Star Trek: Into the Inferno

[Graywand2]

Zuko-Fan-Girl: I'm sorry, but I couldn't get the battle scene right, so I decided to forgo it.

Chapter Twelve
​

“I rehearsed my will like a lesson to be learned by heart; I educated my aggression, aimed it at whatever was around me; I had to struggle against everything: my salvation depended on no one but myself.”
-Andre Gide


Suki sat in the mess hall of the starship Enterprise, staring around at the scene around her. Her men, bewildered at first by the sights surrounding them, had been decontaminated, and, after a change in dress, wearing the same uniform she now wore, were all sitting in the mess hall, crowded around the tables, eating with clear gusto the food that had been prepared for them. She smiled, happiness filling her at the sight of Kyoshi Warriors filling platters of food from the banquet table that had been set out and going to the table and talking endlessly with their comrades. Judging by the way they were eating their food, it was the best they’d had in months.

Which isn’t surprising, Suki thought to herself. That prison slop is disgusting, considering I had
to live on it myself for a time, I can personally attest to that. She noticed there was someone missing from the crowd of Kyoshi Warriors. After a few moments of scanning the crowd, she realized that Ty Lee was missing. She had seemed eager to join in with the rest of the men, but, now that she thought of it, she couldn’t remember seeing the younger woman, her executive officer, enter the mess hall at all.

Funny, she thought to herself, anger bubbling up. I thought I ordered everyone to come here so they wouldn’t get themselves into trouble. Where could she have gone? Sighing, she got up and walked over to one of the Kyoshi Warriors closest to the door. Michiko Kurosawa had apparently served as Ty Lee’s executive officer during her period in command of the Kyoshi Warriors, and would probably know where her wayward superior had gone off to.

“Nakagawa,” she said when she walked over to the group of young women. Instantly, they stood up, snapping to attention.

Pleased as ever to see that Ty Lee had maintained at least a basic level of discipline in the prison, she smiled and ordered them to stand at ease.

“I just want to see if you know where Commander Lee went off to,” she said.

After a few moments of stares among the young women, Nakagawa said, a concerned look on her face, “I don’t know, ma’am. I didn’t see her leave. Though I did here her mentioning her desire to check out a place on the ship called the ‘sweet spot?’”

“Ah,” Suki said, nodding in understanding. The sweet spot was the name for the spot on the ship between the artificial gravity generator and the bow plate, where the gravity canceled out and reversed. “I understand.” A place like the sweet spot would naturally be a place someone like Ty Lee, acrobat as she was, would visit. “Carry on.” With that, Suki left the room and walked down the corridor and into the turbolift. As the turbolift hummed, traveling to the spot where she could easily take the maintenance shafts to the sweet spot, she began to wonder just what was going on with Ty Lee. She’d been…moody and distracted since the end of the battle. Of course, she wasn’t entirely sure that an element of brooding wasn’t normal for Ty Lee, as fighting on the opposite sides and only encountering her once to boot didn’t give you a lot on the person. She’d had a knack for knowing when there was a problem with one of her people, however, and her instincts were telling her something was wrong. It was her duty as the commanding officer to ensure that all her people were fit for duty, so she was going to see what was wrong and what she could do to help.

That and the fact that I’m pretty sure it has something to do with Azula, she thought to herself. There haven’t been many people around here who haven’t had all the significant events in their lives revolve around her in some way. Some, longer than others. Though I don’t understand why Ty Lee and Mai stayed with Azula even though they both clearly hated her. What hold over those women did she have? Why didn’t they just walk away? It was something that had gnawed at her ever since she first received the revelation that Ty Lee had changed. That she’d at last broken ties with Azula, ties that, if the entity that had taken Ty Lee’s form was to be believed, and she had no reason to doubt her veracity, should have been broken a long time ago.

The turbolift door opened and Suki stepped out into the corridor. As she walked through the corridors of the starship, she noticed that the dozen or so Starfleet crewmembers on that deck, walking through the corridors as they set about on their myriad of tasks, paid no more attention to her than they did to anyone else. The idea was somewhat off-putting though vaguely comforting in a way. She had genuinely become a member of the crew. It was that acceptance that led to no one paying her any attention when she walked over to the small circular door on that deck that led to the vast network of maintenance crawlways, throughout the ships. There was a similar door on the deck she’d just left but that was the one closest to the “sweet spot.” Opening it she began her climb through the service crawlways of the starship Enterprise. After she crawled through what seemed like the hundredth crawlspace and reached the top of the one hundred and fiftieth ladder, she finally found herself facing the small, burnished metal door that hid her destination. Crawling over, she was about to open the door when she heard; faint though it was, the unmistakable sound of sobbing. Concern washing over her for her newfound friend, she slapped the entrance panel. The door slid aside with a groan and she stared up into a large cylindrical space. The sobbing was clear now, the sounds of a woman’s anguish reverberated through the room clear as a bell. She peaked her head out of the hatch to look around, and there she was. Ty Lee crouched on the ‘ceiling’, actually the bow bottom side of the bow plating, as though she was standing on the floor in the normal gravity environment of the rest of the ship, crying her eyes out.

“Ty Lee,” Suki said. Abruptly, the other woman’s tears ceased and she looked down at her, a sense of shock in her tear-glistened eyes.

“Captain,” Ty Lee said, addressing her by her title. “What are you doing here?”

“Finding out where you were?” Suki said, the annoyance at what was going on softened by the fact that she seemed to be in genuine emotional turmoil. “I gave you an order to stick to the mess hall until you and the rest were fully briefed on the ship.”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Ty Lee said, shoving herself off the ‘ceiling’ and allowing herself to float back to the floor. “It won’t happen again.”

“What’s wrong, Ty Lee?” Suki asked, sighing.

“It’s everything that’s gone on in the last few hours,” Ty Lee said, shaking her head. “A few hours ago, I was banking everything on a last-ditch plan to secure our own freedom, a plan that had very little chance of success no matter how well I planned it. And, in the metaphorical blink of an eye, I find myself free due to outside help, and not only that, forgiven for everything I’ve done, when I can’t even forgive myself, and I don’t know when I ever can.”

“That day will never come,” Suki said authoritatively. “Somewhere inside you, you knew what you were doing was wrong. There was a voice that screamed at you, begged you to stop what you were doing, but you saw no way out. You felt you had no choice; you had to do what you did. So you started convincing yourself that the people you hurt deserved their pain, you turned a blind eye to that pain and that suffering, and squelched the voice that was telling you it was wrong.” The emotional memories of her own foul acts, committed against the wrong target, tore through her at the moment, and she came close to breaking down herself, before she pulled herself back

“My entire life I’ve known Azula,” Ty Lee said to her, her voice haunted, using the opportunity to get her past with Azula off her chest. “And my entire life I’ve been her pawn, her plaything. Even when we were as young as five she learned that she could break someone through a combination of punishment and reward. I was a nice girl in my crèche days, whenever Mai or Azula asked something of me I would do it. Whenever I didn’t do something like get her a glass of water because it was naptime or I bungled and poured her cranapple juice, or demonstrated a skill she lacked, she would…discipline me. Not on the spot, no. Never on the spot, at least when we were younger. At the time, she was quick to figure out that in the presence of adults, she would be disciplined herself so she waited. During playground time she would ‘accidentally’ burn me. Whenever we weren’t in the presence of adults, she would ‘discipline’ me on the spot.” She gave a derisive smirk, “I once did a perfect handstand, and she shoved me to the ground, and probably would’ve pummeled me if Mai and Zuko hadn’t been there.”

Suki sympathized with her onetime enemy, but she still didn’t understand something, “If Azula really was that horrible, why did you wait until she was about to kill Mai before cutting ties with her? From what Zuko’s told me, Mai apparently had cut her ties with Azula when she saw her reaction to Ozai burning him during that Agni Kai. It would’ve been a simple matter to just up and leave in the middle of then night once, and never come back. Or fake your deaths and head to Ba Sing Se.” Suki regretted her words, the moment she said them. If Azula was willing to hurt them personally, she was more than willing to hurt their families to keep them in line.

It was something Ty Lee wasted no time pointing out. All pretense of rank forgotten she fixed an angry glare, a glare filled with, not hate, but just pure disbelieving anger at a stupid question, on Suki and said, the tears in her eyes almost dried, “If that bitch was willing to hurt us, she wouldn’t hesitate to hurt our families.” She gave another derisive smirk, “You know, Mai and I actually considered doing that, once. But there was one thing holding me back.”

“You’re families,” Suki said quickly, feeling like an idiot for bringing up something so blindingly obvious. “It was a stupid quest-,”

“You know Mai has a little brother right?”Ty Lee said, smoothly overriding her.

“No,” Suki said genuinely.

“She does,” Ty Lee said nodding. “Cute boy named Tom-Tom. An infant. She would’ve had no compunction against ordering his death, she would’ve carried it out herself, and she would’ve done it entirely out of pure spite. I also have siblings that could be at risk, I have eight sisters. The youngest is Talla, a girl of five. Dead ringer for me at that age. She would’ve died a painful death, purely out of spite. Spite, and the fact that that… thing, takes enjoyment out of inflicting pain.” Neither one of us could stand leaving knowing that innocent people, children, were going to die to punish us and to slake that damned and damnable woman’s desires for blood.” The anger in her voice suddenly died, the rage disappearing from her face and she said, her voice hollow once more. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s okay,” Suki said, putting her hand on Ty’s shoulder. “It was a stupid question.”

“Something that didn’t happen isn’t the worst thing, though,” Ty Lee said, her voice hollow. “The worse thing she did, the thing that kept me from openly defying her to her face, was done to me. That is what really kills me. I was a coward. I could’ve killed Azula any number of times over the years. I could’ve rid mankind of a mortal threat, and I didn’t. Because I was a coward, because I was afraid of a repeat of that dark day.”

 

[Graywand2]

“What happened?” Suki asked.

“When I was a child,” Ty Lee said. “I was sent to the Royal Academy for Girls, along with Mai and Azula. Like most Fire Nation private schools, military arts and sciences are a mandatory part of the curriculum for the first year, then become optional afterwards. Younger children of noblemen are unlikely to inherit, and need a different career path, and most young people spend at least a small portion of their youth in the military, seeking personal glory in battle. My family, and Mai, was different however. None of my sisters or Mai had gotten particularly high marks in that area, and Mai was treated like nothing more than prize livestock anyway, so she wasn’t pressured to go into the military. I was different though, where they ranged from mediocre to average I excelled. For most of my first year there, I was second only to Azula. I was all set to stay in the military science program for the rest of my tenure there. One of my instructors once remarked that she was looking at the next generation of Fire Nation generals.”

Suki, curious, pressed forward. “What happened?”

“The end of my first year,” she continued. “I had just turned eleven. I was waiting eagerly for my grades to show up, and when they did, they were as I expected. I had gotten perfect scores, with a one hundred percent for the semester in that area. Eager, and having blindly convinced myself that Azula was my friend for real, I eagerly went to show her my grades. She at first seemed happy for me, genuinely happy. She insisted we celebrate by going camping on the palace grounds. When we were alone in the forest, her demeanor changed. We were sitting by the fire, and Azula was drinking out of this clay cup she had taken with her from the palace. I asked her when she was going to show me her grades.” Azula sighed, and pulled her report sheet out of her pocket. Holding it up with mine, I quickly realized that Azula had gotten a lower score than I had. I had gotten a perfect hundred percent, and Azula got a ninety-eight percent.” At that moment, Ty Lee shuddered and squinted her eyes, as if to block out a painful memory.

Suki, a sick feeling in her gut at what she felt like she was about to describe, said, “What did she do?”

“She walked over and pointed out the difference in scores. Azula’s a perfectionist, and for someone who just passed a military science course with flying colors, I should’ve realized I was walking into a trap. She drained her cup of water, and then, without missing a beat, smashed the cup over my head. I went down screaming blood dripping from my forehead and my lower eye. Eschewing bending, she pounced on me before I could disable her with my already advanced Dim Mak skills, kicking me repeatedly in the kidneys. She then flung me to the ground, kicked me in the gut, and punched me repeatedly. I tried desperately to crawl away, to save myself, but she wasn’t going to let me go free until she felt I had learned my lesson. She grabbed this large stick, and thrashed me with it for what felt like forever. When she was done, she left me there, hurt and bleeding to wander back home on my own.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone because she was the Fire Princess,” Suki said, in understanding.

“Yes,” Ty Lee said, nodding. “Accusing the Sovereign or the Sovereign’s heir apparent of a criminal act is treason. Regardless, the damage was done, I dropped the military science courses, and wrapped myself in a ditzy cloak, in an attempt to never outshine Azula again. When I turned thirteen, I ran off and joined the circus, as it was the only place I felt Azula would never have reason to threaten me again. To be honest, I hoped she would just leave me alone. It was something she did, in fact, do for an entire year, a year in which I was settling into my new life and genuinely beginning to enjoy it.”

“Then she came along and recruited you to join your search for Zuko and Iroh.” Suki said.

Ty Lee nodded, “She threatened my life again and I, like you said, and like the coward I am, squelched the voice that said what I was doing was wrong, and that I was hurting innocents. I convinced myself, particularly after the search for Zuko and Iroh turned into a general hunt for the Avatar that he, and all who supported him, like the Kyoshi Warriors, were standing in the way of the greater good and therefore deserved what they got. So I went along with it, I attacked the Kyoshi Warriors, I helped overthrow the Earth Kingdom, I brought a deadly army under the control of a sick and cruel woman. I betrayed humanity. Then, on that terrible day, what seemed a lifetime ago, I saw Azula and Mai about to face each other down, with Mai prepared to kill Azula. Willing to lay down her life, risk everything, her life, her family, for Zuko, and for the sure and certain fact that Azula’s death will rid mankind on this world of the greatest single threat to its continued survival short of Ozai himself.”

Suki wanted to point out that the greatest single threat to the survival of mankind anywhere was the Romulans, but she sensed Ty Lee wasn’t done.

“That day,” I realized that it wasn’t enough to survive. One has to be worthy of survival. I realized, in a way I never truly thought before that day, that moment, that if I did nothing I would be condemning Mai to death, I would be condemning Zuko to death, that I was condemning what I thought was the whole of humanity to torment and suffering, and that I was condemning my family to having to serve a madwoman. I couldn’t let that happen. Even if it meant my life, and even if it meant my sister and Tom-Tom’s died in the end. But if I did nothing, they’d go to their graves in danger from Azula, so I struck. Slamming my fists into the points that should’ve killed her.”

“It didn’t work, though,” Suki pointed out. “She’s still alive, and she’s still a threat.”

“I had just made a major life-altering decision,” Ty Lee said. “And she was about to kill the one person who was a real friend to me, and it must have been thrown off my attack. I stunned her instead of killing her. When I ran over to get Mai to escape with me, I was utterly stunned to see Azula rise up from the deck. The guards then stormed the dock and took us into custody, where Azula condemned us to rot in that prison. A couple weeks later, the Kyoshi Warriors arrived in the prison. Needless to say, being around my former victims wasn’t exactly comfortable for either of us. I hated myself for putting them in that situation, and they hated me for the same reason. Then I saved Michiko Kurosawa from being raped by one of the prisoners, and they made peace with me. Eager to protect them from further assault, I offered to train them in Dim Mak. They took the offer, offering me membership in the Kyoshi Warriors, and what protection they could give to Mai. Then Shiga and the other command officers died, and something clicked in me. All my old education resurfaced and I took command, keeping the flanks from being rolled up until the guards could restore order. I was willing to step down immediately after the battle, but the rest of them wouldn’t have it, and then I remembered that old saying where if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for that person for the rest of their lives. So, I took command, reorganized the command structure, and plotted to free us all. The demands of command were enough to keep me from dwelling on the past, but when I was finally freed, part of me began to question whether I truly deserved what you had given me. Eventually, I couldn’t take it and wound up here, wandering how I could truly have found retribution for all my sins, my cowardice. How I could be forgiven so easily, and how I can go on.”

“You know how you convince yourself to go on?” Suki responded, her own sins going through her mind. “You accept the fact that you will never forgive yourself. I forgave you, but that was more about me renouncing my anger towards you than any real sign that you had redeemed yourself. That will never happen. You hurt innocent people, and you can never go back from that, but all is not lost. You can help save this world, but only if you fight for what you know to be right, for the rights of others. Not yourself, fight for those who can still be saved. It is the only option you have.”

Ty Lee nodded. “You’re right, of course.” Ty Lee smiled. “I’m sorry, Captain, for violating your orders.”

“It’s okay here,” Suki told her, nodding, feeling genuine respect for the woman in front of her. “You heard something you needed to hear, Ty Lee, oh and please, when we’re not on duty, feel free to call me by my name.”

“Thank you, Suki,” Ty Lee said, a relieved smile on her face.

“You’re welcome,” Suki remarked sincerely.”Now let’s go rejoin the others before all the good food is gone.” She leaned down to open the patch, when she heard Ty ask, “How do you know all this stuff? About forgiveness. What could you have possibly done?”

Suki shuddered, remembering what she did, about the innocent woman she had whose blood she still saw on her hands in her dreams. Suki turned, opening her mouth to respond, before abruptly, the fear, of what Ty Lee would think of her bubbled up.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Suki said, shaking her head. “Let’s go back to the feast.”

She could tell Ty Lee didn’t want to let it go, but she respectfully bowed, and said, “Never mind then.”

“Thank you,” Suki responded.

 

[RobertScorpio]

This was very well written. Azula's outbreak was well written and, in a strange way, sad to see because they were such 'good' friends to that point. I know things are going to pick up real soon, in terms of action, but I love these character parts when they are well written...as this one was. I leave it having a better appreciation of Ty Lee's past, and Azula's, as well.

