Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
“Jirel.”
There was no response from the Flaxian next to him as they walked away from the latest pile of body parts that they had tagged.
So far, the search team had tagged around half a dozen sets of remains, roughly a quarter of the derelict’s crew. Though with some of them having been discovered close together, it was sometimes hard to see when one Flaxian ended and another one started.
Each time they happened upon a set of remains, Jirel’s stomach tightened a little more, and his grip on his phaser rifle got a little more strong. Whatever had happened, the increasingly pointless search for survivors was becoming as grim a job as he had ever been involved in out in space. The unsettling nature of their work was beginning to take its toll.
And things weren’t being helped by the ongoing silent treatment he was getting from his entirely formal and focused search partner. So he tried again to break that particular strand of tension.
“My name’s Jirel,” he continued, “Just so you don’t need to keep calling me ‘newbie’.”
Alongside him, Kataya didn’t offer him as much as a glance, keeping his focus dead ahead as they paced on down the latest corridor. But he did eventually reply.
“I know what your name is. Newbie.”
Jirel strained to detect a sliver of good humour in the Flaxian’s voice when he delivered that comment over the suit-to-suit link. But he heard nothing.
“Right,” Jirel sighed, “I get it, you’re doing a thing. It’s just…I’d kinda like to think we’re at a stage where we can drop all that now?”
No response. They turned another corner to find a mercifully empty corridor greeting them.
“I mean,” Jirel continued as winningly as he could manage under the circumstances, “I thought we’d got past this back in the mess hall…”
Kataya grunted with a trace of amusement at this, but any hopes Jirel had of making a breakthrough in his relationship with his search partner were dashed when the Flaxian looked over at him with a dismissive glare. “That fight gave me respect for your Klingon friend. But not for the rest of you. And around here, on this crew, respect has to be earned.”
Before Jirel could muster any sort of response to that, Kataya swiftly walked on and rounded another corner. Then, as the Trill followed him and looked down the next corridor, a response suddenly came to him.
“Holy crap.”
There was no response from Kataya. But, truth be told, his thoughts were similar. They both stopped dead in their tracks and stared at the sight that their torches were illuminating ahead of them.
On the right side of the corridor, about halfway towards the next intersection, the lines of the dark and weathered walls were interrupted by a huge misshapen hole, torn through the metal itself as if a photon torpedo had slammed through it. Great ugly shards of grey metal stuck out from the rupture, glinting in their torchlight, unsettlingly twisted outwards into the corridor itself.
Kataya raised his phaser rifle without a sound, and slowly stepped towards the carnage. Bereft of an alternative plan, Jirel brought his own weapon to bear and cautiously followed.
As they approached the tear in the wall, his eyes widened at the evident ferocity of whatever had so completely wrenched a direct path through the solid wall.
“Holy crap,” Jirel repeated in a whisper, struggling to think of anything else to say.
As he got to the twisted metal, Kataya was already tapping his wrist-mounted controls, scanning the area to try and ascertain their surroundings. “These are the main laboratories,” he muttered over the suit-to-suit link, gesturing with his other hand to the scene of carnage on the other side of the hole.
“So,” Jirel offered in return, “You gonna tell me this was a meteor as well?”
The Flaxian didn’t respond immediately, keeping his focus on his scans for some sort of clue as to what had happened here. But Jirel persisted.
“I’m serious. What the hell have we beamed into over here? What were they transporting on this crate, Kataya?”
Inside his helmet, the Flaxian shook his head. The words of his response rang hollow when they finally came. His previous assertiveness eroded slightly. “I…have no idea,” he admitted, “Captain Grinya might have seen a full manifest, but he didn’t flag any issues to us. We were just ordered to salvage the ship. Tag and retrieve.”
“Yeah, well, looks like you’re gonna need some bigger tags.”
Kataya ignored him, continuing to scan the remains of the wall. Jirel turned the torch beam on his rifle onto the widest available setting and cautiously peered into the room on the other side of the wall, trying to make out details in the darkness.
The light illuminated the eerie scene of a trashed laboratory, bouncing off wrecked consoles and overturned tables and casting foreboding shadows onto the walls.
Just as he plucked up the courage to take a step through the gap and into the room, being careful not to nick the fabric of his suit on the jagged edge of the hole, a sudden noise caused him to literally jump back in fright.
It took him a moment to calm his heart rate as his helmet filled with a familiar gruff voice.
“Klath to Jirel, come in.”
The unauthorised communication not only caused Jirel to jump, but caused him to follow up with a slight flinch. He felt Kataya’s glare on his back without turning around, as his colleagues once again went against clearly established protocol during Flaxian salvage operations. Still, given the circumstances, he elected to answer the call.
“Hey, Klath,” he managed to get out as he felt his spots start to itch all over again, “Remember those long, super interesting briefings back on the Ret Kol, right? All salvage team comms are addressed to the team leader?”
“Yes,” Klath grunted back, “But that is proving difficult. I am unable to raise Captain Grinya.”
Jirel stepped back out of the ruined laboratory and looked over at Lieutenant Kataya, whose gaze became slightly more steely as he opened a second channel.
“Search team to Captain Grinya. Please respond.”
Jirel watched on as the Flaxian waited for a response, then shook his head and talked back to Klath via his own link. “Nothing here either. Could be interference if they’re still down in engineering?”
“Perhaps,” the Klingon replied, in a tone of voice that suggested he didn’t believe that particular explanation for a second.
Kataya cut into the main comms line and barked out a response before Jirel could muster anything further to his friend.
“We’re closer to the engineering section. We’ll go down and check it out.”
“Oh,” Jirel couldn’t help but reply, “We will, will we?”
