Episode 34: "Tribble Trouble"

4 weeks ago:
 
Captain McMillan of the Gibraltar would never forget the Carolina crew. It had seemed like such a simple mission: go to the planet, get one of the Carolina crewmembers and bring him to Starfleet for questioning. As it turned out, the mission went south bigtime, and several Carolina crewmembers came to his rescue. And yet he had his orders. Starfleet really wanted to know the secret of the sentient starship, after all.

He sighed to himself, once again sitting in the comfortable chair of his office on board the Gibraltar. He hadn't obeyed his orders, and Starfleet wasn't happy about it. Not happy at all. Next time, a very high ranking Admiral had said with a booming voice, he would need to do everything in his power to get his hands on either the Carolina or its crew. In other words, he'd better not screw up again, or else...

2 weeks ago:

Ensign Jones didn't often like his job. Making sure that all the right crates and containers were sent to the right ships, wasn't exactly what he'd call his dreamjob. He had never expected to end up here, at Starbase 38, in the middle of nowhere, sending cargo containers to ships like the USS Gibraltar here. Yes, his job usually sucked.

Usually. For right now he was staring at something that made his job far more interesting. The legs of a beautiful woman. And the rest of her was amazing as well. She wore the uniform of a Starfleet Lieutenant. And the best part of it was... she was telling him about her upcoming leave. He didn't pay any attention to the cargo containers now being delivered to the Gibraltar. And why would he, when he could be staring at this beautiful woman?

And that was how it happened, that one of those containers, which shouldn't have been brought on board, was put in the cargobay of the USS Gibraltar... carrying a surprise.

One week ago:

A subspace signal travelled through the galaxy, from an unknown point of origin, to the Intrepid Starship USS Gibraltar.  It wasn't meant for the Captain, or any of its crew. No, it was a covert signal, meant for one of the cargo containers in the ship's cargobay. Upon receiving it, the container opened. Out of the container jumped something furry, something small... and it gave a purring sound.

September 12th:

It had happened once again. Starfleet Command had received intelligence indicating that the Carolina crew was on its way again, and that they were close to the Gibraltar. Captain McMillan knew what this meant. No screwing up again. He would carry out his orders, to the letter.

There was just one problem. Well... technically it was a bunch of problems. Hundreds of them. Thousands even. And the name of this problem was...

"Tribbles!" McMillan shouted at his crew, as they all gathered in the transporterroom. "They're everywhere! In the corridors, on the Bridge, in my *tea*!" He gestured around the room, to indicate the nature of the problem. There wasn't a deck on board the ship where the pests hadn't crawled into. Even the transporterroom was occupied with the furry, purring, breeding creatures. "I want them off my ship, understood?"

Tribbles in the tea...

The crew quickly went to work... as quick as they could of course, without stepping on Tribbles. And since they were everywhere, that wasn't easy. "Sir," Doctor Lovevamp suggested, "We could sedate them. Use darts filled with tranquillisers on all of them."

"With this amount of Tribbles, that could take weeks." XO Fearguis commented. "I suggest we give them all the same treatment as they did about a hundred years ago, on board the original Enterprise." Kirk's encounter with Tribbles was, of course, legendary. As a Cadet at the Academy, McMillan had found these stories funny. The great Captain Kirk, up to his armpits in Tribbles. Now that he was in the same situation though, he found that there was nothing funny about it.

Tribbles everywhere!

The conversation continued: suggestions like holographic Klingons, lethal injections and simply ignoring the Tribbles, flew over the table, until the meeting was suddenly ended with a tremour that could be felt throughout the ship. "Internal sensors are offline." Lt. Weatherwax reported. "A tribble must have eaten through those systems." But that wasn't the worst part. "And it seems some sort of explosion damaged the warp engines."

Tribbles on the Bridge...

"Explosion?" McMillan was pretty sure that the Tribbles couldn't cause an explosion to happen. At least, not intentionally. That meant that something, or perhaps someone, else was behind this. "Commander Fearguis, Lt.Cmdr. Braveheart, Doctor Lovevamp, you're tasked with getting rid of the Tribbles." He turned to the rest of the crew: Desade, Weatherwax, Four of Nine and Debbydo. "You, get your tricorders, and come with me. It's time to find out what's going on here."

