Origin

“So, how did you all get together in the first place?”

That was Scotty (no, not that Scotty; in this case, it was his first name), the latest in a worryingly long line of short-term engineers aboard Icelandic Troll. We’d just hired him while laying over at Starbase XIV, and he was currently enjoying his first cruise with us. Unlike literally every other engineer we’d had to date, Scotty seemed to enjoy hanging out on the bridge rather than lurking back in the Engineering hull. This notwithstanding the fact that it made the already tiny bridge really tight.

“Oh, I met the Captain here shortly after I resigned my Starfleet commission,” First Officer Shandra Smith said offhandedly.

“Starfleet?” Scotty asked.

“Yup,” she replied.

“I did the usual stint at Starfleet Academy,” Smith explained. “I specialized in security, but I could never quite buy off completely on the whole red-shirt mentality, so I picked up a minor in communications. I served my middie cruise on the Revere, a little scout ship that ran back and forth along the Romulan border. Fairly uneventful, although we did have a few scary moments with some birds of prey trying to sneak across our line.

“That’s actually where security work started to seem more interesting to me. Lord knows, communications could get boring out there, but there was always something for the security people to do. I started shadowing their security chief and learning more about the job.

“After the middie cruise was over, Reliant dropped me off at one of the old Outposts. USS Powhatan had just bee rotated into border patrol and I was assigned to her as Assistant Chief of Security, and got my promotion to Lieutenant. Fun fact: my Mom was, and still is, Powhatan’s CO, and my step-Dad is her Chief Engineer. That was kind of fun for a while–I got to really get into the whole security game, but I picked up a good bit about engineering along the way.

“Anyway… I eventually got into combat training. I think that’s where it all started to fall apart. Starfleet’s training arm has a dense bureaucracy, and it just got to be a bit much. I mean, you’re doing good work for the most part, but there’s always a couple of spoiled snots that ruin it. I had one kid whose Dad was a seriously high-ranking Admiral in First Fleet, and he busted my chops for being ‘too hard’ on his pwecious wittle baby. I was basically had drill sergeant attitude by then, so I gave it right back at him about how his lazy little offspring was going to wind up dead in space one day. That went well. Resigning was easier that apologizing.”

“Wow,” Scotty said. “That’s pretty cool. I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone who left Starfleet and stayed in space.”

“Honestly, I’ll probably go back one day, especially if I can pick up a training gig again. I love the Troll, but I actually do miss the Fleet from time to time. And my issues with Powhatan are… mostly hashed out. But I still try to steer clear of her nowadays.”

“So are you all ex-Starfleet?” Scotty asked.

“Oh, not quite,” Captain Ryan said.

“I went to Academy,” Ryan continues, “but I dropped out in the third year. Just way too much ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ and stuff. And despite all the Kirk stories you hear coming out of the Academy, they’re not all that into innovation or crazy stuff. I was command-track, but what did it for me was trying to pull off my own Kobayashi Maru.

“Kirk was the first one to hack the simulator, of course, but pretty much every command-track kid after that gave it a shot. Eventually, they just scrapped the whole scenario, beefed up the sim, and came up with a new no-win scenario. I was actually one of the first ones to run through the new one.

“It starts out more or less the same, I guess. We chased after the phony distress beacon, we wound up surrounded by Romulans, and they threatened to blow us up if we didn’t let them board and capture the ship. The implication is that they’d torture us all if we did, so kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, right? Our self-destruct wouldn’t work, of course, because that would be too easy. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to let them have the ship or not; we certainly couldn’t have simulated a repel-boarders situation. Anyway, I snuck a phaser into the sim and stunned my entire bridge crew. Then I put the ship on a collision course with the nearest warbird.

“Obviously, they shut the sim down at that point, and had some very lengthy conversations with me. We decided to part ways.

“I wound up working at a water plant on some planet someplace. I honestly don’t remember many of the details. The staff was friendly, the locals were friendly, and there was way too much partying. That’s where I found my first ship, too. It was this rusted-out, busted-up hulk that I found on a beach. The inside was in decent condition, but it was never, ever going to fly, so I kind of made a fort out of it. I lived in it for a year or so. Way too many parties. I eventually started to pull my head out of my ass and realized I needed to get off-planet. Off any planet.

“So I bounced around for a little bit, and finally got my Captain’s license piloting tugs at commercial shipyards. I got used to the small crews, the more relaxed attitude. I got really good at EVAs, in fact, because most of the time we had to manually hook up to the ship hulls to move them around.

“I named my first spacesuit Michio. It’s very possible I proposed marriage to her on more than one occasion.”

(“Marriage?” Scotty interrupted.)

“She had a lot of my bodily fluids in her. Seemed like the right thing to do.

“That went on for a couple of years until I found the Troll up for sale. I’d stashed away plenty of overtime pay, made a down payment, and here we are.”

