Definitely got a little bit of a manga going here. And I'm a big fan of manga. Thanks!! rbs
Star Trek: Bounty - 11 - "Love, but With More Aggressive Overtones"
- Thread starter BountyTrek
- Start date
Part Three (Cont'd)
“It’s not a kidnapping.”
Denella raised an entirely unconvinced eyebrow and kept her weapon raised at the Bajoran on the other side of the Kendra’s cockpit.
“Really?” the Orion countered, “Cos, as far as I can see, you knocked me unconscious, got me all the way back to your ship somehow, and then took off into space. Presumably without telling anyone where we’re going?”
Erami cringed slightly at that list of undeniable facts and reluctantly sighed.
“Ok, granted, there are a few similarities with a kidnapping. But this was all for your own safety.”
“My own safety?”
“Like I said,” Erami shrugged, “We needed to make a quick escape, and there wasn’t really time to explain. We needed to get away from Kervala Prime before the Pakleds got themselves back together, and I couldn’t risk them going after you if I left you there.”
“And now what? You’re just gonna keep me onboard your shuttle forever? Is this how you normally hire your crews?”
“No,” Erami smiled patiently, “We just need to find somewhere to hide for a bit. Just until the Pakleds clear out of the system to try and find us. I’ve done my best to mask our warp trail, so give it a few hours and then we should be safe to head back.”
The Orion still didn’t look convinced. Erami sighed again and gestured to the dagger that Denella was still wielding defensively in front of her.
“Look, if this really was a kidnapping, would you still have that? And wouldn’t I have tied you up instead of leaving you to wake up and hold me at knifepoint? Trust me, I’m familiar with the concept of a kidnapping. And this isn’t one.”
Denella had to concede that these were some good points. At the very least, if she was a kidnapper, Erami was taking an awful lot of liberties.
“Well,” she managed eventually, “I, um, guess that makes sense.”
“You really thought I’d kidnapped you?” Erami chuckled with an amused shake of her head.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Now it was Erami’s turn to concede the point, as Denella rubbed the back of her head with a pained wince.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” the Bajoran winced, “If you, um, put the knife away, I can take a look at you with the medkit?”
Denella shook her head, but found herself holstering the dagger regardless.
“It’s fine,” the Orion assured her, “Don’t think there’s a concussion. But you couldn’t have been a bit more gentle?”
“Don’t know my own strength, do I?” Erami grinned, rolling up her sleeve and flexing her bicep to underline her point.
Denella smiled back, and the Bajoran relaxed now the weapon was removed from the discussion.
“Well,” she continued, “Now that’s all cleared up, I’ll ask you again: You hungry?”
Denella considered trying to deny it, but she was completely famished. She nodded back, eliciting a wider smile from the other woman.
“Perfect,” Erami replied with satisfaction, “Cos I’ve got just the thing. Call it an apology. For, um, not kidnapping you.”
The Bajoran stepped over towards the controls of the shuttle and deftly tapped them. The Kendra had a simple bank of controls, with two seats at the front of the cockpit for a pilot and co-pilot, and much like the rest of the ship they showed clear signs of a lifetime of running repairs, the metal plates and control surfaces a mishmash of different designs and colours.
As Erami worked at the controls, Denella felt the shuttle slow to sublight speeds.
“Cos,” she continued, “I’ve told you we’re hiding from the Pakleds, but you haven’t seen where we’re hiding yet.”
She nodded towards the shuttle’s cockpit window, and Denella turned back to the view, just as the Bajoran swung the ship to her port side.
Denella couldn’t help but gasp, as she saw that the typical starscape view had been replaced by that of a dazzling nebula. It was a swirling mass of pink and purple hues, tendrils of gas twisting and curling around each other in a cosmic dance of charged particles. The light from the view bathed the entire cockpit in a warm pinkish tinge as the Kendra slowed to an impulse crawl just on the periphery of the nebula.
Regardless of exactly how she’d got here, she couldn’t help but be captivated by it.
“May I introduce you to the Kervala Nebula,” Erami smiled as she gazed at the beauty of the view herself, “Figured that if you’re stuck laying low with me for a while, the least I could do was take you someplace nice.”
Denella was still staring through the cockpit window, too transfixed to answer. Erami smiled and stood from her seat, walking over to the rear of the cockpit.
“And get you something nice to eat,” she added.
Denella tore herself away from the view and turned around to see the Bajoran ostentatiously spreading a thick woollen blanket across the deck of the cockpit. Next to her sat a small replicated wicker hamper, overflowing with various food and drink.
“You…made a picnic?” Denella asked, with mild incredulity.
“Yeah,” Erami nodded as she smoothed the blanket out, “And if you ever dare tell anyone about how cute I’m being right now, I’ll give you another whack on the head. Got a reputation as a hard-ass shuttle pilot to maintain.”
Denella felt herself smiling again, as Erami gestured for her to sit down on the blanket.
“So,” she added with a smile of her own, “Wanna try that dinner again?”
She paused, then shrugged before continuing.
“I mean, technically this is brunch, but whatever.”
Denella took another look at the beauty of the swirling nebula, then turned back to the impromptu picnic scene.
And she nodded.
****************************
High above the surface of Kervala Prime’s overpopulated spaceport, the Pakled vessel Martan hung silently in orbit.
It wasn’t much to look at. Externally, the hull was that of a decades-old Andorian freighter, consisting of a spherical forward section and a blocky rectangular midsection, complete with twin warp nacelles that branched off on elevated pylons.
When it had been used by the Andorians, it had served as little more than a supply ship, completing short runs between colonies with raw materials and other resources. But, like all Pakled ships, once Grumtrag and his crew had come into possession of it, they had made plenty of adjustments under the skin. Using whatever extra resources they had been able to buy, steal or otherwise acquire, the rechristened Martan had been thoroughly overhauled from the ground up.
Her warp drive had been replaced with one from a Terrelian cruiser. Her shields had been upgraded using a generator from an old Vulcan transport. And she had been kitted out with weapons systems sourced from half a dozen other vessels.
In combination, the disparate requirements of each system shouldn’t have worked in tandem. But the Pakleds found a way to patch everything together in a way that worked. As a result, despite the rather unthreatening exterior of the Martan, it packed a hefty punch when the need arose.
Not that Grumtrag felt comforted by that fact as he stalked onto the Martan’s bridge.
He had woken up several minutes earlier, to find that he and his trusty first mate had been left behind in the storage room in the port. The Bajoran and her Orion companion had clearly long gone, and hadn’t even bothered taking their disruptors with them.
In something of a foul mood, he had immediately signalled to the Martan to beam them back aboard, and in the same transmission, he had also told his crew to work on getting a trace on any ships that had left the port recently.
By the time he had reached the bridge, little had changed about his mood.
But then, he finally received some positive news. His tactical chief, a stout Pakled by the name of Grivnog, had a report for him as soon as he sat down in his command chair. Because, not only had Grumtrag and his crew thoroughly upgraded the Martan’s propulsion, defensive and weapons systems over the last few months. They had also completed extensive work on the external sensors.
Thanks to a lucky find on a derelict they had come across a few sectors from Kervala Prime, there was now a full set of sensor modules from a Ferengi Marauder installed. Which meant that not only was the unassuming Martan packing a hefty punch, it was also excellent at locating its prey.
And while Juna Erami had done her best to hide her shuttle’s warp trail, she hadn’t reckoned with the beefed up systems of the Pakled vessel.
“We see where they have gone, Grumtrag,” Grivnog reported excitedly, “They tried to hide their path from us, but we have found it. Because we are smart.”
Grumtrag nodded in complete agreement with Grivnog’s final assessment. They were indeed smart. Smarter than the Bajoran that had taken their prize, at least.
“Take us to them,” he barked out without a moment’s hesitation, “Fastest speed!”
The bald Pakled at the helm nodded and prodded at his controls.
The Martan broke orbit from Kervala Prime, and turned in the direction indicated by Grivnog’s sensor data, before exploding forwards in a burst of light as the Terrelian warp drive got to work.
The hunt was on.
“It’s not a kidnapping.”
Denella raised an entirely unconvinced eyebrow and kept her weapon raised at the Bajoran on the other side of the Kendra’s cockpit.
“Really?” the Orion countered, “Cos, as far as I can see, you knocked me unconscious, got me all the way back to your ship somehow, and then took off into space. Presumably without telling anyone where we’re going?”
Erami cringed slightly at that list of undeniable facts and reluctantly sighed.
“Ok, granted, there are a few similarities with a kidnapping. But this was all for your own safety.”
“My own safety?”
“Like I said,” Erami shrugged, “We needed to make a quick escape, and there wasn’t really time to explain. We needed to get away from Kervala Prime before the Pakleds got themselves back together, and I couldn’t risk them going after you if I left you there.”
“And now what? You’re just gonna keep me onboard your shuttle forever? Is this how you normally hire your crews?”
“No,” Erami smiled patiently, “We just need to find somewhere to hide for a bit. Just until the Pakleds clear out of the system to try and find us. I’ve done my best to mask our warp trail, so give it a few hours and then we should be safe to head back.”
The Orion still didn’t look convinced. Erami sighed again and gestured to the dagger that Denella was still wielding defensively in front of her.
“Look, if this really was a kidnapping, would you still have that? And wouldn’t I have tied you up instead of leaving you to wake up and hold me at knifepoint? Trust me, I’m familiar with the concept of a kidnapping. And this isn’t one.”
Denella had to concede that these were some good points. At the very least, if she was a kidnapper, Erami was taking an awful lot of liberties.
“Well,” she managed eventually, “I, um, guess that makes sense.”
“You really thought I’d kidnapped you?” Erami chuckled with an amused shake of her head.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Now it was Erami’s turn to concede the point, as Denella rubbed the back of her head with a pained wince.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” the Bajoran winced, “If you, um, put the knife away, I can take a look at you with the medkit?”
Denella shook her head, but found herself holstering the dagger regardless.
“It’s fine,” the Orion assured her, “Don’t think there’s a concussion. But you couldn’t have been a bit more gentle?”
“Don’t know my own strength, do I?” Erami grinned, rolling up her sleeve and flexing her bicep to underline her point.
Denella smiled back, and the Bajoran relaxed now the weapon was removed from the discussion.
“Well,” she continued, “Now that’s all cleared up, I’ll ask you again: You hungry?”
Denella considered trying to deny it, but she was completely famished. She nodded back, eliciting a wider smile from the other woman.
“Perfect,” Erami replied with satisfaction, “Cos I’ve got just the thing. Call it an apology. For, um, not kidnapping you.”
The Bajoran stepped over towards the controls of the shuttle and deftly tapped them. The Kendra had a simple bank of controls, with two seats at the front of the cockpit for a pilot and co-pilot, and much like the rest of the ship they showed clear signs of a lifetime of running repairs, the metal plates and control surfaces a mishmash of different designs and colours.
As Erami worked at the controls, Denella felt the shuttle slow to sublight speeds.
“Cos,” she continued, “I’ve told you we’re hiding from the Pakleds, but you haven’t seen where we’re hiding yet.”
She nodded towards the shuttle’s cockpit window, and Denella turned back to the view, just as the Bajoran swung the ship to her port side.
Denella couldn’t help but gasp, as she saw that the typical starscape view had been replaced by that of a dazzling nebula. It was a swirling mass of pink and purple hues, tendrils of gas twisting and curling around each other in a cosmic dance of charged particles. The light from the view bathed the entire cockpit in a warm pinkish tinge as the Kendra slowed to an impulse crawl just on the periphery of the nebula.
Regardless of exactly how she’d got here, she couldn’t help but be captivated by it.
“May I introduce you to the Kervala Nebula,” Erami smiled as she gazed at the beauty of the view herself, “Figured that if you’re stuck laying low with me for a while, the least I could do was take you someplace nice.”
Denella was still staring through the cockpit window, too transfixed to answer. Erami smiled and stood from her seat, walking over to the rear of the cockpit.
“And get you something nice to eat,” she added.
Denella tore herself away from the view and turned around to see the Bajoran ostentatiously spreading a thick woollen blanket across the deck of the cockpit. Next to her sat a small replicated wicker hamper, overflowing with various food and drink.
“You…made a picnic?” Denella asked, with mild incredulity.
“Yeah,” Erami nodded as she smoothed the blanket out, “And if you ever dare tell anyone about how cute I’m being right now, I’ll give you another whack on the head. Got a reputation as a hard-ass shuttle pilot to maintain.”
Denella felt herself smiling again, as Erami gestured for her to sit down on the blanket.
“So,” she added with a smile of her own, “Wanna try that dinner again?”
She paused, then shrugged before continuing.
“I mean, technically this is brunch, but whatever.”
Denella took another look at the beauty of the swirling nebula, then turned back to the impromptu picnic scene.
And she nodded.
****************************
High above the surface of Kervala Prime’s overpopulated spaceport, the Pakled vessel Martan hung silently in orbit.
It wasn’t much to look at. Externally, the hull was that of a decades-old Andorian freighter, consisting of a spherical forward section and a blocky rectangular midsection, complete with twin warp nacelles that branched off on elevated pylons.
When it had been used by the Andorians, it had served as little more than a supply ship, completing short runs between colonies with raw materials and other resources. But, like all Pakled ships, once Grumtrag and his crew had come into possession of it, they had made plenty of adjustments under the skin. Using whatever extra resources they had been able to buy, steal or otherwise acquire, the rechristened Martan had been thoroughly overhauled from the ground up.
Her warp drive had been replaced with one from a Terrelian cruiser. Her shields had been upgraded using a generator from an old Vulcan transport. And she had been kitted out with weapons systems sourced from half a dozen other vessels.
In combination, the disparate requirements of each system shouldn’t have worked in tandem. But the Pakleds found a way to patch everything together in a way that worked. As a result, despite the rather unthreatening exterior of the Martan, it packed a hefty punch when the need arose.
Not that Grumtrag felt comforted by that fact as he stalked onto the Martan’s bridge.
He had woken up several minutes earlier, to find that he and his trusty first mate had been left behind in the storage room in the port. The Bajoran and her Orion companion had clearly long gone, and hadn’t even bothered taking their disruptors with them.
In something of a foul mood, he had immediately signalled to the Martan to beam them back aboard, and in the same transmission, he had also told his crew to work on getting a trace on any ships that had left the port recently.
By the time he had reached the bridge, little had changed about his mood.
But then, he finally received some positive news. His tactical chief, a stout Pakled by the name of Grivnog, had a report for him as soon as he sat down in his command chair. Because, not only had Grumtrag and his crew thoroughly upgraded the Martan’s propulsion, defensive and weapons systems over the last few months. They had also completed extensive work on the external sensors.
Thanks to a lucky find on a derelict they had come across a few sectors from Kervala Prime, there was now a full set of sensor modules from a Ferengi Marauder installed. Which meant that not only was the unassuming Martan packing a hefty punch, it was also excellent at locating its prey.
And while Juna Erami had done her best to hide her shuttle’s warp trail, she hadn’t reckoned with the beefed up systems of the Pakled vessel.
“We see where they have gone, Grumtrag,” Grivnog reported excitedly, “They tried to hide their path from us, but we have found it. Because we are smart.”
Grumtrag nodded in complete agreement with Grivnog’s final assessment. They were indeed smart. Smarter than the Bajoran that had taken their prize, at least.
“Take us to them,” he barked out without a moment’s hesitation, “Fastest speed!”
The bald Pakled at the helm nodded and prodded at his controls.
The Martan broke orbit from Kervala Prime, and turned in the direction indicated by Grivnog’s sensor data, before exploding forwards in a burst of light as the Terrelian warp drive got to work.
The hunt was on.
Whaddya know... clever Pakleds... will wonders never cease?
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
One of the things that Natasha had found difficult to adjust to with the size of the Bounty, compared to the Starfleet ships she was used to, was that it was impossible to avoid anyone for very long.
Back in her days onboard the USS Tripoli, or the late USS Navajo, if she really wanted to avoid someone then there were ways to make it happen. Provided they worked in a different department, she could reschedule shifts, stagger her trips to the mess hall, hide away in a holodeck for a few hours, or even just walk the corridors of the engineering decks for an evening if necessary.
But on the Bounty, she had no such options available. And she couldn’t even relax in her cabin for hours on end as she could on a starship. Because she was hungry. And the only replicator onboard the Bounty was in the dining area.
And as soon as she walked into the dining area, she saw that she wasn’t the only bedraggled individual who had sought out the universal hangover cure of a huge breakfast.
“Oh. Hey,” Jirel nodded from where he sat at the table, his fifth jumja tea of the morning in his hand.
For a second, she considered whether she could get away with simply nodding back and walking out again. No matter how ridiculous that would have looked. But ultimately, the combined strength of her growling stomach and her pounding head overruled any other plan she might have had. She medically needed to eat something, and while she would rather have dealt with that issue without bumping into Jirel, that wasn’t a luxury afforded to her onboard a ship of this size.
“Hi,” she replied simply, swiftly pacing over to the replicator and ordering up her hangover cure of choice.
Seconds later, she sat down opposite the Trill, with a steaming mug of triple filtered raktajino and a plate containing a double stack of pancakes complete with butter and syrup.
She could guess the look on Jirel’s face in response to the impending display of gluttony, but she kept her focus on the gooey, sugary mass in front of her and simply pointed at him with her fork.
“Don’t judge me, ok? As a medical professional, I’m aware there are plenty of actual hangover cures in the medical bay. But given how bad I feel right now, I’ve earned the right to cure this one the old fashioned way. By eating a huge plateful of crap.”
Jirel smiled and sipped his tea as she unapologetically attacked the stack of pancakes.
“Hey, I’m not judging,” he half-lied, “I’ve always thought that sticking a hypospray in your neck to cure a hangover is cheating. If you don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime. Or just stick to synthehol.”
She looked up at him, her mouth full of buttery, syrupy goodness, and she nodded.
The moment of hungover camaraderie almost immediately gave way to a more uncomfortable silence. The unspoken issues surrounding their night together hung thick in the air like a fog. Issues that Natasha really didn’t want to deal with while she felt like this.