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Thirteen​

“Deliver up the crown and take mercy
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning his widows tears, the orphan cries,
The dead men’s blood, the pining maiden’s groans,
For husbands, fathers, and beloved lovers,
That shall be swallowed up in this controversy.”

-William Shakespeare, Henry V

The alarm klaxons rang expectantly throughout the cabin of the Talis, and Hravishran th’Zoarhi, known most commonly as Shran barrel-rolled his small ship hard to starboard, getting out of the line of fire of the verdant green Orion disruptor blast that would have reduced his ship to cinders. He cursed his luck, as he had for the past few weeks. He’d gone out and attempted to pursue a lucrative trade deal with a local species called the Tarlac, and the deal had seemed to be going well. Then, while he was en route to the Tarlac homeworld, an Orion ship came at him from where she’d been hiding in a small nebula. It had taken all his training, and the fact that he’d been on edge ever since he’d been cashiered from the Imperial Guard for losing the Kumari, to save him from being killed then and there, sundering him forever from his beloved Aenar bondmate Thirijhamel zh’Daven and the other members of his shelthreth quad back on Andoria. Desperate for a place to hide from the Orion, he had set course for the Briar Patch, hoping that in the infamously treacherous region of space that he’d be able to lose his enemy. It had failed, and the last week, he had pushed his ship well past the recommended safety guidelines for traversing the expanse, playing a cat and mouse game with the zhavey-less dog at full impulse. Now, he was down to his last options: his impulse manifolds were about to give out, the deuterium that fueled the impulse drives was almost gone, and half the power converters on his ship had been destroyed, by lucky shots from the Orion vessel that he, in his sleep-deprived state, weren’t able to avoid.

This would never have happened had I still had the Kumari, Shran thought to himself as he hastily tapped out another evasive pattern into the system, fuming at both the Orion and the Imperial Guard that had seen fit to cashier him due to having his ship destroyed by the Romulans. Had I still been on her bridge, that Orion marauder wouldn’t have had a chance. She wouldn’t be the first Orion ship I’ve erased from the stars. The Orions had sometimes seen fit to raid Andorian outer colonies every few years. He’d been instrumental in…convincing them not to try it, usually by blowing the idiot captain who would dare attack Andorian space out of the stars. It worked, until another greedy pirate captain got it in his head that the Imperial Guard was a bunch of pushovers.

After running from him for a week, he had finally seized what may be his only chance. He was heading for a system he’d detected fifteen hours earlier, hoping that there would be a kelbonite-rich asteroid he could hide on and make repairs. However, fate had at last decided to throw him a lifeline, there was a planet on his screens that at least seemed habitable, and it had some sort of upper atmosphere ionization that would hopefully serve to shield him from the Orion sensors should he actually make it to the planet.

It was at that point that his ship rocked as if Uzevah Himself, had slammed his ship. When the thunderous shaking finally ceased, Shran looked at is console, all his worst fears realized when he saw the blue scrolling lines of Andorian on the screen. There was a warp core breach in progress; that much was obvious from the warning lights on the panel and the double clang of the klaxons behind him. He only had five minutes left, and the planet was seven minutes away.

Shran leaned back in his pilot’s seat, the knowledge of his impending death settling over him like a favored blanket. He thought of his bondmates, and realized with a pain that was like no physical agony he’d ever experienced, that his beloved Jhamel would never know his fate.

There’s nothing I can do about that, he thought to himself. He looked at his screens. The Orion ship was bearing down on him. He was finished, he was either going to die in the next thirty seconds or be beamed away to his new life as a slave as the Talas, named for his tactical officer and lover, disappeared in an uncontrolled matter-antimatter reaction.

His com-panel started to blink. The Orion ship was hailing him. Without thinking, he opened the channel.

“Target vessel,” The rough voice of the Orion’s captain reverberated throughout the ship. “You are in violation of Orion Economic Protocols. Surrender yourself for immediate arrest and confiscation or we will destroy your ship before that overload in your reactor does.”

Shran smirked. “Will be the day,” he said softly, closing the channel. Making a decision, he decided to die in a matter befitting not a civilian trader, but a soldier of the Imperial Guard, he still thought himself to be in the twilight world of dreams. He was about to press the engage button, and was in the middle of commending his soul to Uzevah when, his sensor board lit up again. Opening his eyes, he did a double-take as he saw what the ship’s sensors said the other ship, approaching at maximum impulse, was, its weapons fully charged and targeting the Orion vessel. The Orion ship, he noticed, had stopped focusing on him and was now fully focused on the greater threat that was coming at him suddenly.

He saw a message from the Enterprise appear on his screen, no doubt delivered by the ever efficient Hoshi Sato.

“Shran,” the message read, translated into Andorian automatically by the ship’s computer. “Warp core breach in three minutes. Prepare to be beamed aboard.” Smiling at what fortune had blessed him with, he got up and stood up straight, eyes staring out the ship’s window, taking on the rapidly growing visage of the Enterprise as it grew larger. Then the thought hit him, suddenly, right when the tingle of the annular confinement beam he hoped was coming from Enterprise tingled down his spine.

That’s one less favor Archer owes me, Shran thought, as the white light enveloped him and whisked him away from his dying vessel. And one more I owe him. Damn. The light disappeared and he found himself staring at the familiar gray walls of the Enterprise.

“Moulton to the bridge,” the voice of a young woman said, snapping him back to reality as he recognized it as the voice of the young woman who had beamed him and the captive Aenar from the Romulan cargo ship back at the beginning of the year. “We have him.”

“That’s good to hear,” Archer’s voice said from the com-panel. “Tell him to get his ass to the bridge. When we finish with the Orions, maybe he can tell us exactly he did to piss them off this time. The channel closed right when the ship began to rock under the Orion weapons fire. When the channel closed, Moulton gave him an annoyed look and said, “You heard the Captain. Get to the bridge.”

Shooting her an annoyed look back for being spoken to in such a manner, Shran took off at a brisk pace for the bridge. He was almost to the turbolift when abruptly the ship rocked and a massive explosion rocked the corridor, causing a large portion of the wall behind him to explode, and sending three enlisted Starfleet personnel sharing the corridor with him to scatter for cover in adjoining corridors, and rocking him back on his back.

As Shran pulled himself off the ground, he heard the telltale sound of a transporter beam behind him and he wheeled around to view five hulking Orion goons, in the brass helmets and plate shorts of Orion slavers. He reached for his weapon and pulled it out only to see one of them charge towards him, his brown rifle raised up, clearly intending to craniates him with brute force. Shran, danced out of the way of the rifle’s butt, causing it and him to overextend, exposing his huge backside to the more agile Andorian. Unwilling to let such an obvious target go, he quickly squeezed off a shot, frying the Orion in the back before he could get back up. He heard the sounds of Orion weapons fire to his right and turned to see the other four blowing holes in the chests of the three Starfleet crewmen before they could even raise their weapons. He watched as the Orions turned their attention to him, glaring at him with obvious malice as they raised their weapons.

Shran’s grip tightened on his own weapon and he was about to fire when a whistling sound was heard through the air. Three clear shapes flew into his field of vision and coalesced with sickening thuds in the hands of the four Orions. He watched, stunned, as the hulking green behemoths dropped their weapons and roared with a rage that caused him to clamp his hands over his ears on instinct as they clutched their wounded hands as what were clearly seen to be icicles were sticking out of their wrists. The Orions began reaching for their sidearms, but the telltale blue blasts of MACO phase rifles came from his left slamming into the Orions and sending their seared corpses crashing to the deck with heavy thuds. He turned to thank the MACO soldiers who had impressively dispatched four Orion slavers in the space of thirty seconds. He was stunned when he realized that the people who’d saved him were more than half his age. They were one man and one woman, who looked to his eyes to be no more than sixteen and fifteen to his eyes, had darkened skin, black hair, and blue eyes, and were wearing stripped down MACO uniforms. The two of them didn’t appear to notice him as the woman rushed forward to the three Starfleet crewmen, two women and a man, who’d the Orions had just killed. Leaning over each of them in turn he watched as she felt their necks where he’d learned you could tell if a human’s blood was still flowing.

“Are they still alive?” The young man, who was clearly the woman’s brother said, concern etched in his face and eyes.

“No,” the young woman said, shaking her head. “No, they’ve had it.”

The young man turned his gaze to the slain Orions and asked, his voice choked with wonder and fear, “Who were those…people?” He then turned and gave Shran a look of surprise. “And just who are you? I mean, I know you’re an Andorian, but who are you?”

Shran initially felt a twinge of annoyance at the young soldier, but tempered that annoyance with the fact that the young man was obviously new to the Enterprise. “Those are Orions, he began and my name is Shran, I’m an old friend of your Captain, Jonathan Archer. I would like to thank you, soldier, for saving my life.”

The young man bowed respectfully, and said, “Thank you, but I can’t claim full credit.” He pointed to the young woman and said, “My sister is the one who bended the icicles into their hands, and fired half the shots that felled the bastard slavers.”

The young woman, Katara got up from where she had been checking the bodies of the Starfleet personnel and with a sigh, turned to her brother and said, “Yeah, they’re gone.” Remembering whatever passed for courtesy among these humans, she bowed to Shran and said, “My name is Katara and this is my elder brother Sokka.”

Shran, disbelief on his voice, scanned for any container that could’ve contained icicles. Finding only a simple canteen of water, he asked, “How did you manage to use icicles as a weapon in that fashion?”

Katara opened her mouth as if to respond, clearly thinking about what to say. She then closed her mouth and opened the canteen. Moving her hand close to the mouth of the water-carrying device she flexed her muscles, and, without seeming effort, a tendril of water emerged from the canteen. He watched, mingled, respect, shock, and, he was annoyed to feel, fear, coursing through him as he watched the tendril suspended in midair, before it froze into a solid, razor-sharp mass of shaped ice that was the equal of any icicle he’d ever seen on Andor.

“It’s called Waterbending,” Katara said to the stunned Andorian thaan, grasping the solid tendril, as the ship began to shake again, much softer this time. “Other benders have the ability to control fire, move currents of air, and control soil and metals.” He punctuated the demonstration by levitating the icicle again and melting the molecule of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule effortlessly back into its liquid state before returning it safely to her canteen.

A million questions tore through the Andorians mind at once. How come I’ve never heard of this before? How many humans have this power? Why have they been keeping this from the rest of the Coalition? There were a million questions, and it was impossible to know where to begin first.

The ship shuddered again, and Katara looked at him with a knowing look and said, “I’m sure you have a million questions to ask, but we are in the middle of a battle.”

Katara’s remark snapped him back to himself, and he cursed himself for allowing the situation to distract him from the fact that he was in the middle of a fight against the Orions.

“Of course,” he said, shaking his head. “I was asked to go to the bridge.”

Katara nodded, “Don’t let me keep you, sir,” she said, gesturing with her head to the turbolift behind him. Shran, still utterly shocked by what he had just witnessed, merely nodded and made an about face, heading for the lift. He pressed the button, and the door opened instantly, revealing a lift car that must have arrived while he was talking with Katara. Stepping inside, he heard the door close behind him and turned around to face the bare walls of the turbolift door.

“Bridge,” he ordered, what he’d just witnessed still swimming in his head, what the young human woman had revealed to him, as nonchalantly as if she’d been discussing the weather. As the turbocar lifted, beginning its journey to the bridge, Shran resolved to ask Archer just what was going on around here. It was at that moment that the turbocar slid to a stop, and the doors slid open with a hiss like ice borers, the phosphorescent worms that tunneled through the ice of his homeworld of Andor, and, once burned him severely when he was a child. He stepped out onto the bridge to reveal that the nerve center of the Enterprise was humming with the organized chaos that accompanied battle. Crewmembers rushed around, fire suppressant tanks in hands, as they put out the fires that raged from half a dozen burning consoles, and there was a blanket of smoke in the room that seemed to be only now clearing up. When he stepped off the turbolift he looked at the viewscreen to see rapidly expanding explosions claim the Orion ship, turning it into a rapidly expanding debris field of metal shards. He was distracted from the satisfaction he felt at the site by the sounds of Captain Archer and his tactical officer discussing the aftermath of the recent battle.

“It’s confirmed, sir,” Reed said, the unflappable Enterprise weapons officer, checking some status report on his panel. “The only enemy boarders were on D deck and our…guests have already dispatched them.”

“Did we lose anyone?” He heard Archer ask

Reed checked his status board, and what he saw, presumably the report about the three crewmen he’d watched get shot in the corridor on D deck, made him heave a heavy, frustrated sigh.

“We lost three people, sir. All apparently killed by Orion small arms fire.”

Archer leaned back in his chair and breathed an annoyed sigh, no doubt feeling some level of satisfaction that he’d avenged the death of his crewmembers by destroying their murderer’s ship, and no doubt feeling repulsed at the situation. Suppressing all his usual thoughts about pinkskin weakness, he said, “If it’s any consolation to you, Archer, they died trying to do their duty, and were quickly avenged by those…interesting, to say the least, soldiers you acquired.” His voice caused Archer and everyone else on the bridge, to turn their heads towards him in surprise.

“Shran,” Archer said immediately, standing up in abject surprise. “Are you all right?”

Shran nodded immediately, and said, “I’m fine, pinkskin. Though I am confused about what exactly is going on around here. I mean, killing Orion slavers is one thing, I’ve done that before. But to use icicles to disable their hands, before dispatching them, that I’ve never seen before.”

Shran’s words caused Archer to start, and he shared a look with Reed before turning back and saying, a knowing tone to his voice. “I take it you encountered Katara.”

The taciturn Andorian nodded back, “And her brother.” Shran shook his head and finally the confusion as to what exactly was going on burst through the newly-formed shell of patience and he blurted darkly, “Could you please tell me what exactly is going on around here? I’m seeing humans that have powers that should only exist in myth.”Archer nodded and gestured in the direction of his ready room. “Right this way,” he said, moving towards his ready room. Shran stared at his backside for a moment and slowly followed him.

An hour later, the dour former Imperial Guard Commander sat back in the cushioned chair on the other side of the room from Archer’s desk, listening as Captain Archer finished up the tale. Shran would think that Archer was joking with him, feeding him ridiculous lies and human myths if he hadn’t viewed what the young woman; Katara had done with his own eyes.

“So you intend to help this Aang end the war?” Shran asked, before taking a swig of the blue Andorian ale that Archer still had from their last encounter.

“Yes,” Archer said. “We also plan to hold this world against the Romulan assault we know is coming.”

Archer had explained to him his reasoning that the Romulans were going to attack this world as a part of their general campaign against humanity and its allies. It was an assessment, given how close to the Romulan Empire this world was, protected by the Briar Patch as it was, that Shran had agreed with. There was something however that wasn’t quite fitting, however. What they intended to do with the leaders of the Fire Nation? If they truly intended to depose this Ozai and his daughter Azula, and install Ozai’s, if Archer was to be believed, much more honorable and noble son Zuko on the throne of the Fire Nation, and then proceed to unite the humans on the planet to ensure they could survive the oncoming Romulan onslaught, what was going to happen if humanity won the battle and drove the Romulans off for the time being?

“What do you plan on doing when the battle is over?” Shran asked. “Even if you win, pinkskin, these people haven’t shared a world with your people in thousands of years. Regardless of how you’re native allies seem to have adjusted, the rest of the population might not be so open to being reunited with the rest of your species, and being integrated into the galactic community.”

 

[Graywand2]

“It’s not like we have a choice,” Archer said, sighing. “When the reinforcement fleets arrives we can’t just beat off the Romulans with a very big stick and then leave the humans here to their own devices. The Romulans will just wait until we leave to annihilate them. They’re humans, Shran, which makes them my people as much as the people back on Earth. I can’t just abandon them. Whether they like it or not, their age of isolation from the rest of the galaxy is over, and that’s just in order for them to survive until the end of the year.”

“What do you intend to do with Ozai and Azula?” Shran asked, “If they’re the honorless swine and war criminals that they are, they should be made to answer for their crimes, something the population of this Fire Nation and its colonies might not take kindly to, which would put a dent in you and your people’s plans to unify the population against their common enemy.”

Archer got a thoughtful impression on his face, as he thought about what he’d just said. Finally, after a few moments, he said, “From what Admiral Gardner said when we checked in, the prevailing mood in Parliament on Earth right now is to drag them back to Earth, to the Palace of Justice in the city of Nuremburg in the nation-state of Germany, and there, in the very same room where over two hundred years ago we passed judgment on some of the worst murderers and monsters in the entire history of mankind, there make the criminals of this world answer for their crimes against humanity.” Archer sighed. “But you’re right; dragging them all the way to Earth might not endear United Earth to the population of this world.” Archer sighed again, “That decision is up to Parliament, though, and it’s all a moot point if reinforcements from Earth and the other Coalition worlds don’t arrive before the Romulan onslaught, and I don’t expect that for weeks at the most.”

“You’d better pray then, to whatever gods or god you believe in,” Shran said, “that they do.”
As I will, Shran thought, already sending an appeal to Infinite Uzevah that the ships and warriors of the Imperial Guard would arrive in time.

“I already do,” Archer said softly, almost under his breath, as he stared out into space at the planet below.




