Chapter Text
Part One (Cont’d)
The frustrated cry of anger was clearly audible through the thin walls of the hut.
Denella paused in the middle of her initial examination of Goodlife Ranch’s water pump and pricked her ears up in guarded curiosity. She hadn’t realised that anyone else was awake yet.
The Bounty’s crew had turned in for the night inside the cooler atmosphere of the ship itself, with Zesh eagerly accepting the offer of the ship’s spare cabin after spending too many nights suffering in the stifling confines of the ranch itself. And after a chilled night’s sleep, Denella had specifically woken early to get started assessing the repairs that Zesh needed doing. Partly to avoid doing too much work in the worst of the Nimbosian heat. And partly because she just really loved repairing things.
Although she was starting to reassess the latter of those reasons after three hours spent assessing the state of this particular repair. Very little about the improvised Nimbosian design in front of her made any sense.
And besides, she was an engineer. Not a plumber.
She was just about losing her patience when she had heard the angry cry from outside. Wiping her dirty hands on her weather-beaten overalls, she peered outside the door of the hut at the rest of the ranch, basking in the morning sun. It didn’t take long to locate the source of the noise, though what she saw just provoked further questions.
She stepped out into the heat and walked over to the small porch area to the side of the main homestead, staring at the curious sight in front of her as it rocked back and forth on a creaking wooden chair.
“Sunek?” she managed, “What the hell are you doing?”
The Vulcan was in the middle of running a small knife down a piece of wood in his hands. All around him were haphazard piles of shavings, along with various other wooden bits in varying states of disrepair.
It didn’t escape Denella’s attention that there were also a succession of deep gouges in the wooden handrail next to where Sunek was sitting. From their shape and size, Denella quickly surmised that they had been made very recently by the blade of the knife in Sunek’s hand. The evidence of the ferocity involved in some of the gouges didn’t exactly settle her growing concerns.
Sunek, for his part, didn’t look up from his work, as he rocked back and forth in the chair and continued to shave off thin slices of the light brown wood, his face a picture of concentration underneath his hat. “Some dumb thing Jirel told me about after dinner last night when he wouldn’t shut up about all that ‘Old Earth’ crap,” he explained as he worked, “It’s called ‘whittling’.”
He stuck out his tongue in a show of concentration, underlining how seriously he was taking the task at hand.
“You just sorta carve out what you want in the wood. Stupid hobby, if you ask me.”
Denella watched the Vulcan work. There was something undeniably amusing about the scene, but after a moment her eyes strayed back to the gouges on the handrail. She wasn’t used to her friend getting that angry. Still, she surmised, remembering her own irritation with the water pump, maybe it’s just the heat getting to us.
Eventually, Sunek growled again and tossed the piece of wood he’d been working on onto the deck of the porch below, alongside all the others. “It’s supposed to be a depiction of the ancient Vulcan gods of death and war fighting on their armoured sehlats at the gates of Sha Ka Ree. Saw a piece of art about that when I was a kid, dated back to before Surak’s Time of Awakening. It was pretty cool.”
“And what’s it ended up being?” Denella asked.
Sunek reached down and retrieved his unfinished masterpiece from the ground, idly turning it over in his hands before shrugging in conclusion.
“Piece of wood.”
Denella sighed and leaned back on the freshly damaged handrail. “Do you ever think that maybe the reason you never stick with a hobby for very long is that you set your sights too high?”
“How do you mean?” Sunek asked, scrunching his face up in confusion,
“Well, why not start with something a bit easier? Why not try whittling a…stick?”
Sunek looked at her with disgust. As if she’d just asked him to sculpt something obscene. More disgusted than that, in fact, given that whittling mild erotica was probably next on his schedule. “What would be the point of that?”
She shook her head, accepting that this was going to end up being the latest in a long line of pastimes that Sunek had dived into with both feet and then immediately abandoned. Whittling could join Anbo-jyutsu, Risian cuisine and the bass guitar he had once impulsively replicated for himself on the pile of forgotten hobbies.
