Augment Gothic
Part 36
The Flighty Temptress. Sol System.
"Anything on short range sensors?" I asked.
By the looks of things we'd finally been able to make it back to the 'prime' universe, the reality we'd started off before being pulled forcibly into another dimension by the Forge, only there was some problem with the long range sensors, something that was preventing us from checking on the Federation capital world as part our attempt to make sure that this was indeed the right version of the Star Trek universe and the right time for that matter.
More worryingly, though, were the many garbled distress signals we'd picked up coming from the Sol System. They were near incomprehensible due to the fact that there were so many messages coming out of the same system, thousands of them really, all simultaneously. That was not normal. According to the long range sensors, which could scan other nearby systems without interference, every Starfleet vessel in the sector was returning to Earth at maximum warp.
"Captain, there is a massive class- 5 spatial anomaly in the Kuiper Belt that is throwing up a great deal of gravimetric interference," T'Maz reported, her eyes still locked on her console even as she reported to me.
Her fingers were flying as she dismissed and created new holo-displays of the sensor's output. T'Maz had taken to her new holo-console like a fish to water, practically gushing, by Vulcan standards, about how much more efficient it was then the standard physical Federation control consoles and the incredible utility in being able to custom design and add and dismiss screens and controls as needed. Her holo console now wrapped from waist height to practically the ceiling in a 180 degree half circle around her.
As for the Kuiper Belt, that was a donut-shaped region of icy bodies that lay beyond the orbit of Neptune. Within the belt there were millions upon millions of chunks of ice and rock that would be a serious hazard to even modern navigation, if the belt wasn't so well mapped from centuries of ship traffic.
Similar to the large asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter, the Kuiper Belt was made of leftovers from the solar system's early formation, a failed world. That belt was thin, though, when compared to the one past Neptune.
The Kuiper Belt should not be confused with the Oort Cloud, which was a much more distant region of space at the edge of the solar system. That was also a hazard to navigation if you weren't careful.
In my time the Kuiper Belt might as well have been the edge of the universe itself, with having no ability to actually get there in a human lifetime. In this time, the belt was pretty much practically within spitting distance, which made it extremely worrying that there was some sort of weird space thing right here.
"Can you be more specific than spatial anomaly?" I requested of my sexy Vulcan science officer.
To be fair, it was an extremely general catch-all term that could cover a wide range of strange space stuff.
"One moment," answered the Section 31 agent, continuing to add screens and sensor outputs to her displays.
Before long I received a report which she had compiled and sent to my screen, the report indicated that the anomaly was remarkably similar to the rift in space that T'Maz and I had encountered during our first mission together. This likely meant that the Hur'q were here, and in great numbers.
"I have a complete scan of the system," the attractive Vulcan was now saying. "Please note that sensor accuracy is only at 63% with the gravimetric interference present in system."
Now I could understand why else it had been so hard to get an idea of what was going on in the Sol System. It was a war zone. Scans were picking up at least forty Starfleet ships, of many different classes, in pitched battle with thousands of Hur'q fighters, a dozen cruisers, as well as a type of Collector ship that I'd never seen before, something about the size of an escort ship, and there were well over fifty of them.
What really caught my keen eye, though, were the fucking gigantic Hive Ships, five vessels made from huge asteroids, obviously converted by the Collectors to act as mobile bases for other Hur'q ships. They were hanging back and acting as launch platforms for the Collector fighters, sending new squadrons into the fight every few minutes.
As if that wasn't bad enough, there were even more fighters coming out of the massive rift. Not that many, but in time the sheer amount of fighters would overwhelm even the state of the art defenses of Earth. This was obviously the start of a full scale invasion of the Alpha Quadrant, perhaps the whole galaxy. If they succeeded in taking or destroying Earth, the very heart of the Federation, they would cripple any effective defense before it even started.
Judging by the overwhelming size of the invading force I figured that the only reason the Collectors weren't already plundering Earth was because Space Dock was in the way.
Earth Spacedock, referred to simply as "Spacedock," was the largest Starfleet base in the Sol System. While it wasn't strictly a military base, it did have its fair share of weapons, and powerful shields.
This was likely why the Hur'q Hive Ships were hanging back and sending in the smaller and more expendable craft. Perhaps they didn't want to risk the Hive Ships yet. They might not care for the lives of the individual Hur'q, but they probably wanted to keep their Hives safe, most likely because those ships were where they produced/birthed new Hur'q to continue the fight.
Scans also showed that there were some small Federation ships in the area, though for some reason they weren't running away from the battle area. If I'd been the captain of such vulnerable vessels I'd be pushing my engines to the red line to get as far away from Earth as I could.
"Red alert. Scan those freighters," I ordered.
With my order for red alert status, armor plates slid into place all over the ship, covering every window, every airlock, and the three cargo bay doors that opened to space. The shields, both primary and secondary, also went to full power and all weapons were powered up and readied to fire.
Something just didn't seem right about these freighters. They should be desperately trying to escape the battle. There were also a lot of Starfleet shuttles and runabouts trying to protect the freighters, which was mighty odd since they should be dealing with the big threat and the hundreds of enemy fighters now swarming the system.
