Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont’d)
“You sure you know how to work all that?”
Natasha did her best not to take too much offence from Sunek’s cheeky question, as she looked up from the panel in front of her. “They do teach us a thing or two about these things at Starfleet Academy, you know?”
“Cool,” the Vulcan shot back, “So all of Starfleet’s medical staff are trained in how to fire a spread of torpedoes. It’s a wonder you guys have such a bad rep in so many places, it really is.”
She shook her head patiently at this latest quip and returned her attention to the controls.
Given the Bounty’s precipitous position inside the Badlands, and given Klath’s decision to join the party down on the asteroid, she had elected to move from her usual position in the cockpit to take over the Klingon’s tactical controls. With the potential for some sort of skirmish, it seemed to make sense to have someone keep their finger on the phaser cannons.
“We all get a full round of basic training, regardless of our specialism,” she replied, “Flight control, navigation, tactical, you name it. Never hurts to make sure anyone onboard a starship can save the day if they need to. Friend of mine served on the USS Artemis during the war. They once escaped from a surprise attack from a Cardassian battle wing with the ship’s chief nurse at the helm and the mess officer at tactical.”
Sunek shrugged as he spun around in his pilot’s seat and pointed down at the bank of controls in front of her. “Whatever you say, doc. Just make sure you remember which button fires the phasers and which one arms the auto-destruct.”
She looked up again with a more withering glare, and gestured back out at the dizzying view through the cockpit window. “And how about you keep an eye out for anything I need to shoot at, hmm?”
The Vulcan reluctantly spun back around in his chair and focused on his own controls. In truth, he had just been trying to distract himself from their current situation. He was getting more and more antsy by the minute.
Natasha was feeling exactly the same way. She had already familiarised herself with the weapons controls. But that didn’t stop her from checking her work for the fifth time.
A tense silence descended on the pair of them.
Eventually, the silence became too much for her, even as she embarked on her sixth check of her understanding of the weapons console. There were several nagging questions about their situation, and she took a moment to select the most pressing one.
“Do you believe her?”
Given the context of their situation, she didn’t need to clarify the question any further.
“Seriously,” Sunek replied, keeping his response firmly in his usual conversational wheelhouse, “Are you gonna be like this with all of Jirel’s exes?”
She didn’t dignify his comment with a response, and allowed the silence to return, forcing him into a more serious answer if he wanted to break it. Eventually, he sighed and shrugged his shoulders, keeping his attention focused out of the cockpit window as he talked.
“Fine. Let’s just say that we’ve all got plenty of reasons not to believe her. Jirel more than the rest of us. So I’m pretty sure that there’s more to all this than some husband in distress.”
“Pretty sure?”
The Vulcan shrugged again. “Well, this time’s already been a little different.”
“How so?”
He took a moment to swivel around in his chair and grin back at her from under his shock of tousled hair. “This time she’s paid us up front.”
Natasha considered this point for a moment, then nodded. “So what more could there be to all of this?”
“Knowing Maya,” Sunek replied, “A hell of a lot more latinum. For her, anyway—”
He stopped himself mid-sentence and cocked his ear to the deck in a curious manner, raising an eyebrow to underline his change in focus.
“You feel that?” he asked.
Natasha looked a little confused. The Bounty had been gently bucking and rolling about ever since they had arrived in the Badlands, like an old sailing boat being tossed around in a storm. “Yeah,” she replied with a sliver of sarcasm, “Feels like a plasma storm. I wonder what could be causing that?”
“No,” Sunek hissed, entirely seriously, as he swung back around to his instruments with renewed concern, “I definitely felt it.”
“Felt what?”
“A new wavefront hitting us from somewhere. Everything’s been pretty rhythmic ever since we arrived in orbit. But that was new.”
She had to remind herself that, for everything else she was dealing with when it came to the Bounty’s resident laughing pilot, she was still dealing with a Vulcan. And a Vulcan who could still occasionally use his keen intellect, when it came to noticing the little things.
She instantly started to check her own garbled scans. “You’re thinking…?” she forced herself to ask.
“I’m thinking that something just dropped in. Opposite side to our orbital position, probably trying to use the asteroid as extra cover for their approach. But they sent out a little extra ripple in that soup out there.”
