. Damerell was enjoying it. After all, no-one else he knew could claim to have flown a space-station.
So he really felt bad when Wall said, “Er… we seem to have a problem.”
“What is it?” Damerell said.
Wall blushed. “Ahahahaha. I’ve, er, lost control of the thrusters. They’re locked on, and we can’t change course.”
“Oh. What course were we on?”
Stark looked up from his console. “A direct course towards the wormhole.”
Damerell felt himself feeling faint again. He gripped the railings and waited until he felt he could speak again. “Is there any way of stopping us?”
Barfoot said, “Well, we could always collapse the bubble.”
“Great! What would that do?”
“Destroy the station.”
“Not so great. Anyone else got any other ideas?”
Wall waved his hand in the air. “Yes?”
“Why don’t we just disable the thrusters?”
“Yes!! Mr Barfoot, get on it!!”
“Okay, but it’ll take a while.” Barfoot skipped away, singing to himself, and clambered down into the little alcove in the floor which held all the EPS power relays, and began to fiddle.
Damerell looked at the starmap. They were getting very close to the wormhole. “Could you put a bit of speed into it, Mr Barfoot?”
“All hands, brace for impact!!!”
--
Olding had just watched the crash of the Psycho five times now. Each time, he had tried to explain exactly why it was that the crew did what they did, which was difficult enough under ordinary circumstances, while the aliens, who were still in the visages of his crew, took notes. After the third time, Olding had realised that his chief stumbling-block was the aliens’ total inability to understand the concept of linear time.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try it again once more. We can’t go forwards, backwards or sideways in time. We exist in one frame of time. Got it now?” The aliens looked at each other dubiously.
Finally, Hill spoke. “We have decided, that your species poses no harm to us, as you are really boring. You may go.”
The white light vanished, and Olding found himself back alongside Hill in the Ooze. “Position report, Commander.”
Hill tapped in a command, and said, “We’re in the Gamma Quadrant, sir!”
Olding looked out at the stars. “Very nice. Bring us about. I think we’re goin’ to have to think about what we do next before we actually do it.”
The Ooze came about and headed for the wormhole.
--
Damerell was getting a little frantic now. They were almost on top of the wormhole. “Have you done it yet, Mr Barfoot?”
“Just a few more minutes.”
“We don’t have a few more minutes!!” Damerell screamed.
Wall looked up from his console. “We’ve got fifty-four seconds. Fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one…”
Damerell started to jump up and down with frustration. “Come on, hurry UP!!!!”
Stark called, “Picking up increased neutrino output from wormhole co-ordinates!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”
“It means the wormhole’s about to open!!!!”
“Got it!!” Barfoot called.
“Turn ’em back on now!!!” Damerell screamed.
Barfoot looked suitably aggrieved. “Honestly, turn ’em on, turn ’em off…”
The wormhole opened, and the station flew into it.
--
Olding had managed to smooth their ride out this time, and so he was able to fiddle with the scanners to get some information on the composition of the wormhole. He wasn’t looking, then, when Hill started to laugh hysterically, and point out of the windows.
Olding growled, “Shut up, Mr Hill.”
Hill just grabbed his shoulder and forced him to look.
Olding’s eyes bulged. “Is that?…”
“Yup. That’s DS13.”
The station passed clean over them, and disappeared behind them. Then, they emerged back into Federation space, and Olding brought the Ooze to a halt.
Hill, who by now had managed to get over the original laughing fit, wheezed, “Do we go after them, sir?”
Olding was about to agree, when four Cardassian Galor-class warships dropped out of warp immediately ahead of them.
“No, Commander, I don’t think we do.”
--
DS13 emerged into the Gamma Quadrant unscathed, although Damerell’s blood pressure had gone up a few points. He was trying desperately to figure out how to get them back again.
“Couldn’t we just slingshot round a planet?” Wall said.
“That’s a good idea!” Damerell said. “Find us a planet directly ahead.”
Stark began scanning. “Got one!! It’s… fifty light years away. At present speeds, that would take us… about ninety years to reach it.”
Damerell’s blood pressure climbed a notch higher. Jackson, who had just arrived in Ops, tried to check Damerell’s pulse, but lost count.
Stark was still thinking. “We need to reverse our course, yeah?”
Seeing as Damerell had jumped up onto the main light fitting hanging from the Ops roof, Wall answered for him.
“Yeah.”
“So, can’t we just reverse the thruster power?” Stark asked.
Even Wall found it slightly incongruous that the Chief Engineer was asking these questions.
Barfoot said, “No, these thrusters won’t do that.”
The counsellor, who throughout this discussion had been taking detailed notes on the characters involved, stopped writing and moved over to the status board. She called up a page with the deck plans on it.
“How’s this for an option?” she said. “We take the thrusters out of their original positions, move them round to here,” she indicated a spot on the map, “which is on the opposite side of the station, and fire them enough to send us back towards the wormhole. Once we’re on our way back, we pull the thrusters out again, re-fit them into their original positions, and once we’re back into the Alpha Quadrant, fire them again to brake us.”
Damerell fought to uncross his eyes.
Alone of the crew in Ops, Barfoot had followed the explanation, just. But now he raised the one flaw in the otherwise perfect plan.
“There is just one thing.”
“What’s that?” the counsellor asked.
“The thrusters weigh about fifteen tons each!! There’s no way we’ll be able to shift ’em!!!!”
The counsellor thought for a second. “What about anti-grav packs?”
Barfoot blushed. “Oh yeah.”
Damerell realised that it was his call. “Get on with it, Mr Barfoot.”
Barfoot grabbed a few luckless engineers, and disappeared out of Ops. They heard his voice singing, “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go…”
Wall was counting on his fingers, apparently still not quite up to speed on the plan.
Jackson, bored by the discussion, was cleaning a scalpel and practising his throws.
--
Olding was getting frustrated. It was difficult to persuade Gul Ebil to go home when the Gul was commanding a battle fleet, and Olding was commanding a runabout. The Gul had multiple phasers and torpedoes at his fingertips, while Olding had two low-powered phaser arrays and a couple of micro-torpedoes. He was definitely on a sticky wicket.
“Captain,” Ebil snarled, “Do you seriously expect me to turn around and return to Cardassian space? What will you do to stop me from establishing a Cardassian presence here?”
That was a good point, Olding had to admit. “Well…, I am expecting reinforcements at any second.”
Hill laughed hysterically. The Gul smiled insincerely. Olding looked around at where he knew the wormhole was, hoping that somehow DS13 would magically reappear. He had to admit it wasn’t likely.
--
“Report!!” Damerell shouted at Barfoot as he skipped through Ops.
“We’re shifting them across now! Another few minutes and we’ll be ready for a test.” With that, Barfoot disappeared through a hatchway Damerell hadn’t even seen before.
Damerell consulted the status table. They were still moving faster and faster into unexplored space, truly boldly going where no Yorkshireman had gone before. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a Yorkshireman aboard, and Damerell was heartily wishing there was.
--
Gul Ebil was getting impatient now. “Captain Olding, I demand that you move out of my way, or I will destroy you!”
Olding realised that he couldn’t prevent the Gul’s ship from going through. But he could carry on with his bluff for a little while longer. “Very well, Ebil. But only your ship can go through. The others must remain here.” Ebil looked puzzled, and cut the connection, presumably while he discussed this bizarre offer with his officers.
Hill was understandably confused. “Sir, how are you going to stop them? We don’t have the firepower to take on one of those ships, let alone three!”
“Exactly, Mister Hill. One runabout couldn’t possibly hold off three Galor-class ships. So us saying we will is obviously crazy.”
“Yes!!! So why did you do it?!!”
Olding was developing a headache. He realised that he was going to have to explain this in words of one syllable.
“By ourselves, we couldn’t hold them off, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So I can’t carry out my threat to destroy them, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So why would I?”
“I don’t know!!”
“Because I’ve got backup they don’t know about.”
“But you haven’t!!!!!!!!!!!”
Olding smiled. “Exactly. I know that, you know that, but they don’t.” And he pointed to the four Cardassian ships hanging ominously in space before them.
At that moment, the screen flicked back on, and Ebil said, “Very well. We accept your terms.”
Olding smiled smugly at Hill, who refused to take the bait.
--
“Standby to fire thrusters!” Damerell was very tense now.
Wall, who had been cat-napping through the past half-hour whilst Barfoot and his team worked like slaves to fit the thrusters into place, yawned and stretched a bit before placing his fingers over the relevant controls.
“Standing by.”
Damerell tapped his comm badge. “Mr Barfoot, are you ready?”
“Yes sir!”
“Oh, God. Okay, okay, I can do this. Fire thrusters!!!”
Wall activated the thrusters, and the station shuddered. “We’re decelerating!” Wall called over the growing rumble. “Is it supposed to do that?!!”
Damerell shouted back. “I have no idea!!”
Stark was watching his monitors. “We’re almost at a stop… Okay, we’ve stopped! Relative motion is changing… we’re going astern! Back to the wormhole!!”
Damerell breathed a shaky sigh of relief and mopped his brow with the back of his sleeve. “Cut thrusters, Mr Wall.”
“Thrusters offline,” Wall said a moment later.
“Right, Mr Barfoot, move those thrusters back again!”
Now, they were on a time limit. If they didn’t get the thrusters back in position by the time they emerged from the wormhole again, they would have to repeat the process once more, and Damerell didn’t relish the idea of shuttling backwards and forwards through the wormhole all week.
Counsellor Hill, who had been smiling smugly over the past few minutes, noticed that Wall immediately dropped off to sleep again, now that the action was over. She dug out her notepad and made a few more notes. Doctor Jackson pulled his scalpels out of the dartboard he had chalked up on one of the disused consoles, and counted up his score. Damerell hyperventilated for a few minutes, then began to pace around. After half an hour, he was stopped by Stark, who put a foot out as he went past. Damerell fell to the floor with a thud.
