Chapter Text
Part Three (Cont’d)
“How’re you feeling?”
Denella looked down at Klath, whose leg wound was now looking substantially improved thanks to Evina’s triage work.
“Better,” he admitted, before looking over at the Ktarian woman and adding with a little reluctance, “Thank you.”
“It’s not fixed,” Evina admitted, “You’ll need a proper medical facility for that. But I’ve cleaned it up and stopped the bleeding for now.”
The hulking Klingon started to stand up, showing further reluctance in accepting help from Evina and Denella to get back onto his feet. As soon as he put his weight on his injured limb, he immediately stifled a grimace.
“Like I said,” Evina added sympathetically, “Not fixed.”
Denella watched on with concern as Klath tested his weight again. He eventually looked up at the Orion’s dubious expression and nodded. “I can still fight,” he affirmed.
“Sure,” she sighed, “If any guards storm the shuttle when we land, I’ll just ask them to play fair, line up in an orderly fashion and let the guy with one leg shoot at them.”
Klath responded with a withering glare, but before he could offer anything more as a counterpoint, Sunek called out from the cockpit.
“Hey, we might have a problem here.”
Klath’s glare switched to one of concern in an instant, as Denella’s own expression hardened. “Feels like that’s the theme of today, doesn’t it?” she offered as she stepped and Klath hobbled over to the Vulcan’s position.
Sunek was still wrestling with the controls to the shuttle, but had enough of a handle on them by this point to be able to glance over at them and gesture out of the cockpit window. “We’re almost at these coordinates, and something doesn’t feel right. I’m not seeing anything on the scans that looks like a secure facility. Most of these buildings look totally abandoned. It’s like Friday night at a Promellian discotheque down there.”
Denella peered out of the cockpit window. Sunek had successfully located the controls for the wipers, and they were now manfully fighting a losing battle against the lashing downpour hitting the transparent surface. Through the dark skies, the driving rain and the shining beacons and lights of the scant passing traffic, she made out rows and rows of tall skyscrapers below them, packed close like a small forest of trees straining up towards the top of the canopy layer.
But while this vista looked like it might have been an impressive sight at some point in Varris IV’s past, the sense of decay all around was palpable, even through the pitch black downpour.
The buildings looked run down. Windows smashed, metal supports rusting and stone edifices crumbling. Around the tops of some of them, local plant life seemed to be flourishing, sprouting out from the mighty skyscrapers in haphazard tufts.
As Denella chewed her lip and Sunek flicked the shuttle around to complete another loop, Tegras called out from the rear, having seen the view himself.
“No, no,” the grey-haired Ktarian said, shaking his head, “This is the financial district. There’s no latinum here.”
Sunek and Denella both mustered a double take at this.
But Klath’s attention was diverted by something else. And the Klingon’s leg may not have been at one hundred percent, but there was nothing wrong with his arms.
“Argh!”
The squeal of pain from Palmor caused everyone else in the shuttle to turn around and look at where Klath had shot out a burly limb and grabbed the Ktarian’s own arm.
“You,” Klath grunted, wrenching Palmor’s hand out of his pocket, as Denella spied the tiny disc-shaped object in his grasp.
She reached over and grabbed the disc from the struggling and horrified Ktarian. It didn’t take long for her engineering brain to figure out what it was. “Some sort of tracker. Or a homing device.”
“A trap,” Klath grunted unhappily, squeezing extra hard on Palmor’s arm and eliciting a further squeal of pain.
“He’s been trying to scam you again,” Tegras nodded, “And he’s got plenty of contacts around the colony to call on for a rescue.”
“Well, that’s just great,” Sunek tutted sarcastically from the pilot’s seat.
“I don’t know what this fool is talking about—!”
That was as far as Palmor got with his latest protestation. The rest of the sentence was lost in an even louder scream of pain, as Klath grabbed the Ktarian’s other injured arm and squeezed down on the phaser burn.
“The truth,” he grunted, as Palmor’s scream reached a crescendo, “Where is your latinum?”
“I—I swear,” he stammered, “It’s here—!”
Another squeeze. Another scream.
Denella winced at the sound, and part of her wanted to tell Klath to stop. But a greater part of her was tired of being screwed around, and was focused on the Bounty in orbit, and the possible bomb in its cargo bay. So she allowed the heavy-handed treatment to continue.
“My penthouse!” Palmor screamed eventually, “T—The latinum is in my penthouse! I haven’t used a holding facility since one of my shipments got stolen last year!”