“That’s so cool,” Scotty said. “So where’d you both end up meeting?”

“Oh, the three of us met at about the same time,” I said. “It was in a bar. Donna’s, on New Rome, I think.”

“Duke’s,” Ryan corrected me, “on Altair 7.”

“It wasn’t Jammer’s on Pallas III?” Smith asked.

We all paused for a moment. “Definitely a bar,” I said. “I think we all bounced around a bit.”

“So what’s your story?” Scotty asked. Hoo-boy.

“Starfleet Academy, communications. Did my middie cruise on Jamestown, eventually transferred to Powhatan. Met Smith there. Decided I wanted more action and transferred to the Starfleet Marines. Got promoted a lot.”

There was a silence on the Troll’s bridge. “That’s it?” Scotty asked.

Sigh. “Don’t you want to hear about the ship itself?”

“Well, yeah, but–”

“Troll was originally designed as a garbage hauler, roughly around the lines of a Malon waste export scow,” Ryan said. “She was built at Salazaar, which at the time was trying to diversify and build out commercial ships in addition to all the Epsilon-class cutters they churn out.”

(“Malon! I knew the basic shape looked familiar!” Scotty interjected)

“Sure. Anyway, Salazaar produced about two hundred of these puppies before they quit. Commercial ships just don’t generate the kind of profits a ‘Fleet ship does, I guess. But the Troll’s whole class are probably some of the best-built garbage haulers in the universe. Even the warp drive is ‘Fleet-quality, although it’s obviously a lot smaller than a cruiser would have.

“By the time I picked her up, she’d been in service for about ten years, and had been pretty thoroughly refitted a couple of years back. But she was still in rough shape. The thing that really attracted me to her was the modular design. Salazaar had intended to sell the same basic hull design for a variety of purposes, and so they engineered all these hard points all over the place. The entire crew hull on the ventral side, for example, was pulled off a Salazaar yacht design. Anyway, that made it easy to add a docking point for the skiff, and gave us room to mount the salvage phaser array in the salvage bay.

“The shield generator I, uh, came across during a… discussion with a couple of Subytts. It’s originally from a Rapier-class light cruiser, so it’s about the perfect size. Aft coverage is a little weak because our nacelle configuration is so different, but it’s good enough.

“Anyway, Shandra and Don have done most of the modifications. As we mentioned, we’ve had some trouble keeping a full-time engineer in the crew.”

(“They’ve done great work!” Scotty enthused.)

“Sure. So, that’s about it for the Troll.”

“For the record,” Scotty said, “I love this ship. The whole patched-together, half-gray-market look is totally cool. My last ship was an interplanetary ferry. Nowhere near as fun.”

“Yeah, we’ve really made Troll our own,” Ryan said.

“But I’m still interested in you,” Scotty said, pointing at me.

Ugh.

“I come from a fairly remote colony. Remote enough that the Federation is a government more in name than actuality. We, ah… the colony was founded by some people who still felt Human Augments were a good thing, although they kept their genetic tinkering activities very down-low. Nobody wants another Eugenics War, right?

“But I didn’t do especially well in the colony. They were very insular, and I wanted more. I’m pretty close to baseline Human, but acing Starfleet Academy’s entrance tests was no big. I graduated, did my time on the Jamestown, transferred to the Powhatan, met Smith, all that. Pretty unremarkable. I actually transferred off Powhatan to go through Starfleet Marine Academy. Smith left sometime while I was gone.

“I enjoyed the Marines. They’re a group that really appreciates talent, and they go out of their way to take advantage of it when they find it. Starfleet tends to slot you into whatever role it is you’re supposed to do, which is fine, but if you’re mis-slotted it’s hard to do anything about it. Not in the Marines. They’ll reassign you in a heartbeat. They’d honored my Starfleet rank and brought me in as a Marine Captain, but within a couple of years I was a Brigadier General, and was helping run Marine Academy. I spent some time on the Central Logistics Staff, too.

“But eventually I just got bored. I like starships, but Marines basically see them as giant buses. I got back in touch with Smith somewhere in there, and she seemed to be doing well enough in civilian life, and she’d heard of a commercial ship that needed a small crew. Small crew works for me; it gives me more to do, keeps me occupied. She also made it sound kind of shady, which sounded challenging. So I basically resigned on the spot, and agreed to meet her at the aforementioned bar, where she was meeting Captain Ryan.”

“So you’re… genetically engineered?” Scotty asked quietly.

“We’re all genetically engineered, you doofus,” I said heatedly. “My parents were just a little less random about it than yours. And I don’t like to talk about it.”

“So, that’s our story,” Ryan said before Scotty could follow up. “Other than already knowing your engineering background, though, we’d love to hear more about you.”

“Actually, we’re here,” I said, ending that line of inquiry.