Authors Notes On A Broken Teacup

I've been a Star Trek nerd since I was a child in the seventies. I've done my very best to keep the technobabble and series continuity in the Prime Timeline consistent with canon, so any errors I've made are on me. If you catch any of my mistakes and want to claim bragging rights, please feel free to drop a comment, but read these notes first- I may have already addressed your concerns.

The use of "Stardates" in this story is conspicuously absent. There are some formulae and online tools which correlate time and distance to calculate this metric, which is used to compensate for relativistic effects inevitable with faster-than-light travel. But it's never been used perfectly consistently, and I knew I'd make mistakes that will get picked on, right or wrong. I didn't employ the exposition trick of using ships' logs and personal logs, which is the context where they're usually found, so I didn't miss them.

This story is set in 2293, twenty-six years after the Treaty of Organia between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. I took care to try and match the timeline of the events of

Star Trek VI- The Undiscovered Country

. It's explicitly stated in the film that two months passed between the Praxis explosion and the briefing at Starfleet command where the Enterprise is ordered to escort Kronos One into Federation space. During that time, Spock was conducting diplomatic talks with the Empire, and the Chandrasekhar was putting herself back together and encountering the Jej Jach. When Kovalenko intercepted the news that Gorkon had been killed, it had only just happened. The Khitomer conference had not yet been scheduled, and Kirk and McCoy were imprisoned on Rura Penthe. During the few days before their escape, our crew completed their repairs and conducted the funeral at Gamma Apophis Four. Their communication with Kurosawa threw a wrench into the plans of Admiral Cartwright. It was Kurosawa's idea to send the Chandrasekhar to Khitomer. Cartwright didn't immediately countermand the order because he didn't want to look suspicious, so he convinced Chang to intercept them. That's when the news broke that Kirk had escaped and Chang had to race back to the conference to stop the Enterprise instead. Delgado was merely symbolic and good for the conference, while Kirk was a direct threat to their conspiracy. Cartwright was scrambling when he told the Chandrasekhar to go back to Starbase Twenty-Seven. The order was legit, but Flaco was correct to ignore it.

If I didn't pull any of that off, at least I thought it through. It helps that Starships always move at the speed of plot.

The title of the story and Seeflax's gift to Delgado is a reference to Sulu's teacup breaking in the opening scene of

Undiscovered Country

, when the Excelsior encountered the Praxis energy wave. Nicholas Meyer probably meant to symbolize a radical discontinuity, a shattering of the old order, and it was effective. Everybody remembers the teacup. My own instincts make me want to fix things, or at least clean up the mess. What do we do with ourselves when we're broken? How do we pull ourselves together and move on? What do we become once the damage is integrated into our being? Confronting the future doesn't look much like an undiscovered country to me. It's more like the start of a daunting project. We don't know what resources we have, we have no idea how it will go, or what we'll have to do to somehow make it work.

My original working title of the story, "All Denobulans Are Quite Similar," is from a line delivered by John Billingsley as Doctor Phlox, in ENT s1e13 "Dear Doctor." The romantic storyline between Seeflax and Delgado is (of course) an expansion of the unexplored attraction between Phlox's second wife, Feezal, and Trip Tucker in ENT s2e14 "Stigma" (perhaps Denobulan women have a 'thing' for human engineers). I struggled with the polyamory in this story while trauma fueled my motivation to write it; I am monogamous by nature, but my first wife had secretly practiced "open" marriage the whole time. The normalization of Denobulan culture which I've attempted here is part of my ongoing personal effort to deal with such things.

In Feezal's episode, they never did explain what a 'Rose Petal Bath' was. Seeflax's intimate anointing of Delgado was my own invention. I perpetrated a bit of retconning by including a Denobulan in the timeframe of the TOS movies;

Undiscovered Country

was produced in 1991, but the species wasn't introduced in until

Star Trek Enterprise

premiered in 2001. However, ENT's 'prequel' status establishes Denobulan contact with Earth, Andor, Tellar, and Vulcan since well before the UFP Charter was signed in 2161.

Oberth-class ships such as the USS Chandrasekhar (NCC-675) share a tradition of being named for scientists, explorers, and astrophysicists, including the USS Oberth (NCC-602), USS Grissom (NCC-638), USS Copernicus (NCC-640), and USS Cochrane (NCC-55318). In this story, Professor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's biographical details as described by Delgado are accurate, even though the reference to the later 'Bell Riots' is fiction (from DS9 s3e11-12 "Past Tense"). He was born in 1910 in what is now Pakistan but at the time was part of India under the British Commonwealth, he attended Cambridge University on a Trinity scholarship and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard when invited to join the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he remained for most of his career. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics with William A. Fowler. I had the honor of attending a talk that Dr. Chandrasekhar presented at Syracuse University in 1989 (?), which was honestly way, WAY over my head.

