Chapter Text
Lorca tries to avoid her for the next week to clear his head. When he’d started looking for Michael Burnham, and when he saw that she was the first (convicted) mutineer, he’d assumed that she would be a restrained version of the Michael he knew, bold and brash and barely willing to follow orders, eager for conflict and barely fitted into the Starfleet model. When he met her, he’d seen only a shadow of Michael—not even a shadow but a shade, with straightforward Vulcan intelligence to be used like a tricorder. But suddenly she’s not only intelligent but clever, flexible enough in her thinking to link the monster to the spore drive instead of just trying to saw off its claws.
He reports their victories to Starfleet, only to be told that now he needs to stop. Only in this ridiculous universe would his successes be penalized. The other admirals sit quietly while Cornwell blindsides him with it, telling him he can’t use his spore drive unless Starfleet allows it. He stays in the room as they all walk out, stunned at the stupidity of it, trying to calm himself before he does something truly unacceptable in this universe. Here there’s no challenging orders by knifing the person giving them. Here, Burnham’s mutiny is unthinkable; in his universe, the only thing wrong with it would’ve been failing to kill the captain.
Cornwell walks back in as he’s treating his eyes, turns the lights to full, and he yells at her. She’s unsympathetic, tells him to get his damn eyes fixed, clearly impatient. He calls her Katrina—he’s decided they were on this level of familiarity, once. But she’s not there to make nice or apologize for what happened; she wants to make clear that she did him a favor.
“By the way, there’s something I didn’t bring up, lest you think I was piling on,” she says. “The matter of Michael Burnham.”
There it is. He’d been wondering when someone other than Saru would complain about it. He reminds her, not in so many words, that he’s been authorized to do virtually whatever he wants with whomever he wants to win the war—that no one is supposed to look over his shoulder. “Are you uncomfortable with the power I’ve been given, Admiral?”
“I’m your friend,” she reminds him, and he realizes that he shouldn’t have retreated into the formality of her title.
“It’s my ship. My way.”
Then, as though they knew he was coming, the Klingons capture his shuttle. They gut his pilot, grab him by the neck, and march him into their ship. The female Klingon calls him by name, which is good news. It means they’re at least likely to keep him alive and torture him for information rather than mindlessly bludgeon him. And if he’s alive, he can escape.
Lorca regains consciousness in a filthy cell and registers that he’s grabbed someone’s throat only as the man chokes. It’s Harcourt Fenton Mudd, too clean and unbruised to trust, living all-too-comfortably next to a beaten half-dead man who dies in the next few minutes. Mudd is happy to inform him of all the terrible things that happen on this ship and then says, “I’m a survivor. Just like you.”
Five minutes later, Mudd is snoring peacefully while Lorca paces the cell, learns where the walls are jointed, looks for weaknesses, stress points. As he does it, he comes across another person in a Starfleet uniform, half-conscious on the floor. “I didn’t realize there were more of us in here,” he says.
The man eases himself up. “Pulled out of rotation. Sometimes they let us heal up, so we last longer.” He looks closer at Lorca’s uniform and says, “Shit, you’re a captain?”
Lorca doesn’t answer. He walks back to the main cell area and finds a spot to collapse. Without his eye treatment, the light in the cell is excruciating. The man limps after him, though, and tries to pass him some food, even tries to insist that he eat it. He says he’s already lost one captain and won’t lose another—Lieutenant Ash Tyler, who’s been here seven months and says maybe he’s tougher than he thought.
“Or a liar.” Everyone in this cell is too damn comfortable, except the dead man that the Klingons dragged out. “No one survives Klingon torture for seven months. What are you doing here? They got a reason to keep you alive?”
Tyler admits it, that the captain of the prison ship has “taken a liking” to him, turned him into a personal pet, and Lorca grimaces at the thought. Of all the things a Klingon might do to a human, he’d never thought of rape as one of their preferred methods of torture. Inefficient, too close to humans.
