Star Trek: Task Force Alpha

Prelude - Two

Ho Chi Minh City

Vietnam, Earth

Year: 2405

Twenty-one year old Gia Ngoc was the top of her graduating class in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam at Trần Đại Nghĩa High School when she got the urge to join Starfleet Academy in San Francisco California. She wasn't alone, all over Earth teenagers and young adults were feeling the urge to join the Academy. Starfleet needed new recruits and fast. These new "Delta Recruits" would be learning all that they needed to know and would be placed aboard the newest and best starships as cadets with a year's time. It was a growing necessity that Starfleet Command was looking to fill, they were hoping for over five hundred new cadets to enlist up by late 2410 to hopefully replace the over thirty-five hundred personnel that had already been lost to the Klingons and the war going on with the Empire. It was June 2405 and Gia was had secretly enlisted at Starfleet Academy, a university in San Francisco California where aspiring cadets from all over the United Federation of Planets went to learn before graduating and becoming a full-fledged Starfleet Officers.

Sitting her parents down after dinner that gloomy evening of June 18th 2405 the newly turned twenty-one year old young woman told her parents her plans to enlist in Starfleet. She took a deep breath and started to recite the voiceover from the video created to get young people to register for the Academy, "You are part of a enduring tradition, for over two hundred years men and women had served with honor, courage and wisdom. Our first duty has always been to the truth, the guiding principle that defines us. From the stars you acknowledge that to wear this uniform is to continue a most noble mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations to boldly go where no one has gone before. In this dark hour you must shine, you must light the way for the lost and oppressed. The final frontier awaits, though you sail a ship upon a sea and storm, you wear the uniform, you carry the tradition, valor and sacrifice are your watchman. Whatever comes, whatever finds you, stand tall, hold fast, you are a Starfleet Officer."

"What are you trying to tell us Gia dear?" Her mother asked with a stern tone in her voice. Beside her mother her father sat there with her younger brother and sister with a look on his face that she couldn't easily place.

"I've joined Starfleet," started Gia, "I am leaving tomorrow afternoon for Starfleet Academy, they are sending a shuttlecraft to pick up the other enlisting cadets and myself at the west side of Trần Đại Nghĩa High School."

"No, you are not," said her father in what seemed to be anger. "No one in our family in the two hundred some years Starfleet has been around has a Ngoc left this planet or our solar system. I'm not having that changed now just for you to run off and join Starfleet. If you haven't heard there is a war going on out there with the Klingon Empire for Christ's sake; and what are we supposed to do if you are killed out there?"

"It is my duty to serve and I have already passed my entrance exams for the Academy and I am going," started Gia, "and as for being the first Ngoc to go into outer space, I'm up for the challenge and foresee a possibility of becoming Captain quickly if not an Admiral."

No one, not even her parents were going to change her mind. Cadet Gia Ngoc had made her decision and she was going to follow it; valor and sacrifice were to be her watchman and she would boldly go and light the way for the lost and oppressed, she would become a Starfleet Officer, one of the best she hoped that would go down in history as a legend like Admiral Jonathan Archer, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Admiral Kathryn Janeway had all done. So she headed up to her room and began to pack for tomorrow was almost upon her. As she was about to start packing her second duffle bag with the rest of her belongings that she wanted at Starfleet Academy with the remained of her clothes that she couldn't fit into her first duffle bag she heard a knock at her door. "Yes?" she said not knowing who it was but hoping that it wasn't her father.