After the failure of Operation "Caesar" and his arrest for attempted treason, Admiral Vaughan Rittenhouses' personal correspondence, personal writings and all other files would be seized by Federation Special Services and Starfleet Security. The absolute treasure trove of information - everything from his diary and planner through to random notes on fiction and his stamp collection - has been a boon to historians ever since it was declassified in 2320. Amongst the nearly 450 Terrabytes of information was a series of correspondence between Rittenhouse and Admiral Nogura. Nogura, despite vocally disliking Rittenhouse, would exchange letters with him regularly between 2250 and 2270; both to discuss policy and as a semi-private form of venting about events within Starfleet Command. These collated letters detail Rittenhouses's obsessive disapproval of Captain Christopher Pike during his time as C-in-C Klingon Border Operations (2259-2262). FROM: ADM. VAUGHAN RITTENHOUSE (C-IN-C KLINGON BORDER OPS)
TO: ADM. HEIHACHIRO NOGURA (CHIEF OF STARFLEET OPERATIONS) STARDATE: 2409.1 SUBJECT: CHRISTOPHER PIKE Hiro, Thank you again for the attendance of you and your staff at the joint conference on Starbase 19 last week. I know that many of the senior Admiralty have strapped themselves to their desks these days – especially if it means they get to form a peanut gallery in this whole Chin-Riley v. Starfleet debacle – so your trip to my homestead out on the front was a nice change from the norms. Pursuant to our previous conversation on policymaking on the frontier, I was shocked to learn from Commodore Tafune earlier today about the affair on Cajitar IV. I will remind Command at this point that Cajitar IV remains a diplomatic, logistical, and tactical headache, something that the flagrantly unauthorised involvement of First Fleet has done nothing to help. The current power-sharing arrangement is merely an opportunity for the Empire to abuse the terms of the armistice; even this “Broken Circle” grouping may only just be a front created by Imperial Intelligence to undermine galactic peace. Bob April has told me – in his own typical way – that Enterprise’s excursion to Cajitar IV was completely unauthorised, which may be true. Authorised or not, the fact remains that the senior staff of First Fleet’s flagship took foreign policy into their own and went across clearly defined boundaries of jurisdiction to interfere in the situation on Cajitar IV. Worse, the Science Officer of the starship – none other than Mr. Spock, the fate-blessed son of Ambassador Sarek – decided to engage with and challenge Captain D’Chok in an act of what can best be described as “cowboy diplomacy”. The fact that Spock negotiated with an Officer of the Imperial Fleet at this time – and was unable to establish anything more concrete than an agreement not to open fire on the Enterprise at that moment. And the net result? Cajitar IV’s fragile government has collapsed, the klingon minister on Orion has issued a formal letter of protest and I now have Imperial cruisers patrolling the entire Cajitar sector to “prevent another criminal operation.” Listen, Hiro – I understand that Exploratory Command – and the First Fleet itself – are the primary mission of Starfleet. Certainly, my own arguments with April (who, despite being a mere fleet commander, has equal jurisdiction and authority to me, a Regional Commander) have made it abundantly clear that he has the backing of our political masters, as does the First Fleet’s ongoing mission. This is not the issue. The issue is that April has kept running 1st Fleet like it’s 2255. He’s running defence policy in the Cestus and Finnibus regions out of his own office, even when we have a whole department at Strategic Analysis trying to make head or tail of the Gorn threat. (if there even is a threat – I will remind you we have had more encounters with Klingon privateers in the last 18 months than Gorn attack craft) Worst of all, he has no authority amongst his Captains, who – like April himself, and all the great exploration officers since Archer – decide that they are the final arbiters of policy in all circumstances. Which, of course, brings me to Christopher Pike. You know that I used to like Pike, Hiro. He understood what kind of threats the Klingons were becoming. He stamped out the Orion slave trade before the Empire brought it back. But since the Presidio sent him out to the frontier during the war, he’s gone soft. I’m sorry but he has! Two years ago, he took an experimental craft into Klingon Space for a personal rendezvous with Premier L’Rell without any authorisation from command. What consequences were there? None. What did he do after he returned to Enterprise? He broke the Prime Directive so badly at Kiley 279 that we had to rewrite the god-damn thing. And he got away with it. We put Agatha Drake out to pasture for less. Pike is a symptom of the disease, I think. We do not live in the sort of casual, pastoral days of the pre-war galaxy. The policy must be controlled, organised, and coherent, and not set by jumped-up test pilots who let nepo babies talk shop with the Klingons and use the flagship as a JAG taxi. I am not saying that we should Pike out to pasture – certainly wasting a seasoned officer like that would be a mistake only our predecessors