STAR TREK: EQUESTRIA

by Alicorne

Chapter Twenty Nine- The Call from Chaos

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE CALL FROM CHAOS

I buzzed the annunciator at Capers door after touching up my mane and indulging in a few seconds of Equestrin Biodisciplines to ward off the fatigue and shake the cobwebs out of my mind.
“Come in, Commander.” The speaker bade me. I made note of the formal address and braced myself as a tabbed the door control and ducked through into the Captain’s Cabin.

Caper’s cabin is the same size as ours but it looked three times roomier since it wasn’t cluttered with so much of Sunny’s antique stuff! He had a single bed, scrupulously made up, with a neatly organized collection of framed holos on the little shelf at its head. The wall above it was hung with large framed reprint of The Rings of Saturn by the twentieth-century space artist, Barnstall. The adjacent wall, along the Living Area, bore an even larger work by the same artist depicting an alien landscape of cliffs that bore the hoofwork of some intelligence. Strange, pyramid-shaped mountains were shrouded in the distance while a calm, alien sea lapped the hooves of them all. It occurred to me that this scene had been incorporated into one of Sunny’s Old Movies, the title of which escaped me just then. On the wall next to me was mounted a twisted and scorched piece of pale green alien metal, a fragment of a Romulan ship from the War that had self-destructed during a particularly hair-raising encounter with the Hermes. This particular piece of debris had embedded itself into the hull around the Bridge, we were that close to it! Caper kept it as a souvenir after it had been gone over by Starfleet intelligence and decontaminated. The wall by the workstation was blank.

Caper was not a collector of bric-a-brac. A few old-style actual photographs, heirlooms maybe, sat on the table of the workstation. One of them was in black-and-white and featured an older Pegasus Mare in a high collar and pearls. His great-great-great Grandmother from Moosecow in the nineteenth century as I recall.

There were exactly two chairs. Caper sat in front of the workstation while Sunny sat nearby looking thoughtful and irritated. Mr. Sekkack stood quietly off to the side with his paws behind his back with a Vulcanly neutral expression on his face. A very pretty teapot, white with a blue paisley design and obviously very old, sat amid a set of matching cups. Nopony was drinking.

Caper met my eyes as I came in. The Old Pegasus smiled grimly, his eyes looking tired. It was the same look I’d seen so many time during the War when the Hermes was tasked to do something… unpleasant. My Old Friend needed me once again and I reflected on just how heavy those insignificant bands of gold braid on his cuffs could be.

“Ah, Starry-pushka! Come in, have seat! Edge of bed is best bet, da? Chairs in cabin are not set up for Pony of such stature! Is tea, have some. Have laid out Grandmare Roamanov’s tea set. Is shame to let go to waste, nyet?”

I pricked up my ears. I’d been musing about what Starfleet might have said in the communiqué since he left. I half expected to hear suppressed anger or frustration in his voice. I’d known him long enough to pick up on the nuances of his feelings. Just then, though, there was something I’d never encountered in the Captain before and it made me wonder what was going on inside his head. I’d heard the Captain coldly rage, heap scorn on inept superiors, dispassionately chew out clumsy civilians, and joke with his beloved crew… but I never thought I’d hear uncertainty in his voice before!

I … very carefully… picked up a tiny teacup and delicately used the little tongs to put in two sugar cubes. Pinching the handle between thumb and forefinger, I stirred the mixture with the antique spoon and carried cup, saucer and all engulfed in one hoof over to perch on the edge of his bed. I waved off the offer of the cream pitcher.

“Ok, Caper. Now that you’ve got me in your bed, what next?” I quipped. I kept it light to show Caper that I knew that there was something in the message he had reservations about and that I would be behind him in however he decided to deal with it. The subtle message was not lost on the sharp old Pegasus. His eyes positively twinkled as he replaced the pitcher on its ebony-and-silver tray!
The comment jolted Sunny out of her train of thought who blinked then eyed me narrowly. Sekkack’s expression, naturally enough, didn’t change… though there was the merest glimmer in those placid, dark brown eyes that told the discerning observer that he hadn’t missed it!

