A Matter of Time

by StarfleetStgMgr

Eighteen years ago, he had the most disastrous blind date of his life. Now he's got a strange obsession with apples, temporary command of a starship that flies on a highway made of mushrooms, and a grey-eyed chief diplomatic officer who should be dead. One thing's for sure...life is never boring for the best of Starfleet. Pike fix-it, takes place during DSC S2.

1. Notes on A Matter of Time

Author's notes:

Pike's Age:

It's not firmly established in prime canon (2202 and 2205 are both arguable for a birth year) but the novels set his birth year as 2219. I chose to go with that for this story. A 38 or 39-year old Pike feels about right given the portrayal of the character on DSC. It's maybe a shade young, but I'm just not buying that Disco Pike is 52 or 55. If I was setting it with no canon at all, I would have put it in about 2215 and made him around 42-43.

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The Starfleet Diplomatic Corps:

The Starfleet Diplomatic Corps and the Federation Diplomatic Corps are both mentioned in canon, but there's very little context for what the difference is. For purposes of this story, this is the difference I decided on.

The SDC is made up of actual Starfleet diplomatic officers. Went to the Academy, wear uniforms, the whole Starfleet deal. This is what Leah Kennedy is. Without the CDO program, she probably would have wound up on a major starbase somewhere.

SDC is newer than the FDC and it's tiny. Probably fewer than 200 people. It's a ramshackle little agency that (in my head) really gets going during the second half of the 23rd century.

SDC ranks equate to, more or less:

Attache: Lieutenant

Envoy: Lieutenant Commander

Consul: Commander

Ambassador: Captain

The SDC does not have equivalent ranks to commodore or admiral as of the start of this story; you max out at ambassador.

It takes roughly the same amount of time and work to climb the ranks in the SDC as in Starfleet standard, with some allowance for a much smaller pool of people. Being a CDO is an automatic promotion to ambassador rank, and a new CDO is on average a few years younger than a new captain.

The FDC are all of the ambassadors, envoys, etc. that are not Starfleet trained. Think Odan, Curzon Dax, Sarek, etc.

You want to be space-based? SDC. You want to be planet-based? FDC. Basically, the SDC got started because FDC ambassadors didn't really want to be stuck on ships for months.

I'm using this as justification for some of the mentions in canon for how annoying the diplomatic corps in general was to deal with. There would be lots of crossover and bureaucracy involved in working with two similar agencies with overlap, and probably a lot of arguments as to whose jurisdiction something fell under, since the CDOs tend to hang on to the things they start simply because sometimes they don't have that much to do. I also suspect there's some rivalry between the two, especially if you get an FDC ambassador on a ship with an SDC CDO already there.

Anyways. Thank you for making this far; I hope you enjoy what I've got for you.

-SSM