EP 8 "EROWOON: PART II" - ACT IV
Reb was surprised that only two Helan remained just inside
the entrance to the Fantasy’s airlock.
Both urged him to proceed to the bridge immediately, though Reb wanted
to know what was going on.
As the half-Ferengi proceeded, he thought himself extremely
lucky to have escaped detection. With
the gall of a…well, a Ferengi…Reb had found his way to Sissador’s office with a
gift courtesy of Commodore Jackson (a trinket from the Captain’s booty room).
The Security Officer, unaccustomed to
visitors in his fortified hideaway on top of the station, had been delighted
and charmed by a personal visit to thank him for all his assistance, and indeed
for the magnificent gift. As he
entertained his guest, Reb gained access codes and security information to the
power and security net on the station.
The data he obtained would make his sabotage not only safe and simple,
but also almost untraceable.
The Commodore’s plan was flawless, Reb found to his
surprise. The desired key mechanism was
easily tampered with and subsequent chain reaction adequate to allow him enough
time to retreat. As he had set the
charge, the Commodore had filed her departure details and settled their
account. There was no hanging around
now, the authorities would eventually trace the perpetrator after extensive
analysis, but by then the Fantasy would be long gone with the Captain, the
Ensign and the rest of the crew aboard.
Bounding onto the bridge he senses something was very wrong.
Jackson was biting a fingernail as if to express her own
concern. She turned as he
approached. “Take your station, Mister
Reb, be prepared to take us out on my command.”
“Already?” Reb knew the rescue mission couldn’t have been
completed in such short time, but looking at the viewscreen he could see why.
A group of three K’Tani vessels were
approaching the station. Two were
similar to the fighter’s they had already seen.
The third, lead ship, was much larger, bigger than the Yacht, and
more curvacious in its design. He
wasn’t even sure if it was K’Tani, perhaps some other ally.
“When are they due?” Reb asked.
Jackson was deep in thought, so Ganhedra, seated at
Operations, replied for her. “Twenty
minutes.”
* * *
Kluless, Quatro, Pernalius and Lessing crouched beside the
airlock, weapons at the ready. Quatro
held the lock picking device and waited for an indication that Leonard had done
his job. It was taking an age.
“Should we go ahead anyway?” Quatro whispered.
Kluless narrowed his eyes slowly.
“Patience, patience.”
Quatro couldn’t be patient. She was an buyer, not a security
cadet and the whole situation scared her half to death. Focus, she reminded
herself. What was taking so damned
long?
* * *
“Anything?” Able urged Dronus.
He merely glowered at her and continued to work.
Leonard was fidgeting with anxiety.
This was all taking far too long.
Something blipped in a corner screen,
attracting his attention. It was a console
slaved to the station’s main navigational display, showing the approach grid up
to the legal perimeter of the station’s space.
Three blips were on the outer marker and sending a signal.
The small, inch-square readout made him feel
nervous.
The German flicked his blonde hair and pressed the image
enhance key and saw three K’Tani ships on a direct heading.
“How much time?” he called to the two
helpers below.
Able looked into Dronus’ eyes for a response but saw
none. “Not long,” she called,
lying. The Qovakian continued
regardless.
* * *
Having passed Murak, O’Hara was led around another corner
and saw the man she had touched earlier folded over in agony being sick.
A shipmate was helping him along.
“You should all report to the triage,” the other man
said. “There’s some kind of virus
aboard.”
The Nurse smiled, the Tal Shiar officers didn’t
respond. Turning another corridor,
O’Hara realised the next doorway was their final destination given the walking
trajectory of the officer in front.
This was the moment she had dreaded.
The Romulan entered several commands into the panel and the
door turned slightly opaque – O’Hara was surprised to find such technology on a
Romulan vessel. Beyond the door, she
could see the Captain and Souveson, both bound, and propped up against each
other back to back in the middle of the unfurnished cell.
The Romulan hit several more commands and the door slowly
shifted open. As she stepped across the
doorway, O’Hara unleashed the movement she had been rehearsing repeatedly in
her head. She surged forward, pulling
free of the woman’s grip on her right arm and shoving with her left the Romulan
in front further into the room.
As she stepped in behind, pushing him further she reached
into her bra with her right hand and pulled out a flick knife.
She knew the Romulans behind her must have
had their guns trained on her by now, and hoped she could be quicker.
She launched herself forward on top of the
stumbling guard, twisting her body and releasing the opening knife as she did.
A disrupter blast lanced just above her head, a split second
later the knife impaled itself in the woman’s firing left shoulder with a loud
wail. She instinctively dropped the
weapon and reached for the knife to pull it out.
