Outties

Posted on Fri Sep 2nd, 2022 @ 2:35am by Cadet First Class Pallas
Edited on on Mon Sep 5th, 2022 @ 8:57pm

Mission: The Goddess
Location: USS Himalaya, en route to the USS Gladiator
Timeline: Pallas Backpost #1
850 words - 1.7 OF Standard Post Measure

The USS Himalaya was officially the largest ship that Pallas had ever traveled on. The thing that blew her mind, though, was this: it paled in comparison to where it was taking her: the USS Gladiator.

Maybe that wasn’t saying much, that this was the biggest ship she’d been on. After all, before traveling on a civilian transport to Earth three years ago, she had never left Ardana. So it wasn’t like Pallas was some star tripper, like Cadet Willings whose family was something like six generations of Boomers and Starfleet. Or was it seven? She smirked silently to herself as she looked at his sleeping face, somehow still smug even in unconsciousness. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember whether it was six or seven; it was that Willings’ story kept changing. These kids who grew up in the Federation-proper had it so good that they thought they needed to stretch out already-impressive family histories to be impressive. Heck, the day that Pallas stepped foot in San Francisco, she would have been impressed if the freckled geek said he had a second cousin who ran the roundabout circuit to Jupiter!

But that was three years ago. Three years of learning just how big the galaxy, not to mention the universe, actually is. Three years during which Pallas had moved from being impressed by it all to being, well, disappointed. The thing was, the Federation and Starfleet had all this technology and all these ships and still couldn’t be bothered to even start helping the Ardanans until about a century ago. That damned Prime Directive seemed pretty selectively “prime,” and much less so when another Federation world needed something, like Ardanan zenite.

“It’s necessary,” her professor in the mandatory course on Prime Directive Theories and Application had lectured with the unapologetic confidence of a man who had never watched adults starve themselves so that their children could eat, “that Starfleet Officers understand the unforgiveable, potentially timeline-changing consequences of interfering with the natural progression of other civilizations. One only need to consider….” That was usually the place in those kinds of lectures that Pallas flipped her PADD over to something that might actually be useful to her in the future, like the updated standards for EPS relay emergency bypass.

Disappointed, though, didn’t mean jaded. Not necessarily. There was a small crew at the Academy. “Outies,” they called themselves, cadets from non-Federation planets. An “Innie” cadet, someone who wasn’t Willings but might as well have been, once asked Pallas, “Does Ardana, which was part of the Federation and then left, count as an “Outtie” planet?” This had happened right before she knocked him flat on his back with a sharp left jab and earned herself a handful of demerits and time in the brig. The other Outties didn’t ask bullshit questions. They knew another Outtie when they saw them, talked them, spent time with them. Some stink doesn’t wash off with showers and some scars don’t get covered up by Starfleet uniforms. It was true that some of the Outties were jaded by the end of their time on Earth. It wasn’t illogical; there was a moral argument against the Prime Directive that no one could ignore. Pallas’s friend Milo, the child of a Reman refugee that had seen the worst of it, the hypocrisy got to be too much. He left with only months to go. She would never hold it against him; none of the Outties would. The rest of the Outties, though? They stuck it out. Knew that this was how they were going to make a difference. Not for the people who had been abandoned and ignored before. Nothing could change that. But for the people who came next.

“At some point, though,” Counselor Ww’ye cautioned during one of their final sessions, after Pallas had expressed her excitement about her posting on the Gladiator, “you will have to make the choice of whether you are a Starfleet officer, or you are the heroes you saw beaming down out of the sky to come and save your planet.”

Pallas didn’t take the doctor’s bait. The two of them had gone around this circuit many times over three years of therapy. Dr. Ww’ye knew that Pallas was still hanging on to the belief that those two things could be the same thing, but Pallas wasn’t going to admit it. Never had, never would. The last thing she was going to do at that point was say something to get herself grounded. “I’ve worked hard to become Starfleet. That was my goal,” she said with a smile so slight a Vulcan would be proud.

The Counselor simply nodded and jotted something down on their PADD. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to stop her from getting to where she needed to be.

“Cadet Pallas, report to Transporter Room 1. We are approaching the USS Gladiator.”

It was here. She needed to be here. She tapped her commbadge.

“I’m on my way.”