“What d’you do that for?” he asked as he scrambled upright again.
“Sorry,” Stark said, shrugging, “Just couldn’t resist.”
The counsellor broke her pencil-nib at that point.
--
Olding and Hill watched as Ebil’s ship moved slowly up to the wormhole co-ordinates. Given the cautiousness with which Ebil was carrying out the manoeuvre, Olding was half-expecting to see the ship jump backwards in surprise when the wormhole opened. It didn’t, however, merely pausing for a moment to scan the opening before moving through on impulse power. The other three ships hung menacingly in front of them, with their weapons systems obviously powered up.
Hill began to root around in the back.
“Quit faffin’ around,” Olding said. “What are you doin’, anyway?”
Hill looked embarrassed at that. “I was just wondering…”
“Yes?”
“… Do these things have a loo aboard, by any chance?”
Olding looked round. Hill was red-faced, and his search was becoming a little panicky.
Olding sighed. “Third door on the right.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
--
Barfoot panted noisily into Ops. His uniform was ripped in several different places, and he didn’t exactly look at his finest.
“One of the bloody antigravs failed!” he panted. “We had to shift the last thruster by hand for the last few hundred metres!!
I’ve got three engineers with hernias in the Infirmary waiting for you, Doctor.”
Jackson picked up his medikit, and thought for a moment. Finally, he asked, “What do you amputate for a hernia?”
Not waiting for an answer, he wandered off out of Ops, whistling cheerfully.
Damerell was starting to develop tunnel vision, and his voice seemed to be a little strained as he said, “How far are we from the wormhole?”
Wall was still fast asleep, so the counsellor read off the displays. “Not long now,” she said. “Just… Holy Cow!”
“What?!! WHAT?!!!” Damerell was starting to lose it.
“A Cardassian Galor-class ship just came through the wormhole! We’re on a collision course!!!!”
Just as Damerell thought he couldn’t take any more, the comm chimes whistled. “What is it now?!!”
Barfoot replied, “We’ve got the thrusters fitted back again.”
“Oh, right.” Damerell’s fingers started to tremble uncontrollably.
Counsellor Hill, realising that Damerell was no longer fit to command (if in fact he ever had been), shoved him out of the way, and took control.
She kicked Wall until he woke up, and said, “We’re about to enter the wormhole! Standby on thrusters!”
She then looked up at the screen. The Cardassian ship had come to a very rapid halt, and was now attempting to reverse back through the wormhole. It disappeared seconds before DS13 hit the wormhole’s event horizon and the viewscreen shorted out.
--
Olding and Hill had just got out the backgammon set when the wormhole flared open again. They watched in amazement as Gul Ebil’s ship came rocketing backwards, almost colliding with the other ships in the unit. But that was nothing compared to the shock they got when DS13 followed the Galor out of the wormhole, coming unsteadily to a halt a few kilometres away. Gul Ebil’s face flicked onto the screen in the Ooze, and Olding had to keep his grin under control.
“What do you mean by this, Captain?”
“I told you I had reinforcements on the way, didn’t I?”
“There will be a reckoning, Olding!” Ebil snarled, as his four ships warped out of the Bagellian system.
Hill cranked his jaw shut just as Olding said, “Take us back to Pad A.”
--
Six weeks passed, and after the initial excitement, very little happened aboard DS13. Damerell suffered a mental breakdown thanks to the unaccustomed strain of being in command, but recovered quickly thanks to the counsellor’s advanced mental therapy course (shouting “Pull yourself together you lazy sod!!!!” at him until he did). Wall mastered the art of both flying and landing the runabouts reasonably safely, while Hill, Barfoot and Bleep got most of the station’s systems back on line, while Stark watched and/or baked confectionery. Jackson was as happy as a pig in muck, because the new-found popularity of the station meant that there were hundreds of ships passing through each week, so the number of patients he got increased exponentially.
Olding, however, found that he actually missed the old life, irritating as it had been at times, and began to argue with Starfleet for permission to explore the Gamma Quadrant. Starfleet, by now wise to the behaviour of this crew, told him not to be so stupid and sent a few starships through instead.
Olding was mooching around the Ikea ring one evening, when there was a bright flash of light ahead of him, and someone appeared. He looked around him, and, before Olding could do anything, disappeared again in another flash.
Olding hit his comm badge, and said, “Olding to Ops. begin a scan of the Ikea ring, section 4B.”
“Aye, sir,” Hill’s voice responded. “Er… what are we looking for?”
“For anything unusual.”
“Oh, okay.” Olding hung around for a while, but the mystery man did not show up again. He stomped off back to Ops, to see if they had had any luck. He was to be disappointed, though.
“Nothing, sir,” Hill said. “There is nothing at all out of the ordinary down there. Er, what was it you wanted to investigate?”
Olding harrumphed. “Somebody… appeared down there, then disappeared before I could do anything about it.” As he spoke, there was another flash of bright light, and the man appeared again.
“Would that be me you were talking about?”
Hill’s jaw dropped open, and Olding frowned. “Who are you?”
The man sighed. “Don’t you humans ever talk to one another? My name is Q. You might have heard of me?”
Olding spoke out of the corner of his mouth, “Mr Bleep, access the Starfleet security database. Try to find out if our guest has a record.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Q admonished. “Why is it the first thing any of you humans do when I arrive is to check up on me with your security service? Why not just ask me?”
Olding let rip with his best intimidatory stare, but found that it just bounced off Q. Slightly unnerved by that, he decided that the direct approach. “Alright then. Just who the bluidy ‘ell are you?”
Q sighed theatrically. “I already told you! My name is Q. I am from the Q continuum.” This last bit he spelt out, as if to a slightly backwards child. Olding started to steam with annoyance.
At that awkward point, Bleep came out with the appropriate file. “Bleep…wzrtfgl…Mind the gap… Starfleet has an extensive file on Q, Captain. File reads: On Stardate…”
“Just give us the edited highlights, Mr Bleep,” Olding said. He had very quickly learnt that, in true android style, Bleep had an annoying tendency to talk for hours and hours without a break.
“Bleep…wzrtfgl…Mind the gap… Yes sir. Quotes from conclusion of file: ‘Q is mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ Captain Jean-Luc Picard, USS Enterprise.
“‘Q is a complete arsehole.’ Commander William T Riker, USS Enterprise.”
“I see,” Olding said. Q looked offended at the quotes, but said nothing. Olding frowned. Be careful what you wish for, or you may get it, he thought.
There was a long silence, which Q broke by saying, “Well, come on then, Captain, show me around your station.”
In yet another flash of light, Q’s attire changed from a nondescript jumpsuit to a brightly coloured Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, with a pair of sandals rounding the ensemble off. He clicked his fingers, and an antique camera appeared round his neck. “Well, let’s go then!”
A sudden inspiration hit Olding. “Q,” he said, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to show you around the station. However, my chief runabout pilot, Lieutenant-Commander Wall will be happy to do the honours.”
Wall, who had been peacefully snoozing on the transporter pad, jerked upright at the mention of his name, and said, “What?! Me?!!”
Olding nodded, and Q said, “Hurry up! I’m getting bored!”
Reluctantly, Wall stood up, and, ushering Q towards the turbolift, tried to figure out exactly what it was he was going to do.
Taking advantage of the time he had just bought himself, Olding moved round to Bleep’s station to read the Starfleet file on Q. When he saw the file length, he was glad he had picked Wall to do the tour. It was going to take him a while to read all of this. He was further hampered by the fact that the rest of the Ops crew stood behind him reading over his shoulder.
Ignoring them with some difficulty, he quickly scanned through the file.
--
Wall’s first stop on the tour was the Promenade. For a lack of anywhere better to go, he showed Q into the counsellor’s office.
“Um, well, this is the counsellor’s office and, um, er, the security office as well.”
Q poked around behind the counsellor’s desk while the counsellor herself came up to Wall and whispered, “The Captain thought you’d turn up here. He wants you to make Q’s stay here as miserable as possible. You’ve got carte blanche to do what you like.”
“Cartey blah….?”
“Just do whatever you want, okay?”
“Okay.” Wall thought for a second, then grinned evilly. “Hey, Q! I know where you want to go!! Step this way, my ma.. er, being!!”
As Q walked out of the office, Wall winked and gave the counsellor the thumbs up sign. The counsellor flopped behind her desk, and laughed quietly as she thought of what was about to happen to Q. It wouldn’t be pleasant.
--
Wall led Q into Fred’s Bar, where they found Doctor Jackson trying to single-handedly empty Fred’s stockroom. While Q was standing in the entrance-way, soaking up the lively atmosphere of Fred’s, Wall relayed Olding’s instructions to both Jackson and Fred, and Operation Migraine swung into action. Q moseyed on up to the bar, and sat down on one of the stools.
“Mornin’ pardner! What can Ah git you?”
Q was a little taken aback by that, but rallied magnificently. “I’d like a Tequila Wallbanger on the rocks, no ice.”
Fred thought that one through, then handed Q a neat vodka. Q, not realising what it was, knocked it back in one. Wall sprayed him with a fire extinguisher as he fought for breath. Meanwhile, Jackson fished out his medical kit, and waved a tricorder over him. Q was still too far gone to realise that the tricorder wasn’t actually turned on.
“Right!” Jackson said briskly. “This is more serious than I thought! We’re going to have to amputate!!!”
He dragged Q out of Fred’s and into the infirmary before Q could raise any argument.
Wall tapped his comm badge, and said, “Stage 1 of Operation Migraine is complete, sir.”
“Eh?” came the response.