“Ha!” Caper whinnied. “Nothing so dangerous to Captain’s well-being… and ego… as might be expected otherwise, da?” He picked up a cup and blew on it noisily. Something of the tension left the room as he slurped at the bitter dark-brown tea. He smacked his lips in overdone satisfaction and gestured to Sunny.

“You should try some, Good Doctor! Is not like namby-pamby Bittish tea! This will put feathers on wings!” He half-spread his own in demonstration.

“Or make them fall out, I shouldn’t wonder.” She observed dryly. She reached to take up a cup and took a delicate, well-bred marelike sniff… then hurried to add no less than four cubes of sugar and as much cream as she could without overflowing the cup!

She took a sip and shuddered. “Faith, boyo! Where’d ye learn t’ make tea? N’ out o’ what?”

“ Bah! Old Family recipe in family for generations! Good tea, real tea, is Rushin invention perfected by leetle old peasant mare outside Leapingrad. In hooves of decadent Western ponies is leetle more than tepid eyewash!” He took another sip and made a point of savoring it!

Sekkack cleared his throat politely. “It has been my understanding that Terrestrial tea was first cultivated in Southeast Neighsia in the region of…”

Caper waved a dismissive hoof! “Mere propaganda on part of capitalistic Bittish East Hindia Company to claim bragging rights and subjugate native Donkey Peoples!”

“Indeed.” Sekkack chose not to press the issue. The Vulcan poured himself a cup and took a sip. He quirked an eyebrow on an otherwise impassive face. “… Bracing.”

“Da!” Caper agreed. “Of course is better with just few drops of vodka to bring out full, robust flavor!” He drained his cup and poured himself another. I choose that moment to sample my own. Sugar or not, it was bitter but not unpleasantly so. After that rather syrupy, replicated cola (And marshmallow!) it was rather refreshing. The stuff had real body to it, not unlike our admittedly hard Equestrin groundwater!

“But did not call Starry-pushka here for mere, decadent Oriental tea ceremony!” Caper pushed on. He turned his chair round to regard me. “You know I have had communication from Starfleet Command today, nyet?”

I carefully put cup and saucer down onto my broad knee and folded my hooves in my lap before answering. “Everypony onboard knows it by now, Caper. Hard to keep something like this a secret on a ship this small.”
“Da. Is given fact.” Caper nodded. “Subject of communication regards, not surprisingly, Leetle Pooka. In view of Leetle Pooka’s … significance to Ponies and all Federation itself, Starfleet has taken an inordinate amount of time in getting back to us. Today they have done so. I want you, Starry-pushka, to view message. The rest of you have seen before but I ask that you watch again, carefully!” With that, he swiveled the screen of his workstation around and triggered the playback.

Official messages from Starfleet are normally prefaced with a screen indicating the stardate and origin of the transmission. This one did not. Instead, the screen lit up to show a blue Pegasus with a brilliant, elegantly coiffed, gleaming silver mane and eyebrows in a mustard-yellow uniform with the triple solid gold bars of an Admiral on his cuffs. He was seated at a large, expensive-looking desk with a polished black-and-green marble top that was bare except two unusual objects. One sat on the far side of the desk and took the form of an odd statuette of gleaming gold maybe half a foot tall. It was hard to make it out exactly since it was apparently out of the focus of the video pickup. It seemed to depict a sinuous Dragon of some sort with odd, asymmetric horns. There was something amiss with its limbs, too, but it wasn’t possible to make out just what. It’s body was contorted in an ‘S’ shape and in its jaws it clenched a flagstaff with the flag of the Federation held at a downward angle. The Dragons of Earth died in the Eugenics Wars. I had no idea what alien this thing was a depiction of!

