Once I began frequenting these boards, I began to read fanfiction, specifically, Starcrossed by Stravo. And then I realized that I had dozens of manuscripts, rough drafts, short stories and plot summaries in my house. Though I still have a BIG, AWESOME 4-way fanfic I plan to unleash on the boards at a later date written out, I’ll start with the traditional: Star Wars VS. Star Trek, since I had a little manuscript written out for it. So please enjoy:
STAR TREK VS STAR WARS: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
Disclaimer: Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry and owned by Paramount Pictures. Star Wars created by George Lucas and owned by Twentieth Century Fox and Lucasfilm. I own the story and any original characters/species. No copyright infringement is intended.
Timeline:
Star Trek: It’s been 6 months since the crisis code-named Reman Nemesis took place. Starfleet has completed the research of Voyager’s Transphasic Torpedoes, Ablative Armour Generators, and other technologies. It has also completed a crash building program of a 500-ship military fleet fully equipped with these technologies, with a single mission: To Enter Borg Space, find Unimatrix 001, and exterminate the Borg threat forever. This could change the entire Galaxy, but the economy of the United Federation of Planets has been crippled, smashed by a rash building spree not even seen in the Dominion War. Due to the unfortunate death of Admiral Janeway, the young admiral Spencer Wappel is leading the fleet. This fleet will come back victorious, or it will not come back at all, unless another Borg or other massive threat attacks the UFP directly.
The Klingon Empire is pushing for the Federation to give it the technologies researched at Krinos III, to defend itself in its current state, as it has only a pathetic scattering of ships left after it bore the brunt f the casualties of the Dominion War. It has been rebuffed repeatedly, but is slowly gaining ground.
Under the leadership of a new, more intelligent Praetor, the Romulan Star Empire has focused on exploration rather than conquest, which it projects to be impossible for the next few years, and due to energized colonization attempts, its economy is a now-robust thing and the Empire has inflated to nearly twice former size in only a few months. Its citizenry, unhappy at its third-power status, are hailing their leader, and the Romulan Star grows ever brighter by the day.
Star Wars: It is 3 months after the Battle of Endor, where the Rebellion was finally put to rest once and for all. Unfortunately, the illustrious Lord Vader, and his traitorous son, fell to their deaths during the battle, and the Emperor has begun training a new Sith Apprentice, stronger and younger than Vader, but with the same proficiency with the Force, and with the completion of his training, and the destruction of Endor’s moon by the now fully completed and operational Deathstar, the name Darth Carnadine strikes fear into the hearts of things everywhere.
Prologue
Across the infinite void of space, a great orange ship, a smooth thing of Tritanium and Variethel, a Ferengi Marauder, raced forward. She was a beautiful thing, constantly modified by her commander, Nagus Pron, to be faster, stronger, better. Streamlined Warp Induction systems, twin Warp Cores, and larger, thicker nacelles to outrace all competition.
Extra Phaser and Quantum Torpedo arrays mounted bow and stern, twice the normal amount of Shield Generators, and now, the prize of the day, the Gem that would make them all rich up to their waists in Latinum, secret Federation Weaponry and Defense Augmentations systems from the Starfleet facility on the dead world of Krinos III.
But the ship didn’t look pretty now.
Her forward hull was breached, held together only by forcefields, a great gash looked out into space like a half-closed eye glaring at the world. Plasma was venting from her port nacelle, a great blue cloud wafting out defiantly. Things were not going well.
“Nagus, we have lost Warp Engines!” Tral, who worked Weapons and Tactical, looked pensive. They were still 80 lightyears from the Ferengi border, and they would now have to fight the Federation for their profits.
Behind them, the refit Galaxy-class starship Excalibur dogged them relentlessly. Cpt. Jonathan Minkus was slightly less pensive. They had already won, for all he was concerned. The Marauder couldn’t limp away like a wounded bird any more. They would have to turn themselves in, or be destroyed.
“Captain, their shields are down, however, they have sophisticated sensor jamming equipment, and we are unable to use Transporters against them.” His Bolean Tactical Officer often seemed too wordy for him.
“Hail them, all frequencies: Ferengi ship Marauder, surrender now or be destroyed. You are in violation of Federation space and are carrying Fed”-
He was cut short.
“No.”
Pron turned to Tral.
“Are the Transphasic Torpedoes we stole loaded in our Torpedo Bays?”
“Of course.”
“Fire at will on their Engineering and Bridge sections.”
“But Nagus, that will cause war!” Tral was fearful.
“Tral… Rule of Acquisition 34: War is good for business.”
“Of course.”
“Now FIRE!”
3 small orange dots flew out from the bow of the Marauder, as it lurched to face its opponent like a great whale, methodically, angrily.
They danced towards the Excalibur, and detonated, eviscerating the thing as it was ripped apart violently, the engineering section blasting apart in a loaud pop, the nacelles thrown away like leaves in a hurricane, each popping unnoticed among the blackness of space.
For its part, the saucer smashed apart, molten metal thrown away in all directions.
All hands were lost.
Nagus Pron gazed upon this devastation and grinned viciously. The profit would come today.
“Begin repairs. Focus on the Warp Drive. Send out the shuttles to search that debris. Today is a good day to get rich.”
As the ship’s shuttles flew out, and new plates began to cover the scars of battle, a funny thing happened.
A wormhole opened, a massive thing, 1000 kilometres in diameter maybe. And the tiny dot in this gaping, hungry, swirling blue maw that got sucked away in an instant was the Marauder.
Admiral Donovan Brackiss Raellis stood, his one organic clasped behind his back, gripping his silver metallic one. That metal one was durasteel, he polished it every night to give it a sheen, and it never dented. Damned strong, too. It could lift a durasteel ceiling beam over his head. He’d got it from the Techno-Union, his medical insurance covered it.
He’d got it at the same time as the new eyes, after he had barely survived the crash and destruction of his then-flagship, the Warmonger. He looked lovingly over the floors of his new flagship, the Executor-class Star Destroyer Warmonger II. He’d been blinded, his eyes literally burnt out of their sockets, and his arm had to be amputated by his First Officer after the crash, in the desert of Acklis.
When rescue ships arrived, he’s spent over a day in a bacta tank.
He flexed his metallic hand, and looked out over the 20 Star Destroyers arrayed in front of the bridge-window, and smiled.
200 Star Destroyers, and nothing to do, he mused. His ships patrolled across 10 sectors, a diameter of about 15,000 light-years in diameter, but that was all it was, patrolling. It was mind-numbingly boring. The occasional disgruntled freighter, a rebellious planet that lost its spine as soon as a single Star Destroyer jumped into orbit- small stuff. Sometimes he wished that the Rebellion were still a Galactic Entity, something to fight battles against, to match wits with and win against.
He sighed.
“Admiral!”
It was a technician in the work pit to his left.
Raellis turned, the red laserpoint of the two black orbs that were his eyes swept to him, analyzed him in 7 different visual ranges, checked his profile and medical status. Those things sent shivers up the spines of most of the men recently assigned to this ship, and intimidated everyone else. It was actually a touch the Admiral liked.
The Sensor technician, Han Dashir, looked up at the Admiral. A short man, at least, for an admiral, but with a commanding aura, a regal bearing about him, in his 40s, but he looked younger, straight blonde hair cropped short, a slender, almost lanky man, handsome if not for the eyes, and his Imperial uniform worn with pride.
“Yes?”
Han gulped. He had only just been assigned to this fleet (And the flagship!) and he wouldn’t screw it up.
“6 light-years from here, there’s… Something… Happening. A massive spatial distortion… It might be a wormhole.”
Wormholes were only theoretical, a possibility, a hole in space that made travel instantaneous between two locations. For his ship to discover it…
“Where’s it located exactly, Ensign Dashir?”
“I’m feeding it to our navcomputer now, sir.”
Admiral Raellis almost smiled. A Wormhole! A Something! He might be able to fight whatever was on the other side… The turbolasers on this ship were far too kill-starved, in his opinion.
“Inform the fleet! Prepare for a jump to hyperspace! Set course for the Wormhole!”
In unison, 20 Star Destroyers and the Warmonger II jumped into hyperspace, leaving orbit of their current unofficial headquarters in the Pramin system, headed for what would be the beginning of a clash of cultures. Raellis would get his war.
And so concludes the short prologue to my little epic. Stay tuned for Chapter 1: First Contact, which will hopefully be completed by Wednesday. Please criticize this so that I can do better in the future.
ST/SW: The War of the Worlds, Volume 1
Moderator: LadyTevar
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Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
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ST/SW: The War of the Worlds, Volume 1
Last edited by Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba on 2012-02-08 11:45am, edited 1 time in total.
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Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
- Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
- Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters
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Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
- Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
- Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters
Here it is, one day early. The next chapter will come soon, as I have no school on thursday or friday. Enjoy:
Chapter 1: First Contact
The Marauder was vomited forth from the Wormhole, tossing end over end, a shadow of a pinprick thrown violently into space from, quite literally, out of the blue. The probability of profits today was slim.
Pron noticed that his fingers had made dents into the armrests of his command chair. It took all his efforts to pry them out of the polished hardwood arms. Perhaps when he went into Dry-dock he should go with faux-wood… If he ever got back to Ferenginar with enough left to get to dry-dock.
He looked around.
It wasn’t good.
That last trip had shaken the ship up pretty badly: 3 crewmen lay dead, thrown from their seats of lying back, blood, shrapnel and burns covering their horrific faces. He himself felt deep gashes on his left arm, and blood soaked his back. Dust had settled over everything, and with only the dim crimson emergency lights on, everything was cloaked in a haze of red and grey.
Or maybe his eyes were bleeding.
He shook his head, and with all his might, ripped off the right arm of his shirt, and took off his pants, fashioning tourniquets for his wounds.
He was very tired, and wanted to sleep. But he couldn’t. He was the leader.
“Tral?”
“I’m still here, captain.”
“Status.”
“We’ve lost life support on 5 decks, anti-grav on 6, and are running on emergency systems. We only have emergency sensors, no weapons, impulse power, warp drive, or anything beyond what’s keeping us alive. Sensor reports are finally coming in… Dear Gold… We are no longer in our galaxy. We are at least 100 million lightyears away and… 500,000 lightyears in the past.”
Pron worked hard to keep awake and aware, but his words slurred as he talked. He knew he was dying.
“Workth to geth back imphulsssse, an geth a Mehihal Emeerrrgensseee theam to the Bridge…”
He kept himself barely conscious by singing an old lullaby his mother had sung to him at night in his head… Not a good way to stay awake by any means, but if Nagus Pron had anything, it was an iron will.
He wouldn’t die now, dammit. I plan to live forever, or die trying… That was an old motto of his. He wouldn’t die now, he’d die when he rich, richer than rich, rich enough to settle back down in his old part of town in Ferenginar, or his own moon, and his own fleet of ships off to bring him more profit. He would have many females… 5 was a good number. He would lie with them, and direct his fleet to war and profit.
A new thing came to keep him from sleeping.
After barely a minute in Hyperspace, the Warmonger II and a flotilla of 20 Star Destroyers appeared around this wormhole and this tiny, beaten starship.
Aboard the bridge of the 17 kilometre-long warship, Admiral Raellis beamed. They had the initiative.
“Admiral… We’re picking up only 1 ship… It’s barely the size of a frigate! 600 metres long, no Hyperdrive, its systems are totally alien to our own. I can’t make heads or tails of this thing, but it appears to be severely damaged. We read only 60 lifesigns.”
The enemy was unprepared. Excellent.
“Alien systems are to be expected. Use tractor beams to pull them into the docking bay. Have 4 squads of Stormtroopers and a medical crew ready to begin boarding actions. Have the men set their weapons for stun.”
Aboard the Ferengi ship, this small flotilla elicited awe and terror. In Pron, that meant keeping him awake.
20 ships, each over a mile-long, great dagger-shaped behemoths, the likes of which Pron had never seen. It was marvelous. And at the centre, a thing bigger than the largest starbases he had seen in his life.
Tral was similarly impressed. “Each of the smaller ships carries over a hundred small turret gun, and several larger weapons. I read no warp signature of any kind. Pron, er, Nagus… We’re being caught in some sort of tractor beam! Shall I inform security?”
Pron knew that if these enemies had fleets of ships bigger than any Negh’var or Sovereign class ship, and capital ships bigger than any starbases… Resistance was futile.
“No… We must salvage the situation. We can only hope they have Universal Translators… Hail them, all frequencies: Whoever you may be, I am Nagus Pron of the Ferengi Alliance. We surrender. We require medical assistance. We have information about our Galaxy, which may be of use to you, if you are willing to pay us. I hope we can negotiate a settlement.” He breathed deeply.
He heard a great clashing, smashing, clanking sound, a rumble reverberating from the massive warship which began to pull them into a massive docking bay.
“Tral, please help me up, we must greet our guests. Grab some bars of latinum; they may be of use.”
Pron got up, got into the turbolift with Tral, who held his arm, and they prepared for First Contact.
Luckily, though the Medical Emergency Team had never got there, there had been a medical kit under Pron’s chair, which he had used to seal his wounds- the ones on the outside, at least. He had to look his best.
