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Star Trek: Bounty - 12 - "The Woman Who Cried, Among Other Things, Wolf"

BountyTrek

BountyTrek

Commander
Red Shirt
Hello. :)

After a short interlude, the Bounty hath returned. Apologies in advance.

This story took a while to figure out, and I’m not sure it quite holds together even now. But hopefully that’s just my relentless self-criticism talking rather than a fundamental issue. I guess we'll find out. As ever, I try to make the Bounty episodes easy enough to read as standalones (as we’re now at 427,000 words and counting for this series :eek:), but there are some ongoing stories/plots/callbacks that I’ll try to point out as we go. No spoilers, but in this one there are some major links back to Episode 1, so it might be worth skim-reading that at least.

As ever, hope you enjoy reading. And if you don’t want to read, that’s cool too. :D

Star Trek: Bounty is a slightly off-kilter series set in the Trek universe that focuses on the adventures of the ragtag crew of a small civilian ship, who do what they can to get by in the Alpha Quadrant. They're not exactly Starfleet spec, but they try to keep on the right side of the moral line where they can.

The story so far:
Star Trek: Bounty - 1 - "Where Neither Moth nor Rust Destroys"
Star Trek: Bounty - 2 - "Be All My Sins Forgiven"
Star Trek: Bounty - 3 - "The Other Kind of Vulcan Hello"
Star Trek: Bounty - 4 - "It’s Not Easy Being Green"
Star Trek: Bounty - 5 - "Once Upon a Time in the Beta Quadrant"
Star Trek: Bounty - 6 - "He Feedeth Among the Lilies”
Star Trek: Bounty - 7 - “One Character in Search of an Exit”
Star Trek: Bounty - 8 - "A Klingon, a Vulcan and a Slave Girl Walk into a Bar"
Star Trek: Bounty - 9 - "But One Man of Her Crew Alive"
Star Trek: Bounty - 10 - "Take Arms Against a Sea of Tribbles"
Star Trek: Bounty - 11 - "Love, but With More Aggressive Overtones"

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Star Trek: Bounty
1.12
“The Woman Who Cried, Among Other Things, Wolf”

Prologue

Tyran Scrapyards Administration Office, Tyrus III, Sector 394
Stardate 47121.8

Bzzzz.

The shrill sound of the buzzer on the front desk was enough to rouse the snoozing form of Crax Traxanar from his impromptu mid-afternoon nap, almost startling him enough to cause him to topple out of his chair entirely.

The surly Reegrunion yawned loudly as he slowly got his bearings, blinking against the light from the huge bank of monitors in front of him.

The entire rear wall of his office on Tyrus III consisted of dozens of high-resolution screens, each one displaying a live feed from one of the bays of the vast complex of metal that made up the Tyran Scrapyards up in orbit. A gargantuan construct of tendril-like docking arms and enclosed bays connected to a single cylindrical central core that stretched out for several kilometres.

The whole structure was designed to house dozens of starships, transports and smaller vessels at any one time. There, they were methodically taken apart piece by piece, either using automated drones and robotic arms, or even via workers at the scrapyards painstakingly dismantling their hulls in EVA pressure suits, and whatever raw materials that could be salvaged were sold on.

If the vast noble shipyards of the galaxy were where great ships were born, this was where they came to die.

As the head administrator for the whole venture, Crax Traxanar was happy to monitor the goings on up in orbit from the surface of Tyrus III. Partly because the Reegrunion had never really had the legs for long stretches in space. And partly because he preferred to keep his distance from the other workers. He would be the first to admit that, whatever he was, he wasn’t a people person.

And during his refreshingly isolated days down here, he certainly wasn’t used to getting visitors.

Bzzzz.

With an irritated grunt, and stifling a second yawn, Crax Traxanar finally spun around in his chair to see who had decided to ruin his second favourite nap time of the day.

“Ok, ok,” he muttered, “Just who the hell is—?”

He stopped mid-sentence. Glimpsing the visitor for the first time, he found himself having to suddenly catch his lower jaw on an impromptu and unplanned journey to his knees.

Aside from the rear bank of monitors, and the groaning chair that served as Crax Traxanar’s favourite napping spot, the rest of the administration office consisted of little more than a wide metal desk, which neatly bisected the room in two.

And standing proudly on the other side of the deliberately unwelcoming desk was an elegantly tall and alluring human woman, wearing a dark blue jacket and trousers and with her dark crimson hair pulled back tightly in a bob. Her porcelain face was impeccably made up, and she carried herself with an almost regal air.

Crax Traxanar didn’t get to see much beauty in the administration office of an orbital scrapyard, but suddenly, out of nowhere, here it was. Apparently all alone.

“Ah,” she smiled politely, “So sorry to have woken you.”

She didn’t sound especially sincere.

The Reegrunion administrator stared at the entirely out of place woman for a few more seconds, before looking around the rest of the shabby office, trying to figure out if this was some sort of trick that someone was playing on him. Or even if all of this was a dream, and he was still actually mid-nap back in reality.

His continued silence elicited a mildly amused look from his visitor.

“What’s the matter?” she chided, “Cat got your tongue?”

Crax Traxanar didn’t understand the reference, but the tone of the comment was enough to shake him back to business.

“What do you want?” he grunted, entirely adversarially.

The mysterious woman maintained her polite demeanour as she checked a small padd in her hand.

“Now, now, is that any way to talk to a customer? I’m here to buy one of your ships.”

That was enough to cause the Reegrunion to snort in amusement, now entirely sure that someone somewhere was messing with him.

“I don’t deal with customers,” he replied dismissively.

“Then why do you have the buzzer?” she countered with a raised eyebrow.

He conceded the point with a shrug, and followed it up by standing from his chair, stepping up to the front desk, reaching down and wrenching the small buzzer clean from the recessed housing in the surface of the dirty metal desk.

“Problem solved,” he offered back, as he threw the remains of the device onto the ground.

With that, he went to turn back to the comfort of his chair, but she called out.

“I’m serious. I’m here visiting a friend, and it turns out we’re both very interested in the ship you have in bay seven right now.”

Crax Traxanar reluctantly turned back to the persistent woman and stepped back up to the counter.

“Lady, let me explain something to you,” he hissed, jabbing a finger up in the direction of the orbiting complex, “The ships up there are not for sale. What we’re operating isn’t a shipyard, but a scrapyard. You can tell the difference if you look closely at the spelling.”

He spat out a derisive chuckle at his own joke, but her patient smile didn’t flicker one iota.

“We’re willing to pay scrap value. Plus twenty percent.”

This stopped him mid-chuckle, his interest now piqued. He looked her up and down again with a slightly lecherous leer, still trying to figure her out.

One thing now seemed clear to the opportunist in Crax Traxanar. She was alone, she was defenceless, and she seemed to have money to spare.

“You know,” he drawled, “Tyrus III is a very risky sort of place for someone like you to be standing here looking like that, claiming to have that sort of latinum…”

Before he got any further with his thinly-veiled threat, she took a calm step back from the desk and deftly straightened her left arm, allowing something to slide down the length of her jacket’s sleeve and into her waiting hand.

Out of nowhere, Crax Traxanar found himself staring at a tiny old-school type-1 Starfleet-issue phaser.

“And what if I stand here looking like this?” she asked off-handedly.

He looked at the antique weapon, still trying to process what had just happened. She noted his confusion and smiled in satisfaction.

“It’s a beauty, isn’t it? 23rd century vintage. Picked it up from a Rigellian trader. Never leave home without it. Now, about this ship…”

The Reegrunion considered his predicament for a moment. One that even he could see would only be resolved by dealing with this particular customer.

“Fine. You can have it. Scrap value, plus twenty percent—”

“Ah, hang on,” she countered, “That was my initial offer, granted. But that was before you threatened me like that. Which, I think we can both agree, wasn’t very nice.”

He didn’t respond, but his glare darkened by a few more notches.

“So,” she continued, “Now I’m thinking something more like…scrap value, minus fifty percent.”

“I’m not going to sell for—!”

His protestations were silenced by a subtle prod of the tiny phaser in his direction, backed up by a firm look that underlined the fact that she was willing to use it.

“So,” she smiled thinly, “Do we have a deal?”

Crax Traxanar looked from her face, to the phaser, and back again.

Perhaps if he hadn’t been so determined to work alone in the administration office, he might have had some hope of assistance if he had called out or tried to raise an alarm. But then, he had never been a people person.

So, with no other option that he could see, he reluctantly nodded across the front desk.

“There, that was easy, wasn’t it,” she smiled in quiet satisfaction, “We’re very happy to do business with you.”

“And who is ‘we’, exactly?” Crax Traxanar found himself compelled to ask.

At this, a sliver of irritation crossed her face and she tutted slightly.

“Hmm, yes, it seems that my business partner in this little venture is running late. Story of his life, I suppose—”

Just then, the shimmer of a transporter effect appeared in the far corner of the office, and a figure that was familiar to both parties already present in the office coalesced. The woman with the phaser didn’t take her eyes off the Reegrunion, but she did allow herself a patient smile.

“You certainly know how to time your entrances, darling.”

For his part, Crax Traxanar stared at the newcomer in mild disbelief.

“You?” he grunted, “Don’t you work for me? Up in bay twelve?”

Jirel Vincent stepped towards the impromptu standoff, seemingly unabashed by the scene he had beamed into.

“Used to,” he replied with a grin, “You fired me.”

“I don’t remember doing that.”

“Oh,” Jirel added, his grin faltering slightly, “My bad. In which case, I quit.”

The woman with the phaser afforded him a sideways glance.

“You didn’t get yourself fired?”

“What can I say? I’m a model employee.”

He gestured to the weapon in her hand with a knowing look as he reached her side.

“And you couldn’t get through this transaction without that thing?”

“This thing just got us a bargain,” she chided him, lifting up the padd in her other hand, tapping the screen with a finger and passing it to the Reegrunion, “Speaking of which, check and confirm the latinum transfer, and we’ll be on our way.”

Crax Traxanar reluctantly took the padd and checked it over. To his surprise, given how the two visitors to the administration office could easily have taken the ship for free at this point, he found that the transfer was exactly as promised. Scrap value, minus fifty percent.

“You know,” he offered as he accepted the transfer, “You’re still getting a bad deal here. Even at this price. There’s a reason these ships end up in scrapyards, you know?”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” the woman countered, “And it was bay seven we wanted, right?”

Jirel grinned wider and stared at the wall of high resolution monitors on the wall.

The sight of the Tyran Scrapyards wasn’t necessarily a happy one for him to see. His months spent working here had been long and hard, and thanks to his own cockiness when he had first shown up looking for work, filled with insults and bullying and unwelcome nicknames.

But today, Spotty* was leaving town.

“Oh yeah,” he nodded enthusiastically, as he spied the view on one specific monitor, “Bay seven. She’s absolutely perfect.”

Crax Traxanar regarded the Trill with confusion, wondering whether there was something wrong with the Trill’s eyesight. There were several recorded examples of scrapyard workers suffering from optic nerve damage from poorly-installed eye shields while operating laser cutters on a ship’s hull.

But there was nothing wrong with Jirel’s eyesight. He turned and smiled at the elegant woman with the phaser, then looked again at the monitor displaying the new arrival in bay seven.

He was starting to lose count of the number of ways he was in love.

Displayed on the monitor, third along on the second row on the wall, was the unmistakable form of a Ju’Day-type raider.

End of Prologue

* - Jirel’s unfortunate nickname among his fellow scrapyard workers. First referenced in Star Trek: Bounty - 8 - "A Klingon, a Vulcan and a Slave Girl Walk into a Bar".
 
Part One

“You can’t bring that in here.”

Jirel adjusted the heavy satchel on his shoulder and suppressed the unnerving sense of deja vu that he felt as he looked up at the burly owner of the gruff voice standing in front of him.

Why was it always Nausicaans?

