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

Chapter Text

“You know, I expected this of you,” says her alternate, as Chester is herded onto the Bridge. “But I expected you to be a little better at it.”

“I’m very sorry to disappoint,” says Chester, and means it. She looks around. No sign of Hawthorne, which is a good sign, and no sign of Tanek or J’etris. She hopes that’s good as well. 

The fewer of them in range of her alternate’s rage, the better. She at least has a hope of weathering it.

Her alternate stalks up to her, slow and predatory. Her face is calm, and there is a coldness behind her eyes that Chester knows far too well. She’s seen it a handful of times in her own. It is merciless, a deliberate not-caring that’s the herald of the worst of what she can be. “I had hoped for someone extraordinary. An equal match at the very least.” She stops, laughs a little. It’s a profoundly condescending sound. “You are a sadly predictable disappointment.”

Chester tips her head in mock apology. Tanek and Hawthorne are still loose, or even better, back on the ship with the full contents of this ship’s computers in hand. After doing an unknown amount of damage, too. 

And then there’s her own handiwork. She’s pretty sure they couldn’t have found all of it yet. If Tanek is still hanging around, things are about to get a lot worse. 

The idea of a Tal Shiar agent in the Jeffries tubes is a remarkably comforting one. It would not be under any other circumstances, she thinks, and finds herself suppressing a smile. “How are the repairs going, then?”

Her alternate gives her a look of contempt. “Almost completed, though I do not need this ship fully functional to get what I want.”

“You don’t, do you? And how exactly were you planning on doing that?” Chester asks. Her counterpart glares at her. 

“Oh come on,” she says, trying a smile; it only makes the other woman angrier. “It’s not like I can do anything about it from here.”

“Maybe I should kill you right here,” says her counterpart. “After all, you’ve made it perfectly clear you intend to continue to be an impediment. And I have no patience for any of your…distractions.”

“Your loss,” says Chester, with a cheerful smile. Her counterpart keeps looking at her, a terrible coldness in her eyes that she knows damn well should scare her. But she’s too busy to be scared. “You’ll never actually find out what I did to your ship if you kill me, though. Some of the delays I programmed in?” She shakes her head. “Months. Good luck. It’ll give you an idea of what it’s like handling the Interpreter without our help.”

Her counterpart snorts. “At this point, it’s clear to me that you will say anything at all to keep yourself alive a few minutes longer.”

At that moment, the whole ship shudders. The lights flicker and go down, leaving them in complete darkness. 

Chester waits a beat, then chuckles as unsettlingly as she can. “Looks like your engineers didn’t get that one,” she says. “Want to take bets on what else they missed?”

“Sir? Sir!” 

J’etris wakes up in a Jeffries tube with Ensign Nask leaning over her and starts moving before her jumbled memories align. The fuzzy letters on the access hatch behind her are for a turbolift shaft. “What happened?”

“We’ve been looking for you,” says Nask. “You said you were headed to Engineering, but you never arrived. And then—,”

The ship shakes, slamming them up against the wall. J’etris braces herself. It’s not like anything she’s felt the Interpreter do. 

“We’ve lost helm control and internal comms,” Nask says. “Someone’s engaged some kind of override.”

J’etris looks down at herself. There is a conspicuous lack of uniform. “Someone who looks a lot like me,” she says. “Any idea how hard it’ll be to get comms up again? Even a little bit?”

Nask hesitates. Another shudder thumps their shoulders against the wall. 

“Couldn’t say, sir,” she says. “I’d need a look at it first. Nearest comms panel is that way.” 

“Let’s go. I’ll need an access hatch,” says J’etris. “I’ll try to get up to the Bridge, see what I can do there.” She is for a moment glad of the relatively dignified nature of standard issue underwear. “Soon as you have comms up, warn them we’ve got an impostor. She’ll look like me and chances are, she’s got my uniform.”

“Yes sir,” says Nask, and slides along behind her. “You know, I thought I’d left this kind of thing behind in the Resistance.”

J’etris snorts. “Being posted to one of the Federation’s state of the art new warships? What reason would you have to think that, Ensign?”

Nask giggles, a small cheerful sound at odds with her general demeanor. “Well, sir, let me just note I appreciate the opportunity. Look out for the vole droppings.”

J’etris wonders for a moment if the mirror universe would be so intent on stealing the Interpreter if they knew what state it was in. “Updates on warp capability?”

“Commander Salera and our team has figured out how to block the subspace signal and reboot the cores,” says Nask. “Should be up in fifteen minutes, give or take five. Other systems may take longer.”

“About time for some good news.” J’etris finds the access hatch and pauses by it, reading the deck and section. “All right, Ensign. Let’s give them hell.”

“Yes, sir,” says Nask, and J’etris slides out and into the hallway. Three levels up to the Bridge. 

It’s also senior officer quarters. She hesitates a moment, then turns and keys open her quarters. Better to be armed, just in case. 

A few moments later, mek’leth in hand, she heads for the turbolift. 

As a general rule of thumb, most people do not expect a senior officer to appear on the Bridge in underwear, brandishing a sword. The moment of absolute stunned silence that greets J’etris is probably what saves her, because in the next moment, all attention is turning to the identical woman sitting in the command chair, wearing her uniform. 

“Arrest her,” says J’etris. “She’s an impostor.”

Her alternate almost denies it, almost accuses her of being the impostor, then visibly thinks better of it. No actual impostor is going to show up on the Bridge in her underwear. 

Instead, her counterpart takes several steps back. “Whatever you think you’re doing,” she says, “You’re making a mistake.” She reaches into her uniform sleeve and pulls out a device, activating it.

