Abukoff House Books

(I used probability matrices for the basic setup and added my own flourishes. My Starfleet crew I’d created long ago, and I created the NPCs to fit the story. Dice rolls are matrices are just generally used to advance or twist the plot. One more note. While this sticks to the three acts, I’m not being to strict about how many scenes goin each act. I’m more about having a good story than fitting perfectly within the suggested format)

Act One cast:

USS Discovery. Fuller Class ship. Late/Post Dominion War era Crossfield Class variant but with only conventional impulse and warp drive)

Captain Richard Gabriel Gloucester: Human, 65 years old, British, aristocratic. (picture Ian McKellen as Richard III)

First Officer Commander Mark Ramius. Human, mid 40s. Tall and muscular. Clean-shaven. Close-cropped blonde, tall, Lithuanian. (Picture a tall, blonde Riker, but more serious)

Science Officer Commander Sarah Price. Human, 36 years old. British, young. (Picture Rosamund Pike with shorter hair)

Conn Officer Lt Commander Joal Etahn. Male, 30 years old Unjoined Trill. (Picture John Boyega)

Tactical/Security Officer Lieutenant Kat Nasta. Bipedal amphibian ‘Nautolan’ from mostly-water world Glee Anselm. Age unknown (Dreadlocked Jedi from Star Wars Attack of the Clones, but with neither lightsaber nor force powers)

Federation Ambassador at Large Emil Tagore. Human, 52 years old. Descendant of Emanuel Tagore from pro-fic Star Trek novel “The Final Reflection”. (Picture James Callis from Battlestar Galactica and Picard Season 2)

Session Zero:

From behind the brushed-steel standing desk in his ready room, Captain Gloucester looked up from the terminal to finally look Doctor Torrance in the eyes. “You walked away from the captain’s chair of the Arizona. Some people say you quit.”

“I stepped down-“

“Why?” The question shot across the space between them like a bullet.

“Because I got tired of sending young people to die, and not being able to do anything about it.”

“Part of the job.”

“The fire in me went out. So I stepped back.”

“You took a year off.”

“To decide if I had anything left to give.”

“So what makes you qualified to be my CMO?”

“Graduated in the top one percent.”

“And how do I know you won’t quit on me? You’re sixty years old.”

“Like I said, I’m tired of seeing young people die. Now I’m in a position to do something about it.”

“Well, you’ve put my EMH out of a job. Let’s hope it works out.”

Act One

“Yet once methought It lifted up its head and did address itself to motion, like as it would as if speak. But even then the morning cock crew just loud, and at the sound it shrunk in haste away and vanished from our sight.”

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2

Captain Richard Gabriel Gloucester:

Stardate 57576.3 The Discovery has been ordered to investigate a transmission from the third planet in the Gamma Entebbe system. The transmission was sent by a device last seen on Earth starships during the early to mid 2160s. It is the nature of the transmission that is of particular concern. An appeal for a representative of our starfaring service (their terminology, rendered in english) to consult on a matter of spirituality. We are conveying Ambassador-at-large Emil Tagore to the planet, known to the locals as Poux, to assess the problem.

Captain’s Personal log:

The 2160s were the days following the defeat of invading Romulan forces, the downgrading of Earth’s military forces to one of peace and outreach. And considering that Earth bore the brunt of the Romulan’s attacks and provided the bulk of our defense, the expression Pax Sol was on many lips, both human and not. These were the days before the Prime Directive and when military starship crews were sent to test the boundaries of what we considered safe space, as well as reaching out to potential allies. Records show that few starships were sent to the Gamma Entebbe system that lies in what some call the triangle zone. The intersection of what is now Federation, Klingon, and Romulan space. One confirmed mission to the region was the USS Franklin, under the command of former United Earth MACO officer Major Balthazar Edison. What did Edison and the Franklin leave behind? Were the Pouxians already aware of faster than light travel at the time? Proximity to such a volatile region might suggest that, but instinct tells me there’s danger afoot. And considering the still volatile region, the Discovery will run at yellow alert for the duration of the mission.

