Chapter Text
Part One
She was trapped.
The rush of claustrophobia wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was sudden enough to cause her to jerk her head up, where it impacted with some force on the metal surface above her.
A stream of choice Orion expletives filled the previously silent cockpit of the Bounty as Denella angrily crawled back out from underneath the forward helm console, rubbing her throbbing forehead as she did so.
“Problem?” Sunek grinned, the rangy Vulcan pilot standing over her with his arms folded.
The nausea she already felt from the bang on the head only increased when she was reacquainted with the sight of Sunek’s choice of clothing for today. A brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt depicting a particularly colourful, and partially obscene, beach panorama on Risa.
When asked about his attire earlier, after it had put the rest of the crew off their breakfasts, he had simply explained that he was trying something new. He didn’t mention that his reasons for trying something new were partly connected with the aftereffects of his recent run-in with a group of fellow members of the V’tosh ka’tur, which had left him even more emotionally troubled than usual. He was keeping the finer details, and the unease he felt, to himself. Sunek didn’t like serious discussions.
Denella forced herself back to her feet, still rubbing her head with one hand and dusting down her faded blue overalls with the other. Her face, as it always seemed to be, was streaked with grime.
“Every time!” she fired back with a face like thunder, “Every time I do any repairs under there, I hit my head on that power coupler!”
“I’ll get the medkit,” Natasha Kinsen, the Bounty’s human doctor, chimed in from the rear of the cockpit, disappearing down the rear steps in the direction of the ship’s small medical bay.
From the centre chair, Jirel, the unjoined Trill and the de facto captain of the Bounty, smiled in amusement and glanced over at Klath, the Bounty’s Klingon tactical officer.
“You know what they say. Bang your head on a power coupler once, shame on the power coupler. Bang your head on a power coupler twice, shame on—”
“Shut up,” Denella griped.
They were cruising along at low warp, on a regulation delivery to a Talarian mining colony that they had managed to wrangle from one of Jirel’s contacts in the sector. As such, with little else to do, Denella had decided to get on with some maintenance. A decision she was now regretting.
“Anyway,” she continued, gesturing to the pilot’s console, “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Nuh-huh,” Sunek insisted with a shake of his head, “I’m telling you, the navigation system has been playing up ever since we put in for those repairs last week. It’s not my fault that, as the greatest pilot in the galaxy, I demand perfection from my instruments.”
She ignored the dozen sarcastic replies that sprang to mind at the Vulcan’s latest vainglorious ramblings. She was too annoyed to get into a bickering contest right now.
“Sunek, I’ve run four full diagnostics, I’ve realigned the navigational deflector twice, and I’ve just checked and double checked every single control circuit under there. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“Why? What exactly makes you think there’s something wrong with it?”
Sunek shrugged his lanky shoulders. “It pulls to the left.”
Denella stared back at the tousle-haired Vulcan, who for once in his inherently contradictory life actually appeared deadly serious, despite his choice of shirt.
“It…pulls to the left?”
“Yes! As soon as we go past warp four, we start to drift off course, no matter what I key into the navigation computer. And I need to correct it. Every time, just a little bit back over to the right. Cos it’s pulling to the left!”
She shook her head and shot an exasperated glance at Jirel, who just offered her a flat shrug in return. With no backup forthcoming, she let out a long sigh. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” she replied, “It all checks out.”
“It never used to do that, is all,” the Vulcan grumbled unhappily.
Natasha returned to the cockpit and made a beeline for the Orion woman, waving a small scanner over her head.
“I’m fine,” Denella insisted, trying to swat her hand away, “Pretty sure the cause of the headache is right there.”
She gestured at the indignant Sunek, who wasn’t giving up his hopes of a bickering contest without a fight.
“Hey!” he snapped, “Your repairs messed the ship up, ok?”
The green-skinned woman glanced at Natasha as she continued to work, her irritation level clear in her expression. “On the other hand, if you’ve got a sedative handy, I think I can find a good home for it.”
Natasha stifled a smile as she finished her work and checked the results. “Well, nothing’s broken,” she reported, “Although, you are showing several signs of severe fatigue.”
“Nothing new there,” Denella shrugged as she started to pack up the collection of engineering tools strewn across the deck from her repair efforts on Sunek’s console.
“I’m serious. You really should get some rest—”
Before she could go any further, Denella had finished with her tools and was walking back over to her engineering console at the rear of the cockpit, silently blanking the medical advice being offered. Natasha caught Jirel’s eye and gave a subtle but firm nod in the Orion engineer’s direction, with a look of concern that wasn’t lost on the man in the centre seat. The Trill nodded in understanding and coughed awkwardly.
“Um, you know, Denella, you might wanna listen to her.”
