"Sure, that's fair," Jim agrees readily, pondering what story she might find more interesting. The Battle of Vulcan is a no-go; that's way too depressing and/or horrifying for a night out on the town. Same goes with the USS Vengeance. Maybe the Nibiru mission... sure, it led to disaster, but things went relatively well until the paperwork at the end, and that wasn't part of the actual mission so he doesn't have to include it. "Samus did mention I should tell you the volcano story sometime."
He hasn't told Hunter the entire saga either, although he doesn't know if maybe one of his crew mentioned it while Hunter was sitting vigil at Starfleet Medical. Jim has the excellent excuse of being comatose at the time to excuse his ignorance of that.
"We got sent on a survey mission to an M-class planet called Nibiru in Celes Sector, to catalog the native species and see if there was a warp-capable civilization to contact there. There were natives, but they were about at Bronze Age levels of tech, and the Prime Directive forbids any interference with the natural development of sentients so that there's no alien influence on their culture until they're ready to join galactic society. So we were just going to watch from orbit, record as much as we could, and flag the planet as unsuitable for mining or colonization. But then the geology department noticed this giant volcano near the biggest native settlement that was getting ready to blow, and our scans suggested it'd be an apocalyptic eruption."
"Needless to say," he says dryly, "we decided that not interfering with a species' development and letting them get killed by a volcano instead was a pretty stupid idea. Spock put together a gizmo that'd absorb all the energy from the eruption and let off the pressure; the trick was, it had to be set into the caldera by hand before it could be activated, and with the ash cloud in the way, we couldn't beam anyone down. So they had to go in by shuttle, and that meant making sure the natives were all looking the other way." He pauses for a moment to make sure they're both still following, and in case he needs to clarify anything so far.
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He hasn't told Hunter the entire saga either, although he doesn't know if maybe one of his crew mentioned it while Hunter was sitting vigil at Starfleet Medical. Jim has the excellent excuse of being comatose at the time to excuse his ignorance of that.
"We got sent on a survey mission to an M-class planet called Nibiru in Celes Sector, to catalog the native species and see if there was a warp-capable civilization to contact there. There were natives, but they were about at Bronze Age levels of tech, and the Prime Directive forbids any interference with the natural development of sentients so that there's no alien influence on their culture until they're ready to join galactic society. So we were just going to watch from orbit, record as much as we could, and flag the planet as unsuitable for mining or colonization. But then the geology department noticed this giant volcano near the biggest native settlement that was getting ready to blow, and our scans suggested it'd be an apocalyptic eruption."
"Needless to say," he says dryly, "we decided that not interfering with a species' development and letting them get killed by a volcano instead was a pretty stupid idea. Spock put together a gizmo that'd absorb all the energy from the eruption and let off the pressure; the trick was, it had to be set into the caldera by hand before it could be activated, and with the ash cloud in the way, we couldn't beam anyone down. So they had to go in by shuttle, and that meant making sure the natives were all looking the other way." He pauses for a moment to make sure they're both still following, and in case he needs to clarify anything so far.