Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
Denella could sense that she wasn’t alone.
It had been several minutes since Zesh had left her alone in the hut, the Ferengi suggesting that he go and fix them some food back onboard the Bounty. Since then, she had redoubled her efforts on the water pump in front of her. And was actually starting to make some good progress.
And then, just as she had finished the painstaking and somewhat noisy job of rewiring the main motor, and she prepared to stand back up from her prone, crouched position behind the stocky pump unit, she had been hit with an unerring feeling that there was someone in the hut with her.
They must have got in while she had been running the motor through its full calibration setup.
She deftly reached down for her faithful Orion dagger that was clipped to her belt as silently as possible, and prepared to pounce.
And then, she heard something else.
“Ugh! Stupid planet!”
She felt herself immediately relax and withdrew her hand from the blade, and stood up from behind the pump housing. On the other side of the hut, the irritated Sunek jumped back, seemingly surprised to see her. The jumpscare did little to help his ever-darkening mood.
“Hey, idiot! Don’t do that!”
“Do what?” she asked, as she wearily stretched her aching back.
“Don’t jump out on people like that! I had no idea you were back there!”
Despite the continued erratic behaviour of her colleague, the Orion woman couldn’t help but smile at this bemusing comment. “Where did you think I’d be?” she asked, gesturing around, “Playing racquetball over in the east wing? Sunning myself by the pool?”
Sunek went to snap a fierce retort back at her, but managed to stop himself before his simmering anger boiled over again. A process that he was finding harder and harder to complete the longer he spent in Goodlife Ranch. He put some extra effort into summoning up whatever residual good humour that remained inside of him, and idly gestured to the water pump with his dermally regenerated hand.
“How’s it coming?”
Denella wiped her hands on her overalls and stepped around to the front of the unit. “It’s getting there,” she replied, “Watch this.”
She tapped a command into the control panel, now activated with a fresh external power pack but still flickering slightly, and stood back proudly. The two crewmates watched on as the bulky pump slowly but surely whined into life, filling the small dusty hut with a thoroughly nasty, grinding sound which screeched out from the long-dormant mechanisms.
Both of them involuntarily winced as the noise reached a crescendo, Sunek covering his sensitive Vulcan ears against the barrage of discordant grinding, before the whole unit suddenly shuddered to a silent halt.
A somewhat less proud Denella looked back over at her unimpressed colleague.
“Like I said. Getting there.”
Sunek mustered a smile. And to her fresh concern, Denella realised that it had actually been a while since she had seen him do that. Which was a very unsettling thing to say about Sunek.
What the Vulcan did next was even more unsettling.
“Want some help?”
Denella couldn’t have looked more shocked if he had got down on one knee in the Nimbosian sand and proposed.
“Come on,” he added begrudgingly, “This place sucks, and the sooner we get that stupid thing fixed, the sooner we can go wait for Zesh’s buyer on the Bounty, right?”
“I guess so,” she nodded, before gesturing to a collection of freshly-cut metal pipes on the ground by his right foot, “If you wanna grab those, we need to replace the whole section of pipework from the pump to the faucet.”
Sunek picked up the piping and they started to get to work, the Vulcan passing her the appropriate piece of pipework as she gestured for it.
After a few moments, Denella felt the need to break the silence.
“Ready to talk about it yet?”
Sunek felt himself facing an immediate internal crisis. After all, he definitely didn’t want to talk about his feelings. That was a serious matter, and Sunek hated serious matters. Maybe he used to like talking about them, back in his student days at the ShiKahr Learning Institute back on Vulcan, when he had been an activist with the V’tosh ka’tur, helping fellow Vulcans explore their emotions if they so wished.
But these days, he preferred to act on his feelings, not talk about them.
Still, there was something bugging him, in the part of his mind where his more traditional logical self still resided. Because, logically, if he didn’t want to talk about what he was going through, he’d have just locked himself away in his cabin on the Bounty. Instead, he had come here, where despite his initial shock he must have known that Denella would still be working.
And even after she had made her presence known, he could still have just walked off. But he hadn’t done that. He had stuck around. And more than that, he had actually offered to help, so he had a valid reason for still being here.
Which suggested that, logically, at least on some level, he did want to talk about it.