As the ship pulled into the docking bay, held by the clamps, Admiral Raellis, escorted by his subordinate Captain Rayza, and two protocol droids chattering to each other in binary about the message the aliens had sent, greeted the 4 squads of white-clad death brainwashed to become elite killing machines, and called stormtroopers. The medical crew stood ready to receive casualties.
“Blast it open.”
All 4 Stormtroopers raised their blasters, and as the good admiral shoved his fingers into his ears, they fired, round after round, and slowly, like a surgeon’s scalpel, they carved a 25-foot wide hole in the 3 lowest decks of the Marauder. The smoke created harmed neither the Stormtroopers’ vision, enhanced by their helmets, nor the artificial eyes of Raellis, who promptly pulled his fingers out of his ears.
The two protocol droids appeared to have come to a decision. The more humanoid one turned to Raellis and stated in an effete voice, “The speaker appears to be submissive, and wishes to be non-aggressive.”
Admiral Raellis rolled his eyes. “How much did your component parts cost?”
“All things considered, sir, this is a very strange dialect, and it-“
“Fine, Goldenrod. But get better.”
He looked back to the matter at hand.
All 4 squads had entered the ship, and the medical crew looked expectant.
Suddenly, he saw it.
Flanked by 10 stormtroopers, were 2 short humanoids, their foreheads dominated by 2 huge lobes and a pair of massive ears, great bulbous thing stretching from the tops of their craniums to their chins. They had large, ribbed noses, and sharp, yellow teeth.
One yelled something surprisedly.
“Start translating, you buckets of rust.”
Admiral Raellis stepped forward, and offered his hand.
“I am Admiral Raellis of the Galactic Empire.”
To his surprise, the alien immediately understood, took his hand, and shook it. Admiral Raellis scanned him. He had suffered massive blood loss, and had some minor internal bleeding.
“Medical, fix this alien up.”
The alien began chattering at him, but Admiral Raellis did not understand.
On the other hand, the Ferengi understood Raellis perfectly.
“Oo-mans out here! These aren’t Federation Oomans either- they’re their own civilization- The Galactic Empire. Interesting.”
The 2 Oomans roughly grabbed Pron, and began scanning him.
“Hopefully, negotiations will soon be underway.”
This time, the Universal Translator finally connected both sides, and Admiral Raellis answered.
“I heartily agree. Now how did that happen?”
“Once you patch me and my crew up, Admiral, I’ll tell you all you want.
Over the next few hours, those of the Ferengi that could be saved were patched up, or put into Bacta Tanks if it was very serious, and the Empire’ technicians began analyzing the Marauder’s computers.
Admiral Raellis had taken a short break to send a coded message to Coruscant about the discovery of this Wormhole and a copy of the Marauder’s database, and then began to analyze it on his own.
It was fascinating.
He was intrigued by this primitive culture, which still managed to obtain technology that not even the Empire had developed, such as mass-produced Transporters, Holo-Decks, and small-scale duplicators called replicators.
Their weaponry and defense systems were orders of magnitude weaker than Imperial ships, and they took decades simply to get to the other end of their galaxy.
Theirs would be an easy civilization to conquer. Their largest fleets consisted of only a few thousand ships. Even Raellis’ fleet could conquer their entire galaxy.
Finally, his bloodlust would be sated.
He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and pulled from his desk a bottle of Nubian wine. He took out a small crystal glass, poured in the wine, and took 3 small energy pills from his pocket.
Ever since his first captainship, he had forsaken regular meals for these energy pills, which gave him more nutrients and needed calories than the best-balanced meal in the universe.
After the pills had fully dissolved, he grabbed the glass and sipped it. The alcohol burnt his throat for a moment and left a sweet taste in his mouth. He kept working, whistling the Imperial March to himself.
Admiral Wappel exhaled as he put down his whiskey-glass, and kept whistling the theme to the movie Zulu to himself. And this whiskey wasn’t synthahol either, he had smuggled a crate of the stuff out of the Orion Syndicate and onto the flagship of the fleet.
He had a burger, with bacon, Dijon mustard and ketchup. It was perfect.
He slid his hand over his desk. This was a great ship.
The USS Victory was her name. She had a presence, the largest, most powerful starship ever built by Starfleet at over 800 metres long. The greatest minds of Starfleet worked on this ship; it was like Starfleet had spliced together the crews of the famous Voyager, the infamous crew of Deep Space 9, and the legendary crew of the Enterprise.
He was far too small to handle it all.
At only 36, he was the youngest admiral ever given the rank in the history of the federation, and he felt too young. He was to go on what was known by everyone to be a suicide mission: Even if they destroyed the Unimatrix, if the Borg adapted, they would have to stay in the Delta Quadrant and fight until either side was annihilated. It wasn’t good. There was little chance he would ever see Earth, or his home world of Rigel again.
He sighed. He looked out at the stars as they passed by the window.
He might have to find a love soon, because otherwise, he’d probably die a bachelor.
Well, he’d die in a blaze of glory, at least.
San Francisco, Starfleet Command:
Chaos. Unmitigated chaos.
They were getting silence from the facility on Krinos III. The last reports were choppy, some had been partially blocked, but it was clear what had happened: A Ferengi Marauder had attacked the facility, and had begun assaulting the base.
When they had heard the first reports from the base, they had sent the nearest ship, the USS Excalibur, to intercept the Ferengi Marauder before it could go to warp, in the Subspace Void that englobed the facility, the reason they had chosen it.
Admiral Ross knew that they shouldn’t have put it so close to Ferengi space. But no, the cost was best, the location was best, the planet was best considering the budget…. Well, the best location wasn’t worth a damn when it was in spitting distance of a hostile nation.
Even worse, now, they had detected an enormous subspace distortion near the facility, like that of a wormhole.
But it was far too large to be a wormhole of the sort they had known. The readings were off the chart.
And they had lost the USS Excalibur. Only minutes before the opening of the wormhole, they had lost contact with the ship, which had been pursuing the Ferengi ship.
And now, no one knew what to do.
Some advocated sending as many ships as possible to fortify the location, so as to not have another Dominion War. Some even believed that the Delta Assault fleet should be pulled from its course for what could be nothing.
Then, it looked like someone had ignored the meetings and written something down: The 2nd and 5th fleets were en route to the wormhole, with the goal of fortifying the location. They were to send scientific probes and find out what was going on. If it was a wormhole, they were to send a flotilla of ships to the other side.
Nagus Pron was escorted into Admiral Raellis’ quarters be 4 stormtroopers, who apparently were not at all interested in Latinum sales.
The door opened with a menacing hiss, and he walked into a small, dull-grey room with a few small memorabilia on a table in the centre, and sitting in a leather chair, the same calculating cyborg that he had encountered before they had dumped him into that awful liquid, that Bacta. But it had healed his wounds. This was a place of wonders.
He had been reading up on the civilization in this galaxy, and it amazed him: Single starships melting the crusts off of entire planets!
Flying from one end of the galaxy to the other in days!
Great city-worlds with hundreds of trillions of occupants!
Oomans!
If he could bring back a single warship to his galaxy, he’d be rich beyond belief! He’d be up to his lobes in Latinum!
But first, he’d have to negotiate a little Latinum out of these people. And that would take all his Ferengi business skills.
He was interested at the existence of Oomans here. Oomans had evolved on Earth, but they had apparently also evolved on a great city-world called Coruscant.
He wished to move his business into this galaxy: Entire city-size mining installations evaded tax notice. Great warships could be bought and sold from shipyards. And unlike the pathetic Federation of his galaxy, these people knew the value of money. Trillions of credits were exchanged every minute on some worlds.
But now to business.
The cyborg leader before him was a frightening being. All prim and proper in his grey uniform, his hands crossed under his chin, a metallic one reflecting Pron’s face in it. His two black eyes were punctuated by tiny pinpricks of red glaring at him with some robotic malice. He shivered.
He sat down opposite the admiral.
“What is it that you wish to discuss Admiral?”
“Nagus Pron.” He seemed to roll the words around in his mouth. “You and your ship, the Marauder, were pulled by this wormhole into Imperial Space and you are now under the custody of me and my fleet for violation of our territory.
“However, I must let you know that I plan to invade the puny regions you call the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Your ships are primitive, small and weak compared to Imperial Star Destroyers, and we will not be impeded.
However, you know many things about your worlds, more than we do, and if you are cooperative and help us conquer your peoples, we will hold a special place for the people of the Ferengi Alliance… Or perhaps you would prefer to be the sole recipient of our generosity, Nagus Pron?”
He had completed his speech, but in it, he had subtly given his ultimatum: Work with the Empire, or be tortured to death.
It was not a difficult decision to make.
“I will be pleased to work with you Admiral Raellis, and I hope we can negotiate a deal that will be… mutually beneficial.”
I am glad that you see reason, Nagus Pron. I am sure that you will find our compensation to be most adequate. Tell these two men,” he gestured to two white-clothed men who had appeared in the doorway, “everything they ask for, and you will be duly rewarded. Dismissed.”
Nagus Pron got up to leave. This deal had better be good…
Or else he had just sold his people into slavery.
2 DAYS LATER, KRINOS III SYSTEM
The 2nd and 5th fleets emerged from Warp far from the system, to prevent being stopped violently at the edge of the Subspace Void, and crashing into each other. A massive collection of ships, over 800 of every size, shape or variation. Constructed for the Dominion War, they ranged from Akiras to Steamrunners to Springfields to Defiants and many other, older designs. Their gleaming saucer-shaped hulls glowed, their nacelles flared red, and around them, space seemed a little brighter. It was a glorious fleet.
At the moment, the Sovereign led the fleet. After his skillful handling of the Cronkol battle, it was decided that William Riker was fit to command the flagship of the 2nd Fleet, along with his wife, Counselor Troi, but he still longed for the Enterprise on rare occasions.
But he knew that Captain Picard was always on some diplomatic mission or another, and he assumed that many of the files concerning the captain’s role in the Ba’ku/So’na had been conveniently ‘lost’ by some admiral of operator in the Dominion War.
It was probably best that way.
But now, he was in command. He had only had a few weeks on the Titan before his promotion. And now, he led 2 fleets to what could be nothing.
But it wasn’t.
Like a counter-point to the dull, dark asteroids floating about the rather empty system, and the single large rock known as Krinos III, a great blue hole sat in the centre of the Subspace Void.
The occasional asteroid fell into, becoming a tiny speck in this massive thing, which easily eclipsed everything in the near vicinity, including Krinos III’s small moon used as the secret base for the Federation’s research of the weapons brought back by Voyager from the future.
“It’s a wormhole, captain. The largest we’ve ever discovered, it appears. It’s disrupting our other scans, but… Fragments in the system are those of the Excalibur. I’m detecting no lifesigns anywhere. There’s also evidence of another ship being damaged, but we’ll need to analyze this more closely to know what…
I’d bet my right arm that it’s that Ferengi vessel, though.”
Riker sighed. “Okay… Let’s move the fleet closer to that wormhole, and launch a couple scientific probes into it… Stay away, though. If we got too close, it could suck us in.”
The massive fleet methodically swooped closer to the wormhole, and a Norway moved forward, firing off a pair of Level 10 scientific probes into the maw of the thing.
“Now we wait.”
They waited. And waited. No data came back. Only silence.
5 minutes later, William Riker made a decision that would haunt him for eternity.
“Let’s go in. Hail both fleets, we’re going through the wormhole. I don’t want anyone on the other side to wait for us to leave, or only a small flotilla coming through. Remember, though: diplomacy, first. We don’t want to start a war.”
“Of course, captain.”
“Engage.”
Both great fleets, united in thought and purpose, flew forward into the great blue, as it easily accommodated the fleet, which was like a swarm of bees in an ocean. They flew solemnly, silently, anxious as to what was on the other side. THIS was what Starfleet was: Exploration, not war, was their purpose.
And then they saw the dark at the end of the tunnel.
“Initial reports are coming in… We’re at least 100 million lightyears from home, captain. We’ve left our galaxy.”
This had happened to Riker once before- When the Traveler had sent them hurtling to the edge of the universe. He preferred not to think about that incident.
And then they saw them- A fleet of ivory-white warships, shaped like jagged daggers, over a mile long.
“There’s 80 ships out there, captain… And one, it appears to be the command ship, it’s over 17 kilometres long.”
Riker gasped. He had never seen so many ships of that size in his life.
Aboard this afore-mentioned command ship, Admiral Raellis eyed this enemy fleet. These ships were beautiful, smooth and pretty, bright and noble, like the Mon Calamari ships that had been the backbone of the Rebellion while it had existed. But that hadn’t made a difference then, and it didn’t now.
Hopefully, the Ferengi were an honest people. Otherwise, he was in trouble.
“All ships, fire at will.”
All 80 Star Destroyers moved forward, aligned their Turbolasers to target these oddly shaped craft, and fired.
Immediately, a dozen of the Starfleet vessels erupted in flames, bursting like melons, bits and pieces flying every which way. The smaller vessels were simple vapourised.
Riker looked on with a sense of horror.
“Captain, 20 ships have been destroyed! The enemy is using sophisticated ECM! We’ll need to re-calibrate the communications!”
“Then dammit, recalibrate them! Have all vessels retreat, repeat, all vessels retreat!”
