Chapter Text
Part Two
“It’s gonna be 1-2-3-4. I’m telling you.”
Natasha sighed and shook her head.
The two figures that were so uncomfortably positioned on the floor of the Bounty’s cargo bay had made a modicum of progress in their efforts to free themselves.
From blindly feeling around, Jirel had managed to locate a small set of controls on one set of cuffs, designed to input a code to release the lock, and he had managed to contort his right hand in such a way that he could just about tap at the controls with his index finger.
But, as Natasha had repeatedly tried to tell the excited Trill, this wasn’t quite the significant step forward that he seemed to be treating it as. The telltale buzz of the latest incorrect guess rang out into the cargo bay, and the cuffs remained resolutely in place around their wrists. Much as they had with every other blind guess Jirel had made so far, from 0-0-0-0 to 9-9-9-9.
“My hero,” Natasha couldn’t help but fire out, with levels of sarcasm that Sunek would have been proud of.
“Whatever. I’ve got plenty more plans, ok?”
“Like what?”
There was a telling pause before the Trill’s weak response came back.
“4-3-2-1…?”
Natasha groaned gently in frustration, shivering from the cold deck below her exposed legs as Jirel’s master plan continued to resolutely get them precisely nowhere. Aside from the bomb behind her going off, she absently noted that there was only one way the situation could get any worse.
And Jirel managed to guess that one right away.
“So,” he offered into the silence that had descended, “You know—I mean, earlier, when Mizar was talking about you. And him. Him and you.”
Natasha groaned again. She really didn’t have the patience to be reminded about her latest terrible choice of sexual partner. Especially by one of her previous terrible choices. Not for the first time, she cursed her flawed thought process on her first night onboard the Bounty, after she had been rescued from her unplanned exile on a barren planet in the Kesmet sector following the destruction of the USS Navajo.
When, after six months without any form of company or companionship, she had dispassionately used a process of elimination to decide what she was going to do to avoid spending another night alone with her thoughts, which had been dominated by memories of the Navajo’s final moments, and the face of a dying ensign she had left behind. And for one night, she ended up in Jirel’s cabin.
Had she known at the time that she would end up joining the Bounty’s crew, that Jirel would read significantly more into what happened than a simple one night stand, and that the Trill, for all of his outward bravado, possessed a somewhat pathetic jealous streak the length of the Alpha Quadrant, she would definitely have opted to spend another night elsewhere. Thoughts or no thoughts.
But she hadn’t been privy to that information at the time, so here she was.
She had already suffered through Jirel’s jealous streak on one occasion, just before she had resigned her commission on Starbase 216, when they had run into her ex-husband, Cameron Kinsen. And she hadn’t had much time for it then. And now, given that she was already feeling bad enough to have allowed herself to be taken in by Mizar Bal’s physical charms, coupled with the fact that she was still shackled to an explosive device, she definitely didn’t have time for it.
Not that Jirel seemed to have picked up on any of that.
“I mean,” he continued from the other side of the metal cylinder between them, “It’s cool. Y’know, it’s not that it’s not cool—”
“Good. Glad we could settle that. Because it’s really, truly none of your business, Jirel. And I thought you said you weren’t going to make a thing out of it.”
“Yep, right, I know. I’m not.”
A pause. For a blessed moment, Natasha wondered if it was all over.
“But…I mean, when he said ‘after a night like we had’, does that really mean you two really—?”
“7-1-3-9!”
Of all the responses Jirel had been expecting, and if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t sure which response he wanted to hear, that had definitely not been one of them.
“Excuse me?”
“On the cuffs,” she sighed, “If you really want to keep trying to guess the code, try 7-1-3-9.”
Another pause. Natasha breathed a silent sigh of relief that this appeared to have been enough of a non sequitur to throw Jirel several light years away from his previous topic of conversation.
“…Why?”
“Because I once read about a mathematical study which found that, across all known species that use a structured numbering system, if you ask a large enough sample size to name a random four-digit number, a statistically significant percentage always choose 7-1-3-9. It’s the most random number in the galaxy.”
Jirel considered this response for a moment, before shrugging his bare shoulders as best he could while still being tied up. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. That’s exactly what the people running the study said. But given that nothing you’re trying to do right now makes any sense, I thought I’d at least suggest it.”
“You…want me to try 7-1-3-9?”
“Might work?” she offered, allowing herself to actually believe what she was saying for the briefest of moments.
“It won’t work,” Jirel retorted, as he diligently tapped the interface.
A familiar buzz rang out through the bay.
“It didn’t work,” the Trill added, unnecessarily.
