The Ocracoke limped across open space. Parade protocol kept the warp engines locked out, and soon Starfleet would be on their way. Starbase 74 might be on the fringes of Federation space, but it would be easy work for some frigate patrolling along the Klingon border to wheel around and run them down.
They needed stealth, and Dex was rubbing a budding migraine out of her forehead to figure out where they’d find it.
“Varug. You know any Romulans?”
The old Klingon laughed and shook his head. “Y’can’t just plug a cloaking device into a Federater ship. Good thinking, though. We’ve got to find somewhere to lick our wounds before they’re on us.”
“Any thoughts on that?”
“Ehh, I been banging my loaf against it. Nothin’ concrete, but you might run inventory on this tub, see if there’s a… whacheecallit.”
Dex blinked, folded her arms across her chest, and waited. He’d get there. He always got there. The old man had seen a lot, all sorts of tricks in this campaign or that, from his side or the other.
“We can’t use warp. But we got shields.”
“And stealth technology has a notoriously steep energy cost,” Dex confirmed.
“Ought to see if we can get the cores into diagnostic mode. That’d let us throttle ‘em without actually taking off.”
“And… feed the warp plasma bleed from the engines into the shield emitters?”
“Aye! Battle of… Mizar? Bah, it was near Mizar. Asteroid field. We were being scuttled by this Vulcan ship, they wanted to force us to land on this mining colony… I forget why. Think they shot us full’a holes. Captain didn’t like the idea of bein’ taken captive- ha, and he nearly got a knife through the back for this little trick until he compared it to a Monarian Viper…”
“Varug,” Dex intoned, rolling her wrist in the universal gesture for ‘wrap it up.’
“…Right, right, well, once we realized we were acting like a dangerous serpent, that was good enough for any warrior. Rotate and scatter the shields to create a, a… ‘deflector curtain,’ around the ship, and that curtain all the more impenetrable thanks to the boost from the warp core.”
“We’re lit up like an active vessel in parade mode. If we want this curtain to work, we need to show up on sensors as scrap metal. Can this curtain mask our impulse emissions?”
“No, no. But… ah, you ever get behind the wheel of a car?”
“No.”
“Bah, you should. They’re great fun. Absolute death traps, but good to temper a warrior’s heart. Here’s what we do. You shut everything down, and vent some, eh… nonessentials from cargo. I saw plenty of garbage in there. We ramp up to maximum impulse, shroud the ship in garbage, and then coast under cloak-shields while it’s all shut down.”
“Starfleet reads us as space junk and passes on by. Meanwhile we stay on course for Titus IV, and restore impulse once we’re in the clear. Hah! Varug, where would I be without you?”
“Stark naked on Betazed, being married off to some oversexed bimbo of a man with no sense of adventure. Ought to be grateful I’m protecting you from that.”
“Only every day, old man. Keep your hands on the controls. I’ll radio up once I’m in engineering.”
Dex rushed to the turbolift with a spring in her step, relieved to have a plan and excited to stick it to Starfleet all over again. The old button-and-handle controls gave her pause, but in a way it felt right not to have voice activation. This ship needed to run quiet, and even though there was no sensor in the galaxy that’d pick up a single voice in a distant starship, the hush came naturally.
First stop, engineering. A Starfleet captain- which she never was- had to know enough about engineering to know what their science officers were talking about. She’d only ever formally made the rank of Commander, but that was enough training to try. The giant dual warp cores were dormant, flickering with a low green-blue glow, surrounded by wraparound consoles covered in a mixture of panels and flat chiclet buttons.
She approached the main console and set her hands on the sides of it, leaning down and squinting. She eventually took her glasses off and pulled her hair behind her ears to focus on the flat keypads.
“Okay. Step one. Diagnostic mode. Let’s get some warp access.”
Her fingers flew across the cool glass, flicking through menus. Nested deep underneath the standard functions and a handful of security prompts, she found the testing menu. She was getting tired of pretending to be Commander Calhoun, but that name had legs, and it was walking her into all sorts of places she needed to be.
“Alright. Deuterium and dilithium both look fine. Same as they ever were. Let’s agitate the plasma and wake up the EPS.” She tapped a few keys and slid her middle finger across the display, from the bottom up. Like a pair of enormous early 20th century pistons, one core fired up, then the other as the first cooled.
“Varug, can you hear me?”
“Aye. Ha- and I can see the glow on your face. Are we warp capable?”
“Not a miracle worker. But we’re warp… uh, possessive. I’m trying to figure out how to automate this, so I can start up our makeshift curtain as soon as I shunt out the garbage.”
