Chapter Text
Eluding a bunch of Vulcans in the dark isn’t for the faint-hearted. Chester manages it by stamping on the nearest convenient foot and lunging in the opposite direction while the other three turn on the darkness where an attacker logically should be. She blunders as quietly as she can until her hands hit the hard edge of one of the consoles against the wall. Time to turn her alternate’s awful taste in interior decor against her. There’s a sword here somewhere. The trick will be not getting her fingers cut off in the process.
Or getting grabbed, but by the sounds of it, a few other security personnel have joined in the fight and no one’s noticed she’s not actually there anymore. Her hand bumps something rounded and metal.
The lights come back up, and Chester recognized the hilt under her hand—something damn near a museum piece, an old Earth design of rapier a lot like her usual preference. She guesses it’s there because it so resembles that of her alternate. She pushes herself up on the console with a foot and closes her hand around the blade, using her body weight to rip it free of the wall as she leaps down, slashing back at the sense of movement she gets from behind her.
The blade is just as sharp as she hoped, and one of her erstwhile guards doubles over with a cry. She backs against the console and takes stock of her situation.
There’s a tangle of guards in the corner sorting themselves out—a lot of bruised faces and broken noses, and someone isn’t getting back up at all. There’s the dying bodyguard at her feet, her alternate drawing her sword, pushing her grandmother behind her, and a lot of disruptors aimed at her.
Something, something, sword to a phaser fight, thinks Chester, resigned. She’ll need to bluff her way through or end up dead.
Or surrender, and end up dead eventually. It’s the eventually that actually worries her.
Her alternate raises a hand, forestalling the barrels of weapons that have leveled on Chester. It earns an approving look from Grandmother. Chester really doesn’t like the idea that the woman wants her alive. It’s unlikely to be for any good reason. She levels her sword at her alternate.
A shudder runs through the fabric of the ship, and she presses a hand against the console behind her to steady herself. “It’s working!” someone shouts, excited. Chester looks at the viewscreen, where space is writhing and distorting.
And between one moment and another, the Interpreter appears.
“Right on time,” says her alternate, turning to look at it. “I don’t have time for this anymore. Kill her.”
Fuck. There’s nothing she can do, but she lunges for her alternate anyway, more of a show of defiance before the massed phaser fire kills her—and then nothing happens. Her alternate realizes at the last moment, pulls her dagger and parries Chester’s blow at the last moment and they stare at each other wide-eyed for a moment.
Chester recovers herself first. “I didn’t just make the lights go out,” she says, which is true, but whatever’s dampened energy weapons certainly wasn’t one of her tricks. “You still sure you want to pick this fight with a sabotaged ship?”
Her alternate snarls and draws her sword. Chester has to sidestep to avoid being eviscerated. “Get a tractor beam on that ship, and reactivate the dampening field. We’ll do this the old fashioned way with the shuttles if we have to!”
The Interpreter lurches as she’s snagged with the tractor beam, and all her lights go out in a long wave. Chester’s mouth goes dry. She’s distracting the Admiral again—but is it really doing any good?
Hang on, J’etris, Salera, she thinks. I’ll get you as much time as I can.
J’etris stays in the center seat by sheer force of will as the Bridge goes dark. “Status report!”
“So far we’re still in control of ship’s systems,” says Fult. “The subspace jamming is doing the trick. But they’ve got some sort of dampening field, similar to what they used to disable the warp drive. We’re down to emergency power and that’s going to go fast.”
J’etris grits her teeth. “Reroute power from all nonessential systems to life support and shields. Fult, remember how we talked about playing dead?” She draws in a breath, resenting it. She’s not a very good Klingon at the best of times, but this still galls her. “It’s time to play dead. And to prepare for boarding parties.”
At least they have the advantage of the terrain.
“Wait, sir,” says Lieutenant Kotan at the helm. “I have an idea. Remember how that malfunction in the phaser conduits last week caused the helm to stop answering commands from the main computer? What if we recreated that? That way, even if they take the ship, they’re not going to be able to take it anywhere.”
“Engineering,” says J’etris, “are you getting this? Will it work?”