--
Jackson was enjoying himself. In Q, he had found a patient whose limbs grew back literally seconds after he chopped them off. He was currently sawing off Q’s left leg for the fifth time. Damerell stuck his head round the door, saw the bloodshed, screamed and collapsed forwards into the room. One of Jackson’s assistants dragged him to a med-table. Jackson continued to saw. Q screamed horrifically as he watched his leg get removed from his body yet again.
Between screams, he managed to say, “For God’s sake leave me alone!!!!”
Jackson stopped, hurt. “Look, I’m trying to do you a favour. None of my other patients ever complain.”
“Yeah,” Q said. “That’s because they probably died of shock soon after you operated on them!!!”
“Good point,” Jackson conceded. Regrowing his leg hurriedly, Q rushed out of the Infirmary.
Jackson tapped his comm badge. “He’s just left here in a bit of a state.”
Olding was pleased. “Good, good. I’ve alerted Mr Bleep to stand by.”
--
Q ran down the Promenade as fast as he could. For the first time in his existence, he was scared out of his tiny twisted mind. He cannoned into Bleep with a massive thud.
“Bleep…wzrtfgl…Stand clear of the doors please… Can I help you sir?”
Q looked up. “What? Yes, yes, PLEASE!!!!”
“Bleep…wzrtfgl…Mind the gap… Certainly.” Bleep picked Q up by his collar, and carried the hapless being back towards Ops.
Q began to cry. However, he didn’t make it past the counsellor’s office. Bleep suddenly blew a fuse, and smoke gushed out of his vents. Q was dumped onto the deck. He picked himself up, but was unable to escape before he found a phaser rifle levelled at his face. The counsellor grinned.
“Why don’t you get up,” she suggested sweetly, “Before I blow your head off?”
Q got up. She sat him down on her couch, then placed the phaser rifle down on her desk. For some reason, he didn’t feel any safer.
“Now then,” she said, “Tell me your life story.”
--
Olding was flicking through the status reports. For once, the operation was proceeding according to plan. It was interesting, he mused, that his crew worked best in really bizarre situations. With Q arriving, they had the most bizarre of bizarre situations, and, amazingly, the crew seemed to be rising to the task. His plan, strange though it was, was actually quite simple. The report on Q had said that his main danger was his ability to cause chaos upon his arrival at a Starfleet facility. So Olding had decided that the best way to minimise that threat was to ensure that Q was never able to take the initiative. With this in mind, he had ordered his crew to do what they liked to Q, in the hope that he wouldn’t be able to adapt fast enough.
Hill had been industriously rebuilding the science console, for lack of anything better to do. Now he straightened up when Olding kicked him.
“Sir?”
“I want you to take over from the counsellor, Commander.”
Hill nodded, and left Ops. Olding leant against the status table, and relaxed for a while. He was about to consider retiring to his office and catching up on his paperwork and/or sleep, when Wall arrived in Ops, fresh from his part in the anti-Q operation.
“Anything to report, Mr Wall?”
“Not really, sir. You know as much as I do.”
“Very well.”
--
Olding walked into his office, fished out a pillow, and tried to get some sleep. No sooner had he closed his eyes than Wall burst into a very untuneful song. Olding wrapped the pillow round his ears, and tried again. Wall’s singing only seemed to get louder. After trying to ignore it for a while, he finally snapped.
Opening the doors, he yelled, “CUT THAT BLUIDY RACKET OUT!!!!!!!!!!”
Wall stopped in mid-verse, and dived under the status table. Olding closed the door again, and returned to his paperwork.
--
Hill arrived in the counsellor’s office just as Q was explaining the trauma he had suffered as a child when his parents forbade him from playing with his friend Trelane.
“Come on,” he said, “I’m here to show you the rest of the station.”
“No!!! NO!!! Please, NOOOOOO!!!!!!”
Hill grabbed him by the arm, and said, “Come on, we’re going.” Q was frogmarched out of the office with scarcely time to complain.
The first stage of their tour took them to the Athena ring. Q was barely able to take in all the interesting DNS power taps and IPS connections that Hill pointed out to him, preferring instead to whimper pathetically and cry for his mother. Then the final straw came when they stood in front of a turbolift shaft. Q was trembling now as he fought to remain in control. He wasn’t ready for the hefty shove Hill gave him when the doors opened but no lift appeared. Q disappeared down the shaft with a horrible scream.
Hill tapped his comm badge, and said, “I don’t think we’ll be having any more trouble with Q from now on, sir.”
Q floated back up the turboshaft. He gave Hill a baleful look, and vanished in his characteristic flash of white light.
Hill tapped his comm badge. “Q’s gone, sir.”
“Hmm? What? Oh, yeah, right. Well done.”
--
Some hours later, Olding was propping up the bar in Fred’s.
“Afternoon, Fred,” he said contentedly.
“Afternoon, sir!” Fred said. “What can Ah git you?”
“I’ll have a large stout please.”
“Certainly, Cap’n! It’ll be a pleasure!” Fred slid the stout down the bar to Olding, who caught it on the third attempt. He was lucky in that the bar was a long one, and he was able to chase after the glass before it fell off the end. Sitting back down on his stool, he swigged the stout, and, cleaning his mouth with the back of his sleeve, surveyed Fred’s. It was doing a roaring trade, as usual. Olding tried to count the number of Starfleet uniforms in the room, but gave up when he passed the number allocated to DS13. He hoped that another ship had docked recently that he wasn’t aware of, otherwise the station was critically undermanned.
Beside him was a padd listing the station’s current status, and a general overview of the system. Starfleet had temporarily cut back on its exploration programme due to a flare-up of trouble along the Cardassian border. A rebel group called the Marquis had started attacking both Cardassian and Federation outposts along the border, and both sides had sent ships to intervene. So that left Olding with little to do. He still had a hankering to explore the Gamma Quadrant. Finishing off the stout, he waved to Fred, who was serving another customer, and returned to Ops.
“Afternoon, all,” he said.
Hill looked up momentarily, then returned to trying to remember how he had got the science console to work before. He had tried swapping the data busses between the science and tactical consoles, but had been foiled when he discovered that someone had changed the boot sequence for the command interface.
“Where’s Graham?!” he snarled.
“Er, we left him behind on the planet at the centre of the galaxy about seventy-five years ago.” Wall replied.
“Oh yeah. So it’s not his fault then.”
“No.”
Olding looked around. Everyone appeared to be busy. So he would have to take a runabout by himself. But he didn’t really fancy exploring the Gamma Quadrant by himself. So he returned to Fred’s Bar.
--
“Fred, how’dye fancy a quick trip through the wormhole?”
Fred stopped polishing glasses and looked up. “Why, that sounds jest dandy! But, if Ah may ask, why me?”
“No-one else is available.”
“Fine! Jest give me a second.” Fred shot round the bar, and donning his hat, followed Olding to Pad B and the Piddle. Once there, Olding began the startup sequence, and opened a channel to Ops.
“Ops, this is t’ Piddle, requesting permission to depart.”
“Who’s that then?” Hill’s voice said.
“It’s me, Mr Hill. Your commanding officer.” There was a long pause.
“Oops. Ahem. Piddle, you are cleared to depart.”
Pad B rose, lifting the runabout until it was flush with the outer hull. Olding activated the thrusters, and the Piddle moved slowly away from the station, angling towards the wormhole.
By now, the flaring of the wormhole was old news to Olding, but Fred, who hadn’t seen it before from close-up, was enthralled.
“Dang me,” he whispered, “That’s prettier than an Arizona sunrise!” He took his hat off and watched reverentially as Olding flew the runabout through the wormhole and out into the Gamma Quadrant. It was then that Olding realised that picking Fred to accompany him was not such a great idea. He needed someone to carry out a standard sensor sweep, but Fred couldn’t do that sort of thing. After agonising over what to do for a few seconds, Olding decided on a compromise. He set the runabout on autopilot, and, telling Fred to keep an eye on the sensors in case of trouble, started the sweep himself.
He was about to give up and set it on automatic starmapping when the sensors picked something up. It went past at extreme warp speed, and Olding was left rerunning the few images he had received in an attempt to figure out what it was. He narrowed it down to being of Federation origin, but was unable to determine any more. That was mildly disturbing, but Olding wasn’t about to let it spoil his day. This was the first time in years that he had been able to do some actual exploring, and he was determined to enjoy it.
--
Back on DS13, Hill was not having a good day. He had been happily modifying the science station well beyond the original design specs when a call had come in from Starfleet. He had taken it in Olding’s office for a bit of privacy. It was Admiral Kowalewski.
“Where’s Olding?!” he asked.
Hill wanted to give him a straight answer, but all that happened was that he stammered a bit and said, “Er, um, well, he’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”
Kowalewski’s already flushed face went a deeper shade of purple. “This is an emergency!!!” he growled.
Hill’s reflexes popped into gear, and he shouted, “Red Alert!!! Battle Stations!!!!”
Nothing happened, and Hill realised that no-one except the Admiral could hear him. The Admiral seemed to have paused, and appeared to be counting under his breath. When he started to speak again, it was with a strained tone.
“Several of our ships have reported contact with a hostile force in the Gamma Quadrant. We’re recalling all our ships to this side of the wormhole just in case. Do you understand what this means for you out there?!!”
Hill thought for a while. “The workload’s going to get a bit easier for a while?”
Kowalewski blew a blood vessel. “No!!!! It means that you lot are our first line of defence against a possible invasion!!! You have to be on maximum alert from now on!!!!!”
Hill ducked under the table until the Admiral finished, when he slowly re-appeared.
“So, what you’re saying is, and this is totally hypothetical you understand, that it wouldn’t be such a good idea if, say, the Captain went into the Gamma Quadrant in one of the runabouts for a quick look round then?”
“No!!! It wouldn’t!!!!!!!”
Hill tried to feign relief. “Oh, well, just as well he hasn’t then, isn’t it?”
