Figures - our con man is.... A convict!!! Nice buildup with the uniforms, style of the ship, etc.
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Star Trek: Bounty - 6 - "He Feedeth Among the Lilies"
- Thread starter BountyTrek
- Start date
Part Three
Natasha slowly came round and opened her eyes. Only to find that, initially at least, her vision was almost as dark as when she’d been unconscious. It took a while for her eyes to get used to the dank interior she found herself in.
She felt the pain in the back of her head from where she had been struck, and gently shook her head to test for signs of concussion. She didn’t know exactly how long she had been out, but it had clearly been some time.
Slowly, the darkness around her began to resolve, aided by a few streaks of sunlight permeating through the thatch of the roof.
She could make out a modest, open plan rectangular room, with a series of stout pillars dotted around, which helped to support the roof itself. The ground underneath her feet was made of soft grass, though she could see that it wasn’t a vibrant green, but a sickly brown.
She tried to stand up, but found that particular task was impossible, thanks to her being so tightly shackled to the wooden column behind her with some sort of woven rope material. She noticed that her tricorder was still attached to her belt, as was her communicator. As if her captors had no interest in them.
As she started to struggle against her bonds, she was caught off guard by the sound of an unmistakably female voice from somewhere behind her.
“Brother Falor ties them tight,” the voice said.
Surprised, and suddenly on edge, Natasha managed to awkwardly slide her way around the pillar as best she could until she found the source of the voice. There was a weak-looking Makalite similarly trussed to another of the wooden columns.
“I did not mean to alarm you,” the woman offered with an apologetic tone, “Good wishes to you. I am Sister Lyca.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Natasha replied with a distinct hint of sarcasm.
Recognising that the restrained woman wasn’t a threat, she turned her attention back to her bonds, as Sister Lyca watched on with some curiosity.
“You came with the spotted man?”
Natasha resisted the temptation to roll her eyes at this and continued to work. Given how she was feeling after the blow to the head, she could have really done without another discussion with a local about the famous ‘spotted man’.
“Let me guess,” she grimaced, “You’ve been waiting for him to lead you to salvation?”
She did her best to hide the undertone of derision from her comment, and as she glanced back up at the other woman. And then she saw, through the gloom, that there was no sense of wonder or delight on her face, as there had been with the other Makalites as soon as Jirel had been mentioned.
“No,” Sister Lyca replied, with an edge of defeat, “I didn’t--I don’t believe in the prophecy. That is why I am in here.”
Her comments caused Natasha to stop her attempts to extricate herself from her bonds for a moment, and immediately sparked up her old Starfleet curiosity over again.
“Why don't you believe it?” she asked.
Inside, Sister Lyca felt more troubled than ever, discussing her disregard for The Seer’s prophecy with someone who was apparently one of the spotted man’s travelling companions. For all she knew, this might be some sort of trap, designed to further punish her.
But during her solitary incarceration, she had continued to debate her stance on the prophecy in her mind, especially now the skyship had indeed appeared. And after her last visit from The Seer, she was still convinced that her own beliefs were correct.
Especially now that Brother Falor and Brother Makan had dragged the Bastille’s latest occupant inside.
“I don’t believe The Seer’s words,” she cautiously explained, “And I don’t think that the spotted man will take us to our utopia. I believe that The Seer brought the sickness to us, and that he cannot cure us. And now you are here, I believe it more.”
“Why?” Natasha pressed again, pulling at the thread of information in front of her like a good ex-Starfleet officer should.
“Because if the spotted man truly has come to save us, then why has one of his companions been locked away inside here with me?”
Natasha couldn’t help but nod and smile, seeing the signs of some genuine critical thinking from one of the villagers.
“Sister Lyca,” she offered back to the apparently more level-headed Makalite, “Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”
The blue-skinned woman still looked a little tentative, but she eventually nodded.
“You mentioned the disease,” Natasha began, “I’ve already examined some of the other villagers, but I need to know more. One of the other Sisters said it started several weeks ago?”
Sister Lyca’s eyes widened slightly at this line of questioning. Natasha stifled a sigh.
“I’m…a healer,” she added reluctantly, “Where I’m from.”
“And where are you from?”
Natasha found herself biting her tongue at that question again. For a moment, she desperately racked her brain to try and remember if this planet had a Southern continent. Or were they already on the Southern continent?
In the end, she decided that Sister Lyca at least deserved the partial truth.
“I’m from a place far away,” she offered, “And we’ve come here in our…skyship. But you’re right, The Seer didn’t bring us here. As a matter of fact, I’ve never even met him.”
The Makalite woman nodded in apparent understanding.
“But,” Natasha continued, with a firmer tone, “Weirdly enough, I might actually be able to help your sickness. If you can tell me more about it.”
“I see,” Sister Lyca replied after a pause, “It is true what you’ve been told. The sickness began some weeks ago. When The Seer had been with us for some time. And for all of his visions and prophecies, it always got worse.”
She paused and stifled a grimace, craning her head back to try and look at her arm. It was a look that Natasha’s medical training immediately recognised, regardless of the species.
“Is the pain getting worse?”
Sister Lyca’s head snapped back up to look at her, a little surprised at the instant diagnosis. But again, after a moment, she nodded.
“It grows worse by the hour,” she admitted with another wince, “I fear that it will not be long before I sing my song for the Beast of the Great Hereafter.”
“The…what?”
The Makalite woman blinked across in confusion, as if that question was ridiculous.
“The Beast comes for you when it is your time to pass. It guards the entrance to the Great Hereafter, and only if your song is considered worthy by the beast will you be allowed to pass on.”
Natasha stifled a grimace, reminding herself that, no matter how credulous Sister Lyca may appear on some topics, she was still from a very primitive culture.
“Ok,” she managed, “Well, I don’t think it’ll come to that, Sister Lyca. So long as we can get out of here.”
She looked around the confines of the dark enclosure as best she could, a little confused.
“Where exactly are we? Are we still in the village?”
“Yes,” Sister Lyca explained, “The Bastille is where the Brothers take those that have moved against the prophecy. I myself have spent many cycles here.”
The name of the structure rang some alarm bells with Natasha, not to mention the apparent reason for its use. She looked around again and saw that while the columns they were secured to were simple wooden structures, the walls looked to be a similar metal to that she had seen outside. A few more connections started to fuse together in her mind as she pieced everything together.
“So,” she queried, “The Seer built this place?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “The Seer has changed a lot about our village. He oversaw construction of the Bastille, and the temple in the square. Both buildings were supposed to help with the prophecy. He would go off into the forest to gather the shiny material.”
“Huh,” Natasha mused as she glanced at the metal again, “Must have some funny trees growing around here. And the other villagers used this…material to help support their huts?”
“Yes. Many of the villagers had their huts improved as a reward by The Seer for the extent of their donations to the cause.”
Natasha remembered what Sister Tula had mentioned earlier about the ‘offerings’ that her family had made. A few more alarm bells went off in her head.
“You see,” Sister Lyca continued, “The Seer asks everyone to make regular donations at the temple. Treasures, jewels, whatever can be spared, or found out in the forest. He claims that only through such generosity will the prophecy come true."
“Yeah,” Natasha couldn’t help but mutter, “I bet he does.”
She recalled plenty of historical cases that she had been taught about back at the Academy, where certain groups or individuals had, on occasion, sought to infiltrate and take advantage of less developed societies or cultures. Ekos, Planet 892-IV, Garrian VII, the list went on.
She had even been involved in some hands-on work to deal with some minor pieces of cultural contamination while she had served in Starfleet. It was a perpetual issue for any organisation with a sense of morals in a galaxy where so many species at different stages of development coexisted.
And there were plenty of red flags in what Sister Lyca was telling her. Without even having met The Seer, Natasha was seeing some fairly clear signs of exploitation.
But they weren’t the telltale signs that seemed the most pressing as she looked back at Sister Lyca, and was able to discern through the gloom of the Bastille that she was looking increasingly pale, and seemed to be sweating.
On cue, Sister Lyca coughed loudly, the sound echoing around the hut.
“I fear,” she managed, “The Beast will be here soon.”
“You’re sweating,” Natasha noted, “And pale. Are you also feeling sick? Nauseous? And it’s got a lot worse since you were tied up in here?”
Sister Lyca looked over and nodded, confirming Natasha's earlier prognosis.
Natasha studied her latest patient from a distance, and then looked at the walls again, shaking her head defiantly as her prognosis clicked into place. She also absently wondered how long the hyronalin compound she’d administered to herself some hours earlier would last for.
“Ok, Sister Lyca, the good news is I can help keep the Beast away from you,” she said, “I think I know what’s wrong here. And I think I can heal you.”
“You can?”
“I can,” she affirmed, “Although, the bad news is that, unless we get out of here soon, everyone in the village is going to die.”
With that ominous statement, she redoubled her efforts to break her bonds.
Seconds later, a thoroughly shocked Sister Lyca joined in.
Natasha slowly came round and opened her eyes. Only to find that, initially at least, her vision was almost as dark as when she’d been unconscious. It took a while for her eyes to get used to the dank interior she found herself in.
She felt the pain in the back of her head from where she had been struck, and gently shook her head to test for signs of concussion. She didn’t know exactly how long she had been out, but it had clearly been some time.
Slowly, the darkness around her began to resolve, aided by a few streaks of sunlight permeating through the thatch of the roof.
She could make out a modest, open plan rectangular room, with a series of stout pillars dotted around, which helped to support the roof itself. The ground underneath her feet was made of soft grass, though she could see that it wasn’t a vibrant green, but a sickly brown.
She tried to stand up, but found that particular task was impossible, thanks to her being so tightly shackled to the wooden column behind her with some sort of woven rope material. She noticed that her tricorder was still attached to her belt, as was her communicator. As if her captors had no interest in them.
As she started to struggle against her bonds, she was caught off guard by the sound of an unmistakably female voice from somewhere behind her.
“Brother Falor ties them tight,” the voice said.
Surprised, and suddenly on edge, Natasha managed to awkwardly slide her way around the pillar as best she could until she found the source of the voice. There was a weak-looking Makalite similarly trussed to another of the wooden columns.
“I did not mean to alarm you,” the woman offered with an apologetic tone, “Good wishes to you. I am Sister Lyca.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Natasha replied with a distinct hint of sarcasm.
Recognising that the restrained woman wasn’t a threat, she turned her attention back to her bonds, as Sister Lyca watched on with some curiosity.
“You came with the spotted man?”
Natasha resisted the temptation to roll her eyes at this and continued to work. Given how she was feeling after the blow to the head, she could have really done without another discussion with a local about the famous ‘spotted man’.
“Let me guess,” she grimaced, “You’ve been waiting for him to lead you to salvation?”
She did her best to hide the undertone of derision from her comment, and as she glanced back up at the other woman. And then she saw, through the gloom, that there was no sense of wonder or delight on her face, as there had been with the other Makalites as soon as Jirel had been mentioned.
“No,” Sister Lyca replied, with an edge of defeat, “I didn’t--I don’t believe in the prophecy. That is why I am in here.”
Her comments caused Natasha to stop her attempts to extricate herself from her bonds for a moment, and immediately sparked up her old Starfleet curiosity over again.
“Why don't you believe it?” she asked.
Inside, Sister Lyca felt more troubled than ever, discussing her disregard for The Seer’s prophecy with someone who was apparently one of the spotted man’s travelling companions. For all she knew, this might be some sort of trap, designed to further punish her.
But during her solitary incarceration, she had continued to debate her stance on the prophecy in her mind, especially now the skyship had indeed appeared. And after her last visit from The Seer, she was still convinced that her own beliefs were correct.
Especially now that Brother Falor and Brother Makan had dragged the Bastille’s latest occupant inside.
“I don’t believe The Seer’s words,” she cautiously explained, “And I don’t think that the spotted man will take us to our utopia. I believe that The Seer brought the sickness to us, and that he cannot cure us. And now you are here, I believe it more.”
“Why?” Natasha pressed again, pulling at the thread of information in front of her like a good ex-Starfleet officer should.
“Because if the spotted man truly has come to save us, then why has one of his companions been locked away inside here with me?”
Natasha couldn’t help but nod and smile, seeing the signs of some genuine critical thinking from one of the villagers.
“Sister Lyca,” she offered back to the apparently more level-headed Makalite, “Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”
The blue-skinned woman still looked a little tentative, but she eventually nodded.
“You mentioned the disease,” Natasha began, “I’ve already examined some of the other villagers, but I need to know more. One of the other Sisters said it started several weeks ago?”
Sister Lyca’s eyes widened slightly at this line of questioning. Natasha stifled a sigh.
“I’m…a healer,” she added reluctantly, “Where I’m from.”
“And where are you from?”
Natasha found herself biting her tongue at that question again. For a moment, she desperately racked her brain to try and remember if this planet had a Southern continent. Or were they already on the Southern continent?
In the end, she decided that Sister Lyca at least deserved the partial truth.
“I’m from a place far away,” she offered, “And we’ve come here in our…skyship. But you’re right, The Seer didn’t bring us here. As a matter of fact, I’ve never even met him.”
The Makalite woman nodded in apparent understanding.
“But,” Natasha continued, with a firmer tone, “Weirdly enough, I might actually be able to help your sickness. If you can tell me more about it.”
“I see,” Sister Lyca replied after a pause, “It is true what you’ve been told. The sickness began some weeks ago. When The Seer had been with us for some time. And for all of his visions and prophecies, it always got worse.”
She paused and stifled a grimace, craning her head back to try and look at her arm. It was a look that Natasha’s medical training immediately recognised, regardless of the species.
“Is the pain getting worse?”
Sister Lyca’s head snapped back up to look at her, a little surprised at the instant diagnosis. But again, after a moment, she nodded.
“It grows worse by the hour,” she admitted with another wince, “I fear that it will not be long before I sing my song for the Beast of the Great Hereafter.”
“The…what?”
The Makalite woman blinked across in confusion, as if that question was ridiculous.
“The Beast comes for you when it is your time to pass. It guards the entrance to the Great Hereafter, and only if your song is considered worthy by the beast will you be allowed to pass on.”
Natasha stifled a grimace, reminding herself that, no matter how credulous Sister Lyca may appear on some topics, she was still from a very primitive culture.
“Ok,” she managed, “Well, I don’t think it’ll come to that, Sister Lyca. So long as we can get out of here.”
She looked around the confines of the dark enclosure as best she could, a little confused.
“Where exactly are we? Are we still in the village?”
“Yes,” Sister Lyca explained, “The Bastille is where the Brothers take those that have moved against the prophecy. I myself have spent many cycles here.”
The name of the structure rang some alarm bells with Natasha, not to mention the apparent reason for its use. She looked around again and saw that while the columns they were secured to were simple wooden structures, the walls looked to be a similar metal to that she had seen outside. A few more connections started to fuse together in her mind as she pieced everything together.
“So,” she queried, “The Seer built this place?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “The Seer has changed a lot about our village. He oversaw construction of the Bastille, and the temple in the square. Both buildings were supposed to help with the prophecy. He would go off into the forest to gather the shiny material.”
“Huh,” Natasha mused as she glanced at the metal again, “Must have some funny trees growing around here. And the other villagers used this…material to help support their huts?”
“Yes. Many of the villagers had their huts improved as a reward by The Seer for the extent of their donations to the cause.”
Natasha remembered what Sister Tula had mentioned earlier about the ‘offerings’ that her family had made. A few more alarm bells went off in her head.
“You see,” Sister Lyca continued, “The Seer asks everyone to make regular donations at the temple. Treasures, jewels, whatever can be spared, or found out in the forest. He claims that only through such generosity will the prophecy come true."
“Yeah,” Natasha couldn’t help but mutter, “I bet he does.”
She recalled plenty of historical cases that she had been taught about back at the Academy, where certain groups or individuals had, on occasion, sought to infiltrate and take advantage of less developed societies or cultures. Ekos, Planet 892-IV, Garrian VII, the list went on.
She had even been involved in some hands-on work to deal with some minor pieces of cultural contamination while she had served in Starfleet. It was a perpetual issue for any organisation with a sense of morals in a galaxy where so many species at different stages of development coexisted.
And there were plenty of red flags in what Sister Lyca was telling her. Without even having met The Seer, Natasha was seeing some fairly clear signs of exploitation.
But they weren’t the telltale signs that seemed the most pressing as she looked back at Sister Lyca, and was able to discern through the gloom of the Bastille that she was looking increasingly pale, and seemed to be sweating.
On cue, Sister Lyca coughed loudly, the sound echoing around the hut.
“I fear,” she managed, “The Beast will be here soon.”
“You’re sweating,” Natasha noted, “And pale. Are you also feeling sick? Nauseous? And it’s got a lot worse since you were tied up in here?”
Sister Lyca looked over and nodded, confirming Natasha's earlier prognosis.
Natasha studied her latest patient from a distance, and then looked at the walls again, shaking her head defiantly as her prognosis clicked into place. She also absently wondered how long the hyronalin compound she’d administered to herself some hours earlier would last for.
“Ok, Sister Lyca, the good news is I can help keep the Beast away from you,” she said, “I think I know what’s wrong here. And I think I can heal you.”
“You can?”
“I can,” she affirmed, “Although, the bad news is that, unless we get out of here soon, everyone in the village is going to die.”
With that ominous statement, she redoubled her efforts to break her bonds.
Seconds later, a thoroughly shocked Sister Lyca joined in.
Part Three (Cont'd)
Of all the things that Jirel could accuse Martus Mazur of being, and ever since he had fallen for that Vulcan supply ship scam all those years ago, that was a fairly extensive list of things, it turned out that being a bad actor was not one of them.
As Mazur led him and Klath through the village square, past the Makalites clearing up what was left from the earlier festivities, he couldn’t help but begrudgingly admire his commitment to his character.
From the moment they had emerged from the hut, the El-Aurian had effortlessly slipped back into his role as The Seer, walking through his flock with a kind and peaceable demeanour, a million miles away from the frustration and anger there had been in private.
“My Brothers, my Sisters,” he called out serenely, as the Makalites regarded him with reverence and awe, “Everything is proceeding as The Seer has foreseen. Our salvation is nearly here.”
Jirel and Klath walked a couple of paces behind the overly grandiose performance, with the Trill beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about the way he was being so adoringly regarded by the villagers around them.
Being a saviour was a lot less cool now he knew the truth.
“He is quite the performer,” Klath muttered to him surreptitiously as they headed across the square, “I do not trust him.”
Jirel was more than inclined to agree, on both points.
“Do not fear,” Mazur continued ahead of them, “The Seer will make sure that everything is prepared for. For all of you.”
This somewhat empty comment seemed to be enough to keep the Makalites happy. The villagers that they were passing began to nod and chatter in excitement.
“Like my mother always said,” Jirel offered back to the Klingon, “Never trust anyone who has a habit of referring to themselves in the third person.”
They eventually reached their destination, the squat metal-walled building that some of the Makalites had referred to as their temple. Mazur, billowing robes and all, entered through the main doorway, and Jirel and Klath followed.
Inside, the temple was a fundamentally simple sort of design, much like the hut that they had come from. There was no proper floor inside the dank confines of the temple itself, meaning that they still walked on the dirty ground, albeit mostly bereft of grass and plants. Aside from the four main outer walls, the only other adornment was a long wooden table, with a series of candle-type lamps burning at strategic intervals in order to fully illuminate the room.
The table itself was covered in jewels and precious stones, while below the table were a number of substantially less glamorous items such as woven cloth, wooden sculptures, clay pots and even various bits of food. It appeared as though the Makalites had literally been donating anything they could to secure their salvation.
It seemed clear that they had now stumbled into the very heart of Mazur’s latest scam.
“Amazing what a fancy speech or two and an authoritative enough voice will do to a group of people, isn’t it?” Mazur chuckled as he gestured to the riches on display.
The El-Aurian quickly moved over to the table and produced a small knapsack from underneath his robes. He began to pick up some of the larger gems and jewels, examining them in the candlelight, before depositing those that passed the test into the bag.
And as Jirel watched him sort through the mountain of ill-gotten treasure that his display as The Seer had managed to accumulate, he couldn’t help but feel a palpable pang of guilt deep inside his gut.
“This is low, Mazur,” he grunted, “Even for you.”
In general, the Trill accepted that he was a man who had occasionally exploited a situation when it presented itself. It was sometimes a matter of necessity when you encountered as many sticky situations as he did. But what he was seeing now was something else entirely.
Mazur, for his part, didn’t look back, continuing to deftly examine each jewel at a time.
“Please, spare me the ethics lecture,” he tossed back casually, “If I’d wanted one of those, I’d have sent a distress call to Starfleet.”
At this comment, Jirel felt a slight pang of concern, as he suddenly realised that he hadn’t seen their own former Starfleet colleague for a while. But before he had a chance to ask Klath about Natasha, Mazur continued.
“Besides. For all I know, given my luck, all of these’ll end up being worthless.”
He paused and held up a particularly large purple-tinged gem, turning it around carefully in the candlelight, and then shrugging.
“Eh, maybe not all of them…”
“So you’re cutting and running,” Jirel sighed, “Just like you did with that Vulcan supply ship stunt you pulled on me. You’ve got the Makalites to hand over all their possessions, and you’re gonna leave them with nothing.”
Mazur tossed the purple jewel into the knapsack, and gestured to the various objects on or under the table that he was paying no interest to.
“I’m leaving them with plenty,” he indicated, “Just helping myself to an appropriately sized payment. And I deserve it, because you have no idea what I’ve been through down here these last two months. I’ve helped these people out, given them hope, wasted so much time just…listening to their endless problems!”
“Thought you El-Aurians were good listeners?”
“We have our limits. So, I think I deserve a little something in return.”
“Exploitation,” Klath muttered.
“Reimbursement,” Mazur countered.
“And what happens to the Makalites now, hmm?” Jirel pressed as another jewel was tossed into the knapsack, “You just leave them here, after everything you’ve promised them?”
“Would you rather give them all a lift?” the El-Aurian replied, before shrugging, “Besides, they’ll get over it.”
“You sure about that?”
“That’s the beauty of dealing with people that are so easy to manipulate. They’ll all move on from this as soon as the next movement, or religion, or wanderer with a powerful-sounding voice and some mystical-enough words stumbles past.”
“Nice to see that legendary El-Aurian empathy shining through.”
Mazur ignored Jirel’s barbed comment and concluded his extensive examination of the various treasures inside the temple, lifting the clinking knapsack over his shoulder and walking back over to the door.
“Whatever,” he grunted, “I’d say it’s time for us to get out of here, hmm?”
Jirel looked from Mazur to Klath and back again. He was still conflicted about the morals of the situation they had found themselves in. But equally, he knew that the Bounty and her crew weren’t in a position to call themselves the galaxy’s morality police. And everything that was happening down here was way outside of their pay grade.
