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"Here There Be Dragons" [June Fic Challenge]

hellsgate

Commodore
"Star Trek: Vonnegut"
"Here There Be Dragons"
(June Fic Challenge - Foreign Perspective.)

By Jason K.S. Hauck

Part One:

Gliding through space like most beings with wings or fins swam ancient oceans, Prid was invisible to most detection devices of the linear beings that occupied his neighbourhood of the cosmos. He enjoyed confusing the hell out of them as much as the Q as it entertained him to no end. He'd stride through subspace layers much like a whale breaches and dives. In his linear state, he'd resemble what some Humans of pre-warp Earth referred to as 'Dragons' or Anthropologists called a 'Plesiosaur'.

Even though it tickled Prid to occasionally phase into their time-space to people-watch and see them try to diagnose what they've seen, Prid was careful not to damage the hairless apes physically, retard their development by sharing anything potentially self-damaging, and/or extinguish natural curiosity in the process. There were codes of conduct, even among his kind. Earth used to be Home (on this plane of reality,) to his kind but they grew increasingly uneasy with the apes' expansionism encroaching upon their chosen aquatic environment and the only other species capable of conducting themselves civily around them - The Voth, had long since left following the development of an Ice Age.

For the foreseeable future, psionic attempts at intelligent 'First Contact' left much to be desired, often resulting in witch-hunts, mass extinctions of their distant non-ascended cousins, and mis-diagnosed madness in few-and-far-between enlightened Human 'animal whisperers'. But, in time there would come progress.
 
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Part Two:

Stardate: 58437.62

Old Calendar Date:

2381 - June 9
(1734 Hours)

Caprica Station (Tellar 4)
[Amphibious Research And Development]

Commander Squeak, a member of the Xindi Aquatic, had been busy at his console when suddenly he felt an overwhelming jab of pain right between his eyes that nearly caused him to lose consciousness. The shock equivalent of a Human getting a kick to the balls AND a set of brass knuckles right in the mouth by a trained martial artist. Squeak's emergency buoyancy vest brought him to the surface of the encounter tank allowing him to breathe and a medical team to ask him if he required assistance via the universal translator in his manipulator pack.

Communications in Operations suddenly went crazy, adjacent systems failed. Everything switched back on as operators manually rebooted the core. It took a half-hour of feeling around in the dark with hand torches and engineering tricorders to find the "on" button without banging heads or skidding out of diagonal jeffries tubes.
 
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Part Three:

U.S.S. Vonnegut
Legacy-Class
NCC 1975-E

The Vonnegut had just pulled out of Utopia Planetia following the battle with a sect of Cardassian Augments that had decided to ally with the Trill homeworld's psychotic cousins - the bluegills, when the call came in to investigate the system faillure at Tellar 4.

The Vonnegut's port nacelle had been torn off during a last second decision by one Commanding Officer to bank her Keldon-Class into a ramming course after their primary weapon had been exausted by a strafing hit by the Vonnegut's sister-ship, the Mandela.

The Keldon missed contact with the Vonnegut's saucer section but clipped the nacelle and ripped apart the Vonnegut's shuttlebay.

The Mandela had resumed duty after an overnight in spacedock to patch up superficial hull pockmarks.

After ejecting their core, Vonnegut fired the last available stock of photon torpedoes in their cache to antagonize the Augments into ignoring the core about to breach & give chase on the Mandela, until both the Mandela and the Cardassians were within optimum range to be incapacitated.

The Vonnegut, now missing a nacelle, released its' Arrow-Class runabout/captain's yacht to tractor it's ejected core into the path of the fox-and-hound impulse pursuit, using the Mandela as bait, hoping the Augments would assume the runabout was trying to get the overloading core safely clear of its mothership.

With some risky flying, sent the Captain's Yacht towing the core to "buzz the tower", and flew it right into the augments' windshield. The Arrow-Class runabout released the core seconds before jumping clear of the collision at warp three. The explosion knocked all three motherships ass-over-teakettle, but the Mandela had extended its shields and taken the Vonnegut under-tow. As a result of getting some distance before surfing a huge shockwave, the Mandela suffering the least amount of damage, with superficial pockmarks and a limping Captain's Yacht piggybacking on the Mandela's dorsal hull.
 
A very promising start with the first two parts! I like the premise that mythological dragons might dwell in alternate planes of existence, i.e. strata of subspace. I'm not sure the third part fit as well - it seemed kind of random to me.
 
Well, the challenge required an alien perspective but Starfleet would have to get involved somehow. I should've added the part where Caprica Station sent out its distress call immediately following the system failure and core reboot, but it was late last night & I wasn't functioning on all cylindars after talking to a gf of mine from the States on Yahoo IM. I'll get to fixing the flow of things in microsoft word or ".html" when I have time.
 
Your third part reads more like a report then a story. Not sure if thats what you were trying to do, and if it was good job, but thats what stuck out to me.
 
I'm trying to straddle the line without somehow disqualifying myself as this challenge is supposed to be about an ALIEN perspective rather than the standard Federation/Starfleet-perspective story.
 
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