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

Chapter Text

Piper sits huddled on the floor where he’d collapsed next to the shuttle bunk - like hell is he sleeping - with Gull watching the door. 

It takes a while before he can think, and then more before he can think much other than stupid stupid stupid.

It’s very annoying that having mostly-metal legs doesn’t make him immune to these physical symptoms of anxiety and panic at its worst, but he still feels a tremor in calves he doesn’t have. He could probably stand, if he really had to, but it doesn’t seem like it from here. 

Up to … oh, about fifteen minutes ago, he’s been following what he’d consider fairly strong logic. Point A, you can’t help anyone if you’re dead. Point B, if you trust someone who isn’t trustworthy with the information that’s in your head, you get a bad case of dead. Distrusting people, correctly or not, got you … well, it got you to the point before he’d gotten onto this shuttle. Trusting a trustworthy person could get you a good outcome. (Hopefully. It could also get that person dead, and you too)  Trusting an untrustworthy person got you - again, he can’t stress this enough - dead or worse. He could decide who to trust. He couldn’t decide who was untrustworthy. 

(One could argue that the Federation was a project in getting people to choose trust in spite of logic. But there’s a parasite in Starfleet, in the Federation, and he’s just one cyborg. Plus Gull, of course. And death had a very clear way of making these decision games one-shot.)

That logic applied to everyone on the ship. Not just the Captain, though she held more weight by her position - and of course, because there was no way the Secret Police had let the flagship operation into the Gamma Quadrant go without their people in charge, making her highly likely to be a reason he ended up dead. 

And of course, she was the one who knew. Because he was an idiot. And, because it turns out that ‘oh fuck I’m going to be shot’ has a very effective way of kicking logic right out of your brain. At least his. Vulcans probably have a better way of dealing with this. Lots of people probably do. But it turns out just because you should be dead, you don’t get any steadier when it’s looking you in the face.  

(Also, given the whole ‘woke up in a box’ thing, throwing himself into a cargo container for hours was probably never going to go well, in hindsight. Not that he’d been spoiled for alternatives.)

So he’d vented his rage and his secrets instead of coming up with any sort of cover story for being in the shuttle, no matter how half-assed. He had been so panicked he probably couldn’t remember half of what he said if his life depended on it - hah . Did he tell her he’d seen the woman in her quarters before, when his project had been taken over? He couldn’t say. Of all the small mercies, he’s pretty sure he kept it together enough not to give away Marbog - who he could already hear, very clearly, in his imagination, reminding him just how stupid he’d been - and that if the Captain or anyone else couldn’t piece together that him knowing about his cybernetics meant the guy who worked on his cybernetics knew, they’d have to be dumber than rocks. 

The information was out there now, with Captain Chester. And even if it was worth crying over spilled secrets any more than spilled milk …  on a gut level, it’s hard to regret it. He’s very, very angry, and has been for a long time. And if he’s going to die  - and he is going to die - there’s something preferable to being shot in the front and not the back, looking him in the eyes and seeing every last ounce of spite and defiance, know that he’s been defying them all this time. He’s going to die Starfleet. 

And at the very least, he can be an inconvenient pain in the ass to the fascists for every second he has before that.

The option of keeping secrets was gone, and now with the truth out the question is whether the recipient of the truth is trustworthy or untrustworthy, and of course the recipient was nearabouts the least likely person to be trustworthy - apart from her handler. So he’s almost certainly going to die. No bluster makes up for the fact that his life depends on Chester being trustworthy or the secret police for some reason deciding that Chester appearing squeaky clean is more important than taking him out, and for her to act like she’s trustworthy for long enough for them to kill him in three weeks when they have a better cover story. Why would they do that? He doesn’t know. Lure out co-conspirators maybe? But if they can’t infer Marbog’s involvement, they’ll have to try a lot harder if they want Piper to give his name.  He’s bad at acting, bad with people - trying to anticipate what people would do or reason why people did things that weren’t in an engineering manual generally didn’t go so well - and generally not suited for spycraft.  Having some of it off his chest would be something of a relief, if he wasn’t too panicked to register it. 

Because unfortunately ‘being alive’ was a precondition of stopping - or trying to stop - whatever the Secret Police are doing here, and if he doesn’t… he can’t count on anyone else. He’s too tired and currently more dysfunctional than usual to be the clever one and get away and stay alive that way. But he has to keep trying. He has to.  He’s survived this long leaning on the simple rule of trusting nothing. And bad actor that he is, if nothing else he’s probably not too tired to play grumpy and arrogant. 

He has to keep trying. He has to stay alive. 