Kowalewski was not fooled. “We’re sending a Galaxy class starship, the Oddity, through for a brief reconnaissance. You’d better go with it and recover your captain. The Oddity will be with you in a few hours. Good luck.”
The screen blinked off, and Hill collapsed back into Olding’s chair. The shit had just hit the fan in spectacular fashion. He could only hope that Olding was alright, wherever he was.
--
Olding was having the time of his life. It was a nice peaceful day aboard the Piddle, and he and Fred were getting on famously. He was even able to forgive Fred’s insistence on playing country-and-western music constantly. After a while, he had found himself tapping his feet and humming along.
It was a massive shock, then, when there was a sudden explosion, every alarm in the runabout went off, and the computer voice screamed “Red Alert!!!! We are under attack!!!!”
The country-and-western stopped abruptly.
“Computer, status report!” Olding barked.
“Three unidentified vessels have just opened fire on us,” the computer said. Olding wasted no time.
“Computer, initiate evasive sequence Wall Alpha!”
The runabout spun crazily out of the line of fire. That bought Olding some time. Looking across at Fred, he shouted, “Standby on phasers and micro-torpedoes!!”
Fred looked frantically around, and said, “Ah don’t know how!!!”
In that instant, Olding realised they could not win. They probably couldn’t even get away. Fred, through no fault of his own, couldn’t do the job Olding required him to do. So that left them with only one option. Olding took manual control of the runabout, brought it to a halt, and opened hailing frequencies.
“This is Captain Christopher Olding o’ t’ Federation Station Deep Space 13. I surrender.”
Silence.
“I say again, this is Captain Christopher Olding of…”
The channel crackled, and a harsh voice responded, “This is Dubris Doofah of the Jem’Hadar. We accept your surrender. You will prepare to be brought aboard.” A tractor beam snaked out from one of the ships, grabbed the runabout, and pulled it in.
--
Hill stood in the centre of Ops, reading a padd and trying to keep up with events. He had ordered a red alert the moment the Admiral’s call had ended, and now was overseeing the transformation of the station from a trading post to a front-line command post. At least, that’s what he hoped he was doing. So many things had happened in the last few hours that Hill couldn’t be sure exactly what had happened. He watched as two heavily-laden ensigns ran across Ops and collided with each other, dropping their loads and causing two more to slip up and drop what they were carrying. Within seconds there was a major pileup in Ops. Hill turned away to Mr Bleep, who was sat patiently by his station.
“Bleep… wzrtfgl… Mind the gap… We are at seventy percent of readiness, Commander.”
“Thank you, Bleep.” Hill hadn’t the faintest idea what that meant, but it sounded good.
Next, Wall appeared from somewhere. “All runabouts ready for launch, sir. Micro-torpedoes are fully loaded, and phasers are charged.” He was vibrating with excitement.
Damerell appeared, to report that the Habitat, Ikea and Athena rings had all been evacuated of civilians, and blast doors were locked down and ready. Hill breathed out shakily.
Before he could breath in again, however, Jackson had arrived, reporting that sickbay had been fitted out for combat conditions. Beds had been removed, and trauma sets had been laid out all over the place. There was a disturbing glint in his eye as he said it.
The counsellor ran past clutching an armful of phaser rifles, stopping for long enough to shout, “Hahahaha!!! Let’s kick some serious butt!!!! Did I just say that?” before continuing on her way.
--
Olding had been handcuffed, tied to a large metal block, and left in a room all by himself for a few hours. He was not happy. He had no idea who he had been captured by, or for what reason. No-one had told him that the Gamma Quadrant was now a war-zone. If it wasn’t for the large metal gag welded over his mouth he would be grumbling very loudly by now. He contented himself with making annoyed-sounding “Mmmf Mmmf” noises.
He wondered where Fred was. He hadn’t seen Fred since the aliens had blown open the runabout’s airlock door and dragged them out. Presumably the runabout was in bits by now. So these aliens knew about their technology, and probably all about them as well. Fred wasn’t Starfleet trained, and couldn’t possibly stand up to an organised torture session. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if Fred knew very much about Starfleet Operations. Maybe they would be safe. The door slid open, and Olding saw the silhouetted forms of two aliens in the entranceway. He braced himself.
They had come for him now.
--
Hill was fuming. He was in the middle of trying to co-ordinate the biggest operation of his life, and the counsellor had decided that that made it a good time to carry out his psychological review. To add insult to injury, she was five minutes late. Hill read and re-read the padd he was holding. It contained a complete station status report as of a few minutes before. Unfortunately, it had been written by Wall, who had been unable to resist adding funny comments to the report. Consequently, the report was more funny comments than report. It was not doing Hill’s temper any good whatsoever.
Finally, the counsellor arrived. She had changed from the standard uniform into a Kevlar phaser-resistant jacket, steel helmet, and camouflaged boots with iron toecaps. She had also smeared her face with camouflage paint. Hill tried very hard not to scream.
“Hi Commander Unk!” the counsellor said. She sat down behind her desk, and experimentally sighted a phaser rifle between his eyes. Hill sat on the edge of the couch and attempted to stare her out. He failed.
“Okay, let’s get started.” The counsellor looked him straight in the eye, and riffled through her notes. “So. What is it that motivates you?”
Hill opened his mouth to reply, realised he didn’t have an answer, and shut it again. The counsellor waited patiently, absently doodling on a notepad. Unable to put it off for very much longer, Hill said, “Well, I suppose it’s the challenge of meeting new species, new cultures…”
The counsellor threw a textbook at him and said, “I’m not interested in the Starfleet handbook answer to what motivates you! I want to know what you think!!!”
“Oh. What I think?”
“Yes!!!”
“Okay. Well, um, er, I never really considered any other career.” In an attempt to lighten the tension, he said, “I just like dismantling things.”
“I see. So how long have you had this destructive urge?”
“It’s not a destructive urge!!! I just like to… dismantle… things…” Hill trailed off as he realised that he had just backed himself into a verbal corner.
“Aha!!! So, Unk, you admit you’ve got a destructive urge?”
“Um, well, yes, I suppose so.”
“Good. Do you think it’s got anything to do with your childhood?”
“Well, I suppose I’ve always had this urge to dismantle things.” Hill realised he was selling himself short. “But I like to rebuild them as well!”
The counsellor nodded sagely, and wrote something on her pad.
“And have you ever succeeded in rebuilding something you have dismantled?”
“Well, not exactly.” Hill squirmed a bit.
“So. How do you feel about someone else fiddling with technical things?”
“I HATE IT!!!!!! I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT!!!! IT DRIVES ME RIGHT UP THE WALL WHEN SOMEONE WHO PATENTLY DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING DISMANTLES A COMPUTER THEN… then…”
“Doesn’t put it back together again?” the counsellor suggested, amazed that her ears had stood up to the battering they had just received.
Hill blushed.
“So. Basically, you’re an obsessive with an urge to destroy things in the name of what you perceive to be a higher cause, although you can’t actually vocalise it?”
Hill had only barely followed the last bit, and so nodded and said, “Um, well, I suppose so.”
“Good!! We’ve made some real progress today!! I’ll schedule another appointment for next month. Bye, Unk.”
Hill left, still a bit unsure of what he had just admitted to.
--
He was standing aimlessly on the Promenade just outside the counsellor’s office, when the speakers hummed, and Bleep’s voice said, “Bleep… wzrtfgl… Mind the gap… Ops to Commander Hill. The Oddity has just dropped out of warp.”
“On my way.” Hill dismissed thoughts of his review, and sprinted for the turbolift and Ops. When he got there, Damerell was giving the Oddity co-ordinates for station-keeping. Well, he was trying to.
“Um, up a bit, up a bit, that’s it!! Now, come right just a smidgen… Hold it right there!!!” The Oddity lurched to a halt. A second later, the call came through.
“Oddity to DS13. Request permission to beam aboard.”
“Permission granted.” Hill tensed.
A few seconds later, Captain Bjorn Steelhelmet appeared on the transporter pad in Ops. He nodded stiffly to Hill.
“Good afternoon, Commander.”
“Good afternoon, sir,” Hill responded.
Then, realising that practically the entire crew of DS13 had sidled into Ops to overhear the discussion, he gestured to Olding’s office.
“Perhaps we could talk in here?”
Steelhelmet followed him into the office, and sat down behind the desk. Hill bridled at that, but remembered that Steelhelmet was his superior officer, and said nothing. Steelhelmet steepled his fingers, and looked at Hill with one eyebrow raised. Hill immediately felt at home again. That was an Olding look if ever he’d seen one. Steelhelmet sighed once, and began to explain.
“Our research ships in the Gamma Quadrant came under attack from an unknown force. One of the vessels, the Unbendable, was able to communicate with their attackers before escaping back to the Alpha Quadrant.”
Hill remembered the Unbendable coming back through the wormhole. They had all wondered at the time (at the time! it had only been a few hours ago – it just showed how much work people had done over the last few hours) what on earth had happened to the ship to leave it in that sort of state. It was trailing bits of ship behind it.
Steelhelmet continued. “The attacking ships belong to an alien race known as the Jem’Hadar. Little is known about them, except that they seem to be the military arm of a powerful organisation within the Gamma Quadrant known as the Dominion. The original plan was for the Oddity to carry out a general recon, but now that Captain Olding has gone missing and has probably been captured, that plan has been changed. Now we’ll have to go in and try to rescue him.”
Hill nodded enthusiastically. Then a flaw presented itself. “Do we know where the captain is?”
“Last reports indicated that there was a large concentration of Jem’Hadar warships in Sector 435-667. We believe it highly probable that, if he has been captured, Olding is being held there.”
Hill thought about this, then went pale. “But how are we going to be able to attack a, er, large concentration of ships?”