"The freighters appear to have been boarded by the Collectors," Ro Laren calmly reported.
While I would love to go and join the main battle, this ship having been built with the advanced technologies of the Husnock, the Collectors, and the Federation, designed from the start for war against a numerically superior enemy, Starfleet seemed to be holding its own, for now. Not that that would normally stop me from joining in a fight to protect Earth itself, as it was still my home world, sort of, but there was something going on here that I didn't understand, something that might need my immediate assistance.
"Helm, take us in for a closer look," I commanded, wishing we hadn't been forced to decloak by our proximity to Earth.
Once we had a closer look at the freighters it became clear what was going on. The Collectors had fired their boarding torpedoes at some of the cargo vessels, the ones capable of penetrating shields, no doubt intending to plunder or capture them, as the Hur'q liked to do.
Unfortunately, I also saw another potential danger, one even more sinister than the Hur'q stealing technology and/or eating the crew of those freighters. With how little individual Hur'q valued their lives, it wasn't a crazy thought that the Collectors might fly those captured Federation ships at full speed into the surface of the planet to do insane amounts of damage, or detonating their warp cores in atmosphere or on the surface. In the chaos of battle, Federation civilian ships slipping through the defenses to reach Earth was a distinct possibility. Starfleet might even hesitate to make those hard decisions, not wanting to destroy those ships with hostages onboard and that delay might be catastrophic to Earth.
I'd even seen this tactic work on Earth before during the Dominion War episodes of DS9, when the Breen successfully attacked Earth and crashed their ships into the surface.
"Incoming boarding torpedoes!" Ro yelled. "They have an escort!"
So that was what the runabouts and shuttles were doing, they were attempting to prevent the Hur'q from capturing more of the civilian ships. When the Hur'q had first appeared in the system they must have sent fighters on suicide missions against the freighters in order to cripple them, to keep them from warping out to safety.
Attacking freighters when there were Starfleet ships about might seem foolish, but it made sense to me. Those freighters were crewed by civilians, making them much easier targets for capture. Also, if Starfleet failed to protect them, while in orbit of Earth, that would be a huge blow to morale, instilling fear in the population.
If a civilian ship could be taken right under the noses of Starfleet, in the very heart of the Federation, in orbit of Earth, nowhere would be considered safe. Just because the Collectors didn't value the lives of individuals, didn't mean that they didn't understand that other races did value the individual. Such strategic thinking might be beyond the average Collector warrior, drone, or worker, but they did have an officer class, who could think in such ways.
The loss of the freighters and their crew meant little to me personally, but defending these vulnerable ships would make me look good, and the Hur'q were no friends of mine either.
"Show me the escorts," I instructed.
These were new ships, ones I'd never encountered before. They really weren't much bigger than the shuttles and runabouts that they would soon be trading fire with. They were, however, heavily armed and armored, meant to give the fighters more of a chance to survive to reach their targets. Was this a fundamental change in tactics in response to the fighting they'd experienced in this dimension so far, or did the Hives currently attacking the heart of the Federation simply have a different mindset than the ones we'd already encountered?
I soon discovered that the escorts were in fact much like the Jem'hadar fighters in tactics, the ones I'd seen in the show, when the escorts flew themselves into the runabouts, taking out both the runabouts and themselves. The Hur'q truly were an alien species, with an alien thought process, thus so very hard to predict.
"We're in weapons' range," Laren reported.
Now it was time to see what my ship could really do.
"Scarlett, assign priority targets, auto target and fire secondary weapons as needed. Fire at will."
I watched the tactical display with excitement and imagined that if this was part of a Trek show or movie that the display would have already shifted to an external one in order to show the Temptress firing all its powerful weapons as it blasted apart the smaller enemy vessels. It would be the kind of scene that you could put in a trailer, all explosions, cool special effects, a veritable treat for the eyes and ears, despite the lack of any sound in space.
The tactical display was far less impressive, but much more practical and useful in a large scale engagement with multiple enemy ships. Dots that represented enemy craft simply winked out of existence as the advanced weapons of the Temptress blasted them apart, snuffing out the lives of the enemy.
For a few moments it seemed as if my ship would turn the tide of battle, or at least this part of the battle, only something hit us, something big, and boy was I glad that I'd gone to the trouble of installing so many secondary inertia dampeners and compensators, because if I hadn't everyone onboard who wasn't a hologram or a VI would have been injured severely in the collision.
With the way this dimension worked in the show, I'm sure at least one of my crew would have been horribly injured or killed, but almost certainly taken out of commission and unavailable to assist in the current battle. With the bridge being akin to a vault with multiple redundant systems, including seat belts, to prevent the command staff from being injured, we felt a small bump at best.
"One of the escort ships got through our weapon's fire and rammed us at full impulse. They exploded against the shields. No hull breaches," Neela reported calmly and professionally, just like you'd expect of a veteran of many life and death battles during the Occupation, "but there is a partial shield emitter failure on starboard..."
There was another impact, and I hoped that B'Elanna was okay. She was down in engineering alone, well as alone as you could be on a ship mostly crewed by holograms.
