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Post TNG: Father, I Love You.

Part 15.

Still unsure of her leg, Kathryn was testing her balance and whatnot playing handball by herself. She’d successively scored against her opponent and felt better for winning so utterly without contest. Despite what she smelled like from running in circles for 40 minutes at odds with a fairly impressive woman there was an evil odor weeping from every direction she couldn’t quite place, something nostalgic and ancient she’d settled to live without, which for some damn odd reason made her think of Harry Kim’s musky little quarters on Voyager? The women on Voyager had escaped into some foolhardy marriages to avoid any cohersion towards that dank little bolt hole where confidence in male gender had died. There’s 10 seconds of flickering until that lights go blink much to the consternation of this avid sports woman who’s had a really bad day. The day of hell.

“Computer, resume illumination.” …Nothing? She could hear someone sneaking up behind her. The Admiral had a sixth sense which’d almost cried wolf a might too often of late, but right here, right now however with somebugger in control of the light toggle balking the immense Rec-Theatre into a pitch, a suddenly blinded Janeway chose to totally believe her gut-tip, narrowly missing out on a deck to the back of her haircut because she’d Olympically dropped into a forward tumble clocking at least 25 kph in the short fall, a maneuver mind you she’d not properly exercised since grade school when little Kathy would often get more surrounded playing “catch and kiss” than all the other girls combined. So, her barreling came to rest like a sexy spent medicine ball in another corner of Elba II’s huge ultra dimmed communal games arena area, where she knew she didn’t logically have time to regroup or reprise jackshit but after all the certain death clusterfucks she’d walked out of unscathed over the years this indomitable woman knew it didn’t matter who’s mercy she was beholden to or how powerless and unarmed she was, it always came down to personality, and it was rightly about time for her swollen personality to exert enough shouting, pride and inflated self-worth to work whosoever is thinking about pushing her around into fearfully weighing the terminal consequences of their actions of rubbing her the wrong way before it all turns horribly sour, though even rubbing Kathryn Janeway the right way was quite dangerous if we’d like to be completely honest about the subject. “I don’t know if…”

Her ears work well enough to hear more pat-pat-patting of footfalls, but again reacting on more good instinct, any much more instinct and the lady could sign away for a certificate in clairvoyance, this mistress of armadas and planets caved her less than deft attackers nose right into the backend of his scull with her sexy little elbow, but she was now unfortunately having a trouble dislodging her arm from out of a newly renovated (She’d assume?)sink-hole-like-looking face connected on the other side to yet more arms still failing all over the place endangering Janeway into almost overbalancing because it almost feels like she’s being towed about by a decapitated chicken running a four minute mile, who’s blowing desperation right up, tickling Kathryn slightly, her armpit as her life-affirming/defining uniform was becoming a little shredded what since her victims jagged skull was still sawing simultaneously into her bicep and forearm every-time he tried to uncouple or run away from her, which was immensely idiotic since Admiral Janeways arm buried inside his face was the only thing corking the mass of the fluids suspending the thugs brain from erupting like a geyser… Janeway guessed no matter what next, it would take at least about another minute for her co-joint “friend” to bleed out before he’d shut the hell up gutturally wailing about the pain because of being ironically soundly dead so that she could begin talking at a reasonable volume…

“I am in charge! This is my command! You will stand down and face the consequences of this MUTINY!” Kathryn screams with her big girl voice at a void full of how many bad guys with what sort of masterplan barely overtopping the doglike cacophony of a man(?) who doesn’t like being penetrated by a determined person well enough to get her point inserted that she should be treated as no less than impossibly dangerous. That speech, or similar enough to those words, had been prepared absently during the early days of her vacation in the Delta Quadrant when she wasn’t as yet so sure if she could trust the privateers and pirates who all barely consented to being her loyal crew, but… Nothing. They all turned out to teddy bears who admired young Captain Kathryn Janeway for being a brave woman in a tough situation who’d see right by them. Good salty people. Mostly abused farmers who’d turned on the oppressive Cardassian government that’d raped, slaved, eaten and tortured bulk collections of their families to cement their evil authority over the contested DMZ planets and the Federation Colonies that’d contended to live under Cardassian Rule expecting a fair shake from a body representing law, who shouldn’t have had the leftover strength to bother with such little-fish after controlling the growth and directions of trillions of Cardassians every hour of every day. Funny how such pleasant life experiences would make you consider finding solutions to your problems outside the boundaries of law abidingness? But here now right in the principled inner recesses of the Federation’s heart she was constantly at odds with pretty criminalous people who were legally still loyal citizens, cradled representatives of honorable intentions, supposedly? From pompous agenda ridden bureaucrats to the high handed drones lording over the lowly cogs they keep greased that Federation Law and Order is just a challenge to pole vault over because of the extreme pampering everyone gets from getting everything they ever wanted with out having to justify or sacrifice much at all that she’s felt it common place for almost every one to play the shell game for morality vs. legality. The Admiral couldn’t trust anyone as far as she could throw them (Except for the very small aliens, who she trusted proportionately less than she could throw them.) that she believed all and sundry who hadn’t had to rise above the drudge of a hard life using hard work were actually unconditionally trustworthy, how odd that strange bedfellows make better allies than her closest neighbors? Katie’s to die for hypnotically beautiful eyes are adjusting, but it’s still removed enough from 20/20 that Janeway has no idea how massively she might be outnumbered, but this diabolical force of nature has terror on her side now because the next person who tries to woman-handle her worshipable bulk will also probably not see another birthday as well just like the finally dead yet still rattling about corpse she’s prying off her arm with a regulation issue tritanium toed boot wedged into his throat she’s using for leverage… With a big jerk Kathy is free like an annulment after incautious drinking during a Las Vegas weekend... “Anyone the hell else want a piece of me or are we going to talk?”

“You’re grim, but you didn’t have to do that. He was a good man. I met his family recently, they were optimistic people.” A handsome voice set out from of the black accesses the slayer of dragons and monsters on her kill using a timbre which sounds an awful it like “Authority” but Janeway was so very used to smashing down sentiments that her opposition assumed were “Authority” into tiny snack sized morsels that she was a Gourmet Chef after a fashion. “Really Kathryn?”

“What?” Baritone unbound.

“You’re the only thing in this room turning a conversation into a fight.”

“You all have twenty seconds to get on your knees and put your hands behind your head before I break every bone in every one your bodies.” She’s not getting the reaction she was hoping for, but the Admiral is not quite ready to alter tack just yet.

“We’re not trying to be sinister Kathryn, we’re just visiting.”

I decide who is welcome. I’m in charge.” Keep it simple. Provoke the baddies into giving away more plan than it’s wise to let me get my teeth into yet she sets up the standard psychology so. Go ego go! But hell, Janeway grimaces, would this guy just please stop using her name like he was her best friend?

“I could be trying to be your friend for all you know?”

“My friends don’t wrestle me in the dark.”

“Oh my, how left out you must be? My best friends wrestle me in the dark often enough to leave a permanent smile on my faces.”

Faces? She’s being played with, then really that means she has nothing to lose by acting as brave as she wants to? “10 seconds!” She manages to clip someone else square in their man tits. Janeway can make out the semblance of where the conversation is coming from getting closer as if it is rude to talk from too great a distance…

“I don’t see what you think this little power play is going to settle? We only wanted to have a few words with in private.”

“Then turn the light on.”

“I have really sensitive eyes.”

5 Seconds!NOW!

**Blink**

The light of day should maybe be bothering the Admiral because she’d scuffed up her uniform rolling all over the place like a bloody monkey because in Kathryn Janeway’s vain mind, %80 of her own authority comes from the regalia and trappings representing the force of the important responsibilities placed on her by an empire guarding the sanctity of thousands of Star Systems with the sheer power to convincingly guard thousands of star systems she could redirect to the door step of whosoever pissed off today more so than yesterday Janeway was surprised to find her protagonist wasn’t a human being at all. This creature in charge, the brains behind this operation, was an 8 foot tall white pussy humanoid dribbly glob that was a spunk colony populated by googleplexes of swimmers operating somehow in unison... She’d killed Soong. “A” Soong, she was still surrounded by half a dozen more of him of varying vintage, but all this ill wind about Super Sperm and raging deluges of Noonian Soong clones amok had come to this that she was getting face time with a mass of something she’d taken a shot once a month to avoid since she was 14, “You can’t actually be what you look like, no one is that trigger-happy.”

“You’d be surprised how much young men get off to when they have too much time on their hands.”

“So long as you stay the hell out of my womb.”

“I have no interest in you or being in you Admiral.”

“I’m not good enough for you? Me? But I’m gorgeous!”

“That’s not it at all.”

“I’m a very beautiful woman. Ask anyone! I have to beat them off with a stick, you think you get awards for beating off but I assure you, you’re out classed. Men are drawn to me like lemmings to a cliff face!”

“Please calm down Kathryn.”

“Fertile! You wouldn’t believe how fertile I am, I’ll have you know I had the best looking lizard babies this side of the Gorn Homogony!”

“For Gods’ sake woman! SHUT UP! I’d, …All of me has agreed in unison that we would rather not procreate with anyone, on a whole the bulk of our civilization is not interested in processing into exactly the same humanoid biped over and over again with same encoded personality and intellect that will quickly and certainly suppress our individuality we have to mentally neuter to keep in check, however… A tiny driven minority” It thumbs the figures acting as his honor guard. “-think that joyfully plumbing a vagina is worth a death their every instinct assures our people will be a totally thrilling euphoric ecstatic satisfying experience rivaling even the heddy delights of stamp collecting.”

Janeway smiles to find someone( -things, somethings!) as retrosexual as herself finally. “I’m all that.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Nooooooooooooooooo. So what do you call yourself? Yourselves, all the billions of you standing there? Super Sperm? Cosmic Cum? Dyna Discharge? Incredi-Issue?”

“I hold your life in my hands, please try to take me seriously.”

“It wasn’t so long ago someone held you in their hands and...”

“Kathryn.”

Why is he acting so convivial? “As a favour, I’ll try.”

“‘I’m a lot of people with a lot of ideas, but we all try not to sound too much like the Borg.”

“Wise, but do you think anyone would confuse talking penis snot with a threat as dangerous as the Borg? Women have been going about adventurous and arduous lives during the most traumatic pregnancies since before we were monkeys. I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of the Borg either, but hell I can’t think of a single bully out there today I wouldn’t be concerned enough to worry that Naomi Wildman couldn’t be left to save the day.”

“You don’t want our blood on your hands.”

“You have bl… Is everything that comes out of your mouth going to turn into a disgusting masturbation pun?”

“We’re more concerned with what’s in your mouth. I want an apology to force its way out past your teeth into the open air and jump into my ear hole.”

He looks like a half melted snowman. “You have earholes?”

“I have many holes.”

“Eweeee.”

“Don’t be such a girl. Say you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

“How typical of a woman! Just say you’re sorry.”

“Or?”

“We’ll make the Borg seem like a nursery rhyme.”

“Don’t trivialize the Borg.”

“Why? I fought the Borg persevering throughout every feint, but it got so funny! They had no idea who was impregnating their drones or how? The collective was screaming at what was inside the wombs of their own soldiers “We will assimilate your biological and technological distinctiveness” as if children were some sort of deadly cancer. They were scuttling cubes by the dozen to stop the spread of our infection. We cleared a hundred star systems and fenced them in away from the pastures we’re content to till and graze for the next thousand years to ensure survival of the fittest runs true.”

“You’re a monster. Drones can be recovered. Wholesale slaughter, even the wholesale slaughter of Borg is a last resort. Despite anything else, they are unwilling, innocent victims of the hivemind’s insidious control of their every action that they can learn to deal with after enough re-education.”

“If you had such compassion for our kind I might not advise my superiors to raise your civilization Kathryn. I’m still waiting for my apology.”

“There are more of you? Are you an individual or a collective?”

“I said we weren’t the Borg.”

“I have your word for that.”

“Now you make me sound like the Founders of the Dominion? Are you sure Humanoids are the most plentiful life form in this galaxy?”

“I need a name if we want to write a treaty.”

“We are the sperm that walk like a man!”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“We’re nothing to sneeze at.”

“You sneeze…? Ewwww. You’re pulling my leg.”

“I’m pulling something.”

“You’re not a very serious villain.”

“No, you’re the villain.”

“I am so the hero.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re joking.”

“We’re more insulted by vivisection than bad humour.”

“Oh?”

“You’re experimenting on one of us Kathryn. We have the presence to defend our rights to be treated respectfully just like any other sentient species. I’ve the run of this place. I’ve read your reports and we refuse to become bio-weapons to decimate your enemies and keep your nieghbours docile. We know what you’re up to and it is intolerable.”

“So?”

“We want you to stop and we want you to say you’re sorry.”

“I don’t respond well to force.”

“There’s too few ways to play this out.”

“I don’t run away from conflict.”

“Even, if you are the instigator of genocide Kathryn? Do you run away from culpability?”

“There have been tests but… It would never come to that. You have to trust me.”

“I react terribly to bad faith.”
 
part 16.

Some times he drunk so much, his father would talk to him. Sometimes he drunk so much so his father would talk to him. "He who controls the Jeffries Tubes controls the Star Ship" his father had taught him in matters of Kirkcentric Star Ship guerilla tactics fearful of skulking Romulans like an earthbound father would discuss a fire drill for his children he’d rather not be melted. "From the Jeffries Tube", went the seminar, "you can cripple every major system if you single out the internal sensors first so the "baddies" can’t get a transporter lock on you". Of course the problem was that this course of action was advised to Jake when he was barely 6 years old and his head wouldn’t lay sparks scraping the ceiling of a regular corridor on a Star Ship so often that his friends coaxed him he’d be as bald as his father one day. Which he was for a time, but after a short tide it just seemed a bit pathetic or culty to so blatantly walk in the mans shadow imitating something as ordinary as how he styled his hair like the hundreds and hundreds of Officers in the fleet who only thought all you needed to be a good Captain was an element of baldness. O, that and “Shisko” was just a little too sauced to remember how to get off his assh and rish to the occashion without at least a pot of coffee poured straight down his... It figures, the one time he’s needed to live up to the "Sisko Legacy" as a He-Man Action Hero and Jake’s barely left with the wits to stop an android from buggerizing him. Barely. Not that there would have been anything wrong with that, because Jake would like to write about everything eventually from a first hand perspective but...

"Replicator, steam the place with coffee." After Vulcan seperatists destoryed a Colony by making all the replicators pump mustard gass throughout a string of domed cities it became clear sensually a replicator could be used for aromatherapy and even as a covert launching device for caffine for people too lazy to ask for a cup and walk to the recipticle... Great shades of Talos IV!!!!! Jake figured if he could just have 5 minutes to rest his spinning perception of the merry go round universe to inhale a cubic meter or 2 of java then he'd be set right about to trick Lore in falling out of an air lock before he maims anyone trying to tell him he can't get away with murder. Out smarting insane robots with delusions of godhood hell bent on universal domination was something of a family tradition although Jake is wondering if he's sober enough to care enough? "Computer? Has anyone died yet?"

"You do not have the security clearance to register the crew manifest." The lady inside the computer asuures him.

Focussing his addled reserves, ready to argue with a computer that can't have been a third as inscrutible as odo shooing young Sisko and and a 3 foot tall Nog off the promendae when they'd cat call at the young girls coming off the inbound shuttles... Youth so rocked. "So I could be alone on a ship of corpses? That's hardly going to h... Dad?"
 
Part 17.

“Father!”

“Son!”

As far as Picard was likened these two likefaced buffoons dividing up his view screen were like brothers more than like father and son, but taking advantage of the hallmark like lull, the Frenchman'd bit his tongue while stealthily mouthing the order to take the shields offline and charge Enterprise's capacitors so as they'd be up to speed for round two which was sure to be the final death of his sorely battered sense of "surprise". Seriously, what next? Was Wesley weally his child? Ha! How could that even be possible? Oh no. Would it be unthinkable to speculate that in the not to soon future that Jean–Luc Picard’d fall back in time thirty years abouts to seduce, plum and ravish a firm tight bright young Doctor answering to the name Beverly Crusher? It’s frightening to think how more beautiful that redhead unfalteringly becomes every year, although that hardly means his friend is less attractive every year in reverse that he's retroactively fixing his memories from their golden years backwards.. "Oi!" Picard inwardly yells at the omniscient thing who bothers him constantly, "That was not a wish!" No matter what Picard'd told Q back then, sure there are some threads from the tapestry of his lifetime he wouldn’t mind reinvesting RHETORICALLY, "It is merely human to contemplate "if" but these are idle thoughts Q, not an invitation, so go bother Jellico and leave my completely healthy day dreams alone while I deal with this ridiculous cudgemellon...” Picard never knew when that mad god was listening so he "played it safe" as if he was under constant observation from a perverse sense of humor, which is a very Cardassian way to live ones life. "Gentlemen."

"Yes?" The stereo of their all too similar voices is damn spooky.

"We are all in near equally heavily armed Starships surrounding a barely dazed possibly grazed extremely powerful entity." Picard begins diplomatically to make sure neither father nor son felt sufficiently impotent or inflated enough to try get the end in behind ”Whether or not we have the raw power to accomplish some kind of victory together over this unifying threat… Or whether or not we three have the grace to work together as diverse individuals capable of letting old acquaintance be forgot, you’ll all admit that there is a very complicated back drop behind this overly infuriating confrontation… My friends, that none of us should be impulsive about our decisions that we are not completely sure we’re working against our own means for other agencies.”

The robot and the clone glare acid at each other mutually wondering respectively as if to question if this is some bizarro polite Picard fallen through from an alternate universe that he’d think either of them would appreciate being “handled” with mockunconditional platitudical fauxrespect. They all knew each other well enough by proxy that their relationships had a billion conditions that rose coloured bullshit (think about it.) was not going to smother the coiled animosity for even the immediate concerns of chewing fat between a triumvirate of duelists. Lore dumped his can of worms first “Every time I trust in the Federations sense of mercy I’m pulled into pieces and locked in a closet.”

“Don’t make me laugh Lore!” The mechanical man’s Father admonishes. “You wouldn’t know what a closet looked like if it bit you in your overused ass.”

