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Main OOC Board / Re: Main OOC Thread
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
WELCOME

Petty Officer First Class Ardent



- Writer: Hamdog

Ardent was a Gorn Augment born and raised on the USS Ardent during its 10-year round trip beyond the edge of explored space in the Alpha Quadrant. In 2381, Ardent was assigned to the USS Theurgy via a crew complement replenishment from Starbase 234 after the ship's outlaw status was revoked via a presidential pardon.

Welcome aboard!
2
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Hirek tr'Aimne | The Salt Stair, House of the Thrai Rinam | i-Korthre, Uuluma Chain | Romulus ] Attn: @Dumedion

The waterfront at Dartha smelled of hot oil and gutted fish, and his mother bought him a cone of sherak, then ate a third of it herself. She frowned at the leaf as if it had been folded wrong, then reached for the gooey ones, and he pretended not to notice.

She had nine days between terms at the War College. Every other year she spent them crossing home on the *Hwaelu* with her lecture slates wrapped in oilskin and her hair still pinned for the capital, but that spring she had sent for him instead. He had come over on the mail packet with a cousin's fist knotted in his collar the whole way, certain the capital would be wonderful, and found it built of stone: stone quays, stone stairs climbing to stone houses, emerald banners hanging off everything like washing nobody had come to take in, and the raptor glaring from every arch. He forgave the city because she was in it, out of the grey collar she lectured in, her hair loose to her waist and a fleck of mhoral at the corner of her mouth that he had decided to keep to himself.

They had played hwaeh-vael since the fourth bell, as children played it on every quay in the chain. One went under, and one kept the watch, and the watcher pressed a face to a post and sang the swells to forty: one for the reef and two for the wall, three for the deep where the wall-eater calls. Hirek had the rhyme so far into his mouth he no longer heard the words. It was her turn to go under. He stood with his forehead against a net-mender's post, the wood warm and splintered and stinking of tar, and had sung as far as twenty-six when her hand closed on his arm above the elbow.

He turned with cheat already on his tongue, and her face stopped it there. Every line of it had gone smooth and pleasant, a lamp turned down behind glass. It was the face she wore for the eighth-day man, the ministry clerk who sat in his father's chair on the island every eighth day, drank his father's distillate, and wrote in a little book.

"Go under."

"It's my watch, you said I could keep the—"

Her fingers shut on his arm harder than she had ever held him, until the bone ached and the street blurred. "Go under, Kejail. Stay under. When the quay empties, take the Hwaelu and go home, and do not wait for me."

She let him go and walked up the quay toward the sherak basin without hurrying. He went under between a stack of crab pots and the wet flank of a salting shed, because she had used the voice that meant the eighth-day man was in the house, and from his hole he watched four men in plain grey come out of the crowd and fall in around her. Nobody shouted when they took her elbows, gently, as a son might take his mother's on a stair, and she let them. The fishwives found sudden business in their scales. The netmen bent to their knots. The men walked her up the long ramp toward the Citadel, whose windows were so narrow they looked like knife cuts, and he took them for ministry clerks, having no other name for them yet.

He did not take the boat home. He sat on the Hwaelu's foredeck through the night with his knees drawn up under his tunic while the harbor lamps guttered out one by one along the quay, and an old netman on the next berth threw him a blanket that stank of fish and asked him nothing. Twice the Citadel bell rang the hour, and he sang the swells to forty under his breath anyway. Morning came grey, then white. Past noon, she came down the ramp, walking like a woman on a pitching deck, one palm flat and hard against her belly, and when she saw him, nothing moved in her face for the length of three swells.

Then she crossed the last ten paces at a stumble and hauled him off the deck into her arms, there on the quay, with half of Dartha going past. On the island she held him whenever she pleased, and the house thought nothing of it. In the capital she had never once touched him beyond necessary where anyone could see. She smelled of something sharp and chemical beneath the sherak and the salt, a sickroom smell, and she held on longer than he liked, and he let her, because the hand cupping the back of his skull would not stop shaking.

She held him, and the grey men came back down the quay.

Hirek knew, as the first of them wound her hair around his fist, that this part was wrong. He had been eight, and he remembered every hour of the crossing that followed: her hand on the tiller and the other pressed low beneath her ribs, the long glassy swells off the Kheinhe, his father waiting on the island dock and her walking past him without a word to lie down in a dark room for nine days, and the grey men had stayed in Dartha.

He went at them anyway, eight years old and all knees and elbows, and got his teeth into a wrist before the man shook him off, took him by the collar and the seat of his trousers, and pitched him off the quay.

The harbor shut over him with the sound of a door closing in another room. He kicked, and his legs answered slow and wrong, as if the bones had been swapped for ballast, and they drew him down instead of up. His arms would lift no higher than his shoulders. He screamed for her, and the scream left him in a shining rope of bubbles that climbed past his face and broke on the underside of the light, and through the green he saw her at the quay's edge with two of the grey men pinning her arms back and her mouth stretched open around his name. The cold came in at his ears first and then everywhere at once.

Something hung beside him in the water. His uncle Maec stood upright on nothing a body-length away, his ankles lashed to a dressed block of Uuluma stone on the harbor floor, the pale island rock some governor had hauled across the sea to set in a Dartha wall, and the rope had cut so deep that the feet below it had gone the color of old tallow. The water had swollen him to a stranger's size. Small fish had been at him and left the skin of his face in a lace that lifted and settled when the current breathed. His eye sockets were empty to the bone. Worst was the mouth, because what remained of it was smiling, the same smile he had worn before the Continuing Committee while they killed him by inches.

As he watched, a khiiru eased out of the black ruin where the nose had been. It was the size of a child's fist, rowing itself forward on its spines one after another, and it climbed the cheek through the lace of skin, paused on the lower lid, and let itself down into the left socket. The socket took it in, and the smile below it never moved.

Behind his uncle, further into the green, two more figures hung at their tethers, and the water around them was thick with small moving things.

He had seen Isa Leigh Madsen's face once, on a file King sent in 2362 so that he would understand who had already died for his family: a human woman with straight brows and a stubborn chin. The eels had the rest of her now. They moved through the holes in her torso without haste, a blunt grey head nosing out of one wound while the tail of another slipped into the next, so that she seemed to breathe with them, rising and settling on her rope. Beside her floated Ernan Lars Madsen, whose death Hirek had carried out in a corridor on Romulus because Madsen had ordered him to, and the right hand still curled around a wrist that was no longer there. A long grey rope of him had been drawn from the opened belly and trailed off on the current. A shoal of small reef fish in the colors of festival dye, saffron, reef-blue, and the purple of a shaanel dress, worked up and down its length, tugging.

Hirek tried to scream at that, but had nothing left to do it. His chest had gone tight and slow, his heart laboring at it, and the ends of his fingers were numb.