“So,” Jirel ventured, with a click of his tongue, “About what happened--”
“What’s the plan after we’re done with the repairs?” she jumped in, swallowing another mouthful of pancake, “We gonna try and find a job in the port, or head to that trade convention on Corvin VII?”
“Oh,” Jirel replied, a little taken aback, “I hadn’t really thought about--”
“Cos I think we may as well look for something here first, right? Maybe a delivery we can make on our way over there? Bit of extra latinum?”
Jirel set his mug down on the table and mustered a nod, wondering how the conversation had drifted onto this particular subject from the one he had been intending to discuss.
“Right, sure,” he shrugged, “But, um, all I wanted to say was--”
“Where are the others, by the way?” she continued, her words slightly muffled through another mouthful of food, “I might see if Denella needs a hand with the repairs. Sooner we get them done, sooner we can get moving, after all.”
Jirel sighed inwardly, gradually picking up on the hint that the conversation he had been preparing to have in his head throughout his own carb-heavy breakfast was destined not to happen.
The silence returned, as Natasha continued her meal and Jirel contemplated if there was another way for him to broach his preferred subject.
“So, um--”
That was as far as he got. Although, this time, he wasn’t interrupted by another deliberate non sequitur from Natasha. Instead, the interruption came from outside the room, a curious noise from elsewhere in the ship. Intrigued, and a little relieved at the disturbance, they stood up in unison and went to investigate.
It didn’t take long for them to find the source of the disturbance. Klath had noisily returned to his ship, and to his cabin.
And he appeared to be packing.
The Klingon was in the middle of carefully placing the various bladed weapons that usually hung from the wall of his cabin into a stout metal carrying container when he looked up to see the two figures standing in the doorway.
“And where have you been all night, young man?” Jirel chided, gesturing at himself and Natasha with a sliver of amusement, “Do you have any idea how worried we both were?”
Klath didn’t look especially amused by this. Nor, in truth, did Natasha.
“I have…been with K’Veth,” he begrudgingly replied, as he slid his prized mek’leth into the container, “And I believe I now know what I must do to change her mind.”
“What?” Natasha couldn’t help but ask.
The Klingon looked back at her with steely determination. His cheek was still scarred by the mark left behind by K’Veth some days ago. And he still had no intention of doing anything to remove it.
He didn’t know for sure whether he was acting rationally, or whether he was again allowing the feeling of par’Mach inside him to dictate his actions, at the expense of his more rational side. But equally, after spending another night with K’Veth, he was more convinced than ever that he didn’t care either way. He wanted to be with her. And it was clear to him now that there was only one way that would ever happen.
“She believes her dishonour is too great,” he grunted by way of explanation, “That our great victory back on Brexis II was not enough to remove the stain of what she has done.”
“Great victory…?” Natasha asked in confusion.
“The tribble hunt,” Jirel reminded her, eliciting an unhappy shake the doctor’s head as she recalled the mass slaughter that Klath and K’Veth had carried out in the stores of the Klingon High Council member, “Hey, who knew that didn’t count as a proper battle?”
Klath ignored that comment. He didn’t have time to get into another debate about the morals of the Klingon people’s approach to tribble infestations. It was already taking a great deal of his willpower not to go and kill the one creature that remained in Natasha’s cabin. So, instead, he focused on his packing.
“But,” Natasha persisted, “Where are you going?”
Klath paused again and looked up at her, still deadly serious.
“I must leave the Bounty, perhaps forever. And she and I must travel far from here, to find a battle worthy of reclaiming her sense of honour. And we must not stop until our blades are coated with the blood of our slain enemies.”
As Natasha took in the entirety of that statement, Jirel couldn’t help but chime in from her side.
“You had to ask…”
One of the things that Natasha had found difficult to adjust to with the size of the Bounty, compared to the Starfleet ships she was used to, was that it was impossible to avoid anyone for very long.
Back in her days onboard the USS Tripoli, or the late USS Navajo, if she really wanted to avoid someone then there were ways to make it happen. Provided they worked in a different department, she could reschedule shifts, stagger her trips to the mess hall, hide away in a holodeck for a few hours, or even just walk the corridors of the engineering decks for an evening if necessary.
But on the Bounty, she had no such options available. And she couldn’t even relax in her cabin for hours on end as she could on a starship. Because she was hungry. And the only replicator onboard the Bounty was in the dining area.
And as soon as she walked into the dining area, she saw that she wasn’t the only bedraggled individual who had sought out the universal hangover cure of a huge breakfast.
“Oh. Hey,” Jirel nodded from where he sat at the table, his fifth jumja tea of the morning in his hand.
For a second, she considered whether she could get away with simply nodding back and walking out again. No matter how ridiculous that would have looked. But ultimately, the combined strength of her growling stomach and her pounding head overruled any other plan she might have had. She medically needed to eat something, and while she would rather have dealt with that issue without bumping into Jirel, that wasn’t a luxury afforded to her onboard a ship of this size.
“Hi,” she replied simply, swiftly pacing over to the replicator and ordering up her hangover cure of choice.
Seconds later, she sat down opposite the Trill, with a steaming mug of triple filtered raktajino and a plate containing a double stack of pancakes complete with butter and syrup.
She could guess the look on Jirel’s face in response to the impending display of gluttony, but she kept her focus on the gooey, sugary mass in front of her and simply pointed at him with her fork.
“Don’t judge me, ok? As a medical professional, I’m aware there are plenty of actual hangover cures in the medical bay. But given how bad I feel right now, I’ve earned the right to cure this one the old fashioned way. By eating a huge plateful of crap.”
Jirel smiled and sipped his tea as she unapologetically attacked the stack of pancakes.
“Hey, I’m not judging,” he half-lied, “I’ve always thought that sticking a hypospray in your neck to cure a hangover is cheating. If you don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime. Or just stick to synthehol.”
She looked up at him, her mouth full of buttery, syrupy goodness, and she nodded.
The moment of hungover camaraderie almost immediately gave way to a more uncomfortable silence. The unspoken issues surrounding their night together hung thick in the air like a fog. Issues that Natasha really didn’t want to deal with while she felt like this.
“So,” Jirel ventured, with a click of his tongue, “About what happened--”
“What’s the plan after we’re done with the repairs?” she jumped in, swallowing another mouthful of pancake, “We gonna try and find a job in the port, or head to that trade convention on Corvin VII?”
“Oh,” Jirel replied, a little taken aback, “I hadn’t really thought about--”
“Cos I think we may as well look for something here first, right? Maybe a delivery we can make on our way over there? Bit of extra latinum?”
Jirel set his mug down on the table and mustered a nod, wondering how the conversation had drifted onto this particular subject from the one he had been intending to discuss.
“Right, sure,” he shrugged, “But, um, all I wanted to say was--”
“Where are the others, by the way?” she continued, her words slightly muffled through another mouthful of food, “I might see if Denella needs a hand with the repairs. Sooner we get them done, sooner we can get moving, after all.”
Jirel sighed inwardly, gradually picking up on the hint that the conversation he had been preparing to have in his head throughout his own carb-heavy breakfast was destined not to happen.
The silence returned, as Natasha continued her meal and Jirel contemplated if there was another way for him to broach his preferred subject.
“So, um--”
That was as far as he got. Although, this time, he wasn’t interrupted by another deliberate non sequitur from Natasha. Instead, the interruption came from outside the room, a curious noise from elsewhere in the ship. Intrigued, and a little relieved at the disturbance, they stood up in unison and went to investigate.
It didn’t take long for them to find the source of the disturbance. Klath had noisily returned to his ship, and to his cabin.
And he appeared to be packing.
The Klingon was in the middle of carefully placing the various bladed weapons that usually hung from the wall of his cabin into a stout metal carrying container when he looked up to see the two figures standing in the doorway.
“And where have you been all night, young man?” Jirel chided, gesturing at himself and Natasha with a sliver of amusement, “Do you have any idea how worried we both were?”
Klath didn’t look especially amused by this. Nor, in truth, did Natasha.
“I have…been with K’Veth,” he begrudgingly replied, as he slid his prized mek’leth into the container, “And I believe I now know what I must do to change her mind.”
“What?” Natasha couldn’t help but ask.
The Klingon looked back at her with steely determination. His cheek was still scarred by the mark left behind by K’Veth some days ago. And he still had no intention of doing anything to remove it.
He didn’t know for sure whether he was acting rationally, or whether he was again allowing the feeling of par’Mach inside him to dictate his actions, at the expense of his more rational side. But equally, after spending another night with K’Veth, he was more convinced than ever that he didn’t care either way. He wanted to be with her. And it was clear to him now that there was only one way that would ever happen.
“She believes her dishonour is too great,” he grunted by way of explanation, “That our great victory back on Brexis II was not enough to remove the stain of what she has done.”
“Great victory…?” Natasha asked in confusion.
“The tribble hunt,” Jirel reminded her, eliciting an unhappy shake the doctor’s head as she recalled the mass slaughter that Klath and K’Veth had carried out in the stores of the Klingon High Council member, “Hey, who knew that didn’t count as a proper battle?”
Klath ignored that comment. He didn’t have time to get into another debate about the morals of the Klingon people’s approach to tribble infestations. It was already taking a great deal of his willpower not to go and kill the one creature that remained in Natasha’s cabin. So, instead, he focused on his packing.
“But,” Natasha persisted, “Where are you going?”
Klath paused again and looked up at her, still deadly serious.
“I must leave the Bounty, perhaps forever. And she and I must travel far from here, to find a battle worthy of reclaiming her sense of honour. And we must not stop until our blades are coated with the blood of our slain enemies.”
As Natasha took in the entirety of that statement, Jirel couldn’t help but chime in from her side.
“You had to ask…”
And so far everyone's been too wrapped up in their own stuff to notice a greenish Denella-sized hole in their roster...
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
Shuttlepod Kendra gently hung next to the wispy tendrils of the Kervala nebula as the swirling vista continued to endlessly coalesce and separate in front of the tiny ship.
But it had been some time since either of the shuttle’s occupants had bothered to gaze out at the picturesque view itself. As soon as their impromptu picnic brunch had started, the conversation had begun to flow.
Unlike the entirely public and formal setting of their attempt at dinner together back on Kervala Prime, Denella was finding this environment significantly more relaxing and easy to manage, which meant that she had actually started to enjoy herself.
She had even found that she had moved away from exclusively telling anecdotes about various engineering solutions that she had come up with during her life, and moved onto stories that seemed to keep Erami’s attention a little more easily.
To underline that particular point, as they sat on the blanket and picked at the banquet of delicacies that Erami had hastily replicated, the Bajoran woman threw her head back and laughed out loud in response to Denella’s latest story, filling the cockpit with the sound of joy.
“You’re kidding me,” she chuckled as she chewed on a piece of mapa bread, “The Sheliak Corporate have a bounty…on the Bounty?”
“That’s why we don’t talk about it much,” Denella replied, as she popped a slice of kava fruit into her mouth, “Cos it sounds so stupid. But, yeah, we tend to give that whole area of space a wide berth these days.”
Erami laughed again and shook her head.
“Ok, if that’s really true, and I’m still not entirely sure you’re not winding me up, then I really don’t think it’s fair for you to have given me such a hard time for falling out with a few Pakleds.”
“Huh. Falling out with them? Interesting. So we’re past ‘just a big misunderstanding’?”
“You really don’t quit, do you?”
“Call me old fashioned,” Denella shrugged, “But if I’m getting disruptors pointed at me, I like to know whether I deserve it or not.”
She looked back at the Bajoran with a friendly but determined edge to her demeanour. She still wanted an answer. Erami toyed with the remains of the piece of bread in her hand, then grimaced and sighed in defeat.
“Ugh, fine, ok. I may have…relieved Grumtrag and his merry men of something of theirs a few weeks ago.”
“So you did steal something?”
“I mean,” the Bajoran muttered, “If you wanna put a label on it…”
“What was it?” Denella pressed, happy to be finally getting some answers about what exactly she had stumbled into the middle of.
“That’s not important.”
“Seems to be important to them?”
“Ugh,” Erami sighed with a frustrated smile, “Look, they weren’t even using it. You know what they’re like. Their ships are full of junk they buy, or steal, or find somewhere. And they have no idea what to do with most of it. Plus I really didn’t think they’d go this far to track me down.”
She paused and smiled ruefully for a moment.
“Then again, I guess they figured it was a pretty good bet that I’d wind up swinging back by Kervala Prime sooner or later. I’m never too far away from this place.”
“Why?” Denella asked with genuine interest as she sipped from a glass of sweet springwine.
Erami looked up at her, then jabbed a finger at something over the Orion’s right shoulder.
“Cos of that.”
Denella turned to see the Kervala nebula in all of its glory through the cockpit window, still bathing the room in a pinkish glow. For a second, she found herself captivated by it all over again.
She had been flying around space for long enough for nebulae to be a run of the mill sight. Usually, she only really saw them as either a nuisance, a phenomenon likely to send sensor readings haywire or cause corrosion to the Bounty’s bussard collectors, or as a threat, a hiding place for bandits and other nefarious elements, ready to spring a trap on an unsuspecting passing ship.
But there was something about this one that seemed to captivate her. To the point that she didn’t even care that, for the second time in two days, she had allowed herself to turn her back on a woman that she still didn’t feel she entirely trusted.
“I guess I can see why,” she mused, a little in awe, “It’s incredible.”
“Yep,” Erami nodded in agreement, “But it’s more than that. When I was little, growing up in that labour camp back on Bajor, there wasn’t a lot of beauty around. Except, on a clear night, among all the stars, you could just about make out this tiny little speck of pink.”
Denella turned back to see an unmistakable trace of emotion playing across Erami's features. For some reason, she found it hit home with herself harder than she’d expected.
“Whenever we saw it, my mother used to tell me it was the most beautiful thing in the whole universe. A…jewel of the prophets. That was what she called it.”
She scoffed slightly at the memory and took a sip from her own glass to compose herself.
“Anyway, I guess it kept me going more times than I can remember during the occupation. Even after I’d grown up. Seeing that little pink speck out there in the cosmos was…I dunno. A comfort. And once it was all over, and we’d kicked every last Cardassian out of town, the first thing I wanted to do was get myself up into deep space, and come and see it for myself.”
“Long way from Bajor,” Denella whispered. She had forgotten all about the food and drink in front of her, focused entirely on her dining companion’s story.
“Yeah. Tell me about it. Took weeks to get all the way out here. And every minute I was sat in that old beaten up Bajoran transport, I was terrified.”
“Terrified?”
“Yeah. Cos I thought there was no way this ‘jewel of the Prophets’ was actually gonna be as perfect as my mother said it was. As perfect as I’d pictured it being whenever I saw it up in the sky back on Bajor. Then, the captain came to tell us we were making a pass of the nebula, and I swear I pushed a couple of dozen people out of the way to get a look out of the windows. And…there it was.”
She smiled wistfully at the view out of the window, and almost lost herself in a pang of emotion for a second, before she managed to stifle the sob that had rushed forwards and took a long gulp of springwine to rediscover her more usual casual demeanour.
Without thinking, Denella went to reach out her hand to Erami’s to comfort her. But she stopped herself short of actually making contact and quickly withdrew it again. If the Bajoran noticed her movement, she kept it to herself.
“Sorry,” Erami continued after she finished composing herself, “Guess I can’t help myself, can I? Try to keep things light and breezy, and then out come the Occupation stories.”
They shared a smile as a moment of silence descended. Then, Denella felt a curious urge inside of her. Having seen Erami sharing a story of her past, she found herself compelled to reciprocate. She wanted to talk. Or at least, she thought she wanted to.
“I get what you’re saying,” she began, “Orpheus IV was just as beautiful. Rolling hills, clean air, the greenest grass. The view from my parents house across the valley was…spectacular.”
She paused for a second and looked down at the blanket, sadly toying with a stray fibre.
“But I know I’ll never see that again. It’s all Syndicate territory now…”
“Hey,” Erami muttered gently, “You don’t have to talk about all that if you don’t want to--”
“I’ve never told anyone this, But I’ve tried to recreate it. The little area where I grew up. In a holosuite. I’d try programming the whole thing from scratch, or just do the whole ‘Computer, increase grassland coverage by 25%’ or ‘Computer, decrease humidity by 15%’ thing and hope to hit it lucky.”
“Did you hit it lucky?”
“I’ve gotten close once or twice,” she shrugged, surprising herself with how freely the story was flowing, “But I’m an engineer, not a terraformer. I can get the look right. But not the feel of it.”
She grabbed a small berry from one of the bowls on the blanket and rolled it around in her fingers, focusing on that as she went on.
“On Orpheus IV, there are these flowers. And I’ve got no idea how it worked, botanically-speaking, but they used to bloom all year round. In stages. Like a…ripple, flowing slowly across the valley. So, every morning, when you stepped out of the door, you could smell those flowers in the breeze.”
She smiled sadly and clasped the berry into the palm of her hand.
“The holosuite never got the scent of the flowers right. So, no matter how close it got to the real thing, it was always fake to me. So, I dunno, I guess I just gave up.”
Erami nodded thoughtfully for a moment as Denella idly popped the well-rolled berry into her mouth to help her stifle her own rush of emotion.
“You know earlier,” the Bajoran said eventually, “I told you my mother’s kava root stew was my favourite food?”
Denella nodded. Erami smiled sadly and shook her head.
“Well, that’s not really true. I mean, her stew was the best I’ve ever tasted, bar none. But…in the camp, after she died, my father took it upon himself to make it for me and my sister.”
She toyed with a piece of hasperat on her plate as she pictured the memory.
“Wasn’t exactly easy to get the ingredients together in a labour camp, you know? You weren’t even supposed to make our own meals. But the guards used to turn a blind eye. Less scraps they’d have to bother feeding us, I guess. Still, it used to take forever to forage for everything. Maybe once a month we’d get enough together for my father to give it a go.”
Denella propped her head on her knee as she listened to this latest story, captivated again somehow.
“So he’d get a fire going, and even though he was exhausted from another long day in the camp, he’d stand in front of that cooking pot for hours. And…he’d completely screw it up.”
She let out an involuntary chuckle, causing Denella to lift her head up in surprise.