“Fine,” he sighed eventually, “But where’s Natasha?”
“Who?” Mazur replied dismissively as he peered out of the doorway to see whether the coast was clear or not.
“Human lady, average height, overly friendly, red hair, irritating ability to turn every little thing into a grand ethical dilemma?”
Klath nodded along with this description at Jirel’s side.
“Not familiar,” Mazur shrugged.
Jirel reached for his communicator and tapped the controls to open a comms link.
“Jirel to Natasha. Where are you?”
There was a crackle of static, but no response. The Trill looked at the Klingon with a note of concern.
“Could be the radiation?” he offered.
“Possible,” Klath replied, in a subtle tone that suggested a significant part of himself didn’t believe that for a second, “She was over on the other side of the village when I left her, still investigating the…disease.”
At the doorway, Mazur sighed, clearly irritated by the latest delay to his increasingly improvised escape plan.
“Look, we don’t have time for this. The longer we wait, the more these village idiots will have started to pack up their things and join the queue for a lift. I’m sure your friend will catch up with us.”
Jirel glared back at the man in the robes with no small amount of distrust.
“We’re not leaving here without her,” he stated flatly, “So you’re just gonna have to wait.”
“I’m telling you,” Mazur pressed, “We need to get--”
He suddenly grimaced in pain and staggered slightly, his legs half-buckling underneath him as he started to drop to his knees. Neither Jirel nor Klath moved at first, their sympathies for him not exactly running over. But eventually, Jirel stepped up and helped him back to his feet.
It was then that he saw the signs of the debilitating red rash on Mazur’s arm.
“What the hell?”
The El-Aurian regained his balance and quickly pulled the sleeve of his robes back down, but it was too late to hide what Jirel had seen.
“It’s nothing,” he managed.
“The hell it is,” Jirel shot back, now more concerned, “I thought you said this disease only affects the Makalites.”
“Perhaps,” Klath added, “It might be in your interests to locate the doctor after all.”
“No need,” Mazur grimaced as he internalised the fresh flare of pain from his arm, “Just…get me out of here.”
Jirel grimaced as he considered the situation, then looked back at Klath.
“Ok, here’s what we’ll do. You get the All-Seeing Eye back to the Bounty, and I’ll go and track down Natasha--”
“No,” Mazur countered, pointing at the Trill, “You should come with me.”
“Any particular reason?”
“The Seer and the spotted man parlaying together in the forest will be a lot easier to sell to the locals if we’re seen,” he pointed out, “So as not to arouse any suspicions.”
Jirel sighed again, frustrated by how completely and entirely wrapped up in Mazur’s little scheme he now was. He didn’t really want to openly admit quite how concerned he was feeling about Natasha’s absence, or how much he wanted to be the one to go and find her. But equally, he couldn’t see an obvious flaw in Mazur’s logic.
“Fine,” he nodded eventually.
The three of them made for the exit to the hut together, as Mazur worked on regaining his strength as fully as he could.
He realised that his best laid plans were at risk of unravelling with these additional delays. And that he may be forced to take more drastic action to make his escape.
As Klath walked off towards where he had last seen Natasha, Mazur felt around under his robes, and smiled at the reassuring form of the concealed Edosian disruptor pistol.
Of all the things that Jirel could accuse Martus Mazur of being, and ever since he had fallen for that Vulcan supply ship scam all those years ago, that was a fairly extensive list of things, it turned out that being a bad actor was not one of them.
As Mazur led him and Klath through the village square, past the Makalites clearing up what was left from the earlier festivities, he couldn’t help but begrudgingly admire his commitment to his character.
From the moment they had emerged from the hut, the El-Aurian had effortlessly slipped back into his role as The Seer, walking through his flock with a kind and peaceable demeanour, a million miles away from the frustration and anger there had been in private.
“My Brothers, my Sisters,” he called out serenely, as the Makalites regarded him with reverence and awe, “Everything is proceeding as The Seer has foreseen. Our salvation is nearly here.”
Jirel and Klath walked a couple of paces behind the overly grandiose performance, with the Trill beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about the way he was being so adoringly regarded by the villagers around them.
Being a saviour was a lot less cool now he knew the truth.
“He is quite the performer,” Klath muttered to him surreptitiously as they headed across the square, “I do not trust him.”
Jirel was more than inclined to agree, on both points.
“Do not fear,” Mazur continued ahead of them, “The Seer will make sure that everything is prepared for. For all of you.”
This somewhat empty comment seemed to be enough to keep the Makalites happy. The villagers that they were passing began to nod and chatter in excitement.
“Like my mother always said,” Jirel offered back to the Klingon, “Never trust anyone who has a habit of referring to themselves in the third person.”
They eventually reached their destination, the squat metal-walled building that some of the Makalites had referred to as their temple. Mazur, billowing robes and all, entered through the main doorway, and Jirel and Klath followed.
Inside, the temple was a fundamentally simple sort of design, much like the hut that they had come from. There was no proper floor inside the dank confines of the temple itself, meaning that they still walked on the dirty ground, albeit mostly bereft of grass and plants. Aside from the four main outer walls, the only other adornment was a long wooden table, with a series of candle-type lamps burning at strategic intervals in order to fully illuminate the room.
The table itself was covered in jewels and precious stones, while below the table were a number of substantially less glamorous items such as woven cloth, wooden sculptures, clay pots and even various bits of food. It appeared as though the Makalites had literally been donating anything they could to secure their salvation.
It seemed clear that they had now stumbled into the very heart of Mazur’s latest scam.
“Amazing what a fancy speech or two and an authoritative enough voice will do to a group of people, isn’t it?” Mazur chuckled as he gestured to the riches on display.
The El-Aurian quickly moved over to the table and produced a small knapsack from underneath his robes. He began to pick up some of the larger gems and jewels, examining them in the candlelight, before depositing those that passed the test into the bag.
And as Jirel watched him sort through the mountain of ill-gotten treasure that his display as The Seer had managed to accumulate, he couldn’t help but feel a palpable pang of guilt deep inside his gut.
“This is low, Mazur,” he grunted, “Even for you.”
In general, the Trill accepted that he was a man who had occasionally exploited a situation when it presented itself. It was sometimes a matter of necessity when you encountered as many sticky situations as he did. But what he was seeing now was something else entirely.
Mazur, for his part, didn’t look back, continuing to deftly examine each jewel at a time.
“Please, spare me the ethics lecture,” he tossed back casually, “If I’d wanted one of those, I’d have sent a distress call to Starfleet.”
At this comment, Jirel felt a slight pang of concern, as he suddenly realised that he hadn’t seen their own former Starfleet colleague for a while. But before he had a chance to ask Klath about Natasha, Mazur continued.
“Besides. For all I know, given my luck, all of these’ll end up being worthless.”
He paused and held up a particularly large purple-tinged gem, turning it around carefully in the candlelight, and then shrugging.
“Eh, maybe not all of them…”
“So you’re cutting and running,” Jirel sighed, “Just like you did with that Vulcan supply ship stunt you pulled on me. You’ve got the Makalites to hand over all their possessions, and you’re gonna leave them with nothing.”
Mazur tossed the purple jewel into the knapsack, and gestured to the various objects on or under the table that he was paying no interest to.
“I’m leaving them with plenty,” he indicated, “Just helping myself to an appropriately sized payment. And I deserve it, because you have no idea what I’ve been through down here these last two months. I’ve helped these people out, given them hope, wasted so much time just…listening to their endless problems!”
“Thought you El-Aurians were good listeners?”
“We have our limits. So, I think I deserve a little something in return.”
“Exploitation,” Klath muttered.
“Reimbursement,” Mazur countered.
“And what happens to the Makalites now, hmm?” Jirel pressed as another jewel was tossed into the knapsack, “You just leave them here, after everything you’ve promised them?”
“Would you rather give them all a lift?” the El-Aurian replied, before shrugging, “Besides, they’ll get over it.”
“You sure about that?”
“That’s the beauty of dealing with people that are so easy to manipulate. They’ll all move on from this as soon as the next movement, or religion, or wanderer with a powerful-sounding voice and some mystical-enough words stumbles past.”
“Nice to see that legendary El-Aurian empathy shining through.”
Mazur ignored Jirel’s barbed comment and concluded his extensive examination of the various treasures inside the temple, lifting the clinking knapsack over his shoulder and walking back over to the door.
“Whatever,” he grunted, “I’d say it’s time for us to get out of here, hmm?”
Jirel looked from Mazur to Klath and back again. He was still conflicted about the morals of the situation they had found themselves in. But equally, he knew that the Bounty and her crew weren’t in a position to call themselves the galaxy’s morality police. And everything that was happening down here was way outside of their pay grade.
“Fine,” he sighed eventually, “But where’s Natasha?”
“Who?” Mazur replied dismissively as he peered out of the doorway to see whether the coast was clear or not.
“Human lady, average height, overly friendly, red hair, irritating ability to turn every little thing into a grand ethical dilemma?”
Klath nodded along with this description at Jirel’s side.
“Not familiar,” Mazur shrugged.
Jirel reached for his communicator and tapped the controls to open a comms link.
“Jirel to Natasha. Where are you?”
There was a crackle of static, but no response. The Trill looked at the Klingon with a note of concern.
“Could be the radiation?” he offered.
“Possible,” Klath replied, in a subtle tone that suggested a significant part of himself didn’t believe that for a second, “She was over on the other side of the village when I left her, still investigating the…disease.”
At the doorway, Mazur sighed, clearly irritated by the latest delay to his increasingly improvised escape plan.
“Look, we don’t have time for this. The longer we wait, the more these village idiots will have started to pack up their things and join the queue for a lift. I’m sure your friend will catch up with us.”
Jirel glared back at the man in the robes with no small amount of distrust.
“We’re not leaving here without her,” he stated flatly, “So you’re just gonna have to wait.”
“I’m telling you,” Mazur pressed, “We need to get--”
He suddenly grimaced in pain and staggered slightly, his legs half-buckling underneath him as he started to drop to his knees. Neither Jirel nor Klath moved at first, their sympathies for him not exactly running over. But eventually, Jirel stepped up and helped him back to his feet.
It was then that he saw the signs of the debilitating red rash on Mazur’s arm.
“What the hell?”
The El-Aurian regained his balance and quickly pulled the sleeve of his robes back down, but it was too late to hide what Jirel had seen.
“It’s nothing,” he managed.
“The hell it is,” Jirel shot back, now more concerned, “I thought you said this disease only affects the Makalites.”
“Perhaps,” Klath added, “It might be in your interests to locate the doctor after all.”
“No need,” Mazur grimaced as he internalised the fresh flare of pain from his arm, “Just…get me out of here.”
Jirel grimaced as he considered the situation, then looked back at Klath.
“Ok, here’s what we’ll do. You get the All-Seeing Eye back to the Bounty, and I’ll go and track down Natasha--”
“No,” Mazur countered, pointing at the Trill, “You should come with me.”
“Any particular reason?”
“The Seer and the spotted man parlaying together in the forest will be a lot easier to sell to the locals if we’re seen,” he pointed out, “So as not to arouse any suspicions.”
Jirel sighed again, frustrated by how completely and entirely wrapped up in Mazur’s little scheme he now was. He didn’t really want to openly admit quite how concerned he was feeling about Natasha’s absence, or how much he wanted to be the one to go and find her. But equally, he couldn’t see an obvious flaw in Mazur’s logic.
“Fine,” he nodded eventually.
The three of them made for the exit to the hut together, as Mazur worked on regaining his strength as fully as he could.
He realised that his best laid plans were at risk of unravelling with these additional delays. And that he may be forced to take more drastic action to make his escape.
As Klath walked off towards where he had last seen Natasha, Mazur felt around under his robes, and smiled at the reassuring form of the concealed Edosian disruptor pistol.
Really looking forward to Mazur getting his just reward... You do have a talent for creating miscreants.
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
Sunek let out a frustrated sigh as he lounged back against the dull wall of the Edosian ship’s engineering deck.
“Man,” he tutted, “These Edosians can really talk.”
He paused suddenly, tapping the headset he was wearing and seeming a little bit more concerned about whatever he was now hearing.
“Oh, you--You heard that, did you? Sorry, I thought I’d muted the--Yep. Shutting up.”
Denella stifled a smile as she checked the tricorder readings again, and started to look more satisfied with the work that she’d managed to do. Repairs to the microfusion reactor were complete, and the local radiation levels were already dissipating, as expected.
With Sunek busy with Edosian Internal Security, she had even been able to finish everything without being distracted by more of the Vulcan’s complaints.
In fact, given how the other side of the conversation over the headset seemed to be going, for once it was Sunek who was having to deal with someone who wouldn’t stop talking.
“Yep, right, cool,” he babbled quickly down the headset, “I mean, not cool, obviously, cos…y’know, all the of crew are dead, but--Tell you what, you just give us a shout when you’re in orbit, ok?”
With that somewhat awkward matter out of the way, and regardless of whether or not the overly talkative Edosian official on the other end was actually finished or not, he lifted the headset off his head and sighed.
“Ugh. Some people, am I right?”
Denella kept the various quips that jumped to the front of her mind to herself, and instead merely gestured to him for some sort of report.
“Ok, so, the good news is: They don’t think we were to blame for any of this.”
“Was that even an option?” Denella asked with a hint of a smile.
“Point being,” Sunek continued quickly, “This is an Edosian prison transport, supposed to be on the way to a penal colony on Farkas II. They lost contact with it about nine weeks ago, until some rugged, clever, handsome genius re-activated their comms beacon.”
Denella raised her eyebrow at this, for a number of reasons.
“I thought you said you didn’t touch anything?”
“I touched one thing,” he shrugged back, considering the rest of the matter closed, “But, that means they’ve been able to pinpoint our location, and they’re sending another ship along to clean up the mess they’ve made. So, as the rugged, clever, handsome genius once said to his lackey: I think our work here is done.”
The Orion engineer kept her eyebrow raised, but shook her head.
“Not quite,” she pointed out, “But the leak is sealed, which means we can work on getting those other idiots out of whatever mess they’re in.”
She gestured for Sunek to follow her, as they squeezed back through the doors to the engineering deck and back into the remains of the corridor.
“How are we gonna do that?” he asked as they walked.
“Radiation levels are already dropping around here,” she explained quickly, absently waving her tricorder at him as she talked, “Meaning that we can retune this to deal with the worst of what’s left. And…”
She led Sunek through another set of damaged doors, keeping an eye on her readings to confirm that they were in the right place.
“...We can also retune this.”
She gestured in front of them, and Sunek saw the telltale sign of a transporter pad. Denella walked over to the controls and powered them back to life.
“We’ve still only got the dregs of emergency power,” she continued as she worked, “But that’ll hopefully be enough to get some juice into this thing. Just need to make those adjustments and we’re good to go.”
“Why don’t we just wait to get back to the Bounty before we beam them back there?”
“Who said anything about beaming them back?” she winked, gesturing at the pad, “Come on, let’s get this show on the road.”
Sunek’s face dropped slightly as he caught her drift, pointing to his chest.
“Me?”
“Who else?” she shrugged, “The radiation might be clearing up around here, but I still can’t get a proper lock on them way over on the other side of the next valley. So I’ll beam you over there, you round them up, and by the time I’ve hiked back to the Bounty, you’ll be getting back as well.”
Sunek reached for a string of ready-made excuses, but Denella was ready for them.
“Or,” she added, “Do you wanna climb all the way back up that hill to get back to the ship?”
The Vulcan stopped and contemplated this valid point. Seconds later, he bounded over to the transporter pad.
“Thought as much,” Denella smiled in satisfaction as she finished clearing the interference, “Right, I’m getting a fix on the settlement. Lifesign readings are still a bit sporadic, but I’m definitely registering a Klingon.”
“Sounds like those kids of ours,” Sunek grinned.
Denella tossed the tricorder she had recalibrated to deal with the radiation over to him. He caught it first time.
“Take that with you, it’ll help pinpoint where they are,” she noted, “Also, I’m gonna set you down just outside the village. Don’t want to make any more of a nuisance of ourselves, do we?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Ok,” Denella finished up, “Now, the radiation levels are still high over there, but it should be safe to re-materialise you.”
Sunek’s face immediately dropped.
“Wait, ‘should be’--?”
Denella allowed herself a slight smile of satisfaction, as the suddenly-terrified Vulcan disappeared.
****************************
Klath liked to think of himself as a patient man. He worked onboard a ship with Sunek, after all.
He knew that Klingons had a reputation for being short-tempered and antagonistic at the best of times, and from dealing with his fellow officers during his time in the Klingon Defence Force, he knew there was some truth to that. But he also believed that there were exceptions, and that he was one of them.
Still, even Klath’s own Sunek-approved levels of patience were being tested as he stalked down the streets of the Makalite village.
“And tell me, is it true that the spotted man has the power to make sure we will never go hungry again?”
Klath rolled his eyes to the heavens. In his wake, Sister Ryna had attached herself onto his impromptu tour of the village as he searched for the missing Natasha.
He hadn’t asked her to join his search. In fact, he had been very careful not to ask her anything. But the Makalite woman, who had been entirely taken with Jirel throughout the feast and the impromptu massage earlier, was showing no sign of losing that interest.
“That is not for me to say,” he managed to reply, as he turned a corner and walked on down the next street, looking this way and that for any sign of the red-haired human.
He had offered a similarly straight bat to all of Sister Ryna’s questions so far, but the complete lack of any sort of concrete information didn’t seem to be putting the curious Makalite off from continuing her overly polite and cloyingly friendly interrogation.
“Some have said that the spotted man’s skyship will allow us to pay a visit to the Great Hereafter, where our ancestors now reside. Is that true?”
Klath growled slightly and glanced back at the innocent face of Sister Ryna.
“Unlikely.”
Undeterred, Sister Ryna followed him as he turned down yet another street.
“You are sure that nobody has seen my colleague?” he continued, turning the questioning back on his Makalite shadow for a moment.
She shook her head. Klath growled unhappily again. He was beginning to wonder if he had already searched this section of the village. To him, all of the huts and buildings around him looked pretty much the same. One street of wood and metal huts were the same as the others.
“And when we get to our utopia,” Sister Ryna began to ask, “Will we--?”
His carefully curated patience now exhausted, Klath whirled around and glared fiercely at the Makalite, baring his teeth in anger.
But she didn’t react how people usually reacted in the face of his aggressive side. There was no fear or concern on her features, just the same happy smile. After all, she was in the presence of one of the spotted man’s colleagues. No harm could come to her here. The prophecy was quite clear on that.
The Klingon quickly recovered from his surprise at her complete lack of reaction, and despite part of him really wanting to double down on his aggressive side to try and scare her away, he reluctantly opted for diplomacy.
“I cannot answer your questions,” he insisted, “Now, if you have not seen my colleague, then perhaps you could leave me to--”
“Hey! Klath! There you are!”
It was an instantly familiar voice, and one that told Klath that his levels of patience were not finished being tested just yet.
He turned to see Sunek, tousled hair, garish Hawaiian shirt and all, bounding over to him from one of the side streets. The Vulcan had his trademark grin plastered on his face, despite being faced with the deepening glower on Klath’s own features.
“Stupid transporter set me down half a mile away,” he continued as he stifled a yawn, “And you could have made yourself easier to find.”
“I was not aware anyone was looking for me,” the Klingon noted.
“Ugh, fair point,” Sunek continued, “Anyway, the ship’s fixed and we’ve figured out the radiation issue, so Denella’s sent me to round you guys up.”
He paused, and ran over his phrasing of that comment in his head, before correcting himself.
“I mean--I say Denella sent me to do that, but it wasn’t, y’know, an order or anything. Cos she’s not, like, my boss. Right?”
Completely unaware of, and unconcerned with, the reasons behind Sunek’s interest in the Bounty’s pecking order, Klath kept his attention on the more pressing issue.
“Jirel has already departed. I am…still searching for the doctor.”
He gestured around with a note of frustration, as Sunek shook his head patiently and unclipped the tricorder from his belt.
“Honestly,” he chided, “I have to do everything around here.”
“The tricorders are not--”
“This one is, cos I fixed it,” Sunek grinned back, skipping over some of the details and misappropriating all of the credit for the retuned device.
After a moment, the tricorder began to beep gently.
“There we go. One human. Thattaway.”
He gestured down one of the side roads that led towards the outskirts of the village.
“So now,” he continued, “We just need to--”
It was then that he saw Sister Ryna. And he suddenly looked perturbed.
Klath followed the Vulcan’s gaze to the Makalite. She had been with them throughout their exchange, and had been so silent that Klath had forgotten that she was still there. Which was somewhat surprising given her previously irritating omnipresence.
But she had been there. Silent, and completely fixed to the spot.
Frozen in fear.
“Oh,” Sunek offered as he made his own first contact with a Makalite, “Hey there.”
Sister Ryna stared back at the Vulcan.
And then she screamed.
Sunek let out a frustrated sigh as he lounged back against the dull wall of the Edosian ship’s engineering deck.
“Man,” he tutted, “These Edosians can really talk.”
He paused suddenly, tapping the headset he was wearing and seeming a little bit more concerned about whatever he was now hearing.
“Oh, you--You heard that, did you? Sorry, I thought I’d muted the--Yep. Shutting up.”
Denella stifled a smile as she checked the tricorder readings again, and started to look more satisfied with the work that she’d managed to do. Repairs to the microfusion reactor were complete, and the local radiation levels were already dissipating, as expected.
With Sunek busy with Edosian Internal Security, she had even been able to finish everything without being distracted by more of the Vulcan’s complaints.
In fact, given how the other side of the conversation over the headset seemed to be going, for once it was Sunek who was having to deal with someone who wouldn’t stop talking.
“Yep, right, cool,” he babbled quickly down the headset, “I mean, not cool, obviously, cos…y’know, all the of crew are dead, but--Tell you what, you just give us a shout when you’re in orbit, ok?”
With that somewhat awkward matter out of the way, and regardless of whether or not the overly talkative Edosian official on the other end was actually finished or not, he lifted the headset off his head and sighed.
“Ugh. Some people, am I right?”
Denella kept the various quips that jumped to the front of her mind to herself, and instead merely gestured to him for some sort of report.
“Ok, so, the good news is: They don’t think we were to blame for any of this.”
“Was that even an option?” Denella asked with a hint of a smile.
“Point being,” Sunek continued quickly, “This is an Edosian prison transport, supposed to be on the way to a penal colony on Farkas II. They lost contact with it about nine weeks ago, until some rugged, clever, handsome genius re-activated their comms beacon.”
Denella raised her eyebrow at this, for a number of reasons.
“I thought you said you didn’t touch anything?”
“I touched one thing,” he shrugged back, considering the rest of the matter closed, “But, that means they’ve been able to pinpoint our location, and they’re sending another ship along to clean up the mess they’ve made. So, as the rugged, clever, handsome genius once said to his lackey: I think our work here is done.”
