Chapter Ten: Grounded

Although Lacking Accompanying Visuals, the Computer Voice Says: Last time on Free Enterprise, plot track three: The counter-invasion of Farpoint Station began. Due to communications interference, a fleet of shuttlecraft flew down and deposited away teams, which began working their way toward the main building on foot. After a brief exchange of friendly fire, Riker's team was ambushed by hostile forces and captured. On board the Enterprise, the crew was distracted by the sudden arrival of more unknown forces, which began shooting at them. And now the conclusion of this plot track.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

In which we explore most possible meanings of the term 'grounded'.

Commander Riker knew he was awake because he hurt too much to be dreaming or unconscious.

He wished he could think of something clever to say, like 'We can't be dead, heaven is quieter than this,' or 'Must have been one hell of a party,' or even 'Quick! Get the license number of that elephant!'

What he did say was, "Ow."

"Welcome back to the land of the living, Commander," a glum voice greeted him. Riker knew he should be able to identify it, but his head was pounding too hard to think. When he tried to open his eyes, he snapped them closed, the better to see the fireworks display behind his eyelids.

"Woozat?" he asked, hoping against hope that the phrase had been intelligible. Against his better judgment, he rubbed his eyes. More fireworks went off, but at least he now knew that he wasn't tied up. That was always a plus.

"Stay still, sir," the glum voice—Geordi? It sounded like Geordi—resumed. "They hit you pretty hard."

"You're telling me." With the hands-down success of his latest effort at speech, Riker tried opening his eyes again, and got a look at his immediate environment.

The light was dim, almost dusky. When he looked around, Riker could see, with a little squinting, what looked like a room or perhaps a cellar. It was packed full of people, most of them wearing Starfleet uniforms. To a man, they were all either sitting on the ground, not moving, or lying unconscious. There was really nowhere for them to go. The room was almost completely full.

"Geordi?" he tried again.

"Here, sir," Geordi replied, and now he could see why the engineer was so unhappy. Which was a right sight better than the man himself could do, if you'll forgive the bad puns. The engineer was sitting at his side, having located his commander by sound alone. Whoever had captured them and put them all in this room had also taken away La Forge's VISOR.

Making an association, Riker reflexively reached for his commbadge. It was gone, along with a strip of fabric. When he took a second look at the rest of the room, he could see no other gold-and-silver glint on anyone else's chest either.

"Are you all right?"

"Been better. They took my VISOR before we were beamed here, so I don't know where we are. Sorry, sir."

Word was beginning to spread that Commander Riker was awake. Despite the press, the collective population of the room had begun to focus on Riker, who found himself the center of attention for at least two hundred and fifty people who all needed leadership, and needed it now.

"All right," Riker said, attempting to get control. "Lt. Commander La Forge, mission report. What happened to the Enterprise?"

Before Geordi could speak, several other people in the near vicinity piped up, and for a moment, Riker was lost in a haze of words.

"It was—"

"We didn't—"

"—going to destabl—"

"—of nowhere!"

"—I don't re—"

"It was his—"

"The captain—"

"—escape pods—"

Not wanting to shout over the hubbub, Riker opted rather to use a trick he'd learned about thirty years ago and had been forbidden to use inside since exactly one day after that. Sticking two fingers in his mouth, he whistled shrilly.

The echoes bounced off the walls repeatedly in the sudden void of silence.

Commander Riker jumped in before talk could resume. "Maybe no one was listening," he offered generously, although his listeners would have to be really stupid not to hear the concealed blade in that hypothesis. "Mr. La Forge, and Mr. La Forge only—mission report."

Geordi sat up a little straighter, and even folded his hands in his lap as if giving a summary at the long table in the observation lounge. "Well, I can't tell you what happened on the bridge, because I had problems of my own down in Engineering that kept me from monitoring the bridge uplink very often.

"I'd say approximately thirty minutes after the shuttlecraft left the hangar bays, we started picking up on an odd flux in one of the backup computer processors. It was only in one of them, but those three update each other every three milliseconds, so it was only a matter of time before whatever it was got into the others. It was only luck we caught it before it spread."

"Geordi, less editorializing. I'd like to be up on the situation before our captors come back."

"Right, sorry. I set a handful of crewmen on the problem and got a glance at the bridge uplink. All seemed calm, if a bit tense, so I didn't worry about it. And then we started getting systems failures all across the board."

"What from?" asked an ensign Riker didn't know. Almost instantly, the kid stopped short, went pink, and clapped a hand over her mouth. Riker gave her a harassed smile.

"Captain Picard started calling at that point, and I didn't have an answer for him either.