It didn't take long for McMillan and his team to arrive in Engineering, though the trip there could have taken shorter if they didn't have to dodge all the tribbles laying in the corridors. Engineering itself wasn't spared either: there were Tribbles everywhere. At the consoles, the top level, even near the - now inactive - warpcore! This, McMillan knew, was bad. Very bad.

"Sir!" came the call of Four of Nine, one of Starfleet's former Borg drones. "We have a problem." It seemed that someone was uploading a virus, along with different star charts, to replace the ones they currently had. If the Gibraltar could move, it wouldn't be going anywhere. These star charts were an important instrument when navigating the cosmos...

Tribbles in Engineering!

It was clear that all of this wasn't an accident. The Tribbles, the virus, the explosion... "Who could be behind this?" McMillan wondered out loud.

Surprisingly, Four of Nine had the answer. "A... Kelly Heron, Sir." Apparently there was a signature attached to the virus.

Kelly Heron. The name brought a shiver down McMillan's back. Lieutenant Kelly Heron had been a valuable officer on board the Gibraltar once. She was powerful: there were even rumours that she had the powers of the Q. She had also completely disappeared from Starfleet's radar. And, McMillan realised, she was one of the former members of the Carolina crew, too... The very ship the Gibraltar was ordered to find, just before the Tribbles boarded the ship. Coincidence? Probably not.

"Alright Kelly," McMillan started shouting, knowing Heron would be around here somewhere. If it was her, she wanted to make sure her plan went according... well, to plan. "I know you're here. Show yourself."

For a few moments, there was no response. McMillan frowned, wondering if he had misjudged Kelly. But then all of a sudden, a voice came from *inside* the warpcore. "Good evening Captain."

McMillan was in no mood for games though. "What are you doing here?" he demanded. "Are you responsible for all of..." he gestured around. "This?"

Kelly looked back with a surprised look on her face. "Moi?" she asked. "No, I just got here."

But McMillan wouldn't fall for that. "Oh come on Kelly. I know you better than that." He was about to say more, when all the Tribbles in here suddenly disappeared in a blue light: apparently Commander Fearguis and his team had found a way to beam these critters to a single room, where they'd at least be containted, until a solution was found.

Kelly Heron, the cause of all of this...

Their problems weren't over yet though, as Kelly showed. "By now your main computer will have accepted my uploaded star charts, I have no wish to harm you or your ship Captain, but I can't have you chasing us all the time either." McMillan frowned at her, giving her a 'I'm your former Captain, throw me a bone here' glance. And apparently, Kelly did. "I am acting on orders from Temporal division, Timeline alpha is skewed and only the Carolina can correct it." she explained.

But McMillan was no fool. "I am under orders to find the Carolina, and that's what I'll do, Kelly. Now, unless you can give me some evidence that the timeline is wrong, I will continue on that mission."

Kelly just smiled in return. "Then I guess we'll be seeing each other more often." she said, as she moved closer to the Gibraltar CO. "I am leaving now, since my job here is done. Not that there is anything you can do to stop me."

Sadly, McMillan knew that she was right. Internal and external sensors were offline, the warpcore was down and even if it wasn't, there was a strange computervirus and some unknown starcharts to deal with. "This won't be the last time we see each other."

The smile on Kelly's face remained. "I know Captain." she stated. "Oh, and I'm sorry for the broken leg. Don't take it personally." With that, the dematerialised in what seemed to be a Klingon transporterbeam.

McMillan blinked. Since Kelly Heron was a timetraveller, odds were that he'd meet a past version of her, who would do something to his leg. Not something to look forward to, that was for sure.

"Alright folks," McMillan said with a sigh, shaking his head. "Let's get back to work. We've got a computervirus to extract, and a warpcore to restore." At least, he figured, the Tribble problem was nearly solved...

Now, the next problem would be how to explain to Starfleet that he was once again unable to locate the Carolina...