"A boarding torpedo struck us exactly where the Escort damaged our shields," Laren reported. "We've got Collectors onboard."
This was alarming, for many reasons.
"Hold on the shields are still up!" I complained. "You can't board a ship that has its shields up. Shenanigans. I call shenanigans!"
No one other than myself understand that last part, and this wasn't the time for me to explain, so it was ignored.
"I made sure that the shields could stop their boarding torpedoes!" I yelled.
"The shield emitters in that section, both primary and secondary, were damaged by the Escort ship ramming us at full impulse, Captain," T'Maz reported. "Power had not fully been re-routed to the undamaged emitters before the boarding torpedo penetrated that small shield failure in that section. It is a testament to our shield strength and the skill of your design that the Temptress' shields weren't penetrated by the escort ship ramming us and our ship destroyed. Only perhaps a galaxy-class ship's shields could have done as well under the same conditions."
Until now only the freighters had been infested by the Hur'q. I'd had the time to do a life sign scan and those cargo ships were practically infested with the bug-like aliens. I tasked my ship's VI with beaming Hur'q off those ships when we could risk lowering the shields. If you beamed someone up and then purged the buffer, it was the same as killing them and I had zero issue killing Hur'q by the scores.
Unfortunately, we wouldn't be doing that anytime soon, so hopefully the Hur'q were just planning to collect those ships, their crews, and the cargo onboard those vessels, rather than immediately setting course to ram Earth at full speed.
"How are the Starfleet ships not getting boarded?" I asked aloud to my bridge crew, not caring who answered.
"They must have found a way to modify the shields to prevent boarding," T'Maz said. "Starfleet Intelligence reports indicated countermeasures were in the process of being developed after several examples were found aboard wrecked Collector ships after battle."
That made sense. Starfleet officers were excellent at coming up with quick solutions to problems, even if the countermeasure hadn't been fully developed at the beginning of this battle, no doubt some technobabble, hail Mary solution mid-fight was pulled out of someone's proverbial ass, something that everyone would promptly forget about as soon as the battle was over.
"Scarlett, activate the internal defenses. Intruder countermeasures, level black," I ordered.
The Collector warriors would be kept quite busy by the bloodthirsty holographic horrors I'd created. Unfortunately, the Collectors were unlikely to suffer the psychological effects my xenomorphs, Predator aliens, and Imperial Space Marines had purposefully been designed to evoke, as they were biologically incapable of experiencing fear. Still, they'd do their primary job just as well, which under level black intruder countermeasures was killing intruders with maximum efficiency with no quarter or mercy given, and no holds barred in terms of tactics.
This ship was designed for a galaxy spanning war with the Dominion, and unfortunately, getting boarded was part and parcel of this universe, no matter what paranoid level of precautions I took. Even the vaunted Enterprise had been boarded numerous times by incredibly unlikely foes, like a bunch of stupid Ferengi in that one episode. I knew that no matter how well designed my ship was, it'd happen at some point.
Level black intruder countermeasures put the ship into full lockdown, activating every force field in the ship. Right now, in every 5 meters of corridor a forcefield had sprung up to impede movement, every room in the ship had a force field barrier at the doorway, and key locations, like the bridge, engineering, the brig, the armory, and weapons, had force fields with independent power supplies literally surrounding the rooms, in the floor, ceiling, and every wall.
That measure had been put in place to prevent changelings from shape shifting into or out of key locations, but worked just as well to keep conventional intruders out of key locations they'd need to take to take control of the ship. And these weren't the pansy Starfleet small shock type of force fields, these were the fully lethal versions that could kill with one touch. My holo-killers, being photons and force fields themselves, could pass right through them to reach their targets.
I had tried to be as creatively evil as I could be, taking inspiration from numerous science fiction TV and movies and liberally from horror movies. My first inspired bit of horror was the ability to raise the gravity in various parts of the ship. The gravity was artificially generated already, so why not increase it on command to slow down or cripple intruders?
Suddenly experiencing 5x normal Earth gravity would hamper anyone's movements and restrict their ability to fight back. The second bit of horror was specially designed kill zones, where enemies could be funneled into choke points and trapped, where a radiogenic pulse would then literally vaporize any intruder in the kill zone. That idea I had actually gotten from an episode of DS9 where Chief O'Brien had been supposedly killed.
Along with the holograms for direct offense, I had designed specially hidden auto-turret energy weapons to rapid fire phaser and disrupter bolts on intruders, along with laser cutting beams at around neck and knee level that could be activated to decapitate or cripple enemies.
For most enemy intruders of the alpha quadrant variety these countermeasures would be gross overkill, and God knows Starfleet would balk at it if they knew, but the Collectors were unique in that they could quite simply overwhelm all the defenses through sheer numbers and weight of fire. The holo-emitters could be destroyed once found, the turrets shot out, the gravity plating destroyed, the force field emitters overwhelmed, etc.
There were always ways if you were determined enough and had enough bodies to throw at every obstacle. If they were using the boarding torpedo currently sticking out of my hull like a knife as a transporter relay to send more and more soldiers, like I suspected, then it didn't matter how many I killed, they'd just keep coming.
