Star Trek: Bounty - 207 - "The Stars That Shall Be Bright When We Are Dust"

BountyTrek · Thursday at 6:26 PM

Hello.

Here we are again. After a bit of a festive/New Year/creative delay, it's time for another dubious adventure with the dubious crew of the Bounty. Hopefully not quite as silly as the last holosuite-heavy one. :biggrin:

As ever, hope you enjoy reading!

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 - 201 - “Something Good Happened Today”
Star Trek: Bounty - 202 - "The Bat, the Birds and the Beasts"
Star Trek: Bounty - 203 - "Three Minutes to Three Minutes to Three Minutes to Midnight"
Star Trek: Bounty - 204 - "Acquire, Evade, Retreat, Confront"
Star Trek: Bounty - 205 - "Zen and the Art of Corvallen Shuttlepod Maintenance"
Star Trek: Bounty - 206 - "Any Resemblance to Actual Persons is Purely Coincidental"

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Star Trek: Bounty
2.07
“The Stars That Shall Be Bright When We Are Dust”

Prologue

Tygon Sector, Klingon Empire
Stardate 45009.4

“There!”

The hiss from Lieutenant Kovagh was accompanied by a decisive jab of a stubby finger onto the crimson grid of the tactical board in front of him.

The two Klingons flanking him at his station on the bridge of the IKS Grontar peered at the spot that the junior officer was indicating. Neither looked convinced by what they saw.

The tactical display was dominated by a fuzzy interference pattern, representing the best efforts of the Grontar’s computers to translate the patchy sensor readings it was receiving from the approaching Tygon Nebula into something approaching a viable readout.

But, just where Kovagh had indicated, there was a faint additional trace. A potential contact.

“That is all you have?” the tall Commander Torq, the Grontar’s first officer, replied impassively.

“Pah,” the shorter figure of the ship’s second officer, Lieutenant Commander Lusara, offered with a more dismissive scoff, “That could be anything. Sensor interference, a rogue asteroid—!”

“This is the fourth time I have detected the same signature!” Kovagh fired back, “It is a positive contact, I am sure of it—!”

The excitable young lieutenant only realised he was speaking out of line to a superior when he felt the powerful hand of Commander Torq grabbing him firmly by the shoulder.

“Do not talk that way again, Lieutenant,” he intoned, “Make your report when asked.”

The younger Klingon nodded stiffly, bracing himself for a further volley of anger from Lusara herself, knowing that the ship’s feisty second officer wouldn’t have taken kindly to either his interruption, or Torq’s decision to defend her honour on her behalf. To his surprise, no such response was forthcoming. Lusara merely stared sternly in Torq’s direction.

If Kovagh had been more in tune with the latest scuttlebutt, he may have been less surprised. The developing passion between the two senior officers was an open secret on the Bird of Prey. Initially around the corridors that bordered Torq and Lusara’s cabins, as the violent sounds of their bouts of developing passion leaked into the communal space, and permeating onwards from there.

The news had caused little more than passing amusement among the Grontar’s small crew. Even if they were officially frowned upon, such pairings were commonplace on fleet deployments. When every day brought a fresh battle that might be your last, there rarely seemed much point in waiting for a patch of shore leave to scratch whatever itch a soldier of the Empire might have.

If anything, the affair had given the crew a deeper respect for Torq. Given that, if and when the pairing turned sour, the fiery Lusara would be within her rights to kill her superior on a charge of willful insubordination for fraternising with a junior colleague, and then assume his rank.

Commander Torq was, as far as the crew was concerned, a very brave warrior.

But Kovagh wasn’t up to date on any of that, so both Torq’s defence of the second officer, and Lusara’s decision to apparently allow it, came as a complete surprise to him.

As the junior officer returned to a more deferential silence, the two senior officers consulted the flickering anomaly in the soup of the tactical display a little more closely.

“Four detections or not,” Lusara growled, “It is still most likely the result of interference.”

“Agreed,” Torq nodded stiffly, “However, we are at war. We are here to patrol this region. And we must report this to the captain. Call him at once.”

“We should not be disturbing the captain with every sensor anomaly in the quadrant—!”

“I gave an order,” Torq cut in, “I expect you to carry it out.”

Lusara’s eyes narrowed and blazed red with fire in the direction of her superior. As she tapped the console to carry out the order, she bared her teeth in his direction, and stored this fresh burst of violent rage. Planning to unleash it on her lover’s body once they were both off duty.