More important than Tyler’s personal suffering is what Tyler might be able to offer. He knows how many crew are on the ship, though he can’t tell Lorca anything about the layout. Lorca hears slight movement from Mudd’s corner, just enough to know that the man is listening. He tells Tyler that Discovery can get here, it’s like a ghost, and Mudd’s pet scurries in as they speak and snatches the food. He’d bet money—or his life—that the creature is part of the way Mudd keeps his captors happy. Then Mudd launches into some rant about how Starfleet doesn’t care about the little people like him, and if there’s anything Lorca cares about less than the high-minded principles of Starfleet, it’s the complaints of petty crooks who feel forgotten by it.
When they come for Lorca, Tyler tries to stand in the way, but he can barely stand up at all. They strap Lorca into a chair and the first thing the female Klingon asks—in English—is if he’s ever been tortured. It’s hilarious, or it would be if he weren’t anticipating some physical damage. The agonizers in his own universe were made to cause pain, but for all the suffering, they broke you mentally first. You’d lose your mind long before they inflicted any permanent damage. That was one of the reasons they were so useful, and he’d spent enough time in them to know just how effective they were. But Klingons would pull a person to pieces, leave wounds that bled out slowly or turned gangrenous, maybe take one of the eyes that he’d so jealously guarded.
He'd rather not think about the way she lovingly strokes the tools, so he says, “Your English, it’s excellent,” for a subhuman.
After some self-aggrandizing talk, she calls his ship “a ghost,” and there, he knew it, Mudd was listening. But it’s too early to congratulate himself on successfully spotting a traitor, because she’s pried his eyelids open and from the pain, it feels like she’s gouging out his eyes.
By some miracle, Lorca still has his eyes when they drag him back to the cell, though they’re throbbing in agony. He can see well enough to shove Mudd against the wall, pull the transmitter out of the creature, and smash it under his shoe. He should’ve done the same thing with the creature, but he flings it against the far wall instead. Tyler grabs Mudd and says, “You’re finished. And when it’s time to choose our pain, we’re choosing you, until there’s nothing left.” Lorca likes him.
“Captain,” Mudd tries, “are you really going to let this idealistic young man humiliate himself by siding with you? Have you no decency, Lorca? Actually, that was a trick question. I know you don’t. We both know you lost that with your last command.” It’s gorgeous, the irony, especially because Mudd doesn’t know the truth of it.
Tyler takes the bait, of course. “What’s he talking about?”
Mudd repeats what he thinks is the real story, “the tragic tale of the USS Buran. It was ambushed about a month into the war. The Klingons boarded it and blasted it into smithereens.” He’s relishing the words. “Only one crewman managed to escape—Gabriel Lorca. Apparently, the honorable captain was too good to go down with his ship.”
“That’s only half right,” Lorca says, and it’s more like a quarter right. “We were ambushed, and I did…escape. But I didn’t let my crew die.” Tyler wants to believe him, he can see, wants to believe whatever will let him follow Lorca out of here. “I blew them up.” He tells Tyler what would have happened, what Tyler already knows would follow, and says, “Not my crew. Not on my watch.” And Tyler, dumb desperate kid that he is, accepts it as enough. He doesn’t even ask why Lorca didn’t stay too.
Only minutes later, the Klingons come back in and tell them to choose their pain. Tyler says, “Choose me, captain,” and even though it’s part of the plan, he sounds like he wants it. The Klingons beat him half to hell before Lorca sees his opportunity and they both attack. Seconds later, Lorca enjoys the crack of the first neck he’s broken since falling into this universe; Tyler gapes at him and then follows suit.
Mudd babbles happily as they collect the weapons, until it dawns on him that he’s not coming. “You can’t be serious,” he says.
“Oh, but I can.” He would break Mudd’s neck too, but Tyler is watching and killing a human might be too much for him to stomach, so Lorca hits Mudd across the face with the Klingon disruptor and locks him back in the cell as he begs them to bring him.
Tyler fights well but is too hurt to keep up, and he tells Lorca to leave him behind. A month ago, maybe, Lorca would have, but Landry is dead and he needs someone else with that kind of loyalty, the kind that only comes from saving someone’s life. When he goes back to find Tyler, he’s atop the Klingon woman, so engrossed in punching her over and over that he’s oblivious to the other approaching guard until Lorca kills it. Lorca pulls him off, shoots the female Klingon too and drags him out, and then Tyler flies them out into Discovery’s transporter range.
