(A teaser, just to tease you... 
)
The Shinto Shrine had just the right look, ancient but scrupulously maintained. It was surrounded by a small courtyard paved with tiled stones marked with ancient prayers to the kami said to be enshrined within. The courtyard in turn was surrounded by cherry and plum trees and beds of various flowers. Beyond the trees and flowers, the hill the shrine had been built on offered a view overlooking a feudal province in ancient Japan.
Dian, standing just inside the courtyard’s torii gate, admired her handiwork. Her clothes were part of it. She was wearing a pink and white patterned yukata and had her hair up and held in place with ribbon and long pins. She carried a paper fan with a complex death scene painted on it. Every now and then she used the fan to dispel some of the early summer heat that engulfed the area as she waited for her “dance partner” to arrive.
Alenn materialized on the path between the gate and the entrance to the shrine. Dian smiled when she saw her...then frowned at her appearance. Dian put her hands on her hips and called out, “What are you wearing?”
Alenn looked down at herself and then looked up at Dian. “My Battle Dress,” Alenn called back. Her “Battle Dress” consisted of a bikini made of gold cloth and armor plate that barely masked the most interesting parts of her curvy, toned body, as well as gauntlets and boots that did completely cover her forearms and calves. The gauntlets and boots were gold cloth and plate as well, so the entire outfit matched the gold band tiara that she always wore in public.
“Why aren’t you wearing the yukata I gave you?” Dian said. “I thought we agreed to fully embrace our surroundings this time.”
Alenn approached as she said, “I can’t fight in one of those things. That’s for docile women serving tea. In this I can kick and punch and stab and mean it.”
Dian sighed. “I’m beginning to think you don’t appreciate the effort I go through to make our battlefield interesting.”
Alenn got close to Dian and smirked. “Pssh...’battlefield.’ You make a temple, you make a coliseum, you make a junkyard, you make a desert planet with giant worms...all that happens is I come in and kick your behind.”
“Big talk from someone who looks like she’s dressed for sunbathing. Seriously, the women of your world actually went to war dressed like that?”
“Proudly! We stood at our mens’ sides and faced our enemies together...”
“And you used all the jiggling to distract your enemies while the men cut the other mens’ heads off?”
“Misdirection is a tried-and-true battle tactic. What’s wrong? Afraid you’ll be too taken with my beauty to fight properly?”
Dian rolled her eyes. “You dress like a bimbo, you wave your naughty bits at me...all that happens is that I kick your nicely-shaped behind.”
“Thank you for the compliment. Computer, Elasian Hound Blades.” The computer acknowledged and two long, curved daggers appeared in Alenn’s hands.”
Dian armed herself more theatrically. “Computer...transformation!” She crouched low and spread her arms as the fan in her right hand stretched and solidified, transmuting into a shiny katana. Dian took the hilt in both hands and rose to a dueling stance, angling the blade toward Alenn. “See? Mine’s bigger.”
Alenn crouched into an attack stance. “Do the math. Mine have more surface area and the same length of cutting edge.”
Dian smirked. “Prove it.”
With a war cry, Captain Dian Phua and Lieutenant Commander Alenn, Commanding Officer and First Officer of the Federation Starship Sundown, charged each other.
Their morning workout had begun.
0833 HOURS
NOVA-CLASS FEDERATION STARSHIP SUNDOWN
FIVE LIGHT-MINUTES FROM THE GALACTIC BARRIER
“Good Morning,” Doctor Sandra Langkowski called out cheerily as she walked in to Sick Bay. She went immediately to the department replicator and ordered a hot chocolate. The nurse sitting at the watch desk, an Andorian called Ren’shar, tracked her with his antennae without looking up from the PADD he was typing on. She took a few seconds to sip the hot chocolate and savor the taste, then turned to Ren’shar and grinned brightly. “So what’s for today? Who’s sick? Who’s faking sick to get out of scrub duty?”
“I’m just finishing up the shift report, Doctor,” Ren’shar said. He stood and brought the PADD over. “No casualties over the last two shifts,” he said with a smile of his own.
