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Incident (part 1) PG
#1
She pulled a fang prosthetic from the artificial bridge of her snout, the smell of burning hair and electronics sparked in the background as her eyes opened.  Her ears were turned to recognize the power levels of a ship in space, and the whisper of air escaping out of notable stress tears to the bulkhead were identifying just some of what might be the last moments Charlie was likely to see.

                “…Th… this is the…. U… An.. repea…. U.S.S Ander…com…. please…” the damaged speaker on the bridge was failing, and she could see through the breached hull directly at the ship, but it wasn’t clear whether they were here to finish the job or talk.
 
“Anderson, copy… request secure line. Authorization: Bravo-eight-Zulu prime.” Charlie barked into her wrist computer while she was beginning to realize the extent of the ship's damage.

                “Copy, this is Captain Strait: Response, Charlie-niner-niner-four-echo-echo-seven.” A grizzled combat-hardened naval commander sealed his ready room prepared to receive the authorization response for Starfleet special services.
 
“Response: Charlie-six-niner-niner Zulu, gamma-four.” The right code words had been exchanged. Charlie was losing her patience as she recognized a gaping hole in the bridge and the failing emergency forcefield that was likely to expose her to open space. “Get me off this bucket, Captain, don’t tell anyone you found a survivor among the bridge crew.” She looked around at the bridge and noticed one of the former helmsmen struggling to get back up.  She pulled a disruptor from her belt and fired four rounds into the unfortunate Klingon’s back before he slumped over, surrendering to the fate of the rest of the bridge crew. “Get to as many survivors as you can. You don’t have much time.” Charlie finished.

                “Proceeding with transport to cargo bay seven, the chief medical officer will meet you there.” The captain replied as he heard more discharges from a disruptor and what sounded like steel being bent like tinfoil.
 
                Charlie was firing on a portion of the upper deck that had pinned her behind the captains' chair. The captain, a dashing young Ferasan, had been crushed by the weight of more than three metric tons of the anterior deflector assembly. Charlie melted the welding lines with her disruptor and tore the bulkhead away from the deck, pulling her mangled arm free.  She was mostly synthetic; her body had been damaged when she was part of the borg collective and replaced by a prosthetic core still fifteen years beyond even the best federation robotics engineers. As a mostly cybernetic organism, she felt no pain or loss of function unless it was necessary, and she could heighten her senses far beyond typical limits if the situation called for it. Still, at this point, she just wanted not to die in the vacuum of space.  She couldn’t lift the three tons off of the captain, but the 200 kilograms pinning her leg and lower abdomen were simple to dislodge, the metal creaking loudly as she lifted it away.  She grabbed her left leg that had been knocked off during the firefight and was about the snap it back into place when she was transported.

---
  
‘Life was good’ Commander White thought they were patrolling the federation side of the Klingon border.  The U.S.S. Anderson was a Yorktown class exploration cruiser, equipped with some of the best sensors in the fleet. While some critics said it could be used for spying across honorable treaty borders, proponents of the technology highlighted more than once, early detection of rival forces have been the only advantage many defenseless systems have against those, not in the treaty.

Commander white had the watch that night. There was something about the least active hours on the ship that made him feel like he was feeling space as it was meant to be felt, little if any emergencies onboard, a quiet expanse ahead with nothing but astrometric sensor readings and the occasional celestial body to scan.  The watch was serene, composed, and straightforward.

A blip showed up on the astrometric sensor scan. Something had exploded in the V’ogh nebula.  There wasn’t supposed to be any scientific or military assets within seven parsecs of the nebula because it wasn’t stable. Few knew what an unmitigated explosion would do in that region of space.  The blips on the screen became more frequent. There was a firefight active and involving many ships. Only federation call signs would be evident from this range, so there was little to identify who was fighting who wasn’t the Federation.

“Sir, there seems to be an anomaly in protected space. Sensors are picking up a firefight of some kind heading 241 mark 17.” An eager ensign on duty reported, delving deeply into the data, trying to show his worth.  “Nine Klingon cruisers, engaged with what looks like four ships with unknown affiliation.” The ensign continued. “It’s unclear which side is winning commander.” He finished.

                “Notify Tactical, and Intel, Ensign. “Commander White stood disturbed that his serenity for the evening was ruined. “If we’re waking everyone up for this, I want them to know who’s to blame,” White smirked as he triggered a yellow alert on the conn.

