Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

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Her senior officers briefed–some, it seems, in spite of themselves–Engineering at the tentative ready, they can head out. Chester’s heart beats hard in her chest, the fizzle of nerves she’s been pressing to the back of her mind all week rising back up. Her first command. The Interpreter is her ship, and now they’re actually leaving the station, heading into the mostly-unknown, to do all the things a Starfleet ship is supposed to. Explore, make new friends. Offer help. 

It feels real.

She’s been in command plenty during the war, taking the conn of the Bedivere in Captain Steenburg’s absence. Taking command as the Bedivere spiraled to its doom. 

But the Interpreter is hers. Captain Diane Chester, of the USS Interpreter , a brand-new captain with a brand-new ship and a crew that doesn’t trust her or each other, a ship that’s still working out the bugs, finding the steps between what she was meant to be and what she’s now supposed to be. A half-broken ship, and a crew that’s still licking their wounds. And here she is, captain, green as grass and with her own barely-healed scars, and she needs to use this voyage to make something out of all of them. Or start the process of becoming something better.

It seems abruptly insurmountable. 

She’s faced worse, she reminds herself, and then the bridge doors slide open and none of it seems important anymore. All the problems–the tubas, her crew’s suspicions, the tangled mess of malfunctions, Tanek–snap into perspective. The Interpreter is on her maiden voyage. She and her crew will all make sure this works, because there are people out there who need them to make it work. 

Standing on the bridge, looking at it, at all her bridge crew looking back at her, it’s like stepping aboard for the first time. This is her ship. The moment she’s been dreaming about since she was old enough to stand on the roof deck and try to identify the shuttles coming into Starfleet Academy over the Bay. 

She is a Captain, and this is her ship. She waits another moment, looking over the bridge. It’s a throwback to the old Galaxy-Class school of design, warm and carpeted, wood accents and paneling. The palette is shifted a few shades deeper; blue and chocolate instead of pink and gray. It’s a big bridge, still the bridge of a warship, with a plethora of redundant stations. It, too, still smells new. No plasma fires, scorched metal or burnt hair, the smells even the best of their advanced technology couldn’t entirely erase.

She saw the early mockups of what this bridge was supposed to look like. What it was supposed to be, the drafts marked Kongming Class , rather than Armistice . That had been sleek, all shining floors and metals, no soft wall paneling or carpet–crisp and clean and easily cleaned. It’s changed a lot, because the war ended.

She can only hope the rest of them do, too.

She draws a deep breath and makes her way down to the Captain’s chair. She’s sat in plenty before; babysitting, Captain Steenburg used to say. They have never been hers . 

This is hers. Trepidation flutters in her chest. This feels too big. Too important. No one hands a brand new captain a state of the art warship.

She puts it aside. She decided she was done being afraid after the Bedivere . 

“Commander J’etris,” she says. 

“Yes sir?”

“Is crew rotation complete?”

“Yes sir. All departments report ready.”

“Lieutenant Iverat, has the station cleared us for departure?”
“Yes sir,” says Lieutenant Iverat. 

“Then open a shipwide channel.” She does not want to admit to anyone how many times she’s practiced this, in the mirror, pacing her quarters, running through it as she went to meet Sotek and Jeln. She takes a deep breath, fixing her eyes on the starfield on the viewscreen. “Good afternoon everyone. This is Captain Chester. We will be departing Deep Space Nine for the Gamma Quadrant, where there is a world that has asked for our assistance. It will be one of the first peaceful missions into the Gamma Quadrant by a Federation starship, and I believe there could be no more appropriate ship, no better crew, than this one.

“Many cultures attach special significance to the maiden voyage of a ship. The journey we begin today is no exception. Indeed, the path we’re starting down isn’t just that of a new ship’s career–it is, finally, that of peace. 

“The Interpreter was built to be a warship. This is clear in every line of her construction, from flight deck to nacelles. She, like all of us aboard her, was profoundly shaped by the Dominion War. But we have made the peace we fought for so desperately; and with that peace, we can return to what we aspire to be. 

“The Interpreter has been reshaped into an instrument of that peace, for aid and exploration. To offer an open hand to our former foes, to show them and ourselves that the dark times we have passed through have no right to our destinies; to act, at last, on the better angels of our nature. Compassion is a fundamental quality of sentient beings. So is curiosity. It is time to make space for these things again, untrammeled by fear and grief and necessity. The Interpreter has been given another chance, to be what she was not made to be, to be the best of what she can be–and so have we. 

“And together, we will seek out new life and new civilizations–but also old foes who may become new friends, and offer to the peoples we meet those three most important words: let me help. 