Steelhelmet smiled. “That’s why they sent the Oddity to deal with the Jem’Hadar.”
Great, Hill thought. They sent a nutcase in a captain’s uniform to help them rescue Olding. This was going to be more difficult than he had foreseen. Nevertheless, it had to be done. Steelhelmet had not finished his talk yet.
“We won’t be needing your little runabouts on this mission. But if you really want to come along, then you’re welcome to join me on the Oddity.”
--
That did it, Hill thought. He wasn’t going to stand for this. As Steelhelmet left the station to prepare the Oddity for departure, Hill brought Wall, Damerell, Barfoot and a junior lieutenant called Duffy for a conference.
When they had arrived, Hill explained what he wanted them to do. “I don’t trust Steelhelmet to pull this one off by himself. I want you lot to stand by with the runabouts in case it all goes wrong.” They all nodded sagely, and Hill prayed that they would actually remember to do it. He tapped his comm badge. “Counsellor, Doctor, please join me in Ops.”
When they arrived, he gestured to them, and stepped up onto the transporter pad. They followed him, and a second later the beam rematerialised them on the transporter pad of the Oddity.
Steelhelmet wasn’t there, but he’d sent a flunky to escort them to the bridge. It was while they were on their way that Hill truly appreciated just how big a Galaxy class starship was. When they finally arrived, all three of the DS13 visitors were struck by just how big and tidy the bridge was. At the centre of the bridge sat Steelhelmet, with his executive officer and counsellor sat on either side. The Oddity crew had thoughtfully put a few seats on one side of the bridge for Hill and the other two, but it just made them feel rather stupid, as they were sat in an out-of-the-way corner with no input whatsoever.
--
Back on DS13, Stark had found himself left in command of the station, as everyone else of command rank had left it, either on the Oddity, or sitting in the runabouts ready to clandestinely follow the starship through the wormhole. This mildly perturbed him, as he wasn’t really sure what you were supposed to do when you were in command. He hadn’t really paid attention in the past when Olding had been around, and he was now wishing that he had. He considered giving an order or two, then decided against it. Everybody seemed happy enough doing what they were doing, and why spoil it for them?
Stark began to chop carrots in preparation for a new idea for a salad he had had.
--
The Oddity had her shields up, and was cruising warily through the Delta Quadrant, all sensors at full operational capacity. Some distance behind her, two runabouts were following in her sensor blindspot. Wall and Damerell were flying the Ooze, whilst Barfoot and Duffy were trying desperately to stay out of their way in the Amazon.
On the bridge of the Oddity, Hill sat and fumed whilst Steelhelmet ponced around giving orders and striking ridiculous poses. He really wanted to be the one doing the heroic poses, and having to work with a Captain who was better at it than he was, was really quite galling. He also resented the fact that the Oddity‘s crew weren’t even treating the three of them as equals. In fact, every so often, one of the junior crew – the JUNIOR crew for heaven’s sakes – would walk past and snigger at them. Jackson had fallen asleep, and the counsellor was doing her best to follow suit. Unfortunately, she was sat next to Hill, so she was constantly disturbed by his fidgeting and crossing and uncrossing his legs.
--
Damerell had just about figured out the elementary controls on his panel on the runabout when the console in front of him started to bleep frantically. He glanced down at it, and found he was unable to decipher what on earth it was. While he dug out a copy of the Operations manual, Wall glanced across irritably at him and said, “Can’t you turn that blasted thing off?!!”
“No!! Just hang on ’til I can find out what it is!”
“Well hurry up then!!!”
Damerell abandoned further conversation in favour of hunting through the manual to find the chapter labelled ‘Alarms: What to do if they start howling at you.’ He got as far as Paragraph 3: Hit the off switch, when Wall started to whack his shoulder and gibber frantically.
“What is it now?” Damerell asked irritably.
“AAAAAAAAGH!!!” Wall said, and it was then that Damerell noticed the very large fleet of Jem’Hadar warships coming straight for the Oddity, and by inference, them.
“AAAAAAGH!!!”
--
“Shields up!” Steelhelmet yelled, and Hill gripped the arms of his chair. At least, he thought he did. Unfortunately for him, his chair had no arms, and he ended up gripping the counsellor and Doctor Jackson’s knees. Jackson woke up, yawned, and stretched a bit, and the counsellor slapped him, and said, “Unk, do you mind?!! I’d like to be the one who decides who grabs my knees thank you very much!!” Hill hurriedly removed his hands. A second later, the first shot hit them.
The Oddity lurched as a barrage of Jem’Hadar disruptor fire hit it.
--
Olding was aware of noise outside his cell. The door slid open, and two of the aliens grabbed him and pulled him outside.
“What the bluidy ‘ell are you doin’?” he bellowed, but they ignored him. Olding was dragged out into the corridor, along it into a large room which he suddenly recognised as a shuttlebay, and bundled into the Piddle. Olding didn’t know why they’d done it, and didn’t care. He fired up the engines, and headed for the now-opening bay doors. A few seconds later, the Piddle was out of the Jem’Hadar ship, and heading for the Oddity.
--
“How dare they fire at us!!” Steelhelmet bellowed. “Return fire!!” The Oddity‘s main phaser array discharged a burst of energy at the leading Jem’Hadar ship. It jolted, but continued on course.
Hill tapped his comm badge, and tried to muffle his voice as he said, “Hill to Ooze, do you copy?”
“WHAT? SPEAK UP!!” came the response. Heads turned all over the Oddity‘s bridge. Hill blushed.
“Mr Wall,” he said, “Please don’t shout.”
“WHAT? OH, sorry. Whassup, sir?”
“We’re under attack!” Hill hissed. “They are attacking in superior numbers!”
“Yes, I can see that actually.” The edge in Wall’s voice told Hill that the helmsman was not a happy bunny.
“Well, stay back! We may need you to evacuate!”
“Thank you!!!”
Hill turned his attention back to the screen. Steelhelmet had decided on a strategy, at last.
“Olding’s managed to escape!” he bellowed. “Alter course to intercept him. We’ll pick him up as he goes past, then get the hell out of here!!” Slowly, the Oddity swung around to close with the Piddle.
--
Olding looked at one of the tactical displays to the side of the cockpit windows. It showed just what a confused scrap was going on out there. In front of him, he could see a Galaxy-class starship hurrying towards him. Instinctively, Olding braced himself. This whole situation was shouting ambush at him. He glanced at his sensors, and…
--
Wall watched helplessly as the Oddity flew serenely, impressively, and downright stupidly straight into the path of about fifteen Jem’Hadar ships. They hit her with massive blows repeatedly. The Ooze‘s sensors showed the Oddity‘s shields failing rapidly.
“We have to do something!” Damerell shouted.
“Why are you shouting?” Wall asked. “I can hear you just fine.”
“Oh, sorry. Shouldn’t we do something?”
Wall decided to try a bit of sarcasm. “What do you suggest? Taking them on single-handed, perhaps?”
“We could beam Commander Hill and the others out of there!”
“I dunno…”
Wall never got to finish, as suddenly the comm signal bleeped, and Hill’s slightly panicky voice screamed, “Hill to Ooze!!! Three for emergency beam-out!!!! NOW!!!!!”
“Alright, alright,” Wall grumbled, and Damerell pressed the buttons that dragged Commander Hill, the counsellor, and Doctor Jackson onto the transporter platform.
Hill stepped off it and said, “Well done. Now, you’d better beam off Captain Steelhelmet…” His words trailed off as the Oddity blew up. “Okay, forget that idea. Let’s just get out of here!”
“What about Captain Olding?” Jackson asked.
Hill pointed wordlessly to the Piddle, which was accelerating away from them towards the wormhole at terrifying speed. Jackson shut up. The Ooze and Amazon swung around in space, and followed the Piddle back through the wormhole into the Alpha Quadrant.
--
Back on the station, Olding called a staff meeting. The senior staff clustered around the status table in Ops, faces tense. Olding took his time preparing his notes for his speech. He knew that they would only remember what he was about to say if he kept them waiting for a while. So, after five minutes, when the fidget-sensor alarm he had had set up on the desk in his office warbled that the crew was ready, he left his office, and stood at the top of the steps.
“Mornin’. As you all know, t’ Gamma Quadrant is home to a hostile force. We do not know if their intentions are expansionist, or if they simply do not wish intruders into their territory. If it is t’ former, then this station will be t’ first battlefield. We must be ready to hold this area of space at all times. Good luck everybody.”
There was a pause, then Wall said, “Um… I understood everything up to “Mornin'”. Haha.”
--
Olding lay back on his bed and groaned loudly. He had just come back from the rather elaborate memorial service that Wall had put together in honour of Fred, who had been left behind on the Dominion fleet. As part of the service, the station’s crew had been required to sing ‘Rawhide’ from beginning to end. Twice. Olding’s knuckles clutched reflexively at the bed as he thought about it. Whilst Fred had been a good barman, he hadn’t been that good. And now the bar had been sealed up, until Starfleet could find another civilian contractor crazy enough to come out and work with this crew.
It had been two weeks since he’d put DS13 on alert in case of a Dominion invasion, and still there had been nothing. However, Marquis activity in the Badlands had increased substantially, and Starfleet had advised that Olding check it out. In vain had he argued that the station needed to be fully manned in the event of an attack; Starfleet had insisted. Olding had begun to suspect that Starfleet was deliberately trying to kill them. (Unbeknownst to him, he was exactly right, although the knowledge would have been of little comfort to him.)
However, orders were orders, so Olding had scheduled a mission to the Badlands for tomorrow morning. He would take all three runabouts with minimum crews, and leave Hill in command of the station. That was all he could do really. Whilst grumbling to himself over Starfleet’s bluidy stupid operational plans, Olding nodded off.
