Chapter Text
Hawthorne almost misses her when she first comes in. She’s a tiny little old human lady, beautifully dressed, and he’s already so used to seeing the officers’ bodyguards around here that he doesn’t register the hulking presence of the four Vulcans with her.
He’s got the tricorder with the data dump on it, and he and his alternate have just finished some, if he says so himself, very clever, careful sabotage. Hawthorne isn’t a big fan of sabotage, for the obvious reason, and what little hair remains on the back of his neck has been standing to attention ever since he’s started the process, but even he can recognize that there are some times when you simply have to completely wreck the engines of your local fascists.
And then the voice cuts across the room, high and sharp. “Whose station is this?”
Next to him, Hawthorne’s counterpart goes very still.
“Lock down Engineering,” says the voice. “Someone has been sabotaging my ship.”
“Oh shit,” says Hawthorne’s counterpart, and there’s a sudden flurry of movement. Hawthorne looks down just in time to see his counterpart slip the rest of the way into a Jeffries tube and pull the cover shut behind him. There’s a lock on it, too—it blinks red as soon as it’s in place. “Hey!”
Suddenly, there’s a hulking Vulcan standing over him with a very functional phaser pointed at him.
And a tiny elderly human lady dressed in brilliant jewel tones peering up at him—no mean feat, given his diminutive stature—with a frown on her face. “You aren’t familiar.”
“Yeah,” he says, well aware he sounds scared shitless. “Your Admiral there kidnapped me to help her out.”
“And you sabotaged my ship instead,” says the tiny old woman. “Clever. Unfortunately, I don’t like our Hawthorne enough to be impressed. Security! Bring this man to the Admiral. Tell her that I was right, and that she might want to round up her counterpart as well.”
A pair of massive security officers loom up and take Hawthorne by the elbows. It’s either let them or be dragged. Resentfully, he lets them. Being annoyed in the moment is a whole lot better than being as scared as he ought to be.
“And someone scare Hawthorne out of wherever he’s hiding this week and tell him he’ll end up in one of my labs if he doesn’t fix the damage he did in the next hour,” the old woman says. “Why she keeps the backstabbing little beast around, I’ll never know.”
“Find her. Now.”
Chester hears her alternate’s voice and yanks the access hatch off the nearest Jeffries tube, climbing in and hauling it shut behind her. She’s heard that edge in her own voice. She knows it’s bad.
She’s not going to hang around and find out how bad.
She killed the Bedivere , she reminds herself, and is glad she doesn’t need to hang around and play nice.
She can only hope Tanek is making himself useful. She can only hope he’s gotten Hawthorne out already.
But she can’t count on that.
Sitting in the crawlspace, she realizes just how angry she is. It was not as if she was having a good week to start with. Now, this woman has barged in, helped herself to Chester’s ship and her engineer, because she has the absolute unmitigated gall to think that she deserves it more than Chester herself does. A fairly routine mission has been completely upended, her ship and crew put in danger, and not for the usual reasons of Gamma Quadrant politics, or subspace anomalies, or even Q , but because she’s just met herself and it turns out her alternate self is an even bigger raging asshole than she ever imagined. Who’s decided that anything she wants she should get. And this includes Chester’s fucking ship .
And well. Chester herself. So much for the efficacy of the oldest trick in the book.
Chester sits in the crawlspace, and lets herself get properly angry. No more artifice. No more diplomacy. It’s all out in the open now, and it’s time to start fighting, for real this time.
“You know what,” she mutters aloud, more to relieve her own feelings than anything else, “Fuck this. Fuck you. Fuck your ship. And fuck your Empire.”
She reaches up to the nearest access panel, toggles it open, and gets to work breaking everything.
Embarrassingly, that idiot Hawthorne gets himself caught about five minutes before Tanek manages to navigate the maze of service crawlspaces to reach Engineering. Equally unfortunate, though not for him, is the way he finds out; running into Hawthorne’s alternate self.
The confines of the service crawlways is not conducive to having an effective fight, but it is still fairly easy to pin Hawthorne’s squirming alternate up against the side of the conduit and glare at him.
“Oh,” says the human. “Wrong Tanek.”
“Where’s your alternate?”
The small human slumps. “Dr. Zhao got him. I’m sorry if he was your friend. There was nothing I could do.”
“Hm,” says Tanek, instead of the fervent denial the other man was his friend he wants to voice. “So you ran away.”
“I had to!”
“I am sure that makes you feel better,” says Tanek. “Will you make yourself useful, or should I stun you and leave you for someone else to find?’
Hawthorne’s alternate gulps. “I can…give you schematics of the service systems?”
“Do it,” says Tanek. He receives the offered padd silently and looks through it. “If you have misled me, be assured I will indeed hold a grudge,” he tells the small human.
If this was the Hawthorne to whom Tanek is accustomed, the comment would have earned him enraged shouting at the least and perhaps a lost finger otherwise. This Hawthorne just shrinks back, with the expression of a cornered vole. Tanek gives him a look of profound contempt, and goes on his way.
