Give the Kid a Break! (or a wild Terry Wu appears)
Posted on Thu Sep 15th, 2016 @ 7:02pm by Lieutenant JG Terry Wu
2,855 words; about a 14 minute read
Mission:
Celebrate Culture
Location: Starfleet Academy, Beta Ursae Minor II.
Timeline: A few days prior to current MD
ON
"Chenkins, report!"
At her station, Raquel Chenkins' fingers tapped at various icons on her console, initiating a sensor sweep. "Sir, incoming bogey is identified as a Jem'Hadar Battle Cruiser. Its shields are up and weapons are armed."
At his own station, Terry Wu groaned softly, the sound mingling with various murmurs from the rest of the bridge crew of the Aloysius. A venerable Miranda class vessel, the Aloysius was no match for a Dominion battleship. Sitting in the captain's seat, Commodore Preck dug his fingertips into his forehead, shaking his head minutely. "Take us to Red alert, Chenkins. Suggestions, anyone?"
"Sir, the prudent response would be to hail them and remind them of the standing treaties between the Dominion and the Alpha Quadrant powers." Tulk suggested from the Sciences station, his voice level and precise. Typical. Terry thought.
"Drop out of warp and approach at impulse speed." suggested Mike Kalakona at the tactical station. Short and sweet, and practical to boot, but fatalistic. There was no way an old tub like the Aloysius could outrun any Dominion ship at warp speed, and it couldn't survive one-on-one battle with it, either. The tall Polynesian wanted to go out fighting, not running.
"Make for the Pretolin system." Terry suggested. "We can make it there before they overtake us, duck into the asteroid field and play cat and mouse with them."
"That's not half bad, Ensign." Preck acceded. 'Set a course, take us there. Kalakona -- shields up, warm up the weapons. Tulk -- scan for any anomalies we can use to our advantage."
A chorus of "Aye, sir's" arose from the bridge crew, and the Aloysius dived hell-for-leather towards the Pretolin system and the cover her asteroid belt could provide.
"He's a career criminal from a family of career criminals. Of course nobody trusts him."
"He's a good officer, though. Every one of his CO's say he was one of the brightest officers they've seen. And now he's no longer in Ops. That's got to make the brass happy that he's off the fast track to command."
"Nobody in their right mind would give him his own ship, anyway."
"Shields are down to seventeen percent, all weapons are down!"
"Coolant breach in engineering! They've taken heavy casualties!"
Swatting away a hanging chunk of debris that was danging in front of his face, Terry ran his fingers across his console. "I've got dick here. Impulse at ten percent power, warp engines at three percent." He called out. Why sugar coat it? They were all pretty much screwed. "Hey, Racks, you got any power you can slide my way?"
"A few mega-joules. We're pretty tapped out." She said, chewing on her lower lip as she worked her console.
"Route it through." Terry ordered, glancing back at the Commodore, lying on the floor with a puddle of blue blood growing around him. Technically, Terry was now the ranking officer on the bridge, so why not make the call? "Evacuate all non-essential personnel as far into the interior of the ship as possible and get a damage-control team in hazmat suits down to engineering."
"What are you planning?" Raquel asked, not bothering to raise her head and look at him. Her mousy-brown hair had come loose from the coiled bun she'd pinned it in, and was beginning to unravel into a messy ponytail.
"Something crazy and desperate." He grumbled in response, distributing the power she sent him and programming commands into the console. There was no way he'd be able to do everything on the fly without using shortcuts.
"They've scanned us." Tulk announced dispassionately. "They are coming this way."
"Tha-anks." Terry responded in a sing-song tone, shaking his head a little. "See if you can bounce some sensor echoes off of the rocks out here. Buy us as much time as possible. Mike, get as many torpedos as you can down to the shuttlebay and have them loaded in the Eleison. This is going to be our Hail Mary pass." He said, not missing the liturgical irony of that statement.
"He loaded up a shuttlecraft with the ship's remaining torpedo warheads, jettisoned it and used the ship's nacelles like the coils of a railgun to launch it at the battleship. It's an old smuggler's trick, but nobody's ever thought to use it in a simulation. If it were a real combat situation, they'd be lauding him as a hero and probably teaching that maneuver in command school. Instead he got a reprimand for endangering the crew because he's a troublemaking little chucklehead."
A laugh. "Chucklehead. That should be on the first page of his official record. Troublemaker is."
"Yeah, I've seen. But he's a good kid at heart. I've seen it. It's just... not readily apparent."
"What is it?" Raquel asked, looking at the small dropper-bottle Terry placed on the table. She, Tulk and Mike wore similar expressions of intrigue and even Preck was looking on with an indulgent half-smile.
