Tiger- Crusade

by David Smith

  ‘Don’t worry!!’ O’Mara added hurriedly, trying to calm their nerves. ‘We kept a few samples in a stasis vault, just for study purposes. They’re completely inert.’

  ‘So how would that work?’ asked Chamberlain.

  ‘Well, the way I see it, we take a few samples, place them on the outer surface of Higgs hull, then wind up the heating and structural integrity fields and let them breed. Higgs is quite a bit smaller than Tiger, and we know how they grow and spread now. If we actually cultivate them, my best estimate is that it’ll only take about a week for the little bleeders to have spread enough to cover the whole of the hull. Obviously we’ll have to monitor the situation carefully. When we have hundred percent coverage we kill them off with a burst of excess energy, and hey presto! Higgs has disappeared!’

  Chamberlain still wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘You’re making this sound very easy . . . ‘

  O’Mara shrugged. ‘It’s not that complicated and we’ve had first-hand experience of the process. The only thing different will be how we kill the little buggers off once we’ve got one hundred percent coverage. I was thinking we put the other four ships in a tetrahedron formation around Higgs, reset all the phasers to de-focus or scatter their output, drop her shields and all zap her at reduced power levels until the growth of the LOAVES tails off.’

  Chamberlain looked horrified. ‘You’re going to fire on my ship?!?’

  ‘Trust me, that’s better that than the alternative we had to use aboard Tiger!’ confided O’Mara.

  Chamberlain still looked rattled. ‘You want to cover Higgs in an organic substance that nearly destroyed Tiger, then surround the ship and blast it with phaser energy from every angle? And that’s the good option??’

  O’Mara shrugged. ‘Well the solution we had to use on Tiger was to fly her through the photosphere of a star. I’m pretty sure that would work too, if you fancy giving that a go.’

  Chamberlain looked even more horrified. ‘Sooooo . . . what sort of power output will we need to set the phasers for?’

  Dave realised he might need to speak to Chamberlain to ease her nerves a little, and that this meeting probably wasn’t the place to do it. ‘That’s detail planning, ladies. We’ll run up the mission plans, then allocate personnel to suit. Before we start shooting at each other.’

  ‘Chamberlain, work with Izzy and ASBeau on a plan to extract the Sha T’Al First Minister. O’Mara, Mengele and I will begin working on a plan to get the Tana Emperor. We’ll reconvene here, same time each day for updates until we have workable solutions to both problems.’

  ‘The meeting between the Sha T’Al factions won’t wait for too long so we need to work quickly. Let’s crack on and make things happen.’

  Chapter 12

  Dave went to his quarters and began thinking about how they could man the sort of missions he had in mind. They needed two decent operational crews, with priority probably going to whichever ship took on the mission into Sha T’Al space. With the Sha T’Als more advanced ships and sensors they’d need to have their best people there to deal with that threat.

  Tiger was seriously short of crew, and the situation would only get worse if they had to deploy large numbers of their best people to the extraction missions. At the Arcturus Ranges they’d been forced to deploy Chief Money’s ’Locally Recruited Enlisted Personnel’ (the ship’s complement of hookers) and even the Yeomanry, eighteen NCO’s of extremely limited abilities (outside the bedroom).

  Results had been patchy at best, and at one stage they came close to buggering everything up by managing to load a photon torpedo into a launch tube the wrong way around.

  Sadly, he knew he didn’t have the luxury of a choice. Higgs didn’t have a full operational crew and he thought it extremely unlikely that they had any of the sort of mission specialists these operations called for.

  While he was confident that he could find personnel from Tiger suited to the sort of mission they were considering, he would have to husband his resources to ensure they could run the extraction missions without compromising the operational effectiveness of either ship.

  Dave realised he couldn’t afford to deploy all of his best operations staff on the extraction missions and wondered if he could find a few more useful mission specialists scattered through Tiger’s crew who might be give him some degree of flexibility.

  ‘Susan, please check all crew records. I need a number of extra personnel with advanced tactical training or related skills that would be useful for a special operations infiltration mission in hostile territory with heavy security protection.’

