Personal log, stardate 85075.3.
I spent the next two weeks in the holodeck, enjoying another holonovel. Now that I know how to experience them properly, they have become a beloved hobby of mine. Great captains have hobbies, right? Gives them a place to relax outside the mission. This is mine.
One day when I did my daily check-in with Starfleet, we were assigned a mission. The civilian science station on Kassae IV has stopped responding to subspace network ping requests. Kassae IV is listed as having an atmosphere that contains metreon isotopes, necessitating an orbiting space outpost to maintain proper contact. It wasn't a Starfleet installation.
From previous experience, the transceiver on Kassae Station was most likely broken again. This loss of communication has happened several times before, and other captains say that every time they went to check on them, the science station required repair. These scientists are not starship people, so their orbiting space station is not very well-maintained. While en route to Kassae, I familiarized myself with the scientific literature for the planet. This mission was a geological dig that aimed to discover the reason for the metreons in the atmosphere, given that this planet had never evolved sentient life to create them artificially.
But Kassae IV was in open space, outside the formal borders of the Federation. This was the side of Beta Quadrant that points towards the Klingon Empire. Uninhabited planets are considered neutral territory here. Therefore there was the chance that something nastier could be waiting.
I warped in at a temporary red alert, just in case. This turned out to be a useful piece of foresight, as Kassae Station was heavily damaged (unsurprising) and it had a Gorn troop transport holding position right nearby (very surprising). The vessel attacked us immediately; we shot to kill. Then we hailed the space station.
The harried researcher who responded said that the Gorns did not touch their space station, instead heading straight for the planet. However, that may have been because of how heavily damaged their station is. Glitches in the computer core had become almost unbearable. Much of the living area has cracks in the outer hull from repeated micrometeoroid impacts, but the emergency forcefields are not working properly. There were fires in the utility section because the station was carrying flammable fuel for their planet-based reactor, and it ignited in a mishap. The fire suppression systems were offline due to another computer glitch. They have been trying to fix their comm system for three days now.
We needed an engineering crew, but remembering what happened the last time we beamed aboard a starship in distress, I called for two security officers as well. Zarva said that none of his engineers had experience with this kind of computer. As a result, I decided to head the mission myself. I am very good with fixing computers. While at the Academy, I moonlighted being part of the Academy's computer support team. I hadn't touched a broken computer since I graduated. It will be some good experience, and I thoroughly enjoy it, too.
I beamed aboard the station, directly into the computer room. Having received permission to use the computer's administrative override codes, I started poking around. The comm system was the first thing I fixed. The scientists had repeatedly made small changes to the comm system control program, but nothing they changed would induce the comm to restart. The reason was because the directory containing the transmission logs had ran out of space, and the comm program would not initialize without being able to write to that area. A separate program was supposed to automatically clear these logs, but a corrupted instruction had caused the automatic maintenance processes to stop working on schedule. Were they working, the logs would have be pruned to conserve storage space. The problem with the automated maintenance was trivial to fix. Once restarted, the transmission logs were cleared.
Another part of the maintenance program was supposed to check certain critical processes and keep them running at all times, including the fire suppression system. Apparently the fire suppression system had crashed, but because the automated maintenance was not run as scheduled, it was never automatically restarted. Upon manual restart, the emergency forcefields were deployed in the cargo bays to put out the fires, as would be expected. The problem with the emergency pressure forcefields was that someone modified its configuration, disabling the "smart mode" that when enabled makes that subsystem able to deploy forcefields at the point of the breach; the "dumb mode" can seal off entire rooms only. Turn that back on, and I could then run a repressurization routine in the affected areas. Now everyone had their rooms back. Done!
When I explained how much maintenance their computer had needed to fix all of their problems, the leader of the station staff was extremely embarrassed. Apparently he had been using the override codes to, as he put it, "poke around" in the computer. He made the change to the forcefield program because he saw that it reduced that program's memory usage, which was desired so that the media-entertainment subsystem could run faster. He had also attempted to add a recurring task that would organize certain parts of the media-entertainment system database, but had entered an invalid command while trying to do so. (The task was completely unnecessary, by the way. That part of the filesystem should have been cleaned up through proper reorganization. I told them this too.) After giving them a stern talking-to about keeping the computer systems as they were designed to operate in the first place, I beamed back to my ship.
Now it was time to deal with the planet below. Scanners indicated that the Gorn had landed another troop transport on one of the planet's continents. Interestingly, they landed nowhere near the Starfleet outpost. Hailing the Starfleet outpost, I learned that several scientists were abducted by Gorn soldiers, who beamed out to an unknown location. I posited that they probably beamed back to the Gorn outpost. I then hailed the Gorn.
The Gorn captain, S'snek, was extremely angry. I had to work to calm him down significantly before he would say anything coherent. Eventually, I learned that S'snek's Gorn lineage had once used Kassae IV as a burial planet. S'snek was here on a pilgrimage to the tombs of his ancestors (a key part of Gorn religion, as I knew). However, he could not locate the burial site with his scanners due to the metreon radiation. He noticed there was a Federation outpost, and he abducted the scientists there to see if any of them could help him. I told him that if he had simply asked, then the crew there would probably have been happy to help him. Despite having an interstellar polity, individual Gorn are surprisingly dumb. He was raised in a warrior clan, and as such his warrior's instincts kicked in long before his thinking brain could respond. The scientists were shocked but unharmed, and once I told them all that the Gorn wanted was their help reconfiguring their scanners, the incident was resolved peacefully. Like I said, they were happy to help. If the Gorn had only asked first, then none of this confrontation would be needed.
S'snek then asked about the other troop transport he left to guard the space station. I was incredibly heartbroken, because I didn't realize at the time that the Gorn were here on a peaceful mission; I just returned fire when they attacked us and we destroyed their warship. I froze in front of the viewer, but S'snek realized what I was trying to say a moment later. He was not upset when he learned that his other ship had been destroyed. Gorn captains were supposed to know that you do not fire on Starfleet ships, he said. It will end very badly for you. The other Gorn captain forgot this, and therefore my destroying them was a completely respectable response to being attacked. As I said, Gorn are dumb.
With that, we exchanged pleasantries. The leader of the Starfleet outpost said that if the Gorn are agreeable, they will go to the Gorn tombs with them and respectfully join them in their ancestor-worship. (And write a very interesting paper after they return to their camp, but we won't mention that part.) S'snek was intrigued. Since all was well, I ordered the ShiNarva come about and return to Federation space.
Computer, end recording.