Day Beginning

From TFC Galactopedia

This was something fun I wanted to write, no earth shattering dilemas, no life or death situations that a captain needs to be on his game for hey, I'm allowed to write something non-dramatic aren't I?

“Anything?” the young ‘captain’ of the vessel asked in a soft whisper as he tried to refrain from wiping the sweat from his forehead that had plastered his thick fur to his skin. Well they where in the south pacific he thought, even at night it was almost unbearable.

The squat badger at his side bent over the radar hood in the ‘bridge’ frowning, “nothing yet sir,” he whispered fiddling with a dial. “I keep getting bad returns from the island.”

The young canine nodded slowly with a frown and pushed his prick ears forward. Nothing moves as quietly as a ship at night he had once been told and he thoroughly believed it. With the gentle ‘slapslap’ of the dark water moving against the mahogany hull of his small command it would be hard to make anything out.

“I think I heard something,” the rabbit manning the forward open-top turret that contained twin heavy machine-guns hissed back in as loud a whisper as he dared. It would figure the young commanding officer thought, with his ears he’d probably be the first to hear.

“Where?” the young officer asked back in the same pitch of whisper.

“Five or six degrees off the port bow,” the gunner returned and the canine turned back to his radar operator, who frowned and shook his head in frustration.

That made the young canine bite the inside of his muzzle his ears going back a bit. Staying here he’d probably let his target go by without seeing it the radar was acting so finicky, but if he moved forward he might be detected before he was ready. Choices, and each one brought consequences…

“Engines, give me a slow creep,” he whispered into the sound-powered communications device mounted next to his helm wheel. “Give me ten knots, keep the mufflers on.”

“Got it,” another whisper returned and a muted rumble of three twelve cylinder engines that where originally built for aircraft came to life and the small boat started to creep forward. The young canine moved the helm wheel so that he would put his small command right on the bearing that his forward gunner had called out. Now to see if he played the hunch and got lucky…

He didn’t know how long it had taken, it had seemed like forever as he strained to listen when the badger beside him hissed out. “Got it!” he chimed. “About three miles ahead, big fat and dumb so far.”

The young canine nodded. “Steer me into an attack bearing,” he’d probably have to circle about a bit to get in the right place, attacks of this nature always had to be performed from nearly the exact same angle on a ship. “Get those torpedoes armed,” his whisper was harsh with excitement and the crewfurs on deck scrambled to prepare the four big torpedoes mounted to the deck that where his command’s biggest punch and powerful enough to blow a hole in a battleship’s thick armor, if the worked right. Unfortunately sometimes they didn’t, either they didn’t fire or the dove too deep or they simply just slammed into the hull of the target and never detonated.

“Torpedoes armed skipper,” one of the deckfurs whispered out.

“Come right ten degrees,” the badger at radar announced and he did as told. “hold it… hold it…. Now come back fifty degrees to port!”

The young canine spun the wheel back and he felt his command lean to the outside of the sharp turn. “There!” the badger called out not whispering this time and the young canine winced, hoping whoever was on the ship they where going after hadn’t heard that.

Well, he thought, they’re going to hear a lot in a few seconds. “Engines, full power! Mufflers off and everything!”

In reply the gentle, nearly un-hearable rumble of the engines changed to a loud roar as the three big engines came to full life and his little command surged forward faster and faster. He could feel the vessel begin to ‘bounce’ off the waves and he kept his knees loose to help absorb the shock of it. Still it was jarring as they crashed into a couple waves. There was no ‘speed display’ here but if he was doing his mental math, and the sound of the engines right, they where traveling at close to forty-two knots, about as fast as one of these little warships could do far faster than the target could go.

Unfortunately their target had defenses as flash-pops went off in his night vision, temporarily blinding him till he got use to them and he saw green streaks scream past him. Every fifth ones a tracer, he thought to himself, and then tried to put it out of his mind as he concentrated on his course and the position of the target off the bow of his little command ignoring the splashes about him, and the angry ‘pingping!’ of small callibur projectiles bouncing off the hull. All he needed was a few more seconds…

“Fire all torpedoes!” he called out loudly over the roar of the engines and the deckfurs complied of all things slamming the butts of wooden stocked rifles against the back of the tubes that held the torpedoes and even over the roar of the engines he heard the loud ‘shhhhh-thump!’ of the gas charges the deckfurs had just cracked with the rifles expelling all four torpedoes sending them towards the target. That done his ship no longer had any real reason to be barreling towards its target and the splash from one of the larger guns very close in to the bow accentuated that point.

“Everyone hang on!” he called out and waited a two-count to make sure his crew had grabbed onto something before spinning the helm wheel hard over to the left having to balance the hard turn hoping the little vessel would not tip over in the hard turn and leaning hard to make sure he didn’t topple over as well. His only worry now was getting away from the target before it could draw a bead on him and his crew and praying that torpedoes actually worked as advertised…

“Computer, pause program,” an amused soprano voice with hints of Scotland in its Standard English called out and suddenly everything around the young canine froze the water, tracers in mid air even this command and the furs on it. Everything that was, accept for him.

