Chapter Text
Part Three
Kressari Starbase 34, Sector 34092
Stardate 48432.9
“Huh.”
Jirel watched with no small amount of curiosity as the pompous figure in front of him stepped around the confines of the Bounty’s cockpit, running an oddly superior eye over the consoles and systems of the ship.
The figure paused in front of the pilot’s console at the front of the room, and theatrically ran a wiry finger across the smooth surface of the panel, before lifting the finger up and inspecting it for dust in the light.
“Huh,” he said again, with a non-committal voice.
As the unconvincing piece of theatre in front of him continued, Jirel leaned over to his side where Maya and Klath were standing at the rear of the cockpit. “This guy is the worst one yet,” he muttered to them under his breath.
Klath grunted an unhappy acknowledgement of that fact, but Maya offered him more of a knowing look.
“Trust me,” she whispered back.
Jirel shook his head patiently and turned back to the curious figure on the other side of the room as they continued to assess the quality of his ship.
“Huh,” the tousle-haired figure offered once more as he cast his eye over the tattered fabric of the command chair in the middle of the room.
The worn-down chair had usually been unoccupied since Jirel had found the Bounty. He usually kept himself busy at the helm. But now, with this latest recruitment push for a dedicated pilot in full flow, he was starting to eye it up as his new position.
His own captain’s chair.
Although, he had to remind himself, that was all very much dependent on them finding someone to fill the pilot’s role. A quest that had so far taken them the best part of six months, in between delivery jobs and the occasional dubious scheme of Maya’s.
The search wasn’t helped by the narrow window of requirements that they had. They were in the market for someone who was both qualified enough to fly the Bounty through the endless amount of peril it tended to find itself in, but also desperate enough to accept the meagre and inconsistent level of remuneration that they could guarantee.
Nevertheless, Maya had been certain that she’d found the right candidate during the Bounty’s extended stopover in Kressari space. So much so that she’d invited him onboard to discuss the position further before Jirel and Klath had realised what was going on. And now they had both had a chance to meet this particular candidate, neither of them could exactly bring themselves to share her level of optimism.
“Well,” the stranger said as he turned back to the trio of observers, “Firstly, you need to understand that I’m used to working with significantly more…advanced ships than this. I mean, this is gonna be a major step down for me.”
Jirel shot a glance at Maya, rolling his eyes for good measure, before he turned back to the newcomer. “Really? How much of a step down, exactly?”
The somewhat pompous individual didn’t seem to pick up on the trace of sarcasm in his question. Or at least, if he did, he didn’t allow it to impact his performance.
“If you must know, I’ve just finished some freelance work for Starfleet Intelligence. Testing out this new fighter shuttle of theirs.”
He was entirely unflustered by the blank stares this particular claim garnered from his audience. If anything, it spurred him on to double down on the lie.
“Yeah, see, they recruited me unofficially, from the Maquis. After one of their agents saw me outrun a whole fleet of Cardassian raptors in an old Bajoran transport ship in the Free Haven system. I’m sure they wanted to offer me something permanent. But there were too many rules for a guy like me, you know? Not a fan of that. I like to live by my own rules.”
“So,” Jirel cut in, sarcasm still very much heightened, “Do you…like rules, or not? That’s not actually clear.”
If the candidate was thrown by this, he still didn’t let it show. Instead, he set off on another lap of the cockpit.
“Either way…I guess I could lower myself to this sort of job. For now. But I’d be doing you a favour, you understand.”
“Clearly,” the Trill sighed, folding his arms across his chest and giving Maya another glare.
“So, given the sacrifice I’d be making, I guess I could settle for…first officer—?”
“Ok,” Jirel sighed, ending his participation in the theatre and turning to Maya, “This is your guy? All the people we’ve interviewed, and this is your guy?”
“What?” she replied defensively, “He’s perfect. Plus, he’s desperate. Which makes him cheap.”
“Hey!” the newcomer snapped, “I’m not desperate! I just told you, I’m a—!”
“You’re a liar, dear. But that’s fine. It takes one to know one.”
This seemed to shut the newcomer up for the moment. His carefully hewn resume of untruths seemingly not holding up to scrutiny quite as much as he thought it would.
Jirel sighed and turned back to the scruffy man in front of them. “Ok, I’m sorry. Mr…?”
“Sunek.”
“Mr Sunek—”
“No, just Sunek.”
“I appreciate you putting in so much…effort. But we’re looking for, y’know, an actual pilot.”
At this, Sunek’s face twisted back into a grin. A sight that Jirel found a tad disconcerting to see on the face of a Vulcan, to go along with all the other disconcerting things about the man he had noted since he had arrived for the interview. “Hey,” the laughing Vulcan replied, “I might have embellished some aspects of what I’ve been saying to you. But I am totally, one hundred gajillion percent, one hell of a pilot.”
