Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
The two Pakleds led their hostages quickly into a side room off from the main corridor.
The floor space of the small storage area was mostly empty, with the perimeter of the room lined instead with rows and rows of shelves, all groaning under the weight of various crates and containers. Which meant that, while the room wasn’t exactly vast, there was enough room for the Pakleds to keep a safe distance away from the two women.
Both of their disruptors were still raised. And both Denella and Erami still had their hands raised above their heads as a result.
“So,” Denella offered, directing her words at Erami as much as at the Pakleds in front of her, “Now we’re all alone, does anyone wanna get me up to speed on what’s going on?”
Erami kept her mouth shut, but the Pakleds seemed more amenable to replying. “She owes us for what she took,” the slightly taller of their assailants grunted, “And we have found her now.”
“We are smart,” the shorter one affirmed with a definitive tone.
The taller one nodded in agreement, and took a half step closer to Erami. “Grumtrag knows that you come here. Kervala Prime base. You come here a lot, to make your ship go. And we waited for you.”
“It was all Grumtrag’s idea,” the other Pakled added, gesturing to his colleague with deference, “He is the smartest of all.”
“Great,” Erami replied with heavy sarcasm, “Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look. I’d congratulate you, but I’m afraid I’m fresh out of cookies.”
Both of the Pakleds looked her up and down, apparently considering whether or not to conduct a quick pat down to confirm or deny the report of her lack of cookies. In the end, they opted to maintain their distance.
“I take it that means these are the guys that trashed your shuttle,” Denella chimed in.
“Wow,” Erami sighed, sarcasm still in place, “I am just surrounded by geniuses right now, aren’t I?”
“She took our prize!” the Pakled that had identified himself as Grumtrag spat out, “We looked for it in her ship. It was not there.”
Denella shook her head, remaining calm in the face of the disruptors being pointed at her. This sort of thing was all part of a day’s work onboard the Bounty, after all.
“This is really just a big misunderstanding,” Erami insisted, despite the mounting evidence.
“Really?” the Orion snorted.
“What?” she persisted, “You’re telling me there’s nobody out there that you and your crew have a few misunderstandings with?”
Denella paused for a moment, silently conceding to herself with a slightly rueful grimace that the Bajoran had a point there. “Ok,” she said eventually, changing tack, “What’s the issue here? What’s this prize all about? Latinum?”
Grumtrag shook his balding head at this, keeping his disruptor pointed at them even as he took another menacing half-step forwards. “No latinum. But our prize is worth much of that.”
He narrowed his eyes as he focused on Erami. Denella noted that, with all of the half-steps he had been taking, the weapon in his hand was now within striking range.
“You owe us our prize,” he continued, “And if you no longer have it, then that will make Grumtrag very angry…”
As the Pakled’s face twisted into an approximation of a sneer, Denella managed to catch Erami’s eye for a split second. She tried her best to convey her intentions with that single split-second look.
It was the sort of thing that she would be confident of being able to do with Klath, or even Jirel. Someone that she knew she could trust, and who was on the same wavelength. A shared intuition they had honed by being caught up in far too many similar scrapes over the years. But she didn’t have that intuition with Erami. And by this point, given what had happened to them, she certainly wasn’t sure she could trust her.
Still, given their predicament, she was more prepared to trust her than she was the two armed Pakleds. So she put her faith in the power of her look. One that had conveyed a single word across the storage room.
Now.
Without waiting any longer, she sprung into action, whipping her hand out to grab Grumtrag’s hand that clasped his disruptor and wrenching it backwards with immediate force. The shock of the action caused the taller Pakled to cry out in pain and drop the weapon to the ground with a sharp clatter.
While Denella grappled with one of their captors, the silent message had mercifully been received by Erami. At almost the same time that the Orion had pounced, the Bajoran had braced herself and charged the shorter Pakled. He had managed to get a reactive shot off from his disruptor, but in the sudden chaos the shot did little more than leave a smoking hole in a crate of self-sealing stem bolts on one of the shelves.