“Great. What now?” Natasha signed again, “And before you answer that, bear in mind that if the next words out of your mouth are concerning me, Mizar Bal, or what may or may not have happened in my cabin last night, know that once we’re out of these cuffs, I will use my encyclopaedic knowledge of Trill anatomy and my favourite laser scalpel to make sure you will never need to worry about sharing your cabin with anyone else ever again.”
Jirel instinctively crossed his legs on the cold floor of the bay and focused on the bigger picture. “We could try toppling it over?”
“Toppling it over,” Natasha scoffed, “Toppling over the big bomb?”
“Still not entirely convinced it’s a bomb.”
“Ok, well, we’ll file that one under Plan B, ok? Anything else?”
Jirel chewed his lip thoughtfully, doing his best to make sure his thoughts didn’t drift back to questions about Mizar Bal. “If I can get Devan by himself, I still feel like I can get through to him,” he said eventually, “Get him to stop all this.”
“What makes you think that?” Natasha asked, genuinely curious to hear his answer, given how little she still knew about a lot of her new crew’s old lives.
“Well, y’know, that time together hanging out back at the scrapyards had to count for something, right?”
“Depends if he was a friend or an acquaintance,” she replied knowingly.
Jirel’s shoulders slumped slightly, the Trill a little reluctant to divulge too much about his past, even to the only person onboard who knew most of it already. All the way down to his illustrious Starfleet admiral father.
“Ok, so,” he began to explain eventually, “Back at the Tyran Scrapyards…not a lot of people liked me.”
“Is this the part where I act surprised?”
Jirel stifled a wry smile, reassured that there was still room in their conversation for the usual level of barbs, despite their situation. “Yeah, and I totally deserved it. Rolled up there cocky as all hell just cos I’d spent a few years wandering around the quadrant and hadn’t gotten myself killed yet, crossed all the wrong people on my first day on the job, and thought all the work sent my way was beneath me.”
“I know you can’t see, but I’m really trying hard to act surprised.”
“Yeah, well, by the time I’d started to grow up, it was too late. I was a social pariah. And the Tyran Scrapyards weren’t the sort of place where you wanted to be that. I was bullied, beaten up, given the worst jobs, whatever indignity the other workers could send my way, they did. Where else do you think I learned how to fight so well?”
“Huh,” Natasha offered, a little more understandingly, “I had no idea.”
“Yep. Pretty much everyone there had it in for me. Except for Devan Gol. He was always happy to hang out with Spotty—”
He stopped himself as soon as he said the word, but it was too late. He winced, having not intended to share quite that much with his current company.
“…Spotty?”
Jirel sighed and nodded his head, even though the woman on the other side of the bomb couldn’t see him. “Yeah. That, um, that was one of the nicknames the other workers had for me.”
He paused, wondering what else he could add. Eventually, he settled on something.
“Y’know. Cos of the spots.”
He wasn’t particularly happy with what he had settled on.
“Huh,” Natasha muttered thoughtfully, “Spotty.”
She didn’t know exactly why it happened. Whether it was a burst of mild delirium brought on by spending this long lying half-naked on the cold deck of the ship. Whether it was her mind’s way of working off some of her excess frustrations about the situation she was in. Or even whether it was a genuine subconscious desire to take out those frustrations on the Trill as punishment for his earlier round of profoundly irritating jealousy.
Regardless of why it happened, she couldn’t help but let out an amused snort. One that was more than loud enough to be picked up on by her colleague.
“Are you laughing?”
“No!” she replied, a little too quickly, “No. That was just—I’m not—”
Another snort escaped her mouth before she could stop it. Followed by a stifled chuckle.
“You are laughing!” Jirel persisted, with a hint of indignation, “Stop that! This is serious!”
“I know! I’m sorry! I—!”
Another uncontrollable chuckle burst forth, The more she tried to stop herself from laughing, the greater the urge swelled inside of her. The effort of holding in the belly laugh that was growing inside of her became so great that tears began to roll down her cheeks.
On the other side of the metal cylinder, Jirel listened to the stifled snorts, and despite still feeling a little hurt at her reaction, something about the sound of her choking back laughter caused a similar wave to rise up inside him.
“I mean,” he snorted, “I guess—it is pretty funny—”
Natasha couldn’t hold it in any longer. She burst out laughing. Jirel followed suit.
The two figures sat, still chained up to a cabrodine bomb, and the cargo bay filled with helpless laughter.
* * * * *
At the other end of the Bounty, in the Ju’Day-type raider’s cockpit, the two Ktarians looked up from their work and tilted their heads in curiosity at the distant sound echoing down the length of the ship’s corridor.
