Thoughts and dialogue that could only come from the mind of one man...
Serendipity's Chief Engineering Officer,
Rada Dengar
(This page is under continuous construction...)
-=/\=-
Rada observed the conversation like an anthropologist studying social behavior amongst different species of an ecosystem.
*The majestic Vulcan likes to maintain an ever watchful eye over the activities of his mate but there is the ever present danger that the more aggressive Bajoran will take this as a challenge,* he thought to himself, with no one probing his mind anymore his mood was definitely improved.
-=/\=-
“I think that should do it,” said Rada. He had finally managed to reassemble the Alchemy’sguidance system and was almost sure he’d done it correctly. Almost sure because a guidance system was like a jigsaw puzzle and it seemed that Kellyn had decided to make some modifications so that it no longer matched the picture on the box.
In fact as far as Rada could tell Kellyn had given the system a complete overhaul, this wasn’t a simple issue like if the picture had involved a man at the beach and Kellyn had drawn a pen moustache on him, it was more analogous to the man being repainted in full pastel colours as a small orange duck and the beach being changed to a detailed rendering of the Battle of Hastings complete with seven different varieties of grass, a verbatim replica of the Saxon shield wall and eight thousand Norman warriors…all of whom had pen moustaches.
-=/\=-
There were few worse omens than when an Admiral chose to type something. She could rob him of his rank, separate him from friends and family and transfer him to a remote planet on the other side of the quadrant where they kill Engineers on sight all by saying the word. It seemed that none of these things would be sufficient though and that she needed more than just her own authority to do what she planned to do to Rada.
To exceed her own authority meant that this code she was entering must somehow allow her access to the authority of other Admirals as well. One Admiral was relatively harmless but when they start working together in swarms then they could strip a man to the bone in a matter of seconds.
Worst of all, he had rights under Starfleet regulations but the regulations and their interpretations were all decisions for Admirals. If they were working together then it must be so that they could go beyond what the current regulations allow; torture, beatings and forcing him to watch hour after hour of Klingon opera were all within their power. They could do all of this with just the touch of a few keys on a keyboard, it disgusted Rada that a supposedly peaceful organisation kept weapons as powerful as keyboards in almost every room. He had to know what she was going to do to him.
-=/\=-
He exhaled slowly, as it occurred to him that he still had to breathe.
-=/\=-
There was nothing more distressing to a man who’d been penciled down as sane than meeting someone with an eraser.
-=/\=-
“Friends? Family? Fish? What?”
-=/\=-
"...could there be any worse a death than the kind where you live on?"
-=/\=-
Rather than looking forward to a good meal at night they’d find that eating was one of those things they despised. They’d treat it like a medical check up, they’d know it was good for them but put it off as long as they could.
The ship would be full of hungry and miserable people and tempers would begin to fray. Then, to add insult to injury they’d start decaffeinating the coffee patterns.
The Captain would be completely incapacitated.
-=/\=-
The name of Dengar and its association with incredible amounts of destruction would last until the end of time and probably several weeks past it.
-=/\=-
Rada sat down in the chair across from Reece and whilst he was about to start speaking he noticed how expectant Reece was looking and so he reluctantly took a bite.
He quickly concluded that Szechuan was Chinese for ‘fire’ and that it was meant quite literally. “W…” Rada wheezed out “Wa…”
He put his meal down and headed to the replicator but he couldn’t form the word. At times like this he considered just how ridiculous it was that the replicators were voice activated. “Wat…” he gave up and typed the command in to the keypad and then downed the glass of water in one go.
After an extended period of panting he managed to force out “That’s very nice,” as he requested another glass and a numbing agent for the pain receptors in his mouth.
-=/\=-
They looked much worse from the outside which gave Rada hope that the Romulans would underestimate their current condition, opt to save power by keeping their shields down and weapons off line and to try to destroy them by throwing small Terran oranges; perhaps he was being optimistic but he thought they could survive that.
-=/\=-
He knew that there was a connection between The Alchemy Project and Temporal investigations and realised that he’d pay heavily for attempting to steal their favourite little project here. Who knows if they’d even give him a trial? He might not be too familiar with their work but what if they could just travel backwards in time a few decades, take a trip to Angosia III and tell his father about how his mother’s didn’t like animals that much. He’d never ask her out, they’d never fall in love, they’d never get married and Rada would never be born. He could wake up tomorrow never having existed. This starship command thing was much riskier than anyone had warned him.