“No such luck. Not on this old tub. But your old pal Varug has a trick for that too.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspe-“
The ship was suddenly rocked by a wave of turbulence that nearly knocked Dex from her feet. She tightened her grip on the console and looked down at the grainy projection of Varug in the tiny viewscreen window.
“Status report.”
“We’re being hailed.”
“By WHO?!”
“Federators.”
“No, no, no… no no no, come on, it’s only been a few hours! Did they FIRE on us?”
“Nay. Analysis here says it was, eh… conical photon pulse. Looks to me like wide-beam phaser fire. They were tryin’ to shove us, not punch holes.”
“So they fired on us.”
“Come now, Dexie. A man gives you a little pistol whip, that don’t mean he pulled the trigger.”
Dex frowned and set her hands on her hips. She said nothing for a beat, and Varug spoke again.
“They’re still hailing us.”
“Patch them through.”
Varug’s face was replaced by that of a sharp-looking bolian, his bifurcated face twisted up into a scowl.
“Do you presume to be in command of this vessel?” His voice was a hiss through grit teeth.
Dex could sense the frustration in him. Not just anger at a Starfleet rule broken, but embarrassment, shock, disbelief- he had balled it all up into an expression of squinting anger that betrayed everything.
“Before I answer that, I’d like to know who I’m speaking with.”
“This is Captain Rixx of the USS Thomas Paine.”
A captain. Dex had hoped for some padd-pushing security officer from Starbase 74, but instead she had to deal with a seasoned officer who had rank on her.
Wait, no he doesn’t. I’m not a Commander anymore. This is my ship, and I’m Captain.
She inhaled stiffly through her nose before answering, letting the air refill some of her deflated posture.
“Captain Dex Darro. This decommissioned vessel is being reappropriated.”
“Under whose authority?”
Careful here. Anyone she pinned this on would come for her later. She counted the seconds between breaths to maintain her composure as she dug through her own academy memories for a distracting loophole. She hadn’t thought she’d be justifying grand theft starship to anyone- she wanted it, they didn’t, obviously, so she took it.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“The Betazed Museum of Galactic Culture. We’re supposed to take this vessel there to be displayed.”
“And so you didn’t notify anyone on the starbase, and physically wrested it from the docking clamps rather than have it be released.”
“It…” Oh, hell. Dex wasn’t built for lying. Stealing, sure, but Varug was the one with the tall tales, and if he was on the viewscreen there’d be a galactic incident. “…It was supposed to be a surprise.”
Rixx’s expression flattened, and the Ocracoke shook again.
“You are now within our tractor beam. Please report to the Ocracoke-B’s brig and await arrest. And bring whatever ‘crew’ you’ve assembled with you.” He shut off the connection and the screen went black for a moment. A second later, and Varug was back.
“Dexie…”
“New plan, Varug.” Her expression was hard now, her command training coming to the fore. “We’re still venting garbage, but not to shroud us. I’m setting automatic diagnostics to run on the engines, and I need you to monitor their levels.”
“Aye? Go on, go on, this is my favorite part.”
“Be serious, old man. Once both engines have peaked, two things are going to happen. We’re going to open up the EPS conduits that feed the nacelles as wide as we can, and we’re going to vent the entire aft cargo bay into the tractor beam.”
“Oeh- Dex, you’ll kill us!”
“No, the Federation court system will. Do you want to spend any time in a penal colony?”
“Rather go down swinging, you’re right. So, what’ll this do to us?”
“The lightweight trash runs up the tractor beam and clogs the emitter. Hard to get a clean spray of particles around a couch. As soon as the emitter is disrupted, we’re going to vent the warp overload through the open conduits and burn as much plasma as we can.”
“…Like a rocket ship. Ha, like an honest-to-Kahless spaceman’s silo from a children’s book.”
“Hopefully the burning debris keeps them distracted while we make a one-time jump to Titus IV. We’ll have torched nacelles and two very unwell cores after that, so this engineer of yours better be up to snuff.”
“Nobody better,” Varug promised. “Now go, Dexie! ‘Fore I start to worry and change my mind. Figures the only way to squeeze warp out of this scow would be to break it.”
Parade protocol or not, this jump to warp would be a chemical reaction. The ship would either do it, or buckle and explode on the spot trying not to. Dex prayed to her lucky stars for the former as she set a five-minute timer and rushed to the turbolift. Bottom deck. Remember to grab the handle, not just say it. She sprinted down the hall to aft cargo and looked inside, counting the seconds in her head. Was there anything she wanted to keep? Anything she couldn’t replace?
