Chapter Text
They fight and jump, fight and jump, over and over. They save hundreds of lives—hundreds of souls, the Federation likes to say. He wonders, occasionally, how they tally those souls. How sentient does the Federation require a species to be before they believe it has a soul?
The Terran Empire would never talk about souls.
Lorca takes Discovery to Pahvo, the mysterious planet of light and music, to turn it into a weapon. “You’ll have to modify the electromagnetic frequency to match the Klingons,” Stamets says. He wears a dazed expression on his face lately, and his magical mushroom feel-good high has turned inward. He had better last longer than the damn tardigrade did. “It’s the only way to make the invisible Klingons appear.”
“Yes,” Burnham says, adjusting her pack. She’s already standing on the transporter pad and has been for fifteen minutes longer than planned while Stamets repeats himself.
Tyler is less patient with Stamets. “You told us already.” He is, fundamentally, a prosaically-minded soldier who feels little wonder at the magic of the spore drive. Lorca can tell that he doesn’t look at the spores floating like shining dust motes in the spore chamber and imagine the possibilities; his mind is on a concrete mission, and then an end to the war.
“I just want to make sure you get it right,” Stamets tells him. “I don’t want us broadcasting Madame Butterfly instead.” At Tyler’s apparent lack of recognition, he throws up his hands and says, “Madame Butterfly? The classic opera that culminates in the suicide of a teenage girl? Not the right mood.”
Saru clicks in concern and says, “Lieutenant Stamets, I assure you, we will perform our task properly. You need not worry about us.”
“You’re sure they can’t transport in closer?” Lorca doesn’t like how long this will take, how many variables there are. He can rely on Tyler to keep the other two on track, but still, the less time off the ship, the better.
“Captain, as I have already told you, several times”—Stamets flings emphases on whatever syllables he can—"the crystal structure’s transmitter will scramble anyone or anything that we transport down within 30 kilometers. I don’t think you want them coming back scrambled.”
“No.” Lorca trusts Stamets with the science, at least. He can feel Burnham watching him. She does it more and more, lately, head tilted minutely like she’s examining a set of results. They haven’t spoken privately since he told her to get out, and he wonders if she’s chalked the whole thing up to a very human tantrum, or if she’s still contemplating all the things he didn’t mean to say. “Finish your mission as quickly as possible and come back alive,” he says, which is the closest thing to “good luck” that he can manage right now. “Mr. Stamets, energize.”
He watches Burnham dissolve into gold light. It hurts his eyes to watch. He’s not the kind of captain to go with an away team. Oh, he can fight, he can kill, armed or bare-handed, has done it plenty of times, but he’s tethered himself to Discovery now. The last time he left, he was tortured by Klingons, and he doesn’t have time for that.
* * *
Lorca hates to admit it, but they’ve gotten overconfident. While waiting for the away team, they hear the distress call from the Gagarin and jump, expecting it to be—not easy, but routine. Standard. Blow up some Klingons, save the day. “This is U.S.S. Discovery,” he says, “We’ve got your back.” Routine.
But Rhys can’t seem to fire the damn phasers and Owosekun tells him that the Klingon ships are invisible to their sensors. Everything gets worse from there. They take heavy Klingon fire and then…a Klingon destroyer appears beneath Gagarin, two battle cruisers too; Gagarin has no shields and Discovery is at 32 percent.
He can’t lend the Gagarin shield percentage, so he tells Detmer, “Get us between the Klingons and the Gagarin.” Slowly, agonizingly, the ship shifts its bulk to protect Gagarin, and Discovery takes a direct hit, bridge heaving, sparks showering. He nearly falls at the impact. Someone is unconscious and bleeding on the floor, no time to figure out who, and sirens are going off all over the ship
“Shields below ten percent!” Owosekun yells.
“Did we get both torpedoes? Did we get them both?” The only reason to take the fire at all was to take them both—
The explosion sears his eyes. One torpedo got past them.
“The Gagarin is gone.” He doesn’t know much of Discovery would have survived, if both had hit. He shouldn’t have put Discovery in the line of fire like that. “Black alert. Get us out of here,” he says, and it takes too long but they jump away from the wreckage, the bodies tumbling out into space. For a second, he sees the last moments of the Buran, the flashes of light that burned his eyes past their ordinary sensitivity, the way it morphed from ISS to USS as the Charon and then the Klingons tore great chunks out of its hull.
Lorca tells the crew that they can grieve later and goes to vent his anger on whatever member of Starfleet command will answer. It’s the Vulcan admiral, Terral, who tells him that two more ships are gone, the Hoover and Muroc, all ambushed, all destroyed. Four hundred and sixty-two souls, by Starfleet standards. The mission on Pahvo is the only hope they have—Burnham is the only hope, really. She always seems to be. And all he can do is wait, maintain radio silence, and…wait.
