Chapter Text
Part Three
Klath was in heaven.
He roared in delight as he slammed his elbow back into the Jem’Hadar’s stomach, sending the larger man flying back into the wall behind him. He felt the familiar blood lust surge through his body as he followed up that attack with a couple of swift punches to the Jem’Hadar’s already dazed face. His enemy recovered enough to parry the third punch, however, and countered with a blow of his own to Klath’s side, knocking the Klingon backwards.
As the Jem’Hadar charged again, Klath spotted his bat’leth on the ground where it had fallen earlier in the fight. He sidestepped the charge and made a break for his weapon, grabbing it and swivelling around to face his quarry in one smooth motion.
The Jem’Hadar charged at him once again, but this time Klath was armed. He met the attack with the blunt side of the bat’leth, slamming it into his adversary’s stomach and felling him with a single blow. He swung the weapon around in a graceful arc over his head, and brought the end down onto the prone Jem’Hadar’s head, knocking him out.
Without allowing himself a moment to rest, he spun around again, aware that there was another Jem’Hadar to deal with.
He found himself staring at that second Jem’Hadar on the other side of the passageway, spinning around on the spot wildly, trying to dislodge Denella from where she clung onto his back with the grim determination of a Klingon child riding a wild targ.
“It’s possible I didn’t think this plan through!” she shouted at Klath, the sound of her voice distorting oddly in the air as she was spun around.
The Jem’Hadar, growing tired of trying to dislodge his opponent this way, suddenly reversed into the far wall, slamming into it with all his strength and knocking the wind clean out of her.
“Yep,” she managed to croak, gasping for air, “Definitely didn’t think this through.”
Klath’s eyes narrowed as the Jem’Hadar lurched towards him, leaving Denella to drop to the ground in a pained heap. He waited for the enemy to commit first, and as soon as the Jem’Hadar moved to strike, he pivoted to one side, grabbing the arm of the soldier and using his own momentum to propel him towards the other wall of the passageway. The Jem’Hadar slammed into it with sickening force, but like the rest of his species, he was made of stern stuff. As Klath raced in to finish him off, bat’leth raised, he turned and ducked the swing of the Klingon’s weapon. Klath was momentarily disoriented and his opponent pounced, slamming into him and causing them both to tumble to the ground, Klath’s weapon skidding away down the passage.
They grappled with each other, but Klath was tiring, and the Jem’Hadar managed to get the upper hand, straddling the Klingon and grappling him around the throat. Klath grabbed the scaly hands around his neck and tried to force them apart with all of his remaining strength, but the Jem’Hadar’s grip was like a vice. He began to sense the darkness closing in. Sto-vo-kor was getting close.
Then, he heard something smash into the Jem’Hadar’s side, with enough force to cause his grip to momentarily falter. Klath seized his chance and wrenched the hands from his throat, before finishing off his foe with a firm headbutt.
Still panting deeply from exertion, he extricated himself from underneath the dead weight of the Jem’Hadar and clambered back to his feet, to see an equally breathless Denella clutching his bat’leth, which she had just slammed into the fallen soldier.
“You are becoming a fearsome warrior,” Klath said with genuine pride, as he continued to pant breathlessly.
Denella tossed him the bat’leth and smiled, before retrieving her own dagger from where it had fallen on the stone ground. “Guess I’m learning from the best.”
She moved over to the wall and slouched against it, feeling the fatigue in her body now the rush of adrenaline from the fight was easing off. Klath returned his bat’leth to its sheath and joined her. For a moment, they stood next to each other in silence, catching their breath.
“Why didn’t the disruptors work?” Denella asked eventually, to herself as much to anyone.
Klath slowly looked around the confines of the interior of the structure, his breathing now more controlled.
“Perhaps a dampening field,” he offered, “Of a type we could not detect?”
Denella considered this option and sighed.
“Maybe,” she replied, “I guess I might be able to adjust the tricorder to—”
She paused, still taking somewhat ragged breaths, and looked further down the passageway, beyond the unmoving bodies of the two Jem’Hadar.
“Um, one other question,” she continued, “Where the hell are the others?”
Klath looked around, dumbfounded.
He had no idea.
