Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
Natasha looked over the red welts on the Makalite woman’s arm with the practised eye of a medic, despite lacking her usual array of contemporary medical tools.
“You are a healer, then?”
The Makalite woman who owned the arm watched on a little fearfully as the newcomer to the village checked her rash. She was one of the younger women in the village, who had introduced herself as Sister Tula. And she was the first of the blue-skinned aliens that had allowed Natasha to examine her.
“That’s right,” Natasha said with her best reassuring smile, “Don’t worry, I’m trying to help.”
Sister Tula nodded, though she still seemed wary. But Natasha was used to that in patients from time to time, even from more enlightened species.
“You say this all started several weeks ago?”
“Yes,” Sister Tula nodded, “Brother Yoran was stricken first, but it spread quickly. But The Seer tells us that the spotted man will rescue us all.”
“So I’ve heard,” Natasha said, wryly.
The more she had heard about The Seer, the less she trusted him. But before she could press on with her questions, Sister Tula had one of her own.
“Is it true that the spotted man’s skyship can travel into the heavens themselves?”
Natasha’s gut constricted at the reminder of exactly how many of the rules she had held so dear as a Starfleet officer she was breaking now, accidentally or otherwise. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she managed to reply.
“Oh, I’m not worried,” Sister Tula insisted, “I’m glad. More than any of the others in the village, my family provided the most offerings to bring him here.”
“Offerings?” Natasha asked curiously, as she peered closer at the rash.
“At the temple. My family gave extra, every day, even when The Seer did not ask. All to bring the spotted man here to spare us from the sickness.”
Natasha concluded that she didn’t like the sound of any of that. And despite her lack of specialist medical equipment, she also concluded that she didn’t like the verdict she had come to about the most likely cause of the welts on Sister Tula’s arm.
They were a clear symptom of radiation sickness.
Which was good news for her and the other Bounty crew members, thanks to the hyronalin shot she’d thought to administer. But it was bad news for the Makalites. Because it meant they were all dying.
“Sister Tula, what is all this?”
The two women turned to see an older Makalite woman approaching them from further down the dirt street, regarding Natasha with clear mistrust.
“Oh, Sister Hyla,” Sister Tula replied, “She is a healer. She came with the spotted man and she is looking at my sickness.”
“For what purpose?” Sister Hyla immediately shot back, “You know the words of the prophecy. Our sickness will be cured by the spotted man when we leave for our utopia.”
To underline her point, she stepped up and forcefully lifted Natasha’s hand from Sister Tula’s arm.
“We do not need anything from you. That is not the word of the prophecy.”
Natasha forced herself to keep her irritation under wraps, and mustered a smile in the direction of the older Makalite. “Listen, I’m just trying to help. And I think I know what’s wrong with you all--”
“Sister Tula,” Sister Hyla said sternly, ignoring Natasha entirely, “Perhaps you should return to your family, and prepare for our ascent to utopia. That would please The Seer, I’m sure.”
The younger Makalite nodded her head and smiled excitedly, before scurrying off down one of the side streets.
“You know,” Natasha tutted, “Where I’m from, it’s rude to burst into the middle of a consultation like that.”
“And where is it that you are from?” Hyla asked, her eyes narrowing with distrust.
Natasha bit her tongue again before she blurted out something she regretted. Instead of going down the adversarial route, she tried to placate this new Makalite. “Maybe I could examine your…sickness, instead?”
She gestured down to Sister Hyla’s partially exposed forearm, redness visible across it. Ashamed, Sister Hyla pulled her sleeve down quickly. “I have seen many healers about my sickness already. And I know that only The Seer’s prophecy can save me. I keep the faith.”
“Trust me,” Natasha smiled, “I’m not like those other healers.”
A flicker of something passed across Sister Hyla’s face. A hint of desperation underneath her proud stare that betrayed to Natasha that she might not fully trust in whoever this Seer was. But it was only there for a brief second.
“You cannot tempt me from The Seer’s path. I trust only in him, and the spotted man.”
“But I’m with the spotted man…!”
Before Natasha could argue that point any further, Sister Hyla spun on her heels and walked off. She tutted again and returned her attention to her mostly useless tricorder, running what scans she could as she walked on down the street. There was at least enough information to tell her that the radiation levels were higher inside the village than they had been in the forest.
As she rounded a corner in the road and clipped the tricorder to her belt, she looked up and noticed a curious building on the edge of the village. One made almost entirely of metal.
She had no way of knowing that this was the building the villagers knew as the Bastille.
Equally, she had no way of predicting the sudden blow she felt to the back of her head, which sent her tumbling to the ground.
She was already unconscious by the time Brother Falor and Brother Makan, who had decided she was definitely stepping too far outside the will of the prophecy, began to drag her away.
* * * * *
“I didn’t scream!”
“Sure you didn’t, Sunek.”
Denella suppressed a knowing smile as they walked on down the trashed remains of the corridor on the crashed ship. Behind her, Sunek stalked on, continuing his vocal denials.
“It was just a surprise, that’s all. We’d just walked a hell of a long way, I was really tired, and the last thing you expect when you open up some random ship’s airlock is for a gross hexapedal monster’s corpse to fall on you like that!”
“Tripedal.”
“What?”
“Three legs, three arms. Edosians are tripedal. Not hexapedal.”
“Great. Let me just file that away under ‘Things I’ll never, ever care about’.”
Denella smirked again, as Sunek grunted in irritation. He didn’t like being corrected, especially when he had definitely been wrong.