Mai picked stood in the middle of the office of the former Warden of the Boiling Rock, Zuko right next to her. The two of them, now both dressed in the stripped down MACO uniform every other local warrior on the ship had been put in, stared around the room that had once served as her Uncle’s office, during his tenure as commandant of the Boiling Rock, a time that had come to an end when the soldiers of the Enterprise and the Columbia stormed the prison. Her uncle and the few surviving members of his garrison now were prisoners themselves, held in the makeshift prisoner of war cages aboard the Enterprise under heavy guard, while the airship they had stolen from Azula busied itself with transporting the prisoners to the mainland. Her and Zuko were now tasked by Enterprise’s Captain with searching the Warden’s office for any files and data that might help the war effort, she sincerely doubted she’d find anything, but orders were orders, and she got the feeling, the same phenomenon she’d observed with Ty Lee when she was the commander of the Kyoshi Warriors, that his orders were worth following. It was the mark said to be found in all great warriors, and great leaders. That and the fact that Zuko had explained everything that was at stake if they didn’t join hands with the rest of the world and United Earth. Her mind was still wrapping itself around all this. There were other worlds orbiting other stars with other peoples on them, and only the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest, tiniest, fraction of one quarter of a percent had humans controlling them. And, not only that, all humans shared the same homeworld, this planet called Earth. And, there were aliens that could be seen as humanity’s allies, as well as its enemies, like these Romulans that everyone was so concerned about. She wouldn’t have believed Zuko at all if it weren’t for the fact that an actual, living, breathing alien walked the decks of the Enterprise, this Commander T’Pol.

All in all, it was a lot for the young woman to take in even after being free of this benighted place for a day and a half. Contemplating all the implications had left her even more moody and silent than she usually was. It was a fact that annoyed Zuko to know end, as he thought she was rejecting him, a feeling that was exacerbated by the fact that Mai had been so busy trying to process everything that she hadn’t said more than two words to him in the thirty-six hours since he’d rescued her.

“Look Mai,” Zuko said contritely. “I’m sorry for leaving you in the Fire Nation, and I’m sorry for not giving you a fighting chance to leave this place when we hit it the first time. If you really can’t forgive me for all that, then when this crisis is over, we can go our separate ways.”

It was those words that exploded into Mai’s consciousness, and an unbelievable anger exploded in her being, causing Mai to tamp down on the fires of her own rage.

“Don’t you dare, leave me again,” Mai said darkly. “Not again,” she said, her voice softening. “Please, I don’t think I can stand it.” Zuko stared at her stunned, this was, after all, the longest sentenceIt she’d said to him in a day and a half. After a moment, she said, “For the record, I’ve already forgiven you for all that, having to endure this place caused that change in perspective. I know what my people have done is wrong now, and I understand why you felt you had to leave.”

“Then what is it?” Zuko asked, concern on his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just,” Mai said, her voice faltering. “It’s all a lot for a girl to take in at once, you know?”

Zuko breathed a heavy sigh that he was sure was relief, as he started searching among the files in the Warden’s office. “I do understand,” Zuko responded after a moment searching through one stack of papers. “My entire worldview cracked when I saw Commander Kelby stepping out of that lifeboat, and it only cracked even further in the days immediately following. At first I thought I had gone insane, that the stress of my life had finally overwhelmed my senses, and I had retreated into my own mind and formed some insane fantasy.”

Zuko’s words resonated with her in that moment, as that was what she’d felt like in the first few hours of being free of this place. It had only increased when she’d been issued and taught how to use their weapons, and had seen their raw power for the first time.

“Yeah,” Mai said. “I’ve already felt that.”

“Eventually,” Zuko said, “I learned to accept it, because I really had no choice. Katara had locked us on this course within an hour after their arrival, and I was unable and unwilling to even try to change it, because at the time to Katara I was less than the ground she walked on. That and the fact that being spit on whenever she walked past, literally and figuratively, doesn’t actually make people conducive to wanting to talk to that person.”

“She spat on you?” Mai said angrily, the torrent of rage coming back. The Enterprise won’t be a safe place for her if that’s true.

Zuko apparently sensed her mood and said, “Its okay, Mai. It’s perfectly understandable; I did try to kill her and her brother for a year. That causes people to hold a grudge. Besides we’re friends now.”
It was at that point, as he was looking over one paper, he stopped, holding it longer than the others.

“Oh, my gods,” Zuko said, after a few moments. “Mai, come look at this.”

Curious to see what he’d discovered in her uncle’s papers, she walked over and said, “What?” Zuko moved the paper towards her and she took it, and noticed, with some consternation, that his hands were trembling. Disturbed that something could disturb Zuko to this degree, Mai looked over the paper. What she read stunned her so completely that she had to read it again. And again. When he was done, she looked over at Zuko, who looked back at her, sharing the same blindsided and confused look.

This cannot be, Mai thought to herself. They shared another look, and without another word, the two of them bolted, running out of the room at a furious clip. They ran through the corridors, taking flight after flight of stairs as they ran towards the cavernous supply caverns of the Boiling Rock, the natural formations of the island the prison sat on, that were used for supply storage, the entrance to which was surrounded by cement and guarded by a steel door. Zuko unlocked the door with the key at his belt, and pulled it open, revealing the dark, natural stone caverns within, the main path by flickering, almost used up torches set into the walls.

“You know how to use that flashlight at your belt?” Zuko asked.

Mai nodded, “Yeah,” and she pulled out the small device, and shined that harsh white light into the corridor before turning it off.

“Good,” Zuko said. “We’re likely going to need it.”

“Don’t you have one? And can’t you firebend anyway?”

“I left mine in my quarters, and that thing shines much brighter than any ball of fire I can produce.”

Mai thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, let’s go.” And the two of them stepped into the corridor, Mai’s flashlight shining to further illuminate the cavers. Finally, after an interminable time walking through the darkened stone caverns, they came upon the side cave they were looking for. Mai, trembling ever so slightly, shone her light inside, and her breath caught in her throat. Standing in front of her, stacked five to a column, were row upon row of crates identical to the crates on the Enterprise, only they couldn’t be from the Enterprise.

“Where are these from,” Mai asked, her voice cracking with shock. “The Columbia?”

“No,” Zuko responded, his voice hoarse. “The Columbia was destroyed by the Romulans within moments of arriving in orbit.”

“So, where did these come from?” Mai asked. Zuko, in lieu of response, motioned Mai to follow him as he walked over to one of the crates.

“Help me with this one,” he asked. Mai nodded, and put the still active light back at her belt and walked over to the other side, helping to lift the heavy crate to the floor. When it was on the floor, Mai pulled out her light again and shone it on the front, where the writing was.

Zuko leaned in the light, clearly trying to use his clearly still limited command of their written language to parse the name of whatever ship these crates had come from.

“ECS Fortunate,” he said finally after a few moments. “This came from an Earth long-haul freighter.” He quickly pulled out his scanner and scanned the characters on the crate. After a moment, he nodded and said, “According to the translator in the scanner, this ship was transferring a shipment of weapons and supplies to the MACO garrison on the United Earth frontier colony of New Mecca.”

“Clearly it didn’t get there,” Mai said, stunned. “How did it get here?”

“Well,” Zuko said, nodding. “There have been reports of dramatically increased pirate activity along the United Earth frontier with unclaimed space. Maybe some of it wasn’t the human and Nausicaan corsairs that the Starfleet brass on Earth is apparently thinking.” Zuko then opened the crate, Mai shone the light inside and, what she saw caused her voice to catch in her throat. Filling the crate to the brim, were MACO phase rifles, the black curved weapons glinting ominously in the light of Mai’s torch. They quickly pulled down another crate and opened it to reveal yet more MACO phase pistols. Another crate on the same stack, revealed a set of stun grenades, another revealed a crate of frag grenades, and the last one revealed hundreds of what Zuko said were power converters to keep the MACO weapons and power packs charged.

Zuko and Mai looked at each other, and Mai could tell that they were thinking the same thing. If the other rows of crates had the same content. They were looking at enough weapons to supply a small army.

And the only people who could’ve put them there, was the Romulans.

“I think we have a problem,” Zuko said.

 

[RobertScorpio]

“It’s called Waterbending,” Katara said to the stunned Andorian thaan, grasping the solid tendril, as the ship began to shake again, much softer this time. “Other benders have the ability to control fire, move currents of air, and control soil and metals.” He punctuated the demonstration by levitating the icicle again and melting the molecule of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule effortlessly back into its liquid state before returning it safely to her canteen..

great sequence there...really helps someone like me visualize this...

This was great pacing and i didn't expect a shipment of weapons to be found...

I also like how Mai is realizing that her people arent always doing what is good..

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Fourteen​

“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue waves roll nightly on deep Galilee.”
-George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron “The Destruction of Sennacherib”

“We’re dreaming again,” Suki said pointedly, sighing, as she took in the night-darkened plain that surrounded her. “Aren’t we, Ty Lee?” The young Kyoshi Warrior commander felt a jolt of shock flood through her as recognition of where they were set in. She noted with no small amount of shock that they were on that grassland in Africa again. When she looked off in the distance she could see the dark, imposing jagged shape of Mount Kilimanjaro rising into the night. She looked over at Ty Lee, who was staring back at her with a perturbed look on her face.

“Yes,” she said, sighing. “Yes, we are.” She could tell she was talking to the real Ty Lee because her voice carried none of the… “weight” the entity that had taken her form always did. She gave no hint that she knew preternatural knowledge of what’s to come, nor that she was, as the two of them suspected, a godlike being in human flesh.

“Which is somewhat annoying,” she said after a minute, giving an annoyed huff. “I was sneaking off to visit…” then abruptly the flow of words tumbling from Ty Lee’s mouth stopped, her eyes widened as her face flushed a deep red and she turned away in haste from her commanding officer.

Ah, she thought to herself, a knowing smirk forming on her face. Why do I get the feeling she was with that Security Lieutenant. What was his name, Papandreou? The two of them had been rather openly flirting all last week, starting with the weapons inventory and continuing in the week of our training. One thing must’ve finally led to another.

Not that I mind, she thought. The crew is two-thirds male, and they are roughly equal in rank. But that’s not important right now. What was important was why they were in this place again, and, with Ty Lee now a member of the Enterprise crew with the rest of them, who was waiting for them out here in the darkness on a land she’d never set foot on, yet the land where her ancestors came from, indeed the land that gave birth to all men.

“Suki,” Ty Lee said, her face suddenly illuminated by an orange flickering glow as she stared off to their left, “we’re not alone.”

Suki, stunned by the sudden and unaccountable appearance of the flickering orange light in her friend’s face, turned around slowly to view the source of the flames. Upon seeing what the source of it was, she felt her mouth literally drop open at the sight that had suddenly appeared before her. Sitting on the floor of the African savannah was quite simply the oldest, and smallest, woman she’d ever seen in her life. The woman’s hair had gone entirely a silvery white, a white that now glowed orange in the light of the woman’s campfire. As she pushed at the embers of the flame with a wooden stick, she noticed that the campfire wasn’t just a campfire, but was a cookfire as well. There was a sizable copper pot over the cookfire, the orange flames tickling the bottom of the pot as it sent smoke spiraling far into the star-studded night sky. As if driven by some instinct she followed the wisps and churls of smoke as they traveled heavenward and visibly breathed in shock. The sky was a blanket of stars, millions of glowing points of light that stretched from the horizon far ahead of her, to above her. So many that she could never count them all, and running through them all was a band of clouds that seemed separate, yet part of, the very stars themselves, glowing with their own incandescent beautiful light.

“Gods of my father,” she heard Ty Lee whisper reverently. “It’s so beautiful.”

“It’s your galaxy as seen from your homeworld,” a tired old voice said. She tore her gaze away from the stars and stared down, in perfect shock, at the old woman before her. “From the vantage point of this world it is seen as a cloud running across the night sky.”

“You’re not human, are you?” She heard Ty Lee say, suspicion thick on her voice.

“No,” the old woman, still partially shrouded in the shadow said. “I’m not.” And the old woman moved herself fully into view. Suki, jumped back as if an electrode had been applied to the base of her spine, her hand going to the hilt of her sword.

“You’re Klingon,” she said, stunned. “One I saw one of you last time I was here on this plain.” That same one also poisoned me, she thought to herself, in what I’m sure was a metaphor for my coming death.

“That was Kar-Tela,” the old Klingon woman said, popping the lid off her pot and stirring the stew that was inside. “The goddess of destiny, she was the only survivor when the first Klingon, Kotor, and his mate Lubnob destroyed our gods when they became more trouble than they were worth. She carries a ch’tak, an edged club in her hand, and a cup in her hand that could contain water or poison. Each warrior who faces her has a choice, they can accept the cup and whatever’s in it, or they can smash the cup from her hand and offer battle. But no warrior can defeat destiny.”

“I was offered water,” Ty Lee said from next to her. “Some of the coolest water I’d tasted in a long time. Suki, however,” and she heard a pained sigh. She looked around to view Ty Lee closing her eyes. Suki looked to see the old woman look at her with expectant eyes.

“I took the drink, and got poison,” Suki said, finally after a few moments. “That wasn’t fun.”

“Destiny isn’t often fun,” the old Klingon woman said, giving her an annoyed look. “But you must accept what comes.”

“Begging your pardon,” Suki asked, showing the elder Klingon the respect she deserved for living that long. “But who are you and why are we here?”

“You know my name already from studying the information on the Klingons on your ship,” she said softly, stirring her stew. “I am she who is called Lukara.”

“Of course,” she thought to herself. “You’re the mate of the revered Klingon from centuries in the past called Kahless the Unforgettable.”

She smirked, “If that’s how history chooses to remember us, that’s fine, but we never wed. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m here because the final hours of the life you live are at hand. My people, who’ve turned from the true path of honor Kahless set forth for them in the elder days, are preparing to offer battle to your comrades. For your species to exist, and for mine to one day, centuries from now, to return to the laws of honor, you must be prepared to fight.”

“So, Toph’s rambling prophecy is coming to pass at last,” she said, feeling a cold chill settle on her shoulders. “I will meet my end on the vengeance ship.” She shook her head, “though I can’t imagine what the Klingons will have to avenge.”

“My dear,” she said, smirking. “What do you think Bortas means in your language?”

Her eyes impulsively widened as she realized at last what that meant. The Klingon warship that had been detected in the Patch, the Bortas, was about to attack. The moment she had unknowingly been preparing for her entire life was upon her, and if what she had been told was real, the galaxy teetered on the edge of her blade.

Suddenly the woman looked up, eyes widened to the size of dinner plates as she breathed in sharply.

“It comes,” she said, her entire body quaking with some sort of manic energy as she spoke in a breathless tone. “It comes, the hour of your destiny arrives, the fate of our two species rest on your head. Your trials, the trials that will decide the fate of the galaxy you see above your head have begun.” Everything around her darkened, and Suki jolted awake, as her quarters shook around her, and her intercom wailed with the alarms that sent the ship’s crew to battle stations.

My men will no doubt be rushing to help the MACOs and security personnel secure the vital areas of the ship, she thought to herself as she threw the covers off her. She looked to her left to see that Sokka was already out of bed, no doubt rushing to help defend the ship along with everyone else. She hastily through on her jacket and pants before she buckled on her equipment belt, complete with her sword that had been recovered from the Boiling Rock storerooms. Sighing, she rushed out the door to her quarters.

 

[Graywand2]

Zuko ran at a breakneck pace down the corridor, dodging and weaving his way through the hordes of running crewmembers. He slid between two Starfleet ensigns trying to direct enlisted personnel to where they were needed, shoved one MACO slightly to the left, and almost careened into a Kyoshi Warrior who was hurtling headlong down the corridor towards him. He barely stopped to acknowledge the people he’d almost collided with, that was the farthest thing from his mind.

I have to get to Mai, he thought to himself, as he barreled towards the engine room, where Mai was pulling a shift helping to clean the plasma conduits. I have to get to her and see if she’s all right. I know I’m supposed to help secure the bridge, but they can do just fine without me for the three minutes it’s going to take to see how Mai’s doing.

He was about to turn left down a corridor when a section of the wall in front of him exploded outward in a puff of orange flame. He felt the force of the blast pick him up off his feet and slam him back, hard, to the metal deck, his head impacting the deck hardest. Zuko propped himself up on his knees, his head a blaze of pain as he squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to drag himself up, but he fell back to the death. He was about to try to push himself up again but he felt something pressed against the base of his neck. Almost immediately the pain in his head lessened from a sharp searing fire to a dull ache. He opened his eyes slowly to view Ty Lee standing over him with her rifle slung over her shoulder and a concerned look in her gray eyes. Ty Lee extended her hand, and Zuko, desperate, clutched her proffered hand in a death grip and allowed Ty Lee to help pull him up.

“Are you all right, Zuko?,” she asked, concern thick on her voice, her alert gray eyes scanning the area surrounding her as she spoke. Zuko noticed other Kyoshi Warriors and MACOs pulling people to their feet and sending them back on their way.

“Of course,” Zuko said, as the ship shuddered around him again. “I was going to check on Mai, see how she’s doing.”

“Mai’s fine, Zuko,” Ty Lee said immediately. “She’s preparing to defend Engineering in the event we get boarded, last I saw her she had a rifle pointed at the door and looked ready to kill anything that wasn’t friendly that came through the door.”

Zuko was about to respond when out of the corner of his eyes he saw a red glare. Zuko whipped about to view the red energy coalesce into four humanoid shapes. Zuko stood their stunned, his hands unable to move, even as he heard Ty Lee draw her katana and utter a foul oath he knew that the nice preppy Ty Lee he’d last seen a lifetime ago shouldn’t have known.

When the red energies of the transporter beam dissipated back into subspace, he felt a jolt of shock run through him. Four stocky, muscular, swarthy humanoid males stood in the hallway. They wore armor made of boiled black leather embedded with sliver greaves on the chest, torso, and shoulders. All four of them carried wicked, curved metal blades with multiple spikes that jutted out of the crescent shaped halves in their left hands and equally wicked looking side arms in their right hands. The world around him abruptly slowed, and Zuko found himself drawing his twin Dao swords right when one of the Klingons raised his disruptor. The world around him still feeling like it was stuck in molasses, he watched as a red phase pistol shot from somewhere to his side fell between the two Klingons. Zuko looked around to see that the one who fired the shot was a young woman, only a few years older than he was, with fair skin and blonde hair, her Starfleet uniform had gold command stripes and she had the insignia of a petty officer third class on her right breast: a white delta on a black circle with a left-pointed chevron next to it on the left.