* * *
As soon as Dr. Culber has fixed him up well enough—repaired two cracked ribs, dealt with the concussion, checked his eyes and pronounced them no worse than before—he escapes from sickbay. Tyler will be there at least overnight while they scan him and try to repair him, but Lorca won’t stay any longer than he absolutely has to.
He sees Burnham in the turbolift on his way to quarters. “I hear you freed the tardigrade,” he says. Saru has already given him the whole story, complete with an apology for allowing genetic manipulation in violation of Federation law and an apology for torturing a sentient creature, also in violation of Federation law. Saru doesn't approve of his orders, but spends a lot of time apologizing anyway.
“It was logical to search for an alternate solution. The spore drive was weakening it.”
He turns his head to look at her. She’s staring straight ahead. “You mean it was suffering.”
“And deteriorating. Sir.” She pauses for a long time. “Were you ever in the room when we used the spore drive?”
“Not that I recall.” He didn’t let anyone else initiate a black alert when he was on the ship, and he only initiated a black alert from the bridge. And the science itself wasn’t beautiful to him, only its results.
“Every time,” she says, and he can almost hear a hitch in her voice. “Every time, it screamed.”
“So do pigs when we slaughter them.”
“Vulcans are vegetarians.”
“You’re not a Vulcan.”
She turns on him and snaps, “I was raised as a Vulcan,” of all the things to get angry about.
“So, you found a way to save it. Nearly mutinied against Saru. According to him, you were very…passionate. And Stamets turned himself part tardigrade.” His eyes burn as he stares back at her, but he can’t stop.
“I was confined to quarters.”
“Better him than you,” he says. At her “Sir?” he realizes that maybe she meant that she had no involvement, not that she should have been the one to do it. “I assume you would have done it, if Stamets hadn’t.”
“He’s vital to the design and operation of the spore drive,” she says, which means yes
He can’t stop a smile at that. “Necessary, now. I hear you made Stamets take the spore drive offline to avoid hurting it.”
“I shared my concerns. Captain.”
“During a Starfleet-ordered mission to rescue me from being tortured into revealing the Federation’s secrets.”
He’d expected her to flinch, but she doesn’t look away. “Torture is prohibited under the 1994 Convention Against Torture,” she says. “Even to save the life of another person. That’s what we were doing.” She does love her laws.
“Needs of the tardigrade outweighed the needs of all Federation citizens? Not very Vulcan of you.” He pauses and then teases, “You’re not very careful with your captains.”
She stiffens and drops her gaze and heavy silence descends. Damn it, wrong soft spot. “I apologize, sir.”
He touches her wrist lightly, lets his fingers rest there, thumb on her pulse point. “No harm done. Well, nothing lasting.” He would describe himself as wryly humorous, but she doesn’t seem to agree. Of course, he’s only ever seen her laugh with Cadet Tilly, this universe’s bizarre incarnation of the woman he knew as Captain Killy. “And I picked up a gift from the Klingons.”
She looks up at him again and he realizes he’s still touching her. “Sir?”
He should let go of her wrist. It’s a strange thing to be doing. “It’s been a long day, Burnham.” He’s not sure what’s happening with his vision. It seems to come and go, and when she makes a soft noise, he realizes he’s clenched his hand around her wrist to stay upright. When the turbolift doors finally open, his first step out doesn’t land quite right and he finds himself reaching out for a wall to brace himself. Burnham more or less catches him, props him up, and starts to say, “Computer, site-to-site transport—”
“Computer, cancel that,” he manages. “I’m fine. Culber cleared me. Just need to get to quarters and lie down.”
“Sir,” she says. “I don’t think—”
“I’m the captain,” he tells her. “Just help me get there.”
She heaves him up fully, puts one of his arms around her shoulder, and says, “Lean on me and walk.” He’s very cold and she’s a solid line of heat against his side, albeit one that keeps jostling him. His eyes are throbbing again, almost as bad as they were when the Klingon woman finally turned off the light. He closes them and leans heavily on Burnham and lets her steer him blindly to his quarters and then to his bed. She sets him down as though he’s drunk, guides his head to the pillow, and then…stands there.
He can hear her breathing quietly and reaches his hand out again in the general direction of the sound, brushing what must be her knee before he lets his arm drop again. “Dismissed,” he says.
“Yes, captain.” He barely hears the doors close before he passes out.