Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
“The Badlands?”
Sunek raised his eyebrow in a typically Vulcan-like way, as he delivered his distinctly un-Vulcan-like take on Maya’s plan.
“Like hell are we going into the Badlands.”
From where she stood, leaning on the centre chair where Jirel sat, Maya raised an amused eyebrow of her own at the defiant pilot. “Huh,” she tutted absently, glancing knowingly at Jirel as she did so, “That doesn’t sound like the adventurous young pilot I once had to single-handedly rescue from those half-dozen pheromone-crazed renegades from the Deltan anti-celibacy movement…”
At this, Sunek stood from his seat and pointed an accusing finger at her. “Hey! This is absolutely nothing like that, ok? Also, we have very, very different definitions of the word ‘rescue’!”
From her left-rear console position, Natasha found herself trying to blend into the background as she kept her focus on the mysterious new woman as the debate continued. A woman that she had already heard plenty about, and was now meeting for the first time.
And someone who she was starting to see had an odd level of control over more than just the Bounty’s self-appointed captain. The entire crew seemed on edge now that she was onboard.
“He’s got a point,” Jirel offered from his seat, gesturing at the unhappy Vulcan, “You didn’t say anything about this rescue happening in the Badlands.”
“And it won’t happen there,” Maya replied patiently, “But, as I was explaining to you before your excitable Vulcan so rudely interrupted me, we need some information. And the Badlands is the best place to get it.”
“What sort of…information?” Klath grunted at her.
“Information like where my husband is actually being held. Synergy Mining Enterprises are an ever-moving operation. Jumping from one mineral-rich planet or asteroid to the next, strip-mining what they can before they move on. I don’t have exact coordinates for where all their latest operations are, but I do know where one of their last ones were. Inside the Badlands.”
Jirel looked around at the rest of the Bounty’s crew, none of whom seemed entirely enthused by the plan just yet.
“If we get to the abandoned facilities that they left behind on that asteroid inside there,” Maya continued, “There’ll still be a database uplink in place at their old operations centre. With your esteemed engineer’s help, we should be able to get an exact location for where we’re heading, and details of the security situation at the new location as well.”
“Hell of a place to build a mine,” Denella chimed in from the back of the cockpit.
“The company buys the sites based on what they can get out of them. Not for the view. And when you’re effectively using slave labour to do the grunt work, you don’t need to worry too much about comfort.”
“Neat,” Sunek muttered as he slumped back into his chair, with heavy sarcasm.
“Either way,” Maya persisted, apparently unflustered by the amount of pushback she was getting from the entire room, “That’s where we’ll find the information we need.”
“And,” the Vulcan pointed out to Jirel, “That’s also where we’ll find pirates, bandits and Surak knows who else. Come on, Jirel. This is a really, really dumb idea.”
Jirel contemplated the situation for a moment, then nodded back. “You’re right,” he conceded eventually, leaning forward in his chair and shrugging, “But then, that’s our thing, isn’t it?”
Sunek’s eyebrow remained where it was, even as Jirel forcefully gestured back at the pilot’s controls behind him.
“Take us to the Badlands, Sunek.”
For a moment, it looked like the Vulcan was actually going to refuse. But after a further second or two of unimpressed staring, he swivelled back around to his controls.
“I knew you were going to say that.”
* * * * *
As the Bounty streaked on towards the maelstrom of the Badlands, Maya excused herself from the cockpit and made her way to the ship’s small dining area for some nourishment.
As she sat alone, finishing her meal, the door opened and Natasha walked in.
She had deliberately decided to seek out the Bounty’s guest to try and get more of a handle on her, and met her look with a friendly smile. She had spent far too long travelling the galaxy to let other people’s opinions of someone cloud her own first impressions.
Though she had also come to trust the rest of the Bounty’s crew enough over the last year to take a fair amount of healthy trepidation into the room with her.
As she walked over to the table, Maya took a sip from her cocktail and winced. “Ugh,” she tutted, “Is that lovely engineer around anywhere? She needs to reprogram this new replicator of yours to fix a proper martini.”
“I’m sure we could mix you up the real thing,” Natasha offered back with a friendly tone, “There’s more than enough actual liquor floating around onboard the Bounty. I’m, um, Natasha, by the way. We didn’t really meet back in the cockpit.”
She offered a handshake across the table and Maya accepted with a nod.
“Of course. Maya Ortega. I’m sure you’ve already heard plenty about me, but I guess Jirel never was very good at introductions. And it can be so hard for me to keep track of who he’s employing these days. Is that Ferengi gentleman still around, by the way? I liked him.”
Natasha had to admit that she had also liked Zesh when she had met him. Although she wasn't sure he felt the same way about her after she had successfully convinced the rest of the Bounty's crew to give away his treasured investment on Nimbus III for nothing. She offered a shrug.
“He’s, um, moved on to pastures new.”
“I see,” Maya nodded, breaking the handshake and leaning back in her chair, “Well then, Natasha. What went wrong in your life to end up in Jirel’s company?”
Natasha suppressed the image of a bloodied ensign in the burning corridors of the USS Navajo, and kept up her friendly demeanour. “What makes you think something had to go wrong?”
“Please,” she replied with a knowing tut, “However Jirel might have sold it to you to get you onboard, this isn’t the sort of ship you end up on if your life’s going the way you planned it. Believe me.”