“Sure, yeah, I’ll get right on that,” the Orion woman snorted, “Let me just use some of my vast savings to book a spa weekend on Casperia Prime.”
Natasha sighed and gestured to her scanner. “I don’t mean—Look, you are showing all the classic signals for stress and fatigue. Low endorphin count, high heart rate, clear irritability—”
“In her defence,” Jirel couldn’t help but chip in, “We all get like that after working with Sunek.”
“Um, I’m still in the room?”
Natasha ignored the squabbling and walked over to where Denella was now sat checking over her console, seemingly in a concerted effort to continue to ignore her. “Plus, you’re grinding your teeth a lot.”
Denella’s jaw paused in the middle of a particularly intense grind, and she attempted to casually play it off as a complete coincidence, ignoring the slightly smug look from the medical professional in front of her.
“I’m not asking you to spend a fortnight at a meditation retreat on Betazed,” Natasha continued, “I’m just saying, nothing’s happening here right now. So, get some rest. Go to your cabin, listen to some music, read a book, paint a picture, I dunno. Whatever you do when you’re not fixing the ship.”
Denella finally looked up and acknowledged the persistent woman looming over her console and managed a wry smile.
She didn’t want to admit it, but she was feeling fatigued. As usual, she had insisted on carrying out the majority of the repair work herself last week, and she was now using their gentle cruise to the Talarian colony to work through her ever-present list of minor issues around the ship. The sort of stuff that never really got fixed because she was too busy with more pressing repairs from their last misadventure.
She had actually been looking forward to working her way through them, despite how exhausted she was feeling. Because fixing things made her happy. Even if it also made her tired. But she had a sneaking suspicion that particular argument wouldn’t wash with Natasha.
“Are all doctors trained to be this annoying?” she replied eventually.
“Took advanced classes at medical school,” Natasha grinned back, “Trust me, this is only me on about a three or a four.”
“She’s also right,” Jirel piped up, “Not much going on here right now.”
“We are still 2.7 days away from our destination,” Klath added with a tap of his console.
“It’s still doing it, you know!” Sunek chimed in from the pilot’s console, gesturing to the navigation computer with an annoyed point of his finger having singularly failed to read the room.
Denella sighed and shook her head, a rueful grimace on her face.
“I’ve got plenty to do,” she persisted, gesturing to the maintenance schedule on a dusty padd in front of her, “Plus, by the sounds of it, I need to run a fifth diagnostic on Sunek’s console.”
Jirel jumped out of his seat and walked over to glance at the padd. “All that stuff has needed doing for months. An extra few days isn’t gonna make a difference. And Sunek’s probably just messing with you—”
“Am not!”
“—So either listen to the doc, or we’ll have to drag you kicking and screaming back to your cabin.”
The Orion woman looked from the kind smile of the Trill, to the determined face of the human and the knowing glare of the Klingon off to one side. It was becoming clear that she wasn’t going to win this particular battle.
“Ok. Fine. I guess I’ll go…relax.”
She began tapping her console, eliciting a sharper look from Natasha. “Just gonna set that diagnostic running, and then—”
“Hey,” Natasha barked, pointing to the exit, “Now. Relax. Rest. Sleep. In any order.”
Like a petulant child being sent to their room, Denella reluctantly abandoned her work and shuffled towards the rear steps of the cockpit.
“And don’t worry,” Jirel added, grabbing the padd from her console, “We can do some of—”
“Don’t you dare do any of it. You’ll screw it all up,” she called back, “I’m the engineer, this ship is my baby, and I won’t let you hurt her.”
She gently patted the metal wall next to her for effect. Jirel rolled his eyes.
“You know, I kept the Bounty perfectly shipshape before you got here.”
“No,” Denella smiled knowingly, “You didn’t.”
* * * * *
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She sat alone in the ship’s dining area, a half-finished meal in front of her. It was the first proper meal she’d eaten in some time. But her attention wasn’t on the food, she was focused on the sound she could hear.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It was coming from inside the far wall of the room. She had never studied this specific class of ship in any detail before, but when you had worked on as many ships and shuttles as she had, you began to understand that, under the surface, one was much the same as the others.
Which meant that she could work on diagnosing the source of the tapping.
As she sat in silence, her ear cocked towards the source of the noise, the door to the dining area suddenly snapped open, causing her to gasp in fright.
“Hey, it’s alright, it’s only me,” Jirel smiled as he stepped through the doorway.
It had been several hours since the Trill and his colleagues had so unceremoniously rescued her from her former owners, and she was still struggling to put together the truth of her new situation. The feeling of freedom was one that she was having trouble getting used to.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Jirel tentatively walked over to the replicator, as if not wanting to startle a wild animal on the other side of the room, and ordered a mug of jumja tea with four sugars. Taking the mug from the replicator, he tried to broach the awkward silence.