And then she saw it. Sitting on top of an old coffee table, which itself was flipped upside down, wedged into an L-shaped sofa for space.
A brown leather briefcase. And just between the little gold latches, a nameplate.
Captain Mark Herman Gaskill.
She rushed for it, her heart pounding away with the seconds. This was foolish, but a suitcase like that might be full of shortcuts. Access codes, notes, personal logs- she needed them to keep this from happening again. She felt the ship lurch under the pull of the tractor beam, and her boots hammered against the diamond plate flooring as she leapt over lamps and bookshelves. Three hundred seconds had become thirty before she knew it, but- with a whoop of success- she wrapped her arms around the case and jumped back toward the door, shattering glass and scattering antique books along the way. With so few seconds to spare that she didn’t dare keep counting, she felt the rush of wind as the door slid shut behind her, and then shouted the words that would make all this Federation terror go away:
“VENT AFT CARGO BAY, AUTHORIZATION CALHOUN ALPHA TWO-NINE! GO!”
She was thrown to the ground by the force of their takeoff. Two centuries’ worth of detritus rapidly shot up the tractor beam just as planned, and she could hear Varug’s madman laughter crackling through her combadge as he brought the impulse engines up to maximum- and then the EPS conduits flooded with warp plasma, causing a devastating ignition that violently threw them clear of the Thomas Paine and across space from one point to the next in a single sickening instant.
There were sparks. There were fires.
“Status,” Dex groaned into her badge.
“We’re on Titus IV,” Varug wheezed.
“On?!”
“Cut into atmo. We’re going down. Left nacelle’s completely detached. Right one’s caved in. Plasma backflow has blown into crew quarters on decks five, six, seven, into the galley, into, into…”
“We’re still aloft, Varug? We’re not in freefall?”
“Aye, not in freefall. But the hull temperature’s critical, Dexie. We’ve got to let ‘er go. We’re startin’ to drop plating.”
No. No way. Not after all the trouble they went to. Dex’s brow knit and she pulled herself to her feet.
“Not this time, Varug. We don’t fight for things we don’t intend to keep. The Ocracoke’s more than just a ship we stole, now. She’s our prize, and we fight for her.”
“You’ll surely get into Sto-vo-kor talking like that, Dexie, but if you want to live, this ain’t the way.”
Dex grew quiet and reached for her phaser. She used the flat of her thumb to quickly twist the dial to a low-intensity beam for heating. Two quick zaps and the briefcase was unlocked. She held it under her boot and pulled hard on the handle, yanking the molten clasps apart.
“Come on, Captain. Tell me something good.”
Captain Mark Gaskill was never a hero. He was the type of man to let himself grow doughy touring a relatively safe sector, let his performance record speak for itself as it remained undistinguished but otherwise squeaky clean, and retire as an admiral.
But you didn’t get there without keeping your ship in one piece, and there was more to that than just leaving it in drydock. Every captain had some trick. The flagship of the Federation could separate the saucer to protect itself. Romulan warbirds had their cloaking devices. Varug once told her of a Klingon ship that could fold its arms into the core of its body and ignite the aft thrusters with such ferocity that it would act as a giant sword, puncturing clean through an attacking ship to make its escape.
What did the Ocracoke-B have? What was its failsafe?
She opened an ancient padd and swiped through Gaskill’s logs. Most of it was uninspiring, a lot of gladhanding with ambassadors. One entry was labeled very differently, however, and she narrowed her focus to quickly read it, putting her stresses somewhere quiet, high above Varug’s panicked shouting over combadge.
“Incident Log, September 24th. Unfortunate encounter with a non-Federation species called the Q. Capricious and brazen in their behavior, they donned Starfleet uniforms and ‘volunteered’ to join our crew- though it was clear we weren’t being given much of an option. If not for Lieutenant Press thinking quickly down in the shuttle bay, we might never have been rid of them. I don’t like the idea of idiot demigods putting my crew through catastrophe drills. We’re a touring vessel, for goodness’ sake.
If you should ever run into a member of the Q continuum, take it from me- don’t accept their gifts, and don’t try to give them any of your own. We lured them into the shuttle bay, and Press invited them to go on a routine shuttle run, meet the Antedean representative for some trade talks. They took the bait- pardon the expression if you’re an Antedean reading this- and upon being “trusted” to carry out the talks became so bored that they simply vanished back into their continuum. After some explaining, we sent our actual officers down to finish up.