The young canine looked up with an annoyed frown at the archway roughly two-meters wide that was now sitting a meter or so off the port bow of his frozen command. Inside it stood a petite blue-headed white furred rough collie of his age with her long brown-streaked bluish black hair pulled back into a pony tail and held there today with a silver-colored ribbon. One of her tulip shaped ears almost pricked as she watched him with crystal blue eyes he knew that meant she was finding amusement in something. “Why did you…”

“Stop your fun?” she continued, performing a feat that only Jesus and Peter had done on real water by walking across it. “Because if I didn’t you’d have had to explain why you where late to our first day of classes this form,” she returned as she stepped on the deck of the little boat that was in the frozen turn closest to the waters edge and stumbled a bit before catching her balance.

The young canine blinked down at his companion then checked the wrist-watch he always wore and nearly yelped his prick ears flattening to either side in shock. “I went over by ten minutes!” He had only planned to be in this simulation on the holo-deck for thirty minutes that would have given him ample time to get to class.

“Which is why I came down here to fetch you Chaser,” the collie returned with an ‘impish’ smile her white tail wagging happily behind her. “Knowing you, you where so concerned about getting everything right, you’d forget to program in a timer buzzer for yourself.”

Chaser winced at that looking down at the petite collie. Even though he was not as his mother often comment ‘fully filled out yet’ he was tall and lanky for his age, and admittedly in this stage of his life a bit clumsy of foot at times though Krystal rather enjoyed him having all that fluffy fur of his, she often called him a ‘fluffball’ because of that. “You could have used the com system you know Kryssie.”

The collie playfully stuck out her tongue. “And miss the look on your face when I told you Chase?” Chaser and Krystal O’Donnel had been close ever since they first met, which had really been Chaser running head-long into her because he was instead of paying attention to where he was going he had been as he had heard his one aunt call it ‘gaw gawking’ at the corridors they had been walking through on his father’s ship USS Galaxy for the very first time. Truth be told he still colored under his fur when he thought of knocking Krystal right on her tail, and how he had hidden behind his mother and really wanted to duck into a Jefferies Tube.

“Interesting simulation,” Krystal said as she looked around frowning. “Humid air, those look like islands over there but I can’t tell,” she pointed off to a dark mound rearing out of the water. “I’d have to say somewhere on Earth’s Pacific Ocean.”

“The Solomon Islands,” Chaser returned with a nod knowing that Earth Geography was not a subject most ‘Starfleet Brats’ like them usually where very good at. After all, when you lived aboard a starship you many times never even saw your homeworld’s surface for years at a time. “I think that’s Tulagi, but I’m not sure, I got a bit turned around…”

“Uh huh,” Krystal returned playing things up. “I’m still surprised your mum lets you run this simulation.”

Chaser shrugged. While holo-decks where a very common form of entertainment aboard Starfleet ships those that had families aboard also knew the dangers that they could be to children and teenagers. Every under-aged dependent had to have written permission from their parents to run programs and there where quite a few files that even with parental permission a minor simply could not access. Also like every crewmember every single session a dependent partook in was logged, and those logs where transmitted to their parents each time they used the facilities so it was pretty much impossible to get away with running a program you did not have permission to, though Chaser knew of a couple that had tried a few times. His mother as the ship’s civilian ‘headmistress of schools’ had helped implement the policy aboard and he had often heard some grumbles about her ‘draconian’ policies. “It was a present from Papa McLoude,” Chaser returned referring to his paternal grandfather Vice Admiral Adam McLoude. “Like my MiG Alley and Desert Storm simulations. They’re more like the computer gaming programs I have on my terminal in my room. Mother puts a time limit on these just as much as she does on those.”

Krystal chuckled softly at the explanation, truth be told Chaser’s ‘gaming’ habit was no where near as severe as some of the other students she knew aboard. In fact most his games where historical in nature especially the ones dealing with twentieth-century aircraft. She had not told anyone about his one ‘secret’ program for the holo-deck her father had helped make for him of a disassembled air-breathing single seat combat aircraft, she thought it was called an F-100 but she wasn’t too sure, sitting in a hanger that she guessed was an ancient air base somewhere on Earth. The whole point of that program as far as she could tell was simply to put the thing together. She had discovered it one time after a particularly nasty confrontation with another student and he had used his saved up time on the holo-deck to disappear and become a ‘grease monkey’ for a while as his way of blowing off frustration. The main reason he had never told anyone other than his parents and her father (and her when she had discovered him in it she admitted) about that particular program was because he was afraid that one or two students with decent programming skills and malicious streaks in them would crack into the program and either re-set it completely or do some other trick as a practical joke.

Another thought occurred to Krystal suddenly. “Isn’t that a Japanese ship out there?”

Chaser nodded, “it’s a Yugumo-class destroyer. I don’t know which one though, probably just a fictitious one.”

“And this is a North American vessel?” she pointed to the heavily canted deck of boat they where on.

Again Chaser nodded. “Its an Elco eighty-foot motor patrol boat torpedo, they called them ‘PT’ boats.”