  ‘Accessing . . . Record search complete: recommended personnel are Zbigniew Nowacki . . . ‘

  ‘Hold on, Nowacki’s in supply isn’t he?’

  ‘That is correct Commander. However, his records indicate that as well as exceptional scores in basic tactical training, he served seven years and eight months with the Polish Military, eventually being assigned to their Secret Service Division. He has received training for such missions far in excess of what Starfleet might normally expect. His marksmanship skills are particularly impressive.’

  Dave shrugged. Not what he expected, but a welcome asset all the same. ‘Who else came at the top of the list?’

  ‘Purely on available data, Crewman Ezekiel Moss would be my next recommendation.’

  ‘Moss? What’s his history?’

  ‘Unknown Commander. My review of his biographical data would suggest that his stated life before serving in Starfleet is completely fictitious. His scores in tactical training assessments are actually exactly average for the crew.’

  ‘So why have you recommended him?’

  ‘Apparently, Moss doesn’t know that I log all performances on the shooting range for safety and security reasons. In non-assessment practice, Moss is the ship’s most proficient small-arms user.’

  ‘WHAT?? Better than Chief Belle? And ASBeau?’

  ‘Indeed, Commander. In unscheduled practice, Moss rarely misses a target even though he only ever attempts the highest difficulty scenarios. The only person in the crew who can match his scores is Crewmen Jane Doe, who has not made my list of recommendations due to her inconsistency.’

  Dave paused. Jane Doe had no history at all before joining the fleet, and served uneventfully in engineering until she became stressed or took a blow to the head. This seemed to unlock some kind of primal memory that turned her into and unstoppable one-woman killing machine for a short period of time.

  Dave had seen it happen, and it had scared the crap out of him when it did. He was still weighing up the possibility of trying to unleash her, when Susan continued.

  ‘My next recommendations are Crewmen Stephanie Kwok and Tatyana Kostova.’

  Dave was perplexed: he didn’t recognise either name. ‘Who the hell are Kwok and Kostova?’

  Susan seemed to pause for a millisecond before replying ‘You may know them better by their working names of Suki Diki and Ola Yaddick . . . ‘

  ‘They’re hookers??’

  ‘No Commander, they’re Locally Recruited Enlisted Personnel, currently assigned to the medical team.’

  Yeah, hookers, thought Dave.

  Susan obviously registered Dave’s doubts. ‘Like Moss, Kwok has demonstrated exceptional abilities in unscheduled tactical exercises. I’ve seen her hit a moving target the size of a postage stamp at thirty meters. And Kostova is a Russian ex-Spetznaz soldier.’

  ‘How the hell did she end up as a hooker?‘

  ‘You mean “Locally Recruited Enlisted Person”, Commander’ chided Susan.

  ‘Whatever.’

  Susan snorted unnecessarily before adding ‘In an interview in her files she stated that “the pay was crap, even when we did get paid”. It seems Chief Money may have employed her as a . . . professional lady . . . and additional muscle. It’s purely an observation that the other Locally Recruited Enlisted Persons all clearly view her as their chief protector.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll give the
m consideration. Who’s next on the list?

  ‘Ensign Ruth Ben-David has achieved consistently high scores in most forms of tactical training.’

  Dave paused. Ben-David was a fairly recent addition to the crew, being assigned to Tiger only shortly before Dave had. Her personnel file noted that she had an unhealthy obsession with weaponry. She’d been transferred to Tiger after shooting through an observation port on her last ship with an ancient Israeli fire-arm whilst having sex. ‘Does she have the temperament for this sort of operation?’

  ‘Anecdotally it would appear so. Previous superior officers have praised her calmness in pressure situations and her ability to see orders through in difficult circumstances. She just happens to like shooting things. A lot. She spends more time on the shooting range than any other member of the crew.’

  Dave sighed. They were desperately short of bodies and he knew he couldn’t afford to be that choosy. ‘Any other recommendations?’

  ‘There are several crew members with particular skills and traits that might prove useful in covert operations. The Harvazh and Harvazh Too are metamorphs whose physiology would deceive basic sensors.’

