Chapter Text
Part Two
“What the hell is that?”
Denella shot out her comment just as Sunek ambled up the steps and entered the room, slapping a dusty ration pack down on top of the engineering console where she worked.
“Um, lunch, your majesty,” the Vulcan shot back, “Like you said, the replicator’s off until you power the ship back up again, so I had to go and dig these old things out of storage. They’re still good to eat.”
He paused and tentatively sniffed the dirty brown nutrient bar sticking out of the torn wrapping of his own ration pack and wrinkled his nose slightly.
“I think.”
Denella sighed patiently and gestured to the readouts on the console in front of her. “Not that. This.”
The Vulcan idly wandered around to take a look at what she was pointing at, taking a bite out of the corner of his ration bar as he did so.
Denella had nearly finished patching up the damage to the ship, and had specifically come back to the cockpit in order to make preparations to restart main power before heading back to the Bounty’s warp core to finish the job.
But while she was here, curiosity had gotten the best of her, and she’d decided to use some of the scant emergency power being used to keep the Bounty’s vital systems running in order to take a closer look at the radiation that was affecting both sensor scans and transporter operation.
It was partly curiosity, and also partly a slight sense of guilt about how she’d snapped at Natasha over the comms link earlier. Her frustrations had dissipated now, and she had decided to see if there was anything she could do about the transporter. But what she’d found was more perplexing than she’d been expecting.
“What’s all this?” Sunek asked as he glanced over the readings and chewed on his ration bar, not doing a particularly good job of making it sound like he cared.
“Jirel and the others are up to their necks in natives, apparently. So I thought I’d look for a way to beam them out.”
“What is it with us and natives, anyway?”
She ignored the question and tapped at the controls to bring up a full set of readings that she’d been able to pull together. “Now, I’m not getting much, because of all the interference. But what I am getting makes no sense at all. Look.”
Sunek continued to idly chew away as he looked over the readings. Eventually, he shrugged and looked over at her. “Yeah. Cool. Weird radiation.”
Denella sighed again. She’d known the Bounty’s thoroughly unorthodox Vulcan for long enough to know that underneath several layers of bad jokes, constant sarcasm, garish clothing and intense laziness, there still lurked a substantial Vulcan intellect. It was just that, most of the time, it took a gentle nudge in the right direction to get him to actually bother using it.
“It’s more than just ‘weird radiation’ though,” she mused, “There’s something off about it, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…”
She carefully framed her comment to leave the door wide open for Sunek to sweep in and fill in the blanks in her understanding.
Alongside her, he sighed in frustration. By the sounds of it, he’d already figured it out.
He swallowed his chunk of ration bar and reluctantly looked down at the console. A fresh conflict stirred up inside him, cannily jolted into action by Denella’s words, between his egotistical need to prove how clever he was and his equally strong desire not to do any work.
Eventually, his ego won the battle.
“I mean,” he shrugged off-handedly, “It’s pretty obvious what’s off about it. It’s not naturally occurring. Look at the way the intensity curve changes over distance. If it was a natural planetary phenomenon, it’d be way more uniform.”
“Which means?” she pressed, tipping his ego fully over the edge.
He sighed again, took another bite from his ration bar and started to quickly tap the controls with his free hand.
“Which means it’s a dispersal pattern,” he went on, finishing his work with the controls and tapping the screen that now displayed a zoomed map of the surrounding area, and an associated radiation pattern, “See? There’s your source. Other side of those hills we’re parked next to. Whatever’s over there is what’s causing all this radiation.”
Denella looked down at the screen with a nod of satisfaction, then back over at the scruffy Vulcan by her side. “See, why don’t you do stuff like this more often?”
“Cos it’s boring,” he shrugged as he swallowed his final mouthful of nutrient bar, tossing the empty ration pack wrapper straight onto the deck of the cockpit and earning an irritated tut from the Orion for his actions.
“Hrm,” she added as she studied the details on the screen, “You know, this seems like a pretty short hike.”
Sunek’s face dropped instantly. “Naw. Come on, Denella—!”
“I’m serious,” she insisted, “We’ve got plenty of time now the repairs are done, so let’s go do a bit of sightseeing. Shouldn’t take long to get over there and take a look. If we can figure out what it is, we might be able to solve our transporter problems.”
The Vulcan emitted a further annoyed whine, as Denella grabbed her tricorder and the other ration bar from on top of the panel and walked over to the cockpit steps, pointing at the discarded wrapper on the deck as she passed it.
“Also, pick that up.”
She paused for a second at the top of the steps and looked back at the Vulcan with a smile.
“And just in case you’re still worried about who’s in charge, don’t think of any of this as me giving you orders. Think of them more as strong recommendations.”
With that, she disappeared down the steps, leaving Sunek to grumpily look down at the silvery wrapper from the ration pack.
“See,” he called after her, “I go figure everything out, and this is how you thank me. That’s why I don’t do stuff like this more often!”
Getting no response, he continued to grumble to himself as he followed her down the steps, leaving the wrapper where it was.
He hated hikes.