Chapter Text
Part Two
It was Klath that broke the shocked silence that had descended on the Bounty’s cockpit, the Klingon immediately jumping to action stations.
“I am raising our shields and bringing weapons online,” he barked out as he tapped his controls.
Nobody else in the cockpit moved.
“Why?” Jirel managed to reply, still staring at the vast ship in front of them.
“We must defend ourselves!” Klath spat back at the Trill, “They are Romulans!”
“Yep, thanks for the ID, mighty oracle. And if they really want to pick a fight with us out here, there’s not much our little peashooter of a torpedo launcher can do about it.”
“It’s enormous,” Natasha whispered from the other side of the cockpit. She had seen Warbirds plenty of times before during her time with Starfleet. But back then, she had been on a starship. Somehow, seeing the gigantic vessel from onboard a ship as small as the Bounty seemed to magnify its size even more.
“Jirel,” Klath persisted, “If we are to die, then we must die with honour!”
Jirel spun around to his incensed Klingon weapons chief and tried to keep his voice as calm and measured as possible. “Ok, Klath, just listen to me for a second. I have no intention of dying today, with honour or otherwise. And, right now, the best way of making sure I don’t die today is if we do nothing that might piss off that great big Romulan ship out there, ok?”
For a moment, he thought Klath was actually about to ignore him and open fire, regardless of how futile it would be. But eventually, he merely folded his arms in a show of annoyance.
“We could always run?” Natasha offered.
“Same problem,” Denella replied, “That thing’ll run rings around us at warp.”
“So?” Sunek asked, not unreasonably, “What exactly are we gonna do?”
Jirel went to answer, then stopped himself. A silent admission that he didn’t have a clue. Instead, it was T’Len who answered her estranged husband’s question.
“You could hail them?”
All five of the Bounty’s crew turned around in unison to look at the Vulcan woman with varying levels of disbelief. For her part, she stared back with complete sincerity.
“You were asked to deliver your cargo to a ship at these coordinates, were you not? Well, that is a ship. At these coordinates.”
Jirel scoffed, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “Ok, so, you think the Romulan Empire is paying us - this ship - to deliver their spare parts?”
T’Len remained a picture of sincerity. Jirel scoffed again and looked over to Denella for some sort of support. The Orion woman merely shrugged.
“I mean,” she offered, “If they wanted us dead, we’d be very, very dead by now, right?”
The Trill chewed his lip thoughtfully, then sighed in defeat. “Alright,” he said, feeling faintly ridiculous, “In lieu of a sane plan, I guess I’ll…hail them.”
He swivelled back around to the front of the cockpit and tapped the controls on the arm of his chair, licking his lips and digging down to find his best captain’s voice.
“Romulan ship, this is, um, the Bounty?” he began, not quite finding it, “We were, erm, told to deliver supplies to these coordinates. Do you…know anything about that?”
He slumped back in his chair and waited for a response. He had started to sweat.
“Very nice Jirel,” Denella whispered from behind him, “Sounded very captain-y.”
“Yeah, very funny. Do you wanna take over—?”
Before he got any further, the whole ship rocked gently. Klath jumped back into action, but everyone present knew it didn’t feel like weapons fire.
“They have locked a tractor beam on us,” he reported urgently, “We are being towed into their main hangar bay!”
The Klingon looked up at his colleagues, who he noted with increasing disdain had still not matched his state of battle readiness.
“Well,” Denella offered, “That’s what I’d do if I wanted to offload a bunch of supplies from the cargo bay of a smaller ship?”
“Yeah,” Jirel added, giving himself up to the farce of the situation, “In a weird way, this is actually a good thing?”
Through the cockpit window, they watched as the eerie green-tinged light of the tractor beam pulled the Bounty between the twin hulls of the ship and towards the open doors of the hangar bay at the rear of the ship’s hawk-like front section.
“So,” Sunek quipped as the ship passed inside, “Anyone know the Romulan for ‘We come in peace’?”