--
The next morning, he arrived at runabout Pad B to find that the counsellor was already there. He had decided to take her along with him in the Piddle, whilst Wall and Damerell flew the Ooze, and Barfoot and Duffy flew the Amazon. Climbing aboard, he nodded to her as she bustled about getting the pre-flight checks done. One of the luxuries of being captain, he mused, was that you didn’t have to bother with all the menial tasks any more.
“Mornin’, lass.”
“Good morning, sir,”
“How’s it looking?”
“Pretty good.”
“Good.” Olding began the startup sequence. As the runabout’s engines warmed up and the familiar subharmonic rumble began, Olding opened a channel to Ops.
“Commander, we’re ready to launch.” There was a long pause. Olding suspected that Hill was having problems coping with more than one runabout launching at the same time. This was confirmed by Hill’s general signal.
“Ops to runabouts. Hold on to your hats! We’re going to launch!!!”
The lift accelerated the Piddle upwards at terrifying speed, the hatch rapidly whacked open, and the Piddle was catapulted into space without Olding having to even think about touching the thruster controls.
Recovering his senses, Olding opened a channel to the runabouts.
“Olding to runabouts. Take up formation Olding Alpha, and follow me.”
There was a long silence. Olding sighed. “Just follow me.”
The runabouts engaged warp drive, and sped off towards the Badlands.
--
Some hours later, they dropped out of warp on the verge of the Badlands plasma storms.
“This is it,” Olding breathed.
The Piddle cautiously moved forwards into the Badlands on impulse power, shields raised and sensors at full. As had been previously discussed, the Ooze and the Amazon spread out to search separate areas. They were engaged on a search-and-destroy mission, or, to be more accurate, a search-and-completely-fail-to-find-anything mission. Olding and the counsellor sat tensely, watching their sensors for the slightest hint of anything unusual. All around them, the plasma storms crackled and burst, sending out showers of ionized plasma into the surrounding space.
Aboard the Amazon, Duffy was just returning from recalibrating the aft sensors (at least, that’s what he had told Barfoot. In reality, he’d been fiddling with the runabout’s command protocols. He was the one and only member of the Richard Hill Vital Systems Hacking Fan Club.) when the ship was hit by something with devastating force.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I dunno,” Barfoot shouted back. “It could have been anything!! Plasma discharge, Marquis attack, anything!”
As the Amazon tumbled, Duffy caught sight of something pass across its bows. He didn’t recognise the design, but it sure as hell wasn’t a plasma storm.
“We’d better tell the others we’re under attack,” he said.
“Why?” Barfoot asked.
“Because we’re under attack!”
“Oh. Okay.”
--
Wall and Damerell were singing along to ‘Whiter shade of Pale’ when the call came in. Hurriedly shutting off the speakers, they changed course, raised shields and armed the weapons. Close behind them came the Piddle, with Olding cursing.
He’d been secretly hoping that they wouldn’t find anything, so that he could report that the area was quiet to Starfleet and not have to do any more risky patrols like this one. It was bad enough that they just had to sit and wait for the Dominion to attack, without having the Marquis to worry about as well.
When they arrived at the site of the Amazon‘s distress call, it was to find five Marquis ships surrounding the hapless runabout. Olding opened hailing frequencies. Maybe these terrorists would listen to reason.
“This is Captain Christopher Olding of the Federation Station Deep Space Thirteen. Please identify yourselves, over.”
There was a crackle of static, and then a voice responded, “This is the Marquis.”
Olding decided to play it for laughs. “A big tent?”
“Not that sort of Marquis! We are the freedom-fighting organisation known as the Marquis! You have intruded in our territory. We have already damaged one of your ships. Either leave now or we will be forced to fire on you.”
Olding, by no means anxious to start a fight, saw his straw and grasped at it. “Can we take our runabout with us?”
“By all means. We aren’t barbarians.”
“Thank you.” Cutting the channel, Olding tapped his comm-badge, and said, “Olding to Ooze. Go and tow t’ Amazon out of there. We’ll cover you from here.”
Turning to the counsellor, he said “Set up a phaser pre-lock on the lead Marquis ship. Just in case.”
“Right.”
--
Wall and Damerell had practised this tractoring lark in the holo-suites in Fred’s Bar over quite a while, in fact, they had become the butt of a lot of disgusting jokes stemming from the amount of time they spent in the holo-suites together. So they were pretty confident that they could easily tractor the Amazon and pull her out. So it was a bit of a surprise when they launched three microtorpedoes at one of the Marquis ships instead.
“Oh, shit!” Damerell said. “Do you think anyone’ll notice?” The torpedoes impacted against the Marquis ships, not even damaging it slightly, but angering the other Marquis ships into opening fire with everything they had against the Piddle.
“Do you know what I think?” Wall said. “I think that Captain Olding is really going to be pissed off.”
He was right there. Olding was almost literally spitting flames as he swung the Piddle round and opened up with the phasers, striking the leading Marquis ship and knocking it out of formation. Realising that they were going to be hopelessly outnumbered, Olding was trying to cause enough damage to disorient the Marquis long enough for the Starfleet ships to get away. He therefore ordered the counsellor to target the next ship in line, and a second later the Piddle opened fire once more.
Duffy and Barfoot had been frantically trying to get some sort of power through to the engines so that they could make a getaway when the firing started. That had intensified their efforts. Barfoot was refitting isolinear chips faster than an android on drugs, while Duffy sat at the helm panicking.
“ComeoncomeoncomeoncomeonCOMEON!!!” he said.
Barfoot was too busy overheating his fingers to answer. Finally, the thruster status light blinked green, and Duffy slammed down on the buttons. The Amazon jumped forwards, narrowly avoiding colliding with the Ooze.
Aboard the Ooze, Wall and Damerell had seriously considered defecting to the Marquis to escape Olding’s wrath. Several blasts from Marquis phaser banks convinced them that that was not a workable option. So they were now concentrating on staying alive.
Damerell kept repeating, “He’s gonna kill us!” over and over again like some sort of mantra, while Wall typed in random manoeuvres to the helm, in the faint hope that flying like a total prat would keep the runabout in one piece. Every now and then, a Marquis ship would pass through their sights, and Damerell would try a shot. They had no time to find out if they hit or not, as Wall’s manoeuvres meant that they had no clear idea of how the battle was going.
Olding’s temper had calmed down a bit, replaced by good, old-fashioned fear when he realised that, between the Amazon trying to crawl out of the battle zone, and the Ooze carrying out moves that were putting her structural integrity in extreme danger, he and the counsellor were the only ones carrying the fight to the enemy.
“Prepare to fire!” he said.
The counsellor looked at him disapprovingly. Olding swallowed.
“Please. Ma’am.”
The counsellor opened up with everything the runabout was carrying. “Thank you,” she said.
The fire hit one of the Marquis ships that had already been badly damaged. The first blast dropped its shields, and then a random hit from Damerell destroyed it entirely. The other Marquis ships, seeing the destruction of their comrade, retreated rapidly. Olding breathed a sigh of relief, and made preparations to take the Amazon in tow.
--
Several hours later, runabout Pad A was the scene of utter carnage. Olding was giving Wall and Damerell a dressing down, tearing off a strip, and generally getting really nasty with them.
“You blithering idiots!!!” he shouted. “Do you have no conception of reality? Only you could mistake t’ phaser arrays from t’ tractor beam controls!!!! Are you deliberately trying to start a war here?!!”
Wall and Damerell tried to hide behind each other.
Olding calmed down. “As your punishment, you can go and sit in t’ Ooze on t’ other end of the wormhole, and do nothing.
If t’ Jem’Hadar turn up, you can come back. If not, then you can stay there until I send someone to bring you back. Now go!!”
--
Olding reached Ops just as the Ooze hit the wormhole’s event horizon. He watched impassively until the wormhole swallowed the runabout, then stalked off into his office.
Outside, in Ops, Mr Bleep clanked by, clutching a padd. Hill grabbed the padd as Bleep went by, and read it. It turned out to be a report on Bleep’s current leg status. Hill dropped the padd in boredom. How likely was it that anything interesting was going to happen here?
Several hours later, something did. The wormhole opened, and the Ooze shot through at unbelievable speed. Olding, alerted by the sudden bleating of an alarm, emerged from his office, and said, “Open a channel to t’ Ooze.”
“Channel open sir,” Stark reported.
“…OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGodOHMYGOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” came over the speakers. Olding struggled to make himself heard over the din.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOIN”?!!!” he shouted.
“…OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMY… Ahem. Ooze to DS13. We have a situation report to, er, report.”
“Yes, Mr Damerell?”
“There are about, um, well, let’s say, no, no, more like, on the other hand maybe, no…”
“Get on with it, Mr Damerell.”
“Ah. Right. There-are-over-forty-Jem’Hadar-ships-coming-in-our-direction. Sir.”
“Oh, bugger.” Olding said under his breath. Then, louder, “Red Alert!! Battle Stations!!! Launch all runabouts!!”
“No, no, hang on a second…”
“What is it now?”
“They’re about forty-five minutes behind us, sir.”
“Oh. Right. Why didn’t you say so? Stand down from Red Alert. Cancel runabout launch.”
--
Wall and Damerell landed the Ooze, but didn’t report to Ops. Olding gave them the benefit of the doubt for fifteen minutes, but, as the tension in Ops grew higher, he decided to find out what they were doing. As he arrived outside Pad A, he found a big sign Blu-tacked to the door saying ‘Warning! Gravity turned off!’
He activated the monitor by the door, and stared in shock at the scene it revealed. Wall and Damerell had removed the micro-torpedo launcher from the top of the Ooze and were replacing it with a FULL-SCALE launcher they had found from somewhere. As Olding watched, Wall dragged a (presumably live) torpedo across the deck. Olding decided to get away from this area as soon as possible. With any luck, he could clear the blast radius before anything serious happened.