“I mean,” Erami continued, “Every time, he’d find some new thing to mess up. He’d cook it for too long, or not long enough, or he’d forget an ingredient or two. It was crazy how bad he was at cooking. But…that was my favourite kava root stew. Cos no matter how weird it tasted, that man was giving everything he could to try and recreate the memory we had of our mother’s cooking. And that meant it didn’t have to be perfect.”
“So,” Denella muttered, with a glimmer of understanding, “You’re saying…?”
“I’m saying that you shouldn’t give up on making that program of yours. So long as it brings back some good memories, then that’s enough.”
Denella nodded back and smiled, surprised at how easily she had shared that secret. Especially with someone that had knocked her unconscious yesterday. Erami smiled back, and reached out a hopeful hand across the blanket, leaving it dangling in mid air above the remains of the picnic.
And this time, feeling closer to this relative stranger after their shared stories over the picnic, Denella felt comfortable enough to reach out and take her hand, without such an action being accompanied by the instinctive need to flee.
They held hands and smiled at each other across the Bajoran cuisine.
And as they enjoyed a silent moment of friendship, neither of them even thought to check on the Kendra’s controls, or the silent blip on the main panel.
The blip that calmly confirmed that the shuttle’s temperamental sensor array had picked up a ship on long-range scans.
A ship that was getting closer.
Shuttlepod Kendra gently hung next to the wispy tendrils of the Kervala nebula as the swirling vista continued to endlessly coalesce and separate in front of the tiny ship.
But it had been some time since either of the shuttle’s occupants had bothered to gaze out at the picturesque view itself. As soon as their impromptu picnic brunch had started, the conversation had begun to flow.
Unlike the entirely public and formal setting of their attempt at dinner together back on Kervala Prime, Denella was finding this environment significantly more relaxing and easy to manage, which meant that she had actually started to enjoy herself.
She had even found that she had moved away from exclusively telling anecdotes about various engineering solutions that she had come up with during her life, and moved onto stories that seemed to keep Erami’s attention a little more easily.
To underline that particular point, as they sat on the blanket and picked at the banquet of delicacies that Erami had hastily replicated, the Bajoran woman threw her head back and laughed out loud in response to Denella’s latest story, filling the cockpit with the sound of joy.
“You’re kidding me,” she chuckled as she chewed on a piece of mapa bread, “The Sheliak Corporate have a bounty…on the Bounty?”
“That’s why we don’t talk about it much,” Denella replied, as she popped a slice of kava fruit into her mouth, “Cos it sounds so stupid. But, yeah, we tend to give that whole area of space a wide berth these days.”
Erami laughed again and shook her head.
“Ok, if that’s really true, and I’m still not entirely sure you’re not winding me up, then I really don’t think it’s fair for you to have given me such a hard time for falling out with a few Pakleds.”
“Huh. Falling out with them? Interesting. So we’re past ‘just a big misunderstanding’?”
“You really don’t quit, do you?”
“Call me old fashioned,” Denella shrugged, “But if I’m getting disruptors pointed at me, I like to know whether I deserve it or not.”
She looked back at the Bajoran with a friendly but determined edge to her demeanour. She still wanted an answer. Erami toyed with the remains of the piece of bread in her hand, then grimaced and sighed in defeat.
“Ugh, fine, ok. I may have…relieved Grumtrag and his merry men of something of theirs a few weeks ago.”
“So you did steal something?”
“I mean,” the Bajoran muttered, “If you wanna put a label on it…”
“What was it?” Denella pressed, happy to be finally getting some answers about what exactly she had stumbled into the middle of.
“That’s not important.”
“Seems to be important to them?”
“Ugh,” Erami sighed with a frustrated smile, “Look, they weren’t even using it. You know what they’re like. Their ships are full of junk they buy, or steal, or find somewhere. And they have no idea what to do with most of it. Plus I really didn’t think they’d go this far to track me down.”
She paused and smiled ruefully for a moment.
“Then again, I guess they figured it was a pretty good bet that I’d wind up swinging back by Kervala Prime sooner or later. I’m never too far away from this place.”
“Why?” Denella asked with genuine interest as she sipped from a glass of sweet springwine.
Erami looked up at her, then jabbed a finger at something over the Orion’s right shoulder.
“Cos of that.”
Denella turned to see the Kervala nebula in all of its glory through the cockpit window, still bathing the room in a pinkish glow. For a second, she found herself captivated by it all over again.
She had been flying around space for long enough for nebulae to be a run of the mill sight. Usually, she only really saw them as either a nuisance, a phenomenon likely to send sensor readings haywire or cause corrosion to the Bounty’s bussard collectors, or as a threat, a hiding place for bandits and other nefarious elements, ready to spring a trap on an unsuspecting passing ship.
But there was something about this one that seemed to captivate her. To the point that she didn’t even care that, for the second time in two days, she had allowed herself to turn her back on a woman that she still didn’t feel she entirely trusted.
“I guess I can see why,” she mused, a little in awe, “It’s incredible.”
“Yep,” Erami nodded in agreement, “But it’s more than that. When I was little, growing up in that labour camp back on Bajor, there wasn’t a lot of beauty around. Except, on a clear night, among all the stars, you could just about make out this tiny little speck of pink.”
Denella turned back to see an unmistakable trace of emotion playing across Erami's features. For some reason, she found it hit home with herself harder than she’d expected.
“Whenever we saw it, my mother used to tell me it was the most beautiful thing in the whole universe. A…jewel of the prophets. That was what she called it.”
She scoffed slightly at the memory and took a sip from her own glass to compose herself.
“Anyway, I guess it kept me going more times than I can remember during the occupation. Even after I’d grown up. Seeing that little pink speck out there in the cosmos was…I dunno. A comfort. And once it was all over, and we’d kicked every last Cardassian out of town, the first thing I wanted to do was get myself up into deep space, and come and see it for myself.”
“Long way from Bajor,” Denella whispered. She had forgotten all about the food and drink in front of her, focused entirely on her dining companion’s story.
“Yeah. Tell me about it. Took weeks to get all the way out here. And every minute I was sat in that old beaten up Bajoran transport, I was terrified.”
“Terrified?”
“Yeah. Cos I thought there was no way this ‘jewel of the Prophets’ was actually gonna be as perfect as my mother said it was. As perfect as I’d pictured it being whenever I saw it up in the sky back on Bajor. Then, the captain came to tell us we were making a pass of the nebula, and I swear I pushed a couple of dozen people out of the way to get a look out of the windows. And…there it was.”
She smiled wistfully at the view out of the window, and almost lost herself in a pang of emotion for a second, before she managed to stifle the sob that had rushed forwards and took a long gulp of springwine to rediscover her more usual casual demeanour.
Without thinking, Denella went to reach out her hand to Erami’s to comfort her. But she stopped herself short of actually making contact and quickly withdrew it again. If the Bajoran noticed her movement, she kept it to herself.
“Sorry,” Erami continued after she finished composing herself, “Guess I can’t help myself, can I? Try to keep things light and breezy, and then out come the Occupation stories.”
They shared a smile as a moment of silence descended. Then, Denella felt a curious urge inside of her. Having seen Erami sharing a story of her past, she found herself compelled to reciprocate. She wanted to talk. Or at least, she thought she wanted to.
“I get what you’re saying,” she began, “Orpheus IV was just as beautiful. Rolling hills, clean air, the greenest grass. The view from my parents house across the valley was…spectacular.”
She paused for a second and looked down at the blanket, sadly toying with a stray fibre.
“But I know I’ll never see that again. It’s all Syndicate territory now…”
“Hey,” Erami muttered gently, “You don’t have to talk about all that if you don’t want to--”
“I’ve never told anyone this, But I’ve tried to recreate it. The little area where I grew up. In a holosuite. I’d try programming the whole thing from scratch, or just do the whole ‘Computer, increase grassland coverage by 25%’ or ‘Computer, decrease humidity by 15%’ thing and hope to hit it lucky.”
“Did you hit it lucky?”
“I’ve gotten close once or twice,” she shrugged, surprising herself with how freely the story was flowing, “But I’m an engineer, not a terraformer. I can get the look right. But not the feel of it.”
She grabbed a small berry from one of the bowls on the blanket and rolled it around in her fingers, focusing on that as she went on.
“On Orpheus IV, there are these flowers. And I’ve got no idea how it worked, botanically-speaking, but they used to bloom all year round. In stages. Like a…ripple, flowing slowly across the valley. So, every morning, when you stepped out of the door, you could smell those flowers in the breeze.”
She smiled sadly and clasped the berry into the palm of her hand.
“The holosuite never got the scent of the flowers right. So, no matter how close it got to the real thing, it was always fake to me. So, I dunno, I guess I just gave up.”
Erami nodded thoughtfully for a moment as Denella idly popped the well-rolled berry into her mouth to help her stifle her own rush of emotion.
“You know earlier,” the Bajoran said eventually, “I told you my mother’s kava root stew was my favourite food?”
Denella nodded. Erami smiled sadly and shook her head.
“Well, that’s not really true. I mean, her stew was the best I’ve ever tasted, bar none. But…in the camp, after she died, my father took it upon himself to make it for me and my sister.”
She toyed with a piece of hasperat on her plate as she pictured the memory.
“Wasn’t exactly easy to get the ingredients together in a labour camp, you know? You weren’t even supposed to make our own meals. But the guards used to turn a blind eye. Less scraps they’d have to bother feeding us, I guess. Still, it used to take forever to forage for everything. Maybe once a month we’d get enough together for my father to give it a go.”
Denella propped her head on her knee as she listened to this latest story, captivated again somehow.
“So he’d get a fire going, and even though he was exhausted from another long day in the camp, he’d stand in front of that cooking pot for hours. And…he’d completely screw it up.”
She let out an involuntary chuckle, causing Denella to lift her head up in surprise.
“I mean,” Erami continued, “Every time, he’d find some new thing to mess up. He’d cook it for too long, or not long enough, or he’d forget an ingredient or two. It was crazy how bad he was at cooking. But…that was my favourite kava root stew. Cos no matter how weird it tasted, that man was giving everything he could to try and recreate the memory we had of our mother’s cooking. And that meant it didn’t have to be perfect.”
“So,” Denella muttered, with a glimmer of understanding, “You’re saying…?”
“I’m saying that you shouldn’t give up on making that program of yours. So long as it brings back some good memories, then that’s enough.”
Denella nodded back and smiled, surprised at how easily she had shared that secret. Especially with someone that had knocked her unconscious yesterday. Erami smiled back, and reached out a hopeful hand across the blanket, leaving it dangling in mid air above the remains of the picnic.
And this time, feeling closer to this relative stranger after their shared stories over the picnic, Denella felt comfortable enough to reach out and take her hand, without such an action being accompanied by the instinctive need to flee.
They held hands and smiled at each other across the Bajoran cuisine.
And as they enjoyed a silent moment of friendship, neither of them even thought to check on the Kendra’s controls, or the silent blip on the main panel.
The blip that calmly confirmed that the shuttle’s temperamental sensor array had picked up a ship on long-range scans.
A ship that was getting closer.
Nice relational moment - with a clock that neither of them is ready to notice...
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
“You are being a fool!”
Klath ignored the ferocity with which the comment was fired at him with, and finished placing his spare tunics into the transport container. On the other side of the cabin, K’Veth gestured at his actions with frustrated incredulity.
Neither Klingon could remember which of them had started the fight. But, in typical Klingon fashion, neither of them were even close to admitting defeat.
In the doorway of the cabin, Jirel and Natasha awkwardly watched the two feuding forms trading passive-aggressive barbs, not entirely sure what else to do.
“Remind me again why you let her onboard?” Natasha muttered to the Trill.
Jirel struggled to find an answer to that. When K’Veth had arrived where they were parked and asked to come onboard, it had seemed like the right thing to do. After all, he and Natasha had failed to find a way of talking Klath out of his sudden plan to leave the Bounty on some sort of improvised quest for the perfect battle. So, it had seemed like a good idea to let someone else have a go at talking some sense into him.
Except, the Klingon method of talking sense into someone seemed to involve instantly starting a very heated argument, with an ever-present undertone of violence.
Klath was at least keeping himself measured in his responses, despite K’Veth’s continued angry comments, keeping the par’Mach-based passions inside him for the time being.
“I have explained the plan, K’Veth,” he persisted as he closed up the container, “It will be a glorious quest to rediscover your sense of honour. For both of us.”
“It will be a futile task,” she spat back, “By a stubborn fool who still refuses to see how his feelings have blinded him to the truth. There is no honour out there for me, Klath.”
“There is honour out there for everyone,” he countered, his tone almost zen-like despite the ferocious passions that still swirled inside him.
She threw her hands up in an ostentatious display of frustration, stepping closer to the other Klingon and snarling at him. For an uncomfortable moment, the two person audience in the doorway wondered if they were about to get a front row seat to another Klingon mating ritual.
But Klath remained stoic, even as K’Veth snarled.
“You still patronise me,” she accused him, “You claim to know what is right for me, and you do not even listen to what I am trying to say!”
“I know what is right,” Klath retorted, “For both of us. I feel it. Inside.”
He pounded his fist on his chest to emphasise his point, not caring if two of his colleagues were watching on. But he got nothing more than a scoff back from the Klingon woman.
“What you feel inside is nothing but lust. Brought on by a lonely warrior finding one of his own to mate with after so long alone.”
Her words caused a surge of anger inside him, as she continued to seem determined to prod and poke him into some sort of retaliation.
And she seemed to have finally been successful.
“You challenge me to prove myself?” he growled at her.
“Willingly,” she snarled back.
Without breaking eye contact, Klath reached into a second packing container in front of him on the deck of his cabin and retrieved the mek’leth that he had stowed away earlier, tossing it across the room to her. She caught the end of the handle with practised ease, her fighting skills having been honed like any other Klingon, even in exile.
Then, she raised the blade above her head in anger.
“Defend yourself!”
The corners of Klath’s mouth curved into a trace of a smile as he relished the impromptu fight that was about to unfold. With a single deft movement, he unsheathed his bat’leth from where it hung on his back and brought it to bear.
In the doorway, Jirel and Natasha glanced at each other.
“We should…” the Trill managed, nodding his head back into the corridor.
Natasha nodded in agreement. They stepped back in unison and allowed the cabin door to close, just as the two weapons clashed together for the first time accompanied by furious growls from both participants. The sound of clashing blades continued apace through the door, as they stood in the Bounty’s main corridor.
Jirel looked at Natasha again and offered a shrug.
“Let’s, um, give them five minutes.”
****************************
“A quantum singularity?”
Denella couldn’t help but laugh as she sat cross-legged on the picnic blanket, shaking her head at the Bajoran on the other side, who was now reclining on her side after the meal.
“I mean,” Erami offered with a shrug, “Technically, yes.”
“You stole a quantum singularity?”
Erami sat up straight and maintained a defiant smile.
“Well, you’re the engineer. You know what a Romulan warp core is, right? So, I guess, yeah. Technically, I stole a quantum singularity.”
Denella went to respond, then simply shook her head again.
She had finally gotten Erami to give her the full story of what was going on between her and the Pakleds, and why exactly they seemed so determined to chase her down. She had been expecting the usual story. One of stolen latinum, or purloined spare parts. Something manageable for a Bajoran woman in a shuttlecraft to have been able to swipe on her own without the Pakleds being able to stop her. She hadn’t been expecting the actual answer.
“Hang on,” she suddenly realised, looking back at the Bajoran with sudden amusement, “You stole a quantum singularity, and you thought the idea of me redesigning the Bounty’s thruster vents was far-fetched?”
The two women shared a burst of laughter, before Erami was able to control herself and offer up her defence.
“It’s like I said, the Pakleds didn’t even know what it was. It was just lying around inside their cargo bay behind a set of Terrelian impulse coils. So, I figured that they wouldn’t miss it, and there might be a tidy little profit to be made by flipping it to someone else.”
“You didn’t think to maybe tell them what it was, in return for a share of the profits?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Denella found herself smiling again, as Erami continued.
“Besides, if I’d have told them what it was, they’d have tried to fit it to their own ship, and ended up blowing up half the sector. This way, everyone wins.”
“Apart from the Pakleds,” Denella pointed out with a raised eyebrow.
In truth, while she was still persisting with her questioning tone, she found that she was more doing it to wind the other woman up than anything else at this point. She found that she didn’t much care about the perceived crime Erami had committed, now she knew the truth.
After all, it wasn’t as though she and the Bounty’s crew were above liberating certain things from their owners when things got especially desperate. And Erami was right, it was probably better for everyone that a group of Pakleds didn’t have a Romulan warp core available to them any more.
“So,” the Bajoran concluded, scrunching up her nose, sitting up and holding her hands in the air, “You talked it out of me. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Any more confessions you want to get out of me before you lock me up, officer?”
Denella kept up her stern front in this little role play, as she realised that there was another thing she wanted to ask about, while she had the chance.
“The other day,” she asked, “Did you really do a runner from that restaurant?”
“Huh,” Erami grouched, “Guess I walked into that one as well. But you really think I--?”
Before she could get any further, the Kendra began to shake all around them.
In an instant, the two women switched back into business mode, as they both jumped up off the blanket and rushed to the two seats at the front of the cockpit. Neither bothered to cast a glance at the beauty of the view in front of them this time, focusing entirely on the task at hand. Before they had even reached the controls, Denella already had a sense of what was happening, and it only took a cursory glance of the readouts to confirm that her instincts were correct.
“That didn’t feel like a bit of turbulence from the nebula,” Erami offered.
“Nope,” the Orion replied from where she had slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to the Bajoran, “We’re caught in a tractor beam.”
“We’re being hailed,” Erami added, as she flipped the comms link open.
“Hello, shuttlecraft,” Grumtrag’s familiar voice came out over the speakers, “This is the Pakled vessel Martan. We have got you now, and we will not let go.”
“Looks like your friends found us,” Denella pointed out unnecessarily, “I thought you said you masked your warp trail?”
“I did,” Erami insisted, “Usually these guys don’t know an ion trace from a tachyon eddy. They must’ve upgraded their sensors.”
“You will give us our prize,” Grumtrag continued over the comms link, “Or we will break your ship. We are good at that. We are strong.”
