Author Note
Not a very long chapter for AG, but I wanted to bring my word count up to 200k and I have been working on my Jump Chain story a lot.
Augment Gothic
Gothic's Quarters. Deep Space Nine.
Something was wrong here. I was pretty sure that the woman currently eating breakfast with me was not, in fact, Annika Hansen. Oh, this creature certainly looked like her, it sounded like her, it even smelled like her, and she sure as hell felt like her last night when I pounded her into the mattress, but I didn't think this thing was even human.
The clues were there if a person knew where to look and was willing to ignore what their eyes were telling them. This woman, if this was even a woman, was not like the real Annika Hansen in personality. For starters, the real woman was nowhere near adventurous enough to uproot her entire life and move to an alien planet on virtually the frontier of the Federation, even though her explanation seemed plausible enough.
There were smaller clues as well. For one, she was too perfect a replica. Every detail of her body was right, mostly, but she didn't have any of those little flaws everyone has that you don't care about when you're really into someone. No little scars, or a dimple, a birth mark, nothing like that. My augment memory certainly contained those images of her naked body, but maybe this replica of her was based on some over idealized version of her I had in my mind, rather than the reality, her willingness to travel and go on an adventure included.
That and more had been enough to tip me off and convince me to risk sending a quick subspace message to Earth to the real Annika Hansen, who'd been quite surprised to hear from me, but quite polite about the whole thing too. It seems time did, in fact, heal all wounds and if I did find myself on Earth again in the near future, I might not be so unwelcome in her bed again.
"General, would you please join the senior staff here in ops."
Sisko was calling me? And so soon after our little argument? It must be something bad if he wanted me around. But if I had a Founder in my quarters I couldn't just leave. Assuming this was a founder; seemed way too early in the timeline for that though. Which episode did this correspond with?
"On my way," I responded.
No, I couldn't leave this 'Annika' look-a-like here alone in my quarters. I'd have to take her with me and hope that I could contain or destroy whatever she might turn out to be.
(Line Break)
Ops. Deep Space Nine.
I walked into Ops and saw an Asian dude in a baseball outfit, of all things, with the word 'Kings' emblazoned on it. Then there was a short wrinkled elf-looking guy sitting on one of the consoles. Doctor Bashir was intently scanning the baseball player with his medical tricorder. Oh and there were two Jadzia Daxes, normally a very pleasant idea given how adventurous she could be, but right now I had other things on my mind. Namely that this must be the episode were everyone's imagination starts running wild, but it's actually aliens who were studying the people here on the station by observing their reaction to this phenomenon. How would I handle this? How should I handle this with what I knew? They were able to see Annika in my mind, somehow, despite my mind shield, but did they know I had knowledge about the future? That would be a fucking disaster in the making. Hopefully Q and his buddy had protected that bit of knowledge a bit better than who I had fucked in the past and wanted another shot at.
"It seems we have a small mystery on our hands, General," Sisko said to me. "I'd like you to meet Harmon Bokai, a baseball player from the London Kings who's been dead for two hundred years. He followed my son out of the holosuite."
Why had London ever had a baseball team? That game was just rounders being played by grown men rather than schoolgirls. American baseball must have gotten profitable enough for a time for Britain to want in on the action.
"Don't look at me," Bokai was saying, acting all innocent. "I can't figure it out either."
Sisko then turned to the elf.
"And a medieval fairy tale character named Rumplestiltskin," the commander went on to say. "Who until today, only existed in storybooks and folklore from Earth."
The creature was not pleased to hear that.
"Fine, now everybody knows my name," it complained.
I gestured to 'Annika.'
"This is Annika Hansen, an old girlfriend of mine from Earth, who showed up last night," I told everyone. "Only the real Annika Hansen is on Earth right now. I called her on subspace and checked. So, yeah, some mighty weird shit is happening. The 24th century is just bonkers, dude."
The people here needed a moment to process matters, though the real Dax gave me an amused look, to which I just shrugged and blew her a kiss. Kira was just shaking her head at me, quite used to my antics by now.
"Dax..." Sisko began to say.
Two people replied.