Sandra frowned as she took the device. “Such a boring crew,” she muttered. “Bunch of health nuts. Guess I’ll have to see if someone brings me a challenge at Sick Call. Oh, wait!” She checked the time. “The Captain and Alenn are sparring now, right?”
“I believe so, Doctor,” Ren’shar said.
Sandra was smiling again. “Good! Maybe they’ll do enough damage to each other to make my morning entertaining.” Sandra knew that her friends liked to spar on the holodeck with the mortality failsafes set mid-range between “full” and “off”, so that if they used holographic weapons they would feel the impacts without experiencing the associated physical trauma. This often led them to come to Sick Bay afterward with fascinating neurological injuries. Sandra had them all documented.
“That is possible. Good day, Doctor.” Ren’shar left, forcing himself not to think about what kind of Chief Medical Officer would wish for the Captain and First Officer to hurt each other.
0837 HOURS
Ensign Miora Vin had gotten lost in her work at her station in Main Engineering. She was the watch officer in charge of monitoring the ship’s Structural Integrity, and she was watching telemetry data from a repair drone working on a micro-fracture in one of the spars in the Saucer part of the blended spaceframe. So focused was she on the information scrolling on her display that she almost missed the approach of the Chief Engineer. That didn’t matter. Her symbiote never missed that, and Vin always let his host know when she wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the ChEng’s proximity. So just when the repair drone was putting the final touches on the repair Miora’s stomach churned a little and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she immediately turned to face Vin’s fear.
Lieutenant K’Chara wasn’t that frightening, really...most of the time. In her current form she was actually pleasant to look at. She was tall and slim and had long, straight black hair, and her face was sculpted and her lips pouty and sexy. Her eyes were also a pretty shade of sky blue, and they offset her blue-gray skin nicely.
They were also faceted with over a thousand tiny lenses each, and looked exactly like the arachnoid orbs they were despite their humanoid shape, so one generally tried to avoid looking into them, while also trying not to think about the fact that the crisply tailored uniform she seemed to be wearing was actually made from the short, camouflaging hairs that grew out of the carapace that surrounded her body.
Then there was her smile, which completely gave her true nature away.
PleasedontsmilePleasedontsmile... Miora thought. It was just her bad luck that K’Chara genuinely liked her, and the lieutenant grinned wide...revealing the mandibles and blood-sucking fangs that lined the top and bottom of her mouth. Vin cringed inside her at the sight.
“Good Morning, Enssssign,” K’Chara hissed. “I sssee you’re already hard at work.”
Miora forced herself to calm down before responding. “Yes, Ma’am. I wanted to get right on to the fracture reported last shift.”
“Oh.” K’Chara leaned past her to check her console. “This is excellent, Enssign.” She straightened up and looked Miora in the eye. “You’ve been a great asssset to this section ever since you transferred in. You’re making wonderful progress as an engineer.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I come from a race of engineers.” Suddenly she looked concerned. “But you look a little flush. Is sssomething the matter?” She waited a moment, then grinned again. “I sssee.” She waved her clawed hand in front of Miora’s symbiote pouch, causing Vin to wriggle around in terror. “It’sss your companion that’s nervous.”
Miora blushed. “We don’t mean any offense, it’s just...”
“...Trill symbiotes don’t like BUGS!” K’Chara said with a slightly terrifying giggle. “Well, tell him not to worry. I had a big breakfast so I have no need to catch him today. Carry on, Ensssign.”
“Aye, Lieutenant,” Miora said. With that, K’Chara crouched a little, then leaped into the air and somersaulted right by the top of the reactor’s matter injector before landing lightly right next to a station on the upper catwalk of the Engine Room, half-startling the Rigellian working there.
Miora sighed and turned back to her work. A meek protest from Vin prompted her to say out loud, “No matter what you think, she’s still better than working with Leadbottom.”