"I figured it was linked to the processor error somehow, but it's no quick task going into that system. The computer doesn't seem to like scanning itself, for some reason. We didn't have time to fix the problem at its source, because power was starting to drain from every system except antimatter containment. Life support was going at warp speed trying to keep up, and it was not going to be able to run at that rate for long."

Several people winced.

Despite his blindness, La Forge looked in their general direction, hearing breath drawn in through teeth of all shapes and sizes, and commiserated, "Yeah, you're telling me! I managed to isolate life support with a bit of jiggery-pokery, but not completely. We had no idea where it was going! It was just gone! We tried to stop it, of course, and got the SIF stabilized before the entire ship collapsed on us."

Riker couldn't help but interrupt with: "Is that a technical term I don't know about, jiggery-pokery?"

Geordi La Forge ignored him. "I know that Data wanted power to the sensors, so something was going on outside. We finally stopped the power drain. What was truly awful, though, was that the people I put on checking the computers came up with a result."

Geordi looked in Riker's general direction. "Someone had written in very good code, Commander. And it was done by someone on board. We didn't have time to write it out, either. Captain Picard wanted weapons and shields yesterday."

"Who against?"

"Commander, I just don't know. We got the shields about fifty percent up, and minimal weapons. Then the computer started telling us to evacuate Engineering. I didn't believe it, but then the doors started sliding down. I had just enough time to transfer the Engineering master controls to the bridge substation. Darrin, one of my men, wrote a program a few days ago that let me do that. He was on the bridge, so I figured he could handle his own work."

"Did he do anything else while he was doing that?" Riker growled suspiciously.

Underneath his dark skin, La Forge went pale. "I didn't check."

"Go on. It sounds like you're near the end."

"That's about it, Commander. We were knocked around pretty badly for a while. I heard the captain on the intercom, ordering us to abandon ship."

La Forge looked nervously in Riker's direction in response to the gradually growing sound of teeth grinding. "The shields must have gone down, because I know a transporter effect when I feel one. When we were let out of the beam someone stunned us all right away, and when I woke up my VISOR was gone."

"Thank you, Commander," Riker gritted out. "Does anyone have anything to add? One at a time, please," he added as fifty-six people opened their mouths to speak at once.

No one really did. Various crewmen confirmed the transporter story. Others backed up Geordi's assessment of the damage done to the Enterprise. No one knew who had attacked them, where they'd been beamed to, or what had happened to Captain Picard. Or Lt. Commander Data. Or any of the other senior staff.

The longest anyone could remember being conscious in this room was two and a half hours, a figure presented by a fairly young Vulcan man whose black hair and golden shirt had somehow escaped the dust and muss that characterized everyone else. Actually, he recited a long string of numbers that Riker mentally abbreviated to 'two and a half hours' to save brain space.

To wrap up the information-sharing session, Riker briefly aired his own disaster tale. "I can see at least two people from my away team," he concluded. "Anyone else?"

"Here!" A flutter of movement accompanied this—a waving blue hand. "Lt. Savan reporting, sir!"

Riker thought briefly that it was lucky they were all sitting down. The little lieutenant was barely four and a half feet tall.

"No bridge crew?" There weren't.

"What do we do now, sir?" an ensign asked.

That was a really good question, and Riker didn't have an answer readily available. So he did what all good commanders have done for thousands of years: made something up and delegated the rest.

There's a story they tell to the command track students at Starfleet Academy as a situation test. It runs like this:

You, the captain, are cut off from your ship on a hostile planet. On one side of a deep gorge, your side, you will be killed in two hours, after the sun sets. On the other side, you are safe. You have two ensigns, your executive officer, one two-foot length of cable, and a rock. What do you do?

Supposedly, the correct answer was: Say 'Number One, I want a bridge up in two hours.' Then you walk away.

Standing up so that everyone could see him and he could address the entire room at once, he began, "First, we need some form of weapons. Whoever's put us here isn't doing it for our health, and I'd like to have the advantage when they come back to check on us and gloat." He scanned the room, picking out three people whom he recognized as Security personnel. "Stand up, please. I don't care what it is or how you get it. The rules of combat are not important, as of right now. Anyone who has ever been in a really dirty bar fight, go talk to them," he added, pointing. "But not yet. I'm not done.

"Secondly, we need a way out of here. It's possible someone will just open a door for us, but I'd like to get out on our own terms. Let's investigate every square inch of this room. There has to be a weak spot somewhere."

His mind spun frantically. What else could they do? In the patient silence, a soft moan interrupted his train of thought, coincidentally solving it at the same time. "Anyone with medical training more recent than the Academy, focus on getting our injured a little better. The fewer people we have to carry when we get out of here, the better. Understood?"

