Chapter Text
USS Gibraltar, en route to the Velkamis system.
Sickbay was so crowded with the wounded from the Velk ship that Taiee almost didn’t see the doors part to admit another gurney. This one was pushed by Lar’ragos and escorted by one of her med-techs who was busy transfusing fluids to the broken reptilian upon the mobile bed.
Taiee completed the last of a dozen monomolecular sutures that would serve to keep her Velk patient’s innards firmly within his torso before turning to the newly arriving patient. She gave Lar’ragos a curious look as she asked, “We missed one?”
As she ran the sensor wand from her tricorder over the man, Lar’ragos replied in an even tone, “This is our other friend from the engine room.”
She spared him a surprised glance. “That’s impossible; it would have taken ten minutes with an industrial cutter to free him.” She charged a hypo and injected the Velk, gesturing for two technicians to transfer the patient gently onto the primary exam table. “How’d you do it?”
“Hand phaser,” he answered simply.
She shook her head, raising the bed’s clamshell support frame over the injured solider. “If you want to be coy, fine, don’t tell me.”
He answered quietly. “I’m serious, Doc.”
“You didn’t have time,” she repeated as she conducted a scan of the man’s extensive internal damage.
Lar’ragos smiled at that. “Only if you make the completely unwarranted assumption that time is a linear constant.” He favored her with a wink before stepping back into the corridor.
*****
He pressed the enunciator to her door again, fearing he already knew the reason behind her absence from what had become their shared cabin.
Her voice finally responded to his third attempt, sounding tired and angry. “Come in.”
Sandhurst stepped through and into Pell’s quarters, taking a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The stars that streaked past the rectangular viewport gave him a momentary sense of vertigo, set as they were against the darkness of the rest of the compartment. After a half minute of awkward silence, he could just make her out, lying on the couch under the window.
He skipped the tiresome initial inquiries to which he had already guessed the answers. Instead, he said simply, “It was good advice, and I probably should have taken it… but I didn’t. That’s going to happen from time to time, and you’d best make peace with that fact now.”
“Don’t treat me like a child, Donald,” she said from the shadows, her voice tinged with regret. “What am I doing here?”
He frowned, the gesture lost on Pell in the darkness. “On this mission or on this ship?”
“Gibraltar,” she clarified. “We both know a ship this size doesn’t need a diplomatic officer, and having a command qualified second officer is more of a formality. That leaves you as my sole reason for being aboard.”
“That was enough for you six months ago.”
She sighed. “That’s when I thought you had a legitimate reason for wanting me here.”
“I don’t?” He had meant it as a question, but was unable to edit out the sarcastic inflection.
“I’m a diplomatic expert, Donald!” she said more hotly than she’d intended. “This is what I do, what I’m trained in. I gave you my professional opinion about an especially delicate and potentially volatile situation, and you brushed me off in favor of the rest of your senior officers because their answers made you feel better.”
Sandhurst’s jaw set. “I believe it was the correct course of action. Those men have families, people who love them. I don’t think you’ll hear any of them complaining that they were rescued.”
“That’s not the point,” Pell said as she sat up and swung her legs over and onto the floor. “You took this job, not just your captaincy but your original Starfleet commission, knowing full well that you might be called upon to step back and let matters take their natural course despite your personal feelings and beliefs.” She paused, and he could see her head cocked to one side, silhouetted against the streaking starfield. “It’s easy to perform a hypothetical gut check in an academy classroom. Out here in the real universe, this is where it really counts.”
“You’re not going to quote chapter and verse from Commander Krazner’s prime directive seminar, are you?” Sandhurst had been trying to lighten the mood, but the attempt at humor missed the mark and only seemed to agitate Pell further.
“You’ve been reliving the same scenario for a year now," she observed. "Aren’t you tired of it yet?”
“Meaning what, precisely?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Pell snapped back. “The Briar Patch, Yashk’lin IV, that whole mess at E’Mdifarr. You’ve been trying to atone for past failures, but time and again you end up getting in over your head and dragging your crew in with you.”
“Well,” he remarked as his face flushed with anger, “that’s about the most awful thing you could have accused me of.”
“Tell me it isn’t true,” she replied.
“Not entirely true,” he stated heavily, a hint of concession in his voice. “Don’t get me wrong, Lakesh plays into it and always will to some extent, but there’s more to this.”
“Such as?”
“Thousands of Starfleet personnel have just been killed, and no one seems to know why.” He moved slowly towards the couch, sinking down onto it next to Pell while being careful to give her adequate space. “I could stomach the losses during the war because I knew that ultimately those deaths were helping to keep the Federation free. But this… this was murder, pure and simple.” Sandhurst looked toward her to meet her barely visible eyes. “I’m not giving up again. I’m not walking away again. Not ever.”
“Absolutes get people killed.” Pell took a deep breath to calm herself, and then continued. "If the only people you’re going to listen to are the ones who agree with you, there’s no place for me here.”
“I’m sorry if you feel that way,” he said quietly. The thought of being without her twisted his insides, though he refused to show it. “If you have to leave, I’ll be very disappointed, but I’ll understand.” He reached out, resting a hand on her shoulder. “It’s important for me that you appreciate why I’m doing this.”
“And that is?” she asked.
“If the Dominion is behind these attacks, then we’re at war again. If it’s someone else, then they’ve killed our comrades in cold blood, and I won’t let that go unanswered.”
“What, you’ll take revenge on them? That’s not how Starfleet operates, Donald.”
