Chapter Text
Part Four
“A chameloid?”
Natasha’s angry voice filled the small ready room of the Sud Yot, accompanied by a hefty thud as she slammed the small padd in her hands down onto the desk.
Behind the desk, Commander Turanya sat as impassively as ever, his tendriled fingers steepled in front of him. Her outburst did little other than provoke a flicker of annoyance across his features.
Natasha stood alongside Denella, both of them having found out the truth. To the side of the desk, Captain Sonaya of the Sud Yot was just getting up to speed.
“A what?” the younger Flaxian managed eventually.
“A type of shapeshifter,” Natasha explained for her benefit, through gritted teeth, “There’s only ever been contact with a handful down the years. But apparently the Flaxian Science Agency found one.”
“Yeah,” Denella added, “From a trafficker in the Drura sector.”
The Orion felt her fists balling up instinctively. For reasons that she didn’t need to explain to anyone else in the room, she had a particular hatred for anyone engaged in people trafficking.
Despite all of this, Turanya maintained an entirely becalmed exterior behind the desk, not flinching in the face of the accusations being thrown at him. Even as Sonaya turned to her superior officer.
“Is this true, Commander?”
The male Flaxian kept his focus on the human and the Orion, ignoring his colleague’s question. “You know,” he chided with a slight tut, gesturing at the padd, “Hacking into a Flaxian database is a very serious crime—”
He was silenced by the sound of Captain Sonaya’s fist impacting on the desk with almost as much force as the padd had done. His face betrayed a slight flinch for the first time. He hadn’t been expecting that.
“I said,” the other uniformed Flaxian hissed, “Is this true, Commander?”
Turanya glanced back over at his subordinate and fixed her with his most smarmy of expressions. “That was the rumour,” he conceded, “But we wanted to see for ourselves. After all, it’s not every day that you get wind of a chameloid specimen out here in the cosmos.”
Denella couldn’t help herself.
“You son of a—”
“But,” Turanya patiently interjected with a placating tone, “You understand that this was a rescue mission, first and foremost. As you pointed out, the Drura sector is a hive of trafficking. We heard the reports of a juvenile chameloid being traded, and we…intervened.”
“Right,” Natasha snorted, “One big altruistic gesture.”
“We’re a science agency, Doctor,” Turanya calmly replied, “I’d rather hoped I’d made that clear with your job offer. Which is rescinded at this point, you should probably know.”
Natasha felt her hackles rise all over again at the superior smile that accompanied Turanya’s latest comment, but she forced herself to keep a lid on her emotions. “There’s a hell of a lot more to this than just a rescue, isn’t there?” she persisted, “Otherwise, why all the secrecy? Why don’t your own captains know what you’re doing?”
She gestured to Sonaya, whose eyes widened a little more as she took in the back and forth of the discussion in front of her.
“And,” Denella added with a pointed glare, “Why the hell are you building that…cage back on your station?”
“That’s just a—” Turanya began.
“You weren’t rescuing it,” Natasha jumped in with venom in her tone, “You’d bought it from the traffickers. You were experimenting on it, weren’t you? Even as that transport was heading back to the station.”
“Doctor, you don’t know what you’re—”
“Except,” Denella continued, “By the sounds of it, this poor thing didn’t much like being caged up and experimented on, did it? Looks like it used its powers to break out, disable the transport, and now it might have destroyed one of your cruisers. And…maybe our friends along with it.”
Natasha maintained her poker face despite the rush of emotion she felt as Denella laid out their own personal stakes in all of this, even as Turanya’s expression failed to shift an inch.
“Really,” he sighed, “This is all speculation. And I’m not going to—”
“Answer them!”
The trio of arguing figures turned to see Sonaya brandishing a small phaser she had produced from the belt of her uniform. She pointed it straight at her superior officer, who reacted in shock.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Getting you to answer them,” Sonaya replied with a firm glare.
“You’ve just made a huge mistake,” Turanya scoffed back at her, “Pulling a phaser on a commanding officer? You’ll never see a captain’s chair again.”
Sonaya knew that this was a gamble. She might be in command of the Sud Yot itself, but in the pecking order of the Science Agency, Turanya was her superior. Nevertheless, she kept her weapon poised and licked her lips.
“That is possible,” she conceded with a thin smile, “But if my career really is over, at least I’ll have heard the truth.”
Turanya looked down at the weapon, and then up at the determination in her eyes.
“Ok, fine,” he sighed eventually, “The truth? The truth is that…thing is the most incredible scientific marvel in the galaxy. Chameloids are shapeshifting creatures with humanoid DNA! If we understand the processes involved in that, if we can crack the biological code and harness the potential—”
“It’s a living thing,” Denella hissed through gritted teeth.
Turanya paused, a little thrown off by that statement of fact. But he’d justified this all to himself so often that it didn’t take him long to recover.
“We weren’t going to kill it. Just study it. And you have to see what it might allow us to do? We could allow any individual to manipulate their own cellular structure! We could eradicate any number of ailments! We could wish away disease! You see that, Doctor Kinsen?”
Natasha shook her head coldly. “Even if that was true, that doesn’t justify any of this. Any of the trafficking, or the experiments, or the deaths…”
She let that word hang in the air, seeing the glare on Captain Sonaya’s face darken further.
“Captain Grinya,” she growled, “You sent him and the Ret Kol out here. How much did he know about what he was getting into?”
Turanya glanced at the phaser being pointed at him again, and licked his lips slightly, realising that the situation in the ready room was threatening to get away from him. “I thought he knew enough,” he replied in his most measured tone, “I swear, I didn’t know this would be so dangerous. All I knew was that the transport had suffered a power failure.”