He wants to go find another fight. It’s killing him to sit here, mute, while they repair their shields bit by bit, listening for any whisper from the surface or the slightest hint of a threat in the sky. He’s calculated a hundred times how long it should take the away party to reach their destination; average human walking speed of six kilometers per hour on flat ground, thirty kilometers’ distance to travel would take five hours with no breaks. But they’ll have to rest, at least briefly, and from the scans Pahvo is hilly, densely forested and steep. Its atmosphere has less oxygen than they’re used to. They’ll probably have to spend one night, if not two, to make it, and then who knows if the transmitter’s new frequency will allow them to transport back or if they’ll have to hike all the way back to the original transport spot…Lorca’s calculations are not helpful. He’s been awake for at least thirty hours now, maybe more.
Culber pages him, and, reluctantly, Lorca cedes the conn to Detmer. He arrives in the blinding white of sickbay and says, “Doctor?”
“Captain.” For once, sickbay is empty; they’ve patched up everyone who was injured in the disastrous fight to save Gagarin. Culber beckons him through the door and then ambushes him with a tricorder.
It trills an alarm at him. Lorca swats it away. “I’m fine,” he says. “What do you want, doctor?”
Culber presses a button on the tricorder and it begins flashing red. He sighs. “Sir, I know you won’t appreciate this, but I have to order you to sleep.”
“What?” Of all the preposterous things to say right now.
“Starfleet regulations require that no officer work for more than twenty hours without at least four hours of sleep,” Culber says. “You’ve worked substantially longer than that.”
“We’re in a crisis. The regulations don’t apply.”
Culber is gentle, trying not to spook him. “Captain, you’re well beyond the limits. We’re not in a crisis—”
“We’re at war!” Lorca should leave. Culber can’t hold him here, not physically, and he’s not going to call Starfleet just to complain that Lorca won’t sleep.
“We’ve been at war for eight months.” Culber puts a hand on his shoulder. Lorca must look terrible, for Culber to dare that. “Two hours, Captain. I’m not even asking for the full four. Close your eyes for two hours. You can trust Detmer for two hours. They’ll all have orders to wake you if there’s the slightest sound from the surface or any hint of an incoming warp signature.”
His alarm doesn’t sound. Lorca sleeps for six hours, swimming in darkness. If he dreams, they’re empty. He wakes to the sound of someone saying, “Captain, they’ve returned,” over the comm.
If Culber thought a nap was going to make him feel better, he was wrong. Lorca had already been exhausted, running on adrenaline and anger; those supposedly crucial six hours of sleep have dissipated the adrenaline and left only the anger, the impatience, the need for action. He comes to the bridge to learn that Saru had some kind of emotional meltdown on Pahvo, attacked Burnham and Tyler, tried to ruin the mission altogether.
“He’s resting in sickbay now,” Burnham tells him when she and Tyler report, and of course, why not.
Lorca stares out the front viewscreen at the blue planet below. Something else is wrong. He can hear a sound building. “You said the adjustment to the Pahvan transmitter was a success.”
Burnham turns. “I thought it was, sir. The Pahvans repaired our signal inhibitor after Saru destroyed it...I watched it happen.”
“Mr. Bryce?”
The noise is getting worse. “The signal strength has increased by a factor of ten to the twelfth power,” Bryce tells him. “The music’s stopped.” Burnham goes to her console. “All that’s being transmitted now is a massive electromagnetic wave.”
Burnham looks down at her console screen. “Captain, I don’t understand. I thought the Pahvans—”
Lorca can't help but hate her right now. Of all the missions to blow—
“Sir, Specialist Burnham integrated our technology exactly as ordered,” Tyler says. Lorca hates him too. His eyes are burning again. “We should now be able to detect any invisible Klingon ships within range of the Pahvan signal.”
“Apparently not.” He stands from his chair, walks forward, tries to tamp down the rage. “The transmitter is now sending out a new signal limited to two subspace bands—ours…and the Klingons.” Lorca turns on Burnham. “What you did, Burnham, was invite the enemy to join us here.”
Burnham refuses to be wrong. “No.” She steps in front of Tyler. “The Pahvans did that. Their entire existence is an effort to bring harmony to discord, and they know about our conflict with the Klingons. They’re trying to bring us together. They think they’re helping.”
“Captain,” Rhys says, on the heels of that revelation. “Long-range sensors have detected an incoming Klingon vessel entering the system at high warp.”
It’s the Ship of the Dead, answering the Pahvans’ call. Burnham walks up to him at the front of the bridge, says, “We’re the Pahvans’ only line of defense.” And then she says what he knew she would: “We have to protect them, sir. We have to fight.”
Lorca wanted a fight to distract himself while they were down on the planet, but this wasn’t the fight he was looking for.
He shouldn’t care about Pahvo, beyond its now-abandoned strategic potential. The Pahvans, whatever creatures they are, brought their oncoming doom upon themselves. If they knew about the Klingons from Saru’s mind, they should have known intimately the only possible result of calling the Klingons here. But he can’t help thinking of it as blind, stupid courage, a reckless faith that they have some chance of facilitating peace, even a willingness to die for it. Lorca sent Cornwell to her death on that same absolute willingness to risk herself for the slightest possibility. Did the Pahvans believe that he would stay to save them if negotiations failed? Did they see something in what Saru or Burnham or Tyler thought of him that told them he would protect them?
It doesn’t matter why. Starfleet will order him to leave. The only question is how openly he’ll defy them.