The Orion engineer kept her eyebrow raised, but shook her head.
“Not quite,” she pointed out, “But the leak is sealed, which means we can work on getting those other idiots out of whatever mess they’re in.”
She gestured for Sunek to follow her, as they squeezed back through the doors to the engineering deck and back into the remains of the corridor.
“How are we gonna do that?” he asked as they walked.
“Radiation levels are already dropping around here,” she explained quickly, absently waving her tricorder at him as she talked, “Meaning that we can retune this to deal with the worst of what’s left. And…”
She led Sunek through another set of damaged doors, keeping an eye on her readings to confirm that they were in the right place.
“...We can also retune this.”
She gestured in front of them, and Sunek saw the telltale sign of a transporter pad. Denella walked over to the controls and powered them back to life.
“We’ve still only got the dregs of emergency power,” she continued as she worked, “But that’ll hopefully be enough to get some juice into this thing. Just need to make those adjustments and we’re good to go.”
“Why don’t we just wait to get back to the Bounty before we beam them back there?”
“Who said anything about beaming them back?” she winked, gesturing at the pad, “Come on, let’s get this show on the road.”
Sunek’s face dropped slightly as he caught her drift, pointing to his chest.
“Me?”
“Who else?” she shrugged, “The radiation might be clearing up around here, but I still can’t get a proper lock on them way over on the other side of the next valley. So I’ll beam you over there, you round them up, and by the time I’ve hiked back to the Bounty, you’ll be getting back as well.”
Sunek reached for a string of ready-made excuses, but Denella was ready for them.
“Or,” she added, “Do you wanna climb all the way back up that hill to get back to the ship?”
The Vulcan stopped and contemplated this valid point. Seconds later, he bounded over to the transporter pad.
“Thought as much,” Denella smiled in satisfaction as she finished clearing the interference, “Right, I’m getting a fix on the settlement. Lifesign readings are still a bit sporadic, but I’m definitely registering a Klingon.”
“Sounds like those kids of ours,” Sunek grinned.
Denella tossed the tricorder she had recalibrated to deal with the radiation over to him. He caught it first time.
“Take that with you, it’ll help pinpoint where they are,” she noted, “Also, I’m gonna set you down just outside the village. Don’t want to make any more of a nuisance of ourselves, do we?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Ok,” Denella finished up, “Now, the radiation levels are still high over there, but it should be safe to re-materialise you.”
Sunek’s face immediately dropped.
“Wait, ‘should be’--?”
Denella allowed herself a slight smile of satisfaction, as the suddenly-terrified Vulcan disappeared.
****************************
Klath liked to think of himself as a patient man. He worked onboard a ship with Sunek, after all.
He knew that Klingons had a reputation for being short-tempered and antagonistic at the best of times, and from dealing with his fellow officers during his time in the Klingon Defence Force, he knew there was some truth to that. But he also believed that there were exceptions, and that he was one of them.
Still, even Klath’s own Sunek-approved levels of patience were being tested as he stalked down the streets of the Makalite village.
“And tell me, is it true that the spotted man has the power to make sure we will never go hungry again?”
Klath rolled his eyes to the heavens. In his wake, Sister Ryna had attached herself onto his impromptu tour of the village as he searched for the missing Natasha.
He hadn’t asked her to join his search. In fact, he had been very careful not to ask her anything. But the Makalite woman, who had been entirely taken with Jirel throughout the feast and the impromptu massage earlier, was showing no sign of losing that interest.
“That is not for me to say,” he managed to reply, as he turned a corner and walked on down the next street, looking this way and that for any sign of the red-haired human.
He had offered a similarly straight bat to all of Sister Ryna’s questions so far, but the complete lack of any sort of concrete information didn’t seem to be putting the curious Makalite off from continuing her overly polite and cloyingly friendly interrogation.
“Some have said that the spotted man’s skyship will allow us to pay a visit to the Great Hereafter, where our ancestors now reside. Is that true?”
Klath growled slightly and glanced back at the innocent face of Sister Ryna.
“Unlikely.”
Undeterred, Sister Ryna followed him as he turned down yet another street.
“You are sure that nobody has seen my colleague?” he continued, turning the questioning back on his Makalite shadow for a moment.
She shook her head. Klath growled unhappily again. He was beginning to wonder if he had already searched this section of the village. To him, all of the huts and buildings around him looked pretty much the same. One street of wood and metal huts were the same as the others.
“And when we get to our utopia,” Sister Ryna began to ask, “Will we--?”
His carefully curated patience now exhausted, Klath whirled around and glared fiercely at the Makalite, baring his teeth in anger.
But she didn’t react how people usually reacted in the face of his aggressive side. There was no fear or concern on her features, just the same happy smile. After all, she was in the presence of one of the spotted man’s colleagues. No harm could come to her here. The prophecy was quite clear on that.
The Klingon quickly recovered from his surprise at her complete lack of reaction, and despite part of him really wanting to double down on his aggressive side to try and scare her away, he reluctantly opted for diplomacy.
“I cannot answer your questions,” he insisted, “Now, if you have not seen my colleague, then perhaps you could leave me to--”
“Hey! Klath! There you are!”
It was an instantly familiar voice, and one that told Klath that his levels of patience were not finished being tested just yet.
He turned to see Sunek, tousled hair, garish Hawaiian shirt and all, bounding over to him from one of the side streets. The Vulcan had his trademark grin plastered on his face, despite being faced with the deepening glower on Klath’s own features.
“Stupid transporter set me down half a mile away,” he continued as he stifled a yawn, “And you could have made yourself easier to find.”
“I was not aware anyone was looking for me,” the Klingon noted.
“Ugh, fair point,” Sunek continued, “Anyway, the ship’s fixed and we’ve figured out the radiation issue, so Denella’s sent me to round you guys up.”
He paused, and ran over his phrasing of that comment in his head, before correcting himself.
“I mean--I say Denella sent me to do that, but it wasn’t, y’know, an order or anything. Cos she’s not, like, my boss. Right?”
Completely unaware of, and unconcerned with, the reasons behind Sunek’s interest in the Bounty’s pecking order, Klath kept his attention on the more pressing issue.
“Jirel has already departed. I am…still searching for the doctor.”
He gestured around with a note of frustration, as Sunek shook his head patiently and unclipped the tricorder from his belt.
“Honestly,” he chided, “I have to do everything around here.”
“The tricorders are not--”
“This one is, cos I fixed it,” Sunek grinned back, skipping over some of the details and misappropriating all of the credit for the retuned device.
After a moment, the tricorder began to beep gently.
“There we go. One human. Thattaway.”
He gestured down one of the side roads that led towards the outskirts of the village.
“So now,” he continued, “We just need to--”
It was then that he saw Sister Ryna. And he suddenly looked perturbed.
Klath followed the Vulcan’s gaze to the Makalite. She had been with them throughout their exchange, and had been so silent that Klath had forgotten that she was still there. Which was somewhat surprising given her previously irritating omnipresence.
But she had been there. Silent, and completely fixed to the spot.
Frozen in fear.
“Oh,” Sunek offered as he made his own first contact with a Makalite, “Hey there.”
Sister Ryna stared back at the Vulcan.
And then she screamed.
Vulcanaphobia... This just keeps getting better... Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
Jirel grimaced as he walked through the forest undergrowth.
A few hours ago, aside from the occasional interaction with some of the native fruits and vegetables, his initial walk through the same forest had been a pleasant enough way to waste a bit of time as they waited for Denella to finish her repairs.
But now, as he plodded on and left the Makalite village behind him, the sharp grasses around his legs and the hard soil under his feet felt altogether rougher and more unyielding, and there was something a little foreboding about the towering trees around him.
He wondered how much of that was down to the company he was now keeping on the return leg of the journey. Because instead of his friends, he was now stuck with the only person who apparently wanted to be in the forest less than he did right now.
Except for maybe Denella. She hated forests, after all.
“Ugh. If I ever so much as hear about this place again, I’m looking for someone to sue.”
Martus Mazur walked awkwardly alongside the Trill, finding the going even more difficult in his outlandish costume, not to mention the heavy knapsack slung over his shoulder.
“You could have changed, you know,” Jirel pointed out, “Don’t tell me you crash landed down here dressed like that.”
Mazur decided not to go into too much detail about how he’d been clothed when he’d first got here, before he’d managed to get one of the elder Makalite Sisters to stitch him something a tad more befitting of his character. Admitting that he’d been dressed in an Edosian prison uniform when he’d unceremoniously arrived on the Makalites’ planet might rather have given the game away.
Jirel noted the silence, but didn’t put too much thought into it. As he walked, he found himself more worried about what might be going on back at the village, and wishing that he’d ignored the logic of Mazur’s plan and insisted that he stayed behind to look for Natasha.
He knew that she could more than handle herself. She’d proven that on countless occasions since teaming up with him and his motley crew. But he knew he’d rather be looking for her than stalking back through the forest with his present company.
“How much further is it to that ship of yours?” the El-Aurian at his side grouched, as he clambered over a tree root.
“Does it matter?” Jirel retorted, “You got somewhere to be?”
“Yes, actually. A little place called ‘anywhere but here’.”
Jirel managed a mirthless smile as they stumbled on through the undergrowth, but remained a little intrigued about Mazur’s wider plans.
“Seriously, though, where is it you’re headed, Mazur? Just so I know how long I’ve got to put up with you.”
The El-Aurian tutted as the sleeve of his robes snagged on an errant tree branch, and he stopped to untangle himself.
“If you could get me to the Exigan system, I’ll make sure you’re suitably reimbursed,” he shrugged offhandedly, finishing extricating himself and gesturing to the knapsack on his shoulder.
“Afraid we don’t accept stolen gems as payment. And before you ask, we don’t accept kooky fancy dress costumes or the concept of listening either.”
The robed figure snapped an irritated look at Jirel, looking increasingly annoyed with his perpetual attempts at not especially friendly conversation.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty of latinum stashed away across the quadrant as well,” he replied, “And the sooner we’re off this godforsaken rock, the more there’ll be for you.”
As they walked on towards the Bounty, and Jirel began to contemplate how many different ways Mazur might attempt to scam them out of payment between here and his destination, a thought suddenly occurred to him.
“Hang on, the Exigan system?” he said cautiously, “I thought you said the transport ship was taking you to Ventriss IV?”
A con artist as seasoned at juggling lies as Mazur took the oversight in his stride.
“Change of plans,” he said quickly but calmly, gesturing to the knapsack again, “I know a jewel guy on Exigan II.”
“Of course,” Jirel scoffed, “You’ve got a jewel guy--”
Before the debate could proceed any further, Jirel was stopped by a chirp from the communicator on his belt. Keeping his eyes on Mazur, and hoping for news from Klath, he grabbed it and clicked one of the buttons on the side.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me,” Denella’s voice crackled over the comms link, “Where the hell are you all?”
Jirel internalised the fresh pang of worry he felt about the ongoing radio silence from the village before he responded.
“We’re heading back now. Me and, um, Martus Mazur.”
“The con artist?” Denella asked immediately, eliciting a withering tut from the El-Aurian.
“Everyone’s a critic,” he muttered.
“I think he prefers ‘village mystic’ these days,” Jirel replied with a smile, “His transport ship crashed here, so we’re gonna give him a lift back.”
“Huh,” Denella replied with an edge of concern, “Um, me and Sunek found a crashed ship. That was where all the radiation was coming from. But it wasn’t a transport. It was a prison ship.”
Jirel glanced down at the communicator in his hands in shock. Which, he instantly realised, was a huge mistake on his part. For one thing, the device was audio only, so it really didn’t matter where he was looking. But more importantly, looking down meant that he had taken his eyes off Mazur.
By the time he looked back up, he saw that there was now a stubby disruptor pistol pointed directly at him. Mazur grabbed the communicator and flicked the channel closed.
“Yep,” Jirel sighed in defeat, “There’s always a disruptor…”
****************************
After what felt like a very long time indeed working on the bonds on her hands, Natasha had to admit that all she was doing was giving her a nasty rope burn.
She groaned in frustration and leaned back against the wooden pillar behind her.
“I do not think I can break the twine,” Sister Lyca offered from the next pillar along.
‘Yeah,” Natasha grimaced ruefully, looking around the empty interior of the Bastille, “I’ve kinda come to the same conclusion over here. Guess there’s no point screaming for help?”
“There will be guards outside,” Sister Lyca replied, “Some of the more loyal members of The Seer’s flock. Our voices will not travel beyond them.”
The Makalite woman paused and coughed hoarsely several times. Natasha’s medical ear didn’t like the rattling sound of the cough at all, and felt doubly frustrated that the cure for the Makalite’s disease was so simple and yet so far away.
“I feel,” Sister Lyca managed eventually, her voice sounding weaker all the time, “The Beast of the Great Hereafter may be approaching me. I can only pray that my song is enough to let me pass on through and join the rest of my ancestors.”
Natasha felt a fresh pang of emotion, for Sister Lyca’s plight, and for the reminder of the simple culture that had been so entirely torn asunder on this planet.
“Sister Lyca, please trust me,” she said, “I promise I can cure your disease. The Beast of the Great Hereafter isn’t going to come for you today--”
She was interrupted by the sudden sound of two shrieked wails from outside the Bastille’s only entrance, followed by the unmistakable sound of a pitched scuffle. Moments later, the substantial metal door of the structure was literally ripped off from its hinges, causing both women to flinch against the sudden burst of sunlight that shone into the previously darkened room.
It didn’t take long for Natasha to make out the two familiar outlines silhouetted in the doorway.
“Doctor,” Klath grunted in satisfaction, “There you are.”
“We totally just beat those two guards up,” Sunek added from his side, “Well, Klath did a lot of the beating up. But, y’know, I supervised. Cos I’m kinda in charge of the whole operation.”
As Sunek embarked on his latest defence of his position in the Bounty’s pecking order, Klath sheathed his bat’leth, having used the blunt side to incapacitate the guards, and stepped over to untie Natasha’s bonds.
“Thanks for the rescue guys,” she smiled, “We need to--”
The entire Bastille suddenly reverberated with a new noise. An ear-splitting and plaintive wail, coming from Sister Lyca. As Klath finished untying Natasha, she instinctively flinched at the sound of the shrieking Makalite, who was staring at Sunek with wide-eyed fear.
“Ugh,” Sunek grimaced, covering his sensitive ears, “They’ve all been doing that!”
“Be quiet!” Klath boomed.
Sister Lyca continued to wail for a moment, then paused and looked back at Natasha with a sad, but slightly accusing glare.
“You said you would keep The Beast away, that he would not come today, but you were wrong. The Beast is here…and I am ready.”
She sank her head down to the ground in front of Sunek. Natasha’s mouth dropped open, as she realised what the Makalite seemed to be implying.
“Oh crap…”
“What?” Sunek managed, as he saw the Makalite bowing, “What the hell’s that supposed to--?”
“Please,” Sister Lyca said softly, keeping her head bowed, “I beg for passage to the Great Hereafter.”
Natasha grabbed Sunek’s arm and pulled him over to a corner of the Bastille, followed by an equally confused Klath. She turned to them and kept her voice deliberately low.
“Ok, so, let’s not panic here, ok? But there’s a…fairly strong chance that Sister Lyca thinks Sunek is the guardian of the Makalite afterlife.”
Klath simply grunted at this statement, wondering if this was an opportune moment for another of his famous ‘interesting’s. Meanwhile, Sunek’s face widened into the widest grin in his repertoire.
“You mean, like…a god? Well, well, local kid makes good--”
“Not exactly,” Natasha countered, slamming the Vulcan’s entirely illogical ego into reverse before it had a chance to get going, “From what she’s told me, you’re more of a…guard dog.”
The grin immediately transferred from Sunek’s face to Klath’s. The Klingon was now legitimately finding the conversation interesting for the first time so far.
“You know,” Natasha offered as further explanation, “Kind of a great big hideous beast that protects the gates of the next realm.”
“A great big…hideous…beast?” Sunek repeated, emphasising his least favourite part.
Natasha shrugged apologetically, while Klath did his best to swallow the smirk on his face and offer his colleague a slow shrug of his shoulders.
“Perhaps,” he offered, “It is the ears.”
Sunek’s ego, which felt like it had been under sustained fire ever since they had arrived on the planet, with the emergency landing, then the pecking order and now this, decided on a swift counteroffensive.
“Wh--? But, what about him?” he said, gesturing to the Klingon.
Klath and Natasha looked back at him with visible confusion, but his ego persisted.
“I mean, if these stupid people are gonna start running around calling people hideous beasts, what about ScaryGuy McForehead over here? Hmm?”
Despite the situation, Natasha glanced over at Klath and shrugged.
“I dunno,” she mused, “I’ve always thought Klath was very handsome.”
The Klingon took the compliment with an appreciative nod of his head. He’d always thought the same thing as well. Sunek just stared at the pair of them with incredulity.
“Ok, I see,” he sighed with a knowing shake of his head, “You’re both messing with me as well. Nice. Really, really nice. So, I’m gonna go over there, and--”
He took one step away from them, back towards Sister Lyca, before the panicked Makalite began to wail again, seeing the Beast of the Great Hereafter approaching once more.
“Ok,” Sunek corrected himself, “Not gonna go over there.”
As Sunek’s ego continued to simmer gently, Natasha turned back to Klath and gestured to the Makalite woman, who was still restrained around the other wooden pillar.
“Still, we can’t just leave her here. She’s dying.”
“What do you suggest?” Klath asked, as the wailing continued.
Natasha paused. There was a plan forming in her mind, but it wasn’t exactly one that was going to get Starfleet banging on her door begging for her to come back any time soon. Still, it wasn’t like they had many other options, from what she could see.
“I think,” she replied eventually, with a grimace, “We’re gonna need some help from The Beast.”
Sunek raised an unimpressed eyebrow. Klath looked a little confused.
All the while, Sister Lyca continued to wail.
****************************
Denella sighed in frustration and started on another lap of the Bounty’s empty cockpit.
It had been over an hour since she had beamed Sunek to the others, and she still hadn’t heard anything back from him since a rather curt message to confirm the beam-in had worked.
Meanwhile, she also hadn’t heard from Jirel since his earlier comment that confirmed he was on his way back, apparently with Martus Mazur for company. That comms link had closed unexpectedly, which the Orion was blaming that on the residual radiation.
So, she was left alone on the Bounty, unsure as to what was going on with any of the others.
She usually preferred to be in the thick of things, rather than being kept in the dark. And while she had at least had the chance to double check her repairs without Sunek’s distractions, that had only temporarily interrupted her worrying,
She considered trying the comms links again to the various communicators that were now out there, but instead she paused as she passed Sunek’s pilot console and made a few pre-flight checks. Not that Sunek couldn’t have handled them himself when he got back, but the growing unease she was feeling inside made her instinctively feel it might be in everyone’s best interests to prepare for a quick getaway.
Besides, she’d found that assuming the worst in any given situation was a fairly sensible position to take throughout her misadventures on the Bounty.
As she worked, she saw a blip show up on the external sensors. Two lifesigns making their way back up the ramp at the rear of the ship.
A Trill and an El-Aurian.
She felt the knot in her stomach loosen slightly. At least someone was back onboard.
Within moments, she heard the sound of footsteps coming up the metal steps at the rear of the cockpit, and she turned to greet them.
“Finally. What the hell took you so long--?”
She stopped in her tracks, and the relieved smile slipped from her face.
At the top of the steps, she saw Jirel standing with Mazur alongside him, boasting a disarming smile on his features. And she also saw the disruptor pistol that was pointed squarely at the Trill’s side.
For his part, Jirel mustered an altogether more sheepish smile.
“Hi honey,” he offered, “I’m home.”
End of Part Three
Jirel grimaced as he walked through the forest undergrowth.
A few hours ago, aside from the occasional interaction with some of the native fruits and vegetables, his initial walk through the same forest had been a pleasant enough way to waste a bit of time as they waited for Denella to finish her repairs.
But now, as he plodded on and left the Makalite village behind him, the sharp grasses around his legs and the hard soil under his feet felt altogether rougher and more unyielding, and there was something a little foreboding about the towering trees around him.
He wondered how much of that was down to the company he was now keeping on the return leg of the journey. Because instead of his friends, he was now stuck with the only person who apparently wanted to be in the forest less than he did right now.
Except for maybe Denella. She hated forests, after all.
“Ugh. If I ever so much as hear about this place again, I’m looking for someone to sue.”
Martus Mazur walked awkwardly alongside the Trill, finding the going even more difficult in his outlandish costume, not to mention the heavy knapsack slung over his shoulder.
“You could have changed, you know,” Jirel pointed out, “Don’t tell me you crash landed down here dressed like that.”
Mazur decided not to go into too much detail about how he’d been clothed when he’d first got here, before he’d managed to get one of the elder Makalite Sisters to stitch him something a tad more befitting of his character. Admitting that he’d been dressed in an Edosian prison uniform when he’d unceremoniously arrived on the Makalites’ planet might rather have given the game away.
Jirel noted the silence, but didn’t put too much thought into it. As he walked, he found himself more worried about what might be going on back at the village, and wishing that he’d ignored the logic of Mazur’s plan and insisted that he stayed behind to look for Natasha.
He knew that she could more than handle herself. She’d proven that on countless occasions since teaming up with him and his motley crew. But he knew he’d rather be looking for her than stalking back through the forest with his present company.
“How much further is it to that ship of yours?” the El-Aurian at his side grouched, as he clambered over a tree root.
“Does it matter?” Jirel retorted, “You got somewhere to be?”
“Yes, actually. A little place called ‘anywhere but here’.”
Jirel managed a mirthless smile as they stumbled on through the undergrowth, but remained a little intrigued about Mazur’s wider plans.
“Seriously, though, where is it you’re headed, Mazur? Just so I know how long I’ve got to put up with you.”
The El-Aurian tutted as the sleeve of his robes snagged on an errant tree branch, and he stopped to untangle himself.
“If you could get me to the Exigan system, I’ll make sure you’re suitably reimbursed,” he shrugged offhandedly, finishing extricating himself and gesturing to the knapsack on his shoulder.
“Afraid we don’t accept stolen gems as payment. And before you ask, we don’t accept kooky fancy dress costumes or the concept of listening either.”
The robed figure snapped an irritated look at Jirel, looking increasingly annoyed with his perpetual attempts at not especially friendly conversation.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty of latinum stashed away across the quadrant as well,” he replied, “And the sooner we’re off this godforsaken rock, the more there’ll be for you.”
As they walked on towards the Bounty, and Jirel began to contemplate how many different ways Mazur might attempt to scam them out of payment between here and his destination, a thought suddenly occurred to him.
“Hang on, the Exigan system?” he said cautiously, “I thought you said the transport ship was taking you to Ventriss IV?”
A con artist as seasoned at juggling lies as Mazur took the oversight in his stride.
“Change of plans,” he said quickly but calmly, gesturing to the knapsack again, “I know a jewel guy on Exigan II.”
“Of course,” Jirel scoffed, “You’ve got a jewel guy--”
Before the debate could proceed any further, Jirel was stopped by a chirp from the communicator on his belt. Keeping his eyes on Mazur, and hoping for news from Klath, he grabbed it and clicked one of the buttons on the side.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me,” Denella’s voice crackled over the comms link, “Where the hell are you all?”
Jirel internalised the fresh pang of worry he felt about the ongoing radio silence from the village before he responded.
“We’re heading back now. Me and, um, Martus Mazur.”
“The con artist?” Denella asked immediately, eliciting a withering tut from the El-Aurian.
“Everyone’s a critic,” he muttered.
“I think he prefers ‘village mystic’ these days,” Jirel replied with a smile, “His transport ship crashed here, so we’re gonna give him a lift back.”
“Huh,” Denella replied with an edge of concern, “Um, me and Sunek found a crashed ship. That was where all the radiation was coming from. But it wasn’t a transport. It was a prison ship.”
Jirel glanced down at the communicator in his hands in shock. Which, he instantly realised, was a huge mistake on his part. For one thing, the device was audio only, so it really didn’t matter where he was looking. But more importantly, looking down meant that he had taken his eyes off Mazur.
By the time he looked back up, he saw that there was now a stubby disruptor pistol pointed directly at him. Mazur grabbed the communicator and flicked the channel closed.
“Yep,” Jirel sighed in defeat, “There’s always a disruptor…”
****************************
After what felt like a very long time indeed working on the bonds on her hands, Natasha had to admit that all she was doing was giving her a nasty rope burn.
She groaned in frustration and leaned back against the wooden pillar behind her.
“I do not think I can break the twine,” Sister Lyca offered from the next pillar along.
‘Yeah,” Natasha grimaced ruefully, looking around the empty interior of the Bastille, “I’ve kinda come to the same conclusion over here. Guess there’s no point screaming for help?”
“There will be guards outside,” Sister Lyca replied, “Some of the more loyal members of The Seer’s flock. Our voices will not travel beyond them.”
The Makalite woman paused and coughed hoarsely several times. Natasha’s medical ear didn’t like the rattling sound of the cough at all, and felt doubly frustrated that the cure for the Makalite’s disease was so simple and yet so far away.
“I feel,” Sister Lyca managed eventually, her voice sounding weaker all the time, “The Beast of the Great Hereafter may be approaching me. I can only pray that my song is enough to let me pass on through and join the rest of my ancestors.”
Natasha felt a fresh pang of emotion, for Sister Lyca’s plight, and for the reminder of the simple culture that had been so entirely torn asunder on this planet.
“Sister Lyca, please trust me,” she said, “I promise I can cure your disease. The Beast of the Great Hereafter isn’t going to come for you today--”
She was interrupted by the sudden sound of two shrieked wails from outside the Bastille’s only entrance, followed by the unmistakable sound of a pitched scuffle. Moments later, the substantial metal door of the structure was literally ripped off from its hinges, causing both women to flinch against the sudden burst of sunlight that shone into the previously darkened room.
It didn’t take long for Natasha to make out the two familiar outlines silhouetted in the doorway.
“Doctor,” Klath grunted in satisfaction, “There you are.”
“We totally just beat those two guards up,” Sunek added from his side, “Well, Klath did a lot of the beating up. But, y’know, I supervised. Cos I’m kinda in charge of the whole operation.”
As Sunek embarked on his latest defence of his position in the Bounty’s pecking order, Klath sheathed his bat’leth, having used the blunt side to incapacitate the guards, and stepped over to untie Natasha’s bonds.
“Thanks for the rescue guys,” she smiled, “We need to--”
The entire Bastille suddenly reverberated with a new noise. An ear-splitting and plaintive wail, coming from Sister Lyca. As Klath finished untying Natasha, she instinctively flinched at the sound of the shrieking Makalite, who was staring at Sunek with wide-eyed fear.
“Ugh,” Sunek grimaced, covering his sensitive ears, “They’ve all been doing that!”
“Be quiet!” Klath boomed.
Sister Lyca continued to wail for a moment, then paused and looked back at Natasha with a sad, but slightly accusing glare.
“You said you would keep The Beast away, that he would not come today, but you were wrong. The Beast is here…and I am ready.”
She sank her head down to the ground in front of Sunek. Natasha’s mouth dropped open, as she realised what the Makalite seemed to be implying.
“Oh crap…”
“What?” Sunek managed, as he saw the Makalite bowing, “What the hell’s that supposed to--?”
“Please,” Sister Lyca said softly, keeping her head bowed, “I beg for passage to the Great Hereafter.”
Natasha grabbed Sunek’s arm and pulled him over to a corner of the Bastille, followed by an equally confused Klath. She turned to them and kept her voice deliberately low.
“Ok, so, let’s not panic here, ok? But there’s a…fairly strong chance that Sister Lyca thinks Sunek is the guardian of the Makalite afterlife.”
Klath simply grunted at this statement, wondering if this was an opportune moment for another of his famous ‘interesting’s. Meanwhile, Sunek’s face widened into the widest grin in his repertoire.
“You mean, like…a god? Well, well, local kid makes good--”
“Not exactly,” Natasha countered, slamming the Vulcan’s entirely illogical ego into reverse before it had a chance to get going, “From what she’s told me, you’re more of a…guard dog.”
The grin immediately transferred from Sunek’s face to Klath’s. The Klingon was now legitimately finding the conversation interesting for the first time so far.
“You know,” Natasha offered as further explanation, “Kind of a great big hideous beast that protects the gates of the next realm.”
“A great big…hideous…beast?” Sunek repeated, emphasising his least favourite part.
Natasha shrugged apologetically, while Klath did his best to swallow the smirk on his face and offer his colleague a slow shrug of his shoulders.
“Perhaps,” he offered, “It is the ears.”
Sunek’s ego, which felt like it had been under sustained fire ever since they had arrived on the planet, with the emergency landing, then the pecking order and now this, decided on a swift counteroffensive.
“Wh--? But, what about him?” he said, gesturing to the Klingon.
Klath and Natasha looked back at him with visible confusion, but his ego persisted.
“I mean, if these stupid people are gonna start running around calling people hideous beasts, what about ScaryGuy McForehead over here? Hmm?”
Despite the situation, Natasha glanced over at Klath and shrugged.
“I dunno,” she mused, “I’ve always thought Klath was very handsome.”
The Klingon took the compliment with an appreciative nod of his head. He’d always thought the same thing as well. Sunek just stared at the pair of them with incredulity.
“Ok, I see,” he sighed with a knowing shake of his head, “You’re both messing with me as well. Nice. Really, really nice. So, I’m gonna go over there, and--”
He took one step away from them, back towards Sister Lyca, before the panicked Makalite began to wail again, seeing the Beast of the Great Hereafter approaching once more.
“Ok,” Sunek corrected himself, “Not gonna go over there.”
As Sunek’s ego continued to simmer gently, Natasha turned back to Klath and gestured to the Makalite woman, who was still restrained around the other wooden pillar.
“Still, we can’t just leave her here. She’s dying.”
“What do you suggest?” Klath asked, as the wailing continued.
Natasha paused. There was a plan forming in her mind, but it wasn’t exactly one that was going to get Starfleet banging on her door begging for her to come back any time soon. Still, it wasn’t like they had many other options, from what she could see.
“I think,” she replied eventually, with a grimace, “We’re gonna need some help from The Beast.”
Sunek raised an unimpressed eyebrow. Klath looked a little confused.
All the while, Sister Lyca continued to wail.
****************************
Denella sighed in frustration and started on another lap of the Bounty’s empty cockpit.
It had been over an hour since she had beamed Sunek to the others, and she still hadn’t heard anything back from him since a rather curt message to confirm the beam-in had worked.
Meanwhile, she also hadn’t heard from Jirel since his earlier comment that confirmed he was on his way back, apparently with Martus Mazur for company. That comms link had closed unexpectedly, which the Orion was blaming that on the residual radiation.
So, she was left alone on the Bounty, unsure as to what was going on with any of the others.
She usually preferred to be in the thick of things, rather than being kept in the dark. And while she had at least had the chance to double check her repairs without Sunek’s distractions, that had only temporarily interrupted her worrying,
She considered trying the comms links again to the various communicators that were now out there, but instead she paused as she passed Sunek’s pilot console and made a few pre-flight checks. Not that Sunek couldn’t have handled them himself when he got back, but the growing unease she was feeling inside made her instinctively feel it might be in everyone’s best interests to prepare for a quick getaway.
Besides, she’d found that assuming the worst in any given situation was a fairly sensible position to take throughout her misadventures on the Bounty.
As she worked, she saw a blip show up on the external sensors. Two lifesigns making their way back up the ramp at the rear of the ship.
A Trill and an El-Aurian.
She felt the knot in her stomach loosen slightly. At least someone was back onboard.
Within moments, she heard the sound of footsteps coming up the metal steps at the rear of the cockpit, and she turned to greet them.
“Finally. What the hell took you so long--?”
She stopped in her tracks, and the relieved smile slipped from her face.
At the top of the steps, she saw Jirel standing with Mazur alongside him, boasting a disarming smile on his features. And she also saw the disruptor pistol that was pointed squarely at the Trill’s side.
For his part, Jirel mustered an altogether more sheepish smile.
“Hi honey,” he offered, “I’m home.”
End of Part Three
Love the closing line. And Sunek as the great beast... You do have a fun storytelling style that keeps the story amusing while not letting up on the adventurous tension.
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Thank you. That's the balancing act I tend to try and go for with the sorts of crises that the Bounty's crew are usually dealing with!
Silly, but also somewhat perilous.
Part Four
“Seriously, shut up!”
Natasha and Klath shared a knowing glance as they considered the irony of Sunek making that sort of a statement to anyone, but they didn’t say anything out loud.
Sunek had directed the comment at Sister Lyca, now indelicately slung over Klath’s right shoulder, as they walked on through the forest.
Even though her body was weakening by the minute thanks to the radiation exposure she had been through, her vocal cords still seemed strong, and she was continuing to wail in Sunek’s direction as they made good their escape. Despite the fact that the noisy singing was not exactly making them inconspicuous.
With the guards subdued, the Bastille’s location on the edge of the village had made their getaway that much more straightforward, and with the retuned tricorder now in Natasha’s hands, they were making good progress back to their ship.
“Please, oh Beast of the Great Hereafter,” Sister Lyca shivered as she temporarily stopped her wailing, “I must complete my song. My death song. It is my offering to you.”
Sunek went to fire off an especially critical review of her offering, but before he could say anything, the Makalite’s wailing resumed, as she powered into the next stanza of her death song.
“Ugh,” Sunek griped at Natasha instead, “Why did we have to bring her with us?”
“Because she’s dying,” Natasha reminded him, “And it turns out she listens to you.”
“So?” Sunek grumbled, “What happened to that whole ‘don’t interfere’ policy you Starfleet lot are always banging on about? Feels like this definitely counts as interference.”
Natasha suppressed another grimace. She had plenty of misgivings about what they were doing, especially feeding Sister Lyca’s belief that Sunek was the guardian of their afterlife. But based on everything that she had seen in the village, and the extra information her colleagues had now provided about Mazur and the crashed ship, she was equally sure they didn’t have much choice.
“Whatever version of the prime directive I’m still following, it was already out the window down here. This Martus Mazur character saw to that. Non-interference doesn’t count when the interference has already happened. We need to help the villagers, and Sister Lyca in particular. Her symptoms are worse than any of the others I saw. I guess because she spent so long inside the…Bastille.”
“What difference would that have made?” Klath asked, his voice booming over the top of the singing coming from over his shoulder.
Natasha shrugged. The jigsaw was now fully assembled in her head.
“Because it was almost entirely made of that metal that Mazur had been bringing over there. Which he was presumably stripping from the crashed ship that was saturated in radiation. Based on what I’ve been told, it sounds like he’d ‘reward’ the villagers that donated the most to his temple with extra metal for their huts, which would just have accelerated their symptoms, and presumably caused them to donate even more to try and show enough faith to ward off their sickness.”
“Huh,” Sunek mused, “These guys really are too stupid to live, aren’t they?”
“It’s not their fault,” she countered, “Any species at this stage of development would be susceptible to that sort of manipulation. Even all of our own species, once upon a time.”
“Ancient Klingons would not be fooled by such blatant trickery,” Klath countered with a proud glare.
“Yeah,” Sunek nodded in agreement, “And you’re not gonna pull the wool over a bunch of logical Vulcan eyes either. We’ve always been smart. Most of the time.”
Natasha rolled her eyes as she stepped over a tree branch.
“Believe that if you want, but I’m telling the truth. I’m not too proud to admit that there were plenty of times in Earth’s history when we were suckered in by someone who sounded plausible enough in a time of crisis. Too many times, to be honest.”
Sunek glanced up at Klath, as the Klingon and the Vulcan shared a moment of common understanding between their two species.
“Always said humans were the dumb ones,” Sunek muttered, eliciting a nod from his colleague.
Natasha let that one slide, but she looked back at Sunek with a serious glare.
“The point is that where I’m from, it’s considered rude to crash on a planet, expose the population to deadly levels of radiation and then leave them to it. It’s possible that Makalite physiology makes them especially susceptible to this type of radiation, but whatever the details, we need to treat it.”
As they continued to bicker between them, Sister Lyca’s focus remained on completing her song.
She was still confused about a lot of what was happening, such as how the friends of the spotted man could also know the Beast of the Great Hereafter. But the rational part of her mind that had served her well against The Seer had now been entirely subsumed.
So instead of questioning what was being said, or where she was being taken, she kept her efforts on her singing, praying it would be enough to please the Beast.
Sunek winced a little more as her wailing started to intensify.
“Ok, fine,” he said to Natasha, “But can you give her a sedative or something? I really don’t wanna hear the rest of her greatest hits.”
“We need to let her do what she needs to do,” Natasha countered, much to the Vulcan’s annoyance, “That way, it’ll be easier to get her back and treat her.”
At this, Sister Lyca stopped wailing, and weakly craned her head around to Natasha.
“I do not understand,” she admitted, “The Beast has come to me. I am headed for the Great Hereafter. There is no more to be done, oh healer.”
Natasha sighed again, feeling her frustrations grow. She tried to toe the line between doing the right thing for Sister Lyca and damaging the situation on the Makalite planet any further.
“Sister Lyca,” she managed eventually, “The thing is that…The Beast wants me to heal you. Right?”
She nudged Sunek in the side, who looked more than a little disinterested in whatever she was talking about, and not especially Beast-like.
“Oh, right. Yeah. That.”
Sister Lyca’s eyes widened slightly, as Natasha pulled Sunek away from the Makalite on Klath’s shoulder to mutter to him.
“Look, I hate to say this, but is there any chance you could try that again? Bit more commitment, maybe? Y’know, a bit more…Beast-like?”
Sunek rolled his eyes and sighed. Then, a thought crossed his mind. If she wants commitment, why not give it to her.
He turned back to the Makalite and thrust his arms out wide in a dramatic display.
“Yes, puny mortal!” he bellowed in a considerably deeper voice than usual, “Listen to me, the great Beast, and heed my words! I command you to listen to what the overbearing and profoundly irritating healer is telling you!”
Natasha suppressed a fresh flinch of concern as she saw the repressed amateur dramatics major she seemed to have summoned up from within the Vulcan. But it seemed to do the trick. Sister Lyca nodded back wordlessly.
Sunek turned back to her with a suitably smug grin on his face.
“That enough commitment for you?”
Before she had a chance to fully critique his performance, the tricorder in her hand began to chime out a warning. At the same time, Klath tensed up again, just as he had the first time they had walked through the forest earlier in the day.
The Klingon’s reaction meant that Natasha didn’t even need to check the tricorder to know what was happening. Seconds later, there was a rustling sound, coming from all around them.
They all stopped on the spot. Klath cursed the fact that he couldn’t get a clear path to draw his bat’leth with Sister Lyca still over his shoulder.
And then they emerged. Makalite faces, all light blue and curious, peered out of the undergrowth around them. Dozens of villagers, who seem to have raced to track them down.
In the middle of all of them, Klath and Sunek recognised Sister Ryna.
“You see,” she said to her fellow Brothers and Sisters, “It really is the Beast of the Great Hereafter! He has come for us all on this day!”
On cue, each of the Makalites around them began to wail loudly, each singing their own unique death song in Sunek’s direction.
Klath grunted unhappily, while Sunek turned and looked at Natasha.
“Um” he said awkwardly, “You think I should do the voice again?”
“Seriously, shut up!”
Natasha and Klath shared a knowing glance as they considered the irony of Sunek making that sort of a statement to anyone, but they didn’t say anything out loud.
Sunek had directed the comment at Sister Lyca, now indelicately slung over Klath’s right shoulder, as they walked on through the forest.
Even though her body was weakening by the minute thanks to the radiation exposure she had been through, her vocal cords still seemed strong, and she was continuing to wail in Sunek’s direction as they made good their escape. Despite the fact that the noisy singing was not exactly making them inconspicuous.
With the guards subdued, the Bastille’s location on the edge of the village had made their getaway that much more straightforward, and with the retuned tricorder now in Natasha’s hands, they were making good progress back to their ship.
“Please, oh Beast of the Great Hereafter,” Sister Lyca shivered as she temporarily stopped her wailing, “I must complete my song. My death song. It is my offering to you.”
Sunek went to fire off an especially critical review of her offering, but before he could say anything, the Makalite’s wailing resumed, as she powered into the next stanza of her death song.
“Ugh,” Sunek griped at Natasha instead, “Why did we have to bring her with us?”
“Because she’s dying,” Natasha reminded him, “And it turns out she listens to you.”
“So?” Sunek grumbled, “What happened to that whole ‘don’t interfere’ policy you Starfleet lot are always banging on about? Feels like this definitely counts as interference.”
Natasha suppressed another grimace. She had plenty of misgivings about what they were doing, especially feeding Sister Lyca’s belief that Sunek was the guardian of their afterlife. But based on everything that she had seen in the village, and the extra information her colleagues had now provided about Mazur and the crashed ship, she was equally sure they didn’t have much choice.
“Whatever version of the prime directive I’m still following, it was already out the window down here. This Martus Mazur character saw to that. Non-interference doesn’t count when the interference has already happened. We need to help the villagers, and Sister Lyca in particular. Her symptoms are worse than any of the others I saw. I guess because she spent so long inside the…Bastille.”
“What difference would that have made?” Klath asked, his voice booming over the top of the singing coming from over his shoulder.
Natasha shrugged. The jigsaw was now fully assembled in her head.
“Because it was almost entirely made of that metal that Mazur had been bringing over there. Which he was presumably stripping from the crashed ship that was saturated in radiation. Based on what I’ve been told, it sounds like he’d ‘reward’ the villagers that donated the most to his temple with extra metal for their huts, which would just have accelerated their symptoms, and presumably caused them to donate even more to try and show enough faith to ward off their sickness.”
“Huh,” Sunek mused, “These guys really are too stupid to live, aren’t they?”
“It’s not their fault,” she countered, “Any species at this stage of development would be susceptible to that sort of manipulation. Even all of our own species, once upon a time.”
“Ancient Klingons would not be fooled by such blatant trickery,” Klath countered with a proud glare.
“Yeah,” Sunek nodded in agreement, “And you’re not gonna pull the wool over a bunch of logical Vulcan eyes either. We’ve always been smart. Most of the time.”
Natasha rolled her eyes as she stepped over a tree branch.
“Believe that if you want, but I’m telling the truth. I’m not too proud to admit that there were plenty of times in Earth’s history when we were suckered in by someone who sounded plausible enough in a time of crisis. Too many times, to be honest.”
Sunek glanced up at Klath, as the Klingon and the Vulcan shared a moment of common understanding between their two species.
“Always said humans were the dumb ones,” Sunek muttered, eliciting a nod from his colleague.
Natasha let that one slide, but she looked back at Sunek with a serious glare.
“The point is that where I’m from, it’s considered rude to crash on a planet, expose the population to deadly levels of radiation and then leave them to it. It’s possible that Makalite physiology makes them especially susceptible to this type of radiation, but whatever the details, we need to treat it.”
As they continued to bicker between them, Sister Lyca’s focus remained on completing her song.
She was still confused about a lot of what was happening, such as how the friends of the spotted man could also know the Beast of the Great Hereafter. But the rational part of her mind that had served her well against The Seer had now been entirely subsumed.
So instead of questioning what was being said, or where she was being taken, she kept her efforts on her singing, praying it would be enough to please the Beast.
Sunek winced a little more as her wailing started to intensify.
“Ok, fine,” he said to Natasha, “But can you give her a sedative or something? I really don’t wanna hear the rest of her greatest hits.”
“We need to let her do what she needs to do,” Natasha countered, much to the Vulcan’s annoyance, “That way, it’ll be easier to get her back and treat her.”
At this, Sister Lyca stopped wailing, and weakly craned her head around to Natasha.
“I do not understand,” she admitted, “The Beast has come to me. I am headed for the Great Hereafter. There is no more to be done, oh healer.”
Natasha sighed again, feeling her frustrations grow. She tried to toe the line between doing the right thing for Sister Lyca and damaging the situation on the Makalite planet any further.
“Sister Lyca,” she managed eventually, “The thing is that…The Beast wants me to heal you. Right?”
She nudged Sunek in the side, who looked more than a little disinterested in whatever she was talking about, and not especially Beast-like.
“Oh, right. Yeah. That.”
Sister Lyca’s eyes widened slightly, as Natasha pulled Sunek away from the Makalite on Klath’s shoulder to mutter to him.
“Look, I hate to say this, but is there any chance you could try that again? Bit more commitment, maybe? Y’know, a bit more…Beast-like?”
Sunek rolled his eyes and sighed. Then, a thought crossed his mind. If she wants commitment, why not give it to her.
He turned back to the Makalite and thrust his arms out wide in a dramatic display.
“Yes, puny mortal!” he bellowed in a considerably deeper voice than usual, “Listen to me, the great Beast, and heed my words! I command you to listen to what the overbearing and profoundly irritating healer is telling you!”
Natasha suppressed a fresh flinch of concern as she saw the repressed amateur dramatics major she seemed to have summoned up from within the Vulcan. But it seemed to do the trick. Sister Lyca nodded back wordlessly.
Sunek turned back to her with a suitably smug grin on his face.
“That enough commitment for you?”