A hand settled on his shoulder, and he knew it before he looked. Calluses lay across the root of the fingers where a flight stick rides, and a nick on the thumb marked where she kept the blade at her thigh. He reached up and covered it with his own and drew it down to him, and it came away as light as a glove, and he was holding a hand that ended at the wrist in a ragged crescent of bite marks, white bone showing through the gnawed meat.

He let it go and turned, and she was everywhere. Pieces of her hung in the murky green at every height, an arm, the curve of a hip, a length of thigh with the grey armor peeled from it, ringed above his head in a slow wheel that turned when he turned, like the carved raptors circling the dome of the Senate hall. Pale flowers drifted loose among them, the ones he had pressed into her braid on the holodeck. Her head revolved at the center of the wheel, slow as a weathervane in still air, and her hair had come out of its plait and fanned around it in a black corona so lovely that for the space of a heartbeat he forgot to be afraid. A small fish had its mouth against her last eye. It worked at the soft rim, lost its grip, came back, and came back.

Then the fish fled, all of them at once, from the bodies and the bright entrails and the halo of her, a glitter of small lives scattering upward and away, and the khiiru came backing out of his uncle's eye and dropped, spines tucked, into the dark. The water beneath him darkened. The harbor at Dartha had a dredged floor at nine meters; he had dived it for dropped coins the summer before. This water went past any floor, past where light could follow, and something in it rose.

He felt it before he saw it: pressure in his ears and a slow, cold push through his whole body. Then the shape came up out of the black, and he knew it from the counting rhyme and from the stories every old woman in the chain told on the docks after dark: the thing under the outer wall that broke whole boats to hear the planks go, which no diver had ever seen and lived to describe. The Rhuu'thaesh rose without hurry. A shark's blunt snout came first, and a shark's flat, lidless eye the size of a hatch cover, and then the body went on and on behind it in an eel's long muscular ripple. Arms trailed beneath it, mottling as they came, and down its spine ran a crest of black urchin quills, each the length of his forearm, flexing in slow waves as it swam. It came on until he could no longer find its edges, until there was nothing left in the world but the side of its head and the eye rolling in its socket to find him.

It opened its mouth, and the teeth went back in curved rows, and the rows were full. Things hung on them that had been fish, and things that had been divers, still in their weighted belts, and some of what hung there was still moving: a hand flexing around a hook of tooth, something pale and segmented curling and uncurling, a mouth working at nothing. Between them were split planks and the stove ribs of hulls, a snarl of rigging, a length of rail cut deep with kaelth spirals, and a bow-board he knew because he had sat on it all night with his knees drawn up, the name burned into the wood in his grandfather's hand. Hwaelu. The water began to pour toward the mouth and took him with it, gently, as his mother used to draw him by the wrist through a crowd.

Then voices came down to him, faint and broken by the water, as if someone were calling across a great distance into wind. …return to us… too far, too deep… rise up, our kin, rise up…

He knew Earo's voice among them, cracking on the high notes, and Ovar's flat beneath it, and under them all an old woman's rasp: fool of a boy. Kuluna had caught him by the heels when he came into the world and stitched his scalp when he was eleven, and she had been old both times.

He hung in the current and listened, and he smiled.

She had told him to go under and stay under. He had done it in the College and in the Fleet, in grey offices and in a corridor on Romulus, and the thing that broke boats had come up for him anyway. He opened his arms wide. His right elbow struck something soft that turned slowly away, his left hand brushed the bloated cold of his uncle's shoulder, and he flinched from neither. He lifted his chin into the dark of the open throat and called it out as the watcher calls the one in hiding at the end of the game.

"Vael'ri."

The word left him in silver, and the voices swelled after it. Return. Return to us.

The Rhuu'thaesh came. The jaws closed over him in a rush of black water and broken boats, and the light went out of the world.

His eyes opened on a vaulted ceiling furred with three hundred years of smoke. Salt lay gritty across his bare chest, and a weight sat warm on his breastbone that smelled of burning rope. Two dry palms held his skull as if it might crack. His tongue was thick with a yellow bitterness that coated the back of his throat, and cold air poured across his skin from somewhere to his left, lifting every hair. He knew that ceiling, its soot-black ribs and the salt crystals growing like frost in the seams. He had lain under it at eleven with an oyster hunter's fist-print still on his shirt and this same smoke in his nose. The salt-stair, then, and Kuluna's hands.

Earo stood at the edge of the lamplight, back turned, shoulders shaking, chanting with the sages. Hirek moved his lips, got nothing, and tried again.

"Earo." The boy turned against every rule of the stair, and Kuluna let him. "The round-ears." It came out of him in pieces, the lilt so thick it was nearly all reef. "She sits under my salt. Mine. Go and tell Taev, before he does something to her I'll have to kill him for." His eyes found the boy's face and held it. "And I heard every word you said in that boat, ssethei."

He fell asleep before Earo could decide whether to laugh, and the water he slept in was empty.

[ …Meanwhile, Earo | From the Salt Stair to the Grain House | i-Korthre ]

Kuluna took her hands from his uncle's head and bent, joint by creaking joint, to the glass beneath the pump. The green dripping into it ran thinner and paler now. She watched three drops fall before she spoke. "Hwaelu," she told the under-sages. "The tide's given him back. He'll keep." Her eyes came round to Earo, bright as a gull's in the ruin of her face. "Well? He told you to run, boy."

Earo ran down the salt-stair three steps at a time, his wet boots skidding on stone worn hollow by four centuries of menders' feet, and out past the drying racks at the foot of it, where the split savrei arms hung on their poles and dripped brine onto the cobbles. The storm had gone east and taken the rain with it, leaving the town scrubbed and smelling of weed and wet ash. Along the street the houses kept their storm-lamps lit in the windows, green glass for every house with someone still out on the water, and he counted them as he ran because his body wanted to count something: Sileth's, the Ruhaen widow's, the cooper's, and his grandmother Nuhir's high window above the dye-yard, burning steady. Above the roofs the lamp-towers of the reef watch threw their slow beams across the water, green on the outer wall, white on the inner. Down in the street every shutter stayed closed, because on a storm night the chain did not open its doors to running feet.

He knew where Taev would have taken her. Every old house on the chain had a room under its floor that the khaessuu had never found in eighty years of looking, dug in the years when the eighth-day men kept a clerk on every quay, and Taev's lay beneath the grain store with a trapdoor under the barley bins. Earo heard her from the end of the street. The sound came up out of the ground, through the paving and into his boots, high and torn past anything he had ever heard a throat make, and it stopped him in the road with the hair standing up along his arms and the burnt-copper taste of the skiff's fuel flooding back into his mouth. Behind the grain-house shutters nothing moved. Every house on the street had heard it, and every house on the street had kept its shutters closed, because what the wall sees, the wall keeps.

He made himself go toward it, through the grain-store door left on the latch and past the sacks to the bins. He hauled the barley bin aside, dropped through the trap, took the cellar stairs in a single jump, and hit the door at the bottom with his shoulder.

