Yeager SC Mission 03: "Bol-ling for Planets"

Captain's Logs

Captain Joseph Valiant

Stardate 20606.12

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

It’s been over 3 weeks since we left the Sol system and our mission still has yet to start. There is a reasonable explanation however.

It all started roughly 3 weeks ago when the USS Yeager was ordered to rendezvous with the USS Dauntless and USS Copernicus to do a joint mission. Normally a 2 week long journey would be nothing for a ship, but seeing how the shipyard the Yeager was sent to for repairs after the damaged taken on its previous mission was limited on resources and time, repairs weren’t completed by the time the ship was ordered to leave. Only critical systems had been repaired when the order was given that the Yeager was to disembark. During our journey to the rendezvous the Yeager experienced many technical difficulties which only proved to me that the ship, while still space worthy, was unfit to do a mission.

After 2 weeks at warp and attempting to repair the ship the Yeager arrived at the rendezvous and I and Cdr Harrison-Black were transported, not by our ship as our ships transporters were still down for repairs, aboard the Dauntless to meet with Captain Jal and to be given more details of our mission. During the meeting Captain Jal was informed of the Yeager’s condition, and it was decided the ship would put back to dock at Starbase Charlie for repairs.

Now after 4 days of being in dock for repairs at Starbase Charlie, repairs have been completed and new mission orders have been received, and currently the ship is preparing to launch.

I must say the mission we’ve been assigned to sounds very interesting. It seems that A Class Y planet in the Tholian Assembly has been swapped with a Class M planet from an unknown location. Puzzled by this mystery the Tholians have asked for Federation aid. The Yeager’s mission is to determine how and why this occurred, and if all possible return things back to normal. What interests me the most about this mission is that it presents me, the Yeager, and the Federation a rare opportunity to travel within Tholian space and possibly learn more about their territory and perhaps their culture.

Once the Yeager is ready, we’ll set course for the Tholian boarder where we’ll intercept a Tholian ship that will escort us to the affected system.

End Log.

Stardate 20607.01

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

While in transit to the Tholian boarder to meet our escort through Tholian space, we’ve encountered a spatial anomaly, and our engines have failed. We’ve attempted to decompress the shuttle bay to escape to safety, but our efforts have been only partly successful; we managed to gain some distance from the anomaly, but didn’t get out of the gravity well of the anomaly so we‘re slowly being pulled back in. I fear if we don’t get the engines repaired soon, the Yeager may face a fate far worse than the outcome of any of its previous missions.

Additionally, this anomaly I fear may be having an adverse affect on the crew. Ensign Matthews, a security officer, was sent to sickbay for hallucinations. Only more research will determine if this was caused from stress or negative affects from the anomaly. If mental degradation is caused from this rift, which is the assumption I’m going on now, then our amount of time to escape may be much less then we thought.

End log.

Stardate 20607.09

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

Thanks to the quick work from the ships Engineering department power to the engines was restored and we successfully escaped the spatial anomaly.

Meeting up with the Tholian ship, the Tholian’s openly expressed their dislike for us being unable to meet their stringent time schedule, and demanded an explanation for our delay. Because they seem very strict, inflexible and hard to deal with and because I myself consider nothing near a diplomat and seeing how this mission may have effects with the Federation and Tholian relations, I’ve designated my First Officer, Commander Harrison-Black, to be the missions diplomatic liaison. From now on all communications between myself and the Tholian Captain will be channeled through her.

After Commander Black explained the cause of our lateness to the Tholian Captain the Tholian ship turned about and headed to the planet and the USS Yeager soon followed.

We’re currently following the Tholian ship as an escort through Tholian space.

End log.

Stardate 20608.11

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

We’ve arrived and entered orbit of the class M planet that the Tholian’s want us to investigate. Immediately an away team was dispatched to investigate the surface; the Tholian’s should be joining our away team shortly. I can but only hope we can find the cause of this exchange of planets and retrieve the Tholian’s missing planet.

End log.

Stardate 20608.18

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

We’ve just received a communication from the Tholian commander. He has informed us that the away team that they sent to the surface had been killed by whatever is on the planet surface, and the commander blames us for it. Because the Yeager team was early, which we thought would be good considering how aggravated the Tholian commander got with us being late, it seems they had moved on with their investigation likely figuring the Tholian’s would catch up. Because our team wasn’t there at the landing site when the Tholian’s arrived they blame us for the death of their away team.

