Calculated Risk
Posted on June 10th, 2015 by Kathryn Harper

Doctors Tav and Slade were just doing their jobs, of course. Perhaps she didn’t fully grasp the precise medical reasoning behind their protests, but Commander Kathryn Harper certainly understood the risks to her life beyond the lingering after-effects of her head injury. Admiral Blackthorne had given the usual pre-battle motivational speech, but the reality of this particular situation was apparent to all but the newest cadets. In a battle of this scale, the possibility of death didn’t just exist, but instead overshadowed most reasonable expectations of survival. Still, such speeches were necessary, if only to inspire the best performance possible in the face of overwhelming odds, and she did intend to survive, so an attempt at inspiration wasn’t unwelcome.

Kate now sat in the cockpit of her Mustang fighter, waiting for Atlantis to drop out of warp, signifying that the time to launch had come. Her pre-launch checklists had already been completed, so she ran through them again to pass the time, but the routine failed to keep her mind from wandering. Her recent injury while at the helm reminded her that while the bridge of a Sovereign-class starship was ostensibly safer than the cockpit of a space fighter, there was nowhere that could guarantee perfect safety to a Starfleet officer in the middle of a battle. This wasn’t really something that she didn’t already know, but sometimes reality has a way of dropping periodic reminders of its existence.

Now she prepared to fly the Boudica into the midst of a battle between thousands of ships, with the spectre of a head injury that could worsen from the stress of battle. She couldn’t imagine the bridge being any less stressful during such an enormous conflict, and fighters at least had the distinct advantage of being difficult to hit due to their maneuvering capabilities and relatively small size. Unfortunately, she had previously noted that fighters were often hit by incidental weapons fire that had missed its original target, a problem that only got worse as more combatants joined any given fray. It also took fewer hits to down a Mustang than it did a Sovereign, and all of these cold equations to calculate the probability of her survival had been swirling in her head for too long now.

Commander Harper looked up at the assault bay door and saw the stars cease to streak past. Atlantis had dropped from warp and the time had come for her to lead her pilots into battle. If her head trauma worsened and caused her death, then she figured that would be no different than being shot down, or having a bridge console explode in her face as they seemed prone to doing. With the fate of the Federation on the line, if she survived the battle by doing anything other than giving her all, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself. Kate had willingly chosen to put on a Starfleet uniform, and that was what it meant to wear it.

Resolute, she set her eyes on the assault bay door and gave the signal for the Sharks to launch. As she slammed her throttle forward after lifting off the deck, Kate vowed to survive despite the odds, head trauma and enemy pilots be damned.