Chapter Text
Part Three (Cont’d)
“Hold your fire! I repeat: All teams, hold your fire!”
Jalon bellowed the order into her comms unit, over the sound of the firefight all around them. She and Tylor were ducked down behind their cover, as further disruptor blasts whistled past their position from the strangers down in the alley.
After a few more shots, the Ktarian side of the impromptu battle fell silent, the night air now merely filled with the patter of rainfall and the odd covering disruptor shot from below. A few seconds later, with no further attacks coming their way, even the disruptor fire ceased.
Tylor grimaced in frustration at how quickly the situation had spiralled out of control. The thumping in his temples returned with a vengeance.
Ever since he had arrived on Varris IV, he had found that most of the personnel under his command were not exactly the best and the brightest that Ktarian Security had available. Most of them were either wet behind the ears trainees who had been unfortunate enough to be assigned to Varris IV fresh out of their training programmes. Or long-serving veterans too slow-witted or ineffective to have been seriously considered for a transfer elsewhere.
Ordinarily, that hadn’t especially bothered him. After all, he had only come to Varris IV for a final payday before retirement, and the less overly capable subordinates making his life difficult with their initiative and enthusiasm, the better.
But now Varris IV was facing an actual crisis, he was starting to have some doubts about the rank and file available to him. He just prayed that their aim with a phaser was as haphazard as their permanent records.
Alongside him, Jalon breathed a shallow sigh of relief as the shooting ceased. But she also felt a pang of guilt that her momentary inaction, and her unforgivable deviation from established protocol, could have had a potentially fatal result.
Tylor cautiously peered over the top of their cover as he grabbed the comms unit still patched through to the group at the shuttle. “Trelok?” he grunted with urgency, “You still with me, Trelok?”
There was a burst of static.
Through the rain, he could just about make out the shuttle, and he saw two figures being dragged limply across the wet ground into the side door.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, to himself as much as to his deputy, “Two down. Can’t tell how bad.”
Jalon swallowed a gasp as she saw the activity down by the shuttle for herself. “Chief,” she replied, managing to keep most of the emotion out of her voice, “I didn’t mean to—”
“Trelok! Talk to me!”
Tylor cut her off mid-apology as he barked back down the comms unit, and Jalon got the implied message. Now wasn’t the time for apologies or recriminations, and all of Tylor’s old instincts from back on Ktaris were now kicking in.
There was another burst of static from the comms link. Then, a familiar voice.
“Hey!” Sunek yelled over the link, agitation clear in his tone, “What the hell was that? You promised we’d be clear all the way to the shuttle!”
“I’m sorry about that, Trelok. You have my word, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Starting to think your word isn’t worth much!”
“What’s the situation down there?” Tylor continued, making the concern in his voice as clear as he could in an effort to underline his sincerity.
Down in the square, he could just about make out the final figure disappearing inside the shuttle.
“Ugh,” the Vulcan griped, “Looks like we’ve got two injured. One badly. So, yeah, thanks for all of that, guys!”
“The hostages—?”
“Ok, screw this,” Sunek fired off as the shuttle door closed, “We’re getting the hell out of here. Just like you promised we could!”
“Trelok,” Tylor urged, “You need to keep this channel open, and we need to—”
The comms link definitively clicked closed. Tylor let out a tired sigh and checked his chronometer, seeing that they had officially passed into the early hours of a new day on Varris IV. He rubbed the rainwater out of his eyes, even as the anti-grav units on the underside of the shuttle down in the square began to glow a familiar deep yellow, and the small craft began to ascend into the heavens.
Through the downpour, Tylor and Jalon watched as the shuttle uncertainly gained cruising height, and the rear thrusters fired up and propelled it away from the scene.
Mercifully, as far as Tylor was concerned, this time none of the more trigger-happy members of the Heavy Armed Units dotted around decided to take matters into their own hands. As per Tylor’s slightly tardily-delivered orders, they let them go.
Tylor sighed again and stood up straight from behind the cover, stretching his aching body that was crying out after so long crouched down.
