Chapter Text
Part One (Cont'd)
Jirel and Klath materialised in the cramped transporter room of their ship. At the controls was a green-skinned woman, wearing a set of dirt-streaked overalls tied off at the waist and a grubby sleeveless top.
“You rang?” she said simply, raising an amused eyebrow and gesturing at Jirel’s communicator.
“Denella, has anyone ever told you that you have great timing?” Jirel sighed in relief as he gingerly stepped off the transporter pad and gave her a warm hug.
“I could have beaten that Nausicaan,” Klath muttered bitterly, following Jirel off the pad and appearing as close as a Klingon could get to being in a sulk.
Denella, the Orion engineer of the ship, broke the hug and started to reach across for the transporter controls. “You wanna go back down there?”
Jirel gently patted her hand away and handed her the bronze padd. “Klath will get over himself,” he replied, “We, meanwhile, have what we need.”
Denella nodded as she took the padd and tapped the screen. “The coordinates of the Navajo debris?”
“Exactly as promised,” he grinned, before faltering slightly, “I mean, I’ve only really got Grenk’s word for that at the moment, but…”
Not entirely sure how to finish that sentence in a positive way, Jirel instead turned and led them out the door.
“Great,” Denella sighed, as she and Klath followed.
They walked down the short main corridor of the ship, towards the steps up to the cockpit. Jirel noticed that the lights were still dimmed, a result of the damage they had suffered on their trip to Hestina.
“What’s our status?”
“I’ve got partial main power back online,” Denella replied with just a glimmer of smugness, “Just as I said I would. We’re good for warp speed.”
“Never doubted you for a moment,” he said, before glancing over at Klath, “I owe you three slips of latinum.”
She shook her head and smiled patiently as they ascended into the cockpit, and despite the pain still coming from his leg, and the aches coming from half a dozen other places all over his body, Jirel found himself struck with a reassuring sense of calm and familiarity.
He had been a sickly orphan on a Trill colony, adopted by a human Starfleet officer and his family and brought up on Earth. After leaving home, he had tried his hand at almost everything, from joining a private venture terraforming a Tellarite moon to several long months serving onboard a Denobulan freighter. But only the Bounty had ever felt like home. Their mostly hand-to-mouth existence may have been a long way from ideal, but of all the parts of the galaxy he had ended up at one point or another, this was where he felt like he belonged.
The ship, such that it was, was a small Ju’Day-type raider, picked up by Jirel from a scrapyard many years ago and named after one of the old stories his father told him during his childhood. And from there, he had managed to assemble a motley, but loyal crew. Klath was his trusted friend, tactical chief and hired muscle, depending on what the situation called for. Denella was his skilled and dedicated engineer, responsible for keeping the ageing, battered Bounty in one piece. And then there was his Vulcan pilot, Sunek. Who, as the three of them entered the cockpit and took their usual positions, was already sitting at the helm, looking back at them.
And grinning.
“Cause enough trouble down there?” the wiry Vulcan joked.
Jirel gingerly lowered himself into the centre chair in the middle of the cockpit, as Denella took her post at the aft engineering console and Klath manned the tactical console on the left side of the room.
“No more than we needed to,” he smiled back, “As always.”
“Psh. You really need to stop getting us barred from all my favourite places,” Sunek grouched, before gesturing back to the helm console, “So, where now?”
Jirel swivelled around to check on Denella, who was still tapping away at Grenk’s padd.
“One sec, this stupid thing’s completely locked down. Almost like Grenk was expecting us to steal it.”
“Hey,” Jirel said, wagging a finger at her, “It was a fair trade. Ish.”
She tutted loudly as she continued to work. “I told you I needed more time to figure that latinum trick out,” she grouched, “Just because it worked on a few tins of beetle snuff, you expected me to make it work with latinum—?”
“The point is,” Jirel interrupted her, “We got the padd.”
“The point is: He now thinks I’m a bad engineer.”
Jirel couldn’t help but smile. Despite everything, Denella was most concerned with the idea that somewhere in the quadrant, her engineering prowess was being besmirched.
Before he was able to reply, however, Klath’s console sounded out an alert. The Klingon checked his readouts and growled unhappily.
“There is a shuttle approaching our position from the planet’s surface.”
“Scan for lifesigns.”
“One Ferengi,” Klath reported as he tapped his controls, “And two Miradorn.”
“Persistent fella, isn’t he?” Sunek quipped from over Jirel’s shoulder.
“Persistent, and prepared,” Klath noted, “The shuttle has been heavily modified. Upgraded warp core and shielding, micro-torpedo launcher—”
Klath’s report was interrupted as the entire ship suddenly shook from a nearby explosion. Sunek swivelled back to his own console.
“Well,” the Bounty’s pilot observed, “At least nobody needs to ask where that micro-torpedo came from.”
“Shields up!” Jirel barked, only to receive a glare from Klath.
“Our shields are still inoperative.”
“Damnit. Sunek, get us out of here!”
“On it,” the Vulcan said as he quickly tapped his helm controls, “Any idea where we’re getting out of here to yet?”
