Chapter Text
Part Three
Klath led the motley group as they crept through the fringes of the deep cover of the forest, his bat’leth now drawn.
He had passed the tricorder to Jirel, who was keeping an eye on the readings and doing his best to make sure that they weren’t about to be ambushed by any other Jem’Hadar teams lurking in the undergrowth. Klath’s tactical mind had kicked in immediately. He had taken the lead as they picked their way around the edge of the clearing, keeping under cover for as long as possible and aiming to approach the structure from the rear.
Several minutes had passed since they had watched the five soldiers disappear inside the mysterious pyramid, and since Denella had made her feelings on the matter known for the first time. But not for the last time.
“Jirel, come on, this is insane!” she persisted as they walked on, making sure to keep her voice down despite her obvious despair.
“It’s not insane, it’s common sense,” he replied, deliberately misinterpreting her comment, “Klath’s right, we swing around behind the main entrance, keep under cover for as long as we can—”
“Not the—You saw them, right? The five heavily armed Jem’Hadar? The ones that just walked right inside that thing? I mean, that wasn’t an optical illusion, or a hallucination or something? You all saw them as well?”
“Yes!” Jirel snapped, his voice raising slightly, “We all saw them.”
“And you still wanna go in there?”
It was Natasha, rather than the Trill, that replied this time.
“We still want to go in there.”
There was a clear sense of determination in her voice, her attention still entirely focused on the imposing structure ahead of them in the clearing. The one that she was certain contained the Jewel of Soraxx, her father’s legacy.
“Whoever said a treasure hunt would be easy, hmm?” Jirel added with a grin.
“You did! Yesterday! Specifically about this treasure hunt!”
“Yeah, I’ve really got to start thinking my arguments through more…”
Denella sighed and looked over at Klath, who was ignoring the bickering and instead assessing their surroundings with a keen warrior’s eye.
“Seriously? You as well? You didn’t even want to come here in the first place!”
The Klingon tightened his grip on his bat’leth between his hands and crept onwards through the branches.
“It has been a long time since our last proper battle,” he grunted, a tinge of blood lust clear in his voice, “Five of them should provide a fair fight.”
“Well, I don’t know why I thought I’d get any support over there,” the Orion woman admitted, “But, just so everyone’s completely clear, we don’t have to go into the weird pyramid filled with Jem’Hadar if we don’t want to. Nobody’s making us do that.”
“The jewel’s in there,” Natasha replied firmly, “I know it.”
Klath indicated for them to stop. They had arrived at the closest point that there was to the rear of the structure without leaving the treeline. He scanned the far side of the clearing for signs of trouble and nodded.
“Here,” he said simply, gesturing to the stone wall a short distance away, “This is our best option. We can follow the outer wall around to the entrance.”
“No,” Denella persisted, “Our best option is to turn around, go back to the ship, and pretend we never heard of the Jewel of Soraxx.”
“Can’t do that,” Natasha muttered.
“Hey, Denella, we’ve taken on worse odds than these before,” Jirel smiled, taking a moment to shoot Natasha his most practised of brave space captain-esque looks, “Remember the time we took on a whole battalion of armed guards when we made that food drop on Pylius IV. I got us through that, didn’t I?”
“That was completely different,” Denella argued back, “Pylians are five inch tall bipedal amphibians! We took them on by climbing onto a particularly large rock and waiting for three hours until Klath could beam us out of there!”
On hearing these details, Natasha looked back over at Jirel, whose bravado level was struggling to maintain altitude all over again. She couldn’t help but muster a brief flicker of amusement before her attention returned to their target.
“Technicality,” Jirel managed with a shrug, “Now, are we doing this or what?”
Natasha nodded with determination. Klath gripped his bat’leth even tighter in his hands. Denella rolled her eyes to the heavens and sighed.
“Fine,” she said eventually, “I guess I can’t have you all going off and getting killed without me. If you do, it’s just me and Sunek for the rest of my life.”
“A fate worse than death,” Klath nodded.
