Lessons Learned (Part 4 of 4)

Posted on 24 Aug 2014 @ 5:44pm by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Captain T'Zera

2,343 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 06 - Legend of Souls
Location: USS Galileo/USS Crown - Administrative Offices
Timeline: MD 03 - 1355 hrs

[CONTINUED FLASHBACK]

The distress call was probably the most untimely and unwelcome announcement Lirha had heard thus far in the mission, and it couldn't have come at a worse moment. Just when she thought she'd made a breakthrough in their investigation of the freighter, suddenly their priorities had changed.

Thumbing the comm switch on her chair's armrest, Lirha replied to the frantic message. "Acknowledged, Pretoria," was the first thing she could think of to say before starting to once again evaluating her options, although this time much more quickly and with urgency. "Under attack by who?" she then asked, wondering if it was maybe the same cloaked raider which had briefly appeared earlier.

"RAIDERS! GET OVER HERE, DAMMIT!"

"Captain!" T'Zera called out. On the main viewer the freighter was now venting drive plasma from her overworked nacelles. T'Zera hailed them. "Celestial Pride, cut your engines! They're about to blow!" She pulled the Renown away to a safer distance.

It was already too late. From somewhere deep within the freighter's hull a blinding explosion tore through multiple decks and vented out the port side. The freighter yawed in the opposite direction and dropped out of warp, crippled and dead in space. She was done. Her emergency beacon instantly began transmitting.

T'Zera brought the Renown out of warp and made a hard turn back to the freighter's location.

Lirha's head began to swim at the dilemma now facing her and her crew. She had just received the distress call from Pretoria, but now also had to deal with a second simultaneous distress call from the freighter they had just been pursuing. With many variables and protocols running through her mind, the Orion cadet tried her best to clear her thoughts and focus on the priorities, one by one.

"T'Zera... transmit a message to Pretoria and let them know we will assist them in a moment. Inform them of our current situation with the freighter," she said to her friend before turning to the tactical cadet sitting to the side of her. "Prepare your away team and report to the transporter room. Beam to the freighter and help the crew as much as we can, and also identify the Human lifesigns we detected. We must be quick. Pretoria is armed and hopefully they can hold their own until we arrive."

"Aye, Captain," T'Zera said. She hailed the Pretoria and did her best to explain the situation. The person on the other end, presumably the comms officer, acknowledged in a tense and hurried manner. Obviously they were very busy over there.

Meanwhile the tactical officer left his station to assemble a boarding party as Lirha had ordered. The other cadets likewise continued their work at their stations, coordinating what was now a rescue effort. One or two glanced at Lirha to gauge how she was dealing with the stress they all felt. What was supposed to have been a fun jaunt in a cadet ship had turned into some real life-or-death business. Lirha's calm demeanor, though she might not have been feeling much of it, was reassuring.

T'Zera couldn't see Lirha from where she was sitting at the forward console, but she trusted her friend's abilities. It was her own abilities she was questioning at the moment. She held off her apprehension by doing some meditative techniques her father had taught her while she tapped out commands on her console. Her expression remained impassive as if she were back in her dorm at the Academy working on an assignment.

"Lifeboats coming off the hull," the ops officer reported. Sure enough the main viewer showed two escape pods deploying from their recessed positions in the Celestial Pride's stern section near the ruined engineering spaces.

The engineering officer turned to give Lirha some bad news. "Captain, my sensors are showing a containment breach in progress. They have less than a minute over there. I recommend we call off the boarding party and retreat to a safe distance."

Hearing that T'Zera took the initiative and tapped her commbadge. "Bridge to transporter rooms one and two. Lock onto as many survivors as you can and bring them aboard." There wasn't enough time to get all of them, but if they were lucky they would get most.

"Yes I concur," replied Lirha to the engineering cadet before turning back towards the helm console. "As soon as we finish the transports, pull us back out of range," she added. It was good to know her fellow cadets were on the same page, and they seemed to be doing a good job of taking the initiative to help cut down on the time it took to relay orders. Nevertheless, the Orion couldn't help but feel even more anxiety now at the imminent warp core breach. It had never been her intention to cause a starship's destruction -- whether intentional or unintentional -- and now she couldn't help but sink her head into her hands for a brief moment in an attempt to recollect her composure.

"Aye, Captain," T'Zera said. She entered a course and speed into her console. Just enough to get them away from the blast effects. Below decks the transporter operators worked quickly to retrieve what survivors they could, starting with the ones in the escape pods. Those numbered four in total. They were all engineering rates who had abandoned their posts when it became clear to them that the ship was lost. That meant the Celestial Pride still had fifteen people aboard. Two of them were Human Starfleet officers. The transporter operators scanned every deck with their targeting scanners and initiated transport whenever they found somebody. The nine seconds it took for each cycle of the pattern buffer seemed agonizingly slow. Time was running out.

"Captain, another hail from the Pretoria," T'Zera said. She put it on the speakers. The transmission was staticky and garbled but they could instantly make out the sounds of shouting, explosions, and a red alert klaxon.

"Pretoria to Re..., we have...........Life sup.....critical. We are aban...."

The transmission ended abruptly. Several stopped what they were doing and turned to look at Lirha.

"Mind your stations," T'Zera snapped. "We still have work to do." Everyone got back to their tasks. Pretoria would have to wait.

A series of explosions rocked the Celestial Pride. She was in her death throes. T'Zera immediately raised the shields, effectively cutting off all transporter activity, then backed away at full impulse.

The big ore freighter vanished in a spectacular blaze of matter meeting anti-matter.