A chorus of affirmatives answered him.

"Dismissed, then," he said, for lack of anything better, and joined the fledgling security force to volunteer to teach basic aikido.

"What's going on in there?"

Fetuik winced at the deep, raspy voice of DaiMon Ransk, and then tried to hide that he'd done it. Too late.

"Are you deaf?" Ransk bellowed insultingly, puffed up in triumph and irate about anything seeming even slightly akimbo to his proud moment.

His underling jumped to his feet and snapped to attention, deciding wisely not to answer the foul insult. "DaiMon, sir, the hew-mons are organizing."

"Phah!" Ransk spat. Literally, barely missing the unlucky Fetuik's boots. "The hew-mons have empty pockets and nothing to bargain with. Their organizing won't profit them at all. The cells are bare!"

There was a sheepish lack of response from Fetuik.

The DaiMon looked down at him, eyes squinting almost shut. "The cells are bare!" he repeated, daring his subordinate to contradict him.

"Yes, DaiMon," Fetuik answered finally.

Somewhat satisfied, Ransk strode away, back to overseeing the sweeping out of the Enterprise, leaving Fetuik to stare glumly at his monitors and watch the humans milling around.

This was the second group of hew-mons to organize themselves and start working together to get themselves out of the cells. After observing them for the entire length of time they'd all been in their separate rooms, Fetuik was willing to attribute the driving force of their unexpected spirit to a handful of people.

The burly man with the hair on his face was one of them. In a different cell, the small, dark haired woman had begun to shout everyone else down and get them working on one goal—the same goal as the man. Not five minutes before the man started his arranging, the Klingon and the few people in the room with him had gotten to work. In yet another cell, a dark woman in a funny hat had talked to her cellmates briefly, and everyone had calmly gone to work.

Fetuik was not as stupid as his boss thought he was. If he had been running this operation, he would have kept everyone unconscious until he could work out who was boss aboard the ship. Then he would have deprived the rest of the crew of all their leaders at once.

Instead, DaiMon Ransk, eager to watch them squirm, had just divided them up at random, coincidentally giving almost every group someone with a spine or a will to lead.

But it was, of course, not Fetuik's place to argue with his DaiMon.

Nor was it his place to point out that at this rate, they'd somehow get out of the cells within a few hours. Although it would be his place to take the flak from that turn of events, if they were still on this worthless rock by then.

Fetuik sighed as another security camera shorted out. Checking on the other two cameras that fed into the bearded man's cell, he watched as the blind man accepted the bits of camera from another hew-mon and an alien he didn't know, exploring the torn circuits and metal with his fingers.

Approximately the same thing was happening in all the deep-underground cells, accessible by only a transporter or a very, very skinny and small system of ventilation shafts. Fetuik couldn't help but think they'd manage to get out somehow anyway.

In two small cells all on their own were the captain and the Betazoid woman, who remained sedated so that she couldn't sense that she couldn't sense anyone else. If she knew they were captured, and that her jailers were around, the fact that they wouldn't show up on her internal radar would narrow down the suspects rather quickly.

But apparently all their other leaders were disseminated among the various cells.

Fetuik looked over his shoulder toward the door and wished very hard that they could leave with the Enterprise soon. These humans were making him nervous.

It took five and a half hours for Riker's group to escape from their cells, which proved to be only one in a series of adapted caves. After a couple of hours had passed, their efforts were interrupted by a transport of large numbers of ration packs that appeared to have been taken directly from the Enterprise itself.

"I think we're underground," a civilian with a good nose said finally. "This wall smells like soil and stone."

Riker gave his basic aikido group a short practice assignment so that he could go and consult with the woman. "Underground?" he said, excusing and elbowing past the throngs of people who were all trying to be busy. "Damn," he added, thinking back. "Of course. There were tunnels under the original Farpoint Station, but I had forgotten that only part of the way down they turned into life-form. It could be that that cave system goes deeper. Good work, miss!"

He thought briefly before turning to the room at large and cupping his hands over his mouth. "Savan!" he shouted. "Lieutenant Savan!"

The noise level in the cell dropped briefly before it sprang back up again, most of them looking for little Lieutenant Savan. The pale blue alien popped into visibility a minute later, perched on someone's shoulders.

"Here, sir!"

He vanished below the press of bodies again. The sudden movements of people abruptly shoved out of the way by something at waist level marked his passage through the room.

When he reappeared at Riker's side, the commander filled him in. "We're probably underground. Now, I can feel an air flow, so there has to be a way for the air to get in and out. They can't be transporting air all the time."

"That would be inefficient," someone said.

