You heard it right, I'm back. And promoted!
How did that happen? Well, while Anthi and I had plenty of time to sit and ponder (using some of the techniques learned on Vulcan) we came up with some ideas. All we had to watch in the escape pod were Starfleet historical documentaries. All we had to eat was nearby grass and some ration bars. All we had to drink was some stagnant pondwater and a few bottles of Starfleet water. For shelter we huddled against the escape pod using large leaves as cover. Fortunately, after a few days we were finally located by Starfleet Search and Rescue.
After I cleaned up on my way back, the Admiral "requested" my presence. Before he could court martial me for screwing up so bad I thanked him for sending the U.S.S. Kirk to pick us up. I then happened to bring up that it was a co-incidence that the great Admiral Kirk also lost several ships in his career. Then I dropped in that it was just as well it had been me taking the tribble to the Romulans when they really wanted the Admiral himself to make the diplomatic exchange and that I was glad to have gone through such suffering, danger and trauma to save his life.
There was a lull in the conversation. Shortly thereafter I found myself in a graduation ceremony.
Not only that, but since the old U.S.S. Determination NCC 93545 was sort of reduced to atoms they offered me a new ship too. I got to keep the serial code, but changed the name. Behold the awesomeness of the U.S.S. Resolution NCC 93545-A.
The Resolution is a science vessel, it's not a lot bigger than the Determination, but has much better equipment. Far more powerful shields and a small increase in weaponry, most notable rear firing photons.
My bridge crew beamed on board to welcome me to my new command. Using some of the power and influence I'd garnered recently I managed to pull a few strings and get some promotions happening.
Believe it or not, the crew were all found! Lieutenant Anthi on tactical, Lieutenant Reggie on science station 1, Lieutenant Dwight on engineering and Ensign Garry on science station 2. He didn't quite make the promotion cut due to many and varying factors, mainly my dislike.
Garry, Dwight and Reggie had been found elsewhere on the planet Anthi and I had been marooned on. They had also barely managed to scrape through, though they had a working still, water purification plant and bakehouse cobbled together near their huts. I think their escape pod must have had more equipment than ours.
An emergency call came over the comm before we had a chance to celebrate, so off we went.
The fleet was gathering around a nearby planet that the Gorn had assaulted.
A massive super battleship was bombing the planet, we had to fight through waves of smaller ships to get to it.
It was a little crazy, but the Resolution handled brilliantly, Reggie and Dwight had picked up a few new skills. Reggie, at the new advanced science console, can sometimes hack into opposing ship computers and shut their weapons down momentarily. Dwight has more control from the bridge over engineering and is really good at rerouting power and engineering crews to make fast repairs. We worked together on that. I'm helping by waving my tricorder around as he works. You can spot the dedication to duty. You can also spot the new rank pips.
The Gorn supership was huge, it took all of us combined to take it down.
Unfortunately, a ship that big falling into the atmosphere of the planet caused massive devastation to the continent below, and is likely to cause famine and world wide destruction for years to come. Still. Better that than being torpedoed right? The weapons used by the Gorn were different to what we'd seen before. Garry identified them as Crusher particles. A quick message to Starfleet had us on our way to a planet that had been undergoing an unusually high output flux of the particles.
The planet gives out Crusher particles, which can cause strange time-space fluctuations. It is ringed with satellites that keep the particles locked up. The Gorn had sabotaged a few of the satellites and were siphoning off the particles to use as weapons. We fixed the satellites, and obtained energy signatures that Reggie identified as having come from a nearby asteroid field embedded in a nebula.
We stopped off at a planet on the way to pick up our new Tactical officer Tomarzaharathian or something like that. I call him Tommy. He likes it. I like Tommy.
He's a demolitions expert, and was eager to assist in taking out the Gorn nasties. If the Crusher emanating planet hadn't had the satellites fixed, Tommy's planet would have been destroyed. Or stuck in a time-flux of permanent Monday mornings, which are essentially the same thing.
We arrived at the nebula and Reggie quickly scanned it.
If you enhance the image (click on it - you can do this with all the pictures in this log in case you didn't know) you might see what Reggie brilliantly deducted. Lots of small asteroids and one massive donut shaped one. You may also notice the shield damage on the Resolution. This nebula was highly explosive. We were constantly buffeted by small explosions.
We found soon enough that the Gorns had been working with the Klingons. Some disruptor turrets tried to deter us, but the new weapons systems made short work of them. It was slow work, avoiding the denser regions of gas and larger rocks, but we got to the secret base in the end.
Anthi blew up Klingons, Tommy set the charges, I downloaded the particle weapon schematics (for later research). You may notice that Tommy is kind of donut asteroid shaped himself. He's a little sensitive about it, so don't ever mention it to his face. If you do, he makes a noise like a Farborian Squid being poked with a wet Loharian Cat.
Job well done, we hightailed it out of there and informed Starfleet of our success. They congratulated us and told us there was yet another important mission for us to take on. You can tell how much I was looking forward to it by the happy snap Anthi took from her station when the news came in on the bridge.
But more on that later.
Sparky... out.
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