Ten years ago, I wrote a Star Trek short story in the hopes of being published in Pocket Books' Strange New Worlds, an anthology series featuring the best of submitted fan fiction. The story was never selected. (Maybe because I was already a published author with stories in Playboy and Marvel Comics, but I'll never really know for sure ;-)) Nevertheless, I'm really proud of the piece and have dusted it off and revised it, and am offering it as a Christmas (or Hanukkah) gift to my fans.The story takes place shortly after the third Next Gen movie, Insurrection. (For a downloadable Pdf version, click link at end of story.)
Star Date 51500.0
Jean-Luc
Picard glared at the glass plaque on his ready room desk as though it carried a
deadly disease. The gold inscription read: For
service, above and beyond the call of duty in upholding the Prime Directive.
The irony was not lost on him; Jean-Luc had earned it for an act of mutiny,
defending the Ba'ku race from the schemes of an overzealous Starfleet Admiral
named Dougherty. He had hoped his insurrection would trigger a dialogue over
slack Federation ethics, but the discourse never materialized, and the matter
had been neatly swept under the rug. Dougherty had friends in high places, it
would seem, and perhaps a few silent collaborators as well. Why else would the
fleet's flagship be on a "cooling off" mission cataloguing gas
densities in the Mutara Nebula. Picard wanted to hurl the glass block and its
polished marble base right into space. 