The real-world Apophis is not a constellation, as implied by the third ("gamma") star in a system visible from Earth. It is a large asteroid that will pass close to the Earth on April 13, 2029. The historical Apophis is the ancient Egyptian god of darkness and chaos, the nemesis of the sun god Ra. Most science-fiction nerds will recognise the name from the tv series

Stargate: Atlantis.

I used it because it showed up in a star map of the Archanis sector in the background shot of a scene in

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Some of you will have recognized the concept of "warp, without warp drive" from ST:TNG s5e10 "New Ground." In my head canon, Doctor Ja'Dar's experimental 'soliton wave' drive had its origins in the Chandrasekhar's attempt to 'surf' the Praxis explosion. For the technobabble numbers I used, the blast would have been spherical, and I presumed its energy would dissipate as an inverse function of its volume. The volume of a sphere is (4/3 𝜋 r^3) which I simplified to (4.18879 r^3), which Flaco eyeballed instinctively as 4.2 because he's an engineer, but T'Laan calculated more precisely because she's a Vulcan. I considered using the formula for the surface area of the sphere, but the integers didn't fit well with the warp number capabilities of Oberth class ships, and an inverse cube dissipation was more promising for the plot than an inverse square. The idea that the warp number would increase when a secondary subspace envelope wrapped around the Chandrasekhar (increasing its speed by one exponent value) was explained to me by Dr. Erin MacDonald, the science advisor for the franchise, who presented a lecture on the subject during Star Trek- The Cruise VIII in 2025. She is also an expert on whisky (sic) and we raised a glass to James Doohan in the tasting she hosted in 2024.

Flaco's 'dermal regenerator' modification of the ship's transporter to repair the outer hull occurred to me as akin to the function of the Genesis wave used in

Wrath of Khan.

However, that device decompiled inorganic matter all the way into energy before reconfiguring it as life-bearing organic matter, rather than reconstituting it as the same thing- a much more drastic effect. But in 2293, Genesis was still classified, so we shouldn't expect an engineer on a third tier research vessel to have even heard of it. In this story, using a transporter like a replicator seemed like the kind of weirdo genius idea that set Flaco apart as extraordinary, but that's only because in-universe, Starfleet crews MUST be unimaginative with this tech.

The matter-energy-matter transmutation technology used by replicators and transporters (and Genesis) is the biggest Kludge of the entire franchise, and it was all because the TOS producers didn't want to pay for an extra to walk onto the set carrying a tray of food, or for SFX showing the ship landing on a planet. If this kind of Pure-Fucking-Magic actually existed, we'd all perpetually live in some dreamlike matter-energy flux paradise with godlike powers over everything. The trouble with having such tech is that it solves too many problems. It ruins the writers' ability to get crews into trouble they seemingly can't get out of, so they're forced to disable it with technobabble whenever the plot demands-

"Tetryon flux is too strong, transporters can't get a lock!"

In this story, I had to dance around using an emergency site-to-site transport to get Saarsh to sickbay, because I needed my POV character to be there when he transferred command... and yet still allow Jirex to put Saarsh into transporter stasis. My explanation? The ship's main transporters, controlled from the transporter room, were capable of site-to-site operations, but that system had been modified and was busy doing something else. Flaco and Sovak immediately understood, and just dragged him a few doors down the hall to sickbay. Unlike a larger ship, nearly everything important on the Oberth class ships is on the main deck. The medical transporter Jirex was using only worked inside sickbay, and only for the purposes of beaming stuff into and out of people's bodies, or getting them into the pattern buffer before they died. On a personal note, Saarsh's authorization code 47AF was part of the registry number of an aircraft that I used to teach people to fly twenty-odd years ago.

Bussard collection sounds unusual in the Star Trek universe, and it is. However, its use is well established in canon. Memory Alpha lists at least twelve episodes between six series mentioning this technology. You may specifically remember DS9 s1e6 "Captive Pursuit" in which the Tosk explains how his ship's 'arva node' is used to collect 'collaidrium,' which O'Brien realized was a 'ram scoop' collecting deuterium. I have, however, taken the liberty of using the collection field

itself

as a means of propulsion rather than fuel collection or particle expulsion, such that the 'collection vortex' is employed as a kind of tractor system instead of as a ramjet. I hope this was made clear by Saarsh's declaration 'we're going sailing.' Technology-wise, I admit it's wonky, but as a plot device, it's an unconventional twist born of desperation, which creates an enormous 'reverse wake' that's highly conspicuous AND has the ability to drag a dead Klingon ship towards them.