* * * * *
The sensation of falling had only lasted for a few seconds, as the pair of them had plummeted through the hole that had opened up out of nowhere, but it seemed to last a lifetime.
In truth, they had barely dropped through the floor before they had stopped falling. Except, it didn’t feel like they had landed on anything. They had simply stopped falling.
Natasha scrambled around in the darkness and shone her flashlight around, trying to orientate herself to her new surroundings. They had dropped into a wide cylindrical chamber, the walls wrapped around them covered in similar markings to those in the passageway above. Except, she noticed immediately, the walls here were cleaner, no moss or weeds adorning them. Almost as if they were freshly scrubbed. But that quirk was far from the most interesting part of this new room. The most interesting part was the floor.
Or rather, the lack of it.
“What the hell?” Jirel half-whispered from somewhere next to her in the gloom.
She was now looking directly at what had made him react like that. Directly below them, her flashlight showed that the chamber just continued downwards, extending so far that the light couldn’t penetrate all the way to the bottom. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like it went on forever. And yet they weren’t falling. Instead, they were somehow suspended in mid air. As if they had landed on some sort of invisible sheet stretched out across the chasm to catch them.
Natasha got to her feet uncertainly. She felt her legs wobble slightly at the bizarre sensation of standing in mid air. She tore her attention away from the view downwards for long enough to shine her flashlight back around the chamber itself and locate Jirel, who was looking equally uncertain as he stood back up a short distance from her.
“Ok, so, this is weird,” Jirel offered, internally acknowledging the scale of his understatement.
“The tricorder,” she said, motioning towards the device clipped to his belt.
He grabbed the device and scanned the area, as she focused all of her attention on the symbols and markings on the walls. Mainly because she didn’t want to look down again. But also in part because she was fascinated by them, recognising some of the marks from her and her father’s research.
Despite her recent misgivings about Starfleet, she found herself wishing that she had a dedicated away team with her right now, rather than a wannabe space adventurer with a single out of date tricorder.
The previously undiscovered details about the Soraxx contained within the symbols in front of her must have been incredible, enough to keep a dedicated archaeological team busy for years. And, despite having only just met them, she suspected the Bounty’s crew might not exactly be up for that sort of job.
“From what I can tell, we’re standing on some kind of…weird energy field,” Jirel reported uncertainly, underlining her point without realising it.
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Sorry doc,” he shrugged, waving the tricorder at her, “I usually just use these things to check cargo.”
She sighed and tentatively walked over to join him, suppressing the queasy feeling she got from the sensation of stepping on thin air. He handed her the tricorder and she began to work. She didn’t recognise the origin of this particular design, but it didn’t take her long to realise that it wasn’t up to Starfleet specs. Still, needs must, she told herself as she pressed on.
As she worked, it was Jirel’s turn to look around. But his attention wasn’t on the walls, but on the solid ground above their heads, which had inexplicably returned to being composed of solid rock after their fall. And he wasn’t so much in awe of it, as he was slightly annoyed.
She kept her attention on the tricorder readings as he continued to grouch.
“Nice of you to warn us about the booby traps, by the way,” he muttered, gesturing upwards, “Very nice.”
“I’m not sure that’s what it was.”
“What was it then, the doorbell?”
She didn’t look up, her focus still on her current mystery, but she managed a patient smile.
“There’s still so much we don’t know about the Soraxx,” she explained, “That might have been a completely natural entrance for them. It’s fascinating, really.”
Jirel considered this for a moment.
“Well,” he said eventually with a shrug, “I’m not surprised these guys are all dead if that’s what passed for a door around here.”
He returned his attention to the tricorder. “Any guesses as to where we are yet?”
“Looks like we’re suspended on some sort of low-level chromodynamic energy pattern,” she said as she gestured down to the invisible floor beneath their feet, “Though it has a transient fluctuation in the upper bands that I’ve never seen before.”
“So, in summary, weird energy field.”
She looked up at the Trill, whose annoyance had dissipated and been replaced by a slightly self-satisfied grin.
“If you like,” she replied with a slight smile of her own.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, weird or not, I’m glad it’s here,” he continued, looking down at the bottomless drop below them, “But…why is it here?”