Erami flew into her target’s midriff and sent them both crashing to the ground in a heap.
Denella remained on her feet, even as Grumtrag broke away from her grip and turned to face her. She adopted a defensive pose, but took the opportunity to grab her trusty Orion dagger from her belt, hefting it in her hand with purpose.
She didn’t really want to use deadly force against this particular adversary, given that she still wasn’t sure she was on the right side of the fight. But she did want to get out of here, and she was hoping that the presence of a bladed weapon might convince the now-unarmed Pakled to beat a hasty retreat.
In the periphery of her vision, she could see that Erami and the other Pakled were still frantically grappling on the ground, but she couldn’t worry about that for now. She kept her focus on her own opponent.
The Pakled’s eyes widened as he saw the blade. But either through a surprising amount of bravery or a less surprising amount of stupidity, he didn’t back off, or run away. Instead, he made a break for the disruptor where he had dropped it onto the ground moments earlier.
Denella pounced, reaching Grumtrag before he was able to get a stubby hand on the weapon and taking down the off-balance Pakled with a sharp elbow to the ribs. He fell back to the ground on his front, and the Orion deftly ended his brief attempt at resistance by spinning her dagger around and driving the handle of the weapon down onto the back of Grumtrag’s substantial skull, knocking him clean out with a satisfying thud.
Without pausing for breath, she jumped back to her feet and spun around, aware that there was another fight going on.
On the other side of the room, Erami and Grumtrag’s subordinate were back on their feet. The fearful Pakled charged towards her gamely, but like his superior, his technique in this sort of close combat left a lot to be desired.
Erami was able to evade his swinging arm and grab his other arm in an elegant pirouette, using the momentum of her spin to swing the hapless, lumbering Pakled around her centre of gravity until he impacted with some force into the shelves behind her. The defeated Pakled collapsed to the ground with an ungainly thump, knocked unconscious. He was followed by a box of duranium screws, which toppled off the shelves and landed next to him, sending its contents skittering across the floor.
Erami turned back to the begrudgingly impressed Orion and smiled. “Not just a pretty face, huh?” she shrugged, “Five years in the Bajoran Resistance teaches you a thing or two about handing yourself. Not to mention another few years as a solo shuttle pilot in spaceports like this.”
Denella nodded in understanding, as Erami wiped the sweat from her brow and paced over to one of the discarded disruptors, checking the power levels.
“I guess it’s time for us to make ourselves scarce,” the Orion added as she looked at the forms of the two unconscious Pakleds, “We can always send port security a tip-off about these two once we’re safely back at the landing pad.”
Erami nodded, then idly gestured over to the other disruptor where it lay discarded on the ground and gave her a warm smile. “Wanna grab that, just in case?”
Denella holstered her dagger, then turned and stepped over to the other weapon.
She instantly realised her mistake.
Because, while she and Erami had made a good team when they were fighting the Pakleds, she still had some serious doubts about her. Especially given her continued evasion when it came to the reasons that the two armed Pakleds had been interested in her in the first place, and what exactly this ‘prize’ was that they were after.
But, in a rare lapse of concentration, possibly brought on by the warm smile the Bajoran had given her, she had let her guard down and turned her back on her.
Her fears about how much of a mistake this was didn’t have long to fully coalesce, as a fraction of a second after they had first popped up in her mind, she felt the unmistakable sensation of the butt of a disruptor pistol impacting on the back of her skull. She barely had time to silently chide herself for making such an elementary tactical blunder before she slumped down to the ground, joining the two Pakleds in a state of entirely involuntary unconsciousness.
Erami sighed as she looked down at the Orion’s unmoving form.
“Sorry about that,” she muttered with a slight grimace, “But I guess this is how it’s got to be.”
With another grimace, she stepped towards Denella’s prone form.