Chapter Text
Chester finds the tertiary comms maintenance switchboard about an hour into her stint as a fugitive. It makes her grin, already feeling more cheerful now she’s shed the stupid coat and most of the hair ornaments–most of the hair ornaments turned out to be delightfully conductive and are now aiding various little bits of sabotage throughout the ship. She’s been very productive this afternoon.
She settles in front of it with delight, and starts fiddling. It’s some guesswork but… “This is Chester. Interpreter, please respond. Chester to Interpreter .”
She’s not got much time until someone picks up on the transmission and realizes it’s her, but at least she’s got a good shot at it—thanks to the device her Hawthorne slipped under cover of her threatening him. At least he trusted her that much. It might just save their lives.
“Interpreter here,” says a voice, and Chester frowns. That is not J’etris. “Commander Salera speaking. Captain, what is your condition?”
“Stable for now,” says Chester. “Listen carefully. I may not have much time. The warp cores desynchronized as the result of a subspace signal, which we are trying to disable. A reboot cycle should do the trick. In the meantime, the source of that signal is a ship in the mirror universe. This ship. Be at high alert for intruders, including ones that look like senior officers.”
“Understood. We have already detained Subcommander Tanek’s alternate.”
“Well done.” She settles herself better in the conduit. “I believe they intend to bring the Interpreter through to this universe, then use a signal to remotely take over the computers.”
“Understood. We will take precautions. Do you require assistance?”
“Prioritize the safety of the ship,” she says. “We all have more work to do over here.”
“Acknowledged.”
“And Salera—we cannot allow the Interpreter to fall into enemy hands.” Even just contemplating the possibility makes something lurch sickly in her chest, but her voice is rock steady. “Take the appropriate precautions, including to scuttle the ship if necessary.”
There is a pause, short but significant. Before the war, Salera was an agricultural scientist. Chester isn’t certain of her reasons for joining Starfleet, but even command training can’t prepare you for an order like that. Not for actually following through on it.
“ Understood, sir ,” says Salera.
“Good. We’ll make sure it doesn’t come to that. I’ll contact you again when I can. Chester out.”
Under her, the ship shivers. It’s minute, but it makes her smile. Most of her sabotage is timed. And most of it should start kicking in now.
“It won’t come to that,” she says to herself. She’s done what she can. Now to make other kinds of chaos.
She slides out of the service conduit carefully and, unfortunately, backwards. The damn thing isn’t designed to let you do anything else—and as her feet hit the floor, she finds out why. A weapon nudges into the small of her back.
“I knew I could find you here,” says a familiar voice that does not belong here one little bit, and Chester slowly turns around to face her grandmother.
Her grandmother far more nicely dressed than she’s ever seen her, surrounded by Vulcan bodyguards. She’s better dressed than Chester’s ever seen her in the brilliant brocades her own grandmother would only bring out for major holidays—and get smeared or rumpled as soon as soon as her attention wandered and she went to go tinker with something.
There is an inimical glitter in this version of her grandmother’s dark eyes, and the weapons her bodyguards are pointing at Chester look non-standard and terribly effective.
Chester slowly raises her hands. “How can I help you?” she asks, as courteous as she can, under the circumstances. One of the bodyguards performs a scan, then relieves her of her knife and phaser with a businesslike efficiency.
Grandmother snorts. “Oh, you two are alike, aren’t you. More so than my granddaughter would like to acknowledge.”
“More so than I would like to acknowledge,” says Chester, very dry. “I did gather that I’d worn out my welcome.”
“You sabotaged my ship, young lady.” The tone makes it very clear that this version of her grandmother views that the same way as her own does. Chester wonders if she’s going to survive long enough to end up on a wall somewhere.
“You sabotaged mine first, madam.” Hopefully this version of her grandmother also likes clever answers as much as her own does.
She does. She smiles. “Relax,” she says, “I’m not out for revenge. Not on you, at least.”
Shit , Chester thinks. Did Hawthorne get caught?
“I have no family left, except my granddaughter,” Grandmother says. “You must indulge my curiosity. I have read your files,” and where the hell and how the hell she got that, Chester would like to know! “and it seems you are anything but the fool my granddaughter thinks you are. She has given you far too much leeway, thinking that she knows you. She thinks you’re as ambitious as she is, and as easily swayed by power.” She smiles, a little tucked-away expression. “As I taught her to be. But you’re not, are you. You have a great many things other than power you want, and like her, you will do most anything to get them.”
“Like what?” asks Chester, as evenly as she can.
“The lives of your crew.”
That hits where it hurts. Chester inclines her head. “With all respect, madam, I do not see you benefitting much from this conversation. My understanding is your granddaughter very much wants me dead.”
That tucked-away little smile again. “She is not wasteful,” she says. “Though she is very angry just now. Try not to annoy her further, and you may yet survive this. Allow me to help you.” She eyes Chester a little longer, then nods. “Yes. Walk with me.”
