Went to see the captain, strangest I could find.

Laid my proposition down, laid it on the line.

I won’t slave for beggar’s pay, likewise gold and jewels,

But I would slave to learn the way to sink your ship of fools.

Robert Hunter & Jerry Garcia (1974)

Who is the bigger fool?

It’s a timeless rhetorical device which counterpoises human folly in all its manifest insensibility, prompting reflection on whether the deceiver of the deceived bears greater responsibility in their mutual outcome. Luminaries from backgrounds as diverse as William Shakespeare (exploring madness, deception and misplaced trust in his ‘King Lear’) to Alec Guiness’s questioning of “Who is the more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows it?” neatly encapsulated what the existential philosopher Albert Camys conceptualized as “The Absurd.”

Absurdity refers to the inherent disconnect between our desire for meaning and purpose and the world’s lack of inherent meaning or purpose. This concept asserts that human beings are often caught in a repetitive cycle of meaningless actions and pursuits, similar to the fool who engages in foolish behavior without any genuinely meaningful objective.

As Captain Samantha’s shuttlecraft transcribed its gentle arc across the cavernous interior space of the Spacedock of Starbase 72 and she reviewed the personnel records and service jackets of the new crew she was tasked to lead into uncertainty, she had significant pause to reflect upon the absurdity of her current position and wonder who was leading who?

Tasked with helping protect and save a Federation that she saw as having abandoned her and betrayed her trust by trying to sweep her under the rug when her very existence posed and existential problem to the weave of lies it had spun to lash the disparate fragments of its dream together, Samantha fingered the familiar Captain’s rank – pips on the collar of a uniform that had once represented the pinnacle of her hopes and ideals she wondered if, by accepting Commodore Jalian’s challenge, whether she was again engaged in the futile pursuit of purpose through meaningless actions and her life had become an embrace devoid of genuine essence or if the uniform itself had remained untainted and herself she might still attain some modicum of redemption and true purpose in its wearing?

Sam sighed as the shuttle pilot crested the doughty hull of a dependable California – class utility cruiser, towing another sleek Starfleet vessel gently into its berth and contacted the duty Flight Control Officer aboard her new ship and destination, the USS Vigilant.

As they drifted over the familiar hull, Sam’s mind went back to her days serving as Comms officer aboard the USS Sacramento and she tried to convince herself that life had be relatively simpler in those days, but the fact that a tendril of living crystal was slowly, determinedly growing throughout her body and would one day kill her – a parting gift from the Crystal Entity that had subsumed her father – had been seeded in her during that self-same mission aboard the California – class and that she could find no solace in empty memories.

Apart from haunting her sleep with nightmarish visitations from the Crystal Entity wearing her dead – fathers skin and allowing her fiendish doppelgänger to explore new ways to amplify the gruesome effects of the Agonizer that she had tortured Sam with in the Mirror Universe, the strange crystal lattice seemed to have gifted her no advantage, save to slowly kill her and enable the Commodore to coopt her into mounting this fool’s errand into yet another alternate dimension.

When she looked through the rogue’s gallery that Jalian had assembled to serve as her crew on this suicidal venture, Sam wondered who really was the fool here?

In all of her time in Starfleet, Sam did not think she had ever seen a roster of deplorables, discipline cases, misfits and ne’er do wells and was privately astonished that some of the people on the roster were permitted to wear the uniform and not committed to wear a prison jumpsuit.

In fact, at least one of them had, from what she could see.

“USS Vigilant flight control, this is Shuttlecraft Tamar on final approach, transmitting our descent vector. Please acknowledge.”

The pilot murmured unobtrusively as he gently canted the smallcraft and the graceful lines of the svelte, angular hull of the fleet – footed Duderstadt – class fast cruiser hoved into view through the forward canopy, attended by a buzz of tiny yellow worker bees, her graceful lines were played upon by the revealing glare of fixed floodlights, giving her an almost ethereal quality.

Sam dragged her eyes away from the exterior of the ship as the shuttlecraft slid past and performed a gentle bank to starboard to line up with the Shuttlebay nestled in the skim aft section of the Duderstadt’s saucer and tried to get a ‘feel’ for this new crew.

Starting with the ships Executive Officer.

Commander Rozu was an Orion officer with a seemingly blemish-free record; however Samantha’s eye was drawn inevitably to the glaring fact that he was also the son of Vaidu, the undisputed Queen of the infamous ‘Jensu – Radja’ Pirate Cartel.

