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Escape from the Red Shirt Starship!
"Welease the Wogue Womulan Wesearchers!"
The impassioned cry, from the depths of a very strange dream slapped Syd Carmichael awake. He hadn't meant to fall asleep in the middle of the FawltyCon's marathon back to back screening of Star Trek and Monty Python films, but tiredness, like a silent ninja with an agenda had crept up on him regardless. The consumption of several pints of Old Huddles Persistent Offender beforehand probably hadn't helped there either, he mused.
Slowly, the room stopped spinning and resolved into a more definite form. Something was drastically wrong here. No flickering big screen, or rows of seating. In fact this was a rather small and dingy bedroom, or perhaps a cabin? Had he somehow got himself to bed without any conscious recollection of doing so?
Syd blinked again, really slowly and carefully. Something still not right here. This wasn't the Fulchester Ramada Hotel. Even their cheapest and most basic rooms were not as unluxurious as his current surroundings. A basic bunk bed, no sign of the upper occupant, steel grey walls, mysterious pipework and cable ducts of unknown purpose studded the walls. There was a flat screen set into the far wall from his bed. Syd gestured in its general direction and it blinked on.
A familiar Starfleet logo flashed up. Underneath were the letters forming the following words.
"USS Doldrum - Lieut. Carmichael - Duty Roster."
Syd gathered his shattered synapses together to try to reason out what was happening. "Hell of a joke for someone to play?" he first decided. But he looked more closely at his surroundings, and the more he did this, the more real that his situation seemed. His gaze settled on a chair, over which was hanging a Starfleet uniform, but it was not a costume for any prized position in that organisation.
Syd screwed his eyes up, then blinked again, very hard to refocus. It included a red shirt, possibly the least sought after job in the whole of the Star Trek universe, possibly even after that of the unfortunate personal hygiene consultant employed by the Klingon Empire.
From unseen speakers in the wall, a muffled squelch of intercom spoke. Syd could not quite hear it, but guessed it was something of significance, so he decided to play along. Dressing hastily in his newly acquired uniform, Syd stepped out into the passage from his cabin. Either someone was going to insane lengths of dedication in setting up a wind-up or prank, or this is somehow really a Star Trek starship. Only it didn't feel quite ike the idealised sculpture of rare alloys and exotic materials that you would expect from a favoured sci-fi franchise with a half decent sets and effects budget. The ambiance was a dull grey, the lighting seemed to cast dispiriting shadows wherever you looked, there was a downhearted background hum which Syd couldn't quite classify. Then there was an odour of stale week old 'something' coming from the air conditioning vents.
The penny really properly dropped and his heart jumped into his mouth, when he turned the first corner and encountered a couple of his fellow crew members.
They were wearing the same red shirt that he was, and so were the next half- dozen people that he encountered as well. Could it be, that this whole crew was scheduled for a premature termination or what?
Somehow, without knowing how or why, Syd reached his duty station. He took up his position, prodding at a control console of minor importance. No-one else seemed to be remotely interested in what he was doing, so unsupervised, Syd decided to find out a bit more about his new and unexpected world.
Fingers flew across his terminal. Firstly Syd asked about this ship. The USS Doldrum was one of a two-ship class, built immediately after the successful Galaxy class. The one area where the Galaxies did not succeed, was with the thorny mess-up of controlling their building costs. The administrators decided to prune what they perceived as Starfleet prolificacy here.
The end result was not entirely welcomed by Starfleet. To look at, the graceful saucer and sleek nacelles had been replaced by a dumpier bowl style construction with a huge and ungainly tank-like structure added at the rear of the ship. The unofficial but tacitly approved nickname for these vessels was the 'Armitage Shanks class'. It seems that even the designers were unimpressed with the brief given to them and subtly expressed their feelings below.
, . __.----.____
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Anything cheaply acquired and off-the-shelf that could be found was used in
fitting them out. So the unfortunate crew had to suffer frequent blue screen
of death outages under Microsoft's 'Windows for Starships'. The hologram
emergency doctor was replaced with 'Surly Unqualified Medical Orderly v.2.1'.
The phasers were recycled from earlier decommissioned ships, so it was said
that the USS Doldrum went about armed with her grandmothers teeth.
Once it was clear what Starfleet had ended up with, they went around to the office of the Earth Government's financial controller, armed with the heaviest clue bats they could find, and gently motivated that person not to do this again.
In the meantime, the Doldrums had been built, Starfleet had to make some use of them. Regardless of whatever was attempted, the class soon gained a reputation as unlucky ships. This was cemented in the first Borg incursion at Wolf 359, when the sister ship, USS Delirium somehow transferred a helm command to steer to Port, to suddenly veering 'Starboard' and fatally colliding with the Borg cube. The resulting accident being hushed up as a heroic sacrifice of an ultimate nature.
After that less than stellar combat debut, the partially completed hulls of the second batch of these misbegotten craft were broken up on the slipways, by the unusual method of bombarding the shipyards from high orbit with photon torpedoes.
Whilst browsing, Syd also stumbled on the reason for all the red shirts. In Orders of the Day, a thumbnail portrait revealed the captain as a pasty-faced posh boy called Smethers-Ludwig who stated in said orders "To facilitate a suitably dynamic and forward looking spirit for this ship, it is ordered that all crew members will wear the glorious red shirt of sacrifice, beloved of Starfleet's security and planetary landing party branch."
Syd shook his head sadly and reflected that a major improvement to their luck could well be achieved by the removal of just one man. Also that management speak hadn't gone away by the 23rd century.