Klath kept up the pressure on Palmor’s wound as he stared into the eyes of his adversary, tears beginning to form from the pain. Eventually, he released his grip and turned to Denella with a look of satisfaction.
“The truth.”
“I know where his penthouse is,” Tegras offered.
The defeated Palmor didn’t even bother to call out this latest piece of treachery from one of his fellow Ktarians. Released from Klath’s grip, he slumped back onto the bench down the side of the shuttle’s rear section, holding his injured arm.
Denella saw the look of pain, and reluctantly gestured to Evina. “Now you’ve helped my friend’s leg, might be an idea to fix his arm.”
Evina gave the Orion a dubious look, one that suggested that she didn’t entirely agree that Palmor deserved that sort of treatment. But the look of compassion from Denella eventually caused her to nod and step back over to the medical kit.
“Um, guys,” Sunek chimed in again, “I realise I’m becoming a serious buzzkill here, but we’ve got another problem.”
“What?” Klath grunted, as he, Denella and Tegras turned their attention back to the driving rain in front of the shuttle.
“I’ve got something closing fast on our position,” the Vulcan offered as he gestured to the controls in front of him, “And I’m still figuring out how to read a lot of this, but I think it’s either another shuttle, or a cataclysmic rift in spacetime.”
Denella compartmentalised the slight feeling of shame that registered when she instinctively glanced through the cockpit window for signs of a cataclysmic rift in spacetime, and slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to the Vulcan.
“Get us the hell out of here.”
“Already on it.”
Sunek didn’t need telling twice. He pirouetted the shuttle around and took off in a flash through the downpour.
Palmor Fot’s contacts had arrived.
* * * * *
“I repeat, all units move in. Intercept and escort!”
Security Chief Tylor Ral fired the order out over the comms link as Deputy Jalon Sep kicked their security shuttle’s systems up to full power. Their watching brief was over.
Moments ago, the readouts of their shuttle had begun to flare up with alerts, as they had detected a suspicious craft that was breaking several Varris IV traffic laws, and appeared to be intercepting the shuttle they were tailing. That had been enough to make the two most senior members of the colony’s slapdash security forces into action.
Tylor gripped onto the shuttle console, his headache forgotten, as Jalon gunned the thrusters and moved in on the location of the transponder trace.
Elsewhere, on the perimeter that had been established in the skies above the financial district of the main settlement, several identical shuttles began their own manoeuvres towards the targets.
“Is this what your instincts were expecting, Chief?” Jalon couldn’t help but ask as she flicked on the security shuttles alert sirens to clear a path through the traffic.
“I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, Deputy. That’s kinda the trouble with instincts.”
Jalon suppressed a stifled smile at this, as she swung the shuttle into a sharp climb to avoid a small civilian craft.
“But,” Tylor continued, “Something’s definitely going down. And I can’t risk leaving those remaining hostages with them any longer. So I’d say it’s time to round ‘em up.”
“With pleasure, Chief,” she nodded, before she acknowledged a chance on her instruments, “But they’re moving!”
“I see ‘em,” Tylor nodded, grabbing the comms unit again, “Teams four, five and seven, intercept the new target. All other teams, form up with the lead shuttle for the primary target. Stay with them, keep them out of civilian lanes, use grapplers if you have to, but get ‘em stopped. Out.”
As he clicked off the comms link, he turned back to Jalon, whose focus was entirely on the task at hand, all of her previous doubts having been forgotten now they had a job to do. “Right then, Deputy,” the grizzled chief nodded, “Let’s go get these sons of bitches.”
The shuttle burst forwards, sirens blaring, and closed in on their target.
* * * * *
“Oh, good, more shuttles.”
Sunek managed to fire off his latest volley of sarcasm even as he wrenched the control stick in front of him upwards and to the right, to throw the Ktarian shuttle to the left and downwards.
Denella gripped on to the console and the other passengers did their best to brace as Sunek managed to just thread the shuttle past the edge of the wall of a rusted skyscraper.
The Orion checked the console in front of her and grimaced as she saw the fresh traces that Sunek had been referring to. “These ones look like they’re from Ktarian Security,” she reported, “There must be a transponder in here somewhere.”
“Probably too late to find it now,” Sunek called back, as he flicked the control stick to the right again to send the shuttle into a sharper descent.
Denella ignored his comment and began to do her best to check through the ship’s systems for some sign of tracking software.
The tiny craft plunged deeper into the maze of crumbling skyscrapers, dropping away from the civilian traffic in the higher altitudes, pursued by four identical security shuttles, all of them with sirens blaring.
