Chapter Text
Part One (Cont’d)
“So, she’s Jirel’s ex?”
Natasha, the human ex-Starfleet doctor of the Bounty, broke the uneasy silence that had descended over the ship's cockpit with her question. But it did little to ease the unsettled mood that had accompanied it.
The entire modest crew complement of the Bounty were present. The ship’s emotional Vulcan pilot Sunek sat at the helm controls, their Orion engineer Denella sat at her rear console, while Klath, the Klingon weapons chief, kept a close eye on his own instruments. With the ship hanging in orbit of an unruly planet in a lawless section of space, nobody wanted to be too far away from their positions as they waited for a call from Jirel down on Golos III.
And, ever since the Trill had beamed down, nobody had seemed to be in much of a mood to talk either. Until Natasha’s question brought an inevitable quip from the Bounty’s usually talkative pilot.
“Why, doc?” Sunek couldn’t help but grin, “You jealous?”
Natasha gave the Vulcan a withering glare from behind her sensor panel on the right side of the cockpit. She also did her best to banish any thoughts she had about the latest complications in her relationship with Jirel, after the two had drunkenly ended up in bed together back on Kervala Prime.
On their long journey to the Golos system, she had tried to piece together some more information about the mysterious woman who had dragged Jirel and the rest of them across several sectors, and found her usually talkative colleagues suddenly becoming a little evasive. Especially Jirel.
What she had been able to piece together was that the message had come from one Maya Ortega, a human woman who was a former member of the Bounty’s crew. And possibly more than that, when it came to the Trill.
The fact that Jirel had warped over to the coordinates she had provided wasn’t entirely surprising to Natasha. After all, something similar had happened a few months ago when a Ferengi called Zesh, another former member of the Bounty’s roster, had called on them to help defend an investment of his on Nimbus III. When a former crewmate was in trouble, he was compelled to help.
But while the mood had been generally cheery when Zesh had called them, the mood on the trip to Golos III had been considerably less happy. Jirel had been closed off, and spent long stretches of the trip in his cabin, and the others had been cagey and on edge as well.
So, with Jirel now busy down on the planet itself, having insisted on going alone, Natasha was trying to finally get some answers.
“I’m serious,” she persisted through Sunek’s comment, “That’s who she is?”
Klath grumbled sullenly at his console, still reluctant to discuss it. But Denella looked over at the human doctor and sighed. “It’s…a bit more complicated than that.”
This seemed like enough of an opening for Natasha to start to pull at the thread. “So, then, explain it to me,” she persisted, “Who is this Maya Ortega?”
Denella sighed again, and glanced over at Klath, who simply folded his arms in front of him to indicate his reluctance to expand on the matter any further.
“I mean,” the Orion offered, “She’s gonna find out the full story sooner or later.”
“Yeah,” Sunek chimed in from the front of the cockpit, “Cos you know Jirel’s not just gonna give her that latinum and leave. She’ll want something. And you know what that means.”
Denella nodded and turned back to the expectant Natasha. “Fine. Maya Ortega is…a bit more than just Jirel’s ex.”
“Another secret ex-wife?” Natasha snorted slightly, “Thought we’d already mined that particular cliche?”
Sunek suppressed a grimace at that jibe, correctly surmising that this was a shot at him, and his ex-wife T’Len, who the Bounty’s crew had crossed paths with in somewhat unhappy fashion shortly after Natasha had joined the crew.
“No,” Denella continued, “But more than just an ex. Actually, Maya’s the one he bought the Bounty with. A long time ago. She…technically still owns a stake in her, at least until Jirel hands over that last pile of latinum.”
“Huh. Really?” Natasha replied, seemingly dumbstruck as she glanced around the Bounty’s shabby thirty-plus year old cockpit, “He actually paid money for this thing?”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” the overprotective engineer of the ship muttered.
“Joking,” she offered back with a friendly smile, “But I’m still not seeing what the big issue is.”
“That’s cos you haven’t met her,” Sunek chimed in.
Denella nodded knowingly. Natasha just looked even more confused. At the front of the cockpit, the Vulcan spun around in his pilot’s seat, sighed, and continued.