Scarlett had already informed me that there was some kind of transport disruption field in place preventing her from simply beaming the intruders into buffer and purged, though that could likely also be interference from their primitive, but effective transporter relay.
I'd love to take up my sword and go join in with the counter boarding action, to feel the rush of battle as I slew my foes without mercy, but I needed to stay here. My place was here on the bridge, commanding my vessel. That didn't mean I couldn't see how my holo-warriors were doing.
"Scarlett, show me the corridor outside the hull breach," I ordered.
Immediately a holographic display filled the front of the bridge in full panoramic high definition glory, like they were right in front of us in the flesh. It showed a charnel house. Hur'q bodies were lying stacked upon each other in the corridors like firewood, with blood pooling on the floor. Some were dismembered; others had obviously been killed by energy weapons.
My predator aliens were using their disc and spear weapons, their wrist blades and shoulder plasma canons to great effect. Several Hur'q had obviously been shot with a Predator's net gun, which shot a sharpened metallic net at hyper velocities, the net capturing and then contracting around enemies to cut them to pieces. In this case the holo net had done its job and disappeared, but the horrific cuts left behind on Hur'q bodies remained.
In that part of the ship holographic xenomorphs were grabbing Hur'q from above and below, even pulling a few into quarters along the corridors, separating some from the group, biting heads off and ripping and tearing bodies to pieces.
The space marines were constantly cutting enemies to pieces with their chainswords and shooting their bolt weapons causing mini explosions in flesh. Some were even taking advantage of their great strength and literally throwing Hur'q bodies into the remaining lethal force fields, or using the Hur'q's own weapons on them, all while the auto turrets that hadn't been destroyed were firing, sometimes even through my holograms.
As for the Hur'q, they were advancing, destroying force field and holo-emitters, power conduits and weapon turrets, but every meter was paid for in blood and the only reason they hadn't all been killed was that new soldiers were constantly being beamed onboard to replace the ones we'd already killed.
"Gothic, the Hur'q are pulling back!" Neela reported.
That made no sense at all. We had the intruders contained onboard the Temptress, their advance slowed down to a crawl, but they were winning the larger battle with the freighters!
"The Enterprise is here, along with three ships from the Andorian Imperial Guard."
They were the primary military force of the Andorian Empire, and maintained both starships and Imperial Infantry Units. Unlike the Earth space forces the Imperial Guard hadn't been absorbed into Starfleet, which is why you didn't see many Andorians serving in Starfleet, but as far as I was aware they only protected Andor and a few of their holdings, they hadn't seen any real action in a good long while.
A Galaxy-class ship like the Enterprise was a match for a single Hive Ship, somewhat, and while there were five such vessels here, the Hive Ships depended on their fighters for defense, much like how a hive of bees was defended by the bees swarming an attacker. However, the vast majority of the fighters and the other Hur'q craft were away from the Hives, leaving them somewhat vulnerable.
Not that those details really mattered right now, at least not to me. I had aliens infesting my ship, more beaming aboard every minute trying to take control of her, and something on the scanners was visibly alarming T'Maz. Well, she looked alarmed, by Vulcan standards, and given that she'd had time to restore her emotional control, it must be something really alarming to get such a visible reaction out of her.
"There is something happening to the anomaly," she reported. "It is exponentially expanding in size, and there is something else..."
She paused for a few moments, intently studying what the sensors were telling her, and I once again found myself impressed by how calm she was in this situation. The ship gently shook now and again from weapons' fire, from the many ships we were still fighting ship-to-ship. And even while a pitched battle was being waged in space, the Temptress firing dozens of quantum torpedoes and anti-proton energy beams jacketed in positrons to destroy enemy ships and fighters, we were also fighting inside the ship, the holograms even now fighting a ruthless battle with an ever increasing number of Hur'q warriors.
"I've run a gravimetric analysis," she said. "See the results."
To me a gravimetric analysis was a set of methods used in analytical chemistry for the quantitative determination of an analyte (the ion being analyzed) based on its mass. The principle behind this type of analysis is that once an ion's mass has been determined as a unique compound, that known measurement can then be used to determine the same analyte's mass in a mixture, as long as the relative quantities of the other constituents are known.
Words and terms like that changed meaning over the centuries, as technology advanced ever forward, and T'Maz wouldn't be speaking English anyway, so it was a wonder that I understood anything she said at all.
The data displayed before me made sense of the situation, well, somewhat. As far as I could understand a massive new gravity well had just appeared on our sensors, and a gravity well of this size was normally only found around a body in space that had a mass equal to that of Earth's moon or a small planetoid. Only there wasn't a moon to provide the gravity well, at least not yet.
"By the Prophets!" I swore. "They're bringing a small planet through the rift!"
In the records of the Hur'q, which were hard to understand even for me, I'd found references to a central hive, a supreme nest, or a world ship. While each Hive was somewhat independent even when working in tandem with others, they all answered to one central/supreme authority. Sort of like how the colony worlds of humanoid species would still answer to the home world.