He hated logic sometimes.
“I promise,” Denella chimed in, unaware of the debate going on inside Sunek’s head, “Whatever you tell me won’t go beyond the walls of this hut. By the honour of the Great Sun God of Orion.”
Sunek interrupted his internal discussions to look up at her with a curious expression.
“Did you just make that up?”
“The god? Yes. The sincerity? No.”
Despite his conflicting thoughts, Sunek couldn’t help but offer a lop-sided grin. He passed her another part of the pipework and shrugged in good-natured defeat. “Fine. You were right. I’ve been having some…anger issues lately. And, I dunno, I guess the heat down here has made it worse.”
He thought back to the violent flash of rage a short time ago, when he had come close to throwing a punch at Zesh, and suppressed a shudder.
“A lot worse.”
“You’re an emotional guy,” Denella replied as she fixed the piping into place with a deft flick of her hyperspanner, “I thought you’d be used to that sort of thing.”
“Sure, I’ve been angry plenty of times. But this has been different. Like it’s constantly there, in the background, y’know? And it's been like that ever since the whole Sokar mind meld…thing.”
At this, Denella paused in her work and looked squarely at her friend.
She hadn’t personally seen the full extent of Sunek’s temporary transformation during the Bounty’s run-in with a Romulan Warbird controlled by radical former members of the V’tosh ka’tur. But she had managed to glean enough information to understand that Sokar, a former colleague of Sunek’s, had achieved some form of mind control over his followers by using a series of violent forced mind melds.
Sunek had reclaimed control and broken whatever hold his former friend had over him at a critical moment, just as he was about to shoot Jirel. But this fresh revelation suggested to Denella that he wasn’t entirely over it.
“I’m sure it’ll pass,” he continued, “I guess it’s some residual aftereffect or something. And I’ve been working on a bunch of old Vulcan techniques to fix it, y’know? Spice tea, mental exercise, watched a bunch of these holovids with Betazoid women in them—You know what, that’s not an old Vulcan technique, forget I said that one.”
Denella managed a patient smile. She could allow the odd bit of vintage Sunek in return for him actually opening up.
“I’ve even tried meditation,” he sighed, as if he was now admitting something genuinely shameful, “Pretty stupid, right?”
Denella scrunched up her face. “I meditate,” she countered, “Most mornings, before breakfast. Gets me prepared for another day working with you idiots.”
Sunek grinned back and shrugged. “Well, now you know. Heart poured out. Serious business shared. And like I say, it’s probably just the heat down here making it worse. But I’m in control, and it’ll get better sooner or later, right?”
He looked back at her with a slight glimmer of worry visible in his eyes. Like he was looking for some genuine reassurance from her.
“I’m not sure I can answer that,” she admitted with a sigh, “But, Sunek, if you need to keep talking this through with someone, I’m here. If you like, we could even run through some meditation techniques together?”
Somewhat dashing Denella’s hopes that she’d made a genuine breakthrough in her sudden role as ship’s counsellor, Sunek snorted in amusement at this suggestion. “Yeah, right. Daily classes in the cargo bay? Matching robes? Invite the others down for a good old laugh? Sounds kinda dumb.”
“Kinda dumb?”
“Yeah. Kinda really dumb. Like I said, it’ll get better.”
“You sure about that?”
Sunek reacted to her pointed question with a look of fresh irritation, but paused and reset himself, before breaking out in a fresh grin.
“Sure I’m sure. Nothing a decent meal won’t fix, anyway.”
Denella suddenly realised how long it had been since Zesh had left, and realised that she was feeling pretty hungry herself.
“Huh,” she mused, “That’s a point. What’s happened to our chef?”
She paced over to the door of the hut, leaving Sunek to idly toy with the remaining piping. As she stepped through the door into the Nimbosian sun, her mind was still focused on her worries about her friend, and the revelations he’d just told her. Which meant that she wasn’t nearly as attentive as she would normally have been for any signs of danger.
As she exited the hut, she saw Zesh straightaway.
But she also saw that he wasn’t there of his own volition. And he wasn’t alone either.
He was accompanied by six stout men pointing six Nimbosian pistols squarely at her.
End of Part Two