“California, rest in peace

Simultaneous release

California, show your teeth”

-Red Hot Chili Peppers

Personal Log, Lieutenant Travis Porter. Stardate 43728.8. 

Captain O’va asked for me by name. That wasn’t small. I run the transporters on Solvang, and I write the papers people cite when a pattern buffer starts to sing. La’Ktozia’s ionized atmosphere made my job a study in patience — the field harmonics want to dance when they ought to hold still.

I didn’t expect to be more than a passenger.

Captain had other plans. She roped Lieutenant JG Cherry Jamb, Chief Petty Officer Vito Calabrese and me into the manifest and told us we were riding along for Second Contact.

Cherry’s an Exocomp built to ask the right questions and keep the right records. Acts as if who or whatever programmed her had way too much of one of Castillo’s high-octane coffee blends. She samples, catalogues, observes with the kind of curiosity that makes you trust her notes. Saying she’s happy to be here’s an understatement, but that’s no slight on her — those types always make for the best kind of scientists.

I’ve met plenty of officers who talk a lot and say very little. Cherry’s the opposite. Everything she says has a purpose, even if she delivers it with the enthusiasm of a warp core on a sugar rush. She’s good company. Keeps the air lively.

Vito’s a good man, and a great chef. Knows how to run a proper kitchen. 

Chief Engineer Wu managed to fill the cargo section of the Lilypad — that’s the Captain’s yacht — with something that has to violate some kind of regulation. But, there was a darn good reason. Commander Thorne had scoured the mess of notes from the first ship there — wild ramblings carrying on about cuisine for what seemed like the length of War and Peace. Thorne read through all of it. Can’t measure worth a damn, but he knows people. And it was people that wrote those notes. 

That team must’ve been high as a kite, I reckon, but Eyeball – that’s the callsign those Eos Station flyboys gave him before that run-in with the pirates at Jugdalak nebula – went and had himself a real stroke of genius. 

He’s the kind of man that can make a kitchen out of a cargo bay and make it feel like a place you can call home, and that’s just what he and Wu did. A brick oven stuffed inside a 6A Captain’s Yacht. Thorne stayed up all night coaxing dough from the ship’s garden, turning what grows under our lights into something that smells like home. Wu did the measuring and built the oven to fit, laying those bricks all by himself, while Thorne worked with our head chef, Vito Calabrese to make a variety of some of the best classical pizza recipes from Earth.

You see, these La’Ktozians, they’re all about finding their Divine Pairing – seeing what blends, mixes and pairs with other things. They’ve got tiers of food – Degrees they call them. First Degree means you’ve paired food from two of the Four Sects. Third Degree pairings are considered the most sacred. Now, in all of those ramblings from the Chambois, they went into great detail about all the food, but Thorne saw not a single one ever mentioned anything about pizza. So, the Captain decided we’re giving them an authentic brick oven, and a bunch of pizza recipes, along with a few fresh pies. K’Rell stated it’d be a worthy gift – just like the barrel of whiskey her House brought to a diplomatic soiree she attended a few months ago aboard the Kennedy.

We loaded the assorted pies that Vito prepared into insulated crates and strapped them down. Vito tucked a final tin of prosciutto into the crate and patted it like a blessing. The Lilypad cut through the atmosphere like a horse that knew the trail. Can’t help but think that had to do with the Captain’s flying. It’s all about throttle, attitude and timing. Can’t be hurried, and she flew it tight and polite. She’s the kind of captain that makes formality feel like a courtesy rather than a chore.

After we landed, we met the Offering of the Four – four voices from the four Sects. This feller Wendric Wheyborn met us at the landing site, he’s the elected representative for the Che’Zians. Wore a suit of white fabric veined with indigo – blue cheese if you want to be rude about it – and a blue fez tipped at an angle. His ears were long and swept back – same shape as every La’Ktozian’s. A smile practiced enough to be useful. Moved like a man who’d learned how to make presentation mean something. Even I could see that on La’Ktozia, presentation was a language in and of itself, and Mister Wheyborn spoke it well.

Vito and I hauled that brick oven by antigrav cart to the Cultural Center, while Cherry remotely piloted the crates with the food to be cooked. Wheyborn led us into their center. Large, but not opulent. Just a regular building, with a large X-shaped wooden table in the center. Whole building looked like oak, a lighter shade of wood. The plainness makes sense once you know their past.

Once the oven was set, Captain was chatting with Wendric, Vito was talking with the lady from the Glu’Tan — Ethull I think was her name. Cherry busied herself with the man from the Drupe, Jesze.  I found myself chewing the fat with the feller from the Thew, by the name of Geopf.

At a quick glance, you’d have said Geopf looked like a caricature of a cowboy from the Old West, but with long pointed ears angled back. Bow-legged, with the posture of a surly brawler aiming to look bigger than he is — chest puffed, arms bent like he spent too much time in the gym and can’t lay ‘em flat against his side. Not the kind of man you’d ever call graceful, but there’s no doubt he knew what an honest day’s work looked like.

Geopf talked like a man who’d lived through the stories he told, even though the events happened more than a few generations ago. Said the La’Ktozians used to be predominantly capitalists. Back when profit was their only measure of worth, their food industry poisoned them slowly. Not just their bodies, but their minds, too. Obsession with margins and greed stripped the soul out of what they ate.

When the sickness came, they blamed the oligarchs and their cronies – it was them who’d profited by substituting simple, honest food with toxic junk created in a lab. The people fought back, and won. They took up arms, and took their freedom and health back, one bullet at a time. Small arms played a large role, and they still do. Phasers wouldn’t work right with all the ionization, anyway – too much free charge in the air for the nadions to retain cohesion. At full power, one might even blow up in your hand, provided the safety override didn’t lock you out. Makes sense why they’ve made use of firearms. Captain’s ears perked up a bit when she heard that – she’s got a pretty sizable collection aboard, passed down through at least a dozen generations.

Then came the food. Vito and Thorne really outdid themselves on this spread. New York pizza: plain cheese and specialty slices – baked ziti, chicken parmigiana, buffalo chicken, sausage and peppers. Sicilian slices – thick, rectangular and fluffy. Grandma slices – thin, crispy and square. Grandpa slices – like a Grandma slice but with sauteed onions, and modified with olives and mushrooms. Hawaiian slices – ham and pineapple added. Every ingredient grown or raised aboard Solvang, and anything we couldn’t get aboard, we received in stasis pods from Earth, top priority shipments. No one does diplomacy like the Federation.

These La’ktozians damn near lost their minds – any of the slices with meat, they revered as Third Degree harmonies, uniting all Four Sects. Thorne was right – they’d never tasted a pizza before in their lives, but here they were. Transcendent, was the word they’d used, or at least that’s what the Universal Translator cooked up.

Didn’t take long for the smell of baked dough and melted cheese to fill the hall. The La’Ktozians stood there, eyes wide, like they were watching a sunset for the first time. Wendric raised his slice like a toast, and the others followed suit. For a moment, it wasn’t about diplomacy or doctrine – just people sharing something warm and simple.

Captain O’va said later that this was the kind of contact Starfleet was built for. Not the treaties or the signatures, but the quiet moments when you realize the universe still has the room for surprise. I reckon she’s right.

Cherry catalogued every reaction, every smile. Vito wiped his hands on his apron and said something in Italian I couldn’t quite hear. Whatever it was, I couldn’t argue with him. The oven glowed like a hearth, and for a brief spell, La’Ktozia felt like home.

End log.