Still, ever since the Vulcan’s uncomfortable introduction in the airlock, it had been clear that the crashed vessel was Edosian. And it was proving tricky to navigate. Partly because of the damage from the crash landing, which had collapsed corridors and bulkheads all over the place, but also because it had understandably been primarily designed for crew members with more appendages than either the Orion or the Vulcan possessed.
“What a mess,” Denella mused to herself as they carried on walking down the corridor made out of a silvery metal.
Along with the crash damage, there were signs of further decay. Greenish grass and other local plant life was already encroaching through the gaps and gouges in the hull, making it clear that the wreck had been here for some time.
As they had hiked back down into the valley and got up close, she had started to appreciate just how large it was. When it had been spaceworthy, it would have been over two hundred metres in length, and almost as wide. It had an almost square design for a main hull, with evidence on the outside that two pylon-mounted nacelles had sprung out from the rear, though both appeared to have been wrenched off during the violence of the landing.
“Looks like it was some sort of transport vessel,” she continued as they walked, “It’s big enough, and it's clearly not any sort of warship.”
“So,” Sunek offered by way of reply, as her tricorder chirped out another warning, “Exactly how close to the big bunch of super deadly radiation are we planning on getting?”
She glanced at the garbled readings on the tricorder and shrugged. “We should be ok, given what Natasha gave us. Let’s see if we can find main engineering. Or whatever’s left of it.”
They walked on, past two more lifeless Edosian bodies. All of them they had seen so far had been dressed in a sandy-coloured uniform. One neither of them could identify.
“Maybe some sort of civilian company?” she said as she gestured to the clothing.
“Had no idea Edosian pleasure cruises involved so many crash landings,” Sunek replied, “What do you think they do in the second week? Warp core breach or Borg assimilation?”
They continued past an access conduit that was still gently smoking despite the length of time since the crash, and turned a corner to see a large set of double doors, partially opened, with another body strewn close by.
“This is it,” Denella nodded grimly, squeezing in between the half-open and powerless doors with no small amount of difficulty.
Sunek followed her through, and they found themselves in a vast engineering section, where the vertical and long-dead warp core dominated the room. The core itself was surrounded by various panels and consoles, all equally powered down. There was a huge twisted gash in the far wall, through which Denella spotted a myriad of other broken vital systems.
It wasn’t clear what had caused such a tear in the thick metal plating of that particular bulkhead, but she suspected that might well have been the cause of the crash.
She scanned around with her tricorder as best she could, and zeroed in on one of the control panels on the side wall of the room.
“Hopefully there’s still some trace of emergency power left on this thing,” she muttered, tapping at the console to try and will some life into it.
Mercifully, after a moment, it powered up. Albeit with a flickering and fading display that showed what little was left of the once mighty ship’s power reserves.
“Ok, I’m getting a fix on the source of the radiation,” she reported, “Looks like there’s a leak in one of the microfusion reactors. Must’ve been damaged in the landing.”
Sunek stepped over to a console on the other side of the room and tapped it, powering it up. “Can you fix it?” he asked as he did so.
“I think so,” she nodded, “Just give me a minute.”
She tapped the controls again, then moved across to an exposed wall panel and grabbed a small engineering tool from the pocket of her overalls, getting to work. Meanwhile, Sunek tapped idly at his own computer display, not entirely sure what he was looking for. He spotted a curious headset next to the panel which was clearly designed for Edosian physiology, but he gamely placed it onto his own head and grinned.
“Hey, check this out. Looks like this is what they used for a comms link.”
“Sunek, don’t touch anything,” Denella warned, as she continued to work.
“I’m just messing around,” he tutted, “Besides, it’s not like I can break anything any more than it already is.”
She gestured behind him with her free hand, not taking her eyes off the panel she was working on. “The main antimatter storage pod is just on the other side of that wall behind you. You break that, and this planet becomes part of another star system.”
Sunek instinctively glanced behind him, though all he saw was the silvery metal wall.
“I’m being careful,” he muttered unhappily.
“If you really want to do something, try checking the database, see what the hell this ship is supposed to be.”
Sunek glared at the Orion woman’s back for a moment, a little suspicious of her latest comment which sounded worryingly like another attempted order. But eventually, he started to tap at the console. To stave off the boredom, if nothing else.
After a moment, Denella ran her laser sealer back over the wiring inside the panel, and then walked back over to the wall console she had been using earlier. “Ok,” she nodded in satisfaction, “That’s the worst of the leak dealt with. The seal’s back in place for now, and it looks like radiation levels are already starting to drop, so we can—”
She was interrupted by an urgent chirping sound from the console that Sunek was working on. The Vulcan stepped back slightly as she fired an exasperated look across the expanse of the broken engineering section.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, I swear! That wasn’t me!”
“Then what is it?”
He cautiously stepped back up to the console, as Denella rushed over to him.
“Um,” he managed, “I think it’s an incoming transmission.”
“Ok, before you answer it, let’s just—”
“I’ve answered it,” Sunek grinned as he tapped a button on his headset, eliciting an even more exasperated look from his colleague.
“Why the hell did you—?”
He held his finger up to silence her, and gestured to the headset with his other hand. “Hey,” he said over the comms line, “This is Sunek.”
A pause. Denella waited impatiently as the inaudible response came back over the headset, and started to wonder how much chatter there was from the other end of the link, and how much Sunek was exaggerating to irritate her.
“Uh huh,” he nodded eventually, “Uh huh, yep. Ok, I’ll…just ask.”
He looked back at Denella, looking more than a little surprised. “So, it’s Edosian Internal Security,” he explained.
“And?”
“And they wanna know what we’re doing with their prison transport.”
End of Part Two