  Dave hadn’t thought of that. The Harvazh were actually a colony of microscopic creatures with a collective intelligence. Being constituted of billions of individual entities, they could reform their colony to take almost any shape. They could mimic the skin, heart, lungs and even hair of a human, and in normal circumstances took a humanoid form including copying the standard fleet uniform. Their ability to change shape might prove very useful.

  The Harvazh had been aboard Tiger for almost two years, when some kind of upper colony limit had been reached and they’d split into two equal, smaller colonies, creating the Harvazh Too.

  These colonies were identical in most respects, but in choosing an appearance to facilitate their interaction with Tiger’s largely human crew, the Harvazh had assumed a physical form uncannily like Charlie Chaplin. Even more bizarrely the Harvazh Too appeared to have taken Marilyn Monroe as its template, and even copied the mannerisms and affectations the long-dead movie star displayed in her old films.

  Susan continued. ‘In a similar vein, Crewman Ma’Gat Gon has a chameleonic appearance.’

  Ma’Gat Gon was a Qur’ed, an extra-terrestrial from a giant hot-house world of astonishing bio-diversity. The environment was lethal, with everything trying to kill and eat everything else and the Qur’ed had developed an extraordinary chameleonic ability as a survival tool. She was normally completely invisible to the casual observer, an instinctive ability that she only turned off with great difficulty in order to interact with her shipmates.

  Although her natural state was to be naked (and thus invisible) she wore a standard uniform on duty to avoid freaking the hell out of everyone around her. So her colleagues could see in which direction she was looking, or whom she was addressing, she completed her appearance by wearing dark sun-glasses, although these seemed to hang in mid-air.

  Any other ideas?’

  ‘I believe Crewman Lana Modric might also prove to be an asset.’

  ‘Is she another gunslinger?’

  ‘No Commander, she’s a thief.’

  Dave wasn’t convinced. ‘We’re not going to steal the First Minister, Susan.’

  ‘No Commander, but Crewman Modric is a professional cat-burglar who has considerable expertise in over-coming security systems. She joined Starfleet after serving three years in Italy’s San Nicola maximum security prison.’

  ‘If she got caught maybe she’s not that good?’ Dave quipped.

  ‘It would appear otherwise: her original sentence was for six months, but she managed to escape from the prison on no less than three separate occasions, leading to lengthened sentences. During her last incarceration, she pointed out several other potential escape routes within the penitentiary in order to have her sentence reduced. It seems she’s driven by a desire to defeat the system rather than financial gain. Her particular skill-set will almost certainly be useful in our forthcoming enterprise.’

  ‘Fair enough. Anyone else?’

  ‘Our previous missions have shown that I-Pad has several applications that we don’t know we actually need until the need itself arises. He would appear to be particularly adept at interfacing with IT systems. It would be worth including him as a wild-card.’

  Dave remembered how the little alien service robot had rescued a badly injured Aisling O’Mara on the tiny world of Ying-Yang, and then provided them with an access route through the myriad defences of a Starbase in the mirror universe.

  ‘Yes, good call. He always seems to have something up his sleeve. Literally.’

  ‘That’s as many suggestions as I can usefully make without knowing more details of the mission, Commander. I’ve no doubt there would be many other crew-members with useful skills, but until we define what skills are actually needed I would leave the matter at that. What I would say is that the team will also need a leader. Someone will have to make the command decisions and direct the team during the active phase of the operation.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that’ Dave admitted.

  Susan continued. ‘The obvious choice would be Lieutenant-Commander Beauregard, but he can be a little too . . . enthusiastic at times.’

  ‘The phrase that came to my mind was “trigger-happy . . . ”

  ‘Indeed Commander. Perhaps Lieutenant Janus might be more flexible in his approach . . . ‘

  Dave had given consideration to his Deputy Tactical Officer, but had already ruled it out as he wanted the two tactical specialists on the Bridge of the two ships. He’d thought long and hard about who should lead the high-risk mission on the ground to extract the Sha T’Al First Minister and had eventually decided there was only one logical candidate.

