Splat goes the objective.
So it seems we've technically succeeded at our mission. We were to bring him back dead or alive, and due to a transporter accident, death was the winner of the day. Growing up with Klingons, one develops a strong stomach for blood, guts and gore, or one simply does not survive, so being in the transporter room when they materialized him didn't bother me one bit. Spiegel on the other hand was white as a ghost.
He handled the gore when we'd gone on away missions together during the Klingon war, so it didn't occur to me to drag him out of the room for this mess. There really wasn't a good chance though, the blue bastard's goons easily took up a majority of the space in the transporter room, and when they left, they were quickly replaced by a med team. And even if we'd been able to make it to the door with them in there, our chief engineer showed up about the time we should have been headed out the door. I'm not sure if Spiegel had known what to expect, or if he was just trying to get out of the way by getting in the way, but I had to firmly keep him out of the way of everyone else coming in to do their jobs.
The one who took it worse than Spiegel was Noelle Connor. From the way she reacted, you'd think she'd never seen combat before and that she was personally responsible for every action of the ship's systems. I tried to talk to her, but as usual, I was absolutely inept at dealing with human sensitivities, and Spiegel was so stunned himself all he could think of was alcohol. Noelle wasn't interested in getting drunk.
I was going to have Spiegel check in on Noelle some time this evening, but dude got so drunk that it was all I could do to get him into his bed to let him try to sleep through it. I did set his alarm for the morning, so he'd hopefully make it to the briefing, and I'll make a point to check on him with a prairie oyster, his favorite cure for hangovers.
For now, I'm not happy with how the Trafalgar handled on the way down to the planet this morning, so I'm going to set up a simulator in the holodeck and see if I can work out how to better handle such situations again, or how to improve the shuttle design to better work with such conditions. I have half a mind to surprise Grace and her friends, and invite them to join me, but I have no idea when their duty shifts are, so I don't know if they'd be able to join me. Also, I'm not sure if I'm in the mood to be on the receiving end of hero worship again. It was flattering coming from a little girl but I'm not sure how she's changed since then and I don't know if she still considers me her hero.
I might also need some combat time in the holodeck, there was entirely too little excitement on this away mission compared to what I'd been hoping for given my blank check and the build up. Maybe the Tennis Invasion would be good for me.