Still, the angry undertone of the Vulcan’s latest creative dismissal remained a concern.
“Sunek, are you ok?”
The Vulcan snapped a look at her a little more quickly than he’d wanted to, followed by a guilty glance in the direction of the gouges on the handrail.
In truth, the sudden flash of rage had taken him by surprise. He prided himself on his laid back approach to pretty much every aspect of life, but after his latest failed attempt to recreate a priceless piece of prehistoric Vulcan art in Nimbosian hardwood, he had experienced a flare of anger so great that it had only been satisfied by him repeatedly plunging the knife into the softer wood of the rail.
And he knew, deep down, that wasn’t the first such incident that had happened recently.
He had thrown a padd across his cabin with enough force to smash the screen, after the latest romance novel he had been sent via the interstellar subscription service he had been talked into signing up for had arrived corrupted and unreadable. And he had even wrenched one of the adjusting levers on his pilot’s chair clean from the housing after wasting twenty minutes trying to get it back the way he liked it, after Klath had adjusted the seat to his own larger dimensions.
Ordinarily, he’d have just dismissed it all as a bit of pent-up frustration. Nothing a blowout weekend on Risa wouldn’t cure.
But the residual dispassionate side of his Vulcan intellect couldn’t help but recall his recent run-in with some of his former V’tosh ka’tur colleagues. And the series of forced mind melds he had received from a particularly crazed Vulcan called Sokar. The ones that had caused him to nearly betray his friends, and assist Sokar in a revenge attack on Vulcan itself.
Although he was sure he was back to normal after that, he also recalled what he had seen since then when he had tried to pick up an old childhood meditation technique. The sailing ship on the Voroth Sea. And the storm that sat on the horizon.
Still, Sunek didn’t want to get into any of that right now. That was all way too serious. And now that the handrail had taken one for the team, he felt suitably relaxed again. So he met Denella’s concerned gaze with a typically Sunek-ian grin.
“I’m fine,” he replied, standing up and tossing the wood back down to the ground, “Whittling’s dumb, is all.”
He adjusted his hat, pocketed the knife, and walked back to the front door of the homestead whistling a deliberately jaunty tune.
Denella followed him. Her concerns very much not put to rest.
* * * * *
“Please say it.”
Jirel looked at Klath from across the wooden table that dominated the main living area on the ground floor of Goodlife Ranch’s main homestead.
The actual structure, like the other buildings on the ranch, was made of large wooden beams supporting thin metal sheets. Inside, while there were computer controls dotted about, the furniture was archaic, tired and worn. It was as if you had stepped through a temporal anomaly into the past.
And Jirel was loving it.
On the other side of the table, the Klingon folded his arms defiantly, as the front door opened and Natasha and Zesh entered from outside.
“I am not going to say it,” Klath growled at the Trill.
“Say what?” Natasha asked.
Jirel nodded his head in Klath’s direction and smiled widely. “I’m trying - really, really trying - to get Klath to give me a great big old ‘yee haw’,” he explained excitedly, before turning back to the still impassive Klingon, “C’mon. Please? I’ll give you ten slips of latinum.”
The Klingon’s glower deepened, but Jirel persisted.
“Tell you what, I’ll also accept a ‘Howdy, partner’.”
“I’m almost scared to ask this,” Natasha sighed patiently, “But you are aware that this is all real, right? This isn’t a holosuite program, or a quirky theme park, or some sort of fever dream. This is a very, very real and very, very scary planet.”
“Um, it’s a very, very cool planet,” Jirel countered, gesturing to his hat, “With cowboy hats.”
“And guns. And bandits. And god knows what else.”