“No,” Sonaya said, shaking her head, “When I first told you about the loss of contact with the transport and volunteered to head out there, you said you ‘didn’t want to risk the Sud Yot’. You knew there was a risk.”
“I didn’t think the package would be this—”
“Enough!” Sonaya called out, punctuating her comment with another thump of the desk, silencing the oily commander at last. Then, she looked over at the other two women.
“You have to believe me, I had no idea that—”
“We believe you,” Natasha nodded with a trace of a mirthless smile, “Question is, what the hell do we do now?”
A silence descended. Everyone in the ready room knew they were still more than a day’s flight from reaching the derelict, even with the Sud Yot’s newer engines.
“We need to tell them,” Denella said eventually, “If there’s anyone left alive out there, on the derelict, or the Ret Kol, they need to know what they’re dealing with.”
“We’re still trying to raise the other cruiser,” Sonaya replied, “No reply. And long-range sensors still can’t locate it.”
“The derelict?” Natasha pressed.
“Still drifting, from what we can tell. No power, no communications. Besides, if Captain Grinya is following procedure, the boarding party on the derelict will be suited up.”
At that comment, Denella’s face suddenly lit up. “Spacesuits? With internal comms links?”
“Yes. But they’re only short-range—”
“Got it,” the Orion nodded, “And I think I’ve got an idea.”
Natasha saw the look of satisfaction on the face of the Bounty’s engineer, and felt the knot in her stomach untangle slightly. If Denella had a plan, she felt a little more hopeful.
“Ok,” Sonaya nodded, “You can tell me all about your plan. After I’ve escorted Commander Turanya here to the ship’s brig.”
The commander snapped a look at his still-armed subordinate. “You can’t do that—!”
“After what you’ve just told me, I can, and I will. We’ll let a Science Agency tribunal decide if I’m doing the right thing.”
With that, she waved his phaser at him. He reluctantly stood, still protesting under his breath, and the two Flaxians walked off. Left alone, Denella looked over at Natasha.
“Don’t worry,” she smiled, “Jirel, Klath and Sunek, they’re survivors.”
Natasha nodded back, and tried to force her concerns to the back of her mind, focusing instead on the plan to let the others know what they were dealing with.
But she couldn’t shake the horrible feeling that they were already fully aware of that.
* * * * *
Jirel had never seen a mugato in real life before.
He had seen plenty of pictures of them. He had encountered them in holosuite programs before. He even used to have a stuffed mugato when he was a young adoptee back on Earth, which as far as he was aware was still in a storage crate somewhere in his family’s Colorado home. But he had never seen one in the flesh. Until now.
The figure in front of him on the platform, which had previously been an innocent small girl who had inexplicably appeared in front of him on the derelict, had fully transformed.
Now, a two metre tall monster, covered in white fur and complete with a vicious horn on top of its head, stood in front of him.
He didn’t have time to fully comprehend what had just happened. Whether he was facing a little girl, or a giant mugato, or something else entirely. Because, whatever it was, it immediately began to rush towards him, causing the thin metal platform under their feet to shake and shudder.
Without any other escape option available to him, Jirel acted on instinct. He kept a tight grip on the metal pole in his gloved hands and swiftly spun his body right around it, to dodge the attack.
It was only partly successful. As the mugato reached him, it flailed out with the claws of its left paw, and caught him on the left side of his torso. His ears registered a tell-tale hiss as his suit was compromised, and his brain registered the intense flaring pain as the claws tore into his flesh.
He thought he heard Kataya say something over the suit-to-suit comms link, but his senses were too overwhelmed for the words to register. He considered trying to grab his rifle from behind his back, but the pain was too disorienting.
The mugato lumbered past him to the edge of the platform, then spun around for another inevitable attack. He had seconds to act.
As the beast charged again, Jirel gritted his teeth and jumped off the platform entirely, sliding down the scaffold pole in his gloved hands the fifteen feet or so to the next platform below.
His feet made contact and he managed a ragged breath. He heard a roar above his head.
Forcing himself to keep moving, he staggered over to the ladder to the next platform, and swung his leg out. After a vertigo-inducing glance downward with his helmet spotlights, he scuttled down the rungs as fast as his injured form could move.
At the last second, he lost his footing, and for a dizzying moment he felt his left foot dangle out into the murky drop below him. His injured side caused his left arm to spasm, and with a rush of nausea, he found himself hanging on by just one arm and one foot.
Another roar came from above.
He thought he heard Klath’s voice over the comms link.
Everything was becoming a blur.
With one desperate swing, he flung his entire body off the ladder, landing in a crumpled heap on the platform with enough force to cause a fresh flare of pain to stab through his entire body. He forced himself to roll onto his back, even as the unstable metal grid shuddered from his landing, as he looked back up at the towering warp core, and the platforms above him. He tried to say something, but he could only manage a pained grunt.
And then he saw a huge shock of white fur. Descending towards him.
The mugato had jumped off the first platform.
He tried to cry out as he realised the likely impact the extra weight was going to have on the platform under him. But there was no time. He tried to roll away, but it was useless. He heard the mugato land on the platform with a thud, and the telltale snapping sound of the supports holding it in place in the scaffold.
He felt something claw at his back, to the side of the rifle. He felt a fresh sensation of warm blood soaking into his clothing.
And then he felt the platform give way entirely.
He felt himself falling. He saw a shock of white fur folding in on itself as they fell.
He saw the deck at the very bottom of the warp core’s cylindrical housing approaching with speed.
And then he saw nothing.