"Back At Earth"

[Guest Laarell]

All was quiet on the Terran front.

 

Laarell Teykier, Orion officer aboard the USS Excalibur-C, was more than a little grateful for this. She'd spent every waking hour more than a little on edge, expecting a second surprise attack. This, when coupled with the fact she was waking up at every little sound during her off-shift, expecting it to turn out to be a red alert, left her more than a little bit... how had it been put? Ah. "Cranky."

 

There weren't any red alerts, of course. The invaders were clearly too intelligent to make a second assault when more than half of Starfleet was ready to repel them from the Sol system.

 

Then there was the fact that they'd already done all the damage to Earth that was necessary to take it out as a tactical threat. What did surprise her was that they weren't taking advantage of the fleet's concentration at Earth to attack outer planet. Or another stronghold -- Tellar or Andor, for instance. They had the technology to appear at will, with little warning, and Laarell was wondering why that wasn't better exploited.

 

She'd downloaded quite a bit of data from Agincourt's sensors and research for her own reference, and was working on a project to start spearheading projects to increase their warning time from less than five minutes to... whatever they could get. Evaluations were still underway to evaluate the firepower and shield capacity of the Soltan and Selshan vessels, but it seemed their strength lie more in surprise than brute force. She had to acknowledge the cunning in such an attack.

 

And that was just the tip of the iceberg of surprises she was learning about from the Perseus Arm. The Soltan were a "bio-Borg" (as some snarky lieutenant in Science had termed them), able to rewrite humanoid DNA to their own. She wasn't sure which was more disturbing -- being a cyborg or being altered entirely. Agincourt, as was usual when dealing with Perseus, was the authority, and she'd been eagerly hunting down more information on the DNA-alteration virus.

 

But those were "foreign" issues in the disaster, and Laarell's primary attention was still turned to Earth and the attack. Her current project was helping with some method of Academy reconstruction -- and she'd never dealt with anything so equally depressing and rewarding in her career.

 

The satellite and outreach campuses were entirely swamped with the thirty-thousand surviving cadets, and there was the small problem of what to do with the next semester's worth of incoming freshman.

 

Not to mention the fact that the Academy's output -- and resulting numbers of new Starfleet officers for the next four years -- was going to be incredibly limited. She'd knew "cleanup" was already proceeding on the Presidio, and there were rumors that they were hoping to have the Academy complex reconstructed by the next spring. This was a prospect which possibly left a more sour taste in her mouth than the thought of going into what would likely be a war undermanned; Laarell was making certain that she was well-heard as a proponent of moving Starfleet installations on Earth away from their former sites -- if any place ever deserved to become a memorial, the Presidio was it.

 

Regardless of that situation, Laarell was working with some remaining Academy staff and the Australian and Brazilian satellite campuses to attend to the surviving cadets from the classes that had already been enrolled in the Academy. The best upperclassmen -- who, Laarell thought without offering, had now "been through" more than some of the ensigns already graduated -- were being scattered on various Starfleet vessels, stations, and research colonies to complete their coursework in "real world" settings. McKinley Station was already being recreated, and there was a high need for engineers on that project alone. Medical cadets had already gotten more than a little field training in -- anything that could work a regenerator had been ferried to the various disaster zones.

 

Science cadets were Laarell's special project. She'd been working to get the kids assigned to whatever science institutes and vessels would be willing to work with Starfleet -- the Vulcan Science Institute, for instance, was already offering equivalencies for "transferring" cadets, and she was fairly certain the Daystom Institute would soon be doing similarly with engineering recruits.

 

That said, there were also twelve fourth-years sitting quietly in Excalibur's science lab, working on small research projects to finish out their very-interrupted Starfleet education. Yes, Laarell had a soft spot for the little ones, though she'd never admit it.

 

So yes. Things were quiet enough for a week and a half after Utter Chaos. But would it stay that way? In Laarell's experience, hell no, but she was enjoying it while she could.