The Bounty settled down onto the deck of the hangar bay with a gentle thud. Behind it, the vast bay doors slowly closed and locked together. Seconds later, unbeknownst to the Bounty’s crew, the entire Warbird began to shimmer as the great ship cloaked.
And then Sector Gamma 432 was back to being as unremarkable and boring as it had ever been.
* * * * *
Jirel peered out of the cockpit window at the huge empty hanger bay and shrugged.
“Well,” he muttered to nobody in particular, “Let’s go say hello, I guess.”
He turned around, to see Klath in the middle of tooling up. The Klingon already had his bat’leth slung behind his back, and was in the process of clipping a dagger and a stout disruptor to his belt.
“Klath, what the hell are you doing?”
Klath looked back at the Trill, as if the answer should have been obvious. “I am preparing for battle.”
“Of course,” Jirel sighed, “So, what’s the plan, then? You’re gonna rush out there, single-handedly fight your way through a couple of thousand Romulan soldiers and commandeer their ship?”
Klath considered this for a moment with a look of complete seriousness.
“You are all welcome to assist,” he said eventually.
“Ok, just—No weapons,” Jirel snapped, “We’re here to make a delivery, remember?”
“You hope,” Sunek muttered with amusement from behind Jirel.
Klath stared back at the Trill for a moment. Then, with a further annoyed grimace, he reluctantly started to remove his weapons.
Moments later, six slightly dishevelled and entirely unarmed figures descended the Bounty’s rear cargo ramp and looked around.
“You know,” Sunek mused, “I was expecting it to be a lot bigger on the inside.”
Despite his comment, the hangar bay was more than large enough, made of faded dark metal and stretching out around them. But there was something slightly off about their surroundings.
What little cargo they could see was haphazardly piled up around the place, with no real sense of military order to them. The scuffed walls of the bay showed clear signs of damage and disrepair, as if the ship had just come out of a significant battle. And even the lighting seemed off, slightly dimmer than was really comfortable for a bay of this size, and flickering slightly.
“Huh,” Denella offered simply as she clocked the extent of the decay, “Does this place ever look like crap.”
As they reached the bottom of the ramp, a set of doors on the other side of the bay opened and footsteps paced into the room.
“Welp,” Jirel muttered, trying to adopt his best space captain pose and falling as short as he had with his captain’s voice a few minutes earlier, “I guess this’ll be the welcoming committee.”
Through the dimmed lighting, they saw a trio of figures with pointed ears approaching them. But they didn’t walk with the practised march of Romulan troops. This was more of a ramshackle cacophony of steps on the hard metal floor. And they weren’t wearing Romulan uniforms. Instead, they were all clad in a variety of coloured overalls and tunics. And, while they had pointed ears, they were all clearly not Romulan, but Vulcan.
And they were all smiling.
The Vulcan at the head of the trio was a tall, rangy man with short brown hair and a close-cropped goatee beard. He led the other two Vulcans, a stout male and a slender female, up to the Bounty’s crew and then stopped in his tracks, taking them all in. For a moment, nobody quite seemed to know what to do next.
Except for Sunek, who let out an audible gasp as he finally saw the face of the leading Vulcan in a clear light. “Holy crap,” he blurted out, “Sokar?”
The bearded Vulcan smiled wider and nodded. “Yes, Sunek,” he replied, “It’s me.”
Sunek laughed out loud, crossing the divide between the two crews and wrapping the rangy Vulcan in a tight bear hug. T’Len also broke from her position and walked over to join the others, looking to be familiar with all of them.
“Anyone starting to feel a bit used?” Denella asked without amusement.
“Guys,” Sunek laughed, turning back to the rest of the Bounty’s crew, “It’s Sokar!”
“Yep,” Jirel replied tersely, “We got that bit.”
“But…I know him! From years ago, in the V’tosh ka’tur! I…”
Sunek paused, struggling to take everything in. Sokar took that opportunity to step forwards and address the rest of the Bounty’s crew with open arms.
“My friends,” he said, with a somewhat pompous air, “Welcome to the starship Tolaris. The flagship of the V’tosh ka’tur.”