Chapter Text
Part Three
“What the hell?”
Natasha grunted in frustration as she tapped the console in front of her, being confronted by the same defiant buzz from the system she was trying to access.
On the other side of the lab area on Reja Gar, Denella looked up from her work with a patient smile on her face. “You know, I’ve had better engineering assistants over the years.”
Natasha looked up at the Orion and offered an apologetic smile of her own, as she gestured down at the console. “Sorry. But this is really, really odd.”
Denella reluctantly got up from where she had been connecting up the lighting system for the caged-off section of the lab, dusted herself down, and walked over to where her colleague was still tapping away.
“Trying to order us some lunch?”
“I wish. I’ve been trying to find out…anything, actually. About what they’re doing on this station.”
“Huh,” Denella mused, “So you’re spying?”
Natasha looked up at the green-skinned woman’s amused face and affected a mock-defensive air.
“I’m exercising curiosity.”
Denella accepted that defence with a shrug, as Natasha gestured around the room.
“Besides, it’s your fault. You got me all paranoid talking about those forcefields. I mean, what sort of plants are they putting in this arboretum?”
Denella considered this for a moment as she wiped a smear of dirt across her face and set down the hyperspanner in her hand. “I dunno. Back where I grew up on Orpheus IV, there was a type of vine with four inch spines on it. If you so much as grazed it with your skin, the poison on the spines was strong enough to kill you in about half an hour.”
She offered the other woman a shrug.
“I don’t like forests.”
Natasha nodded in understanding, casting her mind back to her own recent run-in with a toxic plant on a pre-industrial planet that the Bounty’s crew had accidentally found themselves on. One which had nearly ended up killing her. “Fair point,” she conceded eventually, “But that still doesn’t explain all of this.”
She tapped the console again, and another buzz rang out around the room.
“It’s like the entire station database is completely locked down to the public. And I mean everything. I get that they’re not about to let me hack into the weapons controls, but this is a science outpost, and I can’t even call up a manifest of ongoing research projects without hitting half a dozen dead ends. I’ve served on Starfleet ships during wars, and even they had less computer lockouts in place.”
Denella stepped over and looked down at the screen with a thoughtful expression, seeing the error message that she had run into. “Yeah, but in defence of the Flaxians, you guys could really do with investing a bit more in security over there.”
Natasha gave the Orion woman a withering look, as Denella simply offered back a knowing smile and a casual gesture down at the controls.
“I guess I can try and force my way in. Whatever it is they’ve got in place, there’s always a way through somewhere.”
“Didn’t you get arrested the last time you tried to do that?”
Now it was Denella’s turn to look a little unhappy, reminded of her run-in with Starfleet Security on Starbase 216 after she had hacked into their database to try and help Klath track down details about his enemy. “Yeah, well,” she offered back, “If Starfleet put as much effort into their system encryptions as they did into arresting people, they might save themselves a lot of trouble.”
“Still,” Natasha smiled, “I’m not sure we want to risk that sort of thing happening again. We’re already down one ship and three crewmates. I just wish there was some other way…”
Denella nodded thoughtfully, then an idea came to her, even if she was reluctant to suggest it.
“Well…I hate to say it, trust me. But if you really do want to get some more information, you might have another option open to you.”
Natasha realised what she was getting at immediately. And she didn’t like it.
“No,” she said with a defiant shake of her head.
Denella just shrugged again.
“He did say the views were very good…”
Natasha failed to suppress the grimace that raced onto her face at warp speed, and looked back down at the uncooperative screen with a frustrated sigh. She was desperately curious to find out more about what the hell was really going on here on Reja Gar. Her sense of curiosity and intrigue had well and truly been piqued.
The question was whether or not she was curious enough about it to actually go to dinner with the oily Commander Turanya.
And she had a horrible feeling that she was.
* * * * *
“We’re boned.”
It wasn’t the first time that Sunek had offered his own personal report on their current survival prospects, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. But while it was getting repetitive, it was also an entirely concise and accurate summary of their situation. As good as anything else that anyone else could offer.