He took a second to cast his mind back to the last time a Nausicaan bouncer had stood between him and the entrance to a bar. Back on Hestina, at the Targ and Lion, when he and the Bounty were searching for information on the final location of the late USS Navajo, and her black box*.

On that occasion, the solution to the menacing and entirely overzealous doorman had been easy. A simple bribe had been enough for him to look the other way. But this time, Jirel wasn’t in the mood to play around. There was no trace of his usual laid-back look on his face. His mood was dark.

“Listen, friend,” he muttered at the enormous Nausicaan, “I really don’t have time for this.”

The bouncer shrugged his shoulders and pointed a meaty finger at the satchel again.

“No entry,” he boomed, “Doorman’s discretion.”

Another wave of deja vu washed over the Trill. It was clear that, unlike some of his kin, this particular Nausicaan was well aware of the merry dance at play here. The accepted process for a man in his line of work to negotiate a little extra cash from a frustrated wannabe patron of the establishment he was tasked with looking after.

Jirel sighed in apparent acceptance of the situation and reached for his pocket.

The Nausicaan’s look turned to one of anger when, instead of the modest amount of gold-pressed latinum he had expected the Trill to produce, he instead found himself looking down at an ugly disruptor, pointed squarely at his stomach.

“I said,” Jirel hissed, “I really don’t have time for this.”

The bouncer glared impotently at the now-armed wannabe patron in front of him. This move wasn’t in his script. But despite the sense of humiliation he felt at being bested like this by such a clearly physically inferior opponent, the cogs in his brain turned fast enough for the doorman to concede that it wasn’t worth getting killed over.

He scowled at the Trill and jabbed his finger at the entrance to the bar.

“In.”

Jirel kept the disruptor raised as he walked over to the door. The Nausicaan kept his distance.

“Glad we could sort that out,” the Trill offered.

But his mood still didn’t get any lighter.

****************************

Some time later, with the disruptor stowed back away, Jirel sat at the bar and stared down at the remains of his drink.

He found himself in the confines of the dingy establishment known as the Journeyman’s Rest.

The Bounty had arrived in orbit of Golos III a few hours ago, after spending several days warping over to the planet, following the coordinates that had been so mysteriously sent to him via subspace message, all the way back on the Kervala Prime spaceport†.

He had beamed down alone and walked the short distance to the Journeyman's Rest, not bothering with any backup, despite some audible protestations from the rest of the Bounty’s crew.

He could see their point. The Golos system was in an especially unfriendly sector of space, barely a day’s travel from the Badlands, the turbulent expanse of plasma storms on the fringes of the Federation-Cardassian border. An area best avoided unless absolutely necessary.

For several years, the Badlands had been a hive of activity for the Maquis, who used the treacherous conditions as perfect cover for their insurgency against the Cardassian Union. But they had long since been eliminated, even before the Dominion War had begun in earnest. Then, in the absence of the Maquis, criminals, bandits and other nefarious groups had moved in to use the storms as cover for their own illicit activities and questionable business.

The Federation side of the Badlands was still heavily patrolled, but the Cardassian side was more of a free-for-all. The shattered Union, almost razed to the ground in the final stages of the war, no longer had the resources or the manpower to oversee the more remote regions of its boundaries. So the Badlands, and nearby outposts like the Golos system, had simply been left to fester.

Golos III itself had once been a thriving Cardassian trading post, and the Journeyman’s Rest had cultivated a reputation as the classiest kanar lounge this side of the Demilitarised Zone.

But over time, the neglect had taken its toll. What was left of the Cardassian authorities had been recalled to the inner regions of the Union, and plenty of the galaxy’s undesirables had taken their place. And any business owners who couldn’t afford to move had simply had to adapt. As such, the Journeyman's Rest was no longer renowned for its kanar. But it was renowned for just about everything else.

Since he had made his way past the Nausicaan bouncer and taken a seat at the bar, Jirel had been sexually propositioned three times, been challenged to four separate fights, and been offered more illegal substances than he cared to remember.

But, through a combination of patience, luck, and the occasional confirmation that it was a disruptor in his pocket, and he wasn’t pleased to see them, the unjoined Trill had managed to negotiate each of those incidents in turn. For the time being, he wasn’t being bothered.

He looked up from the dregs in his glass and checked the chronometer on the wall. He’d now been waiting here for more than an hour. With an inward grimace, he cursed the fact that, if it was anyone else he was supposed to be meeting, he’d have long since headed back to the Bounty.

But it wasn’t anyone else he was meeting. It was her. And, as ever, something was compelling him to stay.

So, he waited.

He returned his focus to the remains of his Andorian brandy, even as the Lurian bartender slowly idled his way over to him, gesturing to the glass. Jirel shook his head.

Despite the notoriously easy-going look of his species, the bartender took some significant offence to this. It was a tough job to turn a profit on Golos III these days, and there was nothing he hated more than seat-hoggers. Travellers and drifters taking up precious space at the bar while spending the entire evening nursing a single small drink.

There had been a particularly high spate of such transients in the Journeyman’s Rest already that week, and this latest specimen was the straw that broke the Lurian Sludgeworm’s back as far as the bartender was concerned. He was mad.

Just as he was about to give the Trill a serious piece of his mind, a second figure slid effortlessly onto the empty barstool next to him, and ordered on his behalf.

“Dry martini with a twist. And he’ll have another brandy. All on his tab.”

The Lurian glared at the newcomer for a moment, a little put out at being denied the chance to give the impassioned speech about the need to support local businesses that he had mapped out in his head. But ultimately, he simply nodded and hobbled off to prepare the drinks.

Jirel, for his part, didn’t even look up to acknowledge the new arrival.

“What the hell do you want?”

He usually prided himself on his warm and friendly attitude to just about everyone he came across on his travels throughout the galaxy, considering it to be one of his better qualities. But there wasn’t a trace of that in his question.

“Really? That’s all I get? Not even a hello? Tsk, you used to be such a polite young man.”

He downed the remainder of the brandy in front of him, then turned to look at her.

She sat as confident and assured as ever, like a ghost from his past. Dressed in a deep red suit that shimmered slightly in the dim light of the bar, with her hair in a tight bob and a silver brooch pinned to her left lapel. Her porcelain features displayed a familiar superior smile, as she met his gaze. She couldn’t have stood out more against the decay of the Journeyman's Rest.

He felt an immediate flash of anger. And an even more immediate feeling of falling in love all over again. With a woman that he had fallen in love with far too many times to count. He forced himself to repress both reactions.

“Fine,” he offered, with words that dripped with heavy sarcasm, “Hello, Maya. Nice to see you. Now: What the hell do you want?”

She raised an amused eyebrow as the bartender dutifully returned with their drinks. She took a sip of her cocktail and flinched slightly.

“Ugh. Never trust a species that sleeps in mud to mix a decent martini.”

She waited for some sort of flicker of a smile from him, but there was none forthcoming. He kept his defences well and truly raised.

“How did you even find me this time?” he pressed instead.

“Come now, Jirel. You and that crew of yours aren’t exactly black ops. It’s really not that difficult to track you down when I need to.”

She allowed a victorious smile to cross her face as she idly stroked the delicate stem of her martini glass.

“Still,” she continued, “It’s nice to see that I’ve still got you wrapped around my little finger. One little message, and you come running.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he countered, “We happened to be passing. That’s all.”

“I sent that subspace message to Kervala Prime. That’s three sectors away. Must’ve taken you days to get here…”

The victorious smile showed no sign of leaving any time soon, as Jirel scowled in defeat, grudgingly accepting the truth of her observation. In fact, it had taken them the best part of a week to get to Golos III.

“Ok, you got me here. Congratulations. And it’s a good thing, actually. Here.”

He grabbed the satchel where it hung off his bar stool and offered it to her. She eyed the dusty bag up with a modicum of distrust.

“Latinum,” he explained, “That’s what I’ve saved up. And that’s the rest of what I owe you for the Bounty. So, take that and we’re even. And I never wanna hear from you again.”

She just scoffed, making no attempt to take the bag from him.

“This isn’t about latinum, darling.”

“Then what the hell is it about?” he pressed again.

She paused for a second and took another sip from her martini, before she looked back at him, an entirely more serious look on her face.

“I…need your help.”

“Right,” Jirel scoffed, “Well, you can forget about that, for a—”

“It’s about my husband, Jirel. He’s in trouble.”

To the bartender’s delight, Jirel finished his second brandy a lot faster than he had finished the first.

* - See the opening to Part One of Star Trek: Bounty - 1 - "Where Neither Moth nor Rust Destroys" for more details. In fact, this whole opening scene is designed to mirror that scene.
† - See the end of Part Five of the previous misadventure, Star Trek: Bounty - 11 - "Love, but With More Aggressive Overtones".
 
Great scene and nice character development with Jirel. Nice to know he's got a backbone and a temper when he needs them. And it looks like he's going to need them...

Thanks!! rbs
 
Part One (Cont'd)

“So, she’s Jirel’s ex?”

Natasha, the human ex-Starfleet doctor of the Bounty, broke the uneasy silence that had descended over the ship's cockpit with her question. But it did little to ease the unsettled mood that had accompanied it.

The entire modest crew complement of the Bounty were present. The ship’s emotional Vulcan pilot Sunek sat at the helm controls, their Orion engineer Denella sat at her rear console, while Klath, the Klingon weapons chief, kept a close eye on his own instruments.

With the ship hanging in orbit of an unruly planet in a lawless section of space, nobody wanted to be too far away from their positions as they waited for a call from Jirel down on Golos III. And, ever since the Trill had beamed down, nobody had seemed to be in much of a mood to talk either. Until Natasha’s question brought an inevitable quip from the Bounty’s usually talkative pilot.

“Why, doc?” Sunek couldn’t help but grin, “You jealous?”

Natasha gave the Vulcan a withering glare from behind her sensor panel on the right side of the cockpit. She also did her best to banish any thoughts she had about the latest complications in her relationship with Jirel, after the two had drunkenly ended up in bed together back on Kervala Prime.

On their long journey to the Golos system, she had tried to piece together some more information about the mysterious woman who had dragged Jirel and the rest of them across several sectors, and found her usually talkative colleagues suddenly becoming a little evasive.

Especially Jirel.

What she had been able to piece together was that the message had come from one Maya Ortega, a human woman who was a former member of the Bounty’s crew. And possibly more than that, when it came to the Trill.

The fact that Jirel had warped over to the coordinates she had provided wasn’t entirely surprising to Natasha. After all, something similar had happened a few months ago when a Ferengi called Zesh, another former member of the Bounty’s roster, had called on them to help defend an investment of his on Nimbus III*. When a former crewmate was in trouble, he was compelled to help.

But while the mood had been generally cheery when Zesh had called them, the mood on the trip to Golos III had been considerably less happy. Jirel had been closed off, and spent long stretches of the trip in his cabin, and the others had been cagey and on edge as well.

So, with Jirel now busy down on the planet itself, having insisted on going alone, Natasha was trying to finally get some answers.

“I’m serious,” she persisted through Sunek’s comment, “That’s who she is?”

Klath grumbled sullenly at his console, still reluctant to discuss it. But Denella looked over at the human doctor and sighed.

“It’s…a bit more complicated than that.”

This seemed like enough of an opening for Natasha to start to pull at the thread.

“So, then, explain it to me,” she persisted, “Who is this Maya Ortega?”

Denella sighed again, and glanced over at Klath, who simply folded his arms in front of him to indicate his reluctance to expand on the matter any further.

“I mean,” the Orion offered, “She’s gonna find out the full story sooner or later.”

“Yeah,” Sunek chimed in from the front of the cockpit, “Cos you know Jirel’s not just gonna give her that latinum and leave. She’ll want something. And you know what that means.”

Denella nodded and turned back to the expectant Natasha.