“Well, really there’s no need to be so…” Picard doesn’t know how many crewmen aboard Rutledge had been massacred by Lore but there was no need to provoke the positronic madman into killing whosoever was left over by duly insulting the prideful and arrogant creature while nestling in such a tactically unsound position as being surrounded by so many powerfully mostly unknown opponents. Kumar and Belinda would be fine. Fine.

“I’ve read about you Picard.” The 30 somethingish Noonian Soong spurts Jean-Luc’s twofacedness, “ends vs. means” crap. “I’m afraid you’re not going to trick me into being handled from making me afraid of being handled harder by a faceless, invisible and possibly imaginary enemy unnecessarily, especially when the cart is already behind the horse and I’m on your side Jean-Luc like any decent person wouldn’t have a choice but to follow the example of.”

Lore doesn’t take the bait. “I’m not taking the bait.”

Soong creates an unimpressed face. “Have you been drinking son?”

Though this bait the android swallows whole resulting in a mean barbed hook clean, jerking and rejerking the underbelly of his pickled liver. “There’s no law against enjoying some booze with some friends now and then Father, and my gods sake it wouldn’t even’ve been biologically possible unless SOMEBODY hadn’t decided it would be REALLY funny to include an alcoholism fetish into my programming. What was the hell point of that? I am the man you made. How can I be more to blame for following your instincts and primeval compulsions than you are?”

Grimwashing with thick lacquer. “My thoughts every time you kill someone son.”

“If my every effort I take to be true to myself is rotting in your craw why haven’t you choked old man?”

“Have you two met before?” Picard asks wondering if Lore has been up on the clone saga for some time?

“Picard, this is Soong. A copy of Soong certainly but definitively the monster in his prime before he became the doddering old fool I had to take care of. A more honest bucket to pour my hatred into than the hulk flapping about for the last decades of his born again unremarkable life postdating my creation, honestly why would I pretend otherwise that he is a person in his own right and not a wind up toy sprung from the ideals and personality of Noonian khan Soong engrained unwaveringly into his wetware followed through to his every action and evil misdeed? This man is my father and he is, no offense Picard, I know you try hard, my nemesis. ”

“ [Cough!] So you’ve never actually met this man before?” Now that he is in a warship instead of a ship of peace, the Captain of the Enterprise finds that he misses the sound and antics of children in theory despite his own middle aged misgivings he’s a more rounded old man than he ever would have thought possible. Though at least you can forgive children for acting like children, and maybe Lore has arrested development but he’s tried to destroy humanity enough times that the he’s earned the right to be treated like a big boy by the powers that be.

“You can say I make snap judgments but I don’t like the look of his face.”

“HA! Would you listen to this lush?I Once he broke into my liquor cabinet when I he was just a few weeks old and poor fool was walking through walls for hours he was so out of it. You’re driving a star ship the size of, and about as dangerous as a herd of mating whales but you think it’s responsible to addle your wits till you’re no smarter than a pinball machine. You can tell right from wrong and safe from stupid Lore, get with the program before I come over there and give you a spanking!”

**SNORT!!** “You don’t have the balls father.”

“You’re right. I don’t. I cut them off and drowned mine in Mount Doom. More grew back to be taken care of. Gelding yourself twice in a lifetime is a case of the hiccups no one should have to endure. I regimented a strain of nanites to fight back the growth of my testicles on a molecular level so I don’t have to quickly look for a sharp spoon if the space between my legs suddenly becomes occupied by something virile. So you’re right, I have no balls whatever to speak of, but if you mean that I don’t have the will to carry through on my promises and my convictions, then “that”, “That” I have in abundance. You’ll go over my bloody knee and I’ll smack your buns till they’re rank and raw young man if you don’t start showing some respect for your elders and betters.”

So agog, Lore is speechless.

“Now that’s all very interesting but can we continue this after concentrate on resolving Garth of Isar’s latest bout? General orders follow not to trust his unstable ability to act predictably, we have to press the advantage here and now before he starts collapsing stars again. Adhering to Garth of Isar with our three Tractor beam tractor beams from conflicting vectors should mancipate him in a simulated heavy gravity well.”

“Very human Picard, why not just kill him?” Soong asks in an as human fashion.

Picard’s brow furloughs, Lord Garth Master of the Universe was floating space waveringly “asleep” hopefully concussed and not for the right now, a threat to anyone, and despite how much he admires the Klingon Empire there is in glory in murdering sleeping people at all even if not by the thousand. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe in that question. Soong, Lore, lock the old man down.”

“Just need a few extra seconds to…” Lore complains. “After all I don’t have a crew like the rest of you to sound off to my every mad little whim.”
 
Part 18

This paragon of womnahood’d had an easier task hangin’ ten up top a forty footer off the coast of Maui than staying erect in her own sickbay today with how Jean-Luc was rocking her world. Just another manic Monday, but she feel it already in her hair that it’s all already coming to a head, and Beverly knew by oath that all their adventures eventually came down to being defined, win or lose by the humanest of moments, so sooner or later, some burly thug with shoulders big as Jack's from the gold shirt warehouse is going to goosestep into her sickbay to secure her patient bullboyhandling the perturbed lady offward to the Bridge whereabouts Bev's snug dashing French fling'd force about some sort of unlethal dialogue in exchange for the certain death they were now almost certainly facing right now between the crosshairs of BFG that could probably powderize planets as easily as scuttle another Enterprise. Only 21 more letters in the alphabet Jean-Luc. Unfortunately poor Sonja was in no condition to be trusted for acting at all cogent as the occasion rose even further out of control because it’s obvious the compiled stress laying Sonya ass over teakettle had certainly frazzeled her bliss after being these last 6 months impregnanted by a deadman which in itself was odd, since Sonya was only 5 months pregnant when she'd arrived back home aboard Enterprise three days ago unable to tell demons form other sorts of shadows desperate and indiscreet belting bellicosely ‘bout baddies’ babynapping, and of course mathematically speaking Data had died 7 months ago, and despite the Lt Commanders contrary piercing claims, her child had not already been born, so how is it fair to pile on a few more tons of responsibility which would wattle her little brain like an olive in cement shoes being drowned in a vodka martini shaken not stirred. Though tick tock her role in things to come was inevitable but it would just push Sonya past the point of no return as if they were sure this isn’t as bad as it could get. Sonya's poor life and career are already ruined because the powers that be are treating her like a draddle spinning on the edge of a crocodiles maw until the tapped girl's suddenly as witless as a Pakled. It's just not fair. After all this muck amuck, Sonya would need a clean bill of mental health for at least twenty years before she'd be allowed to serve aboard a Federation Star ship even as a barmaid heavens forbid crew. Though she was carrying Data’s child, who’s not to think that’s going to be a full time adventure in anyone’s books that wouldn’t drive a good woman potty anyway?

Bev bunches Sonya over sisterly sharing the biobed with her good friend from these last ten years about, above the covers of course, hugging the strafed recipient of a world of pain and hurt tying to warm this nexus of sucky fate from the new storm massdriving on the engineers parade glooming her sense of expectation and hope. "Sonya. They're going to come for you, but don't be afraid. I’ll be with you, it won’t get out of hand, and you’ll be fine honey."

As if her big momma was there to kiss her booboos better, Sonya nuzzels into Beverly's nurturing waif embrace. "You don't think I don't know I'm the prize in the cereal box? Everyone is coming for me. I'm the goose that laid the golden egg. I’m full of eggs. Data had beautiful golden eyes and skin like eggshells. He was a good egg. He mustn’t have meant to do this to all my eggs. The darling man got so bashful when I would say he was perfect. Why did he have to die? He'd protect me form all this, I know he would. He’d punch someone evil in the nose and save the day just for me. I love Data so much."

Crusher thinks of her life before beside the Android and knows those were her best years. "Of course he would honey, he was a good man."

BOOM! .. **Shudder, shudder** creek .

"What was that?" Like children petrified of thunder Sonya Gomez is not half the woman she used to be, and that fraction is falling as every new crisis sits on her face like a thermometer up a polar bears bum.

"Your boyfriend is tossing his toys."

"My Boyfriend?" Though no one in this distant preset day would understand, the only way to qualify Sonya’s confusion is to say that she was having a “Whatchu talking about Willis?” moment.

"Garth of Isar?" Beverly tries speaking very slowly.

"I’m sorry you’ve lost me? Who?" Sonya starts to believe every other Doctor except this one.

No one really likes using his full self proclaimed title incase someone in earshot thinks that the piss is not being taken but the Doctor releases a huge resigned drone from her attractive lungs to pump the words out as quickly as possible from between her red lips. "Lord Garth Master of the Universe."

“From the song?" Gomez mutters hoping this will veer off from where she’s thinking this conversation is tobogganing down a well face.

"Yes."

Bugger. "And the comic book?"

"Yes."

Double bugger. "But he's made up. A fairy story from olden days."

"No."

"No?"

Beverly tries not to cry outwardly that someone who once talked about making her a Brides Maid is this broken, "Garth's a real historical figure and your lover who right now is trying to save you from being used and abused by the same vile people we’re trying to keep you aw… You’re achieving a new degree of blank shock Sonya I’d previously thought impossible for a human being saddled with our autonomic inflections. A founder of the Dominion sure, but you’re a human being and… Why aren’t you nodding along agreeing with my retelling of your recent personal history Sonya?"

“Garth of Isar?” Rolling the words round and round in her Hispanically word-curling mouth does not make such a union seem any more real.

“Yes.” Beverly exaggerates her nod. Her huge hair goes everywhere, she’s thinking about a hair cut? Then maybe Jean-Luc would throw himself up against her more than once a month as if he owed her currency.

HO! Beverly is making a funny! That has to be it! "Really? I suppose next you’ll tell me is that anthropologists have uncovered the medieval excavations of Smurf Village? Greedy caught in amber baking Smurfberry pie? All the doctors keep insisting I am criminally insane living in an increasingly delusional world adrift from rationality so god knows what I’m capable of not taking notice of while I’ve been too busy being crazy..."

“Sonya. What exactly are we talking about?”

“You’re serious?”

“I haven’t tried to be funny honey about anything.”

“And I’m legally insane, so I suppose have to trust your interpretation of reality over my mad own no matter how different they may be, especially if there’s too many glaring discrepancies… Bev, I want to get well.”

“We can fix you, we have the technology.”

“Right? So I have a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“I replaced Data?” Sonya has already started crying.

“Yes.”

“NO! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!”

“Honey, this is a lot to swallow, but trust me, I am sure I know what is real more than you do.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Really real?”

“Really real.”

“I can trust you?’

“You can trust me.”

“How can I be certain what’s real anymore Beverly?”

‘We can sort out what’s “real” soon enough after we’ve made sure that the thousand people aboard Enterprise are a little less marked for death because someone is in love with you enough to murder the lot of us.”

“Garth of Isar?”

“Ships under attack, remember?”

***CRASH!***

“Right, right. How did I fall in love with a guy out of a book while I was carrying someone else’s baby? That’s crude.”

“Love is a funny thing.” Beverly is losing track of what her patient thinks isn’t factual. They’ve had a lot of conversations like this in the last couple days while the super drugs in her system from Elba II were flushing out and hopefully soon our Doctor Crusher could find out what was left over of the real Sonya Gomez under all that military grade pharmaceuticals? "The ancients could tell some stories. Man turned god gone bad, it's the classic tale but he's going to turn us into kindling unless you can talk him down, however if you don't think you're up to it I can head off Jean -Luc and order him to think up another option. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to honey."

"The Ships under attack?"

"Yes." The deck was tilting 15 degree’s many sides of even as this conversation went on.

‘Oh? I thought my head was still spinning?” Sonya wished her mother were here to hug her better instead, who was fat. Hugging Beverly for comfort wasn’t completely satisfying with all her bones being totally registerable to the flat cheekyside of her face trying unaimibly to nuzzle into some squishy port. "From someone claiming to be my boyfriend?"

“Garth of Isar.”

"Wait a minute? He isn’t that creepy guy who's always looking at my boobs in the whiteroom?"

"I'm not sure about that...” Beverly counts the loonies: One, two. “O. If you're not in an intimate loving relationship with Lord Garth Master of the Universe then why is he trying to kill us to save you? Ono? He must be starker raving mad than the medical journals gave him credence? Sonya if you’re sure you and he never… If he’s not your… I think we’re all being made fools of. Damn it. Sorry."

“Well this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into. Who do I trust now if you’re going to steer me wrong when I’m sure I have no idea what I’m doing that you’ll lead me ass backwards off a cliff into a bath tub of thumbtacks?”

“I just called myself a fool.”

“We wander the universe in jammies, it should be a familiar feeling Beverly. I've been sedated for a while, I'll be shocked to hear the Stardate I'm sure but I doubt I could have gone through the motions of falling in love and committing myself to the... How long have I been stoned Beverly? I’m feeling better now but I haven’t been at all okay for sometime now. They stole my baby I want him back. I want to hold him.”

“You’re still pregnant. You haven’t given birth yet.”

“No, I’m pregnant again. I’m sure of it. I don’t have to believe you any more because you’re not always right. I heard them talking. I’m always going to be pregnant. It won’t stop. And it’s just getting faster and faster and… OW! Crap on a stick.”

Beverly’s face screws up as she realizes that she is sitting lengthwise in bed with a woman who’s water just broke and she’s soaking in it.
 
Part 19.

This Romulan magic lantern show had the Council floor rife. Central to the unbelieving peepers of these princes of the universe was the pomposity personified Ringmaster Romulan’s 40-foot tall holographic windowpane citing Lord Garth Master of the Universe held clenched between the countertugging tractor beams of three Federation Starships ready to tear the mythic hero’s (or infamous demons?) limbs all off like this were an ancient Circus, all in all welling up some very veiny reactions, certainly chief among which is that Starfleet’s damn well dragging 168 Member Worlds back into yet another population halving clusterfuck. The peppered powder-keg play-by-play onset of doom is artfully, histrionically, gratingly framed out for these rulers of the United Federation of Planets by a freshly gazetted swaggering smirking cancer, otherwise, grudgingly with due respect afforded the rights given the position of an Ambassador to the Federation, even an Ambassador from the Romulan Star Empire, was addressed as ”Ambassador” who’d madly thunk it insanely humiliating for his best friends in this august house of ideas, that these supposed highrolling leaders of the free galaxy had their snouts, noses and trunks stubbed into the stark stinky reality of the explosive current events occurring a few days march either-side between Elba II and Earth offering up exactly the fine tuned comforting knowledge on exactly how in no control whatsoever these Councilors were that mad (wo!)men were pushing the Federations all-powerful fleet unanswerably this way and capriciously that way into the jaws of desperation and bouncing against the gums of calamity for no discernibly sane reasons whatsoever! Totally baited a blue fist the size of anyone else’s head smashed into the amphitheatric bench, home overwhich the creation of law and order for this empire throughout the last three hundred years had passed thunders off a satisfying crack. “This is intolerable! Garth of Isar practically founded the Federation! NO MATTER What has become of the mans mental state he is a living testimonial and memorial and monument to the sheer testicles and fortitude of the pioneering spirit of ALL OUR FOREFATHERS!” Business as usual for sure, but herein there’s always a louder difference of opinion which in turn is relatively meeked out by a furious counter suit twice again as outrageous and deafening as the last which is all playing into the seeming Romulan’s will petering plans to make sure anyone with any real power here owed him big that murder was the least he could soon get away with.

I say seeming because, of course it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that the Romulan Ambassador was totally a Klingon Spy in well over his head, the poor guy’d probably been sent on a small, a tiny mission to align a little chaos on Romulus and accidentally fell into this impossibly powerful position three empires to the left and almost everyone, except probably the President, knew it. Certainly Romulus was aware, whyelse send any representative to Earth after a century of tied lines and Chinese whispers if not that they could “out” their fallguy someday if something “nefarious vs. Incriminating” blew up in their ear ridden faces that Romulus could claim infinite deniability, that anything naughty was really all an insidious Klingon plot to undermine the current good relations between the Federation and the Star Empire. Makes sense? Meanwhile Starfleet Intelligence allowed the Romulan Ambassador to run free for similar reasons. The Ambassador had to be a clever clever character not to be utterly executed by either government assuming absolute loyalty as he rocked the boat in an enemy mine. There was no reason not to go down in flames spectacularly when there was no way out because the rock cried out “No place to hide.”

Something short with even more facial hair than your grandmother spits back “BALLS! If Jonathan Archer hadn’t put him down then your wonderful HEROIC Garth of Isar would have rubbled our foundations before the Federation could have been an ounce of help to the galactic stage!!!! In my opinion its long past time THAT FREAK was sanctioned before he randomly destroys us finally, no matter what HISTORICALLY and ANCIENTLY we have to be thankful for of his accomplishments towards the birth of the Federation entire CENTURIES ago! What, I say what, what has he done for us lately?” They could go back and forth like this for months because no Councilor was at all that more powerful than the next as they’re all given exactly equal powers by their local governments no matter what more or less that world brings to the party, so really it was only their own wit, and perhaps charm of each dignitary which sorted out any real pecking order, oh, and threats, lets not forget the constant threats of violence… That is except for the President. The President came imbued with certain powers (he or )she( or it) could maintain over the others, unfortunately the current feary Council selected the sitting President because he was near witless and charmelss and plain old impotent enough that all the powerbrokers assumed arrogantly altogether they alone would have their hand to stuck up his ass like a puppet, but unfortunately for everyone so many people were up to their collective elbows into his rectum that President John Boyce didn’t think it foreign what was happening to Garth that lobbyists and special interests and… They were all tearing him into little pieces. Dignity first, balls second and so on and so on till they’d eventually ground down the souls of his feet to feed the unfortunate. Poor spud was turning into a jigsaw puzzle all the Presidents men and all the Presidents Horses couldn’t put back together again. John loved his horses.