It had taken Jirel and Lieutenant Kataya some time to make their way up to the bridge to meet up with the two other remaining survivors of the late Flaxian cruiser Ret Kol.
By that point, it had already dawned on Klath and Sunek that there were no survivors of the explosion that had so suddenly consumed the other ship. While they still had no power for sensor sweeps, the image on the viewscreen had resolved into little more than a scattered debris field, with no visible signs of shuttles or escape pods.
“So,” Jirel managed eventually, as he stood next to the command chair of the unfamiliar bridge of the derelict and stared at the floating patch of debris on the screen, “We’re on our own.”
“No,” Sunek snapped, as he continued to pace around the rear of the room, “We’re not on our own, are we? That’s kinda the whole problem here, isn’t it? It’s not just us. It’s us, and whatever the hell this great big scary monster is that’s spent the last week gorging on every passing Flaxian in the sector!”
As the Vulcan ranted on, Jirel looked over at Kataya, who was sitting slumped on the deck next to one of the bridge consoles to the left side. He had collapsed there as soon as they had gotten to the bridge and seen first hand the fate of the Ret Kol, and hadn’t even said a word.
But before Jirel could worry any more about that, Klath stepped over to him. The Klingon still carried his phaser rifle in his hands, ready for action inside his bulky spacesuit. “Jirel,” he boomed over the open suit-to-suit comms line, “What exactly are we dealing with?”
Clearly Klath was in no mood to panic, as Sunek was doing. Nor to retreat inside himself, as Kataya had. There was only one thing on his mind, and that was to fight.
The Trill reached for an answer, thinking back to what he had seen down in the belly of the ship.
“We’re dealing with a lot,” he said eventually, “Once, back at the Tyran Scrapyards, I saw a guy lose his footing and fall into a tritanium-crushing machine we used to compact down whatever we scraped off an old ship’s hull to be transported away and sold off. And it ended up being my job to clean up what was left of him…”
He suppressed a shudder at the memory, and then looked back at his friend.
“As of today, that’s officially the second worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Klath pondered this summary for a moment, then nodded in understanding.
“We’re totally boned,” Sunek offered, having heard the same explanation over the open comms line.
Jirel shot the Vulcan a look, then turned back to the shellshocked Kataya, stepping over to the silent Flaxian and crouching down next to him. “Hey, Lieutenant?” he offered with a calm tone, “We kinda need a plan here. And…I hate to say it, but I guess you’re in charge.”
The Flaxian slowly looked up at the Trill in front of him, a lost expression clearly visible on his face through his helmet. “Fifteen years,” he muttered, “Captain Grinya had been doing this for fifteen years. He’d never lost a team member. Not one. Fifteen years…”
Jirel grimaced as Kataya’s voice trailed off. Without his captain, his crew and his ship, the hardened lieutenant that the Trill had endured an uncomfortable search with had vanished, replaced by an entirely less confident and perplexed individual.
“Right,” he nodded in understanding, patting Kataya’s shoulder with a gloved hand, “But me and my friends have been doing this for fifteen minutes. So we’re gonna need you to help us out here if we’re all gonna get through this, ok?”
Kataya just stared back up at him, the silence over the comms link hanging heavily in the air.
Realising that there were going to be no orders forthcoming from the single remaining member of the Flaxian Science Agency onboard, Jirel reluctantly stood back up and turned to the others. “Ok,” he sighed, “Let’s figure this out. What have we got up here?”
He gestured around the unpowered and darkened bridge. Klath grunted an unhappy response as Sunek continued to pace around.
“Very little,” the Klingon admitted, “What power remains gives us access to the data banks and computer records. Life support is minimal, internal and external sensors are still offline, and we have no propulsion or navigation beyond limited thruster control.”
“Can we send a distress call?”
“Short-range only. And this is not a populated sector of space.”
Jirel knew it was a stupid question before he’d asked it. But, as he’d already explained to Kataya, he didn’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.
“The data banks,” he offered, switching focus as his brain tried to figure out the puzzle that they were all trapped inside, “All that stuff that the Ret Kol was downloading. That should tell us what we’re dealing with, right?”
