Psychotic Academy

Hill sat back at the back of the lecture hall and smiled to himself. He’d made it through to Command School! Admittedly, he’d been here for eight and a half weeks, but he still couldn’t believe it. He was in the same room as some of the brightest minds in the universe, and, more importantly, he was supposed to be here! And, just to prove how good life was, when he had got into Command School, Cadet Graham had got into Engineering School. With any luck, he’d never have to see the other cadet again. As the lecturer droned on about standard diplomatic practices, Hill made notes on his padd, all the while dreaming about the great things he would do once commissioned. Someday, he would be out there, dismantling computers for a living, until, of course, the day came when Starfleet would offer him his own command, as naturally they would have to do.

 

Cadet Graham sat behind his desk, re-configuring the lateral control ducts for a shuttle thruster system. This was the kind of work he enjoyed. Work that didn’t involve human contact. And, while the work was exacting, he didn’t mind, and in any case, what did it matter if he got it wrong? So the universe would lose a few more humans. Graham couldn’t help but feel that was a fair trade in return for the acquisition of his skills. He made the final adjustments, and sent a test pulse through the system. Much to his consternation, the micro-circuitry controlling the ducts burnt out. Graham was about to strip the system down and start again, but then decided against it. Marking the ducts ‘operational’, he pushed them to one side, and began work on his next task: ensuring the matter transference protocols in a transporter system were free of glitches.

 

Hill and the other cadets in the class were packing up at the end of the lecture when the tutor called out, “I almost forgot! Tomorrow, at 1300 hours, you’ll be carrying out a role-play exercise in crisis management. You’ll each be allotted an engineering cadet to work with, and you’ll be responsible for carrying out the evaluation of a hull-breach on a starship. You’ll be required to make the decisions, and the engineering cadets will carry out your orders.” While the other cadets began to chatter excitedly about the prospect of an exercise, Hill was suddenly hit by a wave of deep gloom. He just knew who he was going to be paired with.

 

Graham had just finished repairing the transporter system when he received a message from his tutor. After the first few weeks, his tutor had given up trying to speak to him, and sent messages through the Academy Computer instead. The current message read: ‘You are required to report for an exercise in damage control tomorrow at 1300 hours, to be carried out simultaneously with Command School.’ Graham hoped that he wouldn’t be paired with that Richard.

 

The next day, cadets from the two schools assembled outside the simulator rooms. Hill waited as names were called out, and, in groups of two, cadets went off to find their allotted rooms. Finally, the moment he dreaded arrived.

“Cadets Hill, and… Graham.”

Hill’s heart sunk to his boots. Reluctantly, he moved forwards, was told to go to room 16B, and proceeded there, not even checking if Graham was following. Once they were inside the room, the door was locked, and Hill knew he had to maintain his control. More importantly, he knew Graham had to maintain his control.

“So, how are we today?” he asked.

“We are fine, thank you.”

Graham’s answer was curt, but didn’t seem to be indicative of any potential homicidal urges.

Hill checked the computer set in the centre of the room. It had two terminals, facing each other. He sat down at one, and turned the system on. Before he could do anything else, Graham yelled, “Don’t sit there!”
Hill jumped up as if stung. “Why not?!”

“You can’t sit there! I must sit there!”

“Er, why?”

“Because it faces Oldham, the spiritual home of Grahamness.”

“Okay. Right.”

Hill debated hammering on the door and pleading with the instructors to let him out, but knew that wasn’t an option. He would just have to work with Graham. The screens lit up, and a flow of information appeared in front of them.

“Okay,” Hill said, “we have a hull breach in the engineering section, just forwards of the shuttlebay. We’ll have to empty the anti-matter bottles into space, then evacuate the crew. Initiate the anti-matter ejection sequence.”

“No.” Graham stared at Hill defiantly, arms crossed. “You can’t make me.”

Hill opened his mouth to explain that, under Starfleet rules and regulations governing the interaction of the various service branches, specifically, General Order 22, paragraph 14, subsection B, line 12, oh yes he bloody well could, but then closed it again when he realised that quoting regulations wasn’t going to work with Graham.

“We have to save those people,” Hill said, “As well as the ship.”