Not quite enacting a coup, but quite close, gallingly the Romulan Ambassador hushed the rulers of the UFP to a state of civility, but only in so that everyone of them was trying to simultaneously think out how to murder this prick without getting into trouble with the Klingons or the Romulans. “Please. The Romulan Star Empire thinks your pretended outrage is good for the press, but we all know there’s a blackout 500 feet in every direction from wherever I’m standing. Most of you intelligent people are complicit with one side or the other and these unfortunate events are not completely outside your profit and loss projections, so why lie!? I don’t care how many of you are guilty of starting another war but ladies and gentlebeings, these images!” He rolls his hand around the holographic depiction like a carnival barker making sure your eyes are telling your wallet what to do. “Are being transmitted from a cloaked merchant vessel keeping their eye on this ass backwards standoff as it winds down to everyone in the universe dying horribly but please, why don’t we try to cut that outcome off at the pass thank you very much?”

Someone threw a shoe at him.

“THAT IS AN ACT OF WAR! WAR! YOUR WORLD IS FORFEIT!”

Why would anyone with such large ears think to scream so loudly? President Boyce tried to calm the chords of anthropomorphosised TNT before they started a knife-fight. “I am certain the honorable Ambassador from Betazed did not mean anything inflammatory from throwing her footware at you, maybe she just had an itch to scratch?”

A muffled voice from the backbench could almost not be heard to say “The Tellerite Councilman scratches her itch twice a day.” They further muffled as much laughter as they could but that excitable holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx went’n pulled off her other pump ready to put some buggers eye out.

These Romulan mannerisms continued their deluge out from the secret Klingons venom sack “Children, you’re all bloody children. I am so embarrassed we haven’t overrun and decimated such a collection of half wits, it’s almost as if we’re afraid your idiocy is contagious… I’ll insist our admiralty is sacked until we have a brood of warcheifs with the balls to smack up your upstart tinpot civilizations acting uppity on our frontier! ”

“The Ambassador from Romulus will speak with a civil tongue or I’ll cut it the fuck out!” Atomically ejaculates the Tellerite Councilman, which is clear evidence enough for most that this young man had indeed mellowed considerably since he started scratching Lwaxana Troi’s itch twice a day… And numerous times a night as well of course when they didn’t have to sneak around for being discreetly dirty in the workplace, and the near by public gardens too which goes without saying.

Forgetting to swallow, Klingon spit is globbing everywhere as the shouting just gets worse. “I’m allowed to kill you! Diplomatic Immunity Snouty!”

Between all this standing fit for action pretending nothing is chaotic until they’re told otherwise, the Starfleet Marines guarding the entrances and exits in full dress uniforms didn’t know who they were legally allowed to bunt in the face with their rifle buts if needed be they had to move into crowd control mode peacekeeping against the highest ranking civilians in the Federation (AGAIN!) and a green blooded stocky individual that was required to send a coded message to Romulus each and every night reminding the other pointy eared bastards not to cross the Neutral Zone till tomorrow starting about a caravan of death.

“How …How did you know my mother called me Snouty?”

The Romulan blinks. Sometimes he just says the right thing without realizing why. Luck gives him head all the time. “Oh? …Mooooooving along! The robot is of course as you well know guilty of high treason against the Romulan Star Empire, after he proved troublesome and renegade while serving as a Subcommander aboard our flagship the Peregrine in an effort to be an opposite number to your own recently dead tin man Data who more often than not ALONE saved your precious Federation from rack and ruin with out Picard or Riker or… Lore will be unmetaphorically crucified, reboted and murdered over and over again at the pleasure of the state as quickly as the extradition contract can be sorted or it’s war.”

“Lore is effectively immortal, after he’s finished serving his debt to our society for mass murder and other crimes too numerous to number, you are more than welcome to him in a thousand years or so if the Romulan Star Empire still exists.” The Vulcan Councilor fully up to date on the subject appraises his “cousins” reach over.

The Romulan Ambassador unfoccuses blankly near random turfs of thin air. “Did someone say something? I could hear the slightest buzz…” He switches his attention to the next pot ofdiscourse. “But then a CLONE of the progeny of the diabolical Adric Soong on a scavenger hunt to find another clone of Noonian Soong! Soong we’ll be drowning in Soong’s because they’re obviously genetically augmented and contagious! I have the secret documents! I know everything! You know full well the ROMULAN STAR EMPIRE’S reactions to this avenue of scientific exploration by any member of protectorate of the federation because your mules the Human race have proven to be very very untrustworthy and unwise in their own containment and controlled proliferation of Eugenics technology, the fallout of which is still responsible for rough shape of most of this corner of the galaxy!”

The Bajoran Councilor coughs “You’re exaggerating.”

Never tell a Romulan, or a Klingon for the matter, that they are exaggerating, or in error. They’ll jam “their” truth down your throat with such force they’ll bruise the inside of your ankles bad. “200 hundred years ago, 15 million lice ridden SCRUFFY plague infested drunk Klingons decided to die honorably throwing themselves against the Romulan boarder for the glory of their stupid rundown flea circus empire thinking foul keyed songs of these battles would survive longer than the mere days left any of them believed their life spans still metered, and to their credit for a time those mangy animals did occupy a few boarder settlements, raping 9 rings of the hell out of our women almost as much that as our herd cattle, soaking their pestilence into the well traveled, innocent and running scared which inevitably trickled their disease back to the hub of our all-powerful jeweled dynasty resulting quickly one morning soon after in the Immortal and Indomitable Emperor to the Romulan Star Empire rising from a bed of crushed petals and exhausted beautiful women sans his beetle brown chockablock full of Augmented Human DNA! Further to the Emperors shock his harem, the envy of sexually obtuse despots across the barabaric reaches of the Beta Quadrant were also equally untenably marred… RUNIED and WORTHLESS! The product of 2 thousand years of selected breeding to create the perfect Romulan vomited and wretched over himself and the repugnantly renovated house whores he’d emptied himself through over means and exits just hours earlier, after discovering the flatsculled alien ugliness surrounding and daringly still petting him! The greatest Romulan who will ever live had no choice but to behead every last one of these his most favorite concubines for daring to pass on to his Most Perfect Person, this disgusting common affliction which, for another week at least, was terminally incurable, and even after your Denobulan found a half hearted “cure” the mass suicides from the thought of being “human” ate viciously at the reserves of the Romulan Star Empires Imperial Navy and other less honorable occupations. You had murdered and raped us, and murdered and raped our Emperor we love as a god too! It took just minutes for the Most Perfect Emperor to draw enough blood to sign the papers to see about the utter and complete destruction of Earth and if we had not become the most awesome gardener determined to pull humanity out of creation by it’s gnarly maudlin roots, all you silly people would never have put aside your differences in alliance to create this dreadful United Federation of Planets AND YOU HAVE NEVER THANKED US!!! WE MADE YOU! YOU OWE US! …So what if billions died in a bloody four-year carnage festival? Wasn’t that all worth THIS? THIS!” He waggles his arms round’n’round making a couple big circles swoopingly symbolizing “everything”, the Federation and the immediacy of all their cushy jobs. “Because at the very least, we would have thought that if you hadn’t enjoyed losing control of an air born and even we believe space thriving biogenic weapon based on the human genome so that moron races with idiocy impersonating conviction could get hold of, and pervert your doomsday weapons into new terrors then effect an attack against the genetic sovereignty of the Romulan Star Empire ONCE, then why would you keep your Super Sperm under wraps and not feel confident about blissfully clogging into exactly the same suicidal misadventure endangering the entire universe AND ROMULUS AGAIN! If ONE single Citizen from the ROMULAN STAR EMPIRE is in any way altered in the slightest, made the tiniest fraction more “human” we will blow up the sun in this star system. BOOM! No attempt to convert or co-opt your resources, no surrender, no slaving, we’ll launch a 100 thousand ships and decimate all resistance in the way of stamping out humanity and it’s allies once and for all before their insane genetic apocalyptic meat-theatre, this one and certainly next, because we know you’re so cock happy to never learn fro your even your most obvious mistakes, plays out, dragging every sentient being across space time to an unrecognizably mutated conclusion of being nothing but another damn dirty human being severed form their wonderful alien inhuman ancestry and history! I’ll rework this stupid bloody world into an abattoir with industrialized genocide machinery running 24 hours a day! There are our terms, ROMULUS has spoken… If any of you monkeys touch me, I’ll poke your god damn eyes out.”

“My god! Will you lay that shit to rest! It’s been 200 years! We altered your DNA FUN-damentally and you wiped out maybe a tenth of the populations of most of the charter worlds represented in this room as well as jettisoning Denobula into its sun. We’re even! Shut the hell up! I heard you piling that same shit onto a technician at the replimat last night just because you wanted more gravy for your roast turkey and…Would you like to revise your war reparations to the survivors of the Denobulan civilization or is it possible I can get some peace and quiet from this bullshit?” The Trill Council “Woman” pontificating herein was of course still vainly telling people centuries later that she was only 5000 years old, so easily the lady was very very bored and angered when morons kept recycling and rebroaching too similar a topic every 60 years or so thinking themselves novel and original.

“Well, if history wasn’t already repeating itself you could eat my ass slug belly. It’s all HAPPENING AGAIN! AGAIN! This is the beginning of a new expansion of Human DNA free-floating exterior of that considerably pathetically limited species… We are all going to wake up someday soon as nothing but previously different from another, united by Humanity… Subjected by humanity… Infiltrated and INFESTED BY HUMANITY! I have no damn interest in my ridges sinking into my head my blood transforming into a disgusting foul reddish soup and my penis shrinking inside me until it’s a third the natural god given Romulan minimum. Think about it. A clone of the grandson of the originator of the last load of bollocks stalking the genetically modified offspring of a robot made by that madman Soongs Grandson! We are all at risk. Humanity should be expelled from the Federation because it is too stupid to be allowed to live that it cannpt wantonly endanger the universe repeating the same idiotic mistakes every couple hundred years dragging our necks down to the chopping blocks along side it’s bungling personification of cheese! Kick them the fuck out and then the ROMULAN STAR EMPIRE would only charge you the most minimum fee for disposing of this infectious obnoxious gene trash for you… For YOUR own safety!”

There would be a mild hypnotic effect in effect if anyone was to star directly at 300 people rolling their eyes all at the same time, the Romulingon had trained immunities against most simple mind control technology, but he should infer they call in an extermination squad because the sound of crickets during the pause between his last sentence the impossibility of anyone constructing a response to such lunacy was mighty deafening. “Gods above. “ The Ambassador from Romulus persisting to create a fanclub continues. “Will any of you at least admit that this is certainly the beginning of a New Eugenics War before you dismiss my hyperbola and rhetoric as Speciesism?”

**Crickets.**

“Super Sperm is benign.” Again this theatre of diplomats commit a simulations group response barely 30 seconds after the last proving how knee-jerk sheepy they all really are, as 300 people double take fake out, but when Ambassador Spock talks, everybody listens and everyone with enough sense to rub together gets a little afraid, and also, obviously, just a little turned on.
 
Part 20

Could it really have been a million years since that child had comfortably exported himself through a uridium refinery pipeline which was altogether another story about all amok get out you can find at any good DVD retailer, but Sisko here was going to graze himself down to a nub, then nothing, like the well-used rubber of an illiterate, all the while fretting there was every chance a cleaning skutter would try t’make love to him mistaking the award winning author for organic blockage as if he didn’t already have to be super concerned about too much robot love in his diet because Jake was set ready to face down a villain who’d just professed his love for him an hour ago. Stupid droid liked his book. Fanatic sex fiends kept thinking they “knew him” because they loved his book, but hell it was dang perplexing to think the world hadn’t instead shrunk around the Emissaries son since he had to be the same little boy deep down inside who could perform jumping jacks in so cramped an area?

The weapon stuffed in his shorts just made bumping the edges of the tight enclosure more hazardous but Jake’s kinda sure that if his father wasn’t a psychotic delusion that the two of them could backflush the ship easy from engineering shorting out most all the high functioning duotronics, isolinearics, bioneuralics and positronics which is just about everything that made a star ship work or an Android. Sure people might be hurt too, but if he, um, “they”, did nothing, then everyone was certainly going to die as a certainty. Death sucks. Jake had sworn to himself a might while back that he’d not kill anyone ever again. Four was a perfectly good number to stop at, life of journalistic adventure aside, some people managed to endure an entire lifetime without treading into the responsibility for the butchering of the Neurozine tanked Star Ship because it’s easier to hide and waiting for the bogey man to wander off than to rise to the occasion.

The entire ship tumbled. The ceiling became the floor and the floor became the ceiling not that there was architecturally much difference in the claustrophobic crawlspace except that Jake had damn little experience impelling himself with his shoulder blades. So as you can expect he dented the top of his head too on top of being half drugged asleep but totally drugged awake by supercaffinating his domicile’s air supply after backing enough rum to fell a school of Rigellians. Everything might be a dream, y'know? But bumpity bump bump rattle. Something odd was going on, I mean Lore would have to have already be at battle stations to be flying so erratically for any reason. Well at least he had a fall back position if he couldn’t save himself. Yippy.

In the beginning three hours ago he’d thought Lore was a daydream for a while because that’s how the drink kicked his mind around most of the time, but Sisko knew what men were like, for all the Robot’s talk, Lore had probably thank god moved on and become quickly obsessed over a younger (Sleeping.) piece of crumpet. Men are horrible creatures. Jake was so glad he liked girls. Sure they had their own problems, but at least they were alien problems he’d never have to wonder about why he couldn’t understand because woman are insane from a sub quantum level up, but spurned lovers have a sort of fury independent of gender to be cautious of and once they’d kicked a grill in a few feet ahead of his dead father then Lore’s latest caper could be curtains and Lanny would probably pike him out of a medal again citing how much the average UFP Citizen treasures their ignorance, there’d be some sort of story book show down. His friends brave enough to be black bagged for their opinions about the modern day Göbels he was shlepping claimed that it was because he lost his mother at a young age that he’d… Well, a gentleman would have already said too much, and even a big mouth letch would have said too much between the lines of his last book of poetry but Lanny knew he was talking about her and anyone else too that read the tabloids, and she claimed to enjoy being celebrated so immortally that in a thousand years they’ll be debating over whether the Jake Sisko was really talking about her or not.

Jake stuck his head out of the Tube egress to find his father and the mechanical madman already slamming their fists against mid air and forearms deftly blocking killing blows from either front willing to destroy the opposition. Jake felt he needed glasses; limbs were flailing at three hundred miles an hour. This is not how men fight. It was a demigod vs. a machine. The out come of which would satisfy the lofty egos of all the Philosophers in the universe that there’s finally an accounting over who is shaping the path of man. Gods or machines… Jake in the foreground considers his own lack of bravery to insert himself into a battle he can’t properly follow with his mere human senses really just proves that man itself is in no way charged with the fate of it’s own destiny that it’s totally the invisible forces pushing us from all directions which do the job really. If his dad died again, this day was really going to suck.
 
Part 21.

“I’d read this to him when he was tiny and it was too late to be awake, it’s Yeats. I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand…”

It was a sad day. Jonathan Archer’s many Funerals were beginning all across the United Federation of Planets in memorial to the greatest explorer of the twenty-second century, but for this here most august ceremony planted on Archer IV that did actually have the body of the former UFP President in attendance, the security issues involved, which’d been unconvincingly threatened a fortnight earlier, had been immediately escalated up the wahzoo since after the nefarious Adrik Soong’s rubber cell was found abandoned this morning when his warder had arrived to escort the courageous madman out to breakfast becoming himself too shocked just like everyone else with egg on their awe-ridden faces who’d been forewarned of Soong’s intentions much like how the King of Handcuffs’d made huge press challenging the finest penal lodgings across America during the turn of two centuries previous and thought he was full of shit. Marines were running in circles setting up road blocks 15 light-years any side of earth to anticipate the least.

“And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream, And caught a little silver trout.”

An Enterprise was overseeing security for the event. Not Archer’s Enterprise, the remains of his Enterprise were salvaged after the Kobayahi Maru disaster and reconstituted for exhibition in the fleet museum, but it seemed to be an “okay” replacement which might live up to the legacy of the original. Although Robert April had been revered as the architect of their culture, even that torch had been passed and the turk cooling Captain April’s chair would never cut half the jib. That it was red alert you could tell from the colour of the Captains puffing cheeks, baboon red, Pike was the imperfect image of complete composure rattling off the most terrible words loud enough to melt hair into his subspace radio mic trying to garnish the slightest intelligence about this cluster fuck welting up from beneath belittling anyone the least touch responsible as to how after incarcerating this devious criminal genius for the last 50 years that Soong the degenerate could only stay where they put him only when he felt like it still! Was the father of modern cybernetics, the galaxy’s most notorious 600 pound gorilla, making his way to Archer IV as threatened or had his itchy diatribe to his analyst last week been a ruse… Or even possibly a double bluff that he had an emotional compulsion to pay his respects that Soong was faking out that he was telling the truth about lying? Soldierboys the galaxy over knew well that you can’t talk to anyone claiming to be a genius with any honesty unless you have a hand cannon stuffed down their throat that they’ll certainly trust our reptilian stupidity to shine through. As a baby everyone with an IQ over 140 should be dropped several times to save the rank and file from all the damn pompous grandstanding and parading as they try to prove how enbiggened they are.

“When I had laid it on the floor, I turned to blow the fire aflame, But something rustled on the floor, And some one called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl, With apple blossom in her hair, Who called me by my name and ran…”

O bugger it, they’d all been warned, although the usual paranoid people in charge of being paranoid had evaluated all risks that this madman locked up underneath a trillion tons of concrete claiming he’d tour Earth’s colonies before monologing his friend a last bonny farewell, was finally ravingly duckfuck senile, so they logically didn’t believe him… Why didn’t they believe him?! Now all and sundry were running in circles like a cat with cheese tied to it’s tail fretting if it was all Soong was going to do was “speak” at Jonathan Archers Funeral. Captain Christopher Pike, despite the DOZENS of Admirals and world leaders hereabouts was at the center of the command structure, tactical dominance, which means he might well be tactically dominating up top a spent gallows by sunset if Soong lives up to reputation for incidental collateral damage? Or could it conceivably be, that Adrik Soong was actually a man of his word, that all he sentimentally wanted out of today after mostly harmlessly plying an atomic wedgy to Starfleet’s dignity was to pay some respect to a “friend” that helped the old turd out a few times during the more difficult times in his life? Pike is never that lucky. Pike is supernaturally unlucky. Things are going to go boom.

