USS Bill of Rights

[melannen]

This exists partly because sarken was having a bad day yesterday, partly because I am insane, and partly because I wanted to practice freehand inking in GIMP. None of those are probably good enough excuses:


Captain Maddow of the United Star Ship Bill of Rights, with her department heads, left to right: Lieut. Commander Olbermann, Chief of Science; Chief of Operations Lieutenant "Andy" ch'Cuper; Lieutenant Stewart, Communications; and CMO Lieut. Commander Dr. Stehpen (DFA Vulcan Science Academy, and *don't* mention the ears.)


Q: Why does Captain Maddow wear the miniskirt & go-go boots uniform?
A: One, because it's an incongruity, and every time she walks into a Command meeting all those Admirals are forced to remember just how rarely women's uniforms get worn in command gold. Two, because it reminds Captain Kirk that he's never, ever going to get to sleep with her, and this makes her heart glad. Three, because it gets her all the girls. (Four, she still thinks Lieut. Commander Olbermann is only teasing when he asks her to please stop for the sake of his blood pressure.)

Q: Why USS Bill of Rights?
A: Because if there's any ship Captain Maddow serves, it would be that one. (A starship called Bill of Rights actually appears in the novel Best Destiny, one of the still rare Starfleet ships with a human female captain; Maddow's ship is the Constitution-class ship which bore the name before that.)

Q: What's up with Dr. Stehpen's ear?
A: Seriously, don't mention the ears.

Q: Why is the art so bad?
A: Because I don't practice enough. Also, I did this entirely with GIMP's inking tool, set to default (and eraser tool). It was good practice, both for brush inking, and for drawing in general; line weight depends partly on speed, so the greater the accuracy, the lower the precision. It *forces* you to use quick free strokes and be confident in them. Which I need much, much work on. But at least on the computer you can erase as much as you have to! And I would have failed totally without lots of reference from this ST:TOS publicity shot: http://greatbignerd.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/star_trek_csg_014.jpg

Q: No, really, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
A: Because Star Trek is awesome, and Pundit Round Table is awesome, and they both share the same commitment to freedom, diversity, and knowledge, and believe that evil only wins out over good if good is careless. I've wanted for ages to put them on the bridge of a starship anyway. Also, I'm a complete sucker for crossovers. And the art was actually flowing; that's even rarer than days when the fic is flowing.

Also, I was getting tired of The One Pig as my journal header.

(For those unfamiliar with the terminology, Pundit Round Table refers to a Real Person Fic sub-fandom in which Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, and lately also Rachel Maddow hand out together, snark a lot, and solve crime. They are all liberal-to-moderate US cable news commentators (more or less), they are all really good at what they do, and they are all magnificently geeky.)

Also, drawing this has made me realize that part of the reason I love Keith so much is that he exactly matches my mental image of Lieut. Harb Tanzer, Enterprise's chief of Recreation. (Also it makes me want Captain Maddow/Dr. Dehner. Or at least want to draw Ana Marie Cox in Dr. Dehner's uniform.)

Comments

[melannen]

You can write me all the fic you want! About anything you want to write about.

Rachel Maddow was born on a small colony planet, and while she was a small child, it suffered first a disastrous plague and then an attempted genocide. She's always been painfully aware that the only reason she survived was that she was young enough that the Executioner couldn't know she was an undesirable, and that's a large part of the reason she joined Starfleet - to make sure that no one ever had the opportunity to do something like that again.

It gave her a drive, at the Academy, that made her stand out even among the other bright young people who were Starfleet officer cadets, and it gave her the anger to push her way into Command track, and stay there right up until the end. She failed her first test in her last semester at the Academy - the test called Kobayashi.

Despite losing her ship she performed admirably in command, and made the test last almost nine minutes with minimal loss of life. Her instructors had only compliments for her handling of both the scenario and its fallout, which is why Commander Constrev was surprised to find her the next day in the library, researching the history and theory of the test. He wasn't too worried, as there was almost nothing to be found; but it was less than a decade since the reign of the infamous Kirk, and it was standard policy to keep track of a cadet's activities for the weeks after the test.

She noticed him looking over her shoulder and glanced up. "This says it's possible to re-take the Kobayashi maru."