The face that stared back at her from Rozu’s service jacket suggested a man who was supremely confident and possessed a latent mirth in his eyes, as if the Orion was in on some cosmic joke that only he was privy to the punchline to.

Whilst there was nothing in his record of service to suggest criminality or malfeasance in any way, Sam couldn’t help wondering how the Commander managed to reconcile his service with Starfleet alongside sharing a dining table with one of the most strident and defiant criminal organisations in known space? Was there any conflict of interests? Or was there more to Rozu’s success than just hard work and a surfeit of good luck?

Samantha frowned massively. The relationship between Commanding Officer and Executive Officer was pivotal and key to the efficient operation of a Starship. Here she would be flying blind into an anomaly that lead to heavens – knew where or when, with a man who was ostensibly the heir to a vast underground criminal organization at her right hand.

A disconcerting thought, to say the least.

The shuttlecraft slipped aft of the moored vessel and aligned itself with the relatively small aperture at its rear and Sam glanced up and was impressed again at the Duderstadt’s unconventional symmetry. She glanced out of the side viewport and marvelled at the swift sweep of her powerful Nacelles, that would accelerate the fast – cruiser past the Warp 9 mark and sustain a sprint speed of 9.99 and hold it there indefinitely. The utility of a vessel with this type of performance and range could not be easily understated.

She turned her attention to the ship’s Chief Science Officer, a veteran Lieutenant – Commander named T’Shon. For a moment she wondered what sin the Vulcan must have committed to be assigned to such a motley command, from what she saw, T’Shon was a talented generalist with a Major in Theoretical Sciences and it was hard to parse her own particular failing.

Until that was, when Samantha came to her personnel reviews from previous Commanding Officers and uncovered a woman who (whilst undeniably brilliant) was apparently intractable and dogmatic in her pursuit of science and hence a difficult officer to work with.

Although, Sam reasoned, the same could be said about any number of Vulcan officers that she had served with over the years.

The next name on the list came as somewhat of a surprise. The Chief Security Officer was  Lieutenant Va’Nar, a Vodrian.

There had been a Vodrian serving aboard the USS Albion, when she had served as its Executive Officer. These grey/blue skinned refugees from the Gamma Quadrant were few and far between and even fewer of their kind had found their way into service with Starfleet, finding the transition for indentured slave – race to the Dominion to freedom of action in the Alpha & Beta Quadrants an often-difficult transition.

Standing some 7 feet tall and weighing in at well over 300 lbs, a Vodrian was a veritable powerhouse of muscle and bulk, ideal for Security Operations but they tended to fare quite poorly in zero – g  EVA assignments.

A Vodiran she could work with, Sam concluded. A little muscle was never a bad thing in the right situation.

Her attention was piqued by the file on Dr Yasuda Kimura. The USS Vigilant’s Chief Medical Officer had a fair service record, serving in a number of postings from Starbase sickbays to Emergency Medicine and disaster relief, but at some point the pressure must have got to him and the good doctor had developed a quiet addiction to the medications at his disposal.

Sam saw that Dr Kimura had seemed to work through his demons and had had his licence to practice restored after an extensive period of detoxification and counselling yet couldn’t help but wonder how the physician may hold up against future tribulations and stress.

She resolved to keep a weather eye on that particular relationship, as the Ship’s Doctor was the lynchpin that held the cohesiveness and goodwill of the crew together, in many respects.

As the Shuttlecraft glided smoothly down into the Duderstadt’s modest single Shuttlebay, Sam moved more quickly through the service records of the more junior officers of the Bridge crew. Not everything could be gleaned from how a person presented ‘on-paper’ and she had to accept that she would have to find her way with the majority of people, once the ship itself was underway.

Lieutenant (Jg) Rani Ojha was a ‘local – girl’ from one of the colony worlds that abounded the former Demilitarized Zone and the Cardassian border, that was part of Task Force 72’s primary sphere of operations. The only child of Marquis separatists, Ojha had had a hard time of it as she went through the Academy and several altercations logged by Starbase Security seemed to indicate that she was used to fighting for her honor.

Serving as the USS Vigilant’s Chief Operations Officer, Samantha supposed that growing up in an environment of terrorist cells might conceivably imbue an individual with tight communications discipline and organisation, not to say the ability to scrounge vital resources from dubious sources. All aspects that would go up to make a capable Ops officer.

Despite herself, Samantha smiled. She always did have a soft spot for nature’s scrappy underdogs.