The Klingon before him laughed, and a green burst of light appeared out of his weapon. The blast took her dead in the chest, and shock and horror gripped Zuko as he watched the woman literally burst into flame everywhere at once before falling dead to the ground, her body a charred corpse. Zuko, shock, fear, anger and adrenaline coursing through him, turned numbly toward the Klingon who fired the shot. He felt his feet, still feeling like they were attached to lead weights hurtle him forward. He concentrated and flames ran up both blades as he closed with the Klingon. The Klingon turned to face the oncoming new threat, and, grinning broadly, revealing a set of snaggly yellow teeth, brought up his weapon and slid into a hand-to-hand combat stance. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Ty Lee was charging another Klingon warrior, katana drawn. Zuko swung both blades as hard as he could, in a move designed to eviscerate the Klingon warrior he was facing. The Klingon however angled his weapon so that it was pointing vertically and pushed hard. For the first time in human history, human and Klingon swords clashed against each other. Sparks and puffs of flame as the three weapons collided with the ringing clash of steel on steel, the momentum of the Klingon’s counter careening into Zuko like the force of a raging rhino, nearly sending him off balance. Zuko stumbled slightly, but steadied himself and charged again, bringing his blades down on the Klingon’s head. The Klingon flipped his bat’leth up and blocked the attack, and again sparks flew as their blade. The Klingon pushed forward, but Zuko shoved hard to the right, the Dao swords catching two of the bat’leth’s blades and wresting the sword from the Klingon’s grip. The Klingon, a look of surprise mixed with battle lust staggered backwards and moved for a dagger at his belt but Zuko charged forward and rammed the Klingon as hard as he could through the chest. The Klingon gave a roar of pain as Zuko pulled the blades out of the Klingon’s chest. He fell down and hit the deck with a loud crash, his chest and armor and immolated ruin.

He looked up intending to face the Klingon warrior that had been behind him but saw to his surprise that the two Klingons in the back were clashing blades with two of the Kyoshi Warriors. He looked over to his left to see Ty Lee bringing her katana down on the Klingon she was dueling with. Sparks flew as their blades clashed and the Klingon shoved back on her, and brought the lower blade forward in an attempt to spill Ty Lee’s stomach on the deck. Ty Lee bounded out of range to the right, jumped up, and used her feet to shove off the wall with such force that she landed behind the Klingon warrior. The Klingon warrior turned to face her but his foot hit a piece of rubble that had been blown into the corridor from the explosion. The warrior stumbled, his blade coming down, and Ty Lee wasted no time, her blade came up and she rammed the Klingon in the neck. A thick stream of magenta arterial blood coated Ty Lee’s katana and the Klingon fell to the deck when Ty Lee withdrew her sword with a notable sucking sound. Zuko watched, impressed that her skill with the blade had increased exponentially, as Ty Lee wiped her blade with the finishing flourish before sheathing her sword. Without missing a beat she hefted her rifle and turned to face the two other Klingons who were keeping her warriors hard-pressed, and fired. The blue bursts took them in the back and the last Klingons on the deck fell. Almost immediately four Starfleet enlisted personnel with the blue-green stripes of the medical/science divisions pushed between Zuko and Ty Lee and rushed over to the Kyoshi Warriors, whom, he noted grimly had fresh cuts on their arms.

Zuko, satisfied that they were being treated turned to Ty Lee and said, “You’re skill with the blade as improved a lot.”

“Thanks,” Ty Lee said, nodding, as she continued to breath in heavily. “I had good teachers in the Boiling Rock.” She looked curiously at the Klingon bladed weapon that the Klingon warrior had dropped when she killed him. Picking it up gingerly, she held it in both sides and swung it, testing it’s mobility and weight. After a few moments of watching her swing it in the standard attacks used with most two-handed weapons, she nodded again and said, curiosity on her voice, “This is good steel, and a good weapon. I think when we make contact with the Kyoshi Warriors on the surface I’m going to recommend to Suki that we copy this weapon and make it part of our arsenal along with katana’s and energy weapons.”




Captain Jonathan Archer held onto his chair as the bridge shuddered around him. He looked around to see his senior staff and his crewmembers hunched over their consoles as the ship shuddered under Klingon disruptor fire. When the shaking subsided, Archer turned to Reed, and barked, “Report.”

The English officer tapped on his console and said, worry lacing his voice, “Aft hull plating is at forty percent, Forward hull plating is at twenty percent.”

Hoshi Sato cut in, saying as she stuck her receiver in her ear, “we have reports of boaders on decks C, D, and E.” After a second, she nodded and said, a glimmer of hope on her voice, “They’re being engaged by Kyoshi Warriors and MACOs.”

“Sir,” Travis Mayweather cut in from his console. “They’re coming around for another pass.” Archer watched as the Klingon warship came back around, it’s twin disruptor cannons glowing green.

“Target their weapons,” Archer said quickly. “Photonic torpedoes maximum yield. Travis, evasive pattern Delta-Five.”

“Aye, sir,” Reed and Mayweather said in unison, quickly tapping out commands into their respective console. Archer turned back and watched as the Klingon warship unleashed a fusillade of green disruptor fire on his ship. Travis, however, rocked the ship hard to port and the disruptor fire only clipped the side of the saucer. An instant later, yellow bursts flew out of the shuttlepod and slammed into both sides of the Klingon ship, causing their weapons to disappears in the flashes of matter-antimatter reactions.

“Transporter activity,” T’Pol reported, her Vulcan dispassion holding even in the midsts of battle. “E Deck, starboard forequarter and Engineering.”

“More boarders?” He asked, standing up in his chair.

“Negative,” T’Pol said, shaking her head. “I’m reading outbound transporter signals.”

“Outbound?” Archer asked. “They’re beaming people off the ship? Their boarders?”

“More than that,” she said. “There are more transporters signals than there are enemy boarders.”

It was in that moment that the intercom in Archer’s chair beeped. Archer moved over and pressed the connection button.

“Lieutenant Papandreou to the Bridge,” the voice of the twenty-one year old Greek officer in charge of the makeshift prison cells. “Several of the prisoners were just beamed out.”

“How many?” Archer asked, comprehension dawning as to the reason for the attack They must have gotten wind of the abilities of some of the planet’s population, and are trying to take as many humans as possible and hope there are benders among them..

“Sixteen, sir,” Papandreou said, annoyance on his voice. “The remaining ten are panicking.”

An audible beeping sound was heard, the signal that another call was coming in. “Do whatever you have to in order to calm them down, Lieutenant, Bridge out.” Archer closed the channel than opened it again.

“Engineering to Bridge,” the voice of Lieutenant Michael Burch, the officer that had replaced Commander Tucker while he was on his long deep cover mission in Romulan space. “Several people were beamed out of this location. Three of my staff, two MACOs, and that young woman who if she were from Earth I would’ve pegged her as Goth.”

Mai, Archer thought to himself, as anger and rage boiled up in him. He was not in the habit of rescuing people only to allow them to be captured by someone else.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Archer said, giving a frustrated sigh. “Bridge out.” He closed the connection and turned to Mayweather.

“Pursuit course,” he ordered, settling back into his chair.

“Aye, sir,” Mayweather said immediately, turning around and entering the commands into his console.

We’re going after them, Archer said, sighing, a resoluteness settling over him as he leaned back in his command chair. We don’t abandon are own.

 

[RobertScorpio]

Wow..Klingons? I liked how you introduced Lukara and mentioned Kahless in the process. I thought Lukara did a great job warning them what was to come, and how she also mentions that their lives could be nearing end..

“I took the drink, and got poison,” Suki said, finally after a few moments. “That wasn’t fun.”

“Destiny isn’t often fun,” the old Klingon woman said, giving her an annoyed look. “But you must accept what comes.”

That was a funny exchange!! Now, on two part two...

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Fifteen​

​

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r ,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave,”
-Thomas Gray, “Elegy in a Church Courtyard.”

Commander Ty Lee sat at the table in a far corner of the mess hall, picking at the pasta dish slathered in dark red tomato sauce peppered with balls of cooked ground meat with her chopsticks. She’d first encountered spaghetti a week ago when she’d come aboard, it had been the first real meal she’d eaten in months, and the first developed on another world. She was alone in the mess hall, as apparently the fact that they were chasing down and openly preparing to offer battle to a Klingon battleship that had them outmanned and outgunned, robbed people of their appetite, though she believed firmly in dying on a full stomach. Spaghetti had been a welcome part to the largely bewildering, confusing, and frightening first encounter with the concept that her world wasn’t the only world in the universe inhabited by humans. And that there were thousands of species other than her own in the galaxy.

And whatever lingering thoughts I possessed that the three aliens on this ship, indeed it’s very existence, are just some hallucination I’ve created to escape life in the Boiling Rock were just blown two hours ago when I actually fought and killed a Klingon warrior. The moment flashed in her mind, her sword flashing in the overhead lights as the blade came up. The thunk of steel charging through the flesh of the Klingon warriors neck, her sword running with magenta blood. The color of the Klingons blood surprised her, though she’d kept it off her face at the time. She’d read precious little about Klingons in the past week, most of the time she’d spent reading was spent on trying to catch up with the woman on Earth her age were supposed to know about history and other subjects, and mandating that her men do so as well. And what she did read, didn’t mention that Klingons had magenta blood.

Unfortunately, she thought to herself, a sense of comfort settling over her when she thought about it, as it validated to her all the more that she shared the same species as this ship’s crew, like on my world, young woman on Earth couldn’t care less about such things. Unless they wanted to join Starfleet or the Military Assault Command, both of which are actually fairly common career choices.
She heard the door open at the other end of the room and who she saw caused a jolt of shock to run through her, leg muscles sending her jolting up out of her seat, standing at perfect attention, ramrod straight as Suki walked into the room. Her commanding officer, she noticed had a sad look in her blue-green eyes when she caught her gaze. The other woman waved her back into her seat she rapidly closed the distance between them. Ty Lee, obedient to her commander as always, dropped back into her seat like a stone.

“May I sit?” She asked politeness tinged with a sharp sadness on her voice.

“Of course, sir,” she said as she waved at the seat, the Kyoshi Warriors, as part of the strategy of adopting MACO weapons and uniforms, had adopted their modes of address for officers as well. “You don’t have to ask that question. “

“Even commanding officers are required to be polite,” she said pointedly as she sat down across from her. “That’s one of the things that we share with our homeworld.”

“That wasn’t my point,” Ty Lee said seriously, putting down her chopsticks. “You never have to ask my permission to sit at my table. We’ve both been through too much together to ever have to do that.”

Suki smiled. “Thank you, my friend. That-that means a lot.”

Ty Lee bristled, feeling as though someone had pricked her skin with a thousand pins and needles. “What’s wrong?”

“You remember what you said to me in the ship’s ‘sweet spot?’” She asked, sighing. “About how I could possibly know so much about forgiveness?”

“How could I forget?” She asked, remembering the incident clearly. “It’s only been a week, Suki.” When Suki sighed again, suddenly it all clicked together in her head. Lurching forward, leaning onto the table, she said, “You want to finally tell me about it?”

Suki sighed, then nodded, her face scrunching up ever so slightly. If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve guessed that Suki looked like a little girl who was about to confess to her mom that she stole a roll without permission.

Suki started sighing for a few moments and then she said, “Do you remember hearing about an incident aboard a refugee transport in the Chameleon Bay defense perimeter called the Hope of Salvation?”

Ty Lee nodded, unsure about what she was getting at. She’d heard rumors of the incident for days while during her service to Azula, while her, Mai, and Azula were still poking around inside the perimeter, looking for ways to get directly into the city. She’d even read a heavily redacted report on the incident in the Full Moon Bay station, recovered from the commanding officer’s office right before local military units drove Azula’s troops, though by then the three of them had been moving towards Ba Sing Se.

“Yes,” she finally said. “From what we could tell, patrolling ships in the waters off Chameleon Bay signaled that they had detected a ship that refused to stop and be searched as per procedures. The Water Tribe force that was supposed to be preventing hostile ships from getting in the defense zone was out on training exercises so it encountered no resistance getting into the bay and up the mouth of the Chameleon River. Guard posts spotted her and sent word to higher headquarters deeper inside and a strike team was dispatched to board the ship and eliminate the threat before she could pray on refugee transports. However, there must have been a mistake in the orders because the strike team boarded the wrong ship. The ship, barely visible in a blanket of heavy fog refused to heave to and prepare to be boarded. Therefore the strike unit forced their way onto the ship. Encountering stiff resistance they proceeded with their orders to seize the ship and eliminate what they believed to be pirates. Unfortunately, by the time someone got a boat out saying they reached the wrong ship, half the people onboard…her…,” the flow of words from Ty Lee’s mouth ceased, her mouth closing forcibly of its own volition as realization as to what her friend was saying flooded her with a cold chill.

“That was you,” she said after a moment, when she finally conceived of the enormity of what she said. “You were in charge of that mission, weren’t you?”

Suki nodded silently, “by the time we were told what had happened, the actual ship had raided a ship downriver and assaulted a refugee camp before being destroyed by shore artillery. But that pales in comparison to the fact that the ship we boarded and the crew we attacked were refugees and had passed through the checkpoint.”

“How could you confuse a bunch of refugees for pirates,” she asked incredulously, fighting to hold back her anger until Suki finished what she was saying. “I mean, I can understand mistaking one type of ship for another in heavy fog, but surely you could tell refugees apart from pirates.”

Suki shook her head, “A lot of the refugees that travelled upriver towards Ba Sing Se are surprisingly well armed. Which isn’t surprising, the coastlines are thick with privateers and out and out brigands. And with a lot of dispossessed soldiers heading towards Ba Sing Se, soldiers from both sides who’ve lost their units and their bases due to the actions of both sides and for which Ba Sing Se is the only an option, the crews tend to be capable of putting up a fight. They’re difficult to distinguish from pirates during the best of times.”

“That’s what Zuko and Iroh did,” Ty Lee said, nodding in understanding. “My people have an unfortunate tendency to treat such people as deserters. And as the lives of deserters are forfeit, heading towards Ba Sing Se, even if it was the heart of Earth Kingdom territory, seemed very attractive, so long as those that firebend could keep it to themselves.”

“Exactly,” Suki said, sighing. “The ship refused to come about for inspection, which naturally heightened our suspicion. We caught up with her and attached grappling hooks to the side and boarded up via the gunwales. The moment we were boarded, we heard a woman scream and several other men and women with swords and leather armor charged us. That should’ve been my first clue, she screamed when a pirate would’ve charged and called for the people who attacked us to join her. By then, though, we felt we had all the proof we need and I ordered the attack pressed. The rest of my men joined boarded and engaged while the crews of the patrol boats provided cover with arrow fire.”

“Wait,” Ty Lee said, Suki’s last sentence jarring with what she knew. “The crews wear the uniform of the Earth Kingdom Coastal Defense Command. Wouldn’t one of them have stopped the fight when they saw who and what they were fighting?”

Suki sighed, and a look of annoyance mingled with the sadness and pain in her eyes. “That would’ve been so much simpler, wouldn’t it? But unfortunately, corruption is rife in the Coastal Defense Command, and we’ve caught boats preying on refugees in their uniforms.” She shook her head in disbelief, her eyes taking on the haunted look of a woman reliving her past. “It just so happened the ships we were using were loyal, and no, they didn’t try to stop the fight and rebuffed our efforts by taking the head of whoever one of my soldiers tried. So we charged forward. But I’m starting to get ahead of myself, and there are still things I have to do so here.” And she reached into her pocket, pulling out a padd and setting it down on the table. “The whole story is on here, complete, nothing edited and nothing removed.”

Ty Lee, her hands numb with shock, reached out across the table and grasped the padd, the cool temperature of the casing barely registering in her shocked hands. She slid it towards her and into her pocket, not wanting to read the padd in front of her, for fear of causing her friend more emotional pain, if such a thing were possible. Suki looked on the verge of tears, her eyes glistening, as she sat there, impulsively wringing her hands.

“Why didn’t any of them tell me about this incident the first time?” She said finally, her voice hollow.

“It’s not something we like to talk about,” Suki said, sighing “Even with ourselves. I’m pretty sure Kurosawa or Nakagawa probably would’ve told you eventually. But now to the other reason I’m here.” She breathed in a heavy sigh, but she shuddered as she exhaled, closing her eyes, clearly forcing herself to say the words she wanted to say. “I’m resigning my command and my commission effective immediately, and I hereby grant you a field promotion, effective immediately, to the rank of Captain and appoint you as the commanding officer of the Kyoshi Warriors, not just here on this ship, but back on the planet.”

The words slammed into Ty Lee with the force of a bag full of hardened bricks, causing her to shake her head in disbelief, hyperventilating slightly as her head swam with confusion, shock, anger, all of which fought fiercely with two other competing urges, one to drag Suki down to sickbay by force and have Phlox examine her head, and two, to smack some sense into Suki, literally.

“Why,” she said after her head cleared and she brought her breathing back under control. “Why are you doing this?”

“You saw what happened to me in that dream, Ty Lee,” Suki said a hint of anger on her voice warping her voice. “You know and I know that I’m going to die today, when we board that Klingon ship in five hours.” She relaxed, and, her voice shorn of anger, she said, “I would feel better knowing that when I died, I was leaving the Kyoshi Warriors in the hands of a woman of proven abilities, yet didn’t have the Kyoshi Warrior training and therefore was more flexible, more capable of adapting to the changing military and political environment, and therefore able to convince others to do the same.”