"Yes," he told her, "but very few cadets do, and to be honest, I hadn't expected you to be one of them. I want to reassure you that your score on that test didn't bring down your class rankings, if that's been worrying you."

She waved away the whole notion of class rankings with a negligent hand. "No, I'm just trying to figure out what it would benefit me to re-take the test. I did everything right, according to my post-simulation debriefing, and yet still lost; what could I do differently going in? And more importantly, why wouldn't they at least change the basic set-up of the problem for a re-take, if the idea of the test is to assess a cadet's reaction to a novel situation?"

Constrev blinked. "The idea behind the test may not be what you believe it to be, Rachel."

Rachel rolled her eyes. "I know exactly what they're trying to do; to they think it's not obvious? The whole point is power. As long as they control the simulator, they have all the power, and there's nothing I can do to save my ship. So the point of the test must be to see how a command cadet reactions in a situation where he's completely powerless. Cadets are used to being smarter, stronger and more privileged than those around them, from good families and politically powerful planets; take away that automatic assumption of power, and see who melts."

"I'm not entirely sure that power differential is how the commandant would characterize--"

"Of course it's about power," said Rachel. "It always comes down to power. The thing they may have missed is that being on the wrong side of a power differential isn't a novel situation for me. It's my life. The problem isn't how to deal with it, it's how to change it."

Constrev came away from that conversation disquieted, but Rachel stopped her researches into the Kobayashi Maru and seemed to have become fully absorbed in a comms project she and Cadet Uhura were working on involving signals leakage and detection, so when he was told several weeks later that the cadet had requested a re-take, he was suprised but saw no real reason to be concerned. Rachel tended to be thorough and meticulous with her sources; it was entirely possible she simply wanted to check her work.

And it did, at first, seem like an entirely ordinary run. "Captain" Maddow requested confirmation of a distress call in the Neutral Zone, verified that there were no other ships in communications range, notified Starfleet of her intentions and crossed the border with shields up and crew on high alert, only to be immediatly surrounded by a squadron of Klingon Warbirds.

She blinked, nodded, and politely requested Uhura, on comms, to open a channel to the lead Warbird. A growly, mustachioed Klingon captain appeared on screen and immediately declared that, due to her violation of the neutral zone, she surrender or prepare to be destroyed.

That's when things got weird. She sat up, rubbing nervously at her neck, and said "But what if I don't like either of those choices?"

The Klingon captain replied "Do you not see the ships that are surrounding you? Given you situation, you have no choice."

"I see the ships," she said. "But you're a bit arrogant, you know? Maybe there are other factors. Things you don't see. Like the fact that this morning, somewhere in the vicinity of this building, I hid an activated communicator with certain modifications. The second it detects the electrical pattern that signals a ship in this simulation being destroyed, it will send a message to every currently enrolled student at this Academy, informing them that the Kobayashi maru is a fake, designed to be an unwinnable test, and that there's no need to worry about it because everybody fails."

Then she smiled, stretched out her legs, and said "Your turn."

There was dead silence for a few seconds, and then the viewscreen abruptly turned off. Her helmsman turned around and said "Did you really--" but cut out abruptly when she raised an eyebrow at him. And then Cadet Uhura started snickering, quietly, and when a few minutes later power was cut to the whole simulator, a group of high-ranking Admirals came on to the bridge to be greeted by Cadet Maddow swininging around to look at them, and saying calmly, "Ah. So it turns out there wasn't a real Kobayashi Maru after all. That's disappointing."

(There was a disciplinary hearing, of course. Constrev tried to point out that, with Kirk's precedent, it would be extremely unfair to interfere with Maddow's graduation, but apparently merely breaking into and reprogramming the Academy's most secure computer system was nothing, compared to attempting to undermine the authority of the whole Academy before its student body.

Constrev was fairly certain this was the result of the fallacy know as "pride", but attended the hearing to do what he could.

Rachel appeared completely unruffled; when asked for a defense, she pointed out that the guidelines of the simulations allowed for a canditate within the simulation to do anything necessary to achieve success, with no repercussion beyond grades as long as no-one was physically harmed.

"Yes," pointed out Admiral Blitzer, "But the communicator in question wasn't within the simulation, was it?"

"Have you recovered the communicator in question, Admiral?"