"I mean the orginal Dax," the commander then said, "could this be related to the increased Thoron emissions in the Denorius plasma field?"
She considered this.
"Maybe a subspace disruption or maybe a dimensional shift? I didn't see an anomaly when I scanned the plasma field, but it could be so small that the scanners missed it, so our guests could be from alternate realities."
Perhaps I should guide them quicker on the path to figuring this out, but not giving it away entirely.
"Our guests are likely from our own imaginations," I told the room. "The other Dax is Doctor Bashir's wet dream. Last night I was thinking about a woman to spend the night with, with, shall we say, certain bountiful assets and Miss Glorious Rack from my past suddenly appeared in the crowd."
Everyone looked at Annika and then at me with a stink eye, Dax and Kira looking a bit offended after involuntarily glancing at their own racks for a moment before catching themselves.
"What? They're huge and perky and lovely to motorboat in! A Khan-era augment has enhanced needs, you know," I said with mock outrage, before getting back to the matter at hand, though Dax and Kira nodding sagely made me laugh a bit. "And then there's the ugly dwarf over there."
I ignored his token protest.
"Which came from my daughter's imagination when I read her the Grimm's fairy tale," Chief O'Brien said in realization.
This was just the start.
"Don't think your little one is the only thing that brought me here," the imp told the Irish man. "You were thinking about me too, you know."
This needed to be kept on track.
"So either these guests of ours are advanced aliens who are somehow reading our minds and taking forms found in those minds," I said, "or those Thoron emissions are the result of someone opening a gateway to imagination land out there and we're all in deep shit."
Before anyone could comment on those chilling possibilities a voice came over the comm.
"Odo to Sisko."
"Go ahead," Sisko said.
"Is there something you want to tell me?"
"I'm in no mood for games, Constable. What do you want?"
"Are the environmental controls broken down? It's snowing on the Promenade."
Everyone other than me looked at each other in bafflement, whilst the Chief hurried over to his station to begin a diagnostic on those systems.
"Snowing?" Sisko asked.
"We're looking at five or six centimeters of it, down here."
"Bring in all available security, Odo. We're going to Blue Alert."
From my memory Blue alert was an alert signal status on Starfleet vessels and outposts which was only used in some exceptional situations, including, but not limited to, environmental hazards to the crew, main power failure, docking and separation maneuvers, and landing protocols, for ships with the capability. This did seem like a Blue Alert situation since the environment was now being effected, but we weren't under attack.
"What's going on?"
"It seems we may be letting our imaginations run wild. As soon as I have an explanation, I'll give you one. Sisko out."
I'd already given him an explanation, the correct one: mind reading aliens in a first contact situation.
"I think I've got something," Jadzia said while frowning at the readings her console was giving her. "Look at the wave patterns of the plasma field."
Perhaps I would have, but I just didn't care. When in doubt Starfleet personnel just retreated to the familiar, science and techno mumbo jumbo, and funny sensor readings.
"The wave front's converging to a single point," O'Brien reported. "The particle density rises as you get closer to the centre, but then it drops off completely. Í'm not getting any particulate readings from the core, and it's definitely a subspace phenomenon."
"What does that mean?" Kira asked.
She was clearly frustrated at all the science speak, and who could blame her, because really it made no sense. In this case that was okay because Jadzia, the real one, was creating the phenomenon with her imagination.
"Whatever falls in there is just gone," Jadzia explained grimly.
"I want a full analysis. Chief, get a class four probe ready," Sisko ordered.
Typical Starfleet, trying to science a problem away when there was a more plausible and direct solution right in front of them. I had freaking given them the answer and they just blew right past it like they never heard it to retreat to their sensors.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" Rumplestilskin asked.
At this I stood up, enough was enough.
"Stop with the act, guys," I told the aliens. "I know that you're advanced beings and that you are studying us through our reaction to an unknown phenomenon."
I then turned to Sisko.
"And this is why an outsider's perspective that never underwent Federation indoctrination is so valuable. Hey, but maybe that's why you called me to Ops in the first place. Our imaginations are not running wild, Commander, this is a first contact situation, forget about the subspace thingy and focus on the room full of unknown aliens right in front of your faces who can read our minds," I strongly advised.