A brief study of the schematic, and he’s narrowed down the best way to transport a prisoner to the bridge; he assumes that people do not spend very long in the brig here, and from what he’s gleaned from his alternate, this version of the Captain likes to deal with these things personally. He hurries, and is quickly rewarded with a glance through a grating of Hawthorne getting more or less carried by several hulking security personnel, all human.
Tanek smiles a little in the privacy of the crawlspace. It is a very unpleasant smile. Then he slides carefully along to where he sees a sharp turn by the turbolifts.
The yells when he drops out on top of them are very satisfying, especially Hawthorne’s yelp. He dispatches the security guards easily, not bothering to be careful—it’s not as if Hawthorne is on good enough speaking terms with the Captain to tattle on him for accidentally killing one or another of these inexperienced fools. “Into the vents,” he tells Hawthorne afterward. “The Captain instructed me to return you as soon as you had completed your sabotage. She is completing her own part of our mission.”
“Yeah,” says Hawthorne, blanched pale under his freckles. He looks ghastly, even for a human. “Problem with that. Pretty sure they’re undoing our sabotage as we speak.”
Tanek considers this. He looks up at the conduits. “I will admit I am disinclined to leave the Captain here unsupervised. She may do something unwise. There may be an opportunity to address all of these concerns at once.”
“Yeah, but address quickly. Pretty sure someone’s gonna notice when I don’t show up to my execution.”
“Very true,” says Tanek, and lifts him bodily into the vent, ignoring the startled squawk. “Still, I believe we can find them a very great deal with which to occupy their time.”
“I’m going to check on Engineering’s progress,” J’etris announces to the bridge, after a long time of glaring at a PADD. “Commander Salera, you have the conn.”
She stalks out. The Captain is not back yet. The Captain is very good at extracting herself from circumstances much worse than an alternate universe incursion. But she should be back now.
And Tanek hasn’t reported in either. She’s losing people to the other side, and she does not like it. What’s next, an away team? She’s got the transporter settings for it, but she appreciated Tanek’s argument that a single operative would be far more useful—they are unlikely to have numbers on their side, and subterfuge seemed like their best bet.
Of course, there might have been an issue in sending a Romulan to do the job, she thinks. He’s a Tal Shiar agent; he’s in all of this for his government, not to save anyone else’s skin. Though it’s a pretty safe assumption that the Romulans aren’t exactly thrilled at the idea of being overrun by the mirror universe.
No, the issue is she’s got no idea what’s going on over there, and a very limited set of options to find out.
In the privacy of the turbolift, she makes a face. She wishes Chester were here. She’s at her best working with the other woman. Chester thinks about things sideways, J’etris follows the rules. Together…
She looks up sharply as the turbolift slows and stops. That’s too soon, and the doors aren’t opening. She draws her phaser—she’s ordered everyone to carry one—and mentally kicks herself as she taps her commbadge. Shouldn’t be letting senior officers go anywhere alone right now. “J’etris to Security.”
Dead air is the answer. Someone’s jamming comms. Someone learned their lesson from jumping Tanek in one of these.
She’s trapped here, which means extracting herself is the first order of business. It’s trivial to access the upper hatch of the turbolift, easier still to hoist herself out. She glances around the dark shaft; the anti-collision programs on the turbolifts should keep her from being struck by another car within a five-meter radius of the disabled lift, and there’s an exit hatch just above her. Grumbling a curse at herself for her stupidity, she checks the shaft again and reaches for the ladder.
Metal moves on metal. J’etris has time to turn, note that the cover of a Jeffries tube has moved, before the stun blast hits her and drops her on the top of the car.
The woman somewhat poetically known as the Admiral’s Dagger, and to those more realistically inclined, J’etris, is not at all pleased by the uniform she’s pulling on. It’s plain and drab and stuffy and has very little armor. Being the First Admiral’s personal assassin teaches one to prioritize some armor.
She expected better from her alternate, too. She takes the time to stuff the woman’s unconscious body back in the Jeffries tube, reverses the sabotage to the turbolift, and slips down into it, hauling the hatch into place behind her. She has been on the ship for almost a week now. To say she is not impressed is an understatement. They’re soft and careless, casual, completely without discipline.
It may be unusual for a Klingon warrior to work so avidly for a Terran, but J’etris has been a reject all her life. Her family has never cared for her; her species accords her no standing if she has no family; the Alliance uses eager young warriors whose people don’t care about them as cannonfodder if they’re lucky and hard labor if they’re not. So when she found the vicious young Terran captain, J’etris saw opportunity. A promise of living up to her ambition instead of dying for someone else’s.
And if Diane has claws like a grishna cat, and is about as careful with them as any other feral little animal, well. J’etris isn’t from a people that value gentleness in their close relationships. Not here. Not anywhere.
It pleases her to succeed where Diane’s new Romulan toy has failed. She looks forward to rubbing it in his face when she extracts him from the brig. He will not last long; Diane likes things that bite back, not his frantic eager acceptance, and this little debacle, him so eagerly helping his counterpart cross over, will do him no good.
She straightens the tunic and leaves it alone, allowing herself one last sneer at the soft child’s uniform. This will be simple. Release Tanek from the brig, and use the remote in her pocket to trigger the final programming cascade in the impulse drive to bring them all home.