Sulu's Story

"So, basically, you stole a replica of a historic Cerberus A3 Hoverer from Starfleet?" prompted Uhura, once the low table had been filled with bowls of snacks and (at the doctor's insistence) fruit, and there really was no way for Sulu to delay any longer. "How was there even such a thing to steal in the first place? I mean, I get budget cuts, but 250-year-old equipment?"

Sulu smiled wistfully. "Oh, I would have traded those crotchety training shuttles we had back then for a Cerberus any day, but no, unfortunately the Cerberus wasn't part of the normal training fleet…"

He settled back, fondly remembering the excitement of even those training shuttles. All that power at your fingertips. Nothing could beat that feeling.

"We had the First Contact annual celebrations coming up, and there was going to be a historical aerial parade of inter-atmo vessels - everything from a real, honest-to-god zeppelin, to blackhawks, to Y-class freighters, to stealthers. And the Cerberus was to be the jewel in the crown - every kid gets taught what those things did to the warlords' forces at the Anatolian Plateau battle back in the Eugenics Wars, and now the crowds were going to get to see one in reality… They just look so stunning, black and sleek, all that power thrumming through the air, reverberating in your very bones…"

"Anyway, someone above our pay grade - I'm guessing the public-outreach people at HQ - had decided it was worth fabricating a new one, and once it was deemed flightworthy and fitted with all the extra bells and whistles it needed to take part in the parade, they had stuck it out in a hanger up by Kentfield, north of San Fran, and set a bunch of us second-year Flight cadets on painting the last few touches on it. Now, that took about an hour, and then, since our time was clearly worth very little compared to everyone else's, we got stuck out there for the rest of the day… with no supervision. And… well…"

He spread his hands sheepishly, "There was this beautiful antique plane there, you see. And I'd clocked thousands of hours in the simulator for inter-atmo aircraft…"

McCoy rolled his eyes at him. "That's not the same as flying the damned contraptions, now is it? Dear God, I can see where this is going…"

"Well, in my defense, admittedly my very poor defense, but still, there was also a competition going on between the blue and the white flight wings at the Academy..."

Uhura groaned. There was always a competition going on between the blues and the whites. This year, it seemed to be about how early you could cut the warp envelope as you came out of warp, at least judging by some furious e-mails from flight control that had been circulating around Academy Faculty. There was a fine line between guts and stupidity, and it seemed as if the older generation always thought that the younger had missed it by a mile. Or half an astronomical unit in this case...

Kirk, intimately familiar with the idea of the competition from his own time at the Academy, looked pretty scandalized. "Do you mean you brought a civilian up with you in a Cerberus, Mister?"

Sulu blinked. "What? No?" He suddenly grinned. "Just what kind of competition did your year have, Admiral, sir?"

Kirk actually colored slightly. "Eh, nothing. Not a thing. Carry on." Bones, Uhura and Scotty laughed uproariously, but before they could ask further questions, Kirk waved at Sulu, "Now, now, this is Sulu's tale, don't be rude and interrupt him." Sulu laughed, but took the very clear hint, and continued speaking over the others.

"Alright, alright, so the agreed-upon rules for our batch was to find as many different things that could fly, for some definition of flying, and post a picture of us piloting it on a private com-grid. Now, the blues already had a balloon flying over the pyramids, a paraglider over the Grand Canyon, and and one of them had even talked her way onto an old chemical rocket launch on Mars… So we whites were at a decided disadvantage, and would need something bold and cool to start evening the score."

"Like, say, a real Cerberus A3!" Supplied Chekov, and Sulu nodded.

"But how did you get it off the ground?" Asked Scotty. "Even if you were out in the middle of nowhere, surely the automated flight control system would tag you straight away?"

The more congested the skies became, the more everyone relied on the complex global flight-control systems to oversee the many different flight lanes. Vessels could fly fairly close, but major hubs like San Francisco could still be a congested nightmare sometimes.

Sulu smiled, but it had a slightly uncomfortable edge. "Ah. Yes. Well, a Cerberus would certainly be something of an anomaly, and would probably be noticed by Starfleet, but only if the system thought it actually was a Cerberus, you see. It took me about half an hour with the transponder to convince the thing that it was a regular training shuttle instead."

"You can do that?" Asked McCoy, surprised. "I thought those things were locked down when vessels left the factory?"

"Sure. I mean, it takes some fiddling, and you have to get root access, which of course is not a walk in the park, but once you have that, there are about three hundred lines of code that you have to alter manually. The basic transponders are the same all over the fleet; you can do it with vessels of all size. Like if you know that you can fit in in a spacedock berth, but the automated systems won't authorize it, you can sorta change your official size and…"

He met McCoy's outraged gaze, and faltered…

"Vessels of any size, Sulu? Would that include Constitution Class ships, maybe?"

"Eh…" Sulu gave Kirk a desperate glance.

"Are you insane? Fiddling with that stuff in a spacedock? With hundreds of things moving at different vectors!"