"We presume you had a confederate remove the communicator as soon as you'd achieved your objective. And I do hope that wasn't in the nature of a threat, Cadet."

"Have you discovered the confederate, sir?" She glanced up at them through her lashes. "You won't do either - there was no confederate, because there was no communicator. It seemed like an unnecessary risk, given the advantage I held. So unless lying to Klingons in battle is now against the rules of the Service, I am not entirely sure why you've called this hearing."

Costrev caught up to her afterward. He was too curious to resist asking, "Was there really a communicator?"

She glanced at him, and grinned merrily. "Was there really a Kobayashi Maru?"

He drummed his fingers against his leg, and finally said, "Ask James T. Kirk."

[bessemerprocess]

!!!!!!!!!!!UNDYING LOVE, mine you have it.

[bessemerprocess]

Ack, forgot I can't edit over here. Anyway, yes, you have my undying love for this, including the perfect use of that last line.

And actually, that's one of the reasons Rachel gets Kirk drunk all those years later. She really does want to know if there was a Kobayashi Maru and by now she knows his results are as sealed as her, so there must be something interesting there.

[melannen]

This one flowed like OMG, I can't remember the last time a story wanted to come out this badly. (All did was think, "Well, what did real!Rachel do in college?" and then I had ... this.)

And yes! She was actually planning to ask the first time she met him - at a Fleet event, shortly after he got his Captaincy and when she was still a few ranks below him. But the first thing he did was hit on her, and she got distracted for the rest of the night teaching him why hitting on fellow officers is not always a smart idea. She doesn't even think he remembered her, the next time they met, and it just seems awkward to bring it up out of nowhere. She's not sure he knows about what she did in hers, and mentioning it seems uncomfortably like oneupmanship - he's a guy who wears his pride on the outside.

And she does like the guy.

Kind of.

In the same inexplicable way she's fond of old Rear Admiral Buchanan.)

[bessemerprocess]

Aww, Rear Admiral Buchanan is such a stodgy old Admiral. He doesn't even like the Vulcans. He and Sarek have gone to bat a few times, and he still won't admit Sarek won.

[melannen]

Sarek went home afterward and asked his wife to explain the Admiral's logic to him, and Amanda spent the next two hours in hysterics.

[bessemerprocess]

You win the internet.

She just kept laughing again every time Sarek lifted an eyebrow.

[melannen]

I'm re-reading Spock's World right now, and OMG, I just want Amanda to explain humans to Sarek *forever*. Or, on occasion, fail to explain because she's cracking up too hard. (They are so cute together!)

[trouble]

Was this the one where she says "There is nothing little about my husband"? Cuz I use that line all the damned time. (Don is 6'10".)

[melannen]

Yes! On a news interview, in response to headlines about "I Married a Little Green Alien". :D She had to explain it to Sarek, and then he laughed for an entire evening.

[trouble]

That's one of those scenes that is totally cannon and anyone who says otherwise can bite me. I've always had a fondness for the relationship between Sarek and Amanda. :)

[orbitaldiamonds]

WIN.

Both of you! XD

[technocracygirl]

Holy cow, awesome.

This is worthy!

*applauds*

[melannen]

Thank you! Though it was mostly Rachel's work. *g*

[cypher]

...I am not even IN this fandom, but I am squeaking in giddy fannish glee over here. <3 <3 <3 Captain Maddow.

[melannen]

You don't have to be in the fandom to know the glee that is Rachel Maddow, it's self-evident. :P

[sarken]

Oh, damn, she's good.

"...The thing they may have missed is that being on the wrong side of a power differential isn't a novel situation for me. It's my life. The problem isn't how to deal with it, it's how to change it."

That is the perfect combination of Rachel Maddow and Star Trek right there. Guh.

[melannen]

The nice thing about writing crossovers is that you can write what would otherwise be a Mary-Sue, but if the character you're crossing over is awesome enough, *nobody cares*.

Also, activism = hot.

[alixtii]

Oh, I love reading accounts of Kobayashi Maru tests. This was great!

[melannen]

I love anything with war games in general, really, but *especially* Kobayashi Maru. Thanks for the comment!

[orbitaldiamonds]

Wow. I read that like it popped out of your head fully formed!

Nice! :D