That could explain the odd tactics of the enemy seen so far, they had been waiting for the supreme commander to arrive, and now that she was coming, she would be a Hur'q queen who birthed new queens I felt sure. They were regrouping now, and not because the Hive ships were under threat. Thankfully that also meant no new Hur'q were being beamed aboard my ship to replace their losses. Scarlett reported that there were still 133 Hur'q warriors still alive on the TemptressΒΈ but that number was going down every minute.
"Gothic, the Enterprise is on an intercept course for the event horizon of the anomaly, the other Starfleet ships are following and appear to be protecting the Enterprise," Neela informed me.
I didn't doubt for a second that the many times-over heroes that served on that famous ship had come up with an utterly insane, but brilliant plan to close the rift, thereby saving the Federation from total annihilation, because that'd be the only outcome if a Hur'q world ship made it into this system and dimension. That ability to win, to defy fate, was why three different series of Star Trek followed a ship called Enterprise. That was what they were famous for after all, at least when they weren't encountering strange new forms of life, or playing taxi service for some VIPs, or some other random mission.
Many fans of the show had scratched their heads at the mission history of the Enterprise. The galaxy-class of ships had been designed to be a living community in space to allow the ship to go on long 5 to 10 year long exploration missions far, far away from Federation space. They never really strayed far from home, though. I guess the Federation as a whole just felt better with them being on hand instead of years away at maximum warp.
"Well, let's join them," I decided. "Set course for the rift, full impulse. Destroy any Collector ship in range that gets in the Enterprise's way."
This would either be a heroic charge to save the day or a heroic way to die, either way it would be memorable and would earn me a ton of goodwill from the Federation. I wasn't that worried about dying anyway, not really. The crew of the Enterprise would save the day; they always did. Besides, given the stellar distances involved we'd be bringing up the rear, so there'd likely be a lack of things for us to shoot at and be shot by.
(Line Break)
San Francisco. Earth.
It had literally been years since I'd last been here, but I was glad that I had finally returned. This might not have been my Earth, but it was still my first home. In all my travels in this dimension, I'd still never seen anywhere quite like this city. It had such a diverse population, so many cultures intermeshed and somehow living in harmony, and that made this place feel so vibrant and full of life. No wonder Section 31 worked so zealously in the shadows, taking on the role of bloodthirsty amoral monsters willing to do the darkest of deeds to keep this paradise from being destroyed by a cruel and uncaring galaxy.
The mood was quite somber at the moment. People should be celebrating the Federation's victory, especially with how close they'd come to death or enslavement at the hands of the Collectors, yet they seemed almost mute, numb even. I suppose the citizens of Earth were unused to an existential threat to their very lives, one that so rudely made them aware of their own mortality, especially here on Earth where they should be the safest. Perhaps this was exactly the scare they needed to better prepare for and survive the coming Dominion War. The Borg had done that to some degree in the shows, maybe this event could serve the same function?
The day had been saved by the Enterprise, of course, just as I'd expected. They'd fired some kind of beam into the rift, somehow forcing it to close just as the fucking moon-sized ship began to enter this reality. The rift closed, ripping that massive planet-sized ship apart. Multiple fleets of ships would have had a hard time blowing that monstrosity up with all their powerful weapons, but when up against a spatial anomaly, size didn't really matter. After that the remaining Collectors had become completely disorganized and easy to defeat.
Some of the Hive ships immediately fled the system, abandoning their smaller ships, another had blown itself up for some alien Prophets forsaken reason, and one had been destroyed by Starfleet before the fighting had finally stopped.
With the battle finally over I finally had an excuse to leave the bridge and hunt the last few dozen remaining Hur'q that were still onboard. It was glorious. My sword bathed in the blood of my enemies when I had the opportunity to go hand-to-hand. A side benefit of all this was that I now had literally hundreds of Collector weapons lying around that I had quickly stored in my armory, many of them with a still functional micro-singularity power cell. I'd have spares for years at this rate.
I wondered if that was the end of it or if the Hur'q would return one day with a new leader to exact revenge on the Federation. I simply didn't know.
The apartment I was in now was the one I had originally been assigned upon coming to this dimension. I kept it here, despite rarely visiting Earth these days, as the 'rent' was so stupidly cheap in comparison to my full wealth that it made little sense to give it up. My crew also knew that any of them were welcome to use it when on Earth too. In this case, I was glad I had kept it because my ship was in no state to live on at the moment, as it currently had a Collector boarding torpedo sticking out of its side and many decks were more akin to a slaughter house with Collector blood and corpses literally everywhere.
Unfortunately, that meant I'd had to put the ship into a space dock for proper repairs. Given all the damaged vessels up there I would have had to wait weeks for a dedicated repair team to fix up the Temptress, but there were definite advantages to people knowing that I'd fought valiantly to protect civilians and had destroyed dozens of Collector fighters and ships, and of course I also had Section 31 contacts to help expedite and move me to the front of the queue.