Lamplight, low and yellow. Grain sacks stacked to the ceiling, and the smell of barley dust and blood and the blue spirit their islands were known for. The woman on the floor with her back against the sacks, her mouth open on the end of a scream, Taev's boot planted in the hole in her thigh and the butt of his fish-spear set against the wrong angle of her shoulder, leaning. The translator hung humming in the air between them like a patient insect. Taev looked up, and his face did not change.

"He's come back." Earo's voice cracked down the middle. "Kuluna has him; she says he'll keep. He woke long enough to speak." He dragged in air that tasted of grain. "She sits under his salt, tuuvhe. His words, out of his own mouth. He said to tell you before you did something to her he'd have to kill you for."

Taev's lips twitched as if fighting a smile before he lifted his foot from the wound. He lifted the spear from her shoulder, turned it end for end, and stood it against the wall beside the door. For a long moment he only looked down at the woman, who had stopped screaming and was breathing in short wet pulls with her eyes squeezed shut, and then at his own boot.

"Menders. Two from the stair, the ones who keep their mouths shut. Bonesetter's splints, the good salve, and a sleeping draught." Earo didn't move, and Taev's head came round. "Now, Earo."

Earo went.

[ …Meanwhile, Taev tr'Aimne | Beneath the Grain House | i-Korthre ]

When the boy's feet had gone up, and the trap had banged shut, Taev reached past the floating translator and switched it off. The hum died, and the cellar went quiet enough to hear water ticking somewhere behind the sacks. He worked the woman's knife out of the tabletop where he had driven it, wiped the point down his trouser leg, and set it on the flagstones by her good hand with the combadge and the little ear-piece beside it, close enough that she would not have to reach.

The dead agent's wrist unit sat in his coat pocket against his hip, its cell cracked, heavier than its size. He thought of the woman on the terrace hung with vines and the two boys in front of her. He thought, too, of where the skiff had found his cousin: out over the crossing in the black of the storm, before Hirek ever keyed the clan band. Someone had told that man where to wait.

He crouched, forearms across his knees, near enough that he need not raise his voice, and spoke to her in his own Standard, the one his grandfather had learned in a senator's house and handed down with the r's still rolling.

"You won't forgive me for this. I don't expect you to, and I won't insult you by asking." His gaze went to the blood pooled around the print of his boot, then back to her face. "An hour ago I had a Tal Shiar skiff on my cousin's beach, my cousin stitched by a savrei and as good as drowned, and a stranger in my boat with no reef on her sleeve and a tale with the middle cut out of it. Now I have his word. His word is enough here. Yours couldn't be, and that isn't your fault."

He picked a husk of barley off his sleeve and flicked it into the dark.

"You kept your tongue about him with my weight on you. I saw that, and I'll remember it."

He shifted on his heels, and the boards above them creaked as the old house settled.

"Most likely, you come from a world where nobody writes down which market your mother bought her fish in. You'll never stand in a grey office in Dartha with your parents beside you and recite your week to a clerk while he decides which of you to take next. That was the khaessuu, on every quay in this chain, for longer than you've been alive. They took my uncle's seat in the Senate and my aunt's post at the College, and they took something else from my aunt that the whole chain knows and nobody says aloud." His jaw worked. "Out here we learned to know what a stranger is before the stranger learns what we are."

He stood, and his knees cracked.

"I did right by my family tonight. I'd do it again tomorrow, the same way. I won't pretend to be sorry so your night goes easier, and I won't lie to you in my own house."

Footsteps sounded on the stair, two sets, light and quick. Taev collected the spear from beside the door, stood aside to let the menders pass with their kits, and climbed up into the cleared night. He did not go home. He walked down through the dark market to the quay, knelt on the wet stone where the boats rocked against their fenders, and put both hands into the sea to the wrist, and held them there in the black water long after the cold had set them aching.

[ …Meanwhile, Ovar | Beneath the Grain House | i-Korthre ]

Ovar had gone for his grandmother Nuhir because Kuluna sent him, and because nobody on the chain, Taev included, kept a thing from Nuhir for long once she had decided to know it.

She had been sitting up, his grandfather still asleep. He found her at her high window above the dye-yard in a chair drawn close to the green storm-lamp, a shawl over her knees and a cup gone cold at her elbow, and she looked at his face once and stood before he had said a word. She came down the street on his arm in a long coat of storm-dark shaanel, her ironwood stick ticking ahead of her on the wet stones, and twice she stopped to cough into a handkerchief that she folded away before he could see it. Over her other arm she carried a folded length of cloth the color of a winter reef, banded at the Aimne interval, the third band dyed dark.

They met Taev at the grain-house door, coming out with the spear in his hand and blood on his boot to the ankle. Nuhir stopped. She looked at the boot, then up into her nephew's face, and said nothing at all; Taev, who had never stepped aside for a harbor-master or a magistrate in his life, dropped his eyes and stepped into the street to let her pass. Ovar watched him walk away toward the quay without once looking back.

Ovar had always thought his uncle Hirek looked like her. In the lamplight of the cellar stair, he saw it run the other way. Hirek had her long bones and upswept brows and her trick of going entirely still before she moved, all of it made heavier and plainer in a man. She had the original, finer drawn, the cheekbones sharper, and her hair beneath the grey ran darker than her son's, nearly black at the roots of the braid. She was the oldest person Ovar knew after Kuluna, and she went down the cellar stairs one-handed, refusing to let him take her elbow.

The menders had the woman off the grain sacks and onto a pallet of folded sailcloth, and they were bickering in whispers over the grey armor, which neither of them could find the way into. Nuhir handed Ovar her stick. She lowered herself to her knees beside the pallet without help, and for a long moment she only looked: at the shoulder, at the thigh, at the black handprints flowering on the throat. Her free hand went to her own stomach and rested there, flat and hard, and then she took it away. Three short reef words sent one mender for a knife to cut the straps and the other to bring the lamp nearer.

Then she turned to the woman and spoke in Federation Standard, a little stiff, the speech of someone who had read a great deal more of it than she had ever said aloud.

"I am Nuhir t'Aimne. Hirek is my son." She shook out the banded cloth and laid it over the woman's legs and bare belly, smoothing it flat with her palm. "You are the first round-eared guest these islands have had in my lifetime, and my lifetime has been very long, and this is the welcome my family gives you. A cellar, and my nephew with a spear. I am sorry for it. That our lives have driven us to this."

She reached out and moved a strand of salt-stiff black hair off the woman's cheek, where it had dried into the blood, and studied the ruined braid beneath it without comment.

"You need not be afraid in this house, or anywhere on these islands. You came over the water by my son's hand, and that puts you under his salt and under mine, and under all of ours." She took a pinch of coarse grey salt from a pouch at her belt and pressed it into the woman's good palm, folding the cold fingers over it with her own. "That is yours now. For as long as you are on the chain, you are one of us, and no one in this family will put a hand on you again except to mend you."

