USS Castanaga – shuttlecraft cockpit

   It had been two days since Farl had left his home on Earth. He’d only put in for a transfer barely a week ago, yet here he was, on his way. He’d expected much more time to get his affairs in order: a week for personnel to consider his request, another week for the USS Denver’s CO to look at his file, maybe schedule an interview, another month to find a replacement instructor… Guess not.

   Apparently, the Denver had found some sort of warp anomaly on a pre-warp planet? Starfleet had expedited the transfer in order to get Farl’s eyes and expertise out there. At least, that’s what the commander had told him as he’d handed over Farl’s orders. Farl thought it was a little odd – he wasn’t exactly a warp field engineer, in fact, he’d barely scraped by his engineering extension courses – but he was pretty knowledgeable about warp theory itself. Plus, we’re at war – maybe Starfleet was eager to get active starships a full roster. Regardless of the motivation, Farl’s orders were approved, and he was given a type 6 shuttlecraft, and a set of coordinates.

   Farl Ferrus IV didn’t believe in a higher power, but if he had, he might’ve prayed to one that afternoon, on the second day of his journey. A beetle-shaped blip had just appeared on his long-range scanners. His whiskers flattened against his face as a shiver ran down his spine. He hadn’t encountered the Dominion yet… outside of training simulations, that is. He’d been a teacher since the war started. Would this be his first encounter?

   Looked like the answer would be yes. The blip adjusted course and the computer warned Farl he only had 3 minutes to intercept. Pulling up a star chart, Farl identified a nearby solar system with a convenient asteroid belt in far orbit. It was similar to Sol’s Kuiper Belt, but much more dense. With a little luck, maybe Farl could hide his shuttlecraft there. Adjusting course slightly, he dropped out of warp about 30 seconds later.

   Farl’s three minutes were up in the blink of an eye, and the Dominion fighter dropped out of warp on top of him. A blueish haze lit up the interior of the shuttle as polaron beams lanced through the darkness of space. It was a near miss. Farl had retracted the shields slightly – a trick his last CO had taught him – it made shields slightly unstable, but it made his shuttle a slightly smaller target. Unfortunately that was basically the only engineering trick Farl had up his sleeve, but he figured it would get him to the relative safety of the asteroid belt. He was half right.

   Sparks exploded out of the co-pilot’s panel as another polaron beam reached out, angrily cutting through the poor shuttlecraft’s shields and raking across the hull. The beam was interrupted early, however, as a small asteroid sailed between Farl and the Dominion ship. His mind racing, Farl piloted the shuttle behind one asteroid after another. The Dominion ship was following, but couldn’t get a good shot off. How would he get out of this? He needed to get out of this. Besides the obvious side effect of being dead, it would be downright embarrassing to die here, in this shuttle, his only contribution to the war effort being a temporary distraction for a lone Dominion ship. Then inspiration struck. 

   Farl scanned the asteroid field for a suitable target, then dumped all auxiliary power into the deflector dish. Swinging around behind an asteroid the size of his shuttle’s warp nacelle, he overloaded the deflector dish and flung the asteroid at his beetle-shaped opponent. Two things happened simultaneously: the asteroid clipped the Dominion vessel, one good skip across the ventral hull like a flat rock across a pond, and a polaron beam connected with the temporarily stopped shuttlecraft. 

   Farl woke up with a start. Blood matted his facial fur, and had pooled on the control panel. The lights were flickering, and a small fire burned in the wall panel next to him. Head swimming, he slowly tapped on the control panel. Shields gone. The deflector dish is gone. One nacelle was leaking plasma. Life support failing. This was… less than ideal. The only good news was a lack of a Dominion ship on his scanners. Blinking slowly, Farl checked his position. His shuttle had luckily been flung back out of the asteroid field, and he was slowly drifting away from the solar system he’d found. 

   A wave of nausea rolled over Farl, and he barely clung to consciousness. Head wounds bleed a lot, but was that the only problem? After his vision cleared, Farl took a look at his body. Half his uniform had been burned away. So had half his fur, for that matter. Farl Ferrus IV was no doctor, but he knew he needed help. He managed to choke out a request to the computer. “Warp nacelle damaged. Warp speed available for approximately 23 minutes, 15 seconds, before warp plasma leak, renders warp drive unsustainable” the voice informed him. Great.

   Farl struggled to run some calculations in his head. The numbers were slow to come to him. He was fading fast. A decision had to be made. Farl punched a series of commands into the console. Power reallocated as commanded, and the shuttle shakily jumped to warp. Tumbling out of his seat, Farl crawled to a storage locker in the rear of the shuttle. He pulled out an emergency blanket and weakly tugged it over his body. Farl reached for the med kit next, but his vision shrank to a pinprick, and then everything went dark.

USS Denver – Bridge

The bridge was silent. The events on the planet below hung in the air thick and uncomfortable like a fog drifting across a Louisiana swamp. Rebecca sat in the center chair her legs crossed sipping a coffee waiting for word from the multiple – too many teams, that were in the field.

The operations panel buzzed in alarm shattering the silence. Rebecca jumped and nearly dropped her coffee.  Shooting to her feet she didn’t wait for her operation’s officer to announce. “Report.!”

As Lieutenant Przybyszewska was on the planet below her second was at ops.

“Curious…”  Lieutenant T’Leya re-checked her sensor readings.

“There is an object entering the System,” she explained, turning to face the Captain. “Materials analysis suggests it is a Starfleet shuttle, however, there is no power signature and no transponder.”

