Author's note: This story is loosely based on the original, now-defunct Federation tutorial. Obviously, some liberties have been taken. --G.

Stardate 86351.1
Earth Spacedock
Sol system, United Federation of Planets

Cosmonaut couldn't remember when he had last slept. Or eaten anything more substantial than a replicated energy bar. Despite the cutting-edge textiles of his uniform, which were supposed to be rated for up for 96 hours in the field, he felt grungy and unhygienic. In some vague corner of his exhausted mind, he was reasonably sure he stank, but, although normally a fairly fastidious man, at the moment he didn't give even one-tenth of a damn. If he did, and it bothered any of the people around him, that was their problem. They hadn't spent the last however many hours being almost continuously shot at. He had.

At this moment, Ensign Charles Everidge Buchanan, late of the starship USS Kanawha, had what he felt was a surprisingly short list of wants - fewer than ten! - and yet could expect to indulge none of them anytime soon. In order, he wanted:

1) A mojito.

2) A large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese.

3) Another mojito.

4) A hot bath.

5) One of those giant, fluffy terry robes they had at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

6) A third mojito.

7) A very dark and quiet room containing

8) A queen-size-or-larger bed with a closed-cell memory-foam mattress and at least seven pillows, no fewer than two of which to be those Asian ones filled with buckwheat; and

9) Twenty-four hours in which he was legally entitled to murder anyone who woke him.

Instead, what he had was an urgent interview with Admiral Quinn.

Life, he was forced to conclude, was not only unfair, it was so far from fair that the deviation could not plausibly be attributed to statistical variation. This was prima facie evidence of an ill-disposed higher power. (He would have to remember to run this theory past a science officer at the earliest opportunity.)

The admiral's yeoman looked up from whatever she was doing on the computer system built into her kiosk-like reception desk - playing Galaga, Buchanan suspected - and said, "The Admiral is ready for you now, Ensign."

Forcing himself to nod cordially - it wasn't her fault there was a God and He was presently amusing himself by giving Charles Buchanan a kicking - Buchanan squared himself up as best he could and entered the admiral's office.

He'd never been in Admiral Quinn's office, or indeed any admiral's office, before, and now, looking at the two steps he would be required to mount in order to reach Quinn's desk, Buchanan wondered abstractly whether it might be the better career move to go back outside and tender his resignation to the yeoman, rather than attempt to climb them. He supposed not, and so, summoning some last hidden reserve of strength, he mounted first one, then the other, moving his feet with careful deliberation so as not to trip and sprawl headlong across the admiral's desk. Or over it and into his lap.

Quinn was a Trill, white-haired and sporting one of the finest handlebar moustaches it had ever been Buchanan's privilege to see. Something of a moustache enthusiast himself, the younger man was currently rocking the slightly more conventional Vandyke 'tache-and-goatee combo, but he had occasionally thought that when he achieved a slightly loftier post than junior engine-room monkey aboard a Miranda-class frigate, he might essay something more in the walrus line, or possibly a Fu Manchu.

He wasn't sure how much time he'd devoted to this line of thought, but it was evidently a short while, because presently he noticed that Quinn was giving him a hard-to-read look that combined faint puzzlement and something else Buchanan was not currently equipped to recognize. Chiding himself for his lack of focus, he pulled himself together once again and managed to salute without losing his balance.

"Ensign Charles E. Buchanan, reporting as ordered, sir," he said.

Quinn returned the salute a bit casually and gestured to one of the plastic shell chairs facing his desk.

"At ease, Buchanan, sit down before you fall down," he said, not unkindly.

"Thank you, sir," said Buchanan with heartfelt gratitude as he sank into one of the chairs.

"So," said the admiral, perusing a document on one of his desktop holoscreens.

Buchanan could usually read backward - or even upside-down and backward - but right now he had a hard enough time focusing on big things like stairs and Quinn's face, let alone letters in non-standard orientations. He considered replying, "So," in turn, but decided against it. Instead he kept silent, wondering in the back of his mind why a Trill would be named "Quinn". He supposed it must be an English translation, like Polish people once named Kowalewski who were now called "Smith".

After just long enough that Buchanan had started to fear he might be unable to keep himself from falling asleep, Quinn closed the holowindow he'd been reading from and said, "I'm sorry to have to inform you that the Kanawha will have to be scrapped. She's just too badly damaged to be reparable."

"Mm," said Buchanan, nodding. He had suspected as much - he was still vaguely amazed they'd managed to make port, after all the bodged-up repairs and the combat on top of them and, oh yes, the Borg cube. Presumably they'd only made it in because Teerem would have had to commit some kind of Andorian ritual suicide if the ship had required a tow to Spacedock after making it all the way through a day like that.