0840 HOURS
The call to report to the bridge came just as he was finishing breakfast. Lieutenant Martin Michael McCann took his coffee with him, sipping it from his favorite mug, which boldly announced “The Hottest Guys Are RISAN.” He’d finished a third of it by the time the turbolift deposited him on Deck One. He walked down the port curve of the upper level to the command level and found Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Dov Chaifetz sitting in the First Officer’s Chair, finishing out Delta Shift in command. “I keep telling you, Dove,” McCann said as he approached, “If you see something you don’t understand coming at the ship, shoot a torpedo at it and figure it out from the wreckage.”
Chaifetz stood and smirked. “Right. And when it turns out to be a shuttle full of Bajoran Vedeks, my testimony at the court martial will be: ‘I was just following the orders of the Second Officer who was too lazy to come to the bridge.’”
Both men chuckled. They’d been good friends since they met after being assigned to the Sundown, so much so that the crew considered them the male counterparts to Phua and Alenn. “Well, I’m here now,” McCann said, “so what’s up?”
“Actually have a minor mystery for you, M’n’M,” Chaifetz said. “About an hour ago we started to detect a gravitational anomaly coming from the Barrier.”
McCann’s mug had almost reached his lips before Chaifetz finished. It hung in front of his face for a moment, then descended as his eyebrow went up. “You detected what coming from the Barrier?”
“Yeah,” Chaifetz said, “that was my reaction. Come on.” Both men ascended to the Science station and flanked the crewman at the console. Chaifetz pointed at the relevant data, which was on the right of the screen. “At 0722 the Science station reported the formation of a gravity well in the direction of the Barrier and about a third of a light-year beyond the boundary. I would have discounted it as a sensor error, but, look, the thing’s still forming.”
McCann checked the values associated with the forming well. His eyes widened a little as he saw that they were ticking up...exponentially. “What’s it forming from? There’s nothing that far beyond the Barrier but space dust.”
“I know,” Chaifetz said, “and it can’t be coming from the Barrier because Barrier material is massless.”
“How’re we detecting it at all? The sensors are blind to the Barrier.”
“It’s the main deflector. Deflector Control reported a drop off of particulate material impacting the dish, so we did a focused scan of the surrounding area and realized the debris was slowly being drawn toward the anomaly...and so are we, by the way.”
McCann’s head snapped in his direction, then was drawn to the console. He pressed a few contacts and a window opened on the display. He checked the ship’s position in space. It’s speed was miniscule, but it was drifting toward the anomaly. “Geez, Dove, this is the type of news you’re supposed to start with! I’m surprised you waited an hour to call somebody!”
It was a rebuke, but Chaifetz defended himself. “The readings are so outlandish I didn’t want to kick it upstairs before I checked to see if this was some insane malfunction of the ship’s systems. Can you imagine what Alenn would do if I called her up for this and it turned out to be nothing?”
McCann nodded. He could imagine. “So did you do a diagnostic?”
“Level One. Twice. We’d just completed the second when I called you. Everything’s working fine. This is really happening.”
McCann turned to the helm. “Thrusters at stationkeeping. Hold our position right here against the pull of the anomaly.”
“Aye, Sir!” The helmsman said.
McCann turned to Chaifetz again. “We need to get Alenn and the Captain up here before...”
He was interrupted by a warning alarm that sounded shrill and loud across the bridge...then he was flying, his arms and legs flailing, his mug arcing toward the main viewer, which showed streaks of light and dark along the length of the display.
In Engineering, Miora Vin screamed and tried to grab onto part of the reactor as she found herself and her colleagues rising uncontrollably into the air...
In Sick Bay, Sandra Langkowski managed to grab onto her desk to keep from flying into the bulkhead. The Nurse and Corpsman in the examining room had less luck.
And on the holodeck, a split-second after Phua’s sword and Alenn’s blades clashed and they pressed into each other, irresistible force sent them tumbling off the hill and into the sky. They started to fly apart, but both women twisted in the air and reached out. They clasped right hands hard, then clasped left hands to right wrists. Now, whatever they were facing, they’d face together.
For starters, they had a great deal of pain to look forward to as they plummeted from a hundred meters to the village below...
