Trek It!

by Robert T. Jeschonek

  *****

  "What Was Lost and Can Never Be Found"

  In response to an unusual Borg distress call, the Enterprise-D travels to Guinan's homeworld, El-Auria. The planet, long ago assimilated by the Collective, has changed dramatically: the inhabitants, though Borg in appearance, behave like unassimilated El-Aurians. An away team finds that Guinan's ex-husband, Dispin, is the reason. He has developed a way to overwrite Borg programming and control drones with his own commands. He's using the Borg El-Aurians to restore their planet to the glory of the old days...though he's more interested in reliving his past happiness with Guinan. This includes reviving their assimilated son, Shol, who is among the Borg on El-Auria. Unfortunately, Dispin's reprogramming hasn't been completely effective; Shol sent the distress call to the Collective. An unstoppable Borg Angel of Death arrives, a mega-weapon designed to dispose of malfunctioning or rebellious drones when all else fails. In the end, it's up to the Enterprise crew to fend off the Angel of Death...and it's up to Guinan to convince Dispin to leave the past behind--though it might cost them both their last chance to save their son.

  FAIL CALL: Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Sky's The Limit: 4 pitches – FAIL or UNFAIL?

  FAIL! None of the four pitches made the grade with Pocket.

  Star Trek: The Manga

  As Pocket's editors seemed less and less receptive to my pitches, I looked elsewhere for opportunities to write Star Trek. When I saw that the publisher Tokyopop was developing a series of Trek manga books, I thought it would be the perfect situation for me. I write comics as well as Trek, so I knew just how to get the job done.

  While appearing at the Trek mega-convention, Creation Las Vegas, I met the editor of the Trek manga and asked him about contributing to the series. He told me to send him some pitches, and he'd see if he liked any. When I got home, I put together a set of seven pitches. Three ("Red Shift," "Hailing Myself," and "Every Subject's Duty, Every Subject's Soul") were recycled from my pitch package for Constellations. One, "Sympathy for the She-Devil," was recycled from Hearts of Darkness.

  I assembled what I thought was a strong set of seven story ideas, polished them up, and sent them to the editor at Tokyopop.

  Star Trek: The Manga: 7 pitches – FAIL or UNFAIL?

  1. "Red Shift"

  The USSR Enterprise orbits the Soviet planet Soyuz II. Pavel Chekov's fantasy--visiting a Soviet-style utopia--has become a nightmarish reality. The Soyuza Soviets, descendants of lost 20th-century cosmonauts, welcome Chekov and his shipmates enthusiastically, elated by how communist-like the Federation seems to be. Before long, however, the Soyuza have taken over the Enterprise and announced plans to use the ship to wipe out the "Reds," their red-skinned alien enemies. As the Soyuza launch their attack, Pavel reasons with the Soyuza's female premier, who thinks he is the ghost of a boy--also named Pavel Chekov--whom she killed years ago. Pavel, in turn, is haunted by an immaterial being named Yuri, who seems to be the ghost of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. Pavel saves the day when he learns the truth about the Reds: they're actually the mutated comrades of the Soyuza, long thought dead in a horrible accident that twisted the Soyuza with guilt. Ultimately, Pavel and company convince the Soyuza and Reds to unite and forge a better future.

  *****

  2. "Every Subject's Duty, Every Subject's Soul"

  The day before a great battle with the Kraken fleet is due to occur, Kirk wakes to find that instead of captain of the Enterprise, he is now a lowly security officer...a "redshirt." He soon discovers that not only does no one remember him ever having been captain, but the computer records support his new background. While trying to figure out what has happened and restore the status quo, Kirk upholds his new responsibilities and gains fresh insights. He never gives up on returning to the life he remembers, however, and he eventually learns the truth about the change in his circumstances: his new identity was part of a ruse to protect him from a well-known Kraken assassination strategy. Naturally, Kirk ends up in the middle of things anyway. In the end, Spock survives, Kirk resumes the center seat, and the ship heads into battle. Kirk orders the ship to move forward with weapons armed and shields up to confront impossible odds...and the story ends before the first shot is fired.

