| abstract | - Captain Travis Maynard Hatcher reporting on my first command of the USS Challenger. After my previous experiences aboard this vessel I must confess a certain air of overconfidence in my surroundings. The christening ceremony was...of an ancient rite and seemed of an exaggeration of our importance in this mission. Not being the "god-child" of the Federation like James Tiberius Kirk, I fear the crew has let their guard down and has proved to being lax at their duties. The only course of action I see is to engage my crew into immediate action. After a week of aimless travel in the Alpha Quadrant our sensors came into range of a unnamed Class-L Planet with two rings of asteroids and one solitary moon. Detecting weak signals of life on the surface I immediately readied an away team. Not to my surprise the planet proved to be the "book definition" of Class-L, a sea of red deserts discolored by high contents of iron in the ground, high spires of stone reached for dark clouds of super-heated gas, the only visible surface indication of the planetary firestorms within the thermosphere. A rather fascinating phenomena. Lieutenant York, the science officer, said it was ignium, a new kind of gas element, super-heated within the thermosphere combining with the cooling oxygen that descended from the upper ozonosphere that made these torrents of fire. This "greenhouse" effect made the planet rather hot and, around the few lakes and small inland seas, uncomfortably humid. The inhabitants were cordial, but unsettling to we who were accustom to humanoids. Short and reptiloid, with four compound eyes, two on the backside of their heads, which was particularly unsettling, with rapidly changing pigment cells (similar to the now extinct Earth chameleon), they called themselves the O'arh, which in their language means "the only". According to Federation classification, they should be called Guentarians, since the star of the planet, according to Starfleet astronomers, is Guentaris; but I personally preferred calling them "the onlies". I spent much time among the inhabitants, studying their ways of life (I know I'm probably getting a formal inquiry from Starfleet for breaking the Prime Directive). They are a tribal commune, living off the land and giving back to it an equal portion of what they take. They hunt the giant K'gats, a beast similar to the pachyderms of Africa but also like the O'arhs in their carbon-dioxide respiratory systems, for food and to use their hides for shelter; they usually dwelt in caves in the foothills of the spires or the softer red-sandy dunes near the lakes, but oftentimes made K'gat-hide tents when travelling elsewhere, which I found where quite durable even by Starfleet standards. As I stayed among them, I heard several legends that rather intrigued me. One of them was the tale of the mEn'dai, or the sky-demons. Without warning or system, these faceless ones would come down through the firestorms and take young O'arh into the sky, who would never be heard from again (when we made first contact, they thought WE were mEn'dai, until they saw that, like themselves, we possessed faces). Most of the crew, upon hearing this, considered it to be nothing more than a foolish superstition based on the explanation of death. However, I was intrigued by something that one of the diviners of the O'arh, called a "spirit-whisperer" told me about the mEn'dai. "The fire-in-the-sky does not assuage their desires. When they touch the ground, they force our young to take the journey of a thousand steps...from whence, none return." We learned that our arrival was within a standard week (three Guentarian days) of when the O'arhi spirit-whisperers predicted the coming of the mEn'dai. Though we had a schedule to keep with our own five year mission, I insisted that we stay just a little bit longer, in order to see these mEn'dai when they came, if nothing else, to earn the respect of the O'arh by helping them with their woes. The day they came, our ship detected a ship enter the system. It was an unregistered and unmarked cargo freighter of alien origin, which refused to answer our hails as it proceeded towards the planet. I ordered Maddox to open-fire on it, and realized that this was no ordinary cargo freighter. Its shields withstood a phaser barrage at maximum, and it was transmitting a targeting scrambler which made Maddox miss with two photon torpedoes. Sensing the worst, I beamed down to the planet with a security team just in time to see the ship land in front of a O'arhi village. I realized what they meant by "a journey of a thousand steps" when the loading ramp came down, leading up into the bowels of the ship, which were obscured by a bright light from within. The "mEn'dai" came forth. They were of varying races, all wearing an expressionless atmospheric mask which gave the O'arh the belief that they were faceless. The "mEn'dai" ignored us at first, starting to round up the O'arh, who stood as frozen and did not resist. When the mEn'dai saw that we were Starfleet, they open-fired on us and began getting their ship prepared for departure. As we fought, T'kol suddenly disappeared. I saw her approach the mEn'dai from behind, take two out with a nerve-pinch, and then allow herself to be captured. Unfortunately, the ship left as soon as they captured her. I beamed back on to the Challenger and took command. According to scans Maddox took, the "mEn'dai" vessel only activated minimal shielding in its haste to escape. I ordered him to open-fire on it, hoping to destroy their engines. Whoever the captain of that ship was a persistent bastard, because he didn't stop when we fired on him. Instead, he chose to evade our fire by hiding in the asteroid-rings of the planet. Unfortunately, he also made a grievous error: in his haste, he didn't activate all the shielding he needed to survive the asteroid field. Even though his ship's hull had been heavily refurbished, it was still no match for unhindered space-rocks. Slowed down and critically damaged by the asteroid field, we pulled the Challenger up and beamed everyone out of the ship. I and a security team then went down to the transporter pad to oversee the prisoners. The "mEn'dai" pirate team was only five persons, who posed no threat once we disarmed them. Ten O'arhi were freed, along with T'kol, who gave us a wealth of information regarding their activities. According to what T'kol showed us, the "mEn'dai" were a pirate ring employed by the Orion Syndicate and several other undisclosed sources who were trafficking in slave-trade and the "meat-grinder" industry, which slaughtered various alien races en masse for food delicacies which were later sold on both the black and legitimate markets. I was appalled by what I heard. I made the decision to solve this mystery on my own, and so chose not to hand the "mEn'dai" over to Starfleet. There was much more to this than met my eye, and I knew that I had my work cut out for me. But for the moment, I had ten freed O'arhi who had to be returned and a new chapter to begin in the history of the O'arhi race. T'kol and i beamed back, telling the spirit-whisperers and the chief that no more mEn'dai would come down from the sky. They offered us many gifts in gratitude; several pieces of jewelry, plenty of K'gat-hides, crude weaponry inlaid with various gems (some of which had dilithium spear-heads), several crystalline confections they prided themselves as the best anywhere and a complete history of their race written on K'gat-hide parchment. We thanked them for their generosity and beamed back to the Challenger.
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