Chapter Text
Part Four (Cont’d)
“Jirel!”
Klath’s latest bellowed call over the comms link garnered no response.
The Klingon stood alongside Sunek and Lieutenant Kataya, the three men leaning over the guardrail at the top of the warp core’s cavernous pit. They scanned the darkened depths below with their rifle torch lights, keeping the weapons raised as a result. But all they saw was darkness. And all they heard was silence.
The Klingon swiftly turned his attention back to Kataya, who had barely said a word since he and Sunek had raced over to him to find out what was happening. “What was it?” he grunted.
The Flaxian struggled to bring himself to respond, scarcely believing the answer himself.
“It was a…mugato.”
Klath’s glower deepened. Sunek just smirked. “Really? A mugato? Great big hairy thing? Seven feet tall? Big old poison-tipped horn on its head? Don’t tell me, it was riding an armoured le-matya and juggling the Stone of Gol.”
“I’m telling you, that’s what I saw,” Kataya growled back.
“And I’m telling you that no matter how unreliable the lifesign readings are, I’m pretty sure we’d have picked up a giant ape monster by now.”
Klath remained silent, looking down again into the darkness. Kataya, still some way off the confident and antagonistic young Flaxian they had first encountered thanks to the tumultuous shocks he had endured on this salvage mission so far, persisted in his defence.
“I know what I saw,” he muttered, “Except…”
“Except what?” Klath pressed.
Another slight pause. This part of his report seemed fantastical, even to Kataya himself.
“Except…he was talking to it. Before I saw the mugato, I heard him talk to it.”
Klath kept his opinions as private as ever, but Sunek snorted again. “Ok, so, sit-rep: You’ve gone totally insane.”
“I heard it!”
“Yeah, right. My great uncle Tovak heard plenty as well. Just before the Bendii Syndrome got the best of him.”
Klath turned back to them, his torch beams illuminating their reflective visors. “We do not have time for this,” he pointed out, “We must try to save Jirel.”
“From the mugato?” Sunek replied sarcastically, eliciting a further angry glare from the Flaxian.
“From the fall,” the Klingon pointed out, finding himself in the unusual position of playing the role of peacemaker.
He gestured back to the yawning chasm next to the core where Jirel had fallen.
“We cannot descend down there. Too many of the platforms have been damaged. But we can use the access conduits to descend to the bottom of the ship.”
For a moment, it looked as though Sunek was about to continue to argue, but he ultimately nodded, having mainly been using his sarcastic responses to cover for his own worries about Jirel’s fate. “Gets my vote,” he said, grasping his rifle a little tighter.
The two of them turned to Kataya, who reluctantly nodded as well. “If we can’t get down via the maintenance platforms, we’ll need to try and get to the secondary power grid controls through the access conduits anyway. We can look for your friend at the same time.”
With a tentative agreement having been struck, Klath led the trio over to the nearest access hatch in the wall of the darkened engineering bay. With some help from Kataya, he quickly removed the hatch cover. Then, the pair of them reluctantly stowed their rifles behind their backs for the journey, before Kataya led them into the narrow, dark confines of the conduit.
“And remember,” the Flaxian offered, “Be on the lookout for a—”
“Mugato,” Sunek sighed with a roll of his eyes, “Got it.”
As Klath followed Kataya into the conduit, Sunek couldn’t help but circle a gloved finger around his ear in a cuckoo gesture. The lieutenant had clearly lost it.
But, just before he slung his own rifle behind his back and prepared to crawl after them, he double checked that it was set on the heaviest stun setting available.
There might be a mugato down there, after all.
* * * * *
Nothing.
There was nothing here at all. Just a perpetual, inky blackness.
Then, slowly, he began to resolve shapes in the darkness. Confusing, shadowy forms slowly began to coalesce. As he slowly blinked and tried to get a grip on where he was, he knew one thing for certain. He was still alive.
Though he wasn’t sure how long that would be the case.
He tried to lift himself up, knowing that the last thing he had been doing before the fall was fighting a murderous mugato. But he struggled to find the strength.
Slowly, his surroundings resolved themselves. He was lying on his back in an awkwardly contorted position, at what appeared to be the very bottom of the warp core’s shaft.