Rebecca crossed the bridge to look over her shoulder,  “Ms. Jones intercept course, best speed. Lt. T’Lelya inform our away teams we’re breaking orbit.” Pressing her combadge the captain continued to rattle off orders, “Bridge to Sickbay.  We are intercepting a damaged shuttle. Prepare to receive casualties.”

“Acknowledged.” Lavender’s voice played briefly over the bridge speakers. To those who knew her well, she sounded a bit perturbed. T’Leya didn’t and as such she didn’t pick up on it. The Vulcan was more focused on her duties.

“Aye aye,” TLeya nodded to the Captain and speaking in a low voice so as not to disrupt the rest of the bridge opened a channel to the planet.

“Denver to all away teams, we are breaking orbit to render aid to a shuttle within this star system. You will be informed upon our return.”

“Aye, sir. Breaking orbit. Setting interception course. 241, Mark 17 three-quarters impulse. Time to intercept. Three minutes, 12 seconds. Shall we go to Yellow Alert, Captain? We don’t know what damaged the shuttle yet.” 

“Do it, and scan for enemy ships,” Rebecca replied. “Hail the shuttle.”

Shuttle…

   Consciousness slowly returned to Farl. Why? He blinked slowly, clearing the fog from his vision. It was cold. Freezing, in fact. His senses felt pretty dull at the moment, but he was shaking, and also there was a rime of frost along some of the shuttlecraft’s interior surfaces. Not great.

   As he took in his surroundings, he recognized what had awoken him. The shuttlecraft was completely dark, except for a solitary, blinking red light on the control panel. That was a hail. Must be running off its internal, emergency battery, since everything else was dead. Farl clawed his way along the floor to the pilot’s chair, hauled himself into it, and clumsily slapped the comms.

“This is Lieutenant Commander Ferrus, onboard the USS Castanaga. I have no power, not sure how long the communications battery will last. Do you read me? I can see I’ve been hailed, but I don’t know who’s out there and I couldn’t make out your message.”

“This is Captain Talon of the Federation Starship Denver. We’re on our way Commander. ETA is…”

“Transporter range in 14 seconds. Full interception in 36 seconds, Captain.” Jones said with practiced ease.

“We’re almost there. Hang in there and we’ll pull you out,”  Rebecca said.

“Message received, thank you Denver. I’ll be ready. Might need some help getting off the transporter pad though, I’m pretty beat up. Just so you know, I had a run-in with our visiting bullies from the Gamma quadrant in a nearby star system… It was a single Dominion fighter. Unsure if they were destroyed or simply disabled. I’m sorry, I can’t recall the coordinate right now, having trouble concentrating. It was a yellow star, with a dense asteroid field at the edge of the system.” Ferrus made the mistake of shaking his head in a vain attempt to clear the fog. He got stars in his vision for his troubles. “I think the shuttlecraft computer is intact, so if you can restore power to it, you can pull the coordinates and sensor readings.”

Farl thought his vision was going again, as pinpricks of light started to appear around him. Then he realized it was a a transporter confinement beam, and relaxed.

Sickbay…

Doctor Lorsa was standing near a diagnostic table when the transporter beam deposited a Caitian on a nearby bio bed.  “Doctor!” She shouted for Lavender. 

The C.M.O. came flying out of her office at a fast walk, her eyes flicking over the bio-readings as she approached.

“His core temperature is lowered,” she observed, “pulse low but steady. Hypothermia protocol. Get some emergency blankets, I’ll start him on Oxygen.”

Lavender checked her patient’s response as she prepped the mask to slide over the Caitian’s nose and mouth. She could see the sluggishness and confusion in him.

“Commander, you’re aboard the Starship Denver. I’m Doctor Haigh, can you hear me?” Lavender didn’t use the term Doctor in reference to herself too often, but one exception was a situation like this, where a patient was in some distress and hearing they were in the hands of a doctor would give them some comfort.

Lorsa returned with blankets and threw them over the patient  “By the Prophets,” she muttered looking Farl over.

Farl groggily opened his eyes. Was he in a sickbay? It’s hard to make out the details when the walls are swimming. He tried to say “Thank you doctor,” but given the oxygen mask suddenly over his mouth, combined with the hypothermia, he was pretty sure all that came out was “mrrble, unc.” He shivered under the blankets, but he could tell he was already improving. It was warm in here. Farl hadn’t been entirely convinced he’d feel warmth again, until about a minute ago.

“We’ll use a combination of passive, airway and fluid re-warming,” Lavender said mostly to Lorsa as she adjusted some parameters on the bio bed before addressing Farl directly. The air he was breathing was set to be slightly warm to help increase his body temperature.

“We’re going to warm you up slowly Commander, we don’t want to shock your system but you should improve quite quickly now.” Turning to Efe she added “If he was without power I’m willing to bet he wasn’t drinking. Start him on fluids, control the temperature carefully, I don’t want to shock him.”

The Bajoran woman nodded, and rushed to a nearby replicator.  Entering the orders into the keypad a pouch of saline appeared on the pad already warmed per the medical guidelines.   Returning she spread the fur on Farl’s arm and placed a needle-less IV shunt on the spot and hung the bag above the patient. 

Farl nodded his thanks. Shivering under a blanket while caked in blood wasn’t exactly the first impression he’d had in mind when he pictured meeting his new shipmates… But he was alive, thanks to them. That was a good sign, and a much better ending to his journey than he’d expected after first seeing the Dominion ship appear on his sensors. It was gonna be alright.