A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, mirrored and overlaid upon itself
“But, Captain, we're just five hours from finally being in the Solar System – all they had to do was not bring us the foolishness for just five more hours and they would have been safe!”
Lieutenant Commander James Doohan was flabbergasted in engineering, while Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson had his head down on his desk quietly laughing, tickled and unbothered, and Commander Helmut Allemande was on the bridge listening to it all go down and doubtless praying silently because someone had truly run out the margin of safety in all aspects of his life.
That is, the person in question had gotten into real trouble, remembered who had helped him out of a jam 45 years earlier, and made the mistake of calling Commodore Wilhelm Allemande to remind him, as if the commodore owed him another favor.
This was the mistake that had Lt. Cmdr. Doohan absolutely flabbergasted, with the other mistake of messing with the Wheb Collective being secondary because we did not have experience with those results although we knew their fleets were mighty. Cdre. Allemande, on the other hand, was a present experience.
“That's a whole YOU problem! I don't care what you remember me doing 45 years ago – that means you are 45 years older and an even bigger fool! No one is going to move a single fleet resource for you from where I am – I'm five minutes out of retirement, two seconds from permanent retirement because you are running my blood pressure up, and in Near-Earth, most importantly. What do you expect me to do – run out there at Warp 99 to save your old fool tail? You don't even have sense enough to call your frontier regional for help, trying to not let people know how dumb you are and not even understanding your space dust is about to testify because you wasted this much time! You better call the Wheb Collective fleet commanders and apologize and tell them you will respect their space however way they want before they come collect you – get off this line so you have time to do that, notify your next of kin, and jot down a will!”
The Wheb Collective was a small but fiercely independent consortium of planets that bordered the space of the human-led consortium – they had been eyed for conquest by a few of our galactic rivals, but even the strongest of them had decided that tactically, it wasn't worth the trouble. Their fleets were like communal spiders at work, complete with devastating techniques to deploy warp-disrupting and energy-dampening fields around their enemies. Even getting the best weapons through those fields was difficult, so what they did was essentially wrap a ship up, finally getting their fields on the shields and draining them, then onto the hull and draining the whole ship. In simulations, even the fleet flagship struggled in overcoming a reasonably large Wheb Collective fleet, and, 20 percent of the time, had been outright defeated!
Fortunately, the Wheb Collective had no desire for conflict except when their sovereignty was violated. Officially, the fleet never permitted this … but every now and again, some commercial magnate would get full of himself and try to run an unauthorized “shortcut” through Wheb Collective space. This never ended well.
“I guess it does take the same level of intelligence to tick off the Wheb Collective as it does to tick off Wilhelm Allemande,” Lt. Cmdr. Doohan at last concluded.
Nonetheless, though he blustered hard, Cdre. Allemande did hustle across the bridge to my ready room where Adm. Banneker-Jackson and I were talking about docking and debriefing for both my crew and that of the Farragut that we were towing. He referred the matter to Adm. Banneker-Jackson, who contacted the frontier regional commander.
Unfortunately, that happened to be full fleet admiral Chenggis Chulalaangkorn, who was in no mood for the foolishness either.
“I have personally warned that man three times,” he said, “so I'm not about to send a ship in there and get it webbed up and dead in space this far from even Star Base 4. He better work it out with the Wheb Collective – mess around and find out is the order of the day!”
“So, you've lived to be 80, and your choices in life are try to run the gauntlet on the Wheb Collective, call Chenggis Chulalaangkorn to hear no or call Wilhelm Allemande to hear no – and this right here is why we gotta live right,” I said to my old friend and chief engineer once we at last made port. “You see Uncle Benjamin is 82 and doesn't have these problems!”
“Yeah, Uncle Admiral is just cruising,” Lt. Cmdr. Doohan said. “When I grow up … yeah.”
Meanwhile, the elder Allemande and the younger Allemande were having a similar conversation.
“You see, Helmut, sometimes, the kindness is best expressed as you do it: you are soft-spoken, strong, but gentle. But sometimes, kindness roars, because someone in danger must be made to know it, and this is the kindest thing that can be done.”
“I see that, Cousin Wilhelm, under the circumstances. Capt. Silver made it out alive because you shook him out of his delusions.”
“I tell you something that my parents, your great-grand uncle and aunt, told me: if one desires gentleness, one also desires humility, for pride is forever running itself headlong into reality and being roughly, brutally destroyed.”
“For Capt. Silver and his crew, it was just that close,” the younger Allemande said.
“I save you 60 years of getting important understanding, Helmut. It is always just that close. The only difference is the amount of the awareness, and just how fast one is going when reality shows up at a particular scale for you to hit. Warp speed is a terrible, terrible speed at which to crash into reality!”