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File #7 - "Revolution"

"Captain's Log: Supplemental

It's been three hours since we lost contact with the away team on the Victorious and I have become increasingly concerned however we are currently unable to act due to widespread computer malfunctions which are now plaguing the ship.

Chief Engineer Lazard was injured during one of these malfunctions and is currently being isolated in Sickbay due to the same neuro-electrical signature that we determined from Commander Tempest has now infiltrated his neurological systems.

Nurse Onya has been monitoring the situation and the frequency of the neuro-electrical signature which has infected Lazard. It is her conclusion that we could be dealing with some sort of bioelectrical lifeform.

We believe that this lifeform acts like a parasite, using the nervous system of its host to control movement and basic biochemical functions however there is no indication that higher brain functions are affected.

Nurse Onya has begun to work on a way to purge this neuro-electric energy from the body of Chief Engineer Lazard.

---

Zant remained pinned to the floor as he watched the Warrior through the large windows of the Victorious's mess hall. He had been unable to move and left alone for what seemed like hours.

Muraco had taken Val'sha, he did not know where.

He tried to control his fear, his first away mission had not been what he had expected. He had been so proud when Captain Nicholson selected him to be his Chief Science Officer on the new experimental U.S.S. Warrior. He had been the envy of his friends back at the Academy, but lying here, he finally understood that ancient human proverb;

"Be careful what you wish for."

He was almost completely powerless, the ship's internal gravity pulling him down like an anchor in the sea. Just like the anchor, he was motionless and tethered to the floor.

There was a swooshing sound from the Mess Hall door and Zant felt the massive weight of gravity finally lifted off him. The feeling was somewhat uneasy at first and he coughed as the huge rush of oxygen filled his now free to expand lungs.

But he barely had time to celebrate before a hand grabbed him and pulled him to his weakened feet, quickly bundling him out of the room.

He felt so weak... so powerless as he was led down the unlit corridor of the Victorious and into the bowels of the ship. He had also made a quick realisation.

The shape of the person that was leading him and hurrying him along did not match the massive frame of Muraco. So was it possible that Val'sha had overpowered him and come back to save him?

He was barely able to lift his head to confirm this theory but looking down, he saw nothing in the darkened corridor, apart from a small device on the belt of the figure that had grabbed him.

It appeared to be some sort of Starfleet device, he could make out the definitive blue glow of Federation technology but not much more of that. He faltered, struggling to keep himself upright as the hours of crushing gravity had taken its toll on him.

Falling forward... he lost consciousness.

"What ship!?" he felt the words echo inside his head before he slowly came back to the land of the living, from his dreamless sleep of unconsciousness.

He looked up, hoping to see Val'sha but another face greeting him with shock.

He was human...

It appeared to be the face of a gentleman in his mid-thirties. A human male who possessed a certain compassion and kindness within his eyes but the lines on his face told a different story of the harsh conditions that he had endured. Zant had never seen this man before in his life.

He was wearing a tattered, makeshift lab coat, his blue eyes piercing into him like shards of ice from his homeworld as he repeated his original statement.

"What... ship?"

Zant mumbled in confusion as he slowly came to his senses before the human male before him panicked and turned to confront a sound in the distance with a phaser rifle before looking back at the Andorian.

"Look... I don't have time to interrogate you" he said, still clutching the phaser rifle as Zant, who was laying down, stared up at him. There was barely any light in the room, just a flashlight from the phaser rifle that cut through the darkness like a knife.

The man had a strange dialect to his voice that Zant had never encountered before, it reminded him of the traditional English sound of Captain Nicholson but it had a harsher tone with a more upward inflection at the end of each statement. He could have concluded that they originated from the same country, just different regions.

"U.S.S. Warrior" retorted Zant as he propped himself up against the wall, his eyes adjusting to the lack of light in the room.

The room itself had no windows inside it but he was lying right next to a biobed which the man was using for cover when he turned to check the room once again. From the faint, flickering glow from the consoles, he concluded that he would have to be in the Victorious's sickbay.

"W... Who are y-you?" Zant asked nervously, not wanting to anger the man with the weapon who seemed so eager to question him.

The man looked down at the Andorian and pulled out a barely working medical tricorder which he used to quickly scan over him. "Hmmmm" he stated. "No internal injuries, just mild dehydration." He reached down into one of the pockets of his tattered coat and offered Zant a flask.

Zant eagerly grasped at it, taking it and poking his finger inside to check it was actually water and not some poisonous substance. His lectures from Starfleet Academy on testing dangerous substances still rung true in his head. "Y-You're a Doctor!?" noting the teal bands on his uniform under his coat as he reached out to take the water back.

The man let out a short sigh as he propped the phaser rifle on the biobed and turned to sit on it. "Yes... Doctor Kieran Braveheart..."