He could barely see where he had fallen from. The vertical expanse of the core itself stretched up into an expanse of grim darkness above his head. The ship’s continued lack of power meant that there was no lighting to help him out. All around him were twisted pieces of metal from the collapsed platform and scaffolding that had come down with them.
There was no sign of the mugato anywhere. He couldn’t decide if that fact was either a source of comfort, or an incredibly unsettling development.
His view was now partially obscured by a sizeable crack in the visor of his suit’s helmet. Not that his suit’s integrity seemed to matter much any more. It was entirely compromised thanks to the mugato’s claws, and he was at the mercy of the derelict’s own emergency air supply.
He still felt a burning pain across his back and side where he had been mauled. As he shifted his weight, he was sure he felt a squelch from his blood-soaked clothing.
But somehow, thanks to the robustness of the suit he was wearing, he was alive. For now.
With a pained grimace, he tried again to force himself up off the deck, gritting his teeth against the agony that emanated from his wounded body as he did so. The pain was enough to cause him to stop again. Instead, he checked that the comms link on his suit was still open, and forced out a whisper.
“Hey, Klath? Sunek? Kataya? Anyone?”
A shrill burst of static filled his damaged helmet. For a horrible moment, he feared that it may have been irrevocably damaged in the fall. Or worse, he feared that the mugato had somehow got to the others.
“Jirel,” Klath’s voice came back eventually through the choppy link, relief clear in his voice, “You are alive.”
“Jury’s still out on that one. Where are you?”
“We are on our way to your location now.”
“Klath,” he coughed, “Be careful, ok? I don’t know where it is now, but there was a…mugato.”
There was a pause and another crackle of static. Jirel could just about make out Sunek’s voice for a moment, but he couldn’t tell what he was saying. Eventually, Klath’s booming voice returned.
“How badly are you injured? Can you move?”
The Trill braced himself against the pain and tried again to lift his weight, getting as far as mustering himself into a vaguely seated position. “Just about,” he reported, “Remind me to thank Natasha for finding such an easy way to make our money back.”
The voice of Lieutenant Turanya replaced that of Klath. “If you can move, aim for the bow of the ship. We’ll meet you there.”
“Got it,” Jirel managed in response, “I’ll see what I can do.”
The comms link clicked off in another shower of static. Jirel gritted his teeth again, before grunting and straining in renewed determination to get to his feet. Eventually, using some of the scaffolding around him as leverage, he was able to clamber his way out, all the while doing his best to ignore the waves of pain from his injuries.
With some additional effort, he reached back and retrieved his phaser rifle from his back. It was badly scuffed and dented from the fall, but it still seemed to be operational. He knew he couldn’t risk drawing attention to himself by testing the firing mechanism, so for all he knew the weapon was useless. But he felt at least a tad more safe to have it in his hands.
Still, it wasn’t all good news. The torch attachment was shattered, along with those on his helmet, which meant that he had nothing but the scant amount of ambient light to illuminate his path. He peered through the twisted metal all around him, but saw no signs of movement.
Absently, he wondered if the fall might have been enough to kill his adversary. But he noted that if it hadn’t been enough to finish off an unjoined Trill, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to kill a fully-grown mugato.
Or possibly a small child. He still wasn’t entirely sure what it was that he had been fighting.
He checked his wrist-mounted tricorder to get an idea of where he should be heading, but the screen was smashed, the device inoperative. With a sigh, and after another scan of the room, he picked a direction to head in. And with a wince, he began to limp across the room.
Only a few steps into his journey, he was sure he heard a noise.
He whirled around as quickly as his aching body could manage and kept his rifle level and true. But he couldn’t see anything.
Licking his lips and feeling the sweat beading on his brow, he squinted through the darkness in vain, then reluctantly turned back and staggered on, mentally preparing himself at any point for the sensation of the mugato pouncing on his prone form and finishing the job.
Just as it must have done with all of the poor souls he’d seen throughout the upper decks. And just how it somehow must have done with the crew of the Ret Kol.
He suppressed a fresh shudder and picked up his pace as best he could, spying a doorway ahead of him in the gloom. It wasn’t entirely clear where it would take him, but anywhere was better than here.
And then he heard another noise.
Except this one wasn’t unsettling. It was comforting. And very familiar. And it came through loud and clear over the comms system.
“Jirel?”