I did worry about those curious Starfleet types discovering just how advanced my ship's technology was, but my patron's notice-me-not magic/SEP field seemed to still be working these days. My ship had just fought a pitched battle around Earth using extremely advanced quantum torpedoes that did way more damage than they should have, used energy weapons unknown to the Federation, and had shields that shrugged off a Collector fighter fucking ramming the ship on a suicide run, and yet, inexplicably, Starfleet wasn't asking me any questions about my ship, yelling at me for having a powerful warship of my own, or commandeering it to learn all its secrets for the good of the Federation.
So, with that field working I wasn't too worried about the repair crews. They had a lot of work to do and virtually no time to indulge their curiosity. Besides, even if they did get curious, the Temptress was the flagship of the Bajoran Defense Force, so doing anything other than fixing it up and cleaning out the bodies would cause a huge diplomatic incident.
The Federation wouldn't want anything to happen to jeopardize their close relationship with Bajor, as they quite liked having control over the wormhole and as things were going, saw Bajor joining the Federation in the next few years as a near certainty, though they wouldn't likely admit it. Until Bajor officially joined the Federation as members, Starfleet only maintained control over Deep Space Nine so long as the Bajoran government allowed it.
No, everyone was far too busy trying to clean up the huge mess left behind by the destruction of the Collector world-ship, which was even now dangerously cluttering up the Sol System. Any of the larger pieces striking one of the many occupied planets in system would be a disaster and could potentially kill millions, though they were plenty dangerous enough as a hazard to navigation to the huge amount of ship traffic going through the capital system of the Federation on a daily basis. I couldn't imagine that anyone wanted to risk flying into a giant hunk of Hur'q moon when leaving or entering the system.
While watching the Federation President's speech for the third time that evening, I looked over to the other side of my large bed to once again admire the work of art that was Annika Hanson's very, very spankable ass. Oh, I had spanked that ass plenty tonight when I virtually pounded her into the mattress. She was lying on her stomach, sleeping soundly as she recovered from the many filthy things I'd done to her body.
She'd actually come to see me, having somehow learned of my return to this city. We'd talked for a while to catch up and then I fucked her. After that we'd eaten dinner, and of course I'd fucked her again. She'd collapsed into a drooling mess after the third round of augment-level debauchery, halfway through already calling me 'master' and 'my lord' and begging for more.
I'd even left a few bruises on those wide hips I'd gripped to pound that ass into pleasure town. She certainly didn't seem to mind judging by the fucked-stupid grin on her face. Something in her obviously liked the alpha male, the dominant, the primitive man in me that came out when I fucked her like she was just a convenient body to take my pleasure from. We were both odd people.
The Federation President's speech tonight was rather interesting, though I had to remind myself that the Federation was lead by a Council, which was made up of representatives from the member worlds. The Federation president was elected from one of those member worlds, but he or she or it, didn't have total executive power, they still needed the council's approval to do many things.
Of course the Council would debate vigorously over even the most minor of issues. The election or appointment of a Federation Council member to represent Bajoran interests with the Federation government was one of the tasks that Bajor would have to complete when it joined the Federation. If the planet joined, and I had foreknowledge that it would after the Dominion War, I'd have to warn whoever was chosen about the difficult task that would be laid before them.
The Federation Council, due to recent events, had been given a rather nasty wakeup call. The Collectors had done a number on the alpha quadrant and the Federation itself had suffered great losses, and now even Earth and the Sol system itself was suffering those losses due to people dying from injuries taken during the attack.
It couldn't be ignored any more. The Federation's defenses, against such an alien and powerful foe, were found lacking, to say the least. In my opinion, as an outsider with knowledge from many of the Star Trek series, the ideals and principles of the Federation were actually the reason why the Federation had performed so poorly.
Starfleet's purpose had never been to truly act as the Federation's military, and it really wasn't in armament and training, or in strategy and tactics. Starfleet wasn't really a military, but it was being forced to serve that role when it came to defending the many worlds that made up the Federation. As it stood, it just wasn't very well suited to the task. It could be, but it would require a fundamental shift in philosophy.
Clearly the Federation needed to take the job of defending itself more seriously, increasing its ability to defend itself as well as wage war, however most of the Council were concerned that turning Starfleet into a proper military organization would take it away from its mission of peaceful exploration and scientific advancement.
I suspected that they were actually more worried about Starfleet growing in power and how this would effect them, the Federation civilian government, and ultimately the sovereignty of its member planets. In the Cardassian Union, as well as the Klingon and Romulan Empires, for example, the military wielded a lot of influence and this greatly lessened the influence of the civilian leaders.
The current President and leader of the Council, a man called Jaresh-Inyo, had made a speech to the Council offering an end to the debates that had until very recently been consuming the leaders of the Federation.
While the citizens of the Federation were frightened and desperately wanted security, and thus a Starfleet that would and could protect them from powerful foes, a more militarized Starfleet went against the founding principles of the Federation.
At the same time, letting each member world build its own proper space navy, dedicated to protecting their personal worlds, rather than the whole, would weaken the mission of both Starfleet and the Federation and be a disaster in its own right. Richer, more powerful worlds in the Federation would be able to build those navies, leaving lesser worlds resentful and weakening the bonds of unity that kept it all together. And from a logistical standpoint, too many planetary defense forces would mean less recruits and resources for Starfleet.