Emil Tagore was unprepared for the small quarters that the Fuller Class USS Discovery afforded him. A ship the size of a Galaxy Class would normally have comfortably large quarters, and even more so for VIPs, like a Federation Ambassador at Large. Especially one who specialized in first and second contact encounters. What he had been given however was not unlike the sort of accommodations one might find in the French countryside. Small, cheap, and basic, perfectly suited for travelers staying overnight. Indeed, he’d seen images of great great great old grandfather Emanuel Tagore stuffed into quarters on an old Constitution Class that looked spacious compared to what he had. So he dropped his backpack and stacked his three cases of study material in a corner and asked the replicator for a double espresso. Seconds later he was sipping at it and dropping to the floor with his legs crossed. “Computer, continue recording correspondence to Minister Qi’Tu onboard USS Xanthine.” His prompt was followed by the usual chirp of the computer. He took a second drink of the espresso and continued.

“Replicas won’t do. Holocubes won’t do. Because the computer, much like our transporters, can only read the obvious. They only provide the text. It’d be like giving me one side of the head piece of the staff of Ra. I would, so to speak, be digging in the wrong place.” He paused to reflect on just how bad the replicated espresso was. “There are five legitimate scrolls detailing the journey of warriors who slew your Gods. All of them quantum dated to within decades of when it was supposed to have been done. I just need one. It’ll be contained within a vacuumed case and only opened inside of a zero pressure sterile, oxygen free environment. I need to see them and hold them. The state of decay of the ink used. The pressure of the instruments upon the parchment. The sweat and oil from the fingers of the scribes. Those details the computer will never get right. Computer pause recording.” He stood back up and put the remains of the espresso back on the replicator pad. “Computer, replace this concoction with a French press coffee maker and eight ounces of boiling water in a separate container.” As it complied, he spoke again. “Continue recording correspondence.” He had a small supply of vacuum packed fine ground coffee in his luggage that he’d have to dig into as soon as he was finished with this. “Qi’Tu, as a Chaplain, you must be interested in this, and you know, no Klingon will dig into this like I will. Help me make it happen. I’m on an assignment that shouldn’t take long, cleaning up a two hundred year old mess among some primitives. After that I’m on leave for a month. I want to spend it digging around on Qo’noS, drinking some of your awful tea, and annoying the clerics on Boreth. But if I can’t, I’ll find you. And you don’t want that. All my best, Emil.” He paused. “Computer, transmit correspondence and notify me when it’s been read.”

Two days later…

Commander Sarah Price’s crisp British voice pierced the relative silence of the bridge. “Captain, we’re getting some strange readings from up ahead.”

“Explain,” Gloucester shot back.

“Something like the leading edge of a wave heading this way.”

“Dangerous?”

“No, it’s not that strong. I don’t think there’s an explosion behind it. Something familiar about it-.” Her words trailed off and Gloucester knew well enough to let her work it out. Finally it hit her. After verifying her idea, she spoke again. “The Hekaras Corridor.” She turned to look at him, only to see that he was standing right behind her. “Captain, the region ahead is not dissimilar to the kind subspace damage first encountered in the Hekaras Sector.” At Gloucester’s raised eyebrow, she continued. “Not severe enough to pose a threat, and as you know the Discovery is equipped with advanced systems that won’t add to the damage. But it’s made space and subspace here like a body of water. Movement within the area creates waves and ripples and eddies. And there’s some large displacement up ahead, moving in our direction.”

“Warp signature?” He asked. “Transponder?”

“Negative,” Kat Nasta answered from tactical. “Whatever it is is moving too fast and on too fixed a course to be a natural object. But it’s either at full impulse or masking its warp trail.” He turned Gloucester. “Whatever it is, it’s hiding. And friendlies don’t usually hide.”

