The Khan Job
| Star Traks: TOSsed | |
| Episode name | The Khan Job |
|---|---|
| Season | 1 |
| Episode number | 6 |
| Writer(s) | Alan Decker |
| Year | 2268 |
| Stardate | Unknown |
| Chronology | |
| Previous in series | Reign of the Clydesdale [TOS] |
| Next in series | |
| Previous in timeline | Reign of the Clydesdale [TOS] |
| Next in timeline | Trials of Youth [REJ] |
Sending a barely-armed freighter to go check in on Khan Noonian Singh and his followers probably wasn’t one of Starfleet’s best ideas, but this trip is going wrong in ways they never could have imagined.
Summary
When the SS Clydesdale returns to Starbase 6, Mike Harper discovers that Dr. Janet Corbair and Ronnie Harper had accepted the job to check up on Khan Noonian Singh and his followers on Ceti Alpha Five despite his express wishes not to. Now they were due to deliver a report to Commodore Scott Enwright. Corbair and Ronnie planned just to make something up, but Mike says that they're doing to have to actually do the job now because he wants to stay on Enwright's good side.
Upon arriving at Ceti Alpha Five, Mike sends Corbair down in a fake bush to take readings of Khan and friends. A short time later, an unknown ship moves into orbit and beams Corbair aboard before Wodak can get a lock on her. Corbair finds herself in a brig. Captain Talbot arrives and explains to her that he's there to take Khan to work for his organization, which Corbair convinces him is a terrible idea. He sees her point, but intends to kill her and the Clydesdale crew anyway, since she already has seen too much and the secrecy of Section 31 must be maintained. He also says it's a pity, since Corbair was so close to being right in her theories about being able to enchance the abilities of humans with high ESPer ratings. Those theories had led her to perform unauthorized experiments on unsuspecting people which then landed Corbair in the Candelar Acres Federation rehabilitation colony. Seeing that Corbair's work could possibly lead in dangerous directions, Section 31 manipulated the Federation into moving away from ESPer ratings entirely. Talbot goes on to tell her about the USS Enterprise's run-in with the Galactic Barrier and how it affected two members of James T. Kirk's crew.
Corbair bargains with Talbot, saying that he should allow her to continue her work for Section 31 rather than killing her. She's determined that Ronnie has a very high ESPer rating and proved it with tricorder scans. If Talbot can get her Ronnie and some equipment from the Clydesdale along with their information on the Galactic Barrier, she can prove her value. Talbot obliges and beams Ronnie off of the Clydesdale's bridge while she, Mike, and Bork were trying to figure out how to get Corbair back. Ronnie is relieved when she is brought to Corbair, but Corbair has her put inside a cylindrical device and restrained. Ronnie is convinced that Corbair has an escape plan up her sleeve right until moment Corbair activates the device, causing Ronnie intense pain as her body is bombarded with energies simulating the Galactic Barrier.
In the midst of this, an Andorian battlecruiser arrives filled with followers of The Path of Khan. They are detemined to rescue Khan, so that he can assume his rightful place as their leader. The Path of Khan ship, commanded by Igdora, opens fire on the Section 31 ship. Wanting no part of the battle, Mike takes the Clydesdale toward Ceti Alpha Six, but Igdora refuses to let him escape. She gives chase, with the Section 31 ship close behind. The Section 31 ship overtakes the Path of Khan craft, and they resume firing at each other, giving Mike and the Clydesdale crew time to put a plan into motion.
The Section 31 ship cripples the Path of Khan ship, but Mike is able to goad them into getting too close to a makeshift bomb constructed of antimatter containers. With the Section 31 ship adrift, the Clydesdale crew tries to rescue Ronnie, but before Wodak can get a transporter lock, the Path of Khan ship uses what little power it has left to ram the Section 31 vessel, sending them both closer to Ceti Alpha Six. They are soon caught in the planet's gravity and begin to plummet toward the ground.
Inside the Section 31 ship, Corbair has finished the experiment just in time for the ship to start to crash. Ronnie, now literally glowing, is unaffected. She has been transformed. The ships slam into the surface in a massive explosion that completely destroys Ceti Alpha Six. Mike tries to get the Clydesdale out of there, but it is quickly over taken by the shockwave.
Instead of being dead, Mike finds himself still on the bridge, but Ronnie is there. She explains that Corbair changed her and now she has become something more. She intends to go explore the universe and maybe start her own civilization. She tells Mike not to worry about Corbair or Section 31. They've been taken care of. Even the Clydesdale is back to the way it was. She also tells him that he could do so much more and really help people. After one last hug, she vanishes.
