An Introduction of Sorts (Part 1)
Posted on Mon Aug 11th, 2025 @ 5:17am by Captain M'Raz & Lieutenant Commander Jason Reeves & Lieutenant Elias McEntyre & Lieutenant H'iri & Lieutenant Noah Clarke & Lieutenant Richard Pierce MD
Edited on on Mon Aug 11th, 2025 @ 5:24am
2,599 words; about a 13 minute read
Mission:
The Raz Defense
Location: Deep Space Repair Beta Two, Theta Sculptoris
Timeline: MD001 - 0800
Lt. Commander Jason Reeves walked into the conference room. Before heading to this meeting, he had ensured that Sakura and the girls were settled in. After that he walked by docking area to take a quick peek at the Jane Addams. The ship looked pretty bad, be she held it together for them. Reeves was far from an engineer, but he was expecting to hear that the repairs was going to take a few months at best. At the table already was who he assumed to be this Mazurski and Anders who had sent out the invite to this meeting. "Good morning."
Anders lifted a mug in greeting, Mazurski smiled and gestured toward the food. "Coffee is fresh-made," he said as he took a sip of his own. "Captain's orders. Never replicated. Always fresh."
Moving towards the food, Jason grabbed a bagel and began spreading some cream cheese. Followed by pouring himself a cup coffee. Returning back to the table, he took a seat.
Pierce stepped into the conference room with a practiced gait that masked just how little sleep he’d had in the last forty-eight hours. His uniform jacket was unzipped, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a faint line of grime traced across his temple from a weld-sealed bulkhead he’d pried open earlier that morning. He spotted the two coffee pots at the center of the long table and let out a soft, reverent whistle.
“Well,” he muttered as he made his way to the table, “either I finally died and this is heaven… or someone in this room knows how to treat trauma right.”
He poured a cup and took a long sip—black, hot, bitter, perfect.
Pierce’s eyes scanned the two men seated across from Reeves. He gave them each a nod, one hand still loosely holding the coffee. “Dr. Richard Pierce. Chief Medical Officer of the Jane Addams. I assume you’re Mazurski—recognize the voice from the beam-in. And that would make you Anders.”
Pierce took a seat next to Reeves and exhaled slowly, nursing his cup between his hands for a long moment before speaking again.
“Before we talk next steps, I need to say this—my people are safe, now, but moving them wasn’t something I did lightly. We had to evacuate the whole damn Sickbay. Some of those patients were in no shape to be moved—spinal fractures, chest trauma, neural instability. I had to gamble that your base had a working ICU.”
He met Anders’ gaze, his tone even but firm. “So far, it looks like I didn’t lose anyone in transit. But I’d like to get eyes on your facilities as soon as this meeting wraps. Some of my folks need more than warm blankets and a promise.”
Pierce leaned back a bit, tired but focused, and managed a faint smile.
“That said... I’m grateful. We were bleeding out in the dark. Whatever comes next, I’ll do my part—as long as it keeps them breathing.” He raised his mug slightly. “And if I get a refill on this? I’ll even stay civil.”
"I am profoundly relieved to hear that, Dr. Pierce," Raz said as he strode into the room, his gaze raking both sides of the table in irritation. He turned toward Mazurski, "could you send someone to locate the rest of my senior staff? Apparently my invitation wasn't enough to rouse them."
The doors parted with a soft hiss, admitting Lieutenant Noah Clarke into the conference room. He moved with a purposeful stride, a stack of PADDs in one hand and a faint, grease-darkened line across his forearm—evidence of a morning spent in crawlspaces rather than corridors.
“Good morning,” he said evenly, offering a nod to the room as he took the empty seat nearest the far side of the table. He placed the PADDs in front of him without fanfare and reached automatically for the coffee. “Heard there was fresh brew,” he muttered, more to the cup than to anyone present. Clarke didn’t fidget or sigh. He just settled into his chair like he belonged there, like he'd already done the math on what came next.
“Noah Clarke. Chief Engineer of the Jane Addams… for about ten minutes, give or take.” The corner of his mouth twitched in the ghost of a smirk, dry but not unkind. He tapped one of the PADDs with a fingertip.
Elias enters the briefing room, PADDs under one arm, his coffee in another, looking as he always did. Tired, and ready for war. His armor flexed as he sat at his customary position at the table, the chair straining under his bulk.