“Fine. Maya Ortega is…a bit more than just Jirel’s ex.”

“Another secret ex-wife?” Natasha snorted slightly, “Thought we’d already mined that particular cliche?”

Sunek suppressed a grimace at that jibe, correctly surmising that this was a shot at him, and his ex-wife T’Len, who the Bounty’s crew had crossed paths with in somewhat unhappy fashion shortly after Natasha had joined the crew†.

“No,” Denella continued, “But more than just an ex. Actually, Maya’s the one he bought the Bounty with. A long time ago. She…technically still owns a stake in her, at least until Jirel hands over that last pile of latinum.”

“Huh. Really?” Natasha replied, seemingly dumbstruck as she glanced around the Bounty’s shabby thirty-plus year old cockpit, “He actually paid money for this thing?”

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” the overprotective engineer of the ship muttered.

“Joking,” she offered back with a friendly smile, “But I’m still not seeing what the big issue is.”

“That’s cos you haven’t met her,” Sunek chimed in.

Denella nodded knowingly. Natasha just looked even more confused. At the front of the cockpit, the Vulcan spun around in his pilot’s seat, sighed, and continued.

“Ok, here’s the story. Maya and Jirel have a…complicated past. They bought the Bounty together, they put most of the crew together, and their relationship was kinda chaotic. On-again, then off-again, then on-again again.”

“Ah,” Natasha nodded, “One of those exes.”

“And when she was part of the crew, she was always trying to get us involved in crazier and crazier schemes. Properly dodgy stuff, y’know? She always figured that’s where the biggest profits were. And her schemes all got too much for Jirel. So, one day, she left the Bounty behind, and so ended the romance of the century.”

“Except now she’s back?”

“She’s been back before,” Denella replied knowingly, “She’d left long before I joined the crew, but we’ve crossed paths a few times since then.”

Natasha was reminded of Jirel reluctantly admitting the story of how they had rescued Denella from the Orion Syndicate‡. A spur of the moment decision they had made only after accepting a job to deliver supplies to a location inside Syndicate space. She couldn’t help but wonder, if that had seemed like an acceptable job to take on after Maya Ortega had left the crew, how bad were the jobs she had been pushing for?

“So,” Sunek said, picking up the story, “This is how these things tend to go down. Maya calls him up out of the blue, uses his debt to her as leverage, he drops everything to go find her, insisting that this is the last time he’s gonna do it. Then he falls head over heels again, goes along with whatever dumb scheme she’s pitching this time, at some point she screws us all over again, and Jirel swears never to get involved with her ever again.”

“It is a predictable pattern,” Klath boomed out from his console, speaking for the first time in the conversation.

Natasha shook her head and gestured to the others.

“And you just keep going along with this? Even though you know what’s gonna happen? Why didn’t you stop him from coming here?”

“We’ve tried before,” Denella offered, “Believe me.”

“Yeah,” Sunek added, “We’ve found that the only thing we can do is just kinda let the whole thing play out, and hope we don’t lose too much latinum by the end of it.”

Natasha shook her head in disbelief, as the Vulcan continued.

“I mean, we’ve all got someone like that, right? Someone we’re so crazy about, who had such a lasting impact on us, that we’d do incredibly stupid things for, no matter how often we get hurt? For me, it’s this swimming coach I met on Risa, many years ago. We just connected on a…deep spiritual level, y’know? And even to this day, I’ve never met anyone with such a huge pair of—”

“Shut up, Sunek,” Denella cut in, even as the Vulcan’s eyes glazed over at the memory.

Natasha wanted to counter the Vulcan’s somewhat specious argument, but she couldn’t help but remember the number of second chances she had given her ex-husband Cameron throughout their relationship, all the way up to her finding out the details of his affair with Lieutenant Ramirez on the USS Ticonderoga.

Even if it seemed as though Jirel was being an idiot over this woman, she recognised the potential for anyone to be an idiot, given the wrong circumstances.

“Huh,” she managed, “I see.”

“Still,” Denella added, as optimistically as she could muster, “Maybe Sunek's wrong. Maybe he really will just give her the latinum and leave. And that’ll be the end of it.”

Natasha saw Klath’s expression darken, suggesting that he didn’t believe that statement for a second, while Sunek simply snorted from the front of the cockpit.

“Yeah,” the Vulcan added sarcastically, “And if you believe that, I’ve got some prime real estate on Ceti Alpha V to sell you…”

* - See Star Trek: Bounty - 5 - "Once Upon a Time in the Beta Quadrant" for more details.
† - See Star Trek: Bounty - 3 - "The Other Kind of Vulcan Hello" for more details.
‡ - See Star Trek: Bounty - 4 - "It's Not Easy Being Green" for more details.
 
Part One (Cont'd)

“Well, you definitely have a type.”

Jirel passed the comment as he looked down at the picture displayed on the small padd. Staring back at him from the screen was the face of a handsome jet black-haired Trill.

“What can I say?” Maya casually replied from the seat next to him as she patiently sipped her martini, “I like the spots.”

Jirel looked up from the padd and fixed her gaze. He couldn’t help but feel the sliver of a smile creeping onto his face, which he quickly warded off.

I’m not happy to see her, he reminded himself.

“So,” he said aloud, gesturing to the Trill on the padd, “Marriage. This is new.”

“You know I like to move fast,” she offered, not doing anything to prevent her own smile from forming, “His name is Toren Kelsis. We met a few months back and…I guess you could say it was a whirlwind romance. Had the ceremony next to the Crystal Lake of Betazed.”

“Guess my invite got lost in the mail?”

“Would you have wanted to come?” she retorted knowingly, “Bear in mind the ceremony was entirely traditional. So you would have had to show off…all of your spots.”

Jirel tried to dismiss the mental images that particular comment conjured up and focused back on the padd.

“Ok, so, you’ve got a husband. And he’s in trouble. What trouble, specifically?”

The smile departed from her face, and she winced slightly. Jirel watched on with cautious intrigue, looking for the inevitable signs of deception from her.

“We’ve been working together. For a mining operation. Office-based, you understand. I don’t like getting my hands dirty.”

“Disagree,” he remarked dryly, “But continue.”

“Well, we were both based in the finance department. Not exactly glamorous work, but Toren had bigger plans than that. And so did I.”

“Why do I get the feeling that we’re heading somewhere illegal with this?”

Her porcelain features tightened slightly, and she accepted the jibe with a slight nod.

“We thought we’d found a way to…lightly skim a modest amount off their profits—”

“There it is.”

“—Barely anything, really, given the sorts of funds that the company was moving around. Unless you really started digging into every itemised transaction, it should have been virtually undetectable. It was a long play thing, you know? Just giving ourselves a nice little nest egg for whenever we decided to up and move on.”

“Except, I’m guessing your plan wasn’t quite as clever as you thought it was. Now, where have I heard that one before?”

“Yes, well, what we didn’t realise was someone had gotten away with a similar trick a few years back. So the owner of the company had put in a bunch of extra security checks. And he wasn’t impressed when he saw what we were doing.”

She ran her finger down the stem of her glass again, and to Jirel’s surprise, she seemed to be fighting back a genuine burst of emotion.

“Toren was—He took the blame. For all of it. Insisted that I had nothing to do with it, no matter how hard the owner’s thugs punished him. He made sure none of it was traced back to me, even as they were dragging him away. And that’s why I owe him, Jirel. I have to help him. And I can’t do it by myself.”

Jirel stared back at her, the woman that had double-crossed him almost as many times as he had fallen in love with her. Which was a lot of times. He felt certain that he wasn’t getting the whole story. Because you never got the whole story from Maya Ortega. Her emotions seemed genuine. Her story seemed plausible. But deep down, he couldn’t help but feel like he didn’t believe her.

“And if you help me with this,” she continued, gesturing to the satchel of latinum, “Then, in return, I’ll not only write off the rest of your little debt, I’ll pay you and your crew for your time. Twice your normal rate.”

“And where are you getting that sort of money from?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“You don’t need to worry about that. But I’m good for it. I've called in some favours. And I’ll even transfer it up front, if that’s what you need me to do.”

She pushed her cocktail glass away and fixed her eyes on him. He could see a trace of moisture in the corner of her eyes.

“I could have searched around and tried to find another crew to do this with me, Jirel. It’s a big galaxy, after all. But I need someone I can trust. And, no matter what has happened between us in the past, I know I can still trust you.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because you just dropped everything you were doing and flew across three sectors to come and find me.”

Jirel went to insert a scathing counterpoint to this claim, but he found himself immediately faltering, so he remained silent instead.

“You don’t believe me,” she noted, correctly, “Which I suppose is understandable.”

She picked the padd back up off the top of the bar, tapped the screen a few times, then passed it back to him.

“I just transferred half the payment to your account,” she explained, “And this padd contains plenty of information for you to check out. About me, Toren, our employment history, and so on. Feel free to check anything you need to check in order to verify what I’m telling you.”

Jirel paused for a moment, still considering just walking off and leaving her. But something inside him compelled him to reach out and take the padd.

“Thank you.”

And he heard something he wasn’t expecting to hear in her words. Something that he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard from her.

Genuine thanks.

After a second, she composed herself, took a final sip from her cocktail and stood up.

“I’ll be back here tomorrow evening, at the same time, for your answer,” she continued, “So, please, do whatever checks you have to. But hurry. I don’t have a lot of time.”

With that, she walked off. Leaving Jirel staring blankly into space where she had once been standing, wondering how someone he thought he knew so well could still surprise him after all these years.

He still wasn’t sure if he could trust her.

But at least he knew who he could.

****************************

“I do not trust her.”

Klath offered his frank assessment of the situation to the previously silent cockpit of the Bounty from behind his tactical station. Although nobody vocalised an immediate response, it didn’t seem as though there were too many dissenting opinions to his statement.

Jirel sat in his centre chair, looking thoughtfully out of the cockpit window in front of him. Sunek and Denella, along with Klath, were all back at their posts as the Bounty remained in orbit of Golos III for a second day.

Only Natasha was missing. After Jirel had returned to the ship the night before, and he had brought everyone else up to speed with what Maya had told him, he had not hesitated in handing the padd she had given him over to the Bounty’s medic.

He wanted as unbiased an opinion as possible on Maya’s story. And there had only been one person for the job. Someone both unbiased, having never met Maya before, and someone that Jirel knew that he could trust the judgement of.

He wasn’t happy to find that she was now aware of the details of his past with Maya, thanks to some loose tongues in the cockpit while he had been down on the planet below. But given what he wanted her to do, it at least saved him some time.

And Natasha had accepted the responsibility, with all the apparent zeal of her previous career as a diligent Starfleet officer. She had been poring over the data on the padd in her cabin, checking it against whatever she could find in the limited databanks of the Bounty, since last night. Only emerging every few hours to raid the ship’s sole replicator for sustenance. It wasn’t even clear if she’d found time to sleep.

Not that Jirel had done much sleeping himself. He had spent most of the night going back over everything that Maya had told him down in the bar. Trying to figure out how much had been the truth, trying to figure out how much had been lies.

And trying to figure out why, even now he knew she was married, he still found himself drawn to Maya Ortega.

He shook those thoughts out of his mind again as he forced himself to turn to Klath, who seemed to be waiting for some sort of reaction to his summary of their situation.

“You can really be that sure?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Klath leaned back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him, staring back at the Trill as if the answer to that question should have been obvious.

“Because I have met her,” he grunted.

Sunek couldn’t help but snort in amusement from the front pilot’s seat, as Jirel was forced to concede that point with a reluctant nod.

“Still,” Denella offered, “This is all a little bit more elaborate than her usual schemes. Last time, she had us running crates of knock-off jellied gree-worms across the Ferengi border.”

“Took two months to get the smell out of the cargo bay,” Sunek nodded with a shudder, “And we got stopped by a customs shuttle before we got halfway to the drop-off point.”