The man underneath her had been winded, but was now moving.
The third guard was nowhere in sight, hadn’t
even entered the room, but then she saw a doubled fist come crashing down on
the Romulan woman’s neck from behind.
It was Murak.
Christian and Souveson were using their combined pushing
pressure to stand, but they were too weak and bound to help.
The man beneath O’Hara heaved her off, but
the Nurse, sensing what he was doing, managed to kick his dropped weapon away
just before he reached it. They were
both in a crouch, facing each other in pre-combat ritual, and rose slowly to
their feet.
In a roaring rage, the Romulan threw a fast right hook, but
the Nurse deflected it with her left arm and brought her right leg through into
his ‘open’ area, her foot twisting into his solar plexus, sending him stumbling
back. Twisting her body she quickly unwound,
throwing the same foot in an upward arc, striking the man’s head and sending
him unconscious.
Souveson looked dumbfounded at the Nurse as she helped
release them. Christian, wobbling on
his feet, had locked eyes with Murak, who was dragging the Romulan woman into
the cell.
“Ouch, that looks painful,” O’Hara commented at the
Captain’s appearance. He dumbly
flinched as she touched his wounds, but he was clearly badly injured and fit to
pass out. Suddenly the lights flickered
and dimmed and then rose again. O’Hara
smiled. “Mister Leonard,” she explained
to Souveson.
The Ensign was having trouble with her bindings.
Murak pulled the second unconscious Romulan
into the cell and helped her. Though
she still felt distrust, she realised he had helped them, just as the Captain
said he would. Murak caught her eye and
she instinctively smiled in thanks. He
practically beamed back at her, relieved to have apparently rekindled their
forming friendship.
“We’ve not got long,” O’Hara said.
“Murak, lead them out.”
“Where are you going?” Souveson asked.
“Like the good Commodore told me herself,” the Lieutenant
said, arming herself with a disrupter, “on a House Call.”
“Ge ba here!” Christian weakly called after her.
“Tha’s anordrrrr…” and passed out.
* * *
On the way back from the Romulan ship’s docking area,
Leonard’s team had passed Narli, Karless and Madison rushing toward the vessel,
pushing their way past people and through groups with little politeness.
He assumed something had gone wrong with the
rescue, hence the direct approach.
Juxtaposed to the commotion they had just passed, Leonard
was even more surprised to see Ganhedra standing just outside the Fantasy
Yacht’s airlock talking to a station official.
Leonard couldn’t overhear, as the clerk bowed and turned to head their
way.
Leonard gestured for his team to slow and walk casually past
them. If only the official knew what
they had been he would call security immediately.
As it was, he was bowing, telling them what a pleasure it was to
have them aboard and sorry about today’s incident – he hoped it wasn’t the
reason they were leaving and welcomed them back soon!
Leonard hurried Crewman Able and a very contented Mister
Dronus over the threshold into the Fantasy.
He was under very strict orders to proceed directly to engineering, and
he fully knew why. He turned to watch
Ganhedra come aboard and was startled to see that, for an instant, the old
man’s eyes had turned pitch black. The
engineer stopped, and walked toward him, but as he approached the old Helan
stepped out of the shadows and his eyes were normal.
“Yes?” the old man asked quietly.
“Nothing,” Leonard said.
“Just a trick of the light.”
* * *
The shimmer across the surface of the Romulan airlock
indicated a disruption in power.
Quatro, ahead of the others, quickly placed the lock pick, with a shaky
hand, and popped the lock. The lock
opened, but too fast she realised there was a Romulan guard laying in
wait. He firmly grasped onto her hair.
The Alpha Centaurian daddy’s girl wailed, even more when she
felt his arm wrenching backwards, pulling her unceremoniously across the
airlock inside the vessel. The door was
closing again, as if about to trap her body, but simultaneously the grip
released on her hair and the door was fully open again.
Standing above her were Kluless, Lessing and
Pernalius.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Come on,” the shiny deep red skinned man commanded, leading
the way inside.
Just two corridors in, they collided with Murak and
Souveson, hauling Christian whose head was lolling in semi-consciousness.
“Down!” Pernalius shouted, targeting behind and beyond the
rescue team’s heads and firing – whether they were out of the way or not.
He had felled three Romulans with a single
blast but they were only stunned.
The rescue team took over from Murak as he guided them back
toward the airlock. Chahleth suddenly
leapt in front of them and fell over, writhing on his back while holding his
stomach. He saw Murak and croaked: “You
traitor…you will pay for this with your life.”
The threat didn’t appear to phase Murak as Quatro, with
tears in her eyes from her hair pulling, said: “You have Romulan Tree Virus, it
should pass in several days with no side effects.”