The history of Klingon warp drive, the Burrowers, and the brief period of technology exchange between the Klingons and Romulans is all fairly well established in expanded universe sources. The Romulans' use of ion-powered sublight drive is straight from TOS s1e14 "Balance of Terror" (ironically, THAT Bird-of-Prey looks very much like it SHOULD work with Cochrane-style warp engines). But the relative oddity of the warp manifolds on B'rel and K'Vort class Birds of Prey and speculation about the shape-adaptive warp fields generated by Hur'q-style technology is entirely my own. I should also note that Delgado's insistence that versatility is the virtue of Oberth-class vessels was lifted directly from Ensign Rutherford's similar declaration about California-class vessels in LD s5e9 "Fissure Quest," and evidenced by the use of the Oberth-II USS Pegasus NCC-53847 as a testbed for (illegal) Federation Cloaking technology (TNG s7e12 "The Pegasus").

"Damage Control is easy. Reading Klingon, that's hard!" was a line delivered by James Doohan as Montgomery Scott in

Star Trek IV- The Voyage Home

, to which I gave a nod in the text. As many of you know, Klingon language, variously called "Klingon," "Klingonese" (from TOS s2e15 "The Trouble With Tribbles") or, more properly,

tlhIngan Hol

, is not mere gobbledygook. It's a real, workable synthetic language created by the linguist Marc Okrand (for whom I named the Chandrasekhar's cryptographer), with early contributions from James Doohan and Christopher Lloyd. Okrand has produced several editions of 'The Klingon Dictionary,' Robert O'Reiley and Michael Dorn have recorded home-study material, and the fan community has created 'The Klingon Language Institute' as well as the

boQwI'

language learning app. In

Undiscovered Country,

Chancellor Gorkon made a reference to reading Shakespeare "in the original Klingon," as a kind of a joke; perhaps by the late 23rd century, the actual origins were shrouded in the mist of time... but it's worth noting that "Hamlet" has, in fact, been translated into Klingon, and it's available on Amazon.

tlhIngan Hol

grammar is deliberately 'alien,' and quite difficult to learn. Few people are actually fluent, and machine translation is reportedly quite sketchy, but enthusiasm for the language still runs high in the fandom. I've done as well as I could- any errors are my own. "Jej Jach" means something like "Sharp Scream," and "choH potIh," the poison from the mek'leth which nearly killed Saarsh, is "to change something important," or "to turn the tides." The phrase "Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam" has been through the wringer as the consensus of how to translate "today is a good day to die." Okrand himself noted that a large part of the language involves pointing and grunting; but it's my own speculation that ritualized combat is

also

actually part of the language.

Qapla' batIh je!

Shunting warp power through the weapons system was part of the refit and upgrade to the USS Enterprise that we saw towards the beginning of

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

(1979). That was the reason Captain Decker belayed Kirk's order to fire phases to disrupt the wormhole generated by the new warp engines, ordering photon torpedoes instead. It made sense to me that the Klingons would have done the same kind of thing, given the priority they assigned to their weaponry. Integrating the Cloak into the warp manifolds was another liberty I took. I realize that, for reasons of plot, a 'cloaking device' has always been shown as a gizmo the size of a rolled-up yoga mat somehow hooked into the engineering section, such that it can be stolen and re-installed on another ship, but since warp engines remove the ship from normal relativistic space, what better way to 'hide' a ship is that? We've never actually seen a Klingon cloaking device, so why not have it incorporated into the warp drive?

I was concerned that Federation ships were forbidden to use cloaking technology by the Treaty of Algeron, but that was a treaty with the Romulans, not the Klingons, and it would not be signed until 2311, eighteen years from the date of these events. At the time of this story, the Federation simply wasn't interested in cloaks because it wasn't a priority for them, and it was a pretty severe limit on the ship's other capabilities. Kirk used the Bounty's cloak with impunity, so Flaco would have felt no compunction about it, either.

Seeflax's line about peeking at an undressed Delgado was a reference to McCoy's line "When I peek, it's in the line of duty!" in TOS s1e15 "Shore Leave." Her claim that "I've never been mistaken for a man" was a nod to Jenette Goldstien's iconic comeback line in "Aliens." ("Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?" "No. Have you?") It just slipped out. Sorry. I also cited "Vasquez" in passing as a crewman assigned to engineering who was put into stasis.

