Chapter Text
Part Three (Cont’d)
“I’ll admit, I’ve had better plans.”
Maya whispered the comment back to Jirel and Natasha with a calmness that didn’t entirely befit their predicament. They had negotiated several hundred metres of crawl space, following Maya’s vague directions towards the transporter room. But the access vents had only led so far. And now they were stuck.
The three of them were crouched in an intersection, too narrow to stand up in but just about large enough for them to manoeuvre around each other. In the middle of them on the floor was a hatch which dropped down back into the corridors of the habitation dome.
The wail of the alarms continued all around them. And, through the gaps in the grating of the hatch, they could see four Miradorn standing guard below. Directly in their path.
“Yeah,” Jirel whispered back with a nod, “You’ve definitely had better plans.”
Maya tossed an unamused look at the Trill, as Natasha kept her focus on the scene below, keeping her voice low despite the alarm sound bleeding through. “How far are we from the transporter room?”
“If I’ve led us the right way,” Maya replied, “Another three or four intersections.”
“And there’s no other way around?”
“Not unless we wanna retrace our steps. And there’s no guarantee that won’t lead to another dead end.”
“Great,” Jirel chimed in with a tired sigh, “Well, amazing work on coming up with two-thirds of an escape plan.”
“That’s two-thirds more than you did.”
Natasha ignored the bickering between Jirel and Maya, and especially ignored the increasingly flirtatious angle to their words. Instead, she rifled through her Starfleet training for a way out of their predicament. And when that failed to give her any solution as to what to do when trapped in the maintenance vents of an illegal mining facility with four Miradorn guards blocking your path to the only transporter room that can get you onboard a ruthless Ferengi businessman’s private yacht, she turned to what she had learned with the Bounty’s crew this past year.
And then she realised that she did have a plan.
“Ok,” she muttered, “You two need to get back down the vent. As safe a distance as possible.”
Jirel and Maya looked at her curiously, then at each other, then back to her.
“As safe a distance as possible from what?” Jirel managed eventually.
Natasha began to work on the disruptor in her hand, accessing the power controls in the same way that she had many months ago, when she and Klath had been fighting their way through a gang of marauding emotional Vulcan terrorists on a stolen Romulan Warbird. In the interests of expediency, she decided it was best to show her plan, rather than tell it.
The disruptor in her hands began to whine. Jirel’s eyes widened in shock, while Maya just mustered an understanding smile.
“Clever girl,” she replied with a shake of her head.
“Wait,” Jirel added, pointing at the disruptor with palpable concern, “Did you just—?”
“Yep,” Natasha nodded back, “So, go!”
Without any further questions, Maya and Jirel scurried back up the vent, while Natasha opened the hatch and dropped the overloading disruptor into the corridor below, before rushing off after them. As she turned her back on the increasingly high-pitched whine, she prayed she’d got the timing a bit better this time, recalling the injuries to her back she had suffered back on the Warbird.
Down in the corridor, the four Miradorn turned their weapons in the direction of the sound of the hatch as it clunked open, only to see a small disruptor drop through.
A split-second later, via instinctive telepathic warnings, all four realised what they were looking at. As one, they turned and ran. At the same time that Natasha desperately crawled after Maya and Jirel in the vents above.
The four Miradorn sprinted, then dived for the cover of the next intersection. All of them had already accepted that they would probably be too late.
A second later, the whining disruptor exploded. The power cell was partially depleted, but the explosion was still enough to cause chaos.
Natasha felt the shock from the explosion shove her forwards down the vent, where she collided with Jirel and Maya, where they had sought refuge at the next intersection. It was enough to knock the air out of her, but she felt no more serious injuries. The shockwave was followed by a choking burst of smoke, and the sound of the corridor below them partially collapsing, as a new alarm sounded out to join the cacophony.
Maya looked down at where Natasha had landed, and smiled again. “Clever, clever girl.”
Natasha coughed through the acrid smoke and blinked at Jirel, who mustered a smile of his own as he waved his disruptor at her. “Just so you know, these things can also be used as guns.”
“Still,” Natasha offered back with a shrug, “Pretty good distraction, right?”
Inside, she hoped that the explosion had been enough to just incapacitate the guards, rather than kill them. Despite everything, she was still uneasy about the idea of causing any more bloodshed down here. But before she had a chance to think about that, Maya gestured them back into the smoking vent ahead of them.
“It’s only a good distraction if we get moving. Come on.”
With that, she took off. Jirel helped Natasha back into a crouch and the two of them locked eyes together. And Jirel felt compelled to say something.
“Nat, listen, I—”
“I was meaning to ask you something,” Natasha jumped in.
She had seen the look on his face and had quickly decided that, whatever serious statement he suddenly felt the need to make, now really wasn’t the time.
“So,” she continued, “All that talk about you being a swashbuckling space adventurer. And you didn’t even own your own ship?”
She punctuated the question with a knowing smile, and got a slightly sheepish one back from Jirel.
“I mean,” he offered as they began to scamper after Maya, “I tried to pay her back…”
* * * * *
The bridge of the Boundless Profit was in something close to organised chaos.