“At which point the esteemed Maya Ortega made herself scarce,” Denella added.

“As usual,” Klath grunted unhappily.

Jirel couldn’t counter their comments. It was an accurate summary of their usual interaction with Maya whenever she sought them out. Which was why he was so baffled by everything that she had told him. If she was trying to scam them in some way, what was her endgame?

His train of thought was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs at the back of the cockpit. Everyone present turned to see the final member of the ship’s complement walking in, her research apparently complete.

“Well,” Natasha offered, waving the padd that Maya had handed to Jirel in her hand, “I don’t know what to tell you, but this woman’s story seems to check out.”

“All of it?” Jirel asked as he whirled around in his chair.

“I haven’t exactly got access to Federation libraries to verify every single file she’s given you, but from what I’ve managed to pull from public records, everything seems legit. Employment records from Synergy Mining Enterprises, details about Toren Kelsis, marriage certificate from Risa—”

“Wait,” Jirel jumped in immediately, spotting the hole in the story already, “She said she got married on Betazed.”

“She did,” Natasha shrugged, “Unofficially, at least. They got the paperwork done first, then travelled to Betazed for a proper ceremony. Transit logs are all on the padd. I guess it’s just easier to arrange a shotgun marriage on Risa.”

“Or,” Klath grunted, “It is easier to falsify transit logs than it is to obtain a fraudulent Betazoid marriage certificate.”

Natasha looked over at the Klingon with mild bemusement, before turning back to Jirel, who seemed to be seriously accepting that reading of the situation.

“I’m getting a feel for how little trust there is towards this woman,” she replied patiently, “But if she just wanted a fake marriage, why bother with the detail about Betazed at all? And why include the wedding photo on the padd? Which reminds me, I have now seen far more of this lady, her husband and their Betazoid officiant than I was planning on seeing when I started this investigation.”

“Hey doc,” Sunek called out at this, “If there’s nekkid wedding snaps on there, I think it’s only fair that we all get to—”

“Shut up, Sunek,” Jirel sighed, keeping his focus on the woman he trusted, “You’re really sure it all checks out?”

Natasha regarded the look on Jirel’s face with some concern. He looked like someone desperately searching for a reason for all of this to be a lie.

One of those exes, she thought to herself.

She knew that she had the option of making something up. Of lying about something to convince him of the lie he was sure was there. But that didn’t feel right. She hadn’t even met this Maya Ortega yet. And besides, she couldn’t lie to someone that she had somehow come to trust over the last year of misadventures. And more than that, someone that she was starting to be concerned that she was developing genuine feelings for, after their last accidental night together back on Kervala Prime.

So, she told the truth. As mildly and conservatively as she could.

“All I’m saying is…she doesn’t seem to be lying.”

“No,” Klath muttered, “She never does.”

Natasha shrugged and passed the padd back to Jirel, who reluctantly accepted it back.

“Plus,” she offered additionally, “The latinum transfer was real enough. I thought you all said she was the one who usually scammed you out of money?”

Jirel glanced at Denella, and then at Klath. Neither of which seemed convinced, but neither of which had a response to the latinum issue. In the absence of a more rational debater, Sunek sounded out once again.

“Ok, but seriously. Latinum, sob stories and nude photos aside, we’re not actually falling for this, right?”

“Falling for what?” Jirel responded quietly.

“Falling for—I dunno. Whatever the hell she’s trying to sucker us into! Which is clearly what she’s doing, because it’s what she always does! She’s obviously just—”

“And what if she isn’t?”

Jirel fired off this retort a little more firmly and harshly than he had been planning. The tone of his voice even took Sunek by surprise.

A moment of silence followed, with nobody entirely sure what to say. Eventually, Natasha took a step towards the pensive Trill in the centre chair.

“Ok, look, I still don’t really fully understand the whole story with you and her. And you can all bicker on as much as you like about all of this. But from what I can see, at the end of the day, there’s only really one question to ask here.”

Jirel looked back at her, suppressing an entirely different range of emotions that bubbled up when he looked into this woman’s eyes, and prompted her to continue.

“What do you want to do?”

He thought about this, then sighed.

“I…don’t know,” he replied.

With that, he stood and walked out of the cockpit entirely, retreating to the sanctity of his cabin. The others in the cockpit watched him leave with a range of expressions.

“We’re going to do it,” Denella offered eventually.

“How can you be sure?” Natasha asked.

“Because, deep down, he’s too good of a person.”

“He’s too much of an idiot,” Sunek chipped in.

“He is…both,” Klath clarified.

Natasha looked back at where the Trill had just disappeared down the steps, and silently agreed with both points.
 
Part One (Cont'd)

She was sitting in the same seat as the night before when he found her. Still looking entirely out of place amongst the rest of the grizzled miners, travellers, criminals and other ne'er-do-wells that populated the Journeyman’s Rest. He couldn’t help but notice that, on the bar in front of her, sat a fresh martini and a fresh Andorian brandy.

She knew he was going to come.

He ignored that little detail she’d been sure to leave in plain sight for his arrival and slid onto the bar stool next to her. She didn’t bother to look over at him.

“You know,” he said, “I’m really not a fan of this place. Seems to attract the very worst the galaxy has to offer.”

She acknowledged his pointed comment with a trace of a smile, as she slid the waiting brandy over in front of him.

“So, you believe me now?”

There was a confidence in her tone that riled him further, on top of the drink that had been waiting for him. A whole range of temptations flooded his mind. The temptation to walk away, the temptation to laugh, the temptation to grab a weapon and shoot her, and the temptation to get down on his knees and profess his undying love for her.

The rudimentary psychiatrist in him was forced to admit that his feelings towards her were still somewhat mixed.

“I’m not sure what I believe,” he replied, in lieu of any other response he was considering, “You’ve screwed me around plenty of times.”

“Never heard you complaining—Oh, screwed you ‘around’. I see. Carry on.”

“Very funny,” he replied, without amusement.

She shrugged unapologetically and sipped her drink, as Jirel made a deliberate show of pushing the brandy that had been waiting for him to one side.

“So,” he continued after a pause, “Let’s say - for the moment - that I believe you. You’re married, your husband’s in trouble for embezzling funds from this Synergy Mining Enterprises. And apparently, you think I can help.”

“More like: Your crew can help,” she offered back, “You were always a bit of a…figurehead on that ship of yours, darling.”

“Got you out of trouble enough times.”

“Touche,” she shrugged, “Either way, if I’m going to get Toren back, I’m going to need a particular set of skills. Denella’s engineering know-how, Klath’s strength, Sunek’s piloting, and you and…what you have.”

“Cute. You know, you’re throwing out all these insults pretty casually for someone who needs me on their side.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry, force of habit.”

She tried another disarming smile, but he maintained his glare, and fought off the persistent desire he felt to smile back.

“So,” he said instead, “What’s the full story?”

Her smile faltered slightly. She drained her cocktail, signalled for another from the Lurian bartender at the other end of the bar, and then began.

“Fine. Like I said, Toren’s in a lot of trouble. And if I’m going to get him back from where they’ve taken him, I’m going to need you all.”

“Where have they taken him?”

“The owner of this mining company has a simple, but particularly…ruthless approach to anyone he feels has crossed him. Once he’s caught you, he sends you straight to one of his mines themselves, to work off your debt. Brutal, back-breaking work on whatever mineral-rich asteroid they happen to be stripping at the time.”

“Huh,” Jirel offered, “Doesn’t sound especially legal?”

“You don’t get to be as rich as he is by doing things legally. His mining operations are more like prisons, or slave trading. Just about everyone there is his prisoner, until he considers that the debt has been worked off. Every slip of latinum. And you can bet that they're all kept well guarded from the outside world.”

“Neat. Sounds like a fun trip already.”

“I never said it would be fun,” she pointed out, “But, with my contacts and your crew, I think we can rescue him. In return for the rest of that latinum I promised you.”

Jirel stared back at her, still trying to size her up. Trying to figure out why she was looking so sincere about all of this.

“You’re really—?”

He didn’t get any further before he felt a burly hand grab his shoulder. He spun around to see a familiar unwelcome face staring down at him.

“Hello, Trill,” the Nausicaan doorman from the day before scowled at him, “No disruptor today?”

Jirel’s face dropped a little further as half a dozen more Nausicaans loomed into his view over the doorman’s shoulder.

“Friends of yours?” Maya enquired from behind him.

Jirel kept his attention on the lead Nausicaan. He had drunk in enough bars like the Journeyman’s Rest to recognise a bar fight when one was about to happen. With as much confidence as he could muster, he eased himself down from the bar stool, and sized up the significantly taller Nausicaans in front of him.

“Don’t you work here?” he asked their ringleader, who from this angle appeared to be the tallest of them all.

The Nausicaan stretched his armour-plated face into a wider leer and cracked his knuckles in greedy anticipation.

“Day off,” he grunted.

Jirel sighed and nodded in acceptance.

“Figures.”

He knew what he had to do, if he had any chance of getting out of the Journeyman’s Rest, he couldn’t allow the Nausicaans the luxury of a proper fight.

So he shot first.

He swung his right fist at the Nausicaan doorman with all of his might, straight into the hulking monster’s midriff. As soon as it connected, Jirel felt like his fist had exploded, as it impacted with some force squarely into some very thick body armour.

“Ow!” he cried out, loudly enough for everyone else in the bar to turn around, “Son of a—!”

That was as far as he got. Because then the enormous Nausicaan part-time doorman hit back with a firm backhanded flick of his hand, delivered with enough power to send the Trill flying backwards onto the filthy floor of the Journeyman’s Rest.

Jirel barely had time to process the extent of the pain the undignified landing had caused him before he saw the entire gang of Nausicaans descending on his position. He rolled away across the floor in a despairing motion, but felt one of his adversaries grab his left leg and pull him back. He looked down and aimed a sharp downward kick into the face of the Nausicaan that had a hold of him, connecting with enough force to stun him into releasing his grip.

He forced himself back to his feet, but as soon as he did so, he saw the rest of the Nausicaans closing in, each with their hefty fists raised.

Why was it always Nausicaans, he bemoaned, not for the first time since arriving on Golos III.

Then, out of nowhere, a familiar voice called out.

“Excuse me, boys.”

The gang of Nausicaan thugs stopped on the spot, entirely thrown off by the silky female voice that had crashed into their old-fashioned pummelling. They turned to see Maya standing behind them, her hands casually affixed to her hips.

“Me and my friend were right in the middle of a conversation. This is all very impolite of you.”

The Nausicaan nearest to her leered darkly, and stepped towards her.

In a flash, her left arm dropped from her hip, and a tiny vintage type-1 phaser rolled out of her sleeve and into the palm of her hand. Before the Nausicaans could process what was happening, she fired off three bursts of energy, stunning half of the brawling gang, who each dropped to the floor with a heavy thud.

“You see,” she purred at the remaining three, “That was heavy stun. Now that’s polite.”

Just as the lead Nausicaan took another half-step towards her, she thumbed the phaser’s controls.

“And now, it’s set to kill. Even my manners only stretch so far.”

The Nausicaan stopped on the spot, and eyed the weapon uncomfortably, as the pained Jirel awkwardly hobbled over to where Maya stood, gesturing at the object in her hand.

“You had that the whole time? And you let me try to fight them?”

“Never leave home without it,” she reminded him, “But I like to watch you fight. You never did know when to give up.”

Jirel sighed and shook his head, as her face twisted into a knowing smile.

“Now,” she continued, “Are we leaving, or not? Because I suspect it might be in our best interests not to stick around for last orders.”

The sudden intervention of the Nausicaans seemed to have put a lot of Jirel’s previous worries into immediate perspective, and he nodded back.

Moving together, the human and the Trill slowly but surely stepped towards the exit of the bar, with Maya keeping her phaser raised all the way to the door, warning off the remaining conscious Nausicaans, along with any of the other patrons in the Journeyman’s Rest who decided that they wanted to get involved in the evening’s drama.