“Shields up, red alert,” Gloucester snapped. “Mr Nasta, fire two concussive probes ahead. Minimal damage potential. Just rattle them.”

Moments later, two probes could be seen coming out from underneath the Discovery’s saucer section and speeding ahead of them. A few minutes after that, a Vor’cha Class attack cruiser seemed to tumble out of nothingness.

Commander Mark Ramius moved to stand beside Gloucester as the captain nodded to Lt Commander Joal at conn to open a comm channel. Then Gloucester approached the large viewscreen. “Klingon vessel. You are operating cloaked in Federation space, and with no active transponder. Explain yourself.”

After a tense and silent instant, the screen displayed, against a red background, a version of the Klingon Trefoil not seen for nearly a hundred years. It was the version adopted by the old, pre-Khitomer Elite Command Academy. Chang. The short-lived coup d’état by Melkor that had eventually led to the ascension and later assassination of Gorkon. The image of the infamous stylized trefoil then flickered to reveal a middle-aged but obviously fit and lean Klingon captain. “This is Kellen, master of the Suvwl’ QeH. You have no authority here, human. And you’ll pay for this unprovoked attack.”

The Vor’cha found its bearing quickly, coming around in a wide arc that ended with the battlecruiser coming up from ‘underneath’ the Discovery. “Evasive,” Gloucester ordered. “Give us some room.”

“Aye, sir”, Joal answered as he glanced at Nasta. There was a bit of silent communication between the two of them. Two men who’d worked situations like this before and could help each other accomplish their tasks. Soon the Discovery had a few ship’s length of distance from the Vor’cha with weapons charged and optimum weapons arcs achieved.

“Mister Nasta, target its weapons. I don’t want to have to-.” He stopped as the bridge shuddered and tilted hard to port.

“He’s overloading his disruptors,” Nasta said. “Shields at eighty percent.”

“Priority to forward shields. Alpha strike.”

At Gloucester’s command, Nasta fired every weapon at a single point on the Vor’cha’s forward shield. After a brief flare, the shields flickered briefly, allowing a prolonged phaser burst to strike the hull, while a second volley of photon torpedoes swung ‘underneath’ the Klingon ship to impact the long boom connecting the forward hull to the main body of the ship. Sparks flew all along the boom and the ship drifted for an instant.

“Klingon vessel,” Gloucester said, “back off while you can. There’s no need to-.” But it was already recovering itself and coming around. “Keep at it, Mister Nasta. We need to stop this.”

“Aye, sir.” Working together, Nasta and Joal brought the Discovery’s shallow saucer over the Vor’cha’s port nacelle and targeted the engineering hull. Photon torpedoes crashed through failing shields, and the Vor’cha was again knocked adrift.

“Mr Joal, distance. A hundred thousand kilometers. And open a channel. After a brief pause, he addressed the enemy ship. “Klingon vessel, this is your last warning. Next time we’re going to do some real some real damage.” Gloucester glanced at Ramius, and they both looked at Nasta. The young Nautolan nodded in reply.

—

(After three consecutive successful rolls for the Discovery, I rolled a 50/50 chance for the Klingon to realize he was outgunned and be talked down. Answer was ‘no’. Fourth successful hit brought down its shields. Another 50/50 roll for the Klingon to stop brought a ‘no’. On the fifth successful the Vor’cha lost structural integrity. During the battle, the Discovery was hit twice, resulting in several computer processors being offline for three hour repair time. And I rolled one more 50/50 to see if the Vor’cha got off a distress signal before it was destroyed. Which it did, meaning Discovery would be attacked again at some point).

—

There was no reply from Kellen, and the Suvwl’ QeH continued to drift for a moment. Gloucester looked to Price. “Life signs? Energy output?”

“Plenty of life signs. Energy output is down about fifty percent. Looks like they’re diverting it. Rechanneling it.” She was silent as she studied sensor readings. “Into propulsion. Preparing for warp.”