Whoever Palmor Fot had called in as backup had temporarily broken off their own pursuit, disappearing into the night to try and lose their own tail. Which now left Sunek free to swing his controls one way, then the other, between the fading metal and glass constructs.
In the rear, Klath gritted his teeth as his weight was forced onto his injured leg, as Tegras, Evina and Palmor all gripped onto the padded bench.
“Slow down, you maniac!” Palmor managed to spit out, “You’re going to get us all killed!”
“Relax,” Sunek fired back, “I’m a professional.”
The shuttle swung to the right, skimming around the corner of a building and getting almost close enough to scrape the paintwork as it did so.
“See? Loads of room!”
Sunek had initially assumed it would be an easy enough job to lose their pursuers amongst the buildings themselves. All he needed to do was get two or three turns ahead of them and make a swift break for the cloud cover well above their heads. But he was finding that, no matter how many turns he made, he couldn't get any sort of clear moment to make that break. Which backed up Denella’s assumption.
“Yep,” the Vulcan grimaced, “They’re definitely tracking us.”
“Damnit!” the Orion snapped, as the shuttle banked again and Klath growled in pain from behind, “I can’t find anything here to disable! Whatever they’re tracking us with must be some sort of built-in failsafe hardwired into the shuttle’s systems somehow!”
“Makes sense. In case three complete idiots ever decided to take one out for an early morning joyride.”
Sunek glanced over at his colleague and grinned, even as he pitched the shuttle around another turn. He was met by an unamused glare from Denella.
“Fine,” he shrugged, “Two complete idiots and a hot chick.”
He ignored the way the unamused glare increased in intensity, and skimmed the shuttle between two more skyscrapers before he continued.
“Either way, if we can’t disable that transponder, then we’re never gonna shake them.”
At this, Denella was forced to concede the point with a nod of her head, even as she heard one of the Ktarians slide off the bench behind them onto the deck with a thump. “Any bright ideas, flyboy?” she replied.
Sunek considered the situation for a moment. Engaging both his methodical Vulcan mind, and his very un-Vulcan ego’s confidence in his own abilities, to figure out how they were supposed to escape from a security detail who would literally always know where they were.
Then, he made out something down below them, on the ground. And suddenly, his eyes lit up. “Hey, did I see a transporter back there?”
“Um, yes,” she replied, a little confused, “Short-range only, though. Not enough to get us where we need to go, or—”
“Nah,” Sunek shot back, “That sounds perfect.”
“For what?”
The Vulcan glanced over at her and grinned, before calling back to the rest of the passengers.
“Everyone get ready. We’re going on a little trip…”
* * * * *
The modest two-person Ktarian craft hung in the cloud layer that currently covered the entirety of Varris IV’s single vast continent.
It was a standard warp shuttle design, with small nacelles hanging down underneath a squat main body. But this one had been modified and stretched to include a more substantial rear section for habitation purposes, making this a long-range ship. Not an especially comfortable one, but one that could ferry Mizar and Devan to a distant spaceport once all this was over.
The tiny vessel bucked and rolled inside the swirling clouds, like a sailing boat on the ocean.
In one of the forward seats, Devan wished that the rising sickness in his stomach could be blamed on the uncertain motion of the craft. But he knew that wasn’t true. It was being caused entirely by the tension that was bubbling inside him. The feeling that he was finally closing in on his target. And that was fraying what remained of his nerves to breaking point and beyond.
He was this close to Palmor Fot.
Even picturing the name sent a fresh stab of pain through him, and he forced himself to try to focus on something else. Other than Palmor Fot. And the sickness in his stomach.
The waiting wasn’t helping.
They still hadn’t heard from the team down on the planet, and whether or not they had managed to find the latinum that his entire plan now apparently hinged on. But he couldn’t do anything about that. So he tried to ignore the memories swirling around inside his mind, and focused on quelling his nausea.
Alongside him, Mizar looked up from the padd he was idly reading, the screen displaying a list of current rentals available on Risa. Just one of the things he was considering spending his ill-gotten loot on, once they had recovered it.
The larger Ktarian gestured over at the object Devan was holding with a slight trace of amusement.
“You really sure you’ll be able to use that when the time comes?”
Devan didn’t look up at Mizar, but he did look down at the ugly disruptor pistol in his hands. The one he had purchased before he came to Varris IV.
Part of him still wanted to run away from all of this, to give up and not finish what he had started. But then the memories came swirling back through his mind, and he found himself overwhelmed by a new feeling. One of determination.
And he nodded.
End of Part Three