“Just like old times, hmm?” Maya couldn’t help but smile as they backed away.

Jirel, for the time being, stayed silent. As the two of them made their escape from a sticky situation, together.

Just like old times.

****************************

Moments later, they raced down to the end of the street outside and paused for breath around the next corner. Jirel glanced back around the corner, back towards the bar, but saw no evidence that they were being followed by any Nausicaans.

“You know,” Maya opined from his side as she slipped the tiny phaser back up her sleeve, “I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of bailing you out of trouble.”

Satisfied that they weren’t being followed, Jirel steadied his breathing as he ducked back behind cover and glared at her.

“You picked the bar,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but you picked the Nausicaans.”

Before he realised what he was doing, he felt the beginnings of a smile crossing his face. He managed to stop it before it fully blossomed, but the twinkle that appeared in her eyes suggested that she had seen it.

“Still,” she continued, “Even if we’re not being followed right now, I suggest we get moving. So, are you going to help me?”

He stared back at her, as his mind raced. But ultimately, he reluctantly knew there was only ever one answer to that question.

“I always do, don’t I?”

She smiled in silent victory as she went to move off down the side street.

“Glad to see you’re finally starting to trust me—”

The rest of her sentence was cut off when Jirel suddenly stopped her with a firm outstretched arm that shot out in front of her.

“Let’s get one thing straight, Maya,” he growled, “I’m bringing you along for now because you just saved my life back there. And because if what you’re saying about your husband is true, then I feel like we need to help you. But don’t think for a second that means I trust you. Because I don’t. And the second I think you’re messing me, or my crew, around again, I’m gonna drop you off on the nearest asteroid and I’m never gonna respond to one of your messages ever again. Clear?”

He was silently impressed with himself for the level of menace he managed to get into his words, his usual affable air nowhere to be seen. But whatever he personally thought about his impromptu threat, she didn’t flinch at all. Instead, she kept her knowing smile firmly on her face.

“Well well,” she smirked, “That’s more like the Jirel I used to know.”

He didn’t relax the best shot at a menacing leer that was on his face, but he did allow her to idly lower his arm from in front of her as she continued.

“But believe me, darling. I’m on your side on this one.”

With that, she walked off down the side street. After a second Jirel found himself diligently following behind. Still no closer to truly believing her.

****************************

Back in the Journeyman’s Rest, the Nausicaans hadn’t even attempted to follow the Trill and the human after they had made their escape.

Instead, their ringleader had reluctantly told them to take a seat.

The three that had been stunned hadn’t taken long to regain consciousness, and they had joined their colleagues at one of the tables inside the bar. With the impromptu bar fight over, the other patrons had all returned to their own drinks and idle conversations.

The mood at the Nausicaan table wasn’t exactly conducive to idle conversations, however. Even through the silence, the ringleader could tell that the others were angry.

And he was angry too.

Regardless of why it had happened, he really didn’t like losing fights. And this was now two he had lost in as many days, if you counted the minor altercation with the Trill and his disruptor on the previous evening. And his ego insisted that he did count that.

He could sense similar feelings from the others as they silently licked their wounds. Whether or not they had been one of the trio that had been stunned by the human’s phaser, they had all been well and truly shown up in front of every last patron of the Journeyman’s Rest this evening.

But the ringleader, and part-time bouncer, also knew that his men were aware that it had all been worth their while.

Or, at least, it soon would be.

****************************

Over at the bar of the Journeyman’s Rest, the Lurian bartender kept an uncertain eye on the table of Nausicaan troublemakers as he polished a shot glass with a dirty rag.

He was thankful that the earlier fight hadn’t caused too much lasting damage to an establishment that was already rife with lasting damage. But he wasn’t entirely sure the action was over for the night, especially when the Nausicaans were still there.

Then, he watched as two newcomers entered the bar. He had trouble telling the two figures apart, but he definitely recognised them both. He was the sort of bartender that never forgot a face.

He watched on, his glass-cleaning duties temporarily forgotten, as one of the newcomers handed a stout and clearly heavy briefcase to the leader of the Nausicaans, who readily accepted it without so much as a word exchanged.

And then, just as soon as the newcomers had arrived, they turned and walked straight back out again.

The Lurian half-considered chasing after them to give another non-paying pair of customers a piece of his mind. But, much like the table of Nausicaans, they didn’t strike him as the sort of visitors to Golos III that he wanted to be giving a talking to. So instead, he looked back at the lead Nausicaan, who was now dutifully doling out the latinum inside the briefcase to his men, splitting it evenly.

The Lurian wasn’t surprised to see the transaction being completed. In fact, he had overheard the deal being set up a few days ago, during a quieter night in the bar. A deal that involved the Nausicaans allowing the Trill and the human to escape from them, to ensure that they left Golos III together.

He wasn’t really sure why it was so vital that they did that. But he would have been happy to warn either the Trill or the human about what he had heard. He’d have talked to them at great lengths about it, if only they had asked him.

But they hadn’t asked him. For all that he observed from behind the bar of the Journeyman’s Rest, nobody ever asked him about anything.

And that, as far as the Lurian was concerned, was the real tragedy here.

End of Part One
 
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Part Two

Yessik City, Barkan V Colony
Stardate 47693.4

Jirel ran for his life.

He careered through the streets of Yessik City, slaloming through a host of confused pedestrians as he desperately raced on.

Several steps behind him, caring a lot less about avoiding anyone in their way, a group of armed goons pushed their way through the crowds, sending colonists tumbling to the ground in shock or running away in fear.

He turned down a side street just as a blast of disruptor fire whistled through the air behind him, accompanied by a few screams of panic from the crowds. Ignoring the aching in his muscles from the all-out sprint he was in the middle of, he kept on running, and at the same time, he grabbed the stubby communicator from his belt and bellowed into it in desperation.

“What part of ‘emergency beam-out’ aren’t you getting??”

There was a fizz of static over the comms link, and for a moment he feared that the device in his hand was broken again, after the hasty rewiring job he’d attempted on it last week.

But, as he turned down another side street to avoid another burst of disruptor fire, the response finally came.

“I’m working on it,” Maya said over the sketchy link, as calm as ever, “There’s a lot of interference around the colony, you know. Just keep your spots on.”

Another disruptor blast whistled past, impacting on a nearby wall.

“I’m gonna be lucky to keep my head on if you don’t get that thing working!”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.”

“I’m not being—!”

He raced around another corner and skittered to a halt. In front of him, blocking the entire width of the latest side street, stood several more armed goons. He spun around in despair, but the chasing pack head already turned the corner and cut off his only means of escape.

He was surrounded.

From within the gaggle of goons, a one-eyed Andorian stepped out of the crowd, his own disruptor raised at the Trill.

“Look, Thelev,” Jirel began, putting on his best appeasing tone, “You’ve got to understand, this was all an honest mistake. I had no idea that—”

“No excuses, Jirel,” Thelev hissed back, his voice sounding scratchy and distorted through the scars across his larynx, old wounds that the grizzled trader wore on his face as a badge of pride, much like his eyepatch.

Jirel gulped and raised his hands above his head in surrender, as the blue-skinned man took another pace towards him, the goons behind him shadowing his moves.

“I’ve warned you before, Jirel. One of these days you’re going to end up crossing too many people. Looks like today is the day.”

Jirel saw him bring his disruptor to bear. With a wince, he looked up despairingly at the communicator in his hand and screamed out.

“Maya!”

The one-eyed Andorian jabbed his finger down on his trigger a split second after Jirel felt the transporter effect starting up.

****************************

As he rematerialised on the transporter pad, his first instinct was to check his body for signs of a smoking, disruptor blast-sized hole. Once he was sure he was still in one piece, his second instinct was to begin to rant at the woman behind the transporter controls.

“Unbelievable,” he began as he stepped off the pad, “You set me up!”

“I took a calculated risk,” Maya countered with a shrug.

“A calculated—? You switched the bag of latinum I took down there to hand over in return for the dilithium with a bag full of rocks!”

“I honestly didn’t think Thelev would bother checking until you were safely back onboard with what we needed. He’s not usually that thorough.”

“Yeah, well, he checked. He definitely checked. And you didn’t think to maybe mention this little plan of yours to me before you sent me down there to make the swap?”

“If you’d have known, you’d have had to lie to him,” she pointed out, “And I really don’t trust that poker face of yours.”

He fixed her with an unamused glare, before he turned and stormed out of the transporter room, into the main corridor of the Bounty. She sighed and took off after him, persisting with her defence as they walked.

“Look, I just thought there was a good chance that we might get the dilithium and the latinum out of this little transaction.”

“Yeah, well, now we’ve got neither. Which means we’re not gonna double our money by flipping that dilithium, like you promised we would. Which means we’re gonna need to compromise on the repairs again. We can either fix the impulse stabilisers or the secondary power circuit. Not both.”

He marched on down the corridor, continuing to grumble as he did so. The walls of the corridor still looked run-down and tired, a telling reminder of the repair list they still had to work through.

Even though it had now been several months since they had liberated the Bounty from the Tyran Scrapyards, they had made little progress on the myriad issues plaguing the ship that were the reasons the Ju’Day-type raider had been towed to the scrapyards in the first place.

“You’re the one that insisted on bay seven, darling,” Maya offered casually as they walked.

“And don’t ‘darling’ me, ok? Because we are absolutely, one hundred percent, definitely broken up this time.”

He stalked on, avoiding the knowing glance she gave him which suggested how much she doubted the veracity of that statement. Although he was forced to agree with it. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d broken up with her since they had first got together. But it was a lot.

Instead of dwelling on that, he marched on into the dining area, still ranting.

“So, unless you’ve got some other dumb plan to screw up, I’d really like to hear how you think we’re gonna—”

He whirled around to her and stopped immediately, as he saw the shocking sight of a huge Klingon warrior standing in the corner of the room. His eyes boggled in fright.

“Holy crap! Maya, we’ve been boarded!”

The Klingon remained standing where he was and merely turned his head nonchalantly in the Trill’s direction. He didn’t exactly look like he was here to seize the ship.

Maya, with a patient sigh, stepped over to the stoic form of the Klingon.

“He was supposed to be a surprise. He returned my message while you were down on the planet. I met him down in Yessik City yesterday. He was looking for work. And you’ve said we need more muscle around here, so here he is.”

Jirel looked at Maya, then at the Klingon. His look of fright had given way to a more perplexed stare.

“I am Klath, son of Morad,” the Klingon boomed out.

"Well, Klath, son of Morad,” Maya smiled as she completed the introductions, “Meet Jirel, son of…oooh, awkward.”

The orphan Trill fixed Maya with a withering look, before he uncomfortably focused back on the impassive Klingon.

“Ok, I’m not sure this is gonna work—”

Suddenly, a shrill alarm sounded out from the Bounty’s barely-functioning automated systems.

“Proximity alert,” Maya noted, now altogether more serious.

“Great,” Jirel griped as they raced for the door, “So Thelev has a ship as well. Your plan just keeps getting more amazing, you know that?”

They dashed up the steps into the Bounty’s empty cockpit, with Jirel immediately making for his pilot’s seat and checking the controls.

“Got a ship on an intercept course,” he reported, “Weapons range in eight seconds!”

He broke the Bounty out of orbit of Barkan V and pivoted the ship around to face the enemy vessel.

It was a lean and squat ship, slightly larger than the Bounty, with two ugly disruptor cannons poking out of the front of the vessel. Both were glowing fiery red, ready to destroy them.

“Ah, crap,” Jirel groaned, as the disruptors fired, “Hang on!”

He swung the Bounty away just in time, as the twin blasts scorched past their port wing.

“I told you, Jirel,” the rasping voice of Thelev came over the open comms link, “You crossed the wrong guy today.”