She shook her head roughly from side to side, anger suffusing her own voice. “That dream doesn’t have to come true. My destiny, for the longest time, was to be Azula’s crony forever. Do you know why I’m sitting here right now having this conversation with you? I freed myself. I changed my destiny myself. If I can change my fate, change my life, then you surely can avoid whatever fate you feel is waiting for you on that ship.”

“Death is inevitable,” Suki said, shaking her head as he regarded her with annnoyance. “And my death will serve others. Every soldier puts on their uniform knowing that they may be called upon to die so that others may live. My time has come, and you know it.”

“But,” Ty Lee said, intent on arguing the point with her. Suki however, glared daggers at her , and shot her hand up.

“No, Ty!” Suki shouted. “There are some things in life that are beyond our control. This is one of them. I’m going to die today. My time has come and you know it. It’s done. As much as I wish it otherwise, it is done.” Without another word, Suki pushed her chair back and left the table, her footfalls echoing through the room as she made her way towards the door.

Ty Lee, stunned, watched her walk towards the door to the mess hall, struggling to find the words to say to her friend. Suki had reached the door when the words came to Ty. They were so simple, so to the point.

“It’s been an honor to serve with you,” Ty Lee said. “It really has.”

Suki turned back, her eyes sad, and she smiled, a wan, resigned smile on her face. “Thank you, very much.” Suki had turned back to the door when she found herself blurting out.”

“And on the off-chance you don’t die in the next few hours,” she said. “What then?”

She heard Suki’s audible sigh as she pressed the button next to the mess hall door. The door slid open with a dragon’s hiss.

“We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.” And without another word, she walked out the door, closing it behind her.

 

[Graywand2]

Captain Jonathan Archer of the starship Enterprise sat alone in his ready room, looking at the screen of his data terminal, looking over his logs from his last encounter with the Bortas. They had managed to escape the Bortas when she had been under the command of Captain Duras by luring her into a gas giants rings and detonating a spatial torpedo, which thereby disabled the ships sensors, allowing them to disable their weapons and engines and escape.

He thought about the differences between then and now and shuddered. We’re not running from a fight this time. We’re actively going to attack that ship, take her, and get our people back. There’s no other option, I wish there were, but there isn’t. When he thought about how the Klingons had reacted to just damaging the Bortas last time, he found himself thinking.

Imagine the dance I’m going to have to do to avoid a Klingon death sentence this time, he thought to himself.

It was at that point that the door chime rang. Returning himself to the moment, he leaned back in his chair and said, “Come.”

The door slid open, and to his surprise Katara walked into the room. The young woman, clad as she was in the clothes of a MACO sans insignia was carrying a padd in her right hand and a half eaten bear claw, which she must’ve forgotten she had in the rush to come up and tell him whatever she had to tell him, in her left hand.

“May I come in, sir?” Katara asked, a curious expression on her face. “I have a few suggestions about our plans to rescue Mai and the others.” Archer had a feeling in his gut that he knew what one of the suggestions was. Under normal circumstances, he would’ve taken that plan first but these were far from normal circumstances.

“Can I imagine that one of your suggestions is to avoid the full-scale boarding action aspect of the plan in favor of you and your team holding back the Klingons while the rest escaped?”

“That is the chief suggestion, Captain,” Katara said, walking in and letting the door close behind her.
“Me, Sokka, Zuko and Suki could beam into the brig area once you disable the shields on the Bortas and hold off the Klingons while you beam out everyone they took.”

“Out of the question,” Archer said immediately. “Outside a solar system you’re just another group of MACOs, good MACOs but still, experience has shown that small teams of MACOs don’t stand much of a chance against Klingons. You’d hold out for thirty seconds, a minute at the most before you’d be killed, then we’d start pulling the dead bodies of those people off that ship.”

“But to physically take her would in all probability start a war with the Klingons,” she said anxiously, giving him an exasperated look with her cerulean blue eyes, and part of Archer once again wished he was still in his teens or early twenties. “With all due respect, the last thing our species needs right now is to be doing is fighting two enemies with faster and more powerful ships than we have. It would be suicidal.”

“Don’t you think I know that, Katara?” Archer said, getting up out of his chair and walking towards Katara, staring at her with an annoyed look.

Standing her ground and staring right back, she asked, “then why are we doing it?”

“Because we need to know why,” Archer said, folding his arms. “Was this a rogue attack by a Klingon captain looking to increase his standing with Qo’noS? Or was this an operation sanctioned by Chancellor M’Rek and the Klingon High Council, another attempt to negate a so-called genetic advantage my people are getting?”

“Another attempt?” Katara asked quizzically, cocking her head to the side. “Oh, right that flu virus.” After a moment she said, shaking her head, “Dear gods.”

“Unfortunately,” Archer said with a sigh, “the only way to find out both is for us to seize the ship.”

“And if the Klingons find out, and decide to take it out on us?” Katara said, pointedly.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Archer said. “Either way, we’re taking that ship. All you have to decide is whether or not you’re going to help.”

“Of course I’ll help, Captain,” Katara said, a steely glint in her eye. “When the time comes, just get me and my friends aboard that ship, and we’ll do our part. We’ll find the prisoners, and ensure they get beamed out before we go and join the main fight.”

Katara was silent for a few moments, during which time her eyes drifted over to her left hand and widened to the size of dinner plates, exposing the whites of her eyes, when she realized she was still holding the bear claw. She hastily finished it in three bites and when she was done, she pocketed her padd, which presumably carried her revision of Archer’s attack plan and asked,

“How long until we catch up with Bortas?”

He checked the timer on his screen and said, “four and a half hours. Why?”

“There’s one last person I want to see,” she said finally before walking to the door. She pressed the door control and the ready room door slid open with a hiss. Before walking out she turned around and gave a firm nod to Captain Archer. Archer, recognizing the nod as one of one commander, albeit a subordinate one, to another, nodded back, before Katara left the room, the door closing behind her.

Archer gave a frustrated sigh and walked over to the window, looking out at the gossamer red and orange clouds of the Briar Patch.

“What has happened to this mission?” Archer said to no one in particular. When he’d left spacedock for that very first time, eager to return the Klingon courier Klaang to his homeworld. He had been so… eager then. He wanted to get out into deep space and prove the Vulcans wrong about humanity, that they were ready for deep space. He had wanted to explore worlds no other human had ever seen and experience things no other human had ever experienced. And he had done those things. But his mission of wild-eyed exploration had been marked from the start by a war being fought throughout time, and had ended when war that cost the lives of seven million people in the United States, Cuba, Jamaica, and Venezuela. Since then, it seemed like his life had been one unending battle against one threat to humanity’s long-term survival or another: Xindi, time-travelling alien Nazis, renegade Vulcan military dictators, genetically-engineered throwbacks to the Eugenics Wars, Klingons, Romulans.

And now we come full circle, he thought to himself. I find myself out here, fighting my fellow humans and trying to protect them from threats beyond their world. I listen to Katara and Zuko tell stories about the century long war among the people on this planet, a war that began right when humanity on Earth had exhausted its own ability to destroy itself. I listen to them, and I can’t help but wonder, “Were the Vulcans right? Should we never have tried to expand and explore beyond Sol and the surrounding systems? Are we really nothing more than brutal savages who still haven’t learned to channel our aggression properly? Then without compulsion, images of Katara, Zuko, Sokka, Toph, and the others filed in front of his vision. He’d seen them in battle, fearless, brutal, and uncompromising. He’d seen them when they weren’t, smiling and laughing. He’d seen them argue, even fight amongst themselves, and he felt happiness bubble up within him, and he let out a barking laugh, thinking about the fact that human nature transcended worlds.

We are ready, he thought to himself. As long as our species is truly fortunate to count people such as them among their number, than we are ready.

Archer smiled. We are ready. Now we have to ensure we survive.

 

[RobertScorpio]

I just read part one of today's posts.

Well done. I thought you did a real good job with conveying Suki's torment with the incident with the refugee ship. Well one! I wonder, if Ty Lee does in fact live, what 'bring will' they pass?

You are doing a great job of setting the feel of your story. I could actually see some of the events you tell about in my mind; and that isn't an easy thing to do.

I will read part two tonight...

Rob

 

[mari]

I finally caught up on this one! I never watched Avatar but you've done such a thorough job describing the characters and the world, and explaining their powers, that it really doesn't matter. And the way they integrate with the Columbia and Enterprise crews, not instantly, but based on mutual respect for the job they do, the common fight, and the other things they have in common just because they are all human, seems really natural. Also... I read the first part of this update last night, and the visual of Ty Lee eating spaghetti and meatballs with chopsticks stuck with me all day today! In fact, we are having spaghetti for dinner tonight... I wonder what my folks will think...

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Sixteen​

“To our ashes glory comes too late.”
-Martial, Epigrams

Captain Jonathan Archer of the starship Enterprise strode out of his ready room, doing everything to project an air of confidence to his crew. Inside he was reeling with fear and disconcertion even as he sat down and back in his command chair; Katara’s words continued to reel in his head hours after she had come into his ready room. She had made a good point to him when she came and challenged him about the validity of his plan, what they were about to do could very easily lead to the Klingon Empire declaring war on Earth and by extension humanity, which would make the world he’d been trying to defend the last few months even more ridiculously vulnerable than it already was. The other option was that the Klingons wouldn’t pursue the matter. But that was an extremely big “if.”


Though that option may only work if the Bortas isn’t doing the will of the High Council, Archer thought to himself, as he watched the crew busily working around him, all of the touchscreen portions of their displays a bright red as the ship was on tactical alert. But, like I told Katara a few hours ago, there’s only one way to find out, by physically seizing her. Which is going to be a real bitch. I just hope our plan works. Putting that out of his mind, Archer called out, “Report.”


“The Bortas appears to be running at one-third impulse about seventy-five thousand kilometers away,” T’Pol reported calmly, looking at the hooded viewer behind her main console. “She seems to be drifting near a metreon gas deposit roughly five hundred kilometers across.”


That’s good for our plan, Archer thought to himself, hope rising in him, at T’Pol’s words. So long as we can keep them near the metreon gas deposit. “Any sign that they’ve detected us?”


“No, sir,” Reed said, working his board. A minute later the English officer looked up at him, a look of concern on his face as he said, “Though it seems they’ve managed to repair the damage we inflicted to their weapons.” He shook his head. “We’re in for a tough fight.”


Archer sighed, nodding. It’s time then, he thought to himself, let’s just hope all our families don’t have to start to learn Klingon. He slapped the All Decks button on the right arm of his command chair. The brief tone sounded through the bridge and he said, feigned confidence on his voice, “All decks this is Captain Archer, all assault teams report in when I ask for your confirmations. Strike One.”





Katara sighed as she paced around near the transporter platform on D Deck. She looked over at the device a look of curiosity mixed with fear in her voice. Then she looked around at her fellow strike team members. Zuko, Sokka, and Suki were sitting on the floor, their weapons slung over their backs as they talked among themselves. Then she turned back to the device, looking at the roughly diamond shaped device with a brass walls with multicolored hues, divided into eight segments by steel and arranged around a darkened brown and black platform with a dull white center, with some sense of trepidation. She didn’t like the idea of being converted into pure energy and being hurtled through space and into a combat situation. But those people had to be rescued and she gave her word to the Captain. They were going to fulfill their parts in this mission, or die in the attempt.


It was at that point, that the comm.-panel on the unoccupied transporter controls opened up and the iron-willed voice of Captain Jonathan Archer rang through the deck panel.


“All hands this is the Captain,” he said confidently, the pre-battle banter of her friends ceasing at the Captain’s words. “All strike teams report in when I ask for your confirmations. Strike One.”

"That’s us,” she said, and she glided towards the transporter console. Pressing the channel button on the panel, she said, confidence on her voice as she put the possibility of rematerializing with her organs outside her body and then exploding out of her mind. “We’re ready, Captain. Just get those Klingon shields down and we’ll be over as soon as Ensign Moulton gets back to her post.”


An annoyed feminine voice with an accent that she had learned came from the country on Earth called France called back, “I’m in the bathroom!

“No one has to piss for ten minutes unless they have serious bladder problems!” Katara shouted back, hot annoyance flooding her. “Now stop freaking out and get out here so we can get over to that ship!”

Ah, Katara,” Archer’s voice said over the intercom. “This channel’s still open.”


Katara gave an annoyed grunt and removed her hand from the channel open button.

--------------------------------


Captain Ty Lee stood on E deck, an anxious feeling washing over her as she watched the team of engineering personnel moving around in the small four-person lifeboat, making their final modifications to the escape vehicles. Surrounding her, was every single member of the fifty person Kyoshi Warrior strike force that had been rescued from the Boiling Rock last week, as well as roughly a dozen Starfleet enlisted personnel with red, blue and gold stripes on their uniforms . She continued to marvel at the changes in them, in herself. They now wore the gray and brown uniform of the MACO members on the ship, had unpainted faces, wore brown gloves, and she had a rifle slung over her back, taken from the uncovered cache of United Earth weapons that the Romulans must have given the Fire Nation.

And, she noticed with no small amount of pride, they had their very own patch just like the MACOs onboard. It was an inverted triangle made of blue edged with white, with a black center on which was a white silhouette of the revered Earth Kingdom Avatar Kyoshi, the founder and namesake of their organization, in a full combat stance with combat fans over her head with the upside down white comet of their MACO patrons below it. In the base of the triangle, was the words Kyoshi in both English and their written language. In the tip of the triangle was a horizontal patch that bore the name of the ship whose crew they’d joined: Enterprise. They’d been issued uniforms with those patches in the last few hours, and she could feel pride bubbling up in her, ready to spill out of her in droves of tears.

They’ve accepted us as members of their crew, she thought to herself, fighting back those hot tears. They rescued us, gave us a new purpose, and now see them as one of their own. And now it’s time to repay that respect. It was almost enough to wash away the feelings of trepidation and dread that she was soon going to be leading her men into battle. And the shock and confusion that still reeled in her from mere hours ago when Suki had delivered hers shocking confession, and especially the fact that she personally killeda young woman who was only trying to protect her child from who she thought was a pirate, and resigned her commission and elevated her to commanding officer.

“Okay,” a male voice said from behind her, and she turned to see a fair skinned male with brown eyes and the rank one silvery bright and one dark rank tab of a lieutenant (j.g) walk out of the lifeboat. “This pod is done, sir. Like all the others it is now fitted with plasma torches, laser cutters, and a portable docking collar allowing egress to the Klingon ship once the boarding program has finished its work.”

“Thank you,” Ty Lee said sincerely, the back of her mind hoping that she wouldn’t have her guts blasted out by a Klingon disruptor thirty seconds after she boarded the ship.
“You’re welcome, sir,” the officer said, giving her the respect due her Kyoshi warrior rank, which when compared with Starfleet ranks was the equivalent of a Lieutenant Commander. “Now, I have to get back to Engineering. Unlike the rest of the Starfleet personnel here, my team and I are not medics, pilots or engineers assigned to the boarding teams.”

“Carry on, then,” Ty Lee said, nodding. The engineer nodded and motioned for his team to follow him back down the corridor.

She was about to pull her communicator out and contact Shran to tell him to get himself down here if he wants to join the assault, when the comm.-panel on the wall rang.

“All decks,” the Captain’s voice said. “This is Captain Archer.

All strike teams report in when I ask for your confirmations. Strike One.” After a few moments, she heard Archer call out, “Strike Two.”

Ty Lee crossed over to the comm.-panel and pressed the button. “This is Strike Two. We’re ready for combat.” She removed her hand from the console and turned to face her men, Kyoshi Warriors and Starfleeters both, who were all looking at her expectantly. The right words suddenly formed in her mind, flashing into her brain in an instant.

“Attention” Instantly, her men stood at attention, forming a mass of gray and brown Kyoshi warriors tinged at the flanks with the blue of Starfleet personnel.

“This is it, ladies and gentleman,” she said finally, staring around at everyone, projecting confidence and calm into her voice just as she’d been taught in her childhood, in the days before she forswore who she was to protect herself from Azula. “Our entire lives right up to this moment have prepared us for this coming battle. Many of us in this corridor, particularly the ones wearing this uniform have made mistakes. Terrible mistakes. Whether intentional or not, many of us have hurt innocent people, leaving a shame that we eternally regret, and will haunt us for the rest of our lives. But today is not a day for timidity. A good friend once told me that we will never forgive ourselves, and the only thing we can do, those of us who’ve sinned as greatly as many of us in this room have, is fight for others. Fight for those who can still be saved. There are people on that ship out there, not all of them innocent yes, but we will save them. We will not abandon them to torment and death. That is why we’re in this uniform, we fight so that others may live. In the end if we die doing it, I can think of no more honorable death for a soldier.” She saw several people nod in agreement.

“To alter a phrase uttered by a great human leader from two hundred years ago to the present crisis, ‘if humanity lasts a thousand more years, let men and women still say that this was our finest hour.’”

------------------------

Archer sighed as the Starfleet and MACO strike teams reported. The risk he was taking was unbelievable. He was sending everything he had at the Klingons. Those strike teams consisted of every last Kyoshi Warrior, Starfleet Security officer, MACO, and a fair amount of the engineering and medical staffs to patch up his people’s wounds and hopefully disable whatever antipersonnel countermeasures the Klingons had in place.

“Sir,” Mayweather suddenly said, a note of anxiety on his voice. He looked up to see the Klingon ship turning sharply in space, it’s flattened head staring ominously toward.
“Standby for evasive, Travis,” Archer said. Turning to his tactical officer, he asked, his usual steel on his voice “Reed?”
He watched as Commander Reed worked his board. Abruptly the alarm’s on Reed’s console rang out. “They’re charging weapons.”