“It should work!” says Ensign Nask, before anyone else can get a word in edgewise. “It’ll take out phasers, too. ”
J’etris feels herself start to smile. “All right. Fult, I seem to recall the intruder defense systems going offline a bit ago. Think we can recreate that, too?”
Fult says nothing, just starts working with a jerking nod. J’etris settles into the center chair more firmly, raking her memory for all the worst malfunctions the Interpreter has produced in the last six weeks. The enemy wants their ship? Well, they’d better be prepared for the real ship, not the one in the Starfleet schematics, or the recruitment pamphlets. They’d better be prepared for the malfunctions, the voles, and the endless game of ‘what the hell’s going to break this time’.
“Get my ship working,” snarls the Admiral at the Bridge in general, slashing at Chester, who steps out of the way again with a smile, “or die .”
“Such an inspiration to your crew,” says Chester, and parries the next lunge. “You know, threats of murder do not effective leadership make.”
“I,” spits her alternate, “am going to take you to pieces , Captain. Slowly .”
“I wish you luck,” Chester says, flicking her blade away again. She doesn’t bother following that with a full lunge. “I believe you may need it.”
She’s being enraging on purpose, fencing like an instructor teaching someone how to get past a guard, and it’s dangerous. But the angrier her opponent is, the more distracted she will be. The more likely she’ll be to make mistakes, here, or when dealing with the Interpreter.
“I said,” snarls her alternate, “get me that ship!”
“We can’t! There’s cascading malfunctions in the ship’s system and it’s locking us out faster than we can counter them,” The frantic technician looks up at them. “I’ve never seen so many errors! Systems are going offline, parts of the main computer are refusing to talk to each other. Sir, I don’t think this is an intruder defense mechanism, I think these are genuine malfunctions. That thing’s too broken to take over!”
“I thought you said you didn’t need a working ship to carry out your plans, Admiral,” says Chester, cheerfully taunting. “I did warn you, the Interpreter is a little temperamental. What a pity you didn’t give me a good reason to help you.”
“Damn you!” Her counterpart lunges forward again.
“What the hell did you bastards do to ‘Pret?” moans Hawthorne, but he does it quietly.
“Evidently, what was necessary,” says Tanek, who has no patience for human histrionics just now. “Not that it seems to have needed help.”
“The malfunctions,” says Hawthorne, in a voice very near despair. “They’re breaking all the shit we spent the last six weeks fixing. Poor ‘Pret.”
Chester disengages and comes in on the inside line with a fast thrust. Her alternate’s blade shifts in a parry, flicks out of the way and Chester steps back.
“Capture that ship or destroy it!” her alternate yells. “If you can’t get into the systems, force a surrender the old fashioned way!”
The officer at tactical scrambles to obey. Chester’s attention momentarily goes to him, and she almost loses her other eye for her troubles, getting her blade up just in time. She hopes J’etris managed to get shields working again, and the sound of the weapons console beeping acknowledgement is like a punch in the gut.
The ship bucks under her feet, throwing her against a wall. She hits, slides down, hears her alternate cursing. Power goes down again, flickers back on in emergency lighting to the tune of screaming alarms.
All right, thinks Chester. I know I didn’t do that.
“What the hell did you do to my ship?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” says Chester. She grins in the dimness, and has to scrabble to her feet as her alternate throws herself at her, only just ducking as her opponent’s blade draws sparks down the side of the bulkhead. More alarms add their voices to the chorus. If the alarms here are anything like the ones at home, that sounds like the warp core’s compromised, impulse is going down, and a dozen things are overheating. “Sir,” someone’s yelling, “we’ve lost forward phasers, coolant leaks on decks twelve and thirteen and the weapons room is filling with corrosive gas!”
“Well, there you go,” says Chester, more than a little meanly. “You know, Admiral, I’m perfectly happy to accept your unconditional surrender.”
The ship shudders again. Chester drives her alternate back. They’re both good. Her alternate has clearly fought other people, just as Chester has. There were a few battles during the war when she fought with what she had to hand, and that just happened to be her sword. And she’s in the top tenth percentile of competitive historical martial arts practitioners in the Federation, and there she has remained.