in command would have made – but we cannot allow the commanding officer of the poster-ship of the Star Fleet to be a law unto himself. He has under his command the best of the best, and I wonder if his prejudices and moral codes are beginning to clash with those of the Stellar Service and ongoing policy changes. Certainly, one has to wonder if the disaster that Chin-Riley’s arrest is could have been avoided if Chris had been more transparent with us; unlike the JAG Office and the politicians, most of us would have happily swept all this Illyrian nonsense under the rug to focus on the real issue; the Klingons. Do you think Uncle Shu would back April over me here if I push to get First Fleet’s independence restrained? I know he says Exploratory Command needs to be reined in, but when Ryn says that he doesn’t mean it. I’ll see what he can do after the Allocations fight. Regards, Vaughan Rittenhouse FROM: ADM. VAUGHAN RITTENHOUSE (C-IN-C KLINGON BORDER OPS) TO: ADM. HEIHACHIRO NOGURA (CHIEF OF STARFLEET OPERATIONS) STARDATE: 2455.1 SUBJECT: CHIN-RILEY V. STARFLEET Hiro, What a waste of time this week has been. We’ve got Klingons running rampant all over the Triangle, drawdowns in the Beta Quadrant and a knife-fight over the Allocations bill. What is the staff obsessed with instead? Chin-Riley. Chin-Riley! Are we really re-litigating the Eugenics Wars again for the sake of what? Our dignity? Listen I know I’m not popular at home for my stance on genetic modification. I’m no augment sympathiser, you know that, but it is simply exhausting for us to maintain policies that were only created to keep Soong and his cabal out of the Service a century ago. Frankly, we have internal measures to keep out the bad eggs- certainly the JAG officer has kept out unfavourable officers before – but they are determined to uphold policies that even the President’s Office doesn’t back anymore. Personally, I’m glad Chin-Riley’s lawyer whooped the JAG Corp’s ass. You know how I feel about Pasik; he’s one of those inwards-looking isolationist types who still think Rigel is the rim and The Klingons are some eldritch beasts beyond logic. It’s no wonder he decided to gun for Chin-Riley based on the technicality of birth. The whole thing was a waste of time, mind: I know Dai [Dai Mehkan, Chief of Staff, Starfleet Command] was furious about it, especially after the Council ordered the hearing opened to the public, though that’s because Dai hates anything that interrupts his workday. He blames Pasik for this whole mess; we all know that there are plenty of people like Chin-Riley who we let through the regulations because the system benefits from them being in uniform. Do I like augments? Course not. There’s curing illness and creating marvels of medicine and then there’s making baby Khans. We all know about what happened with Dr. Soong a century ago. But that’s a human ide-fixe. We decided to marginalise and cut off the Illyrians based on our own hubris in the last 50 years and what has it achieved? It’s led to colonies creating second-class citizenships and Starfleet crawling up its own ass to enforce a policy half the staff hate. Chin-Riley will almost certainly never get a ship because of this, and we’ll have wasted a good command officer over it all. Besides, if any dumb fucker tried to make another Khan, I know exactly which end of a phaser bank we’d show them. I blame Pike. He’s a smart man – he knew if he had come through the right channels at home and gone around April & the JAG corps, it could have been sorted off the book. I don’t buy the line that Chin-Riley did it on purpose; no, I know that jackrabbit of a CO has wanted to grandstand for a bit about peace and happiness. Good thing that lawyer of hers kept him off the stand, even if she had an agenda. I would not be surprised if Pike orchestrated this whole thing as part of a political stunt. I’ve always thought he had his eye on civilian office at some point; UEMP, Starfleet Commissioner, something where he gets to use the “mandate of the people” to boss us around with. He’s in the public eye now, and I suspect the President’s too. We’ll have to keep an eye on that. Regards, Vaughan Rittenhouse FROM: ADM. VAUGHAN RITTENHOUSE (C-IN-C KLINGON BORDER OPS) TO: ADM. HEIHACHIRO NOGURA (CHIEF OF STARFLEET OPERATIONS) STARDATE: 2465.3 SUBJECT: BANNON’S NEBULA SETBACK Just got off a conference call with Nagawa. She’s throwing a fit over the loss of the facility in Bannon’s Nebula; honestly, everyone up the chain of command is. Honestly, I cannot for the life of me work out how this isn’t being moved to a court martial. A critical deuterium production facility has been scuttled – at great expense in materiel – on the order of an ensign who detected, what? A species living in the nebula? Seriously? Now, H, I know you’ll tell me that a species living in gas is technically possible – or you’ll get that assistant of yours to send over the file that Starfleet Science draws up proving this species has been around for centuries and caused the battle of Bunker Hill or some shit like that, but god-damn it: couldn’t Pike have found some way to fix it without blowing up one of the largely mobile refineries we have left after the war? Does he know how much those things cost? Of course not. Are he and that ensign going to face