"You're probably aware," Quinn went on, "that with the war on, smaller starships are in fairly short supply; most of Starfleet's production capacity at the moment is dedicated to the bigger, more capable platforms, so there's a bit of a scramble at the lower end of the scale."

Buchanan nodded, wondering why in the world Quinn thought he ought to be interested in that. It didn't matter to him what size ship he was assigned to next, as long as it had a place where he could get some sleep and a captain who didn't assign him the very first duty shift after he stepped off the transporter pad.

"Still," said the admiral, "for a man of your obvious talents, there's always a way." Leaning forward slightly, he pushed an isolinear data solid across his desk toward Buchanan. "You'll keep all your key people - after what you went through to assemble them, that's only right. Report to the shipyard on Level One to assume your new command."

Buchanan sat where he was, regarding the isochip with a slightly dumb expression; then he looked up from it and said, "... I'm sorry, what?"

"Ordinarily you'd keep the Kanawha," Quinn said, "but as I said, she can't be repaired. Even if she could, you'd be out of action six months or more, and frankly, I can't spare any of my captains for that kind of time."

The young engineer contemplated his superior for a few moments, seriously considering the possibility that the man either had lost his senses or was messing with him. Then, slowly picking up the data solid, he said as diplomatically as he could manage under the circumstances, "Admiral, I'm an engineer. A junior engineer. A very junior engineer. My job on the Kanawha was to bring the grown-ups coffee."

"And yet you're alive and they're not," said Quinn bluntly. "And you didn't stay that way by hiding under your bunk until the noise stopped. I've read the reports, and not just yours. Once you got the Kanawha moving again, you'd have been perfectly within your rights to run home to Spacedock. Hell, the book says you should've run home to Spacedock. Instead, you and your people dusted yourselves off, lashed your boat back together with spit and promises, and stuck your necks way out for Vega Colony. Do you have any idea how many lives you saved by doing that?"

Buchanan shook his head. "I was too busy to count," he said, more sarcastically than he really intended to be with a flag officer.

"Exactly," said Quinn, a faint echo of a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. "In this business, son, there are three paths to success. You can be good; you can be lucky; or you can be both. That third group is a small one. I'm not in it myself. I can count the number of captains I've known who were members of that club on one hand. You... you might be another." He shrugged slightly. "Or you might not. I could be wrong. If I am... "

Before he could stop himself, Buchanan finished the admiral's train of thought aloud: "If you're wrong, you've only gambled one ship and a bunch of people who, by rights, should be dead already anyway."

"Exactly," Quinn repeated with still greater satisfaction. He rose to his feet; Buchanan stared at him for a moment longer, then clambered stiffly, painfully, to his own.

His little half-smile not concealed now, the admiral saluted and said crisply, "Dismissed, Lieutenant."

"... Aye aye, sir," said Buchanan, returning the salute. Something - adrenaline, presumably - gave him the strength to perform a proper parade-ground about-face for the first time since the Academy, then get down the two steps without killing himself and start for the door.

"And Cosmonaut?" said Quinn just before he reached the door.

Pausing, Buchanan looked back over his shoulder, startled to be called by his Academy nickname by a flag officer. "Admiral?"

"Well done," said Quinn as he returned to his seat.

Now it was Buchanan's turn to wear the half-smile as he replied, "Thank you, sir."

He only got lost twice looking for the turbolift to the shipyard, which would have been reasonably good performance even on a normal day; for all that Spacedock was supposed to be laid out according to some sophisticated ergonomic-intuitive psychometric whatzis principle, he'd never had the slightest idea where the hell anything in the place actually was in relation to anything else. He'd probably have walked past it the third time too, except that Tallasa had reached the area by then and spotted him.

As he, in turn, noticed her, Buchanan felt a faint sputter of annoyance somewhere deep within him. Not that he was annoyed to see her, far from it. In the however many hours since he'd semi-inadvertently made her his first officer in the Khitomer's transporter room, they had become the kind of near-instant fast friends which naturally compatible spirits become under such intense heat and pressure - one equal temper and all that. No, he was annoyed because, despite having had a day (or two, or whatever) every bit as long and arduous as his, she looked great and he looked like he'd woken up under a bridge.

He supposed she couldn't help it. Tallasa K'thav was an Andorian, at least four inches taller than he was and with that deceptively willowy build a lot of Andorian women had; she kept her white hair tactical-officer short and parted on the left. He wondered how she combed it without snagging her antennae and reminded himself to ask her sometime. Anyway, she was Andorian, tall, and graceful, which conveyed natural advantages over his stocky (not to say dumpy) human frame, and she'd managed to score a clean uniform somewhere, which helped a lot; and she was a woman of a species where being a woman mattered, facial-hair-wise, so unlike him she wasn't in desperate need of a shave.

