Seasons of War

[Salir Julio 0]

Agincourt rolled left then right. A stray shot clipped her bow and Salir felt the vibration rock through his console. At the moment, and not before for some reason, he realized that he had absolutely no clue how he'd ended up flying a warship commanded by a Marine who went by the moniker of mythological beast of horrifying dimensions and a giant feline who had a propensity to claw and hiss at things.

 

Of course he knew how he'd come to pilot the giant garden spade, but hadn't he joined Starfleet to be a warp field theorist in engineering? Yeah, he was pretty sure he'd started out near the warp core and on a completely different starship.

 

Bringing the ship around, he sighed to himself, trying to stay focused on the moment. Ever since the Gideon had responded to that distress call, his entire life had been derailed. First there was the whole ship exploding thing and barely being saved only to find out he was on Agincourt and lost in deep space in hostile territory. Then once he'd gotten over the initial shock of being ripped away from people he'd come to appreciate and enjoy and tossed into a completely new power structure, he'd been transferred out of engineering (where he'd been trained to work) and assigned to work in science to try and unravel the mysteries of the alien technology that had flung them half-way across the galaxy.

 

Now working in science wouldn't have been so bad, but the people he had to work with were a giant bat, ectoplasm and a Xenexian with a chip on her shoulder the size of the Black Cluster. They were all more than capable, of course, but dear lord they had the strangest personalities.

 

They had, of course, managed to find their way back through the rabbit hole. That was how all this shooting at each other stuff started. One moment they're sailing home, the next they're watching Earth get trashed.

 

Speaking of that, he wondered exactly how his comrades had made the stunning leap of logic that the ships that were currently engaged with them had anything to do with the Blue Demons . Now, he wasn't, and didn't pretend to be, an expert on such matters, but the lack of any sort of Solton technology and the tale-tale traces they tended to leave behind would leave one to believe that other nefarious forces were at play.

 

If that were the case, which he suspected out of gut-feeling were true, then the whole situation were about to grow a lot worse for people in the Alpha Quadrant. What was it the Colonel had said, "looks like we should just pack the Quadrant back into the handbasket."

 

Swerving to avoid another shot from the flanking Breen cruiser, Salir frowned. He knew that war was a real possibility when he joined up. He was a child of the Dominion War and came to adulthood at the height of the Romulan Civil War, but he'd hoped that the war cycle, deciduous as it was, would be barren during his tenure. Apparently the leaves of conflict weren't ready to fall to the ground and bring a winter's peace just yet.

Edited January 21, 2009 by Salir Julio