“One person’s revenge is another’s justice,’ he uttered quietly, his tone heavy with menace. “The last time I backed away from a similar situation, countless people died as a result. I learned my lesson then.” Even in the dark she could see his expression harden, his jaw clenching. “We’ll find these people, and they will answer for what they’ve done.”
She reached out gently and took his hand in hers. “You didn’t have a choice last time. If you’d disobeyed General K’Vada’s orders, you’d have been destroyed, and those people would still have perished.”
He shook his head fractionally. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“I know the similarities between Velkohn and Lakesh are uncomfortable for you, but you have to maintain your objectivity here. There are going to be too many dangers, too many pitfalls on Velkohn to go rushing in there with some kind of martyr complex.”
“I know,” he exhaled, a long breath that seemed to drain the energy from him. Sandhurst reclined back on the couch and closed his eyes briefly. He reached out a hand to brush the bulkhead with what Pell thought to be tenderness. “I love this old girl, but I can’t bring myself to keep putting her through the meat-grinder mission after mission. There comes a time when it’s necessary to admit there’s just some jobs she can’t do, some enemies she can’t be expected to fight.”
Pell studied him. “And what’s the solution to that dilemma?”
“I don’t know… yet,” he confessed.
“And speaking of vulnerabilities,” Pell picked up her train of thought, “you can’t keep running off impulsively to do outrageously dangerous things. That’s what Liana and I are for.”
He mustered a dark chuckle in response. “When Captain Glover rushes off to do something heroic, he’s being daring and proactive. When I do the same thing I’m being impulsive and reckless. Is that it?”
Pell squeezed his hand as she retorted, “Your motivations are purer than his, I’ll give you that. Terrence is better at weighing the odds, though.”
“There just ain’t no justice, I tell you…”
She lay back next to him, resting her head on his shoulder. “Please. You’re talking to a Bajoran.”
“Oh… right.”
*****
“Decelerating from warp to sub-light. Now at full impulse, Captain.” Lightner, ever the earnest young professional, narrated the ship’s entry into the Velkamis system.
“Any sign of a welcoming committee?” Sandhurst asked.
Behind him from Tactical, Lar’ragos assessed, “Negative, sir. Only minimal interplanetary traffic detected. No signs of any military formations in orbit of Velkohn or elsewhere.”
“Status of the Velkohn’s orbital defense grid?” Ramirez asked.
Chief Ziang replied, “Weapons platforms are on hot standby, but none are presently targeting us, sir.”
“That’s a plus,” Lightner piped up.
“If one of those platforms so much as blinks in our direction I want it slagged.” Sandhurst craned his head to look back at the security lieutenant. “Understood?”
Lar’ragos bobbed his head. “Absolutely, sir.”
Pell studied her board, trying to grasp the volatile situation unfolding on the planet ahead. Taiee stood beside her, looking over the Bajoran’s shoulder as she helped to identify potential locations for setting up medical and relief centers.
Ramirez looked across at the pair from the other side of the well. “There’s some promising spots on the eastern peninsula where several refugee processing centers have been set up.”
Taiee nodded warily. “Yes, but I’m concerned about attracting unwanted attention to those areas. They’re vulnerable as it is with all those displaced people. The last thing I want is a firefight in the middle of refugee camp.”
“With the additional security personnel on loan from the Intrepid, we can repel any attack, Doc. The Velk would have to make it past us to get at the refugees. That’s not going to happen.”
Taiee looked back to see Lar’ragos’ gaze fixed on her. “Can I get a guarantee on that?” she asked, smiling uneasily.
“You just did,” Pava replied coolly.
Taiee, Ramirez, and Sandhurst shared a brief, appraising look. The captain inclined his head. “Take whatever and whomever you need and make it happen.”
*****
28 hours later…
Automated phaser emplacements tracked the overhead flight of Velk reconnaissance aircraft from the periphery of the Federation cordon around what was becoming known as Camp Hope. Within the hastily assembled encampment, Starfleet medical personnel attended to a growing number of displaced civilians. Most were hungry and many were injured after days of fleeing the sporadic fighting that had consumed many of the planet‘s major population centers. The most severely wounded were beamed aboard the ship, attended to by the holographic physicians who had assimilated the totality of Velk medical knowledge.
Taiee was busy cross-typing blood samples when Medical Specialist Yoichi approached. “Doc, I’ve got something you’re going to want to see.” He led her to a small tent, containing a Velk woman and her young daughter. The child was wrapped in blankets and her wounds were bound with grimy sheets saturated with yellowish reptilian blood. Taiee glanced at Yoichi’s medical tricorder, her eyes widening fractionally at the image displayed there. “Gods… that’s…”
“Yes,” he confirmed as he gestured to the mother. “She says it contains a message for us.”
Taiee looked to the woman with disbelief evidenced on her features. “You consented to this?”
“It was the only way,” the woman said simply. “We were searched by the military many times on our way here.”
Taiee worked quickly but delicately. She unwrapped the girl’s bandages, and with Yoichi’s assistance, the two healers removed the alien padd device from within the clumsy incision that scored the girl’s abdomen.
Taiee began repairing the damage to the girl’s internal organs as Yoichi began programming the tissue regenerator for Velk cellular structure. Master Chief Tark, Gibraltar’s senior non-commissioned officer and Lar’ragos’ indispensable right-hand Tellarite stood staring at the padd’s screen as the device dripped yellow gore onto the plasticeen sheeting that served as a floor.
“Something interesting, Tark?” Taiee asked distractedly.
“You could say that,” he snuffled brusquely as he quickly turned and ducked through the tent flap.
*****