It had been the only pathogen Nurse O’Hara could simulate that
would only affect the Romulans and so instantaneously.
In its dry skin application it was perfectly
harmless to anyone not Romulan. Once
inside their bodies, the virus would mutate to an airborn type and spread
rapidly through the crew.
Murak sneezed, feeling the first effects – this didn’t bode
well for him right now. Reaching the
airlock, they found Karless, Narli, Madison and the others carefully laying
several more unconscious Romulans in the inside corridor.
Pernalius was glancing around.
“Where is Lieutenant O’Hara?”
“She said for us to go on,” Souveson said weakly – feeling
out of sorts for abandoning a shipmate.
But O’Hara outranked her.
“What the hell is she playing at?” Madison looked inside the
ship, as if able to see through solid walls to where she was.
Karless spat and walked inside.
“I will get her.”
“No,” Kluless yelped.
“I will go.”
“No,” the Captain managed to say weakly.
“Everyone back to the ship.
That’s an … ordugh…..” he was out cold.
“That is a feeble way to win an argument,” Narli commented
and walked off inside the ship.
Souveson didn’t feel she had the right or the ability to stop him.
“Wait!” Murak called to him.
“I know the ship’s layout better than anyone.”
The Andorian hesitated, then nodded and let him lead the
way.
* * *
“Damn!” O’Hara muttered under her breath.
She was pinned down, as far as she knew,
with her only means of escape cut off.
Between shots, she could hear the coughs and sneezes of the Romulans who
were fast catching the fierce virus.
She fired a shot back, to no avail.
The holdall she carried represented a great deal of
significance, stuffed as it was with medical equipment and drugs stolen from
the Romulan’s triage. The few injured
and distracted people there had posed no threat and she easily stunned the lot
with the lowest setting possible. She
couldn’t help but feel pity – as a medic, she had a duty to help people in
need. But this was war, she reminded
herself, and the Romulans had been about to take over their ship and abandon
them to K’Tani mercies from what Chahleth had said.
There was a scuffle of movement in the distance, some
shouting and more shots fired. In the
murk of smoke and low light, the Nurse finally made out the unmistakable
antennae of Ambassador Narli. She made
towards them but he spun her around as several ‘normal’ lights and control
panels flickered to life.
“That way out is blocked, I’m afraid the Romulans will
regain total control in just a few minutes,” he pushed her forward, urged on by
Murak behind.
“Then where are we going?” O’Hara asked.
She was slightly concerned about all of the
physical exertion she had undergone today and hoped there was little more to
come – for her own sake as much as anyone else’s.
A short crawl later, they were in a small transporter
room. Murak leapt over to the door and
sealed it while Narli got to the controls.
“Well?” O’Hara could see from their expressions their
uncertainty about this course of action.
“Only two at a time, I’m afraid,” Narli said.
“Go on.”
Murak glanced at O’Hara, about to offer to be the one to
stay, but Narli’s look was determined.
They climbed aboard the platform and Narli made a lock onto the lower,
unexposed decks of the Command Yacht.
Beaming aboard the station wasn’t an option because of their transport
inhibitors. He had the same problem
with most of the Yacht, but the unpainted lower decks were perfectly ‘visible’.
He initiated transport, watching the curvey, curled print of
the Romulan displays. He knew quite a
bit of Romulan, and could see the pattern locks, the dematerialisation
sequence, the physical profiles for both individuals and their physical make-up
– something attracted his eye.
“Well, I never,” he said, catching O’Hara’s worried look as
she disappeared. Transport was complete.
Then part of the console suddenly went blank.
Narli re-routed primary systems and isolated
them from outside control, smiling to himself with relief once successful -
another second and the controls would have been permanently disabled.
He fixed an auto transport and jumped onto
the platform. Momentarily the Fantasy
erupted all around him in gleaming white – they were somewhere in the cargo
intake section, many crates lay stacked high all around.
“Well done,” O’Hara patted him on the shoulder and jogged to
a nearby comm panel. “O’Hara to bridge,
myself the Ambassador and Murak are safely aboard.”
“Acknowledged, and well done,” came the clipped response of
the Commodore. O’Hara turned away and
noticed Narli staring at her. He broke
into a sickly smile as if he was hiding something.
“I’ve got to get to the Captain,” was all she said as she
left.
* * *
The thunderous sound of boots made the two Helan by the
airlock nervous, but they were relieved to see it was the crew running down the
corridor, holding the Captain aloft.
Souveson was out of breath – they had fair sprinted back to the ship,
and it was only her youthful determination that had kept her ahead of Madison
and Quatro, despite her injuries.
