"Hero of the Empire" Fiction Excerpt

The opening 400 or so words for my SNW 10 sub "Hero."

Storyline: Commander T'Pol, a Vulcan officer, struggles alone to thwart human rebels from conquering Earth...in an alternate universe with a Terran Empire that oppresses nonhumans.
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Hero of the Empire
by Boris Layupan

T’Pol’s heart hammered in her throat.

The Starship Defiant orbited Earth, prepared to bombard the planet into submission. She had no time to lose.

T’Pol slowed her pace in the ship corridor before her two guards. “You must assist me in preventing Lieutenant Sato from overthrowing the emperor and Starfleet.”

T’Pol’s marine MACO captors, both human, grunted derisively. Corporal Mackenzie, a lithe, muscular blond female in brownish-grey combat fatigues with a skull patch on her sleeve, trailed T’Pol on the left side. Mackenzie prodded T’Pol in the back with the end of her phaser rifle.

“Empress Sato’s expecting you on the bridge,” said Mackenzie. “Move along...Commander.”

T’Pol resisted an urge to thrust the weapon into Mackenzie’s mouth. The unseemly impulse was a telltale of her eroding emotional control, the result of much too close association with the humans of her universe. What would it be like to deal with the benevolent, egalitarian humans of the parallel universe this starship came from?

“I ask forgiveness,” said T’Pol, increasing her pace just a fraction. “It was kind of Lieutenant Sato to allow me to live to witness her conquest of your homeworld.”

The second MACO, Corporal Chang, a wiry oriental human male, chuckled. “I didn’t know Vulcans had a sense of humor, Commander.”

Chang wore the red shirt and black trousers of the Defiant’s original security complement as if it were a badge of honor. T’Pol wasn’t one to criticize as she wore the light blue skirted uniform of a Defiant female science officer.

Her top was stained green, though. A cut on her cheek from where Hoshi Sato had slashed her with a dagger had dripped blood before clotting at last. It’d happened when Sato apprehended her for conspiring against Jonathan Archer on the Avenger, their former escort.

T’Pol fingered her throbbing wound. She would take Sato to task for it very soon.

“As you say, Corporal,” said T’Pol, her tone agreeable.

In the next heartbeat, she crouched to her knees, pivoted back, and spun her left leg around to sweep both MACOs by their ankles. The two corporals cried out and their weapons clattered onto the deck as they fell back.

T’Pol pounced in between the MACOs. She took hold of each at the junction where their necks met their shoulders and pinched the nerve clusters bundled there.

Both MACOs slumped unconscious.

T’Pol scanned the matte-white corridor ahead and behind her. Empty. On a ship designed to be manned by over four hundred personnel, the eighty odd survivors of the Enterprise and Avenger crews were, as a human saying put it, a drop in the bucket.

A red door lay to the left two meters ahead. She grabbed both MACOs by an ankle. Her Vulcan strength put her in good stead as she lugged the corporals to the door.
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"Trial by Fire and Mis-Q's" Fiction Excerpt

The opening 400 some words of another SNW 10 sub of mine.

Storyline: Captain Picard is hurled onto a Napoleonic French warship by Q, a cosmic being of unlimited power...minutes before the ship comes under British attack.
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Trial by Fire and Mis-Qs
by Boris Layupan


Captain Jean-Luc Picard struggled to gain his bearings.

A yellow tropical sun--Earth’s he realized--blazed high in a clear sky. The main deck of a large sailing frigate swayed beneath him. Heat shimmered from the white wooden planking, and a ball of perspiration rolled down into the small of his back. Blue water turned to a sparkling white as the warship broke through it; and in the waves thrown off her pointed bow, dolphins tumbled and somersaulted.

At the ship’s peak, a French tricolor flag fluttered above a man-of-war pennant. Sailors in faded shirts and linen trousers, many wearing caps, bustled around him and aloft in the rigging. Orders, conversations, and curses in French rang in the air, most with his native lyrical southern accent, but some with harsher northern tones also.

“How did I get here?” he murmured in English.

