A Caper Needs A Plan

Posted on Tue Jul 24th, 2018 @ 2:00am by Commander Rita Paris

Mission: Holographic Horrors
Location: USS Hera, Deck 8, Lieutenant Paris' Quarters
Timeline: 2395
Tags: bad ideas, slingshot theory

In order to plan a heist, you have to think of everything in advance. Because you won’t have time to affect the situation once it is in motion, but if you set all of the dominoes up in advance, as the plan comes together, they will all fall in order and the plan will go off as clockwork.

In this case, Rita Paris only had to outmaneuver a starship and space station’s resources and crew, then do her best to anticipate what strategies might be used against her once her plan was in motion, assuming someone figured it out. But first came research, because she had to be sure that she would be able to even try.

Pirate starbase was orbiting a planet, which stood to reason that there was a star nearby that both orbited. M class- for a change, Rita Paris was in luck. There needed to be more information gathered, because the database was very sketchy about allowing her access to top secret classified files which would enable one to slingshot around a star. Well, succesfully. As the Hera had done it before, Paris was working on finding the data via the mission logs, but it was slow going. She was no genius like Sonak or theoretically half the crew of the Hera, so it was hard to search for the information without alerting anyone just what she was pursuing.

Performing this maneuver required extremely precise calculations to be made, such as availability of fuel components, acceleration, and mass of a vessel through a time continuum. According to what she could find, the speed increase that dislodges the ship from the space-time continuum in a slingshot effect is caused by a mathematical factor called the Cochrane's factor. It is added as a multiplier to the basic warp formula based on the amount of curvature of space the ship is traveling through. While the factor within the normal interstellar medium of Federation space is an average of 1292.7238 and in the intergalactic void only 1, in the close proximity of stars and other massive objects it is so high that these disproportionately high speeds are created.

These were piloting terms, and thus the plucky pilot understood them. Calculating them for a ship whose mass was only the size of a runabout would be the tricky part, and there she was definitely a bit lost. But that did nothing to hinder her determination. It could be done- the question was could she do it.

Given that her research indicated that the Hera would be hard docked, that was an element that worked in her favor. Creating a glitch in the docking clamps should be easy to introduce, to insure that should someone decide to come chasing after her in the mighty starship, that wouldn’t be an issue. Provided they figured out what she was up to, which Rita was working to insure no one would know. The pirate vessels were another matter entirely- but hopefully Rita could be subtle about this and so long as no one knew what she was really attempting, then no one would make a move to stop her until it was too late.

The pirate vessels she couldn’t account for, as they were just an X-factor, as was the station itself. But the known variables in the equation were Rita and her piloting skills, the calculations of which she was very shaky and frankly planning to fly by the seat of her pants and hope for the best. And of course there was the vessel itself, which she was leaning toward the Arrow class runabout in the shuttlecraft hangar. It was light, versatile, streamlined and carried all of the amenities of a starship except room to jog. But even if she had to live in it for a few months, the runabout could accommodate her as a personal starship just fine.

While her sense of humor urged her to do it, Rita resisted renaming the small starship ‘Unlucky Lady’. That might just give her away too soon.

There was an assumption that while on shore leave at the station, there would be some degree of lax security involved in her taking out a small craft. She was, after all, the chief flight officer, and it was an entirely reasonable action for her to requisition a small craft and file a loose flight plan with the station. Somehow she suspected pirates were nowhere near as strict as Starfleet when it came to taking joyrides in system. After all, “Say, you’re flying a bit too close to star there” was likely not going to be particularly noticed until she was lined up and on target for a chronal trajectory.

Of course, there was also the question of whether the little craft was capable of surviving the trip. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and Rita Paris was nothing if not desperate. The situation on the Hera was untenable for her, and she wanted to go home. Back to the time that she belonged, if not the dimension. Even trapped in the past of a dimension that was not her own was preferable to being trapped in a future she didn’t understand. Getting back to the right era would be step one of her plan, then playing transporter bingo in an ion storm would be the second part of her plan. Which was absolutely terrifying to her, but there was simply no other way.

Of course, her conscience told her that whenever she landed in the past, she had to do something about this reality's Rita Paris. She couldn't leave... herself... like that. No one knew the unique hell of being a ship's ghost, and this reality's Rita might have been at it longer, if Rita hit the temporal mark correctly. But all of that was immaterial, not unlike Paris herself on the Constitution. If she could be saved, Rita was going to find a way. At this point she was thinking of writing up the notes for the procedure and sending them with a heartfelt plea to the captain and chief engineer, whomever they might be whenever she landed. Note to herself, she needed to write up 'How to Reintegrate a Paris'.

Of course, if she did that, she couldn't pretend to be Rita Paris of this reality anymore- her altruism would cost her the convenient identity and 'slot' in this reality. There was no question for her though- she had to save Rita or it would haunt her for the rest of her life. And even if she ended up stranded here or elsewhere, she'd still be able to look herself in the eye. Maybe if she stuck around, she could be a privateer. After all, she did have a rather remarkable starship with the arrow class runabout, the Selune.

In her head, the starship was already the Unlucky Lady. Stealth plating and 'engines tuned for stealth', Rita had liked it when she'd flown it in the simulator, and kept it as a pet project, qualifying higher and higher on the runabout. She'd studied the vessel and knew both her capabilities and her amenities. She'd had level 1 diagnostics run on all of the shuttlecraft and runabouts, and she had taken an inspection tour. If there was an override she had to find it, or they would shut her down remotely before she even began. And this one looked like someone's pet project, so Rita had to be extra careful.