Corbair awakens back in Candelar Acres, and she is told that she has forty-one more years in her rehabilitation plan. She starts plot her revenge, but her memories of her work and the Clydesdale begin to seep from her mind. Soon they are gone. She goes back to her room to get some sleep, thinking maybe later she'd play some cards.
Back on the Clydesdale, Mike meets with Bork, Smash, Wodak, and Pafal-Sris. Bork checks the ship's computers and finds that they now say Ronnie was killed when a plasma conduit ruptured and that there's no record of Corbair ever being on board. None of them are comfortable with lying about what happened, but they agree to do so for Ronnie. Mike asks if anyone wants a freighter.
The Clydesdale returns to Starbase 6, and Mike goes to meet with Commodore Enwright. He delivers a fictionalized report on Khan that doesn't mention any of what really happens. Enwright decides that no one really needs to bother going out to Ceti Alpha Five anymore. It's probably better not to draw any attention to them. He expresses surprise that Mike sold the Clydesdale to Wodak. Mike tells Enwright that Ronnie believed Mike could help people. He wants to see if she was right.
Featuring
Also Featuring
- Commodore Scott Enwright
- Agent Talbot
- Agent Laghari
- Igdora
Author's Comments
When I started writing TOSsed, I didn't have a complete plan. I knew some storylines that I wanted to do, but I assumed that as I got into it and developed the characters, more and more ideas would come to me and the series would grow like my previous ones had.
That didn't happen. Now whether that's due to limitations in the concept, my own failings, or just what was happening in my own life, I can't say. Regardless, "The Khan Job" in some form or another was always in my plans. How could I not use that title? And I knew early on that the Clydesdale and 2 other ships were going to be involved in some kind of standoff that resulted in the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI. I just didn't know for certain who was on those other two ships.
I had enough to get started with, though, so I started writing and got as far as the scene where Dr. Corbair is stuck in a fake bush scanning Khan and company. Then I stopped.
For several years.
Once we started talking about the Star Traks site revamp and redesign (which was longer ago that you'd think), I decided it was time that I got back to TOSsed. Considering my writing pace in the intervening years (glacial doesn't even begin to cover it) and my lack of new TOSsed ideas, I also decided that it was time to wrap things up in some fashion. That meant dealing with Dr. Corbair's plot.
I'd been laying in subtle hints that something was special about Ronnie since the first story. She can sense the Well before the others, then she is the one Light is drawn to a couple of stories later. All of that is enough to get Corbair suspicious and drive her to get her hands on a decent tricorder. All of that was already in place. I just thought it would come to a head a bit later on and not in this way. Ronnie was going to be fine, and Corbair might have stayed with the ship (I was going back and forth on that one. She was fun to write and brought an interesting dynamic, but it would be hard to keep her around after she was caught experimenting on Ronnie). With the decision to end the series, I was able to go bigger. And thanks to Discovery starting up between when I started writing the story and when I finished it, I had a canon version of a Section 31 vessel I could use for one of the two other ships. The third became the Path of Khan, who apparently continued on after this story but became the political party mentioned in the Waystation election arc.
Ronnie's abilities go back to one of those TOS things that no other series ever touched again. Way back in the first Captain Kirk pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," there's talk of ESPer ratings and the effect that the Galactic Barrier has on people with high ESPer ratings (In a completely unplanned coincidence, I posted this story in the same week that Discovery had an episode where they passed through the Galactic Barrier and Sally Kellerman, the actress who played one of the two crew members affected by the barrier back in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," died.). ESPer rating are never mentioned in TOS after that (or in that Discovery episode), so I threw in a brief explanation of why.
Since this is the last TOSsed post, I want to take a second to just appreciate how weird TOS was. ESP was fairly tame compared to giant green hands grabbing the Enterprise, Abraham Lincoln showing up floating outside the ship, brains being stolen, and so on. There's a lot. By comparison, almost all subsequent Treks seem so staid (I'm excluding TAS and Lower Decks, since animation has let them go pretty wild. Prodigy hasn't really gone to the weird yet.). I hope that Strange New Worlds actually takes the Strange part of its title to heart occasionally.
Despite not originally planning on this being the finale, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The finality allowed me to push Corbair, Ronnie, and Mike to a different place, which hopefully makes for a satisfying conclusion. If there had been a second run of stories, the overall arc was going to involve Noov. He wasn't seen much in the stories I wrote, which was intentional. I still like the idea I had for Noov. It's been around in some form or another since I developed TOSsed, even back when the Clydesdale was going to be a Starfleet ship. I'll probably use it at some point in something, so that's all I'm going to say about it right now.