Chapter Text
Part Four (Cont’d)
The Bounty’s cargo bay was quickly filling with the scent of burning metal.
“You know, it’s actually a good thing this took me so long to get right,” Natasha idly opined, “We’d have been found out in minutes.”
Jirel could see what she meant. It would have been impossible to have hidden the smell from their captors. But fortunately, they had left them to it. And Natasha was finally making progress.
“Just hurry up,” he urged her, unnecessarily.
He couldn’t tell exactly how long ago Devan and Mizar had left them, but he knew it was long enough for his old friend to have already done something stupid. And that was worrying him. Not to mention the fact that Mizar still had the ability to detonate the cabrodine bomb that remained between them.
Even if Jirel still wasn’t entirely convinced that it was a bomb.
“You think they’ll still be on their shuttle?” Natasha asked from the other side of the metal cylinder, as she inched the cutting tool further along the cuffs.
“I hope so,” he replied, “They’ll just be waiting for a call from the others before…”
He paused and considered the last thing that Devan had said to him.
How he needed someone to help him kill.
It didn’t please him to admit it, even to himself, but Jirel was no stranger to death. With the amount of misfortune that the Bounty and her crew tended to run into, it was almost written into whatever passed for his job description. But he still preferred to think that they were the exceptions in the grand scheme of things. That people like Devan Gol, occasional run-in with a Nausicaan aside, didn’t need to get involved in that side of galactic life.
And yet, it seemed as though that was exactly what was happening.
“You really think he’s gonna go and kill someone?” he asked out loud.
“He’s your acquaintance,” Natasha pointed out knowingly, “But…in my experience over the last few years, I’d say that anyone has the power to kill someone. If they really want to.”
“I guess,” he admitted with a sigh, “But there’s got to be more to it than—”
In an instant, and for the first time in hours, he felt the sensation of his hand being freed from the constraints of the cuffs.
“Got it!” Natasha squealed triumphantly.
Still shackled together by their other arms, they managed to get to their feet and extricate themselves from around the bomb, Natasha then making short work of the other set of cuffs, as they dropped to the deck with a satisfying clang.
“Ok,” Jirel urged, as he rubbed his slightly singed wrist, “Let’s get down there, and find Devan before he does something stupid.”
She nodded back urgently, before the two of them paused and awkwardly took each other’s underwear-clad forms in. The Trill held up a finger to make a slight, but important correction to his plan.
“…Let’s get dressed, then get down there and find Devan before he does something stupid.”
Natasha nodded twice as urgently, as the two reddening figures raced for their respective cabins.
* * * * *
“It’s beautiful…”
Sunek stood and gawped at the pile of latinum on the table in front of him. All fifty bricks of it. Across all of his travels, even before he had joined the Bounty’s crew, he had never seen so much wealth in one place.
The fifty shiny bricks sat on top of an anti-grav unit and glistened in the artificial light of the penthouse’s main living area, which was an appropriately decadent setting for such a sight.
Palmor’s residence was filled with fine furnishings and lavish decorations, finished with the most indulgent of fabrics and precious metals. It was a venue entirely out of place with the rest of the Varris IV colony. And it was also a venue that contained a secure storeroom, which Denella had frogmarched Palmor to in order to retrieve the treasure that now sat before them.
“You reckon he’d really notice if we just kept one for ourselves?” Sunek added as he continued to stare at the latinum in awe.
“I believe it likely that he will be able to count to fifty,” Klath replied, with a surprising amount of sarcasm.
“Spoilsport.”
“Heh,” Tegras couldn’t help but grunt, “I wonder how much of that came from legitimate business transactions, hmm?”
“All of it,” Palmor muttered back as he stared impotently at the riches in front of him.
“A likely story.”
As the two Ktarians bickered, Denella pulled the communicator from her belt and glanced at Klath. “Guess we’d better call this in. Before…”
“Kaboom,” Sunek offered, almost mirthlessly.
The Orion engineer stifled a grimace, and tapped the communicator. “Mizar. You there?”
Silence. For a horrible moment, she wondered if things had escalated a little too far in orbit above their heads. Then, eventually, Mizar’s voice came through.
“You found my latinum? Or is this just another social call?”
Denella suppressed the urge she felt to punch something whenever she heard the smug Ktarian’s voice, and worked hard to maintain a level of calm. “The latinum’s here,” she reported, “We’ve done everything you asked us to do down here. So, how about you give us our ship back—?”