“Hey,” Erami fired back, jabbing her finger down on the comms panel, “Next time, say please.”
With that, she clicked the link off, even as the Kendra shuddered again.
“They’re pulling us in,” Denella reported, “And while I appreciate a good bit of defiance, it might be the time to admit defeat on this one and give them their prize back.”
“Might be a bit of a problem,” Erami grimaced, “You were right earlier when you called me out about the Kendra getting ransacked. I don’t have the warp core any more. Exchanged it with a Ferengi trader two weeks ago.”
Denella sighed in frustration as the shuttle shook harder.
“Ok, so give them the latinum. That should hopefully keep them happy.”
“No latinum. Like I said, I exchanged it.”
“For what?”
“You’re sitting in it.”
Denella glanced at the Bajoran, then looked around the entirely modest confines of the Kendra and shook her head.
“You exchanged a Romulan warp core for this heap of junk?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Erami fired back, “We’re very religious people, us Bajorans. Makes us terrible negotiators. We’re way too trusting.”
Denella sighed and turned back to the controls in front of her, contemplating the fact that they seemed to have nothing to barter for their lives with.
“Alright then. Guess we’re gonna have to fight our way out of this one. What have we got, weapon-wise?”
“One phaser array,” Erami replied, “Tends to seize up after a few shots.”
“Perfect,” Denella muttered with heavy sarcasm, “Time to improvise, then.”
She went to work on the controls, her green fingers dancing across the surface of the console as Erami watched on.
“Looks like they’re using a Nausicaan tractor beam,” she nodded with satisfaction, “Which means that I might have a little trick we can use.”
“How come?”
“We run into a lot of Nausicaans.”
Despite their perilous situation, Erami couldn’t help but laugh at this, as Denella continued to work at her controls.
“I’m gonna use our power grid to send a surge of feedback up the beam, right to the source. If we give it enough juice, it should short out their emitter.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Erami nodded back.
As the Kendra crept ever closer to the Martan, still ensnared in its tractor beam, Denella finally completed her work.
“Ok,” she called out, “Get ready to get us the hell out of here.”
She tapped one final command, and a burst of fizzing green energy surged back up the beam being emitted by the Pakled vessel. Just as the Orion had hoped, it impacted with the tractor beam emitters and overloaded the poorly-installed components.
In an instant, the beam was broken. The Kendra was free.
“Getting us the hell out of here, sir,” Erami called back with a grin, as she tapped at her own bank of controls.
Before the Pakled ship could bring its weapons to bear, the Kendra jumped forwards. Straight into the Kervala nebula.
Seconds later, their pursuers followed.
“They’re still on our tail,” Erami reported, as she swung the Kendra away from the first incoming disruptor blast, “And now they’re angry. Any more ideas?”
Denella gritted her teeth and nodded.
“I think,” she said, as the Kendra bucked around in the tumult, “We need some backup.”
End of Part Three
“You are being a fool!”
Klath ignored the ferocity with which the comment was fired at him with, and finished placing his spare tunics into the transport container. On the other side of the cabin, K’Veth gestured at his actions with frustrated incredulity.
Neither Klingon could remember which of them had started the fight. But, in typical Klingon fashion, neither of them were even close to admitting defeat.
In the doorway of the cabin, Jirel and Natasha awkwardly watched the two feuding forms trading passive-aggressive barbs, not entirely sure what else to do.
“Remind me again why you let her onboard?” Natasha muttered to the Trill.
Jirel struggled to find an answer to that. When K’Veth had arrived where they were parked and asked to come onboard, it had seemed like the right thing to do. After all, he and Natasha had failed to find a way of talking Klath out of his sudden plan to leave the Bounty on some sort of improvised quest for the perfect battle. So, it had seemed like a good idea to let someone else have a go at talking some sense into him.
Except, the Klingon method of talking sense into someone seemed to involve instantly starting a very heated argument, with an ever-present undertone of violence.
Klath was at least keeping himself measured in his responses, despite K’Veth’s continued angry comments, keeping the par’Mach-based passions inside him for the time being.
“I have explained the plan, K’Veth,” he persisted as he closed up the container, “It will be a glorious quest to rediscover your sense of honour. For both of us.”
“It will be a futile task,” she spat back, “By a stubborn fool who still refuses to see how his feelings have blinded him to the truth. There is no honour out there for me, Klath.”
“There is honour out there for everyone,” he countered, his tone almost zen-like despite the ferocious passions that still swirled inside him.
She threw her hands up in an ostentatious display of frustration, stepping closer to the other Klingon and snarling at him. For an uncomfortable moment, the two person audience in the doorway wondered if they were about to get a front row seat to another Klingon mating ritual.
But Klath remained stoic, even as K’Veth snarled.
“You still patronise me,” she accused him, “You claim to know what is right for me, and you do not even listen to what I am trying to say!”
“I know what is right,” Klath retorted, “For both of us. I feel it. Inside.”
He pounded his fist on his chest to emphasise his point, not caring if two of his colleagues were watching on. But he got nothing more than a scoff back from the Klingon woman.
“What you feel inside is nothing but lust. Brought on by a lonely warrior finding one of his own to mate with after so long alone.”
Her words caused a surge of anger inside him, as she continued to seem determined to prod and poke him into some sort of retaliation.
And she seemed to have finally been successful.
“You challenge me to prove myself?” he growled at her.
“Willingly,” she snarled back.
Without breaking eye contact, Klath reached into a second packing container in front of him on the deck of his cabin and retrieved the mek’leth that he had stowed away earlier, tossing it across the room to her. She caught the end of the handle with practised ease, her fighting skills having been honed like any other Klingon, even in exile.
Then, she raised the blade above her head in anger.
“Defend yourself!”
The corners of Klath’s mouth curved into a trace of a smile as he relished the impromptu fight that was about to unfold. With a single deft movement, he unsheathed his bat’leth from where it hung on his back and brought it to bear.
In the doorway, Jirel and Natasha glanced at each other.
“We should…” the Trill managed, nodding his head back into the corridor.
Natasha nodded in agreement. They stepped back in unison and allowed the cabin door to close, just as the two weapons clashed together for the first time accompanied by furious growls from both participants. The sound of clashing blades continued apace through the door, as they stood in the Bounty’s main corridor.
Jirel looked at Natasha again and offered a shrug.
“Let’s, um, give them five minutes.”
****************************
“A quantum singularity?”
Denella couldn’t help but laugh as she sat cross-legged on the picnic blanket, shaking her head at the Bajoran on the other side, who was now reclining on her side after the meal.
“I mean,” Erami offered with a shrug, “Technically, yes.”
“You stole a quantum singularity?”
Erami sat up straight and maintained a defiant smile.
“Well, you’re the engineer. You know what a Romulan warp core is, right? So, I guess, yeah. Technically, I stole a quantum singularity.”
Denella went to respond, then simply shook her head again.
She had finally gotten Erami to give her the full story of what was going on between her and the Pakleds, and why exactly they seemed so determined to chase her down. She had been expecting the usual story. One of stolen latinum, or purloined spare parts. Something manageable for a Bajoran woman in a shuttlecraft to have been able to swipe on her own without the Pakleds being able to stop her. She hadn’t been expecting the actual answer.
“Hang on,” she suddenly realised, looking back at the Bajoran with sudden amusement, “You stole a quantum singularity, and you thought the idea of me redesigning the Bounty’s thruster vents was far-fetched?”
The two women shared a burst of laughter, before Erami was able to control herself and offer up her defence.
“It’s like I said, the Pakleds didn’t even know what it was. It was just lying around inside their cargo bay behind a set of Terrelian impulse coils. So, I figured that they wouldn’t miss it, and there might be a tidy little profit to be made by flipping it to someone else.”
“You didn’t think to maybe tell them what it was, in return for a share of the profits?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Denella found herself smiling again, as Erami continued.
“Besides, if I’d have told them what it was, they’d have tried to fit it to their own ship, and ended up blowing up half the sector. This way, everyone wins.”
“Apart from the Pakleds,” Denella pointed out with a raised eyebrow.
In truth, while she was still persisting with her questioning tone, she found that she was more doing it to wind the other woman up than anything else at this point. She found that she didn’t much care about the perceived crime Erami had committed, now she knew the truth.
After all, it wasn’t as though she and the Bounty’s crew were above liberating certain things from their owners when things got especially desperate. And Erami was right, it was probably better for everyone that a group of Pakleds didn’t have a Romulan warp core available to them any more.
“So,” the Bajoran concluded, scrunching up her nose, sitting up and holding her hands in the air, “You talked it out of me. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Any more confessions you want to get out of me before you lock me up, officer?”
Denella kept up her stern front in this little role play, as she realised that there was another thing she wanted to ask about, while she had the chance.
“The other day,” she asked, “Did you really do a runner from that restaurant?”
“Huh,” Erami grouched, “Guess I walked into that one as well. But you really think I--?”
Before she could get any further, the Kendra began to shake all around them.
In an instant, the two women switched back into business mode, as they both jumped up off the blanket and rushed to the two seats at the front of the cockpit. Neither bothered to cast a glance at the beauty of the view in front of them this time, focusing entirely on the task at hand. Before they had even reached the controls, Denella already had a sense of what was happening, and it only took a cursory glance of the readouts to confirm that her instincts were correct.
“That didn’t feel like a bit of turbulence from the nebula,” Erami offered.
“Nope,” the Orion replied from where she had slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to the Bajoran, “We’re caught in a tractor beam.”
“We’re being hailed,” Erami added, as she flipped the comms link open.
“Hello, shuttlecraft,” Grumtrag’s familiar voice came out over the speakers, “This is the Pakled vessel Martan. We have got you now, and we will not let go.”
“Looks like your friends found us,” Denella pointed out unnecessarily, “I thought you said you masked your warp trail?”
“I did,” Erami insisted, “Usually these guys don’t know an ion trace from a tachyon eddy. They must’ve upgraded their sensors.”
“You will give us our prize,” Grumtrag continued over the comms link, “Or we will break your ship. We are good at that. We are strong.”
“Hey,” Erami fired back, jabbing her finger down on the comms panel, “Next time, say please.”
With that, she clicked the link off, even as the Kendra shuddered again.
“They’re pulling us in,” Denella reported, “And while I appreciate a good bit of defiance, it might be the time to admit defeat on this one and give them their prize back.”
“Might be a bit of a problem,” Erami grimaced, “You were right earlier when you called me out about the Kendra getting ransacked. I don’t have the warp core any more. Exchanged it with a Ferengi trader two weeks ago.”
Denella sighed in frustration as the shuttle shook harder.
“Ok, so give them the latinum. That should hopefully keep them happy.”
“No latinum. Like I said, I exchanged it.”
“For what?”
“You’re sitting in it.”
Denella glanced at the Bajoran, then looked around the entirely modest confines of the Kendra and shook her head.
“You exchanged a Romulan warp core for this heap of junk?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Erami fired back, “We’re very religious people, us Bajorans. Makes us terrible negotiators. We’re way too trusting.”
Denella sighed and turned back to the controls in front of her, contemplating the fact that they seemed to have nothing to barter for their lives with.
“Alright then. Guess we’re gonna have to fight our way out of this one. What have we got, weapon-wise?”
“One phaser array,” Erami replied, “Tends to seize up after a few shots.”
“Perfect,” Denella muttered with heavy sarcasm, “Time to improvise, then.”
She went to work on the controls, her green fingers dancing across the surface of the console as Erami watched on.
“Looks like they’re using a Nausicaan tractor beam,” she nodded with satisfaction, “Which means that I might have a little trick we can use.”
“How come?”
“We run into a lot of Nausicaans.”
Despite their perilous situation, Erami couldn’t help but laugh at this, as Denella continued to work at her controls.
“I’m gonna use our power grid to send a surge of feedback up the beam, right to the source. If we give it enough juice, it should short out their emitter.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Erami nodded back.
As the Kendra crept ever closer to the Martan, still ensnared in its tractor beam, Denella finally completed her work.
“Ok,” she called out, “Get ready to get us the hell out of here.”
She tapped one final command, and a burst of fizzing green energy surged back up the beam being emitted by the Pakled vessel. Just as the Orion had hoped, it impacted with the tractor beam emitters and overloaded the poorly-installed components.
In an instant, the beam was broken. The Kendra was free.
“Getting us the hell out of here, sir,” Erami called back with a grin, as she tapped at her own bank of controls.
Before the Pakled ship could bring its weapons to bear, the Kendra jumped forwards. Straight into the Kervala nebula.
Seconds later, their pursuers followed.
“They’re still on our tail,” Erami reported, as she swung the Kendra away from the first incoming disruptor blast, “And now they’re angry. Any more ideas?”
Denella gritted her teeth and nodded.
“I think,” she said, as the Kendra bucked around in the tumult, “We need some backup.”
End of Part Three
Okay - the Alpha quadrant dodged a big one when Erami offloaded the Romulan warp core to the Ferengi... Quite enjoying Klath's quagmire... Thanks!! rbs
Part Four
The two Klingons panted from their exertions as they glared at each other from opposite sides of the small cabin.
The entire room was now in a state of frantic disarray. What furniture there had been was now overturned or tipped over, and there were several deep gouges in the inner metal walls of the room where one or both of the bladed weapons had become temporarily impaled during the fight.
Klath and K’Veth themselves were both covered in sweat, their bodies aching from the strains of the ongoing fight. But still, neither was willing to back down. Even if both of them had both been willing to take a short break.
“You fight well,” Klath grunted, as he stood back up straight and hefted his bat’leth, preparing for the next clash of blades.
“And you still patronise me,” K’Veth countered, bringing her own weapon to bear, “Just because I am dishonoured does not mean I cannot fight.”
“Then you should agree to my plan. Use that ability in our quest for a battle worthy of the name, instead of lashing out at me.”
“Perhaps,” she hissed, with a slightly satisfied smile, “I enjoy lashing out at you.”
Before he could reply, she charged again, forcing him to parry the fiercely swung mek’leth with the edge of his bat’leth. She spun around instantly and swung at him with a follow-up blow, which he caught with the trailing side of his twin-bladed weapon and fenced away.
They faced off against each other again, growling gently at each other as they circled around the edge of the cabin.
Klath still felt a chaos of emotion inside of him. The blood lust brought on by the battle now mixed with his existing feelings of par’Mach that had been ravaging him for days, in a way that gave him a rush like he couldn’t remember feeling before.
In a curious way, he had never felt more like a Klingon.
Then, just as he prepared to charge into the melee once again, the fight was unceremoniously interrupted by the altogether non-Klingon sound of the cabin’s door buzzer.
He paused. As did K’Veth. Despite Klath’s long past within the empire, and everything K’Veth had learned about her people in exile, neither were quite sure what the accepted protocol was for a fight like this being disturbed by a doorbell.
In the end, Klath reluctantly lowered his weapon. K’Veth warily mirrored his move.
“Yes!” he barked out.
A few seconds later, the door slowly opened, and Jirel awkwardly poked his head into the cabin, doing his best to ignore the scene of carnage all around the room and keep his focus on his unhappy weapons chief.
“Um, hey, so, hate to break up…whatever this is. But we’ve got a problem.”
“What?” Klath grunted angrily.
“We just got a call from Denella. She’s in trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Not entirely sure,” the Trill admitted, “But there’s Pakleds involved.”
All thoughts of the fight in front of him now left Klath’s mind. He quickly sheathed the bat’leth behind his back, knowing that there would be no time to resolve his personal matters with K’Veth here and now, no matter how much he wanted to.
Because he could sense that there was a bigger battle ahead of him.
****************************
Moments later, Jirel led the two Klingons up the steps into the Bounty’s cockpit.
Natasha was already seated at the rear engineering console usually manned by the absent Denella, having figured that she’d be more useful there on a rescue mission than her improvised sensor console. Without thinking, Klath slid straight into his own tactical console on the left side of the room, while Jirel jumped into the centre seat and K’Veth hung back for the time being.
“Ok,” Jirel nodded, “Let’s go save--”
He stopped mid-sentence, as he swivelled around to the front of the cockpit and, for the first time, noticed that the pilot’s seat was empty.
They were missing one irritating, grinning Vulcan.
“Where the hell’s Sunek?”
Jirel swivelled back around to the other three individuals in the cockpit, but they didn’t have an answer. Natasha offered him a shrug, as Jirel recalled the last time they had seen their absent colleague.
“You don’t think he actually…y’know, with the Caitian?” he asked her.
“No,” Natasha shook her head definitively, “No. Definitely not. No.”
There was a brief pause, as the two Klingons looked confused and Natasha continued to weigh up Jirel’s question.
“I mean,” she added eventually, “Probably not?”
“Ok, we’ll have to figure that out later,” Jirel sighed with a wave of his arm, “One missing crew member at a time.”
He looked around and considered the options available to him, then had a sudden brainwave.
“Hey, buddy,” he motioned to Klath with a nod of his head, “You two still looking for that proud and noble battle of yours?”
“Yes,” Klath nodded, despite K’Veth’s unhappy glare, “But I do not see how that is relevant to our current predicament--”
Jirel stood from the centre seat and gestured to it.
“I’m the best pilot we’ve got left onboard, so I guess I’ll take over up front. So…how about it, Captain Klath?”
Klath looked at the chair he was being offered, then back at K’Veth, who looked unconvinced by this sudden twist. As if she was now being patronised by the entire crew.
“K’Veth,” he urged with a warrior’s relish, “We must save Denella. This is a true battle for us. If you will accept.”
She felt a fresh rush of blood lust inside, the like of which she had never felt before. Certainly it was more than she felt when she had been marching towards the mass of tribbles back on Brexis II. And she realised that perhaps there was something to what Klath had been saying. This was a true battle. And she was ready.
“I accept,” she nodded forcefully.
Klath stood from the tactical console and gestured for her to take his place. She slid in and immediately began to familiarise herself with the controls.
With K’Veth in position, Jirel at the pilot’s controls and Natasha at engineering, Klath strode over and dropped his frame into the centre seat. And for the first time since his final fateful actions in the Klingon Defence Force, when he had lost his own sense of honour in the eyes of the empire, he took command of a vessel.