Commander Torq was a very brave warrior indeed.

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

Klath, son of Morad, strode onto the bridge of the Grontar.

His heavy captain’s armour shone boldly even in the dim light of the room, and he allowed himself a brief moment to glance around the compact command area with pride. This was his bridge. His ship. His command.

He strode over to the aft tactical station where Torq, Lusara and Kovagh remained gathered.

“Report,” he boomed out at them.

In the presence of their huge, hulking captain, neither Kovagh nor Lusara considered stepping out of line even for a moment, allowing Torq to take the lead as the senior officer present.

“We have detected a potential threat in the Tygon Nebula,” he explained, “Repeated positive contact, though readings are being disrupted by interference from the nebula itself.”

The three officers took a step back, allowing their commander an unobstructed view of the console.

“I see,” Klath nodded, as he glared intensely down at the details of the reported blip, “And what is our current status?”

“We are uncloaked, at impulse,” Torq reported, “Repairs to the warp drive are complete and we should be able to catch up to the rest of the patrol fleet before change of watch. However, we felt this reading merited your attention, sir.”

Klath kept his attention firmly on the readouts, but nodded in acknowledgement. Ordinarily, such a blip would not merit any further investigation. However, as Torq had pointed out to Kovagh and Lusara, right now they were at war.

The Klingon Civil War was only a few days old, yet even the initial skirmishes between sections of the fleet loyal to either Gowron or Duras had been devastatingly bloody. If there was one enemy ready and willing to fight Klingons to the death, it was other Klingons.

Right now, the Grontar was part of a patrol group sent to the Tygon sector by Gowron, to investigate intelligence reports of Duras’s forces illegally moving weapons across the border in this region. Using the nebula as cover, just as this potential contact might have been doing.

Furthermore, Klath and his crew were privy to reports on the operations of Duras loyalists. Including their propensity for sneak attacks on vessels flying Gowron’s colours, using whatever interstellar cover they could find.

It was a distinctly un-Klingon battle tactic. One that had turned Klath’s stomach to hear, almost cowardly enough to be considered Romulan. And yet, it was also proving a very successful one. Just about all of the critical advances made by Duras’s forces had come about from such attacks.

And now, the Grontar was approaching a turbulent, scanner-blinding nebula. One that appeared to contain some sort of sensor trace inside.

In an instant, his warrior’s brain clicked into gear, as he devised the most effective response.

“Helm,” he barked out to the junior lieutenant at the front of the bridge, “Maintain course and speed for now. If this is an enemy contact, we do not wish them to know we have detected them.”

“As you command, sir,” the gruff response came back.

“What is our distance from the nebula?” he demanded, turning to Lt Commander Lusara.

“Two hundred thousand qelI'qammey from nebula boundary,” she reported quickly, “We are on a parallel course.”

Klath turned back to Lieutenant Kovagh and pointed to his console.

“Run a full metallurgical scan,” he ordered, “All sensors concentrated on that area. As we approach, we should be able to get a better eye on what we are dealing with.”

“As you command!”

The young officer snapped into action, as Klath took a moment to thoughtfully gaze at the forward viewscreen, showing the approaching wispy mass of the nebula. And whatever was inside it.

“Tactical alert,” he fired off at Commander Torq, “No shields, nothing to give away our situation. But all weapons crews to combat positions.”

Torq nodded stiffly and tapped a secondary console to initiate the change of ship’s status. The already dim bridge lighting lowered a little further and glowed deep red as a result.

Seconds later, the newest round of scans were complete.

“Here, sir,” Kovagh called out with urgency, “Still only partial results, but definitely a metallic mass.”

“A vessel,” Torq nodded, unnecessarily.

That was all it took for the entire bridge to snap to attention. Someone was hiding in the nebula. And they were at war.

“Full combat alert!” Klath bellowed, as he strode to his raised throne of a command chair, “Helm, alter course to 221-mark-4! Raise shields! Torpedoes ready!”

Captain Klath felt another surge of pride as he felt the entire ship seamlessly preparing for battle all around him, as the men and women under his command carried out his urgent orders.

His ship was preparing to fight for the Empire.

As he settled into his command chair, a chorus of affirmations and alert chimes sounded out all around him. Commander Torq stepped up to his side.