Jirel let out an audible scoff. Klath folded his arms and shook his head. Maya just smiled.
“Ok,” she shrugged, “Prove it.”
* * * * *
In the Bivari system, on the fringes of Sector 34092, something very special was happening.
A new planet was being born.
Currently, the entirely uninhabited star system contained five planets, two small rocky inner planets and three outer gas giants. But those five, and the g-type star they orbited, were preparing to welcome a new addition to their family.
Granted, the new arrival was still roughly fifty thousand years away from fully forming. But in planetary terms, that was practically the blink of an eye.
The sixth planet of the Bivari system had already made one attempt to come into existence, during the formation of the system itself. But the tidal forces imparted by the star and the rapidly-forming outer gas planets meant that the planetary material had merely formed into a stable asteroid belt, set between the second and third planets.
And there it had remained, for several millions of years. Until half a million years ago, when a large comet had passed through the system on a tangential course to the main orbital plane, causing a subtle gravitational effect that was enough to disturb the previous delicate stability of the belt.
The transit of the comet and the subsequent stages of coalescing material in its wake had been another slow process. But the cosmic ballet involved in this rare galactic event had been so captivating that a passing member of the Q Continuum had spent a full 15,000 years perched on top of an asteroid watching the early stages play out. Though even he and his god-like command of the universe had been at a loss to fully describe the majesty of the sight when he had returned to the continuum and his wife had asked him where the hell he’d been all this time.
Slowly but surely, the pieces of rock, ice and dust had coalesced together. And several millions of years behind schedule, the Bivari system was finally getting a sixth planet.
From a distance, the concentrated field of coalescing rocks in orbit between the second and third planets, that had been tentatively christened Bivari II-a by Federation scientists in order not to upset the current naming convention, seemed tranquil. But up close, the formation process was significantly more violent. An unpredictable cavalcade of shifting gravity eddies and tumbling rocks.
Jirel gripped onto the tattered armrest of the Bounty’s command chair for dear life as the latest dirty grey rock loomed large through the cockpit window. Just as it looked like they were about to collide with it, Sunek jerked the pilot’s controls with expert precision and banked the ship left, threading the needle between the rock in their path and a second slab of material that was hurtling towards the first.
As he continued his death-defying demonstration, the Vulcan continued to ramble on and on to deliver, from what Jirel could discern despite his attention being focused on the terror of their flight, a critique of a cocktail he’d been drinking the night before.
“…I think the bartender called it a Kressari Heatwave? Dumb name if you ask me, but man, those things pack a punch…”
The Bounty pirouetted around to avoid another chunk of rock, before the nose shot upwards and to the right, missing a frozen ball of methane by inches.
“…Cos it’s not just the booze. Oh no. These things are loaded with Kressari chilli pods. And, y’know, I can handle a bit of spice as well as the next Vulcan, but even I was starting to sweat after four of these things. If I could sweat, I mean…”
He threw the engines into reverse to avoid a particularly jagged rock that came tumbling across in front of them, then threw the throttle back up to one quarter impulse to pass through another vanishing gap he pointed the ship towards. Jirel fought against the urge to close his eyes. Going through this blind seemed worse somehow.
“…Anyway, point being, I was super hungover this morning, and I’m still not totally recovered. So this might be a bit of a rough ride from time to time—Ooh, this is gonna be a close one!…”
The Bounty skimmed close enough to the surface of another asteroid fragment to kick up a cloud of dust with its thruster exhaust. Jirel’s fingers glowed white where they were squeezing the chair’s armrest.
“..,Ok, let’s go for a big finish here, folks!”
Sunek pushed the ship into a right hand turn around avast ball of solid ice, passing through the wispy trail of vapour being expelled from its surface, before slamming the ship up to full impulse and completing a quickfire slingshot that carried them up and away from the chaotic minefield of rock and debris entirely and back into the relative safety of empty space.
Satisfied that his demonstration was complete, Sunek turned back to his audience to bask in their expected adulation. Jirel was still gripping onto his chair for dear life. Behind the engineering console, Maya looked a little queasy. Even Klath looked paler than usual at his weapons station.
“So,” the Vulcan grinned, “How about I shoot us back to the starbase, and we celebrate with a round of Kressari Heatwaves?”
Jirel slowly extracted his fingernails from the fabric of the armrests and licked his lips, realising how dry his mouth was all of a sudden.
Behind him, Maya recovered a little faster. “Do I know how to pick ‘em, or what?” she offered with a hint of satisfaction.
It was all that Jirel could do to slowly nod back, in response to both Maya and Sunek’s questions.
She could certainly pick them, And he could definitely do with a drink.