Archer swiftly swiveled his chair over to face Hoshi. The brown-skinned, brown-eyed Japanese comm. officer turned to face him, determination in her eyes. “Open a channel to the Bortas, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, sir,” she said, turning back to her console and sticking her receiver in her ear before playing her hands over her board. The channel open tone rang out and Hoshi turned back and gave him a slight nod.
Archer, a sense of calm washing over him like a wave of cool air, stood up out of his chair and walked down the slight step to the other level of the bridge. “This is Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starfleet vessel Enterprise. You have taken several people from my ship. Return them immediately.” He looked expectantly at Hoshi. Hoshi sighed and looked back at him and shook her head slightly, a resigned look in her eyes.
Alea iacta est, he thought to himself, sighing. He walked back to his command chair and sat down, swiveling to face the viewscreen, with the rapidly growing menacing visage of a D5-class battlecruiser. The cruisers weapon ports began to glow an ominous green, and an instant later green bolts lashed out at his admittedly weaker ship.

“Reroute power to forward hull plating!” Archer shouted right as the green blasts collided with his ship. His ship rocked violently, and Archer watched as the deck plating suddenly rushed at him in a gray blur. Instinct pounded through him and he lurched his hands out as he collided with the deck. Archer managed to roll back onto his back and grasp the arm of his command chair, pulling himself back up off the deck. He looked around to view crewmembers rushing around the bridge, frantically trying to lock down stressed systems. He turned to Reed, who was busy himself returning fire on the Klingon ship.

“Report!”

Reed nodded as the ship shuddered under a slightly intense blast. “Forward hull plating down sixty percent.”

“They’re coming around for another pass!” Mayweather yelled out as he worked his board, entering one evasive sequence after another into his controls. He watched as the ship lurched hard to starboard, narrowly evading a yellow photon torpedo blast from the Klingon ship.

“Load photonic torpedoes,” Archer said, roughly. “Maximum yield.”

“Right, sir,” Reed said, fingering his board. His alarm rang out with a muted alarm, and he said, “Ready.”

Archer nodded, “Fire at will, Malcolm, alternating phase cannons and torpedoes. We need to get those shields down, if only for a moment.”

“Firing,” Reed said, working his board. Five red lances lashed out at the Klingon ship, slamming with green bursts into points along the top of the ship in quick succession, followed quickly by two angry yellow torpedo blasts slamming hard into the ship’s hull. He watched as more torpedoes and cannon bursts lashed out at the Klingon ship. Three times he watched as six phase cannon blasts targeted the Klingon ship, as his own ship dodged and weaved in its attempt to avoid Klingon retribution fire.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Reed looked up at him and said, no small amount of satisfaction on his voice. “I’ve done it. They’ve lost aft shields. I don’t know how long they’re going to stay that way though.”
Archer nodded, pressing slapping his companel. “Archer to Strike One. It’s time.”

“Acknowledged,” she heard the voice of Ensign Moulton say over the intercom. “Beaming Strike One over.” He could hear the faint whine of the transporter effect in the background as Katara and her friends were disassembled and rushed through the phase transition coils.

“It’s done, sir,” the French-tinged voice of Ensign Searlait Moulton said, a worried tone on her voice. “Strike One is onboard the Klingon ship.”

 

[Graywand2]

Katara was relieved when the ship finally stopped quaking like the ground did when Toph’s temper flared. Pulling herself up off the deck she looked around to view Zuko and Ensign Moulton pulling themselves up off the ground by pulling on the transporter console. She looked to see Sokka pulling himself up off the ground with the metal of the wall before reaching his hand out to Suki, who grabbed it and allowed her to be pulled up by him.

She instinctively began to look around for something else to grab onto for the next time the ship was hit when the transporter console emitted a channel open tone again.

“Archer to Strike One,” Archer’s voice said over the intercom. “It’s time.”

She watched as Searlait Moulton slapped the button on the companel and said, “Acknowledged.” She said, before turning to face them and using her left hand to wave them over to the transporter platform. Katara nodded quickly and rushed over to the platform, jumping up on it and standing at the front edge. She watched as Zuko arranged himself to her right and Sokka and Suki ran up and went behind her. “Beaming Strike One over.” She watched as Moulton moved her hands over to the four sliding bars on her transporter console. She pushed up on the controls and she immediately heard the hum of activated machinery around her, followed by a sudden tingle running up the base of her spine as molecular imaging scanners mapped the exact location and composition of the innumerable atoms that composed her body, while Heisenberg compensators mapped the position and location of all their subatomic particles. She watched a white light spread from her torso to engulf her entire face as a subspace energy wave broke her down into subatomic particles and routed them all into the phase transition coils. She felt numb, her mind awash with static, as a bright light surrounding her endlessly as she was routed to an emitter pad on the hull, jacketed in an annular confinement beam and sent careening through space, the hull of the Bortas, and several internal decks, all in a quarter of a second. Finally, sensation and thought impinged on Katara’s consciousness, and slowly the white light began to fade and break away, slowly darkening and finally disappearing entirely. Katara found herself in a darkened room, stacked from the floor to the ceiling with row upon row of dark rectangular crates. She looked around the room to find Zuko and the others spreading out, combat flashlights on their rifles, illuminating shipping labels in Klingon script as they spread out among the containers. She walked up to Zuko who was prowling around a shipping container, his rifle outstretched in front of him.

“We’re in a cargo area,” Zuko whispered to Katara silently when she walked up.

Katara, put off by the obviousness of her friend’s statement instinctively rolled her eyes and said, “Well duh. What’s your point? They’re obviously not here.”

“I know,” Zuko said, annoyed and shaking his head. “The point is, we don’t know how far we are from them.”

She withdrew her scanner from her belt, holding where an abashed Zuko could see them. “Which is why we have these.” Without further ado she withdrew the screen and activated the scanner, setting it to scan for human biosigns at its widest scan radius, the ship shuddering under the weapons fire of the Enterprise as she worked.

Katara felt a jolt of shock rip through her as the scanner pinged, a blue dot appearing right on her screen. “There is one human biosign on this deck. About a few meters down the corridor.

Zuko looked like he wanted to grab Katara and kiss her all over, but instead, waving his hand in a manic fashion she motioned for Suki and Sokka. He watched as the two of them ran over to them, curious looks on their faces.

“We have a human biosign,” she whispered furtively, motioning for the door to the cargo bay. “This deck.”
Suki favored them all with a determined look, nodding and saying, “Let’s get going, then.”

Katara nodded back and put her scanner away. “Right.” She said, bringing her rifle down from her shoulder and pointing it at the door. The four of them nodded and they walked slowly to the door. Katara felt a line of sweat trickle down her brow as the door grew ever larger in her vision, a line of sweat that was as much the result of the anxiety and fear that coursed through her as much as the humidity of the Klingon ship. Her heart skipped a beat when the door in front of them, suddenly released a burst of pressure and slid open with the groan of poorly maintained equipment, and four swarthy Klingons, a man and a woman up front with two men in the back, walked into the cargo bay. They had smooth foreheads, brown eyes, long brown hair, and were clad in brown jackets and pants as they walked in with sullen looks on their faces. Katara, surprise at their sudden appearance rooting her to the floor, found himself staring directly into the eyes of the lead Klingon, the woman. The Klingon woman’s eyes suddenly widened in surprise and for a brief moment, human and QuchHa stood there. The world around them slowed as if time itself was being caught in amber, and seconds stretched agonizingly to minutes. Then, the Klingon’s eyes narrowed, and rage flared into being in her eyes. The woman reached, slowly in the illusion of slowness that took Katara in battle, for the holster at her belt, slowly withdrawing a disruptor pistol. Without thinking, Katara squeezed down on the trigger. A blue bolt exploded out of the front edge of her rifle and slammed hard into a point just above the Klingon’s chest, exploding outward in a shower of bright white sparks. Her perceptions broke themselves free and the world around her speed up rapidly, the Klingon slamming to the deck as instinct flooded the young woman, causing her to dive behind a stack of crates. Her agile frame disappeared behind the stack of crates right as three green blasts exploded against it quick succession. She brought her rifle up and drew a bead on one of the Klingons, this time an enraged looking male who was pointing a disruptor pistol at her head. Angling her rifle towards her center of mass, she fired two quick shots in rapid succession. The two shots slammed into the Klingon, one in the torso and one in the stomach, throwing the Klingon back to the floor, smoke roiling up from the immolated ruins of his chest and internal organs, as his eyes stared blankly back at them.

Katara, adrenaline levels spiking in the rush of combat, wheeled her rifle around and hunted for another target. She spied another Klingon male firing at another stack of crates a few feet away. She aimed for his center of mass when two bright blue blasts suddenly converged on the other Klingons stomach, while another blast blew out the chest of the remaining Klingon. Katara, a mixture of relief and revulsion coursing through her picked herself up and walked across the floor as Zuko and the others emerged from their own hiding places.

“You all okay?” Katara asked.

Zuko, Sokka, and Suki all looked at each other, and Zuko turned back to her. “We’re all fine, Katara. You?”
Katara nodded quickly. “I’m fine, guys. Let’s get moving.” And without another word, she put the smoking corpses of the dead Klingons out of her mind and walked out the door, rifle outstretched, and walked into the corridor. The corridor, shared the same brown coloration and darkened lights as the cargo bay, but she noticed that there were panels of yellow emergency lights blinking in both directions along the corridor.
Katara sighed and withdrew her scanner, activating it and scanning for the human biosign. She quickly found it again, and instinctively hissed in shock. The human biosign was very faint. “The biosign is this way,” she said, pointing down the corridor behind Zuko and the others. “About five meters down the corridor. Zuko, lead the way.” Zuko nodded and withdrew his own scanner while Katara replaced hers and brought her rifle back up. Zuko nodded and walked down the corridor. Katara immediately motioned for Sokka and Suki. They instinctively nodded and formed up around her, pointing their rifles down various corridors. As they stalked along, Katara’s sensors felt sharper, her body quivering with energy as they walked along, alert to any threat that might come after them. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Zuko’s fist came up. Katara and the others instinctively followed their experience and their training and fell into defensive positions around him.

“We’re almost there,” Zuko whispered, as the ship rocked again, giving it’s most intense shudder yet. “The human’s right around the corner.” Under his breath, Katara swore he heard him mention. “We’re coming, Mai.” Katara opened her mouth to berate him for thinking it was Mai on no evidence, until she remembered that he’d been dead certain that Mai was in the Boiling Rock, and he’d turned out to be right.
They rounded the corridor and Katara found that the starboard side of the corridor was lined with heavy, brown double doors that stretched down to the edge of the corridor.

“Which one is it?” Katara asked.

Zuko fiddled with his scanner’s controls, tightening the scan radius before finally nodding. “Five doors down.”

“Any Klingons?” Katara heard Suki ask.

Zuko scanned again. “None.”

That’s odd, Katara thought to herself, suspicion rising in her gut. There should at least be one guard. Katara was tempted to order them to fall back, before her common sense told her there was no point. They had to rescue the humans trapped aboard and had to hope that the human they detected was the one who knew where the others were.

One thing for it, then, Katara thought. “Let’s keep moving,” she said. The four of them moved forward, stalking stealthily down the corridor. Katara, eyes alert, counted the doors, half expecting a dozen armed and angry Klingons to storm out of them and cut them to ribbons with disruptor fire and those wicked looking bat’leths and mek’leths. She remembered hearing Ty Lee want to make them part of the Kyoshi Warrior arsenal, until Suki flat out refused the request, reasoning that because there were so many human-looking Klingons, members of the QuchHa caste, it might lead to friendly fire incidents.

“We’re here,” Zuko said, finally. “They were on the other side of the corridor, staring at the final door on the left. “She’s in here.” Without another word, Zuko strode forward towards the door. Katara watched the door, hesitantly, expecting the door to remain closed to a non-Klingon. The door however, slid right open, revealing a dimly-lit room on the other side. Zuko suddenly, stopped, the scanner clattering to the floor.
Oh, no, Katara thought to herself. She was just starting to like Mai, but she’d grown platonically closer to Zuko, so much so she considered him her best friend. Fear and hurt rushing through her, Katara rushed forward, and pushed past Zuko. The sight that assaulted her vision tore at her heart. Mai was lying, strapped two a brown metal table, her skin slick and her clothes darkened with profuse amounts of sweat. The base of her skull was attached to a brown crescent moon shaped piece of metal, and towering above it was brown metal box attached to a metal tripod that was pointing at the back of her head. The device, she noted, a rush of relief flowing through her, seemed to be turned off.

“What is that thing?” Zuko asked, his voice thick with anger and hatred.

“It’s a Klingon mind-sifter,” a voice from behind her said. They turned to see Suki looking at the sight with sadness in her eyes. “According to the Vulcan database on Klingon technology it is designed to forcefully read the memories of any humanoid subject. It’s highest levels cause such severe synaptic stress that it can destroy the higher brain functions, leaving its victim a veritable vegetable.”

“Gods,” Zuko said. “We need to get her out of that thing, now. Did that database say how to extract someone from a Klingon mind-sifter?”

“Yes, it did,” Suki said, pushing through them. She motioned for the two of them to follow him. Walking over to Mai, the two of them undid the straps holding her down, while Suki fiddled with the device on the back of the skull. Finally, Suki pushed the device holding her skull down away from her and Mai suddenly breathed in a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes fluttered open, and she turned her head weakly to face him.

“Zuko?” She asked softly, her voice barely a whisper to Katara’s ears. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Zuko said laughing, and together the two of them pulled Mai up into a sitting position. Katara watched as Zuko enveloped Mai into a massive hug. Mai, weak as a boned fish, just hung her arms weakly at her side and buried her head into his massive shoulder. Finally ragged sobs ripped from the other woman.

“It…it was so painful,” she heard Mai say as Zuko stroked her hair. “That thing reached into my mind. They wanted to understand how bending works. I told them it was genetic, and only certain percentage of the humans only on my world had the ability. They didn’t quite believe me and put me in-,”

“Shush,” she heard Zuko whisper. “It’s okay. You’re safe, now. We’re going to get you back to the Enterprise. Phlox will take care of you, there. Make you right as rain.”

“I love you, Zuko,” Mai said. “I really do.”

“I love you, too,” Zuko responded, kissing her cheek.
Katara sighed, and withdrew her communicator. Flipping the device open, she said, “Katara to Enterprise.”

After a heart-stopping few moments, Archer’s voice broke in.

“This is Enterprise, go ahead.”

“We have Mai,” Katara said. “She’s been through a Klingon mind-sifter and needs medical attention. Can you beam her back.”

There was no response, just a heart-stopping few moments of static being carried over the channel. Finally Archer’s voice responded.

“Standby, Katara,” Archer’s voice said. The channel closed. Katara, felt her heart skip a beat, images of the Enterprise’s destruction flashing through her mind. Then suddenly Archer’s voice cut back in.

“You might want to hold onto something over there,” Katara saw a handhold in the wall behind her, she rushed over to grab onto it, while everyone else grabbed onto the mind-sifter components. The ship suddenly rocked under a huge explosion, the metal heaving her up causing the ceiling to get closer before falling back suddenly as a sharp pain exploded into her lower back as she hit the ground, her death grip on the handhold the only thing that kept her skull from being fractured on the floor of the Klingon ship.
Katara pulled herself up and looked around to see Sokka and Suki picking themselves up off the floor, with Zuko helping Mai to her feet. There was a massive, purpling bruise on Mai’s cheek, and Sokka’s uniform sleeve was ripped, but other than that they were all no more the worst for wear.

“We’re ready for her over here now,” Archer’s voice said through the communicator, which had flown a few feet away to land at the edge of the door. Katara rushed over to it, and picked it up. “You can beam her over anytime now.”

“The Klingon shields?”

“Not going to be much of a problem anymore, Archer’s voice said. “Reinforcements are on route.”

 

[RobertScorpio]

Most TREK aliens know about the klingon sifter, so its cool hearing it seen from a foreign prospective like Mai...very good episode...moved along at a quick pace.

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Seventeen​

“There is no armor against fate;
Death lays his icy hands on kings.”
-James Shirley, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

Archer grabbed onto his chair with a death grip as his ship shuddered around him again. He heard loud bursts behind him as the energies being pummeled into his ship overloaded the surge protectors in the consoles behind him. Ignoring the smell of acrid smoke in the air, he looked over at the tactical station, and asked, his voice thick with concern. “Malcolm?”

Lieutenant Commander Reed, his face partially obscured by gray smoke as he worked his board, nodded, and said, “Forward hull plating down to ten percent. Starboard hull plating is down to twenty, and we’ve just lost our aft plating. Luckily, we managed to take out two of their disruptors.”

“They’re coming around again,” he heard Mayweather say from his flight control station, tension and fear lacing his voice. Archer looked around his bridge. The consoles in the situation area had exploded, strewing their blackened and burnt parts all over the back room. Thick black smoke was steaming from the destroyed consoles as crewmembers, fire extinguishers in hand rushed to put out those consoles and about half a dozen other small fires burning around the bridge.

“Katara to Enterprise,” Katara’s tension-laced, desperate voice suddenly issued from the armrest of his command chair. Hastily sitting back down his command chair, Archer slapped the channel open, as his ship rocked again.

“This is Enterprise,” Archer said, concern and impatience on his voice as his ship shuddered around him.

“We’re a little busy around here; could you please hurry up and say whatever you have to say?”

“We have Mai,” Katara said, shooting back with her own impatient tone. “She’s been through a Klingon mind-sifter and needs medical attention. Can you beam her back?”