"That, my fellow graduates," Terry began with a playful smirk, mimicking the academy quartermaster's stacatto speech patterns, "Is chicory extract. It goes great with coffee, and is used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat stomach ailments. But, for those of us who can't get into the O.C. because of age or rank, it has the added benefit of blocking the enzyme that allows the body to break down the active components in Synthehol." Tulk just rolled his eyes, but Raquel's smile turned up a few lumens, and Mike leaned forward to peer at the bottle with renewed interest.
"I believe that is my cue to excuse myself." Tulk said, with a slight nod to his compatriots. They would all be graduating from the Academy tomorrow; Tulk Raquel and Mike as cadets, Terry as part of his change in career paths, and Preck had needed to recertify after a lengthy and messy court-martial over the deaths of several crewmen under his command.
"Should have slipped some laxative into his carrot juice." Terry muttered under his breath. Vulcans weren't known for being much fun at parties. He picked up the dropper bottle and placed a few drops on his tongue, then, with a grimace, chased it down with half of the contents of the synth-ale in front of him. "Who's up?"
Mike looked a little skeptical for a few moments, then took the little bottle and followed suit, downing the whole of the tankard of synth-ale as if to prove himself to the much smaller Terry.
Terry turned to look at Raquel, his expression part-challenging, part puppy-dog eyes. "Time to step up, Racks. This is a rite of passage." He said, in about as somber a tone as he could manage. Raquel's father had passed away while they were at the academy, which dragged her off-planet for the better part of a month to put his affairs in order. Afterward, Terry had coached her through some of the harder bits of ops training, and they'd grown to be good friends. But it was likely that they'd be posted to different billets after this, and the likelihood of them seeing each other after tomorrow was astronomically slim.
Raquel looked at Preck, as if for permission, but the Bolian just shrugged. "I'm actually allowed in the Officer's club." he told her with a friendly wink.
"Some day, I'm going to be given my own command, Terry Wu..." She began, "And I'll look you up. And if you're actually still alive, you're probably going to be in the brig of a garbage scow, or some run-down starbase. Give me that." She said, snatching up the little bottle and decanting a few drops into her mouth before giving him a defiant look.
"Bartender, the lady would like a Long Island Iced Tea." He said, addressing the chubby Efrosian behind the bar. Preck snorted softly into his root beer; there would be no sauce for him, synth or authentic. Terry reached across the table to poke Raquel on the tip of her nose with his finger. "You'll earn your own command, Racks, the youngest Haliian to hold the center seat. You'll look me up and find me in a penal colony, because brigs are only for pre-court martial offenders. You'll come visit me and we'll reminisce on how I got you the only black marks on your record with all the hare-brained stunts I conned you guys into pulling with me. And despite all that, you'll look back on them fondly because they were the most fun you had since joining the academy."
Mike coughed behind his hand, the cough sounding suspiciously like an impolite word for bovine excrement. Raquel, however, was watching Terry with merriment dancing in her green eyes. "Yeah, it's been fun." She said, picking up the slim glass the waitress brought and taking a long drink from it before any of the three men at the table could warn her to go slow.
"You've read the counselors' assessments?"
"Yeah. One of them thinks he's a complete sociopath. Another one complained that he spent the whole session staring at her chest." A chuckle. "But the one that I lend the most credence to said that Wu is smart and perceptive enough that, unless he's cooperating, they're not going to make any progress with him."
"Then why keep him in the fleet at all? Why waste his time and ours?"
"Because he's an asset. He's good at his job. But I think the biggest reason is because he believes in the spirit of Starfleet, not its dogma. How many times can you remember complaining about people who were the opposite?"
"Touché."
Once the door closed behind them, Terry found himself roughly and clumsily shoved against it, proving that Raquel spent a lot more time in the gym than he did, and then she was leaning in close to press home a fierce, heated kiss to his lips. Her lips were a little too moist, and the kiss just the slightest bit mushy, but not unpleasantly so. Cartoonishly, he flailed his arms around for a moment before resting them around her waist. She was a good three inches taller than him, but that was nothing new -- very few of the women he'd had liaisons with were as short as Terry was. The kiss lasted a good, long while before she drew away and began tugging at the fastenings of his overshirt. "Whoa, hey there, T-Racks, this is going a little fast." He said, catching up her fumbling hands before they got any further. "You never even showed me the slightest bit of interest at the academy."
"Are you complaining?" She asked, drawing away to give him a skeptical look, tracing circles on his chest with a fingertip. Oh, with her hair loose and that look in her eyes, and the heat that was growing between their two bodies, it was hard... Errr... It was difficult to say no to her, and like the utter cad he was, Terry reached out to tear open her uniform jacket, gripping it by the open lapels and using it to pull her close for another scorching hot kiss. They eventually drew apart, but Terry was engaged now, and moved in to savage her neck with his lips.