“All decks, all stations ready. Full combat alert.”

Klath felt an extra level of satisfaction at the speed of the operation, as he leaned forward in his chair, urging the ship towards its quarry.

“Captain,” Torq continued, lowering his voice, “I must point out that with our warp drive repaired, and with the sensor data still inconclusive, it might be appropriate to rendezvous with the fleet instead, and report this observation to command.”

Klath growled in the direction of his loyal exec, but Torq didn’t flinch. In truth, Klath knew that his first officer was carrying out his duties as much as anyone else onboard. Suggesting an alternative course of action was an entirely valid and honourable act. And, given the patchy sensor data and the Grontar’s recently repaired status, there was logic in Torq’s suggestion.

Still, the blood lust beat strongly inside of his chest. And he remained focused on their quarry.

“We cannot continue to allow Duras’s forces to act like this,” he hissed back, “We have already lost too many ships, too many warriors, to their dishonourable ways. They are either engaged in activities with illegal weapons, or they are planning a coward’s attack. Whichever it is, we have the element of surprise here, Torq. And so, we strike!”

For the briefest of moments, Torq considered pressing his case further, even if doing so would come close to overstepping the invisible boundaries of a Klingon vessel’s chain of command. But eventually, he relented and stepped back. He trusted his captain, after all. A warrior who had led the Grontar into dozens of battles without fear. And one whose uniform was adorned with a commendation from Chancellor K’mpec, no less.

“We are approaching firing range,” Lusara called out from her own console on the port side of the bridge.

“Status of target,” Klath called out, his blood lust growing ever stronger.

“Readings have not changed,” Kovagh reported, “They have not altered position.”

Klath’s mouth curled into a greedy smile.

“It seems their own sensors are also limited inside the nebula,” he nodded, “We can use their own cover against them.”

As the Grontar crossed into weapons range, the ship’s eager captain sprang into action.

“Target all weapons on their position!” he bellowed, “Full spread!”

“As you command!” Lusara called back.

Klath stared at the swirling nebula on the screen, preparing for another proud battle in his long, glorious career.

He had no idea that his next word would be the last meaningful order he would ever give from the captain’s chair.

“baH!”

Author’s Note: The Tygon Nebula incident has already been referenced several times throughout the ST: Bounty series, particularly featuring as a plot point in Star Trek: Bounty - 102 - "Be All My Sins Forgiven”.

Robert Bruce Scott · Sunday at 2:05 AM

Looks like we've stepped a moment back in time. Ohhh that dastardly Duras family...

Thanks!! rbs

BountyTrek · Sunday at 10:11 PM

Part One

Main Settlement, Gorvik V
Stardate 54578.9, Present Day

Long ago, he had been a warrior.

He had fought in too many battles to even try to remember. He had served on mighty warships as they had rained fire on their enemies. He had clashed with countless foes on the battlefield in pursuit of glory. He had slain rivals, traitors and assassins and lived to wipe their blood from his blade. He had dined on the spoils of that glory, taken strength from his victories. He had even shared bloodwine and sang songs with General Martok himself.

He had lived for, and been ready to die for, the good of the Empire.

And now, he delivered fruit.

Klath, the Klingon weapons chief of the merchant ship Bounty, paused for a moment and looked down at the crate at his feet, filled with the miserable sight of hundreds of cloying, colourful, gently ripening Golana melons.

He found himself recalling some of those battles. The crash of blades, the heat of the fight, the power of the blood lust that had raged inside of him. Ever since his discommendation, and his painful exile from his people, those memories had kept him going. Despite his dishonour, he still felt a measure of pride in those past acts, and his warrior’s soul still believed that one day, he would return to the Empire.

But with each passing day, he felt those memories - and that belief - growing fainter. After all, that wasn’t who he was anymore.

Now, he delivered fruit.

“Hey,” a familiar, annoying voice called out, “You’d better not be slacking off, buddy.”

Klath was shaken from his ruminations as Sunek, the Bounty’s curiously emotional Vulcan pilot, wandered past towards another of the packing crates stacked throughout the ship’s cargo bay.

“Cos,” he continued, “If there’s one thing I hate more than doing manual labour, it’s doing way more manual labour than the guy who’s actually built to do it.”

The wiry Vulcan idly gestured to the burly Klingon with a tired sigh, as the two of them were joined by a third member of the Bounty’s crew returning to the cargo bay for another crate.

