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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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As an addendum, as the possibility of absolutely worst-case scenario has been averted, I think this is a good chance to strike a critical blow against Syndicate as far as appearances are concerned.

To preface, I don't think we can absolutely convince everyone in the Orion Union, and the die-hard Syndicate crowd will continue to syndicate, but between photonic strike on major metropolitan area, the joint cooperation of Amaraki, Orion and Caitans, and the vast levels of assistance that we're funneling, I believe we have a good chance of finally cracking the Syndicate stranglehold on parts of Orion culture.

What is important to convey is that, for all our differences, we fundamentally have no qualms with Orion culture. Indeed, there are probably many brilliant ideas in it that we could all benefit from. And it is important to highlight that Syndicate is not that culture. It is not Orion way to mass murder thousands, to sow hatred and death, to incite others to even greater vengeance so that the cycle of violence can continue. The Syndicate are parasites, crooks that can't compete with honest, hardworking Orionese, and thus turn to fear and extortion to keep themselves afloat. And they are so desperate to maintain ill-gotten gains, that they'll go to any lengths to terrorize others. The strike on Amarakia could have happened everywhere. What if next torpedo detonates on Alukk, or other major Orion city?

Moreover, the hand-in-hand cooperation between Orion and Amaraki is a proof that no matter how hard the Syndicate tries, we will not be decived. We will not lash out in blind fury. Because that is what they want. And it is why we will instead stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Union in its hour of greatest need, and support it in a fight against creation that seeks to pervert Orion culture to its own, lowly goals.

How's that for propaganda? :V

As callous as it might sound, we gotta strike while the iron's hot, and the more skeptical elements within the Union have the time to wrap their heads around this.
 
Leila Hann said:
Sorry, didn't catch this before.

1. To clarify, Q wasn't threatening to destroy the Orions herself. She was warning Oyana that if they don't get their shit together, sooner or later someone else will.

2. I was also thinking of "Devil's Due." Not because Q was an imposter, but because if I were in Oyana's place that would be my initial assumption, so I had her act accordingly.
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We are entirely of one mind on this matter. You communicated both (1) and (2) perfectly, in my opinion.

Iron Wolf said:
When in doubt I assume some of @Ato's omakes could just be the author taking an authoritative stance on issues that are still contentious in the academic community. Like it could be some people aren't sure if the Hur'q actually ran those suzerainties, or if it was aristocratic factions of the existing society adopting the Hur'q name for legitimacy or as a form of worship. Or if the Janissary Rebellion actually happened, because the main source about it is a text written 100 years later by a biased source. Shit like that.

Personally I assume the Hur'q have a level of mystery hovering around "Sea Peoples" level.
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That makes sense, but there's a limit to how far one can take it. I mean, the reason the Sea Peoples are so mysterious are that:
1) The Sea People existed at the very dawn of recorded history; while writing was widespread throughout the Mediterranean by that time, literacy was 'shallow,' the province of specialist scribes and not of the population at large, used more for recordkeeping than to record literature or accounts of important events.
2) It's been 3200 years, so most of the writing that did exist on them has been lost.
3) Literally every civilization that directly experienced their onslaught has been conquered and subdued, and had its culture overwritten, and then the new culture was conquered and subdued and overwritten likewise, and in most cases this has happened through three or four successive iterations.
4) Related to (3) and increasing the complexity imposed by (1) and (2), we no longer have full fluency in any of the languages of that era, and have to laboriously translate passages that are themselves likely to be translations, which will tend to suppress nuance and detail from the written accounts that we see.

All of these factors are mitigated or removed when talking about the Hur'q. Their actions took place 'only' a thousand years ago (i.e. only five or six Vulcan lifetimes) ago. They left behind several remnant civilizations that would have records that are still readable in the present day, with little or no loss of meaning.

Now, the logistics of space travel mean that we may very well not know what the Hur'q looked like if they were as careful as 22nd century Romulans (or Breen) to wear body-concealing armor and suits. We certainly don't know where the Hur'q came from. Consequently, there is room for 'alternate narratives' like "the Hur'q were actually just a bunch of Gorn renegades in power armor" or something.

But there can't be much ambiguity about what the Hur'q did, because some of the civilizations that witnessed it still exist in recognizable form, and while they may have been hammered back into the Atomic Age, they never got hammered all the way back to the Iron Age. An Iron Age civilization can lose track of exactly what happened when aliens visited it (my portrayal of Orion-Amarki interactions being a good example). An Atomic Age civilization that knows it's the remnant of an interstellar civilization... not so much.

I suggested Aerocommandos instead of Marines because I think any sort of Space Assault Force that specializes in drop pods or high-risk shuttle assaults will be modeled more like Paratrooper or Air Assault units and named as such, rather than using the term 'marine,' which might not even be a cultural concept for some species.
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Yes; the Orions have been star travelers for so long they probably don't have a 'wet naval' tradition so much as a 'space naval' tradition. The Tellarites are another candidate since it would appear that Tellar Prime doesn't actually have a planet-encircling ocean in the first place; sea power can't have been as important in their history.

Ato said:
From canon we know that many worlds in Trek have analogs to earth animals and in translation to whatever federation standard is they are often to referred to as such.(For example; Bajoran Bat, Caldorian Eel, Denebian whale, Algorian mammoth.) So they might be called Amarkian Eagles or Celos Eagles, but something similar is probably known to them. You could of course make a a word for whatever the most common eagle analogue on Orion worlds are and use that, but that would of course not mean anything to Amarkians, or vis versa.

