Lost The Way
| Star Traks: Waystation | |
| Episode name | Lost The Way |
|---|---|
| Season | Stardate 57--- |
| Episode number | 1 |
| Writer(s) | Alan Decker |
| Year | 2380 |
| Stardate | Unknown |
| Chronology | |
| Previous in series | From This Day Forward |
| Next in series | All Ahead Full |
| Previous in timeline | Now Or Never [VEX] |
| Next in timeline | All Ahead Full [WAY] |
MISSING: One rather large space station. If found, please contact Captain Lisa Beck or Lieutenant Commander Craig Porter, care of the Runabout Cumberland.
Summary
Picking up where From This Day Forward left off, Captain Lisa Beck and Lieutenant Commander Craig Porter return to Waystation in the Runabout USS Cumberland only to find that the station isn't there. After running every scan they can think of to determine what has happened with no luck, they decide to head Starbase 219 to see if they can learn anything there. At the starbase, they are taken to the base commander, Admiral Remington, who shows them on his desk console a scan displaying Waystation still present and accounted for. Remington then demands to know who Beck and Porter really are and insists that Beck give him her command clearance code to prove her identity. Beck almost complies, but stops herself, saying this the situation feels wrong. Porter checks the scan showing Waystation and discovers that it is a static image taken weeks earlier. Beck turns on Remington, but he vanishes. Moments later, his office does as well, leaving Beck and Porter in empty blackness. Beck realizes that the situation feels like a dream and focuses her mental efforts on willing herself to wake up. She finds herself lying on a table with a strange helmet device on her head. She removes the helmet and gets up just as a Multek woman rushes into the room. It is Pophlie, who Beck and Porter have encountered before. Pophlie captured their runabout as they were returning to Waystation and connected them to the simulation helmets. Beck gets the drop on her and forces her to awaken Porter. They turn Pophlie over to the Multek authorities and return to Waystation, which was never missing. In prison, Pophlie uses her one comm to contact her employers and let them know that she ran into a small problem with Beck. They tell Pophlie that her services will no longer be required and that they will be pursuing other avenues.
Interwoven in the story are flashbacks to the death of Beck's parents when she was a cadet at Starfleet Academy. After receiving the news that her parents were killed in an Astro-Tech shuttle accident, Beck is granted bereavement leave and returns home to North Carolina for the funeral. When she learns that Beck plans to go back to the Academy, Beck's 15-year-old sister, Kathy, is furious. She wants Beck to remain with her in North Carolina, so that she can continue to live in their family home and go to school. Beck refuses, since her parents wanted her to attend the Academy. Kathy is sent off to live with their grandparents on Oraster Colony. Several months later, Beck is contacted by her grandmother and told that Kathy has disappeared. Beck takes leave from the Academy and goes to the one place she believes Kathy is heading: their family home. Kathy does indeed arrive there, and the girls argue. Kathy feels that Beck is getting everything she ever wanted while Kathy has had everything taken from her. Beck, meanwhile, tells Kathy that she needs to grow up and deal with the situation. When Kathy threatens to run off, Beck calls in the police, who take Kathy into custody and return her to their grandparents. From that moment on, Kathy would not speak to her.
At the end of the story, Beck tries to comm Kathy. She ends up leaving a message.
Featuring
- Captain Lisa Beck
- Commander Walter Morales
- Lieutenant Commander Craig Porter
Also Featuring
Author's Comments
After a light and silly end to the previous run of stories, this run opens with an angst-fest. Honestly, I don't know that there's a single gag in the entire thing. It also has a profanity warning at the beginning. Normally I would edit profanity, but in this case, I felt it would destroy the effect of what was said. But finally we get the story of what happened to Beck's parents (I believe the fact that her parents are dead has been out there since she was a character in Original Traks) and why she and her sister don't speak to each other. I'm sure it was no surprise to anyone that the Kathy issue comes back later in the run.
As I said in the comments for From This Day Forward, I wasn't planning to end the last run with a cliffhanger. The last story of that run was breezy and fun, but I remember saying to Anthony Butler after he read it that I should have Beck and Porter get back and find the station missing, just to be mean. I wasn't serious, but he thought it was a great idea. I went back and forth on it almost right up until I posted the story. My big problem was that I didn't know the conclusion. I hated the thought of setting up something like that without knowing where I was going. In the end, I did it anyway and decided to deal with the consequences later.
So I posted the story, watched the reaction, and knew that I still didn't have a clue how I was going to wrap it up. Due to established continuity (Namely Station Keeping in Vexed Year Seven), this wasn't a situation I could really drag out, and every solution I came up with just felt overdone.
Fortunately, I then went on vacation. Every Summer we go to Lake George in New York for a week. While I'm there, I don't have access to e-mail or even a computer. After I get over the withdrawl symptoms, I find that I have lots of time to think. The gorgeous scenery helps too. Anyway, Lake George is where I plotted out the entire previous run of Waystation, and I hoped that that year's vacation would be as inspirational. While I didn't get every plot thought out while I was there, I did solve a few of my biggest overall structural issues.
Brainstorm #1: the station disappearance isn't the important thing. On the surface, that just sounds silly. The station is gone. Of course that's important. What I realized, though, is that this needed to be more about Beck. I'd been tossing out little bits and pieces about her family over the years, and this was really the opportunity to talk about the death of her parents and the rift with her sister. The loss of the station would lead to a story about another loss in Beck's life. The mechanics of resolving the missing station issue would not be drawn out. Just hit the main points and get out of there. Obviously there's more to it (as Pophlie's conversation at the end indicates), but this story needed to be about Beck.
The title of the story has a bit of a dual purpose. Yes, there are several things lost in the story (Waystation, Beck's parents, her relationship with her sister), but the title is also a reference to the TV show, LOST, the flashback structure of which I stole for this one.
This story is a bit more like Trek than Traks. While I was writing it, I said to a couple of people that it was probably the least funny Traks story I'd ever written (intentionally least funny at any rate). Some humor crept in at the end. I couldn't help it. But really I was aiming for a different tone with this one. I've been fortunate not to have a lot of loss in my life, but I still wanted to deal with my reactions to death. A lot of the funeral material was pulled from my experience at my grandmother's funeral several years ago. Between writing this story and posting it, my grandfather died and I attended his funeral, bringing a lot of this back to the forefront of my mind. It's not great or particularly eloquent. It's not meant to be. But I hope it's at least somewhat effective.
I also hope that people don't necessarily agree with Beck in the flashbacks. She has her point of view, but I intentionally had her handle things kind of badly...at least from my perspective.