“You know,” Natasha Kinsen, the Bounty’s ex-Starfleet medic, offered, “It wouldn’t hurt for you to do more heavy lifting, Sunek. Bulk those arms of yours up a bit.”

“My arms are just fine,” the Vulcan shot back, pushing up the sleeve of his garish Hawaiian shirt and unconvincingly flexing the meagre bicep underneath, “See?”

Natasha smiled and shook her head, as she picked up a crate next to Klath.

“Hey, doc,” Sunek continued with a grin.

“Sunek,” she sighed patiently, nodding at the fruit in the crate, “If this is another ‘nice melons’ joke, may I respectfully point out that nobody laughed at the first three. And an advanced Vulcan mind like yours should really understand the concept of further diminishing returns.”

The Bounty’s pilot looked a little offended at the suggestion that he would try such a puerile gag for the cheapest of laughs, and instead reached into the crate in front of him.

“Um, no,” he retorted, holding up a particularly large Risian banana, “I was actually gonna ask if you wanted to check out my huge—”

“Shut up, Sunek.”

Klath ignored the latest round of playful bickering between his crewmates, and instead lifted up the crate in front of him and followed Natasha down the rear ramp, leaving Sunek to giggle to himself at the unfortunate shape of the fruit in his hand.

As he stomped down the ramp, he passed Denella, the Bounty’s Orion engineer, returning for another crate. She smiled at him as they passed, and he nodded back at his friend.

And these were his friends, he mused. As much as he yearned for the past, this was who he was now. He wasn’t a proud warrior, flying into another glorious battle. He was someone who was friends with a former slave girl, and a human woman, and a deeply, deeply irritating Vulcan.

And he was someone who delivered fruit.

At the foot of the ramp, Klath followed Natasha across the small landing pad where the Bounty had set down for this latest delivery run. The bustling streets of the main market town of the neutral port on Gorvik V stretched out in front of them. Each street was lined on by stores and businesses offering an array of goods and services, while there were further temporary stalls on the walkways in front of the permanent buildings, where traders bartered over all manner of trinkets, fabrics, jewels and, apparently, fresh fruit.

The Bounty had picked up this straightforward delivery by chance, after receiving a general hail from a distributor in the next system over. A Benzite freighter had been waylaid with a faulty impulse drive, leaving an entire harvest of fruit bound for Gorvik V at risk of rotting in their crates.

They had been the first to respond, and while the improvised refrigeration solution that Denella had come up with by tweaking the atmospheric controls in the cargo bay hadn’t been ideal, it had been enough for their cargo to survive the fifteen hour trip to its destination. And now, they simply had to unload the crates into a storage building near to the landing pad, where the trader who had ordered the stock kept his wares prior to setting them out on his stall.

As Klath walked into the storage building and dropped the latest crate down on top of the similar container that Natasha had placed down in front of him, the final member of the Bounty’s crew was already there.

Jirel, the unjoined Trill and de facto captain of the Bounty, stood alongside the market trader. He was one of the resident Gorvikians, a humanoid species whose skin was covered in rows of tiny crimson scales, and whose lizard-like features were topped off with tiny obsidian eyes and a dark brown tongue that unerringly flitted in and out of its wide mouth as it spoke.

The Trill was in the middle of checking over a padd in his hand as the tired Natasha called out to him with a good-natured tone.

“Speaking of people running scared of a bit of manual labour…”

Jirel looked up at the red-haired doctor and smiled back.

“Captain’s discretion,” he shrugged, waving the padd at her, “Besides, someone’s gotta lift all this heavy paperwork, haven’t they?”

Klath noted how Natasha rolled her eyes at him, but also how she smiled a little more warmly, a gesture reciprocated by the Trill. He groaned inwardly at this latest moment of flirtation between the pair.

He knew that both Denella and Sunek found the continued tension between the Bounty’s captain and medic, and particularly their regular denials of the existence of said tension, to be a source of some amusement. But he merely found it to be another source of irritation.

After all, if their mutual attraction was so obvious that even he, someone with absolutely no interest in the mating rituals of other species, could pick up on it, then he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just act on that attraction. Rather than behaving as they did.

As Natasha walked off back to the Bounty, Klath noticed that Jirel’s attention was now on him.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

The Klingon was a little taken aback, as Jirel handed the padd back to the Gorvikian trader with a smile, before walking over to join him.

