NEO-FWLS 2.2 - Where No One Has Really Felt Like Going Before by Stefan Gagne Space. The final frontier. Well, not for me. The final frontier for me would probably be finding out exactly what Ensign Lauren is wearing under her Starfleet uniform. Rumor has it she doesn't wear underwear. But for most of the other guys on this ship, space is probably pretty final for them. That's me, faithful Starfleet lackey in the red tunic. Working his way up the Starfleet ladder from unimportant Security red-shirt clad guard to captain of my own ship. Not that promotion is anywhere in the future, at least not at the rate I'm going. I figured Starfleet'd be a good career move. It pays better than being a janitor, and is certainly more pleasurable than serving burgers with a smile, those being the only two jobs I qualified for. Plus, it looks TERRIFIC on future job applications, if you ever decide to resign and become, say, an accountant. I hadn't figured on two elements, however. First of all, officers are expected to know about astronavigation, warp processes, dilithium doohickeys and all sorts of stuff which uses words with more than four syllables. I'm not big on crash- memorizing. The second thing I hadn't realized was how incredibly dangerous my chosen profession was. Lucky me, I get slapped into the Security section, the bunch with the life expectancy of a slug in a vacuum. (Don't ask me why I picked that metaphor - my creativity usually outruns my logic to the speech buzzer.) The chances of a redshirt returning from an away-team mission alive were very slim indeed. The only person who managed it in the last two months was old Ensign Recyclable, and he had a heart attack afterwards, since he was the galaxy's oldest Ensign at seventy-four and couldn't take the excitement. Unfortunately, the missions are not few and far between on the Starfleet flagship Enterprise. Seems like every damn week we're getting accosted by Romulans or falling into a black hole or being assimilated by Microsoft clones or something. Woe be to the Ensign on duty when that companel lights up and says the dreadful phrase, "Security to Transporter Room Four." Lucky me, it popped up on my shift that day. Dead silence filled the Security lounge, as the twenty or so red-clad youth gazed at the companel in mutual horror. "Break out the hat," someone in the back muttered. We had a procedure for this. They didn't care WHO went on the teams, as long as someone went. All we had to do was fill the quota, which we did by the Hat Method(TM). This consisted mostly of A) getting a hat, and B) putting a pre-made deck of cards in it with the name of one Ensign on each. C), shuffle 'em around, D) draw out as many as needed. E) Read out the names - send the doomed on their collective ways. "How many did they want?" the guy with the hat asked, jumbling the cards around. "Four," piped a voice to the left of me. "Okay. First lottery winner - Ensign Disposable." There was a brief intake of air to the left of me. Poor guy. He only had three months until his tour of duty was up, and he was looking forward to getting back together with his wife and little girl... "Next, Ensign Throwaway." Throwaway apparently had less guts than Disposable, breaking out in tears at the mention of his name. I also recall him crying when Old Yeller died at the crew's cinema. "Ensign Fodder." Fodder gave a depressed sigh, then hiked up his phaser belt a little, trying to look manly under the circumstances. He usually was the John Wayne of the gang, if John Wayne wore underoos and slept with the lights on. "Ensign Expendable." But that name... I knew that name well. It was mine, after all. * The impending doom was put aside as the four of us were ushered into the green/orange transporter room. Yow. I had never been this close to the senior officers before. There was Bones, our manly but gnarled ship's doctor. Mr. Spock, science officer, one of the few aliens we had on the ship; he was a Vulcan, which did not mean 'a heavy machine gun mounted on fighter jets' but rather a being with the personality of stale cheese. And the biggest of the big, the one, the almost saintlike figure in all of Starfleet history : Captain Kirk. Kirk was a god to us lowlies in the Security room, underbite jaw extending to full length as his brilliantly styled hair seemed to stay rock still like James Bond's locks even in a hurricane. His chest muscles pumped themselves in a manly sort of way, and you could feel his commanding presence from six rooms