“You’d think,” Sunek scoffed from behind him.
Before Jirel could lash out at the Vulcan for his latest unhelpful comment, the fretful pilot actually opted to expand on his point.
“I’ve already checked the database out while we were waiting for you to get up here. The whole thing is locked down to anyone without about half a bajillion access codes.”
“Locked down?” Jirel asked.
“Yeah. Like a freaking Romulan prison ship. Everything’s quadruple encoded. The logs, navigational history, ship’s manifest. Can’t even tell you what these guys had for lunch yesterday. We’ve been properly set up here, Jirel.”
Jirel sighed, even as his spots started to itch with a fresh intensity. Given that life support was still just about functioning, he gave serious thought to just ripping off his helmet and scratching them, but for some reason he felt ever so slightly safer with the suit on.
Instead, he turned back to the static Kataya.
“Look, Lieutenant, you need to give us something here. What the hell is on this ship? And why did the Ret Kol think that Captain Grinya had beamed back aboard?”
Kataya looked up at the Trill again, but remained slumped next to the control panel, his phaser rifle lying at his feet. After a moment, he shook his head. “I—I don’t know. We were just told to…secure the cargo.”
That seemed to be all they were going to get out of the formerly gruff salvage expert.
“Secure the cargo,” Klath echoed with an ominous tone.
Jirel thought back to the wreckage of the laboratory and felt himself grimace for what felt like the thousandth time since he had left the Reja Gar station. He still felt a long way from safety. A long way from the Bounty.
He forced himself to shake those thoughts from his mind.
“Ok, so, what now?” he said instead.
“We fight,” Klath inevitably replied, “We turn the hunter into the hunted.”
“Whatever this thing is,” Jirel countered with a stern glance, “It’s picked off two ship’s-worth of Flaxians for fun.”
Klath didn’t miss a beat. He had clearly already considered this. “Still, if we fight, then we die with honour—”
“Ok, gonna stop Rear Admiral Suicide Mission right there,” Sunek cut in, “And, for a less entirely stupid plan, I still say we get the hell out of here.”
“Our lift home just exploded, Sunek.”
“Yeah, but this crate has a shuttlebay, right?”
Klath looked distinctly unimpressed by this suggestion, but Jirel nodded at his pilot inside his helmet. It was pretty clear what their best option was.
“Ok, good plan. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
He gestured in the direction of the access conduit, and watched as Klath and Sunek set off with their weapons raised, before he turned back to Lieutenant Kataya, who remained where he was.
“Hey,” he continued to the Flaxian, stepping over to him and holding out a hand to help him back up to his feet, “You with us, Lieutenant?”
The Flaxian met his gaze again with a set of sunken eyes. For a moment, he didn’t move, to the point that Jirel began to wonder whether they could realistically drag him all the way down to the shuttlebay. Instead, he decided to use his powers of negotiation.
“Look, I’m sorry. For everything that’s happened here. And I don’t know much about Flaxian Science Agency protocol, as I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed. But I’m pretty sure Captain Grinya would have taught you never to give up. And I’m definitely sure the chances of us three idiots getting home alive are gonna be a hell of a lot better with you alongside us.”
There was a slight flicker in Kataya’s eyes, and then he accepted Jirel’s hand. The Trill even did a manful job of disguising the wince of pain that shot up his arm as he fully appreciated the effort required to help lift a burly Flaxian up off the ground.
With Kataya standing back on his own two feet, he hoisted his phaser rifle, locked eyes with Jirel again, and nodded firmly.
“You’re right,” he muttered, “Let’s go.”
With that, they turned towards where Klath and Sunek were impatiently waiting at the entrance to the access conduits.
“Ok, team,” Jirel nodded, “Let’s find ourselves a shuttle.”
One by one, they headed back into the narrow confines of the conduit. As he dropped to his knees and inched himself inside, Jirel tried his best not to think about what might be waiting for them between here and the shuttlebay.
“Just FYI,” Sunek tutted over the comms link, “We’re definitely boned.”