---
  
“Captain Strait, Commander White, asked that I wake you with some pressing information.” The science officer chirped over the intercom in the captain’s quarters.
 
                There was no answer.

“Captain Strait, Commander White requests your presence on the bridge,” the ensign repeated.

                The captain was not responding to the call because he was otherwise engaged with a special guest they had picked up near Drozana Station, a Betazoid magistrate they were responsible for bringing her back to her home planet in time to celebrate the new year.  Kil’ania Husi was well known as being quite the heartbreaker for nearly 20 years in Starfleet diplomatic services.  As her age gained on her, she hadn’t lost a step in keeping her male suitors enticed and enamored with her attentions.   The captain was adamant they respect a professional distance, but Kil’ania was enduring ‘the phase,’ and professional space was the last thing on her mind.

                She had kept him hostage in his quarters for nearly two hours, enjoying the quality time with senior members of the staff as a trained a respected diplomat was accustomed. Still, as she rode him further and further into her control, he was powerless to do more than accept her advances and act as a plaything, she could satisfy her desires with.

                The door signal activated, Kil’ania ignored it while the captain was enjoying a new position. She had convinced him willingly to try.

                The door signaled again as Kil’ania took one of her shoes and threw it clumsily, hitting the door in a vain attempt to shoo away the intruder.
 
                On the third signal, the captain struggled to get away from her but managed to grab his robe and run for the door, activated the stud as his tactical chief Lt. Commander Halic’ Gree stood nearly touching the threshold of the door.

                “What is it, commander?” Strait asked, his eyes looking tired and somewhat not his own as he weakly fought off the attentions of his guest as she made mewling sounds pleasuring herself using her telepathic mind to impress much of the feeling through his mind as well.

“There is an urgent requiring your attention on the bridge, sir,” Gree spoke plainly.  He was an Andorian, built like he had been hewn from a block of granite. He seemed unphased by the telepathic tendrils almost visible in the air.

                Straight looked back at Kil’ania tiredly, but his mind was not his own while they were together. He didn’t even pause as he left with Gree, knowing he kept a spare uniform and sonic shower in his ready room.

                Almost as soon as the captain reached the bridge with his tactical chief, the head of astrometric sciences was eager to speak with him, while his first officer and operations chief were prepared to take orders. “What the hell is going on… hold that thought… I’ll be right back.” He left them all stunned for a moment and escaped into and locked his ready room for about two minutes.  When he returned, he was in a fresh uniform and significantly less stress on his mind.

                “Okay, Mr. Gree, what’s the situation?” He asked his Tactical Chief again.

“There is a significant ship encounter occurring in prohibited space.  The peace charter requires that we investigate and assist if possible.” Commander Gree responded, quite eager for a fight.

                “Okay… Mr. Olsen.” Strait looked at his operations chief.

“Sensors are picking up unidentified craft well within Klingon space. If this is something the Federation needs to be aware of, we have to intercede if we are able.” The trim human engineer responded.

                “White, I normally would have left this up to you, but the unidentified aspect of the ships does concern me, and I would have kissed a Romulan to get away from that woman.” He let out a deep sigh as he was starting to think clearly again.

                “Contact Feragut; he’s gonna need to man the battle bridge.” Strait continued, referring to the X.O., a burly Vulcan tactician Strait had relied on more times than he would publicly admit.  “Set course for the coordinates warp six.” He noted to the helmsman while taking his seat.  

                The Anderson changed course and applied warp six to the incident, E.T.A. thirty-two minutes.

                Charlie was operating the tactical console and the science consoles simultaneously as four of her crewmen were already down.  Two heavy cruisers and five light cruisers and two birds of prey ambushed them and had already taken out her sister ship the “Me’len” with heavy fire on all fronts.

                They hadn’t even offered the opportunity to surrender. They simply opened fire and jammed comms. Charlie knew they were openly defying the High Command by organizing an attack group. Still, as it stood, if they had been on equal footing, the five of her ships could have surgically dismantled anything the Klingons could have thrown at them.  When the ships decloaked The Me’len, and her ship the Go’trin had linked up their weapons to the same target, the other vessels in her small armada followed suit.  With linked weapons and sensor locks on known vulnerable points in a Klingon’s defenses, it should have made short work of known ship designs, but these prototype ships were sabotaged. Charlie didn’t know why, but her weapons were offline, and the shields were below thirty percent.