Jirel ignored the taunts of the Andorian, and kept his focus on the firefight.

“Take it we’ve still not got the shields operational?” he called back.

“Not last time I checked,” Maya replied.

“Ugh. Ok, let me try and get us—”

Before Jirel had the time to say anything else, he saw another burst of energy flying out. Except this one was from the Bounty itself, towards the enemy ship. The blast from their phaser cannons hit home onto the other vessel’s shields.

“Huh,” he mused, “We’re fighting our way out then, I guess.”

He swung the Bounty away from another disruptor blast from Thelev’s ship, and quickly executed a tight arc to bring them around to the rear of the other ship, desperately sticking to them as they tried to shake them off.

“Ok, Maya, take your shot!”

The Bounty’s twin phaser cannons flared out again, sending rapid staccato bursts of red fire that seemed to have been specifically tuned somehow. They impacted heavily on their quarry’s shields and collapsed them. A single micro-torpedo followed, slamming into the rear of the hull and crippling them entirely.

Jirel turned the Bounty away and set a course for safety, a little shocked at the ease with which Maya had dealt with their enemy.

“Hey,” he called back, “Where did you learn to shoot like that—?”

He swung around in his seat to see Maya stationed behind the rear engineering console, with her arms folded in quiet satisfaction. At the weapons console, on the right side of the room, sat Klath, son of Morad.

“In the Klingon Defence Force,” he replied simply.

Jirel looked from the Klingon to the human woman and back again.

“Um,” he managed eventually, with a smile in the direction of the frowning Klingon, “Welcome aboard, I guess?”
 
Part Two (Cont'd)

“The Badlands?”

Sunek raised his eyebrow in a typically Vulcan-like way, as he delivered his distinctly un-Vulcan-like take on Maya's plan.

“Like hell are we going into the Badlands.”

From where she stood, leaning on the centre chair where Jirel sat, Maya raised an amused eyebrow of her own at the defiant pilot.

“Huh,” she tutted absently, glancing knowingly at Jirel as she did so, “That doesn’t sound like the adventurous young pilot I once had to single-handedly rescue from those half-dozen pheromone-crazed renegades from the Deltan anti-celibacy movement…”

At this, Sunek stood from his seat and pointed an accusing finger at her.

“Hey! This is absolutely nothing like that, ok? Also, we have very, very different definitions of the word ‘rescue’!”

From her left-rear console position, Natasha found herself trying to blend into the background as she kept her focus on the mysterious new woman as the debate continued. A woman that she had already heard plenty about, and was now meeting for the first time. And someone who she was starting to see had an odd level of control over more than just the Bounty’s self-appointed captain. The entire crew seemed on edge now that she was onboard.

“He’s got a point,” Jirel offered from his seat, gesturing at the unhappy Vulcan, “You didn’t say anything about this rescue happening in the Badlands.”

“And it won’t happen there,” Maya replied patiently, “But, as I was explaining to you before your excitable Vulcan so rudely interrupted me, we need some information. And the Badlands is the best place to get it.”

“What sort of…information?” Klath grunted at her.

“Information like where my husband is actually being held. Synergy Mining Enterprises are an ever-moving operation. Jumping from one mineral-rich planet or asteroid to the next, strip-mining what they can before they move on. I don’t have exact coordinates for where all their latest operations are, but I do know where one of their last ones were. Inside the Badlands.”

Jirel looked around at the rest of the Bounty’s crew, none of whom seemed entirely enthused by the plan just yet.

“If we get to the abandoned facilities that they left behind on that asteroid inside there,” Maya continued, “There’ll still be a database uplink in place at their old operations centre. With your esteemed engineer’s help, we should be able to get an exact location for where we’re heading, and details of the security situation at the new location as well.”

“Hell of a place to build a mine,” Denella chimed in from the back of the cockpit.

“The company buys the sites based on what they can get out of them. Not for the view. And when you’re effectively using slave labour to do the grunt work, you don’t need to worry too much about comfort.”

“Neat,” Sunek muttered as he slumped back into his chair, with heavy sarcasm.

“Either way,” Maya persisted, apparently unflustered by the amount of pushback she was getting from the entire room, “That’s where we’ll find the information we need.”

“And,” the Vulcan pointed out to Jirel, “That’s also where we’ll find pirates, bandits and Surak knows who else. Come on, Jirel. This is a really, really dumb idea.”

Jirel contemplated the situation for a moment, then nodded back.

“You’re right,” he conceded eventually, leaning forward in his chair and shrugging, “But then, that’s our thing, isn’t it?”

Sunek’s eyebrow remained where it was, even as Jirel forcefully gestured back at the pilot’s controls behind him.

“Take us to the Badlands, Sunek.”

For a moment, it looked like the Vulcan was actually going to refuse. But after a further second or two of unimpressed staring, he swivelled back around to his controls.

“I knew you were going to say that.”

****************************

As the Bounty streaked on towards the maelstrom of the Badlands, Maya excused herself from the cockpit and made her way to the ship’s small dining area for some nourishment.

As she sat alone, finishing her meal, the door opened and Natasha walked in.

She had deliberately decided to seek out the Bounty’s guest to try and get more of a handle on her, and met her look with a friendly smile. She had spent far too long travelling the galaxy to let other people’s opinions of someone cloud her own first impressions.

Though she had also come to trust the rest of the Bounty’s crew enough over the last year to take a fair amount of healthy trepidation into the room with her.

As she walked over to the table, Maya took a sip from her cocktail and winced.

“Ugh,” she tutted, “Is that lovely engineer around anywhere? She needs to reprogram this new replicator of yours to fix a proper martini.”

“I’m sure we could mix you up the real thing,” Natasha offered back with a friendly tone, “There’s more than enough actual liquor floating around onboard the Bounty. I’m, um, Natasha, by the way. We didn’t really meet back in the cockpit.”

She offered a handshake across the table and Maya accepted with a nod.

“Of course. Maya Ortega. I’m sure you’ve already heard plenty about me, but I guess Jirel never was very good at introductions. And it can be so hard for me to keep track of who he’s employing these days. Is that Ferengi gentleman still around, by the way? I liked him.”

Natasha had to admit that she had also liked Zesh when she had met him. Although she wasn't sure he felt the same way about her after she had successfully convinced the rest of the Bounty's crew to give away his treasured investment on Nimbus III for nothing*. She offered a shrug.

“He’s, um, moved on to pastures new.”

“I see,” Maya nodded, breaking the handshake and leaning back in her chair, “Well then, Natasha. What went wrong in your life to end up in Jirel’s company?”

Natasha suppressed the image of a bloodied ensign in the burning corridors of the USS Navajo, and kept up her friendly demeanour.

“What makes you think something had to go wrong?”

“Please,” she replied with a knowing tut, “However Jirel might have sold it to you to get you onboard, this isn’t the sort of ship you end up on if your life’s going the way you planned it. Believe me.”

Natasha regarded the elegant look of the woman in front of her, from the quality of her attire to her general demeanour, and shrugged.

“Fair enough. I guess I’m a bit surprised to find out that someone like you ended up on this sort of ship as well.”

Maya’s lips pursed into a thin smile, as she swirled her martini around with practised grace.

“Please don’t let appearances fool you, dear. I guess you haven’t quite heard my full story from the loose lips of the others?”

Natasha shook her head, still intrigued. She silently slipped herself into the seat opposite Maya at the table.

“If you must know,” Maya continued, “I was born on Turkana IV.”

This sent a shiver down Natasha’s spine. The name Turkana IV was enough to do that to just about anyone that heard it. An infamous failed Federation colony out in the Beta Quadrant, where law and order had broken down to the point that the warring powers that sprang up across the planet had severed ties with the Federation entirely.

Its distance from the core of the Federation meant that there had never been a serious attempt to try and counter the secession. And aside from the occasional uncomfortable visit by the odd passing starship, Turkana IV was left to spiral completely out of control, a wasteland of poverty and violence.

Nobody was interested in going there, and very few people ever got to leave. Except, apparently, the woman sitting across from Natasha at the table.

“I’m going to guess from that look on your face that you’re familiar with it,” Maya continued, “But, yes, after a…difficult childhood, I was fortunate enough to escape. Many years ago.”

Natasha was still processing this new information, as the other woman idly gestured to her own get-up, her clothing, jewellery and the rest of it.

“I know more than enough about what it’s like to have nothing, you see? So once I got away, I resolved to do whatever had to be done to make sure that I never had to live like that again. And I also resolved to make sure I had a lot of fun while I was doing it…”

She offered a sliver of a smile as she sipped her drink.

“Well,” Natasha nodded back eventually, “I’ve certainly heard about your…sense of adventure.”

“I’ll bet you have.”

There was an undercurrent of something in her words that Natasha couldn’t quite place, but that she certainly didn’t like. A hint of tension, even of menace.

Just as she felt herself shift uncomfortably in her seat, the door opened again and Jirel entered.

The Trill had been wrapped up in his own thoughts as he had been walking away from the cockpit, not really thinking about where he was heading. But those thoughts were quickly replaced by new ones. As soon as he saw the scene inside the Bounty’s dining area, he felt on edge for a different reason than before. In the way that anyone gets on edge when they find two people they have previously been intimate with engaged in a private conversation.

“Oh,” he blurted out, with clear discomfort, “You’ve—I mean, you’re here. Both of you. Cool.”

On the far side of the table, Maya instantly began to smile wider, looking at the Trill and the other human woman and instantly putting two and two together.

“Ah,” she purred, “Now I understand this latest bit of recruitment. And another redhead? I guess you’ve got a type as well, darling.”

Jirel squirmed. Natasha’s eyes widened in flustered shock at this comment, the memory of her and Jirel’s most recent unplanned night together still fresh in her mind.

“We’re not—” she began.

“We’re just—” Jirel said at the same time.

They both stopped and looked at each other, both immediately unsure of how to proceed, after the less than definitive conclusion they had reached on what had happened between them back on Kervala Prime. After several dozen shots of liquor.

Seeing the discomfort her casual comment seemed to have caused, Maya drained the rest of her drink and stood from the table.

“Well,” she offered to the two squirming presences, “Glad we got all that cleared up. Now, I’ll see myself to the guest cabin.”

She exited, still smiling and almost without the other two noticing.

Jirel considered restarting the discussion he and Natasha had been having back on Kervala Prime, about whether or not their second night together really did mean something, and elected to focus on his primary headache. He slumped down into another seat at the table.

“Ugh,” he sighed in defeat, fixing her with a distinctly more serious look, “Should I really be going through with this?”

“Where was that attitude this time last week?” she offered with a friendly smile. Though it was immediately clear from his look that this was one of the rare occasions in his life when Jirel Vincent wasn’t interested in joking around.

“I’m serious,” he shot back, “Am I making a mistake here? I’m sure it’ll just turn out she’s trying to screw us all over again somehow. Nothing’s ever straightforward with her. But…if she really does need help, can I really turn her down?”

Natasha adopted a more serious posture and considered his words for a moment. Eventually, she mustered a shrug.

“I don’t know if I can answer that,” she replied, “I barely know this woman.”

He nodded at this, but continued to look at her with a slightly hopeful stare, trying to will some more useful advice out of someone he knew he trusted.

“It’s just…I dunno,” he said eventually, “There was something about her. Back in the day, on the Bounty, the excitement when we were hatching some new scheme. It was just kinda…thrilling. Proper seat of the pants living, you know? And no matter how crazy it all got, we always got out of it. There were never any consequences. Not when Maya was around.”

He paused, then looked over at her a little sheepishly.

“Sorry. Is this weird? Me talking about this?”

“Not at all,” she managed to lie, “I guess I can understand the attraction. But…if you really want my advice?”

He nodded back at her without a second’s thought. She continued.

“I can’t offer anything specific. But all I’ll say is that, speaking as someone with plenty of bad relationships in her past to draw experience from, what you’re describing doesn’t sound like a very healthy way to live.”

