— C. Pike - Blog Posts

if looks could kill, it would have been us instead of him. - Pike

The transmission had been broken, but playing back the recording what felt like a loop of times that had the message laser burned into her memory; and after conferencing with her reporting officer and eventually Captain Pike – determining this a grave enough matter that further investigation proved warranted. The deep, subspace transmission Nyota had received while in the middle of her Gamma shift just the night prior, was the gathering of Klingon ships on a fourth and distant moon of a baron gas giant located on the most remote edges of Federation space.

What Nyota had not anticipated was assignment to Captain Pike’s covert away mission. Uhura’s Klingon was widely unmatched by most save for Klingons themselves, and she had also trained in several forms of martial arts and combat, because she found this a more useful application of her time at Starfleet Academy than aimless running and toning on machines and programs in a gym; however she has never had to exhibit the practical application of either.

Though she was Starfleet to her core and she believed in their ideals and she believed in her Captain; what she did not believe of herself to be true until this fateful mission was that she could take the life of another being. Naive was something she never was nor had she ever believed the possibility unrealistic, but given her chosen field and how fresh from the academy she’d been - never would she have guessed herself primed for such a task.

The Lieutenant’s Captain clearly felt otherwise.

This had given her both a sense of pride, and even more importantly a keen and staunch sense of duty, because she did not want to give Captain Pike a reason to think he may have misjudged the assessment of his comms officer.

The away team was small, only four, and had shuttled to the small outer moon while the Enterprise lay hidden on the other side of the planet, hidden from Klingon sensors by the large magnetic field surrounding the planet as a result of ongoing electrical and ion storms throughout the planet’s atmosphere. Conversely, it meant the away team would be temporarily cut from communications with the ship.

This had been functional, right up until it wasn’t.

What they had come to realize the Klingons had discovered, on this miniscule moon, was uncovered dilithium veins in ancient and entirely frost covered mountains and were covertly mining the crystals while taking advantage of the planet’s magnetic field distorting sensors on long range scans. Their mission parameters were clear; assessing Klingon operations, obtaining evidence to present to Starfleet high command, abscond back to the shuttle to rendezvous with the Enterprise. What no one’s knowledge allotted for was the Klingons having set black market Romulan traps armed with trilithium resin based explosives taking out the two other ensigns assigned to the away team. The Captain was able to dispatch three of the four Klingon patrolmen, but the fourth had gotten the drop on Pike, and a strange sense of both calm and urgency gripped her as tightly as Uhura gripped her phaser rifle; Nyota began to open fire with an adrenaline-fueled-accuracy that she did not yield from until the only one of the two moving was Captain Pike.

There was a suffocating quiet as she looked down at a now lifeless Klingon. Sorrow wasn’t the sensation she felt, but hollowness followed by an abstract sense of satisfaction knowing that feeling was an indicator to her that killing and death were not something she aligned with outside of the most extreme circumstances; and now Uhura saw clearly what those circumstances entailed. Nyota came unfroze from her existential reverie at the sound of Pike’s voice, and she knew the gallows-quip was to meant exactly for that.

The Lieutenant’s attention was back and honed, she repressed the preceding moments to be in the present one, duty sidestepped her Captain’s words and assessed him up and down in search of fatal injury;

“Captain,” her voice steady as she could manage, “ – are you alright? The shuttle is just over this hill, but we have to go now … they won’t let us leave alive, not when they know we’re with Starfleet.”