“Sorry we didn’t have anything in your size in storage, by the way,” he offered, pointing back at the replicator, “This old thing only does food, y’know?”
Denella looked down at the grubby, oversized overalls she’d been given to wear. Jirel had admitted to not even knowing where they had come from, or how long they had been onboard. They smelt musky, and despite her standing nearly six feet tall, she was dwarfed by them.
But despite the smell, and the scratchy fabric, and the fact that they appeared to have been designed to fit a grossly overweight Hupyrian, she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so comfortable.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She looked back at the Trill and managed a thankful smile, in lieu of a more verbose response. It was enough to relax Jirel slightly, and he felt comfortable enough to approach the table and sit down, albeit at the opposite end to her.
Another moment of silence. In her mind, Denella had whittled down the possible sources of the tapping to a shortlist of five.
“So,” Jirel managed eventually, swirling his tea around in the mug, “I was—We were wondering if there was anywhere we could take—I mean, anywhere you wanted to go?”
This distracted her from her diagnosis. Truth be told, she hadn’t really thought about it. She’d never considered that she’d ever again have the chance to actually choose her own destiny.
She thought about going back to Orpheus IV, but soon sadly realised there was nothing left there. Not now. She considered one of the other colonies set up by the Orion Free Traders. But she didn’t even know if they still existed, or if the Syndicate had overwhelmed them all.
She also knew that it probably didn’t matter all that much what she wanted to do. She was aware of the likelihood that she wouldn’t be free for long enough for it to matter.
“No,” she replied, her voice sounding quieter than she’d been expecting.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Oh,” Jirel nodded, feeling the awkwardness in the room rising once again, “Well, y’know, there’s plenty of neutral spaceports around here. We could always drop you off, and—”
“He’ll be looking for you,” she said, causing Jirel to pause in confusion.
“Who?”
“Rilen Dar,” she replied, suppressing the shudder that even saying his name caused, “He was the one who…He owns me.”
“Hey, we’ve been through this. Nobody owns you now.”
“He’ll be looking for you. And for me. And he won’t stop until he finds us. So…I don’t think it really matters where I go.”
Jirel set his mug down on the table and called up one of his more confident swashbuckling space captain looks. It felt like the situation called for it.
“Heh. You know, if I had a bar of latinum for every galactic creep that was out there trying to find us, I’d…well, I’d have traded the Bounty in for a better ship years ago.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Besides,” he continued, “We masked our transporter pattern, and our warp signature. I think. And we’re not planning any vacations in Syndicate space any time soon, so he’ll be waiting a while.”
She considered pushing the matter further, explaining to the Trill precisely how much danger was now hanging over his ship, regardless of how much time might pass or how much bravado he might have in reserve. But she didn’t want to dwell on that too much. And not telling him the full truth about Rilen Dar’s merciless personality was probably an act of kindness. Best he didn’t know too much.
“So, just think about it,” Jirel added, “ No rush, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want. But we can take you anywhere you wanna go, ok? No questions asked.”
She nodded slightly as he finished his tea and stood up, walking back over to the door.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Actually,” she blurted out, causing the Trill to pause and turn back, “I was thinking I could…do something for you. To…thank you?”
“Um, I thought we’d been over that as well,” Jirel squirmed uncomfortably, “That isn’t why we—”
“There’s a faulty plasma circuit behind that wall,” she said, pointing across the room to the source of the tapping, having narrowed her shortlist to one culprit, “That tapping sound? Those things can be pretty dangerous, could explode without warning. But…I could fix it?”
Jirel stared at the Orion woman for a moment, open-mouthed.
“You could…?”
Emboldened by her offer, Denella reeled off the full list she had put together in her head.
“Also, I think I spotted the start of a nasty hull fracture in your cargo bay. And there was a whirring sound coming from the air circulators which is definitely a sign of a loose connection somewhere. Plus the sonic shower in my cabin was stuck on a low setting, and I think your Klingon friend mentioned that the phaser cannons were offline—?”
“What is happening right now?” a mystified Jirel managed, as the Orion slave girl who had barely managed two words to him since she had come onboard continued.
“—And I definitely heard a whine from the impulse drive when we broke orbit. That’s a miscalibration of the primary injectors.”
She paused for a moment, then remembered something new, gesturing at the replicator.
“And I think that’s a Ferengi design, right? The Replipad Mini XS? You can easily reprogram those to make just about anything. The Ferengi just throttle the software so that people need to pay extra for an upgrade.”
Jirel’s open mouth formed a smile. Denella puffed out her cheeks, her worries temporarily forgotten.
“So, can I get started?”