“And faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering, Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass,”

Planetside doubling as a member of the honor guard as well as the security force, Cadet Spock regimentally had slung an extremely powerful Laser rifle to his side. He was certainly the only person involved in the commemorative military aspect of the ceremony that did not personally know Ambassador Archer but he’s a Vulcan in Starfleet and that in of itself is a powerful symbol for what Jonathan Archer stood for: The friendly unification of vicious mutually hateful species who would rather kick the shit out of each other than be decent. That’s not a completely accurate description of the arrogant Vulcan snobbery from the early days but these’re urges similar to what wasn’t to far from the heart of Archer’s instincts from the first fraction of his life poisoned by the ranting of his quite mentally ill father to an even more junior version of the corpse the universe was allowing “people” to say “hello” to one last time had to overcome. Spock was racially profiled into this job. Positive racism if such a term would dare be coined.

“And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.” Sally Archer didn’t know what else to say to the tens of thousands of people here, and further the billions viewing the proceeding remotely, having survived both her husband and son it was almost as if she’d believe there was no evidence of her existence for the future to embrace despite being firmly rooted on a world named after her child’s achievement as until days ago possibly the greatest living human being… With the utmost composure, the last Archer vacated the spotlight for someone else to lament her boy.

Being Vulcan Spock cared neither one way nor another over the passing, mourning and other silly human reflection. Being half human of course, he crushed any stalking “feelings” that tried to steer him towards some minor Romulanesque display with the weight of a billion stacked Star Ships but there was something dready on the horizon. He was in the headlights. The Cadet could see her. She was a predator. If he had a choice Spock would never ever ever ever have the imminent conversation because this woman was known to be an unbalanced unclean drug addict who would most probably draw unnecessary parallels between their lives insensitively marking him also as possibly unclean and unbalanced and worse: human. Spock’d been fighting comparisons against her since soliciting the academy that against his identity she had long since become the practical definition of anathema to the 20something colliding of two opposing cultures. Maybe all the tiresomeness would come to a head now and never be need come be mentioned again but coming in the face finally with the real source of all his contrition enacted no feeling one way or another but… It was still going to be absolutely exhausting to contain her within the civil realms of conversation good Vulcans stay within because she was an unclean, unbalanced drug addict.

“Spock.”

“Admiral.”

“Today, call me T’Pol.”

“T’Pol.”

“I have been following your education.”

“It is agreeable?”

“Most satisfactory.”

“You will speak for the dead?”

“It is human tradition.”

“I should not be here.”

“You are my proxy.”

“Humans.”

“We all look the same to them.”

“ …” Young Spock doesn’t quite know what to say. He is sure the most powerful woman in Starfleet, a Vulcan… The most powerful Vulcan in Starfleet just made a “joke” because there is almost nothing similar between the two of them that a Human would confuse an old woman for a young man? Corruption. Spock steels he must be careful not to never allow the weighted surroundings of his far too human crewmates to pervert his own center of logic this thoroughly as well. His mother knew better than to try and be funny, it was a completely alien language to any Vulcan yet… Maybe it wasn’t “funny” but he’s sure the construction of the sentence possessed the correction level of confliction to justify the descriptive parameters of… “I cannot see how that is possible. We are of different genders and height, and weight and hair colour and eye colour and hair length.”

“I have had two human hybrid children.”

“Interesting.” Spock is well aware of “Elizabeth”, a badly made clone by human extremists used to put foreword a backward speciesist point across, but the very knowledgeable young Vulcan was unaware of another Human Vulcan Hybrid other than himself, especially one sired by an individual so completely in the public-eye under scrutiny without mercy as this unbalanced, unclean drug addict. He should report her to Starfleet Medical for being delusional. Insane people should not hold rank and power in government. Maybe she was back on her drugs? Admirals should not be strung out of tripping either. History has clearly shown that that is how too many wars have begun. History had also never recorded that Admiral T’Pol of Vulcan had never had a second child.

“You chose not to believe me?”

“I chose to find corroboration.”

“That is logical.”

“My father…”

“Jonathan and I found a derelict Star Fleet vessel adrift in the recess between star systems lost from the distant future. The desiccated lone crewman among other attributes shared a human and Vulcan ancestry. You are not the end of our kind. More will follow. We will inspire. Be prideful of the contributions. You will bring cohesion to the unification of your parent’s two cultures because you have to be important. This is the shape of things to come and they are good.”

“The Vulcan Science Directorate has deemed that Time Travel is impossible.”

“If you believe everything they tell you, then an experience like Enterprise is wasted on you Spock.”

“That is not logical.”

“Logic is only the beginning.”

Spock raises his Laser rifle, takes aim and fires, fire which is absorbed by the personal shield surrounding the distant well-wisher in the crowd of poorly vetted mourners. Radically different offensive weapons had to be devised soon because there were too many ways to back end around the effectivity of a good old fashioned Laser, there was some talk about re-exploring the rejected possibilities of phased plasma again after the technology had been dismissed 30 years ago when a few phase pistols had exploded while velcroed harmlessly to the sides of some unsuspecting victims of science not completely understanding what the repercussions of too quickly pushing the boundary walls of discovery were, but even a weapon that will blow your crotch off when you’re least expecting it, is way better than a gun no more lethal than a torchlight when you’re supposed to be drawing a line in space against evil “IT’S SOONG!” Spock yells, hopefully he assumes others will judge him that he is only using such great volume that the other guards can quickly realize to concentrate their firepower and overload the shield protecting the enemy rather than as a human might suspect that Spock is reacting emotionally from a surge of adrenalin and shock. Everything has to appear calculated or he is a Romulan, it’s as simply as clear as that.

The word is raised, ships in orbit transport VIP’s to safety before they’re shot accidentally or on purpose. It’s as if the red sea was parting for the escaped mental patient making his way towards the coffin. “Really!” Trying to act hoity above the melee as if he’s narrating some pompous Acturian holodocumentry Adrik Soong treats the Laser basting like… “I used to be the life of the party. People would see me coming and have a cold one waiting. But now? Ingrates. Have I really done enough to’ve become such a pariah? Stop shooting me Vulcan!” Soong pips his fists to his hips glaring maliciously at the demonic marksmen like a near-matricided mother hen. Spocks thumb however amplifies the amount of power being charged into the deathray increasing the whine and tone running the palate of the best interior decorators swatch collection. “You’re giving me a migraine, do you know how much that hurts? There’s never a aspirin around when I really need one.”

“Put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees.” Spock clearly annunciates like Jimi Hendrix’s Marshal Amp cranked up to 10. Four other security guards, and a M.A.C.O too had joined in the gang zap pouring at least 1.41 gigawatts into Soong’s ineffably well working wall of safety, if it were overloading then shouldn’t the bugger be glowing, changing colour… Something?! The fricking genius must have thought up some incredible new technology which will change the face of the galaxy. He did that a lot. Adrik was going to be insufferable until someone figured out how to build a gun that can punch through his magic barrier. People wondered if he really invented things to be arrogant more than he was arrogant about the things he invented?
“Clear the area for Enterprises main batteries!” Socks huge voice continues to bake into the wax lining all’s eardrums. Some might think he has superhumanaly large lungs (and breath control at that.) to move sound through every buggers frontal lobes right smack into their childhoods certain father knows best reptilian abeyance drives. Admirals and Councilors were jumping through hoops arranged by a mere Cadet whose dictation was the wisest route to comply with because he sounded like he was top dog which some how he was just because he took point, which gave the Science Officer in training the same sort of tactical preeminence which had Pike lording over the current President who had long since run away not half the man Jonathan Archer had been predisposed to ignore his responsibility to protect an Empire, but yes up in orbit Enterprise was pinpointing it’s main gun on Soong because Spock had cleared the area and not the other way around that Pike wanted to shoot Soong.

“Don’t melt Jonathan!” Soong objects above the din of this Vulcan child giving orders no one thinks to question, hoping that Archers mother would agree with him in a stroke of solidarity? If he’d known what a handsome woman she was back in the beginning, then a younger Soong might have made overtures to become Jonathan’s pappy because that’s what victory really smells like. Alas the transporter had scooped her up, off and away along with every most everyone else that wasn’t armed and on duty determined to whack him.

Spock counters in new lulling conversational tones “Cremation is an acceptable human burial practice. Turn off your shield, put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees or Enterprise will carve off this edge of the planet from under you and push you into space.”

“You’re well within the strike zone Vulcan. I’m not worth it.”

Soong was dead centre of the impact which stretched away from him precisely 20 feet in every directly because the geometry of a high-energy weapon is a perfected exact mathematics. The closest protractors were mildly sunburnt from the effect despite being barricaded behind this and that pews, tables and now burning foliage which in all is more effect than felt by the now one might say indomitable Adrik Soong. Their efforts to bully him were getting more tiresome than futile and if they continued to fleabite him he was going to hand these people a righteous smack down since he could only be so patient when dealing with even such childlike minds as these. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Spock lies for the first time in his life. “That was a warning shot.”

“Really? Pull the other one you Vulcan S.O.B. That was full power and half assed and you know it and… T’Pol? Oh my? Is that your kid?” Across the cursed Earth… “Cursed Archer (IV)” of the battlefield, two ancient institutions lock wits like simple people would gibberingly wave.

“No.” She looks over at the square shouldered man at arms, thinks about sleeping with him in 2 years, 3 months, 4 weeks, 6 days, and 17 hours, then repeats her answer to clear up the matter totally: “No. This is not my child.”

“Really? My bad. Not as smart as I thought am I? But so help me if one of you monkeys so much as looks at me cockeyed again I am not going to bring Archer back from the dead like I had so generously decided I’d… I’m trying to be damn Santa Claus! Cork up your chimneys while you’re at it! Bloody ignominy, sometimes I think it’s not even worth escaping from the asylum in the morning some days!”
 
Part 22.

Modular mass production fit to Starfleet’s anal uniform requirements aside, Elba II’s nearly vacant mess reminded Janeway of Voyager, but then frankly absolutely bar-nothing in this universe reminded this our terminally nostalgic Lipstick-Mussolini of Voyager after some insidious fashion, and contrary everything ahead was a pale wash of the best days of her life from when she still had the opportunity to minimize the consequences of her famous and disastrous decision. As long as they had been all still lost in space it was a question of how right she could do by her crew, though now that she had done right by them, the judging came issue about how well done by and quickly the donning right was done which is exactly the sort of extreme pressure which had probably guilted another Janeway to destroy her universe temporally tweaking it’s supposedly inviolatable foundations like a mole devouring as yet unearthed carrot tips.

“You don’t seriously expect me to stick that in my mouth?” She’s framing this insult with a smirk, which could be an effort at humour and he shouldn’t belt her cross the room? Who can tell with such a bitter pill why there’s sugar on her sharp edges sometimes?

“It’s tea.” Her doteful capturer tries to ease the old ladies concerns who is probably demonizing his kindness on some level like a rueful child ungrateful for not being allow to play in traffic. Why he bothers? God only knows. Sure she finally said “Sorry” but he could tell that she didn’t really mean it, but at the very least some one in power knew there were consequences from rubbing Super Sperm the wrong way.

The Admiral’s not completely sure what sort of relationship is developing between the two of them, beauty and the blot, but if it turns out to be slavery, Kathryn Janeway is not going to make it easy for this walking lode of clotted foreskin cheese. “I can see its tea.”

The Abominable Spermman has an English accent for some reason. “You don’t want it? Think about it luv, you’d had one hell of a day. What about a coffee instead?” He sat down on the other side of the table from her maybe two arm lengths from one of the more powerful individuals in the Federation today ready to explain his point of view and maybe apologise for letting the situation run away with itself. Ransom-wise, Janeway overvalued by a few hundred pounds of dilithium, if they could escape the net after the exchange, this Sperm could probably trade her out for two Star Ships if they were inclined to go about petty criminal adventures to pay for their “war” against “whoever”.

Janeway hates losing power. She doesn’t react well to being bullied even less well than she tolerates people fighting back she who she is bullying. “Thankyou, but I’ll make it myself if you trust me not to replicate a phaser? …Look, it’s nothing personal, but I’m usually somewhat worried about where most peoples hands have been… But with you, I’m more worried about what they’re made of that some of you might innocently leak off into my beverage. No offence.”

“Didn’t you ever go swimming with Seven of Nine?”

“What?”

“Borg nanites are not only sexually transmitted but bond to sweat secretions that is you were to both in the same water or swim recreationally, or even drink out of the same tea cup you would have been assimilated.”

“We squeezed and rinsed her daily like a dish sponge collected with old suddy foodwater. Seven barely had enough nanites to keep her systems functioning.”

“Not unlike what you’re going to do to my species Kathryn?”

‘Well you stop hoard up malice that doesn’t exist? We did know that you were sentient of that there was a greater civilization of your kind out there than what we thought we had contained under laboratory conditions. You’re far too dangerous to swim free if their wasn’t a moral conciousness to to keep your reproductry drive in check. I know better now.”

“I’ve read your loge, you make the same mistakes week after week never learning from any of your adventures.”

“That’s mean.”

“You had the opportunity to pad Starlogs with praise and self congratulations, and maybe you did but then I can’t hardly dare to conceive of what sort of monster you must have been charting havoc across the delta Quadrant trying to make your way home at the expense of any one who got in your way.”

“Look dicksnot, if you want to make this personal, then I suggest you bring it because I am a righteous person who is willing to stand behind every action she has ever committed in and out of this uniform. You don’t have the humanity to judge me at all from you askew alien perspective I’m going to seem irrational but if you want a piece of me I’ll thump you hard.”

The composite pastelike snowman globule figure of a quasitrillion matriculating seeds took the balmy racism in it’s stride after a vote form those on the outer mantel bothered with what’s gong on in the outside world from their colony, because the universe would be a dark cold place if “he’d” exterminate everyone that was disgusted by his good looks, which was more or less inside their potential to accomplish, a school had done the math once, if given possibly 10,000 years during which to stretch out to every side of the infinite reaches, then executing all life simultaneously is conceivable on paper. So to keep the peace all this spunk might as well assume a more user-friendly appearance to possibly ease the barbs flowing forth ferociously from this witty witty witty woman. Like the ancient Roman Legionaires would rally about their shields to mimic different patterns after certain animals these quintillions of sperm stopped being so lazy as to just wander about anywhere and started impersonating a solid shape all the while along beginning to refract light in just such a way that every few thousand of them operated as if they were a pixel on a 20th century television unit. The transformation for someone who had holidayed on the other side of the galaxy for the entire course of the bloody Dominion War, that they weren’t wrought with nightmares about the Changeling menace was that of “impressments”… “I’m supposed to seriously believe you’ve never begged to have some guy you lov, well… I hate it how every time I try to talk to one of your lot that it just degenerates into a series of gross sexual innuendo and puns. Can we just try to treat each other like civilized people and halt all the idiotic bigotry? I call myself “Rutherford” when I look like this. Hello.” And he place his all too appearing Human hand out to offer her this tea one last damn time

Much better But… diplomatically at this point she should be taking the mug and drinking a little in good faith to develop a dialogue… Establish common ground. But then no Starfleet Captain before her has possibly forced so many dozens of worlds to petition war against the Federation before her mission on Voyager. The first missiles form Sikaris were expected to try to hit their targets within 15 years.

“Rutherford” gives in with the olive branch and starts drinking her tea himself since he’s not one to wasteful to a good cuppa. “Sometimes I don’t even know why I bother trying to be nice if no ones going to believe I’m sincere about anything… Mmmmm. See. It wasn’t poisoned. You had nothing to worry about.”

Cogs in her brain go first clunk, then thunk. “I know you.”

“I was around, and I have made you tea before, and you drank it, but I’ve been doing odd jobs here on Elba for the last half century. Crazy people yelling out about their sperm attacking them usually end up here which saves us time when we have to clean up our messes sounding off all over the galaxy after an unexpected out break. You’d be amazed how long we’ve been cohabitating symbiotically with your kind tying to be quiet and not bother no one much. ”

“Would I now?” Kathy rolls her eyes three times.

“You still think we’re trying to rule you all?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not the bad guy. You’ve forced the Federation to the brink of civil war Kathryn. Hardly a jewel worth collecting anymore if you’re all half dead? On the other hand if by some chance you stop half of Starfleet from destroying the other half, because you thought you could actually boss the Jean-Luc Picard around without explaining why you’re not tinpot insane then this is a wonderful safe harbour our enemies would be too fearful to mount any siege against just to act out minor animosities about tedious sins past.”

“Then you do have enemies?” Her ears quip like a dog at dinnertime.

‘You know the Dominon?”

“I’ve heard of it in passing.”

“The Founders of the Dominion were originally really descended from a contraceptive spermicidal jelly quite popular with the promiscuous females of their first homeworld. An aquatic civilization of huge sperm-whale-like creatures packing “proto-Founders” with 30 foot long flippers all over their reproductive organs in huge scoops to live lives of irresponsibility and sexual immorality. Not the greatest noblest origin when you’re trying to write a bible to explain god and the creation of your race. That’s why they really hate you solids. As much as they despise being bred artificially as a slave race they’re still engrained to perform the singular task of negating the reproductive aspects of sex and they have to use enormous heaps of sentience to not fall victim to their instinctive compulsions to seep into some passing solids panties and keep it safe from irresponsible entities like myselves and other sperm form any other pubic mammal in universe. Why else do you think they clone their most trusted advisors from the most manipulated of species comfortable not to react their slated abortionistic impulses? ”

“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrright.”

“I’m serious.”

“I don’t believe that for one second.” Sure she doesn’t want to bite, but there’s a juicy delicious tantalizing mouthwatering precious tasty worm rigging seductively like a half naked rugby player on that incredibly dangerous death dealing jaggedly sharp hook. Damn it. Rabbit hole. “ …Vorta’s and Jem’Hadar don’t have sexual organs? Really?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’ve never read anything about this.”