"Mmmm." Raquel murmured, and then giggled a little nervously. "Oh, you are a bad, bad boy, Terry Wu." She arched her neck to give him better access, and he moved in to take full advantage. "Although I'm probably a step or two down from that Curaithian ambassador."
Terry froze for a few moments, and then drew away. "No... No, you're not." He murmured, his eyes a little glassy from the abrupt changing of gears. "But I'm a step or two down from the kind of guy you should be spending time with. Get some sleep, Racks." He said coldly, pulling away from her grasping hands and making a hasty exit.
"So, what's the story with the Curaithian Ambassador? There's a big section of redacted text in there that nobody short of a vice admiral can access, but word of mouth is rife with, how shall we say, salacious rumors?"
"I can't get the kid's word on it, but I know enough to add all the variables together. The Curaithians are an early warp culture, offshoots of the Catullan race who got lost during their colonization period. They've spent the last century in the midst of a civil war, occupying two systems near the border of Tholian space. They asked the Federation to help them mediate the dispute, and Wu's ship, the Thurston gets stuck with the task. Each side nominates an ambassador, and they meet for negotiations on the Thurston."
"Wait, I think I've heard this story before... One male ambassador, one female, both from highly placed families?"
"You've got it. And the two "ambassadors" were supposed to get married on the Thurston to symbolically end their war. Except that Wu got involved with the young lady and completely pooched the deal. Now Starfleet can't fly anywhere near the Curaithians' territory without being fired upon. No big loss if you ask me, their best ships are barely a match for one of our runabouts, but the Admiralty's been pressuring the Council to step up admitting new cultures to the Federation, and overlooking some of their more minor flaws, like a pretty hefty streak of misogyny."
"And Wu's part in all this?"
"Well, either he fell in love with the Ambassador like the stories say, and things escalated, or he found out that the girl was being bartered against her wishes, and decided to take one on the chin for her and the Federation."
"He took it pretty hard on the chin. The Admiralty doesn't want him on anything bigger than a tug or embarked Oberth."
"They tend to have a rather Vulcan perspective on things. 'The needs of the many blah blah blah.' Wu's an underdog, and he's seen the world from the perspective of the few who end up overlooked to meet the needs of the many."
"You've got a little lipstick..." Preck said, pointing at Terry's face and making a circling motion with his finger.
"Yeah, well..." Terry shrugged, taking a moment to order a coffee from the replicator and wiping his face vigorously on his sleeve.
=^= Terry? =^= asked Raquel's voice out of his combadge, sounding both apologetic and concerned. Terry peeled the device off of his chest and promptly dropped it in his coffee. When Raquel's voice again rang out, it did so with a distinctly waterlogged tone. =^= Terry, come on... =^=
"You sure you want to leave her hanging like that, kiddo?" Preck asked, dropping the jovial tone from his voice.
"Yeah." Terry replied glumly, taking a sip from the cup. "She'll probably thank me in the morning. Or hate me forever." He shook his head slightly, frowning at the metallic aftertaste his combadge added to the brew. Or maybe he was imagining that. "Hey, how about it, Preck? I know a club about half an hour away by runabout..." He said, putting on a cocky half-grin. "You know how dancers like a man with pips on both collars. I've got some slips and they're good for striiiips." He concluded in a sing-song tone of voice.
"I can't." Preck replied with a resigned chuckle for Wu's irrepressible and incorrigible nature. "If I go into a bar like that, I'd have to contend with half a dozen drunk admirals."
"Alright, well, I offered. Next time I see you, I'll probably have to salute or something. Maybe ask you to help me out with bail." He added, patting the Bolian's shoulder.
"So, bottom line, what is it you're asking of me, Preck?"
"Just... To look past all the crap in his files and all the youthful exuberance, and see the potential that he's got. This galaxy is teeming with godforsaken backwaters. Surely there's a ship out there that can use a hotshot pilot. Send him out there and let him prove his worth. If he blows this shot, fine, stick him on some relay station out in the middle of nowhere. He'll probably resign and throw his lot in with the Nyberrite Alliance, or some penny-ante foreign legion. But I'm betting you he won't blow it."
"Alright, I'll see what I can arrange. This will probably bring down the wrath of the Admiralty on my office, though."
"Ah, just say there was a last minute vacancy Personnel had to fill, and the computers did all the matching."
"Ok. I just hope the kid doesn't screw up. Last Personnel Chief to run afoul of Admiral Kinky Boots is running a tanker-stop bar and grill out on the edge of Tzenkethi space."
Lieutenant (jg) Terry Wu
Flight Control Officer
Commodore Preck
Currently Unassigned
Cadet Raquel Chenkins
Cadet Tulk
Cadet Michael Kalakona
Space Cadets
OUT
RSS Feed