Not for the first time since they had arrived in orbit, Grenk himself was causing the lion’s share of the chaos. And also not for the first time, Shel-Lan and Gel-Lan found themselves the target of their boss’s rage.
“So, you’re telling me that not only are Jirel and his friend missing down there, but that Maya Ortega beamed down there without any sort of supervision, and she’s missing too?!”
Neither Shel-Lan nor Gel-Lan responded immediately. For the time being, they kept their comments between each other.
“And now,” Grenk continued to rant, “They’ve taken down internal sensors, somehow. And they could be anywhere!”
The spittle-flecked rant continued unabated as the stout Ferengi paced around the room. All the time, the Miradorn twins passed their thoughts internally. Chief among those thoughts were, even though they were being squarely blamed for the unfolding crisis, none of this was actually their fault. In fact, they had feared something like this might happen for some time.
They had, Shel-Lan pointed out, warned Grenk about the relatively unskilled Miradorn he had been hiring as guards. Not to mention the limited numbers that he provided them with to try and make a full three-shift pattern work.
They had also, Gel-Lan added, cautioned against the Ferengi’s over-reliance on automated systems and security software to cover for his understaffed facilities. Which left them open to exploitation from anyone with enough know-how to do so.
“And by the sounds of things, your men are seemingly incapable of finding them!”
Shel-Lan mentioned how it had been Grenk’s idea to allow Maya Ortega unsupervised access to the common areas of the Boundless Profit once she had delivered Jirel and the Bounty to him. In his usual way of attempting to ingratiate himself to someone who the ever-libidinous Ferengi saw as a potential short-term sexual partner.
Gel-Lan backed that up by offering that it had also been Grenk’s decision to allow Maya to keep a level of access to Synergy’s computer network. Seeing as how she could use that in her earlier attempts to convince Jirel and his crew that she was acting in good faith.
“Honestly,” Grenk screamed, “What am I even paying you two for anyway?!”
This comment drew particular ire. Neither twin needed to remind the other, telepathically or otherwise, that they had been pulling triple duty, overseeing the mining site, looking after the salvage work on the Bounty, along with their usual tasks as Grenk’s bodyguards.
They had also, Gel-Lan added, not slept for nineteen hours and counting.
Shel-Lan jumped in with a reminder of a passage from Grand Nagus Rom’s unauthorised biography that he had read to his brother during their last furtive meal break. Not only about unionisation, but about Rom’s firm belief in a fair wage for a fair job. And right now they were getting one unfair wage for three unfair jobs.
“So,” Grenk concluded, pointing a stubby finger at the twins and oblivious to the telepathic debate he was interrupting, “What the hell are you going to do about all of this?”
For the first time since the rant had started, the Miradorn were allowed to respond.
“We have sent every man on the surface to find them that we can afford,” Shel-Lan said, “The other guards are needed to keep the miners secure.”
“Every man on the surface I can afford, you mean,” the Ferengi griped, either accidentally or deliberately misinterpreting Shel-Lan’s use of the word ‘afford’, “And that’s not good enough, the security systems should be able to handle the other miners—!”
“Some security systems have been compromised,” Gel-Lan pointed out, “We cannot be sure that the escapees won’t turn more of the systems off.”
Grenk fixed the right-hand Miradorn twin with a particularly unhappy glare. He wasn’t used to being interrupted like that. Especially by one of his subordinates.
Gel-Lan realised his error as well, even as Shel-Lan telepathically chided him for jumping in.
But just as Grenk was about to unload another bucket of frustration onto the sagging shoulders of the twins, their debate was interrupted by one of the other two Miradorn on the bridge, manning the forward stations.
“I am getting reports of an explosion from inside the mining complex.”
Grenk spun around on his heels with a growl of anguish and bounded over to the console to verify the details. A split second later, he whirled back to Shel-Lan and Gel-Lan and pointed an angry finger at them. “I want every available resource left on this ship ready to beam down there in five minutes! We are going to go down there, we are going to find Jirel’s little jailbreak, and we are going to deal with it! Do I make myself clear?”
Shel-Lan and Gel-Lan both agreed that this was yet another tactical blunder. Overcommitting more of Grenk’s scant physical resources to the mining complex ran a serious risk of leaving the Boundless Profit unprotected as well. With Gel-Lan already having risked their boss’s ire, Shel-Lan opted to vocalise their concerns this time. Though he didn’t get very far.
“If I may, we should leave more men behind to—”
“I said,” Grenk spat, “Do I make myself clear? Or am I going to have to dock both of you even more pay to make up for what this is costing me?!”
Another brief telepathic conference later, the two long-suffering bodyguards slash prison wardens slash mining administrators slash salvage specialists decided that it was futile to argue the case even more. And nodded back in unison.
“Assemble the men,” Grenk snapped again, “And prepare to beam down. I have a feeling I know exactly where Jirel and his little band of irritants are heading…”
As the Miradorn twins rushed off to carry out his orders, Grenk allowed himself a slight smile as he rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
This time, he decided, he was going to make a proper example of Jirel.
End of Part Three