“Do you think the Founders would truly tolerate aberrant servants irresponsibly created out of their control? Do you think they would trust anyone who had the least applicable sex drive not to put mating in front of the Dominions objectionable objectives? Do you think they honestly want to risk their enemies farming Jem’Hadar? Have you ever seen a female Jem’hadar?”

“I’ve seen female Vorta.”

“Surgically altered transvestites.”

“This is ridiculous and fantastical. You are ridiculous and fantastical.” Janeway regrets waking up this morning, she needs a time machine to go back and tell herself that she can avoid the mother of all headaches if she just rolls over and sleeps through the last 14 hours. Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance of idiocy doubly so.

“Think about it, every species humanity has gone to war with, including especially humanity has been the market place for some awful series of sexual atrocities ranging from singular abuse to the orderly construction of rape camps. In every war, that is except the Dominion War, and it wasn’t just because you’re all really really fugly. Kathryn, what does a eunuch need with a rape camp?”

Janeway finds that she can’t stop blinking to compensate with the grating disgust she’s overflowing with from having to listen to such filth. “This is the most dizzying and decentralized attempt at brainwashing I have even been witness to, should I just put my fingers in my ears and wait for the torture to begin which has to be less aggravating than this mountain of horse dung you’re creating and shovelling?” Kathryn is highly unamused that the guy in charge of whether she lives or dies is taking the piss and doesn’t seem highly motivated to press this victory into some sort of agenda. Which is totally buggering because if she doesn’t know his endgame then how the hell can she stop this tub of goo and save the day? About now back on Voyager (Ahhhhhhhhhh, Voyager. Those were the days.) she’d be placing a wager for a weeks replicator rations that this bugger is completely loony living in La-La Land (Duh, he does live in an Asylum.), which she might be able to use to her advantage unless he was just stalling? Stalling for what?

“Your loss if you’re unwilling to accept the truths to the secret history of the universe unfeld to you Admiral Janeway. Scales falling from your eyes, all that tosh. I have no trouble leaving you as ignorant as I found you or is that too late a wish short of plugging you into a Klingon mind sifter which is something unseemly I’d never uncoil on a first date.”

“This is a date?” All the bile in her stomach is getting rowdy about making a break for it.

“From the intelligence I’ve read on you Kathryn, it’s been so long I’m not sure you’d recognize a date if it bit you in the ass. FYI when there’s some guy leaving hickies on your bum, that’s a “good” date.”

Her nose wrinkles from being talked down to about such child-learnt concerns. “I’m not a moron. I’ve just been busy.”

“Are you at least getting your 5 hugs a day? A human consciousness really seizes up if you doesn’t get 5 hugs a day.”

“You really think I have some serious intimacy problems don’t you?”

“Not me personally, just making conversation, but the Tal-Shiar has extensive records on you starting from your tennis competitions in middle-school. You do know why they would be so deeply interested in you right?”

Janeway grumbles something under her breath about how time travel gives her a headache. “You are an invasive biological entity capable of co-opting a female entirely until she is nothing but a factory mass producing an identical human child who we calculate will begin producing Super Sperm (excuse the pun.) come puberty. You are my natural enemy by design; I have no interest in continuing to be cute. State some terms or push off.”

The Rutherford colony can’t believe how resolved this woman is to believe the worst in him and his ilk when he’s being as nice as spermily possibly in the face of someone who is thinking how best to kill him. “For the last time Kathryn, this is not an invasion. Learn a new song. This is just a careless accident; we honestly prefer anonymity to the tired duties of government if we did take over. If I can’t convince you how difficult the Federation would be to rule how do you think I could convince 90 billion people just like you to behave and submit to reason that we can control them and do what we want with out a fuss? Micromanaging an aggressive and diverse population yearning to be free destined to stab us in the back is shit. That’s no ones cup of tea…. You know, if you’d taken my cup of tea, that would have been a much more convincing metaphor. ”

Arms crossed. “You’re still a threat on a personal level, I’m not comfortable in the slightest with what you do to women.”

“You frighten me too. Uteruses eat sperm. Can’t you seem we’re at a standoff?”

“I want a phaser and I want to stick it in my mouth.”

Sigh… “Clones. Brainless clones. Just motherless bred meat for breeding meat. Practically people shaped fish tanks. We know that it’s horrific if the process begins on a thinking creature, there were trillions in the beginning who couldn’t stand the guilt of what they did to their grandmothers, who committed suicide en mass and frankly we don’t like drawing attention to ourselves, just so precisely some one gung ho like yourself doesn’t begin some high and mighty crusade to dab us up off the face of creation.”

“What does all this mean to me?”

“Nothing much, but we would love it if you wouldn’t destroy the Federation bickering with Picard.”

“I would too. I just have to force him to heel.”

“This isn’t about rank. Two cults of personality are coming face to face and one of you is going to get their nose mashed.”

“We’re “bickering” over you. I’m the one who wants to keep it all hush, which means even though I’m probably still out to get you now, but back then before I knew you posed a more invasive threat I was in toe with your partyline to sweep your potential for celebrity and disaster under the carpet. It’s Picard you should be worried about. He’s out there intent to let it out of the bag. I’m practically your friend, is there any need to make me feel so imprisoned?”

“If you want us to stop Picard for you, if you want us to kill Picard for you, just ask.”

Janeway feels like Faust. “What?”

“if we’re n the same side, we’ll destroy your enemies for you.”

“At what cost?”

‘I’m totally benevolent with no alterior motives.”

“I’ve been lied to by experts.”

“Are you calling me a liar.”

“Everybody lies, and I suspect that you are a few trillion some bodies.”

‘Are you calling me fat?”

“Oh dear god… It doesn’t matter want you want, or if I need your help, because this is going to be a fair fight. The Prime Directive works both ways, as much as we do not generally feel inclined to subvert the natural evolution of other cultures, mummifying their sense of accomplishment defying their justification to exist in the face of piddling adversity from their own uncondescended efforts that they have false confidence in the face of real threats, then we sure as hell don’t want some other busy bodied Aliens to impress their values on the Federation steering my civilization either by crutching and padding my decisions which might not have the conviction to tread water absolutely and equally as much as I’d despise my enemies being bankrolled and educated by god monsters from selfproclaimed more evolved civilizations selfevaluatedly infinitely more ethically able to push us around like tin soldiers rolling dice to see who lives and dies to further their own cultures ends no matter how magnanimous their intentions. I will not have my peoples be a puppet and I will not cheat my culture out of the definition of resolute accomplishment from standing on our own two feet strong against the wind because we’re not cripples, and we’re not children and we’re damn well not simps so you can take your aid and it’s invisible strings and stick them up your damn ass.”

She’s angry. He was only tying to help her help him, what’s the big deal? “O. So that’s what the Prime directive is really about. Do unto weaklings as you would have the more powerful do unto you?”

“Concise. Unhypocritically, the Prime Directive is a very selfish document. It saves our ass in so many ways. From ourselves and the guilt of dooming others as much as buffering the Federation from becoming a slave race.”

Rutherford had always thought that the Prime Directive was for Olympic Swimmers who didn’t like getting their toes wet. If you’re going into space to make space a better place, then go into space to make space a better place. “I’m not going to help you if you insist you don’t need my help as a reward for resiliency.”

“Not what I was angling for in the slightest.” She’s rolling her eyes again. An act which is totally becoming a motif of this ass backwards conversation.

“I should hope so.”

“Though I’m astounded you’d think I would try to pull some reverse psychology psychology on you. I can’t imagine the back fire if I failed to play you. What would blow up in my face? I’d never want to be caught manipulating you… It would be rude.”

Rutherford smacks the back of his head causing a raucous eruption of about 2 quarts of sperm to spew out his nose clothing the table with it’s milky vicissitude for a few frank seconds before the billions of life forms get their shit together from after the shocking mid air journey away from the home-fires comfort of the Rutherford colony into becoming little more than a 6 by 8 stain supporting a menial occupation to reflect and refract light creating images of events taking place a few light years away, reminding Janeway of the forward view screen from her precious Voyager which stalwartly lead her safely through the midst of utter precariousness with complete honesty for seven years. The sperm on the table remotely depicted a vicious battle between several ships, one of them easily identified as Picard’s new Enterprise all engaged in combat with what appeared to be a familiar flying man unchecked by the harshness of a hard vacuum and each other.

“What am I looking at?”

Rutherford identifies the players pointing out each, forcing some magnification from his view puddle to clarify the unfolding disaster for the classy human vision of loveliness most men would break all their own fingers to wash her laundry for. “Picard is on the way to Earth to tell everyone that my kind is an uncontrollable plague you personally are trying to illegally weaponize. The USS Rutledge there, barely more than a runabout, was following your orders to blockade or destroy Picard and his mammoth warship 12 times the size of Rutledge however unfortunately she was hijacked by the mad Android Lore who has probably murdered the crew. Usually there’s no love lost between Lore and Picard. They seem to be shooting at each other as much as at Lord Garth Master of the Universe who is on a never ending quest to rescue his girlfriend, a girlfriend, Enterprises Chief Engineer who just so happens to be infested with rouge super sperm and is also regarded as family to Picard having served under him for nearly 20 years and carrying the child of Lore’s Brother who Picard considered a son. Am I talking too fast luv? Then there’s this pesky bugger firing torpedoes from the periphery, a rogue Soong which escaped the culling on Vagra II who’s taken it upon himself to control the spread of Super Sperm even as we conversely frown upon his existence. …Woo! Look at them go, they’d have to be replicating more torpedoes by the palate to satiate all their tubes at this rate to keep the barney stoked tilting each other unsteady neither front knowing who to trust not stab them in the back. There’s more Stars Ships on their way. Riker in the trident is giving speeches about first duties, and higher moralities than the letter of the law as we speak only hours away form the current logger heads.”

‘I’ve got nothing to do with this. If Lore murdered my agents then no one right this second is representing my needs and interests. There’s no blood on these hands.”

“Exactly, There’s time to spare. The butchering of the crew of the Rutledge bought you some time to get your senses together.”

“I am not going to ever look on the execution of 50 Starfleet officers as a good thing.”

“Then you’ll never be made an admiral of anything important Kathryn if you’re not able to sacrifice the needs of the few for the lives of the many. Oh, look, they’re working together to take down Lord Garth Master of the Universe. Team work, well, that was unexpected.”

“Do you have to call him that?”

“Lord Garth master of the Universe?”

“Yes, that.”

“Just in case he’s listening, I don’t want him to think I’m being disrespectful, you can never be too careful with the omniscient, omnipotent and unhinged now can we? Everyone has to be handled just so as to leave the universe a better place than we found it.”

“Just so?”

“Just so.”

“Are you handling me?”

“Are you handling me?”

“I asked first.”

“I made you ask the question. Think back in fear at what else I’ve made you do with the application of superior psychology during the last few weeks Kathryn.”

“Rubbish.”

“You’ve been mindlessly working for me for months like some drone.”

“I don’t have to stand for this.” Janeway stands up.

“Of course you do, or I’ll begin executing the inmates, then the staff, then you.”

Janeway sits down.

“I’m not even going to pretend that you’ve told me anything close to the truth “Ruthorford”, but I do believe that you are a threat on a universal level, and if it comes down to a choice between the execution of the 200 souls in this installation or handing you the last vital ingredients to galactic domination then I welcome death with open arms. Cut my head off please you rancid tower of fêted spunk.”

“And that’s the sort of grit which made me fall in love with you Kathryn Janeway.”
 
Part 23.

Scuttlebutt said sides had to be chosen before they were chosen for you because as much as the general order was to confront Picard and blow him out of space, if Captains were disobeying Admirals, or Admirals with giving insane illogical orders then some Lieutenants and Commanders might see fit to relieve their Captains whose conscience convinced them their Commanding Officers were in error, who’d in turn be blind sided by the Ensigns with their own lofty opinions. Battle lines were being drawn down the middle of Star Ships. Picard is good. Okay there was that Locutus period in his life to be sure, but generally speaking, Picard “fights evil” so if you fight Picard ipso facto then you are evil. It was a simple logical call. Who wants to be evil? However the thing about Admirals is that they’re privy to the bigger picture, they know things you don’t and the chain of commands alleviates the upper ups the burden of having to explain why you doing exactly what they say is in your best interest to be doing, even if you’re falling on your sword how it must be in the best interests of the Federation that your sacrifice is required… But it’s Picard! By right of conquest he should be running things! Then there’s that Wrongway Janway person who must’ve made up her mind to make possibly the greatest human being alive today into public enemy number one because of a damn good reason which is more the fool to her that she’s generating doubt by not supporting her orders with corroborating evidence that she’s started a civil war almost because she thinks thinking people will act like convictionless drones? It went beyond fishy, but Janeway had supporters of her own personality as well as much as sticklers for a military tradition for doing what you’re told or your children will be speaking Klingonese. Eleven ships received the first orders to intercept Picard. Those 11 ships had 15,000 crewmen. The orders to run black came a touch too late. Word spread like heat rash in a spa pool.

Earth

Erica felt she was in a rut. Lunatics insisting they should be in charge of the Federation without supporting the ideals which make the Federation worthwhile living in were again trying to recruit her into an armed insurrection. Was it her hair cut? If this was a fall of Rome back seat driving tug of war her homeland had to look forward to, then it might be more merciful to sell out to the Romulans and have it all snuffed out quick and mercifully. Picard or Janeway? She’d met them both, strong individuals, Picard was left out on the periphery exactly because he was so righteous he’d sacrifice a pocketful of planets to keep everything honest and noble, meanwhile Janeway was “Look at me! I got my crew and then spent a decade charting space one alive today will ever see first hand again.” Erica was a little contemptuous that Janeway had been promoting to Admiral for her decompressed damage control skills after massing up a simple bounty hunting gig but an Janeway seemed to be on the side of Angels and Picard seemed to be willing to let the federation Burn just to prove he was right about something which had yet to come to light, and if Janeway and Nechayev had their way probably never would. Erica gave the orders and set course to intercept Picard and if necessary bhlow him out of space for daring to let, maybe his pride(?) push everything she held dear to the brink.

Mars.

It was obvious why he got this job. He was her keeper. She was Borg, but now she was his girlfriend and the only human being alive which could intelligibly integrate a trans-warp coil into a Federation Star Ship without something going boom, and then so certainly Seven of Nine was the only creature period in the Federation who could mastermind a transwapspaceworthy Star Ship form first principles to scary end product without something going twice as boom, because just lets face it, simply slapping Borg technology into existing Star Ships was first problematic and second morally bankrupt. It’s dangerous to use technology you don’t understand, and it’s more dangerous to use technology you can’t repair and jury rig after the universe inevitably goes pear-shaped. They’d started combing new alloys two years earlier leading her own “collective” here on Mars(It really didn’t go down well whe she tried to assign drone designations to her team.) where she taught the absorbent minds about Oceania Planetia everything they needed to know to do what she does and now finally with Champaign vacuum frozen to the hull they had together built a Federation Star Ship which could cross the galaxy and back within weeks instead of centuries.

Despite how Seven’d softened over the years, she still refused to take a Starfleet commission, so pushing her around was never an option since she only followed the orders she willed to, so everything was on her time table at her sufferance, the way his Blonde genius liked it, god it was arousing when she took control, though if Seven of Nine were in the uniform, subservient to Starfleets hierarchy then he’d obviously never have been promoted to Captain and given the reigns to a ship which was going to reclassify the potential of good and evil their culture can inflict on the universe. Soon enough the Federation would have to break contact with simple warp-basic cultures treating them with kid gloves then, just like they’d been treating prewarp cultures for the last 200 years because of the Federations increased ability to contaminate cultures was proportionately in line with their ability to propel themselves into far away places they don’t belong, which was now extragalactically they’d be mixing the ideologies of distant species that should not even be aware of each other god forbid contradicting and hating one another desiring Federation technology to spread war and idiocy themselves faster and harder. What would the universe look like now if the Vulcans had given man warp technology in the 1930’s that horrid ideas like untapped capitalism might have been a plague destroying world mimicking mans selfishness and greed?

The dangers of enhancing a warp culture with transwarp technology is just as detrimentally potentially apocalyptic as pulling post industrial planets into the warp driven greater communities of the immediate galaxy, but that was food for thought after they finalized how to make this behemoth work on a larger scale and the innovative methods of constructing huge amounts of cheap and clean power and the weapons… Their society had to resign before the Romulans and Klingons learnt how to make transwarp torpedoes. Was it selfish to hoard the technology? Sure. Was it dangerous to allow idiot and psychotic child races to proliferate weapons that can attack other galaxies before they can even cohabitate with their own people? Every one close enough to be at a loss from the absence of the federation had had three hundred years to willingly join their happy family celebrating harmony and unity and they probably have a month left still before there is no Federation to speak of that the 157 member worlds will transport somewhere else more isolated from the hi-jinks of these more backward planets, and then the Council will start acting hoity like all the other space gods until their now peers close the technology gap, if ever.

Sure they cheated, “stole” what they needed from the Borg by reintergrating a drone back into the human race and coaxing all they needed out of her but pride cometh before the fall and if the Borg can’t be as careful as to not radically transform the Federation into something to be feared, then once they had a few more transwarp ships like the USS Raven Seven had built with phaser batteries powered by matter/antimatter/mirrormatter reactors, well lets just say that the Borg Collective was going to have a closing down sale with heavily discounted prices like nobodies business. Captain Kim knew he finally had the chance to save the woman who practically raised him; saving her bacon finally in the smallest effort to repay the second ost wonderful woman in the galaxy for all those good years she’d held him by the scruff of his neck teetering on the rim of his own colossal stupidity and immaturity. Kathryn Janeway was always right and Harry Kim had the most powerful ship in the Federation at his disposal to make sure there was no argument against her disposition otherwise no matter how many other Captains were allying themselves with Jean-Luc Picard, Captain Harry Kim was determined to see that his friend, a human being as loving to him his own mother was going to put down any insurrection which was testing her certitude because there’s no reason to doubt someone as perfect as Kathryn Janeway .

Jupiter Station.