With that, she stood up and walked off in the direction of her own cabin.

Leaving Jirel with plenty to think about.

* - See Star Trek: Bounty - 5 - "Once Upon a Time in the Beta Quadrant" for the full story.
 
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That's really good advice. Really liking the multi-manga angle here. Nothing for a uncertain sputtering new flame like exposure to an old one. And interesting minor highlights on the other crew brought up by their own various relationships with Maya.

Thanks!! rbs
 
Part Two (Cont'd)

The view ahead was a beautiful one, there was no doubt about that.

But as much as Sunek wanted to be able to appreciate the view, all he could feel as he stared out of the Bounty’s cockpit window was a growing sense of trepidation. They had been inside the Badlands for several hours by that point, and the view ahead hadn’t changed all that much. And that was starting to get to him.

For the scientists of the galaxy, the Badlands were a fascinating mixture of fiery plasma storms and gravitational anomalies, still not fully explained by current astronomical theories.

For the captain of a freighter or a transport, they were a certified nuisance. A turbulent expanse of navigational headaches nearly three hundred light years across, lying pretty much right on the most direct path between Federation and Cardassian space.

For the average mercenary, they were manna from heaven. A vast region of space where detailed sensor readings were impaired, communication was patchy and effective monitoring by any form of law enforcement, especially on the post-war Cardassian side, had become virtually impossible.

But for Sunek, the Badlands were just becoming irritating. He had been trying to make sense of them ever since the Bounty had first penetrated the edge of the storm front, but he was still no nearer figuring out the best way of dealing with the unpredictable maelstrom.

The entire ship continued to gently buck and weave around from the effects of the gravitational eddies all around them. The sensor readouts he was using as a guide as he eased the ship through the storms were patchy at best. And the view ahead, of the swirling, crackling plasma storms themselves, was starting to make him a little nauseous.

It was like flying through soup. A turbulent, chaotic, vomit-inducing soup.

“FYI,” he called back to the rest of the cockpit, “This sucks.”

The entire ship rocked again as Sunek quickly tapped his controls to veer around the worst of the turbulence, indirectly underlining his point.

Behind him, in the centre chair, Jirel itched his spots as he kept his own attention on the view. To his side, Maya leaned against his chair, looking significantly more serene despite the ever-bucking ride the ship was on.

The rest of the crew were at their usual positions. Klath grimly kept his focus on his tactical readouts, looking for any sign of trouble in the patchy readings. Denella monitored the Bounty’s essential systems as it flew on into the storm, while Natasha offered a second set of eyes on the sensor readings, trying to get first sight of their destination.

“Just keep her steady,” Jirel muttered back to his tetchy pilot, “The Bounty was built for this sort of thing. This ship loves the Badlands.”

“Yeah, well, this ship’s pilot doesn’t,” the Vulcan grouched.

It was true that the Bounty was more suited than most to navigate this sort of expanse. The Maquis themselves had utilised the Ju’Day-type raider as one of their preferred vessels during their years of operation. But that fact didn’t really settle Sunek’s concerns. And he couldn’t help but feel a slight chill passing down his spine as he stared out at the storms ahead of them.

He glanced back down at his garbled sensor readings and tutted in frustration.

“Ugh,” he grimaced, “This really sucks. According to Maya’s coordinates, we should be right on top of this asteroid by now, but—Holy crap!”

He frantically tapped at the controls, just as a major gravitational eddy bucked the nose of the ship vertically upwards. The rest of the crew braced themselves as the inertial dampeners struggled to keep up.

Eventually, Sunek got the ship level again, and steadied his frayed nerves with a quick Vulcan breathing exercise from his youth. Just as he was about to ask what had caused that sudden burst of turbulence, he caught himself as the crackling clouds in front of them parted, and the unmistakable sight of an asteroid was revealed ahead of them.

“Um,” he announced, “We’re here.”

Jirel turned to Natasha as Sunek delicately brought the Bounty into orbit.

“Anything down there?”

“It’s hard to scan through the plasma interference,” she sighed, “But…I think I’ve got a structure. Northern hemisphere, near the pole.”

“That’s the old habitation section for the mining operation,” Maya nodded, “The whole northern polar region was covered in rodinium deposits.”

“I’m not scanning any rodinium,” Natasha offered.

“Then they did a good job mining it,” Maya pointed out.

Jirel did his best to ignore the discussion between two people he still would prefer to not be talking to each other, and focused on the task at hand.

“Lifesigns?”

Natasha looked back down at her readings, tapped the controls, then sighed again.

“Looks to be deserted,” she reported back, “But again, I’m never going to be entirely sure given the interference.”

“I am not detecting any vessels within range,” Klath added, “Although, like the doctor, my range is somewhat…limited. It is possible there may be bandits or looters in the area.”

“Did I mention how much I love this plan?” Sunek chimed in from the front of the cockpit.

Jirel cast a sideways glance at Maya, who offered a slight shrug in return, then he stood from his seat and turned to the cockpit exit.

“Well, I guess we didn’t come all this way to sit and stare at the thing. Maya, Denella, let’s go hack a database.”

As the three members of the impromptu away team made their way to the rear steps of the cockpit, Klath stood and grabbed his bat’leth from where it was hanging on the wall behind him.

“Hey,” Jirel motioned to the Klingon, “I’m sure we don’t need—”

“I believe it would be wiser for me to join you down there.”

“You don’t trust me?” Maya tutted from Jirel’s side.

“I do not trust the interference,” Klath replied diplomatically, “There is still a possibility that whatever has been left behind down there is being looted.”

Jirel looked back at the steely gaze of his friend and mustered an understanding nod.

“Fine. If you think we need backup, who am I to argue?”

With that, they continued their journey down the steps, leaving Natasha and Sunek to keep an eye on the Bounty.

As he descended the steps at the back of the group, Klath shook his head and muttered.

“You always need backup.”

****************************

It didn’t take long for Jirel to silently appreciate bringing along his backup.

The dank interior of the abandoned offices was barely illuminated by the two beams of light that shone out from the torches that he and Denella carried. It didn’t make for a welcoming scene.

The Trill walked at the front of the quartet, alongside Maya, who was navigating them through to their final destination. Denella and Klath followed close behind, working together to scan for danger with the Orion’s torch and the Klingon’s bulky old tricorder from the Bounty’s limited stash.

Not that there seemed to be any danger to scan. The entire complex was eerily quiet.

The operational headquarters of what purported to be the base for Synergy Mining Enterprises on the asteroid were somewhat modest, consisting of little more than a pair of squat modular prefab buildings.

One of them contained the limited habitation area for the miners themselves, rudimentary barracks that were little more than prison accommodation. Which made sense, given how Maya had described the operation that was run here.

The other housed the slightly more comfortable offices and accommodation for the staff of the company, overseeing operations out on the asteroid itself, which would have been conducted the old-fashioned way. Back-breaking labour in heavy EVA suits for hours at a time. Until every last drop of rodinium had been extracted from the rocks.

The two were connected via a pressurised covered walkway, which was where the four of them had beamed into. From there, they had made their way into the larger office prefab. The scant torchlight illuminated the unfriendly interior of the place. Short grey corridors that led to either sleeping racks, common areas, a cafeteria, or the main office itself. Which was where they were heading.

“This is the place,” Maya nodded as they reached the end of the corridor.

She gestured to a pair of stout dark grey doors ahead of them, which remained definitely closed, powered down like the rest of the base.

With a slight tut, Denella slid over to an access panel next to the door, popped the end of the torch into her mouth to free up her hands, and got to work.

As she worked, Jirel shone his torch back down the corridor, and Klath remained tense.

“Anything?” he asked the Klingon.

Klath looked down at the tricorder and growled in frustration.

“The interference is significant down here as well. I am not detecting anything. But that does not mean we are alone.”

“You deliberately made that sound more scary than it had to be, didn’t you?” Jirel replied witheringly.

Klath didn’t respond, and merely kept his attention back down the dimly-lit corridor, using his own innate Klingon senses to make up for the tricorder’s failings.

“It’s a wonder anyone got any mining done down here,” Denella observed as she pulled a length of wiring out of the access panel, “Having to check over their shoulders all the time.”

“While the mine was operational, there was a hell of a lot more security,” Maya explained, “Orbital sentries, guards, armed shuttles. To keep the whole place secure from anyone trying to get in. Or get out, for that matter.”

“Well,” the Orion replied with a hint of satisfaction, “The good news is that this place is a whole lot less secure than it used to be.”

Just as she said that, the doors to the office opened with a shudder, and Denella took her torch back out of her mouth and shone it inside.

“Good work,” Jirel smiled, as they cautiously stepped inside.

“We should be able to access the database from any of these terminals over here,” Maya gestured to the far side of the room.

She and Denella paced over and started to work, as Jirel and Klath kept watch at the door.

The office had been mostly cleaned out before the operation had left for good. Most of the desks and workstations had been dismantled, or had their interfaces removed. All furnishings or signs of comfort had been packed up and shipped off, leaving behind a desolate look. But some of the bulkier or older work areas remained, albeit powered down. And that was where the two women headed.

Denella withdrew a small power pack from the pocket of her overalls and plugged it into the station, giving the computer a shot of power for the first time in weeks.

“Ok,” she nodded, “We’re online.”

As she went to work, Jirel felt his spots begin to itch as he kept his torch beam aimed at the doorway. He licked his lips and called back.

“How long is this gonna take?”

“Not getting scared, are we?” Maya shot back, as she kept an eye on Denella’s frantic work.

“No. Just impatient.”

“Tsk. No sense of adventure. Just like old times.”

“I like an adventure just fine,” the Trill remarked, “I just remember how all of your adventures used to end.”

Despite the situation, Jirel quietly cursed himself for lapsing back into banter mode with her so quickly, feeling him starting to fall back into his own ways with her despite still not trusting this new venture of hers. Mercifully, before their back-and-forth could become any more flirtatious, Denella called out.

“Ok, I’m in. Not much to it in the end.”

“There’s a good engineer,” Maya purred a little patronisingly, “Now we need the details of any new operations started over the past month. They’ll have moved everything they took from here to another site.”

“On it,” Denella nodded as she tapped away at the computer, “But…there’s a whole other encryption layer on some of this information. Lot of security for a mining operation, isn’t there?”

There was an edge to her question, but Maya played it with a straight bat.

“When you’re breaking as many interstellar rules as this company is, you tend to want to keep things as secret as possible.”

Denella couldn’t help but accept that this made sense, as she continued to work, virtually snooping around the database of Synergy Mining Enterprises as best she could.

“Ok,” she said as she worked, “Getting something here. Security protocols, staff rotas, personnel lists, and a whole bunch of requisition orders for duridium processors.”

“No,” Maya grimaced, shaking her head at the screen, “This isn’t everything. We need exact coordinates, otherwise we’re flying blind.”

“Fine. Let me see what I can—”

She was stopped by the unmistakable noise of a muffled grunt from Klath. The Orion engineer looked up and peered at her colleague through the darkness, already on edge. She knew what that noise meant.

Jirel knew it as well. Even if the tricorder wasn’t helping them, Klath’s Klingon senses were not being inhibited by the interference that was all around them.

And in the last few seconds, Klath’s senses had told him that it might be wise for him to draw his bat’leth.
 
Part Two (Cont'd)

“You sure you know how to work all that?”

Natasha did her best not to take too much offence from Sunek’s cheeky question, as she looked up from the panel in front of her.

“They do teach us a thing or two about these things at Starfleet Academy, you know?”

“Cool,” the Vulcan shot back, “So all of Starfleet’s medical staff are trained in how to fire a spread of torpedoes. It’s a wonder you guys have such a bad rep in so many places, it really is.”

She shook her head patiently at this latest quip and returned her attention to the controls.