He was definitely getting too old for this sort of thing.
The shuttle skimmed along just underneath the heavy layer of rain clouds, and then banked up and disappeared from view. As soon as it did so, Tylor turned to Jalon and nodded, before leading her off the roof.
It was time to give pursuit.
* * * * *
Inside the shuttle, the ride was proving to be a bumpy one.
The interior of the craft was fairly generic, with two pilot seats at the front, semi-partitioned from the main body, which was a wide, open-plan design. There was a bench of seats down the opposite wall to the side door, where Denella and Sunek had managed to lie the injured Klath and Palmor before they had departed, and a couple of raised storage crates further back, where Evina and Tegras sat, clinging on for dear life.
A fenced off area at the very rear housed a transporter. It was clear that the shuttle was designed to ferry security teams where they needed to go as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
But there was very little in the way of smooth efficiency in their current trip. The small vessel bucked and weaved around uncertainly as it flew onwards, tossing the six occupants around from side to side with varying degrees of violence.
“Keep us steady!” Denella called out, as she did her best to tend to the wounded on the bench.
“Good call, genius! Hadn’t thought of that!”
In the pilot’s seat up front, Sunek fired off the comeback even as he focused on desperately trying to figure out the controls in front of him.
The Vulcan had, on plenty of occasions, referred to himself as the greatest pilot in the galaxy. And while that statement was usually presented humorously, as so many of Sunek’s statements were, there was still a kernel of truth to it as far as he was concerned. His distinctly un-Vulcan ego really was of the considered opinion that he was a master at the controls of any craft.
He had learned his piloting skills pretty much on the fly, after he had left his life on Vulcan with the V’tosh ka’tur behind. And after leaving his home, he had found himself behind the controls of a variety of ships as he had drifted through the galaxy.
To his surprise, he had found that, in the pilot’s seat at least, he was a natural daredevil. His swirling emotions gave him the confidence and the desire to always push the envelope, and his intrinsic Vulcan mind gave him the ability to calculate precisely what he needed to do in order to pull it off.
Onboard the Bounty, he had navigated his way through endless firefights and squabbles with a myriad number of enemies. He had steered them through or around all manner of interstellar hazards, from gravity wells, to quantum singularities, to tachyon eddies. And over the years, his skills had improved and his ego had swelled to the point that he genuinely started to believe that he was the greatest pilot in the galaxy.
Until he had gotten behind the controls of a Ktarian atmospheric shuttle, that was.
The shuttle was an older design than he was used to. The controls consisted of a bank of mechanical switches and dials as opposed to the sleeker LCARS panels of the Bounty. He wasn’t entirely sure what half of the dials were measuring. There were too many of them to even begin to try to decipher. And the switches themselves were labelled with a confusing sequence of proprietary acronyms, which didn’t help matters.
There was a central control column, which he was more familiar with. But for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom the logic of, moving it left and right actually moved the shuttle up and down, and up and down were used to steer from side to side.
If all of that wasn’t bad enough, there was the matter of traffic.
Although the skies of Varris IV were relatively empty this early in the morning, there were still a few other shuttles and drone vehicles flying merrily through the night above the main settlement and in between some of the taller buildings. And if the controls were baffling enough, Sunek had absolutely no idea what the rules of the skies were on a Ktarian mining colony.
As a result, not only was it taking all of his piloting skill to figure out how to fly the shuttle, it was taking all of his spatial awareness to avoid being involved in an almighty mid-air collision.
“This is the single dumbest thing we’ve ever done!” he called out in frustration as he desperately flicked the control column down to move the shuttle to the right in order to avoid a substantially larger delivery shuttle meandering across their path.
“It was your idea!” Denella called back.
As the shuttle continued to buck and weave, the Orion kept her own focus on the improvised triage area she had established on the main compartment's bench.
Klath grimaced as he gripped his left leg, blood already seeping through the fabric of his trousers where the phaser blast had caught him just above the knee. “I am fine,” he predictably grunted, as Denella tore at the fabric to get a better look at the wound.