"Discretion is the better part of valor, and cowardice is the better part of discretion" is a line I lifted from the perspective of Zaphod Beeblebrox in one of Douglas Adams'

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

novels. I don't remember which one.

Most of the names of the crew were random and meaningless, but I threw in a few that weren't. Delgado was the family name of a Mexican tour guide we had during a shore excursion from a cruise ship, and yes, the man was quite skinny, or "flaco." Crewman Murphy, the deceased member of Delgago's engineering staff, was named for Karrin Murphy from Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" series of novels. Her name had to be changed to its unusual spelling because it turned out that there actually was a Karen Murphy working for the Chicago PD at the time, and Butcher has let it slip that she, in turn, was named after Peter Weller's "Murphy" in the movie "Robocop." Rrawwl is a twist on another one of Butcher's characters, a sentient cat named Rowl, from his "Cinder Spires" series. Desmond Hendrix was in fact named after Jimmi Hendrix. Lieutenant Commander Kurosawa was named after the famous Japanese film director. Dieffenbach is a family name in my wife's ancestry; they were Swiss artisans and watchmakers by trade, settling in Williamsport, PA early in the twentieth century.

Deleted, or "off camera" and "behind the scenes" moments in the story include:

During the initial disaster, when Kraagla Niv called "brace, brace, brace," Seeflax assumed her "defensive shape," puffing up like a blowfish (as Phlox did in ENT s4e3 "Home"). That, along with her extreme Denobulan flexibility, was why she was relatively uninjured, and was able to act as an early first responder on the bridge.

Flaco was born in the city of Quito, Ecuador. The Earth's equator runs right through the place, and there are locations where you can fill a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom and watch it drain into another bucket clockwise, then walk twenty feet south and do the same thing where it will drain counterclockwise. This appealed to young Gordon Delgado, who decided that he had to learn how the world works, which led him to become an engineer. When Seeflax gave him her teacup, she let it slip that she knew he was from Ecuador, though he'd never told her that specifically. She'd looked it up in his personnel file.

I didn't include an epilogue, but here's what happened afterwards:

The Chandrasekhar was decommissioned with her modifications intact and put on permanent display at Khitomer as a museum ship, commemorating the first Accords. Her impulse reactor was never replaced. She was formally celebrated again during the second Khitomer Accords in 2344, after the battle of Narendra-3, in which the Enterprise-C sacrificed herself defending a Klingon colony from a Romulan attack. Seeflax's kintsugi teacup and the House Mo'kai dk'tagh which Sovak gave Delgado were proudly added to the exhibit as a gift from his estate.

Everyone in medical transporter stasis survived, and CMO Jirex Na Soth received a high commendation from Starfleet. Saarsh's poisoning was counteracted and he recovered fully, but opted to keep his mek'leth scar. He was promoted to Captain and commanded his own ship for two more five-year missions, then retired from Starfleet into the UFP's diplomatic corps. He was eventually appointed as Ambassador to the Klingon empire. Klingons value their honored enemies more highly than their allies, and Saarsh was both. House Mo'Kai remembered the story of Korgh and Saarsh in song, which was belted out in the bloodwine-quaffing halls of Qo'noS for generations and probably in Sto'vo'kor as well.

Delgado's field promotion to full Commander stood, and he also received commendation as recommended by Saarsh. He was assigned as the chief engineer of the newly commissioned Excelsior-class USS Challenger NCC-2032, and was eventually offered his own command. He also continued to research warp-manifold-type engines for Starfleet operations, collaborating with Sovak, which led to the design used by Defiant-class starships seventy-seven years later. He dated Tatiana Kovalenco long distance for a while, parting amicably. Seeflax was right; she was good for him. His marriage to Seeflax persisted intermittently through his life, though not the entirety of hers, since Denobulans normally live for three or four hundred years. In Denobulan style, Flaco concurrently married a younger sister of T'Laan's, whose chosen

koon-ut kal-if-fee

had unexpectedly died. It seems that the lieutenant had designated Gordon as her emergency Pon Farr partner in the event that the ship became stranded when she reached her next cycle. She'd never told him about that contingency plan, but her family knew. They were hoping he'd carried her

katra

back home, though of course he hadn't. He met the family on Vulcan at their request, and began a relationship he never fully understood with her sister. It was part arrangement, part romance, and part opaque ceremony, not to be consummated for another three years until the lady's next Pon Farr. She never objected to his ongoing marital status with Seeflax, which she considered "logical." The couple had two children, born seven years apart.