Every second, more ships were blasted apart by weapons orders of magnitude more powerful than their own. Thousands of men, women, children were vapourised every moment.
The rest of the fleet, desperate, terrified, turned around as fast as they could, grace replaced by the jerking movement of a beached whale. They turned tails, as it were, exposing their nacelles to the enemy, and fled as yet more were popped like fish in a barrel.
The Sovereign turned, and began to flee back to the wormhole, as a great red bolt struck it, and electricity fizzled all over the craft.
Inside, all lights went dark, and gravity ceased to exist.
“Captain, I believe that we’ve lost all power.”
“You don’t say.” This was not good. Riker couldn’t see his hands in front of his face, and he began to float.
But men were ingenious things.
Riker heard a buzz behind him, and a weak, pervasive glow illuminated the bridge dimly, in an almost ghostly fashion.
He turned around.
Security Officer Tannen held his phaser in his hand, and his ruined bridge console molten, shed light like a torch.
“Let’s see what’s going on outside then.”
“Riker floated towards the door to his personal room.
“Everyone, try to melt this door.”
Almost as if they were connected, they fired their phasers in unison, vapourising the door within a second.
Riker floated into the office, and stared out the window.
He had felt plenty of horror already today, but he felt it yet again. He vomited.
They were being pulled towards the command ship.
Admiral Wappel heard the signal of a coded subspace message. They were within Federation Space, still, and he could have a real-time conversation.
He opened his datapad, and Admiral Paris’ face stared grimly at him.
“Yes, Admiral Paris?”
“Admiral Wappel, the facility of Krinos III has been attacked by a Ferengi Marauder. It stole all of the technology. While the Excalibur was sent to destroy this Marauder, we believe that it was destroyed at coordinates I have attached to this message. A massive wormhole opened there, larger than any we’ve found before. We believe it extends all the way into another galaxy. We think the Marauder may have escaped through it. You must get the fleet to secure those coordinates. We don’t want another Dominion War.”
“Of course, Admiral.”
The transmission ended.
Well, he wouldn’t die in the Delta Quadrant after all.
He’d die in another galaxy.
He walked into the bridge.
“Have the fleet change course to these coordinates. I have direct orders from Admiral Paris himself.”
His pilot, Tom Paris, chuckled. “So, dad’s still trying to control my friends’ lives.”
Wappel smiled. “Don’t you badmouth him or I’ll bump you all the way back to ensign. There is precedent, you know.”
Snickers were heard from younger bridge officers at this comment, and Tom began grumbling.
“Come on, people, we have a job to do. Is the course laid in Tom?”
“Yes sir.”
“Engage.”
Chapter 1: First Contact
The Marauder was vomited forth from the Wormhole, tossing end over end, a shadow of a pinprick thrown violently into space from, quite literally, out of the blue. The probability of profits today was slim.
Pron noticed that his fingers had made dents into the armrests of his command chair. It took all his efforts to pry them out of the polished hardwood arms. Perhaps when he went into Dry-dock he should go with faux-wood… If he ever got back to Ferenginar with enough left to get to dry-dock.
He looked around.
It wasn’t good.
That last trip had shaken the ship up pretty badly: 3 crewmen lay dead, thrown from their seats of lying back, blood, shrapnel and burns covering their horrific faces. He himself felt deep gashes on his left arm, and blood soaked his back. Dust had settled over everything, and with only the dim crimson emergency lights on, everything was cloaked in a haze of red and grey.
Or maybe his eyes were bleeding.
He shook his head, and with all his might, ripped off the right arm of his shirt, and took off his pants, fashioning tourniquets for his wounds.
He was very tired, and wanted to sleep. But he couldn’t. He was the leader.
“Tral?”
“I’m still here, captain.”
“Status.”
“We’ve lost life support on 5 decks, anti-grav on 6, and are running on emergency systems. We only have emergency sensors, no weapons, impulse power, warp drive, or anything beyond what’s keeping us alive. Sensor reports are finally coming in… Dear Gold… We are no longer in our galaxy. We are at least 100 million lightyears away and… 500,000 lightyears in the past.”
Pron worked hard to keep awake and aware, but his words slurred as he talked. He knew he was dying.
“Workth to geth back imphulsssse, an geth a Mehihal Emeerrrgensseee theam to the Bridge…”
He kept himself barely conscious by singing an old lullaby his mother had sung to him at night in his head… Not a good way to stay awake by any means, but if Nagus Pron had anything, it was an iron will.
He wouldn’t die now, dammit. I plan to live forever, or die trying… That was an old motto of his. He wouldn’t die now, he’d die when he rich, richer than rich, rich enough to settle back down in his old part of town in Ferenginar, or his own moon, and his own fleet of ships off to bring him more profit. He would have many females… 5 was a good number. He would lie with them, and direct his fleet to war and profit.
A new thing came to keep him from sleeping.
After barely a minute in Hyperspace, the Warmonger II and a flotilla of 20 Star Destroyers appeared around this wormhole and this tiny, beaten starship.
Aboard the bridge of the 17 kilometre-long warship, Admiral Raellis beamed. They had the initiative.
“Admiral… We’re picking up only 1 ship… It’s barely the size of a frigate! 600 metres long, no Hyperdrive, its systems are totally alien to our own. I can’t make heads or tails of this thing, but it appears to be severely damaged. We read only 60 lifesigns.”
The enemy was unprepared. Excellent.
“Alien systems are to be expected. Use tractor beams to pull them into the docking bay. Have 4 squads of Stormtroopers and a medical crew ready to begin boarding actions. Have the men set their weapons for stun.”
Aboard the Ferengi ship, this small flotilla elicited awe and terror. In Pron, that meant keeping him awake.
20 ships, each over a mile-long, great dagger-shaped behemoths, the likes of which Pron had never seen. It was marvelous. And at the centre, a thing bigger than the largest starbases he had seen in his life.
Tral was similarly impressed. “Each of the smaller ships carries over a hundred small turret gun, and several larger weapons. I read no warp signature of any kind. Pron, er, Nagus… We’re being caught in some sort of tractor beam! Shall I inform security?”
Pron knew that if these enemies had fleets of ships bigger than any Negh’var or Sovereign class ship, and capital ships bigger than any starbases… Resistance was futile.
“No… We must salvage the situation. We can only hope they have Universal Translators… Hail them, all frequencies: Whoever you may be, I am Nagus Pron of the Ferengi Alliance. We surrender. We require medical assistance. We have information about our Galaxy, which may be of use to you, if you are willing to pay us. I hope we can negotiate a settlement.” He breathed deeply.
He heard a great clashing, smashing, clanking sound, a rumble reverberating from the massive warship which began to pull them into a massive docking bay.
“Tral, please help me up, we must greet our guests. Grab some bars of latinum; they may be of use.”
Pron got up, got into the turbolift with Tral, who held his arm, and they prepared for First Contact.
Luckily, though the Medical Emergency Team had never got there, there had been a medical kit under Pron’s chair, which he had used to seal his wounds- the ones on the outside, at least. He had to look his best.
As the ship pulled into the docking bay, held by the clamps, Admiral Raellis, escorted by his subordinate Captain Rayza, and two protocol droids chattering to each other in binary about the message the aliens had sent, greeted the 4 squads of white-clad death brainwashed to become elite killing machines, and called stormtroopers. The medical crew stood ready to receive casualties.
“Blast it open.”
All 4 Stormtroopers raised their blasters, and as the good admiral shoved his fingers into his ears, they fired, round after round, and slowly, like a surgeon’s scalpel, they carved a 25-foot wide hole in the 3 lowest decks of the Marauder. The smoke created harmed neither the Stormtroopers’ vision, enhanced by their helmets, nor the artificial eyes of Raellis, who promptly pulled his fingers out of his ears.
The two protocol droids appeared to have come to a decision. The more humanoid one turned to Raellis and stated in an effete voice, “The speaker appears to be submissive, and wishes to be non-aggressive.”
Admiral Raellis rolled his eyes. “How much did your component parts cost?”
“All things considered, sir, this is a very strange dialect, and it-“
“Fine, Goldenrod. But get better.”
He looked back to the matter at hand.
All 4 squads had entered the ship, and the medical crew looked expectant.
Suddenly, he saw it.
Flanked by 10 stormtroopers, were 2 short humanoids, their foreheads dominated by 2 huge lobes and a pair of massive ears, great bulbous thing stretching from the tops of their craniums to their chins. They had large, ribbed noses, and sharp, yellow teeth.
One yelled something surprisedly.
“Start translating, you buckets of rust.”
Admiral Raellis stepped forward, and offered his hand.
“I am Admiral Raellis of the Galactic Empire.”
To his surprise, the alien immediately understood, took his hand, and shook it. Admiral Raellis scanned him. He had suffered massive blood loss, and had some minor internal bleeding.
“Medical, fix this alien up.”
The alien began chattering at him, but Admiral Raellis did not understand.
On the other hand, the Ferengi understood Raellis perfectly.
“Oo-mans out here! These aren’t Federation Oomans either- they’re their own civilization- The Galactic Empire. Interesting.”
The 2 Oomans roughly grabbed Pron, and began scanning him.
“Hopefully, negotiations will soon be underway.”
This time, the Universal Translator finally connected both sides, and Admiral Raellis answered.
“I heartily agree. Now how did that happen?”
“Once you patch me and my crew up, Admiral, I’ll tell you all you want.
Over the next few hours, those of the Ferengi that could be saved were patched up, or put into Bacta Tanks if it was very serious, and the Empire’ technicians began analyzing the Marauder’s computers.
Admiral Raellis had taken a short break to send a coded message to Coruscant about the discovery of this Wormhole and a copy of the Marauder’s database, and then began to analyze it on his own.
It was fascinating.
He was intrigued by this primitive culture, which still managed to obtain technology that not even the Empire had developed, such as mass-produced Transporters, Holo-Decks, and small-scale duplicators called replicators.
Their weaponry and defense systems were orders of magnitude weaker than Imperial ships, and they took decades simply to get to the other end of their galaxy.
Theirs would be an easy civilization to conquer. Their largest fleets consisted of only a few thousand ships. Even Raellis’ fleet could conquer their entire galaxy.
Finally, his bloodlust would be sated.
He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and pulled from his desk a bottle of Nubian wine. He took out a small crystal glass, poured in the wine, and took 3 small energy pills from his pocket.
Ever since his first captainship, he had forsaken regular meals for these energy pills, which gave him more nutrients and needed calories than the best-balanced meal in the universe.
After the pills had fully dissolved, he grabbed the glass and sipped it. The alcohol burnt his throat for a moment and left a sweet taste in his mouth. He kept working, whistling the Imperial March to himself.
Admiral Wappel exhaled as he put down his whiskey-glass, and kept whistling the theme to the movie Zulu to himself. And this whiskey wasn’t synthahol either, he had smuggled a crate of the stuff out of the Orion Syndicate and onto the flagship of the fleet.
He had a burger, with bacon, Dijon mustard and ketchup. It was perfect.
He slid his hand over his desk. This was a great ship.
The USS Victory was her name. She had a presence, the largest, most powerful starship ever built by Starfleet at over 800 metres long. The greatest minds of Starfleet worked on this ship; it was like Starfleet had spliced together the crews of the famous Voyager, the infamous crew of Deep Space 9, and the legendary crew of the Enterprise.
He was far too small to handle it all.
At only 36, he was the youngest admiral ever given the rank in the history of the federation, and he felt too young. He was to go on what was known by everyone to be a suicide mission: Even if they destroyed the Unimatrix, if the Borg adapted, they would have to stay in the Delta Quadrant and fight until either side was annihilated. It wasn’t good. There was little chance he would ever see Earth, or his home world of Rigel again.
He sighed. He looked out at the stars as they passed by the window.
He might have to find a love soon, because otherwise, he’d probably die a bachelor.
Well, he’d die in a blaze of glory, at least.
San Francisco, Starfleet Command:
Chaos. Unmitigated chaos.
They were getting silence from the facility on Krinos III. The last reports were choppy, some had been partially blocked, but it was clear what had happened: A Ferengi Marauder had attacked the facility, and had begun assaulting the base.
When they had heard the first reports from the base, they had sent the nearest ship, the USS Excalibur, to intercept the Ferengi Marauder before it could go to warp, in the Subspace Void that englobed the facility, the reason they had chosen it.
Admiral Ross knew that they shouldn’t have put it so close to Ferengi space. But no, the cost was best, the location was best, the planet was best considering the budget…. Well, the best location wasn’t worth a damn when it was in spitting distance of a hostile nation.
Even worse, now, they had detected an enormous subspace distortion near the facility, like that of a wormhole.
But it was far too large to be a wormhole of the sort they had known. The readings were off the chart.
And they had lost the USS Excalibur. Only minutes before the opening of the wormhole, they had lost contact with the ship, which had been pursuing the Ferengi ship.
And now, no one knew what to do.
Some advocated sending as many ships as possible to fortify the location, so as to not have another Dominion War. Some even believed that the Delta Assault fleet should be pulled from its course for what could be nothing.
Then, it looked like someone had ignored the meetings and written something down: The 2nd and 5th fleets were en route to the wormhole, with the goal of fortifying the location. They were to send scientific probes and find out what was going on. If it was a wormhole, they were to send a flotilla of ships to the other side.