Before she could get any further, Mizar cut in, his voice still supremely confident.
“Palmor Fot?”
The Ktarian man’s yellow eyes widened upon hearing his name directly again.
“He’s here as well,” Denella said simply.
There was no further comment from the other end of the comms link. It simply clicked off.
“Wh—What more do these people want from me?” Palmor stammered, “I’ve done all you asked, given you my latinum, now what?”
“Now,” Tegras offered, his old gloating tone having returned as he watched his old foe squirming once again, “I suspect that life has finally caught up with you, Palmor.”
“Happens to all of us,” Sunek chimed in, “Except for old Trelok here. He’s gonna live forever.”
“B—But,” Palmor stammered, “You have to let me go! You can’t—!”
He was silenced by a familiar noise. All six individuals in the room turned towards the whining sound of the incoming transport.
Klath immediately tensed up. With their transporter inhibitor having been left behind during their shuttle-switching manoeuvre, there was now nothing stopping Ktarian Security from getting to them.
But this wasn’t Ktarian Security.
They watched as Mizar Bal and Devan Gol coalesced on the other side of the living area, as the transporter process completed. Both of them held disruptors of their own.
“Thank you for all your help,” Mizar smiled, stepping forwards with his weapon raised, “But we’ll take it from here…”
* * * * *
“Damnit!”
Tylor punctuated his frustrated growl by slamming his hand down on top of the shuttle’s control panel. His headache was back with a vengeance. Alongside him, Jalon kept her own emotions more in check. Though she could definitely appreciate the sentiment.
They had completed several circuitous searches around the skies of the financial district, but had turned up no trace of the missing shuttle, or scanned any lifesign matching their known targets in any passing vehicle.
They had somehow managed to escape from under their noses.
The shuttle gently banked through a final loop of the southern end of the district, returning to its starting point once again.
“Should I prepare for another pass, Chief?” Jalon asked.
Tylor shook his head as he rubbed the hand that had impacted the top of the console a few moments ago. “No point,” he replied, “We’re looking for a goddamn needle in a haystack, and we don’t even know we’re in the right haystack.”
Jalon nodded. She had come to the same conclusion three loops ago. But she hadn’t wanted to say anything directly to her superior out of respect.
“Nothing from the other teams either,” he grimaced, “I guess we call this off. Get back to HQ and see if we can get anything out of those goons in the other shuttle for our reports.”
They had at least received word that the second target had been successfully rounded up, but that had done little to ease Tylor’s grim mood. He looked out of the cockpit window with a hint of sadness, as the rain thumped down on the hull of the ship.
“Guess that’s just one more bunch of criminals that got away down here—”
He was interrupted by a chirp from the console in front of Jalon. She quickly checked over the incoming message and dismissed it, returning her attention to their issues.
“What was that?” he asked off-handedly, not entirely interested in the answer.
“Oh, nothing, Chief,” she reluctantly replied, “It’s just…I asked the units back at the bar to compile a full list of the hostages that were released, and profiles on the ones still being held.”
She offered him a slightly guilty shrug at the inevitability of her reasoning.
“It’s…standard procedure.”
Tylor stifled a smile and nodded, before returning his attention to the rainfall outside. Then his face lit up, and he spun back around to her. “Let’s see that report.”
“Chief, it’s just—”
“I know, standard procedure. Let me see.”
She called up the report for him on the central screen of the control panel. It didn’t take long for him to break out into a satisfied smile.
“Well, well, well. Would you look at that?”
“Chief?”
“In your list of profiles of those hostages still on the shuttle. Palmor Fot.”
She recognised the name, but still looked a little confused. “Local businessman,” she nodded, “One of the richest men left on Varris IV.”
“And also someone who’s caught up in every criminal enterprise across this whole goddamn colony.”
“Allegedly,” she reminded him, “Ktarian Security has never been able to pin anything on him, since well before I got here.”
“Right,” Tylor tutted, “Guy’s an expert in the art of plausible deniability. At least enough of one to stay ahead of the sort of resources we’ve got. But I’m willing to bet that it’s a bit too much of a coincidence for him to be one of the hostages still on that shuttle.”
“You think he’s part of this?” Jalon asked.
Tylor looked over at her with a satisfied smile, then gestured to the report on the screen that her adherence to standard protocol had handed them.
“I think,” he replied, “You just found us our haystack…”