Chapter Text
Part Two (Cont'd)
Klath walked into the familiar confines of the bar he and Sunek had been in the night before. Though this time he wasn’t looking for relaxation. He was looking for combat.
The Klingon picked his way through the few Kraterites that made up the afternoon’s patrons and headed straight for the bar area itself.
Denella had been able to get him the information he needed from the starbase’s records, and he had spent most of the day so far poring over them. He had been looking for anything out of the ordinary in the manifest of transports, starships and Kraterite vessels that had arrived in orbit or requested landing clearance over the last few days.
He knew that anyone looking for him could just as easily got to the planet by booking passage on a freighter, or stowing away on a passenger transport and keeping their name off the official records, but he was betting that whomever was after him would need more of a base of operations, as well as a quick and easy escape route.
And eventually, he had found a lead. A single Klingon shuttle that had been tracked to a landing site near the local Kraterite town. The shuttle’s clearances had checked out, so nobody at the starbase or within the civilian Kraterite authorities had questioned it. And as far as Klath was concerned, it was exactly what he had been expecting to find. Now, he just needed some more details of who he might be facing.
And so, after managing to sneak away from the Bounty while Denella was distracted by the ongoing repairs, he had made a beeline for the same bar. He had already asked her to do too much, and didn’t want his friends getting any more involved with this matter.
He reached the bar area and gestured to one of the unblinking Kraterite bar staff, who scuttled over with the uncomfortable gait that seemed endemic to their species. Klath stopped the Kraterite before they could pass him a drinks menu.
“I wish to access the security records of this establishment,” he stated flatly.
It was hard to tell how the Kraterite took this, given how difficult it was to read their unconventional features at the best of times, but it chittered slightly before shaking its head. Klath scowled and leaned in closer, speaking slightly louder in a somewhat prehistoric attempt to overcome their communication issue.
“Perhaps there is someone else I can speak to,” he pressed, “Where is the owner?”
The Kraterite chittered some more, glancing from side to side at some of the other staff nearby, but didn’t appear any more amenable to helping him. Instead, it tried again to push the drinks menu into his hands.
Klath’s scowl deepened, realising that he was getting nowhere. A more skilled or patient negotiator might have persisted with the softly-softly approach, or perhaps tried harder to find a way around his current communication problem. A truly committed diplomat might even have accepted the offer to order a drink and spent more time studying the Kraterites to gain a deeper understanding of their wider customs and mannerisms.
But Klath wasn’t an especially skilled or patient negotiator, and he certainly wasn’t a diplomat. So he opted for a different - but in his opinion, equally effective - means of progressing past their current impasse.
He turned and walked a few paces over to a nearby table, where a couple of Kraterites were quietly chirping to each other and enjoying a couple of disconcertingly-hued drinks. He turned back to the barman, to ensure that he still had the Kraterite’s attention, then lifted the table up and overturned it with a single movement. The two glasses smashed on the hard flooring, and the pair of Kraterites, finding their conversation so rudely interrupted, jumped back in shock and clicked angrily in Klath’s direction.
As the bar staff started to rush around in panic behind him, the Klingon calmly walked over to the next table and repeated the process. Another set of glasses went tumbling, another group of Kraterites had their afternoon ruined.
Klath started to feel that he was making real progress.
After the fourth upturned table, and with the bar now in a state of mild chaos in the face of his ongoing impromptu redecoration of the premises, he heard a louder and more angry clicking sound from behind him. He turned to find himself looking at a new Kraterite, this one substantially larger than the others, wielding a small, stubby wooden club in one of its hands and clicking its mandibles together with aggression.
Because of his decision not to quietly observe the Kraterites, he couldn’t tell for sure, but Klath suspected this was the owner, unsurprisingly irate at the damage being caused to his establishment and eager to intimidate the unruly patron into moving on. Except, as the Kraterite uncertainly stood its ground and looked up at the much taller Klingon, it wasn’t clear who was doing the intimidating.
Klath’s scowl transformed into a satisfied smile as he drew his bat’leth and squared up to the bat-wielding figure in front of him. The weapon in the Kraterite’s hand started to shake slightly.
“I wish to access the security records of this establishment,” Klath stated again.
A few minutes later, Klath had been brusquely led into the back office of the establishment, and was sat in front of a rudimentary computer console, with full access to the bar’s security records.
Diplomacy, he mused to himself, is overrated.
As the Kraterite owner watched on nervously from the corner of the room, he scanned through the recorded footage from the night before. It didn’t take him long to locate the footage of himself with the mysterious woman, and despite his unfamiliarity with the controls, he was soon able to complete a scan of her movements inside the premises throughout the night. It helped that she didn’t seem to have spent all that much time in the bar at all, as he had suspected.
If she was an assassin, spending too long around one of her targets would have attracted too much suspicion. Even without Klath’s sixth sense picking up on him being watched. Instead, she had spent just long enough to locate him, deliver her deadly addition to his drink, and leave.
Unfortunately, that didn’t give him much to go on, but as he scoured the rest of the footage, something caught his eye. As the screen reached the point in the night when he had smacked the drink away from Ensign Taris, on the other side of the room, a new figure had entered. One who departed as soon as he saw what Klath was doing. A Klingon male.