Returning hurriedly to Ops, he found that the rest of the senior staff had assembled. Olding, trying to put the Wall/Damerell situation out of his mind, gave them a briefing.
“Mr Hill, you’ll be in command o’ t’ runabouts. Counsellor, you will organise security in t’ event o’ Jem’Hadar troops boarding the station. Mr Stark, you’re here with me in Ops. Which is a point. Has anyone told Starfleet yet?”
There was an embarrassed silence. Olding sighed.
“Send this message to Starfleet. DS13 under attack by superior Jem’Hadar forces. Request re-inforcements.” He turned to face Ops in general. “Bluidy good luck to t’ lot o’ ye.”
--
Some time later, the Piddle, Ooze and Amazon were sitting one hundred metres from the mouth of the wormhole, DS13‘s shields were flickering like Channel 5 on a bad day, and her weapons were armed, and everyone was feeling their blood-pressure rise irreversibly.
The Ooze now sported a full-sized photon torpedo launcher, juiced-up phaser banks, and an engine originally intended for a fast scout. The power curve from her warp core was a steep one, but, as Wall had said, “It’s not as if we’re going to be around for long, so, LET’S HAVE SOME FUN!!!!”
In the Piddle, Hill and Barfoot were anxiously sweating buckets, while in the Amazon, Duffy and Bell, a lieutenant junior grade, were having arguments about who got to do the shooting.
In Ops, Olding had evacuated all non-essential personnel. So there was now just him, Stark and Mr Bleep. The counsellor had organised everyone else into a small army, given them phaser rifles, and positioned them around the station, with instructions to “Kick the living shit out of the Jem’Hadar first, and ask questions later.”
Doctor Jackson had barricaded himself in the Infirmary, armed with his finest scalpel set, determined to inflict serious damage to the first Jem’Hadar who had the temerity to set foot past the doorway.
Stark had been putting the final touches to his victory celebration cake when an alarm bleeped, and he said, “Reading increased neutrino output from the wormhole! Was that right?”
“Yes, that was right,” Olding said grimly. “Here we go. Red Alert!”
--
A few seconds later, the wormhole opened, and Jem’Hadar warships began to swarm through.
“Fire!” Hill said, and the Piddle opened up with full phasers.
Aboard the Ooze, Wall rubbed his hands and said, “Torpedo launch pattern Delta!”
Damerell, who was practically drooling over the new control panel, paid absolutely no attention to what had been said, slapped the buttons hard and randomly, and said, “Torpedoes away!!”
Three Jem’Hadar ships blew up, and Wall’s cry of “YES!!” could be heard aboard the station without a comm channel being open.
In the Amazon, Duffy and Bell were still arguing about who got to fire, and didn’t notice that they had two enemy ships bearing down on them. By the time that Duffy looked up and realised their dilemma, the closest ship was two inches in front of them. The Amazon blew apart without a sound from either of the two hapless crewmembers.
--
On DS13, Olding was watching the master situations board. It showed the main body of the Jem’Hadar ships heading straight for the station itself.
“Arm phasers,” he said, “And be ready to fire on my command.”
Bleep pressed the appropriate buttons, and posed his fingers over the fire controls. Olding waited for a few more seconds, then said, “Fire!!” The station opened up, damaging several ships that were flying past it. As they went past, Bleep lobbed off a salvo of torpedoes, taking out most of that wave of attackers.
Wall and Damerell were having the time of their lives. They had trashed loads of enemy ships, in the process using up all of their torpedoes. But the phasers were still working, and there were still more Jem’Hadar ships to be killed, so they were still happy. The fun of being able to kill things time after time was, so far, counter-balancing the fear of being killed.
Hill and Barfoot were carrying out a more orderly war, manoeuvring in standard evasive patterns, and launching off torpedoes only when they had a definite lock, rather than when they saw something possibly pass past them, as the Ooze had been doing. This had, perversely, given them less success than Wall and Damerell. Hill, however, had a slightly better situational awareness, and so he was the one that saw the formation of Jem’Hadar ships break through and head for Bagel.
“Ooze, there’s about seven Jem’Hadar ships heading for Bagel!! Follow me, I’m going in!” The two runabouts broke off from the battle around the station, and headed for the planet.
Aboard the station, Olding was coping reasonably well, but the sheer overwhelming numbers of the attack were proving to be too much for the station. Their shields were down to 37% and there was no time to allow the power to build up again. They had run out of torpedoes some time ago, and were relying on phasers to do the damage. Olding was trying to think of some nifty strategy to defeat the Jem’Hadar, but, unfortunately, most of his strategies involved starship-type manoeuvres, and so consequently were a little pointless aboard a space station. All he could do was keep the phasers firing. He had to find something to fill time, and make use of what little resources he had left.
“Bleep… wzrtfgl… Mind the gap… four enemy ships on collision course, sir.”
Olding thought fast. “Prepare to lower t’ shields.”
Stark gaped.
“Just do it! On my mark. Three, two, one, now!” DS13 shields shimmered out of existence a second before the Jem’Hadar ships hit them. The ships, unable to correct their course, passed through the empty space where the shields had been and past the station.
“Shields up again! Fire!” Bleep and Stark pounded their consoles, Stark through nerves and Bleep because he was just built that way. Then, the inevitable happened.
“Bleep… wzrtfgl… Mind the gap… Shields have failed, sir.”
A few seconds later, Stark reported, “We have incoming transporter beams! We’re being boarded!”
“Oh, bugger!”
--
Counsellor Hill got her first look at the Jem’Hadar as ten of them appeared two metres in front of her. Deciding to save the open-jawed shock for later, she blew them away with a burst from her phaser rifle. Then, slapping her comm-badge, she yelled, “We’ve been boarded! Pin ’em down!!”
She set about marshalling her forces on the Promenade. They had set up barricades at fifteen metre intervals, but hadn’t manned them until they knew where the Jem’Hadar were coming from. Now they knew, they could start kicking some serious backside. The counsellor ran from barricade to barricade, ostensibly to give orders, but in reality to ensure she didn’t miss out on any of the fun. This sure beat hell out of therapy sessions with Ensign Ingram helping him to get over the loss of his gerbil.
As she ran, she wished that the phaser rifles had a pump-action grip. It would make them so much better-looking. A Jem’Hadar soldier rounded the corner at the same moment as she did. Swinging the rifle by the barrel, the counsellor clobbered the hapless alien smartly across the chops, and added a bayonet to her wish-list of extras for the rifle.
--
In the Infirmary, Doctor Jackson tensed himself. He had sealed the Infirmary doors, sent the patients home (they had been given instructions on how to administer their own medication), and sharpened all his knives until they could have cut through deckplates without blunting. Selecting a number five scalpel, he lifted his arm into a throwing posture as he heard pounding noises coming from the other side of the door.
--
Hill was frantically trying to stop the Jem’Hadar attack force from reaching Bagel. They had taken down two so far, but that still left five heading for the planet. Wall and Damerell had calmed down a bit now that the initial rush of battle had subsided, and Damerell was starting to gibber again. Hill could only hope that they would hold together for a few more minutes. The Ooze fired again, and a third Jem’Hadar ship exploded. Four left, and the first ones were entering the atmosphere.
“Oh, damn! Looks like we’ll have to follow them in!” Hill said.
Barfoot was too busy trying to adjust the weapons systems to cope with the extra strain, so didn’t respond.
Aboard the Ooze, Damerell was watching the plasma coil temperatures rise and rise as they overtaxed the runabout’s power systems.
--
“Erm, I think we’ll have to stop firing soon. We’re, uh, about to overheat the engines.”
“We do that all the time!” Wall said cheerily.
“No, I mean REALLY overheat the engines!! As in, total meltdown overheat the engines!!!!!”
“Oh. Right. Okay.” Wall ceased fire, suddenly noticing the interesting way that the phaser controls appeared to be getting longer. The effect was caused, he realised, by the fact that the panel was in fact melting.
--
In Ops, Olding knew that their usefulness had ended with the arrival of the Jem’Hadar troops. Ops had ceased to be the nerve centre of the station; now, it was just another room to be held at all costs. He drew a phaser from the munitions locker, and readied himself. Unless they beamed in, there were three ways the Jem’Hadar could get in: through the emergency access hatch, the turbolift shaft, or the auxiliary entrance on the port side of Ops.
“Mr Bleep, stand over the emergency access hatch, would you?” Olding said. That took care of one entrance. He and Stark took position covering the other two entrances. Now all they could do was wait.
--
The Infirmary doors shattered. Jackson threw his scalpel into the smoke. He was rewarded by a scream, and could dimly make out someone falling backwards. He really hoped that it was a Jem’Hadar. Luckily for him, it was. The next few soldiers through fell victim to a variety of sharp implements, from scalpels through small saws to double-headed axes.
Finally, he lifted his number three hedge-trimmer, and set to work with a vengeance. The Infirmary walls acquired a new paint effect as a gruesome mix of blood and Ketrasel White sprayed everywhere. Unfortunately, they just kept coming, apparently unhindered by the loss of their comrades. The hedge-trimmer got stuck in some body armour, and Jackson, realising he was beginning to run out of cutting tools, resorted to throwing furniture. Thus, the next soldier through the gap in the doors got clobbered by an airborne stool.
--
The counsellor’s forces had met with some success. The Jem’Hadar seemed disinclined to use more than two beam-in points. Unfortunately, once they were on the station, they could shift at will using some bizarre device that was a cross between a cloak and a phase-shifter. In many areas of the station, the fighting had reduced to the hand-to-hand level. On the Promenade, however, Counsellor Hill and her troops ruled supreme. At the expense of melting down every fitting in the joint, she had adopted the tactic of firing more or less continuously. This seemed to have the desired effect, i.e. it killed off the Jem’Hadar.
