Chapter Text
Part Two
Klath’s entire world was in chaos.
His vision blurred as he was tossed about this way and that, desperately clinging on to whatever he could for dear life. In all of his years, in all the unwinnable battles and myriad implacable enemies that he had faced down throughout his battle-scarred life to date, this was perhaps the closest to Sto-vo-kor he had ever felt.
Atop his out of control Nimbosian horse, he thundered on and on across the desert wilderness.
Behind him, Jirel and Natasha were in hot pursuit, both of them keeping a tight hold over their own ferociously galloping steeds as they tried to catch up with the frenzied maelstrom of hooves and dust ahead of them.
It had become abundantly clear that Klath was not an experienced rider.
As the horse underneath him started to tire slightly, the Klingon managed to secure a stronger grip on the reins. He pulled back sharply on them as he bounced around the feisty animal’s back. But the horse showed no sign of stopping. If anything, the severity of Klath’s actions caused it to speed up again.
“Klath!” Jirel managed to call out over the hooves impacting the sand, “Slow down!”
“I cannot!” the Klingon bellowed back, “I think mine may be broken!”
He gave the reins another yank to underline his point.
The Trill kicked his horse on, trying to manoeuvre himself closer to his friend through the choking dust that was being kicked up, even as Natasha cut left to try and flank Klath on the other side.
“Not so hard!” Jirel urged, seeing Klath’s awkward tugging on the reins, “I thought told me you’d ridden before?”
“You are mistaken!”
Klath’s horse sensed the other animals gaining on either side, and instinctively swerved away with enough immediacy to cause Natasha and her own mount to have to take avoiding action. Klath was nearly thrown clean off by the severity of the movement.
Jirel kept his own horse grimly under control, and with an extra kick, rider and steed were able to get back alongside the Klingon.
“Give me the reins!”
With considerable difficulty, through Jirel reaching out one way and Klath the other, the Trill was able to make a grab for the frayed material of the second pair of reins. He took a tight hold, as the two horses pounded across the desert in formation, and started to ease Klath’s animal out of its gallop, while simultaneously slowing his own.
Slowly, but surely, the two horses slowed to a trot.
“Thank you,” Klath managed, accepting the reins back as Natasha caught back up to them.
“Seriously, I could have sworn you told me you’d ridden before,” Jirel smiled back, “Something about your uncle rearing Sarks back on Qo’noS?”
Klath glowered back at him as he caught his breath, with enough force to make Jirel decide that he should probably move on.
“Nice riding,” Natasha offered to Jirel, who failed to stop himself from looking a little smug at the unexpected compliment, “I assumed all this wannabe cowboy nonsense wouldn’t extend this far.”
“Hey, Colorado born and bred,” he grinned, before his face contorted a little, “I mean, technically I don’t really know where I was born. On a Trill colony, apparently, to whoever abandoned me as a baby—You know what, that can wait for my therapist. Point is, on Earth, my family kept horses out in the country. Y’know, when my dad wasn’t—”
Jirel stopped himself, glancing back at Klath, who was listening on with mild intrigue, not used to the Trill talking about his past in such detail.
“I did not know that,” he grunted, “About your family.”
“Yeah, well,” Jirel managed with a shrug, “Never came up, did it?”
Natasha kept a watching brief, aware that she was the only one of the Bounty’s crew who was privy to the full details on Jirel’s family, and the way that he had so completely failed to emulate his father’s Starfleet career.
At times, she still felt it was odd how little the crew seemed to know about each other’s pasts, given how they spent all their time living in each other’s pockets on such a small vessel. But she was also learning that when your past was as miserable and filled with regret as theirs seemed to be, you didn’t feel like sharing much.
She definitely felt the same way about elements of her own past.
As they trotted on, Jirel glanced over in her direction, eager to steer the conversation elsewhere. “Anyway, you’re not so bad yourself,” he said, motioning to her riding style, “Didn’t realise they had so many ranches back in London.”
She offered a shrug and patted her steed as it bucked its head slightly. “Three years of riding lessons,” she explained, “When I was a teenager.”
“Huh, cute,” Jirel grinned back, “Still though, I guess one snobby riding school isn’t really a match for some real horseback riding, out in the country.”
“Um, pretty sure I was keeping up with you well enough just then.”
“Yeah, but who was the one who managed to slow both horses down at the same time without anyone getting hurt?”
“Psh. I could have done that with my eyes closed!”
“You wanna settle this with a race? Cos we’ve got time for a race.”
In between the bickering duo, Klath emitted a low, frustrated growl. Realising that he was going to be stuck in the middle of them all the way to Arcadia Falls, on top of a wild animal that seemed to have no clear control system.
As the group moved on through the desert, and Jirel started picking out landmarks that they could race to, the Klingon wondered if he had drawn the short straw on this particular adventure.
Fixing a water pump now seemed like the more palatable option.
* * * * *
“Crap on a crapping pile of crap!”
Denella’s latest string of expletives echoed around the confines of the small hut, even as Zesh entered with an armful of straggly wiring.
“From what I remember,” her former shipmate offered, “That’s not a good sign.”
The Orion woman groaned as she stood from behind the bulky water pump unit and did her best to dust down her baggy grey overalls. As Zesh wisely kept his distance, she gestured at the rear of the housing with annoyance.
“I have no idea who put this thing together, but I would really like five minutes alone with them and a live plasma conduit.”
She wiped her face with her hands in frustration, doing little more than coat her skin in a fresh layer of dirt. Zesh smiled sympathetically as she continued. “I mean, it’s a complete mess. There’s about six different types of wiring back here, chunks of isolinear circuitry that I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be doing anything, and—”
She paused to spit out a few flecks of dust and sand that had crept into her mouth.