Her alternate’s toyed with amateurs, taking them to bits piece by piece—that bit of handiwork on the wall behind her was very likely the product of a fight like this. And she’s fought people who knew what they were doing, with a wide variety of weapons. She’s only just realizing that Chester’s slipshod form and shortcuts aren’t a product of inexperience; it’s just that Chester’s never fought with fairness or elegance in her life. With her ship in the balance, she will not be starting now.
That goes for both of them.
But there’s one other thing, one mistake her alternate’s made, and that’s her choice of hilt.
Chester doesn’t use a rapier like this, either. Hers is a cup hilt, a cast-metal seashell that covers her hand. Her counterpart favors a swept hilt, an elegant lattice of metal protecting her hand.
But not enough. On most swept hilts, there is a ring at the base of the blade, small, but not small enough to exclude the point of a sword. Many competitors in Chester’s circles cover it with a sewn piece of boiled leather; she can tell her counterpart’s never fought anyone seriously, at least, not someone with a rapier, because she hasn’t.
So Chester goes in for the lunge, and aims for the center of the ring. It’s called hand sniping, and back home, she has rather a reputation for it. It’s all perfectly legal, of course, but no one likes it.
Her blade slips in, stripping a line of leather away from skin from forefinger to arm, but there is no blood. Instead, as the glove falls open, she sees something that actually makes her pause.
It’s metal and dead white flesh, dull and flat and horribly familiar.
It looks like Borg. It looks like her alternate has Borg implants under there. Chester looks up in horror at her alternate’s rage-filled eyes and says, “You complete fucking idiot.”
Then she drives a powerful backhand blow that has nothing to do with actual historical fencing at the other woman’s face and retreats. Her counterpart comes after her with a snarl, and she has her hands full repelling a very angry and very technically accomplished opponent—but she too is good, she’s good at this, and it’s such a relief to find at least one thing in which she can hold her own. They fight up and down the edge of the bridge, across in front of the chairs for the senior officers; so far the only injury is her alternate’s glove. Chester is going to have to find a way to break the stalemate and soon.
With a snarl, her alternate switches hands, shaking off the tattered glove. Now, Chester can see her hand is withered and distorted around the implants, like melting wax. Burns, and severe ones. “You thought you could fuck around with the Borg?” she demands. “I thought you were supposed to be smart!”
“This was a gift from the Emperor!” shouts her alternate, and rains blows down at her head that have no style at all; Chester counters them, and while her opponent’s sword is raised, kicks her hard in the belly, sending her staggering back.
“Then your Emperor is a fucking idiot!” she shouts. Her alternate comes back at her like a springball, and she pivots and sticks out a foot. The Admiral goes flying, pops back to her feet. “You do NOT fuck around with the Borg!”
“The Emperor gave me back my hands!”
“The Emperor left you wide open to the Borg Queen!” Chester parries the increasingly wild blows with a sort of distant satisfaction. She wasn’t exactly aiming to make her alternate stupidly furious, but she’ll take what she can get. “Or, if you’re incredibly lucky, wide open to becoming the Emperor’s puppet. You’re fucked, Chester.”
Now it’s her turn to be technically correct, elegant, while her alternate fights dirty. She grins into the other woman’s face as they close again. “You know, I almost bought your act, Admiral. I almost believed you were better, smarter, more accomplished than I am. But if there’s one thing I know about myself,” she twists, catching the Admiral’s sword on the quillions of her own with a twist and yanking her in close, “it’s that I can be a real idiot sometimes. Good to know you’re the same.”
The Admiral headbutts her, sending them both reeling out of measure. Chester staggers, her ears ringing, and steadies herself against a console.
“Admiral!” calls one of the technicians. “I’ve got it! We’re in their systems; the remote worm is transferring control now!”
The rage in her alternate’s eyes ebbs, and she begins to smile. “Nice try, Captain.” She raises her sword to Chester’s neck; Chester counters, leveling her own at the Admiral. “Your ship is about to become mine. I would think very carefully about my next actions, if I were you.”
Chester looks around the Bridge for a way out, seeing none. Her eyes go to the viewscreen, where the Interpreter hangs. Home, and her crew; her bleak barren quarters and the uncomfortable air of a briefing filled with strangers, and the idea of losing either fills her with a despairing rage. “And yet,” she says, her sword still steady, “I have a blade at your throat, Admiral.”