Before she had a chance to fully critique his performance, the tricorder in her hand began to chime out a warning. At the same time, Klath tensed up again, just as he had the first time they had walked through the forest earlier in the day.
The Klingon’s reaction meant that Natasha didn’t even need to check the tricorder to know what was happening. Seconds later, there was a rustling sound, coming from all around them.
They all stopped on the spot. Klath cursed the fact that he couldn’t get a clear path to draw his bat’leth with Sister Lyca still over his shoulder.
And then they emerged. Makalite faces, all light blue and curious, peered out of the undergrowth around them. Dozens of villagers, who seem to have raced to track them down.
In the middle of all of them, Klath and Sunek recognised Sister Ryna.
“You see,” she said to her fellow Brothers and Sisters, “It really is the Beast of the Great Hereafter! He has come for us all on this day!”
On cue, each of the Makalites around them began to wail loudly, each singing their own unique death song in Sunek’s direction.
Klath grunted unhappily, while Sunek turned and looked at Natasha.
“Um” he said awkwardly, “You think I should do the voice again?”
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Okay - this installment is just a riot! Love the Makalites assaulting Klath & co. only to start singing at Sunek.
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
“We’re not leaving without them.”
Jirel maintained his position in front of the pilot’s chair in the Bounty’s cockpit, with Denella standing just as defiantly beside him. They both stared back at the ugly disruptor pistol that Mazur was pointing at them, but neither of them flinched.
After all, they’d both spent enough time travelling on the Bounty to have become used to people pointing disruptors at them. For some reason, it seemed to happen quite a lot.
For some, this situation would be terrifying. For the Bounty, this was a Tuesday.
“I’m telling you,” Mazur persisted, keeping his grip tight on the pistol, “I really want this crate up in the air right now.”
The El-Aurian had been very clear about that particular point since he had arrived onboard. Disruptor or no disruptor.
Inside, Jirel again cursed himself for how slow he had been to see the danger signs from Mazur. As someone who spent as much of their life as he did having disruptors pulled on him, he really should have read the signs. And yet, despite knowing that Mazur was untrustworthy, and that he was itching to leave, and having seen what he had done with the Makalites, he hadn’t expected him to go this far.
Still, the wealth of experience he had gathered in the troubling field of having disruptors pulled on him also gave him a sixth sense when assessing the intentions of whoever happened to be the one pulling the disruptor.
He knew that, a lot of the time, the person with the weapon didn’t actually mean to fire it. That the act of having the weapon was intended to be enough of a threat. Because, despite the amount of death and destruction that went on around the galaxy in the average week, the truth was that most of the souls in the universe had no interest in being killers.
And Jirel could see in his eyes that Mazur was one of those souls.
He may have been a con artist, a grifter and a man of a thousand scams, but he wasn’t the sort of man that actually went around firing disruptors at people. So, while he was clearly desperate to leave this planet, Jirel felt that he was safe enough to stall for long enough for the others to get back. And hopefully for him and Denella to regain control of the situation in the cockpit.
“Seriously, Mazur,” he replied, calmly but firmly, “We’re still short three people. And we’re not leaving until they’re onboard.”
Mazur didn’t flinch, though he was struggling to keep his slightly laboured breathing a secret. He was keenly aware that his condition was worsening by the minute.
“You…seem to be forgetting which one of us is armed.”
He waved the Edosian disruptor, a slightly curious design clearly meant for a different physiology, to underline his point.
But, Jirel noted, he didn’t get any closer to actually firing it. So he continued with his distraction, as he glanced over at Denella.
“A prison transport, you said? Sounds like someone’s been a naughty boy.”
“A misunderstanding, nothing more,” Mazur muttered with a smile bereft of mirth, as he nodded at Denella, “But I assume if you’ve found the ship, you’ve told them where it is. Which means I’d definitely prefer to get moving now.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Jirel grinned back, “But--”
He was immediately silenced by a sudden blast of dirty green energy that spat out from the disruptor and slammed into the deck of the cockpit next to his right foot, leaving a smoking scorch mark behind on the metal.
“Hey!” Denella snapped back at him, seeing her precious ship being wounded, “Careful with that thing!”
For Jirel’s part, the blast caused him to momentarily reassess his initial read on Mazur. But still, even though he hadn’t expected him to fire the weapon at all, he also noted that he had deliberately avoided shooting either him or Denella, even to injure them.
In a weird way, the entirely unexpected disruptor blast actually soothed the Trill. Mazur definitely wasn’t a killer.
“Consider that a warning shot,” the El-Aurian snapped, a little more on edge than before, “And let me put this another way: I’ve spent the last two months on this hellhole with all those villagers. So, I’m very much done listening to idiots. If you catch my drift.”
Mazur took a step forward, keeping the disruptor tightly in his grip. Jirel kept an eye on it, wondering if it was close enough for him to dive for it.
“Besides, the way I see it, you don’t have much of a choice here,” he continued, “Either you do what I say, and we leave your friends behind. Or I shoot you, take your ship by force, and also leave your friends behind. Either way, you’ll note the part where they're left behind.”
Jirel kept his defences up, even as Mazur gestured at the pilot’s controls at their side with the weapon in his hands.
“So,” he concluded, “Feel free to choose the option where you don’t get shot.”
“I’m not doing it,” Jirel said firmly with a slow shake of his head, “So I guess we’re gonna have to wait--”
The disruptor fired again. But this time, the green bolt of energy didn’t hit the deck itself next to Jirel’s right foot. It hit him on the right foot itself.
The Trill screamed out in pain and dropped down to the deck.
“Agh! Son of a Tellarite miner!”
Denella instinctively dropped down to where he had collapsed with concern and tried to help him back up. She noted that it had been a glancing blow on the side of his foot, but also noted the burn mark and the smell of burnt flesh that meant Jirel’s pain was very much real.
For his part, Mazur immediately flinched and stepped back away from the scene of the crime, the Edosian disruptor dropping down to his side as he looked both shocked and contrite at what he’d just done.
“Oh, crap,” he managed, “I swear, I was just trying to shoot the deck again! It wasn’t supposed to hit you--!”
“Well it did!” Jirel bellowed in pained anger, “It definitely hit me!”
He was especially angry for two reasons. One, because he’d just been shot in the foot. And two, because he’d allowed himself to completely underestimate Mazur again.
He wasn’t supposed to have actually shot him.
For a few more seconds, Mazur seemed to have lost control of the situation. He genuinely hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, though the scent from Jirel’s disruptor wound that was filling the cockpit rather undermined his intentions.
So instead, the quick thinking mind that had gotten him out of so many worse scrapes in the past got to work, and decided that he had to make the most of this situation.
“Well,” he said, raising the weapon again and nodding at Denella, “Now you’ve seen how serious I am, maybe you’ll be so kind as to get us out of here. Unless you want your friend to lose any more limbs?”
“Haven’t actually lost a limb,” Jirel coughed as he sat prone on the floor, “Which…I appreciate isn’t that big of a brag.”
Mazur ignored his comment and kept his focus on Denella. Reluctantly, she glanced at Jirel and nodded, before standing back up and stepping over to the pilot’s controls.
“Hey,” Jirel managed, “Denella--”
“He’s right, Jirel. We don’t have a choice. I guess we’ll have to come back for the others some other time.”
Jirel’s eyes widened, and he was about to argue the case further, but he saw something in the Orion’s eyes as she stepped away from him that reassured him.
She had a plan.
“There,” Mazur sighed in relief from the other side of the cockpit, “If I’d have known that was all I needed to do to get you to shut up and cooperate, I’d have shot you an hour ago.”
He smiled smugly at Jirel, who winced again and propped himself up against the base of the pilot’s console.
Above him, Denella tapped away at the controls, and the hum of the Bounty’s thrusters began to fill the cockpit. She kept a close focus on the controls, knowing that she needed to be very careful with what she did next. Making it look like the Bounty had just suffered a catastrophic failure, without actually making it suffer a catastrophic failure.
She just prayed that among all his other dubious talents, Mazur wasn’t also a qualified pilot. He had threatened to fly off in the ship himself, after all.
“Come on,” the El-Aurian muttered, “Let’s get going already!”
She licked her lips and gently eased up on the thruster inputs, not wanting to damage the Bounty any more than was necessary.
After a moment or two, she had started to overload the aft thrusters, and the entire ship began to shake and shudder. She quickly powered the whole engine assembly before it shook itself apart, and let out a frustrated grimace.
“Ugh, that’s just great!” she snapped, “See, this is what happens when you rush me!”
“What?” Mazur asked, with a look of distrust.
“I had to do a lot of repairs after we set down here, and I hadn't finished all the pre-flight checks. We’ve got a potential fracture in the aft thruster casing.”
Mazur’s eyes narrowed further. One of the advantages of spending your life conning others was that you developed a sixth sense for when you were being conned yourself.
“Ok, nice try,” he scoffed, “Is that the plan? Fool me with some engineering mumbo jumbo to give your friends, and the Edosians, time to get here? Well, I’m not buying that, so power everything back up and--”
“I’m serious,” she said, spinning around in the pilot’s chair and fixing him with a determined glare, “It’s not a difficult repair, but we need to check it out. Otherwise, if the crack’s bad enough, then as soon as we take off, there’ll be enough of a shimmy for the ship to break apart in the atmosphere. I’m assuming that’s not part of your escape plan?”
“Ugh,” Mazur grimaced, “What kind of piece of junk is this ship?”
Denella kept her emotions in check at the latest slight against the Bounty, as Jirel shifted his weight and muttered through the pain in his foot.
“The sort of piece of junk you need to get off this planet in something other than a prison uniform,” the Trill fired back knowingly, “So you might wanna think about being a bit nicer to the only person around here that can fix it.”
Mazur kept his focus on Denella, but after a moment, the disruptor barrel lowered a tad.
“Ok, fine,” he sighed, gesturing to the panel, “Hurry up and fix it.”
“Can’t do it here,” she replied calmly, “I’ll need to go check the assembly itself.”
“Well, nice try, but I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Despite the sight of the disruptor in his hand, Denella shrugged and stood up from the pilot’s console.
“Fine. Come with me.”
Mazur’s eyes narrowed again. He licked his lips slightly as he felt his best laid plans once again going awry.
“Where?”
Denella decided to twist the knife a little bit, enjoying the sudden look of discomfort on their adversary’s face.
“Outside.”
“We’re not leaving without them.”
Jirel maintained his position in front of the pilot’s chair in the Bounty’s cockpit, with Denella standing just as defiantly beside him. They both stared back at the ugly disruptor pistol that Mazur was pointing at them, but neither of them flinched.
After all, they’d both spent enough time travelling on the Bounty to have become used to people pointing disruptors at them. For some reason, it seemed to happen quite a lot.
For some, this situation would be terrifying. For the Bounty, this was a Tuesday.
“I’m telling you,” Mazur persisted, keeping his grip tight on the pistol, “I really want this crate up in the air right now.”
The El-Aurian had been very clear about that particular point since he had arrived onboard. Disruptor or no disruptor.
Inside, Jirel again cursed himself for how slow he had been to see the danger signs from Mazur. As someone who spent as much of their life as he did having disruptors pulled on him, he really should have read the signs. And yet, despite knowing that Mazur was untrustworthy, and that he was itching to leave, and having seen what he had done with the Makalites, he hadn’t expected him to go this far.
Still, the wealth of experience he had gathered in the troubling field of having disruptors pulled on him also gave him a sixth sense when assessing the intentions of whoever happened to be the one pulling the disruptor.
He knew that, a lot of the time, the person with the weapon didn’t actually mean to fire it. That the act of having the weapon was intended to be enough of a threat. Because, despite the amount of death and destruction that went on around the galaxy in the average week, the truth was that most of the souls in the universe had no interest in being killers.
And Jirel could see in his eyes that Mazur was one of those souls.
He may have been a con artist, a grifter and a man of a thousand scams, but he wasn’t the sort of man that actually went around firing disruptors at people. So, while he was clearly desperate to leave this planet, Jirel felt that he was safe enough to stall for long enough for the others to get back. And hopefully for him and Denella to regain control of the situation in the cockpit.
“Seriously, Mazur,” he replied, calmly but firmly, “We’re still short three people. And we’re not leaving until they’re onboard.”
Mazur didn’t flinch, though he was struggling to keep his slightly laboured breathing a secret. He was keenly aware that his condition was worsening by the minute.
“You…seem to be forgetting which one of us is armed.”
He waved the Edosian disruptor, a slightly curious design clearly meant for a different physiology, to underline his point.
But, Jirel noted, he didn’t get any closer to actually firing it. So he continued with his distraction, as he glanced over at Denella.
“A prison transport, you said? Sounds like someone’s been a naughty boy.”
“A misunderstanding, nothing more,” Mazur muttered with a smile bereft of mirth, as he nodded at Denella, “But I assume if you’ve found the ship, you’ve told them where it is. Which means I’d definitely prefer to get moving now.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Jirel grinned back, “But--”
He was immediately silenced by a sudden blast of dirty green energy that spat out from the disruptor and slammed into the deck of the cockpit next to his right foot, leaving a smoking scorch mark behind on the metal.
“Hey!” Denella snapped back at him, seeing her precious ship being wounded, “Careful with that thing!”
For Jirel’s part, the blast caused him to momentarily reassess his initial read on Mazur. But still, even though he hadn’t expected him to fire the weapon at all, he also noted that he had deliberately avoided shooting either him or Denella, even to injure them.
In a weird way, the entirely unexpected disruptor blast actually soothed the Trill. Mazur definitely wasn’t a killer.
“Consider that a warning shot,” the El-Aurian snapped, a little more on edge than before, “And let me put this another way: I’ve spent the last two months on this hellhole with all those villagers. So, I’m very much done listening to idiots. If you catch my drift.”
Mazur took a step forward, keeping the disruptor tightly in his grip. Jirel kept an eye on it, wondering if it was close enough for him to dive for it.
“Besides, the way I see it, you don’t have much of a choice here,” he continued, “Either you do what I say, and we leave your friends behind. Or I shoot you, take your ship by force, and also leave your friends behind. Either way, you’ll note the part where they're left behind.”
Jirel kept his defences up, even as Mazur gestured at the pilot’s controls at their side with the weapon in his hands.
“So,” he concluded, “Feel free to choose the option where you don’t get shot.”
“I’m not doing it,” Jirel said firmly with a slow shake of his head, “So I guess we’re gonna have to wait--”
The disruptor fired again. But this time, the green bolt of energy didn’t hit the deck itself next to Jirel’s right foot. It hit him on the right foot itself.
The Trill screamed out in pain and dropped down to the deck.
“Agh! Son of a Tellarite miner!”
Denella instinctively dropped down to where he had collapsed with concern and tried to help him back up. She noted that it had been a glancing blow on the side of his foot, but also noted the burn mark and the smell of burnt flesh that meant Jirel’s pain was very much real.
For his part, Mazur immediately flinched and stepped back away from the scene of the crime, the Edosian disruptor dropping down to his side as he looked both shocked and contrite at what he’d just done.
“Oh, crap,” he managed, “I swear, I was just trying to shoot the deck again! It wasn’t supposed to hit you--!”
“Well it did!” Jirel bellowed in pained anger, “It definitely hit me!”
He was especially angry for two reasons. One, because he’d just been shot in the foot. And two, because he’d allowed himself to completely underestimate Mazur again.
He wasn’t supposed to have actually shot him.
For a few more seconds, Mazur seemed to have lost control of the situation. He genuinely hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, though the scent from Jirel’s disruptor wound that was filling the cockpit rather undermined his intentions.
So instead, the quick thinking mind that had gotten him out of so many worse scrapes in the past got to work, and decided that he had to make the most of this situation.
“Well,” he said, raising the weapon again and nodding at Denella, “Now you’ve seen how serious I am, maybe you’ll be so kind as to get us out of here. Unless you want your friend to lose any more limbs?”
“Haven’t actually lost a limb,” Jirel coughed as he sat prone on the floor, “Which…I appreciate isn’t that big of a brag.”
Mazur ignored his comment and kept his focus on Denella. Reluctantly, she glanced at Jirel and nodded, before standing back up and stepping over to the pilot’s controls.
“Hey,” Jirel managed, “Denella--”
“He’s right, Jirel. We don’t have a choice. I guess we’ll have to come back for the others some other time.”
Jirel’s eyes widened, and he was about to argue the case further, but he saw something in the Orion’s eyes as she stepped away from him that reassured him.
She had a plan.
“There,” Mazur sighed in relief from the other side of the cockpit, “If I’d have known that was all I needed to do to get you to shut up and cooperate, I’d have shot you an hour ago.”
He smiled smugly at Jirel, who winced again and propped himself up against the base of the pilot’s console.
Above him, Denella tapped away at the controls, and the hum of the Bounty’s thrusters began to fill the cockpit. She kept a close focus on the controls, knowing that she needed to be very careful with what she did next. Making it look like the Bounty had just suffered a catastrophic failure, without actually making it suffer a catastrophic failure.
She just prayed that among all his other dubious talents, Mazur wasn’t also a qualified pilot. He had threatened to fly off in the ship himself, after all.
“Come on,” the El-Aurian muttered, “Let’s get going already!”
She licked her lips and gently eased up on the thruster inputs, not wanting to damage the Bounty any more than was necessary.
After a moment or two, she had started to overload the aft thrusters, and the entire ship began to shake and shudder. She quickly powered the whole engine assembly before it shook itself apart, and let out a frustrated grimace.
“Ugh, that’s just great!” she snapped, “See, this is what happens when you rush me!”
“What?” Mazur asked, with a look of distrust.
“I had to do a lot of repairs after we set down here, and I hadn't finished all the pre-flight checks. We’ve got a potential fracture in the aft thruster casing.”
Mazur’s eyes narrowed further. One of the advantages of spending your life conning others was that you developed a sixth sense for when you were being conned yourself.
“Ok, nice try,” he scoffed, “Is that the plan? Fool me with some engineering mumbo jumbo to give your friends, and the Edosians, time to get here? Well, I’m not buying that, so power everything back up and--”
“I’m serious,” she said, spinning around in the pilot’s chair and fixing him with a determined glare, “It’s not a difficult repair, but we need to check it out. Otherwise, if the crack’s bad enough, then as soon as we take off, there’ll be enough of a shimmy for the ship to break apart in the atmosphere. I’m assuming that’s not part of your escape plan?”
“Ugh,” Mazur grimaced, “What kind of piece of junk is this ship?”
Denella kept her emotions in check at the latest slight against the Bounty, as Jirel shifted his weight and muttered through the pain in his foot.
“The sort of piece of junk you need to get off this planet in something other than a prison uniform,” the Trill fired back knowingly, “So you might wanna think about being a bit nicer to the only person around here that can fix it.”
Mazur kept his focus on Denella, but after a moment, the disruptor barrel lowered a tad.
“Ok, fine,” he sighed, gesturing to the panel, “Hurry up and fix it.”
“Can’t do it here,” she replied calmly, “I’ll need to go check the assembly itself.”
“Well, nice try, but I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Despite the sight of the disruptor in his hand, Denella shrugged and stood up from the pilot’s console.
“Fine. Come with me.”
Mazur’s eyes narrowed again. He licked his lips slightly as he felt his best laid plans once again going awry.
“Where?”
Denella decided to twist the knife a little bit, enjoying the sudden look of discomfort on their adversary’s face.
“Outside.”
Interesting reading skill Jirel has - I suppose it makes sense.. Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
“Oh, and booze. You need something from The Beast? Can't go wrong with booze.”
Natasha grimaced inwardly as she listened to Sunek setting the Makalite village even further off their natural course of evolution. The amount of cultural damage being inflicted on them seemed incalculable.
She had to remind herself that this was going to be for the greater good. That right now, curing the Makalites of their radiation poisoning was a bigger issue than the latest hard turn their belief system seemed to be taking thanks to a particularly significant case of mistaken identity.
“Food as well,” Sunek continued, “The Beast loves food. So if any of you have got, like, a sandwich or something on you, that’d be--”
“Ahem,” Natasha coughed from next to the Vulcan, “Dial it back a bit?”
He glanced at her and with a wide innocent smile. After initially being offended by the role that the Makalites had cast him in, his inner showman now seemed to have grown into the role. Especially after they had gained a wider audience than just Sister Lyca.
The three Bounty crewmates, along with Sister Lyca still slung over Klath’s shoulder, stood where they had been ambushed in the middle of the forest, surrounded by a dozen or so Makalites, including Sister Ryna.
They all sat cross-legged on the ground, enraptured by the Vulcan’s words, like a group of school kids gathered around their teacher for story time. Except, the story they were currently being spun by the guardian of the afterlife didn’t appear to have any sort of moral at the end.
“Food,” Sister Ryna nodded, looking around at her fellow Makalites, “The Beast of the Great Hereafter wishes for food. Quick, we must forage!”
“Yes!” one of the Makalite Brothers called out, “And then we must sing our songs to him again!”
At this, Sunek winced slightly.
“Ah, yeah, I meant to talk to you about the singing, actually. See, The Beast actually has very sensitive ears, and--”
“Sunek--I mean, mighty Beast,” Natasha muttered again, before they were delayed even further by an impromptu foraging party, “Perhaps now’s a good time to get everyone moving?”
He looked a little miffed to have his entertainment curtailed, but reluctantly turned back to the Makalites with a sigh, ratcheting up the theatre of his performance.
“No time for sandwiches, puny mortals, it is time for us to move!”
The Makalites looked at each other, and stood up obediently, before Sister Ryna took a cautious step towards the Beast.
“We will go wherever you wish us to, oh great Beast. Even if you are to take us to the Great Hereafter itself.”
“We trust in you,” another Makalite called out, “The Seer has forsaken us. And so has the spotted man. They were no longer in the village.”
“Yeah, well,” Sunek shrugged casually, “That’s what you get for putting someone other than me in charge.”
“But when I told everyone I had seen the Beast of the Great Hereafter,” Sister Ryna continued, “We had to come and find you for ourselves. To help us find our salvation!”
Natasha felt as though her face had become a permanent grimace as the full details of the situation were spelled out to them by the Makalites. But it did at least give them the chance to fix the most pressing issue.
“We can do a lot better than salvation, can’t we, mighty Beast?” she chimed in, “We can heal your sickness.”
“Is this true?” Sister Ryna asked excitedly, directing her question to Sunek.
“The Beast was already preparing to cure me,” Sister Lyca chimed in from Klath’s shoulder, “I am sure he can cure all of you as well, Brothers and Sisters.”
“Yes! Of course!” Sunek pompously bellowed, back in full Beast mode, “The great, mighty and incredibly handsome Beast will order his weak and feeble servant here to cure you all of your foul and wretched disease!”
As well as her grimace, Natasha found that her withering glare was getting a serious workout today.
“Right,” she managed eventually, “So we should get moving.”