The mender came back with the knife. Nuhir waved him off a moment longer.

"I don't know who you are. I don't know why Hirek brought you across the water, and he will tell me or he won't; he was a secretive boy, and he is a secretive man. But my grandsons tell me a Tal Shiar agent came to the south beach tonight and did not leave it, and that when they found him you were underneath him with his hands on your throat and a crownfish spine already in his side." Her eyes went briefly to Ovar, who found the floor very interesting. "My son came off that reef with a savrei's work up both arms. He should never have reached the sand. I taught military medicine at the War College for sixty years, and I know what it takes for a man to live through that, and what he has to be holding on to." For a moment it was Hirek's half-smile on an old woman's face, and then it was gone. "Someone gave him a reason to keep breathing. I think it was you. Thank you for my son."

She sat back on her heels, and Ovar heard her knees protest.

"Rest now. He will be more himself by morning. If he is still flat on the salt-stair, you will want for nothing, because I will see to you myself, and I have not forgotten where the bones go." She held out her hand without looking, and Ovar put the stick into it. "Ovar. The warm blankets from my chest, the good ones. A jug of island juice, not the ale; she's lost too much blood for the ale. And find her something to wear that isn't armor." She was already turning back to the menders. "Her shoulder first. Then the leg. Gently, or answer to me."

Ovar was on the stair before she finished.
- hwaeh-vael: the chain's children's hiding game; one goes under, the other keeps the watch and sings the swells to forty
- vael'ri: the watcher's call when the one in hiding is found
- *Hwaelu*: the Aimne family sloop
- khiiru: harbor urchin, black-spined, fist-sized
- Rhuu'thaesh: the wall-eater, a leviathan of island legend said to live beneath the outer reef wall
- khaessuu: the carrion crabs that strip the drowned along the quays; the islands' name for the Tal Shiar
- eighth-day man: the ministry informant posted to a household under watch
- Kejail: Hirek's hidden name, used only by close kin
3
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0800 hrs ] Maybe By Next Tuesday
Last post by joshs1000 -
[CPO Avandar Lok | Flight Deck | Fighter Assault Bay | Deck 16 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy] Attn: @Ellen Fitz @Dumedion
[Show/Hide]

Lok was rather taken aback by the whole affair. After Doctor Leux and his assistants materialized both groups just kind of milled about aimlessly while looking on with various mixtures of concern at the fallen officer. Some eyes darted to the Ferasan who still held the weapon that caused all this commotion, but were a bit preoccupied. Lok felt like a real fool, he had a century of life behind him and yet he still couldn’t help but blunder into some rash decision based in some manner of pride.

Finally several of Theurgy’s security officers arrived, none that Lok knew personally, lower down the totem poll no doubt, just here to keep some form of civility. It was unlikely anyone in the immediate vicinity had called for the gold shirted and armed personnel, but they had heard of the commotion none-the-less. The leader of the security team, one Petty Officer Daniels, spoke briefly with Lok and got his side of the story while retrieving the bloodied wrench which was promptly stowed in a specialized evidence container. The other officers talked to both the Theurgy deck crew and the pilots, the wounded one was still under the care of Leux but had roused with a wicked headache.

“We’ll get this taken care of, Chief.”

Lok realized that Daniels was talking to him again. He glanced down just in time to witness a smile and wink on the part of the securityman. The big cat nodded in reply. Daniels started to walk away and Lok, suddenly processing what he had just been subtly told, whirled around in a hot flash of anger. In the days since they had been pardoned, a wave of “us versus them” had descended upon the ship causing all manner of poor discipline and rule violations when it came to dealing with Starfleet again. Lok had already chastised his deck gang on such behavior but seeing it among the security officers was just the last straw. He should be arrested and marched to the brig for committing assault on a fellow member of Starfleet and yet he was going to be let off with a wink! Had this been more sensible times back in the Golden Era of the fleet he would have been hauled before the captain and disrated on the spot.

Lok started after Daniels to make himself clear but found that his feet and his voice failed him. Despite his seething and yearning for a punishment, ever since that wink he had felt relief cutting the edge off his frustrations. With a dejected sigh, his ears and tail drooping, Lok turned back to the scene to see the injured officer getting unsteadily to his feet.

“Back to your duties!” Lok ordered the gathered mechanics in a stern tone, though with perhaps a tinge of the biting vitriol that he had kept from unleashing upon Daniels.

“You have the deck Hussein.”

Hussein nodded in silent acknowledgement as she went about getting everyone back to work and leaving the security officers and Doctor Leux to deal with the remains of the dust up.

After watching Lok march off, Hussein turned to Leux, also noting a Granzite whom she had not recognized among the medical staff, she often would find some way to accidentally injure herself so had grown quite familiar with the group.

“Is there anything I can help you with Doc?”

[NCO’s Quarters | Deck 13 | Vector 3 | USS Theurgy]

Without the constant tenor of combat and peril, Lok had finally been able to properly move into his quarters and actually sleep in a bed instead of in a chair or on the deck or under a fighter. Though much of it was still spartan beyond the basic decor that every Starfleet vessel had, Lok had taken some of his mementos out of his footlocker and put them about the shelves to make the place look a little more lived in. Namely it was his pictures, over a hundred years of life meant that he had amassed quite the collection, much of it was back home on Betazed but some he always kept with him. A picture of his long deceased parents, a picture of him at boot camp, him with Captain Harriman on his last day aboard Enterprise, and of course all manner of away mission photos and those pictures of friends, lovers, and cherished colleagues, many long gone.

In this setting he contemplated his future while gazing at the activity around the Starbase just outside his window. Lok wanted to give in to melancholy, just as he always had when he did something so heinous, to become apathetic and just let the years roll on by until he could just start over. And in a sense, he was just going through the motions of Starfleet but with no real drive like he had all those decades ago. Lok got pleasure from his job sure, but the satisfaction of a job well done would not suffice forever. He scanned over the photos across his bed and spied one of him and his father on the day Lok graduated from boot camp. Lok standing ramprod straight, his fur neatly groomed with the biggest grin of pride on his face and next to him the middle aged Betazoid in the old maroon Starfleet uniform also beaming with pride.

You’ll be a captain one day, you’ll just have to go the long way round…

Lok nodded as he remembered the words, said off handed in a joking way by the old man, but sincere in their message.

“Computer,” he finally spoke, “show me all the information regarding the Warrant Officer Program - and I’d like to send a message to Commander Cross.”
4
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0700 hrs] The Salvage Job
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia “Shadow” Al-Ibrahim | Cockpit, Wolf-04 | Near Cayuga wreckage] Attn: @RyeTanker @Ellen Fitz @Eirual @Krajin @Nesota Kynnovan @Stegro88  (and anyone else)

The Cayuga looked like a tomb; lifeless, left to rot in the void.