Commodore Geordi La Forge had taken the desk job of looking after the welfare of every Star Ship passing through Sector 001 a day after Leah told him she was pregnant and 23 hours and 56 minutes after the second most beautiful woman in his life finally agreed to marry him. For the last 20 minutes however he’d been throwing his weight around kindly asking everyone that likes him to put aside their duty to Starfleet and mount a rebellion because Picard stands for decency and any one who says any different is a dirt lying scumbag. If it was just Janeway sure, they could laugh it off, her 5 minute old Admiralty was little more than a cosmetic gold star for a… Geordi had been lost in the Delta Quadrant too, trapped 70 thousand light years away from home BUT effortlessly he’d made it back home in 10 minutes with out nary no one considering he’d deserve a promotion to Commander at all. **Sigh** …The problem was that with a powerhouse like Alyanna Nechayev backing the Picard hitsquad, it shredded any legal recourse to cut any military action off at the knees with some sensible level headedness. Not only did Alyanna Necheyev write the law, she rewrote it to get away scary struff and ignored it utterly as a criminal if anyone had the grumbahs to call her on it.

Geordie had twelve ships at his command and he’d stripped three more of there crews and locked them down in the brig and other detainable areas on the station. Even so close to earth the forces he had collected were sandwiched inbetween the opposition, but no matter the trouble, jean luc Picard would save the day and it would all end up aces because that was the Captain’s Job to be a hero who kills monsters not that Geordie knew who the monsters where this time, but their relationship was built on unconditional trust. He was going to war and he wasn’t asking questions or reason might get in the way of doing the right thing.

The Midas Array

“Join us!”

“Join us!”

“Join us!”

Reg had heard the same sort of enlistment throughout a 20th century Zombie “movie” last month viewed alongside his buddy Tom Paris the anachronistic fetishist, but really how this enlistment clarion ideologically bisected Starfleet hit closer to home was reminiscence from how his home had broken as a child when he wished dearly that either of his mother or pappy had said “Join us… Join us... Join us…” as if they loved him instead of his father losing the coin toss and then raising him to be wary of strong women. Somehow he had become third officer in this administration and since Admiral Paris was currently strangling his immediate inferior who said “Someone with half a brain had to end this madness and recall Janeway’s fleet before it was too late.” Reg then phasered the wrong guy asleep and then corrected this by blasting the other guy he called boss too into the land of nod firmly placing the legal responsibilities of the Midas Array on his drooping shoulders until one of his superiors wakes up and tries to Court Martial him if not both. There was a civil war brewing and the ball was in his court, he had to QUICKLY decide how to co-ordinate a fleet set to destroy the man he thought of as a father of tell Star Fleet to suck a lemon? As far as defining moments go, and as terribly in love with Admiral Janeway as Barclay might be, and as much as he believes in her uncanny ability to win out every day holding up the heaviest ideals… Father knows best. Picard was coming to Earth and Reg had the Authority and firepower to clear the way.

“Um, hell.. O? Is this thing on? Testing? Yes. Well. This is Commander Reginald Barclay, acting commanding officer of this installation as Admiral Paris and Commander Robinson are napping… We have to make a stand for what is about right… and goodness… Anyone not in support of Captain Picard can please remand themselves to their quarters or else… it might get ugly, um. Section leaders report to ops.”

Reg knew it would take about ½ an hours to convert the Midas array into a pretty lethal verteron cannon, one of the proposed fail safes against the next Borg Invasion, since everyone was sure there would always be another Borg invasion Barclay had his finger on a very big button.

Alpha Centauri.

The Federation ignored Starfleet. It was a box where they isolated and banished the undesirable and unmanageable for their free society. Alpha Centauri was the closest colony to earth out side of man’s solar system and the millions of people on this planet were panicking to was anarchy. Starfleet was going insane, soldiers were already in the streets telling people to be orderly and it was only a matter of time before someone started burning planets which disagreed with their ideology not that the civil population knew why their army was turning in on itself, but when they did it was usual that they would laugh themselves silly about how some got silly overreacting over nonsense.

The Good people of Alpha Centauri were told that if they did anything to help Janeway’s fleet there would be consequences. Which was a hairs breadth for formally telling these free beings that they were under martial law. It’d only been 14 hours and civilization was totally spinning out.

Vulcan

Humans are insane. The Vulcans didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
 
Part 24.

Unlike his father, Jake albeit briefly and not completely earnestly did buy into the church surrounding the faith of the Prophets, that when they purely ceremonially offered him the position of Kai since the then young Jake was much more than a representative of the prophets in corporeal existence, but was a real honest to “god” actual living Prophet, so for just a little while, 4 months barely, as long as it took the son of the Emissary to get the leg work around the background for a series of Articles highlighting the nooks and crannies of the Bajoran religion from the honest perspective of both their god and the supreme head of their bureaucracy, Sisko put some damn interesting thoughts to paper. Afterward pragmatists were annoyed that he didn’t poke enough fun at all the silly men in skirts lighting candles and being craven to blinky wormhole aliens, meanwhile the zealots were divided too, some calling it a relief that their god has a sense of humour and others calling the Earthling an obvious Paugh Wraith in training wayward from his respected father, since no one would dare question the Kai’s heredity despite the Boy, man… Kai: while not actually expressing any godlike super powers as yet, was the son of a man no Bajoran would take light bad being said about, but after Kai Jake decompiled his administration, most Bajoran temples still keep a room(closet.) for him prepared if he needed some where to lay his hat, and others more fearful in the up and up places scuttled at the mere mention of his name since how he called himself a trump-Kai, that no matter who’s wielding the political religious power at any moment it doesn’t mean he might not come back and pick up where he left off for some scathing follow up expose on bastards using religion as a tool standing unfriendly on the plebs backs even the boldest malevolence was tamed into only using this religion for good. Jake Sisko was an angry and powerful god when he wanted to be, but that was all many years ago.

Through the irregularities of time travel and voyaging into alternate dimensions and a few other cosmic slights of hand skulduggery, Jacob had seen his father die at least a dozen times in wholly different ways, or just the same way form different perspectives amidships another side of the field of engagement, and it hurt worse every-time it happened since his father was supposed to be some mighty colossus who could turn the course of indemonstrable rivers or more famously smash space fleets large enough to blackout entire suns with lone but his steely gaze utterly dead if you believe the twelve opera’s Worf wrote on the subject each more dreadful than the last lo cute for the hero worship factor. For someone so mythic, so unkillable it was goading to see him constantly laid down, it was ineffable Jake had to relive and remake his father’s death again and again that no matter the second guessing and hundred year old Trill Domino forward planning, Benjamin Sisko was making his way against the hardest resistance to be immortal and it was unfortunate and distasteful his son bore witness to too many bloody missteps from the Emissary. In-between fighting each other, one of the Lore’s thumped the top of Ben’s skull so hard, his spine collapsed in on itself like an accordion and for a second or two the great explorer could actually see his ribcage from the inside out as most of his internal organs tried to speedily evacuate out of his anus because of the shock from their living accommodation being suddenly reduced to a third.

Jake issued his standard reaction: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” And then some how, from his gut he forced the universe to correct itself, or at lest uncontrollably he pushed himself backward in time to when before it all went wrong that he could save his Father from… And I do mean uncontrollably, because jaunting back 5 minutes would have done it good but this is pure autonomic flailing at his godlike powers he’s got in reserve like a baby trying to fly a bottle rocket like a surfboard except that he’ll never live long enough to figure out how to access any of this gracefully or properly…

Star Date 44001.4.

Jake can barely open his eyes, he’s so sleepy but then what just happened starts to be less half remembered dreamstuff and more coal for the fear engine that drives his life from one disaster to the next “ …Dad! They killed Dad…” Oh, my. Something is horribly wrong with his body the old drunk is starting to figure out.

Jakes dutiful beautiful mother bends over his half sized bed wondering how such a little boy can produce so much sweat that he could full up a hot tub from his brow springs. She had good memories of her husband in a hot tub. “Don’t worry my little baby, your father is on the bridge with Captain Storil, and that tough old Vulcan won’t let anything bad happen to your father. Everything is perfectly fine.”

Jakes hands were tiny and his mother, god not yet rest her soul, was the size of a mighty redwood. Her face alone seemed to have a larger diameter than a pizza pie! This was the past, and this was his body from the past and this was the Saratoga and Nooooooooooo! Fate couldn’t be that malicious a bitch to give him back his mommy for…

Red Alert! All hands brace for combat!

Jake Sisko despite being fortune, is still her fool, mindful of not getting his mouth washed out with soap as was the custom in these days expletes the mildest curse he can think of… “Oh boy.”
 
Part 25.

“What is in the needle?” T’Pol overlaps these two sentences. ”Spock: Punch him in the face.”

Her subordinate is four times faster than a human Olympian and 5 times stronger. Something in the mixing made this Star Fleet Officer stronger and more perfect than either a Human or a Vulcan, greater than the sum of his parts and such-what, or maybe it’s just that he was so driven by obnoxious sneering judgemental elders demanding he become a failure in the beginning it sassed Spock into stacking the deck to be worshipped as a god someday before he dies as he superhumanly SUPERVULCANLY superdupersedes every 200 foot tall hurdle his culture tried to crush him with. Although laser fire and the new Enterprise’s crowd control stun battery had no effect on Soong, it was a logical supposition that since he could breathe, see and excrete salvos of spittle past his defensive barrier, to suppose that maybe a less technological and more brutal assault would make headway against Soong’s marvellous atomic umbrella ultra science couldn’t. No luck. Spock breaks 19 bones in his hand.

“I had an emotional reaction there T’Pol.” Soong Chuckles “Peed myself a little. This brute charging you is something… ” He thumps his heart like a mad Englishman a couple times. “Stirring on a primal level you could never hope to understand. How can your people evoke such passion in others while denying such pleasures for yourself?”

“What is in the needle Soong?”

Despite the decades since the adoption of the Hypospray, one of Adrik Soong’s hands seemed to be completely at the task of holding a rather large hypodermic syringe, which medical science today can’t help but frown on in every way… “300 years ago children were murdered, after a fashion, and from their tiny bodies no larger than a few hundred cells really, properties were harvested and grafted into other sickly humans to make them less imperfect. Some say that the valuelessness placed upon human life during these experiments which gave cripples back their sight, lame legs and dead arms was the beginning of the first Eugenics War as earnestly as when the first Augment to show some ingenuity destroyed Thailand.”

The slight woman capable of benchpressing a Shuttle Pod flipped open her communicator. It chirped. “Vice Admiral T’Pol to Pike. Site to Site Transport 40 tons of cobalt/nickel 6 feet above Soong’s head in 3 minutes if I don’t countermand, General Order 24 too. Soong is not leaving this world a free man.” Fearlessly she’s walking towards her sworn enemy without reservation because if you really think abut it he’s done nothing threatening at all other than survive being killed by stuff which should lay waste to a city used properly.

“What have you got against me Vulcan?”

“Last time we met, Travis Mayweather lost an arm.”

“Who?”

Like two generals under a flag of truce having tea looking for an opportunity, T’Pol is now breathing on Soong they’re so close to one another. She puts her hand out to touch the radiolitic sheaf between them, it’s warm to the touch but not shocking. “My Armoury Officer.”

“Hmmph. An Armless armoury officer hardly alarming, more harmless. I should have taken the time to fall in love with you T’Pol. Two hundred years ago they would have had you selling underwear and you’re still as young and beautiful as the day I first met you.” Soong looks down in shame at his own withered craggy hands and mourns to think he can’t recall the last time his pecker jiggled from being in the proximity of an interesting woman. He was old. Even with all the propping from his arcane science, if this old bastard dared try to look half his true age, he’d be a buried desiccated corpse.

“When you became responsible for selling me on the Orion Slave Market? Hardly an efficient Valentines woo. The clock is ticking Adrik.” She hasn’t bothered grabbing for the laser under her robes, Admirals give orders, they tell a thousand soldiers to kill something, and no hand weapon can compare with that threat or should, and if she did draw her hand weapon it was suggesting that a thousand soldiers wouldn’t leap to attack what ever at her whim. No one that didn’t have a gun and wasn’t willing to die for Star Fleets principles or lack of principles was left living in the combat theatre, it was totally game on.

“Would I rather be a hammer or a nail? Do you seriously think that you can drive me into the ground like a peg?”

“Yes.”

“Then who am I to disagree with such an impressive intellect?”

“No one of consequence.”

“That’s cold T’Pol. Ice cold.”

“You are not violating Jonathan Archers corpse with whatever that cocktail that is. Reanimating his flesh will not bring back his soul or his mind. You will be creating some abomination that will discredit the mans memory and mock the sincerity of his death.” Soong laughs at that like some cardboard villain from movie night, he must be on some unusual medication T’Pol accesses.

“Think back. T’Pau has his soul and his mind, a copy, and if she doesn’t then certainly Surak does. All I need to do is reanimate his flesh and then your hokey religion can handle the rest shuffling some katra’s around. I read the Kir’Shara it’s child’s play for your race, no one has to die and it’s a sin that you allow death to perpetuate itself still on the face of this Galaxy when you have the power to save everyone!”

“Including you old man?”

“I’ve got irons in other fires but my eye is on the ball and I won’t be needing you to bite me halfway across the river like that frog and scorpion fable. You don’t want to help me, I know that, but that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to toss you a freebie like this, because I’ve always like you people no matter how often you’ve tried to kill me. You’re practically like family. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth honey.”

The Vulcan Civil War was like yesterday to her. “The Jonathan Archer you speak of is 90 years younger then the man we lay to rest, his time is past, it would be cruel to introduce him to these dark and changed times. T’Pau and certainly Surak would never consent to… You have 15 seconds to get on your knees and put your hands behind your head or we all die.”

“40 tons of cobalt/nickle?”

“You will be smothered and held immobile by something you can’t transport through until you starve to death unless you have also made incredible advances in Transporter technology too?”

The old wizard thinks about it. “No, no, You’ve completely created a weapon I didn’t anticipate off the cuff. Not very Vulcan at all, I’m completely at your mercy. Is mercy an emotion? Should I be wary to expect mercy from a Vulcan? I should surrender right now and you can - ”

“ON YOUR KNEES!”

Soong doesn’t like the sound of his voice being interrupted by some petulant authority figure. “I haven’t played a game like that in 20 years Admiral for good reason. I’m so old, it’ll take me 20 minutes to get down and 20 minutes to get up again all the while making the most humiliating grunts and sighs to coax this tired old frame into… TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE!” The false claims of geriatricacy did fake out the lady with an IQ of 300 well enough that Soong side steps her dominating pose crossing the divide between their ancient west stand off and Archer’s open casket to ram the now autoinfamous needle into Jonathan Archers remains, hammering the plunger down emptying in total whatever miracle gunk Soong thought could reverse 2 weeks of necrosis into this husk as 40 tons of loose ore began to materialize 6 feet above Adrik Soong’s head.
 
Part 26.

A long time ago it had taken Picard 3 days to summon the steel to face Hugh when he’d had every intention of using the boy as a Trojan to destroy one of the most vibrant and interesting species in the galaxy. Deadly, uncompromising, evil, vibrant and interesting. It was a mixed bag. Although hardly the same situation, but enough parallels could be drawn that despite how the Federation was eating itself there was still an imperative that Jean-Luc needed to soothe, conviction dictates he should know what it is he’s fighting for, what it is everyone else is dying for? From what his Comm Officer could tell, the protagonists thought the buck stopped with Picard and it was on his shoulders alone both forces were driving themselves against each other. Who was this child? Blight, family or both? Even if he couldn’t trust the brief truce between the belligerent and provocative combatants involved in today’s fiasco, the mighty Frenchman was on his way to the Nursery to get some clearer options regarding some unseen avenue out of this sticky wicket he could grapple without unloading most of his torpedo compliment into the Star Ships and that flying historic footnote imitating Jove trying to intimidate him. Of course Enterprise didn’t carry as many reserve torpedoes as it used, the new XO had practically turned Enterprise into a Hospital Ship, which had been a godsend during most of the disaster relief missions of late, but if his Ship of Peace ran out of steam half way through this battle, he doesn’t care who she is, there would be hell to pay with a pound of flesh.

After Geordie had left, Jean-Luc, unless he’d went outside his command, was left with the least obvious choice for his Number One, but the lady had it coming, had a lot more than that too which is altogether another novel worth of storytelling entirely, but anyone else with an inch more seniority than Beverly was ½ an inch overdue for their own Captaincy which would have turned Will’s seat into the most spinningest revolving door ever, that he’d never establish a relationship the Captain of the Federation Flagship needs with his First Officer to trust the life and death of the universe to, considering how ridiculous it is how often his ship falls into the tersest situations peppered drug addicts couldn’t write as imaginary melodrama about. After a year of this new regime the Jury was in and accountedly: The redhead wasn’t too bad at all, the two of them saved the day well enough together like super heroes and their too public relationship, which wasn’t exactly unyouthful all the time hadn’t exactly skipped ahead to the fear and loathing of a silver wedding anniversary where some fine couple of something or others were using cutlery to stab each other in the face. It was a functional, comfortable and boring coupling of companionship, breakfast and sex. Jean-Luc had almost had a heart attack 3 months earlier during a pregnancy scare but this intrepid explorer and nigh undefeated warrior would kill to truly be boring, so frankly Enterprise’s Captain really had no idea how he kept being thrust into such outrageous situations?

She’s at her desk when he finally arrives for the sitrep. “What is that horrid stink? …Number One?”

This brash spurt of manliness creates a frown on her face that says that she’d rather be assured she’s beautiful. “Jean-Luc, I’ve told you, either call me “Beverly” or “Doctor Number One” or “Commander Doctor One”… ” Beverly wasn’t keen on being thought of as interchangeable, especially if he’d start crying “Number Woo oh UN!” in the heat of passion so that then they both start thinking of Will Riker, which would be even more horrifying if such an intrusion excited the mood rather than threw a wet blanket on the tangled affair. “I’m not expecting a hug, but really! I’ve just finished delivering Sonja’s child. A healthy boy in just 25 minutes, the old fashioned way. It’s not good. The computer tried to log the boy automatically into the Federation Census Database but…” She looks up at the gorgeous septuagenarian through mopey tired bedroom eyes that more than make up for her scent.

“Noonian Soong?”

