“How did you know to ssshoot the sssuit?” Boots hissed as he prodded the smoldering remains of the suit. Its ashes still glowed with the residual energy of the assault, but as the heat dissipated the embers faded.
Upon unleashed the full force of their DPS on the suit, the “supervisor” monster crumbled without a fight. Every point of damage done to the suit transferred and amplified the boss until it was rendered into a twitching pile of wreckage in the middle of the floor. After it collapsed, Helvetica, Boots, and Rocky-Road kicked its pieces around the room and into the hallway for good measure.
It wasn’t coming back.
“Something the cook said,” Helvetica replied. She looked around the manager’s office. “I suppose this means we control the ship now?”
Rocky-Road swished her tail and sauntered over to the desk. With a hmph she swept some of the debris from the fight off the table and onto the floor revealing a flat screen computer embedded in the wood paneling. She tapped the surface a few times eliciting a series of chirps. She frowned and looked to her tricorder.
“Captain,” she said. “I believe the system is requesting a new superuser. It seems to have indicated an entity in this room should submit a name.” She swept her tricorder over Boots and Helvetica. “It’s indicating you.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Helvetica said as she walked over and looked at the screen. In the dimly lit office she could clearly make out the request for her to identify herself and then choose a name for the ship.
“Captain Helvetica,” she said aloud. The system acknowledged her name and then displayed a diagram of the Borg Sphere with a tag sticking off the side waiting for a name.
Helvetica glanced around the room, her eyes drifted over Boots—his gigantic form, swashbuckler weapons, leather outfit, and lizard-features—and Rocky-Road—her feline eyes flowing in the poor lighting and tail swishing expectantly behind her. The adventure had been interesting, especially for the beginning of a video game. She looked at the still-smoldering remains of the suit in the chair and then her eyes were drawn to the portcullis window through which they witnessed the destruction of the U.S.S. Oxford.
“I think that this ship, and the Borg, have really been a missed opportunity,” she said. “I would like to name the ship: Missed Opportunity.”
An affirmative sound emitted from the desk.
“And fix the lights.” The green, dimly light room changed atmosphere dramatically moments later. The lights came up several lumens, but not enough to hurt her eyes, however enough to give contrast and definition to the walls, table, and floor.
“Operator Helvetica of Sphere 551 of 600 adjunct 3 identified. Designation Missed Opportunity accepted. Crew is on standby. Please input operating parameters.”
“Let’s go home,” Helvetica said. “Initiate transwarp to Earth Space Dock.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Rocky-Road and Boots said simultaneously.
* * *
The ship shuddered as the transwarp drive roared to life, building the capacitance necessary to open a rift in the fabric of subspace. The interstice, a swelling of particle effects barely larger than the Missed Opportunity, expanded in front of the spacecraft like a cat’s pupil opening into an empty curved non-space. Pixelated bubbles effervesced over the front of the hull as the ship slid towards the opening pushing out of space-time when the drive triggered and the ship catapulted into the portal—
–to re-emerge amid hundreds of other ships all parked haphazardly outside Earth Space Dock.
The massive wing of a Scimitar-class Dreadnought Warbird creaked as it tilted away from the Missed Opportunity as it emerged from transwarp. Her arrival shoved several smaller ships out of the way, a Defiant-class was squished up against a Tholian Recluse, and three Galaxy-X-class Dreadnoughts all slid serenely away after being displaced, only to start slow, languorous turns to get a look at what just arrived.
“What the hell? How did you get a Borg Sphere?” asked one of the Galaxy-X.
“It’s a holoemitter,” another ship said.
“Dat ass.”
“Borg lock box confirmed!”
“That’s it,” the Scimitar-class ship’s captain said. “STO is dead. I’m quitting.”
The author Helvetica writes the Helvetica Voyage, Helvetica Venture, and Hellvetica Chronicles for Vox Ex Machina and proudly supports the works of Kyt Dotson, whose writing includes Mill Avenue Vexations (a gothic webserial featuring cab driver Vex Harrow), Black Hat Magick, and Helljammer and invites you to check out the novel, The Specter in the Spectacles by Kyt Dotson.
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