Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

Ross wants Chester off the station as quickly as Chester wants to be off the station; the vole mitigation comes to a ‘good enough’ conclusion, repairs are finished up (for now), the crew recalled, and the Interpreter heads for the Gamma Quadrant to show the flag and hopefully not suffer any catastrophic failures in the process. The Deep Space Nine repair crews seem to think they’ve headed off the major problems, at least. 

But they always think that, and they’re usually wrong. If there’s one thing the Armistice Class is good at, other than looking scary on paper, it’s inventive new ways to break. 

Two days later, in the middle of the night, Chester’s eyes snap open to the sound of her door chime. She’s on her feet and headed across her quarters before the sound fades, adrenaline bringing her fully awake without any need for coffee. Someone at her door means comms are down, at best—she stuffs her bare feet into her boots as she opens the door.

Standing in the offshift-dim corridor, she sees exactly what she expects—her chief engineer in a similar state of disarray, a small indignant human who gives her a perfunctory glare by way of greeting. He’s in a hastily donned engineer’s uniform, which puts him one over on her pajamas.

She looks down at him. He frowns up at her, his brown hair sticking out at all angles over the cybernetics that wrap the back of his head, freckles and the dark smudges under his eyes, stark against his pale skin. 

“All right,” she says. “What broke this time, Mr. Hawthorne?” She makes a face. “Aside from comms.” He wouldn’t be here in person otherwise. 

“The warp cores desynchronized.”

Chester’s stomach drops. That’s about as bad as it can get. “Have I got time to change?”

Hawthorne glances down at the cartoon hedgehogs on the buttercup yellow of her pajama pants. “Please do.”

It’s not that Engineering hasn’t already seen her pajamas—several of them, too many times, too many midnight emergencies to avoid that—but Hawthorne doesn’t consider them appropriate PPE. Chester ducks back into her quarters and dresses in the dark with the speed of long practice, deftly tucking her wrist-thick sleep braid into something that resembles a regulation bun. 

Too many midnight calls during the war, and too many now. She remembers her grandmother warning her to never be the first person to test a new technology, let alone a ship—or volunteer her ship to test a new technology. The Interpreter manages to be all three at the same time. A powerhouse warship on the drawing board, she ran into rushed production for the war, corners cut because of resource shortages and timelines and some of her new design elements never made it through labyrinthine Starfleet approval processes. Others did. Not all of them are the ones Chester would have prioritized.

And then the whole thing was refitted for peacetime. The poor ship is a frankenstiened mess of purposes, not just technologies, temperamental and struggling at the best of times. 

Chester reaches out on reflex to pat the bulkhead. “Not your fault,” she tells the ship, then opens the door. “So why are comms down?”

“High levels of neutrinos,” says Hawthorne. “Some other kind of interference. Sounds like Lieutenant Vixx is prioritizing us not blowing up before finding out why we almost blew up.”

“I see,” she says, and heads for Engineering. He falls into step with her, glaring at the padd in his hands. Hawthorne doesn’t do anything but glare around her. The last time she saw him smile was when a replicator malfunction knocked her flat on her back under several tubas. “This have anything to do with the readings you warned me about this afternoon?”

“Probably everything,” he mutters. “Could have been. Could also have been an outside influence. The shared field is very delicate.”

Chester makes a face. Warpfields can be combined. The interaction, however, is dangerous and touchy—sudden unexpected encounters, even gentle ‘brushes’ of leading edges, can have the same effects as a collision. Ships can merge warpfields to aid a damaged comrade, and sometimes to follow one another, but it’s delicate work with explosive results if it goes wrong.

That merging is what’s going in on the Interpreter’s engine rooms, all day, twenty-six hours a day. Interpreter has two cores, for redundancy and a number of other advantages her designers were very excited about—among other things, she should be able to sustain a high warp indefinitely, the cores trading the strain, and the interaction is thought to protect the ship from certain risks. But Chester, in her three months of command, isn’t sure that either argument is worth the headache the two cause. She’s heard some of Hawthorne’s engineers naming the two, ascribing personalities—and the single constant in those personalities is the two cores can’t stand each other. 