How they were reading my mind was a bit of a mystery given my mind shield which even full betazoids couldn't penetrate, but I didn't much care, I just wanted them to go away so I could forget about faux Annika and get on with my life and finish my deal with Zek. On the plus side I did get to make that holo sex tape last night. Yeah, it wasn't actually 7, but it was good enough!
"Everything else is a distraction," I told the crew of DS9 even as Odo called Sisko to complain about exotic animals now running loose on the promenade. "Focus on the talking aliens right here."
Thankfully, people finally started listening to me and soon the stupid test came to a satisfactory end.
(Line Break)
The Flighty Temptress. Romulan Space.
I remembered this TNG two-parter when Worf is told that his father is alive and in some Romulan prison camp. On the word of a shady information dealer Worf then went off to save his father only to find out that his Dad wasn't there at all, but many Klingons were.
Then there was some crap involving Worf teaching some young Klingons to act like proper Klingons despite the fact that Worf himself didn't act like a proper Klingon, as unlike the rest of them he actually acts honorably. And of course had been raised on Earth by human parents.
It all gets resolved by having the younger Klingons leave and join the Empire while the rest remain with the Romulans who'd they'd formed a community and families with.
At the same time Data gets zapped with an alien gizmo and starts dreaming, which sounded way more interesting than being alone on my ship while Worf had his latest adventure.
As to why I'd agreed to bring him out here, well, for starters, there was no reason to trust a shady information dealer to give you a lift when you knew someone who had a strong ship of their own, of non-Federation design, one that was far more suited for a clandestine trip into Romulan held space. I wasn't even charging the man, which was normally against my personal code of life, but Data had requested I help Worf and I owed Data a great deal for his help over the years. In fact Data was still working on the programming of my heads up display. Plus Worf would be coming to DS9 in a few short years and become quite an important character in the timeline, so building a better relationship with the man would be in my best interest.
I was also starting to suspect my strong and steadily improving relationship with Dax might mean marriage between the two was looking possibly unlikely, so throwing the guy a bone was the least I could do. I think I checked a lot more boxes than Worf did in Dax's perfect mate criteria, being a strong as fuck deadly warrior, successful inventor, professional adventurer, holoauthor, and very proficient lover with a very open mind when it came to sexuality given my burgeoning harem that she would be able to partake of.
The Temptress also had its own Klingon military-grade cloaking device for hiding from short-range sensors and a stealth mode which protected me from detection on long-range sensors, which made it excellent for sneaking a Federation officer into Romulan space. That had shocked the Enterprise like you wouldn't believe. Plus my ship had better armor, shields, and weapons than any other craft its size. If I ever got my hands on either more Collector power cells or decalithium to make my own red matter, a major overhaul and redesign of the Temptress was going to happen first thing and hopefully well before the Dominion war starts up, though I really had to wonder how the Collector threat was going to possibly change things there. Maybe the Founders would say 'fuck this' and try to close the wormhole themselves rather than deal with those conquerors? One could certainly hope.
My cloaking and stealth systems had turned out to be quite handy while on the way here as otherwise we may have been spotted by that fucking huge Collector ship I'd detected. At least it had seemed like a Collector ship on the long-range scanners, since I'd never seen another ship that size with such a strong energy reading, and it had been partly organic. Oh, and it had also been filled with Collector life signs.
We'd kept our distance from that ship, changing course so as to keep as far away as possible, just in case the Collectors could detect cloaked ships. If anyone was going to deal with them I assumed it would be the Romulans since this was their space and they'd be out for blood considering the last Collector ship had killed millions on a colony of theirs. I'd sent Sloan a subspace message when Worf stepped out of the cockpit with a full copy of my sensor readings to give him a warning about the incursion. With how well he knew me, I'm sure a nice little payment in latinum would be waiting in my account for the information.
Worf was currently within the compound down on the planet and had been for a while now while I stayed cloaked in orbit. I was keeping track of him using a special device I'd implanted under his skin with his permission. During the Occupation of Bajor, members of the Bajoran Resistance had sub dermal implants composed of tritonium isotopes. In the event of capture, the implants could be activated to leave a trail that could be followed.