“Liar,” she fired back, as she saw the extent of the injury.
To her rudimentary medical eye, it looked like the blast had only caught him with a glancing blow. But even a glancing blow from a Ktarian phaser rifle had been enough to do substantial damage.
“What about me?” the shrill voice of Palmor reverberated around the confines of the shuttle from the other end of the bench, “I’m injured too!”
Denella glanced over at the Ktarian, who was holding his substantially less badly injured arm, and waved her disruptor at him dismissively. “You’ll live.”
The Ktarian didn’t seem too pleased with that response, and fired back by gesturing down at Klath’s leg with a dark sneer. “Perhaps. But your friend might not.”
Denella clenched her jaw and tightened her grip on her weapon. Not for the first time, she wished they could have left this particular hostage behind at the bar.
But they still needed him.
They were disturbed by the shuttle making another violent change of direction, causing Klath to growl slightly as his wounded leg jarred awkwardly against the bench.
“Sorry! Another truck!” Sunek called out from the cockpit, “Also, does anyone wanna tell me where we’re going?”
Denella looked up at Klath, then across at Palmor, who seemed determined to remain mute on that particular subject all over again.
“Go,” Klath grunted at her through gritted teeth, “We must get to the latinum.”
“But you’re—”
“I am fine,” he lied again.
She gave her friend a particularly withering glare, which he countered with his best insistent nod.
“Um,” Tegras awkwardly piped up from the rear of the shuttle, “If I may?”
Everyone on the bench turned to the older Ktarian, as the vessel swayed in the air again. He pointed at a storage locker embedded in the wall of the shuttle’s interior.
“There should be a medical kit in there,” he explained, “Standard requirement for all atmospheric shuttles on the colony.”
“And I’m a registered field medic back at the mine,” Evina added from his side, “I can take a look at your leg for you.”
Denella smiled at the source of the unlikely assistance. Klath merely grimaced further, continuing his occasional role as the worst patient in the history of the universe. “Thank you,” the Orion engineer nodded at the two Ktarians, “And again, I’m sorry that you had to be a part of this.”
Evina smiled back, then gingerly made her way across the unstable deck of the shuttle and retrieved a small medical kit from the storage locker.
“Pah,” Palmor mocked, “Tending to our captors’ wounds. Perhaps while she does that, you might like to fetch him some Liset root tea and a pillow, Tegras?”
“They may have taken us hostage,” Evina calmly replied, “But they protected us back there when the shooting started. They didn’t need to do that.”
“They didn’t protect me very well,” Palmor grouched, looking down at his arm.
Evina ignored him and approached Klath, who kept his disruptor raised in his hand despite the growing pain in his leg.
“I will be watching you closely,” he grunted at her.
“Good to know,” she replied with a sliver of sarcasm.
Denella mustered a smile, then stepped over and grabbed Palmor’s good arm. “Come on, you. Time to tell our chauffeur where we’re going.”
Before the Ktarian had the chance to begin a fresh round of protestations, he was hauled up into the cramped cockpit, where Sunek was still wrestling with the controls.
“Ok, buddy boy,” the Vulcan called out over his shoulder, gesturing to a particular set of dials on the panel in front of him, “Coordinates go in there. I think.”
As Denella had expected, Palmor didn’t immediately try to do anything. She sighed and prodded her disruptor into the small of his back again. “Seriously, we don’t have a lot of time.”
With extreme reluctance, the Ktarian leaned over and tapped in the requisite coordinates.
“There,” Sunek nodded, “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Next stop…um, wherever we’re going.”
He tapped a few more controls in front of him, briefly activating the shuttle’s turning indicators before stopping them again with a slightly embarrassed glance, and then gripped the control column with determination as the shuttle sped on to its destination.
With Sunek focused forwards and Denella relaxing slightly now that they were on their way, neither of them noticed Palmor gently reaching into his pocket with the hand of his injured arm. He felt a familiar small disc-shaped object inside, and tapped the button on top.
Then he allowed himself the slightest of smiles, having played his final roll of the dice.