Chapter Text
Part Three (Cont’d)
“You are being a fool!”
Klath ignored the ferocity with which the comment was fired at him with, and finished placing his spare tunics into the transport container. On the other side of the cabin, K’Veth gestured at his actions with frustrated incredulity.
Neither Klingon could remember which of them had started the fight. But, in typical Klingon fashion, neither of them were even close to admitting defeat.
In the doorway of the cabin, Jirel and Natasha awkwardly watched the two feuding forms trading passive-aggressive barbs, not entirely sure what else to do.
“Remind me again why you let her onboard?” Natasha muttered to the Trill.
Jirel struggled to find an answer to that. When K’Veth had arrived where they were parked and asked to come onboard, it had seemed like the right thing to do. After all, he and Natasha had failed to find a way of talking Klath out of his sudden plan to leave the Bounty on some sort of improvised quest for the perfect battle. So, it had seemed like a good idea to let someone else have a go at talking some sense into him.
Except, the Klingon method of talking sense into someone seemed to involve instantly starting a very heated argument, with an ever-present undertone of violence.
Klath was at least keeping himself measured in his responses, despite K’Veth’s continued angry comments, keeping the par’Mach-based passions inside him for the time being. “I have explained the plan, K’Veth,” he persisted as he closed up the container, “It will be a glorious quest to rediscover your sense of honour. For both of us.”
“It will be a futile task,” she spat back, “By a stubborn fool who still refuses to see how his feelings have blinded him to the truth. There is no honour out there for me, Klath.”
“There is honour out there for everyone,” he countered, his tone almost zen-like despite the ferocious passions that still swirled inside him.
She threw her hands up in an ostentatious display of frustration, stepping closer to the other Klingon and snarling at him. For an uncomfortable moment, the two person audience in the doorway wondered if they were about to get a front row seat to another Klingon mating ritual.
But Klath remained stoic, even as K’Veth snarled.
“You still patronise me,” she accused him, “You claim to know what is right for me, and you do not even listen to what I am trying to say!”
“I know what is right,” Klath retorted, “For both of us. I feel it. Inside.”
He pounded his fist on his chest to emphasise his point, not caring if two of his colleagues were watching on. But he got nothing more than a scoff back from the Klingon woman.
“What you feel inside is nothing but lust. Brought on by a lonely warrior finding one of his own to mate with after so long alone.”
Her words caused a surge of anger inside him, as she continued to seem determined to prod and poke him into some sort of retaliation.
And she seemed to have finally been successful.
“You challenge me to prove myself?” he growled at her.
“Willingly,” she snarled back.
Without breaking eye contact, Klath reached into a second packing container in front of him on the deck of his cabin and retrieved the mek’leth that he had stowed away earlier, tossing it across the room to her. She caught the end of the handle with practised ease, her fighting skills having been honed like any other Klingon, even in exile.
Then, she raised the blade above her head in anger.
“Defend yourself!”
The corners of Klath’s mouth curved into a trace of a smile as he relished the impromptu fight that was about to unfold. With a single deft movement, he unsheathed his bat’leth from where it hung on his back and brought it to bear.
In the doorway, Jirel and Natasha glanced at each other.
“We should…” the Trill managed, nodding his head back into the corridor.
Natasha nodded in agreement. They stepped back in unison and allowed the cabin door to close, just as the two weapons clashed together for the first time accompanied by furious growls from both participants. The sound of clashing blades continued apace through the door, as they stood in the Bounty’s main corridor.
Jirel looked at Natasha again and offered a shrug.
“Let’s, um, give them five minutes.”
* * * * *
“A quantum singularity?”
Denella couldn’t help but laugh as she sat cross-legged on the picnic blanket, shaking her head at the Bajoran on the other side, who was now reclining on her side after the meal.
“I mean,” Erami offered with a shrug, “Technically, yes.”
“You stole a quantum singularity?”
Erami sat up straight and maintained a defiant smile. “Well, you’re the engineer. You know what a Romulan warp core is, right? So, I guess, yeah. Technically, I stole a quantum singularity.”
Denella went to respond, then simply shook her head again.
She had finally gotten Erami to give her the full story of what was going on between her and the Pakleds, and why exactly they seemed so determined to chase her down. She had been expecting the usual story. One of stolen latinum, or purloined spare parts. Something manageable for a Bajoran woman in a shuttlecraft to have been able to swipe on her own without the Pakleds being able to stop her.
She hadn’t been expecting the actual answer.
“Hang on,” she suddenly realised, looking back at the Bajoran with sudden amusement, “You stole a quantum singularity, and you thought the idea of me redesigning the Bounty’s thruster vents was far-fetched?”
The two women shared a burst of laughter, before Erami was able to control herself and offer up her defence. “It’s like I said, the Pakleds didn’t even know what it was. It was just lying around inside their cargo bay behind a set of Terrelian impulse coils. So, I figured that they wouldn’t miss it, and there might be a tidy little profit to be made by flipping it to someone else.”
“You didn’t think to maybe tell them what it was, in return for a share of the profits?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Denella found herself smiling again, as Erami continued.
