Chapter Fifty-Nine (Kark) (1/2)

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.4

We've been out in the Dead Zone Fringe for the past two months, examining an old Precursor World that was unsurveyed. Nothing of interest, my Spock was disappointed that a hundred and change million year old set of ruins had been largely devastated by time on a largely dead world. Examination showed that the world was subject to a massive amount of orbital strikes, glassing, oceans boiled away, and massive atmospheric loss. My Uhura has been, well, less than stellar. I think she did a lot of door sitting to rack up rankings since she missed an urgent communication from Starfleet that we haven't been able to get back. Going to have to replace her. Not to mention, she's using the Uhura look but wearing a Discovery uniform? That's not OK.

Going to head back to a Deepspacenine Station and see what's going on. That transmission was seriously encoded and pulsed directly to us. I'll turn in our survey results and see if I can get Type III warp engines. They Type IIc are good, but my Scotty has told me that it's picking up a lot of harmonics from hyperspace, like a 'rumble' that keeps coming.

Long patrol, almost three years, and the most exciting thing we had was a talk with a Borgcube that was heading back to the edge of the zone. Their cloning bank and SUDS stacks got blown out so they didn't want to risk anything and marked themselves as NoPvP. We did provide assistance to them due to their status as a neutral vessel and nano-forged them a new creation engine.

They were cagey as to what they ran into that could damage a BB Class Borgcube that bad.

--Kark 8873

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.14

I don't know what that was in warp-space, but whatever it was, it knocked us clear out of warp and blew out my port nacelle. That rumbling in hyperspace is still going, every few hours, the rumble lasting for an hour or so. It's bad enough I had to order the holodecks shut down due to harmonics.

My Uhura really screwed the Oriongirl. I told her to keep an ear out for any unusual traffic, and what does she do? Routes a priority message from Starfleet with an ”ALL FLEETS” header to her personal com device. The encryption bricked her com device AND the message. Later she punted another message that came in with an ”ALL GUILDS” header while she was 'taking a break and listed as 'idle'' over to our Spock's terminal, and bricked half the science lab including our Type III nano-forge. I'll be filing a formal complaint against her and demanding a point review.

My Spock thinks that there's something going on, something we missed by our Uhura's incompetence and he's pretty upset. About a step from pitching her out the airlock. I've never seen a Spock so mad his ears twitch. She keeps forgetting this isn't an eVR run and keeps walking around with an 'idle' over head.

No matter. Scotty told me it'll only be a few more days until the warp drive.

--Kark 8873

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.38

Well, we've got power back. I had to put our Uhura in the brig to guarantee her safety. She had fired up the holodeck, overriding the lockout code, and was running a NexGen-MarySue Sim. In the middle of one of those 'rumbles' she forwarded a message marked ”CONFED.MIL” to ENGINEERING.

That bricked EVERYTHING. Our nano-forge, the warp-core, everything. Had a Data down there, new guy at playing a Data, literally melted his brain. I mean, positronic alloy running out of his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. That interacted with the rumble and the holodeck generation field.

It gutted the ship, destroyed our Respawn Pods, and Spock and Scotty think it may have blown out our SUDS auto-update.

We've been using the shuttles to stay on atmosphere while we got the warp-core back up. We haven't yet, but we've got the life support back. It's been nice to eat a meal not out of a shuttle's emergency stores.

Scotty's estimate is ”about when you let me bash that bitch's head in” for when we get the warp-core and engines back up.

--Kark 8873

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.52

We've got the warp core back up. The SUDS can't auto-update, meaning if anyone gets killed, they're stuck on the backup from four weeks ago. Crew members are LIVID. Plus, the Respawn Pods are screwed. We tried regening the Data, and... it wasn't good.

His screams haunt my dreams.

Now we just have to fix the nacelles. The computer's started having problems again.

Damn, I'm tired. I might step back from Kark rank for a couple years. This mission has been bad.

--Kark 8873

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.85

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that Uhura is a Romulan spy. We found out, finally, where the computer instability was coming from.

SHE HAD CRACKED TEMPLATES IN THE SHIP COMMUNICATION DATABASE!

Some of them had some nasty, and I mean N.A.S.T.Y. virii in them. That's what's been hashing our computer. So our Uhura doesn't know jack about Meatspace LARP and apparently just doorsat on eVR stuff, she loaded the computer of my ship with cracked templates full of virii, and she bricked half out shit.

On the plus side, it looks like we'll have Warp-1 capability in a few days.

Oh, and our rescue beacons?

Bricked.

--Kark 8873

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.141

Holy Shatner. Where do I begin?

First, the port nacelle went down again. We were sitting in between two planets when a whole Gorn FLEET dropped on us. We're not talking one of the little ones, I think it was every Gorn ship out here. FULL of lizard dudes. We're even talking a couple of those 'species only' ships where everyone on the ship was born a saurian. We figure we're screwed since they immediately opened a SUDS channel to get a compressed backup of everyone. You only do that when you're about to have a major fleet engagement.

Then the Fleet ”Big Rock Thrower” himself coms me. Not on my Starfleet com, but my person com. Tells me he'll send a shuttle right now. Told me I could bring my Spock, McCoy, and Scotty.

What we heard, we didn't believe.

Full template unlocks. We're not talking some hope of luring back old players, we're talking ”You Want It, It's Yours” template unlocks. Apparently some group of xenospecies out past the Dead Zone woke up an entire Precursor Fleet and are getting the shit Tashayarred out of them so the Confed told everyone to grab their shit and go help.

Showed me one of the messages my Uhura borked. It was an emergency update to the Type-IIc Warp Engines. That 'rumble' we're getting from hyperspace? That's the low bands being overpressured. You know those bands, the slow ones that are mainly used by colony ships or long-haul truckers? Yeah, so much metal is started to move that it's causing hyperspace reverberation into jumpspace AND warpspace. I had Scotty run how much metal that might be and he told me that the math comes out to move than gigatons of metal. He said you could probably see the bulge from hyperspace in subspace.

The Gorn helped us repair and update our Warp Engines. He said he couldn't tell me much more, I didn't have the right security header so he couldn't be sure I was actually Kark ranked.

Oh, and because that doofy moron put cracked templates in my computer, he had to register me as a possible pirate vessel.

I should airlock that moron.

--Kark 8873

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 8532.151