He did his best to zoom in on the figure, and even with the rudimentary equipment available, he could see the scar running down the Klingon’s face. He emitted a low growl of recognition, as he downloaded the files to a small padd and stood up, turning back to the Kraterite in the corner.
“Thank you,” he boomed, “You have been most helpful.”
He stalked out of the back office, leaving the Kraterite to chitter to itself.
The Kraterite language was one of the most complicated in the galaxy for humanoids to understand, indeed negotiations over the planet’s entry into the Federation had taken longer than any other in history not because of any specific requests or particular points of contention, but simply because it had taken that long to complete and verify the nuance of the translations for all relevant formal documents.
Still, the Kraterite bar owner’s current chittering was more readily translatable, as it watched the looming Klingon stalk off and considered the minor devastation he had left behind.
It roughly translated as: I’m getting too old for this.
* * * * *
Denella was still having trouble concentrating on the repairs.
Not because of any further unwanted attention from Lieutenant Kapadia. In fact, since her choice comments to him the night before, he seemed to be making a particular effort to stay out of her way. Aside from a formal couple of check-ins to keep track of their respective work schedules, she had barely crossed paths with the Starfleet man all day.
Instead, today she had something different to worry about. It hadn’t taken her long to discover that Klath had sneaked away from the ship at some point during the day without warning, and that now he was on the planet somewhere facing an apparent assassin by himself.
A warrior does not let a friend face danger alone indeed, she scoffed to herself.
It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this. And when Klath had his mind set on something becoming a solo mission for him alone, he usually made sure that it was. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t worried. And it felt wrong to just be casually carrying on with her meticulous repair work when he was out there somewhere.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The voice caught her by surprise, and snapped her back to reality. She whirled around to see Jirel standing a few steps away from where she was working on the port side of the Bounty’s hull. She also realised she could smell a faint burning smell, but she kept her focus on the Trill.
“Why are you creeping up on people like that?” she shot back.
“Um, I asked first,” he replied, gesturing behind her, “Further question, why the hell are you burning a hole through the ship?”
She turned around to discover the source of the burning smell. As she had been daydreaming about her own worries, it seemed that she had indeed managed to burn a deep additional gouge into the ship’s scarred hull with the laser cutter she was wielding. In shock, she flicked the cutter off, said a silent apology to her poor ship, and turned back to Jirel.
“I’m not—! I mean, as it turns out, I am doing that,” she conceded, “It’s just…I’m worried about him.”
“Yeah, me too,” Jirel nodded in understanding, “But Natasha says they’re divorced, so—”
“Hold on,” Denella said, thoroughly confused, “We might be worried about two different people here. I’m talking about Klath?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jirel replied, not entirely convincingly, “Me too?”
The Orion woman studied the Trill for a moment. She was glad that he had finally been here to help for most of the day, but it was clear that he wasn’t exactly on top of his game. He’d been working slowly and ponderously, as if he was being sidetracked by something playing on his mind as well. The way he was now squirming rather backed that idea up.
“But, um, yeah, Klath, mmhmm,” Jirel said in quick succession, before forcing himself to calm down, “I mean, you know him though, right? He goes through these little Rambo phases every now and again.”
Without the dubious benefits of orphan Jirel’s upbringing back in Colorado, Denella didn’t have enough of a grasp on ancient Earth culture to understand that reference, but she managed a nod. “I know. But this time it feels...different. This isn’t just some little fracas or a bat’leth duel. Someone actually tried to poison him.”
Jirel nodded, having heard all about Klath’s experience in the bar.
“It’s just—Could you try talking to Admiral Jenner?” she persisted, “I dunno, you’ve got this whole understanding, so maybe he can spare some security officers to go track him down?”
He maintained a reasonable poker face this time, not wanting to reveal to his engineer how badly his latest interaction with the admiral had gone. How stretched that particular understanding was starting to feel. “Sure,” he managed eventually, “I guess I can try and—”
Before he could complete his sentence, they heard footsteps approaching. They turned in unison to see a trio of Starfleet security officers marching across the landing pad towards them. None of them were the same as the officers in his and Natasha’s earlier escort, but they all had their weapons raised in a similar manner.
Jirel looked back at Denella, wondering if even his misplaced confidence could stretch as far as making this out to be more than a coincidence. “Um,” he offered to her weakly, “Surprise…?”
She didn’t look convinced. As the officers reached them, the leader of the trio, a stout human woman with short cropped blonde hair and an expression that suggested only business, surveyed the pair of them. Jirel, eager to defuse the tension, stepped forward with his hands up, assuming that this was another welcoming committee from the admiral.
“Ok, fine,” he said with a grin, “Take me to your leader. And again, no need for the phasers.”
The lead officer fixed him with a withering look, before gesturing to the Orion woman standing next to him. “These are for her.”
Feeling oddly hurt again, though for the opposite reason to the last security detail he had come up against, he turned to Denella. “Um, what the hell—?”
“If you’ll come with me ma’am,” the officer interrupted, gesturing the grease-streaked Orion back the way they had come.
“Me?” Denella half-scoffed, “What have I done to deserve all this?”
“You are charged with violation of Federation property, unauthorised access of Starfleet records and deliberate misuse of a starbase data stream uplink.”
Jirel looked back at Denella in shock, as the officers walked off, taking the Orion woman with them and leaving Jirel alone. Wondering how exactly he was going to spin this one with the admiral.