She had noticed they were losing ground, though. Her forces were slowly being forced back into the area around the Infirmary. There was a trail of phaser rifle power packs marking their retreat, as well as dead Jem’Hadar. The counsellor decided to change tactics.
“Form two lines!” she yelled.
Hurriedly, the mixture of security, science and command officers and crew who formed the remnants of the DS13 defence force formed up into two lines.
“Right, prepare for volley fire!” The others looked at her incredulously.
“Well, it worked for Michael Caine.” There was a silence. Even the Jem’Hadar looked dubious.
“First rank, fire!” A short burst of phaser fire knocked out the leading enemy soldiers.
“Second rank, fire!” As the first rank knelt to let their comrades fire, another blast rang out.
“They’re getting too close! First rank, fire, then fall back!” The first rank stood, fired, then ran back behind the second rank.
“Second rank, fire! Fall back! First rank, fire! Fall back!”
Slowly, and devastatingly, the Starfleet troops fell back towards the Infirmary in a relatively disciplined fashion. These new tactics were working surprisingly well, but they couldn’t hold out for much longer.
--
The Piddle bounced viciously as it passed into the atmosphere. Ahead, Hill could see the last two Jem’Hadar ships. He locked on to the portside vessel, and fired. The ship jolted, and the two of them broke formation and headed off in opposite directions.
“Mr Wall, follow the starboard-side vessel. I’ll take the port!” Hill’s voice over the comm channel was getting very distorted.
“Right! Okay!” Wall was suddenly aware that the ride was getting rather bumpy. Bumpier, in fact, than it really should be. Then, there was a massive BANG! and it smoothed out.
“Erm, we seem to have just lost the torpedo launcher,” Damerell said.
“Who cares? It wasn’t like we were gonna be able to use it again.”
“Good point!” The Ooze, suddenly freed of the extra weight, leapt forwards, and banked right after its quarry.
--
Counsellor Hill’s phaser rifle was beginning to overheat now. She had been firing almost continuously for over half-an-hour, and had gone through thirteen power packs. Now it seemed as if the barrel was drooping a bit. She was now just outside the Infirmary doors, where Doctor Jackson was kneeling down, pulling out knives from fallen Jem’Hadar. Behind her, less than a few metres away, were a thin line of Starfleet officers and crew, all clutching phasers, phaser rifles, captured disruptors, sharp sticks etc. The line had broken down some minutes before. They had about five minutes left.
Dropping the rifle and drawing a hand phaser, she prepared to go down in style.
--
Hill was having difficulties with this one. It was jinking from side to side, avoiding his fire very effectively. Try as he might, he just couldn’t get a decent lock onto it. Swearing viciously, Hill tried the dispersion effect: firing wildly in an attempt to fill all the available space in front of him so that he would eventually clobber the Jem’Hadar ship. He wondered how the Ooze was doing.
--
Ops was under siege. Jem’Hadar troops had tried to get in through the emergency access hatch, but Mr Bleep’s weight on the hatch had prevented them from making any progress. Unfortunately, they were trying to get in through the turbolift shaft, and the auxiliary entrance simultaneously, thus forcing Olding and Stark to split their fire. This meant that there was only one phaser trained on each entrance. There was a big pile of bodies by the lip of the turbolift shaft, but each time the Jem’Hadar got a little further out before Olding shot them. It was only a matter of time before they overran Ops.
--
Wall and Damerell were also having difficulties with their target. It had got on their tail twice, and knocked their shields down to about twenty percent. And now it had disappeared from view again.
“Hang on!” Damerell said.
“No, no, don’t be daft, they couldn’t pull off the same stunt three times and get away with it…” Wall said, but got cut off by the sounds of phasers striking the hull.
“Shields have failed! We’re losing engine power!” Damerell howled.
“Okay, so they could,” Wall conceded. “But, then, they won’t be expecting this!”
He hit full reverse on the thruster control panel, and the Ooze stopped dead. The Jem’Hadar ship, flying closely astern of them, flew straight into the back of the runabout. It completely annihilated the extra engine bits Wall and Damerell had added, and shortened the runabout’s overall length by about three feet. But it also punched the Jem’Hadar ship clean out of the sky.
Wall checked the damage report. “We can survive this one!” he said. “If I can get us back out of the atmosphere, we’ll be able to coast back to the station!” He piled on the thruster power, and theOoze‘s auxiliary systems, protected by the sheer mass of extra garbage that had been spot-welded onto the back, kicked in, lifting the runabout slowly towards space.
Then, the call from the Piddle came in.
--
This Jem’Hadar ship was good. Too damn good, Hill thought with no little annoyance. It had broken off, and was currently on his tail. The same skill and persistence it had displayed earlier in avoiding Hill’s fire, it now employed in directing fire onto him. Barfoot was busy trying to divert all available power to the rear shields, while Hill took his hands off the controls to tap his badge and call for assistance.
“Ooze, this is the Piddle, requesting HELP! We are under attack!!!”
“Oh, sod! It never rains but it bloody well chucks it down!!” Wall said. “Do we have any phaser power left?” he asked Damerell.
“The answer to that lies somewhere between yes and no, but closer to no.”
“I see.”
At that point, the thrusters failed, gravity took over, and the Ooze began to fall. “The way I see it, there’s only one thing we can do!” Wall said through gritted teeth.
Damerell looked at him blankly, then realisation arrived, and he looked around frantically for the exit. “No, no, no, I don’t think this is a good plan. In fact I think this is a very BAD plan!!!!!!”
“It’s the only one we have!” Wall said, using the small reserves of power they had left to change the runabout’s course.
“I was afraid of that.”
Below them, the Jem’Hadar ship was still hanging tightly onto the Piddle‘s tail. Damerell tapped his comm-badge, and said, “Don’t worry, Commander! We’re coming!”
The Ooze accelerated towards terminal velocity. Wall and Damerell held onto the console for dear life as the runabout collided stern-first with the Jem’Hadar ship. This time, the impact ripped off the entire stern section of the Ooze. The power levels fell to nought, and Wall hit his comm-badge.
Hill had seen the explosion from behind him, and pulled away in relief. The Jem’Hadar ship was gone, and so, he realised with shock, was the Ooze. Then, a message came through from Wall. The channel was weak, and he could only make out Wall’s words with difficulty.
“Sir… please tell Captain Olding… we didn’t screw up this time… Please tell him it wasn’t our fault…”
“Don’t worry, Mr Wall. I’ll tell him,” Hill said. “Good luck.”
His only answer was a hysterical laugh, abruptly cut off.
Hill took the Piddle back into space, to see a flotilla of Jem’Hadar ships coming straight for him. He snarled, and shifted shield power to double-front. He wouldn’t let them past. To his intense shock, the entire job lot of them turned around and began to head back for the wormhole at top speed.
Hill and Barfoot began to scream and shout things along the lines of “We are the greatest!!!” and “Did we kick butt, or did we kick butt?!!”
--
The counsellor dropped her empty phaser, and grabbed a chair leg. She began to beat a Jem’Hadar about the head rapidly, whilst around her similar things were happening. The phaser rifles were empty, the sharp sticks were blunted, and even Doctor Jackson’s scalpels were getting broken. There was only so many times you could use them for bayonets. Realising they were fighting a hopeless battle, Counsellor Hill and her troops desperately held their ground. The counsellor’s chair leg splintered, and she poked the Jem’Hadar in the eyes, grunting in satisfaction as he went down, clutching at his eyes and screaming. But there was another one there. The counsellor decided on a little anatomical experiment. As the soldier got close enough, she brought her knee up firmly. The Jem’Hadar emitted a little high-pitched squeak, and collapsed.
“Doctor!” she shouted.
“Yeah?”
“A note for your files! The Jem’Hadar keep their genitalia in exactly the same place we, well, you, do!”
“Oh, right! That’s quite interesting, actually!”
In Ops, Olding and Stark had fallen back to a defensive position behind Mr Bleep. Their phasers had run out, and Stark had been forced to sacrifice his victory cake to slow down a platoon of Jem’Hadar. Olding was busy throwing data-padds and things. It was obvious that the station was about to be overrun.
--
Hill was still chasing the Jem’Hadar ships at full speed, all the while wondering why they were actually running away from him. The Piddle had taken so much damage, however, that they weren’t able to catch up in time to stop the Jem’Hadar fleet swinging past DS13 before flying into the wormhole. He cheered as the last one disappeared.
“I don’t believe it!” he said to Barfoot. “All by ourselves, we scared ’em off!!! This is definitely one for the history books!”
“Erm, well, actually…” Barfoot soundlessly indicated the rear sensor screen.
Hill was very annoyed to see that it hadn’t just been him in his runabout that the Jem’Hadar had been running away from. It had also been the small matter of forty-plus starships that had just entered the system.
--
The counsellor suddenly realised she was clobbering empty air. She stopped, and looked around. The Jem’Hadar had all disappeared. All around her, other Starfleet officers and crew were doing exactly the same thing: looking around gormlessly at the lack of opposition. Up in Ops, Stark was busy trying to scrape bits of cake off the face of a splurged Jem’Hadar soldier. Olding picked himself up from where he’d been forced to hide under the toppled Mr Bleep. It seemed the battle was over.
--
Some hours later, Bagellian forces were busy checking out the crash-sites of the Jem’Hadar ships and the Ooze, when they heard voices.
“Ow!”
“What are you moaning about? I’m much more badly injured than you!!”
“What?!! Bloody cheek!!! Have you seen the state of my arm?!!!”
“Your arm?!!! I’ve got a hole in my leg big enough to stand a glass up in!!!!!!”
“No you don’t!!! Look…”
“OW!!!!!! You didn’t have to jab your finger in there!!!”
Wall and Damerell, it seemed, were little the worse for wear.
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