Kataya fixed him with a freshly determined glare. “Until we’ve re-established contact with Captain Grinya, I’m in effective command of this operation. So yes, we will. Newbie.”
Before the Trill could retort any further, the Flaxian turned and walked off. Jirel sighed inside his helmet and began to follow, keeping his eyes on the scene of destruction that still dominated this stretch of corridor.
“Hey, Klath, you still there?” he called out over the comms link, not caring what Kataya thought about another breach of procedure.
“Yes,” the Klingon replied.
“Listen, buddy, you two keep an eye out up there, ok?”
“For what?”
“I…don’t really know,” Jirel admitted with a sigh, “But based on what we’ve seen down here, I’m pretty sure there’s something else onboard this thing with us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Looks like…something got out of the labs down here. You should see the damage. Whatever it was made mincemeat out of the place.”
“I see,” Klath’s response came, “Something…big?”
Jirel cast a final look at the twisted wreckage that had once been a solid tritanium bulkhead and suppressed a fresh grimace.
“Yep,” he replied, “Something big.”
* * * * *
Lieutenant Rondya sat in the command chair on the Ret Kol’s bridge and sighed.
As second in command of a Flaxian cruiser primarily tasked with salvage missions, he found that there was a lot of sitting and waiting involved.
Perhaps if his commanding officer was more of a delegator, he might have had the opportunity to actually lead more of the salvage teams, and get in on some of the action.
But Captain Grinya had never been a delegator. He was a leader. And so his second in command was usually left with little more to do than keep the centre chair on the bridge warm for hours on end, while the real work happened elsewhere under the eagle eye of Grinya himself.
On the main viewscreen, the derelict hung at a slightly awkward angle compared to the Ret Kol itself, a testament to the ship’s lack of power.
It was a substantially larger vessel than the cruiser, featuring a large rectangular secondary hull which housed the sensor banks, storage areas and laboratories alongside the main engineering areas, and a smaller semi-circular forward hull housing the bridge and crew accommodation, connected to the larger section with a short neck. Two stubby nacelles branched out from either side.
It wasn’t an ugly design by any means. But given that Rondya had been staring at it for the best part of four hours by now, he was definitely starting to dislike it.
The bridge was largely understaffed, as it often was during the meat of a salvage operation. Aside from Rondya himself, there was a junior officer keeping an eye on the helm and matching their course with their target, and a relief officer at the rear comms and engineering panel to keep an eye on the derelict itself.
There was some concern among the bridge crew at some of the reports from over on the derelict, not least the complete lack of survivors found so far. But equally, it wasn’t the first time they had dealt with such an unhappy situation. It was part of the salvaging process, after all.
As time ticked on, Rondya found himself absently drumming his fingers on the armrest of the command chair, apparently to the irritation of the helmsman, whose shoulders flinched slightly as the noise persisted.
Then, out of nowhere, the comms panel behind him chirped, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Captain Grinya and the team were ready to return. Like clockwork.
Except, this time, that wasn’t what the comms traffic was.
“Lieutenant,” the comms officer reported, “You’re being contacted. From below decks.”
“What?” Rondya scoffed, as he swung around in his chair.
“It’s Crewman Jadaya. From the port engineering section.”
The Ret Kol’s executive officer couldn’t help but raise a curious eyebrow. Jadaya was one of the newest members of the crew, and pretty much the lowest-ranking. He was very much the subordinate’s subordinate. Having actually met the sickly young crewman when he first came aboard, Rondya had considered it very lucky of him to be joining the Ret Kol at the same time as the three newbies had joined up for salvage duty.
If it hadn’t been for the Trill, the Vulcan and the Klingon distracting the more rowdy members of the crew, he was pretty sure they’d have eaten Jadaya alive.
Still, contacting the bridge from his lowly position, especially in the middle of a salvage operation, suggested that someone had gotten to the crewman for a spot of old-fashioned hazing anyway.
“Crewman,” Rondya responded, keeping his tone formal despite the amusement he was feeling inside, “How can we help you down there?”
“Um,” the weak voice of Jadaya stammered, “I—I just thought I should report it in, sir.”
Rondya couldn’t help but shake his head as he heard the helmsman snort behind him. Everyone on the bridge was wondering exactly what fanciful message the bullied crewman was being asked to deliver to his senior officers. “Report…what, Crewman? Out with it.”
“R—Right, um, y—yes. It’s just…Captain Grinya said I didn’t need to report it, but I r—really thought I should—”
The amusement vanished from Rondya’s face in an instant.
“What the hell are you talking about, Crewman? Captain Grinya is aboard the derelict.”
“Yes, sir. B—But he beamed back. Just now.”
Rondya rolled his eyes. Maybe the Ret Kol’s crew were losing their touch if this was the best they could come up with as a plan to haze their newest arrival.
“Ok, Crewman, I don’t care who put you up to this, but you need to clear the line. We’re in the middle of—”
“Sir,” Jadaya’s voice came back, a little more certain, “I’m telling the truth.”
Rondya glanced at the officer at the comms station, who seemed equally perplexed by the effort that the junior crewman’s persistence. Still not entirely sure he wasn’t being hazed as much as Jadaya was, he reluctantly stood up from the command chair and left it spinning behind him.
“I’m on my way.”
The Ret Kol’s exec strode off the bridge in a foul mood. He was already cooking up a suitable punishment for the young crewman for all of this. A couple of weeks spent cleaning the waste reclamation unit was the first thing that sprung to mind.
A few moments later, when he arrived in the Ret Kol’s engineering section, he was as shocked as anyone to discover that Crewman Jadaya had been telling the truth.