And if he doesn’t… There has to be a way to keep trying even if he’s dead. Marbog will keep trying, will stay vigilant… but Marbog doesn’t know anything about the specifics of what is on this moon. Not that he does, not really, but - 

If there’s any chance that he can give Marbog a warning that the secret’s out - if there’s any chance that Marbog knowing could help stop this… 

It’s an engineering problem. Work the problem. You’re good at this. 

He opens a panel on the hull, and gets to work.

Hopefully, it will look like a minor bits of noise in the internal shuttle’s system’s logs when they download to ‘Pret. The code isn’t complicated, the encoding phrase is hartleyrathaway, so it’s not impossible to guess - but Marbog would guess it first. 

As he inputs the message - nothing more complicated than ‘captain knows’ and the coordinates of the planet - the woman’s face keeps lingering at the edge of his mind, smirking. He wouldn’t forget that expression, just a flash on her face when she’d walked on to his project. Before she’d gotten his team killed. Before she and her fascist cohort had shoved this in his head.

He is probably going to die. A significant, not especially rational part of him - the same part that had spat the truth at Chester in rage - would very much like to see her go down with him. 

It wouldn’t change anything. Or maybe it would. Sometimes you couldn’t see the results of your shot.

He is probably going to die. There’s nothing else he can do between now and then. He certainly won’t be sleeping. He should try and eat, but he can’t bring himself to try and stagger to his feet just to go back out and replicate plain granola in front of Chester, especially given he’ll almost certainly throw back up again before they land. 

Nothing left to do but think of a song , but his flute is back in his quarters. He looks up at the shuttle’s ceiling and hums, instead.

It ranks high in Chester’s list of most unpleasant shuttle rides ever, including that one with a JAG officer and Captain Steenburg after the whole debacle of rescuing Rilas that one time during the war, but they get there, and Hawthorne beams her down with only minimal grumbling. 

She materializes in a desolate clearing in a boulder field. It’s almost a relief after eighteen hours in a shuttle with a man who hates her, but unfortunately it also contains DeWinter, who is waiting for her. 

“Captain Chester,” she says. “It’s good to see you.”

“Well,” Chester says, “it seems my leave got canceled, so I didn’t have anything better to do.”

“Sorry about that,” says DeWinter, obviously not sorry in the slightest. “But it’s urgent. Come on.”

Chester follows her along a narrow trail. “So when did Section 31 become aware of this?” she asks.

“A few months ago. But it took some time to realize the scale of the problem. Respite was chosen because it was convenient to both Federation and Cardassian space. It was an ideal place to stage an evacuation–and now the infrastructure is in place, it’ll be an ideal place from which to launch an attack.”

“Tell me about this infrastructure.”

“Barracks,” says DeWinter, “exercise and medical facilities, a landing field. You’ll see in a few moments.”

“Any reasons given for the evacuation stalling?”

“None. No official communications, either.”

“Hm. Outside observers?”

“Primarily Federation.” DeWinter’s face screws up, displeased. “They’re so worried about another war they won’t see what’s brewing right under their noses.”

“Yes, the prospect of another war with the Dominion should scare anyone,” says Chester. 

“You saw more of it than most,” says DeWinter. “You know what they’re capable of. They shot your commanding officer in front of you during the Battle of Betazed.”

It’s the last thing Chester wants to be reminded of–the shock, the guilt. The certain knowledge she could have done something. 

Of course, lying low meant that Commander Faisal’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. It got her, and the others, out alive. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, it means she’s got a slightly better excuse than most. 

“And there was the Bedivere ,” continues DeWinter, as they climb the ridge, her voice getting softer as they go. They’re probably getting closer. “They like to talk to you about the civilians you saved, and the crew you saved, but not about the ones you didn’t.”

Yes, a lot of the Cardassians who’d run to them for help had been gunned down before they’d even reached the wreckage. They’d saved nine. 

“And you were on the retrieval team for Captain Jeln when–”

“You know, reminding me of all my worst experiences in the Dominion War before showing me a Jem’Hadar encampment is fairly clumsy emotional manipulation,” Chester says. “Let’s not, shall we?”

DeWinter shrugs. “Only making conversation.”

“Yeah, sure you are,” says Chester, and just before they crest the ridge, DeWinter gestures for her to crouch and get behind a line of rocks. She does, following the other woman around another corner and through a crevice until they have their vantage point, high above the encampment. DeWinter hands Chester a pair of field glasses. 

Chester uses them. Yes, that’s a Jem’Hadar encampment, and that’s a lot of Jem’Hadar. They look alert, prepared, purposeful–as if they’re just waiting for the ships to arrive to take them to their next conquest. There are guards, there are patrols. She pans the glasses over, finding the training facility, the medical facility, the ships. 

There’s no way it’s this simple, she thinks. No way. What is she missing? But the ball of dread in her gut grows heavier. This really could be a Dominion invasion, forming right under their noses. 