“Ok, here’s the story. Maya and Jirel have a…complicated past. They bought the Bounty together, they put most of the crew together, and their relationship was kinda chaotic. On-again, then off-again, then on-again again.”
“Ah,” Natasha nodded, “One of those exes.”
“And when she was part of the crew, she was always trying to get us involved in crazier and crazier schemes. Properly dodgy stuff, y’know? She always figured that’s where the biggest profits were. And her schemes all got too much for Jirel. So, one day, she left the Bounty behind, and so ended the romance of the century.”
“Except now she’s back?”
“She’s been back before,” Denella replied knowingly, “She’d left long before I joined the crew, but we’ve crossed paths a few times since then.”
Natasha was reminded of Jirel reluctantly admitting the story of how they had rescued Denella from the Orion Syndicate. A spur of the moment decision they had made only after accepting a job to deliver supplies to a location inside Syndicate space. She couldn’t help but wonder, if that had seemed like an acceptable job to take on after Maya Ortega had left the crew, how bad were the jobs she had been pushing for?
“So,” Sunek said, picking up the story, “This is how these things tend to go down. Maya calls him up out of the blue, uses his debt to her as leverage, he drops everything to go find her, insisting that this is the last time he’s gonna do it. Then he falls head over heels again, goes along with whatever dumb scheme she’s pitching this time, at some point she screws us all over again, and Jirel swears never to get involved with her ever again.”
“It is a predictable pattern,” Klath boomed out from his console, speaking for the first time in the conversation.
Natasha shook her head and gestured to the others. “And you just keep going along with this? Even though you know what’s gonna happen? Why didn’t you stop him from coming here?”
“We’ve tried before,” Denella offered, “Believe me.”
“Yeah,” Sunek added, “We’ve found that the only thing we can do is just kinda let the whole thing play out, and hope we don’t lose too much latinum by the end of it.”
Natasha shook her head in disbelief, as the Vulcan continued.
“I mean, we’ve all got someone like that, right? Someone we’re so crazy about, who had such a lasting impact on us, that we’d do incredibly stupid things for, no matter how often we get hurt? For me, it’s this swimming coach I met on Risa, many years ago. We just connected on a…deep spiritual level, y’know? And even to this day, I’ve never met anyone with such a huge pair of—”
“Shut up, Sunek,” Denella cut in, even as the Vulcan’s eyes glazed over at the memory.
Natasha wanted to counter the Vulcan’s somewhat specious argument, but she couldn’t help but remember the number of second chances she had given her ex-husband Cameron throughout their relationship, all the way up to her finding out the details of his affair with Lieutenant Ramirez on the USS Ticonderoga.
Even if it seemed as though Jirel was being an idiot over this woman, she recognised the potential for anyone to be an idiot, given the wrong circumstances.
“Huh,” she managed, “I see.”
“Still,” Denella added, as optimistically as she could muster, “Maybe Sunek's wrong. Maybe he really will just give her the latinum and leave. And that’ll be the end of it.”
Natasha saw Klath’s expression darken, suggesting that he didn’t believe that statement for a second, while Sunek simply snorted from the front of the cockpit.
“Yeah,” the Vulcan added sarcastically, “And if you believe that, I’ve got some prime real estate on Ceti Alpha V to sell you…”
* * * * *
“Well, you definitely have a type.”
Jirel passed the comment as he looked down at the picture displayed on the small padd. Staring back at him from the screen was the face of a handsome jet black-haired Trill.
“What can I say?” Maya casually replied from the seat next to him as she patiently sipped her martini, “I like the spots.”
Jirel looked up from the padd and fixed her gaze. He couldn’t help but feel the sliver of a smile creeping onto his face, which he quickly warded off. I’m not happy to see her, he reminded himself.
“So,” he said aloud, gesturing to the Trill on the padd, “Marriage. This is new.”
“You know I like to move fast,” she offered, not doing anything to prevent her own smile from forming, “His name is Toren Kelsis. We met a few months back and…I guess you could say it was a whirlwind romance. Had the ceremony next to the Crystal Lake of Betazed.”
“Guess my invite got lost in the mail?”