With such an exotic energy reading to lock onto I could beam him out whenever I wished, but I wouldn't do that yet as he would need time to destroy the peace and harmony the people on this world had created while learning to live together.
Besides, I'd supplied the Starfleet Officer with a sub dermal transmitter, which was still working, and since Worf hadn't contacted me it was safe to assume that he didn't want to leave just yet. As such all I could do was wait.
If need be I could bust him out. All that stood between myself and Worf would be a few fat and lazy Romulan guards with disruptors who were guarding prisoners that didn't even want to leave anymore.
This might seem like a lot of trouble to go to, but it wasn't really that much work or even all that much danger given my cloaking device and stealth mode. Not getting paid to sit here was bumming me out, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I was partially paying back Data for all his help, would probably be getting some latinum from Section 31 for the info on the Collectors I'd sent them, and my improved relationship with Worf would pay dividends in the future when he came to DS9. So, maybe it wasn't all bad.
To kill the time I was working on a few design projects I'd had on my to-do list. Currently I was working on a pair of levitation boots, as I jokingly called them, like the kind used by Starfleet personnel during Kirk's era. Those boots were equipped with booster rockets in the heel of the boot. The booster rockets allowed for a more rapid ascent should it be needed. The boots also allowed the user to hover in the air. The pair I was currently putting together were loosely based on the same designs as those used by Spock in the Star Trek movie: The Final Frontier, but I wouldn't be using something so akin to rockets anymore.
The boots were part of a long-term plan I had to build an entire Iron Man-esque suit using advanced Trek technology. My personal armor system was already incredibly advanced and the boots I currently wore had jump assist thrusters in them, but sustained flight with them was not in the cards at the moment. The new boots I was designing were the most important part for sustained flight, but I still needed to tweak my armor overall because my current design wouldn't be able to handle the sustained stress of flying through the air at supersonic speeds, though developing a new shield configuration for aerodynamics and heat shielding would solve all my armor issues quickly and easily. In space there was no need for a special shield design because there would be no air resistance and the armor was already designed to be airtight and maintain pressurization in vacuum. Adding attitudinal impulse thrusters in the palms could be used to alter course, again similar to Iron Man.
I'd combined the original boot designs with current 24th century tech, combining ship thruster/impluse tech, with anti-gravity and repulsor tech, with a dash of the tech from magnetic gravity boots, so that my 'Iron Man' suit would allow me to attach and walk upon the hull of a starship. That ability could be mighty handy should I ever have need to board a starship but couldn't dock or transport myself on board for whatever reason. With an anti-proton weapon, like my rifle or pistol or even my sword, any standard hull material could be cut through so I would be able to slice a hole in the hull of an abandoned ship and get in that way. That would be useful if I ever wanted to do some salvaging.
Actually, now that I thought about it, if I flew in my armor in space there would be no atmosphere or friction to slow my acceleration. So, any sudden deceleration could easily kill me. I'd have to put in some inertial dampening technology as well. Thank the Prophets my Collector power cell produced so much power or this entire design would be completely unfeasible. It was a ridiculous power hog given all the bells and whistles I had currently installed.
"Worf to Gothic."
It had been a couple of days since I'd last spoken to anyone so it took me a few moments to realize that I had to speak in order to reply. I really needed to spend more time with people and less time working on developing cool new tech. During the period I was working on my rifle and armor designs days had passed without me even realizing it, my girls coming to keep me company the only time I stopped.
"My mission is complete," he told me. "I will be leaving this planet by different means. You no longer need to wait for me."
Guess the Romulans were providing him with a lift home. Glad they weren't mad we had violated their space.
"Understood, please give my regards to Data and the senior staff of the Enterprise. Gothic out," I said calmly, though somewhat annoyed that I had waited all this time for nothing and the asshole hadn't even bothered to say thank you. Thankfully I had made some good progress on my levitation boots, or thruster boots, or whatever silly name I could think of next while I had waited or I would have been super pissed.
Might as well go home then.
(Line Break)
Holosuite. Deep Space Nine.
"So what's this holonovel about?" Kira asked.
