Renegade
By Master Solo the TrekWars fan
Rating: G or PG, suitable for everybody
About a month after the Enterprise was sent to chase the Xindi, Starfleet had agreed to send a second ship into the expanse after much persuasion.
The captain of the secretly-built NX-08 examined her diverse crew one final time before the ship un-docked. Savé was the ship's Vulcan weapons officer. Unlike other Vulcans who worked aboard Starfleet ships, Savé was an outcast and a mercenary hired only at the human crew members' recommendation, despite his survival of many trips to the Expanse. No, endless persuasion sounds more like it. The captain thought. The captain could not forget the unnerving sound of the Vulcan chuckling at the words the High Command used to describe him. Only the fact that this completely bald Vulcan had been exiled and interacting with millions of cultures for forty years kept the Venezuelan captain from showing her surprise.
At the engineering console was the genius who designed the ship's Warp engine. The woman fainted and toppled the captain at the first sight of Savé, who, at first glance, appeared to be the combination of a street gangster and a pirate from the old myths. Though the captain never said a word, she could bet that the chief engineer's reaction was caused by her upbringing in the top level of society. The engineer never mentioned her background, but the captain knew that the mother of this woman was one of the last renowned tekkonauts and later an influential member of Starfleet..
"Is engineering ready, Lieutenant Fisher?" asked the captain.
"Sure. Always ready to serve Earth." Replied the chief engineer, whom English speakers referred to as May Fisher. Although the woman was in her forties, she, most likely thanks to a life-prolonging experiment her mother participated in, had the appearance and enthusiasm of someone a decade younger.
"Daniel, let's go. Set the coordinates Savé gave us." The captain ordered her helmsman. The minute the captain issued her orders to the man, she saw the displays change. Daniel Mars was the ship's helmsman from the colony on the red planet. As a descendant of those that left Earth out of hatred for the planet, war torn at the time, Daniel never set foot on his ancestral planet. He was a classmate and a friend of the captain's when Starfleet trained them, which led the captain to address him by his first name most of the time.
"Captain, I sent the message to Starfleet." The woman heard the voice of her communications officer when the ship was a safe enough distance from Earth to go to warp. Last but not least on the bridge was Cynthia Lablanche, the ship's Parisian polyglot. Of the three women on the bridge, Cynthia was by far the tallest and the lightest colored.
"Lieutenant Fisher, we're going to warp now." Finally, the Renegade starts her mission. The Renegade had specific instructions to follow: go and meet Enterprise at the first of Savé coordinates, and with partnership from the Enterprise, make sure the locals don't help the Xindi, do the same thing at the rest of locations, and finally stop any further attacks from the Xindi. The captain must avenge for the damage, both physical and otherwise, the Xindi had done to her and to all the others that they had hurt.
The Vulcan's sensitive ears picked up something unusual as the captain gave the orders to go to warp. The captain's tone changed, and the language became more different than when she talked before.
I hope your emotions won't cloud your judgment, captain. Savé thought. He knew that the language spoken on the bridge was not the captain's first language and had learned that members of the emotionally unrestrained species generally spoke foreign languages with extremely strong accents when driven by feelings.
As the NX-08 headed steadily toward the expanse, Savé could not help but ponder about the people of his current employers. This was one of the most unusual, diverse people he had encountered in the forty years he spent wandering from one end of the galaxy to another.
On the bridge of the ship alone were the extremes of a single race. Within that space, it seemed that the captain and the communications officer were complete opposites and everybody else fell somewhere in between the two women. The captain was a short, plump, woman with dirt colored skin who wore her jet-black, wavy hair short while the fair-skinned, slim Lablanche stood as tall as any male and always pulled her straight, blonde hair into a bun.
The Vulcan then focused his thoughts on the diversity the eyes could not detect. Lablanche and Fisher had told him once that more than half the crew did not speak the language used on the ship as a first language and at least Fisher was raised with speaking two completely different tongues. According to the two women, Earth was once home to hundreds upon hundreds of languages and dialects and 'renegade' was only a translation of the ship's name.
Once they dropped out of warp, the dark-skinned Vulcan would have to face one of his former employers at the plant where he was sure certain pieces of the probe were smelted.
On Earth...
Forrest muttered a silent curse as an error message appeared on the screen before him. Whatever was in the expanse, it blocked all communications from Earth and kept him from contacting both Enterprise and Renegade. That meant that the captains of both ships would be working alone and are in for more surprises than either of them would expect.
Endnote: If this fic seems weird to anybody, it's probably because I'm a Chinese kid who's taking French. If you want me to continue, hit review and tell me that you want another part. This is separate from VulcanHalf, unless you count the review that inspired this.