“Take us into orbit,” he called out for his first order.
“Aye aye, captain,” Jirel shot back with a grin as he tapped the slightly unfamiliar bank of controls in front of him, “And don’t worry yourselves. I used to handle all the flying around here before Sunek came along.”
The Bounty slowly rose up from the landing pad on the outskirts of the spaceport and began to ascend. As Jirel tapped another command, a series of shrill alarms suddenly sounded out. The entire ship bucked wildly under their feet, and for a nauseating second the view through the cockpit seemed to spiral out of control, before the Trill got them stable.
“Yep, that’s right,” he continued, a little more sheepishly, “Always engage inertial dampeners before switching to impulse power. Just…keeping you all on your toes.”
“Um, Captain Klath,” Natasha called out, as the Bounty broke through the atmosphere and returned to space, “So you’re aware, I took an advanced shuttle piloting course at the Academy. Finished top five in every practical exam. Just in case you feel the need for any crew reassignments.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Klath nodded, maintaining a serious poker face as part of the act, “I will…bear that in mind.”
“No, really, that’s all very funny,” Jirel griped as he manoeuvred the ship into high orbit, “I’m starting to see why Sunek gets so paranoid up here…”
Natasha mustered a smirk, as Klath stole a glance at K’Veth, who was entirely ignoring the short burst of the Bounty crew’s usual cockpit banter in favour of continuing to study the weapons controls.
With a slight smile of satisfaction, he turned back to the front of the cockpit and called out to his slightly humbled pilot.
“Set course for the source of Denella’s distress call. Maximum speed.”
Seconds later, the Bounty shot forwards. On the way to save their friend.
The two Klingons panted from their exertions as they glared at each other from opposite sides of the small cabin.
The entire room was now in a state of frantic disarray. What furniture there had been was now overturned or tipped over, and there were several deep gouges in the inner metal walls of the room where one or both of the bladed weapons had become temporarily impaled during the fight.
Klath and K’Veth themselves were both covered in sweat, their bodies aching from the strains of the ongoing fight. But still, neither was willing to back down. Even if both of them had both been willing to take a short break.
“You fight well,” Klath grunted, as he stood back up straight and hefted his bat’leth, preparing for the next clash of blades.
“And you still patronise me,” K’Veth countered, bringing her own weapon to bear, “Just because I am dishonoured does not mean I cannot fight.”
“Then you should agree to my plan. Use that ability in our quest for a battle worthy of the name, instead of lashing out at me.”
“Perhaps,” she hissed, with a slightly satisfied smile, “I enjoy lashing out at you.”
Before he could reply, she charged again, forcing him to parry the fiercely swung mek’leth with the edge of his bat’leth. She spun around instantly and swung at him with a follow-up blow, which he caught with the trailing side of his twin-bladed weapon and fenced away.
They faced off against each other again, growling gently at each other as they circled around the edge of the cabin.
Klath still felt a chaos of emotion inside of him. The blood lust brought on by the battle now mixed with his existing feelings of par’Mach that had been ravaging him for days, in a way that gave him a rush like he couldn’t remember feeling before.
In a curious way, he had never felt more like a Klingon.
Then, just as he prepared to charge into the melee once again, the fight was unceremoniously interrupted by the altogether non-Klingon sound of the cabin’s door buzzer.
He paused. As did K’Veth. Despite Klath’s long past within the empire, and everything K’Veth had learned about her people in exile, neither were quite sure what the accepted protocol was for a fight like this being disturbed by a doorbell.
In the end, Klath reluctantly lowered his weapon. K’Veth warily mirrored his move.
“Yes!” he barked out.
A few seconds later, the door slowly opened, and Jirel awkwardly poked his head into the cabin, doing his best to ignore the scene of carnage all around the room and keep his focus on his unhappy weapons chief.
“Um, hey, so, hate to break up…whatever this is. But we’ve got a problem.”
“What?” Klath grunted angrily.
“We just got a call from Denella. She’s in trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Not entirely sure,” the Trill admitted, “But there’s Pakleds involved.”
All thoughts of the fight in front of him now left Klath’s mind. He quickly sheathed the bat’leth behind his back, knowing that there would be no time to resolve his personal matters with K’Veth here and now, no matter how much he wanted to.
Because he could sense that there was a bigger battle ahead of him.
****************************
Moments later, Jirel led the two Klingons up the steps into the Bounty’s cockpit.
Natasha was already seated at the rear engineering console usually manned by the absent Denella, having figured that she’d be more useful there on a rescue mission than her improvised sensor console. Without thinking, Klath slid straight into his own tactical console on the left side of the room, while Jirel jumped into the centre seat and K’Veth hung back for the time being.
“Ok,” Jirel nodded, “Let’s go save--”
He stopped mid-sentence, as he swivelled around to the front of the cockpit and, for the first time, noticed that the pilot’s seat was empty.
They were missing one irritating, grinning Vulcan.
“Where the hell’s Sunek?”
Jirel swivelled back around to the other three individuals in the cockpit, but they didn’t have an answer. Natasha offered him a shrug, as Jirel recalled the last time they had seen their absent colleague.
“You don’t think he actually…y’know, with the Caitian?” he asked her.
“No,” Natasha shook her head definitively, “No. Definitely not. No.”
There was a brief pause, as the two Klingons looked confused and Natasha continued to weigh up Jirel’s question.
“I mean,” she added eventually, “Probably not?”
“Ok, we’ll have to figure that out later,” Jirel sighed with a wave of his arm, “One missing crew member at a time.”
He looked around and considered the options available to him, then had a sudden brainwave.
“Hey, buddy,” he motioned to Klath with a nod of his head, “You two still looking for that proud and noble battle of yours?”
“Yes,” Klath nodded, despite K’Veth’s unhappy glare, “But I do not see how that is relevant to our current predicament--”
Jirel stood from the centre seat and gestured to it.
“I’m the best pilot we’ve got left onboard, so I guess I’ll take over up front. So…how about it, Captain Klath?”
Klath looked at the chair he was being offered, then back at K’Veth, who looked unconvinced by this sudden twist. As if she was now being patronised by the entire crew.
“K’Veth,” he urged with a warrior’s relish, “We must save Denella. This is a true battle for us. If you will accept.”
She felt a fresh rush of blood lust inside, the like of which she had never felt before. Certainly it was more than she felt when she had been marching towards the mass of tribbles back on Brexis II. And she realised that perhaps there was something to what Klath had been saying. This was a true battle. And she was ready.
“I accept,” she nodded forcefully.
Klath stood from the tactical console and gestured for her to take his place. She slid in and immediately began to familiarise herself with the controls.
With K’Veth in position, Jirel at the pilot’s controls and Natasha at engineering, Klath strode over and dropped his frame into the centre seat. And for the first time since his final fateful actions in the Klingon Defence Force, when he had lost his own sense of honour in the eyes of the empire, he took command of a vessel.
“Take us into orbit,” he called out for his first order.
“Aye aye, captain,” Jirel shot back with a grin as he tapped the slightly unfamiliar bank of controls in front of him, “And don’t worry yourselves. I used to handle all the flying around here before Sunek came along.”
The Bounty slowly rose up from the landing pad on the outskirts of the spaceport and began to ascend. As Jirel tapped another command, a series of shrill alarms suddenly sounded out. The entire ship bucked wildly under their feet, and for a nauseating second the view through the cockpit seemed to spiral out of control, before the Trill got them stable.
“Yep, that’s right,” he continued, a little more sheepishly, “Always engage inertial dampeners before switching to impulse power. Just…keeping you all on your toes.”
“Um, Captain Klath,” Natasha called out, as the Bounty broke through the atmosphere and returned to space, “So you’re aware, I took an advanced shuttle piloting course at the Academy. Finished top five in every practical exam. Just in case you feel the need for any crew reassignments.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Klath nodded, maintaining a serious poker face as part of the act, “I will…bear that in mind.”
“No, really, that’s all very funny,” Jirel griped as he manoeuvred the ship into high orbit, “I’m starting to see why Sunek gets so paranoid up here…”
Natasha mustered a smirk, as Klath stole a glance at K’Veth, who was entirely ignoring the short burst of the Bounty crew’s usual cockpit banter in favour of continuing to study the weapons controls.
With a slight smile of satisfaction, he turned back to the front of the cockpit and called out to his slightly humbled pilot.
“Set course for the source of Denella’s distress call. Maximum speed.”
Seconds later, the Bounty shot forwards. On the way to save their friend.
Love it - Sunek is missing - like probably up to his ear tips in trouble of his own...
And a rusty Jirel at the helm...
Thanks!! rbs
And a rusty Jirel at the helm...
Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
The shower of sparks that exploded out of the panel behind them was all the warning they needed to know that the Kendra had been hit. Still, the shuttle’s computer elected to underline the gravity of their situation by adding a further pair of alert sirens to the cacophony that was already ringing out all around them.
“Any chance you can shut those damn things off?” Denella called out over the impromptu symphony, as Erami swung the Kendra away from another Pakled disruptor blast.
“Kinda busy right now stopping us from dying!” the Bajoran called back.
The vessel shuddered again as another hit smashed into their buckling shields, sending another cascade of sparks out from above their heads.
“A job you’re really sucking at, just FYI,” Denella grimaced as she swiftly rerouted a handful of additional power reserves back into their defensive systems, “Shields are getting shredded, and there’s not much juice left to give them.”
Erami turned the shuttle into a sharp dive to the right, just as another blast skimmed past, missing them by inches. The Pakleds had them easily outgunned, that had never been in doubt. But at least at sunlight speeds, and with the additional disruption of the nebula, Erami was able to use the small shuttle’s manoeuvrability to keep them half a step ahead.
For the time being, at least.
“Those are Klingon disruptors they’re packing,” Denella reported as she checked on what scans she could get from the Kendra’s systems, “I’m also reading a Terrelian warp core, a Ferengi impulse drive and a computer core from…actually, I have no idea who.”
Erami shook her head as the shuttle shuddered again.
“Alright, new plan,” she called out, “There’s a pocket of deuterium bearing 121 mark 4. Ready with that phaser bank when I say!”
Denella nodded and then desperately gripped onto the console in front of her as the ship entered another dizzying turn. The captivating hues of the nebula that had once looked so beautiful were now starting to make her a little nauseous.
Erami steadied their course and gritted her teeth, using her years of experience piloting endless battered ships past their manufacturing tolerances to keep the Kendra on course.
“The Pakleds are right on our tail,” she bellowed as she saw the patchy sensor readings, “Ready, and…now!”
Denella fired the tiny phaser cannon of the Kendra directly ahead, into the denser pocket of gas. It immediately ignited in a crimson fireball, just as Erami desperately pulled the nose of the tiny ship upwards.
“Ok, this is gonna be a lot closer than I--!”
The whole cockpit juddered as the explosion rocked the shields of the ship, causing them to flare bright orange. Denella was slammed into the console in front of her, briefly knocking the wind out of her body with the force of it.
But while they caught a glancing blow from the explosion, the Martan took a direct hit, causing their own shields to groan under the impact and forcing them to briefly break off from direct pursuit. Erami kept the Kendra’s nose pointing up, even as the shields continued to flare, and then shot them away from their more cumbersome pursuers.
“Little trick I learned flying raiders with the Resistance,” she smiled in satisfaction, “A bunch of us once used that same idea to blind the sensors of a whole Cardassian transport convoy. Should be enough to throw them off for a bit.”
“Nice,” Denella coughed as she rubbed her aching midriff, “Love how borderline suicidal it was.”
Erami stifled a smile as she levelled their course.
“Come on, you loved it really. Besides, when was the last time you got to do something like this?”
Denella considered her response. She had in fact done something similar to this very recently. When she had embarked on a desperate solo quest inside a far less inviting nebula to rescue a childhood friend from within the Orion Syndicate, culminating in her destroying an entire Orion Cruiser belonging to her former owner Rilen Dar, killing everyone left onboard.
But she decided that, even if she had felt comfortable enough to open up a little about her past during brunch, she really wasn’t ready to share that story. So instead, she shrugged and turned her focus back to her readouts.
“By the way, that little trick of yours pretty much took out the rest of the shields.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Erami replied, “I’m gonna try and head deeper into the gas cloud. See if we can hide as best we can before they get ship-shape. Your friends on the way or what?”
“They’ll be here,” Denella affirmed, as the Kendra limped deeper into the nebula.
She just hoped she was right.
****************************
The Bounty was shaking slightly from the stress being put through her engines as they chased down the distance between them and the battle.
It wasn’t a long journey from Kervala Prime to the nearby nebula that shared the star system’s name, but every second still counted. So they were taking the engines past the redline.
Klath knew it was a risk that they were taking, given that the ship’s redoubtable engineer wasn’t onboard if anything were to go wrong. But his command instincts told him that it was an acceptable risk. They should get ample warning from the computer if the stresses were getting too high, and it was imperative they made the best time possible.
As he sat in the command chair, he couldn’t help but think back to the last time he had taken a ship into battle, when he commanded the IKS Grontar. A battle that had ultimately turned out to be the needless slaughter of an undefended freighter. And one that ultimately cost him his place in the Empire.
He silently resolved that this was going to be a very different mission. Not one where someone’s honour would be lost forever, but where someone’s would be gained for the first time.
“Phaser cannons are fully charged,” K’Veth barked out from his side, “Micro torpedo tubes are all loaded.”
Klath nodded back with a proud look, and she felt another surge of blood lust in her veins. She had settled into her new role entirely, all thoughts of her former shame and distrust of Klath’s motives now forgotten. Her eyes were almost glowing with the strength she was feeling inside.
Klath returned his attention to the forward view, gaining succour from his own blood lust. He was sure that this would be a glorious battle.
Tempering his growing confidence in their quest, Natasha chimed in a warning from the engineering station.
“Just bear in mind that we still have some secondary systems offline for repairs. We’re not gonna have a lot of backups to work with.”
“Nice report, Lieutenant Buzzkill,” Jirel quipped from the pilot’s seat.
In the command chair, Klath took a moment to fire a stern glare at the Trill in front of him.
“The pilot should keep his focus on his work when we are at battle readiness,” he grunted, “A lesser commander may tolerate a level of…inane behaviour from his crew. I do not.”
Natasha stifled an amused smile at Klath’s deadpan delivery, as Jirel turned around to eye the Klingon’s prideful face.
“Don't go getting too comfy in that chair, ok, buddy?”
Klath didn’t answer him.
He merely gripped the armrests of the chair tighter and stared grimly at the view ahead, as the Bounty sped on towards the source of Denella’s distress call. The overworked ship shaking with stress all the while.
Slowly but surely, the pink and purple mass of the nebula in front of them loomed larger.
The shower of sparks that exploded out of the panel behind them was all the warning they needed to know that the Kendra had been hit. Still, the shuttle’s computer elected to underline the gravity of their situation by adding a further pair of alert sirens to the cacophony that was already ringing out all around them.
“Any chance you can shut those damn things off?” Denella called out over the impromptu symphony, as Erami swung the Kendra away from another Pakled disruptor blast.
“Kinda busy right now stopping us from dying!” the Bajoran called back.
The vessel shuddered again as another hit smashed into their buckling shields, sending another cascade of sparks out from above their heads.
“A job you’re really sucking at, just FYI,” Denella grimaced as she swiftly rerouted a handful of additional power reserves back into their defensive systems, “Shields are getting shredded, and there’s not much juice left to give them.”
Erami turned the shuttle into a sharp dive to the right, just as another blast skimmed past, missing them by inches. The Pakleds had them easily outgunned, that had never been in doubt. But at least at sunlight speeds, and with the additional disruption of the nebula, Erami was able to use the small shuttle’s manoeuvrability to keep them half a step ahead.
For the time being, at least.
“Those are Klingon disruptors they’re packing,” Denella reported as she checked on what scans she could get from the Kendra’s systems, “I’m also reading a Terrelian warp core, a Ferengi impulse drive and a computer core from…actually, I have no idea who.”
Erami shook her head as the shuttle shuddered again.
“Alright, new plan,” she called out, “There’s a pocket of deuterium bearing 121 mark 4. Ready with that phaser bank when I say!”
Denella nodded and then desperately gripped onto the console in front of her as the ship entered another dizzying turn. The captivating hues of the nebula that had once looked so beautiful were now starting to make her a little nauseous.
Erami steadied their course and gritted her teeth, using her years of experience piloting endless battered ships past their manufacturing tolerances to keep the Kendra on course.
“The Pakleds are right on our tail,” she bellowed as she saw the patchy sensor readings, “Ready, and…now!”
Denella fired the tiny phaser cannon of the Kendra directly ahead, into the denser pocket of gas. It immediately ignited in a crimson fireball, just as Erami desperately pulled the nose of the tiny ship upwards.
“Ok, this is gonna be a lot closer than I--!”
The whole cockpit juddered as the explosion rocked the shields of the ship, causing them to flare bright orange. Denella was slammed into the console in front of her, briefly knocking the wind out of her body with the force of it.
But while they caught a glancing blow from the explosion, the Martan took a direct hit, causing their own shields to groan under the impact and forcing them to briefly break off from direct pursuit. Erami kept the Kendra’s nose pointing up, even as the shields continued to flare, and then shot them away from their more cumbersome pursuers.
“Little trick I learned flying raiders with the Resistance,” she smiled in satisfaction, “A bunch of us once used that same idea to blind the sensors of a whole Cardassian transport convoy. Should be enough to throw them off for a bit.”
“Nice,” Denella coughed as she rubbed her aching midriff, “Love how borderline suicidal it was.”
Erami stifled a smile as she levelled their course.
“Come on, you loved it really. Besides, when was the last time you got to do something like this?”
Denella considered her response. She had in fact done something similar to this very recently. When she had embarked on a desperate solo quest inside a far less inviting nebula to rescue a childhood friend from within the Orion Syndicate, culminating in her destroying an entire Orion Cruiser belonging to her former owner Rilen Dar, killing everyone left onboard.
But she decided that, even if she had felt comfortable enough to open up a little about her past during brunch, she really wasn’t ready to share that story. So instead, she shrugged and turned her focus back to her readouts.
