Chapter Text
Part Four (Cont'd)
Klath charged forwards, his eyes focused on the disruptor pistol.
Despite being temporarily distracted by Sunek’s not especially clever plan, Kolar quickly realised that his opponent was making his move, and brought the pistol back to bear. But he wasn’t fast enough. Klath slammed into his side and sent him crashing to the floor. The pistol flew from Kolar’s grasp and skittered away across the dusty ground.
The two Klingons continued to desperately wrestle for the upper hand, grappling with each other on the ground. Kolar ensured that he maintained close combat to ensure that Klath’s bat’leth remained unusable for the time being.
For a moment, Kolar gained the upper hand, rolling Klath onto his back and sinking his hands onto his throat. Klath grimaced with effort as he choked and spluttered a fraction of a lungful of air, and desperately used the last of his strength to kick his opponent off him.
Kolar went flying through the air with the force of the sudden powerful impact and landed in a cloud of dust.
“Yeah! Go Klath!” Sunek shouted out from his immobile vantage point, adopting the role of impromptu cheerleader for the time being.
Freed from the clutches of his rival, Klath ignored the pain and sprung back to his feet, finally able to bring his bat’leth to bear. A few feet away, Kolar regained his own footing and drew the d'k tahg from his belt. Now both armed with more traditional bladed fighting weapons, Klath allowed himself a sliver of satisfaction. This would be a good fight. No disruptors.
They circled each other again. Klath thrust forwards a few times with his larger two-handed blade, testing out his opponent’s defences, and Kolar deftly parried each one away with a strong flick of his dagger.
“You fight well,” Klath noted, panting slightly from the exertion of the fight.
“I have had to, all my life,” the scarred Klingon replied, his words still bereft of warmth, “Thanks to you and your crew.”
Kolar jabbed out with his blade, and Klath parried the arc of the weapon away.
“Still,” he countered again, “There was no need to hide behind poisons. We could have settled this like Klingons from the start.”
“Your crew did not deserve a fair fight. And neither do you. I am sorry that you will die in combat.”
Klath whirled his bat’leth around in another attacking arc, and Kolar deftly jumped back out of his reach.
“I have lived with the guilt of my actions since that day,” Klath replied, “And I will do so until the day I die.”
Kolar thrust forwards again, anger flaring in his eyes. “That day is today, Klath. Today the Sons of Marlek have their vengeance.”
Klath channelled a fresh rush of shame into something more productive, charging forwards with his bat’leth raised to his chest. He parried the thrust of Kolar’s dagger, before spinning his own weapon around and delivering a firm blow with one of the ends to the other Klingon’s stomach. Kolar staggered backwards, threatening to lose his footing on the stony ground.
Without waiting, and still powered by his sense of shame, Klath immediately sought to capitalise, rushing forwards while his enemy was off balance to deliver the killer blow.
But the turbulent mix of guilt and remorse that was currently powering him caused Klath to miscalculate. Kolar regained his footing sooner than he had been expecting, and he had been anticipating Klath’s attack. He dodged the sharp edge of the bat’leth and slammed his dagger down onto the end of the weapon’s handle, catching Klath off guard and sending his trusty weapon skittering away out of his hands.
A bulky boot to the stomach sent him flailing to the ground. He tried to right himself, but before he had the chance to do so, he felt Kolar’s foot come down on his arm. He roared in pain, the sound echoing out into the darkness with enough intensity to cause Sunek to flinch, and almost put him completely off what he was trying to do.
Through the gloom, Klath could see Kolar standing over him, the glint of the blade raised above his head. And he stopped struggling. Perhaps today was a good day to die. He prepared to embrace whatever lay ahead on the other side.
Of all the things he was expecting to see in his last moments, a disruptor blast fizzing into Kolar’s right arm was not one of them.
Now it was the other Klingon’s turn to scream out in pain, instinctively grabbing his arm and losing focus on his prey. The air was thick with the stench of burnt flesh.
Klath’s acceptance of his fate was forgotten. He slammed his leg up into Kolar’s torso and pushed him back. Kolar toppled back onto the ground. The d'k tahg dropped out of his grasp. Klath pounced on it and grabbed the weapon. He stood above the ailing Kolar, their positions suddenly reversed.
Through the agony of his bloodied and burnt arm, Kolar stared up at him. Klath stared back.
“batlhbIHeghjaj!”
May you die well.
He cried out the Klingon phrase as he plunged the blade down into his enemy’s chest. Just before the blow was delivered, Kolar’s expression changed. From pain to relief. And then his eyes glazed over. The blade remained sticking out of his chest, even as Klath removed his hands from the grip and sunk to the ground in exhaustion. It was over.
As he usually did after a battle, he felt a surge of power and strength. As if he had absorbed some of the life force of his slain foe.
But this time, he felt something else. Regret.
He sat panting next to his fallen enemy and took a moment of contemplative silence.
“Um, a thank you would be nice?”
Sunek’s voice broke his respectful moment. Klath looked over to see the Vulcan still trussed to the tree trunk, with Kolar’s disruptor pistol underneath his right foot.
“You?” Klath managed through his weary gasps of breath.
“Well, who the hell did you think did it? Section 31? Now, seriously, if it’s not too much trouble, can you untie me?”
Klath forced himself back to his feet, wincing at the injuries across his body, and walked away from Kolar’s unmoving form. He avoided eye contact with Sunek as he approached and began to untie him. He was keenly aware now of how much the Vulcan had seen. How many of his secrets he now knew. And given how talkative Sunek was, he feared that they wouldn’t remain secrets for very long.
Sunek, for his part, remained silent. Despite his usual candour, his focus was on the dead Klingon further across the clearing, a thousand questions spinning through his head. And he wasn’t sure how many of them he wanted answered.