Talia throttled back to match Atlas’ thrust on the approach. The Valkyrie’s deflector scattered debris before it as Shadow angled for a wide loop, down around the bow at forty-five degrees, then swung to port and leveled out amidships — flood lights lit. Her eyes tracked the damage as she went between darting glances at the sensor readouts.

 Whatever her wingman had pinged, the probes returned it as a weak mass blip, minimal band projection; something there that ‘mysteriously’ disappeared, almost as if someone realized they were no longer alone.

Fuck, Shadow cursed silently with a tsk.  “Bogey just went dark. I don’t like this Atlas,” she shook her head. “Couldn’t get a full EM profile on it — but even if it was just a salvage rig, that’s bad news.” There was a pause to collate their combined sensor net into a single return. Anahi bleeped a few seconds later. Talia’s eyes narrowed at the data, then beamed it directly to Gramps.

“Maslow, Wolf-04. Visual on the primary; zero emissions — nav point uploaded,” Shadow reported, then paused to watch as her lights slid across the wounded hull, noting the blackened craters and gorges over pristine white. “She took one hell of a beating,” slipped out in a somber whisper, which prompted an immediate correction in tone. Focus. “Ten pinged a bogey at the edge of our sensor envelope — unable to ID with all the background data. Sending you what we have for analysis.”

This feels like a trap — an ambush, waiting to happen, Shadow shook her head again, thumb hovered over the weapons safety release.

“Maslow, recommend we elevate to yellow alert immediately — shields and weapons,” Shadow added, then clicked off and waited for Arnold’s assessment. “Anahi, start scanning for biometrics — sync with pup two. Let one push range to .75 AU.”

The Valkyrie’s computer chirped in acknowledgement as Shadow released the breath she’d been holding.

“Feels like we just fell for the perfect bait, big guy,” Shadow muttered to Atlas, after a glance at her distant wingman. “Nothing for it but to stand-by for when the shit hits the fan.”

A chorus of alerts erupted suddenly; Talia’s reaction was immediate and instinctual — she throttled up and dove into a tight turn between the Cayuga’s nacelle pylons, using the wreck as cover while her eyes scanned the ships readouts for data.

“Break, break, hot EM spike — repeat — hot EM spike,” Shadow alerted the entire flight. “Maslow, Wolf-04; internal EM spike, location: deck nine, repeat, deck nine inside the primary. Looks like an percussive wave. Ten, can you confirm?”

She throttled back, thumb steady over the weapons release as dark eyes blinked at the return in mild confusion. A few taps played the sound out through her helms speakers.

It sounded like…an explosion?

That made zero sense. There were no thermals, zero radiologicals, just a few power surges in the micro-ohms — barely readable and hardly dangerous.

“The fuck is going on,” Shadow huffed to herself, then waited for someone to verify what she’d tracked.

OOC — if you havent seen Down Periscope, you wont get the joke. Highly recommend you watch it 😜
5
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0800 hrs ] Maybe By Next Tuesday
Last post by RyeTanker -
[Main Engineering | Deck 25 | Vector 3 | USS Theurgy] @joshs1000 @Ellen Fitz @Hans Applegate @Eirual @Dumedion @Stegro88 @chXinya @Nesota Kynnovan

"Excuse me, can I help you?"  Ensign zh’Ron asked.

The Tellarite man looked up at the Andorian stood and something flashed in his eyes as the Ensign felt her antennae quiver and focus on the dark haired man with stubble.  "Yes Ensign."  The rank carried an unnecessary level of emphasis.  "We're here for the Quantum Slipstream Drive. "  He handed over the PADD officiously.  "It's to be disassembled and sent to the Starbase immediately."

The Ensign blanched.  Chief Arnold was off on an away mission, and Lieutenant Ryn was supposed to be on bed rest.  That left her as the most senior person in the department.   Unfortunatley for the Tellarite, she was Anodiran, which meant she was naturally combative and didn't take kindly to being pushed around.  "I see and you are?"  Maybe it wouldn't hurt to be petty.

"I'm Ensign Brask and I'm here to remove the Quantum slipstream drive."  He said, barely containing the challenge in his voice. 

This was not lost on the Ensign as her antennae went back on her head and she glared at the asshole in front of her.  She had to think of something before they tried to remove the drive and possibly in their fumble fingered way, blew up the ship. "I see.  I don't think the Chief and Assistant Chief Engineer would countenance such an operation with something so closely tied into the main reactor."  Brask wasn't really that interested, he had his own orders.  "It's a delicate enough piece of technology sir that's not too well understood and a lot of intricate work went into getting the power system properly calibrated to it."  The Ensign began spouting as fast as she could as she rode the knife's edge into insubordination.

This time, Ensign Brask did frown mightily.  "Well, thankfully, I am actually competent and will have this sorted out properly. The orders here supercede the authority of your Chief engineer.  So I'll get back to it."  He retrorted.  At this point the Engineering crew who were not handling critical tasks stopped what they were doing made their way over to the main control console to see what the commotion was all about. The Ensign had little choice and she glared one last time before making the only request she could. "Can I see the orders?"  Brask practically shoved the PADD into her chest and pushed the smaller Andorian away. 

Ensign zh’Ron stood there shocked for a moment and got ready to whirl on the jerk when a quiet voice came over her combadge.  "Wait Ensign."  The Andorian stopped as she recognized Thea's soft tone. "Put the PADD on the console, let me see it."  Ensign zh’Ron quickly moved to a console and placed the PADD down.  Information soon began running through the data slate faster than she could see. 

Ensign Brask truned back to the QSD and was surprised to see his tricorder lying on the floor.  He grumbled a moment and tried to lay it on the drive again.  Or at least he tried when a forcefield bounced the tricorder back refusing to let the device touch drive.  The Tellarite whirled on the Andorian. "Who put in that forcefield??!"  He shot fury at the assembling crew and jabbed a finger at all of them. "WHO?" He repeated.  He looked at the befuddled but somewhat seeming smug crew, then saw the Andorian standing near a console. "I'm going to court-martial you for this Ensign." The Ensign shook her head.  "I didn't do anything.  It happens automatically unless the proper codes are put in. I swear by the Wind Spirits sir."  The Lieutenant was about to accuse the Ensign of lying, but invoking a spiritual oath was a good sign of desperation, so she probably was telling the truth.  His eyes turned to the PADD on the console and he moved to take it. 