“Who else would be interested in an abandoned mine on an asteroid?”
He didn’t waste any time replying directly to her. As he tapped at the helm controls to bring the Bounty out of orbit, he also jabbed a finger down on his comms link to the others.
“Hey, Jirel!” he called out, “Bandits!”
The response took a second to come back over the static-flecked link. And when it did, it merely deepened the concern in the cockpit.
“We know!”
* * * * *
Jirel snapped his response into the communicator as he fired back over the top of his scant cover with his disruptor pistol.
From somewhere in the gloom, he heard a roar from Klath, followed by the sound of a bat’leth impacting on something heavy. But the weapons fire didn’t die down by much.
They had no idea how many bandits they were dealing with, but it was enough. As soon as Klath had sensed them, they had all looked for cover. But the shooting had started almost immediately.
Jirel fired off another few covering shots and looked around. He was hunkered down behind one of the bulky computer terminals in the office, cut off from the others. He knew Klath was enjoying himself out there somewhere, but he had no idea what had happened to Denella and Maya.
“You wanna maybe beam us up?” he called out into the communicator, “Any time now would be great!”
“On it,” Sunek’s response came through the static.
The lack of any sort of quip or comeback in the Vulcan’s reply underlined the severity of the situation more than anything else could.
With some effort, Jirel affixed his communicator back onto his belt, then began to crawl towards where Denella and Maya had been working. In the darkness, he heard another satisfied bellow from Klath, as he tackled another opponent.
He managed to crawl along behind his cover to the next row of terminals. There, he just about made out two crouched figures in the half-light. And one was clearly injured.
Paying no more attention to his own safety, he fired off a couple more warning shots, then switched to a hunched dash for the final few metres to the figures, hearing a disruptor blast whine just above his back and impact on the wall behind him. As he reached them, he saw Denella’s injury. She winced as she pressed her right hand around an ugly wound on her left arm.
“Crap,” he managed, “How bad?”
“Bad enough that I’d be up for cutting this vacation short,” the Orion replied with a pained grimace on her face.
“They’re gonna beam us up any second.”
“That’ll be nice.”
Jirel turned and fired off another few shots to keep the remaining bandits at bay. Another roar from Klath followed, followed by an agonised scream from one of their attackers.
“At least someone’s enjoying themselves,” Denella added with a pained smile.
Jirel glared over at Maya, who appeared strangely sanguine about their predicament. She gestured down at Denella and shrugged. “She’ll live.”
“She’ll—?” Jirel echoed incredulously, “What the hell have you brought us to? Was this a trap?”
“Absolutely not,” she countered, “I have no idea who these people are. Showing up here, trying to shoot everything. Presumably some passing thieves, looking to strip the place of whatever got left behind. And apparently they’re not interested in sharing.”
“Ugh. This was supposed to be the easy part of the plan! You have completely—!”
He stopped as soon as he saw her left arm straighten and the antique type-1 phaser drop into her hand. In one fluid motion, she brought the tiny weapon to bear on him, and fired.
The line of red energy spat out from the weapon, flying just over his shoulder, and into something behind him, which groaned in pain, then slumped to the floor. Jirel and Denella looked over to see the bandit, of a species they didn’t recognise, slumped in a stunned, unconscious pile on the ground, his weapon by his side.
“You know,” Maya smiled smugly at Jirel as he turned back to her, “I’m starting to get tired of saving your life all the time.”
Just as Jirel went to fire off an appropriate comeback, the transporter took effect.
* * * * *
“Glad you could make it!”
Sunek called out just as he pirouetted the Bounty around to evade a blast of disruptor fire from the unidentified ship that had brought the bandits to the asteroid, and manoeuvred the ship out of orbit to try and effect an escape.
A succession of footsteps cascaded up the steps to the cockpit as Jirel, Klath and Maya arrived on the scene. Natasha, having initially been a little shocked by the mise en scène that materialised on the transporter pad, especially the growling Klath, mid-bat’leth attack, had taken the injured Denella straight to the Bounty’s small medical bay.
“Now,” Sunek continued, as he bucked the ship around again, “If someone wouldn’t mind raising the shields, that’d be awesome!”
