Chapter Text
Part One (Cont’d)
“Bored.”
Denella didn’t reply, focusing instead on her efforts to seal the duranium sheet in front of her in place over the Bounty’s starboard impulse casing using the laser welder in her hand.
“Bored!”
She sighed and wiped the sweat from her brow. As expected, the slightly higher gravity and the warming midday sun overhead was turning a theoretically simple repair job into more of a sweat-inducing grind. She could already tell that she was going to medically require a sonic shower by the time she was done.
“Boredboredboredboredboredbored—”
“Sunek!”
She finally snapped at the Vulcan standing next to her on the small anti-grav platform, as it hovered a few feet off the ground next to the ship’s starboard impulse engine.
The extent of her unwillingly appointed lackey’s role in the repair at this point was simply to hold the sheet in place while she securely welded it down. But even with a task as simple as that, Sunek had still decided to make his feelings on the situation very clear indeed.
“Could you just, please, be quiet?” she asked in exasperation.
The Vulcan seemed largely unperturbed by her angry, sweaty glare, and pouted back at her. “But I’m—”
“Bored. Yes. You’ve made that very clear. But, could you just let me work in peace.”
His pout didn’t show any signs of leaving his face any time soon, but he nodded reluctantly and allowed silence to descend on the scene.
Denella suppressed a sigh of relief and returned to her work, carefully running the welder along the edge of the dark grey metal sheet.
Suddenly, she heard a distinctive tap-tapping sound, and her engineer’s ear cocked up in concern. She stopped her welding work and grabbed her tricorder from her belt, running the device across the engine itself. “Crap. If that’s coming from inside the plasma conduit, we’re gonna need to replace the entire—”
It was then that she saw that Sunek was now staring off into the distance, idly tapping his fingers on the side of the Bounty’s hull with his free hand as he did so.
“Sunek!”
He paused in the middle of his tapping and looked over to her, a picture of innocence.
“What?”
Summoning the deepest reserves of her strength of will, Denella resisted the increasingly strong temptation to introduce the laser welder in her hands to any number of Sunek’s body parts, and instead powered down the small device for a moment.
“Ok, new plan,” she said, as calmly as she could manage, “I’m gonna finish off the work up here. On my own. And you can…go fix some lunch? I’ve had to power everything down while we’re working, so you’ll need to see what we’ve got in storage.”
Sunek raised an eyebrow. A universal symbol consistent across all Vulcans, from the most stoic Kolinahr graduate to the most emotionally fragile member of the V’tosh ka’tur, that indicated that the owner of the eyebrow was distinctly unimpressed. “Lunch? I’m a pilot, not a caterer.”
Keeping her strength of will as fully charged as possible, Denella disguised her irritation with the friendliest smile she could muster under the warmth of the sun. “Please? I’m starving. Besides, it’ll be a hell of a lot less like hard work.”
Sunek considered this for a moment. He didn’t much like the idea of fixing lunch. But he equally didn’t like the idea of staying out working in these conditions. His laziness and his apathy had a brief tug of war inside his mind, before he nodded and started towards the edge of the anti-grav unit. Just as he was about to clamber down, he paused and looked back at the Orion woman.
“Wait. You’re not—? To be clear, this isn’t an order. I mean, you’re not my boss.”
Denella paused in the middle of powering the laser cutter back up and sighed again, looking over at the Vulcan with her best ‘go and fix lunch’ glare.
“It’s just,” Sunek continued, “What Jirel said before about—I just wanna be clear that I’m fixing lunch entirely of my own volition. Not cos you’re, y’know, in charge of me or anything.”
“Ok,” she replied in exasperation, “Noted.”
“Good.”
With a look of satisfaction now that was settled, Sunek jumped over the railing at the edge of the anti-grav unit and dropped to the ground a few feet below, before slowly plodding back inside the Bounty via the ramp.
Denella took a moment to appreciate the bliss of the sudden burst of peace and quiet now being afforded to her, before she powered the welder on fully and picked up where she left off. Just as the tool made contact with the metal again, her communicator chirped out.