“Would you have wanted to come?” she retorted knowingly, “Bear in mind the ceremony was entirely traditional. So you would have had to show off…all of your spots.”
Jirel tried to dismiss the mental images that particular comment conjured up and focused back on the padd. “Ok, so, you’ve got a husband. And he’s in trouble. What trouble, specifically?”
The smile departed from her face, and she winced slightly. Jirel watched on with cautious intrigue, looking for the inevitable signs of deception from her.
“We’ve been working together. For a mining operation. Office-based, you understand. I don’t like getting my hands dirty.”
“Disagree,” he remarked dryly, “But continue.”
“Well, we were both based in the finance department. Not exactly glamorous work, but Toren had bigger plans than that. And so did I.”
“Why do I get the feeling that we’re heading somewhere illegal with this?”
Her porcelain features tightened slightly, and she accepted the jibe with a slight nod. “We thought we’d found a way to…lightly skim a modest amount off their profits—”
“There it is.”
“—Barely anything, really, given the sorts of funds that the company was moving around. Unless you really started digging into every itemised transaction, it should have been virtually undetectable. It was a long play thing, you know? Just giving ourselves a nice little nest egg for whenever we decided to up and move on.”
“Except, I’m guessing your plan wasn’t quite as clever as you thought it was. Now, where have I heard that one before?”
“Yes, well, what we didn’t realise was someone had gotten away with a similar trick a few years back. So the owner of the company had put in a bunch of extra security checks. And he wasn’t impressed when he saw what we were doing.”
She ran her finger down the stem of her glass again, and to Jirel’s surprise, she seemed to be fighting back a genuine burst of emotion.
“Toren was—He took the blame. For all of it. Insisted that I had nothing to do with it, no matter how hard the owner’s thugs punished him. He made sure none of it was traced back to me, even as they were dragging him away. And that’s why I owe him, Jirel. I have to help him. And I can’t do it by myself.”
Jirel stared back at her, the woman that had double-crossed him almost as many times as he had fallen in love with her. Which was a lot of times. He felt certain that he wasn’t getting the whole story. Because you never got the whole story from Maya Ortega. Her emotions seemed genuine. Her story seemed plausible. But deep down, he couldn’t help but feel like he didn’t believe her.
“And if you help me with this,” she continued, gesturing to the satchel of latinum, “Then, in return, I’ll not only write off the rest of your little debt, I’ll pay you and your crew for your time. Twice your normal rate.”
“And where are you getting that sort of money from?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“You don’t need to worry about that. But I’m good for it. I've called in some favours. And I’ll even transfer it up front, if that’s what you need me to do.”
She pushed her cocktail glass away and fixed her eyes on him. He could see a trace of moisture in the corner of her eyes.
“I could have searched around and tried to find another crew to do this with me, Jirel. It’s a big galaxy, after all. But I need someone I can trust. And, no matter what has happened between us in the past, I know I can still trust you.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because you just dropped everything you were doing and flew across three sectors to come and find me.”
Jirel went to insert a scathing counterpoint to this claim, but he found himself immediately faltering, so he remained silent instead.
“You don’t believe me,” she noted, correctly, “Which I suppose is understandable.”
She picked the padd back up off the top of the bar, tapped the screen a few times, then passed it back to him.
“I just transferred half the payment to your account,” she explained, “And this padd contains plenty of information for you to check out. About me, Toren, our employment history, and so on. Feel free to check anything you need to check in order to verify what I’m telling you.”
Jirel paused for a moment, still considering just walking off and leaving her. But something inside him compelled him to reach out and take the padd.
“Thank you.”
And he heard something he wasn’t expecting to hear in her words. Something that he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard from her.
Genuine thanks.
After a second, she composed herself, took a final sip from her cocktail and stood up.
“I’ll be back here tomorrow evening, at the same time, for your answer,” she continued, “So, please, do whatever checks you have to. But hurry. I don’t have a lot of time.”
With that, she walked off. Leaving Jirel staring blankly into space where she had once been standing, wondering how someone he thought he knew so well could still surprise him after all these years.
He still wasn’t sure if he could trust her.
But at least he knew who he could.