The bodyguards have yet to lower their weapons. This is not a request. Chester gives them all a suspicious look and then falls into step as she would with her own grandmother.
“Allow me to tell you the story that might have been yours, had you been a little unluckier,” Grandmother says. Chester looks at her all attentiveness and dutifulness, and she reaches out and thumps her forearm with a small hard hand like a gnarled treeroot. “Stop that. I know it’s an act when my own granddaughter puts it on; don’t think I can’t see through it on you. Before Spock’s idiotic reforms, our family was very powerful in the Empire. We were the Emperor’s closest ministers and advisors; every so often one of our stupider offshoots might make a general or admiral. The Emperor ruled the Terran Empire, but we ran it, and its might was founded on thousands of years of our service, our loyalty, and our brilliance.
“And then Spock’s reforms happened, and our enemies scented blood. One of them sold the entire Empire to the Alliance to bring us down. I should have died then with your great grandparents, but the head of that family—our Emperor has stripped their name from history—decided her revenge would be far more complete if she took their heir and made me hers, raised me as a traitor to the Empire and to my own species.”
Her mouth twists bitterly. “And as I was a small child, for a while, she was successful. I was safe, I was cared for, I had the best education available to a Terran, I was a renowned scientist, and I had nothing of myself. But political currents shift. I was betrayed. The ones who stole me did not lift a finger, and your mother and I were sent to Terok Nor.
“I had thirty years of sorrow before the rebellion began, before my granddaughter rose to reclaim her birthright at the right hand of the Emperor. We have what was always meant to be ours. And we will not be surrendering it again.” Her sharp dark eyes turn to Chester. “This could have been you,” she says. “You’ve had a comfortable life, unlike us, but do not think that the Alliance will forget who helped secure our victory.”
Oh no, thinks Chester. What did Quark and Rom do when they were over here?!
“You will either deal with us, or you will deal with them, and they will never accord a Terran the slightest shred of respect. Your Federation is soft and comfortable, and it will have no chance at all before them.”
“If that’s the case,” says Chester, as blandly as she can, “then why do you and the Admiral want my ship so very badly?”
This time, the blow from Grandmother’s small gnarled hand hurts .
“That was a stupid question,” says Grandmother. “And you knew it.”
Chester just ducks her head. She suspects this means it wasn’t a stupid question.
“Do not be so stupid,” says Grandmother. “My granddaughter is not wasteful, but she will not hesitate to dispose of you if you’re too much trouble.”
“Doctor,” says someone, hurrying up, and Grandmother pauses to look at him, a young human man, lanky, dark-haired, and quite handsome, clutching a datapad and wearing a labcoat, “We have the results from the latest trials, would you like to see examine the results?”
Grandmother darts a narrow look at Chester. “Yes,” she says, after some thought. “Yes I would. Come along. This will be good for you.”
Somehow, Chester doubts that, too. She glances at the bodyguards. Unfortunately, she’s not going to have a choice here.
“I fell behind in my time in exile,” Grandmother is saying as they follow the young man down the corridor. “But I’m finally regaining my touch. The plentiful resources the Emperor gives my work certainly helps.”
They reach a door, and Chester with a lurch recognizes a biohazard symbol by the control panel. One of the bodyguards keys in a sequence, then stands aside as the doors slide open. “Don’t worry,” Grandmother says. “It’s all safe for humans. I made very, very sure of that.”
Worse and worse. They pass through several labs, filled with innocuous equipment, then down a corridor to a doubled pair of doors. Here, Grandmother pauses to don a lab coat of her own, carefully buttoning it up, and gloves. Then they enter the room. The smell hits first, old blood and something faintly sulfurous, enough like cheese and broccoli soup to be nauseating, disinfectants and preservatives. Chester has to gulp back nausea as she realizes the source.
It’s a morgue. That may be giving it far too much dignity. It’s a horrorshow. There are corpses on the gurneys. They appear to all be Cardassian, but Chester will admit to some guesswork there, because they’re missing certain things that would make identifying their species easier. Like large patches of skin.
“We have the results from the chemical test and the pathogen test today,” the young man announces proudly. “The tweak to the surface preference for the necrotizing fasciitis was successful in aerosolizing it—that one infected the rest of its test group before succumbing.” This with a gesture to one of the Cardassian bodies, one missing half a face. Chester can see bone in the bloody horror left behind. “We’re waiting on fatality rates there and should know in the next twenty-six hours. I’m anticipating 95% to 100%, however.”
Grandmother relieves one of the bustling lab techs of a probe and goes to look herself. Chester stays back, feeling her hands go clammy with sweat.
“What’s the incubation period? Any asymptomatic transmission?”
The eager young man deflates. “That’s the problem,” he says, as Grandmother delicately lifts what remains of the man’s lip to examine the inside of his mouth. “No asymptomatic transmission, and the incubation period is short.”