Nagus Pron was escorted into Admiral Raellis’ quarters be 4 stormtroopers, who apparently were not at all interested in Latinum sales.
The door opened with a menacing hiss, and he walked into a small, dull-grey room with a few small memorabilia on a table in the centre, and sitting in a leather chair, the same calculating cyborg that he had encountered before they had dumped him into that awful liquid, that Bacta. But it had healed his wounds. This was a place of wonders.
He had been reading up on the civilization in this galaxy, and it amazed him: Single starships melting the crusts off of entire planets!
Flying from one end of the galaxy to the other in days!
Great city-worlds with hundreds of trillions of occupants!
Oomans!
If he could bring back a single warship to his galaxy, he’d be rich beyond belief! He’d be up to his lobes in Latinum!
But first, he’d have to negotiate a little Latinum out of these people. And that would take all his Ferengi business skills.
He was interested at the existence of Oomans here. Oomans had evolved on Earth, but they had apparently also evolved on a great city-world called Coruscant.
He wished to move his business into this galaxy: Entire city-size mining installations evaded tax notice. Great warships could be bought and sold from shipyards. And unlike the pathetic Federation of his galaxy, these people knew the value of money. Trillions of credits were exchanged every minute on some worlds.
But now to business.
The cyborg leader before him was a frightening being. All prim and proper in his grey uniform, his hands crossed under his chin, a metallic one reflecting Pron’s face in it. His two black eyes were punctuated by tiny pinpricks of red glaring at him with some robotic malice. He shivered.
He sat down opposite the admiral.
“What is it that you wish to discuss Admiral?”
“Nagus Pron.” He seemed to roll the words around in his mouth. “You and your ship, the Marauder, were pulled by this wormhole into Imperial Space and you are now under the custody of me and my fleet for violation of our territory.
“However, I must let you know that I plan to invade the puny regions you call the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Your ships are primitive, small and weak compared to Imperial Star Destroyers, and we will not be impeded.
However, you know many things about your worlds, more than we do, and if you are cooperative and help us conquer your peoples, we will hold a special place for the people of the Ferengi Alliance… Or perhaps you would prefer to be the sole recipient of our generosity, Nagus Pron?”
He had completed his speech, but in it, he had subtly given his ultimatum: Work with the Empire, or be tortured to death.
It was not a difficult decision to make.
“I will be pleased to work with you Admiral Raellis, and I hope we can negotiate a deal that will be… mutually beneficial.”
I am glad that you see reason, Nagus Pron. I am sure that you will find our compensation to be most adequate. Tell these two men,” he gestured to two white-clothed men who had appeared in the doorway, “everything they ask for, and you will be duly rewarded. Dismissed.”
Nagus Pron got up to leave. This deal had better be good…
Or else he had just sold his people into slavery.
2 DAYS LATER, KRINOS III SYSTEM
The 2nd and 5th fleets emerged from Warp far from the system, to prevent being stopped violently at the edge of the Subspace Void, and crashing into each other. A massive collection of ships, over 800 of every size, shape or variation. Constructed for the Dominion War, they ranged from Akiras to Steamrunners to Springfields to Defiants and many other, older designs. Their gleaming saucer-shaped hulls glowed, their nacelles flared red, and around them, space seemed a little brighter. It was a glorious fleet.
At the moment, the Sovereign led the fleet. After his skillful handling of the Cronkol battle, it was decided that William Riker was fit to command the flagship of the 2nd Fleet, along with his wife, Counselor Troi, but he still longed for the Enterprise on rare occasions.
But he knew that Captain Picard was always on some diplomatic mission or another, and he assumed that many of the files concerning the captain’s role in the Ba’ku/So’na had been conveniently ‘lost’ by some admiral of operator in the Dominion War.
It was probably best that way.
But now, he was in command. He had only had a few weeks on the Titan before his promotion. And now, he led 2 fleets to what could be nothing.
But it wasn’t.
Like a counter-point to the dull, dark asteroids floating about the rather empty system, and the single large rock known as Krinos III, a great blue hole sat in the centre of the Subspace Void.
The occasional asteroid fell into, becoming a tiny speck in this massive thing, which easily eclipsed everything in the near vicinity, including Krinos III’s small moon used as the secret base for the Federation’s research of the weapons brought back by Voyager from the future.
“It’s a wormhole, captain. The largest we’ve ever discovered, it appears. It’s disrupting our other scans, but… Fragments in the system are those of the Excalibur. I’m detecting no lifesigns anywhere. There’s also evidence of another ship being damaged, but we’ll need to analyze this more closely to know what…
I’d bet my right arm that it’s that Ferengi vessel, though.”
Riker sighed. “Okay… Let’s move the fleet closer to that wormhole, and launch a couple scientific probes into it… Stay away, though. If we got too close, it could suck us in.”
The massive fleet methodically swooped closer to the wormhole, and a Norway moved forward, firing off a pair of Level 10 scientific probes into the maw of the thing.
“Now we wait.”
They waited. And waited. No data came back. Only silence.
5 minutes later, William Riker made a decision that would haunt him for eternity.
“Let’s go in. Hail both fleets, we’re going through the wormhole. I don’t want anyone on the other side to wait for us to leave, or only a small flotilla coming through. Remember, though: diplomacy, first. We don’t want to start a war.”
“Of course, captain.”
“Engage.”
Both great fleets, united in thought and purpose, flew forward into the great blue, as it easily accommodated the fleet, which was like a swarm of bees in an ocean. They flew solemnly, silently, anxious as to what was on the other side. THIS was what Starfleet was: Exploration, not war, was their purpose.
And then they saw the dark at the end of the tunnel.
“Initial reports are coming in… We’re at least 100 million lightyears from home, captain. We’ve left our galaxy.”
This had happened to Riker once before- When the Traveler had sent them hurtling to the edge of the universe. He preferred not to think about that incident.
And then they saw them- A fleet of ivory-white warships, shaped like jagged daggers, over a mile long.
“There’s 80 ships out there, captain… And one, it appears to be the command ship, it’s over 17 kilometres long.”
Riker gasped. He had never seen so many ships of that size in his life.
Aboard this afore-mentioned command ship, Admiral Raellis eyed this enemy fleet. These ships were beautiful, smooth and pretty, bright and noble, like the Mon Calamari ships that had been the backbone of the Rebellion while it had existed. But that hadn’t made a difference then, and it didn’t now.
Hopefully, the Ferengi were an honest people. Otherwise, he was in trouble.
“All ships, fire at will.”
All 80 Star Destroyers moved forward, aligned their Turbolasers to target these oddly shaped craft, and fired.
Immediately, a dozen of the Starfleet vessels erupted in flames, bursting like melons, bits and pieces flying every which way. The smaller vessels were simple vapourised.
Riker looked on with a sense of horror.
“Captain, 20 ships have been destroyed! The enemy is using sophisticated ECM! We’ll need to re-calibrate the communications!”
“Then dammit, recalibrate them! Have all vessels retreat, repeat, all vessels retreat!”
Every second, more ships were blasted apart by weapons orders of magnitude more powerful than their own. Thousands of men, women, children were vapourised every moment.
The rest of the fleet, desperate, terrified, turned around as fast as they could, grace replaced by the jerking movement of a beached whale. They turned tails, as it were, exposing their nacelles to the enemy, and fled as yet more were popped like fish in a barrel.
The Sovereign turned, and began to flee back to the wormhole, as a great red bolt struck it, and electricity fizzled all over the craft.
Inside, all lights went dark, and gravity ceased to exist.
“Captain, I believe that we’ve lost all power.”
“You don’t say.” This was not good. Riker couldn’t see his hands in front of his face, and he began to float.
But men were ingenious things.
Riker heard a buzz behind him, and a weak, pervasive glow illuminated the bridge dimly, in an almost ghostly fashion.
He turned around.
Security Officer Tannen held his phaser in his hand, and his ruined bridge console molten, shed light like a torch.
“Let’s see what’s going on outside then.”
“Riker floated towards the door to his personal room.
“Everyone, try to melt this door.”
Almost as if they were connected, they fired their phasers in unison, vapourising the door within a second.
Riker floated into the office, and stared out the window.
He had felt plenty of horror already today, but he felt it yet again. He vomited.
They were being pulled towards the command ship.
Admiral Wappel heard the signal of a coded subspace message. They were within Federation Space, still, and he could have a real-time conversation.
He opened his datapad, and Admiral Paris’ face stared grimly at him.
“Yes, Admiral Paris?”
“Admiral Wappel, the facility of Krinos III has been attacked by a Ferengi Marauder. It stole all of the technology. While the Excalibur was sent to destroy this Marauder, we believe that it was destroyed at coordinates I have attached to this message. A massive wormhole opened there, larger than any we’ve found before. We believe it extends all the way into another galaxy. We think the Marauder may have escaped through it. You must get the fleet to secure those coordinates. We don’t want another Dominion War.”
“Of course, Admiral.”
The transmission ended.
Well, he wouldn’t die in the Delta Quadrant after all.
He’d die in another galaxy.
He walked into the bridge.
“Have the fleet change course to these coordinates. I have direct orders from Admiral Paris himself.”
His pilot, Tom Paris, chuckled. “So, dad’s still trying to control my friends’ lives.”
Wappel smiled. “Don’t you badmouth him or I’ll bump you all the way back to ensign. There is precedent, you know.”
Snickers were heard from younger bridge officers at this comment, and Tom began grumbling.
“Come on, people, we have a job to do. Is the course laid in Tom?”
“Yes sir.”
“Engage.”
-
Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
- Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
- Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters
-
Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
- Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
- Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters
Chapter 2: The Calm before the Storm
Captain Riker awoke. He was hungry. His stomach gave a pitiful groan to voice its discontent. His skull felt too sizes too small, he had a throbbing migraine.
He forced himself into a sitting position, and opened his eyes.
He couldn’t see a thing. Either they had him in the dark or he was blind. He suspected the former.
He rubbed his temples, tried to remember what had happened…
They had been pulled into one of those evil-looking warships, and then…. A gas poured into the bridge, and he had fallen unconscious.
Then he had woken up.
“Well… How’s that for First Contact?” He laughed in spite of himself, but his throat was bone-dry, and his voice was hoarse.
He touched his surroundings. The room was maybe 2 metres by 3 metres long, with smooth, metal walls, and nothing- no bed, toiletries, or anything. He found only a hole in the corner, which he presumed was the equivalent of a toilet. He also felt along what appeared to be the frame of a door.
He lay down again.
With a hiss, a door he had inspected opened. Bright light shone into the room, burning Riker’s sensitive eyes, blinding him for a moment as he adjusted. He raised his hands in a vain attempt to shield himself.
After a moment, he could make out 3 humanoid figures, one in a grey uniform, the others in white armour, standing at the door.
“Captain William Riker, rise.”
Well, they could understand him, at least.
The 2 soldiers wore masks that had distorted grimaces on them.
The other was a man, with short-cut blonde hair, a chiseled jaw, and a clean-shaven face. His eyes were cybernetic.
A man?
What was a human, species Homo Sapiens, doing in another Galaxy?
Riker’s jaw fell open, and he couldn’t make sense of it.
These people had captured him, these aliens… But how could Humans be here? Perhaps the Progenitor Race had left its seed here, too…
“Captain William Riker, do not force us to harm you.”
Riker stood up on shaking legs.
“Good. I imagine you may be hungry and thirsty at this time, am I correct?”
The man held out a bowl of soup, and a glass of water, on a steel tray. The scent of the soup, warm, salty, hearty, flowed through him.
“Who the hell are you and why did you attack our ships?!”
Riker yelled forcefully, like he had released a ball of hatred in his stomach.
The human, whom Riker noticed had a cybernetic hand as well, set the food on the ground.
“I am Admiral Donovan Brackiss Raellis of the Galactic Empire. Your people launched an unprovoked assault into our space with a fleet of ships. We defended our home.”
“Without even a warning? Without trying diplomacy? YOU launched the unprovoked attack!”
“Do not become emotional or I will have to render you unconscious once more, captain. My job is to defend my galaxy. If you had wanted to negotiate, you would have sent a single diplomatic vessel.
“But instead, you sent a fleet of warships… Pitiful warships.”
Riker began drinking the water the admiral had given him, taking in great gulps of the ice-cold liquid which soothed his throat. Raellis saw this.
He kicked Riker in the side. The blow connected solidly, and Riker toppled over. The water spilled onto the floor.
“Now, captain, I want you to help yourself by helping us.”
“No.”
“Your decision. I’m sorry it had to be like that.”
Admiral Raellis waved his hand, and Riker heard a pulsating, vibrating sound. He turned his head to look up.
A small black sphere hovered above him, instruments of pain sticking out of it at odd angles.
“You may be transferred to another facility in a few hours. Please make sure you keep your dignity until then.”
He and the two white-armoured soldiers turned in unison, and they marched out of the room, leaving Riker and the interrogator droid in solace.
His screams weren’t heard by anyone outside of his dark, sound-proofed room.
San Francisco
If Starfleet Command had been in chaos a few hours ago, now it was an abyss of insanity.