If the Captain caught him sitting in her chair then she might think that he’s trying to take the ship from her, he did try to kill her once and so she probably wouldn’t put stealing past him.
-=/\-=
So Rada had to be briefed on the state of his department. Typically this meant going to his Assistant Chief Engineer but he had never chosen one. Not choosing one had been a very difficult decision but in the end made sense. On one hand not choosing someone meant potentially devastating consequences. The ship could be under attack, consoles could be exploding everywhere, the Captain would be screaming for the shields up and Commander Reece could be screaming some off key version of a twenty first century Terran musical compilation over the intra-ship communication channels trying to calm the crew down which would lead to calls from every department for the speaker systems to be cut off. Rada wouldn’t be able to do anything because he’d have been knocked unconscious by a falling brick which he could only assume someone would have replicated especially to drop on him.
-=/\-=
He’d be cast off the ship, they would have heard of how in primitive times people were made to walk the plank and so they’d force him to walk one straight out of an airlock and then he’d been dead.
Of course that was just the best case scenario. There’s also the possibility that the box offered no new technology for them. It may contain someone’s shopping list and be of absolutely no use to them whatsoever. At first glance that might not seem to change the Federation a whole lot, but Rada always glanced twice. If they managed to scan through technology as advanced as the Hugreti then people might start to think that they could scan through anything.
The Romulans might start to think that they would soon be able to scan through their cloaking devices. The Klingons might think the same. The Romulans would have to attack the Federation before that had a chance to render their advantage void. The Klingons might not worry about losing their advantage but they would worry that the Federation would stop fearing them and so like a vicious dog when a meeker one dared look them in the eye they’d attack too.
The Federation has so many enemies, all of whom would be just waiting for a chance when they’re vulnerable and boy, would they be vulnerable. They’d be attacked from all sides and they’d lose. The Klingons and the Romulans would each claim to control the former Federation territories and a war would ensue between them and one would emerge victorious but so weakened from the continuous warfare that the remaining major powers would all start to attack while they can. The winners would take the Federation space and would end up being attacked themselves and the cycle would just keep repeating until eventually all life in the quadrant would be wiped out.
That shopping list would spell doom for them all.
-=/\-=
Such is the curse of those who hide themselves from the world, if you never reveal yourself then you can never truly be loved.
-=/\=-
They’d been forced to rush and so they’d basically ended up hooking together a series of existing scanning technologies and linking them through a central control. It was about as pretty as a Targ and had just as much going for it in regards to energy efficiency.
It reminded Rada just how far he’d come from the Engineering projects he’d worked on at the Academy in which the first requirement was that always they obeyed the three ‘E’s of Engineering which he was told were Efficiency, Efficiency, and never repeating yourself more than once.
-=/\-=If Rada did wake up, he’d probably be dead.
-=/\-=
He really was enjoying the time when the ship was stuck in the Terran system because almost nothing could go wrong. There were no alien creatures infesting the hull or probing into their minds; it was just nice.
He really was enjoying the time when the ship was stuck in the Terran system because almost nothing could go wrong. There were no alien creatures infesting the hull or probing into their minds; it was just nice.
-=/\-=
As Rada stared in awe at the Zenith’s Primary Electroplasma conduit hub with isolinear reorrienter in a Rankton James alignment he couldn’t help but think of Wren.
It wasn’t that they were at all similar. Rada was almost certain that Wren would object if he attempted to pump fatal amounts of electricity through her body and that even if she agreed to it she’d just not be able to conduct the energy in a manner satisfactory to Starfleet’s efficiency specifications.
The conduit, on the other hand, wouldn’t look anywhere near as good in a dress.
-=/\=-
“I hate gardening, Captain. I hate a lot of things, and frankly there are some things I don’t like very much about you. I don’t like how much you let your decisions be swayed by emotion. I think it’s pretty damn inconsiderate how loud you play your music sometimes and frankly it wouldn’t hurt you to lay off the coffee.”
-=/\=-
Though the dull lighting kept always around him was blinding, worse was the darkness that let him see.
-=/\=-
Life was truly that fragile that it left no doubt that few were more extraordinary than those who could save it and none were less remarkable than those whose greatest achievement was to take it.
-=/\=-
Behind the old and dust covered counter stood and old and due to his lack of movement nearly dust covered man.
-=/\=-
He’d learnt that lesson the hard way, much of it in this very city as a much younger man, and considering that he now began to recall the young Angosian who’d passed him by on those steps. There was an eagerness about him that told Rada he was all ready and prepared to find a buyer for his untarnished soul.
-=/\=-