The words “mind-sifter” sent fear and concern running down Archer’s back like someone running the New York marathon. He remembered being threatened with the mind-sifter when he’d been a Klingon prisoner a few years earlier, after his last encounter with the Bortas. His concern for Mai was compounded when he remembered what he read about the mind-sifters capabilities in the Vulcan database after his escape from Rura Penthe soon after his life-sentence there.

He quickly glanced over at Reed, an expectant look in his brown eyes. Malcolm fingered his board than gazed right back, the look of resignation on his face telling Archer everything he needed to know. The Klingon shields were not down at the moment. Everyone on that ship was stuck and unable to get back to Enterprise and into the waiting arms of her medical personnel at the moment.
Unable to say anything else, he hastily returned to the conversation he was having and said, “Standby, Katara,” Archer said, closing the channel. Switching the channel to internal communications, Archer opened it again and said, “Archer to Sickbay.”

After a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, Phlox’s voice deep, rich voice resounded through the bridge, tension and concern on his voice. “This is Phlox. What is it, Captain?”

“I’m calling to tell you that Katara and the others have recovered Mai,” Archer said immediately. “She’s been subjected to a Klingon mind-sifter and needs urgent medical attention.”

Archer heard Phlox give an exasperated sigh, clearly expressing anger at anyone who would harm one of the people under his care. “Thank you for telling me, Captain,” He said after a moment, “we’ll be ready for her when she arrives.”

Archer nodded, sighing in relief. “Will she be okay?” He asked a heartbeat later.

“That remains to be seen, Captain,” Phlox said, sadness on his voice. “Those lucky enough to survive being subjected to a Klingon mind-sifter suffer severe nerve and cellular damage as well as extreme synaptic stress. If you don’t get her over here soon, even if she’s lucid now, she may spend the rest of her life in a vegetative state.”

“We’ll do all we can,” Archer said, keeping his anger at the whole situation bottled up. “Bridge out.” Looking up at T’Pol he asked, “Commander?”

“The Bortas is just outside the range of the full effects of the metreon gas pocket,” T’Pol responded immediately, removing her head from the viewer. “Detonating a spatial torpedo in the pocket now should be enough to cause a blast that will disable the Klingon ship without destroying it.”
Archer turned immediately around to Reed and said, “Do it.”

Reed nodded and fingered his board, “You might want to call Katara back, sir,” Reed said, a slightly amused inflection on his voice. “Tell her she’s going to be in for one hell of an explosion.”

“Right,” Archer said nodding. Reopening the channel to Katara, Archer said, “You might want to hold onto something over there.” Without waiting for Katara’s response he looked over at Reed and gave a single nod of his head.

Reed nodded right back and pressed one control on his board, sending alarms ringing from his console. “Firing,” was all he said to accompany them. Archer looked at the viewscreen to see a single torpedo arcing through the blackness of space, cutting through the gasses that were going to conduct the force of the shockwave right into the Bortas.

And into us, if we don’t get moving, Archer thought to himself, suddenly remembering. Aloud he said, “Travis.”

“Understood, sir,” his helmsman said, as his ebony hands worked the board as fast as humanly possible. “Getting us out of range of that shockwave. Full impulse.” He watched as the Bortas begin to get rapidly smaller on the viewscreen. Then, abruptly, a massive burst of orange appeared, flaring to life like a new sun. The Bortas flipped up and over like a pro skateboarder kicking a board up back home, orange light flickering in huge arcs across her hull as her shields overloaded and collapsed. Finally, the Bortas’s thrusters kicked in and the ship ceased tumbling at an angle.

“All stop,” Archer ordered. Mayweather complied immediately, bringing the hundreds of tons of starship that was Enterprise to a halt, thrusters automatically balancing out the inertial desire to move forward with an equally powerful inertial thrust in the opposite direction.
“Commander?” He asked, turning to T’Pol.

T’Pol fingered her board. After a moment, she nodded and said, “The Bortas has sustained heavy damage. It has lost engines, weapons, and shields.”
“Get us back into transporter range,” Archer ordered. As Mayweather complied with the order, Archer pressed the panel on his armrest, reopening the channel to Katara. “We’re ready for her now. You can beam her over anytime.”

After a moment, Katara’s voice came back over the channel, curiosity on the young woman’s voice. “The Klingon shields?”

“Not going to be much of a problem anymore,” Archer said confidently. “Reinforcements are en route.”

“Understood, Captain,” Katara said, relief melting into her voice. “We’ll proceed with our mission. Katara out.” As soon as Katara closed the channel, Archer tapped his companel again, opening an intraship one. “Archer to Ensign Moulton.”

“Moulton here, Capitan,” the young Frenchwoman’s voice said over the intercom, her breathing slightly heavy, an exhaustion no doubt brought on by the struggle to remain functioning while the ship was coming down around her. After a moment, she said, “There’s a medical team coming down the corridor, sir. What’s happened?”

“Strike One has located and recovered Mai. She needs desperate medical attention. Beam her back immediately.”

“Aye, sir,” Moulton said immediately, her breathing steadying. “Energizing.” The faint whine of the transporter process occurred in the background, lasting for a fraction of a second. before Moulton’s voice reappeared. “She’s back onboard.” The unmistakable sound of a falling body was heard in the background over the channel.

“She’s just collapsed, sir,” Moulton said after a moment, a sympathetic tone on her voice. “The medics have her though, and are carrying her back to sickbay on a stretcher.”

Archer looked around to view varying looks of relief on the faces of everyone except T’Pol. Archer wasn’t surprised, Mai, despite her emo attitude, had proved helpful, particularly in Engineering, something she was surprisingly quite skilled at after only a few days of being shown how the ship works, even to the point of catching an open circuit in the atomic matter piles of the impulse engines that could have cost them the ship in an uncontrolled fusion reaction. Unsurprisingly, Mai had quickly earned the respect of everyone onboard, especially the engineering staff.

Trip would like her, Archer thought to himself, smiling, his heart burning at the thought of his chief engineer and best friend somewhere in Romulan space. Hopefully, when Trip at last comes home from the cold, she can meet him.

But that’s a moot point right now, he quickly admonished himself. It’s a moot point because he won’t have a ship to go back to unless we complete his mission and I start concentrating.
Slapping his console again, he gave the fateful order, his heart sinking like a stone as the words tumbled from his lips. “Archer to all strike teams. It’s time.”



Ty Lee watched as the disabled Klingon ship grew steadily larger in the cramped escape pods vision, as the five other pods just in her immediate field of vision maintained their focus. Her experience with space battles was extremely limited to say the least, but she couldn’t resist the urge to whistle appreciatively at the sight. The Klingon ship was listing at forty-five degree angle and there were several scorch marks running down her hull. “How did Enterprise manage to do that?” Ty Lee asked, wonder on her voice as she continued to stare shocked at the damage done to the Klingon ships.

“As far as I can tell,” Shran responded, from the thick brown leather seat to her left. “Archer managed to lure the Klingon ship to the extreme range of a metreon gas pocket before detonating it. Being at the extreme edge of range it wasn’t enough to destroy it, but it was enough to leave it unable to prevent us from boarding.”

“That’s good,” Ty Lee said, nodding, completely unsure what a “metreon” was but singularly impressed nonetheless. As the ship continued to grow larger in her vision, the ends of the ship slowly disappearing as they got closer to a relatively undamaged part of the hull, she turned to the Starfleet petty officer next to her, a young woman roughly five years older than she was with dark-skin and brown hair and eyes, who was busy monitoring her screens.

“How soon until we reach the hull?” She asked the woman with red operations stripes on her uniform, an itching feeling running down the ship to get onboard her and finish their mission.

The young woman’s eyes drifted over to another part of her display which Ty couldn’t see, then said, “Ninety seconds, sir.”

“Good,” Ty Lee said. She returned her attention to looking at the vast expanse of Klingon hull that was now before her eyes when a loud, almost frantic sounding thumping suddenly pierced the air aboard the tiny lifeboat. Ty, stunned by the unexpected noise turned around in her chair and looked at the ten Kyoshi Warriors and Starfleet personnel unceremoniously crammed into a space designed for half their number, fully expecting one of them to be frantically stamping his or her feet, unable to take such a tight enclosed space. However, the seven Kyoshi Warriors, two Starfleet medics, and one engineer were moving their heads from side to side, looking for the source of the thumping. After a moment though Ty’s ears tuned in and she realized that the thumping was coming from the small storage compartment right below her chair. Ty Lee, a sneaking feeling worming through her that she knew who was causing the thumping sound, withdrew her scanner, activated it and targeted it at the compartment. Sure enough, her scanner pinged, announcing that it had detected a singular human biosign, which, at such close range it quickly identified as female and roughly thirteen years of age. Sighing in frustration she unbuckled herself and walked over to the compartment, untwisting the lock and opening it up. The human form inside suddenly breathed in a sharp intake of breath, pulling itself out to reveal a thirteen year old girl with thick black hair bound into a ponytail and light green eyes that were distinctly filmy, wearing a green shirt and blue trousers. She was throwing off a fiery red aura, an aura that spoke of anger and a near-homicidal rage.

“Hello, Toph,” she said, mock sweetness on her voice, covering up the annoyance surging through her before she lost control, hauled her out of the storage compartment and punched her in the face. “What brings you on our mission of vital importance to our people?”



Suki sighed as she pushed herself off the metal walls of the darkened turboshaft she was now repelling down, hearing the others push off and recollide with the wall as she did so. She sighed in annoyance. She hated the idea of repelling down an area where she couldn’t even see the rope she was using to repel, but not because she wanted to live.

It’s not like I have any illusions about surviving this mission, she thought to herself, muttering in annoyance. It’s just that I don’t want my death to be breaking my neck by falling to the bottom of what is essentially a metal chute. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to fulfill the prophecy. It was at that point that the shaft around them shuddered, the metal under her feet shuddering.

That’s not weapons fire, she thought to herself, than the answer hit her like a lead brick dropped on top of her. “That’s them!” She shouted. “The rest of them have soft-landed on the hull and are probably cutting their way inside as we speak.”

“Good,” she heard Sokka say, relief evident on his voice. “The sooner we find our people and get out of here, the sooner I can eat.”

Oh, Sokka, she thought to herself, her heart burning in sadness. I’m going to miss your fixation on your stomach. It was at that point that Katara’s stunned voice cut through the darkness.

“Quiet,” she said, the sounds of a scanner beeping through the air. “I’m reading a stationary turbocar only five feet down. If we can get in it, we may be able to get to where Mai said the other prisoners are much more quickly.”

“Then let’s do it,” Zuko said, and with that, she heard feet hitting metal as they repelled down the shaft, heading towards the turbocar below her. She heard the sounds of feet hitting metal, and sighing, she repelled herself down after them, hoping that she wouldn’t slip and lose purchase.

 

[Graywand2]

The door to the lifeboat opened, revealing a darkened corridor that glowed faintly with a yellow light being emitted from panels lining the wall. She looked back at her people, who had looks of consternation on their faces as they squeezed themselves into the even smaller aft compartment of the lifeboat. She looked down at the sullen face at the newest and unexpected member of her boarding party. Toph Bei Fong’s mouth might have been cast in a sullen expression but her eyes were alight with manic energy. She wasn’t surprised. Toph Bei Fong’s element was combat, and she was back inside it.

“Lead the way, fancy feet,” she said, her previous anger apparently forgotten. “It’s time to kick ass.”



Ty Lee nodded, uncertainty at what a bender who was unable to bend could do on a mission like this, and stepped into the Klingon corridor, her rifle aloft. After a moment, she heard a scramble of feet behind her as the rest of the squad she took with her entered the corridor. They spread out, stepping lightly, their rifles in front of them, as they moved cautiously through the Klingon ship. She watched as her team moved into defensive positions around them, rifles pointing down each of the adjoining corridors.

“Stop moving!” Toph’s voice said from behind her. Everyone in the room stopped and looked at her expectantly. Toph pointed down the corridor. “There are people coming up that way. Humans.” As soon as the words escaped her lips the sounds of distant weapons fire occurred, appearing from all around them. She could hear the sounds of disruptor fire mixed with the sounds of pulse and phase rifle fire.

“The other teams must be encountering resistance,” Toph said, calmly. “There’s a Starfleet security team about four sections aft of us, four MACO teams on the decks below it, and two other Kyoshi Warrior groups three sections to starboard.”

“There should be more than that,” Ty Lee said, impressed despite herself, but there probably fighting outside of Toph’s hearing range, “but more to the point, who’s coming down the corridor?”

Toph listened, then a wide smile broke out on her face, flashing a row of white teeth that glowed yellow in the emergency lights.“It’s Katara and the others! They’re alive.” It was at that point that the sound of running feet were heard and, sure enough, she found relief filling her as Zuko emerged around the corridor, surprise on his face as he lowered his rifle. A second later, Suki appeared, and more relief bubbled up inside the young woman, particularly at the fact that her head was still attached to her shoulders. Katara and Sokka appeared a moment later and the four of them bounded towards them.

“You still live, I see,” Ty Lee said pointedly, as she gave a knowing stare to Suki.

Her friend smirked back, “This mission isn’t over yet, Captain.” She used her rifle to point down the corridor. “The rest of the prisoners are down there and-,” it was at that point that Suki’s eyes drifted over to where Toph was standing before flitting back to her with a confused look on her face. “What’s Toph doing here? Archer barred her from participating in further missions.”

“He did,” Toph said angrily from behind her. “But has someone telling me ‘no’ ever stopped me in the past, Suki?”

“No, it hasn’t,” Zuko said from behind Suki as he looked at Toph and gave a resigned shake of his head.

But Toph didn’t appear to be listening to Zuko. Her eyes were staring around her as she listened to something farther away. Suddenly, she breathed in shock, “There’s a group of Klingons coming at us down the corridor where you guys came from, and the Kyoshi groups fighting down that corridor,” she said pointing to the right, “have just broken and are falling back down a side corridor towards two MACO fire teams.” She saw tangible fear appear in Toph’s eyes. “The Klingons are right on top of us.”

Shit, Ty Lee thought to himself, instinct and an undercurrent of fear running through her. “First and second teams, take that corridor! Third team you’re with-,” as the teams she ordered moved into position, a green blast from the corridor Suki and the others came down slammed into the wall a bare centimeter from Suki’s head. The attack was followed by the sounds of hundreds of footfalls coming down the corridor. Suki and the others fell into a defensive position as Ty Lee raised his rifle to see a stocky Klingon male with prominent forehead ridges, wearing a brown jacket and pants run down the corridor. The Klingon, with graying strands in his long black hair ,a rapidly graying scraggly beard on his face, and a gleaming bat’leth on his back, glared at them along with six other Klingons, all with prominent forehead ridges that marked them as those Klingons, HemQuch, who avoided contracting the genengineered Levodian Flu that had created the QuchHa.

“Surrender, tera'ngan,” he said roughly. “To the Klingon Empire.”



Suki stared, shock ripping through her as she stared at the Klingon captain and the group of warriors that accompanied him. For a half second the fact that she had resigned her command of the Kyoshi Warriors ran screaming from her mind, and she was tempted to order them to attack. Then reason, and tactical sense, slapped her in the face.

Don’t be stupid, girl, she thought to herself, shaking her head at the idiocy of what she had suggested. Attacking them would be a mistake even if we won. It would just leave us out of position for when the Klingons came charging at us from starboard. She looked over at the woman she’d given her position to, and saw that understanding in her gray eyes. As the two women looked at each other, she could see understanding, shock, and terror mixed in her eyes as Ty Lee was waging an internal struggle to accept what was about to happen.

I’m sorry our friendship has to end this way, Suki thought to herself, caught as they were in the throes of what the Klingon’s they fought call tova’dok, “a moment of clarity between two warriors on a field of battle,” sadness flooding her before being replaced by a hard sense of resolution, that what was about to happen was what must be done. I wish time had allowed me to get to know you better. But my time has run out. It was then that unbidden, the memory of a drama she had watched a couple weeks ago during the Enterprise’s movie night. It was a movie set in a period of tension between Earth’s nation-states, nearly two centuries before now. The commander of the sub that was the main setting of the movie, Red October was trying to defect to Captain Archer’s home nation of the United States, but he had to deal with his political officer first. He’d been told that the political office assigned to the submarine was in his quarters. When he arrived he found the man, Ivan Putin, digging around in his journal and had read a few lines that had stuck in her head because of their poignancy, though it had taken some extra research to understand the symbolism.

The seventh angel poured his bowl into the air, she remembered him reading from the Captain’s journal. And a voice cried out, “it is done.”

It is done, she repeated to herself mentally, giving Ty Lee a slight, barely perceptible nod. Ty Lee, eyes glistening from barely held back tears, nodded back. Turning back she found the Klingon commander staring back at her, rage in his eyes.

“No,” she said, her hand going to her sword, the coolness of the metal hilt reassuring her. “No retreat. No surrender. If we go down today, we go down fighting.” With that she drew her sword and held it out in front of her in an attack stance. The other Klingons chuckled at her, bringing their disruptor rifles up and pointing them at her.

“Mev’yap!” The Klingon captain shouted, and the Klingons lowered their weapons. The Captain unlimbered his bat’leth and held it out in front of him, in a combat stance that was fairly universal among all users of two-handed weapons. “Foolish tera’ngan,” he said arrogantly, “I will bleed you like a stuck targ!”

“Maybe so,” she said, stepping forward slowly, with the calm grace of a predator. “But either way, we fight.”