                The Go’trin was doing better than the rest of her fleet mates combined, Charlie has used the deflectors, and sensor arrays to create echoes of her vessels through the attacking fleets and used manual torpedo launches to destroy both bird’s of prey as well as a light cruiser.  She bypassed every non-critical system and managed to get three of the six arrays online as well as a single torpedo tube.  A massive explosion ripped through the deflector array above the captain’s chair as the entire assembly came through the upper deck, killing him instantly.

                Both helms stations practically exploded under the stress of the attacks and the sabotage that had rendered them less than useful, to begin with.  She was alone now fighting the Klingons with no real chance of coming out of this alive.  Charlie patched all the stations of the bridge to her console. A bulkhead exploded, sending shrapnel through her right leg and piercing her right side and face. She no longer looked like a refined and prim Ferasan woman. She had the look of the human devil on her face and the look of the Klingon hells in her eyes. Six of the nine Klingon vessels had been disabled or destroyed by a maimed prototypical escort under the command of a pissed off borg tactician.

                The heavy cruisers couldn’t get a target lock on her engines to disable her and end the battle as she manually controlled the helm using the volatile nebula as concealment, the science station using sensor echoes of hundreds of targets in place of her real location.  She activated more than one pocket of Metreon gas floating absently above the ships and disabled her own ship's shields, but destroyed a single heavy cruiser as the rest of the attacking group realized they might be able to kill her. Still, the loss to themselves was more than they were willing to pay. They resumed cloak, and the remaining five ships made for high warp.

                The Go’trin was dead in space, and there was no chance it was going to make it back to any port in this shape. Most of the crew were killed, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone coming to her rescue, but as long as life support stayed online, she could get the ship running again in a matter of days.

                The sensors triggered a new hit on their forward array. A federation ship was coming in at cruising speed. They would be in targeting range in 13 seconds. Another blast from the ruined deflector assembly ripped most of the front of the bridge off, sucking two of her crewmates dead bodies out into space immediately before the emergency forcefields activated, the ship was dead, and Charlie could see the U.S.S. Anderson was coming into range, without a single weapon at her disposal. Maybe it was time to give up.

                Commander White had been sent to oversee the secret visitor they were entertaining.  As he entered the cargo bay, he nodded to two other officers on his left and right, with the Chief Medical Officer Commander Yvonne Cain, following closely behind. The transporter started materializing, and the moment something corporeal came into view, White had already regretted the assignment.

                A Nausican would have blanched from the first few moments and movements of the woman before him.  Half of her Ferasan face had been impacted, countless lethal wounds covered her abdomen and right leg. She was carrying her right leg in her hands as copious formations of blood pools over the cargo floor.

                The two tactical officers didn’t even pause for a moment. They turned and ran for the door as though death itself had been let loose on them. While White reached for his phaser, ready to defend himself and Dr. Cain rushed in to help.

                Charlie collapsed on the pad and lost hold of her leg as it clattered haphazardly on to the deck in exhaustion, her mind kept her body together, and she had been through her fair share of harrowing experiences.  White noticed a human face underneath the shattered bone and bio-welded superstructure of her face. She wasn’t Ferasan, that much was quickly becoming evident.

                Commander white hadn’t been told anything other than he was to see to her needs, but the look on Cain’s face showed him whatever intelligence their guest might possess was quickly fading with her life signs. “Emergency transport to I.C.U. bed fourteen!” White shouted through his communicator. Cain nodded in agreement as the mysterious woman dematerialized to the Hospital deck.

                The U.S.S Alexander is a Yorktown class science star cruiser designed to be a support vessel. Mass casualty events were becoming more and more common in the fight against significantly more aggressive foes than anything faced in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century,  it could hold it’s own in a traditional standoff against known vessels, but it was far more effective at mapping the field, or picking up after the bulk of the combat was over.   The Hospital deck was designed to house up to nine-hundred moderate to high-risk patients. It was prepared with nearly two-hundred officers prepared for precisely that task, with thirty-eight surgeons and almost one hundred and fifty triage nurses.

                Inside the I.C.U. Bay a flurry of motion marked the value of the crew staffing it, triage nurses were looking over the forty-eight survivors, all of them showing good prognosis, sadly there were more than six hundred dead either floating in space or in pieces along with the wrecks of nine vessels.  As far as public information had traveled, no bridge officers survived even to begin to explain what was happening or why they were in Klingon space.

