Field Command: The Joker

[LeftEar JoNs 0]

02.03.09

USS Excalibur NCC-2004 C

Field Command: The Joker

 

Commander Left Ear JoNs sat quietly in the command chair on the main bridge, willing herself to stay seated and still and not pace the bridge. The Excalibur would be arriving at the intended destination that had been earmarked as the originating source of the mysterious distress call, and then the ships XO and bridge personnel would determine if the signal had been a hoax or not.

 

That sounded like a great plan … on paper and in theory. The Fleet Academy textbooks all heralded the “right” thing to do, which was answering any and all distress calls, as any field commander’s sworn duty. It was when you actually got out into the field and started working that you got slapped with the Joker card, finding out that the classroom learning was no substitute for the actual field work implementation that sometimes fell into the category of trial and error.

 

In other words, if you were in command of a ship, you were usually damned if you did and damned if you didn’t with any number of command decisions.

 

Left Ear had made the decision to bolt from the Black Marsh planet and check out the distress call, leaving Captain Corizon and his Away Team with their collective Al Ucard, Klingon, Brikar, Human and Dameon asses out in the wind, literally and figuratively. The Excalibur’s communication wireless was down, either due to the planet itself, or purposely taken out by the same source that could be feeding the main ship a distress call from some distant unknown crew under attack by raiders; Left Ear knew that if there was a problem within the internal ships systems to cause the comms to go down, the chief engineer would have informed her of it. The planetary team had no way of knowing that their home ship was gone, and the Excalibur had no way of knowing the condition of the ground team.

 

So … was this a wild goose distress rescue chase, or a well conceived plan to lure the big ship and her remaining crew away from the Black Marsh? Was the landing party as well being intentionally cut off? Or was it legitimate? It was a fact that the Gamma system boasted raiders, pirates and many other reprobates of that sort of ilk; the Excalibur herself had tangled with the Blood Cult Raiders.

 

The brown furred panther Exec kept mentally rationalizing her command decision over and over; the planetary team still had the transport shuttle that they had launched in on the planet’s surface – if they needed to get off the rock quickly, then they did have a transport craft. Commander Ramson’s fighter patrols were still in orbital vectors about the planetary vector grid, patrolling as well as monitoring the defensive sensor buoys that the flight teams had placed. There would be an additional pick up shuttle on standby as well, per the patrol orders.

 

So … why did Left Ear feel very much like a loner despite being surrounded by bridge personnel going about their duties?

 

This was another thing the Instructors never told you, at least out right, in the command classes - as a ships commander, you were part of the crew but still alone, separated by an invisible line of command decisions and responsibilities. It was JoNs, not the crew, who would take any heat or fallout from leaving the landing party behind, legitimate distress call or not. That was one of the sacrifices you accepted if you desired to be the first or second in command of a starship, and it wasn’t necessarily fair, just the way that things were done.

 

And somewhere, the Joker that popped up occasionally to haunt a commander was laughing at the way the situation would play itself out regardless.

 

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.