Conversations with Heroes was a lot like taking dictation.
Background
As a part of the 2013 ficlet flashdance challenge, we were tasked with creating a posting every day of one week, with at least 1,000 words. I decided to tie the whole shebang together with a documentary filmmaker creating a work about the Xindi War.
Plot
In Between Days
It’s just after the war has ended, and independent filmmaker Carlos Castillo has an assignment to cover the Xindi War from the perspective of the people who fought it.
Sharp-eyed readers should spot that Carlos is a prime universe counterpart to one of the men killed by Doug Beckett, as is outlined in Fortune.
The prime universe Carlos comes to the NX-01, but he also tracks down crew members like Lili, who are off the ship (as is established in Everybody Knows This is Nowhere). He interviews the following crew members –
Jonathan Archer – he discusses the turning point for this character, a Star Trek: Enterprise canon act where he forced an Ossarian pirate into an airlock.
Maryam Haroun – Maryam mentions her Muslim faith. Also, she talks about the deaths of fellow crew members and feels that her failure to pray may have had a correlation with that.
Lili O’Day – Lili relives killing She Who Almost Didn’t Breed in Time, which was originally outlined in Reversal and The Mess.
Jennifer Crossman – her memory is of the canon act of deceiving Degra.
The final piece is Carlos’s own statements about having met the Enterprise‘s crew. And he mentions the effect this assignment has personally had on him.
The story was well-received. I also loved the pressure creativity aspect of it. This story also has the third-highest number of reviews of any story of mine (only Reversal and Revved Up have more).
At a much smaller Star Trek site that I really don’t go to anymore, they celebrated once I’d hit a certain number of posts. As a thank you for that, I posted this little party story. It’s only meant to be a bit of fluff. However, I was able to add a bit to my lore. For a long time, this was the first story in my saga.
Plot
In Between Days
Hence as a fill in for the canon episode Two Days and Two Nights, I wrote this story in order to give a little depth to Travis. After all, in the episode, about all that happens is that he suffers an injury while rock climbing on Risa. But he didn’t start off rock climbing. At least, I didn’t want him to.
Hence, the little bit of fan fiction.
One thing I was able to do with this small story was to bring in Witannen a lot faster and earlier than before. With no statement of the name of the species (and Travis leaves quickly, plus in Star Trek: Enterprise canon he’s knocked out not too long after that), there’s no real first contact. However, for sharp-eyed readers, the stage is set for this species. Hence when the Witannen show up in Together, he really should have remembered them. But with him losing consciousness in canon, it fits that he would either not remember or maybe even suffer just a tiny bit of amnesia.
The character, of course, is Star Trek: Enterprise canon, and is the Mirror Universe counterpart to Hoshi Sato.
Declaring power
However, the Enterprise series only showed her declaring her power, and never actually consolidating or wielding it, as the show was cancelled far too soon. I have tried to rectify that, and I recognize that the official books have done so as well. But I think Star Trek is a big tent, and there’s room for all sorts of fanfiction interpretations of what happens next.
Portrayal
As in the series, the Empress Hoshi Sato is played by Linda Park.
Personality
Empress Hoshi Sato on the Bridge
Suspicious, nasty and ruthless, Hoshi makes a perfect Mirror Universe Empress and all-around villain because she will stop at nothing.
She’s just a bit campy in canon, but I make her truly dangerous. In Throwing Rocks at Looking Glass Houses, she violently takes charge, beginning a bloody reign by first killing off Phlox and Ian (Malcolm‘s counterpart), and then moving onto the Emperor Philip IV (counterpart to Colonel Philip Green) and, eventually, T’Pol.
Machiavellian
As a true Machiavellian, she eliminates the Emperor’s entire family, in order to prevent the people from perhaps, in the future, rallying around a successor. This includes the Emperor’s infant daughter, Anastasia, a reference to Princess Anastasia of Russia, killed when the Bolsheviks came to power. This also establishes Hoshi’s reign as having the potential to become totalitarian, which is confirmed with later stories. But that’s nothing new. In The High Cost of Dissidence, her predecessor has proven to be just as immoral.