[Anywhere But the Briefing Room]
"Of course," Mazurski said. He rose immediately, relieved to be out of the Caitian's line of fire, and went off to find a manifest for the Jane Addams so he could figure out exactly who he was tracking down. "Let's see," he muttered. "Crewman Lipinski. Am I missing anyone?" He went through the list again. "Nope that's it. Taggart is in Sickbay."
Rather than wake up any of the exhausted engineers currently catching an hour or two of sleep, Mazurski went himself to personally deliver the same message to each of the Jane Addams' department heads. "Captain M'Raz is waiting for you in the Briefing Room on Deck 2. You're late. He's not happy but there is fresh coffee and food if that helps any."
[Back in the Briefing Room]
Raz, working on maybe an hour's nap, poured himself a cup of coffee and settled down at one end of the table to wait for the rest of the senior staff to arrive.
Elias leaned back in his chair some, sipping on his coffee as he waited for the others to arrive and the briefing to begin.
A svelte, female Caitian walked in. Despite her warm smile, there was a hint of weariness in her eyes. At the same time, there was a sense of determination about the Cait. She first looked at the Captain and acknowledged his presence. "Captain," she said with a small purring lilt in her voice. She did not wait for an acknowledgement, simply turning away and finding a seat. "Morning, everyone," she concluded as she sat.
"We have a lot to cover, so I'll get started," Raz said as he set his coffee mug down on the table. "I've spoken at length with Commander Anders here about repairs to our ship and, frankly, that's not going to be possible."
Anders sent an apologetic glance around the table. "The base is on the edge of occupied space and we've been ordered to withdraw immediately. I've only got a few engineers here with me, enough to finish a project we've been working on for months now, and we're due to ship out in a day or two. And frankly, even if we were fully staffed, I'm not sure Starfleet would be willing to invest the time and effort it would take to fix her. Sad as that is to say."
"We'll work with you," Mazurski said as he found a seat and reached for the coffee pot, "to get all of your personal items off the ship. Whatever that takes."
"H'iri," Raz said, "I'd like you to coordinate that effort. Last night, Commander Anders here showed me this." He nodded toward Anders who keyed in a command and a holographic representation of a ship appeared in the center of the table. "Galaxy Class. The USS Crazy Horse."
H'iri answered, "Of course, Captain. I will make all the arrangements."
"Thank you," Raz said. "As long as its safe. No life-threatening maneuvers to retrieve a favorite shirt, understand?"
With a mischievous grin, H'iri responded, "How about nail polish?"
Raz wagged an extended claw in her direction but turned his attention to his Chief of Security who was drawing breath to speak.
Elias spoke first, "Galaxy Class? I thought they all went down with the Utopia Planitia and San Fran Yards?"
"This one was brought here as a test bed for new technology before being released into active service," Raz said. "It's the only ship here and from what I understand, hasn't even had its shakedown cruise as yet."
"It's good to know that Starfleet didn't have all our Galaxy classes in the preverbal one basket," Reeves replied. "Twelve phaser arrays would be more helpful than the eight we currently have. Also, do we have an official count of how many we lost on the Jane Addams?"
"I should have lead with that," Raz said with a tired sigh. "Forgive me. Preliminary numbers have the death toll around forty. Injuries in the hundreds, I believe. Doctor Pierce, if you could give your report?"
Pierce set his mug down slowly, the brief moment of quiet civility shattered by the hard weight of reality settling back over the table. His expression remained composed, but the flicker behind his eyes said he had already memorized every name on that list of forty. Probably had the count before anyone else.
He gave a small nod to Raz and then looked to the others.
“We lost forty confirmed,” he said, his voice low but steady. “Three died in the initial barrage before we even made it to triage. Seventeen more during the critical period—structural collapses, burns, blunt force trauma. Most of them didn’t have a chance. And the rest…” He paused, then continued more quietly, “...we just couldn’t get to in time.”
His fingers curled slightly around the edge of the table as he went on. “Of the injured, we’ve got two hundred twelve being treated at the base infirmary and overflow shelter. Triage tents are standing, but it’s not a full hospital. Most of my team is still working in rotating shifts, doing what we can with borrowed equipment and improvised tools. I had to greenlight patient transport I wouldn’t normally sign off on—there were a few cases where I honestly wasn’t sure they’d survive the move. But staying aboard wasn’t an option. Not with the atmosphere starting to fail on Deck 5.”