away. "Ah, our Security team, has arrived," he said, adding dramatic pauses where he felt they were needed. "Shall we, go?" I stepped gleefully up onto the transporter pad. Okay, I would have to actively try not to be turned into a cube of salt and crushed... but... come on, I was on a mission with Captain Kirk! Some excitement is acceptable. I bet Ensign Lauren would LOVE to hear this. Maybe it'd settle the ongoing betting pool in the lounge. "Energize," Kirk ordered. Shimmer shimmer shimmer... I had beamed around a lot already, so this was nothing new, and certainly not worthy of note. I did not explode. The usual pock-marked rockscape of some colonized word faded into view, with the traditionally ill-lit sky showing off several different shades of red and purple. Very rarely do we land on a traditional blue-green world; I hadn't seen Earth itself since my Academy days. "Captain Kirk! Thank goodness you and your five friends made it to our humble world alright!" enthused a professional looking man in view. The number seeming... well, incorrect. I took one step and realized why, but went into denial about it for a moment regardless. "Ick," I said, pulling my foot out of the red goo with considerable effort. Bones passed a salt-shakerlike thing over the patch, listening to the odd beep noises. "It appears to be the remains of Ensign Fodder..." "GLEH!" I shouted, ripping the gooey boot off and throwing it as far as I could, where it killed a small mammal which caused a chain reaction that prevented the most enlightened species ever to exist from evolving past the rodent stage, which is probably in violation of the Prime Directive. But I'd rather walk in one sock and commit genocide than squelch around all day with someone's lung butter all over my boot. "Transporter accident," Mr. Spock confirmed. "Very tragic." One down, I thought. And swallowed hard. "Yes, tragic," Kirk agreed, then turned back to the scientists. "So, what seems, to be the problem?" "Well, it's this hole here," the scientist said. "It's... it's been... emitting, well, strange emissions." "Strange emissions?" Kirk repeated. "Strange emissions." "What?" I said. "We came halfway across the sector to see a hole in the ground that's farting?" "Mr. Spock here is, a renowned expert in strange emissions, lad," Kirk said, resting a manly hand on my shoulder. "Strange, emissions are very big in, Starfleet nowadays." Spock peered oddly at the hole, and waved what looked like a Game Boy over it, listening to the beeps and clicks. "Fascinating, captain," he said, in a perfect monotone. "This hole appears to be emitting strange emissions." "Can you, elaborate?" "Insufficient data." "Speculate, Mr. Spock!" "It seems to be a mixture of quazines, neutrinats, and gamma photons," he said. "Fascinating." "I've had quazines before," Ensign Throwaway piped in. "They taste great with a little salt." "Hmm. We, must see what is in that hole. Ensign Throwaway?" "Umm, yes?" Throwaway said, unsure whether or not he should have commented about the quazines. "Climb down that hole." "Umm, sir, are you sure that's, umm, safe?" "Just do it, man!" Kirk pleaded. "Innocent lives, may be at stake." Throwaway glanced around. "Where? Or do you mean mine?" Kirk grumbled a bit and gave Throwaway a good kick in the rear, propelling him forward into the hole. Thud. "What do you see, down there?" he called a little too loudly into the hole. "It's--AAAUUUUGGGHHHHH!!!!" Throwaway screamed. Kirk jumped backwards as odd purple and green lights flew from the pit. There was a wet squelch, some sounds remarkably similar to gelatin (lime) flowing across a cheese grater, and that was that. Spock reexamined the hole with the cuisinart-like thing. "Fascinating. It appears Ensign Throwaway was bombarded with praline emissions." "Mutated him horribly too," Bones said, waving the calculator-like thing over the hole as well. There seemed to be a lot of waving of gadgets going on. "That would explain the tentacle poking out of the rim," Disposable said, pointing to the orange limb hanging from the hole. Two down... not looking good... "That, thing killed, one of my men!" Kirk exclaimed dramatically. "Disposable. Lock on with phasers and, destroy the thing in the hole." "What?!?" Disposable said. "No way. You're so itchin' to waste whatever the hell that is, YOU do it. I ain't gonna wake up tomorrow with no tentacles hangin' out of my armpits." "Ensign," Kirk soothed, resting another vice-like manly grip on the poor sop's shoulder. "Desperate