“Besides, if I’d have told them what it was, they’d have tried to fit it to their own ship, and ended up blowing up half the sector. This way, everyone wins.”
“Apart from the Pakleds,” Denella pointed out with a raised eyebrow.
In truth, while she was still persisting with her questioning tone, she found that she was more doing it to wind the other woman up than anything else at this point. She found that she didn’t much care about the perceived crime Erami had committed, now she knew the truth. After all, it wasn’t as though she and the Bounty’s crew were above liberating certain things from their owners when things got especially desperate.
And Erami was right, it was probably better for everyone that a group of Pakleds didn’t have a Romulan warp core available to them any more.
“So,” the Bajoran concluded, scrunching up her nose, sitting up and holding her hands in the air, “You talked it out of me. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Any more confessions you want to get out of me before you lock me up, officer?”
Denella kept up her stern front in this little role play, as she realised that there was another thing she wanted to ask about, while she had the chance. “The other day,” she asked, “Did you really do a runner from that restaurant?”
“Huh,” Erami grouched, “Guess I walked into that one as well. But you really think I—?”
Before she could get any further, the Kendra began to shake all around them.
In an instant, the two women switched back into business mode, as they both jumped up off the blanket and rushed to the two seats at the front of the cockpit. Neither bothered to cast a glance at the beauty of the view in front of them this time, focusing entirely on the task at hand.
Before they had even reached the controls, Denella already had a sense of what was happening, and it only took a cursory glance of the readouts to confirm that her instincts were correct.
“That didn’t feel like a bit of turbulence from the nebula,” Erami offered.
“Nope,” the Orion replied from where she had slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to the Bajoran, “We’re caught in a tractor beam.”
“We’re being hailed,” Erami added, as she flipped the comms link open.
“Hello, shuttlecraft,” Grumtrag’s familia voice came out over the speakers, “This is the Pakled vessel Martan. We have got you now, and we will not let go.”
“Looks like your friends found us,” Denella pointed out unnecessarily, “I thought you said you masked your warp trail?”
“I did,” Erami insisted, “Usually these guys don’t know an ion trace from a tachyon eddy. They must’ve upgraded their sensors.”
“You will give us our prize,” Grumtrag continued over the comms link, “Or we will break your ship. We are good at that. We are strong.”
“Hey,” Erami fired back, jabbing her finger down on the comms panel, “Next time, say please.”
With that, she clicked the link off, even as the Kendra shuddered again.
“They’re pulling us in,” Denella reported, “And while I appreciate a good bit of defiance, it might be the time to admit defeat on this one and give them their prize back.”
“Might be a bit of a problem,” Erami grimaced, “You were right earlier when you called me out about the Kendra getting ransacked. I don’t have the warp core any more. Exchanged it with a Ferengi trader two weeks ago.”
Denella sighed in frustration as the shuttle shook harder. “Ok, so give them the latinum. That should hopefully keep them happy.”
“No latinum. Like I said, I exchanged it.”
“For what?”
“You’re sitting in it.”
Denella glanced at the Bajoran, then looked around the entirely modest confines of the Kendra and shook her head. “You exchanged a Romulan warp core for this heap of junk?”
“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Erami fired back, “We’re very religious people, us Bajorans. Makes us terrible negotiators. We’re way too trusting.”
Denella sighed and turned back to the controls in front of her, contemplating the fact that they seemed to have nothing to barter for their lives with. “Alright then. Guess we’re gonna have to fight our way out of this one. What have we got, weapon-wise?”
“One phaser array,” Erami replied, “Tends to seize up after a few shots.”
“Perfect,” Denella muttered with heavy sarcasm, “Time to improvise, then.”
She went to work on the controls, her green fingers dancing across the surface of the console as Erami watched on.
“Looks like they’re using a Nausicaan tractor beam,” she nodded with satisfaction, “Which means that I might have a little trick we can use.”
“How come?”
“We run into a lot of Nausicaans.”
Despite their perilous situation, Erami couldn’t help but laugh at this, as Denella continued to work at her controls.
“I’m gonna use our power grid to send a surge of feedback up the beam, right to the source. If we give it enough juice, it should short out their emitter.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Erami nodded back.
As the Kendra crept ever closer to the Martan, still ensnared in its tractor beam, Denella finally completed her work. “Ok,” she called out, “Get ready to get us the hell out of here.”
She tapped one final command, and a burst of fizzing green energy surged back up the beam being emitted by the Pakled vessel.
Just as the Orion had hoped, it impacted with the tractor beam emitters and overloaded the poorly-installed components. In an instant, the beam was broken. The Kendra was free.
“Getting us the hell out of here, sir,” Erami called back with a grin, as she tapped at her own bank of controls.
Before the Pakled ship could bring its weapons to bear, the Kendra jumped forwards. Straight into the Kervala nebula.
Seconds later, their pursuers followed.
“They’re still on our tail,” Erami reported, as she swung the Kendra away from the first incoming disruptor blast, “And now they’re angry. Any more ideas?”
Denella gritted her teeth and nodded.
“I think,” she said, as the Kendra bucked around in the tumult, “We need some backup.”
End of Part Three