Syd's fingers once more raced across his console. An external view of the USS Enterprise, the pride of Starfleet gracefully glided across his screen. It seemed that the USS Doldrum was taking part in a mission with that exalted craft. Then another horrible clunking realisation hit genre-savvy Syd with all the force of a wet blanket, wrapped around a sixteen tonne jack hammer.
What if this whole ship is going to be a redshirt sacrifice? He just knew something very bad was going to happen here soon. The Enterprise would rescue the situation at the end of the day, as they always did. A victory would be celebrated, but tinged with solemnity at the loss of their fellow crew members in the other ship. Which he was on right now!
And we unfortunates here would all be dead! Syd was not having this, and resolved to find a way to get off this ship, any way possible.
Syd's brain raced desperately, variously clutching at and rejecting a bunch of half-formed ideas and concepts. The most obvious one, of grabbing a hand phaser and forcing the teleport operator to beam him across was rejected. All too readily, he imagined that a ship's issue phaser here would misfire, the trigger pulling clean away and the gun breaking apart. Then he would be taken to the ship's brig to a guaranteed demise.
"Welease the Wogue Womulan Wesearchers!"
A rogue spasm of wecollection, sorry, recollection arced across Syd's synapses. Why it was only a short sleep ago that he was celebrating the wild excesses of the Monty Python years. Thus led, Syd started to search for ideas here. So, no Lumberjacks or dead parrots could help, but wait, a small glimmering of inspiration sparking to something bigger, yes, this might just work.
A short while later, Captain on the bridge...
Captain Nigel Smethers-Ludwig was a vexed man. To say that he had just cause even before this latest issue with one of his officers, was to understate the true position by a factor of many large numbers used for interstellar travel.
He'd had a reasonable career up to a couple of years ago, before the 'admiral's daughter misunderstanding incident' had marked him as the Starfleet equivalent of an offspring of Cain. This poxy ship, the USS Doldrum was used as a dumping ground for all their no-hopers, hard luck cases and general losers. It gave him absolutely no pleasure to interact with any of them at more than a very minimal and superficial command level. Now here was one of the prize idiots waiting to see him, a junior grade lieutenant reporting with a supposed illness that defied any rational description.
"Show him in", the captain sighed.
What happened next was burned into his memory for the (short) remaining lifetime he had.
Syd walked, in, no marched, staggered, gestured wildly. It was a parody of a walk, sticking two figures up at the art of marching and laughing wildly in the face of dance as well.
"What the hell are you doing man?! Stop that right now!" the Captain shouted.
"I can't sir, that's what I came to see you about." responded Syd.
"This really is too much, STOP DOING THAT!"
"Sir, I'm trying to explain, it's not possible, I think I've got a dose of the Corellian Marching Plague, its one of those rare alien conditions, there's only a few specialists within Starfleet that know how to treat it!." Syd entreated.
The unfortunate captain glowered at hapless sweating Syd, who was still a blur of random and frankly silly movement. "Is there nothing else we can do? I'd suggest we sedate you and let nature take its course."
"Sir, the sick-bay hologram is worse than useless, we all know that, but there's better facilities on the Enterprise, perhaps they can help?" And for god's sake, get me there quickly, I'm about to drop, I've got sore feet and leg cramps breaking out,Syd added in an unspoken fashion.
"Ri-i-i-ght! Get it out of my sight and get him over to the Enterprise! Let him be their problem!" the captain yelled.
Syd cheered silently to himself, "Thanks be to the Ministry for Silly Walks!" Given new heart by his impending reprieve from the red shirt ship of doom, he maintained a virtuoso silly walk, right up to the point of transfer to the Enterprise. Upon arrival there, he stumbled out of the teleporter and collapsed.
As Syd regained his breath and slowly sat upright, he caught sight of a monitor showing the ungraceful and frankly dumpy lines of the USS Doldrum. There it was, glistening in the starlight. Then suddenly a bright gout of flame flickered and grew, starting to tear it apart.
"Phew! Just got away from there in the nick of time!" He exclaimed.
Just then, the Federation's luckiest crewman, became the unluckiest man in the universe once more, an aura shimmered around Syd, eerily resembling a rogue teleporter snatching him away from safety. In the couple of seconds before Syd disappeared for good, he was heard to scream "FUUUCK MY LUUUUCK!"
"Well what the hell happened there?" A random Enterprise crew member asked.
Geordi LaForge carefully polished his fingernails and assumed the most casual and unaffected air possible before replying. "That's definitely one for next month's 'Starfleet Engineering Gazette.' What we've just witnessed is something called 'Snatchback'. It's one of the rarest most unlikely teleporter accidents theoretically possible. This is the first time it's ever happened in a live situation."
Waiting for the awestruck crewman to ask to hear more, not getting the desired response, but deciding to proceed anyway, Geordi added "What happened just now, the Doldrum beamed that poor chap across. Once that was done, they didn't clear him from their buffer. So their teleporter was still locked on to him, wherever he happened to be on the Enterprise and potentially ready to bring him back."
"But surely there's a lot of safety systems, and multiple redundancies covering almost any situation?" The crewman queried.
"Quite so, and they can cope with most situations, but a catastrophic power surge *could* override the safeties, therefore the teleport would operate in a rogue and unpredictable fashion, even as that ship was dying. And of course, the most telling factor of all to make a potential disaster an actual disaster was present, he was wearing a red shirt!" Geordi concluded.
"Anyway, I checked his story about this so-called 'Corellian Marching Plague'. It was complete and utter bollocks!" added a suddenly appearing Dr Beverley Crusher.
Then strangely, inappropriately, everyone laughed.
The End
CiH For Maggie Diskmag, May 2015.