“What course?”

“Hard to say for sure,” she said. “There’s a lot of damage so the normal automatic course adjustment routines aren’t running. But-. They’re using RCS thrusters to set an initial course. At us. Directly at us. Power transfer is reaching critical. It’ll hit warp speed in seconds.”

“He’s not going to give up, Captain,” Ramius said. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

The Vor’cha seemed to right itself, and it almost seemed as if it was gathering itself for one final attack. Gloucester made the decision quickly. “Hard to port, Mister Joal. Nasta, target all weapons on it and fire.”

Discovery lunged to port as the Vor’cha executed its collision course, firing weapons that caught the Klingon ship’s nacelles and engineering hull. But not before it activated its warp drive. The resulting explosion of antimatter and drive plasma mixed with duranium created a short-lived artificial nebula that crossed through space and subspace to spread out to just over a parsec in length.

Gloucester stared at the screen for a moment without saying a word. “He left us no choice, officers. Remember that. Stand down from red alert.” He tapped his comm badge “Ambassador Tagore, to my ready room. Mr Ramius, you have the con. Hold this position while we assess our condition and our next move.”

Five minutes later, Tagore appeared from the bridge turbo lift and moved towards the command deck. Ramius turned to him and nodded to the entry to the captain’s ready room. “In there, ambassador.”

Tagore stepped into the captain’s ready room expecting to see a desk with a couple of chairs and the comfortable furnishings one was accustomed to seeing on capital ships. Instead he found an almost spartan office dominated by a tall, brushed steel standing desk. Gloucester stood behind it, almost glowering.

Gloucester looked up as the tall, thin Tagore stopped in his tracks upon entering the room. “Ambassador,” he nodded, then recounted the encounter with the Vor’cha. “Tell me about this region of space, and why a Klingon attack cruiser came out of it and launched an unprovoked suicide attack at us.”

Tagore tried to conceal his unease at the encounter that was so coldly described, as well as the almost confrontational manners that the patrician captain displayed. As usual, he was able to fall back on the comfort that he found in the understanding of people and politicians in general that served him so well as an ambassador-at-large. “Most galactic powers refer to it as the Triangle region, although there are two. But perhaps owing to the fact that this one is close to the Shackleton Expanse but otherwise the slightly more isolated of the two, this one tends more towards the lawless. Nobody wants to exert too much power there for fear of provoking the other, so rogue elements have filled in the vacuum. And they refer to the region and themselves as the Iron Triangle. This Vor’cha could have been one of theirs. Though why they’d throw themselves at us like that is quite frankly inexplicable.”

“It was a suicide attack,” Gloucester snapped. “Nobody does that without a reason.”

“True. But it’s easier for Klingons to rationalize suicide attacks than it is for us.”

“So we’re back where we started. Nowhere.” His eyes went pure steel. “And our destination lies right in the middle of this triangle.”

“Captain, the Iron Triangle lives by its own rules. Nobody else is willing to step in with authority, so they fill the vacuum. With what, only they know. That’s a constant throughout history. Empires and terrorists have done it for centuries. But I can tell you this. A Vor’cha is not a cheap thing to throw away. It wasn’t done on a whim. Whatever they stood to gain from us was probably worth more to them than that ship.”

“Then there are sure to be more where that one came from.”

“There’s only one positive that I can see,” Tagore said. He noted the distaste in Gloucester’s eyes. Fair enough, he supposed. A ship full of people had just suicided itself trying to destroy them. “Sorry, but what I mean is that a Vor’cha would be an expensive acquisition and probably a very difficult one. The odds of them having more of the same, or more advanced, are pretty long. And since they’re easy to detect in this disturbed space, you should have the advantage in any further encounters.”

“Small consolation,” Gloucester muttered. Then he favored Tagore with a warm glance and half smile. “But I’ll take it. Thank you ambassador.” There was a brief pause, as if Tagore was waiting for more, so Gloucester tapped a button on his desk that opened the door to the bridge. “I won’t keep you any longer.”