  *****

  3. "Sulu and the Sumo Sutra"

  The Enterprise rushes to the aid of Hikaru Sulu's cousin, Hatori, a famous Yokozuna sumo champion and Zen master running a sumo training facility on the heavy-gravity planet, Oonyo. (Meanwhile, Hikaru is in a funk because an Academy classmate got promoted ahead of him.) A monstrous alien warship stands ready to attack Oonyo if Hatori loses his match with the alien leader, Naga. The wrestling is psychic as well as physical and takes a serious toll, sending Hatori into a coma. Hikaru impulsively steps in to take his place and undergoes a mind-blowing experience: he and Naga battle as titanic astral forms, bigger than planets, wrestling their way across the solar system, then the galaxy and beyond. Hikaru is in over his head in more ways than one; he soon discovers that Naga's true plan is to pave the way for a psychic invasion that will hollow out the species of the Federation and replace their minds with those of Naga's clients. Things look bleak...at least until the cavalry arrives. The entire crew of the Enterprise, channeled via mind-meld by Spock, lends their mental energies to the fight...and Naga is defeated. When it's all over, Sulu realizes he shouldn't rush promotion; right now, he's exactly where he needs to be--with a family who will catch him when he falters.

  Naga has great power but no soul or imagination; he seeks to recreate his extinct universe by channeling his power through conflict with Hikaru...destroying Hikaru's universe in the process. Naga's plan almost works, until Hikaru helps him realize that this is Naga's universe, in an earlier era.

  To defeat Ny, Hikaru must learn the lesson that the greatest strength lies in patience.

  *****

  4. "Bairns"

  The Prine, a newly-discovered species with the psychokinetic ability to manipulate machinery, take over and disable the Enterprise. A Prine named Aura Proto switches sides, agreeing to help Scotty repair the ship's engines before the Enterprise can be used as a booby trap to start a war. While working together, Scotty and Aura become attracted to each other and quickly grow close; Scotty even tells her the secret names that he has given to his "bairns," his engines. As time runs out, Aura must project her mind into the engines to repair them...and she takes Scotty's mind with her. It's an awesome experience for Scotty, but it takes a terrible turn when Aura's mind becomes trapped in the engines for good. When the crisis has passed, Scotty mourns and renames his engines after his lost love inside them: Aura and Proto.

  *****

  5. "Sympathy for the She-Devil"

  Kirk and company look like bad guys when they terrorize a diminutive species on the planet Tiburon...but the Enterprise team has good reason to strike. Though Tiburon is strictly quarantined, Starfleet teams raid the world periodically to eradicate budding warp drive technology and keep the natives planet-bound. The Tiburons are products of the long-ago experiments of Zora, the infamous scientist recreated as a paragon of evil in the TOS episode "The Savage Curtain." Flashbacks reveal unexpected facets of Zora, charting her transformation from idealistic activist to disillusioned terrorist...while the descendants of her creations transform at nightfall into horrors that besiege Kirk's away team. The Enterprise team escapes but leaves behind a dark legacy of their own: though by daylight, the reverted Tiburons remain unaware of their dual nature, Starfleet's preemptive raids have sparked a vengeful mentality, making the heretofore harmless alter egos more determined than ever to reach space...where the darkness will unleash their savagery on the galaxy.

  *****

  6. "Hailing Myself"

  In the midst of a crisis within a temporal anomaly known as the Sieve, Uhura realizes that the distress calls she is now sending from the bridge of the Enterprise are the same messages that she heard on a subspace radio set decades ago as a child. The messages inspired her to
become a communications specialist...but she remembers that the story they told had a tragic outcome (though she never heard the name of the Enterprise through the static). As the situation worsens, Uhura has no choice but to broadcast the fateful messages, though she remembers that each one will lead her and the Enterprise closer to disaster. A surprise signal from Uhura's younger self inspires a change of plan, however, as well as a change in the direction of Uhura's life. Inspired by her younger self, Uhura discovers that the Sieve anomaly is composed of sentient fragments of space-time. She communicates with the fragments, convinces them to free the ship...and realizes that she might just have the right stuff for the Starfleet command track after all.