“Yes,” Sister Ryna nodded, “We should be swift, for more are following from the village.”
“What’s that now?” Sunek asked, a little less Beast-like.
“More are coming,” Sister Ryna repeated, “Brother Falor, Brother Makan, Sister Hyla, and many more. They still trust in The Seer and the spotted man, and they did not believe my words about the Beast’s visit. They forbade us from leaving, and when they find us gone, they will surely follow.”
Natasha mentally added the charge of causing a religious schism to the rap sheet that a theoretical Starfleet tribunal would be handing down to them.
“Well,” Sunek shrugged at her and Klath, “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Natasha checked the retuned tricorder in her hand and nodded. The Bounty wasn’t far away, but she could also see a number of Makalite lifesigns now bearing down on their position.
“Perhaps,” Klath motioned to the Vulcan, “The Beast should lead the way.”
Sunek turned back around, and saw that the dozen or so Makalites were still staring at him, waiting on his every word.
“Oh, right,” he nodded, “Come, simple peasants. Follow your noble Beast!”
He swaggered off into the forest, followed by Sister Ryna and the other Makalite believers, many of them still excitedly chattering to each other in hushed voices.
Klath shared an unhappy glance with Natasha before they followed in the wake of the over-acting guardian of the Makalite afterlife.
“He is giving me a headache,” the Klingon muttered as they walked through a deeper patch of undergrowth, still carrying the ailing Sister Lyca on his shoulder.
“Could be worse,” Natasha offered, “At least they haven’t started singing yet--Ow!”
She stopped suddenly and hissed in pain. Looking down at the source of the pain, she saw a small purple thorn from one of the plants she had brushed past that was embedded in her leg, having pierced clean through her trousers.
“You are hurt?” Klath asked as he saw her leg.
She reached down and gently pulled the thorn out, before giving both the offending object and her leg a cursory scan with the tricorder.
“Just a scratch,” she offered back, “Between this and that fruit I found earlier, I’m kinda getting used to the local flora not agreeing with me on this planet.”
Klath nodded and continued walking.
Natasha carefully slipped the thorn into her pocket for later study, deciding that she may as well have something to show for her first proper away team mission in a year. Then, satisfied that there was nothing but the flesh wound to be concerned with, she resumed walking behind Klath.
She was far more concerned with the number of lifesigns that were approaching them from behind.
Not to mention what might be awaiting them further ahead.
****************************
“This would have been a lot easier if you hadn’t shot me.”
Jirel grimaced slightly again, as he propped himself up against one of the Bounty’s landing struts to rest his injured foot.
To his side, Mazur stood in the grass, largely ignoring him. His focus, and his disruptor, were both trained on the more mobile of his prisoners, as Denella worked on the thruster assembly.
A gentle breeze blew across the clearing where the Bounty had landed, whipping up the stalks of grass, and the sky overhead was still clear and green-ish, though the sun was now much lower in the sky as sunset slowly approached.
The tranquillity of the scene was entirely lost on the armed man in the robes.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” he shouted in frustration at Denella, as she ran the coil spanner across the hull.
As far as he was concerned, she didn’t actually seem to be doing any proper work. If anything, she just seemed to be waving the bulky metal tool around the thruster housing without any sort of rhyme or reason. Once again, his senses told him that he was being conned in some way.
The Orion engineer, for her part, ignored the slight against her technical prowess and continued to work.
The truth was that, while she did know how to use the coil spanner, and had done since she was a small child being taught how to fix vintage shuttles by her father on the Orpheus IV colony, there weren’t actually any repairs to conduct.
But she had to follow through with the fictional damage that she’d set up back in the cockpit to buy them some more time, and so she was keeping up the pretence that there was something in the aft thrusters that needed repairing.
By waving the bulky metal tool around the thruster housing without any sort of rhyme or reason.
She couldn’t help but take a small amount of smug satisfaction from the way she was able to fool him. As far as she was concerned, that was what you deserved for not understanding the basics of engineering.
“Nearly finished,” she reported back to the El-Aurian, as she casually flicked her finger over the set of controls on the side of the spanner, causing a dark red light at the end of the device to gently pulse on and off.
To the uneducated Mazur, it looked like the implement was doing something. Even though she was simply cycling the coil spanner’s torch attachment through a partial diagnostic program.
“Make sure you are,” Mazur grouched.
Despite the pain in his foot, Jirel was finding some enjoyment in the improvised piece of theatre that Denella was putting on. But he felt he should help out with the ongoing distraction.
“Feeling the Edosians getting closer?” he offered, “What sort of scam did you try to pull with them, anyway?”
“Like I said, a misunderstanding,” the El-Aurian shrugged.
Though he did also glance up at the sky in a moment of paranoia, as if he might be able to spot another Edosian ship in orbit.
“Fair few misunderstandings given the crash side,” Denella chimed in, as she kept her attention on the torch diagnostic.
“Hey,” Mazur shrugged, “It’s not my fault their ship hit an ion storm and couldn’t cope with it. And it’s certainly not my fault that their species is so fragile.”
Denella paused for a moment and looked back at him with an accusing glare.
“They all died in the crash?”
Mazur met her accusation with a knowing glance.
“Come on now. I’m not a killer, ok? I don’t even like to use guns--”
He stopped and awkwardly gestured to Jirel’s injured foot with the disruptor that had done the damage.
“Y’know. Normally.”
“So glad you decided to make an exception to that rule,” the Trill grimaced.
The El-Aurian switched his attention back to the work that Denella was still doing, pacing around with an ever-decreasing amount of patience.
“Whatever. You’ve got ten minutes to finish whatever the hell you’re doing. Or maybe I’ll shoot his other foot. Even things out.”
Denella looked over at the already crippled Jirel and sighed, giving him a look that suggested she was all out of stalling options. They’d bought as much time as they could.
Jirel looked around. Mazur was too far away, and he was too injured to consider any sort of surprise attack. They needed something else.
Then, he glanced behind Mazur, over at the tree line, and he smiled.
“Oh, and booze. You need something from The Beast? Can't go wrong with booze.”
Natasha grimaced inwardly as she listened to Sunek setting the Makalite village even further off their natural course of evolution. The amount of cultural damage being inflicted on them seemed incalculable.
She had to remind herself that this was going to be for the greater good. That right now, curing the Makalites of their radiation poisoning was a bigger issue than the latest hard turn their belief system seemed to be taking thanks to a particularly significant case of mistaken identity.
“Food as well,” Sunek continued, “The Beast loves food. So if any of you have got, like, a sandwich or something on you, that’d be--”
“Ahem,” Natasha coughed from next to the Vulcan, “Dial it back a bit?”
He glanced at her and with a wide innocent smile. After initially being offended by the role that the Makalites had cast him in, his inner showman now seemed to have grown into the role. Especially after they had gained a wider audience than just Sister Lyca.
The three Bounty crewmates, along with Sister Lyca still slung over Klath’s shoulder, stood where they had been ambushed in the middle of the forest, surrounded by a dozen or so Makalites, including Sister Ryna.
They all sat cross-legged on the ground, enraptured by the Vulcan’s words, like a group of school kids gathered around their teacher for story time. Except, the story they were currently being spun by the guardian of the afterlife didn’t appear to have any sort of moral at the end.
“Food,” Sister Ryna nodded, looking around at her fellow Makalites, “The Beast of the Great Hereafter wishes for food. Quick, we must forage!”
“Yes!” one of the Makalite Brothers called out, “And then we must sing our songs to him again!”
At this, Sunek winced slightly.
“Ah, yeah, I meant to talk to you about the singing, actually. See, The Beast actually has very sensitive ears, and--”
“Sunek--I mean, mighty Beast,” Natasha muttered again, before they were delayed even further by an impromptu foraging party, “Perhaps now’s a good time to get everyone moving?”
He looked a little miffed to have his entertainment curtailed, but reluctantly turned back to the Makalites with a sigh, ratcheting up the theatre of his performance.
“No time for sandwiches, puny mortals, it is time for us to move!”
The Makalites looked at each other, and stood up obediently, before Sister Ryna took a cautious step towards the Beast.
“We will go wherever you wish us to, oh great Beast. Even if you are to take us to the Great Hereafter itself.”
“We trust in you,” another Makalite called out, “The Seer has forsaken us. And so has the spotted man. They were no longer in the village.”
“Yeah, well,” Sunek shrugged casually, “That’s what you get for putting someone other than me in charge.”
“But when I told everyone I had seen the Beast of the Great Hereafter,” Sister Ryna continued, “We had to come and find you for ourselves. To help us find our salvation!”
Natasha felt as though her face had become a permanent grimace as the full details of the situation were spelled out to them by the Makalites. But it did at least give them the chance to fix the most pressing issue.
“We can do a lot better than salvation, can’t we, mighty Beast?” she chimed in, “We can heal your sickness.”
“Is this true?” Sister Ryna asked excitedly, directing her question to Sunek.
“The Beast was already preparing to cure me,” Sister Lyca chimed in from Klath’s shoulder, “I am sure he can cure all of you as well, Brothers and Sisters.”
“Yes! Of course!” Sunek pompously bellowed, back in full Beast mode, “The great, mighty and incredibly handsome Beast will order his weak and feeble servant here to cure you all of your foul and wretched disease!”
As well as her grimace, Natasha found that her withering glare was getting a serious workout today.
“Right,” she managed eventually, “So we should get moving.”
“Yes,” Sister Ryna nodded, “We should be swift, for more are following from the village.”
“What’s that now?” Sunek asked, a little less Beast-like.
“More are coming,” Sister Ryna repeated, “Brother Falor, Brother Makan, Sister Hyla, and many more. They still trust in The Seer and the spotted man, and they did not believe my words about the Beast’s visit. They forbade us from leaving, and when they find us gone, they will surely follow.”
Natasha mentally added the charge of causing a religious schism to the rap sheet that a theoretical Starfleet tribunal would be handing down to them.
“Well,” Sunek shrugged at her and Klath, “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Natasha checked the retuned tricorder in her hand and nodded. The Bounty wasn’t far away, but she could also see a number of Makalite lifesigns now bearing down on their position.
“Perhaps,” Klath motioned to the Vulcan, “The Beast should lead the way.”
Sunek turned back around, and saw that the dozen or so Makalites were still staring at him, waiting on his every word.
“Oh, right,” he nodded, “Come, simple peasants. Follow your noble Beast!”
He swaggered off into the forest, followed by Sister Ryna and the other Makalite believers, many of them still excitedly chattering to each other in hushed voices.
Klath shared an unhappy glance with Natasha before they followed in the wake of the over-acting guardian of the Makalite afterlife.
“He is giving me a headache,” the Klingon muttered as they walked through a deeper patch of undergrowth, still carrying the ailing Sister Lyca on his shoulder.
“Could be worse,” Natasha offered, “At least they haven’t started singing yet--Ow!”
She stopped suddenly and hissed in pain. Looking down at the source of the pain, she saw a small purple thorn from one of the plants she had brushed past that was embedded in her leg, having pierced clean through her trousers.
“You are hurt?” Klath asked as he saw her leg.
She reached down and gently pulled the thorn out, before giving both the offending object and her leg a cursory scan with the tricorder.
“Just a scratch,” she offered back, “Between this and that fruit I found earlier, I’m kinda getting used to the local flora not agreeing with me on this planet.”
Klath nodded and continued walking.
Natasha carefully slipped the thorn into her pocket for later study, deciding that she may as well have something to show for her first proper away team mission in a year. Then, satisfied that there was nothing but the flesh wound to be concerned with, she resumed walking behind Klath.
She was far more concerned with the number of lifesigns that were approaching them from behind.
Not to mention what might be awaiting them further ahead.
****************************
“This would have been a lot easier if you hadn’t shot me.”
Jirel grimaced slightly again, as he propped himself up against one of the Bounty’s landing struts to rest his injured foot.
To his side, Mazur stood in the grass, largely ignoring him. His focus, and his disruptor, were both trained on the more mobile of his prisoners, as Denella worked on the thruster assembly.
A gentle breeze blew across the clearing where the Bounty had landed, whipping up the stalks of grass, and the sky overhead was still clear and green-ish, though the sun was now much lower in the sky as sunset slowly approached.
The tranquillity of the scene was entirely lost on the armed man in the robes.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” he shouted in frustration at Denella, as she ran the coil spanner across the hull.
As far as he was concerned, she didn’t actually seem to be doing any proper work. If anything, she just seemed to be waving the bulky metal tool around the thruster housing without any sort of rhyme or reason. Once again, his senses told him that he was being conned in some way.
The Orion engineer, for her part, ignored the slight against her technical prowess and continued to work.
The truth was that, while she did know how to use the coil spanner, and had done since she was a small child being taught how to fix vintage shuttles by her father on the Orpheus IV colony, there weren’t actually any repairs to conduct.
But she had to follow through with the fictional damage that she’d set up back in the cockpit to buy them some more time, and so she was keeping up the pretence that there was something in the aft thrusters that needed repairing.
By waving the bulky metal tool around the thruster housing without any sort of rhyme or reason.
She couldn’t help but take a small amount of smug satisfaction from the way she was able to fool him. As far as she was concerned, that was what you deserved for not understanding the basics of engineering.
“Nearly finished,” she reported back to the El-Aurian, as she casually flicked her finger over the set of controls on the side of the spanner, causing a dark red light at the end of the device to gently pulse on and off.
To the uneducated Mazur, it looked like the implement was doing something. Even though she was simply cycling the coil spanner’s torch attachment through a partial diagnostic program.
“Make sure you are,” Mazur grouched.
Despite the pain in his foot, Jirel was finding some enjoyment in the improvised piece of theatre that Denella was putting on. But he felt he should help out with the ongoing distraction.
“Feeling the Edosians getting closer?” he offered, “What sort of scam did you try to pull with them, anyway?”
“Like I said, a misunderstanding,” the El-Aurian shrugged.
Though he did also glance up at the sky in a moment of paranoia, as if he might be able to spot another Edosian ship in orbit.
“Fair few misunderstandings given the crash side,” Denella chimed in, as she kept her attention on the torch diagnostic.
“Hey,” Mazur shrugged, “It’s not my fault their ship hit an ion storm and couldn’t cope with it. And it’s certainly not my fault that their species is so fragile.”
Denella paused for a moment and looked back at him with an accusing glare.
“They all died in the crash?”
Mazur met her accusation with a knowing glance.
“Come on now. I’m not a killer, ok? I don’t even like to use guns--”
He stopped and awkwardly gestured to Jirel’s injured foot with the disruptor that had done the damage.
“Y’know. Normally.”
“So glad you decided to make an exception to that rule,” the Trill grimaced.
The El-Aurian switched his attention back to the work that Denella was still doing, pacing around with an ever-decreasing amount of patience.
“Whatever. You’ve got ten minutes to finish whatever the hell you’re doing. Or maybe I’ll shoot his other foot. Even things out.”
Denella looked over at the already crippled Jirel and sighed, giving him a look that suggested she was all out of stalling options. They’d bought as much time as they could.
Jirel looked around. Mazur was too far away, and he was too injured to consider any sort of surprise attack. They needed something else.
Then, he glanced behind Mazur, over at the tree line, and he smiled.
Sunek in Beast Mode... Love it! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
“They’re right behind us!”
As Sunek issued his report, a particularly large stone went whizzing past Natasha’s head, impacting on a nearby tree trunk with some force.
She hadn’t really needed the report.
“Yep, got it,” she called out, “Everyone keep moving!”
The other villagers had closed them down more quickly than they had been expecting. The Makalites moved significantly faster than the Klingon, Vulcan and human thanks to their familiarity with the environment, and Natasha knew they had slowed their own group down.
And she also knew that the other villagers had brought weapons with them. The slingshots that Klath had assessed to be of no real threat during his impromptu tactical analysis of the village earlier.
What he hadn’t factored in during that analysis was the impact that the slightly higher gravity of the planet would have on the ability of the natives to propel the simple projectiles with rather more devastating force than one might expect.
The dent left behind in the tree trunk to their right as another stone whizzed past and slammed into the bark clearly underlined that.
Klath staggered over another tree root, doubly frustrated that he was having to retreat from the onslaught with Sister Lyca still on his back, and that her presence was still preventing him from grabbing his bat’leth and turning to fight.
“This is becoming annoying,” he growled as another stone whistled past.
“Ah, you say that every time people start throwing rocks at us,” Sunek quipped as he vaulted over a fallen tree trunk.
Up ahead of them, one of the stones being hurled from behind struck one of the Makalite Brothers squarely in the back, causing him to fall to the ground with a yelp of pain. Despite the danger of the situation, Natasha’s medical training overrode everything else, as she stopped to help the blue-skinned man back up.
“You ok?” she asked, as another couple of stones impacted nearby.
The Makalite Brother managed a pained nod as she helped him back to his feet. With the pursuing pack getting ever nearer, they followed the rest of their group back through the undergrowth.
It didn’t take them long to catch up. A few more paces further on, they found that the dozen or so other Makalites, headed by Sister Ryna, had stopped right at the edge of the clearing. Much to the continued frustration of Sunek and Klath.
Why they had stopped was immediately clear, despite the danger from behind. The Bounty was visible across on the other side of the clearing, nestled under the mountain range behind. Natasha felt a slight pang of comfort as she saw the now-familiar shape of the ship she had begun to call home.
But that was nothing like the feeling it had evoked in the Makalites.
“The skyship…” she heard Sister Ryna whisper.
But aside from that, they stood in venerable silence. Because not only was the skyship there, but so was The Seer.
****************************
“My flock?” Mazur spat at Jirel.
The Trill kept his eyes focused on the El-Aurian.
“Yeah, your flock,” he replied, a little louder than was strictly necessary given the short distance between them, “I assumed you might want to do something for them before we left, given all they did for you. Especially now we’re back at the…skyship.”
The implication in his comment passed Mazur by entirely. Instead, he let out a cackle of laughter.
“My flock! Those stupid backward villagers? You really think, after all I’ve been through, I’m going to go back and help them?”
Jirel patiently maintained eye contact with the armed man, but didn’t say anything, allowing the amateur dramatics of the professional con artist to play out. And letting him loudly dig his own grave. Metaphorically speaking.
“You have no idea how annoying this entire mess has been for me, do you? How utterly boring, how tedious and pointless! Trapped in that dreadful village for weeks on end, listening to those morons going on and on about prophecies, and diseases, and all their other problems! Having to make up a new vision every day just to shut them up!”
He tutted and paced up and down under the Bounty. Denella had stopped in her fictitious repair to watch the speech play out.
“They just wouldn’t stop complaining! About anything! ‘Oh, Seer, my crops won’t grow!’ or ‘Oh, Seer, the rains haven’t come yet!’ or ‘Oh, Seer, my elbow hurts!’.”
“Seems like that’s the sort of thing The Seer should be dealing with.”
“Psh, yeah, well, good thing I’m not The Seer any more, isn’t it?”
“No,” Jirel grinned knowingly, “You’re Martus Mazur. The greatest swindler in the galaxy. Reduced to peddling lies to the Makalites.”
“Precisely,” Mazur nodded pompously, appreciating the unexpected ego massage.
He appreciated it slightly less when he saw a wide grin spreading across Jirel’s face, as the Trill’s focus shifted from Mazur himself to something behind him.
That shift of focus wasn’t lost on the El-Aurian. Nor was the distant, but unmistakable sound of excitable chattering coming from behind him.
With a sinking feeling, he slowly turned around to the tree line, and saw the large gaggle of Makalites gathered on the edge of the clearing. Also visible among the number of blue-skinned aliens were the unmistakable forms of a human, a Vulcan and a Klingon.
Some of the Makalites were armed with stones and slingshots, but they had paused in their assault once they had seen the skyship in the clearing. And heard The Seer speaking.
And now all of them, from the smallest Makalite to the burliest Klingon, looked thoroughly unhappy with him.
“Ah,” Mazur sighed, “Crap.”
He felt a familiar sensation inside. A sensation that he had experienced plenty of times as he had bounced around the cosmos from trick to scam and back again. The game was up. The grift was well and truly over.
So distracted was he at the collapse of The Seer’s facade that he didn’t even notice a familiar object come arcing through the air towards him. He only became aware of it when it impacted heavily on the back of his head.
Martus Mazur dropped the Edosian disruptor and crumpled to the ground in a becalmed, and deeply unconscious slump. Denella stood over his now immobile form, gripping her trusty coil spanner in her hand and smiling in satisfaction.
“See?” she said to the unconscious Mazur, “I do know how to use one of these.”
She turned back to Jirel, who smiled back at her.
“And all’s well that ends--”
But he didn’t get any further with his comment.
Because then the first stone, propelled from somewhere along the tree line of the forest, thudded into the ground next to them.
****************************
During The Seer’s little speech, and his subsequent incapacitation, the Makalites gathered on the fringes of the forest had been struggling to process what was happening. For the umpteenth time in the last few weeks, their system of beliefs was being turned on its head, and they all had different opinions on the developing situation.
“The Seer has forsaken us!”
“The spotted man’s companion has assaulted The Seer!”
“What of his prophecies? He said they were lies!”
“The spotted man and The Seer were abandoning all of us!”
“This is blasphemy!”
The splinter group that had been fleeing from the village with Sunek, Klath and Denella, and whose belief and trust in The Seer had been overtaken by their trust in the Beast of the Great Hereafter, who had visited them to cure their disease, took The Seer’s words as vindication of their decision, and proof in Sister Lyca’s long-held belief that The Seer had been a false prophet.
Which made them angry, because for a long time before the Beast had shown up, they had been following him just as much as the others.
Meanwhile, the larger group of villagers led by Brother Falor, Brother Makan and Sister Hyla, the group that had remained faithful to The Seer’s prophecy and to the spotted man’s skyship, were splintering further.
Some were angry with The Seer, for his hurtful words and his spiteful actions that seemed to undermine everything he had told them since he had arrived in their village, now he had admitted freely that he wasn’t the man he claimed to be.
Others were too blinded by their devotion to The Seer to pay attention to what he’d actually been saying. His actual words had stopped mattering to them a long time ago, because they were often so confusing and contradictory that attempting to rationalise them completely was a hopeless task. Their faith was all that mattered now.
And they were angry because they had seen the green woman, who none of them had seen before, but who also appeared to be travelling with the spotted man himself, attack The Seer and knock him to the ground.
Whichever of the expanding collection of splinter groups each Makalite belonged to, one thing was common amongst all of them. They were all angry.
And before Natasha, Klath or Sunek realised what was happening, that anger began to escalate all around them.
“The Seer’s prophecies were false! He said so himself!” Sister Ryna called out, “Just as Sister Lyca told us!”
“The Seer and the spotted man were going to leave us!” Brother Falor bellowed, especially angry seeing as how The Seer had promised him such a prime seat onboard the skyship when it made its ascent to the heavens, in return for his loyalty.
