Academy Loans

You know how I last made logs about how bored I was? This morning an all points distress call came through to any ship in close proximity to the Vega system, where we just happened to be. Turns out those transwarp glitches were Borg probes popping in and out of the system for God knows what reason. In about three hours (after engineering turns the port warp nacelle back on), we’ll be underway.

It’s funny, really. My illustrious Starfleet career went on for six months of complete nothing, and then less than two weeks after starting this personal log, the Tempest gets its first taste of the action. Maybe I should record more of these in the future.

We’ve been out on patrol for about half a year now, and probably the most exciting thing to happen to us was a diplomatic incident on Risa where a famous Gorn entertainer was being hassled by Federation war activists. We were called in to diffuse the situation, and I was assigned as part of the ground team to clear out the protestors. As much as the Gorn creep me out sometimes, Fed hawks are arguably worse, so it was probably one of the better days of my life when I got to stun beam a particularly unruly native. Since then, we’ve been swinging past the Vega systems; high command has ordered us to run comprehensive sensor sweeps thanks to some “weird transwarp activity” in the vicinity recently. Of course, ever since the transwarp network went online, “weird transwarp activity” has been pretty much the norm, so I don’t really expect much.

If it weren’t for the fact that I have to pay off these academy loans somehow, I’d have left the service a long time ago.

I was stationed aboard the USS Tempest, NCC-93343, formerly USS Montauk, NCC-75409, formerly USS Robert April, NCC-8403, formerly USS Tempest, NCC-1988. A real mouthful, to be sure.

She started out as a Miranda class built during the Federation-Klingon cold war, before the Khitomer accords were passed. She had a completely unremarkable service history until a chance encounter with a Klingon raiding party, and was promptly shot to bits. She was hauled back to Earth, declared irreparable, and decommissioned. A year after the accords were signed, she was brought out of mothballs, repaired, and recommissioned as the Robert April, an Academy traning vessel. She again served a completely unremarkable career well into the 24th century, when she was finally decommissioned in 2365. In 2373, the ship was pulled out of mothballs along with thousands of other outdated ships to serve as frontline vessels in the Dominion War. Hastily upgraded with then-modern technology, and recommissioned as the Montauk, she fared about as well as one would expect of a 23rd century ship in a 24th century war, which is to say “Swiss-cheesed at the Second Battle of Chin’toka.” She was towed back to Earth, again, and declared irreparable, again. Of course, this lasted until 2401, when she was once again dug out and refitted in the face of increased Klingon aggression, finally recycling her old name.

Thanks to that, the ship is a horrid chimera of parts, and all the refits in the world could’t de-age the poor ship. She’s loud, creaky, and unstable, with a sensors system that routinely shuts down other significant systems like gravity control and life support when operating at levels slightly above regular. Every other week an EPS conduit leaks, bursts, or disintegrates, and the new warp core is so far ahead of the original hull configuration that its a miracle the ship can crank it past Warp 6 without crumbling apart like a saltine. It is essentially a miracle that anything on the vessel still works, and proof of just how bad the war has gotten that Starfleet would even consider hauling an antique like this out to the frontlines.

Fortunately, high command seems currently unwilling to murder me and the crew by throwing us into the neutral zone, so we’ve been assigned to short-range survey duties in the local Sirius cluster. Not that it makes life any more exciting, given that Delta Volanis is probably the last chunk of unmapped space in the area. I’ve spent the last six months scanning gaseous anomalies while dealing with sensor bugs every other week, which I’m sure is entirely indicative of the “grand adventure” Starfleet promised all us cadets when we applied.

And yet, for some reason, I’ve grown rather fond of the Tempest. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome.

It seems everyone in Starfleet has one of these, so I might as well make one myself.

My name is Elizabeth Lyons. Most everyone calls me Izzy, though. I’ve been aboard the Tempest for almost seven months now, and I can safely describe the experience as “boring, yet unfun.”

My father was the captain of a starship, the USS Kestrel, and I was born on board,  five years after the end of the Dominion War. My parents fought in the war, but then again, so did everyone else. The Kestrel was a survey vessel, not even remotely fitted for combat, and so they were generally assigned on long range scouting missions and light patrol duty. After the war, they were transferred back to Deep Space 3, and returned to planetary survey and exploration. I grew up on that station, alternating between the Kestrel and a day care center for children of crew stationed there. That was where I was when the Kestrel disappeared, in 2383. I was 3, then.

Since then, I’ve been shuffled between UFP foster facilities, finding myself on all manner of space stations during my childhood. In 2403, I ended up on Earth Spacedock, after it had been rebuilt, where I applied for Starfleet Academy. I’m not really sure why, considering my parents went missing in the line of duty. Maybe I still believed in the old holovids about exciting new adventures to be found in deep space. Of course, having no existing family members meant I had to pull a lot of strings with close friends and station administrators, but I ended up getting in after a staggering amount of credit loans. I spent most of my time in Academy alternating between attempting to wrap my head around advanced theoretical concepts, getting drunk with friends groundside and fruitlessly chasing cute boys from the tactical division. I ended up barely graduating in the summer of 2407 with a degree in applied astrophysics, an achievement that to this day astounds me. After that, my colleague and best friend Travis Morgan was somehow able to convince me to take the advanced command courses, adding another year of misery to my academic career, and stacking more future loan payments on my accounts to boot. Truthfully, though, I enjoyed the coursework far more than the undergraduate science courses I took, probably because they were a lot closer to the promise of freedom and excitement on the frontier worlds of the Federation. I graduated in the middle of my class in the summer of 2408 and was assigned to the USS Tempest, NCC-93343 as an ensign science officer.

It was a hell of a ship, and not in the positive way either.