She can’t say it’s unreasonable. The Interpreter is constantly at war with itself, the port and starboard cores in a computer mediated détente. 

Or. Theoretically mediated. 

Chester looks up at the erratic flashing of the starboard core, then at the slower but equally erratic flicker of the port, folds her arms, and sighs. “Suggestions, Commander Hawthorne?”

“A full refit at an appropriate shipyard.”

“I meant for our current problem.”

He shoots her a quick frown. “We’re going to have to shut everything down. Cold reboot of the cores in diagnostic mode, figure out why they desynchronized, and how to keep them from doing it again. Then we’ll power down again and fix it; I’m not having my engineers working on a live core.”

“How long?”

“Three days, give or take.”

They’re in the Gamma Quadrant. Too far to limp home on impulse. And by no stretch of the imagination, friendly space. “We’ll be sitting ducks for three days,” she says. “That’s a long time to hang around in this neighborhood defenseless.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, acidic, “would you prefer to blow up?”

She favors him with an exhausted look. “I’m concerned about someone else coming along to blow us up.”

“That seems like a problem under your jurisdiction,” Hawthorne says, already busying himself with one of the consoles. 

No comms. They won’t be able to yell for help, and Chester isn’t sure she wants to. Negotiator is out of the question, still undergoing repairs at Deep Space Nine; Sotek and the Armistice are four days away in the opposite direction, from their last communication. Defiant is six days away by now, finishing Negotiator’s mission.

They’re on their own. 

It’s the Gamma Quadrant. The Interpreter is out here in the first place because she theoretically can manage to be on her own for long periods, defend herself even at half-capacity. Chester runs a hand down her face, staring at the cores, and wishes with all her heart that for once, she had a chance to fight with her poor mess of a ship at full capacity. “Can we take the cores down one at a time?” Hawthorne gives her an incredulous glare. “Mr. Hawthorne, no one’s going to reach us for four days at the least. We’re in highly hostile space. If someone does show up, we’re going to need to be ready to defend ourselves.”

“I’ll see what I can do to keep weapons functional,” he says. Then, grudgingly, “I suppose it’s possible to do it one core at a time, but we’d need to shut down completely for the resyncronization process. And it’ll take longer.”

“Give me options,” says Chester. “Send them to Tactical as well. And get me comms as soon as you’ve made sure we’re not going to blow up immediately.”

“Yes, Captain,” he says. He doesn’t sound happy about it, but Hawthorne never sounds happy about any of her orders. 

“Thank you, Commander. I know you’ll do your best.” Chester leaves him to it, and heads for the bridge. 

J’etris is already on the bridge, a great deal less rumpled than Chester herself feels. “Any news from Engineering?” she asks. 

Chester gives her Klingon XO a very wry look. “They’re working on options. Guess it’s our turn for engine trouble.”

“Except, unlike the Negotiator, we don’t have anyone to give us a tow.” J’etris grew up on Earth—a little down the coast of California from Chester, in fact—far more comfortable with the idiom of her human family than the Klingon family that still refuses to acknowledge her existence. She and Chester were the two surviving senior officers of the Bedivere; she was the tactical officer when Chester was first officer. They spent the months of medical leave after the end of the war together, for want of anyone else who understood—a lot of backpacking California’s wilderness. A lot of talking, deciding what to do with themselves, whether they could stay with Starfleet, after everything. As soon as Chester decided, yes, she would stay, J’etris had made up her mind.

There are three people in the universe Chester knows almost as well as she knows herself. Sotek and Rilas are two; J’etris is the third. Chester requested her as her first officer. She can’t imagine having a better person at her back. 

“Options,” says J’etris. “I don’t care for any of the ones Hawthorne’s proposed, and he hasn’t cared for any of mine.”

“I imagine for good reason on both parts,” says Chester, joining her in front of the viewscreen. “Even if we could call for help, there’s no one out here who would reach us in time.”

“I suggest deploying the runabouts and shuttles in a defensive perimeter,” says J’etris. 

