Are they out of their Vulcan Minds? Pt. 1

Posted on Sat Jan 18th, 2025 @ 4:30pm by Captain Shran dh'Klar & Lieutenant Inara Senn

Mission: Training Cruise
Location: Captain Shran 's Ready Room
Timeline: After Senior Staff Meeting.

Inara waited a moment in the Conference Room before going to the Captains Ready Room. There were things about this that simply did not add up.

Shran hadn't even sat down when the door chime rang. He knew who it had to be, "Come in Inara."

"Captain, with all due respect, are they all out of their minds?" Inara said calmly. "I remember Red Squad to have been this group of smug bastards. They lorded over us, and when Jake Sisko told the truth that it was no training exercise, I knew what happened."

Shran waited for the door to close. He stood by his desk rigidly, his left hand tapping on the polished wood. "You know, when I was at the Academy, several years before you, Red Squad didn't exist. If it had existed at the time I was at the Academy, I almost certainly would've been a member of the group. But that is moving towards hypotheticals in the past. I can appreciate the fact that your time at the Academy included dealing with Red Squad, and apparently those encounters were not always pleasant. As I have explained to my son Archer, who happens to be preparing to enter the Academy, life is full of times, places, and people in which you will find yourself at disagreement, and you either learn to live peacefully despite not agreeing on everything, or you allow yourself to become angry and bitter and eventually make rash decisions that have many consequences, both seen and unseen. I would hope that your recent past experiences here would inform you enough that you shouldn't let the past bias you."

Shran took a moment of silence before continuing, "The Sisko article was well written, but it left out quite a bit, likely because Jake had no choice about what was stricken by intelligence. The Red Squad Jake Sisko wrote about was filled with idealistic people, people that allowed themselves to buy into a cultlike mentality that they were untouchable. They paid for that mindset with their lives. Only one person of that team is still alive, and she is a lieutenant serving on the Titan currently. The Commandant of the Academy as well as several of the Admirals that make up the Admiralty are different today, and those that find themselves as members of Red Squad are equally different today. Don't allow bias, past issues, or just a general malcontent mindset make you treat these cadets as something they may not be."

"Bias? It is fact, Captain." Inara mentioned calmly. "Starfleet Command taking risks again, and sometimes I wonder about the end results, and if I were in Starfleet Command. I would be telling them how inappropriate this is." She mentioned. "Which I view it as most certainly inappropriate. Are they truly ready for this. I mean, The Planet of the Apes, Viking Gods, Temporal Anomalies. Iconian Gateways. It is enough to drive sane people mad."

"What do you find so inappropriate Inara? The fact that Command is saddling me with a group of cadets? I've dealt with cadets before, not a big deal. The only thing that bothers me is that I have a few cadets that come from Federation and StarFleet nobility. Then again, I have Deanna. And as for the readiness of all the strange things we encounter, that is part of being in StarFleet. We explore strange new worlds. We seek out new life and new civilizations. We boldly go into the unknown and explore. They can't learn how to handle those things without being on ships and experiencing these things. The Academy is like being in a safe science lab where you can make theories. Being on a starship is taking those theories and putting them into practice to see how things play out. Maybe the theory is sound, maybe it isn't. You don't know until you try" Shran replied.

"No, there's controversy about this, ever since Jake Sisko published 'Valiant down.' And he wasn't happy about Starfleet Intelligence being up his ass about this. We should name the squad something else. This is a slippery slide boss." Inara mentioned.

Shran offered a soft chuckle. Inara was forgetting Shran's past. "No slippery slope. They are still called Red Squad. You don't get to change their name just because you dislike it."

"This is not a controversy Starfleet Command should want. I will protest this, as they should have kept these old wounds closed. I won't press this issue with my cadet or command, nor make a fuss, but I still stand my ground. They were arrogant, egotistical, smug punks, and they went on a 'training mission,' fucked up big, and now they're dead. I do not want this 'red squad' to die like that." She shook her head. "Not again. This time, the Cadet I will train will know clearly what bad ideas are."

Shran shook his head. "You are placing your biases on all of this and making poor assumptions. I will grant you that the Red Squad that existed in the past was as you say, at times arrogant and blind to reality and took actions that got them killed. Command deserves as much of the blame for those young people's deaths as Red Squad itself. But you might want to consider a few things before you allow yourself to go off on some crusade. After the destruction of the Valiant, Red Squad was disbanded for the rest of the war. The Commandant of the Academy was relieved, and a new Commandant was installed. When Red Squad was reinstituted, no one that was made part of it was at the Academy when those Red Squad members you seem to loathe were. In fact, not a single cadet at the Academy was at the Academy at any point during the war; they were all children who grew up during a harrowing time for the Federation. I applaud your desire to put the cadet assigned to you through her paces. I expect the same from all of my officers working with these cadets. That doesn't mean treating them harshly and placing blame on them for sins of the past that they had nothing to do with. We aren't Klingons."

Shran remained quiet to see if Inara would respond. Not having a lot of time, he cut things short. "Look, I get you have issues with Red Squad. I get you have issues with Command. And I get you have issues yourself that you refuse to deal with. But these cadets are not the people you have issue with, and taking out your anger on them won't change anything. Now, I have a group of cadets to meet with, so you have a few minutes to go stew, and I am going to leave and meet these people and do other things that I am supposed to do because, well, last I checked..." and he felt his collar, "yes, last I checked I'm the captain. Now, off you go" he chided in a humorous yet serious manner.

As he hustled her out, he offered her a quote to consider, "If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought."