Collecting Dust Like Mothballs

Lt. Col. Shuzo sat at the shera wood desk of the small compartment at the back of the ship's library, a rarely used feature on starships today. With a galactic encyclopedia of knowledge available at one's fingertips from any terminal across the Federation, the need for libraries had practically ended.

It was for this reason that Shuzo decided to spend the bulk of hir free time, which was in ample supply these days, combing through massive amounts of stored data. Shuzo had forgotten what hir initial search was for, finding something more interesting to pursue. What s/he was researching didn't matter; the peace and quiet was all that existed. The chief tactical and chief security officers had both refused all aid from the aged Axanar. There was nothing Shuzo could provide them from hir treasure trove of combat experience that they couldn't obtain from the ship's computer.

Shuzo knew this to be a mistake on their part. The 25th century had become too reliant on technology. Not just the Federation but every other warp-capable civilization. However Shuzo knew that technology had its drawbacks. It was prone to failure when least expected and most often when needed most. What good would one be with a transporter on a rock of kelbonite? Shuzo knew that the best resources were those possessed in mind and body. Despite hir advanced age, Shuzo was in top physical form; s/he had even bested the chief of security in a sparring match during the last security training exercise, one of the most recent reasons for the chief's dislike of the Axanar. However it was the mental aspect of resourcefulness that Shuzo was aspiring to improve. S/he had seen a lot and learned from it all, but there was much more that s/he did not know and no matter how fancy and new or state-of-the-art the engineers vowed a ship to be, it always failed to have what was needed when needed most. Shuzo thought of the Excelsior, not the latest one but "The Great Experiment". S/he had brought that failure up to the chief tactical officer and spent the better part of a shift arguing the irrelevance of it in the here and now, after all transwarp speeds were achieved and all other inefficiencies in that design were overcome.