In Paving Stones Made From Good Intentions, Hoshi pits Doug, Aidan and Chip against each other, in order to get someone new to run Tactical, as she has had Ian killed. However, rather than eliminate or emasculate his rivals, the victorious Doug decides to have them work under him, in a more cooperative type of venture. This continues to the time of Reversal. Aidan repays Doug’s kindness by cuckolding him and trying to take his girl, Jenn Crossman.
By the time of First Born, Hoshi has decided that she wants an heir. When Rick Daniels goes to the Defiant on a mission, they hook up, and she becomes pregnant. She proves to be a horrible mother, having Beth Cutler care for her son with Rick. By the time of Coveted Commodity, her childbearing years are coming to an end.
And by the time of Shake Your Body, Milton Walker seizes an opportunity and comes calling.
Relationships
Maximilian Forrest
This canon relationship is shown in the two ENT Mirror Universe episodes.
Forrest’s Captain’s Woman
Both actors have said they believe she loved him. However, he may or may not have loved her. I go with this, that his love for her is ambiguous, if it exists at all.
Further, she is ambitious. Even if Forrest had survived, it would not have been enough. She would have left him, at some point, unless he could go a lot further, a lot faster, in their careers.
Even then, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have stayed for long.
Jonathan Archer
Another canon relationship, Hoshi cheats on Forrest with Archer. But when Archer proves to be too slow to get ahead, she offs him.
Travis Mayweather
MU Hoshi and Travis
The final canon relationship, Hoshi turns to Travis for help in dispatching Archer.
The way I write them, they stay together, but she is dominant in every single way. In Coveted Commodity, this becomes all-too clear, as he reminisces about how, every time she’s had a child from someone else, she’s told him that it’s for her security.
Travis is mainly interested in his own security, so he goes along with it. And, in Commodity, he comes to understand that he’s better off where he is, rather than to try to usurp her.
Richard Daniels
In January of 2156, Rick goes on a temporal mission to the Mirror, to fix the Defiant. With poor cash flow and no money to pay him, plus an urge to make it with a time traveler (he foolishly reveals that detail about himself to her), they hook up. Nine months later, Jun is born, and the Temporal Integrity Commission has to scramble. Because Rick wants his temporally paradoxical son to live, Jun has to be sterilized, and Rick is forbidden from returning to the Mirror at any time during Jun or Hoshi’s lives, not even long before conception or after her menopause or even after her death.
Rick’s boss, Carmen Calavicci, fakes Rick’s death by arranging for wreckage to be left on Daranaea. She also applies delta radiation in utero and Jun is thereby sterilized.
Aidan MacKenzie
Aidan, her second baby daddy, is seduced at the end of Reversal, an act that Doug wisely resisted. Hoshi makes it very clear that she does not care at all for Aidan, but he’s got good genes. By the time of the alternate timelines in Temper, Aidan is the designated babysitter for the royal brats.
José Torres
By the time of Brown, José is already trying to make time with the Empress, following up some small flirtation during Throwing Rocks.
Francisco Ramirez
At the same time that she is involved with Torres, Hoshi is also involved with Ramirez.
The Perks of Being in the Inner Circle
Chandler Masterson
Chip is next in the passing parade, and is thrown over when Hoshi has his children.
Andrew Miller
After Travis’s death, Hoshi goes after Andrew, who is stuck with her until he leaves via suicide. He is, in this instance, cheating on her, with Melissa Madden, who dies, pregnant by him, in a shuttle crash. When he refers to MM in his suicide note, Hoshi changes the note in order to favor herself and gratify her ego.
Milton Walker
After Andrew’s death, Milton shows up, as he is on the run from the authorities. This former Eligian Order monk hasn’t been with a woman in decades, but Hoshi is older and less attractive, so she grabs onto him anyway.
