"Shortest War Ever"
is a Star Trek Online fanfic by StarSword, part of the Bait and Switch (STO) setting. The story was originally composed for Unofficial Literary Challenge #35: "Rhyme Directive" on the STO forums.
The USS Bajor is covertly observing a pre-warp civilization, waiting to hand the job off to a dedicated science vessel, when a rapidly developing nightmare scenario on the surface brings Captain Kanril Eleya into direct conflict with the Prime Directive.
Tropes:
- Alien Non-Interference Clause: The relative merits of the original Trope Namer are discussed extensively. The Bajor crew are using electronic countermeasures to hide the ship's presence from the Sabek ("they think we're a GPS satellite"), listen to radio traffic, and raid libraries and museums under holographic disguises to learn about the Sabeks' political situation. When it becomes clear the two major powers on the planet are on the verge of a nuclear war, the senior staff have a full-on debate on whether it's justifiable to interfere in an internal conflict of such nature despite the Prime Directive. Of particular note, Dul'krah notes that his own people nearly went extinct after a global nuclear war when the Federation refused to intervene despite knowing of their existence (it led to the Pekh'dar initially refusing to join the Federation after they found out), as well as the Federation's canonical refusal to aid the Bajorans in ending the Occupation. Eleya also pointedly contacts Starfleet Command ahead of time to ask for permission to bend or break the rules if a war starts, but one starts while she's talking to the admiral and she chooses to attack without waiting for permission.
- Aliens Steal Cable: Inverted: the protagonists listen in on the Sabeks' internal communications and raid their libraries and museums to learn about their history and politics.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Neither the Alliance for Global Unity nor the People's Syndicalist Dominion are intended to be sympathetic: the one is basically The Empire, controlled by a single kingdom whose people live in poverty and most of whose ruling class seems to have fallen for their own propaganda, while the other is shown to use "single list" yes-or-no balloting to simulate free elections without the risk of the ruling party actually losing. Eleya thinks the bright spot is the fact that several nation-states on the planet are apparently chafing at being underfoot: there's been a spate of uprisings in the various client states in recent years.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: A single Galaxy-class starship versus two Nuclear Age Space Filling Empires armed to the teeth. The USS Bajor completely obliterates both blocs' entire deployed nuclear arsenals in thirty minutes.
- Epigraph: "So Long Mom" by Tom Lehrer.
- Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: The story is closely inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with the AGU and PSD loosely standing in for the NATO powers and the Warsaw Pact. The Republic of Valdemar stands in for Cuba itself, as an island nation formerly affiliated with the Alliance but now allied to the Dominion following a revolution. It's essentially a What If? scenario where the Crisis really did go nuclear.
- Finishing Each Other's Sentences: A pair of Bynar ensigns working for Biri do this when she asks them for a second opinion on what she's pretty sure is the Sabek's first scientific paper on warp theory.
- Foreign Cuss Word: A petty officer swears in Swedish after intercepting military chatter about the Confederation of Samar deploying its navy to blockade Kalamar.
- Loophole Abuse: Eleya retroactively justifies intervening in the nuclear war by citing a revision to General Order 24 (pointedly dated after "A Taste of Armageddon") stating that for a Starfleet vessel to intentionally depopulate an inhabited planet requires a direct order from the President of the Federation and ratification by the Federation Council. She then argues that her inaction would have led to the depopulation of Volante, and therefore she would have been in violation of the law had she not intervened. Admiral Velasquez calls BS on the excuse and Eleya admits she "did the only thing that was going to let me sleep at night!"
- Orbital Bombardment: Just one of the tactics used by Eleya and Tess to stop the war: in addition to destroying nuclear subs and missile silos with orbital strikes, they also use tractor beams, ECM, deflector shields, and airstrikes by shuttlecraft.
- Shout-Out:
- Eleya favorably compares a Sabek novel translated by the Bajor crew to The Thrawn Trilogy, which she read at Starfleet Academy.
- The Bajor crew code-names a theoretical all-out nuclear war on Volante "CASE NIGHTMARE RED". In The Laundry Files by Charles Stross, that's one of the eponymous agency's hypothetical scenarios for The End of the World as We Know It (specifically referring to an Alien Invasion).
- Silly Reason for War: Played for Drama. Eleya says after the fact that the war almost certainly started because some nameless radar operator in Kalamar made a mistake, leading the Dominion to retaliate against an Alliance nuclear launch that never actually happened, and things snowballed from there. Such errors have happened several times in real life, though they've fortunately never led to an actual nuclear exchange... yet.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: Eleya asks for suggestions of possible ways they could prevent or stop a war, Prime Directive notwithstanding. Gaarra suggests trying to defuse it by introducing antiwar propaganda into the native Sabeks' communications networks. Chief of the Boat Kinlo immediately shoots that down because the Sabeks are a pre-Information Age species and barely even have personal computers in major cities.Kinlo: They're dependent on corporate and state media to get any information out; they'd notice the intrusion.
- The Smurfette Principle: Lampshaded with Kar'tan, the Samarian intelligence secretary and the only female identified in its leadership cadre, whom Secretary-General Va'kreht muses was promoted to the Cabinet due to affirmative action. She's indicated to do her job well but is very much a Sarcastic Devotee of her own side.
- Sophisticated as Hell: The narrator gets in it at one point.Thirty minutes after it began, the Third Alliance-Dominion War ceased with a whimper, not a cataclysm, as generals, statesmen, merchants, and laborers raised bleary, shellshocked eyes to the perfect, impassive blue sky over their lands, collectively wondering what the bloody hell just happened?