She smirked and checked the readings again, swinging the tricorder around the confines of their surroundings. Spotting something in the data, she swept her flashlight up past Jirel and gestured behind him.
“Probably because of that.”
The beam of light illuminated the way to a clear opening in the stone wall, level with the invisible floor beneath them.
“See, now that’s a door,” Jirel replied, starting off towards it.
“Wait!”
He paused, his right foot dangling awkwardly in front of him.
“I told you the chromodynamic—The ‘weird energy field’ has a transient fluctuation, remember?”
“You think I’d forget something like that?” Jirel sarcastically offered, even as he struggled to maintain his balance on one leg.
She rolled her eyes and sighed, scanning the invisible floor in front of them again.
“It’s not uniform,” she explained patiently, “I can’t tell if it’s deliberate or if it’s just malfunctioning after five thousand years, but there are, for want of a better word, gaps. So I wouldn’t put your foot down there if I were you.”
Jirel remained awkwardly on one foot, wobbling slightly. “Care to tell me where I can put it?”
She ignored the half-dozen retorts that immediately jumped into her head upon hearing his question and focused on the scans, which showed a constantly changing patchwork of invisible holes that dotted the ground like swiss cheese.
“Might be easier if you just follow me,” she admitted.
She stepped carefully on a slow, meandering path towards the doorway and Jirel fell in line behind, all the time the pair of them hovered in mid air on the invisible ground beneath them. Eventually, they reached the doorway and found with some relief upon stepping through that there was solid stone ground to walk on again. It was only when they got that far that Natasha realised she’d been holding her breath.
“Ok,” Jirel said, breathing a sigh of relief and gesturing to the tricorder, “What’s that thing say about a way out of here.”
“A way out of—? What are you talking about? What about the jewel?” she snapped.
“What about it? You’ve brought us all the way to some crazy labyrinth full of trapdoors and invisible floors and crap knows what else? This is, by some considerable distance, not what I signed up for on this one.”
Natasha shook her head in frustration, refusing to believe that he was going to be this stubborn. “But don’t you see? We’re here. We’re inside. All my father’s research was right! We’re this close to the Jewel of Soraxx—!”
“We were just this close to falling into a bottomless pit!” Jirel shot back, gesturing back the way they had come from, “Not to mention the fact that Klath and Denella are back up there with a couple of Jem’Hadar! We need to find the exit. Now.”
He fixed her with a deadly serious gaze. She stared back at him. Neither willing to back down. In the end, Natasha gestured to their current surroundings.
“Ok, we can argue as much as we want, but the way I see it, we don’t have much of a choice. We can’t get out the way we got in. So, we’re going that way.”
Jirel turned and looked down the foreboding stone-walled corridor they were now in. At their only way forward.
“I guess you’re right,” he grimaced, “But we’re looking for the way out. Ok?”
“Ok,” she lied.
They walked on down the corridor, not taking any time to examine the further etchings and marks that were scattered across these walls. As they turned a corner, they found the passageway ahead now branched off in two different directions.
“Well, easy choice,” Natasha shrugged, “Left, or right? I say right—”
“Left,” Jirel shot back.
“Why?”
“Dunno. I just like left. Do I need a reason? I wanna go left.”
She studied the Trill’s face, wondering whether his anger at their plight was actually making him act as petty as she suspected he was being. “Are you…just saying that to disagree with me?”
“Psh. No. Now, are we doing this or not?” Jirel grouched, starting to walk down the left-hand passageway.
She followed behind, checking the tricorder readings as they went. And immediately seeing the problem they were walking into. She barely had time to glance forward and see Jirel’s right foot coming down onto the solid stone floor, which immediately lit up with a red flash, just like the pressure pad he had triggered in the entrance.
She had no time to warn him of what was about to happen.
Fortunately, she did have just enough time to roughly grab hold of the back of his jacket and tug him backwards.
“Hey—!”
Before his angry growl progressed any further, and milliseconds after he collapsed backwards onto the ground as a result of her unexpected action, a flare of bright green energy pulsed out of the walls either side of where he had just been standing in a ferocious crackle of deadly power. The way forwards down the passageway was completely blocked by the searing crackling light show.
Jirel looked up at Natasha from where he sat in a crumpled, but relieved, heap.
“I mean, right’s good too…”