Zant recognised the name from the crew manifest he had seen on the bridge of the Warrior when all of this had started. Doctor Braveheart was listed as the Chief Medical Officer of the U.S.S. Republic and had been presumed dead when the ship was presume destroyed.

There was a considerable calmer attitude in the room as Zant began to feel safer in the presence of another Starfleet Officer. However he continued to maintain his guard as Muraco had attacked them when they first boarded the ship.

"Who are you?" asked Braveheart as he gulped down some of the water that Zant had just been drinking.

"Ensign Zant, Chief Science Officer of the Warrior" responded Zant, with a slight hint of pride in his voice.

"Aren't you a little young to be a senior officer?" asked Kieron, which immediately cut down his pride.

"No!" responded Zant with annoyance. "I'm twenty-two!"

"Great..." sighed Kieran sarcastically. "Well "Mr Child Progeny", what brings you to the Triangulum Galaxy?"

Zant looked slightly confused. Had the Doctor lost his mind during his isolation on the ship, or was he under the control of the same entity that had force Muraco to attack them? "What?"

There was a moment of silence in the air as both parties seemed unsure what to say to each other, finally Zant asked. "What do you mean?" his blue skin seeming to shimmer in the lack of lighting.

"Wait... where are we?" asked the Doctor as he went back to fiddling about with the setting on the phaser rifle.

"Azure sector?" answered Zant, slightly confused at where this line of questioning was going.

The Doctor looked jubilant and for a moment, Zant believed that he might burst into tears at the sound of this news. "We... made it" he muttered to himself as he continued to tap the settings on the phaser rifle. "We made it home..."

"Look... can you tell me what is going on!?" Zant was getting slightly flustered at all the double talk. He had always prefered science because scientific fact was not capable of deceit. "The Republic has been presumed destroyed for twenty years and the Victorious has been missing for almost a hundred!"

Keiran looked back at the doorway into sickbay to make sure that nobody was there.

"You've heard of the Battle of New Alexandria" right?"

Zant nodded, he had completely forgotten to check if he still had his commbadge which he could use to contact the Warrior. He reached out, only to discover that it was missing. It could have been removed when Muraco took him out of his environmental suit.

The Battle of New Alexandria was a conflict above a remote station in the Beta Quadrant. In 2396, a fleet led by the U.S.S. Enterprise-E and the U.S.S. Republic unsuccessfully attempted to protect the outpost from a dangerous classified version of the Borg Collective. It had been one of the first major Borg conflicts in years.

The battle ended in the destabilisation of the collapsed New Alexandria star which was accelerated by the Borg vessel into a singularity in their attempts to create a wormhole and rejoin the rest of the Collective. The aftermath destroyed the station, half the Fleet and the Borg vessel but several ships like the Republic were never recovered.

Doctor Braveheart continued to speak, there was a deadly earnestness to his voice and a darkness in his soul. A void of pain and loss that Zant could not even begin to understand.

"The Republic was pulled through the singularity into the Triangulum Galaxy, with three other Federation ships, the Arizona, Quest and the Endeavour. When we realised we would never make it back home. We decided to build a colony for ourselves in that Galaxy."

Zant nodded, although wondering how the Victorious fitted into this story.

"After a few months, we encountered the Victorious. This ship was an experimental Starfleet Black Project. It has some sort of engine that allows it to jump between different Quantum Realities... Don't ask me. I'm not an Engineer. All I know is that it was built the same time as the Excelsior's "Transwarp Drive" and this engine is even more a lemon then that was..."

Kieron paused... he looked away from Zant, like he was remembering something particularly painful for him.

"The drive brought the ship to Triangulum. It displaced it in time as well. Time travel is shitty that way."

Zant gave a short smile as he sat patiently and listened.

"Well anyway... we thought we could use the drive to get back home and we encountered some kind of lifeform that overtook the ship and infected many of the remaining crew."

"Like Muraco then?" asked Zant.

"Yeah, it can't control people's minds but it can force them to do actions, like protect it. It seems to be some kind of sentient energy that I've never seen before. We took the Victorious back to our new home and it... well the ship used the database to get the prefix codes of our small fleet."

Zant looked horrified at the prospect of what the Doctor was saying.

"It killed my friends... it spread... took control of them and flew them into the local star. The radiation killed everyone on the Endeavour and the Quest... well... our Captain ordered the Republic to destroy it rather then have it turn on the colony. We tried to get a team over here to find some way to purge this lifeform... but... eh..."

"I watched it cripple the Republic and destroy its life support systems. It left the people there to die."

There was moment of silence as the Doctor recanted the dark chapter.

"It's become impossible to tell where "it" ends and the Victorious begins. It has become the ship in every sense... a sentient starship and it plans to do what every lifeform wants to do..."

"To reproduce..."

Zant's eyes widened in shock and horror as he understood the magnitude of what Braveheart was saying.

"Oh Uzaveh!" he thought in horror. "The Warrior!"