Mercury Mission History/2390
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SD 239001: Here Comes the Sun
The away teams on Deep Space 10 faced escalating troubles in addition to their search for the missing SCE crewmen when Eta Corvi sent out a coronal mass ejection. Although the Mercury and her support craft would be protected by their shields, DSX — with nothing but minimal power — would face radiation that would prove deadly to the away teams. The Mercury raced to get its transporters back online; the shuttle crews raced to find the away teams within DSX; and the away teams raced to find the missing personnel. Thankfully, all was well that ended well, and the transporters on the Mercury were restored minutes before the CME passed by the station.
SD 239002: Personal Request
As January ended, the Mercury’s away teams returned from the abandoned DSX with the mystery mostly solved, but with some unanswered questions — for example, the nature of Corporal Sian Douglas’s unconsciousness after an encounter with one of DSX’s cybernetic “spiders.” However, before inquiries could begin, Captain Aron Kells — reportedly at the behest of Starfleet — ordered the mission completely classified; officers were not even to discuss it amongst themselves. But before the crew could fully unpack this strange directive, they received a message from Eyas Wulfantine, asking for their help: his mother had been sentenced wrongfully to death on the Pythron homeworld , and he hoped that some of his friends would accompany him to rescue her. Nearly the entire senior staff showed up to take part in this unorthodox mission, and while they suffered from unforeseen complications without the benefit of the Mercury, a passing luxury liner, stolen Gorn shuttle, and other strange transports ensured that the motley group made it to Pythro by month’s end. Meanwhile, back on the Mercury, Lt. JG Alexander Richards remained in command and left DSX, where the Mercury had been unloading supplies, to answer the distress call of a freighter that had been caught in the gravity well of a gas giant.
SD 239003: Better Late Than Never
As March began, most of the senior staff remained off-ship on an unexpected and unofficial mission to rescue Eyas Wulfantine’s mother from a trumped-up death sentence on his homeworld. The rescue parties split into three groups and sowed chaos across the planet — sometimes overt and sometimes covert — as the group under the charge of Eyas made its way closer and closer to his mother. Meanwhile, the skeleton crew aboard the Mercury, under the command of Lt. JG Richards, the chief science officer, answered a distress call in the JB-437 system from a vessel that turned out to be an old Constitution class starship, the USS Saratoga, that had been lost and adrift in the gravity well of a gas giant in the Menthar corridor for one hundred years. Finally, Deep Space 10 (DSX) officially came online under the command of Commander Melitta Herodion.
SD 239004: Grand Opening
The rescue of Eyas Wulfantine’s mother was a success, but the senior staff of the Mercury was left with the not-so-minimal task of sneaking back to the Menthar Corridor. After this had been accomplished, the crew settled in around Deep Space 10 for some shore leave.
DSX had come fully online while the senior staff was in absentia, and many of them used the opportunity to explore, meet the new residents, and acquaint themselves with the officers who had recently been assigned there. Events of note during shore leave included an experimental surgery upon Lieutenant Commander Roshanara Rahman and the reappearance of the Ring, last encountered by the USS Drake years before, around a planet in the Omicron Geminorum system. Meanwhile, some of the new junior lieutenants bonded; Captain Quinn Reynolds discovered an old friend; and Lieutenant Commander Isaac Bale and Major Jacen Fanel, the Mercury’s two hardened warriors, discussed the noble art of fatherhood.
SD 239005: Journey to the Lost Library
As the Mercurys shore leave at DSX came to a close, the crew was stunned when Captain Aron Kells's accident of years prior aboard the Ring was repeated, and three different versions of Kells were combined into one: his sixty-year-old self. Though the crew, Starfleet Intelligence, and Temporal Investigations wanted to investigate further, the matter was put aside in favor of a larger mission: An installation had been discovered on an uninhabited M-class planet in the Beta Scuti system, some three weeks into the Menthar Corridor at maximum warp, that long-range probes believe to be a library of some sort, and one that may hold ancient knowledge about the dominions of races that once called the Corridor home — and, perhaps more relevantly, what happened to them. After their journey to the planet, second officer Isaac Bale took down an away team and discovered quickly that they weren't the only interested party. Aboard the Mercury, Lieutenants Alexander Richards and Mei'konda searched for patterns in the relics left behind by the Menthar and the other ancient races in the corridor.
Meanwhile, on DSX, Commander Melitta Herodion had newly assigned-investigator Lt. Cmdr. Msafiri Bakari look into some strange (and perhaps related) comm traffic while the Mercurys chief engineer Roshanara Rahman stayed behind by medical order and used the time to get the station’s systems fully online with the unexpected assistance of her attending physician Niccolò del Vedova.
SD 239006: Political Maneuvering
The mission to excavate and explore the ancient library at Beta Scuti proceeded smoothly right up until the away team discovered that they weren't the only party interested in the information the library had to offer: an independent group of mercenaries had also taken an interest. Meanwhile, back on the Mercury, the crew discovered the independents' ship when both ships suffered catastrophic power losses and the other required the Mercury's assistance to maintain her orbit.
However, the Mercury crew's efforts to save the other ship were in vain and, with the crew evacuated, the planet's manufactured interference cut through, and the away team returned, the Mercury returned to Deep Space 10 with a wealth of data regarding the history of the region to sort through. The crew took some leave time upon their return to DSX, though upon that return, Mercury and DSX COs Aron Kells and Melitta Herodion discovered that they would soon be joined by Federation Ambassador Lily Ventu, who had recently left StarBase 118 to begin her campaign for a seat on the Federation Council — though why she chose to stop over at the small and removed DSX was, as yet, unknown.
SD 239007: End of Days
After extensive questioning by Mercury CO Aron Kells and DSX CO Melitta Herodion, Ambassador Lily Ventu admitted that she had been asked to venture out into the Menthar Corridor with a modified troopship to “assist” with the incipient eruption of a supervolcano on 83 Leonis II. The planet was home to an agrarian pre-warp civilization, and while it seemed clear to the crew of the Mercury to what use the troopship was to be put, Captain Kells made the decision that an evacuation of a portion of the population would not take place as it would be a violation of the prime directive
However, two away teams were sent down to the planet. The first, led by executive officer Commander Harrison Ross, and including Herodion, Dr. Saveron, and Lieutenant Tato Zeme, was to examine the blind observation post of the Starfleet team that Ventu revealed had been assigned to the world, though Ross's team found no sign of the team upon first inspection and added their potential disappearance to the list of mysteries. The second team, led by Captain Kells and including Lieutenant Commander Roshanara Rahman, Lieutenant Mei'konda, Lieutenant (JG) Trel'lis, and Ensign Kotir Arith, landed the shuttlecraft Valentina Tereshkova within the volcano itself and beamed out to the planet’s surface to determine if any mitigation might make the eruption less severe.