sroloc--elbisivni asked: It's not 1 AM, but would a person curious about whether or not piracy would *work* for a star trek au be welcome in your askbox?
ALWAYS.
Okay so we’re going to talk AU where the Enterprise crew goes rogue. Now, here’s the thing, the Federation just kind of wants to make friends with everyone. They have a habit of going out, fighting wars, and then making friends with their erstwhile mortal enemies—the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, even the Borg (although admittedly only Seven of Nine and the Borgettes), and that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. The Federation isn’t perfect, but fundamentally they just want to hold hands with aliens and poke spatial anomalies with a big stick and build wildly implausible and unsafe technology and hit big red buttons to see what happens. That sort of thing…just doesn’t really lend itself to piratical behavior within the Federation itself. You get smugglers, naturally, and space pirates attacking the Federation, and even your odd freedom fighter/rebel corps (I’m thinking the Maquis from Voyager, although, hell, they end up part of a Starfleet crew too) but even in the AOS (and we’re doing AOS because I just saw Beyond again), with Admiral Marcus kicking around, I can’t really see the Enterprise crew going properly pirate.
(I mean, I guess they kind of do, several times in TOS, but only in the ultra-technical Mark Watney-esque sense of space piracy of “we’re taking the ship that’s not ours without permission.” And they always do it to save everybody and let’s be real, it’s hard to punish the people who saved the Federation, it would be a bit hypocritical to go “thanks for the save, glad not to be dead, time for your court martial”.)
That being said, obviously now the solution is to figure out under what circumstances they WOULD go full pirate. And in the AOS I’m going to say that the way that would happen would be if Admiral Marcus had a little more success with the whole Section 31 thing.
So, let’s suppose that he did, and Marcus might have died with the Vengeance but Section 31 sort of slowly took over Starfleet, as these things tend to do, and the Enterprise is out on their five-year mission so they don’t realize anything’s wrong because they’re pretty far out into uncharted space and even subspace signals get weird after that kind of distance.
And then the Enterprise comes home, cruises into spacedock, and the crew is dropped into a Terran Starfleet that…they don’t recognize anymore. Things are stiff with protocol, there are massively lethal torpedoes being integrated into the new ships, half the science complexes have been annexed by weapons research, McCoy’s highly alarmed by the sort of questions he’s being asked about the new species he has records of, and the Security officers are being issued some very large phaser rifles. Let me tell you a thing: Jim and the bridge crew ain’t pleased with this development.
Between Spock, Jim, and Chekov, they hack into the ‘Fleet database and discover the plans for the next mission of the starship Enterprise. And their response is “Nope.” The Enterprise crew is loyal unto death to their captain—hell, he died for them already, they’re not in a rush to forget that—so when he summons them quietly to an out-of-the-way location and tells them that Starfleet is planning to start a war, they believe him. And when he asks “Please help me stop this” they agree, readily and gladly.
And then they steal a ship. They steal their ship, because when Captain James Tiberius Kirk leads his own crew onto his own ship, no one thinks to stop them, until Scotty’s dismantling the tracker they slipped into Engineering and Sulu’s punching it and the Enterprise is soaring away.
And then…well. I suppose then they have a war to stop and a Federation to evade and a Starfleet to fix. They refuse to take off their uniforms, even after the fourth time they’re accosted by another ‘Fleet ship and barely escape alive—they are Starfleet, the real Starfleet, and they will prove it. They’re wanted criminals, according to the Federation, run rampant under the command of a lunatic captain. Every scrap of incriminating information about Jim Kirk is dragged out of the mothballs and splashed across every news source in the quadrant—did you know he was a repeat offender in Iowa? Did you know he had a record of violence and aggression? Did you know he destroyed property? And once the Enterprise is really getting to be a problem, they crack open the classified files and there’s whole new surge of questions. Did you know he was on Tarsus IV? Did you know he admitted to murdering guards there? Did you know that his psych eval afterward said he’d never really recover? Did you know, did you know, did you know?
The Federation, the point is, is officially on the hunt.
Unofficially, though…well. They’ve escaped an awful lot of brigs and shiplocks—all though underhanded trickery and violence, their ex-guards are always quick to point out. See, they have the footage to prove it, look, the Enterprise crew is crafty and tricky and crazy and dangerous. And there were problems with the lock, with the cuffs, with the shiplock, can’t the Federation keep their own people in good quality tech? Naturally no one would help the Enterprise, they’re wanted criminals, they’re dangerous, they’re pirates.
That brig door has been broken for years.
They’re pirates with a weird habit of helping stranded ships and going on strict rations so they can share their food and figuring out ways to save whole cultures from plagues and negotiating treaties, though. The worlds that are part of the Federation territory learn to fear their own ships, but the Enterprise…she’s their savior. The names of the crew are whispered among the people on the ground, Kirk and Uhura and Spock and McCoy and Chekov and Sulu and on and on and on. She’s always oddly well-stocked for a pirate ship, never really risks starvation. Her dilithium chambers are always full—must be stealing from old wreckage and defeated enemies, of course.
The Federation’s upper echelons hunt the Enterprise down.
The Federation’s people love her. They call her the Silver Lady, or the Lady of Starlight, or Lady Luck.
And everywhere she lands, her crew says “We will fix this. We will stop this. This is not what Starfleet should be, we are what Starfleet should be, and we will make this better.”