“That’ll make us look mighty unfriendly.”

“That’s the point. Do you want to try and launch the only vessels aboard with propulsion and weapons when an Orion pirate drops out of warp on top of us? We’re going to look vulnerable anyway; let’s at least look intelligent about it.”

Chester nods. J’etris cocks her head at Lieutenant Fult, the Tellarite tactical officer. “Get shuttles and runabouts ready to launch. Deployment pattern beta.” Fult nods her acknowledgement and starts to scramble the shuttles.

Chester glances sidelong at J’etris. “You’d already worked out the deployment patterns.”

J’etris grins back at her. “After I heard about what happened to Negotiator, I suspected we might have similar problems. I like being surprised about as much as you do—and we’re a pretty tempting prize out here.”

“You can say that again,” says Chester, and lets out a long breath. “Here’s hoping Mr. Hawthorne can keep us at enough power to at least put shields up if we need them.”

Shields are a more reasonable request than all weapons systems. Hawthorne doesn’t show up at the senior staff briefing, still too busy getting the cores under control; they’ve decided to shut all of it down, trusting the shuttles to keep an eye on them. The reserve power holds steady; Chester finds herself very, very glad that the designers of the ship built redundancies into that, too. Maybe they had an idea of how delicate the warp cores would turn out to be. 

Though this is crediting them with more foresight than she generally tends to. 

She’s very glad that the Armistice Class have yet to be approved to carry families. This is anxiety-inducing enough with only Starfleet personnel aboard. She thinks of the reports she’s read of ship disappearances, and thinks it would be an awfully good time for anyone thinking about jumping out on them to do so. There’s no help coming. And if they’re attacked, seriously attacked, there’s almost nothing she can do. She’ll be faced with a choice between surrender and destroying her ship in a hopeless fight, and which she goes for will depend on their opponent. 

She wants better solutions. But they’re in a very bad situation, and they all know it. Lieutenant Fult is running her people through security drills, and wheedled Hawthorne into lending her a few of his people to get some augmentations to the runabout weapons. Chester won’t be able to fight the Interpreter properly if they get jumped, but they’ve got two runabouts and six shuttles out there who will be at least able to put up a token resistance. 

At least it’s given her something to think about that isn’t the mess with Tanek. 

Speaking of which, she hasn’t seen him since that whole incident—the whole incident that seems ridiculous now, sitting in hostile space just waiting for someone to jump out and mug them. She knows he’s aboard, the crew roster and computer agree on that. But he hasn’t shown his face in days. 

Maybe he’s just as embarrassed as she is.

Serves him right. Whatever the Romulans say, that’s as much his fuckup as it is hers. 

Hawthorne is estimating comms back in the next two hours. Chester hopes he’s right. Knowing there’s someone on the way will do a hell of a lot to make her feel better, even if it doesn’t actually do them any good. There’s also been a suggestion of using the shuttles to tow them, but it’s not like it’s going to move anything particularly quickly, and if they do get jumped, they’ll need their getaway to be fast. 

At some point there’s going to be nothing more to do. She needs to accept that. But with the stakes this high, it’s very hard. 

She lets out a long breath, and stretches out on the couch in her ready room. This feels far more like home than her quarters. She reaches over to fiddle with one of the ceramic cats her grandmother gave her, and sighs. 

“Computer, lower lights to twenty-five percent.” Then she turns over and composes herself to at least nap before the next disaster hits. 

Ensign Nask Aja is deep in a Jeffries tube, prodding at a conduit in the hopes that unplugging and replugging the damn thing will do the job. She’s a tiny slip of a Bajoran, dark curls tightly braided against her head, with wide brown eyes in a square face, a determined jut to her jaw. She wasn’t old enough to fight in the Resistance during the Occupation; but she certainly hung around the fighters, cleaning weapons and asking questions and sometimes throwing stones when a distraction was needed. Starfleet is… confining, but pleasant in its way; the memory of missed meals does a lot to remind you to appreciate replicators.