  ‘I’ve already selected a leader for the away team on that mission. Bearing in mind that we’ll have to provide Ops staff to crew the Bridge on both Tiger and Higgs, I wanted someone with command experience who could be spared from ship ops and also has a track record with clandestine operations.’

  Susan barely paused. ‘I presume you’re referring to Lieutenant Marianne Delgado?’

  Dave nodded ‘I can’t begin to express how much she impressed me when she rescued us in the mirror universe. She coped with the pressure of being an undercover operative and really came through when it mattered. I certainly can’t think of a better candidate.’

  ‘I agree with your assessment Commander, but have to advise that she’s currently suspended on charges of desertion’ cautioned Susan.

  ‘I appreciate that, but I’m sure that’ll sort itself out when the court hears that she’s effectively been ship-wrecked in an alien universe for the last two years. And it’s not like she’s the only person who’s been suspended . . . ‘ grumbled Dave.

  ‘In that case, I believe she’s eminently suitable Commander.’

  ‘Thank you Susan, hopefully we’ll flesh-out the bones of the plan over the next few days and be in a better position to finalise a team.

  Dave looked over the list. Sometimes having a few odd-balls and oddities in the crew could be useful. As this was a high-risk and highly illegal mission, Dave decided that he’d have to ask the crew to volunteer, rather than assigning them to the mission. He had the bodies for the job, but did they have the courage to take the job on?

  --------------------

  Dave called the Steward of the Officer’s Mess to the planning meeting for the mission into the Tana Empire.

  Chief Butler arrived promptly, and Dave asked him to sit down.

  ‘Steward, we’ve got an unusual mission at the planning stage. I need to find out if any of the crew have a particular talent in terms of entertainment value. It’s not necessarily the sort of thing that shows up in Fleet personnel records, so I figured you’re probably the best person to ask.’

  The Steward raised an eyebrow, but was otherwise unperturbed. ‘That’s an interesting question Commander. I’m aware that
many of the crew regard themselves as talented, although in truth, that is clearly a matter of personal opinion. There are a few with quite extraordinary abilities, some of which are truly entertaining, but I couldn’t be sure that I know everyone’s abilities. Have you considered auditions?’

  Dave paused. He hadn’t considered that, as he was thinking in mission terms and allocating specific resources rather than asking people to ‘have a go.’

  ‘That’s a great idea, Steward! We have an open audition, but have to remind people that it’s in relation to a potentially dangerous mission . . . ‘

  ‘A word of caution sir. An open audition will absolutely attract a raft of people who truly believe they’re talented, but are invariably . . . not’ warned the Steward with as much tact as he could muster.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Well sir, if you’ve ever been to one of Chief Money’s Karaoke nights down on the Rec-Deck, you’ll probably have noticed how difficult it is to lever the microphone out of the clutches of Crewman Robyn Soles.’

  Dave remembered PO Soles from the Engineering department very clearly having met her several times, but he’d never heard her sing. She was a competent weapons engineer, who went about her work with little fuss and no significant problems that he could remember. What he did remember about the bubbly and attractive Australian was that due to an alleged phobia of woven fabrics, she’d insisted on having non-standard uniforms manufactured especially for her. They were exactly like everyone else’s uniform, but made from PVC or latex. Very, very tight latex.

  ‘So Soles will be first to audition?’

  ‘Indeed, sir, and you’ll wish she hadn’t.’

  Dave banished the image of Robyn Soles from his mind and asked ‘What’s wrong with her singing?’

  There were astonished looks around the table. Commander Romanov explained. ‘Do you remember that brawl that broke out at Arcturus Starbase when we revalidated the ship?’

  Dave nodded.

  ‘Well the reason so many of our crew were heading onto the promenade was that most of them had gone to a bar on the deck above which was hosting a karaoke session. Soles can’t help herself but grab the mic. There were around three hundred people in that bar when she got on stage but there were only two left by the time she’d finished her song. She was one of the two, the other was the MC. Even the bar staff buggered off.’