“By the way, that little trick of yours pretty much took out the rest of the shields.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Erami replied, “I’m gonna try and head deeper into the gas cloud. See if we can hide as best we can before they get ship-shape. Your friends on the way or what?”
“They’ll be here,” Denella affirmed, as the Kendra limped deeper into the nebula.
She just hoped she was right.
****************************
The Bounty was shaking slightly from the stress being put through her engines as they chased down the distance between them and the battle.
It wasn’t a long journey from Kervala Prime to the nearby nebula that shared the star system’s name, but every second still counted. So they were taking the engines past the redline.
Klath knew it was a risk that they were taking, given that the ship’s redoubtable engineer wasn’t onboard if anything were to go wrong. But his command instincts told him that it was an acceptable risk. They should get ample warning from the computer if the stresses were getting too high, and it was imperative they made the best time possible.
As he sat in the command chair, he couldn’t help but think back to the last time he had taken a ship into battle, when he commanded the IKS Grontar. A battle that had ultimately turned out to be the needless slaughter of an undefended freighter. And one that ultimately cost him his place in the Empire.
He silently resolved that this was going to be a very different mission. Not one where someone’s honour would be lost forever, but where someone’s would be gained for the first time.
“Phaser cannons are fully charged,” K’Veth barked out from his side, “Micro torpedo tubes are all loaded.”
Klath nodded back with a proud look, and she felt another surge of blood lust in her veins. She had settled into her new role entirely, all thoughts of her former shame and distrust of Klath’s motives now forgotten. Her eyes were almost glowing with the strength she was feeling inside.
Klath returned his attention to the forward view, gaining succour from his own blood lust. He was sure that this would be a glorious battle.
Tempering his growing confidence in their quest, Natasha chimed in a warning from the engineering station.
“Just bear in mind that we still have some secondary systems offline for repairs. We’re not gonna have a lot of backups to work with.”
“Nice report, Lieutenant Buzzkill,” Jirel quipped from the pilot’s seat.
In the command chair, Klath took a moment to fire a stern glare at the Trill in front of him.
“The pilot should keep his focus on his work when we are at battle readiness,” he grunted, “A lesser commander may tolerate a level of…inane behaviour from his crew. I do not.”
Natasha stifled an amused smile at Klath’s deadpan delivery, as Jirel turned around to eye the Klingon’s prideful face.
“Don't go getting too comfy in that chair, ok, buddy?”
Klath didn’t answer him.
He merely gripped the armrests of the chair tighter and stared grimly at the view ahead, as the Bounty sped on towards the source of Denella’s distress call. The overworked ship shaking with stress all the while.
Slowly but surely, the pink and purple mass of the nebula in front of them loomed larger.
Cavalry on the way... but could there be other cavalry as well? Never a good idea to get complacent...
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
It hadn’t taken long for the Martan to relocate the Kendra.
The Pakled ship moved slowly through the swirling gases of the nebula, and fired both disruptor cannons at the small orange shuttle.
“Incoming!” Denella cried out from the co-pilot’s seat.
Erami was already on it, swinging the ship away and barely evading the two deadly balls of green energy that fizzed past the hull. In the same movement, she was able to bring the Kendra to bear on the port side of the Martan as it lumbered through a pitched turn of its own.
Denella didn’t need a second invitation. She fired off another few spits of phaser fire, which impacted hard on the Martan’s shields. Though it barely slowed them down.
“We’re not making a dent,” she growled in frustration, “May as well be firing witty insults at them.”
“They’d never understand them if we did,” Erami replied, as she banked the Kendra up and over the top of the other ship’s rectangular midsection, “I’m gonna try and circle in close around them, make it hard for them to target their weapons.”
Just as she said that, she was forced to wrench the Kendra on another nauseating turn to the left to avoid a fresh disruptor blast.
“Hard-ish,” she added quickly, “If you’ve got any more ideas, this’d be a good time to use ‘em.”
Denella ignored the three new alert warnings that flashed up on the panel and danced her fingers across the controls.
“Ok, it’s a long shot, but I’m gonna channel power from every system we’re not using right now into that phaser cannon. Give it the supercharger treatment.”
Erami nodded in understanding and turned the shuttle around again, checking her readouts on the enemy ship as she did so.
“Looks like their shields are weakest around their starboard three-quarter section. Gonna line you up for a shot at that.”
The Kendra shook again as a plasma relay at the rear of the cockpit exploded in a fiery blast, only being quelled by the despairing hiss of the automated suppression systems.
“Ugh, she’s falling apart!” the Bajoran cursed as she wrestled with the controls.
“She can take it,” Denella affirmed, her long-honed engineering instincts giving her a sixth sense for when any ship was close to breaking point.
Eventually, Erami swung them back around, bringing them to bear on the exact part of the Martan that she had indicated.
“Ok, have at it!”
Denella nodded, mentally crossed her fingers, and pressed the firing button.
A surge of energy shot out of the single phaser cannon in the Kendra’s nose. One far greater than the cannon itself was designed to handle. The energy impacted on the Pakled ship’s shields and caused a crackle of energy to cascade out across the surface in a chaotic pattern of light that illuminated the already-colourful scene inside the Kervala nebula.
“Yes!” Erami yelled out, “Got ‘em!”
As soon as her celebrations began in earnest, however, the entire section of controls in front of Denella immediately fizzed and crackled, sparks flying everywhere, causing the Orion to jump back in shock to avoid a nasty burn. The Kendra shuddered once again from the latest misfortune to befall it.
“Warning,” the shuttle’s dispassionate computer voice intoned, “Power overload in main weapons control.”
“Wondered when you’d chime in,” Erami grunted mirthlessly in the direction of the computer voice as she glanced at the recovering Orion, “How bad?”
“Ugh. That one shot just fried the entire phaser array! Really wasn’t designed to handle that much power. And if we’re not careful, it’ll spread to--!”
Before she could get any further, a further burning shower of sparks burst out from the wall behind them, as Erami tapped her controls fruitlessly.
“We just lost main power completely! Warp drive offline, impulse engines are cooked!”
“Goddamnit!” Denella growled in frustration, “Power overload must’ve cascaded through every system on the ship. Stupid idea!”
“Hey,” Erami smiled across at her as the Kendra continued to fall apart all around them, “At least we got in one good punch. Always gotta get in one good punch, whoever you’re fighting.”
Her supportive words didn’t entirely quell Denella’s frustrations. She was still kicking herself for going all-in on the phaser plan. Which had brought them a bit of time, but at the cost of entirely crippling the shuttle. She watched helplessly as the fizzing and the crackling on the Martan’s temporarily overwhelmed shields began to subside and the larger vessel began to right itself.
“I take it that we’re too late for a friendly surrender?” Erami added with gallows humour.
Even as she spoke, she saw the twin disruptor banks either side of the Martan’s spherical forward section glowing ominously with fire.
“I think we’re past that point,” Denella offered simply.
She wondered if this was it. No warp drive, no impulse, and a pair of Klingon disruptors attached to a Pakled ship about to obliterate them.
“Screw this,” Erami cried out, “Shunt all available reserve power into the thrusters!”
Even as the glow from the disruptors reached its peak, Denella got the transfer done, though she was sure it would be too late.
Erami jabbed her finger down on the Kendra’s thruster controls, sending the remaining auxiliary power into the tiny engines at the same time the Martan fired. The sudden burst of momentum propelled the shuttle almost out of the path of the blasts, but not entirely. The second disruptor shot caught the Kendra with a heavy glancing blow.
Denella felt herself falling, and caught the sound of a bone snapping somewhere as she landed on the deck with an awkward thump. She caught sight of Erami sprawled in a similarly undignified heap to her right.
The view from the cockpit window was one of chaos, as the shuttle tumbled out of control through the gas cloud. A new cacophony of alarms sprung into life, as another plasma relay blew out at the rear of the cockpit.
“Warning,” the computer’s voice calmly intoned, “Antimatter containment failure is imminent.”
“Ugh,” Erami groaned as both women dragged themselves back towards the controls, “That guy never shuts up!”
Denella forced herself back into the co-pilot’s seat and went to work, as Erami clambered back into her own seat and tried vainly to level off their course.
“Trying to lock down antimatter storage,” she called out, “It’s on the redline!”
“Great,” the Bajoran replied, “So even if the Pakleds don’t kill us, my own ship’s gonna do the job for them!”
Denella concentrated all her engineering skills into the crisis, even as Erami managed to arrest their spin and get them close to stability.
“Ok,” the Orion puffed eventually, “Containment stabilised--”
She stopped as the two women saw the Pakled ship bearing down on them again, disruptors glowing. This time, there was no time for evasive action.
“Crap,” Erami said simply.
Denella was about to wholeheartedly agree with her analysis, when a new alert suddenly flashed up on her console.
“Wait! There’s another ship coming in. It’s the Bounty!”
The reassuringly familiar sight of the Ju’Day-type raider filled the view ahead of them, as the Bounty swept between the Martan and the Kendra and took the full force of the disruptor blasts for them on their own shields.
Erami stared in shock, before glancing over at Denella.
“See?” the green-skinned woman smiled through the smoke of half a dozen burned-out plasma relays, “Told you they’d be here.”
It hadn’t taken long for the Martan to relocate the Kendra.
The Pakled ship moved slowly through the swirling gases of the nebula, and fired both disruptor cannons at the small orange shuttle.
“Incoming!” Denella cried out from the co-pilot’s seat.
Erami was already on it, swinging the ship away and barely evading the two deadly balls of green energy that fizzed past the hull. In the same movement, she was able to bring the Kendra to bear on the port side of the Martan as it lumbered through a pitched turn of its own.
Denella didn’t need a second invitation. She fired off another few spits of phaser fire, which impacted hard on the Martan’s shields. Though it barely slowed them down.
“We’re not making a dent,” she growled in frustration, “May as well be firing witty insults at them.”
“They’d never understand them if we did,” Erami replied, as she banked the Kendra up and over the top of the other ship’s rectangular midsection, “I’m gonna try and circle in close around them, make it hard for them to target their weapons.”
Just as she said that, she was forced to wrench the Kendra on another nauseating turn to the left to avoid a fresh disruptor blast.
“Hard-ish,” she added quickly, “If you’ve got any more ideas, this’d be a good time to use ‘em.”
Denella ignored the three new alert warnings that flashed up on the panel and danced her fingers across the controls.
“Ok, it’s a long shot, but I’m gonna channel power from every system we’re not using right now into that phaser cannon. Give it the supercharger treatment.”
Erami nodded in understanding and turned the shuttle around again, checking her readouts on the enemy ship as she did so.
“Looks like their shields are weakest around their starboard three-quarter section. Gonna line you up for a shot at that.”
The Kendra shook again as a plasma relay at the rear of the cockpit exploded in a fiery blast, only being quelled by the despairing hiss of the automated suppression systems.
“Ugh, she’s falling apart!” the Bajoran cursed as she wrestled with the controls.
“She can take it,” Denella affirmed, her long-honed engineering instincts giving her a sixth sense for when any ship was close to breaking point.
Eventually, Erami swung them back around, bringing them to bear on the exact part of the Martan that she had indicated.
“Ok, have at it!”
Denella nodded, mentally crossed her fingers, and pressed the firing button.
A surge of energy shot out of the single phaser cannon in the Kendra’s nose. One far greater than the cannon itself was designed to handle. The energy impacted on the Pakled ship’s shields and caused a crackle of energy to cascade out across the surface in a chaotic pattern of light that illuminated the already-colourful scene inside the Kervala nebula.
“Yes!” Erami yelled out, “Got ‘em!”
As soon as her celebrations began in earnest, however, the entire section of controls in front of Denella immediately fizzed and crackled, sparks flying everywhere, causing the Orion to jump back in shock to avoid a nasty burn. The Kendra shuddered once again from the latest misfortune to befall it.
“Warning,” the shuttle’s dispassionate computer voice intoned, “Power overload in main weapons control.”
“Wondered when you’d chime in,” Erami grunted mirthlessly in the direction of the computer voice as she glanced at the recovering Orion, “How bad?”
“Ugh. That one shot just fried the entire phaser array! Really wasn’t designed to handle that much power. And if we’re not careful, it’ll spread to--!”
Before she could get any further, a further burning shower of sparks burst out from the wall behind them, as Erami tapped her controls fruitlessly.
“We just lost main power completely! Warp drive offline, impulse engines are cooked!”
“Goddamnit!” Denella growled in frustration, “Power overload must’ve cascaded through every system on the ship. Stupid idea!”
“Hey,” Erami smiled across at her as the Kendra continued to fall apart all around them, “At least we got in one good punch. Always gotta get in one good punch, whoever you’re fighting.”
Her supportive words didn’t entirely quell Denella’s frustrations. She was still kicking herself for going all-in on the phaser plan. Which had brought them a bit of time, but at the cost of entirely crippling the shuttle. She watched helplessly as the fizzing and the crackling on the Martan’s temporarily overwhelmed shields began to subside and the larger vessel began to right itself.
“I take it that we’re too late for a friendly surrender?” Erami added with gallows humour.
Even as she spoke, she saw the twin disruptor banks either side of the Martan’s spherical forward section glowing ominously with fire.
“I think we’re past that point,” Denella offered simply.
She wondered if this was it. No warp drive, no impulse, and a pair of Klingon disruptors attached to a Pakled ship about to obliterate them.
“Screw this,” Erami cried out, “Shunt all available reserve power into the thrusters!”
Even as the glow from the disruptors reached its peak, Denella got the transfer done, though she was sure it would be too late.
Erami jabbed her finger down on the Kendra’s thruster controls, sending the remaining auxiliary power into the tiny engines at the same time the Martan fired. The sudden burst of momentum propelled the shuttle almost out of the path of the blasts, but not entirely. The second disruptor shot caught the Kendra with a heavy glancing blow.
Denella felt herself falling, and caught the sound of a bone snapping somewhere as she landed on the deck with an awkward thump. She caught sight of Erami sprawled in a similarly undignified heap to her right.
The view from the cockpit window was one of chaos, as the shuttle tumbled out of control through the gas cloud. A new cacophony of alarms sprung into life, as another plasma relay blew out at the rear of the cockpit.
“Warning,” the computer’s voice calmly intoned, “Antimatter containment failure is imminent.”
“Ugh,” Erami groaned as both women dragged themselves back towards the controls, “That guy never shuts up!”
Denella forced herself back into the co-pilot’s seat and went to work, as Erami clambered back into her own seat and tried vainly to level off their course.
“Trying to lock down antimatter storage,” she called out, “It’s on the redline!”
“Great,” the Bajoran replied, “So even if the Pakleds don’t kill us, my own ship’s gonna do the job for them!”
Denella concentrated all her engineering skills into the crisis, even as Erami managed to arrest their spin and get them close to stability.
“Ok,” the Orion puffed eventually, “Containment stabilised--”
She stopped as the two women saw the Pakled ship bearing down on them again, disruptors glowing. This time, there was no time for evasive action.
“Crap,” Erami said simply.
Denella was about to wholeheartedly agree with her analysis, when a new alert suddenly flashed up on her console.
“Wait! There’s another ship coming in. It’s the Bounty!”
The reassuringly familiar sight of the Ju’Day-type raider filled the view ahead of them, as the Bounty swept between the Martan and the Kendra and took the full force of the disruptor blasts for them on their own shields.
Erami stared in shock, before glancing over at Denella.
“See?” the green-skinned woman smiled through the smoke of half a dozen burned-out plasma relays, “Told you they’d be here.”
Quite fun to see a battle between ships that really aren't rated for battle... I wonder if that concept is lost on the lustful Klath...
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
Jirel felt like a kid again as he busied himself at the helm of his ship.
Before he had found Sunek, he’d done all of his own flying. And while his egotistical side enjoyed the feeling of sitting in the centre chair, regardless of how little he’d actually done to earn it, he had to admit that he’d missed the rush that came from a bit more of a hands-on role.
It may have been tired and beaten up, and it may be far from the fastest ship in the galaxy, but the Bounty was still a nimble old slugger of a vessel, ever-willing and ready for this sort of close combat at impulse speeds, with plenty of deadly firepower and flight controls tight enough to turn it on a proverbial sixpence.
And Jirel was making sure it did just that. He would be the first to admit he wasn’t half the pilot that Sunek was, though he’d never do it within earshot of the Vulcan, but he was still capable of holding his own when the chips were down.
Having drawn the fire of the Pakled ship, he deftly swung the Bounty back around and brought it to bear on the form of the modified Andorian freighter.
“Fire!” Klath bellowed from the chair behind him.
K’Veth tapped her controls. Twin blasts of phaser energy shot out from the Bounty’s wing-mounted cannons, followed by a volley of micro torpedoes. The Pakled ship had nothing like the Bounty’s reaction speeds, and the cumbersome larger vessel’s shields glowed white hot as they absorbed them. Seconds later, they returned fire from their deadly disruptors.
“Evasive!” Klath called out, now in full-on battle-hardened Klingon captain mode, “And bring us to bearing 285 mark 2. Target their aft shields!”
Jirel’s fingers jumped over the helm controls as the Bounty gracefully avoided most of the disruptor blasts, but one impacted heavily on the Bounty’s own shields, causing the lights to momentarily dim in the cockpit.
“Shields weakening,” Natasha reported, “Looks like they’re packing a hell of a punch.”
“They are Klingon disruptors,” Klath noted.
“Gotta love the Pakleds,” Jirel grimaced.
“They are an old design,” the Bounty’s temporary captain continued, “Designed to operate on a regularly modulating energy frequency. Try to match the harmonics of our own shields to their weapons, it should give us some additional protection.”
“On it,” Natasha nodded, digging deep into her Academy era engineering training to carry out the complex task.
Meanwhile, the Bounty swung past the aft section of their quarry, just as Klath had ordered, and K’Veth fired again.
“Direct hit!” she reported, her voice energised with the violence of the battle.
“Unknown vessel,” the voice of a Pakled filled the air over the comms link, “We do not know you. But don’t try to stop us, because we are smart. And we are strong.”
“Nobody likes a show-off,” Jirel muttered.
Several more disruptor blasts came rushing towards them. Jirel swerved the Bounty around a few of them, but several hit home. An access panel on the left side of the cockpit blew out.