“Keep working,” says Grandmother, now opening the corpse’s mouth. There is a dark hole where the hard palate should be. Chester looks away, but finds the chemical test group instead. She drops her eyes to the incongruously clean floor. Unfortunately, not looking doesn’t do anything about the smell. “We want them to bring it back home, after all.”
Grandmama back home is a warp systems engineer. She has little patience for fools, a streak of efficient ruthlessness just like the one Chester knows she herself possesses, but nothing, nothing like this.
Chester is not too proud to admit that this scares the shit out of her, has thrown her in a way she can’t hide or recover from. Facing her own counterpart was far better. She knows that she’s an asshole, and it’s not unsettling to see that reflected back at her—the shock there is just an issue of magnitude.
This woman, who acts so very much like her own grandmother in so many ways, carrying out horrific experiments on prisoners with the intent of unleashing bioweapons on a civilian populace, with the same pleasant lecturing demeanor with her coconspirators that Chester’s own grandmother has toward the small army of hopeful postdocs that trail after her at the Academy— this skates very close to being more than she can handle.
She’s not even sure there’s a way to handle this.
Please take me out of here, Doctor, and let me go get nicely tortured to death by my alternate; it’ll be a lot less upsetting.
She clears her throat. She doesn’t mind that this is going to sound more like a scared kid than a starship captain. “You’re very sure that won’t infect humans?”
“Oh absolutely,” says Grandmother. “The bacteria find certain of the enzymes we produce completely toxic. Don’t worry, I tested it very thoroughly.”
Chester wonders how much of that testing took place on the remaining family of the woman who had ‘adopted’ her.
“In any case, all the biological materials from the housing facility are sterilized before they’re brought here. Useful settings on the transporter.” She looks up, sees Chester. “Oh dear, you’ve turned green, haven’t you. Don’t worry, my granddaughter is just as squeamish; it was probably too much to hope for that you’d be much better. Sotek, T’Rall, take her out of here and get her something to drink. You’ll feel better for that.”
What would make Chester feel better would be pulling the pins on a string of plasma grenades and closing the door on grenades, corpses and doctors alike, but getting out of here will have to do. She nods, shakily, and lets herself be led out of the room.
Chester is so shaken, in fact, it takes a moment for her to realize the identity of one of the two bodyguards who’s escorted her out. And she should have, much earlier. Sotek has only been one of her best friends since the Academy.
But there’s something rigid and closed down behind his eyes, in a way nothing like Sotek’s Vulcan discipline, and the long, jagged scar that bisects his face distorts his mouth on one side in a constant sneer. His presence by her shoulder is nothing like that of her friend.
She knows it’s hopeless, and part of her doesn’t even want to try, because she knows it’s just setting herself up for more horror. “Sotek?” she says. “We’re friends, back home.”
Sotek dips his head to look down at her. Gone is his owlish demeanor—unless it’s the last glimpse of an owl a small rodent gets before talons break its back. “That is not the case here.”
Chester is too deflated to argue with him. “Pity,” she mutters, and leans her head back against the wall. It’s very obviously the lab break room. There’s the Earth with a dagger through it on one wall, huge and garish, a replicator with dishes scattered around it, what appears to be a plush of a tribble with fangs, and a calendar entitled Hello From Risa!! , though this version has a lot more chains than most of the tasteless pinup calendars Chester’s seen. She stares blankly at the unnatural endowments of the array of different genders on this month’s page, and reflects that the dashes of personality do a lot more to make her feel a lot worse about the whole thing.
She thought that finding out about her alternate’s murder of her entire crew aboard the Bedivere would be the low point of her day. Boy, was she wrong.
Her glass of water sits untouched, and her guards stand unmoving over here, and she swallows a few more times, willing back the nausea. If she’s going to vomit, she reflects vindictively, she’s aiming for Sotek’s boots.
Grandmother’s alternate bustles in, without lab coat or gloves, and goes to wash her hands, giving the fanged tribble a pat as she finishes. “You’ll be pleased to know we’ve got a way around the asymptomatic transmission issue,” she says cheerily.
I’m really not , Chester thinks. She really needs to get past this and start planning a way to burn the whole place down on her way out, but right now she would really like to spend a few more hours staring in blank horror.
Grandmother’s alternate’s comm chirps. She taps it. “Yes?”
“ Grandmama, stop playing with your food, ” says the Admiral’s voice, with the same fond exasperation Chester’s heard in her own when her grandmother was destroying an oven or fussing over a new recipe. “Bring the Captain to the bridge; we’re almost ready.”
Chester is not looking forward to finding out what, exactly, her alternate is ready for. She stands, eying the door. Maybe if she bolts, she’ll surprise them.
Sotek’s hand clamps down on her shoulder, T’Rall’s on the other side. Chester slumps. Apparently not.
“I think you’ll find this impressive,” Grandmother says. “Don’t worry. You’re of a lot more use alive, and I’ll suggest she not kill you.” She pauses, gives Chester a sidelong glance that’s deeply critical and the most honest thing Chester thinks she’s had from this woman in any interaction this afternoon. “At least not yet.”