“But you can’t hurt those lovely engines! What have they ever done to you?!!”

Graham stared at Hill fixedly. He couldn’t understand why Hill could even consider doing such a barbaric thing, let alone order someone else to do it. There were plenty of other options open to them if they wanted to save the ship. They could pump liquid nitrogen into engineering, which would act as an ultra-coolant for the warp core, enabling someone to go E.V. and fix the hull without risking a core breach if they accidentally fused a connection somewhere.

He suggested his plan to Hill.

“Right. And the crew?”

Graham looked blank for a few seconds, before saying, “What about them?”

“What happens to them when you pump liquid nitrogen through engineering?”

“Oh. They all die.”

“I think we’ll stick with my plan. That’s an order, by the way.”

Reluctantly, Graham began the sequence to eject the anti-matter bottles into space, while Hill issued orders to a non existent crew to evacuate engineering. Then, he found he had a problem. The breach meant the starboard corridors leading from the shuttlebay couldn’t be used, and the emergency bulkheads along the port side were jammed and couldn’t be raised. Hill frowned, then sent orders for them to evacuate in the shuttles. They could always be picked up later. The message soon returned ‘NO POWER TO BAY DOORS. TRAPPED.’

While Hill was pondering that one, Graham shrieked “Oh no!”

“What?”

“Those adorable engines will overload in ten minutes!!!!!!”

“And then what?!!!”

“The entire ship will be annihilated. To think of all that technology, immolated in one hideous instant!!! Oh, woe is me…”

Ignoring Graham for a second, Hill realised that they had a problem. Everyone in the saucer was safe; they could just separate the hulls. But all those in engineering would perish unless a way could be found to rescue them.

“Have you ejected the anti-matter yet?”

“It can’t be done. We don’t have enough power available.”

“Fabulous.”

“If we pump…”

“Shuttup!!!!”

Graham assumed a hurt expression, and stared fixedly at his controls. He couldn’t see anything wrong with his solution. So they’d lose a few crew. But the technology would be saved.

Meanwhile, Hill had the glimmerings of an answer. It was unorthodox, but it was the only solution he could envisage that would get him a passing grade and Graham’s co-operation.

“Which are the most resilient systems on the ship?”

Graham went into auto-pilot as he answered. “Defence subsystems are all designed to resist power spikes and energy fluxes that might be expected in battle above and beyond the normal tolerances.”

“Right. Thought so. Start channelling the excess energy from the engine overload into the defence circuitry, specifically the phasers. When it gets high, fire phasers to bleed the power off.”

Graham set to work, unhappy at the thought that the phaser circuitry could overload, but happy that Hill was thinking about the engines first. Finally, he thought, a command officer with his priorities right!

Hill then gave the next part of his scheme serious thought. He still had to evacuate the thirty or so crewmen that his computer told him were stuck in the shuttlebay. According to the readout, the hull breach was vertical one, and that about two metres worth of the corridor bulkhead was open to space. Over the entire side of the ship, that was a serious problem, but for one corridor…

The corridor was twenty metres long, and, as it led from the shuttlebay, it had an airlock at either end, with manual controls that would be unaffected by the power blackout.

“Estimate system failure in fifteen minutes due to overload. And we’re going to stop long before that happens,” Graham said threateningly.

Hill had bought himself an extra few minutes. Now he had to hope his insane plan would work. He had a nasty feeling he was going to get carpeted over this one. Typing in a message to the fictitious crewman in the shuttlebay (actually a senior officer sitting at a far more comfortable desk than he was), Hill waited to see what the reaction was. It very quickly appeared.

ARE YOU MAD?!

Oh dear. Hill repeated his orders. This time, the answer was less bellicose, but still not good.

YOU’LL GET US ALL KILLED.

Now Hill lost his patience. Quickly, he typed: YOU DON’T HAVE ANY OPTION. SAUCER SEPARATION TAKES PLACE IN TEN MINUTES. YOU’VE GOT THAT LONG. GET ON WITH IT!!!!

Graham, who had configured an area of his monitor to keep an eye on what Hill was doing, abruptly said, “You’re going to separate the ship! But how are we going to save the engines?”