Theme Music
Offspring
Jun Daniels Sato
The first born ends up running the Empire, with Kira, after Hoshi’s death, in Who Shall Wear the Robe and Crown?Prior to that, Jun runs Communications on the Defiant.
Kira (Kirin) MacKenzie Sato
Kira (sometimes called Kirin, which means giraffe) is the tallest of the children and, by rights, was supposed to be the eldest. He runs the Tactical station before becoming co-Emperor with Jun, but predeceases his elder brother.
Arashi Sato
With a head for business, Arashi is the only of the children of the Empress Hoshi Sato who is born without the Y Chromosome Skew. His parentage is allegedly unknown, but Torres does not have the skew, whereas Ramirez does. Therefore, it’s a lead pipe cinch that the head of the treasury is Torres’s son.
Takara Masterson Sato
Takara, the only girl, is the elder of a pair of twins, and eventually becomes the forebear of the successor to Jun and Kira – Charles Tucker VI, AKA the Emperor Charles I. She is removed from the Empress’s influence at an early age.
Takeo Masterson Sato
The younger twin, Takeo is a gay man, and is rescued from a life with the Empress by his father, Chip, and Chip’s wife, Lucy Stone, taking him away at a young age.
Izo Mayweather Sato
The youngest, son of Travis Mayweather, almost dies in utero, as Izo has a hole in his heart. Travis’s sacrifice suffers Izo to live; he grows up to run the Empress’s (and, later, his brothers’) Secret Police.
Quote
“Get me my ships! Get me my legions!”
Upshot
Empress Hoshi Sato is just the character that goes on and on, the gift that keeps on giving. I love writing her, putting her into difficult and easy circumstances, and generally giving her evil some buffoonish tendencies as she inevitably misses the mark in some areas as she all too accurately hits it in many others. I guarantee her return.
The Earth-Romulan War is canon but was not a part of Enterprise.
A focus (unlike a spotlight) is an in-depth look at a Star Trek fanfiction canon item and my twist(s) on it.
Of course, all of fan fiction is like that, but the idea here is to provide a window into how a single canon concept works in fan fiction.
Background
The Earth-Romulan War is a part canon never actually on screen. For a lot of fans, it is a missed opportunity in Star Trek: Enterprise. If the series had gone onto seven seasons instead of just four, undoubtedly they would get to the war.
Occurrences
Dispatches from the Romulan War
A few years ago, I became part of a project called Dispatches from the Romulan War. Dispatches has been posted in a lot of locations. My two contributions are Soldiers’ Marriage Project, which introduced character Rona Moran, and Prison Break, which was intended to give some hope that some people thought dead at the start of the war were actually alive. Further, it had a prison called Gemara, at Berren Five. I have used this on several occasions and it was first mentioned in The Puzzle.
Before the War
As a run-up to the war, in The Further Adventures of Porthos – The Stilton Fulfillment, the NX-01 hosts the Caitian ambassador and his family. However, the ship suffers some damage in a quick hit and run. This is much like hostilities can ramp up in prelude to a real war.
The Beginning of Hostilities
After some more leisurely exploratory moments, such as are in The Light, Intolerance and Reversal, things get down to business in Together. While the ship speeds toward Earth to deliver Jennifer Crossman to her wedding to Frank Ramirez, things are at a bit of a lull. But when ten people are kidnapped off the ship, T’Pol needs to work with her allies in order to find them again. There isn’t a lot of time to divert to this mission, but she still needs to try.
Achieving Peace shows the last of the treaty negotiations. Laura Hayes is there. And in Shell Shock, protesters are angry with Starfleet’s involvement in two wars in such a short period of time. A part of Malcolm’s problems during that story are his memories of the war. This includes the particularly brutal death of an anonymous crew member.
Upshot
For this huge gap in canon, there was no reason to not cover it. Hell, it’s the elephant in the room, when it comes to the ENT era.
Why not show it?
The Earth-Romulan War will be back in my writing; I guarantee it.