So the President came up with the idea of upgrading and increasing the planetary defenses of all Federation member worlds with shields and orbital defense installations, while keeping those defenses under the local control of the sovereign planetary governments. This would lead to better defended worlds which would relieve much of the strain on Starfleet to always be there at a moment's notice.
This was an effective compromise given that it would make people feel safer, even it really wouldn't help that much in other ways. Pure defense was never going to be enough against a powerful enemy set on destroying you, they'd just work around those defenses. But still, it was better than nothing and would save lives in combination with a Starfleet that eventually took seriously the military role it only grudgingly took on.
Clearly Jaresh-Inyo was indeed a clever man, and knew how to handle the Council, no surprise since he'd made a decades long career of representing his planet on the Council before eventually coming to lead it.
A buzz sounded, indicating there was an incoming communication for me, so I switched over from the recording of the speech to the screen which contained the face of Commander Riker. I could tell by the look on his face that he had a favour to ask of me, but really didn't want to ask it.
(Line Break)
The Flighty Temptress. Sol System.
I had to admit that the engineering/repair teams at Space Dock had done a wonderful job of cleaning and fixing up my ship. All of the major battle damage was gone, the corpses of the Hur'q that my holo-warriors and I had killed had been dealt with and they'd even restored the new ship smell by some tweak to the air filtration and life support systems. The rest of the repairs had been handled by a happy B'Elanna and her holo-engineer teams.
Currently I was on the bridge, carefully reviewing Scarlett's surveillance reports on the repair teams in order to make sure that the repair crews hadn't messed about with things they shouldn't have or left any surprises behind in the form of computer viruses or surveillance devices or trackers, or whatever, while they should have been replacing emitters and installing new power conduits.
I'd been very careful to shut down any systems that could lead to my more advanced tech being discovered, especially the technology that the Federation didn't already possess, like the quantum slipstream drive, the more advanced replicators, and the weapons systems. Active dampening fields would even prevent their equipment from getting any scans. I'd also made sure that the holographic defenses, weapon turrets, and lethal force fields wouldn't come online until I returned or a true threat to the ship was discovered.
The last thing I wanted was some poor engineer to end up vaporized, or beheaded, or somehow splattered against the walls because they accidentally switched on the intruder defenses. If Hur'q warriors bio-engineered from birth to serve as soldiers couldn't handle my many defenses, then pacifist Starfleet types wouldn't last even a few seconds.
I'd already taken the time to review more of the footage of my holographic defenders taking on the Hur'q for the purposes of an after action review and to determine what improvements could be made.
The lethal force fields had been extremely effective in keeping the Collectors contained, at least for a while, with the holograms being able to pass through the fields as needed to kill them. The kill zone chokepoints had also been excellent at trapping large groups to thin their numbers, the radiogenic pulse then vaporizing everything organic in its area of effect.
Simulated bolters and chainswords had torn Collectors apart even as more warriors had been beamed aboard to replace the ones I'd killed, the initial boarding torpedo that had penetrated my ship's hull acting as a transporter relay through my shields. At some point in their travels through the quadrant they must have stolen some transporter technology. Given the number of races that had it, it wouldn't have been all that hard to acquire. The hologram xenomorphs and Predators had gone to work too, dealing out death and destruction to the waves of boarders, from close up and far away.
The bloody result was something that never would have gotten past the censors if my adventures had been part of the Star Trek franchise. It was a good thing that the bodies and pieces of bodies had been beamed off the ship by the repair crews and never re-materialized. At one point I had considered selling the Collector corpses to Section 31 for study and experimentation, but with recent events they had plenty already.
Given the damaged Collector ships littering the Sol System right now, the Federation science types would not be lacking for research material. As for me, I had more data and tech to study to last a lifetime. And my inventory of Collector weapons and power cells was huge now.
The repair crews hadn't laid a hand on the material wealth that I'd gathered on my last trip, though some of it had been lost due to weapon's fire and explosive decompression on one of the decks. I still had plenty, so being greedy had worked out.
That which I didn't wish to keep on hand for myself I'd already traded for Federation credits. Given all the rebuilding currently going on, and the new plans to upgrade planetary defenses throughout the Federation, the demand and price for high quality non-replicable materials was sky high.
Sure, Federation credits weren't the most universal form of currency, but they could be converted to gold pressed latinum with minimum to moderate difficulty, and they had their uses. I had come to this system with the intent of buying certain supplies for the ship while performing a test run for the slipstream drive, which B'Elanna had kept fully locked down until the repair teams had left the ship.
I'd been able to buy everything I needed, though the downside of the recent attack was that I'd had to pay more for those same supplies. Not everything was free on Earth, of course, it was just that most necessities of life were. The things that weren't, most people just didn't need to buy in their daily life.
"So who are we playing taxi service for?" Ro Laren asked of me.
I looked up from B'Elanna's reports on the ongoing repairs to answer her.
