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.Emergency Measures	By : keithcompany Category: Star Trek > The Next Generation Views: 3433 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek: Enterprise, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Emergency Measures
- 2-And finally...
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More disclaimer: This work is my own. Do not repost this story beyond the limits of the Fair Use standards of Copyright Law (quotes, examples, 'you gotta read this' excerpts, the usual).

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I took the seat the XO indicated. He sat on the other side of the table, at an angle and apparently relaxed. We were at the stateroom’s dining table instead of his desk or his formal office up on Deck 2. Between his posture and the location, he was obviously trying to set an informal atmosphere for this meeting.
At the same moment I realized that, the Counselor smirked. We both glanced at where she sat at the end of the table.
“He has your number, Will,” she told him. Commander Riker nodded and turned back to me.
“So, Ensign Craig, how do you like being stationed on the Enterprise?”
“Very much, sir. It’s an honor, of course, and I appreciate it greatly.” I was trying to be sincere, and not just because a Betazoid was watching me. The Commander’s poker skills were legendary on the lower decks.
“So I’ve heard from your supervisors,” he said with a nod. “Now, this is just a six-month evaluation, Ensign. Nothing that goes down in your permanent record.”
“Yes, sir. The Engineer explained it to me, sir.”
“You don’t have to use ‘sir’ as punctuation, Ensign,” Troi said.
“Yes, he does,” Riker said, eyes still on me. I nodded. I wasn’t sure if the Counselor had ever quite been a boot-dot, even fresh out of the Academy. But talking to higher officers properly was drilled into us. If I didn’t say ‘sir’ I probably couldn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I was looking over your record.” He gestured towards a padd. “It’s interesting.”
“Interesting good or interesting bad, sir?”
“Well, that’s what we’re here to find out.” He spun the padd towards him but didn’t look at it. “Officers in the Fleet tend to cross train extensively. An Away Team member may have to pilot a shuttle, run a transporter, fix a replicator, disarm a bomb, jury rig a forcefield from a tricorder and a phaser… Any number of things may come up.”
“Yes, sir,” I acknowledged. Troi’s eyebrows rose slightly.
“You…” He raised the padd. “You went through the Academy’s Engineering Domain. Your thesis was on transporter technology. Your extra credits were transporter schools. Your midshipmen cruise was on the USS Dexter, in the transporter crew.” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “I think a pattern is developing, Ensign.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Since coming here, you’ve volunteered for extra duty whenever transporter maintenance is scheduled. You’ve traded watches to man the transporter rooms when we’re in port.” He placed the padd gently down. “Does that sound like cross training to you, Ensign Craig?
“No, sir.” He just looked at me. “Sir, I am keeping up to date on my department qualifications. I can land a shuttle. I can repair all but the most specialized electronics on board and I can contribute to a team effort on those. I just want to be really competent with the transporters.”
“Why?” Troi asked.
I took a second. I’d actually practiced this speech a few times. “Sir. Sirs, I don’t argue that Away Team members need a wide range of skills to meet the challenges Starfleet encounters. There’s just no telling what they’ll meet or greet out here. Success or failure may require musical knowledge, gambling skill, or the ability to turn rocks into replicators.”
The two of them smiled or nodded at various points. Of course, they’d not only seen all the space logs I’d read through, they’d written more than a few of them.
“But to me, sir, it seems that the transporter is the make-or-break link on many, many missions. Teams may need esoteric skills in the field, but they also need a very competent hand on the transporter to get back safely.”
“And you think that’s you?” Riker asked.
“Lieutenant C’holk has stated that an Away Team being extracted in transporter-sensitive conditions has a 3.5% better chance of survival if I’m operating the panel.” It wasn’t bragging, not exactly. Vulcan statements on chance were taken almost as gospel in the Fleet. I was just restating a statement of fact.
Riker held his chin in his hand. His gaze went through me and into deep space. He’d been through a few tricky transports. I heard that a specific malfunction was even named after him.
“Can’t complain about three whole percent,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was sincere or sarcastic. Troi winked at me, though, so I was able to breathe again.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” he said after a moment. “You can still become a transporter ninja, but I want you to increase your cross-training hours. That’s a given. And not negotiable. I’ll have La Forge come up with a list. Start with your weakest area, work your way up.
“And if your transporter bonus reaches 5%, you start giving other engineers training.” He glanced at Troi for any input, then looked at me.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir!” I stood, tried to figure out if I should salute or shake his hand. He just nodded his head towards the exit. I didn’t quite run.
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Two months later I was up to my elbows in a shuttle’s warp nacelle when the lights flickered. All I could tell was that the ship’s speed changed, but not by how much.