Admittedly, it was a very loosely organized plan. One that had far more potential for her to be splattered on the windshield of time and space than arriving home intact. But she had to try. She didn’t belong here- in this alternate future she was perpetually behind the curve on everything, and she still got lost in anything other than a simple conversation. The pressure from her CO was certainly an issue, as turning down the come-on from the pirate princess in Starfleet on her private pirate starbase could potentially have numerous unpleasant consequences, many of whose possibilities seemed to delight in popping up randomly in her brain.

While there was the possibility that piracy might have changed in the dozen decades Rita was gone, generally it implied that Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a settlement, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable items or properties. The variant of course was the somewhat nobler Privateer, who employs similar methods to piracy, but the captain acts under orders of the state authorizing the capture of merchant ships belonging to an enemy nation, making it a legitimate form of war-like activity by non-state actors. Just which state would authorize such things was still unclear to the time-tossed temptress, as surely the Federation did not condone such actions.

Yet there she sat in the command chair of a Starfleet vessel, which certainly lent credence to the possibility that Starfleet was complicit in the captain’s lifestyle. Not something that happened back in her day, to be sure, but times had certainly changed. Plus this is an entirely different dimension, so anything goes.

So much had changed, and perhaps if it was at least her history, her reality, Rita might have adapted better. But it was just too hard when everything she knew was wrong- Kirk went to the Academy a year later here, for instance. Even the most trivial of facts from her lifetime were consistently wrong here. Here, she and the crew of the Exeter were barely footnotes in history- all their accomplishments never happened. The fact that there was a Rita Paris whose asinine father had accidentally arranged for her murder was practically dumb luck on her part.

The truth was that she hated being stupid. She hated being the slow kid in every room. She hated not knowing where she stood. She hated not being valued, being so easy to dismiss as a relic who had nothing to contribute. She hated that she didn’t have a good relationship with the command staff. Xustos was far too Alpha male for her to get along with, and Captain Telvan was just a scary mystery to her. No attempt to get to know the woman had succeeded. And they'd literally been naked together.

Something that still bothered her was that damned dinner party. When the captain had invited her to dinner and to bring a +1, she had to know Rita would invite the only friend she’d made on the boat. Upon which she opened the evening by promoting Thex in front of her, which had galled Rita to no end, since Telvan had made it abundantly clear that she was deliberately withholding Rita’s rank and could grant it back on a whim. That seemed particularly humiliating to Paris, watching her only friend get promoted at what was supposed to be a fun evening. An evening where she was talked over, perpetually left behind in the conversation, manipulated through guilt over her eating habits and overall had her requests for any sort of validation ignored. She may as well have been the ghost of the Hera.

If Telvan was trying to seduce her, she clearly had no idea whom she was trying to seduce. Or, perhaps she was accustomed to a very different kind of woman than the Starfleet career gal, who came from the era of miniskirt uniforms and the glass ceiling.

It wasn’t to say that her time here had been all bad. She genuinely liked the colorful Mona Gonadie, and had appreciated her tutelage. The sims were good, but after time on the stick, talking to another pilot was the best way to process what you learned, in Rita's experience. Akira was a sweet girl, vulnerable yet brave, still trying to figure out how to be alive, just like the rest of them. Surprisingly, the woman who graduated 32nd in her class had apparently earned the respect of the chief science officer. Vaemyn recognized that her out-of-the-box approach did not mean her ideas were without merit. Thex had befriended her almost immediately, and together they’d already had quite a few adventures.

The one true regret Rita had would be leaving her friend behind, but Thex would be obligated to stop her if she knew what Rita was up to. Even if she came with her, in the past, Thex would be just as unhappy as Rita was in the future. But as a true blue engineer, Thex could never leave her girl, as she so often called the Hera. The retro throwback officer would have to write a letter to her little blue gal pal, explaining everything and setting it to deliver after she was gone. It was a lot like a ‘dear john’, but she couldn’t leave and not say goodbye to her only friend. Her easy smile, her tender heart, her bashful ways, her incredible dancing. The woman was a study in contrasts, and Rita had liked her instantly. The blue and the gold, the brave and the bold.

Tears welled up in her eyes at that, and Rita had to pause a bit.

The rest of the crew seemed varying degrees of disinterested in Rita’s existence, and that was fine by her. Her psychiatrist wouldn’t wonder what happened to her, as he was connected to the database, and she suspected he would misunderstand her motivations. She regretted that she wouldn’t be helping him toward citizenship, but while he made an amazing interactive database, he was shit as a therapist. Mansplaining, strongly skewed personal opinions and denying, downplaying or ignoring her actual expressed issues. Rita could have gotten that from nearly any man in a bar. She'd be in a lot less need of therapy soon enough, hopefully, if she could find her way back to Sonak.

The odds were almost completely stacked against her survival. If she should survive the time travel, there was no guarantee that she would succeed and arrive at the right point in history. If she succeeded in her little chronal cruise, there was still every possibility that she might end up transporting to the Mirror Universe and get stuck there. Or another reality that she was as yet unaware of that might be worse than the one she was in now. But Rita Paris was an explorer, and a survivor. She should not have survived so many of her missions, yet here she was, still alive and kicking at the dawn of the 25th century. Sometimes guts and planning and a little bit of luck really could see you through, if you believed in yourself.

If there was one thing Stuart and Sonak had taught her, it was to believe in herself.