“I’m working on it,” Denella fired back, still frantically wrestling with the padd.
“Looks like we’re going this way then.”
As the ship shook from a second nearby detonation, the cockpit was abruptly bathed in a flash of light, indicating their progression to warp speed.
“Grenk has gone to warp as well,” Klath reported, “And he is gaining.”
The ship shook as another torpedo exploded nearby. Sunek deftly altered their course, moving to port as he tried to shake the Ferengi.
“Just so you know,” he grimaced, “Not enjoying this.”
Feeling impotent in the centre chair, Jirel swung around to Klath again. “Long shot, I know, but have we got anything to fire back with?”
“We exhausted our complement of torpedoes on that Orion scout ship last week,” the Klingon reminded him, “So, not unless Denella was able to repair our phaser cannons.”
“Hey, I got the warp drive back, didn’t I?” Denella retorted, “What am I? A miracle worker?”
“Apparently not,” Sunek chimed in.
“Thin ice, Sunek.”
Jirel ignored the bickering and racked his brain for ideas, as Sunek pitched the Bounty into another warp turn, avoiding another micro-torpedo blast as he did so.
“There’s gotta be something we can use.”
“Still got a cargo bay full from that comet mining job we got suckered into,” Denella quipped, “We could literally throw rocks at them?”
Jirel went to retort, then his face lit up. “No, but that does remind me what else is left behind from that job.”
Klath nodded in understanding. “The gravitic charges.”
“They’ll have to do,” he said, tapping the control panel on the arm of his chair to bring up a tactical view of their immediate surroundings, “Sunek, there’s an asteroid bearing 212 mark 140. Can you get us there?”
“If I can’t, there’s not gonna be much of you left to complain about it.”
The Bounty turned and took off in a dizzying new direction, as another explosion rocked them, slightly more firmly this time.
“That one actually hit us,” Klath announced.
“Nobody’s perfect!” Sunek shot back.
“Glancing blow,” Denella reported, “Minor damage to the starboard wing, structural integrity still holding.”
“Coming up on your asteroid now,” Sunek shouted, “Dropping out of warp.”
Jirel watched the starry landscape in front of them coalesce back into a more static pattern as the ship returned to sublight speeds. In front of them, gently tumbling over end-on-end, was a small brownish rock.
“Klath, ready with one of those charges.”
The Klingon nodded, working his controls while keeping another eye on his readouts. “Grenk has dropped to impulse,” he noted, “He is closing.”
“Good. Get as close as you can, Sunek.”
“Close enough to write our names in the dust,” the Vulcan replied.
Another explosion rocked the cockpit, but Sunek kept the ship’s bearing true. Slowly but surely, the dirty ball of rock in front of them grew larger and larger. Jirel gripped the arms of his chair, waiting for the right moment.
“Ready…ready…and…now, Klath!”
On the underside of the Bounty’s hull, a small panel opened up and spat out a tiny metallic disc. The gravitic charge, primarily used to mine small planetoids and moons, automatically activated, and was immediately attracted towards the highest gravity field in the vicinity. In this instance, the small asteroid directly in its path.
As the mine neared the rock, the explosive yield of the device armed itself. It detonated the millisecond the sensors on the bottom of the disc made contact with the solid surface of the asteroid. The ancient remnant of a planet that never formed exploded into a billion pieces, all flying out from the centre of the explosion with devastating energy. If the Bounty hadn’t still been heading straight for it, Jirel would have said it was almost beautiful.
“Pull up, Sunek!” he bellowed instead.
“Yep. Don’t need the reminder,” the Vulcan shot back, his fingers already dancing across the helm controls.
The Bounty eased nose-up, and took off away from the remains of the asteroid with seconds to spare.
The Ferengi shuttle following close behind didn’t have the luxury of preparing for such an evasive manoeuvre, and instead was forced to slam its engines into reverse as a hailstorm of rock and debris enveloped it. The shields of the tiny vessel flared green as dozens of impacts registered on them, before collapsing altogether. The remaining debris impacted directly onto the shuttle’s exposed hull, causing a series of tiny explosions across the dirty orange vessel. Eventually, Grenk’s ship was left drifting in space. The chase was over.
“Yeah!” Sunek whooped, punching the air with delight for good measure, “How d’ya like them tulaberries?”
Jirel’s face creased into a relieved smile of his own. He turned and winked at Klath. “Nice shooting.”
“I would not say that constituted ‘shooting’,” the Klingon growled, before the corners of his mouth turned upwards into a sliver of a smile, “But…it was enjoyable.”
“Got some more good news for you,” Denella piped up, waving the padd in the air, “Cracked the code on this, and I’ve got us some coordinates.”
“Great,” Jirel nodded, “Pass them over to Sunek and let’s get going.”
“And once we’ve got going,” Sunek said, giving the Orion woman a trademark cheeky grin, “Maybe our engineer can finally get round to fixing our weapons?”
The Vulcan continued grinning, even as he was ducking out of the way of a Ferengi padd that had been aimed squarely at his head.