Less than a hundred ships had escaped from the wormhole. They had images of great mile-long warships tearing apart ships with single blasts, without warning.
The number of ships remaining, the number of enemy ships, and the distance of the other galaxy had been determined in a dozen reports with a dozen different results. No one knew.
The Klingon Empire had somehow heard of the wormhole, and wanted full access to negotiate a peace treaty. It also had stepped up its demands for the Voyager technology. Chancellor Martok had hinted that the Klingon Empire would use force if necessary.
The Ferengi Alliance was pressing that they had fair right to the wormhole, as they believed that it was the Marauder that had first found it. They also believed that the Marauder was not even in Federation space, and thus not violating Federation Territory, when the incident had occurred.
The Romulan Star Empire had not made demands of any sort, they had only hinted that they knew of the wormhole, and that they were not interested in negotiating with the Federation over it. But something was going on with them, and everyone knew it.
Only one person had done something useful through all this.
Admiral Paris. He had immediately sent a message to the Delta Assault Fleet, and it was en route to Krinos II already.
He imagined that he was the only one around who could stop chattering his teeth and actually do something.
Now half of the rest of the staff were giving him praise bordering on fellatio.
The other half were giving him hell for diverting their greatest fleet to fight what could be ‘nothing’.
He knew that a nothing generally didn’t destroy hundreds of ships in less than a minute. Unless he had had a very poor education, and a downright dishonest dictionary, this certainly wasn’t nothing.
The sound of the president was heard over all the people running and screaming their heads off.
“This is the president. All top-ranking personnel report to a conference meeting in 15 minutes.”
Admiral Paris sighed. He was getting too old for this.
He tapped his comm badge, and muttered, “Beam me outside of the President’s building in Paris.”
He disappeared into the sparkles of the transporter.
The President’s building had been built at the end of the Dominion War as a fail-safe. It was protected from Transporters, scanners, and could withstand the entire payload of a Dominion battlecruiser. It was dug in 2 miles below the surface, with a small turbolift the only way in or out, except for a direct one-way transporter to the President’s personal ship, to be used only in the direst of emergencies.
He looked around him. Forest in every direction. This odd Tritanium door simply sat, forlorn and misplaced, in the middle of a virgin green forest.
Vines had begun to creep up onto the turbolift.
He began to use his foot to kick the vines away from the door.
As he occupied his time, several more men twinkled into existence around him.
He recognized a few of them; Admiral Janeway, the one who had allowed Project Emancipate to come into existence, and for the Delta Assault fleet to go on their quest to slay the mighty dragon.
Admiral Soval, the current head of the Starfleet Intelligence Bureau, who had recently been caught in a swirl of rumours concerning the mysterious ‘Section 31’. However, he had been with Starfleet for over 100 years, and he had been steadfast in his denial of the claims as to his connection to the organization. He was old now, and generally quiet, only saying something if it was important. But he always looked at every detail, from every angle, to fit the pieces together. That was why he was still the head.
Dem Surrial, a Na’Kuhl, head of Starfleet Special Technologies Development Centre on Vulcan. It was him and his team who had reverse-engineered Voyager’s new technology, and built somewhat diluted, weaker versions of it. Now he and his team were at work on 2 projects: The ‘Cochrane’, one of Voyager’s shuttles that had reached Warp 10, and refining the Federation’s use of Time Travel. He was aloof, brilliant, and arrogant. He pushed his men hard to learn, and he only tolerated the best. But some people thought that he might have some ulterior motives behind his work.
Most of the others he didn’t know on a personal basis, some he didn’t even know at all. Starfleet had many divisions of work within the top brass.
And then, quietly, the door slid open with an innocuous hiss. Inside, it was large enough to fight 20 people on the way down.
Everyone filed in and waited as they descended 2 miles into the bowels of the Earth.
Admiral Ross bit his tongue.
It had been 2 days since the fleet had moved to the other side of the wormhole, 600 strong, and now, they had only 93 ships left. Only a few of them were damaged at all, though: A single blast from those monstrous ships could vaporize most ships in a single hit.
If just one of those came through the wormhole…
Even worse were some ships that were hit, and just lost all power, before being taken in by those dagger-shaped warships. What could be happening to the crews of those ships? What was the enemy learning?
The only saving grace was that in a day, Admiral Wappel and the Delta Assault fleet would be coming to reinforce his position.
He took as glass of water and rubbed his temples. As he did this neither he, nor anyone else in the fleet noticed the small cloaked Ferengi vessel fly silently from the maw of the Great Devouring Maw, as the men were calling it, and jump to lightspeed.
Admiral Raellis looked out at the wormhole, and sighed,
Twice already had he called to Coruscant about his amazing discovery, requesting reinforcements to his position. Twice they had said no. This was the first Wormhole discovered, and they said no? Damn beaurocrats.
If he were supposed to conquer this galaxy he’d need more than 150 ships!
He took solace in the fact that in a day, a shipment of Golan Arms Stations would arrive to hold the wormhole so that his Star Destroyers could run rampant and destroy these pathetic humans from the other galaxy.
These humans… They were insane. They had forsaken their nature to create a farcical egalitarian utopia, all about peace and weakness. They would have been destroyed by any of the other, smarter powers soon if they hadn’t had strings of good luck; Alien beings destroying their enemies, technology given to them by the future- It was ridiculous, in a way.
But it might make this a challenge. And there was nothing like a good challenge.
The captives they had taken from the primitives- Almost 1000 in all- had talked, and so had their computers. He could not believe that they kept entire libraries of all that they knew in the computers of every ship in the fleet. It was redundant, and would allow enemies unparalleled access to their weapons systems, history…
And Star Charts. He already knew all of the major systems in this Federation, and its neighbours. Vulcan, Tarsonis III, Earth, Romulus, Qo’noS- Locations, defense systems, populations, and leaders were all known to him already. Whatever the prisoners said he already knew. He didn’t even need to interrogate them.
Still, two Star Destroyers had pulled a large asteroid over to the wormhole to be used as a prison complex, and he hated to see things go to waste, so now nearly 1000 primitives were being held and tortured in that asteroid.
For all their problems, these aliens did have their genius- A teleportation device that could revolutionize boarding tactics, a small-scale duplicator used for culinary purposes, and several other minor technologies that the Empire did not have.
After a few minutes, 12 top Starfleet brass walked single-file into a spacious conference room, and at the head of the table, President Travis Daniels.
With a gesture, he invited his guests to sit down.
“We all know why I have called you together today, gentlemen, and I must be frank. A wormhole has opened to another galaxy, and a species of hideous power. We sent two of our most powerful fleets through the wormhole, and over 500 were destroyed in less than a minute before a few fled. We don’t know how powerful their weapons are, how great their industrial capacity is, or even if they’re humanoid. But we must find a way to keep them from destroying us.”
A scattered few mumbled something or another.
“Admiral Paris, I understand that you have already diverted the Delta Assault fleet to confront the enemy?”
“That is correct, Mr. President. They were only to be called back in a dire emergency, and that has happened.”
One admiral stood up.
“Shouldn’t we try to use diplomacy, instead of going in guns blazing?”
Admiral Paris sighed. “I believe we tried that, and thy destroyed 500 of our ships. Shall we try again, and lose the rest of that fleet?”
More grumbling.
The president said, “I understand both of your positions, but their position is obvious. I can’t allow another Dominion War. We can either stand up and fight or we can be destroyed. Those are our only options.”
“There is a third, sir.”
“Yes, and what is that?”
“Close the wormhole.”
The president nodded. Admiral Soval spoke quietly, “That would prevent any contact between our two governments.”
“Is it possible?”
“Likely, yes. According to prevailing wormhole theory, size matters not.”
“Good.”
A thousand lightyears away, in the Krinos II system, the Delta Assault fleet slipped out of their limited transwarp speeds. Admiral Wappel stood up.
“Hail the fleet: That’s good timing, men, we’re here a day early. Let’s move in.”
Captain Riker awoke. He was hungry. His stomach gave a pitiful groan to voice its discontent. His skull felt too sizes too small, he had a throbbing migraine.
He forced himself into a sitting position, and opened his eyes.
He couldn’t see a thing. Either they had him in the dark or he was blind. He suspected the former.
He rubbed his temples, tried to remember what had happened…
They had been pulled into one of those evil-looking warships, and then…. A gas poured into the bridge, and he had fallen unconscious.
Then he had woken up.
“Well… How’s that for First Contact?” He laughed in spite of himself, but his throat was bone-dry, and his voice was hoarse.
He touched his surroundings. The room was maybe 2 metres by 3 metres long, with smooth, metal walls, and nothing- no bed, toiletries, or anything. He found only a hole in the corner, which he presumed was the equivalent of a toilet. He also felt along what appeared to be the frame of a door.
He lay down again.
With a hiss, a door he had inspected opened. Bright light shone into the room, burning Riker’s sensitive eyes, blinding him for a moment as he adjusted. He raised his hands in a vain attempt to shield himself.
After a moment, he could make out 3 humanoid figures, one in a grey uniform, the others in white armour, standing at the door.
“Captain William Riker, rise.”
Well, they could understand him, at least.
The 2 soldiers wore masks that had distorted grimaces on them.
The other was a man, with short-cut blonde hair, a chiseled jaw, and a clean-shaven face. His eyes were cybernetic.
A man?
What was a human, species Homo Sapiens, doing in another Galaxy?
Riker’s jaw fell open, and he couldn’t make sense of it.
These people had captured him, these aliens… But how could Humans be here? Perhaps the Progenitor Race had left its seed here, too…
“Captain William Riker, do not force us to harm you.”
Riker stood up on shaking legs.
“Good. I imagine you may be hungry and thirsty at this time, am I correct?”
The man held out a bowl of soup, and a glass of water, on a steel tray. The scent of the soup, warm, salty, hearty, flowed through him.
“Who the hell are you and why did you attack our ships?!”
Riker yelled forcefully, like he had released a ball of hatred in his stomach.
The human, whom Riker noticed had a cybernetic hand as well, set the food on the ground.
“I am Admiral Donovan Brackiss Raellis of the Galactic Empire. Your people launched an unprovoked assault into our space with a fleet of ships. We defended our home.”
“Without even a warning? Without trying diplomacy? YOU launched the unprovoked attack!”
“Do not become emotional or I will have to render you unconscious once more, captain. My job is to defend my galaxy. If you had wanted to negotiate, you would have sent a single diplomatic vessel.
“But instead, you sent a fleet of warships… Pitiful warships.”
Riker began drinking the water the admiral had given him, taking in great gulps of the ice-cold liquid which soothed his throat. Raellis saw this.
He kicked Riker in the side. The blow connected solidly, and Riker toppled over. The water spilled onto the floor.
“Now, captain, I want you to help yourself by helping us.”
“No.”
“Your decision. I’m sorry it had to be like that.”
Admiral Raellis waved his hand, and Riker heard a pulsating, vibrating sound. He turned his head to look up.
A small black sphere hovered above him, instruments of pain sticking out of it at odd angles.
“You may be transferred to another facility in a few hours. Please make sure you keep your dignity until then.”
He and the two white-armoured soldiers turned in unison, and they marched out of the room, leaving Riker and the interrogator droid in solace.
His screams weren’t heard by anyone outside of his dark, sound-proofed room.
San Francisco
If Starfleet Command had been in chaos a few hours ago, now it was an abyss of insanity.
Less than a hundred ships had escaped from the wormhole. They had images of great mile-long warships tearing apart ships with single blasts, without warning.
The number of ships remaining, the number of enemy ships, and the distance of the other galaxy had been determined in a dozen reports with a dozen different results. No one knew.
The Klingon Empire had somehow heard of the wormhole, and wanted full access to negotiate a peace treaty. It also had stepped up its demands for the Voyager technology. Chancellor Martok had hinted that the Klingon Empire would use force if necessary.
The Ferengi Alliance was pressing that they had fair right to the wormhole, as they believed that it was the Marauder that had first found it. They also believed that the Marauder was not even in Federation space, and thus not violating Federation Territory, when the incident had occurred.
The Romulan Star Empire had not made demands of any sort, they had only hinted that they knew of the wormhole, and that they were not interested in negotiating with the Federation over it. But something was going on with them, and everyone knew it.
Only one person had done something useful through all this.
Admiral Paris. He had immediately sent a message to the Delta Assault Fleet, and it was en route to Krinos II already.
He imagined that he was the only one around who could stop chattering his teeth and actually do something.
Now half of the rest of the staff were giving him praise bordering on fellatio.
The other half were giving him hell for diverting their greatest fleet to fight what could be ‘nothing’.
He knew that a nothing generally didn’t destroy hundreds of ships in less than a minute. Unless he had had a very poor education, and a downright dishonest dictionary, this certainly wasn’t nothing.
The sound of the president was heard over all the people running and screaming their heads off.
“This is the president. All top-ranking personnel report to a conference meeting in 15 minutes.”
Admiral Paris sighed. He was getting too old for this.
He tapped his comm badge, and muttered, “Beam me outside of the President’s building in Paris.”
He disappeared into the sparkles of the transporter.