times, call for desperate measures. There's a chance, that the alien monster may, come after innocent lives. I'm responsible, for the lives of six hundred crewmen. Do it for Starfleet. Do it for the Confederation. Win one, for the Kirker." Dirk pressed the phaser into Disposable's hand, aimed, and pushed the trigger before jumping very far away to view the results safely. The traditional orange ray-o-doom zapped out at the hole. Without warning (as usual) a line of blue lightning traced the ray back to the source, and overloaded the phaser, causing a massive explosion. After the smoke cleared and everybody had a good cough, Ensign Disposable was gone. All that was left was a smoldering crater and a pair of boots. Nobody knows why only the boots remain in these cases. "Where'd he go?!?" I shouted. "He appears to be over here," Spock pointed out. "And there. And over there. And draped over that rock a mile away. And-" "We get the picture," Kirk said. "Bones, is there, any chance--" "He's dead, Jim," Bones confirmed. Three down. Only me left. "Very well, we'll just have to resort to, more drastic measures," Dirk said. "Ensign Expendable, I want you to, set your phaser on overload, strap it to your head, and go in there and fight that monster." "WHAT?!?!" I shouted. "Wait!" yelled a voice from far away. Another scientist, somewhat identical to the one we already had here (I suspect they just clone 'em off) ran blindly up the hill. "I'm really sorry," he said, panting and out of breath. "I forgot, I, I..." "Pull yourself together, mister!" Kirk ordered. "I forgot," he said, "That I lost some equipment around here last night." "Eh?" "Well, I was packing up after checking for time-space disturbances -- never know about those buggers, they really can sneak up on you -- and I must have missed something... because when I got home, I realized I had left behind my, my..." "Spit it out, man!" "My Strange Emissions Emitter, sir." Pause. "I suspect it fell in that hole," he continued. "It might have accidentally, er, activated." He peered in the hole, at the smoldering (and somewhat slimy) mess. "Oh dear," he added, since nobody else was contributing to the conversation much. "Was anybody hurt?" * "Another round for Mister Indestructible!" roused a cheer from the back of the Security lounge. A toast! In my honor! The second Ensign to survive a mission completely intact. Not a scratch on me, not a limb lost, and my brains were still intact and at a reasonable number of cells. Truly a day to celebrate! "Here's to the Man Who Would Not Die!" "Hip hip!" Pause. "Wot comes after 'hip?'" asked a drunken voice. "'nother Hip, I think." "Hip!" I was living it up, pigging out on my favorite Starfleet tasty meaty treat, Something Like Meat On a Stick(tm). A taste delight in every bite, and I truly earned it. A silence befell the crowd, like the combined silences of space, PBS during dead air time, and a day all the cicadas died. Someone new had walked into the lounge. "Hey there," Ensign Lauren said, pulling a chair up to my table. "Hey." "Heard you lived through one," she said. "You're quite a man." "Sometimes," I said, inflating the ego a bit more, "I amaze myself, even." "What to you say we head down to the ship's stores and view a holoflick later this week?" she said. "Say, Thursday, nineish? I have a very non-regulation uniform I can wear." "I'll be there," I smiled, and chewed away as she beamed me a smile and walked out. There was a collective exhaling as she left. "Freeeeow!" someone exclaimed. "The Livewire's gonna be able to settle the betting pool once and for all!" I smiled, chewing away s'more on my dinner. "Great job!" someone behind me said, giving me a hearty pound or three on the back. Guk! "Wot's wrong?" "Why's 'e turnin' blue like that?" "I'm choking!" I tried to say, but the glob of meat in my throat sort of prevented it. My lungs suddenly felt the need to go on strike, protesting the blockade. "Anybody know Heimlich?" "I met him. Cheap bastard, never paid fer the drinks 'e had with me." Various people argued about the personality of Mr. Heimlich, and dirty jokes were exchanged as my vision faded gradually to black. "Wass wrong with him?" "I think 'es dead." "Awww, maaaan! Now we'll NEVER know about her underwear!" "Whose, Expendable's?" "Naw. He wore jock straps. I mean Ensign Lauren." "No, wasn't he more of a boxer shorts chap?" And the final score is, Fate 4, Redshirts 0. Yet another episode in a long, unbroken losing streak. Five year mission my ass.