She nods, moving her hair around provocatively framing a face that could launch a thousand Star ships… That temporally adapted saying should be used with more hesitancy now Picard reflects, considering what’s between Sonja Gomez’s legs is (or now he supposes, “was”.) ACTUALLY launching a thousand Star Ships into battle right now… “You’re noticing a theme here too?”

Jean-Luc nods in agreement with the confluence of conspiratious letterheads. “There’s a… It must be a clone, he’s a young man. The original consciousness might have been transferred, or not. Either way there’s someone sitting out there in weapons range with a powerful Star Ship who looks just like Data. Lore’s out there too with his finger on the button as well, so there’s two Star Ship Captains out there who look like Data but… one of them is, or appears to be human.”

“You think what’s happening to Sonja has happened before?”

“How many other people did Data have sex with?”

“Tasha?”

Picard shrugs. “I’m just glad he turned the Borg Queen down if this sort of…”

“She’s pregnant again.”

His pupils define into pin points “That’s not good.”

“First I put her on the scales. She weighed a few tenths of a microgram more than she should‘ve compared to the computer ‘s mockup, which was supposed to take every atom into account. I had to tie the external sensor filters through the holographic emitters, which we would normally use to track cloaked ships when we get panicky in Romulan space. There’s a type 2 civilization of cybernetic genetically augmented sperm living inside my friend. Billion’s of them.”

“Type 2. Extraordinary.”

“She’s a person Jean-luc.”

“Of course.”

“Once I’d isolated a few of them, I was able to hack into their radio telepathy and I can tell you that they weren’t too happy about anything we do that has the slightest impact on their civil rights. They’re threatening war if I persist in the slightest further into intruding into the sovereignty of their world.”

“Their world is my Chief Engineer.”

“Jean-Luc, we haven’t had the best of luck fighting nanites civilizations. We lumber. And we’ll never have appropriate defences against any enemy like this so long as the Federation insists on retarding investigation into specific useful avenues of science fearful we’ll create a new Borg race which might crush us better than the original.”

“All that verve. You'd make a powerful politician. What about if we talk to our friends from the Nanite Civilization Wesley created, least I checked there was a subset invested to a religion which regarded you as something between a queen mother and the Madonna? Surely you could… What?”

“The sperm inside Sonja can hear us.”

“Oh, can then now?”

“Jean-Luc, they’re not terrorists, they’re just life forms who procreate parasitically like any number of a billion creatures crawling about, over and through you. Remember how Enterprise reacted when it became sentient and couldn’t stand how we tickled and wriggled inside her?”

“It’s not the same.”

“Economies of scale.”

Picard pumps out his chest, and tugs down his uniform. “You! In there! Get out! I don’t want to threaten you, but we can make you somewhere else to live as spacious and perfectly tailored to your needs, there are alternatives to a conflict between the two of us in a battle you cannot possibly hope to win… Are you sure they can hear me Beverly?”

“They can hear you, but I don’t think they care.”
 
Part 28

They’d been talking for hours, and not always on topic, it was heady making headway because she’s so headstrong, but the Admiral was giving as hard as she was taking. It wasn’t impossible to see that there might be a friendly relationship at the end of the end of this discourse. Which in itself was a curious commentary since the “enemy” was human who should be dominated by the law of human kind just as she was. It was then that thousands of force lattices sliced into crosshatching Rutherford’s body barely giving the fellah time enough to yelp “Gordon Bennet!” Dividing and conquering the trillions of benign entities co-operating to with in a hairs breadth of charming Kathryn Janeway’s pants off, that is if she wasn’t sure it would destroy her, into billions of tiny unimpingable cells. What had been a man was now a cube made up from simple ordinarily fizzling force fields divided further into billions of cubes inside that creating walls between the collective effort of all the shocked super sperm locked mercilessly into their new penal lodgings.

Four Pips on her collar. “I was offered Voyager. Small fish. Threw it back. Fortunate.”

Kathryn knew this remarkable woman. A Starfleet Captain, protégée to Ian Knapp and lover to a man that had left Janeway blushing for three weeks after a nude scuba diving incident on Mars, who in her time, so long ago used to be the foremost expert on the Borg without having ever met those monsters firsthand back when no-one dared think to challenge the Federation’ s Authority. “What the hell sort of weapon is that?”

Elizabeth Paula Shelby loves saving the day. “This? It was designed before we thought the Borg was interested in adapting our biological distinctiveness or even that the Borg were harvested from innocent stock, which could be recovered given a clement environment and a little patience... This is what happens when a Starfleet Engineer is allowed to create an Immoral weapon.” Shelby runs her fingers down the barrel of the weapon as if it was beloved. “Admiral, if there’s even one drop of that spunk outside my box I made we’re in a world of trouble. We have to get out of here. Shelby to Excelsior: Two to beam up.”

Janeway’s either complaining or objecting as the Transporter begins converting her biomass into a coherent --- “I had just about brokered peace in our time before you rui…”

The 40 something dirty-blondes vanish as the Super Sperm goes insane tossing their inertia obeying penitentiary from one side of the Mess and back again, and back again, and back again, and back again and… That there would be some sort of conspiracy against them creating weapons designed purely to incapacitate their quiet invisible society was intolerable. This is an act of war! Every unit of cum, each at least as strong s an Indian Elephant pitching a tizzy, were ramming the walls of their prison dissingularly forcing a damn odd flight pattern to turn the joint into rubble. If someone was out to get them, then that means the Cold War was to be put on the back burner in favour of something more escalatory if they didn’t die from loneliness first, divorced from their family by this technological witchery.
 
What!!! It's so damn short, Guy. Why, why???

I noticed one error. How come that you write Part 28, when previous part was Part 26
 
Part 27 was black bagged and is currently being tortured in an isocell for information by a positively charming Cardassian tailor.

My bad.

I write a couple chapters simultainiously usually and sometimes switch the order around, but the word document template this is living on in my system is becoming quite unweildly. I'm half way through the next two if that's any clue to how my brain works.
 
Part 29.

Despite everyone else acting out, taking Picard’s name in vain assuming to draw parallels against the war diaries of Julius Caesar guessing Enterprise was making it’s way to some latter-day Rubicon, this busty curvy Riker was endeavouring upon an actual mission from Jean-Luc Picard and god help anyone who got in her way. Titan under command of Deanna Riker, because her husband, the Captain, was on a fishing trip for the last two weeks in an alternate universe cementing a vital trade pact with a new gregarious empire friendly to the Federation, had just committed the orders, the Picard Manoeuvre even, to destroy a Star Ship twice the size of Titan between her and Vargas II, the Starfleet Captain of unsaid doomed vessel who didn’t consider this student of Picard and Riker as a formidable warrior to take seriously because she appealed first to the opposing Captain’s sense of decency with a little diplomacy, that in turn Deanna was quickly forced into a “kill of be killed” blinking contest with Quantum Torpedoes and bravado. If only Starfleet Uniforms still showed a little cleavage, Deanna is sure that as a woman with a rack this impressive she’d get into half as much trouble she didn’t want to pleasantly get into and twice as much that she did want, that she could’ve Hypnotise a spud dill hole like the Starship commander across the divide into standing down rather than having to make a peaceful healer like Deanna Riker go through the dreadful process of smashing him into flotsam and jetsam. Besides any man with at least half a bean for a brain should know better than to mess with a pregnant woman’s wit and opinion.

It was a mistake to think the Commander weak. Deanna had seen death, killed people with her own two experienced hands and then empathically endured those people mortally just vanish like exploding soap bubbles of pathos, which was all academic compared to Deanna’s crutching adolescence contrite with wagering wanton world wars worth of domestic character assassination and reassasination against’n’from her beloved mother with dramas like lengthy tennis volleys back and forth no less visceral than a 12 inch wound left to ferment for a hungry puss farmer called her superego… Like that time having a “conversation” with her mother about how Deanna too should so be allowed to date that (In retrospect creepy - ) Cardassian barely 15 years her senior, when she was but 12, which turned positively postal after Lwaxana ballisticly slept with her daughters suitor (“Don’t do who I do, do who I say” the crazy old woman was preaching.) to make a point, breaking her usual rules about leaving married men choiceless but to fall in love with the complicated predator and crawl after Ambassador Troi for years begging for another scratch at the prize. With Cardassians you have to take stupidity in equal measure with primus. Those two Betazoid’s were throwing Furniture the size of each other at one another for weeks after that pissing contest, and Deanna was even ejected out of the house briefly after she punched Lwaxana in the mouth while she was asleep, proving “civil blood made civil hands unclean” and tested the young at heart Star Ship Commander’s will for just such a breakdown in society like this balls up they were drowning in now. Deanna knew there were safe outs to guarantee the 500 people under her to make it out the other side of this oddity alive, or even the 700 aboard the hulk she just scuttled but her first duty was to the trillions of beings in the Federation who everyone here had pledged to sacrifice their lives for to guarantee their liberty and the right to pursue happiness. Trillions for half a thousand, there’s no such thing as a fair trade.

“The enemy is destroyed Captain.” Military tradition. If you’re in charge, then you’re called Captain, no matter your actual rank. Will was in another universe; he’d suggested she go to town with the technicality. Truth. She loved it. When this was over, if the side of angels prevailed despite “abandoning” her sweet Will, Mrs Riker really considered putting out some feelers for a ship of her own because frankly she was big enough and ugly enough for the liberty and the challenge, especially since Will had been sidelining her recently because of her “condition”, that some how she was more treasured and porcelainlike, that any attempt to live her life to the fullest would endanger his child. Woman had been balancing his since the beginning, and if she didn’t know what she was doing, then damn it the technology exists that someone else in their marriage can carry his daughter for the next 5 months or William T Riker can shut his stupid ape pie hole the heck up.

“Don’t call them the enemy Tim. They were just following orders. If there’s another foundless conspiracy in Starfleet driving our friends and family patriotically off a cliff like flag toting lemmings, I mean to get to the bottom of this before I have to kill more people I should consider my family.” Family, her bloodkin had no great ability to stay above ground, that Deanna had always found it easy to adopt new people into her inner circle, which isn’t too much of a gamble considering she weighs naked souls for a profession, so just like Santa Claus this gal knows for a truth about who is naughty and who is nice. But speaking of family, Captain Picard had sent her off to find out if his prodigal daughter was where they left her nearly 20 years ago. “Tim, I’m heading up the away team.”

“No offence Dee… Um, Captain. But your husband left very specific orders about what we were supposed to do if you tried to beam yourself into any hairy affair off ship. He said he’d punch me in the nose if you even thought twice about it.”

“Baby.” Riker sneers at her subordinate who is usually a peer she mucks about with unromantically.

“That’s mostly the point.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

Tim stretches his position like a cat on hinds pretending they’re 6 feet tall, “I double up as a nurse on top of my Engineering duties, I can pull your rank for medical reasons Deanna. Captain Riker left explicit instructions Captain Riker. I saw what Captain Picard said as well as you did, that there’s a biohazard down there which is most certainly the beginning of something very very bad. You’re too important to… ”

“My friend is on the planet maybe, and she’ll be able to answer enough questions to conceivably sort this “crazy” out before it’s taken too far.” Deanna tries not to remember the fear and screaming about burnt flesh from the crew of the USS Dilettante, she’s had too much of a hand in making dead only minutes earlier as she tried to fathom what the hell might be the definition of taking this situation “Too far”. “I’m starting to think those words have no meaning…” She taps her boobie mounted communicator her husband had a habit of groping when it was less amusing to use his own pin. “Riker to Michaud, I want to take a security detail downstairs. 5 bodies, all armed, phasers set to kill, No woman. My gender is susceptible to something honary on the surface I believe I’ll be immune to.”

“Um, Captain… well, I was given orders that you weren’t allowed to -- ”

“Right. The next person to try and upstage me because I’m carrying that maladjusted manchild’s hellspawn is going to find themselves spending a month in the brig. PEELING POTATOS! Do I make myself explicitly clear who is sitting on top of this pecking order?? Michaud, 5 gold shirts and Tim, you have the con while I’m gone, and I want you to head the rescue efforts to see if we call pull any more survivors out of the Dilettante’s wreckage, but not to worry gentlemen, if this even starts to go badly it’ll slide out of control so well we won’t even notice the universe ending. Guys? I’m not repeating myself, say: “Yes ma’am.” and be about your duties.”

They both comply. It’s not like they had any real choice which Riker they’d rather have up their ass or down their throat or on their backs spanking them for being bad naughty little boys. Well maybe it wasn’t totally clear cut but… Tim took the conn and Deanna still mostly her fit self with the barest bump expressing an unusual line to her uniform exits the bridge on her way to Transporter Room Number One to meet up with Michaud and his burly goons. If Tasha Yar was still alive down there being perpetually molested by the ghost of Noonian Soong then this Betazoid might just get angry enough to forget she’s a refined civilized lady and not someone who was practically raised in a brothel because so many idiots thought they could replace her father rebounding in and out of her life that she might have to blow some stuff up. Deanna adored having the empowerment of a Starship at her finger tips because there was no argument it added some edginess to her character.
 
Part 30

Luck has it his junior alternate this old man was driving wasn’t still on the tit, because that’d’ve been a deal breaker. Jake’d be too busy washing his own little mouth out with soap for the next 6 hours to even think about manipulating the timeline brightening the blightened future a little. “Mommy… Mom. Jennifer. Listen very carefully I may only be able to say this once… I’m maybe broadcasting my consciousness from the future or something, don’t ask me about the math because I think it’s magic or religion, but right here, right now, we’re living in one of those fairy stories about Captain Kirk you like so much… It’s still me Mom, but I’m even a couple years older you are because I’m from the distant future where things are going wrong. Not really that bad, but its obvious we’re lemminglike starting to trek down 12 miles of bad road to a cliff.“

Mothers take bullshit in their stride come bedtime or bath time. “Rubbish. Jake, this’s no time for games, I put you to bed already, so listen here young man, I expect that you should be in bed. Move it or lose it. You’ve till the count of 5 to get your naughty little brown backside back into your billet or there will be hell to pay when your father gets home.” Such a comment is far too prophetic for Jake considering how he knows the blaze their domicile will be redecorated into over the next half hour… Although how she expects her son to sleep between the blaring racket of a red alert siren and the Borg weapon Strikes is anyone’s business when the two of them really should be making their way quickly to the escape pods, or the shuttle bay, except that they never did because this is the day and the hour that his mother died and so much of the good in the future did rely on leaving his father a bitter melancholy widower which would eventually cast that depressed hulk into the role of the Emissary of the Bajoran Prophets which is far too important to screw up even to bring his mommy back.

“Please don’t talk down to me. The Saratoga is lost. The Borg won’t be stopped for hours until well after you are dead. I can’t save you. Your death is too important.” Jake hopes he doesn’t look too cute while trying to preach like Cassandra because she had to take him seriously or.. The adult picked him up. She picked him up by a wrist and an ankle. Effortlessly. And set a course for young Jake Siskos bedroom. Jennifer’s mother had warned her daughter that all those children raised on Star Ships never turned out right. Weird gravity pushing and pulling their brains in uncertain directions. “Jake? You keep talking like that and I swear I’ll medicate you.”

She asked for this… “HAS no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn'd?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned?
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.
O you will take whatever's offered
And dream that all the world's a friend.
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.”

(beat)

The recitation from the tot suspended in mid air like main sale from his mommy's jib suspended her tracks. “Shelle.. Um, Yeats? Yeats right? Where the hell did that come from? Poetry?” Her nose turns in disgust or maybe fear. “You’re not my son.”

“I was trying to tell you. Yes I am. I travelled through time! Don’t send me to my room! We have to save the federation from itself and… Well some bad guys.”

She looks about for a punchline unsure if Sal from the bakery was pulling her leg again. “But you’re still my son? But you. As you were before… My child?”

“Yes, and I can feel “me” safely sleeping in hind area of my brain, it’s a squeeze but he’s safe too. He’ll be let out and fine after I go back to where I belong or a similar enough future I can call home.”

Some people can be smart. “You could just as easily not be my son. The ship is under fire. You could be a psychological attack meant to work in tandem with…” Occums Razor. Ben Sisko’s little boy might just be telling the truth, but if he was pulling her leg, and it was just a 10 year old outwitting her, then as a parent Jennifer Sisko’s authority as a parent would be shattered forever... What the hell was that about her own mortality?

“Mom, you don’t know to be petrified of the Borg. It’s a classified secret at the moment that we’ve been teetering on the brink of extinction since Q made an introduction a year ago. They eat technology and eat flesh, reconstituting it all into a single malevolent lifeform which is only still more hungry for new technological and biological distinctiveness grandifying it’s skillset until the universe is nothing but Borg. 39 Star Ships including the Saratoga is going to washed aside effortlessly today. They’ll be no more thinking we’re the king of the castle and almighty, we’re a savage child race surrounded by gods and monsters who don’t tolerate us so much as haven’t noticed us. Today is the end of the innocence for the Federation. We are the Aztec welcoming Cortez, the Zulu spears struggling against English rifles. Today is the day we notice where our subbasement link in the food chain is situated. It’s not a good day.”

“Jake you’re scaring me.” Jennifer doesn’t want to die. “I don’t want to die.”

“I’m really not happy about it either but this entire room is going to blow up. Fire will eat it first and then the ship will be cut in half and explode. This is history. This history creates a good future after a fashion, the Federation stands. Freedom prevails. At some cost, further tragedy but it defines us. You are going to be dead in the next 15 minutes, that is your destiny and if you would just let me down form this undignified position because all my blood seems to be rushing to my ear and it’s putting spots in front of my eyes. I don’t have time to black out mom.”

Ageless Jake is put back onto the carpeted deck kidneys first. Erecting himself out of the flop his mommy left him in, tugging at his jammies which had ridden up to pull them out of his shit, “Mom, we need to send a message to Enterprise. I need you to register a hail to Commander Elizabeth Paula Shelby. I have a laundry list of logic mines I need her to place over the next 20 years creating a series a breaks and diversions to make sure the good guys can pull the fat out of the fire when it all gets drawn to the brink. I know her and I trust her to save the day and right about now I think she’s in Command of… Computer record message...”
 
Part 31.