“I hope pain is something you enjoy,” the Klingon said softly, a predatory smile appearing on his face before he gave a guttural shout and charged, bat’leth swinging in an arc that would shred her torso from left to right…

Sokka watched, his mind numb as the Klingon charged Suki, his guttural roar like that of a wild beast as it echoed through the corridor. She watched as Suki met the Klingon’s swing with a downward swing of her own blade. Their blades met in a shower of sparks as Suki’s swing stopped the Klingon’s cold. The Klingon, smiling now at the unexpected challenge now brought his blade up and brought it crashing down towards Suki’s head, Suki’s blade flew up and met it there as well.

Sokka, shock and fear, and the millions-years old instinct he shared with all humans, rushed forward towards the fight, driven by the fear-laced desire to help his mate. He was stopped by a sudden pressure on his chest that shoved him stumbling back. Anger exploded into his consciousness and his eyes focused on Ty Lee, who stood in front of him glaring.

“This is something she has to do herself,” Ty Lee said darkly.

A seething torrent of rage flowing through her, Sokka shot back,“I can’t just let her-,” then the sound of a disruptor blast echoed through the halls of the Klingon ship, and a green flare occurred in the corner of his eye. He wheeled around to see one of the Kyoshi Warriors slump to the ground, a massive burn at the center of her chest as her brown eyes stared back blankly into the air. She looked up to see about a dozen Klingons, roughly seven HemQuch and five QuchHa charging down the corridor at them, disruptor rifles blazing away at them, shots landing wildly among them.

“Fall back!” Ty Lee shouted, hefting her rifle and firing two shots at the oncoming Klingons, “down the corridor!” The Klingons gave annoyed grunts and charged at them, their weapons firing. She watched as everyone in the group ran down the corridor, angry red phase pistol blasts lashing out from the weapons of the Starfleet personnel at the Klingons coming at them. His feet were on fire in their haste to move away from the rapidly advancing Klingons coming at them from starboard. As he ran down the corridor, he felt something slide under him and as if he’d gained the power of flight he felt himself rise into the air. Then the air rushed around him as the deck came charging up like a rampaging polaroo. A fiery burst of pain exploded in his head, and he felt himself slide swiftly into an oppressive and all-consuming darkness…

Sokka floated through the darkness, his mind a roil of static as he struggled to comprehend the world around him. Every so often, flashes of memory would burst through his brain. One moment he would be struggling to stay afloat, the next he was standing their watching as Suki and the Klingon captain battled it out before the memory shattered and he was drowning in a sea of black once more.
He was about to give up battling the crushing darkness that pressed at his very when he felt a burning sensation at the distant edges of his consciousness. Then more sensations returned, he got the distinct sensation that wherever he was very humid, he could feel his clothes slicking to his skin, then a dull throbbing ache. Finally, the darkness shifted and he found scenery flickering around in his mind as it returned to full sensation. Finally, his eyes opened entirely and he found a brown-skinned woman with green eyes and black hair wearing a Starfleet uniform with the bluish stripes of a member of the science/medical division.

“Welcome back,” the young woman said as Sokka propped himself up on his shoulders. A brown glove suddenly appeared in his vision and he grabbed at it, looking up to see Ty Lee at the other end of it, staring down at him with a look of concern on her face. Sokka pulled himself up off the ground and looked around her, seeking the familiar faces of Katara or Zuko. As he looked, he felt fear run down his spine. He could see they were in a room with about a dozen metal brown doors. He noticed that several of the doors were open, and that people in battered and torn Starfleet uniforms were being escorted out, by Kyoshi Warriors and MACOs, while four Starfleet Security members stood at the entrance. He looked to the back of the room and saw a group of four humans in the gray jumpsuits that the Fire Nation prisoners had been dressed in being whisked away by the Enterprise’s transporter beams.

We must be in the holding area, Sokka thought to himself, but that realization was drowned out by the flood of sharp panic flooding his body at the fact that Katara, Zuko and Toph weren’t there.

Fear rushing through him he wheeled back to face Ty Lee. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Ty Lee said, shaking her head, her voice cracking with sorrow. Her words though, caused an explosive torrent of rage to explode through him as though a dam had burst. Without thinking he grabbed Ty Lee and shoved her hard against the bulkhead with a resounding thunk.

“What do you mean you don’t know?!” He shouted angrily, seeing red as he held her against the wall as the MACOs and Kyoshi Warriors responded to the noise and pointed their rifles at him.

Ty Lee, her face a mask of anger and hurt angrily waived her hand at them before pushing back hard on his chest. “I mean I don’t know! Shortly after you were knocked out and had to be picked up by Shran we managed to fall back until we ran into a force of Starfleet security officers and MACOs who had secured the ship’s brig. They helped us kill the Klingons attacking us down the corridor, but we were beset by another group of Klingons who attacked at both directions. During the ensuing fight, they managed to isolate those of us who were in the Klingon’s brig and forced the other two remaining groups to fall back down the corridors. We’re still here because we used thermobaric grenades to thin out the Klingons before counterattacking.”

Sokka sighed, anger gripping him as he thought about the fact that he’d been useless as all this had been going on.

“This entire mission was a mistake,” he growled, resisting the urge to slam his fist into the wall. “We came up with an alternative attack plan, Archer should’ve followed it!”

“Actually,” Ty Lee said, giving him a pointed look. “The general plan seems to be working. We’ve secured the majority of our objectives. Our forces took engineering before they could start a core breach; we seized the armory, and most of the points on the lower decks. But there are still holdouts on every deck, and from the chatter and comm.-check we’ve been receiving, the senior officers on every deck are ordering our forces to regroup for a final push. I’ve ordered all forces on this deck to regroup here. Most acknowledged but haven’t arrived yet.”

“And Katara, Toph, and Zuko?”

“They were with Shran,” Ty Lee said, shaking her head. “They haven’t responded. That means that they’ve either entered an area where there’s interference or they’re dead.”

Sokka, stunned looked away from Ty Lee and said, her heart refusing to accept the possibility, “They’re not dead. I won’t believe that until.,.” he shook his head. “I’m going back for Suki. I at least know where she is.”

“No,” Ty Lee said, shaking her head. “You’re not. You’re staying here until reinforcements arrive. That’s an order.”

“I don’t answer to you,” Sokka said, wheeling around. “I answer to two people as long as Aang has us liaising with Starfleet; Jonathan Archer, and my sister, who I always answered to anyway, whether I want to or not. Not you.”

“There’s no one to go with you,” Ty Lee said heatedly. “You’ll be killed.”

“The odds improve slightly if you come with me,” Sokka said, gesturing for the door. “Need I remind you she’s your commanding officer?”

“Was my commanding officer,” Ty Lee said, folding her arms under her breasts. “She resigned her commission before coming on this mission. I’m now in command of the entire Kyoshi Warrior military organization, both the warriors on the Enterprise and the warriors on the planet who don’t know it yet.”

Sokka, shock coursing through him, stared back at her as though she’d grown a second head that sprouted lines from the Enterprise database that had nothing to do with the situation at hand entirely at random.

“Why would she-,” but he was stopped from asking his quesation by another disruptor blast, another flash of green in the corner of his eye, and he wheeled around to see a Starfleet security officer slump to the ground with a massive burn in the center of her chest. Sokka saw his hands move his rifle up at their own volition, a rifle he hadn’t even been aware he still possessed. Sensations of control returning he snapped off a shot that slammed hard into the center of mass of a smooth headed Klingon woman rushing down the corridor. The blast knocked him into a Klingon soldier directly behind her, sending them careening into the ground, struggling to get up. That didn’t faze the six other Klingon warriors careening down the corridor facing the brig. Bursts of blue and red exploded into the Klingons as they charged down the corridor, green disruptor blasts landing among them wildly. He saw the three remaining security officers scramble for cover, hiding behind brig’s doorframe as they continued to return fire on the Klingons. Sokka slammed into the ground to avoid a disruptor blast that hit the wall behind him and exploded in a shower of sparks. Sokka returned fire knocking down another Klingon, and worry pierced them. There were still half a dozen Klingons still coming at them with blood on their minds, and they were brandishing mek’leth’s, the hooked curved swords that Klingons preferred to use in combat alongside the bat’leth, in their right hands, and disruptor pistols in their left. A security officer moved out of the cover of the door frame to get a better shot, and a green blast took him in the lower abdomen, sending him flying a few feet to land in a burned heap at the other side of the room. Sokka tried to find a target, but the Klingons burst into the brig area. In moments the Klingons had attacked the security officers, ramming their mek’leth’s sent them bleeding to the floor, clutching at their wounds in a desperate attempt to keep their innards from spilling out.

Sokka his mind numb instinctively climbed off the ground, drawing his sword and holding it in front of him. The pure black jian glistening in the lights of the Klingon’s brig lights, he gave a shout of his own and charged…

 

[Graywand2]

Suki felt a burst of searing pain travel up her arm as her blade locked with one of the ventral blade’s of the Klingon’s bat’leth. Suki whipped her blade up in a blinding arc, intending to slice the Klingon’s face open from the chin to the base of his cranial ridges. The Klingon captain shifted his face out of the way right as she brought her blade up, and brought the left side of his weapon slicing down at Suki’s leg. Suki sidestepped the furious swipe bringing her blade up to crash onto the Klingon’s exposed back once he overextended himself. The Klingon however pushed himself back up faster than any other warrior she’d ever fought, his blade meeting hers in a shower of sparks that cast warmth on her face.

“Tell me your name tera’gnan,” the Klingon captain said as he brought his sword down at Suki’s head. “For the song that will be written about this day, the day I slew a human warrior the equal of any Klingon.”

Suki’s blade crashed against it, and Suki shoved hard to the left intending the force the Klingon’s blade from his hand. The Klingon shoved back and sent Suki stumbling. She saw a flash of metal in front of her eyes and whipped back from it before bringing her blade slamming into it.

“It’s Suki,” she growled as she stabbed at the Klingon’s abdomen. “Yours?”

“Pagh,” the Klingon growled. And Pagh swung his blade around and brought it in an upward curve that would’ve sliced her from her pelvis to her solar plexus. Again Suki’s blade crashed down against it, causing it to swing to the left.

Destiny seems to want to drag this out, Suki thought in that moment. No matter, he’ll win, it’s only a matter of time. But I have never given up without a fight. I didn’t give up without a fight when my patrol was ambushed by Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai, and I will not give up now, on this crippled ship far from home.

Sokka’s blade slammed against the mek’leth, causing showers of sparks to spark from their blades. He felt a jarring pain flow up his arms as the Klingon shoved hard to the right to untangle their blades. As the Klingon warrior pushed, his chest came closer to him and, an opportunity exploding into his consciousness, he gathered all the adrenaline fueled strength he had and launched a savage front kick right into the warrior’s solar plexus. The Klingon grunted in pain and stumbled back, his sword arm falling down and Sokka adrenaline fueled strength and anger coursing through him, stabbed hard into the Klingon’s chest. His chest exploded in a flower of magenta blood as the weight of the now very dead QuchHa Klingon fell off his blade. He looked over to see Ty Lee fighting three Klingons at once among the bodies of the MACOs and the Kyoshi Warriors that had been with her in the brig. He watched as he sliced at one with her sword as she lashed out with a kick at the neck of one Klingon, sending him tumbling to the floor making strangling noises as he clutched his throat even as she punched another in the face. She wasn’t unscathed: there were dark blue bruises on her arms, and several nasty looking cuts in her lower torso and in her thigh.

An alarmed Sokka, rushed forward to take some of the pressure off her when Ty Lee’s foot hit the leg of one of the dead MACOs in front of her, she stumbled forward, her sword falling out of position.

No, Sokka thought desperately, his blood running cold as the Klingon slammed his fist into her chest, causing the ribs under the blow to fracture with an obscene crack before he rammed his blade into the left side of her chest. Ty Lee roared in pain and stumbled back and the other Klingon, the one she punched slashed at her side as she fell stumbling to the ground. The Klingons turned to face him, eager looks on their faces when red blasts suddenly burst into the room, slamming into the Klingons and sending them crumpling to the floor.

Desperate to help Suki’s friend, and ignoring the Starfleet security officers charging into the corridor behind him, Sokka ran forward and knelt in front of Ty Lee. The lines of the woman’s face were a mask of pain, his eyes squinted in pain as blood ran from her wounds darkening her uniform. Ty Lee moved her leg, sliding it in an attempt to stand but Sokka, sadness tearing at his gut gently put his hand on her leg.

“Don’t try to move, Ty Lee,” Sokka said, softly, tears starting to form in his eyes. Ty Lee opened her gray eyes and looked up at him.

“I never thought it would end like this,” she said, her voice hoarse, grabbing desperately at Sokka’s hands. Sokka responded and gently grasped her still warm right hand.

“You’ll be fine,” Sokka said, reassuringly, even as doubt slammed into him. She was badly wounded and it would take truly heroic medical intervention to save her life. If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my time on this mission, is that one thing the crew of a ship named Enterprise is good at is heroism that defies the odds. Let’s hope they pull off another miracle..

“Go,” she said, her eyes fluttering. “Go to Suki. Save her, if you can, but if you can’t, at least be there when,” then her eyes closed, and her head collapsed back. Sokka, stunned grabbed her wrist.

There was a pulse, thready, weak, but it was still there. He felt a hand on his shoulder and he looked up to see three Starfleet medics standing over her, kits in hand, and without thinking he stood up and moved away from her. Pushing through the oncoming group he found ten Kyoshi Warriors standing out in the corridor, looks of concern on their faces for their commander even as they watched over the corridor, rifles in hand.

An idea came to him and he said, “Captain Ty Lee has been injured. But Suki is still battling somewhere on this ship. We will go and rescue her, if we can.” He then pushed past them and marched down the corridor, not caring if they followed him.

And maybe, Katara and the others are alive as well.

Suki’s katana crashed against Pagh’s bat’leth once again. Suki disentangled her blade and ducked to avoid a swipe from the right side of Pagh’s sword that would have cut her jugular. The Klingon roared and charged her, bringing the right side of the bat’leth swinging up at her. Suki maneuvered her katana down angling to block the upward thrust.

A fiery burst of pain exploded through her, and she felt like her chest muscles were being ripped out of her one by one. Squinting in pain she looked down to see the right hook of the bat’leth sticking out of her chest, already a thick and dark red with blood halfway down the point as it dripped to the floor. She could feel strength draining from her. Her arms and legs felt like they were attached to lead weights, and her eyes were fighting her brain to close of their own volition. She moved her head up, though the effort felt like she had tried to move the Enterprise by getting out and pushing on her aft sections. She looked to see shock, in Pagh’s eyes. Shock, and a savage smile of triumph.

“I will look for you in Sto-vo-Kor,” he said, a sense of respect on his voice. “At the right hand of Kahless himself.”

No, the thought exploded from some distant corner of her brain, from some primal, savage instinct imparted from millions of years of evolution along with the rest of her species on Earth. No, he will not win, if there’s an afterlife we go there together. She found one last reservoir of strength in her sword arm, and gave a last, defiant, guttural roar of her own, bringing her blade up and slashing as fast as possible upwards. The blade cleaved through his neck, spraying her with a thick and sticky mass of magenta blood. The captain of the Bortas fell away from her, dead before he hit the ground, collapsing with a loud thunk.

Suki felt an unexpected bubble of serenity flow through her even as she fell back herself, collapsing to the ground with a thunk. It hurt, but she didn’t care. She was dying anyway. Her destiny was at last about to be complete. Her mind relaxed comfortably, use to the idea of death. She’d resigned her command to Ty Lee, confessed her sins at last, and she and Sokka had made love one last time, there was nothing else for her to do but lie back and let her life end. She felt rough hands on her face, though and heavy fingers pushed her eyes open. She found herself staring up into the eyes of one of the Klingons who was giving her a look of respect, the kind of look one gave a fallen foe who had proved herself worthy. She heard a low rumble emanate from the bottom of the Klingon’s throat. The rumbling grew steadily louder and the Klingon’s mouth twisted into a snarl, finally the Klingon arched his head up and opened his mouth, letting out a guttural roar that was picked up by the other Klingons until it echoed throughout the corridor.

The Heghtay, she thought to herself, the information bubbling up in her mind from some forgotten corner. The warning to the dead that a warrior was going to arrive. She felt oddly contented by the gesture, despite all that happened. Then, unexpectedly a blue blast slammed into the Klingon’s chest, sending him careening to the floor a few inches away. Her eyes closed and she gave herself to the blackness.

As she sank deeper into the blackness, she saw a pure white light in the distance. Instinctively she reached for it, lunging at it with hands she couldn’t see. The light grew brighter, until it encompassed her vision. She felt something solid under her, like a metal or wooden floor, though she couldn’t tell what it was. She felt strength return to her, and felt an uncontrollable urge to stand up. Lifting her upper body off the ground, she looked around, curiosity flowing through her.

“Hello,” she said, wonder on her voice. “Where am I?” Then she heard off in the distance the sound of someone walking on metal. The sound grew steadily closer and a humanoid shape appeared in the distance. It grew closer and it had a blurry and indistinguishable features, all she could see was that it had a head, a torso, and had two arms and two legs attached. Finally, it grew more distinct in her vision. It coalesced into a being with dark skin in his mid forties. He had no hair on the top of his head, yet a black beard grew on his chin and he had a black moustache above his lip. His irises were black and he was wearing a black jumpsuit, with gray shoulders, with a red undershirt with four brass pips along his neck.

“Hello, Suki,” the human said, with a deep powerful voice, extending his hand out to her. Instinctively, sensing she had nothing to fear from this man, she grasped it. The two of them shook hands.

“My name is Benjamin Sisko,” he said. “The Emissary of the Prophets.”

 

[RobertScorpio]

I did not see THAT coming at all...great episode!!! What is he doing there? Will be fun to see where you take the Emissary, or should I say, where he will take Suki.

Rob