The malfunctions have only bought them so much time, systems redundancies and the ship’s own automated repair programs now working against them. The enemy virus is on the move again. Hawthorne’s done his job far too well.
“Slow them down,” says J’etris, working frantically at an Engineering console shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the ensigns. Self-destruct is now out of the question. At the rate the virus is progressing, it’ll cut their command access long before the sequence is complete.
“We have to do something,” hisses Hawthorne. He worms his way down the Jeffries tube, looking for an access panel. Tanek catches him by the collar of his uniform and holds him back. “If you stray more than two meters from me, the sensor dampner will no longer function, and you will get us caught.”
“We have to do something ,” Hawthorne snarls. “That’s my ship over there.”
“And we will,” says Tanek. He drags Hawthorne toward him. “But it is clear that Starfleet ingenuity will not save the day today. It is time for a different approach.”
“Hey—hey! What the fuck are you doing?”
“Bringing the Admiral a fugitive,” says Tanek, “like the good, devoted servant I am.”
The sneer in his voice on the last sentence is not nearly as reassuring as he probably thinks it is. “Tanek,” says Hawthorne. “Tanek, I’m not exactly the best actor.”
“You won’t need to be,” says Tanek, and kicks open the Jeffries tube, dragging them into the middle of the attention of an astonished Bridge.
“I have found the saboteur,” Tanek tells the Bridge, hauling a disheveled Hawthorne by the scruff of the neck like an indignant kitten. Chester has a moment of lurching uncertainty about which Tanek she’s looking at. The obsequious, almost pleading look he casts at her alternate is alarmingly true to life. It’s the look of a dog begging for scraps.
But she knows that the alternate Tanek can’t be here. She told this Tanek to find Hawthorne and escape. Evidently, they have been unable to do that—but that explains the sabotage, the systems failing that Chester knows she didn’t access.
Hawthorne struggles, for the look of the thing because there’s no way in hell he’s getting away from Tanek but to his shock Tanek lets himself be thrown off balance, lurching them both toward the tactical arch at the back of the Bridge. Hawthorne lands splayed against it, and Tanek bounces off it to turn and deck the officer manipulating the connection to Interpreter .
To his credit, Piper only needs a glance at the console before he’s working, his fingers flying over the surface. Tanek takes up a position at his back, batting aside one of the black-clad officers like it’s no effort at all.
The Admiral is for once completely lost for words. It takes her a long moment to put two and two together, and she glances at Chester with a startled, shocked outrage in her face.
“Yes, that would be my Tanek,” says Chester, and grins. “How’s it feel being on the other side of that little trick for once?”
“Kill them!” shouts her alternate. “And as for you, Captain—” She slashes against Chester’s sword, slapping it out of line and moving in. Chester parries, taking a step back and away.
“I’ve almost broken their link to our systems, Captain!” yells Hawthorne from Tactical, and ducks as someone slashes at him. That someone meets a sudden and conclusive end at Tanek’s hands a moment later; somehow the man’s gotten hold of a knife. It’s a slightly alarming sight, and Chester is briefly very glad to have him on her side.
But she’s got problems of her own.
Her alternate presses her attack, face a mask of rage. She clearly thinks that killing Chester will solve her problem, collapse Hawthorne and Tanek’s resistance. Chester, already tired, finds herself fighting for her life, and her alternate is driving her slowly down toward the command chairs and the center of the Bridge, and if her grandmother’s isn’t waiting there with a knife to finish the job, Chester is very, very wrong in her assessment of both versions of her grandmother. She pivots to put her back to the wall.
Her best hope is to make her alternate even angrier. Make her make stupid mistakes.
“You’ve talked a lot about how we’re different. The only real difference between us,” she says, “is that you’re a hell of a lot more interested in your own survival.”
“You don’t get to call me a coward and live!” howls her counterpart, and charges.
Chester sidesteps, pivots again, and brings her pommel down hard on the back of her alternate’s head. The First Admiral of the Terran Empire goes down flat. “Hawthorne!” yells Chester, “Get us a channel to the Interpreter. Tell them to beam us back, then get the hell out of here!”