"Exactly. Lieutenant, if you stand on my shoulders you should be able to reach the ceiling and upper walls."

"And search for vents!" the lieutenant filled in. "Yes sir!"

"Are there any kids in here?"

Melissa Flores and Clara Sutter waved for attention. Riker grinned at Melissa.

"All right, Number One, find someone tall. Anyone else who's fairly short, meet up with a partner who can carry you. Let's search the ceiling!"

With eight pairs wobbling around the room, being steadied as needed by the people they passed by, they covered the ceiling bit by bit, fingers brushing carefully across the metal panel, looking for irregularities.

Just as Riker was beginning to feel a little foolish at the apparent failure of his plan, a commotion broke out on the opposite side of the room. "Here!" Melissa shrieked. "There's a panel!"

All the pairs converged on that spot. "Make way, make way!" Savan cheered, directing traffic majestically from his lofty perch.

"I can feel the edges of a panel, but I can't get it loose," Melissa explained, tracing her slim fingers through the ridges to show them all where it was. "I could get through this. It's big enough."

"So could I," Savan agreed, watching the newly-revealed outline.

A general chorus of approval greeted this announcement, and they began passing pieces of metal that had been scavenged from the security cameras and other pieces they'd found to the piggyback riders. A group of people had been set to sharpening the pieces of shrapnel against each other, and some of them were quite keen.

There wasn't enough room under one vent for all eight teams to work on it at once, so Riker and Ensign Horth, who was carrying Melissa, stayed at the vent while the others kept searching for other exits.

It took a while; the metal needed frequent honing or replacing and the tall people carrying the others needed to pass their burdens on to somebody else from time to time, but they eventually had three holes in the roof and one through a wall.

"We need four teams of two people each," Riker announced. "No, Melissa, you're not going. Sorry."

"But—" Melissa said, and hushed with only that token protest.

Once four teams had been assembled, the commander gave them their marching orders. "Stay out of sight once you get to the top. Try to get to a communications station and get a message to Starfleet."

"But we were being jammed," a crewman pointed out. "Why would it be any better now?"

Riker grimaced. "Because now they've got what they wanted, Ensign—the Enterprise. Best case scenario, they've taken her and gone." He returned to addressing the teams. "If the jamming is still in effect, find a transporter room and get us out of here. If you can't do that, then we need weapons and supplies. Try to locate the rest of the crew if you can. Is that clear?"

"Yes sir!" everyone said.

"Good luck."

After the groups had vanished into the ventilation shafts, everyone was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. With their best volley shot, there was nothing to do but wait and relax a little bit, up to and including trying to eat inedible MREs. There were multiple reasons why they were emergency rations, chief among them that it would have to be an emergency before anyone would want to eat them.

"Look on the bright side," Geordi suggested wryly. "They've beamed us some projectile weapons—we can always throw them at whoever comes in." He swung one against the wall to make his point. It—the wall, not the ration brick—went clang.

In the end, they didn't have to mount an assault with MREs. The prisoners in the other cells had come up with their own inventive solutions as well, and the teams from Riker's cell eventually met up with whoever had been sent from the other chambers. After digging the Bandi of Farpoint Station out of wherever they'd been hiding, they managed to get the transporter system working.

After that it was only a matter of time before the entire crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise was gathered in New Farpoint Station proper, madder than hornets and about as busy.

The Station's sensors had confirmed instantly that not only was the Enterprise not in orbit, but also that there was a warp trail matching the Enterprise's emission trace exactly leading out-system. Once it passed Deneb VII, though, it broke off abruptly, as if whoever was on board had taken steps to cover their tracks.

A bit of exploration yielded heaps of things taken from the ship and abandoned landside. They found Geordi's VISOR in a heap of broken furniture and coolant coils. Practically laughing with relief, he snatched it gratefully from the hands of the search leader and ran off to get that message to Starfleet.

Commbadges were everywhere, scattered all over the floor and across consoles. Many of them were not in working order due to having been stripped down or taken apart. This was very odd, because commbadges are not that complicated, and are not made of very valuable materials. Certainly they don't hold any secrets.

Deanna Troi, still woozy from the sheer amount of sedative that had been pumped into her, sat down out of the way under doctor's orders, and so it was to her, the only person sitting still, that Spot came up to, demanding Feline Supplement 74 in a loud and imperious voice. She promptly bolted under a console again when Deanna wobbled to her feet, crying "Data, Data, Data!" happily, and would not come out. This was probably encouraged by the group of kids that all decided that they were going to coax her out, an activity instantly discouraged in passing by Commander Riker, who had been in Spot's bad books, not to mention crosshairs, for a while.