“Return fire!” Klath bellowed, “Continue targeting aft shields!”
“Are we responding to their hail?” Natasha asked.
“We just did,” the Klingon pointed out.
K’Veth’s latest round of weapons fire impacted directly on their enemy’s weak spot again.
“Their aft shields are bucking,” she reported with relish.
Another explosion rocked the Bounty. Two more relays exploded above their heads and showered them with bright, white-hot sparks.
“So are ours!” Natasha cried out.
Amongst the chaos and the carnage Klath remained almost zen-like. He watched the battle unfold and directed his troops as if he was still on the bridge of the Grontar.
“Match their movement,” he called out to Jirel, “Come to 310 mark 5. Fire at will!”
He kept a tight grip on the armrests of his chair, as the battle continued all around him. The blood lust continued to course through his body.
****************************
“Damnit!”
Denella spat the word out as she thumped her hand down on the almost useless controls in front of her, emphasising her frustrations.
“I take it that means we’re not getting main power back anytime soon?” Erami asked mirthlessly from the other seat.
“We’re not getting anything back. Power, warp drive, weapons. Even the impulse controls are dead.”
“Huh. I really did get ripped off for that quantum singularity, didn’t I?”
Denella didn’t offer a smile, and looked back out of the Kendra’s cockpit window at the battle still raging in the Kervala nebula.
The good news was that the Bounty has successfully diverted the Pakled’s attention entirely away from their shattered shuttle. The bad news was that her precious ship was now getting the full force of their weaponry. And there was nothing that they could do to help them.
“They’re taking a beating from those disruptors,” she despaired as yet another volley of fire from the Pakled ship slammed into the Bounty’s collapsing shields, “We’ve got to do something.”
“I’m all ears,” Erami shrugged.
Denella couldn’t find anything to add. They had been left entirely impotent in the fight. A pair of hapless spectators to what was happening in front of them, waiting for a rescue. Like a couple of damsels in distress.
And then, she had a sudden spark of inspiration.
“Actually, we do have something we can use.”
Leaving Erami looking a little baffled, she stood up from her seat and clambered across to the rear of the cockpit, stepping over the remains of the picnic that were now strewn all around the deck from the chaotic journey the Kendra had been on since brunch.
“What?” Erami called back to her.
She ignored the question for the time being, focusing on bypassing the dozen or so safety protocols in place behind the panel she was working at that she needed to circumvent in order to carry out her plan. Satisfied with her work, she rushed back to the front of the cockpit and jabbed a finger down on the comms link.
“Denella to Bounty,” she called out.
“Bounty here,” the voice of a stressed Natasha came back, accompanied by the sound of a small explosion, “Bit busy right now!”
“I can see that,” the Orion replied, “But I think I’ve got a plan. I’m gonna eject the antimatter pod and lay a trap. Just get the Pakleds over here.”
“Got it,” Natasha’s response came, before the comms link clocked off.
Satisfied her message had got through, Denella started to frantically tap her controls, preparing her trap now the safety protocols were bypassed.
“We’re ejecting our antimatter pod, are we?” Erami piped up from her side, “I’m not quite the engineer you are, but don’t we need that to, y’know, escape?”
“We’re not getting the warp drive back online,” Denella pointed out, “If we’re escaping from this one, it’s certainly not gonna be under our own steam. So, if we’re not gonna be using that antimatter pod for anything…”
Erami considered this entirely valid point, then shrugged.
“Alright, what the hell. Stupid warp coils never worked on this crate anyway.”
Denella nodded back as she continued to work.
“One question,” Erami added, with a little less confidence, “We dump the pod and, I’m assuming, blow it up in the faces of those Pakleds, you sure we’re gonna have enough juice left to get away from that with just our thrusters?”
Denella kept her focus on her controls, but nodded firmly.
“Definitely,” she lied.
****************************
Despite their perilous situation, K’Veth was still enjoying every second of the fight.
It didn’t take a seasoned warrior to see that things were not going in their favour. The enemy had greater firepower and stronger defences. The battle may well be lost.
But, in some ways, that was making her first true experience of fighting on the battlefield even more glorious to experience. The idea that she might actually die in battle, the highest possible honour for any Klingon warrior, just made her heart beat faster as she fired at the enemy again.
Even if their enemy was a modified Andorian freighter full of Pakleds, and the battle was taking place in a pink and purple nebula, she still felt an unfamiliar sensation inside. One that she didn’t think she’d ever experienced before in her lifetime of exile.
A feeling of pride.
Klath had been right. She was discovering her personal sense of honour. Of self-belief. Perhaps for the first time ever. And suddenly it felt like there was nothing she couldn’t do. Maybe, she thought, as she glanced over at the man in the centre seat, who still willingly carried the scar she had left behind on his cheek, she could even consider his offer of joining.
But for the time being, she had more pressing engagements to look after.
“Their shields are weakening,” she reported excitedly after her latest volley.
“Not by enough,” Jirel chimed out from the pilot’s seat.
“You all heard Denella’s plan,” Klath commanded from the centre of the room, “Get us to their position, and make sure you bring our enemies with us.”
The Bounty shuddered again from another glancing blow from the Pakled ship’s disruptors, as Jirel swung the ship around through the swirling gases.
“Don’t think we’re going to need to worry about that part,” he called back grimly.
“Ventral shields have collapsed,” Natasha reported, “The hull is exposed!”
“Divert power,” Klath barked.
“There’s not much left to divert!”
Klath spun back around to Jirel, even as K’Veth fired a flurry of micro torpedoes from the Bounty’s aft launcher into the Pakled vessel, slowing them a tad.
“Keep our exposed side from their line of fire,” he ordered, “And increase speed to full impulse.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Klath!”
They raced on towards the trap that was being set.
As they neared the Kendra’s position, K’Veth fired again, ensuring that the Pakleds were still in hot pursuit of them. She felt another surge of adrenaline inside as every last micro torpedo slammed home. The blood lust rose higher and higher inside her.
Her only regret was that it would be the antimatter pod, rather than her own weapons, that delivered the fatal blow.
****************************
“Gisjacheh!”
This time, Denella opted to loudly curse in her native tongue into the smoke-filled cockpit, as she desperately grappled with her controls.
“I beg your pardon?” Erami offered from her side.
“Pod ejection systems are offline,” she reported despairingly, “And every power transfer relay to the system is fried!”
“Warning,” the computer noted, “Antimatter pod ejection systems are offline.”
Both occupants of the cockpit fixed the increasingly annoying computer with a stern glare, before Erami clambered out of her seat.
“On it,” she nodded, as she rushed for the cockpit exit, “I’ll eject it manually.”
“Be careful!”
Denella called out before she’d even realised what she was saying. It was enough to cause Erami to stop in the doorway and look back at her. But despite the slight curl of a smile on her face, she didn’t offer any sort of quip in return, she just nodded back.
“Always am,” she added.
With that, she exited the cockpit, heading for the rear section of the shuttle, while Denella composed herself and focused on the scene out of the cockpit window.
Ahead of them, she could see the Bounty was gaining, with the Pakleds right behind them. In her mind, she willed Erami to hurry up, wondering if she should have gone back there to do what was needed, and feeling helpless once again. But ultimately, she elected to trust her.
She watched in horror as a further blast from the disruptor banks of their pursuers collapsed the Bounty’s shields entirely. One more hit and the hull would be compromised. Or worse.
It was now or never.
“Ok!” Erami shouted out over the shuttle’s crackling comms link, “Pulling the ejection levers…now!”
There was the slightest of shudders that passed through the Kendra like a ripple, as the shuttle’s tiny and seemingly harmless antimatter pod departed from a hatch on the underside of the dirty orange-hued hull.
As soon as she felt that sensation, Denella fired the Kendra’s thrusters, pushing the tiny ship backwards and away from the pod, as fast as the remaining propulsion system would allow.
The Bounty and the chasing Pakleds loomed ever nearer.
“Get back up here!” she called out, “I’m gonna have to detonate it any second!”
The Bounty swept over the top of the shuttle. The Martan was closing, its disruptors glowing in preparation for another assault that would cripple the Ju’Day-type raider.
And the Pakled ship was now directly above the pod.
Erami arrived back in the doorway of the cockpit. But there was no time to brace herself.
They were out of time.
Denella detonated the pod.
Jirel felt like a kid again as he busied himself at the helm of his ship.
Before he had found Sunek, he’d done all of his own flying. And while his egotistical side enjoyed the feeling of sitting in the centre chair, regardless of how little he’d actually done to earn it, he had to admit that he’d missed the rush that came from a bit more of a hands-on role.
It may have been tired and beaten up, and it may be far from the fastest ship in the galaxy, but the Bounty was still a nimble old slugger of a vessel, ever-willing and ready for this sort of close combat at impulse speeds, with plenty of deadly firepower and flight controls tight enough to turn it on a proverbial sixpence.
And Jirel was making sure it did just that. He would be the first to admit he wasn’t half the pilot that Sunek was, though he’d never do it within earshot of the Vulcan, but he was still capable of holding his own when the chips were down.
Having drawn the fire of the Pakled ship, he deftly swung the Bounty back around and brought it to bear on the form of the modified Andorian freighter.
“Fire!” Klath bellowed from the chair behind him.
K’Veth tapped her controls. Twin blasts of phaser energy shot out from the Bounty’s wing-mounted cannons, followed by a volley of micro torpedoes. The Pakled ship had nothing like the Bounty’s reaction speeds, and the cumbersome larger vessel’s shields glowed white hot as they absorbed them. Seconds later, they returned fire from their deadly disruptors.
“Evasive!” Klath called out, now in full-on battle-hardened Klingon captain mode, “And bring us to bearing 285 mark 2. Target their aft shields!”
Jirel’s fingers jumped over the helm controls as the Bounty gracefully avoided most of the disruptor blasts, but one impacted heavily on the Bounty’s own shields, causing the lights to momentarily dim in the cockpit.
“Shields weakening,” Natasha reported, “Looks like they’re packing a hell of a punch.”
“They are Klingon disruptors,” Klath noted.
“Gotta love the Pakleds,” Jirel grimaced.
“They are an old design,” the Bounty’s temporary captain continued, “Designed to operate on a regularly modulating energy frequency. Try to match the harmonics of our own shields to their weapons, it should give us some additional protection.”
“On it,” Natasha nodded, digging deep into her Academy era engineering training to carry out the complex task.
Meanwhile, the Bounty swung past the aft section of their quarry, just as Klath had ordered, and K’Veth fired again.
“Direct hit!” she reported, her voice energised with the violence of the battle.
“Unknown vessel,” the voice of a Pakled filled the air over the comms link, “We do not know you. But don’t try to stop us, because we are smart. And we are strong.”
“Nobody likes a show-off,” Jirel muttered.
Several more disruptor blasts came rushing towards them. Jirel swerved the Bounty around a few of them, but several hit home. An access panel on the left side of the cockpit blew out.
“Return fire!” Klath bellowed, “Continue targeting aft shields!”
“Are we responding to their hail?” Natasha asked.
“We just did,” the Klingon pointed out.
K’Veth’s latest round of weapons fire impacted directly on their enemy’s weak spot again.
“Their aft shields are bucking,” she reported with relish.
Another explosion rocked the Bounty. Two more relays exploded above their heads and showered them with bright, white-hot sparks.
“So are ours!” Natasha cried out.
Amongst the chaos and the carnage Klath remained almost zen-like. He watched the battle unfold and directed his troops as if he was still on the bridge of the Grontar.
“Match their movement,” he called out to Jirel, “Come to 310 mark 5. Fire at will!”
He kept a tight grip on the armrests of his chair, as the battle continued all around him. The blood lust continued to course through his body.
****************************
“Damnit!”
Denella spat the word out as she thumped her hand down on the almost useless controls in front of her, emphasising her frustrations.
“I take it that means we’re not getting main power back anytime soon?” Erami asked mirthlessly from the other seat.
“We’re not getting anything back. Power, warp drive, weapons. Even the impulse controls are dead.”
“Huh. I really did get ripped off for that quantum singularity, didn’t I?”
Denella didn’t offer a smile, and looked back out of the Kendra’s cockpit window at the battle still raging in the Kervala nebula.
The good news was that the Bounty has successfully diverted the Pakled’s attention entirely away from their shattered shuttle. The bad news was that her precious ship was now getting the full force of their weaponry. And there was nothing that they could do to help them.
“They’re taking a beating from those disruptors,” she despaired as yet another volley of fire from the Pakled ship slammed into the Bounty’s collapsing shields, “We’ve got to do something.”
“I’m all ears,” Erami shrugged.
Denella couldn’t find anything to add. They had been left entirely impotent in the fight. A pair of hapless spectators to what was happening in front of them, waiting for a rescue. Like a couple of damsels in distress.
And then, she had a sudden spark of inspiration.
“Actually, we do have something we can use.”
Leaving Erami looking a little baffled, she stood up from her seat and clambered across to the rear of the cockpit, stepping over the remains of the picnic that were now strewn all around the deck from the chaotic journey the Kendra had been on since brunch.
“What?” Erami called back to her.
She ignored the question for the time being, focusing on bypassing the dozen or so safety protocols in place behind the panel she was working at that she needed to circumvent in order to carry out her plan. Satisfied with her work, she rushed back to the front of the cockpit and jabbed a finger down on the comms link.
“Denella to Bounty,” she called out.
“Bounty here,” the voice of a stressed Natasha came back, accompanied by the sound of a small explosion, “Bit busy right now!”
“I can see that,” the Orion replied, “But I think I’ve got a plan. I’m gonna eject the antimatter pod and lay a trap. Just get the Pakleds over here.”
“Got it,” Natasha’s response came, before the comms link clocked off.
Satisfied her message had got through, Denella started to frantically tap her controls, preparing her trap now the safety protocols were bypassed.
“We’re ejecting our antimatter pod, are we?” Erami piped up from her side, “I’m not quite the engineer you are, but don’t we need that to, y’know, escape?”
“We’re not getting the warp drive back online,” Denella pointed out, “If we’re escaping from this one, it’s certainly not gonna be under our own steam. So, if we’re not gonna be using that antimatter pod for anything…”
Erami considered this entirely valid point, then shrugged.
“Alright, what the hell. Stupid warp coils never worked on this crate anyway.”
Denella nodded back as she continued to work.
“One question,” Erami added, with a little less confidence, “We dump the pod and, I’m assuming, blow it up in the faces of those Pakleds, you sure we’re gonna have enough juice left to get away from that with just our thrusters?”
Denella kept her focus on her controls, but nodded firmly.
“Definitely,” she lied.
****************************
Despite their perilous situation, K’Veth was still enjoying every second of the fight.
It didn’t take a seasoned warrior to see that things were not going in their favour. The enemy had greater firepower and stronger defences. The battle may well be lost.
But, in some ways, that was making her first true experience of fighting on the battlefield even more glorious to experience. The idea that she might actually die in battle, the highest possible honour for any Klingon warrior, just made her heart beat faster as she fired at the enemy again.
Even if their enemy was a modified Andorian freighter full of Pakleds, and the battle was taking place in a pink and purple nebula, she still felt an unfamiliar sensation inside. One that she didn’t think she’d ever experienced before in her lifetime of exile.
A feeling of pride.
Klath had been right. She was discovering her personal sense of honour. Of self-belief. Perhaps for the first time ever. And suddenly it felt like there was nothing she couldn’t do. Maybe, she thought, as she glanced over at the man in the centre seat, who still willingly carried the scar she had left behind on his cheek, she could even consider his offer of joining.
But for the time being, she had more pressing engagements to look after.
“Their shields are weakening,” she reported excitedly after her latest volley.
“Not by enough,” Jirel chimed out from the pilot’s seat.
“You all heard Denella’s plan,” Klath commanded from the centre of the room, “Get us to their position, and make sure you bring our enemies with us.”
The Bounty shuddered again from another glancing blow from the Pakled ship’s disruptors, as Jirel swung the ship around through the swirling gases.
“Don’t think we’re going to need to worry about that part,” he called back grimly.
“Ventral shields have collapsed,” Natasha reported, “The hull is exposed!”
“Divert power,” Klath barked.
“There’s not much left to divert!”
Klath spun back around to Jirel, even as K’Veth fired a flurry of micro torpedoes from the Bounty’s aft launcher into the Pakled vessel, slowing them a tad.
“Keep our exposed side from their line of fire,” he ordered, “And increase speed to full impulse.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Klath!”
They raced on towards the trap that was being set.
As they neared the Kendra’s position, K’Veth fired again, ensuring that the Pakleds were still in hot pursuit of them. She felt another surge of adrenaline inside as every last micro torpedo slammed home. The blood lust rose higher and higher inside her.
Her only regret was that it would be the antimatter pod, rather than her own weapons, that delivered the fatal blow.
****************************
“Gisjacheh!”
This time, Denella opted to loudly curse in her native tongue into the smoke-filled cockpit, as she desperately grappled with her controls.
“I beg your pardon?” Erami offered from her side.
“Pod ejection systems are offline,” she reported despairingly, “And every power transfer relay to the system is fried!”
“Warning,” the computer noted, “Antimatter pod ejection systems are offline.”
Both occupants of the cockpit fixed the increasingly annoying computer with a stern glare, before Erami clambered out of her seat.
“On it,” she nodded, as she rushed for the cockpit exit, “I’ll eject it manually.”
“Be careful!”
Denella called out before she’d even realised what she was saying. It was enough to cause Erami to stop in the doorway and look back at her. But despite the slight curl of a smile on her face, she didn’t offer any sort of quip in return, she just nodded back.
“Always am,” she added.
With that, she exited the cockpit, heading for the rear section of the shuttle, while Denella composed herself and focused on the scene out of the cockpit window.
Ahead of them, she could see the Bounty was gaining, with the Pakleds right behind them. In her mind, she willed Erami to hurry up, wondering if she should have gone back there to do what was needed, and feeling helpless once again. But ultimately, she elected to trust her.
She watched in horror as a further blast from the disruptor banks of their pursuers collapsed the Bounty’s shields entirely. One more hit and the hull would be compromised. Or worse.
It was now or never.