Given the Bounty’s precipitous position inside the Badlands, and given Klath’s decision to join the party down on the asteroid, she had elected to move from her usual position in the cockpit to take over the Klingon’s tactical controls. With the potential for some sort of skirmish, it seemed to make sense to have someone keep their finger on the phaser cannons.

“We all get a full round of basic training, regardless of our specialism,” she replied, “Flight control, navigation, tactical, you name it. Never hurts to make sure anyone onboard a starship can save the day if they need to. Friend of mine served on the USS Artemis during the war. They once escaped from a surprise attack from a Cardassian battle wing with the ship’s chief nurse at the helm and the mess officer at tactical.”

Sunek shrugged as he spun around in his pilot’s seat and pointed down at the bank of controls in front of her.

“Whatever you say, doc. Just make sure you remember which button fires the phasers and which one arms the auto-destruct.”

She looked up again with a more withering glare, and gestured back out at the dizzying view through the cockpit window.

“And how about you keep an eye out for anything I need to shoot at, hmm?”

The Vulcan reluctantly spun back around in his chair and focused on his own controls. In truth, he had just been trying to distract himself from their current situation. He was getting more and more antsy by the minute. Natasha was feeling exactly the same way. She had already familiarised herself with the weapons controls. But that didn’t stop her from checking her work for the fifth time.

A tense silence descended on the pair of them.

Eventually, the silence became too much for her, even as she embarked on her sixth check of her understanding of the weapons console. There were several nagging questions about their situation, and she took a moment to select the most pressing one.

“Do you believe her?”

Given the context of their situation, she didn’t need to clarify the question any further.

“Seriously,” Sunek replied, keeping his response firmly in his usual conversational wheelhouse, “Are you gonna be like this with all of Jirel’s exes?”

She didn’t dignify his comment with a response, and allowed the silence to return, forcing him into a more serious answer if he wanted to break it. Eventually, he sighed and shrugged his shoulders, keeping his attention focused out of the cockpit window as he talked.

“Fine. Let’s just say that we’ve all got plenty of reasons not to believe her. Jirel more than the rest of us. So I’m pretty sure that there’s more to all this than some husband in distress.”

“Pretty sure?”

The Vulcan shrugged again.

“Well, this time’s already been a little different.”

“How so?”

He took a moment to swivel around in his chair and grin back at her from under his shock of tousled hair.

“This time she’s paid us up front.”

Natasha considered this point for a moment, then nodded.

“So what more could there be to all of this?”

“Knowing Maya,” Sunek replied, “A hell of a lot more latinum. For her, anyway—”

He stopped himself mid-sentence and cocked his ear to the deck in a curious manner, raising an eyebrow to underline his change in focus.

“You feel that?” he asked.

Natasha looked a little confused. The Bounty had been gently bucking and rolling about ever since they had arrived in the Badlands, like an old sailing boat being tossed around in a storm.

“Yeah,” she replied with a sliver of sarcasm, “Feels like a plasma storm. I wonder what could be causing that?”

“No,” Sunek hissed, entirely seriously, as he swung back around to his instruments with renewed concern, “I definitely felt it.”

“Felt what?”

“A new wavefront hitting us from somewhere. Everything’s been pretty rhythmic ever since we arrived in orbit. But that was new.”

She had to remind herself that, for everything else she was dealing with when it came to the Bounty’s resident laughing pilot, she was still dealing with a Vulcan. And a Vulcan who could still occasionally use his keen intellect, when it came to noticing the little things.

She instantly started to check her own garbled scans.

“You’re thinking…?” she forced herself to ask.

“I’m thinking that something just dropped in. Opposite side to our orbital position, probably trying to use the asteroid as extra cover for their approach. But they sent out a little extra ripple in that soup out there.”

“Who else would be interested in an abandoned mine on an asteroid?”

He didn’t waste any time replying directly to her. As he tapped at the helm controls to bring the Bounty out of orbit, he also jabbed a finger down on his comms link to the others.

“Hey, Jirel!” he called out, “Bandits!”

The response took a second to come back over the static-flecked link. And when it did, it merely deepened the concern in the cockpit.

“We know!”

****************************

Jirel snapped his response into the communicator as he fired back over the top of his scant cover with his disruptor pistol.

From somewhere in the gloom, he heard a roar from Klath, followed by the sound of a bat’leth impacting on something heavy. But the weapons fire didn’t die down by much.

They had no idea how many bandits they were dealing with, but it was enough. As soon as Klath had sensed them, they had all looked for cover. But the shooting had started almost immediately.

Jirel fired off another few covering shots and looked around. He was hunkered down behind one of the bulky computer terminals in the office, cut off from the others. He knew Klath was enjoying himself out there somewhere, but he had no idea what had happened to Denella and Maya.

“You wanna maybe beam us up?” he called out into the communicator, “Any time now would be great!”

“On it,” Sunek’s response came through the static.

The lack of any sort of quip or comeback in the Vulcan’s reply underlined the severity of the situation more than anything else could.

With some effort, Jirel affixed his communicator back onto his belt, then began to crawl towards where Denella and Maya had been working. In the darkness, he heard another satisfied bellow from Klath, as he tackled another opponent. He managed to crawl along behind his cover to the next row of terminals. There, he just about made out two crouched figures in the half-light.

And one was clearly injured.

Paying no more attention to his own safety, he fired off a couple more warning shots, then switched to a hunched dash for the final few metres to the figures, hearing a disruptor blast whine just above his back and impact on the wall behind him.

As he reached them, he saw Denella’s injury. She winced as she pressed her right hand around an ugly wound on her left arm.

“Crap,” he managed, “How bad?”

“Bad enough that I’d be up for cutting this vacation short,” the Orion replied with a pained grimace on her face.

“They’re gonna beam us up any second.”

“That’ll be nice.”

Jirel turned and fired off another few shots to keep the remaining bandits at bay. Another roar from Klath followed, followed by an agonised scream from one of their attackers.

“At least someone’s enjoying themselves,” Denella added with a pained smile.

Jirel glared over at Maya, who appeared strangely sanguine about their predicament. She gestured down at Denella and shrugged.

“She’ll live.”

“She’ll—?” Jirel echoed incredulously, “What the hell have you brought us to? Was this a trap?”

“Absolutely not,” she countered, “I have no idea who these people are. Showing up here, trying to shoot everything. Presumably some passing thieves, looking to strip the place of whatever got left behind. And apparently they’re not interested in sharing.”

“Ugh. This was supposed to be the easy part of the plan! You have completely—!”

He stopped as soon as he saw her left arm straighten and the antique type-1 phaser drop into her hand. In one fluid motion, she brought the tiny weapon to bear on him, and fired.

The line of red energy spat out from the weapon, flying just over his shoulder, and into something behind him, which groaned in pain, then slumped to the floor.

Jirel and Denella looked over to see the bandit, of a species they didn’t recognise, slumped in a stunned, unconscious pile on the ground, his weapon by his side.

“You know,” Maya smiled smugly at Jirel as he turned back to her, “I'm starting to get tired of saving your life all the time.”

Just as Jirel went to fire off an appropriate comeback, the transporter took effect.

****************************

“Glad you could make it!”

Sunek called out just as he pirouetted the Bounty around to evade a blast of disruptor fire from the unidentified ship that had brought the bandits to the asteroid, and manoeuvred the ship out of orbit to try and effect an escape.

A succession of footsteps cascaded up the steps to the cockpit as Jirel, Klath and Maya arrived on the scene. Natasha, having initially been a little shocked by the mise en scène that materialised on the transporter pad, especially the growling Klath, mid-bat’leth attack, had taken the injured Denella straight to the Bounty’s small medical bay.

“Now,” Sunek continued, as he bucked the ship around again, “If someone wouldn’t mind raising the shields, that’d be awesome!”

Klath instantly slotted into his tactical position, as Maya took Denella’s engineering station and Jirel slid into the centre seat.

“Shields up,” the Klingon reported, “Weapons online.”

“Disabling fire only, ok?” Jirel called back.

Klath paused for a fraction of a second, bitterly recalling the last firefight the Bounty had been involved in during their trip to Kervala Prime, and the way that it had ended with his former lover slaughtering a ship full of Pakleds.

“Ok, swinging her around,” Sunek bellowed, shaking Klath back into the moment, “Give ‘em both barrels!”

The whole ship turned to stare down the other vessel, a squat prowler-type design. Twin bursts of fire spat out from the Bounty’s wing-mounted phaser cannons and impacted on their adversary’s shields, with enough force to cause them to flare with crackling energy, fizzing against the backdrop of the plasma storms.

This show of force seemed to do the trick. Bandits tended to avoid confrontation with anything actually capable of beating them, and so the prowler turned on its axis and limped back to the asteroid itself.

“Take it we’re not waiting around to exchange insurance details?” Sunek quipped from the helm.

“Hell no,” Jirel sighed, “Get us out of the Badlands.”

“With pleasure.”

Sunek tapped his controls, as Jirel swung around to where Maya was sitting, standing from his chair with an angry scowl.

“Look,” she began, seeing his expression, “I know what you’re going to say, but—”

“That was a really dumb plan, you know?” Jirel growled, cutting her off, “And the only thing dumber than the plan is me, for actually agreeing to it!”

“Jirel, please calm down, you’re going to strain something. The important thing is we got most of the information we needed—”

“What we’ve got is an injured engineer, a bunch of fresh battle damage, and we still don’t know where this so-called husband of yours is even being held! Why I thought flying blind into the Badlands was a good idea, I’ll never know.”

“Still,” Maya persisted, “We got away. Denella will be fine. And you’ve got to admit, there’s never a dull moment when I’m around, is there? Besides, I didn’t think there’d be any bandits.”

Jirel’s expression darkened a little more as he walked over to the steps, still ranting.

“This is classic you, you know that? You just assume your plans’ll come off, and then we end up having to fight for our lives!”

As he descended the steps, Maya sighed and followed him.

“And another thing,” Jirel continued to rant as his voice faded, “You’d better believe you’re gonna get our repairs done while Denella’s recovering…”

Sunek turned and watched the two squabbling figures disappear into the bowels of the ship, before glancing over at Klath.

“Nice to have her back, isn’t it?” he offered with a dollop of sarcasm.

Klath just growled unhappily.

****************************

The argument continued all the way to Jirel’s cabin, as Maya followed him through the door.

“…I’m sure there’s barely any damage,” she continued, “You saw how easily they gave up back there? I doubt they left too many marks. Besides, it’s the Badlands. We were always going to have a few scrapes.”

“This isn’t a few scrapes, Maya,” Jirel fired back, “This is, once again, you recklessly endangering everyone’s lives, and me being too stupid to stop you!”

“I saved your life down there, remember?”

“Yeah, right after you endangered it!”

She stepped closer to him and he held his ground in the middle of the cabin. They both stared into each other’s eyes with renewed passion, even as their tone remained antagonistic.

“You had fun down there, admit it,” she growled.

“Fun? You think I had fun?”

“No. I know you had fun.”

A beat. Jirel suddenly found himself entirely incapable of lying.

“Of course I had fun!” he shot back angrily.

“Good boy,” she smiled back.

In an instant, they were on each other, kissing and pawing at each other’s clothes. Falling back into every aspect of their former life together on the Bounty, a sudden rush of lust being powered by the adrenaline from their narrow escape, and the intensity of their argument.

Jirel forced himself to come up for air and looked back at the woman he had fallen in love with even more times than she had saved his life. The woman that he seemed drawn to with the power of a tractor beam.

“I thought you were married?” he managed.

“I thought you liked an adventure?” she replied.

They smiled, and embraced each other again.

Deep down, Jirel knew that he was making another huge mistake. Because it was always a mistake. But he equally found that he didn’t really care.

Besides, with Maya, there were never any consequences.

They fell back onto his bed, still wrapped around each other, as Jirel succumbed entirely to his latest mistake.

End of Part Two
 
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