Krystal frowned a bit though admittedly part of her wanted to laugh, only this big fluffball would know such odd-ball information from memory. “Then, I would have thought you would have been over there,” she pointed to the frozen flashes of the Japanese tracers and gunfire. “You are after all part Japanese, in decent at least.”

He shrugged gently. “Sometimes I run it from the Japanese side, remember, I’m part North American too,” he gave one of his shy smiles.

She tried very hard not to chuckle but she did shake her head as she gave him the PADD she had been holding in her paw up till then. “Here, I stopped by your family’s quarters and downloaded your class schedule for the form for you. We don’t have many classes together this time since it’s the first form of choosing specialties.”

Chaser nodded a bit sadly, he and Krystal had been in pretty much the same classes since the beginning of their time together on the Galaxy. With a crew and civilian compliment around a thousand there where actually a fair amount of students, but even then if you where the same form, you tended to have a certain group in classes with you all the time. That was going to change now that they where choosing their specialties. In Federation Schools, even the ones aboard starships, students worked to a certain point with general classes and then chose a specialty that would tailor their classes from that point forward. They still took several ‘general education’ classes to keep themselves well rounded but their classes began to include more and more subjects dealing with their specialties.

In Krystal’s case she was fallowing in her mother’s steps, Doctor Willow O’Donnel, Galaxy’s Chief Medical Officer. Ever since Chaser had known her she had always said she wanted to be a doctor just like her mother. For Chaser he admitted he had decided only last year that he would start on an Engineering specialty. Part of that had been because everyone would think it an extension of the ‘hero worship’ he had had for the crewfurs of Galaxy’s Starfleet Corps of Engineers ‘action team’ specialists that Krystal’s father, Chief Engineer Laddire O’Donnel had gotten assigned to the ship a few years before. He had practically eaten up any unclassified exploits of the SCE team and had even to his great embarrassment tried to listen in on one of their conversations once in the forward lounge area, a place under-age dependents generally where not allowed to go. He really didn’t want to have to put up with the ridicule those childish actions where bound to gain him from some of the other students but he had also decided that he liked taking things apart and putting them back together. That and he always got squeamish at the sight of blood so taking Krystal’s path was a bit out of the question.

“We better hurry,” Krystal said tugging him gently towards the arch that was the exit to the holo-deck bringing the taller canine out of his thoughts. “Computer End Program and save,” she announced as they passed the arch and the scene behind them disappeared into the familiar black room with a yellowish-orange grid of how the holo-decks naturally looked.

“Huh? What why? First Class isn’t for another fifteen minutes.”

“I know, but your first class is in the Deck Seven Classrooms and to be honest,” she wrinkled her fine tapered muzzle a bit looking at the replica khaki US Navy officer’s uniform that he had completely unbuttoned the top of displaying the white t-shirt underneath, itself sweat sodden. “You need a shower or something, you stink.” She laughed at the hurt look on her sweetheart’s muzzle. They where not ‘dating’ at least officially, Krystal’s twin Dana though grumbled often that they where in everything but name. “Seriously Chase you didn’t have to actually turn the humidity up to what it would be like on Earth!”

“I wanted it to be realistic,” he said sheepishly as they walked out and towards the turbolift a short distance away.

“You didn’t have to be that realistic,” she sighed softly. “No wonder Keba Eldar likes to tease you so much.”

“Could we please not talk about Keba, bad enough that I’ll have to put up with his superior ‘My parents are joined Trill’ attitude without you around most the time this form, I don’t want to think of that panther before I have to.”

Krystal just sighed and shook her head as they entered the ‘lift. “Deck Eight,” she announced. Every student had others that rubbed them the wrong way, for Chaser it was the son of the only Trill couple aboard, and the fact that his parents where both one of the few Trills that where ‘join’ with another species of their world to form a symbiotic organism made him… abrasively superior at the best. He seemed to rather enjoy tormenting Chaser who he saw as a perfect target to ‘bring down to size’ as he was, after all both the captain’s and the headmistress’s eldest son. That in the Trill’s mind from what Krystal could tell meant that Chaser must be getting privileges that no other student could get and thus needed punished for taking advantage of his ‘privileged position.’ It was all nonsense in Krystal’s mind but still Keba and Chaser where often at odds more than not.

“Tell you what, you keep from blowing up at ‘Mr. Trill and Mighty’ in your class with him today and I’ll bribe you,” she smirked.

“Bribe me?”

She smiled as the lift slowed the short distance to the proper deck. “Ice-cream Sundays in the student lounge,” referring to the small ‘common lounge’ set aside for and used as a recreation facility by the majority of students aboard Galaxy. It only had one replicator and the pattern memory had extremely limited options, mainly held down to things like ice cream or parent-approved beverages. Said same replicator also had a form of ‘credit system’ built into it where each term students only had so many credits they could use on it and once those where gone the replicator locked them out.

Chaser blinked looking down, “isn’t that more a self bribe for you? Especially considering how much you like mint…”

She frowned at him as they walked down the corridor to his family’s quarters. “I didn’t say anything about yours being mint chocolate ice-cream yours would be that peanut-butter stuff you like so much,” she just shook her head and pushed him towards the hatch. “Anyways get changed and into real clothes or you’ll be late for class!”