Her first response was to utter an untranslatable old phrase in her native Orion tongue, which the quadrant’s foremost linguists had termed ‘the most succinctly offensive curse in history’, due to its ability to crudely question the integrity of three generations of your family while graphically associating them with four different types of livestock in just six short syllables.
Her second response was to reluctantly flick the welder off again and grab the chirping device from her belt, before she had a chance to fully calm down.
“What the hell is it now?” she snapped.
* * * * *
Despite everything that was happening around her, Natasha was still taken aback by the Orion’s growled response over the comms link. She’d always seen the engineer as the calmest and most level-leaded of the Bounty’s usually impulsive crew.
“Denella?” she managed to reply.
“I’m afraid Denella’s busy right now. You’re through to the Orion goddess of pissed off engineers,” the snippy response came back.
Natasha glanced at Klath where he stood next to her, the Klingon looking equally confused by their colleague’s tone, before she tentatively continued.
“Um, ok? Are the repairs done? Cos we might have a bit of a problem over here.”
A short pause. An odd clanging sound came back, which neither party on this end of the comms link could quite place, but a more discerning ear might have recognised as the sound of an old-style laser welder making heavy contact with a sheet of duranium.
“What sort of a problem?” Denella replied eventually.
“We’ve, um, accidentally encountered some of the natives of this planet,” Natasha explained with a sigh, “And they’re…”
She paused and looked around.
She and Klath stood to one side of the central square of the village they had been brought to, and although they were trying not to draw attention to the chunky communicator in her hand, in truth they were mostly being ignored by the villagers. Their attention was entirely on the ‘spotted man’.
Jirel had been carried all the way to the centre of the square, and was now sitting on a wooden chair in the centre of a long, elaborately decorated table, looking unduly pleased with himself. Villagers - Makalites, as Natasha had learned they called themselves - scurried around the table, laying out a number of clay jugs filled with drinks, woven decorations and other items in front of the Trill that they had inexplicably proclaimed as their saviour.
To one side of the green, a small band had started up, playing a quirky folk-style tune on a series of strange woodwind-style instruments. Some of the Makalites nearby had started performing a loosely choreographed dance, apparently also entirely for Jirel’s benefit.
As the music, the dancing, the drinking and the merriment continued, Natasha tried to convey the scene as accurately as possible over the comms link.
“They’re…having a party.”
There was a particularly long pause before Denella’s reply came.
“Ok, I’m gonna hang up now—”
“No, Denella, wait,” Natasha jumped in quickly, “Something really strange is going on. This is a pre-warp society, pre-industrial even. And yet they’re totally fine with us being here, and they’re even calling Jirel their…saviour!”
“…Our Jirel?”
“Exactly!”
“He claims to have never met them before,” Klath added helpfully from Natasha’s side.
Another pause, as the Orion took this unlikely information in.
“Well, clearly,” she replied eventually, “But, what’s your endgame here, doc? Cos I’m right in the middle of these repairs.”
Natasha suppressed her mounting frustrations at the reactions she was getting from the Bounty’s crew regarding the huge faux pas they were in the middle of committing with the Makalites, and tried to block out the sound of the seemingly tuneless woodwind melody coming from on the other side of the square.
I’m not in Starfleet any more, she reminded herself.
“Well, we obviously need to get out of here asap,” she concluded eventually, “Once the Bounty’s ready to go, we’ll find a quiet corner of the village, and you can beam us out. With any luck this’ll all just be remembered as a…mass hallucination or something.”
It wasn’t exactly the greatest solution, she knew. But given the resources they had, there wasn’t much more they could do.
“Yeah, can’t do that,” Denella countered, “All that radiation. Wouldn’t wanna try beaming you through that on our old transporter. If you wanna get out of there, then you’re gonna have to walk.”
Natasha grimaced, realising that the Orion woman was right. “Fine,” she sighed, “I guess we’ll try to make our excuses and…”
She paused, distracted by a new group of Makalites carrying enormous platters of colourful foods from one of the nearby huts and setting them down on the table in front of Jirel.
“Oh my god,” she whispered in horror, “There’s a buffet.”
Her palpable concern for the situation was interrupted by the sound of the comms link being terminated, as Denella finally hung up.