More distracting by leaps and bounds was the forearm-long, two finger thick crystal rod the Admiral toyed with. I gave it another look. No, it wasn’t a rod after all. As he rolled and fidgeted with the thing I saw that it had nine facets and came to a nine-sided point at each end. Each time it caught the light, a facet would light up with a different color. Sometimes red, sometimes blue or green or yellow… sometimes I could not describe the color. It never left at least one of his hooves and he would gesture and point with it, carrying it like an old-fashioned swagger stick.
Behind him on the wall was the logo of the Federation, the upturned horseshoe wreathed in stylized laurel leaves encompassing a radial display of the Founding Star Systems with Earth at the center.

The Pegasus leaned into the pickup with a dazzling, insincere smile on his face. “Ah! Captain Cloud Caper!” He exclaimed in an oily, smooth voice. “ I am Admiral Quicksilver of Starfleet Galaxy Exploration Command. You know, the chap that sent you on this little… jaunt.” His eyes seemed to smile, but there was an almost subliminal element of …what? Amusement? Gloating? I couldn’t quite lay a hoof on it.

Quicksilver flipped the crystal and pointed it dead on, the facets of the tip flashing with a nimbus of rainbow light. “You’ve been given a lot of leeway in regards to how you carry out your mission, Captain, but you’ve overstepped your boundaries this time! Really! Making such a to-do about a glorified, talking parasprite! Making such outrageous suppositions! Filing reports to aliens without consulting me! Tsk, tsk, tsk!” As he spoke he flipped the thing endwise, spinning it on the end of his finger so that it positively coruscated multicolored light. His eyes never left it as he spoke. He flipped in end-for-end, turning it into a prismatic wheel for a few beats before snatching it out of the air and pointed it straight at the pickup once again! I was rapidly becoming irritated at the thing…

His voice lowered and his eyes hardened. All the seeming good-naturedness fled his features. “The Princesses are dead, Captain. Dead and gone! Sooo last epoch!” His manner… and the crystal… flipped again. “You are hereby ordered to proceed at once to Pegasus Epsilon-Two…” He paused to chuckle, looking smugly pleased with himself for some reason. “Or as close to it as you can, these days! After you conclude your little business at Cestus-III, of course!” He waved a dismissive hoof at the screen then, “Once you are there you will remain until such time as I arrive. You will then hand the Faery over to me. She’ll be better off with me than with your bunch, anyway!”

One of his pale, almost white eyes fixed upon the pickup. “Oh, one more thing, Captain!” Clutching the crystal with both hooves he leaned in until his face filled the screen. “Since you have proven yourself unable to keep your mouth shut about things that are quite beyond you I’m taking this opportunity to give you a lesson in… resourcefulness!” He smiled winningly. “ I am ordering you to put the Hermes under a communications blackout. No more transmissions! No personal messages home, no inquiries to Starfleet, no contact with any vessels whatsoever as per my direct command. I’m in charge here. I make the rules. I can do that!”

He threw himself back into his chair carelessly and positively gloated into the screen! “But that shouldn’t be a problem, shouldn’t it, Captain? After all, we Ponies are all grown-up and mature these days, aren’t they? Twenty-two hundred years are a long time to learn to cope by ourselves. We haven’t done so bad in all that time, haven’t we?” An element of combined patronization and mockery tinged his voice as he waved the crystal baton airily. “A few global wars aside, that is! What’s a few billion Pony lives more or less in the long run in order to prove an ideal?” He hunkered forward in his seat suddenly and peered intently out of the screen!

“Let’s just see how much mature and grown up twenty-two centuries have made us, shall we? You have your orders, Captain!”

He struck the tabletop with one end of the crystal and lounged in his chair like it was a throne! He threw the other hoof out in a grand gesture, a grim, gloating smile lighting up his face. “Admiral Quicksilver, out!” He began a low, sinister chuckle as the screen faded to black. The chuckling continued for some seconds until the audio switched off.