“They have both forsaken us!” Brother Makan, equally miffed at how his prime seat offer had been set to come to nothing.
“The Seer has been struck down!” Sister Hyla, committed to the words of the prophecy to the bitter end, retorted, “We must ignore this blasphemy, and save him!”
“No!” Sister Ryna shot back, “We must stop him!”
And then, as the angered words escalated, the crowd moved. Forwards, into the clearing. Those with weapons brought them to bear.
“Oh no,” Natasha managed, “No, everyone, listen--!”
Before she could get any further, the first stones left their slingshots.
****************************
Denella helped the injured Jirel towards the rear ramp of the Bounty as best she could, even as more stones whistled past them. She had left Mazur where he had fallen, reasoning that she’d come back for him later. At least she was sure that he wasn’t going anywhere for the time being.
And besides, they had more important things to worry about. Namely the dozens of blue-skinned aliens racing across the clearing towards them, flinging stones about with deadly force.
“What the hell are they doing?” she managed, “I thought you said they liked you?”
“They did!” Jirel insisted, gesturing out at one of the approaching Makalite women, “That one even gave me a massage--You know, I don’t come across great in that story. Ignore that.”
Denella had no time to query that further, as a particularly large stone slammed into the metal of the ramp, just inches away from them.
And then they heard a familiar voice.
“My people! Please! Stop this attack!”
Despite their situation, Denella and Jirel couldn’t help but glance at each other.
“Was that…?”
“Definitely sounded like…”
Their confusion deepened as the Makalites obeyed the commanding sound of the voice, the entire pack coming to a halt immediately and turning back to the source of the voice.
Even the few remaining true believers of The Seer, led by Sister Hyla, looked up from where they had rushed to attend to their unconscious saviour.
Behind them, in the middle of the clearing, Sunek stood and bellowed out at the crowd.
“Listen to the Beast of the Great Hereafter! Your brave, wise and perfectly proportioned Beast! Do not attack the feeble and destitute spotted man, or his measly skyship!”
A few of the Makalites began to chatter amongst themselves, even as Sunek calmly approached them. His arms were extended wide, in a similar manner to how Mazur had presented himself, though his face was less serene and peaceable, and more deeply smug.
Further back, Natasha and Klath, with Sister Lyca still on his shoulder, followed the Vulcan.
“It appears to be working,” Klath noted with a grunt.
“Depends on how you’re defining ‘working’, I guess,” she sighed.
It had been the only play they had left, to send Sunek out to stop the Makalites. That didn’t mean that she had to like it. Sunek walked on through the awestruck Makalites. Even the former followers of The Seer now believed what Sister Ryna had been telling them. The Beast was here.
“The supremely intelligent and sexually potent Beast is pleased you are listening to him,” Sunek continued as he walked on towards the Bounty, “Now he demands that you return to your homes, while The Beast deals with the spotted man and his skyship. Once and for all.”
The Makalites looked at each other again.
Then, as Jirel and Denella’s jaws dropped in unison, the entire hoard, even those tending to The Seer, turned back and headed towards the forest.
The flock obeyed their new master.
They passed by Klath and Natasha, barely paying them any notice. And as the Makalites disappeared, save for the one on Klath’s shoulders, Sunek triumphantly stepped up the ramp to where his stunned colleagues were standing.
“What?” he said with the most casual of shrugs, “Turns out I’m a god. Don’t act so surprised. At least there are some people in this big old galaxy of ours who know my proper place in the pecking order.”
With a final flourish, the latest con artist to ply his trade amongst the Makalites stepped past them and swaggered his way back into the ship.
After a moment, Denella turned to the still-stunned Jirel.
“I forgot to mention. He’s got some HR issues he wants to discuss with you.”
“Clearly,” Jirel managed.
They were joined by Natasha and Klath, along with his passenger. He managed a weak apologetic smile at the deeply unhappy human doctor.
“Seriously. We don’t usually do this sort of thing."
“Uh huh,” she replied with a raised eyebrow.
She walked on into the ship, as Jirel hobbled after her, still supported by Denella.
“Hey, also, could you take a look at my foot? Kinda got a bit shot--”
“Get in line,” she fired back, “First up, we’ve got a village to save.”
The pain from his foot made him consider arguing his case further, but he reluctantly agreed with her order of priority. They carried on up the ramp.
“By the way,” he added, “Who the hell made Sunek a god?”
End of Part Four
“They’re right behind us!”
As Sunek issued his report, a particularly large stone went whizzing past Natasha’s head, impacting on a nearby tree trunk with some force.
She hadn’t really needed the report.
“Yep, got it,” she called out, “Everyone keep moving!”
The other villagers had closed them down more quickly than they had been expecting. The Makalites moved significantly faster than the Klingon, Vulcan and human thanks to their familiarity with the environment, and Natasha knew they had slowed their own group down.
And she also knew that the other villagers had brought weapons with them. The slingshots that Klath had assessed to be of no real threat during his impromptu tactical analysis of the village earlier.
What he hadn’t factored in during that analysis was the impact that the slightly higher gravity of the planet would have on the ability of the natives to propel the simple projectiles with rather more devastating force than one might expect.
The dent left behind in the tree trunk to their right as another stone whizzed past and slammed into the bark clearly underlined that.
Klath staggered over another tree root, doubly frustrated that he was having to retreat from the onslaught with Sister Lyca still on his back, and that her presence was still preventing him from grabbing his bat’leth and turning to fight.
“This is becoming annoying,” he growled as another stone whistled past.
“Ah, you say that every time people start throwing rocks at us,” Sunek quipped as he vaulted over a fallen tree trunk.
Up ahead of them, one of the stones being hurled from behind struck one of the Makalite Brothers squarely in the back, causing him to fall to the ground with a yelp of pain. Despite the danger of the situation, Natasha’s medical training overrode everything else, as she stopped to help the blue-skinned man back up.
“You ok?” she asked, as another couple of stones impacted nearby.
The Makalite Brother managed a pained nod as she helped him back to his feet. With the pursuing pack getting ever nearer, they followed the rest of their group back through the undergrowth.
It didn’t take them long to catch up. A few more paces further on, they found that the dozen or so other Makalites, headed by Sister Ryna, had stopped right at the edge of the clearing. Much to the continued frustration of Sunek and Klath.
Why they had stopped was immediately clear, despite the danger from behind. The Bounty was visible across on the other side of the clearing, nestled under the mountain range behind. Natasha felt a slight pang of comfort as she saw the now-familiar shape of the ship she had begun to call home.
But that was nothing like the feeling it had evoked in the Makalites.
“The skyship…” she heard Sister Ryna whisper.
But aside from that, they stood in venerable silence. Because not only was the skyship there, but so was The Seer.
****************************
“My flock?” Mazur spat at Jirel.
The Trill kept his eyes focused on the El-Aurian.
“Yeah, your flock,” he replied, a little louder than was strictly necessary given the short distance between them, “I assumed you might want to do something for them before we left, given all they did for you. Especially now we’re back at the…skyship.”
The implication in his comment passed Mazur by entirely. Instead, he let out a cackle of laughter.
“My flock! Those stupid backward villagers? You really think, after all I’ve been through, I’m going to go back and help them?”
Jirel patiently maintained eye contact with the armed man, but didn’t say anything, allowing the amateur dramatics of the professional con artist to play out. And letting him loudly dig his own grave. Metaphorically speaking.
“You have no idea how annoying this entire mess has been for me, do you? How utterly boring, how tedious and pointless! Trapped in that dreadful village for weeks on end, listening to those morons going on and on about prophecies, and diseases, and all their other problems! Having to make up a new vision every day just to shut them up!”
He tutted and paced up and down under the Bounty. Denella had stopped in her fictitious repair to watch the speech play out.
“They just wouldn’t stop complaining! About anything! ‘Oh, Seer, my crops won’t grow!’ or ‘Oh, Seer, the rains haven’t come yet!’ or ‘Oh, Seer, my elbow hurts!’.”
“Seems like that’s the sort of thing The Seer should be dealing with.”
“Psh, yeah, well, good thing I’m not The Seer any more, isn’t it?”
“No,” Jirel grinned knowingly, “You’re Martus Mazur. The greatest swindler in the galaxy. Reduced to peddling lies to the Makalites.”
“Precisely,” Mazur nodded pompously, appreciating the unexpected ego massage.
He appreciated it slightly less when he saw a wide grin spreading across Jirel’s face, as the Trill’s focus shifted from Mazur himself to something behind him.
That shift of focus wasn’t lost on the El-Aurian. Nor was the distant, but unmistakable sound of excitable chattering coming from behind him.
With a sinking feeling, he slowly turned around to the tree line, and saw the large gaggle of Makalites gathered on the edge of the clearing. Also visible among the number of blue-skinned aliens were the unmistakable forms of a human, a Vulcan and a Klingon.
Some of the Makalites were armed with stones and slingshots, but they had paused in their assault once they had seen the skyship in the clearing. And heard The Seer speaking.
And now all of them, from the smallest Makalite to the burliest Klingon, looked thoroughly unhappy with him.
“Ah,” Mazur sighed, “Crap.”
He felt a familiar sensation inside. A sensation that he had experienced plenty of times as he had bounced around the cosmos from trick to scam and back again. The game was up. The grift was well and truly over.
So distracted was he at the collapse of The Seer’s facade that he didn’t even notice a familiar object come arcing through the air towards him. He only became aware of it when it impacted heavily on the back of his head.
Martus Mazur dropped the Edosian disruptor and crumpled to the ground in a becalmed, and deeply unconscious slump. Denella stood over his now immobile form, gripping her trusty coil spanner in her hand and smiling in satisfaction.
“See?” she said to the unconscious Mazur, “I do know how to use one of these.”
She turned back to Jirel, who smiled back at her.
“And all’s well that ends--”
But he didn’t get any further with his comment.
Because then the first stone, propelled from somewhere along the tree line of the forest, thudded into the ground next to them.
****************************
During The Seer’s little speech, and his subsequent incapacitation, the Makalites gathered on the fringes of the forest had been struggling to process what was happening. For the umpteenth time in the last few weeks, their system of beliefs was being turned on its head, and they all had different opinions on the developing situation.
“The Seer has forsaken us!”
“The spotted man’s companion has assaulted The Seer!”
“What of his prophecies? He said they were lies!”
“The spotted man and The Seer were abandoning all of us!”
“This is blasphemy!”
The splinter group that had been fleeing from the village with Sunek, Klath and Denella, and whose belief and trust in The Seer had been overtaken by their trust in the Beast of the Great Hereafter, who had visited them to cure their disease, took The Seer’s words as vindication of their decision, and proof in Sister Lyca’s long-held belief that The Seer had been a false prophet.
Which made them angry, because for a long time before the Beast had shown up, they had been following him just as much as the others.
Meanwhile, the larger group of villagers led by Brother Falor, Brother Makan and Sister Hyla, the group that had remained faithful to The Seer’s prophecy and to the spotted man’s skyship, were splintering further.
Some were angry with The Seer, for his hurtful words and his spiteful actions that seemed to undermine everything he had told them since he had arrived in their village, now he had admitted freely that he wasn’t the man he claimed to be.
Others were too blinded by their devotion to The Seer to pay attention to what he’d actually been saying. His actual words had stopped mattering to them a long time ago, because they were often so confusing and contradictory that attempting to rationalise them completely was a hopeless task. Their faith was all that mattered now.
And they were angry because they had seen the green woman, who none of them had seen before, but who also appeared to be travelling with the spotted man himself, attack The Seer and knock him to the ground.
Whichever of the expanding collection of splinter groups each Makalite belonged to, one thing was common amongst all of them. They were all angry.
And before Natasha, Klath or Sunek realised what was happening, that anger began to escalate all around them.
“The Seer’s prophecies were false! He said so himself!” Sister Ryna called out, “Just as Sister Lyca told us!”
“The Seer and the spotted man were going to leave us!” Brother Falor bellowed, especially angry seeing as how The Seer had promised him such a prime seat onboard the skyship when it made its ascent to the heavens, in return for his loyalty.
“They have both forsaken us!” Brother Makan, equally miffed at how his prime seat offer had been set to come to nothing.
“The Seer has been struck down!” Sister Hyla, committed to the words of the prophecy to the bitter end, retorted, “We must ignore this blasphemy, and save him!”
“No!” Sister Ryna shot back, “We must stop him!”
And then, as the angered words escalated, the crowd moved. Forwards, into the clearing. Those with weapons brought them to bear.
“Oh no,” Natasha managed, “No, everyone, listen--!”
Before she could get any further, the first stones left their slingshots.
****************************
Denella helped the injured Jirel towards the rear ramp of the Bounty as best she could, even as more stones whistled past them. She had left Mazur where he had fallen, reasoning that she’d come back for him later. At least she was sure that he wasn’t going anywhere for the time being.
And besides, they had more important things to worry about. Namely the dozens of blue-skinned aliens racing across the clearing towards them, flinging stones about with deadly force.
“What the hell are they doing?” she managed, “I thought you said they liked you?”
“They did!” Jirel insisted, gesturing out at one of the approaching Makalite women, “That one even gave me a massage--You know, I don’t come across great in that story. Ignore that.”
Denella had no time to query that further, as a particularly large stone slammed into the metal of the ramp, just inches away from them.
And then they heard a familiar voice.
“My people! Please! Stop this attack!”
Despite their situation, Denella and Jirel couldn’t help but glance at each other.
“Was that…?”
“Definitely sounded like…”
Their confusion deepened as the Makalites obeyed the commanding sound of the voice, the entire pack coming to a halt immediately and turning back to the source of the voice.
Even the few remaining true believers of The Seer, led by Sister Hyla, looked up from where they had rushed to attend to their unconscious saviour.
Behind them, in the middle of the clearing, Sunek stood and bellowed out at the crowd.
“Listen to the Beast of the Great Hereafter! Your brave, wise and perfectly proportioned Beast! Do not attack the feeble and destitute spotted man, or his measly skyship!”
A few of the Makalites began to chatter amongst themselves, even as Sunek calmly approached them. His arms were extended wide, in a similar manner to how Mazur had presented himself, though his face was less serene and peaceable, and more deeply smug.
Further back, Natasha and Klath, with Sister Lyca still on his shoulder, followed the Vulcan.
“It appears to be working,” Klath noted with a grunt.
“Depends on how you’re defining ‘working’, I guess,” she sighed.
It had been the only play they had left, to send Sunek out to stop the Makalites. That didn’t mean that she had to like it. Sunek walked on through the awestruck Makalites. Even the former followers of The Seer now believed what Sister Ryna had been telling them. The Beast was here.
“The supremely intelligent and sexually potent Beast is pleased you are listening to him,” Sunek continued as he walked on towards the Bounty, “Now he demands that you return to your homes, while The Beast deals with the spotted man and his skyship. Once and for all.”
The Makalites looked at each other again.
Then, as Jirel and Denella’s jaws dropped in unison, the entire hoard, even those tending to The Seer, turned back and headed towards the forest.
The flock obeyed their new master.
They passed by Klath and Natasha, barely paying them any notice. And as the Makalites disappeared, save for the one on Klath’s shoulders, Sunek triumphantly stepped up the ramp to where his stunned colleagues were standing.
“What?” he said with the most casual of shrugs, “Turns out I’m a god. Don’t act so surprised. At least there are some people in this big old galaxy of ours who know my proper place in the pecking order.”
With a final flourish, the latest con artist to ply his trade amongst the Makalites stepped past them and swaggered his way back into the ship.
After a moment, Denella turned to the still-stunned Jirel.
“I forgot to mention. He’s got some HR issues he wants to discuss with you.”
“Clearly,” Jirel managed.
They were joined by Natasha and Klath, along with his passenger. He managed a weak apologetic smile at the deeply unhappy human doctor.
“Seriously. We don’t usually do this sort of thing."
“Uh huh,” she replied with a raised eyebrow.
She walked on into the ship, as Jirel hobbled after her, still supported by Denella.
“Hey, also, could you take a look at my foot? Kinda got a bit shot--”
“Get in line,” she fired back, “First up, we’ve got a village to save.”
The pain from his foot made him consider arguing his case further, but he reluctantly agreed with her order of priority. They carried on up the ramp.
“By the way,” he added, “Who the hell made Sunek a god?”
End of Part Four
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Part Five
There were times since she had joined the Bounty’s ramshackle crew that Natasha had felt that she could use a medical assistant or two. But this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.
She crouched on the banks of the stream that flowed past the Makalite village, carefully emptying the contents of the flask into the water, and checking the resulting concentration levels of the anti-radiation compound with her tricorder.
All the while, Sister Lyca crouched next to her, watching on in awe. While a short distance away, Sunek leaned against a tree and yawned.
They were a little way upstream from the village, and partially shrouded by the early evening gloom that was setting in. Her scans had shown the stream to be the source of the well inside the settlement, which Sister Lyca had confirmed was the main water source for the entire population.
And therefore, this was the best place to subtly and swiftly cure them of their radiation sickness, without having to bring each Makalite back to the Bounty, as she had been forced to do with Sister Lyca’s more severe condition.
“And this will cure the others?” the Makalite woman asked, craning her neck back around to Sunek as she posed the question.
The Vulcan rolled his eyes and sighed. Predictably, the universe’s most skittish man was starting to find his role as the Beast of the Great Hereafter a little annoying ever since he had been dragged back out here by Natasha.
Still, she felt she needed to include him. Her instructions to Sister Lyca to help cure the other villagers were far more likely to be carried out if they carried the seal of the Beast.
“Yes!” he called out as pompously as he could, “The great Beast will cure you all! For he is so very powerful! And, also, you should direct any further questions at my feeble subordinate!”
He gestured to the nonplussed Natasha and returned to his yawn. Sister Lyca turned back to Natasha with an eager look that suggested she did indeed have further questions.
While she had been treating her, she had been sure to check Makalite physiology in more detail, and had been disappointed to find that their genetic makeup precluded any sort of memory wiping technique she would have been capable of performing.
The old Starfleet cheat code when it came to cultural contamination wasn’t going to work this time.
“Perhaps I can learn to be a healer, like you?” Sister Lyca asked, as Natasha concluded her scans, satisfied with the dispersal process of the compound.
“I’m sure you could,” she replied as she stood up, “And you can start by making sure everyone drinks plenty of water from the well for the next day or so, right?”
Sister Lyca nodded enthusiastically, but then persisted.
“Perhaps…if the Beast allows it, you could teach me how to be a healer?”
“I’m fine with that,” the Beast muttered off-handedly as he idly picked a fleck of dirt from under his nail.
Natasha suppressed a sigh and shook her head patiently at the innocent face of the blue-skinned woman.
“I’m sorry, Sister Lyca. But me and the Beast need to get going.”
“Where?”
Natasha paused for a moment, silently cursing herself for still not checking if the planet had a southern continent or not. Her silence caused a ripple of understanding to spread across Sister Lyca’s face.
“I see,” she replied sagely, “You must leave. In your skyship.”
“Right,” Natasha nodded back, “But I’m sure you’ll do fine without us. And you remember what else the Beast told you to do back in the village, right?”
“Yes,” she replied quickly, “We must rid ourselves of The Seer’s belongings.”
Natasha nodded in satisfaction. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but with the anti-radiation meds now flooding through the village, she hoped that leaving the Makalites to remove the scrap metal from their village was the right thing to do. At least for the time being.
“Praise to you, Beast,” Sister Lyca called out, “And praise to his divine healer.”
Sunek didn’t even bother looking up despite this praise, but Natasha flinched with worry.
“Sister Lyca, please, you don’t need to praise us--”
“But you travelled here with the Beast of the Great Hereafter! And you showed us the truth about The Seer! You even cured my sickness!”
She held her arm up as proof of her final point, now devoid of the ugly rash that had been there for so long before, before gesturing down at the stream.
“And now you are curing all of us. Surely these are the acts of a saviour?”
Natasha sighed again, glancing at Sunek for some kind of backup on this one.
“Hey,” the Vulcan shrugged, “I say we take it. How many chances in life do you get to go down as an actual saviour?”
Devoid of support from the tousle-haired Vulcan, she shook her head and turned back to the enthusiastic Makalite.
“Sister Lyca, please, we’ve talked about this. I’m just a healer. And if the last few weeks have proved anything, with The Seer, the sickness and everything else, it should be that you don’t need to look for saviours any more. Do you understand?”
The Makalite woman paused and considered this for a moment, cocking her head at an odd angle as she looked down at the stream where the healer had released her cure.
“Yes,” she replied eventually, “I think I do understand. Good wishes to you, healer.”
She didn’t really understand at all. She didn’t understand a lot of things about the Beast’s healer, from a place she couldn’t possibly comprehend.
But she could see from the healer’s expression that this was important to her.
So, out of respect for her saviours, Sister Lyca decided to lie.
****************************
“Two hundred bars of gold-pressed latinum!”
Jirel stood on his freshly healed foot and glanced over at Denella and Klath, then back at Mazur, where he stood inside the Bounty’s cargo bay. The El-Aurian was shackled in a replicated set of handcuffs, but that wasn’t stopping him from at least trying to wriggle out of the situation verbally.
“What do we reckon? Is the great con artist good for two hundred bars?”
“Unlikely,” Klath offered with a grunt.
“For a start,” Denella pointed out, “Those jewels he brought with him were barely worth the price of the bag he was carrying them in.”
The jewels, worthless as they were, had been returned to the Makalite village. Mazur rolled his eyes and tutted.
“You don’t have to rub it in, you know. And I don’t have two hundred bars on me, obviously, but if you get me out of here, I can make a few calls, and--”
His latest proposal was interrupted by a chirp from the communicator on Denella’s belt. She checked it and nodded.
“The Edosians are in orbit. They’re ready to retrieve their prisoner.”
“Ugh,” Mazur grouched, shaking his head and waiting for the inevitable, “All you idiots had to do was take off. And you couldn’t even do that right.”
“Look at it this way,” Jirel grinned, “At least you’re finally getting off this planet.”
“Cute,” Mazur griped.
Jirel looked over to Denella and nodded at the communicator.
“Guess we’re ready down here. Tell them to collect whenever they’re ready.”
“Three hundred!” Mazur suddenly blurted out, “I just remembered a Ferengi contact in the Agoras sector that owes me a debt. I can make it up to three hundred bars!”
He gave the three Bounty crew members his best plaintive look to go along with his latest offer, but given the time they’d had on the Makalite planet, none of them were in a charitable mood.
“I guess we could think about helping you out,” Jirel mused, “For…eight hundred?”
Mazur’s face slumped.
“Four. Four hundred!”
Jirel glanced at his colleagues again and grinned.
“I definitely said eight hundred, right? You both heard that?”
“That’s what I heard,” Denella nodded.
