Voyager: Quarantine

Four Henries. Five Djuriches. One Thomas and one Lindsay. Eleven lucky people comprising The (second-to-)Last Mission before Christmas break at the Space Center (where they obviously take their jobs very seriously).

For the record, Graig, Ty, Mel and I were 5 minutes late, not 15 as stated on Mr. Williamson's blog. After Sara dropped me off at home, I didn't waste any time getting on the road to pick up Graig and I drove as fast as I could without sliding off the road or getting pulled over. We were all really looking forward to this mission and Melanie talked almost nonstop both ways of her extensive "expertise" on the Space Center (Ty and I kindly neglected to point out she'd only been on one mission). She talked quite a bit during our briefing too, come to think of it. (Much thanks to Thomas and David for letting her be a security guard.)

I hadn't thought much about what job I wanted before Saturday (probably because it was finals week) but I'd half considered engineer and communications. Then during the briefing when our flight director went through the jobs, I surprised myself by telling Sara I wanted first officer. I've been first officer twice before, once on the Phoenix and once on the Magellan. I loved it. The more I thought about being first officer on the Voyager the more I wanted the job. (So, much thanks to everyone else for letting me have it.) The other jobs were sorted out pretty quickly after Lindsay and Rachel "volunteered" for the two most stressful positions (ambassador and captain) and then Jon (our flight director) told us about our mission to distribute vaccine for a deadly flu to a Federation planet in quarantine.

There were three objectives: 1) Maintain the quarantine on the planet. 2) Prevent civil war from breaking out between the 3 annoying, arrogant continents. 3) Survive.

Our first big problem was the pirates that kept attacking, trying to steal the vaccine so they could sell it on the black market for big bucks. They were able to infiltrate our ship and take over the bridge, knocking us out and dragging us down a few decks where our ambassador (when she woke up) was able to talk the enemy captain out of killing us outright and keep her busy until we were able to steal back a gun and slowly recapture our bridge. (There was more to it than that, including the pirate captain being called to the bridge and stupidly leaving us by ourselves, and a brief time when Thomas pretended to have the flu, but that's basically it.)

Even after we beat back the pirates and locked them in the ship's brig, there were complications with our mission. Ambassador Lindsay spoke with representatives from all three continents on Tyrus 3 (the quarantined planet). All three wanted their people to have the vaccine first and all three were extremely hostile and arrogant to us and each other. One leader even threatened bodily harm and launched a ship (to attack us or go get the vaccine herself, I'm not sure which), breaking quarantine. We had to chase it, shoot it, and beam the leader aboard our ship before hers exploded. Meanwhile, also breaking quarantine, the other two continents beamed ambassadors aboard the Voyager and Lindsay had her hands full keeping them from killing each other (or shouting at the captain while she was trying to work).

As first officer, I was supposed to be sending status reports back to the Federation every ten minutes, so I had a giant digital clock sitting next to my computer. I glanced at it periodically, trying not to look but unable to help myself, trying not to panic that our time was rapidly running out. I was grateful Rachel seemed to have things under control because I was having trouble thinking clearly.

The USS Sahara finally arrived with the vaccine, but they'd been attacked by pirates on the way and lost about half of it, so we had to wait for it to replicate aboard the Voyager before we could send equal amounts to each of the three continents. We also had to inoculate ourselves since the Tyrus ambassadors had broken quarantine. 5:00 came and went. I started to relax. Maybe Jon would let us finish...

We were sending the ambassadors back with the vaccine when Jon's voice came over speaker: "Bad news. You are out of time."

He talked us through the mission objectives and convinced us we'd succeeded. (Do they always do that when you run out of time?) Even I was satisfied with the end results. We'd had just enough time to tie up our loose ends and there wasn't much else we could have done (maybe Lindsay could've used more time to make sure the three continents weren't going to end up at war).

I glanced at the clock on our way out and had a sneaking suspicion we'd been given extra time, a suspicion I gleefully confirmed with Mr. Williamson's Sunday post on the Space Center blog. The Space Center rocks. What more can I say?