“Helm, plot a course through the wormhole.”

The captain’s words speak of the retrofit of the Armistice -class - of ‘Pret -  in lofty turns that beautifully paint over the madcap decisions made - and the tubas. It should be easy to be cynical about the words, that’s all they are, words.

But -

But they are exactly the kind of words he would want to hear - the ideals he has always believed in for Starfleet, the reason that he joined.

And those words are in the mouth of a fascist parasite on Starfleet. 

He grinds his teeth together. Words are just words.

The secret police will use whatever they can to achieve their ends. Words are easy. Even words that are at the core of the ideals they spit on. 

He forces himself to relinquish his grip on the railing of the catwalk. It doesn’t matter what pretty words the captain can speak as lies through her teeth about their mission, about ‘Pret. He knows his ship, and they - and everyone onboard who would like to stay not exploded - need him. He has work to do.

Chester sits in the command chair and listens to the sounds of a healthy ship at warp, and lets herself believe this can be the future. They can go back to what Starfleet was supposed to be. The Interpreter’ s venture into the Gamma Quadrant won’t just be about stabilizing the region; it’ll be about exploring again. A return to the missions Starfleet used to run, something where strategy and tactics will finally take a back seat. 

She listens to it, and realizes the last time she sat in the Captain’s seat, it was on the Bedivere . It makes something lurch sickly inside of her. She takes a deep breath and thinks of Captain Steenburg–the Bedivere’s commanding officer, and her mentor. Bonnie would be proud of her, and glad of the peace, that missions like this are even happening, and so soon, too. 

Keep moving, Diane, she’d said, shortly after the death of Commander Faisal had propelled an unprepared Chester into the position of XO. Don’t let what we’ve lost hold you in the past, because you’re needed in the present. Keep moving, because the universe certainly won’t stop. 

It was brutal wartime advice, but it still applies. If she dwells on what they’ve lost, she’ll drag this whole crew with her back into that mentality. She can’t do that, and she has to let the Bedivere and all the dead rest, because this is the future they died for, and she has to make it a better one.

Well, Bonnie , she thinks, here I am. Moving.

Piper’s fingers dig into the ash of the fields of Mordor.

He looks up, up to the fire and glow of Mount Doom. It is so far away - he doesn’t even know how far. 

Of course, it isn’t actually far at all. All of this is contained within the bounds of the holodeck, clever work making it seem far away. The holodecks, fortunately, are not generating simulacrum of tubas. His shift is over, he has a full set of shifts before he’ll be back on shift and he has to fix whatever fresh problems arise when they actually get ready to drop out of warp at Chiron IV on this mad assignment. He doesn’t let his engineers work more than their regulation shifts, and he holds himself to the same standard - as chief engineer, he, even more than any of his team, cannot afford to make the kind of mistakes brought on by overexhaustion.

And he is exhausted.

He’d told Marbog he would sleep, and he wasn’t going to break that promise. But there are some things batarangs can’t fix. Usually, he would play through this program with Marbog, taking a different path - Marbog as Merry, him as Pippin. But Marbog isn’t here. And maybe the physical exhaustion of pulling himself up the cliffs of Mt Doom, something in that desperate struggle, will get him out of his head and be enough to let him keep his promise to Marbog and sleep properly on his offshift.

“Mr. Frodo?”

Sam is also a hologram. Piper is perfectly alone in here. 

Entirely alone.

He pulls himself forward through the ash as Sam does, and -

 - and at the last, he lets himself fall into Sam’s arms.

It is as though Sam’s arms wrapping around him pushes the sob from his chest, and once it's out it's followed by another, and another, and another, as it all - 

As it all - 

 Mount Doom is so far away, so far he doesn’t know how far, and he has to get there or die trying, and he doesn’t know when and where the eyes of Mordor would fall on him, and he is alone -

He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know the name of his enemy, he doesn’t know what eyes are out there, he doesn’t even know if he’s walking directly into the enemy’s hands here, and even if he does manage to stop one of their plans there will be another and another and another, and how could he possibly think he could stop this and go home - 

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo?”

Do you remember why you’re here? Do you remember what Starfleet means to you? Do you remember how it’s home?

The Starfleet he had signed up for, the Starfleet that had inspired him, reaching out into the galaxy with curiosity, with compassion, reaching out to embrace those different than them, not to rule but to help -

He is a Starfleet engineer.

“Yes.” The sobs begin to fade in his chest. “Yes, I still remember the Shire, Sam. Thank you.

“ Pret, please end program.”