Ensign zh'Ron stepped aside as he flipped through the information.  Seeing what he needed, he punched in a combination and expected to hear the sound of a forcefield being lowered.  Thus, his brain had trouble comprehending the red screen in front of him saying INCORRECT CODE. ACCESS DENIED. His head snapped to the Ensign who had backed up and shrugged her shoulders helplessly. He turned to the PADD and checked the code then punched it in again. INCORRECT CODE. ACCESS DENIED. PLEASE CONTACT LIEUTENANT RYN OR LIEUTENANT COMMANDER ARNOLD.  Brask stared dumbfounded at the negative access and thought furiously.  Hacking would take too long and given the denial of a higher level command code, it could prove fiendishly difficult.  An idea struck "Computer, where is Lieutenant Ryn?"  He'd wake her up if needed to get this ordeal going, maybe it would save him some time in the long run. The standard computer voice reply was not what anyone was expecting. "Lieutenant Ryn is not onboard the ship" he blinked in confusion, she was supposed to be on bed rest. "Where is Lieutenant Ryn?"  The reply was instant and just an infuriating. "Lieutenant Ryn departed with Lieutenant Commander Arnold at 0700." There was a gasp, and a cough that might have been someone's attempt to smother a chuckle.

The crew here couldn't be trusted, so he turned to his own people, most of which looked distinctly unconformable. He needed to get back control of the situation. "Find the forcefield projector, we'll disable it and proceed with the removal."  He ordered.  A clear voice quickly came back. "I would advise against that Ensign."  He whirled around looking for the speaker.  "Who said that?"  A chocolate haired woman in a dark suit materialized in front of him and he gave the woman a once over before his eyes settled on the name and registry number stencilled on her chest. It's the damn hologram!  He sniffed in derision. "Computer deactivate hologram."

His eyes bulged and confusion reigned when Thea coldly stared into Ensign Brask's pudgy face with more depth than a computer program should have, crossed her arms over her chest and leaned in then flatly said. "No."
6
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia “Shadow” Al-Ibrahim | In transit, Kheinhe Sea | Uuluma Chain | Romulus] Attn: @Ellen Fitz

He hadn’t called out for her.

The rain hammered the beach; falling in sheets of cold gray. The surf crashed ashore, the wind howled, thick with rolling thunder -- even with that, as Talia fought for both their lives, Hirek hadn't made a sound.

The Tal Shiar bastard tried to choke her to death; Talia’s answer was to bury the blade-like appendage ripped from her own thigh into his body, but the life-ending pressure around her throat didn’t cease. As everything greyed out, through watering vision tinted red and black at the edges, his head suddenly turned into gray-green mist…

Then there was just dead weight crushing her into the sand, and weakness: the helpless feeling of entrapment, as confusion bled to panic until the weight was gone, and through the rain, someone stood over her.

A hand reached out to grab ahold of a wrist.

“W-who are you — where’s Hirek,” Talia demanded in a voice that was barely recognizable as her own; a croaked thing of abused vocal cords — barely more than a rasp.
 
An unknown voice answered in a language the translator couldn’t process; male, hitched in urgency, still riddled with the tilting inflection of youth.

She knew in her gut something was wrong the moment the other boy had called out on the beach; knew it was bad by the way they moved. She didn’t know who they were, or if they were friend or foe, but she knew as soon as they’d lifted Hirek from the sand that everything had gone horribly wrong, and the shock of the moment would sear it into her mind for the rest of her days.

Hirek was limp; between distant flashes of lightning, Talia saw that his eyes were open — yet they stared at nothing. His face held no expression; that terrible blankness confirmed the feeling that had crept into her gut, even as rationality argued against it.

No — please, no, her mind pleaded. Not him. Please.

But it was. He was gone.

Something broke in Talia; more than just physical pain — something deep. Something that didn’t care if her arm was useless, or about the wound slowly leaking her life out, or the way her throat felt like someone had tried to flatten it.

Reason abandoned her. Logic became a forgotten memory.

Talia lashed out then, anguish incarnate. The boy took her fist, held her down; the rain took the tears from her bruised, welted, bloody face. Her ears rang with the blood that pumped through her body, and the sound of a howl she didn’t even realize had torn free from her own tortured throat.
 
Her hand found the cuffs at the boy’s collar.

Hirek’s cuffs.

Hirek was gone.

The fight abandoned her as consciousness faded; the mind unable to cope with the trauma sustained.

Later, in the boat, she couldn’t bear to look at the body. It took everything Talia had, wracked with pain from without and within, to hold on to the last vestiges of her wits; knowing that Hirek lay beside her, lifeless, ate away at that resolve like acid through metal. On the heels of that followed the guilt; the knowledge that he died because of her, for her, after everything they’d shared, and everything they hadn’t.

Another life stolen by consequence, paid for by another in her stead.

Talia fought it down, all of it, every passing second. The fire in her leg — the abused, throbbing pain in her shoulder — even the grinding ache in her throat; they were nothing compared to the devastation she felt. Worse still, there was no outlet…none she could risk taking, at any rate. To keep her sanity, every ounce of remaining energy was bent towards the mental wall that held everything at bay; anger, loss, heartache…the heat of it burned her as real as the body next to her, yet she refused to be consumed by sheer force of will, as the boy prattled on. The inability to make heads or tails of what he said made it easy to ignore.

He paused to lay a wet cloth over Hirek’s death stare; Talia’s lips trembled at the sight of it, as hot, bitter tears welled. She turned away in silence as the bow rose and fell with its rhythm, grateful for the rain; a hiss escaped her teeth as he pressed something into the wound at her thigh with words the translator decoded into gibberish. Dark, bloodshot eyes rolled to his. If the boy saw her reaction, he didn’t show it, not in any recognizable way.

The elder moved up from behind the boy, braced himself on the rail and leaned in close. His face was stone, the words chopped, heavily accented, but the translator read them cleanly; a warning, phrased into a promise.

Talia kept her silence as she watched him move away, then squeezed her eyes shut against the pain.

[Some time later…| i-Korthre Dock | Inner Cretak | Uuluma Chain | Romulus]

Taev lifted the woman over his shoulder, carefully, as the boys secured the boat. Beyond the dock, the lamps burned through the empty street and market, dripping with the rain. The storm was moving on, glacially; up through the caul, the tower stood in the mist – a stone peak of pink-veined marble.

Ovar scrambled back from astern, litter in hand. Taev nodded, then gestured to Earo, beckoning him from where he tied up the bow. “To the stair,” he nodded to his nephews. “If the tide doesn’t take him, bring him to my place with a sister in tow. No one else,” he added, shifting the woman’s weight as a whimper escaped from her.
 
Ovar shot a hesitant glance as he did what he was told. “Uncle…the woman –“

“Do as I say,” Taev growled, already turning to disembark.

The boys had their wounded elder on the lift and halfway up the street in another minute. Taev watched them disappear into the mist, the sound of their feet swallowed by the rain. “Meet the dawn with us, cousin,” he intoned at their backs, then turned and headed for home. Until he was sure of her intent, the woman would stay out of sight. Jaw clenched against what he knew was likely to come, he moved with haste, grateful for the rain that washed away the spots of red that dripped from the woman onto the road.