He took a breath. His tone sharpened slightly, more professional now. “We stabilized the worst cases on-site before transit. Spinal trauma, crush injuries, neural degradation—we've got two in induced comas to prevent cascading failures. I’ve requested access to your imaging suite and surgical bays, if possible. My staff needs time and gear to keep everyone stable.”
He leaned back slightly, but didn’t relax.
“As for psychological trauma—don’t ask for numbers yet. But after what we went through? I’d bet credits to raktajino that most of the crew haven’t even begun to process it. And neither have we.”
Pierce gave a small nod to Raz. “That’s the report, Captain. I’ll have a full medical breakdown by tomorrow, assuming the base’s systems are up to handling our files.”
Reeves looked over at the doctor giving a nod of respect. The man had been at it nonstop with hardly any rest at all. And he was right. This crew was going to be in need of serious counseling. Himself and his own family included.
"Thank you, Doctor," Raz said. He turned his attention to the group, one after the other, his expression almost unreadable. "Bottom line, we can't stay here. We're not far enough from Arcturus. If the Borg continue as they've been, they'll be here in no time." He gestured toward the image of the ship in front of them. "We can't go back to the Jane Addams and we can't stay here. So that's our ride. The USS Crazy Horse. Lieutenant Clarke and I spent a great deal of time last night in briefings about this ship." He nodded toward his Chief Engineer, "Lieutenant, I'll turn the briefing over to you. Introduce them, if you please."
Clarke nodded and set his coffee aside, then stood up and walked over near the large wall display and tapped his large PADD. The conference display came to life with a slow, rotating wireframe of a Galaxy-class starship. Even stripped to the bones of its schematic, the design carried a certain elegance. “Alright,” he began, “meet our new ride: USS Crazy Horse. Galaxy-class, Block II refit. Starfleet has given her a much sharper edge than the typical explorer.”
The ship model shifted, its clean blue lines shimmering as a translucent layer coated the hull. “This is where things get interesting. What you’re looking at is the Stealth Integration & Emissions Containment System—codename Ghostskin. It’s not a cloak. It’s not magic. It’s… very clever science applied aggressively. Under the hull, high-capacity heat sinks store both our own waste heat and whatever the environment throws at us. While that’s happening, a micro-field lattice—think of it like a net made of subspace static—scatters incoming scans and bounces them sideways so anyone looking gets a nice, confusing ghost image. Meanwhile, the hull itself adjusts at a quantum level to bend, absorb, and match whatever radiation happens to be in the background. To enemy sensors, we look like a patch of empty space having a quiet day.”
Clarke swiped again, the display shifting to a highlight of the warp nacelles and power grid. “The warp coils get their own subspace dampers so our trail vanishes. We even store our own comms, scans, and telemetry inside quantum buffers, dumping it all later when it’s safe—so no one can follow the bread crumbs in real time.”
The image dimmed slightly, key hull sections glowing in red. “When we run in Silent Mode, we shut the noisy stuff down. Life support ticks over to backups. Most of the guest quarters have been swapped out for the heat and data storage hardware that makes this work. This isn’t a ship for mass evacuations—it’s a ship for slipping in, doing the job, and getting out before anyone knows we were there.”
He let that sit for a moment before adding, “My old warp theory professor used to say: ‘There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.’ Ghostskin is no exception. Push her past twenty-four hours in stealth and the risk of core instability goes up exponentially. Also, just like traditional cloaking technology, weapons must be offline to reduce our heat signature, along with shields. Life support will be on backups and due to the energy storage, the heat will slowly ramp up with each hour of use.”
Clarke lowered the PADD to his side, letting it silently tap against his leg. “And while the Borg can’t see us on sensors, this isn’t invisibility. You get the right angle, good optics, and we will still show up. Thankfully, the Borg aren’t big on windows.”
A faint smirk tugged at one corner of his mouth. “The short version? She’s faster, smarter, and more flexible. She’s going to give us more options than running and praying.”
He turned back toward the captain. “I’ll coordinate with security, tactical, and ops so everyone knows how to work with her systems, sir.”
Captain M'Raz
Commanding Officer
USS Jane Addams
Lt. Commander Jason Reeves
First Officer
USS Jane Addams
Lieutenant Elias McEntyre
Chief of Security
USS Jane Addams
Lieutenant H'iri
Chief of Operations
USS Jane Addams
Lieutenant Noah Clarke
Chief Engineer
USS Jane Addams
Lieutenant Richard Pierce, M.D.
Chief Medical Officer
USS Jane Addams
[To Be Continued in Part 2]
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