No Rest for the Wicked (Mercury)
| USS Mercury | ||
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 INACTIVE STATUS | ||
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Mission Summary
Part 1
- Stardate 239011
Following their efforts at the Menthar Anchorage, the Mercury’s crew relaxed in a holodeck scenario of the fictional "Stardust Fair" designed by acting CO Harrison Ross. However, they did not count on the return of Captain Kells, very recently returned from his trial on Deep Space 10. Kells called out Commander Ross, Lieutenant Commanders Rahman, and Dr. Saveron and dressed them down for holding a celebration without finishing their mission and this — along with the the captain’s meetings with several others — sparked and then fueled rampant rumors of what may have happened during his trial.
Meanwhile, Ross, Rahman, and Saveron were tasked with preparing the ship to follow up on the most promising lead they’d discovered at the Anchorage: the independent trader FTS Treasure Sprite, which was thought to have information about the supposed Iconian gateway. And though the Mercury found the Treasure Sprite quickly, the away team led over by Ross found little information and only corpses; assistant CMO Kotir Arith removed one of these to the Mercury’s morgue for further study. However, under the leadership of Lt. Cmdr. Rahman, the ship’s historians Captain Harku Kvitova and Crewman Ivani Gupta determined a useful search criterion for the gateway; the crew soon tracked it to the second planet of the Nygel system. Once there, Commander Ross set out again with an away team — but shortly after beam down, the Mercury had company: A Keldon-class Cardassian warship equipped with an experimental cloaking device. With one shot, the Cardassian ship disabled the Mercury and thereafter tractored it, threatening the crew with death if they didn’t provide details on the gateway.
Part 2
- Stardate 239012
The Mercury disabled momentarily the tractor beam of the Cardassian warship and outran their pursuer to one of the Nygel system’s stars where, using its metaphasic shielding, the ship and crew were able to hide for a time. However, the Cardassians were not deterred, and as a last-ditch maneuver to try and convince the Cardassians that the ship had been destroyed, the Mercury’s crew evacuated and then jettisoned the lower sensor module to simulate the ship’s destruction. This still didn’t put off the warship, and so the Mercury was forced to trigger a solar event and try and damage the warship at the expense of their warp core. Though the warship was not destroyed, it was badly damaged.
Meanwhile, on the ravaged surface of Nygel II, the away team quickly encountered trouble as they searched for the Iconian gateway. The Orion Pasht-Nos, skipper of the free trader Treasure Sprite—the same ship that had led the Mercury to Nygel—ambushed and captured two members of the away team after the surface had caved in abruptly. Captain Kells set off in a shuttle with Lieutenant Jade Shryker and Ensign Sahriv to retrieve the away team, and just in the nick of time, rescued the team before the structure was destroyed in a massive cave in.
Before the Cardassian warship or the Mercury could gather their wits, two Cardassian Galor-class warships, under the political call of the Detapa Council majority and who disagreed with the assignment of the ship that had attacked the Mercury, arrived to investigate. With them was the Galaxy-class USS Garuda, newly arrived in the Menthar Corridor to assist with the Mercury’s mission. The attacking warship turned and fled while the Garuda and her escorts retrieved the Mercury and towed her to DSX. The Mercury was then returned to Federation space for a six-month overhaul, and her senior staff was reassigned to the Garuda, under Captain Cassandra Egan Manno following Aron Kells’s disappearance with one of the Mercury’s shuttles.