* * * * *
Denella lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t entirely sure how many hours she had been in the holding cell now, but it had been long enough that the game with the rubber ball had lost all of its lustre.
She sighed. Still worried about Klath, but increasingly worried about herself. With still no sign of any of her crewmates, she was wondering whether she really was heading for a Federation penal colony.
It probably wouldn’t be that bad, she had eventually surmised. After all, this was the Federation. It wasn’t like they were about to send her to Rura Penthe. Still, it wasn’t exactly what she’d been planning to do with the next ten years of her life.
Just as she started to contemplate the most efficient way to get her sentence reduced for good behaviour, she heard footsteps approaching, and the forcefield being deactivated.
“Get up,” the familiar voice of the female security officer barked, “You’re free to go.”
Denella looked up in confusion. The officer stood impatiently in the entrance to the cell, gesturing for her to leave. “What’re you waiting for? Room service? Get out of here.”
She uncertainly swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, not entirely this wasn’t the officer’s especially cruel revenge prank for the number of times Denella had distracted herself with the rubber ball game. But the officer did nothing as she carefully stepped out of the cell.
“I don’t understand,” she managed to get out, once she was safely on the other side of the cell’s forcefield.
“Neither do I,” the blonde woman replied with a shrug, “But those were the orders we received. If you really want to stay, I can contact the head of security and ask them to check for a fourth time?”
Denella decided not to push things any further, and instead she quickly made for the door, planning to get back to the Bounty and figure out exactly which one of her shipmates had finally come through for her. And what the hell had taken them so long.
As she stepped out into the corridor, she was shocked to see Lieutenant Kapadia waiting for her. Her eyes narrowed slightly in confusion.
“You? You did this?”
The engineer shrugged meekly and nodded, then gestured for them to start walking away from the security area. She didn’t need a second invitation.
“I, um, did what you said,” he explained as they walked, “I checked the records on your ship. For what you’d accessed. It was just like you said. Nothing critical, nothing major, just the base’s transit logs for the last two weeks.”
“Yeah,” Denella nodded, “Just like I said. But—?”
“So, I got in touch with starbase security, and I said I’d done it.”
Denella stopped in her tracks and stared back at him. “You did what?”
“Um, y’know, I said I was working on repairing your ship. It’s an old design, and the ODN relays we had in storage would probably be too fast for your data couplings. So I wanted to check if there were any older Federation vessels on the planet or in orbit that we could ask for some spares. And, um, because I can be too eager sometimes, I accessed it from where I was…on, erm, your ship.”
She looked back at her fellow engineer with a mildly amused grin. “Our data couplings’ll work just fine with any old ODN relays.”
“I know,” he shrugged, “Fortunately, the head of starbase security doesn’t.”
“So…what?” Denella asked, “You’re gonna take the ten years in a penal colony instead?”
“W—Well, actually, all I did was access Starfleet records from a non-standard interface,” he replied with a slight grimace, “It’ll stay on my permanent record, but they’re not gonna be sending me to a holding cell any time soon. I hope.”
He smiled back at her. She studied his face a little more, hoping that her gut feeling she was now having wasn’t accurate. “Hang on,” she said sternly, “Please tell me you didn’t do this because you wanted another chance to try and ask me—?”
“No,” he said quickly, flushing with embarrassment, “It wasn’t that. I just…I saw the logs. What you did wasn’t an act of treachery. It was an act of loyalty. And given the sort of risk you took, and where you ended up, I figured that had to be one good friend.”
Her face dropped as he said it, as she remembered the significantly more pressing issue that she had to deal with. “Crap,” she whispered, “Klath.”
She took off in the direction of the Bounty’s landing pad as quickly as she could, before Kapadia even realised what she was doing. The engineer was left on his own, looking slightly sheepish in the middle of the corridor. But after a second, he smiled and walked on.
Must be a really good friend.
* * * * *
It didn’t take Denella long to reach the landing pad where the Bounty sat, and she tore straight up the landing ramp. She didn’t even bother to check the state of the repairs, as she climbed the ramp, ran through the cargo bay itself and into the main living area of the ship. She stopped when she got to the medical bay.
There, she saw a dishevelled Vulcan and a battle scarred Klingon sat tending to their wounds as best they could.
Sunek was running a dermal regenerator over his wrists, which seemed to be covered in some sort of rope burn, while Klath was tending to his right arm and wincing slightly. They both looked up as the Orion woman stood staring at them.
“Look at the state of you two,” she managed with a relieved smile, before stepping over to Klath and wrapping him in a warm hug.
Klath writhed uncomfortably from within the hug, only partly because of the additional pain it was causing to at least three separate injuries on his body.
“Please, Denella,” he managed to grunt, “Not in front of the Vulcan.”
Denella’s relieved smile became a relieved laugh as she broke the hug, looking back at the impish grin of Sunek from the other side of the small medical bay. “Hey,” he said, holding his own arms out, “Where’s mine?”
The Orion woman shook her head and glanced from one to the other, a more serious look on her face as she sized up their injuries. “What the hell happened?”
Klath remained silent, and she noticed with concern that he looked away from her when he heard the question. As if he had an answer for her, but didn’t want to give one. Confused, she glanced over at Sunek, who she was certain would be distinctly less circumspect in giving her all the gory details. Instead, the Vulcan looked over at Klath, then back to her, and shrugged.
“He won.”
That didn’t clear anything up for her. But something about the atmosphere in the room told her that it might be best not to pursue that line of questioning too deeply for the moment.
“So, it’s all over?” she offered instead, to Klath.
This time, he looked up at her.
“Not quite.”