“If you can think of a way to save the engines, then by all means tell me,” was Hill’s terse reply.

By now, he figured, the senior officer reading his messages would have informed the Commodore running the simulation that one of the cadets had flipped. Specifically, that that cadet was ordering crewmen to hold their breath, run down a corridor with no atmosphere, then enter an airlock and get out the other side. Hill was fairly certain that it was feasible, but it was at the very least off-the-wall. He watched the coloured indicators showing live crewmen slowly shift across from the shuttlebay down the corridor to the rest of the ship, and from there to safety. They were going across in batches of three, which was a good idea. At this rate, they’d all be out before the critical moment was reached.

Graham, who had taken Hill’s last comment to heart, was frantically trying to find a way to save the ship’s engines from melt-down. He was already bleeding some of the excess power off through the phaser arrays, but they could only take a fraction of the power being produced by the runaway intermix chamber. The rest of the power was still there, and soon it would burst through the chamber’s confines and destroy the ship. Unless…

Graham considered an option. If he could direct the force of the overload towards the hatch at the bottom of the intermix chamber, the one that had earlier jammed and prevented him from ejecting the anti-matter bottles, then maybe that would destroy the hatch, and the overload would escape into space. It felt bad to be plotting the destruction of technology, but Graham convinced himself that it was all for the best. The Vulcans had a saying for it, didn’t they? ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.’ In this case, he would have to sacrifice the hatch in the interests of preserving the rest of the ship.

He got to work, adjusting the field set up with the limited computer power he had available, so that there was no shielding at the base of the chamber, and boosted shields everywhere else. The reaction began to spread out down the chamber, towards the base. Structural stress indicators began to light up, telling Graham that the force of the reaction was pressing against the hatch.

“Begin saucer-separation sequence,” Hill said.

“NO! I’ve almost saved the engines!!”

“What?!”

Hill left his seat and stood over Graham’s shoulder. Graham flinched at the proximity, but carried on working. He watched in satisfaction as the monitors reported that the hatch had been atomised and the force of the overload spent itself in space. Hill’s jaw dropped, and, at that moment, the simulator room door opened, and they were motioned outside.

All the other cadets were standing in the corridor waiting for them, but they were taken straight past them, up to Admiral Forster’s office. The Admiral didn’t look too pleased.

“Oh, crumbs! I can’t believe I’m having to deal with this! Do you two have any idea what you’ve done?”

Seeing as Graham was out there somewhere, Hill replied, “Erm, we responded to a simulation as best we could.”

“You spent the first five minutes bickering, by which time most of your class-mates had already finished! You then proceeded to deal with a problem that shouldn’t have come up in the first place with… highly unorthodox methods.”

“Ah, that,” Hill said with a weak laugh.

“Yes, that! Cadet Hill, do you seriously expect me to believe that your best solution to that problem was to risk thirty crewmen’s lives by telling them to run down a corridor open to hard vacuum holding their breaths?”

“I appreciate it was unusual, Admiral, but I felt that was the only way to get that crew out of there. Besides…”

“You mean to tell me that you didn’t think of ordering them out through the Jefferies tubes?”

“Oops.”

“D’you see the logic in that? You could have got them out through the Jefferies tubes without risking the lives of any of them. And as for you, Cadet Graham…”

Graham was still gazing into space. At the mention of his name, he looked around startled for a few seconds before focussing on the Admiral.

“Hmm?”

“When a starship is faced with immediate destruction, do you mean to tell me that your instinctive response is to risk the crew in an attempt to save the engines?!!!”

“Yes.”

Admiral Forster was temporarily at a loss for words. “Didn’t it occur to you that it might be preferable to put the lives of the crew ahead of the existence of the engines?”

Graham’s face went a dangerous shade of purple. “How dare you suggest that the engines of a starship are in some way inferior to its crew!!! The engines are a ship’s life-blood, its raison d’etre, its…”

“Yes, thank you, cadet. Well, despite what you two did, I am sufficiently impressed by your actions to let you off. This time. But in future, Cadet Hill, try the simple solutions before you go for the complicated ones, and Cadet Graham, I suggest you go and think about the value of life. Dismissed.”

The two cadets marched out and returned to their class, each feeling unjustly put upon.