Kirk patted McCoy on the shoulder, "Now, now, to paraphrase something someone said earlier tonight: sometimes, Bones, you don't need to know more than your very competent captain tells you, in order to not… get pulled off-focus by minor parking matters."

McCoy sputtered and grumbled but eventually settled down. "Well, if you had some other more high-ranking idiot in on your plan, I guess I can't blame it all on you. I'm never letting you fly me anywhere, again, though. And I mean both of you!"

Uhura said innocently, "But, Leonard, didn't you insist on Sulu being the pilot for that data-gathering trip you are taking next week up to the sun's corona?"

"Well… After that I'm not letting him drive me anywhere!"

"My loss, of course, Doctor," said Sulu. "And it was a stupid move - mainly because it was done for all the wrong reasons. Now, fortunately, my tampering only led the systems to think I was a legit modern shuttle, it didn't actually make the transponder lie about my size or speed, so I wasn't at risk to crash into anything.."

"I intended to take the thing up, a classic vertical takeoff, and then fly for a minute over to the Cataract Falls, take a picture, and then scurry back, and spend the rest of the evening resetting the transponder. The others helped by scanning the skies for any incoming brass that would be able to pick the thing out on sight, but luckily we were all alone out there, and far enough out from any major sky lanes." No one questioned why Sulu had been the one chosen to fly the old airplane by the other cadets.

"I got in, did the pre-flight check three times, and then a thirty-meter test takeoff and landing, just to make sure I could actually control the thing. There was a modern interface, and the graviton add-on meant that I didn't actually need to fire up rocket fuel all over the ground. Even though this meant that it wouldn't be 100% of the original, historical experience, it also meant that I didn't have to incinerate the local plant life, and my pals, so I was quite okay with that. Still, once up in the air, it was all traditional air-pressure imbalance that kept me going, no graviton fields at all! For the first couple of minutes, the thing was shaking so much that I thought my teeth were going to fall out. Then it turned out to be relatively easy to fly it - no, scratch that, it was fantastic to fly it. It's like the difference between riding an anti-grav sleigh and a real horse. I could feel the plane being alive under me. I shouldn't have done it, and I deserved everything that happened afterwards, but I will never forget that feeling…"

"I can only attribute the rotten timing of what happened next to the bad karma that I was carrying around just then. I'd just gotten over to Cataract Falls when my com board lit up, and I was being hailed. I thought the game was up, but then I realized that it wasn't our lieutenant, or some other angry officer; it was the continental National Park's office! They said that they saw I was flying a Starfleet shuttle outside the space lane, and said that they wanted to ask me a favor, if I had the time..."

"I should have said no. I should have made up an excuse, or just pretended I couldn't hear them, or maybe that I couldn't speak Standard, or really anything, but I instead found myself squeaking out a 'yes ma'am, anything you need ma'am', and just like that, me and my 'shuttle' had been pressed into service."

"The National Park person was apologetic about bothering me, but said that they wanted an eye in the sky on a forest fire over in the Muir Woods. They had the fire under control, but didn't want to extinguish it - forest fires are good for woodlands; it's a natural part of their life cycle. But something had pinged the sensors about movement that got a little too close to the safety perimeter, and protocol demanded a physical check. Rather than send out someone from their own office for what was probably nothing, why not ask the friendly Starfleet shuttle that seemed to be in just the right area to angle over and have a quick peek…"

"So I did. It wasn't a major fire, but it was very noticeable as I got closer, dark smoke billowing up in the sky. Part of the Redwood forest was burning. Trees that had stood there since the days of the Miwok and the Pomo tribes were dying, becoming the soil that would nurture the next generation... My scanners weren't that great, but then again I'd been told exactly where to look, and I skirted the forest fire coming around to the west. I could confirm that nothing looked out of place, and that might have been it, except that I suddenly saw a couple of hikers, about two kilometers from the safety perimeters, and they seemed to be heading inwards. I told the National Park lady, and she said that they were out of the danger zone, there had been alerts, and they could most likely see the smoke, so she wasn't worried...But then she had to go and add 'but, of course, it's up to you if you want to warn them, just to be safe.'"

"Yeah… 'it's up to you if you want to warn them'... Gods, suddenly I realized exactly what kind of trouble I could get in. And I don't mean taking a plane up without permission, I mean that I really really really didn't want to go down there with the Cerberus. My mind was telling me that it wasn't necessary, that I should just take the plane back. But... how much of that certainty was influenced by wanting to cover up what we'd done? I didn't know. The hikers weren't even in the outer danger zone. But… Maybe they hadn't heard the alerts. Maybe they were aliens that didn't even have visual optics. Maybe they were drunk. And now that I had thought about going down and debated the matter with myself, I knew that if something were to happen to them on the ground, and my lieutenant asked if there was a chance that I was emotionally compromised over the matter, I wouldn't be able to give them a straight 'of course not'."