The Eng touched the bulkhead with his hand and concentrated on the vibration. “Warp Eight,” he said. “Must be an emergency.” He glanced at the open cowling. “Put it back together, get it operational. Never know what we’ll need.”
He was out the door by the time all department heads were summoned to the bridge.
I cleaned up, sealed the opening and ran the little ship’s diagnostics. They were just finishing when I was summoned to the transporter room. I did run this time.
Riker and Worf were on the pads by the time I got there. Teegle was behind the console. I started to relieve her.
“Craig,” Riker said, “you’re with us.”
“Sir?” An Away Team? An Away Team in an Emergency? Me?
“There’s a transporter problem on a Klingon security post,” he said, waving towards a spot between him and Mr. Worf. “Going to see how good you really are.”
I stepped into place. The Security officer handed me an excursion belt. Two types of tricorder and a phaser were on it. I swallowed and put it on.
Doc and two of her nurses joined us with treatment packs. I backed up to make room for them. The Captain’s voice said something about orbit, Riker acknowledged.
“Everybody ready?” he asked. I wondered very briefly if there was any point to answering honestly, then the world went away.
It came back, and it came back angry. The Academy simulator had a Klingon Bridge training mode. The smell was similar, but worse. Something had burned here.
The darkness was made only slightly less dark by faded red lights. The construction was modern Klingon, with several blast marks on the walls and floor. Passageways stretched out in four directions. Three were sealed, one wasn’t because the blast doors were crumpled on the ground.
The air was weak, even for a Klingon environment. We all coughed, even Worf.
“The life support systems have been working for three days to restore breathable atmosphere,” he said.
“And they’re almost there,” Riker joked. Crusher and the nurses each hit us with some TriOx.
Then the Away Team fanned out, lights spearing through the gloom. They called out for any survivors.
Worf nudged me. I looked at him. He was facing away from me but nodded to my right. I turned and saw Riker staring at me.
“Sir?”
“I said, check the transporter. The distress message said they were using the transporter to save the survivors, but they didn’t say where they were going.”
“Ah. Of course, sir.” I recognized the main transporter console for the facility. I had studied Klingon technology, mostly so I could be sure to capture their beam in an emergency.
As I had suspected, they had used the buffer to store patterns until they could be retrieved. It was a growing practice in life-or-death situations, a sort of virtual life boat.
But there were problems.
“Sir? The computer memory of the transporter systems were damaged in the fighting. They worked up some pretty esoteric renovations to get enough storage for all their systems.”
“They’re IN the transporter?” Worf asked.
“Like Scott’s solution on the Dyson Sphere,” Riker mused. “Life support failing, no transport available, they jumped on the pad and beamed themselves into a permanent beam.” He stepped to read over my shoulder.
“Are their patterns holding up better than Mr. Scott’s shipmate did?”
“Yes, sir. I think.” I ran a tricorder across the displays. I could read the language, but I couldn’t think in Klingon units. I needed the translation to make it work.
“Sir, there are three survivors for sure,” I finally said.
“And what are you unsure about?” Crusher asked.
“There are links to every working computer on the station, people are stretched across up to seven different systems, the pattern being resolved on a rotating basis. According to these readings, three of them are on computers here. There’s something else, though. Some sort of pattern, that almost looks right, but…”
“Can you bring them back or not, Ensign?” Riker asked.
“I think so. They have to come back here,” I said. “The patterns were encoded by this, um, exotic processor set-up, they have to come back out the same way. And if these readings are right, the last person transported…is the one in the odd pattern.”
“How odd?” someone asked.
“Pretty fucking odd,” I said. It was a week before I realized I’d been so distracted as to swear in front of ranking officers. No one seemed to notice at the time, though.
With Worf’s help I got a very secure understanding of the set-up. Then I carefully reconstructed one of the patterns out of the memories and into the buffer.
Then I crossed my fingers and pushed the button. A Klingon warrior appeared on the pad, staggered towards us and collapsed. Crusher knelt to attend to him.
I waited until he was stabilized and transported up to the Enterprise (by Teegle), then brought out the next two. They reacted in a similar fashion.
Then I was down to the final pattern. I prayed briefly and then brought it back into the waking world.
A Klingon female appeared on the pad. She didn’t stagger, just looked at us blearily, smiled (I think), said ‘It worked!’ and passed out.
“That’s what was wrong with her pattern,” I said. We were staring down at the limp form of an 8-inch tall Klingon.
Crusher and staff beamed out with the last patient. Riker turned to me. “She said, ‘it works.’ Does that mean this was something she did on purpose?”
“I would guess so, sir. I mean, she used every single bit of available memory to do this. There just wasn’t room for four people. I mean, unless they cut off their arms and legs to reduce mass-“
“Klingons would never do that,” Worf stated. “They would sooner die.”
Couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. “Then she found some way to reorganize the mass she had or to use less and keep her brain and body functional.”
“You sure she did this to herself?”
“She was the last one to beam into the storage. It would have to have been her.”
Riker shook his head and told Enterprise we were ready to beam up. I interrupted. “I want to look around the system, sir. See if she was clever enough to find a way to preserve anything else.”
“Very well,” he said. “Worf? We’ll probably need you when they wake up.”
“Yes, sir. I will call another officer down to protect the ensign.”
“Good. Craig, send your readings and the logs to Data. Let’s see if we can find out how to restore her.”
Over the next few hours, Data verified my initial conclusions from the Ops station. He also found a file that the engineer had wanted me to read. It was instructions on how to use the existing transporter set up to bring them back out.
We thought it was supposed to be part of the distress broadcast, or maybe just displayed on the console, but that part of her plan had failed.
Lucky for them all, her and my ideas of transporter usage seemed to dovetail nicely, and I hadn’t needed them.
When I couldn’t find anything else that could bear on the situation, I told my escort and she had us beamed back aboard.
Teegle said that Crusher wanted us both to be examined for any respiratory complications so we went to Sickbay.
“YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED YOURSELF, THEN!” someone hollered as the door opened. Lt. Jippe automatically thrust herself between me and the aggressor. Just as her phaser rose to point towards the Klingons shouting at each other in the middle of the room, Worf’s hand stopped hers.
“They’ve been like this for two hours,” he muttered. “Ever since Crusher woke them.
“But she is too small to even hold a qis!” one protested. I started to make sense of the scene. The three full-sized Klingons surrounded an exam table where the tiny woman stood glaring up at them.
The largest male was the loudest. He seemed the most upset. There was a female who seemed to be arguing with him and a male that just watched the others silently.
“IF she is so CLEVER,” the leader replied, “then she can figure out a way to slice herself upon it.”
“I have done nothing wrong!” the little one protested. “I saved every life I could, Father, after you slew the traitors.”
“Father?” I asked.
“Traitors?” Jippe asked.
“YOU CALL THIS SAVED?! You are PREY, now. Even a targ could stomp you to death.” He smashed a fist on the table. It was well to the side of the shrunken woman, but it still knocked her to her knees. She popped back up.
Over in a corner, the med staff waited impatiently for the screaming to stop.
“Kompell was the station commander,” Worf said, eyes locked on the drama. “The survivors are all relatives of his. Daughter, niece, nephew. The ‘traitors’ were station personnel that he discovered supported a mek'leth champion that he detested.” There was no irony in his voice. Worf clearly saw that dispute as a valid reason to slaughter your detachment. At least in the Klingon Defense Force.
“That’s enough!” the CO shouted. He and Data were in another doorway. Picard’s glare silenced the patients. “You’re alive. We go forward from that point.” He gestured towards the tiny woman as he and Data stepped forward.
“Take Lieutenant Keerha and…” He looked around the room for a second.
“And Ensign Craig?” Data suggested.
“Yes. Everyone involved in the transporter rig. See what can be done.”
“Yes, sir,” I acknowledged and stepped towards the Operations Officer.
“YOU did THIS!” Kompell shouted. He started to lunge towards me. Worf and Jippe were suddenly between us. Neither one made a threatening gesture, but their stance made it clear they were ready for him.
“Bah!” he growled. Then he stormed out the door. His relatives followed, then Picard and Worf.
“Shall we go to Engineering?” Data asked. He offered a hand to Keerha. She sat in it and we left.
The transporter nexus had already been set up with the readings I had uploaded and Data had examined. We recreated her effort to save the survivors.
“I am unsure what you were attempting to accomplish,” Data said. “Was this,” and he gestured to her tiny form, “intentional?”
“Oh, yes, Commander.” She paced back and forth on the console. “I was comparing the space available to the mass of the detachment. Someone was going to have to die. Then I remembered K’s’hess’ paper on Planck’s Polarization-“
I’ll admit I was staring at her. She was small but perfect. Everyone on the station had stripped off their weapons and armor to fit into the memories. She had a short shift that stuck to her skin like surgical dressing.
Her fangs stuck out to give her that small lisp all Klingons seem to have when they aren’t shouting. Her long black hair was disheveled at the moment but looked beautiful to me.
When she mentioned K’s’hess, though, I was brought back to my duties. “Polarization through scale lens physics!” I said. “I was reading that two weeks ago!”
“That would explain much,” Data said. “I found it difficult to follow your efforts to retrieve the survivors. But they clearly were successful. The two of you seem to have very similar interests. It makes you an effective team, even when you were separated.”
Keerha looked up at me and beamed. I looked down at that snaggle-toothed smile and fell head over heels in love.
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.Emergency Measures