It had taken some effort to accommodate everyone's schedule, but I had finally been able to get Kira Nerys, Ro Laren, Neela, and Jadzia Dax to spend some time with me all together. Not enough time to go to our little island paradise for a well deserved bit of pampering by the beach or in my palatial master bedroom, but more than enough time to try out at least some of my new holonovel and get to know each other better as a group. At this point I was pretty sure all the girls here knew I was sleeping with every one of them. If I played my cards right, maybe I'd get that orgy I was hoping for with Dax involved. After Risa I knew that she was fine with having another woman in bed with us, why not three more?
"Writing my Mass Effect holonovel is taking too long," I responded to Nerys. "The world is too deep and complex and it's requiring a lot of time to get right. My publisher is getting annoyed with my delays, so I've spent a few weeks putting together a much simpler holonovel based on the movie Aliens, which never got made in this dimension."
And even if it had, the copyright would have long since expired. Since it had never been made here, regardless of its origins in my home dimension, it was essentially my original creative work.
"The story is pretty simple really. The female lead, Ellen Riply, is the only survivor of a crew who all got horribly murdered by a non-humanoid creature known as a xenomorph," I explained to my Bajoran babes and Jadzia. "It came out of an egg, raped someone's face, and a baby alien burst out of their chest after using the human to incubate. You get the full story from Ellen Riply if you interact as her during the holo adventure. We play the badass marines who have been sent to investigate a colony that they have lost communications with. Oh, and that colony was built on the same world Ellen Riply and her crew originally found the egg containing the xenomorph, so it's safe to assume that tons of people are already dead and that there are horrible monsters loose in the colony that we marines have to somehow save."
It should make for a decent action-filled holonovel with some strong horror elements, since I liked to remind humanity whenever I could that not every species out there wanted to be best friends with us. My super fans in the Klingon Empire, who frequently sent me subspace fanmail with video clips of their most badass kills, which I actually got a kick out of, were going to love this holonovel.
To increase emotional buy in, the players got to choose at the start of their mission what the species makeup of the colony was. So humans could choose to make it a human colony to save, Klingons could select their own race, or even make it a mix, whatever would best motivate them to save the colony at any cost.
That was when I'd noticed that Laren and Dax had started to hotly debate some issue.
"Can you tell me why the Federation isn't preparing for the coming war with the Collectors? I just can't understand it!" Ro was asking Dax, hoping she could explain this apathy.
It was a valid question. Laren and I had run the battle simulations. If a Hur'q/Collector hive ship attacked Bajor we wouldn't be able to stop the Collectors from landing troops on the planet, not by a long shot. With the station having been moved to the mouth of the wormhole, hours away at full impulse, it wasn't in any position to defend the planet. We would have to rely on our sub-impulse raiders and a few slightly more advanced ships. We had some converted Cardassian military freighters and some impulse capable fighters, but that wouldn't be near enough to stop a whole hive ship. We'd need firepower along the lines of a Galaxy-class starship or two, since one didn't really do the job last time. And those weren't cheap or many and Bajor being a non-Federation world was unlikely to get one assigned to protect it.
Frankly I was long resigned to relying on non-traditional methods to take one out, like shuttling or beaming aboard a large tri-cobalt explosive device to destroy it from within. Getting ahold of tricobalt was the problem as it was a strictly controlled and monitored substance, even for me as the military general of an allied world. If I still couldn't obtain one I had plans in mind to build a nuclear weapon, which was relatively simple to do with holo design and precision replication these days. I hadn't tried yet, but it might even be possible to replicate the plutonium or uranium needed. The risk of deadly radioactive fallout to Bajor, though, if it exploded too close to the planet, was the real concern. In open space it wouldn't matter much if I used a nuclear weapon, but near a planet and it was a big risk. Maybe I should still keep one on hand in the Temptress at least? It certainly would have been useful the last time I was onboard a hive ship.
"What makes you think we aren't?" Dax asked back, somewhat defensive.
It was only the threat of the Borg that had merited the creation of the Defiant-class, the Federation's one and only attempt to design and build a ship meant only for war, and that had only required one of the Borg's giant cubes getting all the way to Earth itself. The Collectors were much less of a threat in people's minds, at least for now, so I didn't imagine anything was getting done about them. The Federation would have to suffer quite a loss to motivate them to see the true threat. Sure, Section 31 already saw it, but even their influence and resources had its limits.