Madison was wheezing quite heavily as he tried to control his exertion,
but he hadn’t once faltered from his objective.
Not bad for a barred judge, she thought.
They all trundled up to the airlock and it was with great
relief when the two Helan finally closed and sealed it.
They had all returned safely.
Karless pressed the comm panel.
“Rescue team all aboard,” he said.
* * *
On the Yacht’s bridge, Jackson dropped into her seat – the
tension of others carrying out her orders out of her sight or influence had
been difficult to endure.
“Control tower reports ready for our departure,” Reb
reported (she had left him to communicate directly with tower control while she
concentrated on other matters).
“Release docking clamps,” Jackson said.
Reb forwarded the request and they complied.
“Clamps released,”
he said with great relief.
Even now he wondered if the sabotage would be traced back to them more
quickly than the Commodore anticipated.
“Station-most thrusters, one quarter,” she said, recalling
the departure sequence with ease.
“Docking unit clear,” Reb had skipped an order, but it didn’t
matter. “Turning to port heading 345
mark 165.”
The Command Yacht halted its reverse, nosed down and to the
left and rippled forward.
The tell-tale sound of the communicator hail sounded.
From the turbolift, Christian staggered onto the bridge, O’Hara,
still dressed suggestively, holding a Romulan dermal regenerator to his head,
loudly complaining that if he didn’t hold still he would pass out again.
Narli and Murak also exited, both taking
their bridge positions.
“The station is hailing us, Captain,” Narli said.
Jackson turned her head and the Captain smiled at her.
He looked almost Human again.
“On speakers,” Christian grunted.
“This is Station Security Officer Verfar,” the stern female
voice boomed. “You are in violation of
the station’s Rules of Conduct, please halt where you are immediately.”
Christian replied: “This is Captain Christian, I am not
aware of any violations. Our account
has been paid in full and now we are on our way.”
“Captain Christian,” the voice had turned gentle.
“Several infractions have come to my
attention, and until I investigate them I must insist you return to port
immediately.”
Christian looked worried but the Commodore rose and patted
him reassuringly on the arm. She
signalled mute to Narli. He complied.
“Bridge to Engineering.
Mister Leonard, are you ready?” she asked
confidently
“Systems are standing by,” Leonard replied.
“Activate now, Commander,” she said.
Jackson pointed at the main viewscreeen and
Reb switched the display to show the K’Tani vessels approaching their
position. Suddenly, disruptor fire from
the Romulan vessels lashed out at the unshielded K’Tani.
One escort was severely disabled, the main ship
instinctively pulling away. Another
couple of volleys were all Leonard could muster before the Romulans regained
control of their weapons systems. The
comm system was alive with multiple channels screaming and shouting as Reb
coasted the Yacht ever forward, away from the fracas.
“Are we clear yet?” Jackson asked nervously.
“Almost, another few seconds,” Reb said.
Jackson turned to Christian.
“They have a warp inhibitor field to fifteen kilometres,” she
explained. “We had hoped it would be
disabled in our earlier action, but they must have a damned good repair crew.”
“Captain!” Quatro and the others had joined them on the
bridge. She was pointing at the largest
of the K’Tani vessel – it began to break apart.
Not damaged, but rather several ships that fastened into
one. Four of the six parts were now
heading straight for them.
“We have to go!
Now!!!” Ganhedra urged from behind.
“PLEASE!” his tone was positively desperate.
“Just a few more seconds,” Reb said, glancing at the old
man’s words with intrigue.
Wham! Wham!
Wham!
Three shots fired at their only partially shielded ship rocking it port
and starboard. Sparks flew and the ship
continued to judder until the stabilisers made sufficient adjustment.
Reb held onto his console and said a prayer
with eyes tightly closed, expecting the worse.
When he opened them, he saw that, remarkably, warp capability was still
at his command. Just one more second –
there. They were clear.
Reb picked a random trajectory and jumped the Yacht to
warp. Several seconds later he dropped
out of warp, vented some plasma, turned the ship and warped in another
direction. There was no way the K’Tani
ships could find them on short range scanners now.
He knew they would have to double back to reach the
Passenger and Command Sections, but essentially they had prevented immediate
capture.
Murak felt surprised at his own emotions.
Sadness and guilt he knew he would have to
deal with, but not pity. He said his
own private prayer that the Romulans on board would only get what was
just. While some were clearly nasty
people, a few were also just doing their duty.
He wondered at himself – how could he have
committed to these Humans as he had done?
No. His mother and father had taught
him the differences between right and wrong, and he knew he had done the right
thing.
EPISODE 9: LIBERTY BEL