Where it is clear that within the use of federation standard (which may or may not be English) there is a common word for large avian analogue predator that is widely applied. It would be Eagle.
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Yeah, but "what's an Eagle?" was too funny to pass up.

Animal themed names don't seem very common in Star Trek, at least not for 'big things' like entire organizations. A single ship, or a baseball team, or something might get named after an anima. But an organization that's going to play a pivotal role in the operations of multiple governments for some years to come? Not so much, I would think. The fact that no two planets have precisely the same fauna is probably one of the reasons for that.

Oh definitely, in fact I tried to suggest in the last part that no body was really sure what happened during the fall of the Hur'q or immediately after. and that the earliest accounts of Borass founding the Empire of Rigel are were really only written a generation or so later. And the author is quite clearly biased since the possibility of the Syndicate playing a role in the rebellion is dismissed out of hand, when really I think its probably likely they did.
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I suspect a whole lot of different groups were involved.

The Klingon 'janissary revolt' almost HAS to have been something that really happened, and really accomplished more or less what the Klingons say it did. Because it's more or less the only way to explain how the Klingons could have been in space for centuries without having conquered the quadrant in the absence of the Hur'q. If they got that technology by rebelling against the Hur'q, then for most of that time they were the Alpha/Beta Quadrant equivalent of the Kazon: big and tough and dangerous to cross if they got their act sorted out and acted together, but prone to internal factionalism, and with most of their power coming from having disproportionate access to a lot of legacy technology they didn't fully understand and weren't quite... savvy... enough to duplicate.

But at the same time, there would have been a lot of other organizations opportunistically rising up to take advantage of the massive dislocation of power structures within the Hur'q empire, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Syndicate was one of them.

Leila Hann said:
Also, with thicc green ladies and dreamy blue bishie boys fighting side by side, I expect we'll be seeing some aquamarine children within a few years.
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:D

I am with you on this.

That said... Handle with care. Exposing Amarki to Orion pheromones, in the absence of counterbalancing medication, tends to trigger severe yandere tendencies.

The easy way to resolve this is with a counter-agent that keeps the Amarki brain firmly set at 'normal;' the Amarki themselves know how to do this (since they sorted through the pharmacological archives of that trading post the Orion Empire abandoned on the dark side of the Amarki's favorite moon, anyway). No yandere-ism, but also no suggestibility and compliance.

[This is what the Amarki gendarmes would be doing, naturally]

The hard way to resolve this is the reason why Amarki house-servants became a prestige commodity in the Orion Empire at its height. Because first you have to dope them with psychoactive substances to suppress the severe yandere tendencies without suppressing the suggestibility and obedience. Then you have to dope them with still other psychoactives to suppress the side effects of the stuff that suppresses the yandere tendencies. Then you have to give them something else to handle the side effects of those drugs, and so on, and in general it becomes extremely difficult to keep the (suitably docile) Amarki on a balanced cocktail of psychiatric drugs that doesn't result in their liver crashing out or something else going disastrously wrong.

Basically, Amarki are really hard to render docile. Obedient is easy, docile is hard. Therefore, docile Amarki, especially docile Amarki who didn't look like they were wasting away from a drug habit, were a sign that their owner could afford to blow a LOT of money on their slaves' medication regimen.

Of course, Amarki slaves becoming a prestige good resulted in a "knock-off imitation" market where the slave trader takes the quick and easy route of sticking an automated implant in the Amarki's brain to regulate the dosages on an hour by hour basis. Thus allowing the Imperial Orion on a budget to buy her Amarki slaves "off the rack" without needing to pay a fortune for specialists to keep adjusting their meds. And those are the implants the Syndicate has duplicated the blueprints for, because by the time the Empire neared its end, they were actually extremely effective.

At least, extremely effective until the fall of the Empire. Which shut down the pharmacies catering to the high end luxury domestic slave market, at which point it didn't matter if the Amarki had brain implants because the drug reservoirs ran down. At which point millions of Amarki slaves started going off their meds.

Swarms of blue yandere space elves on the rampage probably did not do the collapsing Empire any favors. :D

[My brain gets appalling sometimes, but I would dearly love anyone to come up with a convincing reason why things like this wouldn't happen in a technologically advanced society that runs on hypercapitalism and doesn't have a problem with large scale slavery. No, seriously, I'd be delighted.]
 
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VIGIL does work as a nickname too. They're keeping an eternal "Vigil" watching for the Syndicate. "CHEESE IT. IT'S THE VIGIL!" And so on.
 
I base the Sea Peoples - Hurq comparison based mostly on how little canon information there is on them and the confusing nature of the historical record, but I suppose that could just be because there's never been a need to delve into the scholarship around the Hurq on any of the TV shows. :p Especially if they mostly operated in the territory of the Gorn, Orions, and Klingons.
 
Iron Wolf said:
I base the Sea Peoples - Hurq comparison based mostly on how little canon information there is on them and the confusing nature of the historical record, but I suppose that could just be because there's never been a need to delve into the scholarship around the Hurq on any of the TV shows. :p Especially if they mostly operated in the territory of the Gorn, Orions, and Klingons.
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There is an old Klingon joke that the HurQ were actually Romulans. But that the name comes from the sound they make when you strangle them!
 
...you know with all the cultural details we've built up there has to be an episode sometime where an Explorer finds itself in the Old Empire era. I shan't forgive the producers of this show if they don't :p
 
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