The President’s building had been built at the end of the Dominion War as a fail-safe. It was protected from Transporters, scanners, and could withstand the entire payload of a Dominion battlecruiser. It was dug in 2 miles below the surface, with a small turbolift the only way in or out, except for a direct one-way transporter to the President’s personal ship, to be used only in the direst of emergencies.
He looked around him. Forest in every direction. This odd Tritanium door simply sat, forlorn and misplaced, in the middle of a virgin green forest.
Vines had begun to creep up onto the turbolift.
He began to use his foot to kick the vines away from the door.
As he occupied his time, several more men twinkled into existence around him.
He recognized a few of them; Admiral Janeway, the one who had allowed Project Emancipate to come into existence, and for the Delta Assault fleet to go on their quest to slay the mighty dragon.
Admiral Soval, the current head of the Starfleet Intelligence Bureau, who had recently been caught in a swirl of rumours concerning the mysterious ‘Section 31’. However, he had been with Starfleet for over 100 years, and he had been steadfast in his denial of the claims as to his connection to the organization. He was old now, and generally quiet, only saying something if it was important. But he always looked at every detail, from every angle, to fit the pieces together. That was why he was still the head.
Dem Surrial, a Na’Kuhl, head of Starfleet Special Technologies Development Centre on Vulcan. It was him and his team who had reverse-engineered Voyager’s new technology, and built somewhat diluted, weaker versions of it. Now he and his team were at work on 2 projects: The ‘Cochrane’, one of Voyager’s shuttles that had reached Warp 10, and refining the Federation’s use of Time Travel. He was aloof, brilliant, and arrogant. He pushed his men hard to learn, and he only tolerated the best. But some people thought that he might have some ulterior motives behind his work.
Most of the others he didn’t know on a personal basis, some he didn’t even know at all. Starfleet had many divisions of work within the top brass.
And then, quietly, the door slid open with an innocuous hiss. Inside, it was large enough to fight 20 people on the way down.
Everyone filed in and waited as they descended 2 miles into the bowels of the Earth.
Admiral Ross bit his tongue.
It had been 2 days since the fleet had moved to the other side of the wormhole, 600 strong, and now, they had only 93 ships left. Only a few of them were damaged at all, though: A single blast from those monstrous ships could vaporize most ships in a single hit.
If just one of those came through the wormhole…
Even worse were some ships that were hit, and just lost all power, before being taken in by those dagger-shaped warships. What could be happening to the crews of those ships? What was the enemy learning?
The only saving grace was that in a day, Admiral Wappel and the Delta Assault fleet would be coming to reinforce his position.
He took as glass of water and rubbed his temples. As he did this neither he, nor anyone else in the fleet noticed the small cloaked Ferengi vessel fly silently from the maw of the Great Devouring Maw, as the men were calling it, and jump to lightspeed.
Admiral Raellis looked out at the wormhole, and sighed,
Twice already had he called to Coruscant about his amazing discovery, requesting reinforcements to his position. Twice they had said no. This was the first Wormhole discovered, and they said no? Damn beaurocrats.
If he were supposed to conquer this galaxy he’d need more than 150 ships!
He took solace in the fact that in a day, a shipment of Golan Arms Stations would arrive to hold the wormhole so that his Star Destroyers could run rampant and destroy these pathetic humans from the other galaxy.
These humans… They were insane. They had forsaken their nature to create a farcical egalitarian utopia, all about peace and weakness. They would have been destroyed by any of the other, smarter powers soon if they hadn’t had strings of good luck; Alien beings destroying their enemies, technology given to them by the future- It was ridiculous, in a way.
But it might make this a challenge. And there was nothing like a good challenge.
The captives they had taken from the primitives- Almost 1000 in all- had talked, and so had their computers. He could not believe that they kept entire libraries of all that they knew in the computers of every ship in the fleet. It was redundant, and would allow enemies unparalleled access to their weapons systems, history…
And Star Charts. He already knew all of the major systems in this Federation, and its neighbours. Vulcan, Tarsonis III, Earth, Romulus, Qo’noS- Locations, defense systems, populations, and leaders were all known to him already. Whatever the prisoners said he already knew. He didn’t even need to interrogate them.
Still, two Star Destroyers had pulled a large asteroid over to the wormhole to be used as a prison complex, and he hated to see things go to waste, so now nearly 1000 primitives were being held and tortured in that asteroid.
For all their problems, these aliens did have their genius- A teleportation device that could revolutionize boarding tactics, a small-scale duplicator used for culinary purposes, and several other minor technologies that the Empire did not have.
After a few minutes, 12 top Starfleet brass walked single-file into a spacious conference room, and at the head of the table, President Travis Daniels.
With a gesture, he invited his guests to sit down.
“We all know why I have called you together today, gentlemen, and I must be frank. A wormhole has opened to another galaxy, and a species of hideous power. We sent two of our most powerful fleets through the wormhole, and over 500 were destroyed in less than a minute before a few fled. We don’t know how powerful their weapons are, how great their industrial capacity is, or even if they’re humanoid. But we must find a way to keep them from destroying us.”
A scattered few mumbled something or another.
“Admiral Paris, I understand that you have already diverted the Delta Assault fleet to confront the enemy?”
“That is correct, Mr. President. They were only to be called back in a dire emergency, and that has happened.”
One admiral stood up.
“Shouldn’t we try to use diplomacy, instead of going in guns blazing?”
Admiral Paris sighed. “I believe we tried that, and thy destroyed 500 of our ships. Shall we try again, and lose the rest of that fleet?”
More grumbling.
The president said, “I understand both of your positions, but their position is obvious. I can’t allow another Dominion War. We can either stand up and fight or we can be destroyed. Those are our only options.”
“There is a third, sir.”
“Yes, and what is that?”
“Close the wormhole.”
The president nodded. Admiral Soval spoke quietly, “That would prevent any contact between our two governments.”
“Is it possible?”
“Likely, yes. According to prevailing wormhole theory, size matters not.”
“Good.”
A thousand lightyears away, in the Krinos II system, the Delta Assault fleet slipped out of their limited transwarp speeds. Admiral Wappel stood up.
“Hail the fleet: That’s good timing, men, we’re here a day early. Let’s move in.”
-
Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
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Chapter 3: The Opening Salvo
Admiral Ross sighed audibly, as a wave of relief rippled through him and the rest of the bridge crew. He saw the elongated shapes of hundreds of ships slip out of warp and retract into their usual shapes. The Delta Assault Fleet.
He recognized most of the ships as they glided on impulse towards him.
They had all been refitted for this mission, with Ablative Armour Generators, Transphasic Torpedo ports, Transwarp Engines- Not as good as the versions from the future, but they held up.
And he didn’t actually recognize all of them.
Some had been refitted and upgraded so radically that he could barely recognize them.
Some had been kept secret by Starfleet for years- whether for illegal technology, or something entirely different, he didn’t know.
And some- mostly small ships- were entirely new designs.
Mostly small ships.
Sailing proud, at the centre of the fleet, was the USS Hero. Nearly a kilometre long, it was a majestic thing.
4 nacelles protruded diagonally from the oval centre of the ship. Out the front, a flat egg-shaped saucer was raised slightly over the centre. A massive phaser lance was slung under the saucer section, connecting to the centre.
The ship, like the others in this fleet, bristled with torpedoes and phaser ports. It was a like a massive, beautiful bulldog in a way.
“Admiral Wappel is hailing us, Admiral.”
“Put him through.”
The young, almost boyish face of Admiral Wappel beamed at him.
“I hope we’re here on time, sir. I didn’t want to miss dinner.”
Ross rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you’re here. Whatever was on the other side made mincemeat of my fleet.”
“So do I scold them and give them a time out or rub their noses in it?”
“You could shoot at them, too.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The viewscreen switched back to a view of space, and the Delta Assault Fleet moved seriously towards the wormhole’s opening.
Admiral Wappel let out a deep breath, and began to speak to his fleet.
“Remember, all you men and women who are about to ride with me into the maw of death, that it was today, today that Admiral Wappel led his men into the first battle of the fleet, the first battle with another universe, the first, and hopefully last, blow in this fight. Remember, when you are old and weak, that you fought with your captains and admirals this day, and recant to your children, and children’s children, about that battle you were in.
‘We are all the best. We are Starfleet’s cream of the crop. So fight like it. Because we need everyone we can get- to defend our freedom, to avenge all the men they have killed, to fight like a cornered grizzly.
‘Because, all you who sit, ready to charge in the valley of evil, as of this moment, we are at war.”
A great, gray orb floated through space, silent, evil. Tiny swarms of insects flew at it, and all were suddenly extinguished in brief flashes of green.
It headed towards a planet- It was Earth! She remembered Earth. Her friends had told her about it. The friends she had left behind long ago…
The Orb stopped, resolute and aloof.
She heard a whisper of a sound. “Commence Primary Ignition.”
8 green beams of light coalesced together on a great dish in the orb. And then, together, a massive laser lashed out angrily from the vile orb. It struck Earth, and it burst apart in a great explosion. The screams of a billion people ripped through her mind as they cried out in terror… And were suddenly extinguished.
The vision faded.
She woke up in a cold sweat, breathing heavily. It hadn’t been a dream.
Someone had just done something to cause that vile orb to destroy Earth… And her old friends.
Her old joints protested, but she moved shakily to the cockpit of her ship, and set in a course for Earth.
She had to warn them.
Q felt it. A decision had just been made. Of the billions of galaxies in the universe, two of them were about to enter a period that would change them both massively. The primates were about to go to war.
But this wasn’t as simple and unimportant as it sounded. Both of these ape races were- eventually- going to be very important in the grand scheme of this universe.
And they weren’t supposed to find each other. Not now.
Neither was ready for what was to come.
Q snapped his fingers.
He was going to coax this little ride along. And his favourite captain was going to be part of it.
“Move, quarter impulse to the other end of the wormhole, Engage.”
The Delta Assault Fleet moved slowly through the maw of the wormhole, into the belly of the beast.
“The enemy is within visual range now, Admiral. I’m detecting 150 ships and one gigantic ship… It may be a command ship.”
“Tom, set a course. Take us right into the heart of it.”
A bead of sweat appeared on Admiral Wappel’s face.
Tom grimaced.
“Come on, sir, it’s not like I can’t bring us out of here if it gets dicey.”
Wappel just looked on somberly as the fleet neared the lip of the wormhole. And he realized something.
“All ships, drop shields, put every joule possible into your armour.”
Each ship underwent a transformation, then and there: Great sheathes of armour slid over the ships’ hulls, buttressing them against attack.
Aboard the Warmonger II, Admiral Raellis watched with a calculating eye.
His ships were in ‘Island formation’. Clusters of five or ten ships were scattered over the perimeter. Each group would target all weapons on a single ship to break down its defenses.
“I’m reading approximately 600 ships coming out of that wormhole, all of them frigates, corvettes, and the like. The longest is only 900 metres long.
“Just a moment… They have dropped their shields.”
“Raellis cocked an eyebrow.
“What?”
“It seems as though their hulls are somehow covering themselves in… armour. I can’t get a read on their systems, this is the densest armour I’ve ever seen.”
“Curious.”
“They’ll be in weapon range in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1.”
“All ships, on my mark… Fire at will.”
Hateful green turbolaser bolts sliced through space as the Delta Assault Fleet neared.
Swarms of them smashed into the fleet. 5 hit the Hero, and it rocked violently.
“Armour is regenerating, captain.”
The weapons fire destroyed 5 small ships, as their armour failed them.
“We’ll be in weapons range for torpedoes in 5… 4…”
Admiral Raellis stood on his bridge as flames engulfed more enemy ships.
“All ships, deploy fighter screens.”
Admiral Wappel watched, as more of his ships were ships were destroyed. He counted ten by now. But now he could bite back.
“All ships, fire on my command those 3 warships at the coordinates I lay in.”
He tapped his console.
“Fire!”
At once, clouds of glowing Transphasic torpedoes shot from his fleet, speeding towards a small cluster of Star Destroyers. Simultaneously, clouds of black TIE Fighters were vomited from the fighter bays of Admiral Raellis’ fleet.
The 3 Star Destroyers erupted in red and gold explosions as over a thousand torpedoes bombarded them in an instant. They were shredded in a second by this voluminous onslaught.
Meanwhile, thousands of TIEs screeched towards their targets. Wappel stared, his jaw open, in horror.
“Tom… Go to the Delta Flyer. Jack, man piloting. Comm, inform the fleet to scramble all combat shuttles. We need point-defense against those fighters.”
“Yessir.” All three spoke in unison before they went about their respective tasks.
“Those fighters will engage the fleet in 4 seconds, sir.”
“Godspeed, Tom.”
The Hero was equipped with 12 upgraded Danube-class runabouts, and three upgraded Delta Flyer-class heavy shuttles. Most of the ships had about 4 to 8 combat shuttles. All of them had Transphasic torpedoes and ablative armour generators. He hoped they’d be enough.
Tom was fast, but not fast enough.
Obscuring all vision, the TIEs engaged two Miranda-class vessels, making Swiss cheese out of them.
And then Tom and the rest of the fighter pilots scrambled.
And then everything went to shit.
The Admiral Wappel’s fleet was now among the Star Destroyers, evading as much weapons fire as possible, spitting torpedoes at them.