“Tsk,” Jirel sighed theatrically, “And he calls himself a good listener…”
Mazur’s glare back at the Trill was fuelled by a combination of defeat and withering dissatisfaction.
“You know,” he said eventually, “This whole thing with the Edosians really is just a big misunderstanding. And I’ll get it straightened out. Just like I always do.”
“Have fun doing that,” Jirel shrugged.
“Oh, I will,” Mazur nodded, “And then, once I’ve got all that sorted, I’ve got plenty of friends around the quadrant who I can call on to sort out any other…problems I’ve got.”
Jirel’s face dropped slightly at the implication, even as the Edosian transporter beam began to take effect, and the El-Aurian started to dissolve. As he slowly vanished inside the dark green beam, he offered them a false smile.
“Be seeing you…”
He left behind a moment of contemplative silence, which Jirel eventually broke.
“You, um, don’t think that’s gonna come back to bite us in the ass one day, right?”
He tried not to read too much into the rather more prolonged silence that followed his question.
****************************
The process of removing all traces of The Seer’s influence was taking a long time. But the healer’s cure at least seemed to be working.
As Sister Lyca carried the latest piece of metal out of the village and back into the forest, she allowed herself a smile of satisfaction at the sight of the other villagers, already looking stronger and healthier, as they worked on disposing of the rest of The Seer’s materials.
The Bastille remained standing for now, but the temple had been demolished, and the treasures inside returned to their rightful owners. With most of the huts now stripped of their metal supports, it wouldn’t be much longer until everything was back to normal.
She dropped the metal on the accumulation of scrap that they had made in the forest and started back to the village. After a few steps, she paused to look up into the night sky, staring at the twinkling objects in the heavens. She wondered if the Beast, the healer and the skyship were up there right now, watching over them all.
Eventually, she was distracted by an excited shout from the village. She looked over to see Brother Falor and Sister Ryna beckoning her over with eager looks on their faces.
“Good wishes to you both,” Sister Lyca smiled as she reached them.
“And good wishes to you, Sister Lyca,” Sister Ryna replied, “Our day’s work is done. The takarti root soup is ready. Perhaps…it is time?”
Sister Lyca smiled and nodded. Brother Falor and Sister Ryna led her back through the deserted streets of the village, back to the main square.
As they arrived, she saw that there was a larger audience around the fire than she had been expecting tonight. Even Sister Hyla and the other Makalites who had stayed loyal to The Seer until the bitter end were in attendance, having been forgiven and allowed to rejoin the rest of the flock.
It felt like so long ago that she had been the outcast, shunned by the villagers and locked away inside the Bastille. Now, she was the talk of the town. Sister Lyca, who had followed the Beast and the healer all the way back to the skyship, and returned with the news that the village’s sickness would be cured.
And as Brother Falor and Sister Ryna joined the excited audience and left her standing alone in front of them, illuminated by the flickering fire, she didn’t feel nervous. She felt content.
A reverential silence descended as she prepared to speak.
“Brothers and Sisters,” she began, “Let me tell you again of the Beast, and the Great Healer. And tell you of their teachings…”
She paused for a moment. The truth was that, while she had been invited to tell her stories as soon as she had returned to the village, there really wasn’t much to say. Neither the healer nor the Beast had given her any real teachings to impart on the others.
But having been invited to speak, and having basked in the attention of her audience, she had quickly found that the half-truths, the exaggerations and the lies had come a lot easier than she had been expecting.
“The Great Healer told me many things,” she continued, “This summer, she foretold of a great and bountiful crop…”
Perhaps The Seer had been more of an influence on her than she realised. Or perhaps she was just happy to have been welcomed back into the fold, and was enjoying the unexpected attention.
Either way, Sister Lyca continued to speak the fictional words of the Beast of the Great Hereafter and his equally Great Healer.
And once again, the entire belief structure of one small village of Makalites was completely and thoroughly rewritten.
****************************
Natasha sat in the Bounty’s dining area and glanced over the message on the padd in front of her.
“Thought you’d be getting some rest?” Jirel asked as he walked into the room and made a beeline for the replicator.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she admitted as he joined her at the table.
“Starfleet guilt again?”
She fixed him with a deeply unimpressed glare.
“You don’t feel bad at all? For everything that happened back there?”
Jirel set his jumja tea down on the table and shrugged.
“It could have gone better,” he conceded, “But I’ve told Sunek he’s not allowed to do any more comet slingshots.”
“Really? That’s your takeaway from all this?”
“One of them. Besides, I’m not sure he’ll listen to me anyway. Kinda feels like being worshipped as a divine being might have had some lasting effects on the guy’s ego.”
Natasha was inclined to agree with that point.
“But,” Jirel continued, “It’s not like we could have fixed it, right? I mean, the damage was done way before we showed up.”
“True,” she admitted, gesturing to the padd, “And that’s what this is for. My latest message…back to the admiral.”
Jirel’s quizzical look gave way to one of grim understanding.
Admiral Jenner. The Starfleet officer who had made an unofficial request for Natasha to keep him updated on their journey after she had resigned her commission several months ago. The man who had indirectly brought them together by slipping the Bounty’s crew a mission to track down and salvage the black box of the late USS Navajo.
And the man that, unbeknownst to the rest of the Bounty’s crew, was Jirel’s mostly estranged adoptive father.
“Really?” Jirel snorted, “You’re gonna tell my dad on us? What are you, twelve?”
“No,” she replied patiently, “But Starfleet has resources for dealing with cultural contamination like this. Hell, they’ve caused enough of them down the years, it’s only right that they’ve learned a thing or two.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah, so I’ve suggested they coordinate with Edosian Internal Security to recover the wreckage, and also send a team to monitor the village.”
She paused and wiped her brow, surprised by how warm she was suddenly feeling, and absently wondering if there was something wrong with the ship’s environmental systems.
It would make sense. There was always something wrong with the Bounty.
“Do what you gotta do, Nat,” Jirel offered, “But…if you are telling my dad about all this, can you leave out the bit where I let the villagers throw a feast in my honour? I mean, I don’t want the guy to start respecting me too much…”
She managed a smile and nodded back.
“Don’t worry, oh spotted man. I’m blaming it all on Mazur. He caused the problems, after all. The rest of the details will just get stored away on the personal blackmail file I’ve got on you.”
“Hrm,” Jirel mused, “That’s not filling me with confidence.”
He smiled back, as she started to itch the back of her neck. A curious sensation was rising up inside of her that she couldn’t quite pinpoint.
“You ok?” he asked, with an edge of concern, “You look a bit…pale.”
She felt herself getting warmer. Visible beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
“Yeah,” she managed, feeling a little weak, “I think I just need to--”
She went to stand, and immediately faltered. A sudden stabbing burst of pain spread through her leg. She looked down at the limb, and with growing horror, remembered the plant thorn that had embedded itself there earlier.
“Seriously,” Jirel persisted, “What’s wrong?”
“Back on the planet, there was--”
She winced in pain and grabbed the table for support. Jirel rushed over to try and support her.
“There was what?”
“A plant. It didn’t show anything on the tricorder, but…”
Her vision started to fade. She felt herself going limp, falling into Jirel’s arms as they both slumped down to the ground.
“Hey! Denella! Klath! Sunek!” she heard the Trill call out, “We’ve got a problem down here!”
Even though he was right next to her, it felt like his voice was coming from a far distance. Blackness closed in on the periphery of her vision, like she was disappearing down a tunnel.
She felt the vague sensation of being picked up. She thought she heard him say something else, but it was a faint whisper.
And then she drifted away entirely. And she couldn’t see, or hear anything. She was gone.
Her comatose form flopped lifelessly into Jirel’s arms.
To be continued…
There were times since she had joined the Bounty’s ramshackle crew that Natasha had felt that she could use a medical assistant or two. But this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.
She crouched on the banks of the stream that flowed past the Makalite village, carefully emptying the contents of the flask into the water, and checking the resulting concentration levels of the anti-radiation compound with her tricorder.
All the while, Sister Lyca crouched next to her, watching on in awe. While a short distance away, Sunek leaned against a tree and yawned.
They were a little way upstream from the village, and partially shrouded by the early evening gloom that was setting in. Her scans had shown the stream to be the source of the well inside the settlement, which Sister Lyca had confirmed was the main water source for the entire population.
And therefore, this was the best place to subtly and swiftly cure them of their radiation sickness, without having to bring each Makalite back to the Bounty, as she had been forced to do with Sister Lyca’s more severe condition.
“And this will cure the others?” the Makalite woman asked, craning her neck back around to Sunek as she posed the question.
The Vulcan rolled his eyes and sighed. Predictably, the universe’s most skittish man was starting to find his role as the Beast of the Great Hereafter a little annoying ever since he had been dragged back out here by Natasha.
Still, she felt she needed to include him. Her instructions to Sister Lyca to help cure the other villagers were far more likely to be carried out if they carried the seal of the Beast.
“Yes!” he called out as pompously as he could, “The great Beast will cure you all! For he is so very powerful! And, also, you should direct any further questions at my feeble subordinate!”
He gestured to the nonplussed Natasha and returned to his yawn. Sister Lyca turned back to Natasha with an eager look that suggested she did indeed have further questions.
While she had been treating her, she had been sure to check Makalite physiology in more detail, and had been disappointed to find that their genetic makeup precluded any sort of memory wiping technique she would have been capable of performing.
The old Starfleet cheat code when it came to cultural contamination wasn’t going to work this time.
“Perhaps I can learn to be a healer, like you?” Sister Lyca asked, as Natasha concluded her scans, satisfied with the dispersal process of the compound.
“I’m sure you could,” she replied as she stood up, “And you can start by making sure everyone drinks plenty of water from the well for the next day or so, right?”
Sister Lyca nodded enthusiastically, but then persisted.
“Perhaps…if the Beast allows it, you could teach me how to be a healer?”
“I’m fine with that,” the Beast muttered off-handedly as he idly picked a fleck of dirt from under his nail.
Natasha suppressed a sigh and shook her head patiently at the innocent face of the blue-skinned woman.
“I’m sorry, Sister Lyca. But me and the Beast need to get going.”
“Where?”
Natasha paused for a moment, silently cursing herself for still not checking if the planet had a southern continent or not. Her silence caused a ripple of understanding to spread across Sister Lyca’s face.
“I see,” she replied sagely, “You must leave. In your skyship.”
“Right,” Natasha nodded back, “But I’m sure you’ll do fine without us. And you remember what else the Beast told you to do back in the village, right?”
“Yes,” she replied quickly, “We must rid ourselves of The Seer’s belongings.”
Natasha nodded in satisfaction. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but with the anti-radiation meds now flooding through the village, she hoped that leaving the Makalites to remove the scrap metal from their village was the right thing to do. At least for the time being.
“Praise to you, Beast,” Sister Lyca called out, “And praise to his divine healer.”
Sunek didn’t even bother looking up despite this praise, but Natasha flinched with worry.
“Sister Lyca, please, you don’t need to praise us--”
“But you travelled here with the Beast of the Great Hereafter! And you showed us the truth about The Seer! You even cured my sickness!”
She held her arm up as proof of her final point, now devoid of the ugly rash that had been there for so long before, before gesturing down at the stream.
“And now you are curing all of us. Surely these are the acts of a saviour?”
Natasha sighed again, glancing at Sunek for some kind of backup on this one.
“Hey,” the Vulcan shrugged, “I say we take it. How many chances in life do you get to go down as an actual saviour?”
Devoid of support from the tousle-haired Vulcan, she shook her head and turned back to the enthusiastic Makalite.
“Sister Lyca, please, we’ve talked about this. I’m just a healer. And if the last few weeks have proved anything, with The Seer, the sickness and everything else, it should be that you don’t need to look for saviours any more. Do you understand?”
The Makalite woman paused and considered this for a moment, cocking her head at an odd angle as she looked down at the stream where the healer had released her cure.
“Yes,” she replied eventually, “I think I do understand. Good wishes to you, healer.”
She didn’t really understand at all. She didn’t understand a lot of things about the Beast’s healer, from a place she couldn’t possibly comprehend.
But she could see from the healer’s expression that this was important to her.
So, out of respect for her saviours, Sister Lyca decided to lie.
****************************
“Two hundred bars of gold-pressed latinum!”
Jirel stood on his freshly healed foot and glanced over at Denella and Klath, then back at Mazur, where he stood inside the Bounty’s cargo bay. The El-Aurian was shackled in a replicated set of handcuffs, but that wasn’t stopping him from at least trying to wriggle out of the situation verbally.
“What do we reckon? Is the great con artist good for two hundred bars?”
“Unlikely,” Klath offered with a grunt.
“For a start,” Denella pointed out, “Those jewels he brought with him were barely worth the price of the bag he was carrying them in.”
The jewels, worthless as they were, had been returned to the Makalite village. Mazur rolled his eyes and tutted.
“You don’t have to rub it in, you know. And I don’t have two hundred bars on me, obviously, but if you get me out of here, I can make a few calls, and--”
His latest proposal was interrupted by a chirp from the communicator on Denella’s belt. She checked it and nodded.
“The Edosians are in orbit. They’re ready to retrieve their prisoner.”
“Ugh,” Mazur grouched, shaking his head and waiting for the inevitable, “All you idiots had to do was take off. And you couldn’t even do that right.”
“Look at it this way,” Jirel grinned, “At least you’re finally getting off this planet.”
“Cute,” Mazur griped.
Jirel looked over to Denella and nodded at the communicator.
“Guess we’re ready down here. Tell them to collect whenever they’re ready.”
“Three hundred!” Mazur suddenly blurted out, “I just remembered a Ferengi contact in the Agoras sector that owes me a debt. I can make it up to three hundred bars!”
He gave the three Bounty crew members his best plaintive look to go along with his latest offer, but given the time they’d had on the Makalite planet, none of them were in a charitable mood.
“I guess we could think about helping you out,” Jirel mused, “For…eight hundred?”
Mazur’s face slumped.
“Four. Four hundred!”
Jirel glanced at his colleagues again and grinned.
“I definitely said eight hundred, right? You both heard that?”
“That’s what I heard,” Denella nodded.
“Tsk,” Jirel sighed theatrically, “And he calls himself a good listener…”
Mazur’s glare back at the Trill was fuelled by a combination of defeat and withering dissatisfaction.
“You know,” he said eventually, “This whole thing with the Edosians really is just a big misunderstanding. And I’ll get it straightened out. Just like I always do.”
“Have fun doing that,” Jirel shrugged.
“Oh, I will,” Mazur nodded, “And then, once I’ve got all that sorted, I’ve got plenty of friends around the quadrant who I can call on to sort out any other…problems I’ve got.”
Jirel’s face dropped slightly at the implication, even as the Edosian transporter beam began to take effect, and the El-Aurian started to dissolve. As he slowly vanished inside the dark green beam, he offered them a false smile.
“Be seeing you…”
He left behind a moment of contemplative silence, which Jirel eventually broke.
“You, um, don’t think that’s gonna come back to bite us in the ass one day, right?”
He tried not to read too much into the rather more prolonged silence that followed his question.
****************************
The process of removing all traces of The Seer’s influence was taking a long time. But the healer’s cure at least seemed to be working.
As Sister Lyca carried the latest piece of metal out of the village and back into the forest, she allowed herself a smile of satisfaction at the sight of the other villagers, already looking stronger and healthier, as they worked on disposing of the rest of The Seer’s materials.
The Bastille remained standing for now, but the temple had been demolished, and the treasures inside returned to their rightful owners. With most of the huts now stripped of their metal supports, it wouldn’t be much longer until everything was back to normal.
She dropped the metal on the accumulation of scrap that they had made in the forest and started back to the village. After a few steps, she paused to look up into the night sky, staring at the twinkling objects in the heavens. She wondered if the Beast, the healer and the skyship were up there right now, watching over them all.
Eventually, she was distracted by an excited shout from the village. She looked over to see Brother Falor and Sister Ryna beckoning her over with eager looks on their faces.
“Good wishes to you both,” Sister Lyca smiled as she reached them.
“And good wishes to you, Sister Lyca,” Sister Ryna replied, “Our day’s work is done. The takarti root soup is ready. Perhaps…it is time?”
Sister Lyca smiled and nodded. Brother Falor and Sister Ryna led her back through the deserted streets of the village, back to the main square.
As they arrived, she saw that there was a larger audience around the fire than she had been expecting tonight. Even Sister Hyla and the other Makalites who had stayed loyal to The Seer until the bitter end were in attendance, having been forgiven and allowed to rejoin the rest of the flock.
It felt like so long ago that she had been the outcast, shunned by the villagers and locked away inside the Bastille. Now, she was the talk of the town. Sister Lyca, who had followed the Beast and the healer all the way back to the skyship, and returned with the news that the village’s sickness would be cured.
And as Brother Falor and Sister Ryna joined the excited audience and left her standing alone in front of them, illuminated by the flickering fire, she didn’t feel nervous. She felt content.
A reverential silence descended as she prepared to speak.
“Brothers and Sisters,” she began, “Let me tell you again of the Beast, and the Great Healer. And tell you of their teachings…”
She paused for a moment. The truth was that, while she had been invited to tell her stories as soon as she had returned to the village, there really wasn’t much to say. Neither the healer nor the Beast had given her any real teachings to impart on the others.
But having been invited to speak, and having basked in the attention of her audience, she had quickly found that the half-truths, the exaggerations and the lies had come a lot easier than she had been expecting.
“The Great Healer told me many things,” she continued, “This summer, she foretold of a great and bountiful crop…”
Perhaps The Seer had been more of an influence on her than she realised. Or perhaps she was just happy to have been welcomed back into the fold, and was enjoying the unexpected attention.
Either way, Sister Lyca continued to speak the fictional words of the Beast of the Great Hereafter and his equally Great Healer.
And once again, the entire belief structure of one small village of Makalites was completely and thoroughly rewritten.
****************************
Natasha sat in the Bounty’s dining area and glanced over the message on the padd in front of her.
“Thought you’d be getting some rest?” Jirel asked as he walked into the room and made a beeline for the replicator.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she admitted as he joined her at the table.
“Starfleet guilt again?”
She fixed him with a deeply unimpressed glare.
“You don’t feel bad at all? For everything that happened back there?”
Jirel set his jumja tea down on the table and shrugged.
“It could have gone better,” he conceded, “But I’ve told Sunek he’s not allowed to do any more comet slingshots.”
“Really? That’s your takeaway from all this?”
“One of them. Besides, I’m not sure he’ll listen to me anyway. Kinda feels like being worshipped as a divine being might have had some lasting effects on the guy’s ego.”
Natasha was inclined to agree with that point.
“But,” Jirel continued, “It’s not like we could have fixed it, right? I mean, the damage was done way before we showed up.”
“True,” she admitted, gesturing to the padd, “And that’s what this is for. My latest message…back to the admiral.”
Jirel’s quizzical look gave way to one of grim understanding.
Admiral Jenner. The Starfleet officer who had made an unofficial request for Natasha to keep him updated on their journey after she had resigned her commission several months ago. The man who had indirectly brought them together by slipping the Bounty’s crew a mission to track down and salvage the black box of the late USS Navajo.
And the man that, unbeknownst to the rest of the Bounty’s crew, was Jirel’s mostly estranged adoptive father.
“Really?” Jirel snorted, “You’re gonna tell my dad on us? What are you, twelve?”
“No,” she replied patiently, “But Starfleet has resources for dealing with cultural contamination like this. Hell, they’ve caused enough of them down the years, it’s only right that they’ve learned a thing or two.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah, so I’ve suggested they coordinate with Edosian Internal Security to recover the wreckage, and also send a team to monitor the village.”
She paused and wiped her brow, surprised by how warm she was suddenly feeling, and absently wondering if there was something wrong with the ship’s environmental systems.
It would make sense. There was always something wrong with the Bounty.
“Do what you gotta do, Nat,” Jirel offered, “But…if you are telling my dad about all this, can you leave out the bit where I let the villagers throw a feast in my honour? I mean, I don’t want the guy to start respecting me too much…”
She managed a smile and nodded back.
“Don’t worry, oh spotted man. I’m blaming it all on Mazur. He caused the problems, after all. The rest of the details will just get stored away on the personal blackmail file I’ve got on you.”
“Hrm,” Jirel mused, “That’s not filling me with confidence.”
He smiled back, as she started to itch the back of her neck. A curious sensation was rising up inside of her that she couldn’t quite pinpoint.
“You ok?” he asked, with an edge of concern, “You look a bit…pale.”
She felt herself getting warmer. Visible beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
“Yeah,” she managed, feeling a little weak, “I think I just need to--”
She went to stand, and immediately faltered. A sudden stabbing burst of pain spread through her leg. She looked down at the limb, and with growing horror, remembered the plant thorn that had embedded itself there earlier.
“Seriously,” Jirel persisted, “What’s wrong?”
“Back on the planet, there was--”
She winced in pain and grabbed the table for support. Jirel rushed over to try and support her.
“There was what?”
“A plant. It didn’t show anything on the tricorder, but…”
Her vision started to fade. She felt herself going limp, falling into Jirel’s arms as they both slumped down to the ground.
“Hey! Denella! Klath! Sunek!” she heard the Trill call out, “We’ve got a problem down here!”
Even though he was right next to her, it felt like his voice was coming from a far distance. Blackness closed in on the periphery of her vision, like she was disappearing down a tunnel.
She felt the vague sensation of being picked up. She thought she heard him say something else, but it was a faint whisper.
And then she drifted away entirely. And she couldn’t see, or hear anything. She was gone.
Her comatose form flopped lifelessly into Jirel’s arms.
To be continued…
And we close on a cliff-hanger... I knew that thorn would come back into the story.
Totally love the Great Beast thread. Echoes of The Apple (original series). Thanks!! rbs
Totally love the Great Beast thread. Echoes of The Apple (original series). Thanks!! rbs
Thanks for reading again! And it wouldn’t be Star Trek with the odd cliffhanger, would it?
Next story/episode is almost ready, so all will be resolved very soon. Hopefully…
Interesting comparison! There was definitely a slightly 'reckless' approach to the natives. Feels like that’s maybe two TOS-ish homages in a row now after the ‘Planet of the Costumes from the movie that wrapped last week on the next studio lot over’-style Nimbus III/Western episode. I’ll have to start taking bets on what comes next: A run-in with space hippies or someone stealing Sunek’s brain.
Next story/episode is almost ready, so all will be resolved very soon. Hopefully…
Interesting comparison! There was definitely a slightly 'reckless' approach to the natives. Feels like that’s maybe two TOS-ish homages in a row now after the ‘Planet of the Costumes from the movie that wrapped last week on the next studio lot over’-style Nimbus III/Western episode. I’ll have to start taking bets on what comes next: A run-in with space hippies or someone stealing Sunek’s brain.
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