The status of our own away team is still unknown.

End log.

Stardate 20609.12

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

The Yeager has been hit by some sort of energy wave originating from the planet surface that has knocked us out of our special orbit and sent us into one of the many mines surrounding this planet. The mine impacted in the drive section of the ship, and the resulting explosion and damage has caused damage to our warp core; it’s currently on a build up to an overload. If something isn’t done soon our core will breach.

Incase there is nothing that can be done and a core breach is inevitable, I’ve ordered the ship out of orbit to clear the minefield; if we have to evacuate the ship I don’t want our escape pods to be taken out one by one by the minefield.

End log.

Stardate 20609.16

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

Thanks to the quick work of the Engineering department, a disaster has been averted. To prevent the core from overloading and breaching do to a leak in the coolant system and a malfunction in the matter/antimatter regulators, Engineering shut down the core. Thankfully the shutdown systems were operational, if they weren’t we would have had to eject the core, and worse yet if the ejection systems were damaged we would have abandoned ship. So I’m quite thankful that the problem could be solved by shutting down the core.

Engineering has informed me that because of the damaged systems, we won’t be able to power up the core until various repairs are done, which may be sometime. This poses a problem in terms of ships power; without the warp core the ship is operating off emergency generators. While the emergency generators can supply the ship with power for sometime during normal operations, operations of various other systems, such as defense and offensive systems can drain our reserves quickly. It’s my hope that we won’t be forced into a far more dangerous situation with only our reserve power available.

Additionally, we’ve just received word from the away team on the planet surface, and it doesn’t seem like good news. While no details were given on their situation, there was a request for an emergency beam out which to me denotes something terribly wrong has happened. I’m on my way down to the transporter room now to talk with LCdr Tregelen to find out the specifics of what has happened.

End log.

Stardate 20610.05

Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

In my talk with Lt. Commander Tregelen, I’ve been brought up to speed with what all has happened with the away team. It appears an alien race from another galaxy named the Bol’s have exchanged planets to save their civilization in their home solar system from an alien structure that was built on this planets surface that was designed to drain mental energy. Because destroying the structure was impossible for the Bol civilization they created a transportation device to transport the planet. The catch was however, it could only be transported in exchange for a planet or object with equal mass. The Tholian planet was the only match they could find. If the alien could be removed, destroyed, or permanently deactivated, it would seem likely that the Bol on the planet surface would agree to exchange planets back.

When Lt. Commander Tregelen and I got to the Bridge, it was discovered matters became far more complicated. The Tholian’s had taken matters into their own hands and began removal of the alien structure on the planet. With their web technology they were able to remove the structure that was deeply imbedded deep down to nearly the planets core.

While at first it may seem like removing the structure would be a good idea, it wasn’t. Because of the size and depth of the structure its removal removed a large amount pressure from the planets core up to its crust. The release of the pressure allowed for the tectonic plates to shift planet wide to fill in the vacuum to cause equilibrium of pressure once again. This resulted in large tectonic shifts that set off nearly every volcano on the planet. With so many volcanoes erupting at once the pressure inside the planets core dropped significantly which only caused more tectonic shifts. With the pressure in the core of the planet decreasing the planet began to collapse on itself.

Currently we have 3 hours to devise a plan to get the Tholian planet back or this planet will implode and we’ll forever strand the Tholian’s in another galaxy.

End Log.

Stardate 20610.21

Captains Log Stardate 20610.21 Captain Joseph E. Valiant recording:

Soon after the Tholian’s removed the alien structure on the planets surface LCdr Tregelen took a shuttle back to planet, to attempt to talk the Bol into returning the planet; she wasn’t too forthcoming originally. The reason being is that if the planet was to be transported back, the shockwave alone would have devastating consequences for her home solar system. She did agree however she would activate the transportation device if they could devise a plan to transport the planet back without severe consequences.

While Mr. Tregelen was talking matters over with the Bol the shuttle pilot was fighting keeping the shuttle a lift because of the horrible storms that had developed on the planet because of the volcanic eruptions. While the pilot attempted to find a suitable landing spot the shuttle was struck by several severe bolts of lightening effectively frying its flight controls. The shuttle then spiraled down to the planet and crashed.