“Besides,” Zesh chimed in from her side, “You’re here to do a job, Jirel. And we need a plan. My buyer won’t be here for another two days, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a plan,” he replied with a dismissive wave of his hand, keeping his attention on Natasha’s unimpressed face, “Listen, doc, don’t let that Starfleet guilt of yours ruin everyone else’s fun while we’re down here, ok?”
Natasha’s face immediately morphed into a glower as deep as anything that Klath had been able to produce. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean. Everyone knows how much you lot hate to be reminded about this place. Tends to be a bit of an obsession with you guys. The grim little hellhole you helped to create. How could the perfect Federation mess up so badly—?”
“Ok, firstly, I was kinda hoping you’d noticed, but I left Starfleet behind a while ago. And secondly, I might be unhappy about being here. But not because of some collective guilty conscience. Because of basic decency. I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of us all profiting off of other people’s misery!”
“My buyer assures me that he intends to sell the water back to the Nimbosians for a fair price,” Zesh offered, not exactly making the strongest pitch for humanitarian of the year, “Minus overheads.”
Jirel’s focus remained on Natasha. The human woman stared back across the table, allowing herself to be consumed by the growing unease that had been kindled ever stronger since Zesh had revealed Goodlife Ranch’s secret treasure. “I’ve told you before, you need to stop pretending like you’re still in that old uniform of yours,” the Trill fired off with a knowing grin, “Cos if you don’t, then you’re not gonna last long in this job.”
“And you need to stop pretending that you’re too cool to care about other people, cos I know by now that’s not true,” she countered, before gesturing to his cowboy getup, “And you really need to stop pretending this is a costume party. Cos it isn’t. It’s the Planet of Galactic Peace. The most dangerous planet in the quadrant.”
“I’m not pretending this is a—”
“You’re wearing spurs, Jirel,” she said, gesturing down at the metal spikes sticking out the back of his dusty boots, “You’re actually wearing spurs.”
There was an awkward pause from the Trill, as he looked down at his footwear and back up again.
“They, um, they came with the boots—”
“He replicated them this morning,” Klath boomed out from his side of the table.
“Ok, whose side are you on?”
Zesh sighed deeply and flopped down in the chair next to Klath, gesturing to the bickering duo as he did so. “You know, Jirel, all this is no way to run a business operation.”
The Ferengi’s pointed comment was enough to distract the Trill and the human from each other, as they whirled around to Zesh in unison.
“Um, excuse me?” Natasha snapped.
“Rule of Acquisition number 229, my dear. Latinum lasts longer than lust.”
That comment was enough to elicit a scoff from Natasha, and a look of confused innocence from Jirel. Both of which, Klath wordlessly thought to himself, seemed designed to overcompensate for something or other.
“Well, that’s definitely not what’s happening here,” Natasha fired back.
“Yeah,” Jirel nodded defiantly, “Plus, Rule of Acquisition number 581: You should always…y’know. Shut up.”
“Good one.”
“Hey, I’m defending your honour here!”
“I don’t need my honour defended by a man who’s dressed up like a holodeck malfunction! Besides, this isn’t about—This is about us doing the right thing down here!”
“Which we definitely are doing.”
“How can you say that—!”
“Guys!”
The unexpected voice of Denella caused the bickering duo to shut up, to the appreciation of their small, unhappy audience around the table. They all turned to see the Orion engineer and Sunek standing in the doorway, surveying the scene with a trace of amusement.
“Hate to break up this thrilling discussion, but…what’s this plan of yours?”
Jirel considered brushing off that comment and getting back to his bickering. But he could feel every set of eyes in the humid homestead on him. And he decided it probably wasn’t the time.
“Fine,” he conceded, “The plan. Let’s get moving.”
The Trill walked over to the door, making a distinctive clinking sound with every step that he took. The sound that had seemed so incredibly cool to him when he had walked down the Bounty’s loading ramp this morning suddenly making him feel distinctly self-conscious.
As he walked past Denella and Sunek and out into the harsh sunlight, the Vulcan glanced down and raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“What the hell have you got on your feet?”