She joined during the war, because she understood war. She went into Engineering because it was a place you could be clever, cause a lot more trouble for a lot less expense, be strategic about how you fought. And now it’s peacetime, and she’s got a diplomat of a captain and a safety-obsessed worrywart for a commanding officer, and Nask Aja might have given up right there if the ship weren’t such a flying disaster. 

But the Interpreter is such a disaster. She loves it for that. In the Academy and her first posting to the Hood , Starfleet was offputtingly perfect, sometimes not quite real in its perfection—even during the war. And then the war ended, and she was posted to the Interpreter, where nothing works the way it should, and it feels like being home. She doesn’t spend much time feeling useless here, that’s for sure. 

And that’s what she needs.

Nask worms her way deeper into the ship’s guts, her microwelder clamped between her teeth, tricorder in one hand and the other steadying her on the ladder. Commander Hawthorne would have a fit if he saw her right now, but what minor safety violations the Chief Engineer can’t see can’t send him into a shouting fit. Besides, she gets the feeling that those shouting fits are good for him. Therapeutic, at least. Prophets know he spends enough time biting his tongue around the Captain, for reasons she’s still not managed to shake out of him. Personality mismatch, she’s guessing, even though a small guilty part of her feels she ought to be taking Commander Hawthorne’s part in whatever weird standoff the two of them have going on. 

Damn, these conduits are fucked. Some of it’s the voles, but it’s not all voles. This ship was built in a hurry, like the fighters at home, and there are mistakes all over the place. If she ever starts forgetting how close the Federation came to losing, she just needs to look at these Jeffries tubes, at the slapdash way this ship was thrown together, a last desperate prayer in the face of annihilation. The Interpreter is a real ship, not one of those prissy pieces of art where six designers argued for months over the shape of the seats in waste extraction. She was built as a workhorse and as a last hope, and Nask loves her for it. If anyone tries to promote or transfer her off this ship, she’ll fight them tooth and nail. Other ships may work better—other ships may work —but Interpreter has a personality.  

She hears something up ahead. She freezes. Someone is in the Jeffries tubes with her, and it isn’t a vole.

They’re not Starfleet either. That noise—something was off about it. Something is wrong about it. And Nask hasn’t lived this long by ignoring her instincts.

Slowly, she slips her tricorder back into her jacket, takes the microwelder out of her mouth, and plays with the settings, an unpleasant little smile tightening the corners of her mouth. Starfleet doesn’t tend to be creative with the tools to hand, not unless you really scare them. 

She eases forward, moving with the surety of her knowledge of the ship’s bowels, and very soon she finds the source of the noise; a Bajoran woman all in sleek black, crouched at the junction of two of the tunnels. Long habit is what quashes her reaction into a simple indrawn breath through her nose—it looks like Major Kira, from the station. 

Nask’s eyes narrow. It can’t be Major Kira. She has no reason to be here, dressed like this, and the possibilities that leaves are all bad. Nask doesn’t care which one’s the right explanation. Whoever, whatever this is in her ship is a hostile entity.

Nask’s decisiveness and willingness to take risks have earned her both reprimands and praise, and most recently Commander Hawthorne’s worried ire, but this time they save her life. As the impostor turns her head, Nask lunges for her, pressing the microwelder against her jaw. “Stay very still,” she tells the woman, who is an exact replica of the Major even this close. “This is a microwelder. I’ve changed the settings so the fieldlimit of the laser element is now four centimeters. It’s designed to slice through conduits, and it most certainly will slice through you.”

The impostor’s hand eases away from her belt, probably from a weapon. “What a nasty suspicious mind you have, my dear,” she purrs. She raises her hands and spreads her fingers in a languorous and graceful gesture as unlike the Major as can be imagined, and tips her head back. It’s only then that Nask catches a glimpse of the other side of her face, and it’s only because she’s seen worse that keeps her from reacting; a long ragged scar runs the length of the impostor’s face, the eyelid sagging over an empty socket and the shell of the woman’s ear shredded, as if someone had seized her earring and ripped it from flesh. “Very well. Take me to your Captain. Tell her…” the impostor’s mouth twists into an unsteady smile, “…the Intendant will see her now.”