Moments before Picard had been in his ready room on the Enterprise, recording a log entry on his encounter with the cosmic being, Q, at Farpoint Station--

This was Q’s doing!

Picard thumped a brass-plated telescope he held in his right hand against his left palm. He realized that instead of his one-piece red and black Starfleet uniform he now wore a dark blue coat with gold lace, white pantaloons, and half boots. He brushed his hand against two cool and heavy flintlock pistols strapped to his waist and a gilded saber at his left side. Picard reached up to rub his head. He brushed back a luxuriant forelock of dark hair protruding beneath the brim of a black bicorn hat. The outlandish headwear offered him no real protection from the sun.

A sudden thrill of wonder over his new head of hair electrified him. He recognized his outfit as that of a senior French naval lieutenant’s circa 1800 or so.

“Mon Dieu!” whispered Picard, his mind reeling.

His father, Maurice, had spoken of the Picard family history continually when he was a boy. One ancestor of note was the Picard who fought at Trafalgar. Had Q placed him in the life of his ancestor, or was this an elaborate fantasy? What did the cosmic being hope to gain from it?

“Computer,” said Picard. “End holodeck simulation.”

The sailing vessel remained in place around him.

“Recognize Captain Jean-Luc Picard,” he said. “Terminate simulation. Override code zed--”

The look-out at the fore masthead hailed the deck.

“Sail ho to windward!”

Picard stood riveted.
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"History's Pawn" Fiction Excerpt

I'm posting for the heck of it the opening 400 some words of my SNW 10 sub "History's Pawn."

Storyline: Captain Braxton, a Starfleet temporal enforcer trapped in a repeating time loop, sets out to avenge himself on the man who set the loop in motion.

Gary Seven, a human time travel agent for unknown aliens.
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History's Pawn
by Boris Layupan


NEW STARDATE 1789.49.3.135
EARTH STANDARD: MAY 2866

Captain Braxton's two future selves gazed at him. He caught the deranged glints in their eyes. Thrills of fear corkscrewed up his spine.

Is this what the future holds for me? He couldn't let that happen.

On the bridge’s upper level, Lieutenant Ducane, the young, spare-framed first officer, sat in the captain’s chair. Ducane draped his hands over the arms in a manner befitting a judge.

“Release me, Lieutenant,” said Braxton. “We’re in a Pogo Paradox causality loop: actions taken to forestall an event will trigger it. Reintegrating me with my doppelgangers and arresting me for their crimes ensures I will commit them.”

Apprehending Braxton’s older self at the end of a circus-like pursuit across different periods of Voyager’s journey through the Delta Quadrant hadn’t satisfied Ducane. In his zeal to clean up the timeline, the rigid officer enlisted Voyager’s Captain Janeway to apprehend Braxton’s older self again at the instant his older self first set foot on that blasted ship. Trying to keep the temporal mechanics of this farce straight gave Braxton a headache.

Ducane steepled his fingertips together. “I’m sorry, Captain. The longer the three of you remain separated the greater the resulting temporal psychosis will be. And regulations require you stand court-martial for violating the Temporal Prime Directive.”

Braxton drew on his emotional reserves to keep his composure before the pitying looks of the Relativity’s bridge crew. But his mood was as somber as the dark tones of his blue-gray uniform. Security Chief Haran'asar stood by Braxton, a full head taller. The bony spikes along the Jem'Hadar’s jaw gleamed in the bridge’s illumination. Lieutenant Kalrynn Oyama, the assistant security head, was all business too. Her Japanese features, fused with her Klingon skin tone and intensity, gave her an air of exotic beauty and danger as she guarded Braxton’s doppelgangers.

Intolerable! thought Braxton. Not only was he relieved of his command over the Timeship Relativity, but he faced two manic versions of himself from the future. Years of rehabilitation from being lost in time had just gone out the airlock. This was Gary Seven’s doing, but his situation was only a byproduct of some larger scheme he knew Seven had to be orchestrating.

Braxton had to wrest back his freedom and stop Seven. If left unchecked, there was no telling how that menace would disrupt the established timeline even further....

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