Back on the Yeager, we detected the crash when the shuttle stopped registering on our sensors. Additionally scans showed that there were 2 life signs and one faint. Because the Yeager was now out of shuttles and now because of the storms use of the transporters weren’t possible to beam the two officers up from orbit, I opted to initiate blue alert and take the ship into the planets atmosphere to get into a range where the transporters would be safe to use. Knowing that we would likely need to communicate with the Bol again and be within range I also ordered the helmsman to find a suitable landing spot and put the ship down.

Once in range we beamed Mr. Tregelen and the shuttle pilot, who was badly injured, back aboard. Not wasting any LCdr Tregelen went to the science lab and got to work on finding a way to transport the planet back.

Do to the quick thinking of LCdr Tregelen and his science department, a plan was formulated to get the Tholian planet back without sending this planet back to its natural location and destroying the inhabitants of that solar system. The plan was to initiate the planets transportation device at the same moment the planet exploded; this would then suppress the shockwave by having half the energy release on our side of the transport and the other half at the other.

With this plan formulated, Tregelen left the Yeager, and met up with the Bol once again to give her the plane. She agreed to this plan, but requested to stay behind to make sure the transportation device worked properly and was initiated at the right time; she felt it was her responsibility to do so because she was the only one who knew the systems, the lives of those back in her home world was at stake, and finally she felt responsible because it was her who first initiated the transport that stranded the Tholian’s in another galaxy.

When Tregelen returned and informed me of the Bols choice I wasn’t too thrilled. Already the Tholian’s had caused the destruction of a planet and the life on it, and now another being was about to be killed. Mr. Tregelen did present me with the Bols reasons though. The most important one being that the Bol knew the transportation device’s systems and if something were to go wrong she could fix it and considering that timing was a delicate element in the plan, it was almost a necessity to have someone there to make sure things went correctly. Although it was the Bol’s choice to stay and the reasoning was sound, it still didn’t make accepting it easy.

With time now nearly out, I gave the order to depart and move to a safe distance. Once we were to safe distance the planet exploded and was transported, leaving the Tholian planet behind. Detecting their planet was returned safely the Tholians then contacted use telling us they didn’t require our assistance any longer, and demanded we leave their space.

Currently we’re on course back to Federation space as the Tholian’s ordered.

End Log.

Crew Logs

Engineering

ENG - Ensign Julia Nielson

Stardate 20610.10

Well, it's certainly been a hectic few days. in the weeks previous, just milling about engineering, and then wham bam everything gets crazy.

It started as the typical shift, the usual maintenance and diagnostics on a few systems here and there. Suddenly the ship shifted and threw us all around. One of the warp core’s main conduits ended up getting severed by some spatial anomalies, which we patched up in half the time we usually do: new record! After that my luck seemed to go downhill from there. I went to fix a problematic relay, which had the ship in the dark with main lighting down, when I was knocked unconscious by a saboteur. Now there’s a lovely bump on the back of my head.

After a quick trip to sickbay to get patched up, I was called to be in an away team down to an M class planet that was now in the place of a Tholian planet. Apparently in an attempt to save their planet from a megalith structure that was attacking them telepathically, the Bols swapped planets with the Tholians. I managed to repair the transporter and attempted to disable a harmonic resonance that was being emitted from the megalith structure, however the source I was using to emit a destructive interference frequency, a tricorder, wasn’t powerful enough to broadcast a frequency that covered as much distance as the megalith, so there was only a minor change. The Tholians decided to take action against the megalith themselves, and used the infamous Tholian web to remove the structure from the surface of the planet. As spectacular and scary as the sight was, to actually see a Tholian web taking place before my eyes, it caused so much damage to the planet. The planet began to self destruct, and we had to evacuate back to the Yeager as quickly as possible. That had to have been one of the most frightening experiences I’ve lived through…

Needless to say, we made it back to the ship safe and sound. Worse for wear I’ll admit. I unfortunately can’t say the same for the Bol-Majesty. At this point I’m not sure what’s the state of the planet, as I’ve been in Engineering ever since our return to the ship. When we got back, main power was offline due to the warp core being down again. While we were in the midst of repairing it, we ended up going to Blue Alert, so that tells me that the planet is still intact for us to be able to land, which gives me some hope for the Bol-Majesty…

So this day of interesting of events isn’t over yet, oh… I should get some of these burns checked out, but I can only hope for the best for this planet and get cracking on the repairs to that nice big hole just outside of Engineering. At least there’s no crawling in the Jeffries’ tubes this time…

End Log.