  *****

  7. "The Sphere Signal"

  Like Alan Lomax collecting roots music from the American countryside of the 1930s, Hunter Rheinhardt preserves the music of alien species, especially those that are disappearing. Along the way, Hunter has discovered a common construct that he calls "the universal song"--a harmonic pattern found on thousands of worlds--and he believes it has cosmic significance. The Enterprise escorts Hunter--Spock's friend and onetime music teacher--to a hostile world where all language is based on this song. Hunter believes this might be the song's birthplace, but he and the Enterprise team--while fighting for survival among the warlike natives--find that the song did not originate here. Instead, clues point to a strange nearby pulsar emitting radiation in extraordinary patterns. This leads to an incredible discovery: an ancient alien device that created the pulsar as a transmitter of the "universal song" in the form of radio waves and radiation. Enterprise crew members attuned to the signal take the ship too close to the pulsar, and the ship is nearly destroyed...but Hunter gives his life to save the ship, and the crew receives an amazing reward: a data burst including a map of other beacons located in the Milky Way and beyond. These beacons broadcast the "universal song" through space; this true "music of the spheres" may have been left behind long ago by an ancient civilization to draw sentient species from their homeworlds and entice them to explore the great unknown.

  FAIL CALL: Star Trek: The Manga: 7 pitches – FAIL or UNFAIL?

  SEMI-FAIL! The editor rejected four of the pitches and asked me to expand three of them into short proposals. I did as he asked, thrilled that I seemed to be getting some positive attention on the project.

  Star Trek: The Manga: 3 proposals – FAIL or UNFAIL?

  1. "Hailing Myself"

  (Set 3 months after TOS: "The Changeling")

  When the Enterprise receives faint, broken signals from an unknown alien species, Lieutenant Uhura finds them strangely familiar. The signals are a welcome distraction for her, as she's facing a personal crisis, fighting to return fully to normal after the Nomad probe wiped her memory (in "The Changeling"). Though Uhura has been reeducated enough to return to duty on the bridge, her memories of her past are virtually nonexistent. She has become discouraged enough about her situation to consider resigning from Starfleet and starting over.

  As the Enterprise approaches a heavily distorted region of space, the alien signals intensify, and the message becomes clearer: the alien Fendi are near destruction and begging for help. Ages ago, to escape the spatial distortions in the region--which the Fendi themselves caused by using the fabric of local space/time as an energy source--the Fendi shifted their planet to an inaccessible dimensional pocket extruded into another universe. The pocket decayed over time, however, and is about to collapse and crush the Fendi homeworld.

  Soon, Uhura realizes that she can't breach the collapsing pocket and communicate directly with the Fendi. However, she discovers that another signal is penetrating the pocket; thanks to a transtemporal wormhole, a young girl on Earth, decades in the past, is able to talk to the Fendi. Uhura is shocked when the girl reveals that her name is also "Uhura." By examining the little girl's voice pattern, Spock confirms his suspicions: she is Uhura of the Enterprise as a child.

  Thanks to Nomad's memory wipe, adult Uhura doesn't remember communicating with the Fendi as a child...but she learns from her diaries that this was an important event in her life. Two decades ago, ten-year-old Uhura used a unique subspace radio to communicate with the Fendi and help save them from disaster. This remarkable incident inspired her to become a communications specialist and serve aboard a starship. Unfortunately, the diary entries don't detail the resolution of the crisis...

  Transmitting back in time through the wormholes, adult Uhura is able to speak to her younger self. Keeping her true identity secret so as not to damage the timeline, adult Uhura passes instructions from the Enterprise team to ten-year-old Uhura. As the dimensional pocket continues to collapse, young Uhura relays the instructions to the Fendi. The Fendi hurry to build a device that will help free their world from the collapsing pocket; the device will work from inside the pocket in conjunction with a Scotty-rigged device working from outside the pocket.

