Chapter Text
Part Four (Cont’d)
“Well,” Natasha managed, as the bulky crate next to them exploded into fragments from the latest incoming disruptor blast, “At least we found the hangar bay.”
The turbolift had indeed deposited them near enough to the hangar bay, with the Bounty sitting right where they had left it.
Unfortunately, it seemed that once word got out about their escape, it hadn’t been much of a leap for the Tolaris’s crew to realise they might head there at some point. Hence why they had been greeted by half a dozen heavily armed Vulcans, and were now pinned down behind a pile of cargo crates.
“Return fire!” Klath growled from her side.
She grimaced and fired out a few more shots as best she could, remembering her Starfleet training and focusing on maintaining a defensive posture. Even though she was a doctor, she was still more than capable of fighting. The war had seen to that. The old maxim of ‘First, do no harm’ tended to go out of the window when you started getting shot at.
To her side, Klath was still unarmed, both in the physical sense and the weapon-based sense, and feeling more than a little useless. He gripped onto his injured limb and tried to keep his focus on their battle tactics.
“This is not a particularly advantageous position,” he grumbled, as another disruptor blast struck the wall behind his head.
Natasha fired off a few more hopeless shots of her own and checked the pistol. The power levels of the disruptor were dropping fast. Klath ducked his head out around the other side of the crate and scanned the rest of the hangar bay, before ducking back as more fire came in.
“They are flanking us,” he reported, “On both sides. Make your shots count!”
“I’m trying!” she shouted back in frustration over the sound of further incoming fire.
“You must try harder.”
“You’re a terrible instructor, you know that? Any other helpful comments?”
Klath considered their situation for a moment, as the weapons fire got closer and closer. “It is possible,” he said eventually, “That today is a good day to die.”
“You also suck at motivation!”
“I do not see another option,” the Klingon replied with a grimace.
She sighed and checked the disruptor’s power cells again. She didn’t have many shots left. And by the sounds of it, their opponents did. Two more disruptor blasts passed over their heads, leaving scorch marks on the wall behind them. She didn’t have a plan either. Oddly enough, Starfleet offered very little training for how to deal with a gang of psychotic armed Vulcans. In fact, that was pretty much the only group of galactic inhabitants Starfleet hadn’t found itself picking a fight with recently.
She wondered if this was how her life was destined to end. All in pursuit of trying to strike up a friendship with an injured Klingon. How stupid could she be?
Then, something came to her. She realised exactly how stupid she could be. She glanced behind them and saw another cargo container.
“Klath,” she shouted back to the Klingon, “How close are they?”
Klath ducked out to check. “Thirty metres, and still advancing,” he reported, “On both sides.”
“Ok,” she nodded, “I’ve got a plan. But it’s kinda stupid, and a bit suicidal. Although, I assume from your previous comments that you don’t have much of an issue with that?”
Klath didn’t respond. Over to his left, another cargo container exploded under weapons fire, showering them both with fiery shards of debris. Natasha ducked further down, then gestured to the mostly unblemished container almost directly behind them.
“Think you can make a run for that?” she shouted.
Klath checked where she was indicating. The additional cover was a good twenty metres away across the deck of the hangar bay, with no obvious additional cover between them and it. It also didn’t seem to offer any significant strategic improvement on their current suboptimal location.
“I believe so,” he replied, “What is your plan?”
Another disruptor blast whizzed by. They were almost on them.
She opened the casing of her disruptor and fiddled with the settings, quickly figuring out how to achieve what she was aiming for despite the unfamiliar Romulan design. The pistol’s muzzle began to glow bright green. Something that Klath immediately recognised.
“You have just—!”
“I know,” she shouted out, “Let’s go!”
They raced out from behind their cover, towards the container that was twenty metres away. Keeping low and fast, even as their adversaries trained their weapons on their moving forms.
She ducked an incoming disruptor shot. Fifteen metres to go. Maybe less.
She mentally braced herself for the inevitable disruptor blast to her side that would fell her, but two more shots whizzed past without hitting, the Vulcans apparently struggling to aim amidst the chaos around them. She didn’t even know if Klath was behind her, or alongside, or if he had been cut down by a disruptor shot. But she kept moving, focusing on her destination.
Ten metres.
Behind her, the Vulcans were upon their original position, having closed up in a pincer movement. But they didn’t move away from their former cover, merely swivelled around to try and get a clear shot at them. Which meant they were far too close to the disruptor pistol that she had just rigged to overload.
Five metres.