)The Shinto Shrine had just the right look, ancient but scrupulously maintained. It was surrounded by a small courtyard paved with tiled stones marked with ancient prayers to the kami said to be enshrined within. The courtyard in turn was surrounded by cherry and plum trees and beds of various flowers. Beyond the trees and flowers, the hill the shrine had been built on offered a view overlooking a feudal province in ancient Japan.
Dian, standing just inside the courtyard’s torii gate, admired her handiwork. Her clothes were part of it. She was wearing a pink and white patterned yukata and had her hair up and held in place with ribbon and long pins. She carried a paper fan with a complex death scene painted on it. Every now and then she used the fan to dispel some of the early summer heat that engulfed the area as she waited for her “dance partner” to arrive.
Alenn materialized on the path between the gate and the entrance to the shrine. Dian smiled when she saw her...then frowned at her appearance. Dian put her hands on her hips and called out, “What are you wearing?”
Alenn looked down at herself and then looked up at Dian. “My Battle Dress,” Alenn called back. Her “Battle Dress” consisted of a bikini made of gold cloth and armor plate that barely masked the most interesting parts of her curvy, toned body, as well as gauntlets and boots that did completely cover her forearms and calves. The gauntlets and boots were gold cloth and plate as well, so the entire outfit matched the gold band tiara that she always wore in public.
“Why aren’t you wearing the yukata I gave you?” Dian said. “I thought we agreed to fully embrace our surroundings this time.”
Alenn approached as she said, “I can’t fight in one of those things. That’s for docile women serving tea. In this I can kick and punch and stab and mean it.”
Dian sighed. “I’m beginning to think you don’t appreciate the effort I go through to make our battlefield interesting.”
Alenn got close to Dian and smirked. “Pssh...’battlefield.’ You make a temple, you make a coliseum, you make a junkyard, you make a desert planet with giant worms...all that happens is I come in and kick your behind.”
“Big talk from someone who looks like she’s dressed for sunbathing. Seriously, the women of your world actually went to war dressed like that?”
“Proudly! We stood at our mens’ sides and faced our enemies together...”
“And you used all the jiggling to distract your enemies while the men cut the other mens’ heads off?”
“Misdirection is a tried-and-true battle tactic. What’s wrong? Afraid you’ll be too taken with my beauty to fight properly?”
Dian rolled her eyes. “You dress like a bimbo, you wave your naughty bits at me...all that happens is that I kick your nicely-shaped behind.”
“Thank you for the compliment. Computer, Elasian Hound Blades.” The computer acknowledged and two long, curved daggers appeared in Alenn’s hands.”
Dian armed herself more theatrically. “Computer...transformation!” She crouched low and spread her arms as the fan in her right hand stretched and solidified, transmuting into a shiny katana. Dian took the hilt in both hands and rose to a dueling stance, angling the blade toward Alenn. “See? Mine’s bigger.”
Alenn crouched into an attack stance. “Do the math. Mine have more surface area and the same length of cutting edge.”
Dian smirked. “Prove it.”
With a war cry, Captain Dian Phua and Lieutenant Commander Alenn, Commanding Officer and First Officer of the Federation Starship Sundown, charged each other.
Their morning workout had begun.
0833 HOURS
NOVA-CLASS FEDERATION STARSHIP SUNDOWN
FIVE LIGHT-MINUTES FROM THE GALACTIC BARRIER
“Good Morning,” Doctor Sandra Langkowski called out cheerily as she walked in to Sick Bay. She went immediately to the department replicator and ordered a hot chocolate. The nurse sitting at the watch desk, an Andorian called Ren’shar, tracked her with his antennae without looking up from the PADD he was typing on. She took a few seconds to sip the hot chocolate and savor the taste, then turned to Ren’shar and grinned brightly. “So what’s for today? Who’s sick? Who’s faking sick to get out of scrub duty?”
“I’m just finishing up the shift report, Doctor,” Ren’shar said. He stood and brought the PADD over. “No casualties over the last two shifts,” he said with a smile of his own.