"There you are," she said, catching his arm. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to get here. Admiral Quinn's office commed me to meet you here twenty minutes ago. ... Are you all right?" she asked, looking more closely at his haggard face.

Buchanan gave her the witheringly sardonic look that deserved, his red-rimmed, fatigue-bagged eyes rolling slightly. Seeing it, she made an OK-fine-you-win face, conceding the point without saying a word. He chuckled and started for the turbolift.

"What's going on?" Tallasa asked as she followed him into the lift. "Are we being reassigned?"

"Sort of," Buchanan replied, then told the lift, "Starship Requisitions."

The Starship Requisitions concourse was as unfamiliar to Buchanan as Admiral Quinn's office had been; it took him a few moment's puzzling over the holographic signage before he figured out which of the people he needed to see. Then there was a queue to wait in, providing him with another opportunity to fall asleep in a public place, but mercifully, it moved briskly enough that this wasn't a problem.

"May I help you?" the lieutenant on duty asked when it was his turn. A pleasant human woman of around Buchanan's same age and seniority, she didn't bat an eye at his hideously disreputable appearance. When he handed over the isochip Quinn had given her, she slotted it into her console, read the resulting message on her screen, and gave him a broad smile.

"Oh, Lieutenant Buchanan, of course," she said. "Admiral Quinn's office notified us to expect you." She handed him a PADD. "Your orders. You'll find your ship in Bay 7G, and please accept my congratulations. Everyone's talking about what you and your crew did at Vega."

Buchanan blinked slowly at the PADD, then at her face, squinting slightly, as if she were hard to make out. "Er... thank you, Lieutenant... "

"Laurel," she said. "I won't hold you up," she said with a diplomatic glance at the queue behind him, "but congratulations again, and clear skies to you, Captain," she added a touch mischievously.

"Uh... thanks," said Buchanan, touching the edge of the PADD to his forehead in a vague salute as he allowed Tallasa to pull him away from the desk.

"Captain?" the Andorian demanded once they were out of earshot of the requisition desk. "Captain?"

"It's only a courtesy title, bestowed on a starship's commanding officer regardless of actual rank," he replied, absently parroting one of his plebe-year Academy instructors. "Can you get us to Bay 7G?"

"I can try," Tallasa replied. "And I know what it means, thank you. I just - that was why Quinn wanted to see you in such an all-flaming hurry? Battlefield commission?"

"Uh-huh," Buchanan replied absently. He was paying no attention to where they were going now, relying on Tallasa to act as the guidance system while he perused the information on the PADD Laurel had given him. "Personally, I think the man's lost it, but he's an admiral, so that's probably his prerogative."

"Are you kidding, that's amazing!" she insisted. "That's... that's old-school."

"Mm," said Buchanan, and then, "USS Trenchant, I don't think I know her. Nice name, though." He frowned, looking more closely. "This registry number must be a typo, they haven't been that low since the 2200s - "

"Uh... I don't... think it's a typo," said Tallasa slowly, pulling him to a halt.

"Wha - ... oh."

For a few long seconds, Cosmonaut Buchanan and Tallasa K'thav stood and just stared through the floor-to-ceiling window at the vessel awaiting them in Bay 7G. Her lines were absolutely unmistakable to anyone who had ever attended Starfleet Academy, or even thought about Starfleet Academy, or watched a single movie or tri-D-vision program about the Golden Age of Starfleet, or owned a Starships Through the Centuries coloring book as a child (all of which were things that both of them had done)... and yet she was so startlingly unexpected in this setting that neither one could, for the moment, entirely take her presence on board.

Buchanan rubbed his eyes theatrically, but it made no difference; the ship was still there. Without looking away from her, he handed the PADD to Tallasa, who flipped through the top document until she found a supplementary information page at the back.

"USS Trenchant, NCC-1723," she read. "Block II Constitution-class heavy cruiser, San Francisco-built. Commissioned Stardate 1284.3, mothballed Stardate 3948.7. Reactivated... today," she went on, incredulity seeping into her voice. "Reclassification as light cruiser pending. Lieutenant Charles E. Buchanan commanding." She regarded an annotation suspiciously, then added with a gentle punch to his shoulder, "Also, Lt. Laurel wants you to com her later, you dog."

He didn't seem to notice the punch or the remark; he took back the PADD without looking, his eyes still on the ancient starship.

"A hundred and sixty years old... " he murmured; then, slowly, he turned toward her, a grin spreading onto his face.

"Well, Mr. K'thav," he said, "I guess we'd better go round up your husband and the rest of our lost sheep."

Tallasa eyed him dubiously. "I thought you were exhausted."

"I am!" he said cheerfully. "But I can sleep on the bus!" He put a hand on her near shoulder and moved off with her down the hall. "First, let's go see if Ghemik will sell us some velour shirts."

"The Third Path" - a Star Trek Online Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
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