She only hoped that they weren’t too close as well. Even if they made it to their cover, it wasn’t exactly a safe distance from this sort of detonation. She dived forwards at the last second, just as the disruptor exploded.
And then everything went dark.
* * * * *
“Sunek, what the hell?”
“Come on, Jirel,” Sunek shrugged, his dark leer remaining firmly in place, “If you’re really being honest, you can’t say you never expected our friendship to end with one of us pointing a disruptor at the other one, hmm?”
Jirel kept his response calm, ignoring the feeling that deep down, he felt his pilot may have a point. “Guess I never factored in the bit about you committing genocide.”
Sunek’s leer vanished, now replaced by a look of rage. He kept the weapon pointed squarely at Jirel’s chest. Sokar stepped over to the pair of them, and relieved them of their own disruptors.
“I’m very disappointed in you, T’Prin,” he told her calmly, “Who are you working for? Starfleet Intelligence?”
“The V’Shar,” she replied, with an equal amount of calm.
“Hmm,” Sokar shuddered, “Even worse.”
Jirel’s focus was still on Sunek. His long-time friend, who now looked so strangely different. “Sunek, what the hell did he do to you?”
Sunek went to answer, but it was T’Len who got there first, her own weapon pointed determinedly at the Trill as well.
“He has made him stronger!” she shouted, standing by her sometime husband, “We are all stronger for knowing Sokar.”
“And to think you told me this wasn’t a cult,” Jirel replied with heavy sarcasm.
“Psh, this isn’t the V’tosh ka’tur, Jirel,” Sunek mocked, “That was just some lame little wannabe activist movement. Surely even you can see that this is way bigger than that.”
“You must listen, Sunek,” Not T’Prin said, her focus still on the cloaking device in the middle of the group, “Your actions are not your own. Sokar has controlled you with his melds—”
“Quiet!” Sokar snapped, “I’m tired of everyone meddling in my plans. Nobody will stop me from having my revenge on Doctor Sevik!”
Sunek and T’Len nodded along firmly at this. Not T’Prin raised an eyebrow.
“Doctor Sevik is dead.”
Somewhere, deep inside Sunek’s mind, near the top of a wall, Old Sunek gasped.
What? Old Sunek said.
“What?” New Sunek echoed out, before he realised what he was saying.
“Ain’t that a bitch?” Jirel said, seizing on the look of confusion on the Vulcan’s face, “You’ve come all this way, and you’re not even gonna carpet bomb the right guy?”
Sunek stared blankly back at the V’Shar agent, his trigger finger faltering as his disruptor slipped to his side. If it wasn’t for the identical one that T’Len still had pointed at him, Jirel might have allowed him to relax a tad.
“No,” he managed, “Cos…Sokar showed me—I mean, I saw—”
“I know what you saw. Sokar also melded with me. But Doctor Sevik died many years ago,” Not T’Prin continued, “In exile, and in disgrace. It is deeply unfortunate what happened to you, Sokar. But this is not the answer. This attack cannot be allowed to—”
“This is all lies! V’Shar lies!” Sokar spat.
“It is the truth,” she persisted, “His methods were never medically approved by the authorities, and as soon as the full details of his treatments became a matter of public knowledge, he was removed from—”
Sokar didn’t want to hear any more. He fired.
The dirty green disruptor blast slammed squarely into Not T’Prin’s stomach, and for a moment the stoic Vulcan woman’s face displayed a genuine emotion. A look of shock.
The energy of the blast was enough to knock her back into Jirel’s equally aghast arms. The pair of them collapsed onto the floor in what felt like slow motion. Jirel stared in horror at Not T’Prin’s crumpled form. No longer caring where the weapons in the room were pointing.
“Hey, hey, don’t worry,” he managed, “It’s—It’s gonna be ok…”
Looking down at the green blood soaking her top, he knew he was lying. He wasn’t a doctor, but he knew that the prognosis wasn’t good.
“I was…unsuccessful,” she managed to croak, “But I hope you will have the chance to be a hero…”
The last remnants of life drained from her body. Jirel gently rested her down on the ground, then stared up at the armed Vulcans with primal anguish.
“This is your guy, Sunek?” he snarled at his friend, “This is the guy you wanna follow?”
Jirel wasn’t sure if he was expecting an answer. Either way, he didn’t get one. Because as soon as he had heard Not T’Prin’s comments, and seen Sokar’s violent retaliation, Sunek had vanished.
Not physically. Physically he was still in the room. But mentally, he was somewhere else.
He was on the deck of a sailing ship. On the Voroth Sea.
And he wasn’t alone.
“Hello,” said Old Sunek.