The next encounter came the following morning at about 4 am, ship’s time.

“Something at the outer edge of sensor range,” Kat Nasta announced from the tactical station behind Gloucester.

“Flickering on and off,” Sarah Price added from the science station on the left of the circular bridge. Her crisp London accent betrayed no tension. “Like a ghost.”

“No transponder,” Nasta said. “No warp trail. Moving though. No, it’s gone again.”

“Full stop. Tactical, firm up forward shields. Miss Price, concentrate scans ahead. Mr Joal, hailing frequencies. Wide band so whoever it is can hear us.” Gloucester rattled off the orders without tension or hesitation, as if they were completely routine. Finally he tapped a comm panel on the arm of his chair. “Mr Ramius join us on the bridge please.”

“Aye sir.”

As Ramius was answering, a strange shimmering effect appeared at nearly point blank range to the Discovery. It was as if a large ship was decloaking against the uneven backdrop of a planetary ring system. Thousands of glimmering points of light appeared out of nowhere, being scattered in all directions by the nose of a big ship that gradually becoming visible as it passed an invisible line. Twin flashes of green disruptor energy erupted from the broken forward edges of two roughly cylindrical warp nacelles as soon as they reached the decloaking line.

The destructive energy bled through the Discovery’s still adjusting forward shields, scattering across the sensor suite before crashing into the ship’s tactical array, rendering it defenseless. A second volley hit before the Discovery could maneuver away, buckling several sections of hull that were almost instantly sealed by force fields. The long, sleek ship listed to port and began a slow tumble.

On the bridge, Gloucester ignored a stream of blood that ran from his forehead down the side of his face. “Identify!”

“That’s a Klingon Sarcophagus ship!”, Nasta said breathlessly. “A Hur’q design not seen for more than a hundred years, and very rarely even then. I can’t believe the Empire is fielding one.”

—

(Klingon Sarcophagus ship, updated to the current era. As it was cloaked, it was automatically given the first success. The second roll was also a success for the Sarcophagus ship. This time I rolled for damage results and they were catastrophic, leaving the Discovery adrift- I considered methods of changing this, using threat or momentum, but decided to let the dice throw in a plot twist leaving the Discovery disabled and forcing another way to advance the story)

—

Gloucester absorbed the information without replying. “Contact that ship!”

A moment later, the face of a Klingon woman appeared on the viewscreen. Gloucester didn’t wait for her to speak. “Explain your actions!”

She spoke slowly through bared, uneven teeth. “Captain Richard Gabriel Gloucester.” The words were in rough, heavily accented Federation Standard, and sounded as if even speaking them was a distasteful effort on her part. He’d started to reply when she continued, talking over him. “You will surrender yourself and your ambassador for final transport to Poux.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“If you come peacefully, your ship-“ she sneered at the word, “will be allowed to retreat.”

On the bridge, Gloucester was taking this in as Ramius pushed the turbo lift doors apart and made his way to the command deck. He calmly reported to Gloucester while visually taking in the chaotic bridge scene. “Forcefields are keeping our hull intact. Engineering reports that we’re stable but not going anywhere without help. We’ll probably need a mobile repair base. There is one a day or two away. Doctor Torrance reports no fatalities and only a handful of serious injuries.”

“Transporters?”

“The damage to the sensors also took out our transporters.”

“Understood.” Gloucester’s eyes seemed to soften, which worried Ramius. “Ambassador Tagore and I will continue the mission on the Sarcophagus Ship. I’ll try to find out what this is all about and what it has to do with our mission. Contact that mobile base and get the ship back in fighting shape.” At the sudden stubborn shadow that fell over Ramius’s features, Gloucester added, “if they wanted us dead, we’d already be dead. Do your duty commander, and I’ll do mine.”

End of Act One