“And I know,” he continued, gesturing to the crates of fruit, “It’s not exactly the most exciting work. But it’s still work.”

Klath felt a little reassured that Jirel hadn’t actually known what he was thinking. The one thing worse than observing their flirtation would have been if the Trill had asked him for advice on the matter.

Still, his reassurance only went so far. It still appeared that Jirel was eager for another of those social situations that irritated him. A moment of small talk.

“The work is…fine,” he grunted back, hoping that would suffice.

Jirel smiled patiently back at his longest-serving and least-talkative crew member. Someone who he could, despite the Klingon’s best efforts, often read like a book after their years together.

“We’re delivering melons, Klath. I know you’re not fine with that.”

An image popped into the Klingon’s mind. Of him fighting through a group of Romulan footsoldiers during a skirmish on a border colony near Gamma Eridon, armed with nothing more than his trusty bat’leth. The same weapon that was still sheathed on his back right now.

He wasn’t fine with what he was doing now. But he was equally not fine with small talk.

“Look,” Jirel continued, despite the expected lack of a response, “It’s just one job. And a handy one at that. We got double the usual rate for stepping in at the last minute like this.”

“As I said,” Klath said again, “The work is…fine.”

“…Right.”

As the two friends walked back towards the Bounty, Jirel patted the huge Klingon on the back.

“How about, once we’re done here, we try to find something a bit more challenging, hmm? Maybe something a bit closer to bandit country? See if we can fire a few torpedoes at a pirate ship or two, or at least find a decent bar fight?”

Klath suppressed a sigh as they emerged back onto the street. While he could see that his friend evidently meant well, he still had no interest in having the conversation that the Trill seemed determined to have.

“Jirel,” he persisted, “The work is—”

He stopped on the spot. Both physically and conversationally.

Suddenly, he felt the unmistakable sense of being watched. As though an attack was imminent. His warrior instincts flared into life, and he spun around into a squat, defensive pose.

But he saw nothing in front of him apart from the merry crowds of shoppers and sellers continuing their transactions. All either oblivious or uninterested in the Klingon’s shift in posture.

Jirel, however, had seen that reaction before. Usually just before something bad happened.

“What is it?” he asked with an edge of concern, scanning the crowds of shoppers.

Klath’s own keen eyes continued to dart around, almost willing whomever he had sensed to emerge from the peaceful scene in front of him. But his defensive posture slowly relaxed again, as he was forced to conclude that he must have been mistaken.

“For a moment,” he began, “I thought I saw…”

He paused again.

Long ago, he had been a warrior. But now he delivered fruit. And that was clearly now showing in his instincts. The ones he had honed on so many battlefields when he had fought for the Empire.

The ones that had evidently now atrophied to the point that he could no longer trust them.

“It was nothing,” he concluded with a definitive nod.

With that, he turned away from the crowds and continued on towards the Bounty. Jirel followed, casting a concerned eye at his troubled friend.

Klath felt Jirel’s look. His instincts were still working that much, it seemed. But he was far more concerned by his previous faltering reaction, which seemed to confirm what he had been increasingly feeling of his time in exile.

He had once been a warrior.

But with each passing day, he was becoming a little less of one.

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

A few hours later, the Bounty’s delivery was complete.

Now, with the ship lighter by several pounds of fruit, and their bank balance heavier by several bars of latinum, the weatherbeaten Ju’Day-type raider gently lifted off from the surface of Gorvik V and jetted back towards orbit.

As it moved up into the red-tinged cloud layer, nobody on the ground would have been able to make out the almost imperceptible shimmer of the transporter effect on the underside of the port-side wing. Equally, thanks to some clever transporter manipulation, the Bounty’s own somewhat antiquated sensor systems failed to detect that anything was amiss.

But something was amiss.

In a split second, a tiny sector of the ship’s hull plating had been removed, and in its place, an identically-sized and weighted section of metal had taken its place.

Except this one was also equipped with a tiny rectangular metal device, attached flush to the hull plate that it had replaced.

A tiny rectangular metal device that, as the Bounty broke through Gorvik V’s atmosphere and back into the cold blackness of space, began to transmit.

Star Trek: Bounty - 207 - "The Stars That Shall Be Bright When We Are Dust"

BountyTrek

Captain

Robert Bruce Scott

Commodore

BountyTrek

Captain

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