Natasha regarded the elegant look of the woman in front of her, from the quality of her attire to her general demeanour, and shrugged. “Fair enough. I guess I’m a bit surprised to find out that someone like you ended up on this sort of ship as well.”
Maya’s lips pursed into a thin smile, as she swirled her martini around with practised grace. “Please don’t let appearances fool you, dear. I guess you haven’t quite heard my full story from the loose lips of the others?”
Natasha shook her head, still intrigued. She silently slipped herself into the seat opposite Maya at the table.
“If you must know,” Maya continued, “I was born on Turkana IV.”
This sent a shiver down Natasha’s spine. The name Turkana IV was enough to do that to just about anyone that heard it. An infamous failed Federation colony out in the Beta Quadrant, where law and order had broken down to the point that the warring powers that sprang up across the planet had severed ties with the Federation entirely.
Its distance from the core of the Federation meant that there had never been a serious attempt to try and counter the secession. And aside from the occasional uncomfortable visit by the odd passing starship, Turkana IV was left to spiral completely out of control, a wasteland of poverty and violence.
Nobody was interested in going there, and very few people ever got to leave. Except, apparently, the woman sitting across from Natasha at the table.
“I’m going to guess from that look on your face that you’re familiar with it,” Maya continued, “But, yes, after a…difficult childhood, I was fortunate enough to escape. Many years ago.”
Natasha was still processing this new information, as the other woman idly gestured to her own get-up, her clothing, jewellery and the rest of it.
“I know more than enough about what it’s like to have nothing, you see? So once I got away, I resolved to do whatever had to be done to make sure that I never had to live like that again. And I also resolved to make sure I had a lot of fun while I was doing it…”
She offered a sliver of a smile as she sipped her drink.
“Well,” Natasha nodded back eventually, “I’ve certainly heard about your…sense of adventure.”
“I’ll bet you have.”
There was an undercurrent of something in her words that Natasha couldn’t quite place, but that she certainly didn’t like. A hint of tension, even of menace.
Just as she felt herself shift uncomfortably in her seat, the door opened again and Jirel entered. The Trill had been wrapped up in his own thoughts as he had been walking away from the cockpit, not really thinking about where he was heading. But those thoughts were quickly replaced by new ones.
As soon as he saw the scene inside the Bounty’s dining area, he felt on edge for a different reason than before. In the way that anyone gets on edge when they find two people they have previously been intimate with engaged in a private conversation.
“Oh,” he blurted out, with clear discomfort, “You’ve—I mean, you’re here. Both of you. Cool.”
On the far side of the table, Maya instantly began to smile wider, looking at the Trill and the other human woman and instantly putting two and two together. “Ah,” she purred, “Now I understand this latest bit of recruitment. And another redhead? I guess you’ve got a type as well, darling.”
Jirel squirmed. Natasha’s eyes widened in flustered shock at this comment, the memory of her and Jirel’s most recent unplanned night together still fresh in her mind.
“We’re not—” she began.
“We’re just—” Jirel said at the same time.
They both stopped and looked at each other, both immediately unsure of how to proceed, after the less than definitive conclusion they had reached on what had happened between them back on Kervala Prime. After several dozen shots of liquor.
Seeing the discomfort her casual comment seemed to have caused, Maya drained the rest of her drink and stood from the table. “Well,” she offered to the two squirming presences, “Glad we got all that cleared up. Now, I’ll see myself to the guest cabin.”
She exited, still smiling and almost without the other two noticing.
Jirel considered restarting the discussion he and Natasha had been having back on Kervala Prime, about whether or not their second night together really did mean something, and elected to focus on his primary headache. He slumped down into another seat at the table.
“Ugh,” he sighed in defeat, fixing her with a distinctly more serious look, “Should I really be going through with this?”
“Where was that attitude this time last week?” she offered with a friendly smile. Though it was immediately clear from his look that this was one of the rare occasions in his life when Jirel Vincent wasn’t interested in joking around.
“I’m serious,” he shot back, “Am I making a mistake here? I’m sure it’ll just turn out she’s trying to screw us all over again somehow. Nothing’s ever straightforward with her. But…if she really does need help, can I really turn her down?”
Natasha adopted a more serious posture and considered his words for a moment. Eventually, she mustered a shrug. “I don’t know if I can answer that,” she replied, “I barely know this woman.”
He nodded at this, but continued to look at her with a slightly hopeful stare, trying to will some more useful advice out of someone he knew he trusted.
“It’s just…I dunno,” he said eventually, “There was something about her. Back in the day, on the Bounty, the excitement when we were hatching some new scheme. It was just kinda…thrilling. Proper seat of the pants living, you know? And no matter how crazy it all got, we always got out of it. There were never any consequences. Not when Maya was around.”
He paused, then looked over at her a little sheepishly.
“Sorry. Is this weird? Me talking about this?”
“Not at all,” she managed to lie, “I guess I can understand the attraction. But…if you really want my advice?”
He nodded back at her without a second’s thought. She continued.
“I can’t offer anything specific. But all I’ll say is that, speaking as someone with plenty of bad relationships in her past to draw experience from, what you’re describing doesn’t sound like a very healthy way to live.”
With that, she stood up and walked off in the direction of her own cabin.
Leaving Jirel with plenty to think about.