Chapter Text
Part Four
The two Klingons panted from their exertions as they glared at each other from opposite sides of the small cabin.
The entire room was now in a state of frantic disarray. What furniture there had been was now overturned or tipped over, and there were several deep gouges in the inner metal walls of the room where one or both of the bladed weapons had become temporarily impaled during the fight.
Klath and K’Veth themselves were both covered in sweat, their bodies aching from the strains of the ongoing fight. But still, neither was willing to back down. Even if both of them had both been willing to take a short break.
“You fight well,” Klath grunted, as he stood back up straight and hefted his bat’leth, preparing for the next clash of blades.
“And you still patronise me,” K’Veth countered, bringing her own weapon to bear, “Just because I am dishonoured does not mean I cannot fight.”
“Then you should agree to my plan. Use that ability in our quest for a battle worthy of the name, instead of lashing out at me.”
“Perhaps,” she hissed, with a slightly satisfied smile, “I enjoy lashing out at you.”
Before he could reply, she charged again, forcing him to parry the fiercely swung mek’leth with the edge of his bat’leth. She spun around instantly and swung at him with a follow-up blow, which he caught with the trailing side of his twin-bladed weapon and fenced away.
They faced off against each other again, growling gently at each other as they circled around the edge of the cabin.
Klath still felt a chaos of emotion inside of him. The blood lust brought on by the battle now mixed with his existing feelings of par’Mach that had been ravaging him for days, in a way that gave him a rush like he couldn’t remember feeling before.
In a curious way, he had never felt more like a Klingon.
Then, just as he prepared to charge into the melee once again, the fight was unceremoniously interrupted by the altogether non-Klingon sound of the cabin’s door buzzer.
He paused. As did K’Veth. Despite Klath’s long past within the empire, and everything K’Veth had learned about her people in exile, neither were quite sure what the accepted protocol was for a fight like this being disturbed by a doorbell.
In the end, Klath reluctantly lowered his weapon. K’Veth warily mirrored his move.
“Yes!” he barked out.
A few seconds later, the door slowly opened, and Jirel awkwardly poked his head into the cabin, doing his best to ignore the scene of carnage all around the room and keep his focus on his unhappy weapons chief. “Um, hey, so, hate to break up…whatever this is. But we’ve got a problem.”
“What?” Klath grunted angrily.
“We just got a call from Denella. She’s in trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Not entirely sure,” the Trill admitted, “But there’s Pakleds involved.”
All thoughts of the fight in front of him now left Klath’s mind. He quickly sheathed the bat’leth behind his back, knowing that there would be no time to resolve his personal matters with K’Veth here and now, no matter how much he wanted to.
Because he could sense that there was a bigger battle ahead of him.
* * * * *
Moments later, Jirel led the two Klingons up the steps into the Bounty’s cockpit. Natasha was already seated at the rear engineering console usually manned by the absent Denella, having figured that she’d be more useful there on a rescue mission than her improvised sensor console.
Without thinking, Klath slid straight into his own tactical console on the left side of the room, while Jirel jumped into the centre seat and K’Veth hung back for the time being.
“Ok,” Jirel nodded, “Let’s go save—”
He stopped mid-sentence, as he swivelled around to the front of the cockpit and, for the first time, noticed that the pilot’s seat was empty. They were missing one irritating, grinning Vulcan.
“Where the hell’s Sunek?”
Jirel swivelled back around to the other three individuals in the cockpit, but they didn’t have an answer. Natasha offered him a shrug, as Jirel recalled the last time they had seen their absent colleague.
“You don’t think he actually…y’know, with the Caitian?” he asked her.
“No,” Natasha shook her head definitively, “No. Definitely not. No.”
There was a brief pause, as the two Klingons looked confused and Natasha continued to weigh up Jirel’s question.
“I mean,” she added eventually, “Probably not?”
“Ok, we’ll have to figure that out later,” Jirel sighed with a wave of his arm, “One missing crew member at a time.”
He looked around and considered the options available to him, then had a sudden brainwave.
“Hey, buddy,” he motioned to Klath with a nod of his head, “You two still looking for that proud and noble battle of yours?”
“Yes,” Klath nodded, despite K’Veth’s unhappy glare, “But I do not see how that is relevant to our current predicament—”
Jirel stood from the centre seat and gestured to it. “I’m the best pilot we’ve got left onboard, so I guess I’ll take over up front. So…how about it, Captain Klath?”
Klath looked at the chair he was being offered, then back at K’Veth, who looked unconvinced by this sudden twist. As if she was now being patronised by the entire crew.
“K’Veth,” he urged with a warrior’s relish, “We must save Denella. This is a true battle for us. If you will accept.”
She felt a fresh rush of blood lust inside, the like of which she had never felt before. Certainly it was more than she felt when she had been marching towards the mass of tribbles back on Brexis II. And she realised that perhaps there was something to what Klath had been saying.
This was a true battle. And she was ready.
“I accept,” she nodded forcefully.
Klath stood from the tactical console and gestured for her to take his place. She slid in and immediately began to familiarise herself with the controls.
With K’Veth in position, Jirel at the pilot’s controls and Natasha at engineering, Klath strode over and dropped his frame into the centre seat. And for the first time since his final fateful actions in the Klingon Defence Force, when he had lost his own sense of honour in the eyes of the empire, he took command of a vessel.
“Take us into orbit,” he called out for his first order.