"So, in the end, I took the plane down in a clearing just ahead of the people. It turned out to be two hiking Andorians, and of course they knew about the alerts, and had updating real time maps of where the danger zone was. And of course they were suddenly far more interested in this ancient-looking airplane than the shrubbery, and of course they wanted to take pictures of it. A lot of pictures. I think I made up some sort of my-religion-believes-that-pictures-can-steal-your-soul thing, but, as it turned out, that didn't really matter in the end. I left my two new, excited pals, and took off again, hiding in the clouds all the way back to Kenton. The National Park's person hadn't caught on, and thanked me for taking a few minutes to lend a hand and cheerily signed off…"

"No one saw me. The landing wasn't a problem, but when I got out, I saw that our new paint job had gotten a very realistic, historical-looking patina from the wood smoke - some sort of reaction with the nano-colors. And it became clear that they hadn't bother to fabricate original engine filters, so the exhaust chambers were all dirty brown… Still, we could probably have managed to clean it up and restore everything if we'd worked our asses off, but just then Ambjornsson, one of the other cadets, came out all white-faced, waving a portable holo viewer. And there, on the evening news, were pictures of our Cerberus and two grinning Andorians… And then the reporter called up Rear Admiral Sint and asked him about the curiosity of Starfleet flying ancient airplanes in modern service, and he made up something on the spot about the importance of integrating our knowledge of history in the modern day 'Fleet, and acknowledging our roots…"

"Our lieutenant beamed in about two minutes after that. She wasn't… pleased. She wasn't the type who shouted, she just looked at us, as we were standing at attention, scrutinizing us one by one for several minutes. I really thought Ambjornsson was going to cry. I still had my flight helmet on, and I wasn't even going to try to hide it. Eventually she dismissed everyone else with a gesture, and they nearly fell over themselves trying to get to the plane to clean it up. I didn't really have a good excuse, and all I could do was follow along as she brought me back to Rear Admiral Sint, and, well, he had no problem shouting…"

"Suffice it to say that I didn't get to see the parade. As you know, Starfleet doesn't really like suspensions, believing that less work isn't going to straighten anything out. I think Sint would have wanted to make an exception, just for me, but our lieutenant made a calm case that I was salvageable, and that, in the end, taking the plane up at all had been the infraction, the rest of the things just snowballed. Since they wanted me as a pilot, they couldn't ground me, but they threw on extra duty shifts - idle hands and all that. I think the idea was to keep me too exhausted to have time for any more shenanigans until I was graduated. They sent me over to the xenobotany specialists, where I spent most of my time spreading chemical manure over plants…"

"Bah." said Chekov. "Even from that you came up smelling of roses. You know, he'd never touched a flower in his life before that? And when he got out, he'd won an orchid competition! Disgusting, is what it is!" But he was grinning proudly at the Japanese man beside him.

"Good choices, lad." Said Scotty, raising his glass at Sulu. "Well… good choices when it really mattered, at least." He turned a warning finger to the others. "I hope you all realize that the real moral of this story is that someone went to all the trouble of recreating something so beautiful as the Cerberus, and then not installing proper filters! Suspension? Hah! Those engineers, and I'm using that term very loosely now, they should be keel-hauled!"

"Space vessels have no keels, Mr. Scott," interjected Spock.

"Oh, I will make one. Just for them."

"Look at the time - we only have about an hour before your shuttle leaves, Pavel," Uhura observed.

"Oh no, we're not wrapping this up just yet," McCoy interjected forcefully, "It's your turn, Spock!" He gave the Vulcan a challenging grin, which only earned him a raised eyebrow.

Kirk smiled, but quickly interjected, "you don't have to, Spock."

"I am not sure that is true, Jim," Spock said, surveying the others. "I believe not participating would be a clear break in the social rules that have emerged tonight."

"Yes, very bad form. Wouldn't do. Now spill," ordered McCoy and settled back in the sofa. "You seem to have a talent for getting the screw-ups in your record censored by higher powers, or somehow not entered at all," he gave Jim a look, "But I'm sure there's something unclassified that that eidetic memory of yours can drag up. And we've already filled our quota of stories about breaking regs in order to do something self-sacrificing and noble" he jabbed his thumb in Chekov's direction, "So you're not allowed to tell us something like that."

Spock ignored him, turning to the admiral. "If I understand the criteria for this storytelling session correctly, the tales should be based in a personal mistake which lead to problems of some magnitude, but which nonetheless, possibly due to starfleet training and ethics, ended in a far more benign manner than might have been expected."

McCoy groaned at what he thought was too dry an explanation, but Jim smiled and nodded. Spock had analyzed the unspoken agreement that had arisen in the group, and by putting words on it, had focused everyone's thoughts. Jim had found many of the tales funny, and he was not above teasing the others about their mistakes, especially when they'd volunteered the stories themselves. But what would stay with him was the manner in which his friends had managed, through ingenuity and perseverance, to get up off the mat.

"Then, I believe I have such a story to contribute. As for why events unfolded as they did, I can, regretfully, only say that each and every step seemed quite logical at the time..."

Author's note: One more chapter to go - a tale of Spock's early year's with Pike on the Enterprise. What did you think of Sulu's story?

I'm, as usual, indebted to DelJewell and WeirdLittleStories for grammar, spelling and lots of story help!