From: Jerome McKee (parakeety_at_hotmail.com)
Date: Tue May 01 2007 - 08:51:04 PDT
"DIASPORA"
(Continued from "Midnight Bloom")
--------------------------------------------------
Location: SS ASTRAL QUEEN
Stardate: [2.7]0430.1745
Scene: Bar
Not *the* bar, of course. Aboard Stellar Lines' luxury liner, SS ASTRAL
QUEEN, there were several bars, but this particular bar seemed the quietest,
and so it was here that Michael Turlogh Kane decided to have a drink.
Still twenty hours out from the Bajoran wormhole, the ASTRAL QUEEN gently
ploughed the furrows of heaven at low warp speed. Kane had been surprised
that so many private transportation companies had routes to GATEWAY station,
but he preferred the idea of turning up incognito anyway, so shelling out
some latinum for a ticket seemed like a good idea.
"Whiskey." Kane sat up on a barstool and put his cigarettes in front of him
- looking around surreptitiously, he was pleased to see other patrons
smoking. Must be why the place is so quiet, he mused. "Straight up."
His preconceptions of GATEWAY station had been shredded after a quick look
through Starfleet records. On the far side of the Bajoran wormhole on the
edge of the new Gamma Quadrant frontier, the GATEWAY space station was home
to over a quarter of a million people and one of the Federation's most
important military and commercial bases. Its position at the edge of the
only stable wormhole known to exist made it strategically priceless, and now
that the Federation was making diplomatic and commercial advances there,
thousands of traders used it as a stepping-stone to disseminating their
goods across both the Alpha and Gamma quadrants. The wormhole itself was
constantly open these days, so much so that space-traffic control centres
had been constructed at either end to more efficiently manage the
ever-increasing queues of shuttles, cruise liners, and starships (both
military and civilian) that thronged to use the wormhole. While still
manageable, the place was rapidly becoming a bottleneck.
There was all that, plus the fact that GATEWAY was, in many respects, the
capital of the Federation in the new Gamma Quadrant. There had been several
First Contacts with new alien races, and these peoples needed a focal point
for their diplomatic and cultural exchanges. It must seem odd for them, Kane
mused, that a bunch of outsiders from the Alpha Quadrant would muscle in on
their territory like that - surely there were several races who remembered
the Dominion War, and who viewed the GATEWAY as an unwelcome fortress of a
foreign imperialist power?
The place seethed with potential and possibilities. With so many souls
coming and going, it would be virtually impossible to completely police them
all - who could imagine what was happening in the darker corners of the
station? In a place where commodity was all-important, perhaps even lives
could be bought and sold like cheap trinkets.
"Sheee-yit! Gawdemmit! Ain't this hyere the purtiest lil' bar on this whole
boat!"
Kane opened his eyes, and like everyone else in the room, turned to regard
the obnoxiously loud fat guy in a ten-gallon stetson hat who was approaching
the bar. He was short, rotund, and ageing quickly, with speckles of white in
his blonde sideburns and eyebrows. He wore a hideous tweed suit, topped off
with a sparkling cravat and that battered white stetson. And he was getting
closer.
**Keep walking, bollocks,** thought Kane, knowing it was useless. The
newcomer was homing in on him like a buzzard on some Arizona roadkill.
He opened his mouth, revealing yellowed teeth, and the noise began again.
"Well, howdy thar pardner! Ya don' mind if'n ah sit mah butt right up hyere
aside ya, do ya?" Without waiting for an answer, he plonked his arse down on
the stool next to Kane, letting out a deep exhalation. "Sheeee-yit!
Kane paused for a moment to wonder at the myriad injustices in the universe.
There must be easily several thousand passengers on the ASTRAL QUEEN, yet
the cosmos had seen fit to inflict this little encounter on him, unbidden.
Why on earth (or anywhere else in space) did this sort of thing have to
happen to him, especially when he was minding his own business? It was like
his whole life was a bad sci-fi story, written on a computer somewhere by a
fat baldy nerd with a minuscule penis. Sometimes, he was sure that there
were a dozen people reading it and laughing.
And now Stetson Man was talking directly at him. "Headin' fer GATEWAY, are
ya son? Huh?"
Kane sipped his whiskey. "Yes." All five thousand passengers are, fat-arse.
And maybe they'll do us a favour and jettison you to make up some time.
"Isn't everyone?"
The fat man chuckled. "Ah suppose so, boy! What's yore business there, if'n
ya don' mind me queer-in'?"
Politeness. Remember your manners. "I'm in Starfleet." Kane knocked back
half his glass - the sooner it was down, the sooner he could leg it.
But something had changed. "Say, boy," the main asked, his eyes narrowing,
"y'all are Irish?"
That did it. Kane put down his glass and turned to face him, looking him up
and down like he was a dog turd. "So what if I am?"
"Yee-haw!" hooted the fat man, slapping his thighs and punching the air. "Ah
knew it, boy! Ah kin sniff out the accent at a hunnerd parsecs, yup siree!
Hooo-ah!" He held out his pudgy hand. "Herb Hicks at yore service - ah run
the Irish Pub on the Promenade yonder!"
Kane dumbly shook the man's hand. "Irish Pub?"
"Abso-darn-lutely!" Herb nodded his head so vigorously that his jowls
wobbled like jelly (or even jell-o). "O' Shaughnessy's Irish Pub - a lil'
bit o' the old country in the Gamma Quadrant! We's got lepreechins - "
"Leprechauns," corrected Kane.
"Whatever! We's got lepreechins an' shillaylees, we's got stout an' stew -
shoot, we's even got us an ol' turf fire a-smokin' in the corner! Yeehaw and
bee-gore-ah! How's mah blarney?"
Kane looked at him as if he was mad. Knowing it was possibly suicidal, he
decided to state the obvious. "Are you Irish, Mister Hicks?"
"Nope, ah'm from Louisiana!" winked Herb. "But that's ay-okay, because mah
daddy was Irish!"
That, at least, made it better. Kane perked up a bit. "I'm from Thomond. Did
your daddy live anywhere near there?"
"Hell no!" exclaimed Herb, draining his glass. "He was from Texas!"
It was going to be a long, long twenty hours.
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NRPG: This post is dedicated to every American tourist ever to stand in
front of me in the ATM queue trying to work it, or who surveyed all the
Guinness taps in the pubs and then said "Can I get a Guinness here?", or to
the fools who fall for fake "Caution - Leprechauns Crossing" signs on the
roads. Ireland - where the grass is so friendly and the people are so green!
I wonder will anyone notice the strange man who suddenly starts using the
quarters designated for the CO? ;)
Jerome McKee
the Soul of Captain Michael Turlogh Kane
Commanding Officer
GATEWAY Station
the Soul of Lieutenant Solomon Arn
Senior ACT Instructor
Starfleet Academy
"He speaks an infinite deal of nothing!"
- Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", Act 1, Scene
1.113
"Futile is resistance. Assimmilated you will be."
- Yoda of Borg
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