With the Klingon leading the way, the four of them crept out of the cover of the forest and up to the rear of the ancient structure, slowly inching their way around towards the entrance while hugging the crumbling wall. Klath wielded his bat’leth with practised precision, Jirel and Denella both unholstered stubby disruptor pistols of a type Natasha hadn’t seen before, while she herself unclipped her type-1 phaser and checked its power levels.
Jirel scanned the structure with the tricorder in his other hand as they neared the entrance.
“Hard to pin down, these Jem’Hadar,” he offered with grim frustration, “They’re definitely in there. Somewhere.”
“Joy,” Denella muttered to herself.
They cautiously approached the entrance, Natasha taking a moment to reach out and touch the walls of the pyramid, feeling the moss-encrusted stone at her fingertips. Despite the risks ahead of them, something about the feeling comforted her. She was close.
Klath led them inside, through the crumbling entrance. Natasha followed behind him, with Jirel and Denella bringing up the rear. The interior was similarly decayed. A vast dank passageway of eroded stonework that extended into the darkness ahead of them, huge pillars flanking either side, supporting whatever remained of the ceiling above their heads. Natasha pulled out a flashlight and shone it over the walls, illuminating lettering and runes etched into the stonework, faded after so many years and partially obscured by dirt and vines, but still visible. She recognised the type of writing immediately from her father’s work.
This was definitely the right place.
“Amazing,” she whispered to herself.
“Ok,” Jirel said before she could ruminate any further, “Everyone stay on your toes. First sign of trouble, just stay calm and make sure to—”
They all heard the sound at the same time. A footstep landing on the stone floor behind them. They whirled around in unison, in time to see two Jem’Hadar emerging from their hiding places either side of the entrance they had just walked through, their weapons raised.
“Yep, I’d call that the first sign of trouble,” Jirel managed to add.
Before he realised what was happening, he felt himself being pulled back behind the nearest of the stone pillars. He stole a glance to see Natasha grasping onto his arm. Unlike them, Klath and Denella had no time to find cover. The Jem’Hadar soldiers pulled their triggers in unison.
And nothing happened.
Denella seized her chance and tried firing her own pistol. But it also failed to discharge.
“What the hell?” she muttered, a reaction silently shared by the Jem’Hadar as well, given their pair of bemused looks.
The Jem’Hadar, their weapons now seemingly useless in the conventional sense, swung their rifles around and gripped them like clubs, before charging at the Klingon and the Orion. Denella dived out the way of one of them, while Klath predictably stood his ground, meeting his own adversary’s weapon with a swing of his bat’leth and severing it in two, before slamming the other end of his weapon into the soldier’s midriff. As Denella rolled back onto her feet, she grabbed her Orion dagger from her belt, mirroring the others in switching to a more old fashioned form of combat.
Still safe behind their cover, Jirel wrenched his arm from Natasha’s grip. “We’ve got to help them. Come on!”
She nodded. He took one step away from behind the pillar, mentally preparing himself for another brawl.
And then he heard a click.
He paused in confusion. Something felt wrong. Natasha stopped behind him. He looked down at his foot to see it resting on one particular stone tile on the floor of the passageway. A tile that was now blinking intently with a flashing red light.
“So,” he said absently, gesturing down to his foot, “That’s probably not a good thing, right?”
Before she had time to say anything, both of them suddenly experienced the odd sensation of the whole floor disappearing from under their feet. In that one small section of the passageway, they were, for a split second, floating above nothingness.
Jirel barely had time to contemplate the irony of how, after he had wished for it repeatedly just a few hours earlier, the ground was now indeed about to swallow him up.
Back at the entrance, Denella parried an attack from the Jem’Hadar in front of her, before she was knocked off her feet by a follow-up blow. She just managed to roll away before her opponent’s rifle, now an improvised club, came crashing down where she had been lying. A short distance away, Klath continued to grapple tightly with the other Jem’Hadar, his bat’leth trapped between their two bodies, as he tried to gain the advantage via brute strength, rather than fighting tactics.
None of the four of them, each immersed in fighting their own battle, noticed as the other two figures suddenly dropped and disappeared underground, emitting a pair of terrified yelps.
Nor did they notice as the floor sealed up behind them, leaving no evidence behind that either of them had ever even been there in the first place.