“Aye aye, captain,” Jirel shot back with a grin as he tapped the slightly unfamiliar bank of controls in front of him, “And don’t worry yourselves. I used to handle all the flying around here before Sunek came along.”
The Bounty slowly rose up from the landing pad on the outskirts of the spaceport and began to ascend.
As Jirel tapped another command, a series of shrill alarms suddenly sounded out. The entire ship bucked wildly under their feet, and for a nauseating second the view through the cockpit seemed to spiral out of control, before the Trill got them stable.
“Yep, that’s right,” he continued, a little more sheepishly, “Always engage inertial dampeners before switching to impulse power. Just…keeping you all on your toes.”
“Um, Captain Klath,” Natasha called out, as the Bounty broke through the atmosphere and returned to space, “So you’re aware, I took an advanced shuttle piloting course at the Academy. Finished top five in every practical exam. Just in case you feel the need for any crew reassignments.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Klath nodded, maintaining a serious poker face as part of the act, “I will…bear that in mind.”
“No, really, that’s all very funny,” Jirel griped as he manoeuvred the ship into high orbit, “I’m starting to see why Sunek gets so paranoid up here…”
Natasha mustered a smirk, as Klath stole a glance at K’Veth, who was entirely ignoring the short burst of the Bounty crew’s usual cockpit banter in favour of continuing to study the weapons controls.
With a slight smile of satisfaction, he turned back to the front of the cockpit and called out to his slightly humbled pilot. “Set course for the source of Denella’s distress call. Maximum speed.”
Seconds later, the Bounty shot forwards. On the way to save their friend.
* * * * *
The shower of sparks that exploded out of the panel behind them was all the warning they needed to know that the Kendra had been hit. Still, the shuttle’s computer elected to underline the gravity of their situation by adding a further pair of alert sirens to the cacophony that was already ringing out all around them.
“Any chance you can shut those damn things off?” Denella called out over the impromptu symphony, as Erami swung the Kendra away from another Pakled disruptor blast.
“Kinda busy right now stopping us from dying!” the Bajoran called back.
The vessel shuddered again as another hit smashed into their buckling shields, sending another cascade of sparks out from above their heads.
“A job you’re really sucking at, just FYI,” Denella grimaced as she swiftly rerouted a handful of additional power reserves back into their defensive systems, “Shields are getting shredded, and there’s not much juice left to give them.”
Erami turned the shuttle into a sharp dive to the right, just as another blast skimmed past, missing them by inches.
The Pakleds had them easily outgunned, that had never been in doubt. But at least at sublight speeds, and with the additional disruption of the nebula, Erami was able to use the small shuttle’s manoeuvrability to keep them half a step ahead. For the time being, at least.
“Those are Klingon disruptors they’re packing,” Denella reported as she checked on what scans she could get from the Kendra’s systems, “I’m also reading a Terrelian warp core, a Ferengi impulse drive and a computer core from…actually, I have no idea who.”
Erami shook her head as the shuttle shuddered again. “Alright, new plan,” she called out, “There’s a pocket of deuterium bearing 121 mark 4. Ready with that phaser bank when I say!”
Denella nodded and then desperately gripped onto the console in front of her as the ship entered another dizzying turn. The captivating hues of the nebula that had once looked so beautiful were now starting to make her a little nauseous.
Erami steadied their course and gritted her teeth, using her years of experience piloting endless battered ships past their manufacturing tolerances to keep the Kendra on course. “The Pakleds are right on our tail,” she bellowed as she saw the patchy sensor readings, “Ready, and…now!”
Denella fired the tiny phaser cannon of the Kendra directly ahead, into the denser pocket of gas. It immediately ignited in a crimson fireball, just as Erami desperately pulled the nose of the tiny ship upwards.
“Ok, this is gonna be a lot closer than I—!”
The whole cockpit juddered as the explosion rocked the shields of the ship, causing them to flare bright orange. Denella was slammed into the console in front of her, briefly knocking the wind out of her body with the force of it. But while they caught a glancing blow from the explosion, the Martan took a direct hit, causing their own shields to groan under the impact and forcing them to briefly break off from direct pursuit.
Erami kept the Kendra’s nose pointing up, even as the shields continued to flare, and then shot them away from their more cumbersome pursuers.
“Little trick I learned flying raiders with the Resistance,” she smiled in satisfaction, “A bunch of us once used that same idea to blind the sensors of a whole Cardassian transport convoy. Should be enough to throw them off for a bit.”
“Nice,” Denella coughed as she rubbed her aching midriff, “Love how borderline suicidal it was.”
Erami stifled a smile as she levelled their course. “Come on, you loved it really. Besides, when was the last time you got to do something like this?”
Denella considered her response. She had in fact done something similar to this very recently. When she had embarked on a desperate solo quest inside a far less inviting nebula to rescue a childhood friend from within the Orion Syndicate, culminating in her destroying an entire Orion Cruiser belonging to her former owner Rilen Dar, killing everyone left onboard.
But she decided that, even if she had felt comfortable enough to open up a little about her past during brunch, she really wasn’t ready to share that story. So instead, she shrugged and turned her focus back to her readouts.
“By the way, that little trick of yours pretty much took out the rest of the shields.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Erami replied, “I’m gonna try and head deeper into the gas cloud. See if we can hide as best we can before they get ship-shape. Your friends on the way or what?”
“They’ll be here,” Denella affirmed, as the Kendra limped deeper into the nebula.
She just hoped she was right.