The Qs left a parting gift in my office, and I’ve decided to keep it in my trunk for safekeeping. Whatever it does, I don’t want it. These people are nothing but trouble.”
She was already running before Captain Gaskill had even made it clear where to go. The trunk in his office was turned on its side, flipped by the turbulence, and broken open already by the impact. The gift they left behind was apparent- a glowing white pyramid suspended in what looked to be a regular glass mason jar full of clear fluid. She used her undershirt for traction and pressed her palm against the lid, twisting it open and dumping it out on the carpet.
“Dexie, we’re getting awfully close to the ground! Hull integrity’s down to about nineteen percent! Aft plating is just… gone!”
“I don’t like to gamble, Varug, but I’m gambling. You just keep hanging on, old man. I’ve got something here.”
The little pyramid, shining with clear oil, began to glow, and then to emit a thin fog from its peak. Within that fog was the image of a smirking head.
“You’re not Gaskill. Ha, and I imagine he thought we’d forget how he ditched us.”
“Listen, there’s not enough time. I read the log, it sounds like you didn’t get what you wanted from the Ocracoke.”
“We didn’t. It was very disappointing.”
“Would you like to?”
The Q’s mouth hung open for a moment in surprise, then he laughed.
“You’re going to die, aren’t you?”
“I don’t have time to pretend we aren’t. We stole the Ocracoke and we want to keep it. We’re putting together a crew. I thought this was going to be what the humans call a genie in a bottle, but if it’s a deal with the devil instead, I’ll take that too. Just tell me where to sign.”
“Oh, I like you. The betazoids always did have a taste for risk that I found absolutely charming. I suppose that comes with the territory, when you can suss out how things feel so far ahead of time. Eliminate doubt, go with your gut-“
“Come on! Shut up and save us if you can! I’ll replicate you some damn uniforms myself, just keep this miserable old scow from flying apart so we can dock it and get ourselves a real engineer! I’m sick of pretending to be one- hell, I’m sick of pretending to be a lot of things. A captain, some human called Calhoun, ugh!”
“Ooh, listen to that desperation. I feel every bit like the proverbial cat with its proverbial mouse. But! Very well, captain. You and I will get to know each other in person after you’re nice and parked. I know a wonderful restaurant nearby.”
“Dexie?” Varug’s voice cracked like a much younger, much less leathery man. “…We’re evening out. I can pull up and put us in orbit. Hull temperature’s… cooling. What did you do?”
“Nothing you aren’t used to, old man.” She paused, shook her head, and sighed. “I just… got us into trouble.”
“If this is trouble for you, I’d hate to see a catastrophe, my girl. Just the same… somehow, we’re okay.”
Sixty miles below, a Vulcan in a beige jumpsuit with bushy sideburns wiped his forehead with a rag and stared at the moon, puzzled. He’d just watched a shooting star slow to a stop, disappear briefly, and then take off at a ninety-degree angle, perpendicular to its original trajectory.
“Fredge, you are being hailed,” another Vulcan called out from the shop behind him. He looked back through the garage door at his coworker, lying on his back beneath a detached turbine with a welding torch in one hand.
“Me? By name?”
“You are in charge this shift. It would be you anyway, even if they had not used your name.”
He nodded and approached a tilted communications console, tapping on the screen a few times to adjust the wavy picture. A wild-eyed Klingon stared back at him, looking very out of breath.
“We’re comin’,” Varug panted. “Transporter bay’s shot. Dexie did something funny that put the skin back on the ship, but the insides are a right mess. We’ll pick you up in a shuttle.”
“This is unexpected, Varug. You are still able to pay?”
“You want off this rock? You can take what I give you, plus whatever you want to grab out of the fore cargo bay.”
“Not the aft?”
“Nay, she’s gone. Long story. We’ll see you soon there, Fredgie.”
“Please do not call me that, Varug.”
“Bah, you and Dexie can’t let an old warrior get away with anything. Fine. Get you a bag ready, just the same. Job like this, you’re bound to kip on the ship. Don’t even know if we have replicators yet, so you’ll want the change of clothes, ‘mong other things. Soap, et-cetera.”
Fredge nodded and knelt next to his coworker, doing his best to keep clear of the showers of sparks.
“I have been commissioned for an assignment in low orbit. A starship.”
“The entire starship, Fredge?”
“The entire starship. The job will pay out substantially, but you will need to care for the shop. Perhaps it is time to open up an apprenticeship.”
“Perhaps. Live Long,” the Vulcan on his back began.
The faintest smile crossed Fredge’s face as he finished the salute, hand aloft,
“And prosper.”