When I looked up the others will still contemplating the screen. As soon as I caught Caper’s eye I asked. “Ok… What. The. Hell. Was. THAT?”
“A performance.” Sekkack stated quietly. “I have had occasion to meet Admiral Quicksilver before. That individual was most certainly not he… unless he has undergone a dramatic psychological reversal in the recent past.”
“Aye, a performance.” Sunny put in. “Has anypony had th’ occasion t’ see a movie called Doctor Strangelove…?”

Surprisingly, Sekkack nodded. “The movie in question was made in the sixth decade of Earth’s Twentieth Century as I recall. The title character in the story was a metaphor for certain elements of what was then called ‘The Cold War’…”

Caper cut him off unapologetically. “Admiral Quicksilver is like name. Slippery, accommodating to current environmental conditions, and poisonous in even small quantities! A thorough Bureaucrat with Political aspirations. A scrupulously by-the-book type but not crazy Pony! Galaxy Exploration Command alone cannot alter our Mission Profile. Must be put before all of Starfleet and Federation Council. Nyet, person on screen is Admiral Quicksilver like I am Tsar of all the Rushias! Beeg question is who is impostor and how was able to send message over Starfleet channel?” He cocked a bushy brow at me.

“I’ll go over the sensor logs.” I said. “Hopefully we can get an idea of just where that transmission came from. Source of the transmission aside, though, how much stock do we put in this story?” I took in the assembled Ponies and Vulcan with my eyes. “Even if it is Admiral Quicksilver…like I’m Khan… he’s weeks away even with our engines! He’s not in a position to have much say in what we do or do not do one way or another. In my opinion he’s a kook with inside information about Tyllae. I mean, just listen to the guy! A highly placed kook, but still a kook! We already know there are a lot of Ponies and Others who are, uh, … insecure about defining the reality of the Goddesses.”

“Then why send us to the Pegasus Epsilon system?” Sekkack asked. “It is a very remote location. Surely it would be more logical to divert us somewhere in Federation Space where this individual would have assets to use against us.”

“The daft Laddie could be an alien!” Sunny took up her teacup, took another sip, and quietly screwed up her face in reaction to the taste! She put the cup down quickly and continued. “Th’ Klingons’ve got an axe t’ grind wi’ us already! P’raps they have some friends out here we dinna ken.”

“Pegasus Epsilon is seven hundred point three-eight light-years beyond any Klingon outpost I am aware of.” Sekkack countered. “It is even farther removed than Federation Space, Doctor.”

Only Sunny would argue with a Vulcan! She was just coming up with a counter of her own when Caper spoke .

“Perhaps are stranger forces at work, da?”

We all looked at him.

He shrugged fatalistically. “After all this time we find Faery. Maybe is coincidence, maybe not.” He caught all our eyes in turn then, “Who knows what else is stirring? What was sitting on ‘Admirals’ desk, Good Doctor?” He suddenly speared Sunny with his gaze! “ Or am I suddenly smarter than local expert in mythology? Or is that you only want what you consider good examples of mythology to come to life again? Other forces may not have same regard for Doctor’s preferences, da?”

I racked my brain for what I could recall about ancient Pony history. Damnit! It was all word of mouth by the time the Colony was founded!

Sunny remained silent. It was Sekkack who spoke up.

“The creature called ‘Discord’, the Spirit of Chaos?” A frown flirted with his eyes though the rest of his face didn’t betray it. “I submit that there is far more circumstantial evidence to support the supposition that purely mundane agencies are involved in these proceedings. To make the assumption that wholly supernatural forces are involved is simple not logical.”

“Until short time ago Faeries were ‘wholly supernatural’! Da, comrade Sekkack?” Caper gave the Vulcan an innocent look.

“This is a classic case of being a non-sequiter, Captain.” Sekkack stated. “Your facts are not following a logical procession…”

Caper thumped his table decisively. “Then let me do leetle experiment to bear out findings! Hopefully Captain is wrong, will not be first time. I am first to admit! Am nothing if not humble Pony!”

He tabbed the communicator control on his desk. “Communications!”

“Here, Captain.” Merry’s replacement, Lieutenant Holly, came over the speaker.