any consequences for this? Of course not. Another job well done for Bob’s golden boys. You know I am sick and tired of First Fleet simply getting away with being sub-standard. They are the flagship force of the Federation. They are the people that new contacts meet first – more important representatives than any diplomat or do-gooder politician could ever be. And what have they done since the Klingon War? They’ve bungled security in the spin ward regions, let those Gorn smell blood, and left my boys in 4th Fleet overextended in the Cajitar and Alnwair sector. April has all those staff and resources on Starbase One and what does he use them to do? Argue with us at TacFleet about jurisdiction and play politics over that damned Prime Directive of his. Have you heard that he’s lobbying for it to be instigated as a foreign policy doctrine? He must be mad! How would we ever stop the Klingons if we had to abandon every potential ally between here and Krios? We both know April is overpromoted. He’s a politicians’ admiral: he gives them the Starfleet they want, not the one they need, and Pike is the ineffective poster boy for that. Their overfocus on the Gorn says everything you need to know – God knows I’ve read enough frantic memos about “murderous baby lizards” to make me wish they had attacked me. If they’re so dangerous H, ask me this: why are they staying in the back of beyond when I’ve got Klingon cruisers patrolling as deep as M’Talas? What’s the real threat, some distant pirates knobbling the thick-as-pigshit settlers who didn’t realise they were building their bumfuck farming colony on holy ground, or the 40,000 Klingon soldiers who occupy Vico-Enol’s capital? We both know the answer to that. FROM: ADM. VAUGHAN RITTENHOUSE (C-IN-C KLINGON BORDER OPS) TO: ADM. HEIHACHIRO NOGURA (CHIEF OF STARFLEET OPERATIONS) STARDATE: 2477.5 SUBJECT: DAK’RAH Received your offices’ memorandum on the Dak’Rah affair. Hopefully, you and Uncle Shu have gotten my official reply too, with all the implications within. Unofficially, however: are you fucking kidding me? Firstly: that cow Nivelle knew he was a war criminal and we still kept him on the books. Secondly: Dai seriously thought the smart way to deal with discontent was to re-traumatise our veterans? Thirdly: That Ambassador got himself killed (fuck knows how I’m not sure I care) and there’s going to be…no real investigation? Sure, Starfleet Security will bumble around the place like some half-erect Argelian policeman but that’s…it? We’re not recalling Enterprise? No inquiry? No psychometric examination of that Doctor? No stain on Chris Pike’s record? Nothing? We’re going to chalk up the death of the alleged war criminal who was, somehow, the cornerstone of our diplomatic efforts to contain the Klingons to, what, bad luck? An act of God? Who the fuck are we, the CIA? I am starting to think that this is about undermining KLICOM. It’s gone too far to be just pure incompetence; no, at this point this has to be about scuppering everything I’ve done here since Drake got the sack. I’ve not read April’s report – my doctor keeps telling me not to stress my heart – but I’m sure it’s full of the usual excuses. Then again, I’m not sure this is Rob’s fault. It’s that jockey Pike. It was his ship – his people – that got that sonofabitch Dak’Rah killed. What was his security chief doing all day? What was his XO doing? What was he doing that meant that he left his doctor alone with a Keeno?[1] God knows I’m happy the bastards are dead, but I still believe in a fair trial. Those things are good to watch. You know that none of my boys would have done this. No, no, this should have been a KLICOM job. None of my captains or crews would have dared make a mistake anything like this, even if I’d ordered them to dump that prick Fox out of an airlock. They’re too good for that. No, Pike’s gone soft. I can’t even blame April for that. He missed the war – lily-livered coward – and seems to have decided that it hasn’t happened at all. Do you know that he still hasn’t integrated his tactical departments properly? Or increased his security complement? Using his “Five Year Mission Authority” to keep the clock frozen in ’55 as if that’ll fix anything. I bet the fuckers’ covering for whatever buffoon let that Klingon onto the ship armed. I would like to say there would be a reckoning – god knows, if Pike was one of mine he’d have been keel-hauled by now twice over – but that’s not how April seems to run things. I wouldn’t run 1st Fleet like that at all, but then again – I’m not a god-damn explorer. I’m a navy man, through and through. I have better things to do than babysit scientists all day. [1] Keeno – slang for Klingon, drawn from the term “Klingon Imperial Naval Operations” (KINO) which was used by Starfleet Tactical/Intelligence to distinguish the Imperial Navy from the Retinues of the Great Houses before 2262.
1 Comment
Canal_Lane
30/1/2024 01:46:24 am
Rittenhouse is a blowhard... but, he really does have a point that Pike and the crew of the Enterprise, any enterprise really, get away with absolute murder without any real repercussions. Thanks for taking the episodic format of resetting every week, and turning it into a giant hole for the rest of Starfleet to gawk at, haha.
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