  When the devices malfunction and accelerate the collapse, young and old Uhura work together and find another answer to the problem: the imploding pocket exists in a realm of fully sentient space/time...a "living universe." By communicating with the living universe instead of trying to breach it, the Uhuras are able to convince it to release its hold on the Fendi homeworld. This also breaks the link between grown-up Uhura and her younger self--but not before adult Uhura comes to feel that a vital link to her past has been restored. A key memory returns to her, and she decides to keep pushing to succeed instead of giving up and resigning from Starfleet.

  *****

  2. "Every Subject's Duty, Every Subject's Soul"

  A new security officer joins the crew of the starship USS Charlemagne. His face is unfamiliar, his name is "Ensign Roy Quinn"...but under the disguise, he's none other than James T. Kirk, masquerading as a "redshirt."

  The Charlemagne heads for the hostile planet Kraken, where the security team faces a dangerous mission: stopping the resurgence of weaponized reality-warping technology. As captain of the Enterprise, Kirk was responsible for destroying the original technology...and as a result, was forbidden by the Krakens from ever returning to their world.

  Now, Kirk has to return, but not for the reason his security teammates think. Kirk's secret purpose for going back to Kraken is to liberate a defector scientist, Dr. Shiwadi, who will only surrender to Kirk in person. Disguising himself as Roy Quinn is the only way Kirk can set foot on Kraken and retrieve the defector.

  Keeping Kirk's Charlemagne redhsirt teammates in the dark about this will make his masquerade more convincing. Only the Charlemagne's captain knows that Roy is really Kirk.

  As the Charlemagne heads for Kraken, Kirk works side-by-side with his redshirt teammates to prepare for combat. He makes friends, pushes his limits, and takes his licks from a difficult--perhaps incompetent--security chief: Lieutenant Frank Mitchell. Frank is the younger brother of Gary Mitchell, the best friend Kirk had to kill in TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

  The Kraken mission turns out to be a tough one. The security squad beams down in the middle of a civil war, and it doesn't take long for all sides to start shooting at them. Kirk's teammates take some heavy hits before he makes it through the heaviest fighting and slips away to Dr. Shiwadi's rendezvous point.

  Kirk enters Shiwadi's hiding place and gets two surprises. First, the supposed defector calling herself Shiwadi is actually a woman named Leyden, with whom Kirk had an intimate encounter during his first visit to Kraken. Stunned, Kirk reveals his true identity to Leyden, asks her what's going on...and gets another surprise. Kraken soldiers stride from the shadows with weapons drawn. The defection was a ruse to lure enemy-of-the-state Kirk back to Kraken soil, where he could be killed for denying the Krakens the reality-warping technology they'd developed.

  Kirk fights valiantly against the Krakens, but the odds are against him...at least until Lieutenant Mitchell shows up. More heroic than Kirk realized, Mitchell defeats the Kraken captors and gives his life to save Kirk. Mitchell dies without knowing that he h
as saved the life of the man who killed his brother.

  As the Charlemagne team evacuates, Leyden begs Kirk to take her with him. Being one of his romantic conquests has made her life miserable. She went along with the defection ruse because she knew Kirk would come for a scientist with the secret of warping reality...and she was sure he would overcome the odds and take her away.

  Kirk escapes with Leyden...and new insight into the lives and nobility of the redshirts. Back aboard the Enterprise, restored to his true identity and rank, Kirk discusses the experience with Spock and Bones on the way to the transporter room for an away mission. Before the door opens, Kirk says his time as a redshirt convinced him to request a field test of new equipment by Enterprise security personnel...equipment that could have saved the lives of his teammates from the Charlemagne. The door opens, revealing security personnel clad in helmets and body armor similar to those first seen on film in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The Enterprise security department will be the first in Starfleet to test this new body armor. "No more red shirts, sir," says one of the security officers. "You know better than that," says Kirk. "Once a redshirt, always a redshirt."