Klath instantly slotted into his tactical position, as Maya took Denella’s engineering station and Jirel slid into the centre seat. “Shields up,” the Klingon reported, “Weapons online.”
“Disabling fire only, ok?” Jirel called back.
Klath paused for a fraction of a second, bitterly recalling the last firefight the Bounty had been involved in during their trip to Kervala Prime, and the way that it had ended with his former lover slaughtering a ship full of Pakleds.
“Ok, swinging her around,” Sunek bellowed, shaking Klath back into the moment, “Give ‘em both barrels!”
The whole ship turned to stare down the other vessel, a squat prowler-type design. Twin bursts of fire spat out from the Bounty’s wing-mounted phaser cannons and impacted on their adversary’s shields, with enough force to cause them to flare with crackling energy, fizzing against the backdrop of the plasma storms.
This show of force seemed to do the trick. Bandits tended to avoid confrontation with anything actually capable of beating them, and so the prowler turned on its axis and limped back to the asteroid itself.
“Take it we’re not waiting around to exchange insurance details?” Sunek quipped from the helm.
“Hell no,” Jirel sighed, “Get us out of the Badlands.”
“With pleasure.”
Sunek tapped his controls, as Jirel swung around to where Maya was sitting, standing from his chair with an angry scowl. “Look,” she began, seeing his expression, “I know what you’re going to say, but—”
“That was a really dumb plan, you know?” Jirel growled, cutting her off, “And the only thing dumber than the plan is me, for actually agreeing to it!”
“Jirel, please calm down, you’re going to strain something. The important thing is we got most of the information we needed—”
“What we’ve got is an injured engineer, a bunch of fresh battle damage, and we still don’t know where this so-called husband of yours is even being held! Why I thought flying blind into the Badlands was a good idea, I’ll never know.”
“Still,” Maya persisted, “We got away. Denella will be fine. And you’ve got to admit, there’s never a dull moment when I’m around, is there? Besides, I didn’t think there’d be any bandits.”
Jirel’s expression darkened a little more as he walked over to the steps, still ranting.
“This is classic you, you know that? You just assume your plans’ll come off, and then we end up having to fight for our lives!”
As he descended the steps, Maya sighed and followed him.
“And another thing,” Jirel continued to rant as his voice faded, “You’d better believe you’re gonna get our repairs done while Denella’s recovering…”
Sunek turned and watched the two squabbling figures disappear into the bowels of the ship, before glancing over at Klath.
“Nice to have her back, isn’t it?” he offered with a dollop of sarcasm.
Klath just growled unhappily.
* * * * *
The argument continued all the way to Jirel’s cabin, as Maya followed him through the door.
“…I’m sure there’s barely any damage,” she continued, “You saw how easily they gave up back there? I doubt they left too many marks. Besides, it’s the Badlands. We were always going to have a few scrapes.”
“This isn’t a few scrapes, Maya,” Jirel fired back, “This is, once again, you recklessly endangering everyone’s lives, and me being too stupid to stop you!”
“I saved your life down there, remember?”
“Yeah, right after you endangered it!”
She stepped closer to him and he held his ground in the middle of the cabin. They both stared into each other’s eyes with renewed passion, even as their tone remained antagonistic.
“You had fun down there, admit it,” she growled.
“Fun? You think I had fun?”
“No. I know you had fun.”
A beat. Jirel suddenly found himself entirely incapable of lying.
“Of course I had fun!” he shot back angrily.
“Good boy,” she smiled back.
In an instant, they were on each other, kissing and pawing at each other’s clothes. Falling back into every aspect of their former life together on the Bounty, a sudden rush of lust being powered by the adrenaline from their narrow escape, and the intensity of their argument.
Jirel forced himself to come up for air and looked back at the woman he had fallen in love with even more times than she had saved his life. The woman that he seemed drawn to with the power of a tractor beam.
“I thought you were married?” he managed.
“I thought you liked an adventure?” she replied.
They smiled, and embraced each other again. Deep down, Jirel knew that he was making another huge mistake. Because it was always a mistake. But he equally found that he didn’t really care.
Besides, with Maya, there were never any consequences.
They fell back onto his bed, still wrapped around each other, as Jirel succumbed entirely to his latest mistake.
End of Part Two