“Ok!” Erami shouted out over the shuttle’s crackling comms link, “Pulling the ejection levers…now!”
There was the slightest of shudders that passed through the Kendra like a ripple, as the shuttle’s tiny and seemingly harmless antimatter pod departed from a hatch on the underside of the dirty orange-hued hull.
As soon as she felt that sensation, Denella fired the Kendra’s thrusters, pushing the tiny ship backwards and away from the pod, as fast as the remaining propulsion system would allow.
The Bounty and the chasing Pakleds loomed ever nearer.
“Get back up here!” she called out, “I’m gonna have to detonate it any second!”
The Bounty swept over the top of the shuttle. The Martan was closing, its disruptors glowing in preparation for another assault that would cripple the Ju’Day-type raider.
And the Pakled ship was now directly above the pod.
Erami arrived back in the doorway of the cockpit. But there was no time to brace herself.
They were out of time.
Denella detonated the pod.
Great action sequence - Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
The antimatter pod annihilated itself in a coruscating burst of energy. The shockwave from the explosion travelled out in all directions through the nebula.
The Bounty avoided the worst of it, Jirel keeping the impulse engines working overtime to steer them clear of the blast.
Behind them, the Martan caught the detonation fully in the face. The huge explosion tipped the larger ship up and off its axis entirely, causing the shields to flare bright white one final time, before they flickered and died.
Given the precarious way that the Pakled crew had assembled the Martan, from all manner of different systems jumbled together, the sudden shock also caused further failures across the board, as main power and various other systems were overwhelmed and overloaded.
The Martan gently tumbled end over end through the nebula, now bereft of both weapons and propulsion. The explosion had done its job. The Pakled ship was disabled.
But the shockwave didn’t stop there.
And the Kendra, limping away on thruster power, didn’t stand a chance.
****************************
At the same time that she detonated the pod, Denella called back to Erami.
“Hang on!”
It was a futile warning, but with the Martan’s glowing disruptors ready to fire, it was all that she could do.
The shockwave hit barely a second later. Even as the Martan was spiralling away in the opposite direction, the leading edge of the wave slammed into the Kendra.
Denella’s world was turned upside down. Even though she had been seated, and bracing for the impact, she was still immediately tossed onto the deck below.
She heard a thud elsewhere, as Erami was also thrown to the ground alongside her. She tried to cry out, or to call for the Bajoran, but it was all she could do to keep herself from being thrown about in myriad other directions as the Kendra was tossed around like a rag doll.
The pink and purple glow from outside began to swirl around like a kaleidoscope, as they continued their out of control journey.
“Warning,” the ever-unwelcome voice of the computer calmly reported, “Hull stresses exceeding design tolerances.”
Denella tried to claw her way towards the controls, to try and do something to arrest their dizzying flight. But the forces at play were too strong. She couldn’t stand, or even crawl her way back over to the pilot’s controls.
She heard the sound of a power line rupturing somewhere, and smelt the acrid stench of a fire that had sprung up nearby. A rush of nausea rose up from her stomach as the atmosphere grew darker all around. She was sure she could hear the Kendra’s hull starting to creak, as the structure began to fail.
And she closed her eyes, waiting for the end.
Then, she felt something.
A hand, grasping hers.
She forced her eyes back open and saw Erami, blood trickling from a blow to her head, looking back at her through the chaos.
As the Kendra continued to groan and strain, and it seemed as though the end was near, all of Denella’s other instincts were overridden by the immediacy of the moment. She dragged herself towards the Bajoran. Erami did the same.
And as the shuttle fell apart around them, they held each other close.
And waited for it to all be over.
****************************
“Qapla’!”
From the centre seat of the Bounty, Klath bellowed with pride as he saw the crippled Pakled ship through the cockpit window.
“Reading massive power fluctuations over there,” Natasha reported, a tad more formally, “Main power is offline. But…minimal casualties.”
She added the final part of her report with the measured tone of a field medic. Regardless of who they were fighting, she never liked to see too many casualties. On either side. She had seen too much carnage in her later years with Starfleet.
“A glorious battle,” Klath nodded with satisfaction.
Alongside him K’Veth found that she wasn’t entirely in agreement. The blood lust was still beating inside of her. She felt unsatisfied somehow. She looked out at the stricken form of their enemy. And her eyes narrowed.
“Now,” Klath continued, “We must locate the shuttle, and--”
“Qapla’!”
His order was interrupted by the battle cry from K’Veth. He swivelled around in his seat just in time to see her tapping the weapons controls once again, her eyes flaring with fury.
“K’Veth,” he bellowed instinctively, “No!”
But it was too late. The blood lust in the first-time warrior was too strong.
He stood from his chair and stared out through the cockpit window, as the flurry of micro-torpedoes burst forwards from the Bounty’s forward launcher and impacted on the Martan’s now entirely exposed hull.
And as the torpedoes slammed home, the jury-rigged nature of the Pakled ship worked against it once again. The torpedoes were not deadly in their own right, but they caused a chain reaction of failures across further systems, spreading out through the vessel like a disease, much too quickly for the Pakleds to do anything about.
And then the Martan was enveloped in a fiery explosion.
K’Veth felt a satisfaction inside that she had never experienced before. It lasted until she set eyes on Klath, who was scowling at her in anger.
Elsewhere in the cockpit, Jirel and Natasha stared at her as well, both in shock.
“We are victorious,” she called out.
“We were already victorious,” Klath spat back with a growl, “They were defeated. And…there was no honour in that action!”
Before K’Veth could say another word, Klath looked back at Jirel.
“The ship is yours again,” he said simply, “You should recover Denella and the shuttle, and then we must put back for repairs.”
Jirel nodded silently, still shocked by what he had just witnessed.
With that, Klath turned and stormed out of the cockpit, disappearing down the steps without even a glance at his fellow Klingon at the tactical console.
K’Veth watched him leave in silence, as the full consequences of her actions slowly began to sink in with her. The blood lust was gone. The feelings of triumph and glory had vanished. Her pride had disappeared as quickly as it had fleetingly appeared.
And the sense of shame had returned.
****************************
The sensation of the Bounty’s tractor beam gently enveloping the Kendra was enough to stir the two forms lying on the deck of the shuttle back into the present.
The gentle tug of the tractor beam was accompanied by a reassuringly familiar voice.
“Bounty to Kendra,” Jirel called out over the comms link, “You ok over there?”
Denella opened her eyes and blinked back at Erami. The two of them smiled. Then, they broke their impromptu hug on the Kendra’s deck plates and helped each other back to their feet, uncertainly standing up amongst the smoking wreck of the cockpit.
The air was still thick with the scent of burning, as the fire suppression systems struggled to cope with the multiple sources of flames. The lighting was dimmed, and across the control panels at the front of the cockpit, dozens of warning lights continued to flicker off and on. And to cap off the scene of devastation, the remains of their picnic were now smeared across every available surface.
But, for all of that, they were alive. They had made it.
“We’re ok,” Denella confirmed back over the comms link with a tired sigh of relief, “We could use a tow though.”
A second later, a significantly more relieved-sounding Jirel came through over the link.
‘We’re glad to hear that. And you know what? I’ll even waive the salvage fee.”
Denella stifled a smile, then looked out of the cockpit window at the oddly empty scene in front of the Kendra.
“Um, also, what the hell happened to the Pakleds--?”
“Long story,” Jirel said quickly, “We’ll, um, explain everything when we’re safely back at Kervala Prime.”
Denella considered this for a second, as the comms link clicked off, not entirely sure that she wanted to know exactly what that was supposed to mean. But she didn’t have long to consider that. With the immediate crisis over, and her usual self returning, she felt a slight rush of awkwardness as she looked over at the relieved Erami.
“Listen,” she managed, “I, um--I mean, about the--”
“I know,” Erami nodded, “I thought I was going to die too. And it’s always nice to feel like you're not gonna die alone.”
She smiled and gently reached out towards Denella’s head. The Orion found herself suppressing the need to flinch at the impromptu moment of contact.
The tension she felt was defused when Erami simply picked a slightly sorry slice of kava fruit out of her hair.
Denella looked at the offending piece of leftover picnic food and couldn’t help but laugh. Erami joined in with the moment of shared relief.
Then, as the laughter subsided, and the Kendra slowly began to move out of the nebula, tethered to the Bounty, Erami looked around at the carnage and shrugged.
“So,” she offered, “Wanna help with some repairs?”
****************************
Klath had stormed out of the Bounty’s cockpit, but he hadn’t been bound for his cabin.
Instead, he had marched straight down the steps and into the small unoccupied medical bay of the ship, and busied himself searching through the ship’s supplies for a specific implement.
As he searched, he tried to avoid thinking about the feelings he now had inside of him.
He felt a definite rush of anger, at the way K’Veth had lashed out and destroyed the Pakled ship, ruining their proud battle.
He felt frustration with himself, for not having seen the issue ahead of time, and for allowing her to overreact in the heat of the moment.
He felt an undeniable sense of guilt. Once again, a ship under his command had destroyed a defenceless ship. Just like the Grontar had so many years ago.
And he also felt regret, because he knew that his attempts to kindle a sense of honour inside the woman he had obsessed with for so long had been ruined.
But there was one thing he no longer felt. Something that was no longer there.
He no longer felt par’Mach.
Eventually, he found the tool he had been searching for. He stood in front of a small mirror on the wall of the medical bay, and started to run the dermal regenerator up and down his cheek.
And he didn’t stop until every trace of the scar had vanished.
End of Part Four
The antimatter pod annihilated itself in a coruscating burst of energy. The shockwave from the explosion travelled out in all directions through the nebula.
The Bounty avoided the worst of it, Jirel keeping the impulse engines working overtime to steer them clear of the blast.
Behind them, the Martan caught the detonation fully in the face. The huge explosion tipped the larger ship up and off its axis entirely, causing the shields to flare bright white one final time, before they flickered and died.
Given the precarious way that the Pakled crew had assembled the Martan, from all manner of different systems jumbled together, the sudden shock also caused further failures across the board, as main power and various other systems were overwhelmed and overloaded.
The Martan gently tumbled end over end through the nebula, now bereft of both weapons and propulsion. The explosion had done its job. The Pakled ship was disabled.
But the shockwave didn’t stop there.
And the Kendra, limping away on thruster power, didn’t stand a chance.
****************************
At the same time that she detonated the pod, Denella called back to Erami.
“Hang on!”
It was a futile warning, but with the Martan’s glowing disruptors ready to fire, it was all that she could do.
The shockwave hit barely a second later. Even as the Martan was spiralling away in the opposite direction, the leading edge of the wave slammed into the Kendra.
Denella’s world was turned upside down. Even though she had been seated, and bracing for the impact, she was still immediately tossed onto the deck below.
She heard a thud elsewhere, as Erami was also thrown to the ground alongside her. She tried to cry out, or to call for the Bajoran, but it was all she could do to keep herself from being thrown about in myriad other directions as the Kendra was tossed around like a rag doll.
The pink and purple glow from outside began to swirl around like a kaleidoscope, as they continued their out of control journey.
“Warning,” the ever-unwelcome voice of the computer calmly reported, “Hull stresses exceeding design tolerances.”
Denella tried to claw her way towards the controls, to try and do something to arrest their dizzying flight. But the forces at play were too strong. She couldn’t stand, or even crawl her way back over to the pilot’s controls.
She heard the sound of a power line rupturing somewhere, and smelt the acrid stench of a fire that had sprung up nearby. A rush of nausea rose up from her stomach as the atmosphere grew darker all around. She was sure she could hear the Kendra’s hull starting to creak, as the structure began to fail.
And she closed her eyes, waiting for the end.
Then, she felt something.
A hand, grasping hers.
She forced her eyes back open and saw Erami, blood trickling from a blow to her head, looking back at her through the chaos.
As the Kendra continued to groan and strain, and it seemed as though the end was near, all of Denella’s other instincts were overridden by the immediacy of the moment. She dragged herself towards the Bajoran. Erami did the same.
And as the shuttle fell apart around them, they held each other close.
And waited for it to all be over.
****************************
“Qapla’!”
From the centre seat of the Bounty, Klath bellowed with pride as he saw the crippled Pakled ship through the cockpit window.
“Reading massive power fluctuations over there,” Natasha reported, a tad more formally, “Main power is offline. But…minimal casualties.”
She added the final part of her report with the measured tone of a field medic. Regardless of who they were fighting, she never liked to see too many casualties. On either side. She had seen too much carnage in her later years with Starfleet.
“A glorious battle,” Klath nodded with satisfaction.
Alongside him K’Veth found that she wasn’t entirely in agreement. The blood lust was still beating inside of her. She felt unsatisfied somehow. She looked out at the stricken form of their enemy. And her eyes narrowed.
“Now,” Klath continued, “We must locate the shuttle, and--”
“Qapla’!”
His order was interrupted by the battle cry from K’Veth. He swivelled around in his seat just in time to see her tapping the weapons controls once again, her eyes flaring with fury.
“K’Veth,” he bellowed instinctively, “No!”
But it was too late. The blood lust in the first-time warrior was too strong.
He stood from his chair and stared out through the cockpit window, as the flurry of micro-torpedoes burst forwards from the Bounty’s forward launcher and impacted on the Martan’s now entirely exposed hull.
And as the torpedoes slammed home, the jury-rigged nature of the Pakled ship worked against it once again. The torpedoes were not deadly in their own right, but they caused a chain reaction of failures across further systems, spreading out through the vessel like a disease, much too quickly for the Pakleds to do anything about.
And then the Martan was enveloped in a fiery explosion.
K’Veth felt a satisfaction inside that she had never experienced before. It lasted until she set eyes on Klath, who was scowling at her in anger.
Elsewhere in the cockpit, Jirel and Natasha stared at her as well, both in shock.
“We are victorious,” she called out.
“We were already victorious,” Klath spat back with a growl, “They were defeated. And…there was no honour in that action!”
Before K’Veth could say another word, Klath looked back at Jirel.
“The ship is yours again,” he said simply, “You should recover Denella and the shuttle, and then we must put back for repairs.”
Jirel nodded silently, still shocked by what he had just witnessed.
With that, Klath turned and stormed out of the cockpit, disappearing down the steps without even a glance at his fellow Klingon at the tactical console.
K’Veth watched him leave in silence, as the full consequences of her actions slowly began to sink in with her. The blood lust was gone. The feelings of triumph and glory had vanished. Her pride had disappeared as quickly as it had fleetingly appeared.
And the sense of shame had returned.
****************************
The sensation of the Bounty’s tractor beam gently enveloping the Kendra was enough to stir the two forms lying on the deck of the shuttle back into the present.
The gentle tug of the tractor beam was accompanied by a reassuringly familiar voice.
“Bounty to Kendra,” Jirel called out over the comms link, “You ok over there?”
Denella opened her eyes and blinked back at Erami. The two of them smiled. Then, they broke their impromptu hug on the Kendra’s deck plates and helped each other back to their feet, uncertainly standing up amongst the smoking wreck of the cockpit.
The air was still thick with the scent of burning, as the fire suppression systems struggled to cope with the multiple sources of flames. The lighting was dimmed, and across the control panels at the front of the cockpit, dozens of warning lights continued to flicker off and on. And to cap off the scene of devastation, the remains of their picnic were now smeared across every available surface.
But, for all of that, they were alive. They had made it.
“We’re ok,” Denella confirmed back over the comms link with a tired sigh of relief, “We could use a tow though.”
A second later, a significantly more relieved-sounding Jirel came through over the link.
‘We’re glad to hear that. And you know what? I’ll even waive the salvage fee.”
Denella stifled a smile, then looked out of the cockpit window at the oddly empty scene in front of the Kendra.
“Um, also, what the hell happened to the Pakleds--?”
“Long story,” Jirel said quickly, “We’ll, um, explain everything when we’re safely back at Kervala Prime.”
Denella considered this for a second, as the comms link clicked off, not entirely sure that she wanted to know exactly what that was supposed to mean. But she didn’t have long to consider that. With the immediate crisis over, and her usual self returning, she felt a slight rush of awkwardness as she looked over at the relieved Erami.
“Listen,” she managed, “I, um--I mean, about the--”
“I know,” Erami nodded, “I thought I was going to die too. And it’s always nice to feel like you're not gonna die alone.”
She smiled and gently reached out towards Denella’s head. The Orion found herself suppressing the need to flinch at the impromptu moment of contact.
The tension she felt was defused when Erami simply picked a slightly sorry slice of kava fruit out of her hair.
Denella looked at the offending piece of leftover picnic food and couldn’t help but laugh. Erami joined in with the moment of shared relief.
Then, as the laughter subsided, and the Kendra slowly began to move out of the nebula, tethered to the Bounty, Erami looked around at the carnage and shrugged.
“So,” she offered, “Wanna help with some repairs?”
****************************
Klath had stormed out of the Bounty’s cockpit, but he hadn’t been bound for his cabin.
Instead, he had marched straight down the steps and into the small unoccupied medical bay of the ship, and busied himself searching through the ship’s supplies for a specific implement.
As he searched, he tried to avoid thinking about the feelings he now had inside of him.
He felt a definite rush of anger, at the way K’Veth had lashed out and destroyed the Pakled ship, ruining their proud battle.
He felt frustration with himself, for not having seen the issue ahead of time, and for allowing her to overreact in the heat of the moment.
He felt an undeniable sense of guilt. Once again, a ship under his command had destroyed a defenceless ship. Just like the Grontar had so many years ago.
And he also felt regret, because he knew that his attempts to kindle a sense of honour inside the woman he had obsessed with for so long had been ruined.
But there was one thing he no longer felt. Something that was no longer there.
He no longer felt par’Mach.
Eventually, he found the tool he had been searching for. He stood in front of a small mirror on the wall of the medical bay, and started to run the dermal regenerator up and down his cheek.
And he didn’t stop until every trace of the scar had vanished.
End of Part Four
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No glory in the destruction of hapless pakleds... Nice resolution - except - where is Sunek? Hopefully lost in the cattails...
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
We'll find out soon enough.
I usually submit the Part Five/Epilogue section as one post, but this one feels a little bulkier than usual, so I think I'll split it in two.Similar threads