Science

CSO - LCdr Alexis Tregelen

Stardate 20610.26

I have just witnessed something that most Starfleet officers only see in simulations. I saw the destruction of an entire planet, a destruction that could have been avoided. It started with a simple mission, to enter Tholian space and investigate a planet that had appeared out of no where. I must admit, when I was told about this mission the scientist inside me was intrigued but the Starfleet officer was a little cautious of the Tholians. Our first dealings with the Tholians wasn’t the best, we arrived late for our meeting. A fact that they have yet to forgive us for and I doubt never will. We arrived at the planet and I led a team consisting of Lieutenant Commander GreyGor, Lieutenant Junior Grade Jennifer Matthews and Ensigns Ebony Liora and Julia Nielson. We decided that because we were late for the initial meeting we would make sure that we were early for this one, my first mistake.

We landed a few minutes before the Tholians so I gave the order to set off towards a structure that we had detected on the way down as the only structure on the planet. Upon arriving at the structure we received a distress call from the Tholians, they were under attack. Leaving Nielson and GreyGor at the structure to try and find a way inside; Myself, Liora and Matthews raced back to the landing site to assist the Tholians, unfortunately by the time we got there it was too late, they had been destroyed by the local inhabitants. Fortunately we were able to best these creatures before they could do any damage to us or the ships. On the way back to the structure we were attacked again by a larger group of the creatures and I was shot through the shoulder and passed out. The next thing I knew I was on the ground with Ensign Liora looking over me. She had patched the damage mostly and I was set to keep going.

We arrived back at the structure and entered it via the pathway that Nielson and GreyGor had found. Upon entering what turned out to be the main room of the complex the entire room came to life, something i found out later didn't happen when Nielson and GreyGor entered the room. It turns out that the complex was made by a race of telepaths and because I am a Betazoid they could communicate with me. After a long talk with a creature that is known as the Bol-Majesty a second group of Tholians appeared. A...heated communication between myself and the Tholians issued, something that I was assured in Academy multi-culturalism class was a good thing but it turns out that I got the wrong Tholian to do this with but as we were arguing we were suddenly attacked by…I don’t know how to explain it, it was like something was in my head with a sledgehammer smashing my brains to mush. The Tholians were greatly affected as well causing them to freeze in spot and one of them shattered.

After an emergency beamout back to the Yeager and a quick meeting with Captain Valiant the Tholians used there tractor nets to basically rip the Megalith out of the ground causing the planet to start to destabilise. If we were going to get the Tholian planet back we needed to talk to the Bol. I took a shuttle to a low orbit to try to communicate with the Bol but we were forced down by the break up of the planet. We landed in a pool of molten rock and started sinking; the entire shuttle was engulfed within minutes but I managed to drag Petty Officer Appleton who had be knocked unconscious out of the shuttle and to relative safety. From there I communicated with the Bol as best I could over such a distance and we came to an understanding. If we could make sure that the Tholians paid for what they did and we could work out a way to transport the planet with out it harming its home system then the Bol would initiate the transport. I tried to call to the Yeager but I guess there was too much interference. I feared the worst, that myself and Appleton would be left on the planet to die but the Yeager broke through the atmosphere and landed on the planet, something that I had only seen once before and that was when we crash landed in the water.

Back on the Yeager the science team and I worked hard on finding a way to do just what the Bol had asked. We were finally able to formulate a plan which involved perfect timing of the transport to coincide with the explosion so that the force would be spread across the two locations and therefore lessen the effects on the Bols home planet. I explained the plan to the Bol and she agreed with one slight change. She would be staying on the planet as it was destroyed to ensure the plan went off without a hitch. After explaining to me that there was no other way I returned to the Yeager and informed the Captain.

We lifted off and proceeded to a safe distance and watched as the final stages of the explosion rippled across the surface of the planet. Within moments it was gone, The Bol had made the ultimate sacrifice for us, for me, someone that she had only just met and for that she will have my undying gratitude and thanks.

We are now en route to a planet to drop off supplies.

End Log.