Piper watches Captain Chester and Gull dematerialize at the same time; Captain Chester to her designated rendezvous point, Gull to a point where a careful preview of the terrain had put him out of visual range and not near any other life signs.

The transport has no hitch, and there’s a handful of seconds where he thinks it worked; that the meticulous tweaks to the comm badge to keep the open connection with Gull, that his extensive work on Gull’s many redundancies was good enough, that his sweep of the train had been accurate. 

And then there’s static from Gull’s comm connection.

“Gull? Gull!!”

The static cuts off  and he gets back a string of beeps that roughly corresponds to I’m fine, idiot. The connection’s down on the planet. I muted the bloody static I was getting.

So nothing’s wrong with Gull, Captain Chester just beamed down into an area with signal jamming sophisticated enough to block Gull for her private conversation with her boss . 

  “Fucker.” It doesn’t matter that Gull is no longer here to keep static running to interfere with any internal recordings, if the secret police want to listen to him swear, there’s plenty of footage of that. And if they can jam Gull, they can probably overcome the static program too.

Well, he’s probably dead anyway. Might as well know what he’s dying for. Maybe get a chance to be a thorn in someone’s side while he’s at it.

“Can you find a redundancy that works? Or get a transporter lock?” I already bloody tried. “Okay, okay. I know. Don’t get shot.” Obviously. 

“Fucker,” he mutters again. She must have been trying so hard to keep a straight face when he put this together, she must have known her bosses would be blocking any surveillance Gull could do. Smug fucker and her fucking mindgame bullshit . Right now she’s probably having a good laugh with her boss and figuring out what new generation of mind control tech to shove into his head next. 

That’ll teach him to play along and let his guard down even the slightest fraction. Had he thought for a second that there was a chance she was trustworthy? Idiot. 

Right. He’s not going to just sit here and sulk. Maybe they thought they’d blocked him finding out anything, but they were going to learn how wrong they were.

At least Gull had beamed down outside of the jamming field, so he hadn’t just dropped out of contact on materialization. And he still has the shuttle running sweeps of the planet, for whatever good that will do if they have something good enough to block Gull when he’s on the surface, anything they don’t want him to see will probably be well out of sight from the ship. Where, by now, the secret police know he’s waiting.

Fuck that. He’s spent months waiting with his mouth shut, waiting for a break. 

Whatever’s there to be seen, he’s going to see it on the surface with Gull. If he’s going to die, he’s going to die being a thorn in the secret police’s side. 

And specifically the smirking face of the woman who had gotten his team killed.

That rage still boils in him, desperate irrational desire to see her go down with him. Maybe he won’t get a chance to take the shot. But maybe he will.

He steps over to the replicator. “Steak dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, with tray and cutlery including fork and steak knife, please.” 

He half wishes he could just call up the replicator pattern for one of the batarangs he keeps under his pillow - yes, he knows it’s dumb, but the secret police hadn’t given him laser vision, or any of Victor Stone’s cool cyborg weapons. 

Well, what he really wishes is that he had Sting, a good elvish cape that would keep him hidden from enemy eyes, and ideally a Samwise Gamgee. 

At least Sam would approve of fighting with the cookware you had to hand, even if he probably wouldn’t approve of anything else about this. 

And, of course Gull would zap him if he compared the drone to Samwise Gamgee.

He dumps everything but the steak knife back into recycling, tucks the knife inside his boot - there’s certainly nothing it can cut in there. 

Plausible deniability was his friend. If he wasn’t going to get stunned or outright killed on sight down there - the only way he’d get close enough for this to be any use - it would be because Chester was actually trustworthy - a possibility, however unlikely - or playing trustworthy so the situation appeared squeaky clean. She wouldn’t know - or would be pretending she didn’t know - that the connection was jammed. Maybe she hadn’t even gotten the chance to tell her handler he was here - so her handler would have no reason to suspect he knew anything at all. Of course, if she had told her handler, it wouldn’t matter how he played it.  

She knew he was here, knew he was sweeping the planet, knew he was monitoring. Well, he’d said that if the connection cut out he’d start to worry.

He’s Lt. Commander Piper Hawthorne. He never doubted the official story of his accident. He hates the Dominion. He is very concerned about having lost contact with his Captain after detecting some irregularities in his planetary sweep, so he beamed down a safe distance away. None of this is a problem. He’s a professional young commander who won’t stab you in the throat with anything, no matter how grumpy he seems.

He could keep thinking himself in circles - he’s too tired to decide if it’s the best option, if it makes sense. It’s the easiest thing to do, he’s been playing this part for months. 

You’ve gone quiet. We’re doing something stupid again, aren’t we?

“Unfortunately.” Piper says, plugging in the coordinates he had beamed Gull down to. “I’m beaming down to meet you.”