Issues

[Apollo 0]

Since coming aboard the Republic, Apollo Link discovered that Shoreleave was an invitation for trouble…absolute trouble. So to avoid such trouble, he’d learned to stay shipside and bury himself in work. And there was plenty to do.

 

They’d taken on some new crew at the New Bajor base…once again, and he was busily assigning them tasks. There were literally hundreds of experiments and surveys that the Republic had been supposed to conduct while on assignment to the Gamma Quadrant, but for one exploding reason or a Holly, just hadn’t got done. And so now, as the reached the homestretch this mission, Science hurriedly tried to catch up.

 

Link for his part, when he wasn’t giving someone an order, remained isolated in Astrometrics recording all the spatial data they’d gotten from the Nebula explosion. And if wasn’t in astrometrics, he could be found in the biology lab, dissecting those nasty bird-creatures.

 

Seriously, those things creeped him out, but if the Federation were to ever encounter them again, they would need every last piece of data possible.

 

He couldn’t help but be fascinated with them though. They were highly evolved, designed for war and conquest. And though he hated them with every fiber of his being, he barely knew anything about them.

 

Standing in the lab, he poked at one of the mid-sized ones on strapped to the table. There was a certain immorality about dissecting these things that made Apollo uneasy. This was a sentient being, that would have grown into an adult…a person just like any of the crew members of the Republic. Yet some how, he could justify ripping it open and seeing what made it tick.

 

However, if his enemy had been a Klingon or a Jem’Hadar…would the order to dissect it came so easily? Wouldn’t that be in violation of about a dozen treaties?

 

Link sighed as he continued to dissect the poor creature.

 

The last few months and weeks had been exhausting on him, and now faced with this moral issue—he found himself lost.

 

He’d read a memo that the Republic had gotten a Counselor transferred aboard. Link detested them…absolutely detested them. He was a private person, a person who liked to keep things under the cuff and to himself. His problems were his own, and he’d sort them out by himself.

 

But if he’d learned anything from his time on Republic, and from Rian, it was that sometimes you had to just give in to pride and let someone else help you. So facing a moral dilemma about the creatures, and physically and mentally exhausted from this wretched Quadrant…Link gave in and made an appointment with the Counselor.