“—The whole thing is filled with crapping sand!”
Zesh stepped forwards cautiously and set the wiring down on top of the unit, as Denella took a tired slug from the canteen of water she had brought from the Bounty.
“This is Nimbus III,” he offered, “I’ve found that down here, people tend to make do and mend with whatever they can get their hands on. Everything gets repaired, reclaimed or repurposed. Over and over again. Actually, I was rather hoping that sort of thing would appeal to you.”
“What the hell gave you that idea?”
“Because I recall a time onboard the Bounty when we made our escape from a gang of Kzinti pirates thanks to someone getting the warp core back online using an ore sample pod as an improvised intermix chamber.”
Denella mustered a friendlier expression. She could see when someone was massaging her ego. Throughout her life, she’d heard just about every line going. But when it was her engineering prowess being complimented, she didn’t entirely hate it. And, deep down, while the water pump was proving to be a singularly frustrating challenge, with the unassuming exterior of the unit hiding a chaotically improvised mish-mash of components and systems, there was a part of her that was in its element.
“Besides,” Zesh continued, gesturing to the wires he had brought, “Your humble assistant has dredged up the extra duranium wiring you wanted. Cannibalised it from an old mining generator.”
She cast an eye over the parts that Zesh had brought with him, picking through the wiring with a critical eye. “Hmm. Not exactly ideal, is it?”
“Just the way you like it,” Zesh countered with a smile.
This time, Denella’s face creased into a wry smile of her own. He wasn’t wrong.
“Ok,” she continued, as she continued to sort through the pile, “Now I just need Sunek to get back with that microsoldering kit I asked for, and I’ll see if I can—”
As if she had just read out some mystical Vulcan incantation, almost as soon as she had mentioned his name, the door to the hut swung open and Sunek burst in, looking even more irritated than Denella had been.
“Ok, so, this place is officially my least favourite place ever,” the Vulcan griped to nobody in particular as he stomped into the dusty hut, “Stupid, sand-filled, hot-as-crap hellhole of a dump of a stupid planet!”
Zesh watched the Vulcan pacing around the stuffy hut with a modicum of curiosity, but Denella snapped her attention back to the task at hand. “Sunek, you got that microsoldering kit?”
But Sunek wasn’t listening. He was entirely absorbed by his own frustrations. And his anger.
“You know what just happened? I went back over there to get whatever stupid thing you wanted, rested my hand on the rail of the cargo ramp, and just freaking burned myself! Right down to the bone!”
He held out his right hand to underline his point, which now displayed an ugly red burn across its pale surface.
“Hurts like crap! And I do all my favourite stuff with that hand, so now that’s gonna be a whole thing—”
“Sunek,” Denella sighed, “The kit?”
“I mean, what the hell are we even doing here?” the Vulcan’s rant continued unimpeded, as he poked an accusing finger squarely in Zesh’s direction, “Protecting this guy’s stupid Tongo prize? I remember when we used to take on actual proper jobs, y’know?”
“And I remember when you used to be the funny one,” Zesh muttered under his breath.
Sunek’s keener Vulcan hearing meant that he fully picked up on that comment, and he whirled around with genuine venom in his eyes. A look that caused Denella genuine unease.
“Oh, I’ll show you funny, big ears,” he snapped, marching over to the Ferengi and forming an angry fist with his good hand, “I’ll show you right now—!”
“Sunek!”
Denella snapped his name out with enough intensity to cause the angry pilot to immediately pause, though not before everyone present, including the thoroughly unnerved Zesh, could see that the fist was raised, and he had been ready to use it.
Keeping her focus on the Vulcan, Denella jerked her head in the direction of the door. “A word? Please?”
With his anger now regressing back to a mere sulk, Sunek reluctantly followed her out into the blazing heat, cradling his injured hand and leaving a relieved Zesh to pat the nervous sweat off his brow with his pocket square.
As soon as they were a short distance away from the hut, Denella whirled around to her colleague, who was looking down at the ground and scuffing the sand with his boot.
“Ok, look, I don’t know what the hell’s gotten into you lately. If it’s the heat, or something you ate, or the first stage of Pon Farr, but you need to calm down.”
“I am calm!”
“Don’t lie. You’ve been flying off the handle ever since we got here, and you were just about to punch Zesh in there!”
“He was asking for it.”
“He really wasn’t.”
Sunek’s head snapped up to glare at her, a fresh flash of anger glowing in his eyes. But unlike Zesh, Denella didn’t flinch. After the day she’d had wrestling with the water pump, she had some frustrations of her own to work off.
“Please, try it,” she grunted, “Cos I’m definitely in the mood to punch back.”
For a moment, it looked as though Sunek was actually going to take a swing. But at the last moment, he unclenched his fist and returned to unhappily cradling his burned hand.
“Sorry,” he managed, an apology delivered with all the emotional conviction of a surly teenage Tellarite that had just been caught stealing latinum from their mother’s purse.
“Save another one of those for Zesh,” she replied, before gesturing down to his hand, “Now, go run a dermal regenerator over that, and then, if it’s not too much trouble, bring me the microsoldering kit.”
He gave her another of his best teenage pouts, but eventually conceded the point with a slight nod of his head, and started a slow trudge back towards the Bounty, exaggeratedly kicking his heels as he went.
As Denella watched him leave, her own frustrations subsided, replaced by concern for her friend. Whatever was happening to him.
As Sunek walked, he tried his best to ignore the fiery pain in his hand.
And the similar sensation in his head.