All the shuttles had vanished with the ship except for one. The pilot of the shuttlecraft Blaidd-Drwg, one Lieutenant Piper, had somehow gotten wind of the hijacking and had quickly programmed an autopilot course into the little ship's computer, sending it hundreds of miles away before beaming herself into New Farpoint so that the enemy would not think to look for it. A message was sent off to the Bandi city nearest the coordinates to go look for it, and a transporter beam bearing someone who could actually fly the ship back was not far behind.

No one, Bandi or Starfleet officer, had any idea about who had been behind the outrageous turn of events, although they had whole lists of races or alliances it was probably not. No one had seen them properly. Any orders or commands they had issued had been done through vocoders. It seemed highly unlikely that a whole ground-based space station, not to mention the flagship of the fleet, had been taken over without even a culprit to pin it on, but that was the way the situation stood. Whoever they were, was the general consensus, they're very good.

The ground-based and shipboard divisions of the crew compared notes. Most of their stories matched Geordi La Forge's account.

Everyone agreed that the ship had been attacked by an unknown vessel, but oddly enough, the hostile ship had not fired at the hull. Rather, the bridge crew attested, they had used a beam that disrupted Starfleet shields if and when it was focused properly.

They managed to avoid disaster for a while, mostly thanks to Ro Laren, whose creative evasive maneuvers had stopped the unknowns from focusing on one area of the shields for too long. Unfortunately, one of her crazier ideas, which culminated in spinning the ship laterally, ended up stressing the engines so badly that they shut down, leaving the Enterprise motionless and vulnerable. The shutdown was better than a core breach, but Ro was still furious with herself, despite the fact that she'd bought them all time.

When the shields went down, people started vanishing from the ship, and first to go, most likely, were Geordi and his engineers, which ruined all chance of getting the engines back up to speed.

Whoever they were, though, they'd had to take the bridge by force. Data had focused the shields on the bridge as the other decks were depopulated, so the invaders had to beam in on a lower deck and come up. That was their best chance at identifying them, but they'd been hooded and cloaked. There hadn't been time to ask names before they started shooting.

Apparently the bridge had been rather damaged, especially when Data was inspired to stand in front of important panels and dodge at the last second, leaving smoking trenches through several consoles.

It hadn't worked for very long though, and it still hadn't inflicted enough damage to keep their enemies from running off with the ship, leaving almost everyone on New Farpoint Station to twiddle their thumbs or scream with impotent fury, depending.

An informal and chaotic head count taken once all the cells had been emptied revealed the absence of the oh-so-helpful computer programmer Glenn Darrin, as well as several other overlooked people who had been stationed in important but unnoticed positions at the time of the attack. Captain Picard grimly ordered a list made up as well as physical descriptions if at all possible, to be transmitted to Starfleet Command with the recommendation of investigation appended to it.

Two days after the crew escaped their prison cells, Starfleet turned up in the forms of the Excalibur, the Zhukov, and the Repulse. They, and assorted brass who had come along via commlink, were not happy.

With a general air of restrained fury, the displaced crew was ordered back to Utopia Planitia for general debriefing and determination of the situation, a combination that failed to add 'and appropriate punishment' but implied it very heavily. They were forbidden to contact their families and even to discuss the situation with the crew of whichever ship they were onboard of.

It was a long, silent, ominous trip.

After this point, Chapters Two, Five, and Eight occurred, respectively.

Disclaimer: I own Lieutenant Savan and the way he turned out to be important, as well as a couple of Ferengi I could do without but the story couldn't! But in this chapter, I don't own: the computer voice; any of the humorous things Riker could say in paragraph two; the incredible book Ender's Game; fireworks; the Enterprise-D or any other starship herein; Farpoint Station, although one could argue that I own New Farpoint; the MREs; various Star Trek characters, aliens, or cats; or anything Doctor Who-related that snuck in while I wasn't looking, including one of the humorous things in paragraph two and some interesting technical terms. Also, I swear I didn't make up the situation test story. Really.

Author's Note: Well, there is Chapter…what chapter is it? Oh yes, 10! That's a great number. And it really makes me happy to finally have this chapter out! Actually, I'm just happy in general. In the last twelve or so hours I have been to a bookstore, bought almost more books than I could easily carry, impressed my mom with my driving, heard from a friend, drunk four and a half cans of Dr. Pepper and counting, eaten a Crunch chocolate bar and a handful of brownies, watched the making-of for one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes, and ON TOP OF THAT, watched four HOURS of Deep Space Nine! So, LEGALLY, I am not tripping out. But I am running on a combination of caffeine, sugar, and endorphins. For your sake, I hope you are one-tenth as happy as I am right now.