* * * * *
Sunek sat alone in the cockpit of the Bounty, blithely tapping at the controls. He was immersed in an attempt to try and pick up some sort of local newscast. He already knew that he had absolutely no interest in anything that a local newscast would possibly have to say to him, but he was still setting about his task like the very future of the galaxy depended on it.
Because Sunek was bored.
He had long considered boredom to be one of the main drawbacks of his decision to fully embrace his emotional side.
Sunek hadn’t been born into the V’tosh ka’tur. Far from it. He’d had the most banal and ordinary of upbringings on the Vulcan homeworld, even getting several stages through the Kolinahr ceremony at one point. But he’d always felt different from his peers, always found his emotions harder to control, and he discovered with the V’tosh ka’tur that this particular trait of his didn’t need to be an affliction, or a flaw. It could be an incredible, rewarding asset.
Except, Sunek mused to himself, they never tell you about the boredom.
If he was a more traditional Vulcan, he assumed he could be spending this time meditating, or studying any number of metaphysical conundrums, or even playing the lute. But Sunek hated meditation. He had no interest in metaphysical conundrums. And even after months of patient lessons during his childhood, he couldn’t play the lute to save his life.
And so, here he was. Bored, lonely, and desperately searching for a local newscast just for something to do.
Eventually, he found one. But after thirty seconds watching a documentary focusing on recent work to improve irrigation facilities in Bajor’s Dakhur Province, he realised it wasn’t exactly helping to alleviate his boredom. After thirty more seconds spent idly retuning the Bounty’s dorsal receiver array to try and pick up something more interesting from a culture with a looser concept of the documentary format, he was bored of that as well. Thirty seconds later, he was even bored of his new plan, which admittedly just involved him spinning aimlessly around in his seat.
He looked around the empty cockpit and sighed.
“Screw this,” he muttered to the empty room.
He stood up and started towards the exit. His latest new plan involved him ignoring his instructions and following the others, wherever they had gone. After all, whatever they were up to couldn’t be any more boring than this. He was stopped in his tracks by the sound of the ship’s proximity alarm sounding out.
Something, or someone, was approaching his position.
He bounded back over to his seat to check the sensors. He hadn’t been expecting the others to get back so soon, but given how his time alone was going, he had to admit to being pretty happy that they were. That sense of happiness didn’t last long.
“Crap,” Sunek said to nobody in particular.
The sensor reading showed that the proximity alert wasn’t coming from the ground, but from the air. Specifically, from an eerily-familiar Ferengi shuttle.
Grenk had found them.
“Crap, crap, crap, crap,” he chanted in tantric repetition, as he quickly powered the Bounty up, skipping half a dozen safety checks as he did so, and began to lift off.
He didn’t have time to consider the others, or where they might be. He had to get moving. The micro-torpedo that slammed into the ground where the Bounty had been stood, seconds after it lifted off, rather underlined that point.
He threw the ship into a sharp, tight bank to the left, just as another alarm sounded out from the panel in front of him.
“Hull stress at critical levels,” the mechanical voice of the computer rang out.
“Shut up!” Sunek snapped back, pulling the ship’s nose up vertically to avoid another torpedo as it zipped past.
The ship veered across the top of the forest, pursued shortly afterwards by the stocky orange shape of Grenk’s shuttle, still carrying signs of its encounter with several fragments of asteroid. The Bounty wasn’t as manoeuvrable in atmospheric flight as in the vacuum of space, the controls slightly more sluggish and less responsive, not helped by the thoroughly bashed-up state the ship was currently in. Nevertheless, in a weird way, Sunek was enjoying himself.
At least he wasn’t bored any more.
Plus, he’d been piloting the Bounty for so long now that he knew the whole ship like an extension of his own body. And he knew how far he could push it. With a grin on his face, he threw the ship into an even sharper bank to the right, determined to shake off his relentless pursuer.
“Hull stress limits exceeded,” the computer reported, “Hull breach in progress.”
“Huh,” Sunek managed over the whine of the latest alarm.
Maybe he didn’t know how far he could push it after all.