Star Trek: Rogues – A race across the quadrant in search of a MacGuffin

Welcome to the seventh part of The Search For Story, a series of articles where we’ll take a character, group, species, timeline, or event and look at what that might look like as a standalone series, miniseries or movie.

With the previous six stories we’ve kept only two constants, the first is that they are at their hearts Star Trek stories (that is sort of the point after all), and the second is that they are all stories set one way or another inside of Starfleet. This time we’re going to break the mould and step outside of Starfleet.

For this story we’ll be borrowing elements and inspiration from a few Picard centric episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the various characters of Harrison Ford and a bit of the beautifully crafted world of everyone’s favourite space-western Joss Whedon’s Firefly.

Title: Star Trek: Rogues

Inspiration: Jean-Luc Picard, Harrison Ford, Firefly

Setting: 24th Century, Alpha/Beta Quadrant

Alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

A Ferengi and a Naussican walk into a bar on Risa, they ask around less then discreetly about a man they’re looking to meet who’s supposed to have information to sell. Unbeknownst to them, the female Andorian bounty hunter at the bar and our protagonist the new Human bartender, the man they’re looking for is an archaeologist running scared for his life after discovering the supposed site of an ancient MacGuffin thought lost centuries ago which may hold the key to a near limitless energy source.

‘The archaeologist had managed to escape a earlier life threatening situation by sneaking onto a transport headed for Risa, information which, once sold, has preceded him to the location where he will die tragically at the hands of a small group of Breen mercenaries just as he meets our previously mentioned unlikely group of rogues.

This chain of events sets the Bartender, Bounty Hunter, Ferengi merchant and Naussican bodyguard on a treasure hunt across half a dozen planets, often with the Breen closing in behind them at every turn. At first they have the Andorran’s shuttle, but when that is lost in a crash landing mid way through the second act they are forced to beg, borrow and steal their remaining methods of transportation.

Will they stay together or be forced to split up to reach their goal? Any one of these rogues could easily have been the character of the week, or a background character walking the corridors  on one of the mainline Star Trek series, passing through another series of events while scamming passage from one of Starfleets finest.

Remember since none of these characters have official ties, to their respective government organizations they can’t just call in the cavalry to come to their aid, and we don’t know yet who is bankrolling the Breen.

Will our protagonists find the MacGuffin?

Will it be worthwhile or turn out to just be a myth?

Will the Ferengi and/or the Naussican turn on the others for profit, or will they all become an ongoing rag-tag group having adventure after adventure as the years go on, a sort of Guardians or the Quadrant set within the Star Trek universe?

What do you think? Hit us back on Facebook or Twitter with your thoughts.