Thath Jarthell was a Tellarite and served as the ships Tactical Officer. Argumentative and confrontational were traits typical to his people and, in some respects, not completely without merit for an individual whose purview was the offensive systems of a starship. But noting Jarthell’s relative age and correspondingly low – rank, Sam could see that the Tellarite had never advanced beyond the rank of a Junior Grade Lieutenant, so mentally braced herself for stormy relations ahead.

Lastly Macey Lewis, who served as the ship’s CONN officer had the opposite problem. Originally a full Lieutenant, the pilot had been implicated (peripherally at least) in a smuggling operation and had been incarcerated in a Federation Penal Colony for two years and upon her release had been demoted and busted down two ranks to a lowly Ensign.

Currently serving in the capacity of a reserve officer, Lewis’s assignment to the USS Vigilant was the last chance of redemption upon a career marked by poor choices. If she did not make the grade, she faced a return to prison to serve out the remainder of her sentence.

Yet, Sam could see the benefits of having a pilot with an unconventional mindset and bag of tricks at the helm of such a swift vessel, so decided she would just have to wait and see if Macy Lewis showed promise or was just the victim of her own worse impulses.

The shuttlecraft came to a rest on the Shuttlebay deck and a small team of technicians marshalled the craft to its assigned revetment and the pilot began to secure the craft and power down its essential systems.

Sam used this time to review what she could about the Displaced.

Captain Arthur Hansen. Prematurely balding, a man in his early 50’s with a mercurial air to him and a service record to boot. Maybe it was the welcoming crinkle around his dark brown eyes or the fact that he too seemed to be somewhat of a black sheep when it came to playing by the Starfleet rulebook, but Sam felt a creeping sense of kinship to the lost CO of the Vigilant and determined that she would do everything to restore him to his command, even it meant losing her own.

Her future was uncertain, yet her eventual death by the Crystaline Virus growing in her was not. At least it was keeping her from the nightmare of submitting to the persistence of the Hive mutagen that coursed through her veins and threatened to transform her (and anyone it came into contact with) into a monstrous insectoid intent of spreading its hegemonic franchise.

As the entry hatch hissed open and the clamour of industry that signalled life on the deck of the Shuttlebay invaded the cabin, Samantha Hyland came finally to the USS Vigilant’s missing Chief of Engineering and the most urgent of the Displaced that she was tasked in retrieving from another dimension.

Ostensibly, Lieutenant Commander Vanya Anouska Petrovna looked like the same 21-year-old Ensign that had been assimilated by the Borg at the Battle of Sector 001, yet Samantha had to remind herself that that event took place back in 2373 AD and the young woman she saw in the Service Jacket image was actually older than she was in subjective terms.

Blonde hair, the high Slavic cheekbones that bespoke of her Russian heritage, but these familiar signifiers were all but erased by the presence of a large, amber – hued ocular implant , where her left eye should be and other tell – tale signs of Borg assimilation.

Sam noted that, since her rescue and reclamation from the Collective in 2398, Six of Eleven (as Anouska preferred to be called since her return) had undergone a difficult period of both physical and psychological rehabilitation and had gone on to serve with distinction aboard the USS Kirk, a Shran – class escort, before transferring to the Vigilant.

The ability to interface directly with the technological systems aboard the maintenance – high Duderstadt – class vessel made the Lieutenant – Commander the logical choice for Chief Engineer, yet Samantha (who herself had survived the ordeal of assimilation, if but from a Mirror Universe amalgam of the Borg in form of the Hive Collective) wondered if Six of Eleven felt more human or if she identified more with the Borg.

It was a dichotomy that she herself was struggling with at that very moment, but she stowed the PADD and hefted her kitbag and stepped out of the shuttle….to be met by absolutely no – one whatsoever.

Normally there is a time – honored tradition when the incoming CO of a vessel is formally welcomed aboard by the senior representative of the command staff, who formally relinquishes command and then the whole mess if the new Captains problem, but there were only the small group of flight – ops techs going about their business and mostly ignoring her as they worked.

“Computer. Locate Commander Rozu.” She called aloud.

After the briefest of pauses, the ships computer confirmed in its dolcid tones,

++Commander Rozu is in Holosuite #, situated on deck…++

“I know where it is!” Hyland snapped, interrupting the computer as she hefted her bag on her shoulder and made her way purposely towards the bank of turbolifts towards the rear of the bay.

She might have inherited this ship of fools, much against her better judgement, but she was damned if she was going to be made a fool of by her new First Officer or any other member of this oddball crew of misfits.

She entered the car and turned to face the Turbolift doors as they hissed shut and slid together, cutting off the view of the Shuttlebay.

She smiled grimly and assured herself.

“It’s time to make a few changes around here!”