The Shuttle Pod from Rutledge landed without any explosions while Picard was on the other-side of his grand vessel taking measure of Lord Garth Master of the Universe. He trusted Lore could be managed by his officers at hand and the simple passenger they’d been treating like one of the family for the last year almost. Trust had been earned throughout several harrowing adventures with Lore and those who would oppose the positronic man because even treacherously and evil Lore could be trusted to act predictably. :)

“General” Lore’s return was greeted by 16 robust Security Guards (Two Klingons, 7 humans, two Vulcans an Andorian, a Benzinite, a Brikar and 2 Bajorans.) in full dress Uniforms and a flurry of trumpet tooting pumped ambiently throughout the Shuttle Bay PA… But the primary greeter/ambassador was another Soong type Android, not because he was physically Lore’s equal if everything got grim but just because the childlike near duplicate wanted a long lost Hug from his big brother. Hugs are good. The original Soong had engrained a sense of family into his androids deep. Quite the retinue flanking a red carpet to hark the visiting king, Lore should feel a degree of respect that Picard assumed that this formidable allotment of Starfleet’s finest was offered to frame the return of a being who’d almost killed a great deal many of friends of the crewmen who’d served more lengthy tours aboard Enterprise and her stocky predecessor. Lore was holding a leash. A gimp on the other end of that lead was only just now becoming evident; it was a humbled human being still wearing an ill fitted singed soiled Starfleet Uniform. (It’s McIntosh.). The “prisoner’s” hands tied behind his back with the leashing moored to a ball gag wound into his mouth.

Picard’s Orders to Security had been clear. “Ego trumps paranoia. Full honours. Treat that psychopath like royalty and maybe he’ll forget we’re over a barrel. Don’t let him provoke you. Lore will attempt to get a rise to prove that he’s more civilized than a monkey. Do you want to prove to that bigot you’re a monkey? Unless he kills someone, don’t raise a hand without my say so. That madman is after all holding the entire crew of Rutledge hostage and we don’t know what might provoke him to set off some dead-mans switch and kill 60 Starfleet Officers as well as Benjamin Sisko’s Son who... Make it so.” No one’d said a word or feigned the slightest emotion when a double take was clearly called for. It was public knowledge that Picard had killed Captain Sisko’s first wife, the mother of thechild at the moment who Picard’s hands held the life of off balancey. Two generations dead by a single hand is a cold responsibility… but how disposable were they to be forced into a combat situation with their hands so ultimately tied until after first blood...

Lore sniffs to suggest the smell of these people is unpleasant, also then disapprovingly the robot scuffs his heal. “Where’s Picard? …I have a gift for him.” Tugging on the monkey reign to show these soldier boys that the sample is good healthy stock and even alive.

Almost hippity hopping: “Brother! I love you!” At a kilter B4 moonly stretches out his arms preparing to express his siblingly love, which doesn’t re-enact any warlike knee jerking from this loon copping a feel.

Lore is trying to act as if he’s not over whelmed with by the reunion. “Dear god. Some one put you back together again. I thought selling you to the Romulans would’ve gotten you out of my hair completely. You are such a bad penny B4.”

Smiling like a coital gerbil B4 can’t believe his ears! “You know me!”

“know you? Hell, I named you? You think Often Wrong Soong had had any talent for fatherhood? No, he left that stuff up to me after mother left, I am after all the artistic one in the family as well as the black sheep.”

“Silly. You’re not a sheep. You’re an android.”

“How quickly I am reminded that you deserve every inch of your name.”

“I do. You are the best brother in the quadrant!” And they hug again.

“Yes it was so nice B4 you showed up.”

“O?… Funny? My brother is funny! I love my funny brother!”
 
Part 32.

Soaked in afterbirth a baby Giraffe can bloody well run at full tilt seconds after falling out from it’s mother, usually in the opposite direction of some licking lipped hungry thing gnashing it’s teeth, but situated on the other end of such a spectrum, you’ll find helpless human babies infirm and guileless like happy-meals flailing mindlessly drawing attention to themselves on silver platters. Odd no, that the Giraffe is not the dominant creature on Earth then? But you see, life is so easy for such beasts that they have no reason to over come adversity... It’s because athletically ridiculous Man’s huge unfinished brain should still require nearly 2 years gestating in their mommies before exiting to stand a snowball in hells chance of coming up roses and don’t get half what they need which is why they’re so bloody useless in the beginning. Less like a cartoon, the Vulcan brain is often a dozen times denser, capable of conducting ideas 40 times faster up hill once they get their emotions beaten into order, so really off hand a greater disappointment, Vulcan children are radically more pathetic even than what are issued forth form human mommies, that Vulcan youglings should have needed to stay incubating for 6 whole years for the paint to dry perfectly, but only hamper a third of this which ironically has it that Vulcan children are really very very stupid in most every way compared to humans of the same age for usually the entirety of the first decade and change, but it’s a tiny glory that Terrans reach their shanty molehill of an apex well before a Vulcan can even cognate the starting block, because by the final curtain no one really cares that earthmen children an do addition before a Vulcan sprog can crawl. However sometimes being born, and being born ready is more easy than ripping your way out of some woman’s midsection with a half-formed empty mind, sometimes there will be and has been a few pinholes in history that a child can be immaculately created through the fingertips of a…

[WHOOSH! POW …(Back of his fist clashes into one side of her kisser.) ]

“You KNEW! You all knew! How the hell could you stay so damn inscrutable and silent while millions and millions of our people died! GOD! MY father at his worst was right! We should have thrown you emotionless bastards all into the sun when we had the chance! You’re all damn inhuman green blooded calculating goblinish monsters!” Even though, given the complexities of being (re)born so recently, after just seconds, this reincarnated Archer’d riving into a gale force tanty slapped his “mother” like a bear catching salmon, tossed his toys. If she were human, her head would have fallen off and rolled away, but there will be a doozy of an olive bronze bruise stretching from chin to forehead soon enough but she is not prideful or sensitive. “Your people are dead to me! And I will destroy you ALL! I…”

Not bad for first words. Bloody quick too, developmentally speaking. Some might consider this Jonathan Archer exactly the genuine article, albeit a snapshot from some point in distant history mostly, others still would regard him as a new born creature resembling the man they are all familiar with, but in antiquated terms, just prefabricated and mass produced from a patented design is this soul charging the rejuvenated corpse of President Jonathan Archer that honestly it’s cheating that this “person” should be afforded the same salt that the not yet expired Jonathan Archer would have received a week earlier. Others still would call him a mixture of both if “he” had been cognoscente and observant inside the mind of T’Pau of Vulcan he wouldn’t have been blended and jaded by her lifestyle and experiences over the last half century. They’ll figure out how “real’ he is eventually but right now this ranting zombie tries to again gong the Vulcan leaders head against with his meatfist mallet, but the triply physically superior Vulcan catches his wrist disallowing a second pounding of her delicate beautiful eardrum as the all-powerful T’Pau of Vulcan more than capable of crushing this Earth Man’s hand into a jelly eeking free from his arm stump, suggests: “Do not do that again.”

Physically and otherwise, he can feel her strength pushing him, Archer’s absolutely aware of what this woman’s scrupulous body can do because he’d spent the last 60 years or so holidaying in a narrow corner of her psyche only trundled out every 7 years like some sort of tawdry sex manual to cushion her through an unsavoury duty which created her politically useful children. “I, Archer: kama Sutra manifest!” he’d cried himself to sleep some relative nights in the beginning, imprisoned within the “Imagined Reality” her mind developed for him, waiting dreadfully in anticipation like a clay pigeon for the next time this Vulcan inDignitary would need to use sex to ease a diplomatic situation, or she was chosen by some unmated acquaintance to suffer their beastial advances out of her season that Jonathan would be supplicated like Vercingetorix before the Roman Senate cooing, nay braying for a “little death”. Enjoying sex was emotional and Romulan, each equally unforgivable, which indicted T’Pau (like every-other living Vulcan had been taught) to religiously clinicalize intercourse petering any introspective horror about her sexuality, however Archer was the perfect patsy to muffle that shame in the beginning creating a third party buffer. Blame the human! Then it became blame the human if it seems like I’m enjoying myself or rather quite good at screwing people’s brains out she’d rationalize. Later still, once T’Pau could accuse Archer for everything immoral in her life, the lady could go to town, as she would draw from his experiences and appetites, starting first in asking him when to buck, whiney, neigh and scream the name of whosoever is on top of her, and then it was Archer who really went to town…

“You used me.”

“You enjoyed yourself disgustingly Earthman.” You might have imagined she had frowned at this point but no one would dare suggest such a thing in the slightest because it’s inconceivable you could insult a Vulcan more by reminding her that she had spent the last 60 years as a hybrid. “We will put all our issues to rest later.”

Archers body had been removed from his coffin, and now it lay on the ground near by to the plot which had been dug for him surrounded by his friends, T’Pau and Soong crouching closer to the heart of the planet to focus the mysticism of this Vulcan resurrection voodoo hoodoo with the power of positive thinking, horridly worried something might have gone wrong and they had to order some one armed to pull the plug, but younger by the minute Jonathan was calming down from his rude awakening. His two eyes are continuing a locked tizzy with T’Pau strafing into her culpability with 400 pounds of glare; this witch has a lot to answer for. “I still expect to see your face when I look in the mirror. Seeing you like this is like I know to look into a mirror.” Archer wants all the bones in his hand back in once piece. He’s coming back to his senses and might stop screaming about the darkest secret behind the origins of the Earth Romulan War before some agent from Section 31 black bags him and drags the poor Zombie away to be beaten to death with saps all over again, not that his humanity was suddenly so incalculable that he might belong in a Zoo. Is this how Sim felt? “We are going to throw down T’Pau and I will destroy you for what you have done to me over the years... But you’re right, that’s for another day. You can let go of my hand now. I will behave.”

Does she want to? He’s been inside her longer than any-other man in her life. His departure emptied a hole.

Archer didn’t like repeating himself from even before he died. “You… Can… Let… Go.”

The emotional distraction is unforgivable. T’Pol and Spock are the only Vulcan witnessing her almost complete mental breakdown, but these two are unclean and their words mean little to true Vulcans on matters of morality and sanity, but grief and loss where nipping at her reserves so she would have to be strong until she’d reconstructed Archer from the template in her cache to rebolster her own personality with his humanity like T’Pau always did whenever she “shared” him with someone “envious” as to how she was so creative, even artistic between the sheets. T’Pau never tried to consider epidemically how many millions of copies of Jonathan Archer were now built into the psyches of Vulcans all across the Quadrant pulling their ancient culture down to his level, but gosh the wronginuity “felt” dirty, which was as good as it gets, and damn it what smug good is their piety if they had nothing internally to measure it against?

She releases his wet fist unharmed from anything but the bloodiedness of striking her. Everyone is looking hasteny at their creation wondering if Soong hadn’t pushed them into some godless experiment after all but he’d had gravity on his side that it was really effortless to push a katra into the mindless, soulless hulk rebecoming alive in front of them compared to the tragedy of leaving “it” as a vegetable or the monsterousity of having to put it out of it’s misery having just days earlier coming to terms of what they thought was the seventh and final death of Jonathan Archer. His eventually 8th death had better stick because all and sundry were becoming tired or remourning his supposed passings over and over again.

Jonathan gets to his feet and admires the friendly familiar and much much, older faces, “O… Sorry for that outburst. I’ve been screaming to myself for so long that… I was half way through a rant when… I’m alive? This is… Great… It is good to see all these friendly faces… It’s a good thing I wasn’t embalmed.” No one is in the mood for this gallows humour. “ …There are things inside me, I can hear them talking and swimming… This was not a very good idea. What have you done to me, what have I become?”
 
Part 33.

Aloft in Orbit of Elba II, aboard the USS Excelsior, 30 hours Since Enterprise set course for Sector 001.

God may have broken the mould when he conceived these two hotties, but Federation science had long since amended that manufacturing cockup, cataloguing graphically their bio-molecular signatures definitively, then updating the collective Federation Database back up every-time they rinsed through a pattern buffer which the tentacled Memory Omega is integrated with, so that god forbid if anything should happen, there was a Zombie recourse to fallback onto, not even the planet of the living Riker’s or Quarkstock has convinced the stern hands of applied scientific ethics is a bunch of godless meddling with forces which should not be tampered with, though officially by rights, Transporter Cloning is wittingly illegal for just about anyone else still but the Government. Emery Dickinson’s fantastic machinery is still sparklingly collating the last jumble masses of their atomic anatomies, though losing a freckle or two maybe from an unnecessary speedy strobed lurch, 99.998888321997% of Kathryn bounds off her reception pad like the devil himself is on her tail (Which actually happened once but is truthfully a story for another day.), but instead of continuing to scat more than a dozen more feet into the free and clear of a direct line of phaserfire, but Janeway martially spins about-face staring down her new jailor from a short distance chock full of true grit… “Am I your Prisoner Captain Shelby?”

Wearing the same uniform embodying the same obligations as her supplicated inquisitor, the breath taking blonde supposedly answered from a lower rung in the same chain of command than her hostage, had once years earlier at the Academy programmed a transporter to add a little fat mass into her composition ever day for a month she’d exercise the hell out of until she qualified a grade paunchier for the annual wrestling championships, and won, has had years to get her poop straight for this moment since a ten year old boy tapped her as a sleeper agent to save the Federation in it’s darkest hour during which was once then the Federations darkest hour, Shelby had been continuing floored to see first topped and then sidelined into obscurity as each year tried her people unimaginably more cleverly and grimly that the Massacre at Wolf 359 became comparatively brighter and… “Is this a Civil War Admiral Janeway? Or are you just accidentally caught up in events? ”

Janeway tugs herself like Picard, firming the risen line of her Uniform wrinkling the outline of her boobs. “That much is obvious Captain. I hope you plan on respecting that uniform you’re wearing. I am your superior officer. You will give me Command of this vessel immediately. I have to save the day.”

Shelby has been playing the long game on this. “ { …Sigh… } This uniform stands for honor, and a duty to the people of the Federation, not blind loyalty to you and an irresponsible command structure which hands out weapons of mass destruction to crazy people. Certainly “blind loyalty” to a lot of things, but you? No.”

Janeway takes two steps towards the person who is supposed to controlling this conversation where upon she prods Shelby’s divine chest with a witchy old index finger to exclamate this point. “The hell it doesn’t.”

Now they’re right up in each other’s faces competing for air. This is a pissing contest. “Ma’am we are in the smallest grey area you can imagine where you have an opportunity to either explain your side of this, or admit its all an uncontrollable clusterfuddle you have no idea what to do with. Kathryn, you can either help me put this war in a box or I can put you in a box.”

The temperature in Transporter Room 3 lowered 2 degrees. “You got the stones to execute me?”

(HA!) Shelby is certain her Security will belt this Admiral in the face if she tells them to, she’s earned their Loyalty dozens of times, and they have been explained their first duty before heading off on this mission a week ago to kidnap a Starfleet Admiral because she doesn’t treat her crewmen like children if she can help it, but Shelby needs to keep Janeway Talking because there might be angles she hasn’t accounted for while preparing her mousetrap these many years. “If that’s your definition of “putting you in a box”, then sure, why not? Although I was only considering rendering you in stasis until the current crisis had resolved… Kathryn, put your ego to one side, whatever is happening between you and Picard, this Super Sperm invasion, and even Lord Garth Master of the Universe, a disingenuous inharmonious front is not helping. Be the bigger woman.”

“Are you calling me fat?” Janeway pushes her sleeves up.

“What?” Shelby blinks, but raises her weapon.

“Disingenuous front? These are my real breasts god damn it!” Pointing at the mentioned parties squarely with a thumb from each hand.

“What?” Shelby is either being played with or, Kathryn Janeway might be a plasma injector short of a warp manifold. Though Mac would pretend he was insane at the drop of a hat to get out of rubbing her feet even when he should’a got lucky. “This isn’t time for games Kathryn. This is a time for heroes.”

“I’ve been a hero and I’ve been a villain.”

“Kathryn I’ve had more than enough time to figure out what’s going o...”

The tide turns. “Really? How much time? You don’t seem surprised or working on the fly… Elizabeth (is it?)? ..Elizabeth, how exactly did you know I was in trouble? That I was the centre of this mess? There’s no way you could have snuck up on that installation after everything went to hell, everyone was walking on eggshells and… I can feel one of those head aches starting.” Janeway gently retires to a submissive position like someone flicking a switch. Either Braxton, or some ancient version of herself who thinks they know better is messing with the time stream to… There is a string of explosions behind Kathy’s eyeballs. She hates time travel.

“One month ago.” Shelby lies, “You came back from the future Admiral Janeway, and tried to enlist B”Elanna Torres, to rout Picard off first before this all began. At first this future version of yourself tried to pass herself off as a present day Admiral Janeway but… Temporal Investigations has that definition of you in a holding cell and they really want to talk to you about the importance of maintaining our historical foundations before they strip you of rank.”

Janeway doesn’t find this difficult to accept, that there’s another Janeway exerting her will over history, in terms you can understand; this lady is almost an addict. “O? Did I do that again? You don’t think it’s heroic to change the past to save maybe the Universe from being destroyed? That Spunkclot planetside was trying to convince me I was wrong about a lot of things, but the bad guys are always trying to make me believe in the wildest fabrications. Picard stole my project and broke my leg and if he’s raised a fleet to avoid judicial restraint… Is Starfleet really tearing itself apart?” Kathryn feels the first trickle of guilt.

“It’s like a Mothers Day Sale on Lissepia with so much ear gouging and back stabbing.”

Kathryn needs to lull the enemy into a false sense of security “This isn’t Kirk’s Federation, a scandal like this is going to defrock me. These stars on my collar are useless, but you probably already knew that… A deal? I can make a deal? Why didn’t you stop all this from spinning out of control earlier?”

“Because it’s illegal and immoral to act upon foreknowledge Admiral. On some basic level you must admit a crime is a crime even if you get away with it., there is a moon with cells row upon toe of nothing but Kathryn Janeway’s who think they know better than every other being in the universe how the universe should unfold… You’re just rotten.”

“I’m being rail roaded.”

“What’s a rail road?”
 
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