"I know for a fact that Starfleet is not prepared for the deadly threats that the future will bring," I said to Jadzia in as serious a tone as I could muster. I wanted it to be crystal clear that I wasn't fucking around right now, even if I had to hint I might know more than I really should. "Which is a shame because a few years down the line you're really going to truly regret not having some warships in your arsenal ready to deploy."
Jadzia looked confused.
"Did Q say something to you about the future?" she asked. "You sound like you know for certain that there is some danger coming our way."
I wasn't sure how to safely answer that, though suggesting my knowledge might be from Q and/or the Prophets seemed like the smartest move.
"After having a vision granted to me by an Orb of the prophets and talking with Q, let's just say I have some small idea of what is to come and leave it at that," I replied. "We're going to lose a lot of people if Starfleet doesn't start acting like the defense of the Federation is actually the main part of its mission. Exploring and expanding our knowledge of the universe is important, definitely, but that isn't the sole reason, or even the most important one, that Starfleet was created."
Jadzia sighed with the weight of many years of memory and wisdom, her eyes looking distant for a few moments, like she was remembering many things from the past.
"I remember what Starfleet was like in the twenty second and twenty third century," she said.
Dax, the slug, not the beautiful young woman, was nearly as old as I was.
"I don't know. It just seems as if somewhere along the way we lost the ability to act like soldiers, people who could defend our existence in a harsh galaxy. Curzon Dax worked very hard to obtain and keep the peace with people like the Klingons. Because of people like him we have had this golden era of mostly sustained peace that we're enjoying now, but sometimes it does seem like Starfleet stopped being a military at all and became all about exploration."
At that my mind flashed back to my earliest research upon arriving in this dimension, when I realized that the fictional Star Trek shows were real here. Starfleet was the deep space exploratory and defense service of the United Federation of Planets, yet far too much time and effort these days was invested in the former rather than the latter.
Its principal functions included the advancement of Federation knowledge about the galaxy and its inhabitants, the advancement of Federation science and technology, the defense of the Federation, and the facilitation of Federation diplomacy.
As per its mandate of deep space exploration, its personnel were frequently brought into contact with cultures and sentient species whose existences were unknown to the Federation. Starfleet officers therefore acted as official representatives of the Federation in these cases.
Starfleet vessels were also frequently used to ferry ambassadors on diplomatic missions. Which seemed odd to me now that I thought about it more, Starfleet should have special ships for diplomatic missions. I didn't think the ambassadors of my time went to trips to foreign nations onboard navy destroyers.
"But while I do agree with you about the Hur'q and the threat they pose, it's not as if the Federation Council would hear me out if I suggested we build some warships. If I was still Curzon Dax, an ambassador of renown and influence, maybe I could do more. Unfortunately, the reality is that I'm just a lieutenant now," Dax said. "And I know Ben has repeatedly requested that a starship be posted here to the station, and that Starfleet has refused him time and again because they thought it might upset the Cardassians."
And they wouldn't listen to me either, even if I suggested I knew something about the future; I was a general of a non-Federation planet and an augment after all. If I suggested a military build up they'd just think it was part of some complex scheme for me to seize power like Khan and his lot had.
"Let's quit with the weighty bullshit of galactic politics and warfare and just get through this holonovel," Neela suggested after a period of contemplative silence. "My work shift starts in a few hours."
Yes, we lacked the ability to lessen the apathy that gripped the Federation as a whole. Better to get to what I had originally planned for this outing and just have some fun together by running through the program and kicking some alien ass! With all of us going through it together we should be able to easily spot and record any bugs in the matrix. Having Bashir and O'Brien run through it a few times should also help in that goal since they were big fans of action oriented holo programs and had quite enjoyed some of my previous works. I needed this holo adventure to sell well if I was ever going to be able to afford a proper starship to defend myself and Bajor with.
If the Federation refused to get off their collective asses and see the threat out there, then it would be up to me to defend my new home.