The Star Destroyers tried to blast apart these small, but tough ships that were trying to dogfight with them.
The TIEs swarmed among the Federation vessels, blasting at them and the fighters.
The shuttles, vainly in most cases, tried to protect their wards and destroy the black screeching TIEs.
Other than these constants, nothing was assured.
Star Destroyers were more powerful than any Federation vessel, of course, but they were not accustomed to fighting at point-blank ranges. The Federation also outnumbered them 4 to 1. Then again, TIEs more than made up for this.
Tom figured this out quickly.
Squeezed between the hull of a massive Star Destroyer lashing green blasts at the Hero, the Hero itself, and a horde of screeching TIEs, he was stressed.
Three careened past him, shooting their lasers at his armoured Delta Flyer, it shook rapidly, but he was fine. As two moved close together and began to fire hot energetic death at him, he squeezed off one of his four Transphasic at the bastards. As he sailed in too close, he pulled up as exploding shrapnel struck his now-weakening craft.
“Tom, move away from the warship! She’s gunna blow!” he heard over his comm. He needed no more encouragement.
He hit the full throttle, and made a hard turn which threw him from his seat as the wedge-shaped Star Destroyer behind him was torn apart by more torpedoes and exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel as large as his flyer hurtling towards him, hot, molten and deadly.
3 TIE Interceptors sailed past him, shredding a poor Danube-class. They turned and shrieked towards him, spitting.
As if in response, phaser fire from the Hero shot up to vapourise 2 of the offending fighters.
“Thank you, sir.” Whispered Tom. He banked, and targeted the last one, slicing off a wing with his ventral phaser. He hoped Wappel was doing better.
He wasn’t.
“Upper-left nacelle’s armour is buckling!”
“Divert power from the neck!”
“Enemy fighters are closing!”
“We only have 5 Danubes and 2 Delta Flyers left!”
“We’ve lost two more ships!”
He’d have to retreat from this battle soon, or his entire fleet would be destroyed. He needed to repair, tell Starfleet and the other powers everything, figure everything out- Besides, the main point of this attack was just to show this enemy that he could fight back.
“Sir… I’ve detected… Cpt Riker.”
“What?” This was what he needed to get out of the battle. A prize.
“He, and hundreds of other Starfleet personnel that were part of the original fleet are being held on that small asteroid facility. Only 1 warship is guarding it.”
“Have the Defiant and the Sao Paulo engage the warship while we rescue our men.”
Immediately, two Defiants raced along with the Hero to the lonely asteroid.
Admiral Raellis watched this intently.
“One Star Destroyer cannot handle all three of those vessels.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re using they’re most powerful warship to rescue POWs. I expect they’ll retreat with them soon enough. Besides, they’ll have to use one of those vessels to rescue the prisoners, and only the largest one has the necessary volume. One could take two of those small vessels.”
“Of course, sir.”
We’re in Transporter range, captain. The Defiant and the Sao Paulo are engaging the warship.”
“Let’s give these Mass Transporters a christening, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Defiants swung under the Star Destroyer, as the underside appeared to have both less fun and their reactor core. However, this cost them, as they were left defenseless for midship guns to batter their armour.
Meanwhile, the Hero began to batter down the weak shields around the facility.
The Defiant fired off a full volley of torpedoes into the Star Destroyer’s belly, though it held and the torpedoes simply exploded as they smashed against the shields. The beast focused on the Sao Paulo, and a few green turbolasers struck the armour.
“We have a quarter of our men, captain… The Sao Paulo’s shields are at 60% and holding.”
The Defiant and the Sao Paulo, in unison, blasted away at the armoured reactor with all their might. However, more turbolasers splashed against the Sao Paulo, and for a moment, its ablative armour generators failed.
A single green beam lashed angrily against it, vapourising the ship in an instant.
“The Sao Paulo is destroyed, captain. Three quarters of the prisoners have been beamed up.”
The Defiant raced forward, guns blazing, to avenge her fallen comrade. Around the engines, where green flak bursts rocked her violently, over the hull and behind the command tower. But as she unloaded volley after volley into the ship, she forgot about the dragon’s teeth.
Turbolasers blasted into her, shearing off part of the ship.
In her death throws, the Defiant commenced a Warp core breach, began the process of executing her torpedoes, and smashed, literally in a blaze of glory, into the shields of the Star Destroyer.
“We have completed the transport of all colonists. The Defiant has Kami-Kazeed into the warship.”
Admiral Wappel needed a drink.
“ Bank towards it. Fire all forwards ventral torpedo ports!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The Hero turned to face the monster which had destroyed the Defiant and the Sao Paulo, and a fan of glowing orbs careened into the bow of the Star Destroyer.
“Their shields are buckling.”
“Fire at will!”
More torpedoes impacted upon the Star Destroyer. Finally, the shields broke, and the hull became a torn wasteland of molten metal and burnt superstructure.
“Fire the phaser lance at that command tower!”
The phaser lance struck out through the void of space, erupting against the command tower, shearing it off.
“Inform the fleet: We’re going back through the wormhole. Repeat, all ships are to disengage and retreat back into Federation space.”
And with that, the wounded fleet broke off, and fled back into the great Maw.
Admiral Raellis watched.
“Shall we follow them in, admiral?”
“No. Let them leave. They probably have enough reinforcements to destroy us anyway. Have all fighters return to their bays. Begin repairs. I need to contact some people.”
The Emperor wouldn’t refuse to give him help now- He’d be an idiot to do so. This was a hostile enemy that had destroyed over 30 of his ships! At any rate, he could pull a few strings and get a few extra ships from other admirals and Black Sun.
He needed time to reflect, anyway.
Captain Riker woke up. He remembered beatings, burning, poison, blindness… What were they going to do to him now?
But in front of his blurry eyes, he could make out the expression of young Admiral Wappel.
“Hello, Will.”
Riker, his voice weak and husky, whispered, “They didn’t even ask me any questions…”
And this is what happened when, as I idly worked on the intro of this chapter, my brother hijacked the computer:
Chapter 3: The Opening Salvo FROM A PENIS. A VERY LARGE PENIS.
A wave of relief flushed over Admiral Ross WHO WAS HAVING A MAJOR CHUBBY, as he saw the elongated PENIS-SHAPED forms of hundreds of PENIS SHAPED Starfleet vessels slip out of warp WHICH MADE THEM LOOK LIKE THEY WERE COMING OUT OF AN EVEN BIGGER PENIS, and then retract into their familiar forms LIKE PENISES- Mostly familiar SINCE THEY LOOKED LIKE PENISES.
Many had been secretly designed TO LOOK LIKE PENISES and kept under lock and key for years (BY MEN WITH SMALL PENISES. THEY WERE VERY INSECURE MEN, AND KEEPING THE PENIS SHAPED SHIPS MADE THEM FEEL BAD ABOUT THEIR SMALL PENISES), before being taken out of mothball, refit and sent off to the war.
Others were so massively refit that they were no longer recognizable. THEY NOW LOOKED LIKE PENISES.
Some, mostly small PENIS ships, were actually new PENIS designs.
Mostly small ships, AND ONES THAT LOOKED LIKE PENISES. SMALL PENISES.
Its saucer section raised up, cocky and noble, the USS Hero sat at the centre of the fleet. 4 warp nacelles pointed out diagonally from the familiar conical PENIS SHAPE. IT WAS LIKE A LARGE PENIS. A VERY STRONG PENIS, LIKE A STALLION, AND YET DELICATE, LIKE A ROSE WRAPPED IN SILK.
I AM A VERY NERDY BOY. NERDY NERDY NERDY. HOW NERDY AM I? VERY NERDY. NERDY BOYS LIKE TO TYPE NERDY ‘FAN-FIC’, LIKE THIS, WHICH IS NERDY FANFIC, WHICH I AM TYPING, BECAUSE I AM A NERDY BOY. HOW BIG A NERD AM I? I’M TYPING NERDY FANFIC. THIS MAKES ME A VERY SPECIAL TYPE OF NERD: A FANFIC WRITING NERD. I ALSO SPEND LOTS OF NERDY TIME NERDING IT UP IN NERDY CHATROOMS FOR NERDS. SOME OF THOSE NERDS WRITE NERDY FANFIC AS WELL. SOME OF THE NERDS DO NOT, BUT THEY ARE STILL NERDY, THOUGH NOT AS NERDY AS I, BECAUSE I AM A FANFIC WRITING NERD. I AM PART OF A NERD ELITE, AND ALL THE MEMBERS OF SAID GROUP ARE VERY NERDY. NERDY NERDY NERDY. SEE HOW NERDY I AM? I CAN USE ‘SCIENCE’ TO PROVE WHY STAR WARS WOULD BEAT STAR TREK. THIS MEANS THAT I NOT ONLY WATCH STAR TREK, WHICH WOULD MAKE ME NERDY IN AND OF ITSELF, BUT I ALSO READ DISSERTATIONS ON WHY IT IS INFERIOR TO STAR WARS. NERDY, EH? VERY NERDY. NERDY NERDY NERDY. NERDING IS FUN WHEN I’M NERDING IT UP WITH OTHER NERDS. AND SO ON, WITH THE NERDINESS AND WHATNOT
Admiral Ross sighed audibly, as a wave of relief rippled through him and the rest of the bridge crew. He saw the elongated shapes of hundreds of ships slip out of warp and retract into their usual shapes. The Delta Assault Fleet.
He recognized most of the ships as they glided on impulse towards him.
They had all been refitted for this mission, with Ablative Armour Generators, Transphasic Torpedo ports, Transwarp Engines- Not as good as the versions from the future, but they held up.
And he didn’t actually recognize all of them.
Some had been refitted and upgraded so radically that he could barely recognize them.
Some had been kept secret by Starfleet for years- whether for illegal technology, or something entirely different, he didn’t know.
And some- mostly small ships- were entirely new designs.
Mostly small ships.
Sailing proud, at the centre of the fleet, was the USS Hero. Nearly a kilometre long, it was a majestic thing.
4 nacelles protruded diagonally from the oval centre of the ship. Out the front, a flat egg-shaped saucer was raised slightly over the centre. A massive phaser lance was slung under the saucer section, connecting to the centre.
The ship, like the others in this fleet, bristled with torpedoes and phaser ports. It was a like a massive, beautiful bulldog in a way.
“Admiral Wappel is hailing us, Admiral.”
“Put him through.”
The young, almost boyish face of Admiral Wappel beamed at him.
“I hope we’re here on time, sir. I didn’t want to miss dinner.”
Ross rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you’re here. Whatever was on the other side made mincemeat of my fleet.”
“So do I scold them and give them a time out or rub their noses in it?”
“You could shoot at them, too.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The viewscreen switched back to a view of space, and the Delta Assault Fleet moved seriously towards the wormhole’s opening.
Admiral Wappel let out a deep breath, and began to speak to his fleet.
“Remember, all you men and women who are about to ride with me into the maw of death, that it was today, today that Admiral Wappel led his men into the first battle of the fleet, the first battle with another universe, the first, and hopefully last, blow in this fight. Remember, when you are old and weak, that you fought with your captains and admirals this day, and recant to your children, and children’s children, about that battle you were in.
‘We are all the best. We are Starfleet’s cream of the crop. So fight like it. Because we need everyone we can get- to defend our freedom, to avenge all the men they have killed, to fight like a cornered grizzly.
‘Because, all you who sit, ready to charge in the valley of evil, as of this moment, we are at war.”
A great, gray orb floated through space, silent, evil. Tiny swarms of insects flew at it, and all were suddenly extinguished in brief flashes of green.
It headed towards a planet- It was Earth! She remembered Earth. Her friends had told her about it. The friends she had left behind long ago…
The Orb stopped, resolute and aloof.
She heard a whisper of a sound. “Commence Primary Ignition.”
8 green beams of light coalesced together on a great dish in the orb. And then, together, a massive laser lashed out angrily from the vile orb. It struck Earth, and it burst apart in a great explosion. The screams of a billion people ripped through her mind as they cried out in terror… And were suddenly extinguished.
The vision faded.
She woke up in a cold sweat, breathing heavily. It hadn’t been a dream.
Someone had just done something to cause that vile orb to destroy Earth… And her old friends.
Her old joints protested, but she moved shakily to the cockpit of her ship, and set in a course for Earth.
She had to warn them.
Q felt it. A decision had just been made. Of the billions of galaxies in the universe, two of them were about to enter a period that would change them both massively. The primates were about to go to war.
But this wasn’t as simple and unimportant as it sounded. Both of these ape races were- eventually- going to be very important in the grand scheme of this universe.
And they weren’t supposed to find each other. Not now.
Neither was ready for what was to come.
Q snapped his fingers.
He was going to coax this little ride along. And his favourite captain was going to be part of it.
“Move, quarter impulse to the other end of the wormhole, Engage.”
The Delta Assault Fleet moved slowly through the maw of the wormhole, into the belly of the beast.
“The enemy is within visual range now, Admiral. I’m detecting 150 ships and one gigantic ship… It may be a command ship.”
“Tom, set a course. Take us right into the heart of it.”
A bead of sweat appeared on Admiral Wappel’s face.
Tom grimaced.
