Diplomatic Mission?

[Archie Phoenix 0]

What kind of diplomatic mission was this?

 

That is what Ensign Archie Phoenix was wondering as he uploaded his findings to Commander Alces. He was supposed to be serving an orientation period -- studying the ship’s systems, committing the engineering manifest to memory, learning the chain of command and other protocols specific to Arcadia and its command staff, and serving only the duties of an enlisted man. He’d been in his quarters studying the schematics of Arcadia’s auxiliary craft (a coincidence not lost on him) when the alert klaxons began to whine and an officer whose voice he did not recognize called him to main engineering. Orientation, it seemed, was going to be accelerated.

 

The scene in engineering was one of emergency … not the sort of thing typical of a diplomatic mission. But then, Archie did not know the details of the diplomatic mission. He only accepted the information he was given and did as he was told. That, he knew, was the way of the Starfleet Ensign. When neither Lieutenant Sema’J or the officer with the unrecognized voice (whoever that may have been) could be located, the way of the Starfleet Ensign became taking the nearest unoccupied station and doing things. Jostled by three passing officers and ignored by two others, Archie found this to be a station next to the warp core.

 

Then something happened that was even more unexpected then an alert during a diplomatic mission. The first officer himself contacted Ensign Phoenix. Ah … not entirely accurate. Commander Alces actually contacted engineering, and it turned out that the unoccupied station which Archie turned into an occupied station contained the incoming comm system. Delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, Archie proceeded to the shuttle bay on the Commander’s orders -- investigate the broken half of the cloak-capable spy shuttle sitting in the bay in order to determine what technology is aboard the other half and, therefore, in the wrong hands.

 

At that point, Archie suspected that the diplomatic mission had turned into something barely recognizable as a diplomatic mission.

 

Incidentally, the broken half of the shuttle had turned into something barely recognizable as half of a shuttle. It could be more easily recognized as a small and disorganized pile of rubble. This was actually quite fortunate, however, as the shuttle-half possessed by Arcadia was supposed to have been vaporized. Only these few shards now sitting on the shuttle bay deck had been recovered by the crew’s hasty transport efforts. They were mostly parts of the shuttle designed to survive an explosion so that they could be recovered later for either salvage or (appropriately enough) investigative purposes. Archie knew about this all too well -- he had an object in his quarters synthesized to withstand the most destructive forces imaginable.

 

“Let’s see if the shuttle’s flight recorder was recovered,” Archie said to Ensign Black, the officer who‘d been sent to assist him. He’d instantly recognized her from the engineering personnel records he was studying. He could not easily forget her pink hair -- a quirk of her physical appearance that was even more fascinating in person. He guessed that his orange eyes were just as peculiar to her. “It is a small crystal, no larger than a combadge. It should give us a clearer picture of how the damage to the shuttle was distributed.”

 

Arcadia’s sensor records of the shuttle’s destruction were not very clear. But they revealed enough to indicate that the pile of rubble in the shuttle bay had not previously contained the cloaking device. Most likely, that was now in the aforementioned ‘wrong hands,’ and though Archie was not an expert at either diplomatic missions or whatever emergencies they tended to create, this possibility disturbed him. There was still a chance that the shuttle blast had damaged the cloaking device, possibly to the point of non-recognition, but the limited sensor scans would not provide any determination. The small pile of wreckage would need to be searched.

 

When the data upload was complete, Archie tucked his PADD away and moved to Jordan’s side to help her move the largest scrap of metal on the pile -- a twisted, jagged, and scorched hull shard. If this was the result of diplomacy, what would Arcadia’s other missions be like … ?