Chapter Text
Part One (Cont'd)
Beep, beep, beep…
She paused midway through the thirty-ninth push-up of her routine, and listened.
It took her a while to recognise the origin of the noise, accustomed as she was to silence this far into the dank cave she had been forced to call home.
She had initially set up camp nearer the entrance to the caverns, to try and take in at least some of what passed for natural light outside. But after a week, the relentless noise of the fierce sandstorms that whipped around on the surface outside had started to drive her crazy. Once it became abundantly clear that the storms weren’t a passing weather feature and were in fact the default conditions on her new home, she had retreated deeper into the cave structure, craving the silence.
Except now, the silence was being interrupted.
…beep, beep, beep…
She soon realised that the shrill, piercing sound permeating through the cave was coming from a small metal box, coated in layers of sand and dust from weeks of neglect, which sat propped up against a rock towards the rear of the cave. The rhythm of the beeping was slow at first, but quickly began to gain in tempo.
She forced herself back to her feet, her daily exercise routine now forgotten about, and scurried over to the box, opening it up to reveal a small control panel and readout display. She called up the information which was triggering the alert.
…beep, beep, beep…
Natasha Kinsen had lost count of exactly how long she had been on Kesmet IV, but she knew that it was now being counted in weeks or months, rather than days. Her tattered uniform was now just a degraded memory of what she once was.
The planet that Escape Pod NC-12c had delivered her to was not the most hospitable of environments to say the least. Barely hitting the minimum requirements for Class M, the arid desert conditions and howling storms meant that there was barely anything in the way of plant or animal life to keep her alive. Over the time that she had been there, she had gotten by on the rations she had been able to salvage from the wreckage of the escape pod, which had soft landed a kilometre or so away from the caves she was now using for shelter.
The exercises themselves had quickly become part of her regime. Not necessarily something that she wanted to do, in fact physical training had been by far her least favourite aspect of life in Starfleet, dating back to her Academy days. But with precious little else to do on Kesmet IV, they at least served to keep her healthy, and give her days some semblance of structure.
…beep, beep, beep…
Landing near to these caves had proven to be a godsend not just from a shelter point of view, given the heat and the storms outside, but from a survival point of view as well. She had found a subterranean stream of water which had supplemented her rations. Helped to keep her alive. All in the vain hope that she might one day hear a sound from the metal box sitting in front of her. The emergency comms unit that she had dragged all the way from the pod.
She absently chewed on one of her remaining ration packs as she checked the details that the unit was providing her.
As the results came through, she let out a yelp of delight. A ship, positively identified, had entered the system. Just barely registering on the degraded sensors of the emergency unit, but a ship nonetheless.
…beep, beep, beep…
But the sensors could tell her nothing else. And she quickly discovered that the damage from the crash had rendered the unit unable to send or receive any transmission, meaning that she couldn’t even make contact.
She was at the mercy of the sensors of the approaching ship. And she had no idea who they were.
…beep, beep, beep…
It could be a Federation ship on a rescue mission.
…beep, beep, beep…
It could be a cruiser from the Orion Syndicate.
…beep, beep, beep…
It could even be a Borg Cube, on its way to assimilate the Alpha Quadrant.
…beep, beep, beep…
After so long alone on Kesmet IV, she admitted to herself that anything might be better than nothing. But just in case, she reached into her meagre stash of supplies from the escape pod, and retrieved a phaser.
* * * * *
“Well, it’s got to be here somewhere!”
Denella sighed and forced herself to bite her tongue. She tried to keep her attention on the sensor readouts in front of her, and ignore the singularly annoying figure that was looming over her.
Sunek evidently wasn’t going to take her pointed silence as an acceptable response. The Bounty’s pilot continued to lean over his console, sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong.
“Seriously, we’ve come all this way, and it’s just vanished?” he continued, drumming his fingers on the top of her panel, exacerbating her annoyance.
Jirel walked over to the engineering console, noting Denella’s irritated demeanour and turning to the seemingly oblivious Vulcan.
“Sunek, what are you doing?”
“Helping.”
“Define that word for me.”
Sunek sighed and held his hands up. “Fine. How about I go back over there and use this incredible intellect to keep the ship at station-keeping, hmm?”
“If you would,” Denella muttered.
Sunek went to fire back another quip, but Jirel stopped him with a firm glare. Instead, the Vulcan simply tutted and returned to the helm console, as Denella looked up at Jirel.
“I hate to say this, but he’s kinda got a point,” she sighed, “Starship black boxes don’t just disappear.”
“First time for everything,” Jirel shrugged, “Are we definitely looking in the right place?”
“The debris field is definitely from a Federation vessel,” Klath’s voice boomed out from the tactical console on the other side of the cockpit, “Metallic composition and the size of the field suggests a ship of the Navajo’s size.”
“And yet, no black box,” Denella reiterated, wringing her hands in frustration, “And we don’t get that, we don’t have anything useful for the redoubtable Admiral Jenner. And we don’t get our repairs.”
Jirel gave her a resigned nod. He didn’t need reminding about that aspect of their situation.
The job had seemed straightforward when they had first taken it on, to recover the black box from one of the many Starfleet ships that had disappeared during the Dominion War. It wasn’t the first time they’d taken on this sort of salvage mission. It was usually easy enough to find out about any fresh wreckage from the galaxy’s underbelly. And Jirel and his crew had plenty of contacts down there. And while such wrecks were often pillaged by opportunists before the Bounty got near them, he’d never heard of anyone stealing a black box before.
Yet, despite the Bounty having scanned the debris field they had been led to ten times over, they couldn’t find a trace of it. He was aware that all eyes in the cockpit were on him for their next move. But right now, Jirel wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do.
The worried silence that had descended was broken by an alert from Klath’s console. He looked down at his panel with clear confusion.
“That the black box?” Jirel asked hopefully.
“No,” Klath replied, “A lifesign.”