                The guest was unconscious, dead as far as most could diagnose, but she showed brain function, and her nervous system was acting normally.  The teams working on her were amazed that her condition stabilized within a matter of minutes, even after most of the blood in her system was gone.  Captain Strait was able to pull up the service record of the woman from her authorization callsign: Commander Cain has been briefed on her conditions and what to look for when none of her staff would understand her life signs if they encountered her.   Cain knew that Code Name: Charlie was one of the first fully assimilated borg to be liberated and working for Starfleet special services, and as long as her brain and spinal cord was intact, she would likely survive nearly any mission.

                Cain scanned her and separated her brain and spinal cord from the dead body, keeping Code Name: Charlie in stasis protein bath while the dermal replicator slowly grew a new body for her. It would take eleven hours to complete the process. Only then could get the answers to this genuinely bizarre encounter.

                Starbase K-7 was silent orbiting Sherman’s planet in the Aldebaran sector.  Admiral Juzon Brin’ was the supreme commander of neutral zone command. Now that the treaty had been finalized, his job had changed to a different but no less complicated mission: To strengthen the borders and fight against critically more dangerous enemies. Those enemies existed throughout all of the allies, many of them with false faces and even more false allegiances.   The U.S.S. Alexander orbited the station while Captain Strait stood at attention in front of a heavily adorned desk of the Admiral, while the man himself read the report closely.  

                All the metallurgical data and technical data of the wasted hulks of ships still floating in the nebula gave little information to what happened.  Contact with the high command inferred the ships were attacked due to a direct order from the Klingon High command to put down an insurgency but refused to give clear evidence of what they suspected or why they kept this to themselves.

                The admiral looked up and nodded, leaning back.

“She is recovering?” The admiral eventually spoke.

                “Sir, the information on this agent is very specious. She is recovering unexpectedly well in the pod you instructed us to store her in.  I imagine she should be conscious within the next twenty-four hours.” Strait confirmed.

“When will she be ready for transfer?” Admiral Brin’ responded.

                “Commander Cain said she should be mobile and potentially ready for transport in thirty-eight hours,” Strait concluded.

“When she regains consciousness, keep her there… I need you to do something for me…” He stood from his desk and approached the captain. “She won’t remember who she is, at first…” He started.  “Keep her comfortable, stress that she is a survivor of the battle of Shens,” He continued knowing far more about the woman than just how to make her feel at ease. “She’ll understand that and accept it.” He was particular about what she needed to know and what she was.

“She’ll have nightmares around week two of her consciousness, give her three hypospray doses of Amphetamine, three hyposprays of Namenda spaced ten minutes apart per dose. Then give her access to an extranet console.” He said cautiously.  “Record everything she does on the device and relay the activity into a subspace signal, target Jupiter science station in sol system, in sixteen hours they will send you a coded frequency that only she can decrypt.” He clapped the captain gently on the shoulder before moving back to his desk.

“I understand this isn’t easy, but you found my agent in the middle of a private war, and everything that could have told us what happened differently is floating through a corrosive nebula.” He sat again and pulled up official orders.   “Her subcortex has a perfect recall of everything she has seen and heard since her assimilation. To stop a rising in the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Empire, we need to know what she’s seen and how we might stop it.” He signed his name and slid the orders over to the captain.

“This might seem barbaric; this is all we have on this group, and this is the only way we can be sure she wasn’t compromised.” He looked up at the captain and smiled. “Greatness isn’t something you plan for John. The greatest things we do, happen as a result of something happening outside of our control and our training to know what to do with it.” He shrugged and leaned back in his chair.  “She isn’t just a tool for us. She’s the best we’ve got.  Once Jupiter station sends that signal back, she’ll remember everything, and you have my permission to debrief her when she has something to tell you.”

                “Why can’t we leave her in your care, Sir?” Strait asked.

“If you were to wake up and the first thing someone did for you is place you on a transporter pad and forget about you, how comfortable would you feel?” He responded. “Charlene Series was a good officer, far before she was assimilated.” He sighed. “When we got her back, she seemed intent on doing the most dangerous missions. She wanted to make sure the borg and anything like it would never infest this part of the galaxy again.” He looked at the captain soberly. “Ultimately, this was her choice. As the future of her involvement will continue to be.” He finished.

                “Understood, sir.” He saluted. The Admiral stood and saluted in return.

“I never thought I would live to see the day. A Klingon attack group on its own might just have saved us all.” He chuckled as the captain turned and left.


(I planned on writing this all in one chunk but after some communication with mom and others, it's turned into a much larger story.  I'll have part 2 up in a few days, sorry about the absence, RL sucks sometimes)
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