The forlorn voice of one of the transporter operators spoke over the comm. "Transporter room one to bridge. We retrieved thirteen survivors from the freighter. Commander Gerhardt and Lieutenant Casey were not among them."

Cursing in her native tongue, Lirha began to feel a sense of panic at what was happening. She'd been almost positive that their investigation and pursuit of the freighter would have yielded at least some information and possibly the retrieval of her Starfleet instructors, but now her worst fears were being realized. "What happened to the other survivors? How many people did we lose during the beam out?" she asked. For the moment, she'd blocked out the distress call from Pretoria because it was the only way for her to focus on more immediate events.

"We lost six," the transporter chief said. "There wasn't enough time. I'm sorry, Captain."

There was a momentary silence on the bridge. Not so much to honor the dead but because no one knew what to say next. It was cut short by a hail from Starbase 247.

"Starbase operations to Renown. We've lost contact with the Pretoria. She may have been destroyed. We're deploying runabouts at this time. Request that you rendezvous at the site to provide overwatch as soon as you are able. Acknowledge."

T'Zera looked over her shoulder at Lirha. Seeing the look on the Orion's face she answered the hail herself. "Acknowledged. We're on our way. Renown out." Next she called tapped her commbadge to talk to the transporter chief. "Bridge to transporter room. Secure the prisoners in the brig and see to their medical needs if they have any."

"Understood."

Next T'Zera punched up some new commands on her console. She tried to work as quickly as possible. "Course laid in to the Pretoria's last position, Captain," she said. She looked up at the viewer and waited.

"Engage," Lirha said in a solemn voice. Six dead on the freighter with possibly two of them being her instructors, and now Pretoria was lost as well.... And all of it had been the result of her own stubbornness and enthusiasm. If there was a worse way to start her career in the center seat, the Orion couldn't think of one.

T'Zera wanted to comfort her friend, knowing how she must be feeling, but there was no time for that now. They had to keep their professional faces on.

The Renown jumped to warp and was at the Pretoria's last known position within minutes. The elderly garrison vessel was destroyed with all hands, apparently having taken the raider with it.

It would end up taking four weeks for an investigative team to piece together what had happened, during which time the cadets were kept at the starbase to answer questions and draw up their own written reports.

The whole thing had indeed been a ruse to kidnap one officer from the Renown. The Rigellian freighter crew, working in conjunction with the pirate raiders, who turned out to be Naussican, had originally planned to kidnap a Ferengi businessman from the starbase. Rumor had it that the Ferengi was transporting something very valuable back to his homeworld. It was never clear what exactly that was. The Rigellians were set to carry out their plan when they heard another rumor that the Ferengi had lost his valuable possession while gambling against a Human Starfleet officer. How they got hold of this information was never clear, either, because it was untrue. Gerhardt and Casey had been at a casino on the station's promenade the night before but had won nothing.

Of course the Rigellians didn't know that at the time. All they knew from their network of contacts was that the object of value was now in the hands of a training officer from a ship called the Renown. They couldn't be sure which one because that ship had two of them. So in the end they had decided to simply abduct both. They beamed the officers aboard their freighter while using the raider as a feint, counting on the inexperienced cadets of the Renown to go chasing after the armed ship while allowing the freighter to go on its way. It was a perfect storm of greed and criminal stupidity, and it had all gone wrong with disastrous consequences.

Once the whole episode was over another team of training officers arrived to help the cadets get the Renown home. Lirha was again asked to take the ship out of dock to honor Commander Gerhardt's last orders.

Compared to all that had happened, the cruise home was as dull as they come.


----- Present Day -----

"By the way, thank you for sending out the new bridge module," Captain T'Zera said. "The layout shows a superior design sensibility, and the interfaces are much easier for the crew to use."

"Of course. It is the least I could do and Galileo recently received a new one as well. Much improved design and functionality, I agree," replied Lirha before she lifted her mug of hot chocolate to her lips and took a long sip. Licking the creamy froth off her upper lip, she then continued. "So when are you next scheduled for shore leave?"

"We will be docking at Deep Space Nine soon," the Vulcan replied. "If I have a chance I will visit Bajor. However, It seems that there is always so much work to do. It never occurred to me how much administrative work is involved with running a starship." She leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her tea. "Could it be that things were simpler when we were young? Or is that a flawed perception?"

Lirha smirked at her friend and shook her head, her dark hair bobbing lightly across her shoulders. "You think you have it bad? Try running an entire task group... I even have my own yeoman now but between the two of us, we still cannot keep up with the paperwork," she grinned, then sighed softly. "Yes...things were simpler back then," she agreed.

Pausing for another short moment to take another drink from her mug, she then curiously thought about T'Zera's vacation plans. "Bajor? I have not been there in years. Why are you going?"

"We are to be reconfigured with intelligence and surveillance modules. Our assignment is to go to the Gamma Quadrant to verify that the Dominion are maintaining their treaty obligations. Bajor is where we will swap out the modules and receive a more detailed briefing before we deploy through the wormhole." She paused and then added the kicker. "We will have a Jem'Hadar escort during the mission."

Lirha did a double-take through the screen after hearing the words 'Jem'Hadar escort'. Really? she incredulously thought before slowly shaking her head. "Well...certainly nothing as interesting as working with the Dominion," she smirked. "Tell me more about this. Have you been assigned a Vorta?" Leaning back in her chair and taking another sip of her hot chocolate, the commodore prepared for an interesting conversation with her old friend.

[OFF]

--

CDRE Lirha Saalm
Mission Advisor
USS Galileo

Captain T'Zera
Commanding Officer
USS Crown

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