“On it!” says Hawthorne. “Channel open!”
“ Interpreter, this is Chester! J’etris, there’s three of us to beam out. Please tell me the damn systems are working!”
“Barely!” There’s a tight note in J’etris’s voice. “Going to need to know it’s really you, Diane! ”
“I want a rematch for that rapier vs bat’leth fight we did because you definitely cheated!”
“ One pickup as ordered. We’ve got some guests we need to send back, too. ”
“Proceed!” Chester lurches over to Tanek and Hawthorne. A moment later, the blue of the Interpreter’s transporters whisks them away. Chester doesn’t get a last glimpse of her grandmother’s double, and she’s glad of it.
The transporter room of the Interpreter has never been a more welcome sight. Chester sags a little as soon as it registers.
Tanek is looking at the sword in her hand. “I wasn’t aware Starfleet was in the habit of taking trophies,” he says.
Chester lifts the sword, examines it. “It’s a shoddy bit of work anyway,” she says, then shrugs. “If she didn’t want me to take it, she shouldn’t have cornered me.”
Then she taps her commbadge. “Chester to Bridge, get us out of here!”
The ship bucks, throwing her against the transporter console. Hawthorne almost goes flying; Tanek stays right where he is with insulting ease. “Working on it!” says J’etris.
Chester heads for the Bridge, sword still in hand and very, very glad to be back aboard.
“It is so nice to be on a bridge without any disembowelled corpses on the walls,” she tells J’etris once she arrives.
“That’s strangely specific.”
“What’s the situation?”
“We’re outrunning them. Warp cores are functional and operating normally, so we’ve got some lead. We’re working on recreating the modifications to the deflector dish in hopes of replicating the transition between universes; estimated time to completion is fifteen minutes. T’ivesk,” she names one of Hawthorne’s deputies, an equally dour, steady Andorian, “is pushing as fast as he dares.”
“Good. If we have weapons, feel free to start shooting at them. I want her as discouraged as possible.”
“Her, Captain?” asks J’etris, her eyebrows rising. Chester realizes J’etris hasn’t had the opportunity to meet her alternate, and makes a face. “Let’s just say I make a slightly more dedicated villain than I’d like to.”
“Ah,” says J’etris, with a glance at her attire. “I see. Mr. Kotan, you heard the Captain. Have yourself a little target practice.”
“Aye aye, sir,” says Kotan, grinning. “Maximum discouragement initiated.”
“I want them embarrassed,” says Chester, “not dead. Dead isn’t going to make the lesson stick.” She hears an echo of her own counterpart there and grimaces. At least she’s fairly sure she’s bumped herself into the category of people her alternate wants dead, and that is genuinely reassuring. “I want her to know it’s far more expensive to grab ships from our universe than we’re worth. And I’d like her to stop chasing us.”
“Torpedoes away,” says Mr. Kotan, cheerfully. “A full spread of quantums, that should give them something to chew on.”
“Ten minutes until we can make a try to get home,” says J’etris.
“Sir, they’re hailing us!”
Chester hesitates. Then she nods. “Put them on.”
It’s not her alternate who greets them. It’s her grandmother’s alternate, sitting in the center seat, her face very cold and grim. Behind her, the Bridge does not look good; several consoles are smoking, and the bodies of crew litter the floor.
“ Captain Chester ,” she says, and the tone is one Chester has only ever heard from her own grandmother a handful of times. It’s the tone that convinced her as a little kid that if her grandmother ever got truly angry, the world would end. “You’ve made a mistake today.”
“I beg to differ,” she says. “You and the Admiral made a mistake today. You abducted me, my ship, and my crew from our universe. You attempted to murder the crew of a Federation starship, and use it to pursue your own war. I cannot allow that.”
“And you turned against your fellow Terrans. You turned against them, and you turned against yourself , and you did it by gaining our trust. I will not forget that. And though you may escape today, be assured that when I have the time to properly deal with you, you will regret it.”
The transmission terminates. There’s a brief silence. The aft view of the pursuing ship shows it dropping off, streaming atmosphere and plasma fire from the wounds left by the quantum torpedoes.
“All right,” says Chester. “Let’s get home.”