“Come on, sir, it’s not like I can’t bring us out of here if it gets dicey.”
Wappel just looked on somberly as the fleet neared the lip of the wormhole. And he realized something.
“All ships, drop shields, put every joule possible into your armour.”
Each ship underwent a transformation, then and there: Great sheathes of armour slid over the ships’ hulls, buttressing them against attack.
Aboard the Warmonger II, Admiral Raellis watched with a calculating eye.
His ships were in ‘Island formation’. Clusters of five or ten ships were scattered over the perimeter. Each group would target all weapons on a single ship to break down its defenses.
“I’m reading approximately 600 ships coming out of that wormhole, all of them frigates, corvettes, and the like. The longest is only 900 metres long.
“Just a moment… They have dropped their shields.”
“Raellis cocked an eyebrow.
“What?”
“It seems as though their hulls are somehow covering themselves in… armour. I can’t get a read on their systems, this is the densest armour I’ve ever seen.”
“Curious.”
“They’ll be in weapon range in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1.”
“All ships, on my mark… Fire at will.”
Hateful green turbolaser bolts sliced through space as the Delta Assault Fleet neared.
Swarms of them smashed into the fleet. 5 hit the Hero, and it rocked violently.
“Armour is regenerating, captain.”
The weapons fire destroyed 5 small ships, as their armour failed them.
“We’ll be in weapons range for torpedoes in 5… 4…”
Admiral Raellis stood on his bridge as flames engulfed more enemy ships.
“All ships, deploy fighter screens.”
Admiral Wappel watched, as more of his ships were ships were destroyed. He counted ten by now. But now he could bite back.
“All ships, fire on my command those 3 warships at the coordinates I lay in.”
He tapped his console.
“Fire!”
At once, clouds of glowing Transphasic torpedoes shot from his fleet, speeding towards a small cluster of Star Destroyers. Simultaneously, clouds of black TIE Fighters were vomited from the fighter bays of Admiral Raellis’ fleet.
The 3 Star Destroyers erupted in red and gold explosions as over a thousand torpedoes bombarded them in an instant. They were shredded in a second by this voluminous onslaught.
Meanwhile, thousands of TIEs screeched towards their targets. Wappel stared, his jaw open, in horror.
“Tom… Go to the Delta Flyer. Jack, man piloting. Comm, inform the fleet to scramble all combat shuttles. We need point-defense against those fighters.”
“Yessir.” All three spoke in unison before they went about their respective tasks.
“Those fighters will engage the fleet in 4 seconds, sir.”
“Godspeed, Tom.”
The Hero was equipped with 12 upgraded Danube-class runabouts, and three upgraded Delta Flyer-class heavy shuttles. Most of the ships had about 4 to 8 combat shuttles. All of them had Transphasic torpedoes and ablative armour generators. He hoped they’d be enough.
Tom was fast, but not fast enough.
Obscuring all vision, the TIEs engaged two Miranda-class vessels, making Swiss cheese out of them.
And then Tom and the rest of the fighter pilots scrambled.
And then everything went to shit.
The Admiral Wappel’s fleet was now among the Star Destroyers, evading as much weapons fire as possible, spitting torpedoes at them.
The Star Destroyers tried to blast apart these small, but tough ships that were trying to dogfight with them.
The TIEs swarmed among the Federation vessels, blasting at them and the fighters.
The shuttles, vainly in most cases, tried to protect their wards and destroy the black screeching TIEs.
Other than these constants, nothing was assured.
Star Destroyers were more powerful than any Federation vessel, of course, but they were not accustomed to fighting at point-blank ranges. The Federation also outnumbered them 4 to 1. Then again, TIEs more than made up for this.
Tom figured this out quickly.
Squeezed between the hull of a massive Star Destroyer lashing green blasts at the Hero, the Hero itself, and a horde of screeching TIEs, he was stressed.
Three careened past him, shooting their lasers at his armoured Delta Flyer, it shook rapidly, but he was fine. As two moved close together and began to fire hot energetic death at him, he squeezed off one of his four Transphasic at the bastards. As he sailed in too close, he pulled up as exploding shrapnel struck his now-weakening craft.
“Tom, move away from the warship! She’s gunna blow!” he heard over his comm. He needed no more encouragement.
He hit the full throttle, and made a hard turn which threw him from his seat as the wedge-shaped Star Destroyer behind him was torn apart by more torpedoes and exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel as large as his flyer hurtling towards him, hot, molten and deadly.
3 TIE Interceptors sailed past him, shredding a poor Danube-class. They turned and shrieked towards him, spitting.
As if in response, phaser fire from the Hero shot up to vapourise 2 of the offending fighters.
“Thank you, sir.” Whispered Tom. He banked, and targeted the last one, slicing off a wing with his ventral phaser. He hoped Wappel was doing better.
He wasn’t.
“Upper-left nacelle’s armour is buckling!”
“Divert power from the neck!”
“Enemy fighters are closing!”
“We only have 5 Danubes and 2 Delta Flyers left!”
“We’ve lost two more ships!”
He’d have to retreat from this battle soon, or his entire fleet would be destroyed. He needed to repair, tell Starfleet and the other powers everything, figure everything out- Besides, the main point of this attack was just to show this enemy that he could fight back.
“Sir… I’ve detected… Cpt Riker.”
“What?” This was what he needed to get out of the battle. A prize.
“He, and hundreds of other Starfleet personnel that were part of the original fleet are being held on that small asteroid facility. Only 1 warship is guarding it.”
“Have the Defiant and the Sao Paulo engage the warship while we rescue our men.”
Immediately, two Defiants raced along with the Hero to the lonely asteroid.
Admiral Raellis watched this intently.
“One Star Destroyer cannot handle all three of those vessels.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re using they’re most powerful warship to rescue POWs. I expect they’ll retreat with them soon enough. Besides, they’ll have to use one of those vessels to rescue the prisoners, and only the largest one has the necessary volume. One could take two of those small vessels.”
“Of course, sir.”
We’re in Transporter range, captain. The Defiant and the Sao Paulo are engaging the warship.”
“Let’s give these Mass Transporters a christening, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Defiants swung under the Star Destroyer, as the underside appeared to have both less fun and their reactor core. However, this cost them, as they were left defenseless for midship guns to batter their armour.
Meanwhile, the Hero began to batter down the weak shields around the facility.
The Defiant fired off a full volley of torpedoes into the Star Destroyer’s belly, though it held and the torpedoes simply exploded as they smashed against the shields. The beast focused on the Sao Paulo, and a few green turbolasers struck the armour.
“We have a quarter of our men, captain… The Sao Paulo’s shields are at 60% and holding.”
The Defiant and the Sao Paulo, in unison, blasted away at the armoured reactor with all their might. However, more turbolasers splashed against the Sao Paulo, and for a moment, its ablative armour generators failed.
A single green beam lashed angrily against it, vapourising the ship in an instant.
“The Sao Paulo is destroyed, captain. Three quarters of the prisoners have been beamed up.”
The Defiant raced forward, guns blazing, to avenge her fallen comrade. Around the engines, where green flak bursts rocked her violently, over the hull and behind the command tower. But as she unloaded volley after volley into the ship, she forgot about the dragon’s teeth.
Turbolasers blasted into her, shearing off part of the ship.
In her death throws, the Defiant commenced a Warp core breach, began the process of executing her torpedoes, and smashed, literally in a blaze of glory, into the shields of the Star Destroyer.
“We have completed the transport of all colonists. The Defiant has Kami-Kazeed into the warship.”
Admiral Wappel needed a drink.
“ Bank towards it. Fire all forwards ventral torpedo ports!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The Hero turned to face the monster which had destroyed the Defiant and the Sao Paulo, and a fan of glowing orbs careened into the bow of the Star Destroyer.
“Their shields are buckling.”
“Fire at will!”
More torpedoes impacted upon the Star Destroyer. Finally, the shields broke, and the hull became a torn wasteland of molten metal and burnt superstructure.
“Fire the phaser lance at that command tower!”
The phaser lance struck out through the void of space, erupting against the command tower, shearing it off.
“Inform the fleet: We’re going back through the wormhole. Repeat, all ships are to disengage and retreat back into Federation space.”
And with that, the wounded fleet broke off, and fled back into the great Maw.
Admiral Raellis watched.
“Shall we follow them in, admiral?”
“No. Let them leave. They probably have enough reinforcements to destroy us anyway. Have all fighters return to their bays. Begin repairs. I need to contact some people.”
The Emperor wouldn’t refuse to give him help now- He’d be an idiot to do so. This was a hostile enemy that had destroyed over 30 of his ships! At any rate, he could pull a few strings and get a few extra ships from other admirals and Black Sun.
He needed time to reflect, anyway.
Captain Riker woke up. He remembered beatings, burning, poison, blindness… What were they going to do to him now?
But in front of his blurry eyes, he could make out the expression of young Admiral Wappel.
“Hello, Will.”
Riker, his voice weak and husky, whispered, “They didn’t even ask me any questions…”
And this is what happened when, as I idly worked on the intro of this chapter, my brother hijacked the computer:
Chapter 3: The Opening Salvo FROM A PENIS. A VERY LARGE PENIS.
A wave of relief flushed over Admiral Ross WHO WAS HAVING A MAJOR CHUBBY, as he saw the elongated PENIS-SHAPED forms of hundreds of PENIS SHAPED Starfleet vessels slip out of warp WHICH MADE THEM LOOK LIKE THEY WERE COMING OUT OF AN EVEN BIGGER PENIS, and then retract into their familiar forms LIKE PENISES- Mostly familiar SINCE THEY LOOKED LIKE PENISES.
Many had been secretly designed TO LOOK LIKE PENISES and kept under lock and key for years (BY MEN WITH SMALL PENISES. THEY WERE VERY INSECURE MEN, AND KEEPING THE PENIS SHAPED SHIPS MADE THEM FEEL BAD ABOUT THEIR SMALL PENISES), before being taken out of mothball, refit and sent off to the war.
Others were so massively refit that they were no longer recognizable. THEY NOW LOOKED LIKE PENISES.
Some, mostly small PENIS ships, were actually new PENIS designs.
Mostly small ships, AND ONES THAT LOOKED LIKE PENISES. SMALL PENISES.
Its saucer section raised up, cocky and noble, the USS Hero sat at the centre of the fleet. 4 warp nacelles pointed out diagonally from the familiar conical PENIS SHAPE. IT WAS LIKE A LARGE PENIS. A VERY STRONG PENIS, LIKE A STALLION, AND YET DELICATE, LIKE A ROSE WRAPPED IN SILK.
I AM A VERY NERDY BOY. NERDY NERDY NERDY. HOW NERDY AM I? VERY NERDY. NERDY BOYS LIKE TO TYPE NERDY ‘FAN-FIC’, LIKE THIS, WHICH IS NERDY FANFIC, WHICH I AM TYPING, BECAUSE I AM A NERDY BOY. HOW BIG A NERD AM I? I’M TYPING NERDY FANFIC. THIS MAKES ME A VERY SPECIAL TYPE OF NERD: A FANFIC WRITING NERD. I ALSO SPEND LOTS OF NERDY TIME NERDING IT UP IN NERDY CHATROOMS FOR NERDS. SOME OF THOSE NERDS WRITE NERDY FANFIC AS WELL. SOME OF THE NERDS DO NOT, BUT THEY ARE STILL NERDY, THOUGH NOT AS NERDY AS I, BECAUSE I AM A FANFIC WRITING NERD. I AM PART OF A NERD ELITE, AND ALL THE MEMBERS OF SAID GROUP ARE VERY NERDY. NERDY NERDY NERDY. SEE HOW NERDY I AM? I CAN USE ‘SCIENCE’ TO PROVE WHY STAR WARS WOULD BEAT STAR TREK. THIS MEANS THAT I NOT ONLY WATCH STAR TREK, WHICH WOULD MAKE ME NERDY IN AND OF ITSELF, BUT I ALSO READ DISSERTATIONS ON WHY IT IS INFERIOR TO STAR WARS. NERDY, EH? VERY NERDY. NERDY NERDY NERDY. NERDING IS FUN WHEN I’M NERDING IT UP WITH OTHER NERDS. AND SO ON, WITH THE NERDINESS AND WHATNOT
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Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
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SpecWar826
- Youngling
- Posts: 80
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- Location: I don't know I'm Lost
What you don't remember tribun is that when they brought the armor down to 40 percent was after the queen assimilated future janeway and had somewhat of a contermeasure against it cause after they first installed it and tested it on 3 cubes they all fired on voy and we here kim say armour holding at 96%
CHANCE FAVORS THE PREPARED MIND
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Tribun
- Jedi Council Member
- Posts: 2164
- Joined: 2003-05-25 10:02am
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- Contact:
Nonetheless, the brute force of SW weapons would make the point moot anyway. Even with that armor, a turbolaser would destroy the ship with one hit.SpecWar826 wrote:What you don't remember tribun is that when they brought the armor down to 40 percent was after the queen assimilated future janeway and had somewhat of a contermeasure against it cause after they first installed it and tested it on 3 cubes they all fired on voy and we here kim say armour holding at 96%
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Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
- Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
- Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters
-
Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
- Sith Devotee
- Posts: 3317
- Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
- Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters