Part Four (Cont'd)
“Oh, this is ever so exciting!”
Administrator Trolow clapped excitedly as he watched the unfolding details of the game on the screen in front of him. On the other side of the administrator’s office, Martus Mazur lounged on a sofa sipping a Tarkelean Tea, and making less of an effort to follow along.
“Hardly exciting,” he yawned with renewed confidence after his successful trip to the disrupt the source of the attempted interference, “My crew are almost at the finish line.”
“Ah,” Trolow beamed, “But so are the other crew.”
That was enough to snap Mazur out of his reverie. He jumped up from the sofa in an instant.
“That’s not possible!”
He stalked over to the screen on the desk and took in what the Wadi administrator was cheerily reacting to. And the usually casual and confident El-Aurian snarled in anger.
“What?! How the hell are they closing? That ship of theirs should be nowhere near that fast!”
“Ah, but that was before they rerouted auxiliary power through an iterative feedback circuit and then channeled that energy directly into the warp core,” Trolow reported, “Setting up a quite thrilling end to our game. Ah, games are good!”
“Rerouted the what to the where? That’s just nonsense!” Mazur spat, “How could they have known…”
His words tailed off as realisation dawned on his face. His expression darkened instantly as he turned back towards the door of the office.
“Where are you going?” Trolow asked, without taking his eyes from the screen, “You’ll miss the end if you leave now!”
“I’ll be back,” Mazur grunted, “I just need to check something. Make sure there aren’t any…bugs in the program.”
As he walked on, Trolow simply clapped and watched the finale unfold.
****************************
“It should be just a few more intersections away!”
“You said that a few intersections ago!”
“Try doing this in heels, then you can complain!”
Natasha and Jirel bickered their way through another intersection in the labyrinthine corridors of the Starship Bounty, having already raced their way up fourteen decks and past countless near-identical intersections as they tracked down the Stone of Unity.
Natasha kept up her pace, doing her best to channel her Academy athletics training even as she focused on keeping her balance in the thoroughly impractical footwear she had been saddled with along with the rest of her doppelganger’s thoroughly impractical outfit.
Just behind her, the bruised and battered Jirel was starting to flag.
“This isn’t easy for me either,” he gasped, “I’ve spent the last hour being punched, remember?”
“You really should be used to that sort of thing by now,” she called back.
Jirel mustered a half smile at that, despite the pain he was in. She was right, after all.
“Why the hell is this ship so big anyway?” he wheezed in frustration as they sprinted through yet another intersection, “Five people live here!”
“Just focus! We’re nearly there!”
She reached the next intersection and skidded around the corner, nearly losing her footing as she did so. Behind her, Jirel followed in her wake.
“By the way,” he gasped, “Not that I’m complaining, you understand, but…how the hell did you get here?”
She ran up, but couldn’t help glancing back at the Trill as they continued their breathless journey through the improbably vast starship.
“Someone had to rescue the damsel in distress, didn’t they?” she smiled.
Jirel’s own half smile became a full smile, even as he felt his lungs starting to ache as they rushed down another corridor.
“Now,” she continued, back to business, “Calla and the others gave me the directions, and it should be just along…here.”
She came to an ungainly halt in front of an entirely nondescript door and walked inside. Jirel, glad to be slowing to a walk, followed her.
They found themselves in an almost empty storage room. Rows of shelves lined the walls along the sides and back of the room, but they were entirely bare. Apart from a small piece of rock on one shelf, halfway down the left side of the room.
“Huh,” Jirel panted, “At least it’s not gonna take long to search for it.”
“Guess that’s the problem with lazy holosuite programs,” Natasha replied, “Not as much effort put into set dressing.”
She stepped over to where the unpretentious Stone of Unity sat and lifted it off the shelf. Just as Jirel had feared back in the cavern, she half expected her action to trigger some sort of booby trap that they would then have to fight their way out of.
But she quickly reassured herself that she was being silly. That sort of thing only happened in the real world, after all.
“Ok,” she nodded with satisfaction, “One Stone of Unity, successfully recovered. And the Bounty’s on its way to fetch us, so we just need to hold out here until—”
Her confidence came to an abrupt end as the sound of an angry roar came reverberating into the storage room from somewhere in the corridors of the deck they were on. Despite still not being experts in the program they were inside, it didn’t take long for either of them to figure out what must have made the noise.
“That sounded like…” Jirel began.
“Klath,” Natasha nodded.
With an eight foot tall armour-plated Klingon killing machine now apparently hunting them down, neither of them needed to debate their next move.
They raced off out of the storage room and back down the corridor, as fast as Natasha’s heels and Jirel’s lungs could carry them.
****************************
“Captain Jirel, you appear to be injured.”
The statement of fact from the unflappable robe-wearing form of Sunek carried no sympathy, even as Captain Jirel staggered slightly bow-legged out of the turbolift and into the middle of the cavernous expanse of the Starship Bounty’s bridge.
“Don’t worry about it,” he wheezed as heroically as he could manage.
“I am not capable of worrying about anything,” the Vulcan noted with a raised eyebrow.
“Whatever,” the Trill grimaced, as he gingerly sat down in his mercifully cushioned command chair, “What’s our status?”
“I have dispatched Klath to deal with the intruders,” Sunek reported from the vast wraparound helm station at the front of the dazzling amphitheatre of a bridge, “And we are still on course for our final destination. However, the other ship appears to be gaining.”
“Gaining?” Captain Jirel snapped, leaning forwards a little too quickly and wincing from the resulting rush of pain from his somewhat personal injury, “How?”
“They appear to have found a way to reroute auxiliary power through an iterative feedback circuit and channel the resulting energy directly into the warp core.”
“Ah, damn them! That’s fiendishly clever!”
“Indeed. A most…fascinating solution.”
Leaning a little gingerly back in his seat, Captain Jirel heroically stroked his chin and considered their rapidly deteriorating situation. And, just as he always did, he felt compelled to take the most heroic and exciting course of action available to him.
“Sunek, turn us around. Raise the adaptive shield array. Load all quantum torpedo launchers and power up the phasers.”
“Captain Jirel,” his unflappable pilot replied, “If I may, the logical course of action for us would be to—”
“I know it would, old friend. But like I always say, there’s not a lot that’s logical about—Ow!”
The Vulcan glanced back at the muscular Trill, who seemed to be quietly whimpering as he adjusted his position in the cushioned seat yet again.
“Perhaps you should seek medical attention before—”
“Just do it!”
With another casually raised eyebrow, Sunek turned back to his bank of fully three dimensional holographic controls, and carried out his captain’s orders.
And the crew of the Starship Bounty prepared to do something heroic. Just as they always did.
****************************
“They are adjusting course to intercept us.”
Klath’s report boomed out into the more cramped confines of the Bounty’s cockpit.
“See?” Sunek called back from the pilot’s station, “Now we’re playing this stupid program by its own rules, everything’s going our way. So let’s go shoot down one stupid Vulcan wearing some very stupid robes.”
Denella stood from her engineering console and headed for the exit.
“Don’t shoot them down too much before we get the others safely back onboard. I’ll get to the transporter.”
As she reached the rear steps of the cockpit, Klath called out to her.
“You do realise that you will not be able to beam them aboard while both vessels have their shields raised?”
“In the real world, maybe,” she shrugged back, “But given everything else we’ve just done, I reckon this program will forget about that little problem if the situation suits it.”
The Klingon considered the evident logic of this entirely illogical statement, and nodded back in acknowledgement, if not in understanding.
Without waiting for further questions, Denella raced on down the steps, as Klath focused back on his confusingly upgraded weapons controls. Such matters required his full attention, after all. Despite the ridiculous situation they were in, a battle was still a battle.
“Coming up on them now,” Sunek called out, “Give ‘em hell, buddy!”
The tiny Bounty dropped out of warp almost on top of the enormous Starship Bounty. A split second later, Klath’s warrior instincts went to work. A cavalcade of weapons fire spat forth from the tiny ship, volleys of micro-torpedoes interspersed with flashes of fire from the wing-mounted phaser cannons. Each and every one found their target, setting off fiery explosions across the hull of the other ship.
And this time, thanks to the fact that Klath had coupled a theta-band energy matrix to the phaser cannons, they caused some serious damage.
****************************
“This way!”
Jirel followed Natasha as she dived down another corridor, all the while hearing the heavy thump of the footsteps of their lumbering pursuer behind him.
What the Starship Bounty’s version of Klath lacked in speed and maneuverability, he apparently more than made up for in persistence. Despite leading him on a merry dance through deck after deck of the ship, the mute warrior’s tracking skills were keeping him on their tail.
Aside from his lumbering speed, the only other positive to their chase was the constant roaring and growling from their pursuer, which meant that there was no chance of the brutish version of Klath sneaking up on them.
As they skittered down another corridor, Jirel managed to pant a response in between the deep breaths he was taking.
“Where…the hell…are the others?”
“They’ll be here,” Natasha called back as she rushed on, with the Stone of Unity tucked under her arm like a rugby ball, “Just hurry up. I thought you said you’d been working out?”
“I said…push-ups,” Jirel gasped back, “Not…cardio!”
Natasha ignored his wheezing complaints as she took a right turn and swung down another corridor as fast as her impractical footwear would carry her. Jirel reluctantly followed in her wake. It was only when they got halfway down this latest stretch of corridor that they saw the solid metal wall facing them at the end. They both skidded to a halt in an instant.
“Nice one,” Jirel offered, “Amazing escape route.”
“What the hell?” Natasha snapped back, “Why is it a dead end? What sort of ship has a corridor that doesn’t lead anywhere—?”
Her valid question was cut off by a sudden roar from behind them. They glanced worriedly at each other, and then slowly turned around, already knowing what they would see.
At the other end of the dimly lit corridor, cutting them off from their only means of escape, stood the flashing red eyes and enormous body of the Starship Bounty’s version of Klath.
“Um,” Jirel managed, “I, ah, don’t suppose you’d be interested in negotiating…?”
The monster answered his question with another unintelligible roar, before he began his charge down the corridor towards them.
“So,” Jirel offered as the armour-plated killing machine lumbered towards them, “Any bright ideas?”
“Not really,” Natasha gulped back, “I guess, in a badly-written holosuite program like this one, this is the point where we’d be rescued by some sort of implausible last-second—”
Klath’s scarlet eyes widened in surprise as he saw the shimmer of the transporter effect taking hold on the two figures in front of him.
By the time the enormous warrior realised what was happening, he was powerless to stop himself from careering straight through the empty space where his quarry had been standing, straight into the metal wall at the end of the corridor.
He impacted with enough force to shake the entire superstructure of the Starship Bounty.
****************************
“Got ‘em!”
Denella called up to the cockpit just as the Bounty completed its attack run down the entire flank of the vast Starship Bounty, leaving behind a cavalcade of destructive explosions from their freshly and inexplicably upgraded weaponry.
“Ok then,” Sunek offered to Klath, “Hope you don’t mind me ruining your fun, big guy, but we really should get to that finish line.”
Klath did his best to look like someone who wasn’t actually starting to enjoy the sheer havoc his weapons fire was causing to their holographic enemy, shrugging his burly shoulders.
“Proceed,” he boomed back.
Denella, Jirel and Natasha bounded back up the steps into the cockpit, just in time to see the Bounty take off at warp.
Leaving the heroes in their wake.
“Oh, this is ever so exciting!”
Administrator Trolow clapped excitedly as he watched the unfolding details of the game on the screen in front of him. On the other side of the administrator’s office, Martus Mazur lounged on a sofa sipping a Tarkelean Tea, and making less of an effort to follow along.
“Hardly exciting,” he yawned with renewed confidence after his successful trip to the disrupt the source of the attempted interference, “My crew are almost at the finish line.”
“Ah,” Trolow beamed, “But so are the other crew.”
That was enough to snap Mazur out of his reverie. He jumped up from the sofa in an instant.
“That’s not possible!”
He stalked over to the screen on the desk and took in what the Wadi administrator was cheerily reacting to. And the usually casual and confident El-Aurian snarled in anger.
“What?! How the hell are they closing? That ship of theirs should be nowhere near that fast!”
“Ah, but that was before they rerouted auxiliary power through an iterative feedback circuit and then channeled that energy directly into the warp core,” Trolow reported, “Setting up a quite thrilling end to our game. Ah, games are good!”
“Rerouted the what to the where? That’s just nonsense!” Mazur spat, “How could they have known…”
His words tailed off as realisation dawned on his face. His expression darkened instantly as he turned back towards the door of the office.
“Where are you going?” Trolow asked, without taking his eyes from the screen, “You’ll miss the end if you leave now!”
“I’ll be back,” Mazur grunted, “I just need to check something. Make sure there aren’t any…bugs in the program.”
As he walked on, Trolow simply clapped and watched the finale unfold.
****************************
“It should be just a few more intersections away!”
“You said that a few intersections ago!”
“Try doing this in heels, then you can complain!”
Natasha and Jirel bickered their way through another intersection in the labyrinthine corridors of the Starship Bounty, having already raced their way up fourteen decks and past countless near-identical intersections as they tracked down the Stone of Unity.
Natasha kept up her pace, doing her best to channel her Academy athletics training even as she focused on keeping her balance in the thoroughly impractical footwear she had been saddled with along with the rest of her doppelganger’s thoroughly impractical outfit.
Just behind her, the bruised and battered Jirel was starting to flag.
“This isn’t easy for me either,” he gasped, “I’ve spent the last hour being punched, remember?”
“You really should be used to that sort of thing by now,” she called back.
Jirel mustered a half smile at that, despite the pain he was in. She was right, after all.
“Why the hell is this ship so big anyway?” he wheezed in frustration as they sprinted through yet another intersection, “Five people live here!”
“Just focus! We’re nearly there!”
She reached the next intersection and skidded around the corner, nearly losing her footing as she did so. Behind her, Jirel followed in her wake.
“By the way,” he gasped, “Not that I’m complaining, you understand, but…how the hell did you get here?”
She ran up, but couldn’t help glancing back at the Trill as they continued their breathless journey through the improbably vast starship.
“Someone had to rescue the damsel in distress, didn’t they?” she smiled.
Jirel’s own half smile became a full smile, even as he felt his lungs starting to ache as they rushed down another corridor.
“Now,” she continued, back to business, “Calla and the others gave me the directions, and it should be just along…here.”
She came to an ungainly halt in front of an entirely nondescript door and walked inside. Jirel, glad to be slowing to a walk, followed her.
They found themselves in an almost empty storage room. Rows of shelves lined the walls along the sides and back of the room, but they were entirely bare. Apart from a small piece of rock on one shelf, halfway down the left side of the room.
“Huh,” Jirel panted, “At least it’s not gonna take long to search for it.”
“Guess that’s the problem with lazy holosuite programs,” Natasha replied, “Not as much effort put into set dressing.”
She stepped over to where the unpretentious Stone of Unity sat and lifted it off the shelf. Just as Jirel had feared back in the cavern, she half expected her action to trigger some sort of booby trap that they would then have to fight their way out of.
But she quickly reassured herself that she was being silly. That sort of thing only happened in the real world, after all.
“Ok,” she nodded with satisfaction, “One Stone of Unity, successfully recovered. And the Bounty’s on its way to fetch us, so we just need to hold out here until—”
Her confidence came to an abrupt end as the sound of an angry roar came reverberating into the storage room from somewhere in the corridors of the deck they were on. Despite still not being experts in the program they were inside, it didn’t take long for either of them to figure out what must have made the noise.
“That sounded like…” Jirel began.
“Klath,” Natasha nodded.
With an eight foot tall armour-plated Klingon killing machine now apparently hunting them down, neither of them needed to debate their next move.
They raced off out of the storage room and back down the corridor, as fast as Natasha’s heels and Jirel’s lungs could carry them.
****************************
“Captain Jirel, you appear to be injured.”
The statement of fact from the unflappable robe-wearing form of Sunek carried no sympathy, even as Captain Jirel staggered slightly bow-legged out of the turbolift and into the middle of the cavernous expanse of the Starship Bounty’s bridge.
“Don’t worry about it,” he wheezed as heroically as he could manage.
“I am not capable of worrying about anything,” the Vulcan noted with a raised eyebrow.
“Whatever,” the Trill grimaced, as he gingerly sat down in his mercifully cushioned command chair, “What’s our status?”
“I have dispatched Klath to deal with the intruders,” Sunek reported from the vast wraparound helm station at the front of the dazzling amphitheatre of a bridge, “And we are still on course for our final destination. However, the other ship appears to be gaining.”
“Gaining?” Captain Jirel snapped, leaning forwards a little too quickly and wincing from the resulting rush of pain from his somewhat personal injury, “How?”
“They appear to have found a way to reroute auxiliary power through an iterative feedback circuit and channel the resulting energy directly into the warp core.”
“Ah, damn them! That’s fiendishly clever!”
“Indeed. A most…fascinating solution.”
Leaning a little gingerly back in his seat, Captain Jirel heroically stroked his chin and considered their rapidly deteriorating situation. And, just as he always did, he felt compelled to take the most heroic and exciting course of action available to him.
“Sunek, turn us around. Raise the adaptive shield array. Load all quantum torpedo launchers and power up the phasers.”
“Captain Jirel,” his unflappable pilot replied, “If I may, the logical course of action for us would be to—”
“I know it would, old friend. But like I always say, there’s not a lot that’s logical about—Ow!”
The Vulcan glanced back at the muscular Trill, who seemed to be quietly whimpering as he adjusted his position in the cushioned seat yet again.
“Perhaps you should seek medical attention before—”
“Just do it!”
With another casually raised eyebrow, Sunek turned back to his bank of fully three dimensional holographic controls, and carried out his captain’s orders.
And the crew of the Starship Bounty prepared to do something heroic. Just as they always did.
****************************
“They are adjusting course to intercept us.”
Klath’s report boomed out into the more cramped confines of the Bounty’s cockpit.
“See?” Sunek called back from the pilot’s station, “Now we’re playing this stupid program by its own rules, everything’s going our way. So let’s go shoot down one stupid Vulcan wearing some very stupid robes.”
Denella stood from her engineering console and headed for the exit.
“Don’t shoot them down too much before we get the others safely back onboard. I’ll get to the transporter.”
As she reached the rear steps of the cockpit, Klath called out to her.
“You do realise that you will not be able to beam them aboard while both vessels have their shields raised?”
“In the real world, maybe,” she shrugged back, “But given everything else we’ve just done, I reckon this program will forget about that little problem if the situation suits it.”
The Klingon considered the evident logic of this entirely illogical statement, and nodded back in acknowledgement, if not in understanding.
Without waiting for further questions, Denella raced on down the steps, as Klath focused back on his confusingly upgraded weapons controls. Such matters required his full attention, after all. Despite the ridiculous situation they were in, a battle was still a battle.
“Coming up on them now,” Sunek called out, “Give ‘em hell, buddy!”
The tiny Bounty dropped out of warp almost on top of the enormous Starship Bounty. A split second later, Klath’s warrior instincts went to work. A cavalcade of weapons fire spat forth from the tiny ship, volleys of micro-torpedoes interspersed with flashes of fire from the wing-mounted phaser cannons. Each and every one found their target, setting off fiery explosions across the hull of the other ship.
And this time, thanks to the fact that Klath had coupled a theta-band energy matrix to the phaser cannons, they caused some serious damage.
****************************
“This way!”
Jirel followed Natasha as she dived down another corridor, all the while hearing the heavy thump of the footsteps of their lumbering pursuer behind him.
What the Starship Bounty’s version of Klath lacked in speed and maneuverability, he apparently more than made up for in persistence. Despite leading him on a merry dance through deck after deck of the ship, the mute warrior’s tracking skills were keeping him on their tail.
Aside from his lumbering speed, the only other positive to their chase was the constant roaring and growling from their pursuer, which meant that there was no chance of the brutish version of Klath sneaking up on them.
As they skittered down another corridor, Jirel managed to pant a response in between the deep breaths he was taking.
“Where…the hell…are the others?”
“They’ll be here,” Natasha called back as she rushed on, with the Stone of Unity tucked under her arm like a rugby ball, “Just hurry up. I thought you said you’d been working out?”
“I said…push-ups,” Jirel gasped back, “Not…cardio!”
Natasha ignored his wheezing complaints as she took a right turn and swung down another corridor as fast as her impractical footwear would carry her. Jirel reluctantly followed in her wake. It was only when they got halfway down this latest stretch of corridor that they saw the solid metal wall facing them at the end. They both skidded to a halt in an instant.
“Nice one,” Jirel offered, “Amazing escape route.”
“What the hell?” Natasha snapped back, “Why is it a dead end? What sort of ship has a corridor that doesn’t lead anywhere—?”
Her valid question was cut off by a sudden roar from behind them. They glanced worriedly at each other, and then slowly turned around, already knowing what they would see.
At the other end of the dimly lit corridor, cutting them off from their only means of escape, stood the flashing red eyes and enormous body of the Starship Bounty’s version of Klath.
“Um,” Jirel managed, “I, ah, don’t suppose you’d be interested in negotiating…?”
The monster answered his question with another unintelligible roar, before he began his charge down the corridor towards them.
“So,” Jirel offered as the armour-plated killing machine lumbered towards them, “Any bright ideas?”
“Not really,” Natasha gulped back, “I guess, in a badly-written holosuite program like this one, this is the point where we’d be rescued by some sort of implausible last-second—”
Klath’s scarlet eyes widened in surprise as he saw the shimmer of the transporter effect taking hold on the two figures in front of him.
By the time the enormous warrior realised what was happening, he was powerless to stop himself from careering straight through the empty space where his quarry had been standing, straight into the metal wall at the end of the corridor.
He impacted with enough force to shake the entire superstructure of the Starship Bounty.
****************************
“Got ‘em!”
Denella called up to the cockpit just as the Bounty completed its attack run down the entire flank of the vast Starship Bounty, leaving behind a cavalcade of destructive explosions from their freshly and inexplicably upgraded weaponry.
“Ok then,” Sunek offered to Klath, “Hope you don’t mind me ruining your fun, big guy, but we really should get to that finish line.”
Klath did his best to look like someone who wasn’t actually starting to enjoy the sheer havoc his weapons fire was causing to their holographic enemy, shrugging his burly shoulders.
“Proceed,” he boomed back.
Denella, Jirel and Natasha bounded back up the steps into the cockpit, just in time to see the Bounty take off at warp.
Leaving the heroes in their wake.
