Stardate 87734.02

Well, as you can imagine, it was with great relief that we were picked up from our space coffin of a shuttle/escape pod. Garry kept on telling us stories to keep us sane. My desire to throttle him gave me something to focus on.


The ship that picked us up? The Resolution! I was immediately re-instated as her captain and it was back to work. On board was Admiral G'rel who was concerned that the Romulans had been developing secret bio-weapons in a secret facility somewhere secret.


She knew of our history with Romulans, and had taken steps to upgrade the Resolution with better shields and weapons... just in case. We warped to the neutral zone, and headed in to a system that looked like an asteroid belt full of garbage.

No sooner had we begun our search... Romulan Warbirds decloaked. Fortunately they were the small sort, not the larger D'Deridex class. Even with the upgraded systems, it was a tough battle. Reggie managed to take the targeting computers offline on one ship, while Anthi boosted phasers and Tommy increased our torpedo yield. 

With a few quick repairs we were back on our way, skimming over the surface of a particularly large asteroid, we were suddenly halted in our tracks. Simultaneously I had Anthi report a ship decloaking, Garry reporting we were locked in a tractor beam and Tommy praying to some sort of alien idol.

And wouldn't you know it, it was one of the big ones. This next image shows us up close and personal, you can see how much smaller the Resolution is.

Of course, they had no chance, expecting little from a ship as small as ours, they were mightily surprised. It was a tough fight, but I managed to pilot us behind the larger ship and stick to the rear. I had been playing around with the more advanced targeting upgrades and we cheated the fight by dropping the bigger ships shields and launching a full overloaded photon torpedo spread into the "neck" of the D'Deridex.


Surprised, I think, at the nasty wound we'd inflicted, the ship cloaked and (I assume) ran away. While left alone for the present, we found the secret asteroid base.

After taking out the measly turret defences, we beamed over to get a look at their computer systems. They didn't want us to.

We found data suggesting that a nearby Romulan Starbase was the repository of "many biological experiments". The Admiral suggested we go there. I suggested that an entire starbase may be out of our league. The Admiral called in the fleet to attack one side of the starbase, while we were to infiltrate while the enemy ships were occupied elsewhere.

We approached at high speed, beamed over, and had the Resolution run away again, to be called back when we were ready to beam back. The Romulans put up a bit of a fight, but claimed to be medical researchers, not weapons researchers. We still came under heavy fire from the security teams. My new phaser had a "dissolve" setting. It worked.

Eventually we got to the computer core. It was DNA coded so we couldn't log in. I had to think for a minute. Petting a tribble is good for the brain juices. It doesn't quite work as well as a white cat though.

The Admiral solved the dilemma by stepping forward and putting her hand on the computer. She then transferred data about the Undine onto a small device. The rest of the computer systems were actually full of medical research. The Romulans hadn't been lying... the Admiral had!

Great, duped AGAIN by a shapeshifter. She beamed away, laughing at us the whole time. However, it was not a complete loss. Sure we'd slaughtered innocent Romulan medical researchers, destroyed several of their ships and allowed an Undine access to the files they had. But... I had noticed the shapeshifter flinch when I was petting Triblon. Valuable information indeed.


The Resolution picked us back up and we hightailed it out of there, only some fancy flying helped us dodge a Scimitar in full destroy everything mode.

After reporting back to Starfleet, we were told to take it easy for a while and that if we were serious about helping with the Romulan and Undine threat we would need a better ship. To qualify for the next tier of ship, I needed a promotion to Commander. To qualify for promotion I had to prove that I could solve a diplomatic concern, rather than my usual blow everything up method.


A planet near one of our Transwarp gates, produced an ore, Rarium, that helped power the gate. Unfortunately the Klingons wanted the ore also. It was decided that I should try diplomatically to solve the situation.


I beamed down to the planet to find the local princess waiting for me.

I could tell right away that I'd like this mission. Well, no sooner had we started the walk to the chieftain's village than we were attacked by a Klingon raiding party. We defended ourselves diplomatically. That didn't work, so we shot 'em.

It turned out that the chief had decided to give the ore to the strongest candidate.

I diplomatically suggested that Anthi take on the Klingon captain. Before anything could happen, though, a message came through from both the Resolution and the B'Tagh (the Klingon's ship) saying that an asteroid was minutes away from smashing into the planet.


I diplomatically suggested that we try to get rid of the asteroid. The chief agreed that whoever destroyed the asteroid would be declared strongest and get the Rarium ore.


We diplomatically agreed, diplomatically beamed up and then diplomatically fired all weapons as the Klingon vessel decided that their best chance to destroy the asteroid before us was to destroy us so we couldn't take out the flaming chunk of space-rock.

We diplomatically declined to be taken out of the picture so easily. Although the Klingon ship was bigger, we were more nimble, and my crew know plenty of good tricks now. We had to use them all to disable the Klingon vessel. The Resolution took quite a beating.

In the end we had just enough power left to blow the asteroid up. Unfortunately we'd forgotten some pretty basic physics. The smaller chunks of asteroid burned up in the atmosphere rather than smashing right to the ground, but we hadn't removed enough mass from it. The resulting heat from the spread out chunks of exploding rock sent a searing wave throughout the high oxygen content atmosphere of the planet.


We diplomatically made our apologies to the inhabitants of the planet. Fortunately we had managed to beam them on-board before the fire consumed their world. I had to very diplomatically put them behind force-field reinforced bulkheads. For their own safety. They seemed somewhat upset. 


Here's an "after" picture of the same planet.

Still, sometimes you have to look at the bright side of things. The Federation was free to mine the Rarium ore now without any interference! And technically it wasn't our fault, the asteroid would have hit anyway. Reggie even found another planet with very a similar atmosphere to move the people to.


The end result, as far as I was concerned, diplomatic success!


We headed back to Starbase Earth via the transwarp gate to deliver the good news.

Sparky... out.


Captain's Log: Supplemental - I only allowed the Princess to stay in my personal quarters as a way of trying to comfort her in her loss. I thought it was the diplomatic thing to do. My "How to win battles and influence aliens." By J.T. Kirk (10th edition) said it was the right way to go.