[The Salt Stair | House of the Thrai Rinam]

Her old bones ached from the storms chill. Beyond the wide entrance, Kuluna, called She-who-is-Two, or less officially as simply the Elder Sage, watched the sea with bright eyes; even though her frail, ancient body sat confined to a hover-chair, life and wisdom still burned within them.

The storm was passing — with it, the sea would calm. The cycle continued, as it would for eons after she was finally at rest.

But not tonight.

Her head turned at the ruckus of their entry. Her nose caught the smell of them, and their burden, before her other senses caught up: two youths, soaked cold with rain and sea, panting from exertion — the body between them reeked of the venom from the shadow-hunter-of-the-deeps.

Kuluna summoned her aids with a keyed tone without a word, then pointed a gnarled, bony finger to the salt table. One of the boys fell into an explanation as she placed a hand upon the body, feeling by touch what technology would tell.

“Can you save him,” the older of the two boys asked.

 She chastized the child with a look.

“The sea takes what it is given, foolish boy. He is yet at the threshold; any longer and the tide would have claimed him. Aside, child,” she hissed with a wave. From the outer alcoves, the under-sages approached, working by rote in effortless synchronization: clothes were removed, intravenous feeds punctured flesh, cleansing oil of baalu essence applied with meticulous care to the stitching wounds.

The boys moved away, turning their backs to the work as tradition dictated; the ways of the sages was not for their eyes to see.

Kuluna spread a handful of salt across the bare chest of her charge, then set a kittra bowl upon the sternum and lit the end of dry rope upon it; the salt was for the body, to remind it where it belonged — the smoke, for the soul — a warning of the dangers of the deep. She felt the body’s rhythm of life: weak, growing weaker. The vitae purification pumps purred to life, drawing the lifeblood out for revitalization before cycling back in — the shadow-hunter’s poison dripped into a clear glass below it, pulled from flesh and blood like fat from milk.

She lifted the veil of damp cloth from the open eyes to drop in the thick, yellow fluid of alanarri; the only known anti-venom, harvested and distilled from the hunter itself — a drop for each eye, then three more on the tongue. The body would burn as the anti-venom did its work; the sages set a cold draft of air across his bare flesh to cool it.

“Call to him now,” Kuluna rasped, then moved to cup both sides of the head within her palms. The under-sages began first, joined a heartbeat later by the youths. They chanted repeatedly in low tones, calling out to the lost diver:

“Return to us. You have swam too far, too deep. ‘Ware the tide, ‘ware the darkness. Rise up, our kin, rise up and return. Return to us.”

The Elder Sage bent to his ear as she watched the others tend his wounds; the stink of old rope smoke heavy in the air. “Hear me, fool of a boy — I brought you into this world, I shall bring you back to it. Heed my voice. Return, now — turn away from the dark. Its peace is a lie. Turn to the surface, boy. Do it now, or be forever lost.”


[Meanwhile…]

Talia woke to find herself on a floor, propped up against a row of grain bags; wearily, her eyes searched the surroundings — shelves of stored food stuffs upon solid walls. A heavy door beyond a small flight of stairs, with a man sat upon an ancient wooden chair. In the lamplight, she noted the long-toothed spear set across his lap, and the bottle of neon-blue liquid held in one hand.
 
He resembled Hirek in a loose sense; similar but distinctly different — the hair was longer, reaching his shoulders, loose and wet. The skin was darker, more weathered. His beard was fuller, dark and streaked with grey — the ends twisted into braids no wider than Talia’s smallest fingernail. Beside him, on a table, her combat blade stood with its point driven into the wood; he’d placed her combadge next to it, along with the ear bud.

A device hummed as it floated in the air between them.

He noticed her attention, and offered a nod before leaning forward to speak. The words rolled from his lips in a tilting cadence, only for the device to echo them in droning Federation standard, out of sync, but loud enough for her to understand:

<Taev, I am called. You name.>

She shifted with a silent grimace of effort, trying to sit up straight; the attempt only earned more pain; her answer, when it came, was little more than a hoarse whisper. Clearing her throat accomplished nothing.

“Talia.”

Another nod. More words.

<We meet well Talia of Federation. Injuries of you will be tended in time. We talk first.>

The pilot’s eyes took in the room again, then the spear; Taev didn’t miss it.

<A secure place. No path out. Only me.>

“What do you want,” Talia croaked.

Taev took a pull from the bottle, then set it aside to rest his elbows on his knees as if he considered how to proceed.

<Talia here. Why.>

She swallowed around the pain in her throat; her mouth filled with the metallic tang of her own blood. It hurt so much to talk.

“Diplomatic mission. New government.”

This seemed to amuse Taev mildly.

<Talks in Dartha. Not here. Why Talia here.>

She looked down at the bloody rag tied about her thigh — the fluid slowly dripping into a puddle beneath the limb. There was no desire to speak of Hirek, or what they had gone through; it was no ones business but theirs to know.

<Speak.>

Talia remembered what Taev promised on the boat. She met his gaze, trying and failing to keep her expression and voice steady. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I'm not a threat to you or your family.”

His brows rose at that.

<Why Talia here. Speak the tale. I learn truth.>

So she told him, between breaths of whispers, how they had left Dartha. How the Tal Shiar had found and attacked them. How their craft had been damaged, and how they had been forced to swim ashore. Brief, succinct, free of all the emotional attachments and purposefully devoid of any details involving Hirek.

Taev stood after the translator finished, the spear in his hands like a cue-stick player waiting on his turn at the table. His face was unreadable, but Talia saw something close to weary resolve cloud his eyes. He stepped closer with a shake of his head. Talia was already squirming away as he spoke.

<Opinion of tale lacking truth. Talk in Dartha. Federation in Dartha. Not here. Only Talia. Tale holds no water. Understand. No feeling of happiness for action. Protection of family everything. Be still. Speak the tale. Truth only.>

His foot hovered over the wound in her thigh the same instant the blunt end of the spear rotated up to rest a finger-length away from the joint of her shattered shoulder. Talia’s good hand rose to grip the wood with all the strength she had left, but they both knew it was nothing close enough to stop him.

“I told you,” the pilot hissed through clenched teeth. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this!”

<Speak the tale. Truth only.>

Slowly, he applied pressure to both wound and shoulder; Talia hissed at the exponential increase in agony — but had already made up her mind. Hirek had gone to a place she couldn’t follow. Whatever they were to each other, whatever they could have been, had died with him; but that truth was for her to hold and no other.

“I. Told. You,” Talia groaned. Taev applied more pressure. The pain had her gasping, drawing ragged breaths through blood-pinked teeth. But she refused to break. She’d die first.

<Speak. Only truth. After pain stop.>

“F-fuck you,” Talia spat.

The spear end found the edge of her shoulder socket. Taev tilted it, ever so slightly, to leverage the ball of the joint away; blood oozed from around the toe of his boot, as he leaned more weight into the wound.