"An engineering officer formerly stationed on the Enterprise, a Lt. Reginald Barclay," I answered her. "The Enterpriseis taking on new crew while it is here on Earth, so Mr. Barclay is being transferred to Deep Space Nine."
Barclay was an occasional character in Star Trek The Next Generation, and later on, Star Trek Voyager, who worked as an engineer, often being used as comic relief by the writers of the show.
At one point he had an addiction to the holodeck, which was first seen in the episode "Hollow Pursuits," in which he creates holographic reproductions of the ship's bridge officers, who are completely responsive to Barclay's every whim, where he himself was no longer crippled by his social anxiety and his confidence was extreme. Some fans speculated that that also meant holo-sex with the likes of Deanna Troi and Dr. Crusher, as several steamy kisses were shown in the episodes.
Being totally unlike their ship-board counterparts, they served to bolster his low self-esteem. With encouragement from Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, however, later on Barclay redeems himself and helps to uncover the cause of a critical multi-system failure on the Enterprise in time to avert the ship's destruction.
In the episode "The Nth Degree," Barclay's brain was altered by an ancient alien race from an extremely distant galaxy, the Cytherians, radically increasing his intellect. Which was something I had some experience with once I'd come to understand just what becoming a Khan-era Augment meant for me.
Under this alien influence and improvement, Barclay seized control of the Enterprise and brought the ship into contact with the Cytherians, who wanted a cultural exchange, but did not actually want to leave their home system, instead choosing to bring aliens to them. After the exchange the Cytherians returned the Enterprise to Federation space, restoring Barclay to normal and leaving him with only the memory of his actions, but no idea how or why he had done the things he'd done.
In the episode "Realm of Fear," Barclay was forced to deal with his transporter phobia when assigned to an away team. Though he was capable of allowing himself to be transported, he believed that while getting transported that he could see large worm-like creatures.
When no evidence of a problem was found, Barclay believes himself to be going mad. However, he later discovered that the worm-like creatures were actually human survivors somehow trapped inside the transporter beam. With Barclay's help, the people are successfully rescued.
In "Ship in a Bottle," Barclay unwittingly revived a sentient holo-simulation of Sherlock Holmes' arch-foe, Professor James Moriarty (who was previously seen in "Elementary, Dear Data") while performing holodeck maintenance.
This resulted in Picard, Data, and Barclay unknowingly becoming trapped in a Moriarty-created simulation of the Enterprise, which forced them to research a method of making holo-simulations "real" outside of the holodeck.
When the ruse is discovered, Moriarty and a holographic companion were tricked into a simulation within the simulation, and stored in a computer where they continued to exist, believing that they had gained freedom from the holodeck.
There was some other stuff as well, but I didn't think more about Barclay's life as I didn't care much about the man.
"It's bad enough we have a Vulcan on board," Laren said. "Now you're letting Starfleet officers hitchhike? He's got to be a spy."
If he was a spy then Starfleet Intelligence had made a piss poor choice of agent in Barclay, as the man was not brave, and he wasn't super smart anymore, so any attempts to learn the secrets of my ship would just end up with him getting caught and charged with espionage. I'd lock him in a Bajoran prison for the rest of his life if he messed with the Temptress.
This poor ship had been through more than enough without a fool messing with it. No, I was far more worried about Section 31, or the Obsidian Order, or the Tal Shiar, any one of those organizations was competent and ruthless in the extreme. I had put in many countermeasures to prevent spies from succeeding, but I was also relying on the power of my god-like patron and their notice-me-not magic to keep the various spy agencies in the quadrant from being interested enough to engage in a mission like that.
"Barclay is of no concern," I assured my Bajoran babe. "I'm sure that Riker just wants to be rid of him as soon as possible, and Riker knew that I was planning to immediately head back to the station."
I'd really not intended to be away for this long. Hopefully they were doing alright without me on DS9 to hold their hands.
"And because of the shortage of available ships at the moment they really can't spare a runabout to transfer him on a journey that long, so we'll play taxi service as a favour" I finished by saying.
We wouldn't leave for a while yet, as my crew still needed to do a final systems check before we went to warp, and since we had a Starfleet officer onboard I couldn't risk using the slipstream drive unless we were urgently needed back at the station.
Well, that was only part of the reason. The warp drive itself still needed testing at high speeds over a long distance, so this was actually a good chance to do that.
Sure, three weeks at high warp wasn't exactly my idea of fun, but I had plenty to do and study while on the return trip to Bajor and the ship still had some repairs left to complete, new supplies to unload, inventory, and store, etc. I could even watch that holo-sex tape that I'd just made of Annika and I. She looked so fucking hot when I'd gotten her to dress up as Seven of Nine. While mighty confused at my impromptu role playing with costumes, she'd gamely went with it.
This might also be the perfect opportunity to finalize my plans for my nanite armor system and have the technology surgically added to my physiology. The simulations had long been completed by Scarlett and my new VI Jarvis was ready to go.
Soon enough, like my idol Tony Stark, I'd have the constant protection and abilities granted by an ultra advanced armor system that was with me at all times. As the Collector attack on Earth had proven, this was an uncertain universe and I had to prepare for the worst.