Sandra frowned as she took the device. “Such a boring crew,” she muttered. “Bunch of health nuts. Guess I’ll have to see if someone brings me a challenge at Sick Call. Oh, wait!” She checked the time. “The Captain and Alenn are sparring now, right?”
“I believe so, Doctor,” Ren’shar said.
Sandra was smiling again. “Good! Maybe they’ll do enough damage to each other to make my morning entertaining.” Sandra knew that her friends liked to spar on the holodeck with the mortality failsafes set mid-range between “full” and “off”, so that if they used holographic weapons they would feel the impacts without experiencing the associated physical trauma. This often led them to come to Sick Bay afterward with fascinating neurological injuries. Sandra had them all documented.
“That is possible. Good day, Doctor.” Ren’shar left, forcing himself not to think about what kind of Chief Medical Officer would wish for the Captain and First Officer to hurt each other.
0837 HOURS
Ensign Miora Vin had gotten lost in her work at her station in Main Engineering. She was the watch officer in charge of monitoring the ship’s Structural Integrity, and she was watching telemetry data from a repair drone working on a micro-fracture in one of the spars in the Saucer part of the blended spaceframe. So focused was she on the information scrolling on her display that she almost missed the approach of the Chief Engineer. That didn’t matter. Her symbiote never missed that, and Vin always let his host know when she wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the ChEng’s proximity. So just when the repair drone was putting the final touches on the repair Miora’s stomach churned a little and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she immediately turned to face Vin’s fear.
Lieutenant K’Chara wasn’t that frightening, really...most of the time. In her current form she was actually pleasant to look at. She was tall and slim and had long, straight black hair, and her face was sculpted and her lips pouty and sexy. Her eyes were also a pretty shade of sky blue, and they offset her blue-gray skin nicely.
They were also faceted with over a thousand tiny lenses each, and looked exactly like the arachnoid orbs they were despite their humanoid shape, so one generally tried to avoid looking into them, while also trying not to think about the fact that the crisply tailored uniform she seemed to be wearing was actually made from the short, camouflaging hairs that grew out of the carapace that surrounded her body.
Then there was her smile, which completely gave her true nature away.
PleasedontsmilePleasedontsmile... Miora thought. It was just her bad luck that K’Chara genuinely liked her, and the lieutenant grinned wide...revealing the mandibles and blood-sucking fangs that lined the top and bottom of her mouth. Vin cringed inside her at the sight.
“Good Morning, Enssssign,” K’Chara hissed. “I sssee you’re already hard at work.”
Miora forced herself to calm down before responding. “Yes, Ma’am. I wanted to get right on to the fracture reported last shift.”
“Oh.” K’Chara leaned past her to check her console. “This is excellent, Enssign.” She straightened up and looked Miora in the eye. “You’ve been a great asssset to this section ever since you transferred in. You’re making wonderful progress as an engineer.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I come from a race of engineers.” Suddenly she looked concerned. “But you look a little flush. Is sssomething the matter?” She waited a moment, then grinned again. “I sssee.” She waved her clawed hand in front of Miora’s symbiote pouch, causing Vin to wriggle around in terror. “It’sss your companion that’s nervous.”
Miora blushed. “We don’t mean any offense, it’s just...”
“...Trill symbiotes don’t like BUGS!” K’Chara said with a slightly terrifying giggle. “Well, tell him not to worry. I had a big breakfast so I have no need to catch him today. Carry on, Ensssign.”
“Aye, Lieutenant,” Miora said. With that, K’Chara crouched a little, then leaped into the air and somersaulted right by the top of the reactor’s matter injector before landing lightly right next to a station on the upper catwalk of the Engine Room, half-startling the Rigellian working there.
Miora sighed and turned back to her work. A meek protest from Vin prompted her to say out loud, “No matter what you think, she’s still better than working with Leadbottom.”