“What the hell’s so funny?” Mizar grunted at Devan, not expecting an answer.
The smaller Ktarian didn’t offer one, aside from an anxious shrug.
Unlike their prisoners, they had little to laugh about themselves. They had just been informed of the latest unhappy developments down in the Ktarian Moonrise on the planet below, as their seemingly straightforward plan hit another hitch. It had done little to improve Mizar’s already darkening mood.
“I thought you said this guy’s crew would do the job?” he grouched, “Two hours they’ve been down there, and now Ktarian security are all over the place!”
Devan flinched slightly under the latest barrage directed at him, and resumed wringing his hands together with renewed vigour. “W—We should beam them up now,” he managed in an altogether quieter voice than Mizar’s own rich baritone, “While we still can.”
Mizar leaned back in the seat of the Bounty’s tactical console and looked over at the mild-mannered Ktarian standing next to the centre seat. “We can’t do that now, can we?” he replied with irritation, “As soon as they turn off the transport inhibitor, the security teams will get to them!”
Devan shrank back behind the centre seat in the face of this latest verbal assault, and increased the intensity of his hand-wringing.
He knew it had been a stupid suggestion. The inhibitor not only prevented transporters from beaming through it, but it also prevented any attempt to establish any sort of transporter lock on anyone inside it to prevent a swift beam out.
“S—So,” he managed to mutter, “What now?”
Mizar Bal sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, mulling over the situation in front of them in silence. Eventually, he opened his eyes again and leaned forwards in his seat. “We’ll stick to the plan,” he replied with a nod, “Get our stuff, get the hell off this ship and get over to the shuttle.”
Devan’s eyes widened slightly at this, as he grew slightly more concerned by the dark look on his colleague’s face.
“B—But, shouldn’t we—?”
“We should keep ourselves as far away from this as possible right now. If it all goes to crap down there and the security forces trace those idiots back to this ship, I don’t want to be anywhere near it.”
“W—What about Fot?”
“We’ll still have the comms link. If they get away with Fot - and, more importantly, if they get my latinum - then we’ll know about it.”
Before Devan was able to counter any further, Mizar stood up from the tactical console and pointed back out in the direction of the Bounty’s cargo bay. “Now,” he added, “How about you go make sure our cargo is primed for long-range, remote detonation, ok?”
Devan’s eyes widened even further, as he felt the sensation of his carefully planned idea spiralling further out of control.
“B—But, we’re not actually going to—?”
“What’s the point of bringing a threat if you’re not willing to use it?” Mizar interjected, “Besides, nothing like a bomb threat to keep those fools down on the planet in line, just in case they decide to hand themselves in…”
Devan Gol couldn’t muster a counterpoint to this. So he absently started to bite his nails, even though most of them were already eroded down to the quick.
It wasn’t supposed to have been like this, he told himself. And once again, he found himself cursing ever recruiting the help of Mizar Bal. Even though he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to get this far without his help.
Devan had been planning how he was going to find Palmor Fot for months. But it had quickly become apparent to him that, while he could figure out the theory, he was never going to be able to carry the whole thing out by himself in practice. So he had started to sniff around in the Ktarian underworld as best he could, throughout several other old colonies in a similar state to Varris IV, and he had eventually struck up an uncomfortable working relationship with Mizar.
The plan had initially seemed simple. Devan had the plan, and Mizar was there to provide the leadership that was needed. He would help Devan succeed in his aims, and in return, he would get the latinum that Palmor Fot had to his name.
Except, Devan had already succeeded in his aims, in as much as the Bounty’s crew down on the colony had found Palmor. Now it was Mizar’s stake in the game that had proved to be the issue, and now meant that his carefully laid plans were unravelling.
Devan took a second to compose himself, resting his hand on the arm of the centre chair in the cockpit and trying not to focus too much on the guilt he felt upon touching the seat where Jirel usually found himself. He tried to summon up memories of happier times, before Palmor Fot, to get him focused back on the task at hand. But those memories seemed further away than ever.
“Is there a problem?”
Devan took a deep breath and looked over at Mizar, who seemed as entirely unconcerned by the meeker Ktarian’s moment of crisis as he always was. “N—No,” he managed to stammer, “I’ll go and deal with the detonator.”
Mizar’s eyes narrowed slightly, displaying more than a modicum of distrust. Then he nodded. Devan took that chance to walk back down the rear steps of the Bounty’s cockpit as quickly as his shaking legs could carry him.
He walked on down the ship’s main corridor. All the while wondering how everything could have gone so wrong.