Chapter I: A Ship in Peril

Cass waits, emotionless, until she's told that the Potential has eluded her would-be captors. At that point, she requests a damage report and issues all the right orders for getting repairs underway and injured people to sickbay. She wonders briefly why she doesn't have a first officer to do that sort of thing.

"Send an encrypted message to Starbase 279 about the ambush and our situation. Patch the response through to me in the captain's ready room."

She leaves the bridge after handing the conn to Mezron. Once she's inside the small ready room and the door to the bridge has slid closed, she sinks heavily onto the small couch, leaning forward to place her head in her hands. She runs over the events so far of her first command.

1. She'd abandoned protocol and her designated course to Starbase 279 to investigate a mysterious distress signal, without having sent messages to Spacefleet beforehand.

2. She'd ignored her own instincts when the distress signal ceased and the other signal took its place, sending an away team onto the disabled ship instead of going to red alert and leaving the area immediately.

3. She'd managed to get some important insights into what was really happening, but that hadn't translated into helping Captain Ery-An or her crew, and had entailed serious damage to the Potential. They'd barely made it out of the trap.

4. She'd abandoned her away team to pirates.

5. She'd abandoned her away team to pirates.

6. She'd abandoned her away team to pirates.

She stopped at the third overt repetition, but it played on a loop in the background of her mind.

Marbo will head towards the ready room after seeing the captain leave, stopping by sickbay to grab an autoinjector of a nerve relaxing medication to alleviate stress and anxiety.

He rings the bell on the door, and presents himself and the injector openly through to the exterior camera.


"Commander. Zlam. Stress Reducer. Thought you could use it. Made a hard choice. Conscience heavy."

He stands and awaits an answer.

By the time Marbo shows up at the ready room, Cass has moved from the couch to the captain's chair at the desk. She is just staring at the viewscreen, listening to the recriminations of her internal voice, but at least it probably looks like she is a functional commander.

Sighing, she says, "Come." When the doctor steps inside and the door has closed, she says, "Next time, wait until you're inside to offer me drugs, okay? I don't want the crew to start talking about how the acting captain is caving under the stress. They need to believe in me, that I can handle the job." With a look of disgust, she adds, "Whether or not that's true."

She waves a hand to offer him a seat on the couch.

"Potential, come in..." Nothing. "M1K-3, Ensign Myers, Lt. Felt, I think we're stuck here for now. The Commander will be back, she knows what she's doing, we just need to bide our time. That vibration we're feeling is almost certainly a tractor beam. I'm not sure who's pulling this ship in, but we need to prepare ourselves.

"Ensign Myers, you work with M1-K3 to secure the area. You two know how to tactically arrange the situation better than I would in case it comes to a fight. Lt. Felt, you and I will search the ship for these remaining life forms. Pull out your Tricorder, and let's see what we can find."

Zephyr is loving this. The adrenaline rush of discovery is only surpassed by the adrenaline rush of danger. His whole life things always worked out in his favor. Today would be no different, he was sure of it. Now he just felt he needed to keep the others calm, M1-K3 excluded of course. Zephyr has spent enough time as an officer to realize that different people handle stress in different ways. Lt. Felt got a little twitchy when under stress, and Zephyr knew this. That's why he partnered up with him, maybe he could give him a little confidence.

"Lieutenant stay close to me. Last thing we want to do is split the party. Everyone knows that's a recipe for disaster."

Zephyr and Lt. Felt leave the ship's bridge area and head down a neighboring corridor, tircorders in one hand, phasers in the other, and eyes wide open.

"Okay, yeah. You're right," Cass says, rubbing her face with her hands. She stands up and offers her arm for the injection, saying, "Hit me," before noticing Marbo's sudden change in demeanor. "Oh, great. What now?"

Moira takes a squirrelly young man, Chet, with her. She was never one for formal titles when there was work to be done. Knowing they were or of harm’s way, she headed to sub sector 5 to make the repairs.

It’s a good thing we got outa....that.

She dismisses Chet and heads to the bridge. Something probably went wrong up there. Needs fixing. When she arrives and sees the carnage, she sighs, but her eyes are drawn to the empty captain’s chair. She looks at it, full of determination, and with a swift motion...

....greases the pivot base. Coherent or not, Captain Darcy would not appreciate a chair that didn’t swivel.

Where is everyone? Sonofa- I will not be the ranking officer in this room.

Cass give him a tired smile. "Don't you dare. I need all the facts if I'm going to improve my decision-making. So Mike got hit by that disruptor blast I heard over the transmission. Well, probably better him than one of the others."

She thinks in silence for a while before continuing. "And it's four ships, actually, not three, if you count the one they used as bait. My guess is that they trapped the Sigma using that same ploy, and then forced the captain to help them snare another Consortium vessel. Probably looking to nab successively larger ships with more powerful weapons.

"The question is - why?"