Absolutely nothing happens. 

J’etris has the surreal experience of seeing herself look utterly bewildered. Her alternate presses the button again, and again, there’s a complete lack of result. 

With a snarl, she tosses the device aside and lunges for J’etris herself.

Which means turning her back on Fult. 

The stun beam catches her between the shoulders before she can get three paces and drops her on the deck. “Belay whatever she just told you,” J’etris announces to the world in general. Another shudder from the ship almost knocks her off her feet. “Status report?”

“We’ve got an anomaly in the deflector array,” says Lieutenant Kotan from the helm. His hands fly over his console. “She ordered it powered up as soon as we got the starboard warp core online.”

The Interpreter bucks violently, and J’etris has to steady herself against the tactical arch as she makes her way down to the center seat. 

“I believe I know what is happening,” says Salera. “As I reported to the impostor when she relieved me, the Captain made contact a few hours ago. Our opponents seek to draw us into the mirror universe and there stage a remote takeover of the ship. The Captain requested precautions be taken, including preparations to destroy the ship rather than allow capture.”

Orders that she probably wouldn’t have even needed to give J’etris, they would have been enough in alignment. The frustration of allowing herself to get jumped in a turbolift makes J’etris bare her teeth. “Did you take countermeasures to a remote takeover?”

“Yes,” says Fult. “Incoming transmissions are buffered from the computer core until they can be manually checked. But we have no way of knowing how long your counterpart was aboard or whether she or one of our other infiltrators has already installed a device that can link the ships regardless of these precautions. And Subcommander Tanek’s duplicate has escaped custody..”

“Are our internal scanners still functional?” asks J’etris. 

“Yes,” says Fult, “but unlikely to be accurate. I suspect that all our intruders have been using some outgrowth of Klingon cloaking technology to mask their life signs. I have security teams doing sweeps of the ship, but frankly sir, it’s very likely to be even less effective against Tanek than it is about the voles. There’s a lot of empty space on this ship.”

The ship shudders again. “And we’re about to have much bigger problems,” says J’etris grimly, and settles firmly into her seat. “At least they’re taking us where we want to go. Lieutenant Kotan, have we got weapons?”

Kotan tries, but he shakes his head. “No. No sir. They’re still rebooting.”

“Dammit,” says J’etris. “Fult, will a remote takeover of a starship work if that starship is dead in space?” 

There’s a significant pause over her shoulder. She looks up. Fult is staring down at her with an expression that suggests she’s more of an idiot than usual. “It will,”’ she says. “But that doesn’t make it a good idea.”

“Let’s keep that under consideration,” says J’etris. “For now, I want to come in firing. Concentrate on getting weapons systems online, shields too. Have we got comms yet?”

“Coming up now,” says Lieutenant Iverat. The Horta’s synthesized voice sounds particularly cheerful even for her.
“Intruder alert for Tanek’s double,” says J’etris. “Then get me Engineering. We have some preparations to make.” The ship shudders again, and she grins. “Let’s make them really regret inviting us over…” She pauses, looks them over. “And let’s go get the Captain.”

Crouched in a crawlspace most definitely too small for him, hoping his alternate’s signal dampener is covering both their life signs and not just his, and with Hawthorne leaning over his shoulder, trying to peer past him at the tiny video feed on his padd that they’ve hooked into the enemy Bridge security monitors, Tanek keeps seeing the fanatic faith in his alternate’s eyes, when he spoke of his loyalty to this Admiral. It was disturbing; for his part, he believes that his ability to believe in anything, much less anyone, has been irredeemably compromised. Nevertheless, he’s been on his guard, in case this Admiral is in fact as enchanting as his alternate seems to believe.

Now Tanek is seeing the woman in question, and he is most certainly not impressed. What is sitting in the command chair is most certainly not a conquering queen, but stubborn, resentful, and petty. Brutality makes up for none of those things, though from what he’s seen of the ship, she seems to think the ample quantity of that brutality might count for something. Tanek fails to find this convincing.

The Captain, fool though she is, makes a much more inspiring picture as she glowers at the guards around her. However, his opinion may be influenced by the damage he has noticed during the time he’s spent in the ship’s systems. It was all done rather hastily, but it showed a becoming competence that he is pleasantly surprised by. It has been a long time since he was last pleasantly surprised. So much so, in fact, that he added a few little flourishes of his own.

This ship will not be going anywhere. Nor will it be firing any weapons. Tanek is looking forward to the results of the first shot with the open glee of a child at a military parade.

Then the power goes down. 

“Was that one of ours?” Hawthorne whispers. “I don’t remember doing that.”

“I believe it very likely it was the Captain,” says Tanek. “Though I provided some assistance, of course.”

“Of course,” deadpans Hawthorne. He shifts his weight uncomfortably—humans, Tanek is realizing, need to move around a lot—and adds, “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“I do not think the outage will be long enough to be useful to us,” says Tanek, and glances at the padd again, though it isn’t much good. “We will emerge in a relatively unoccupied part of the enemy Bridge, and should power be restored too quickly, we will simply provide the enemy with further hostages.”

There is muffled shouting outside their hiding spot, the Admiral berating her subordinates. “I really hate that woman,” mutters Hawthorne.

“That much is evident.”

A few moments more, and power comes back just as Tanek suspected. He allows himself to feel briefly smug about this before turning his attention back to the security feed.

The Captain is not where she is supposed to be. She has eluded the attention of her guards and has armed herself from one of the melodramatic displays of weaponry with what appears to be an archaic Earth sword. She is also, as far as he can tell from the low quality image, smiling.

“Are you kidding me right now,” mutters Hawthorne.