“Please to send to Starfleet Command request for verification of orders received earlier today. Priority message.”

“Yes, Sir!”

“Captain out.” Caper switched off and made a show of looking all around the cabin for a sign that something was wrong. I would have thought him serious but for the look he slipped me.

I cleared my throat and pointed out. “Starfleet is more than a week away even by subspace. You’re going to have to wait a while to see if you’re right.”

“Good point, Science Officer! Purpose second experiment to see if Captain is few shots short of full bottle of vodka!” He toggled the communicator again.

“Helm!”

“Lieutenant Glidepath here, Captain.”

“We have new orders, Lieutenant. Change of course. Alter our flightpath to rendezvous with Ghooran Base. Maintain same speed.” Caper swiveled his eyes to lock with mine.

“Laying in new course, Captain.” We could hear the quiet beeps of the controls as he inputted the new destination. There came an error beep. I heard Glidepath re-enter the correction. Again, there came an error beep!

“Sir? We’re, ah, having some difficulty in making the course change, Sir. The Helm keeps rejecting the change, Sir.” He tried again with the same results.

Caper was calm. “Disengage Time Warp Drive. Override Helm controls. Use thrusters to point ship physically at Ghooran Base. Proceed at impulse.”

The descending thrum of the Warp Drive droned around us. We could hear the commands being inputted. All at once the Yellow Alert klaxon sounded! An instant later the sound of a distant explosion came conducted through the very hull!

“Sir! There’s been an explosion in the thruster assembly!”

Kyrk’s voice came over the intercom. “Damage Control report to Engineering, Maneuvering thrusters! Captain Caper to the Bridge! Captain Caper to the Bridge!”

With terrible calm, Caper toggled the communicator again. “On my way, Mr. Kyrk.” He switched off and held his eyes with his own.

“Experiment concluded, Starry-pushka! Go over Sensor Logs. We will need all information we can get, nyet?”

Comments

[Verdigris]

Discord, you idiot-savant of a twit. Of the Millennium.

[Alicorne]

2704162 But he's an idiot-savant with the Power of Chaos! It makes a difference! (See? It wasn't Luna after all!)

[meerkat8472]

Well, there's a plot twist. Why couldn't Discord have been killed in the Eugenics wars too huh? oh well, guess it's time for the Q references to begin.

[Darth Wedgius]

Looks like somepony's slipped his bearings again. I can't identify the staff he's twirling, though...

[Alicorne]

2705917 References? He played Q in FIM basically. It's the same character!

[Alicorne]

2705927 I should hope you can't! I'd like to think I've done something original!

[meerkat8472]

2706290 Yes I know, and they're just as annoying as each other too, *sigh*. I was also intrigued by that crystal rod thingy, meh, it's probably nothing... (famous last words). I hope someone finds the elements real quick. You've probably guessed that Discord and Q aren't my favourite characters, I hope he's defeated soon.

[Tony Flash]

why hasn't anybody turned the "kooky/psycho admiral" into a trope, yet? mabey call it "General Flipped" to go with the other tropes like it.

[Firefinder]

2705917>>2706290 I believe that the guy who played Q is Discord voice acter.

[Verdigris]

2707062 Yep, the one and only (we hope) John DeLancie.

[Verdigris]

2705353 Okay, you got me.

[Alicorne]

2706870 ...I seem to remember a Mad Magazine Star Trek Parody they did. At one point in the story Spock pointed out that the situation had become a major disaster. Kirk hit the comm button on his chair and ordered 'Major Disaster' to report to the Bridge. ...Followed soon after by General Catastrophe! (The next logical progression would be Royal Screw-Up? ) Does that qualify as a 'trope'?

Oh, wait! There was a TV series long ago about stock comedy characters in the Old West stationed at a fort in Indian Country. It was called (Wait for it....!) F-Trope, wasn't it?

Silly me! It was that thing Muhammed Ali like to do in the ring. You know, 'Trope-a-dope'!

*Makes hasty exit before things get ugly!*