0840 HOURS
The call to report to the bridge came just as he was finishing breakfast. Lieutenant Martin Michael McCann took his coffee with him, sipping it from his favorite mug, which boldly announced “The Hottest Guys Are RISAN.” He’d finished a third of it by the time the turbolift deposited him on Deck One. He walked down the port curve of the upper level to the command level and found Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Dov Chaifetz sitting in the First Officer’s Chair, finishing out Delta Shift in command. “I keep telling you, Dove,” McCann said as he approached, “If you see something you don’t understand coming at the ship, shoot a torpedo at it and figure it out from the wreckage.”
Chaifetz stood and smirked. “Right. And when it turns out to be a shuttle full of Bajoran Vedeks, my testimony at the court martial will be: ‘I was just following the orders of the Second Officer who was too lazy to come to the bridge.’”
Both men chuckled. They’d been good friends since they met after being assigned to the Sundown, so much so that the crew considered them the male counterparts to Phua and Alenn. “Well, I’m here now,” McCann said, “so what’s up?”
“Actually have a minor mystery for you, M’n’M,” Chaifetz said. “About an hour ago we started to detect a gravitational anomaly coming from the Barrier.”
McCann’s mug had almost reached his lips before Chaifetz finished. It hung in front of his face for a moment, then descended as his eyebrow went up. “You detected what coming from the Barrier?”
“Yeah,” Chaifetz said, “that was my reaction. Come on.” Both men ascended to the Science station and flanked the crewman at the console. Chaifetz pointed at the relevant data, which was on the right of the screen. “At 0722 the Science station reported the formation of a gravity well in the direction of the Barrier and about a third of a light-year beyond the boundary. I would have discounted it as a sensor error, but, look, the thing’s still forming.”
McCann checked the values associated with the forming well. His eyes widened a little as he saw that they were ticking up...exponentially. “What’s it forming from? There’s nothing that far beyond the Barrier but space dust.”
“I know,” Chaifetz said, “and it can’t be coming from the Barrier because Barrier material is massless.”
“How’re we detecting it at all? The sensors are blind to the Barrier.”
“It’s the main deflector. Deflector Control reported a drop off of particulate material impacting the dish, so we did a focused scan of the surrounding area and realized the debris was slowly being drawn toward the anomaly...and so are we, by the way.”
McCann’s head snapped in his direction, then was drawn to the console. He pressed a few contacts and a window opened on the display. He checked the ship’s position in space. It’s speed was miniscule, but it was drifting toward the anomaly. “Geez, Dove, this is the type of news you’re supposed to start with! I’m surprised you waited an hour to call somebody!”
It was a rebuke, but Chaifetz defended himself. “The readings are so outlandish I didn’t want to kick it upstairs before I checked to see if this was some insane malfunction of the ship’s systems. Can you imagine what Alenn would do if I called her up for this and it turned out to be nothing?”
McCann nodded. He could imagine. “So did you do a diagnostic?”
“Level One. Twice. We’d just completed the second when I called you. Everything’s working fine. This is really happening.”
McCann turned to the helm. “Thrusters at stationkeeping. Hold our position right here against the pull of the anomaly.”
“Aye, Sir!” The helmsman said.
McCann turned to Chaifetz again. “We need to get Alenn and the Captain up here before...”
He was interrupted by a warning alarm that sounded shrill and loud across the bridge...then he was flying, his arms and legs flailing, his mug arcing toward the main viewer, which showed streaks of light and dark along the length of the display.
In Engineering, Miora Vin screamed and tried to grab onto part of the reactor as she found herself and her colleagues rising uncontrollably into the air...
In Sick Bay, Sandra Langkowski managed to grab onto her desk to keep from flying into the bulkhead. The Nurse and Corpsman in the examining room had less luck.
And on the holodeck, a split-second after Phua’s sword and Alenn’s blades clashed and they pressed into each other, irresistible force sent them tumbling off the hill and into the sky. They started to fly apart, but both women twisted in the air and reached out. They clasped right hands hard, then clasped left hands to right wrists. Now, whatever they were facing, they’d face together.
For starters, they had a great deal of pain to look forward to as they plummeted from a hundred meters to the village below...