Talia endured this for three beats of her heart before her whimpers turned to full blown screams. She screamed until her lungs burned, through the pain and tears and choking breaths. She screamed in agony, in rage and in defiance. She screamed until everything faded away, her mind unable to bear any more.

In the silence that followed, Taev grunted at the woman’s stubbornness, then sat back down. He’d wait and drink, till she came round again — then start over.
7
Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epi S: [Day 03 | 0900] Changing lanes
Last post by Pierce -
[ Lt. Commander Alana Pierce | Central Intelligence Suite | Deck 5 | Vector 1 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Krajin
[Show/Hide]

Alana stood and walked to the replicator, acquiring the cola for Lt. Va'rek. As it was created, she grabbed it, handing the cup to him over the desk before taking a seat once more. She quietly took a sip of her own before continuing. Admiring the taste and the fizz of the softdrink.

Placing the cup back on her desk. "Thankfully you weren't out of commission very long. From what I've gathered since coming on board, it's been a perpetual one after another battle." She folded her hands. "I only received the field promotion mere weeks ago after my predecessor was sadly prematurely taken out."

She smirked regarding his analysis and reading of her profile. "As you can imagine, I too do my due diligence with the crew. More out of professional courtesy thank espionage. However, that trait never lies dormant. That being said, my...time...here is a rather interesting, yet unorthodox situation that was deemed classified after a mission that went horribly wrong due to conditions outside my control." Alana took another sip to recalibrate as she kept the memories hidden in the deepest recesses of her mind. Pierce quietly studied him wondering if he was attempting to read her mind. Knowing full well the training from Starfleet Intelligence caused her mind to be erratic and difficult to read if at all for anyone searching.

Decidedly, she offered a nugget of truth to the mix to allow him to feel more at ease with some level of trust and transparency. "Nevertheless, my past though redacted at the highest levels, is one of issues that cascaded in a perfect unity of misfortune. Long story short, I was born in the 23rd century and brought forward to this time merely a year ago. That being said, I am more than qualified for what comes ahead in a manner most in today's era aren't. Coming from a time of perpetual conflict and war does that to you."

She smiled warmly. "Which brings me to why we're meeting now. I see another who values caution, knowledge and the security of Starfleet and this ship in high regards. Your file is loaded with honors, war and tactical training. Your bout in the Dominion War specifically caught my attention."

Looking at his file in the corner of her eye, she prepared the question. "How would you like to come work in the Intelligence department? Our ranks are presently low, and I could use someone I can trust to carry on the mission."
8
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ tr'Aimne rescuers | South Beach, Unnamed Isle | Uuluma Chain, Romulus ] Attn: @Dumedion

Earo kept his cheek to the stock after the body finished falling. He kept it there through the next swell, while Daughter of Providence climbed the black face of the water with her outriders dark and her oars shipped and slid down its back, because the beach was still in the scope and a beach could still do something. Nothing on it moved except the rain, which fell straight through the space where the man's head had been.

"Hwaeh," Ovar called from the port bow. It was the old reef-watch word for a thing gone under that won't come up again. He had the infrared glass pressed so hard against his brow it would leave a ring by morning. "He's down. The small one under him is moving, the left arm. The long one up the sand is ours. Aimne bands on the cuff."

Earo had already seen the cuff. Every child on the chain learned to read a sleeve before learning to read a slate: how far apart a house set its dye-bands, how dark the third one ran, whose water you were looking at from forty paces off a pitching deck. The Aimne interval he'd known since before he could walk. He took his face off the rifle. His right hand kept the shape of a grip that was no longer there, and he wiped his palm down his thigh, then again.

Since he was fourteen, he had been putting rounds through gourds his cousins flung off the vaela tower for jars of old Sileth's honey. A gourd went to pieces. The man had stayed upright over the woman for the space of a breath with nothing above his collar, and then folded onto her like wet sailcloth.

Ovar had watched it closer through his own glass, and he had seen his brother's hand, and he kept both to himself.

"Ra'uuvre," Taev said from the tiller.

The mainland had no word for it. Ride in on the back of the breaker and let it set you down. Taev brought the tri-hull in on the shoulder of a wave, and the sea put her center keel on sand. The ironwood shuddered down its length. Water ran out of the luck-spirals cut along her rail, one kaelth for every crew she had carried home, forty-one of them, the newest still pale. The brothers went over the bows into surf to the waist, and the undertow dragged at the backs of their knees all the way up the slope.

Ovar reached the pile first. Close to, the dead man was only heavy. Under the rain he smelled of cold fear-sweat and of the sharp green soap the dryfoots sold in paper twists on every corner in Dartha. Ovar took him by the belt and the back of the jacket and rolled him off onto the sand, and underneath, something drew breath with a whistle in it, thin as air through a split reed.

A woman. Small, in grey armor gone dark and powerless, with a badge on the breastplate showing some long-muzzled animal he didn't know. Reef-weed had stung her face into a lattice of fine red lines, and the dead man's hands were printed into her throat in colors already coming up. One arm lay wrong from the shoulder. The other came off the sand and shut on Ovar's wrist, and the grip ground the small bones there against each other. There were no bands on her anywhere, nothing at cuff or collar to tell whose water she had come out of.

She said something in the Federation tongue. He caught one word of it, because it was a name, and the name was theirs.

"He's here," Ovar told her in the reef dialect, having nothing else. "Lie still. Hwaelu, hwaelu, you mad thing."

Her eyes found his face and slid off it, and the grip on his wrist never eased.

Earo had gone to the other body. The arm stopped him before the face did. Punctures ran from wrist to elbow in three rows, neat as a sailmaker's seam, each hole ringed white, and out of every one a fine green lace had spread under the skin to join its neighbors and go on climbing. The same stitching crossed the shoulder. A third seam showed through the torn cloth at the thigh.

In the season of their sixth year, every child on the chain was walked down to the drying racks at i-Korthre and made to lay a hand flat on a hru'savrei's arm, split, salted, and stretched on poles, each sucker rimmed with hooked spines.

Hirek's eyes were open and the rain was falling into them, and the lids never moved. Earo put his ear to his uncle's mouth and waited through two swells before a thread of breath came, cold against his cheek and bitter with savrei ink, like the smell of a kettle left to boil dry.

"Tuuvhe Taev!" Ovar was on his feet, hands cupped, bellowing down the beach. "Ilhaan Aimne! It's Hirek! A savrei had him on the wall, the web's past his elbow and into the shoulder! Breathing, barely! The woman's alive, throat's crushed! The flyer's nose-down on the sand, nobody in it!"

Taev's answer came back flat across the surf, pitched to carry and no louder. "Earo, the boat. Ovar, the flyer. Nobody puts a hand in his wounds."

Earo ran the stern anchor out himself. He waded it past the break, dropped it, set the fluke with his heel, and came back to carry the bow line up the sand to the bole of a sea-pine. He tied the hitch his grandmother had taught him on her own dock at Cretak, the one she said no husband could untie and no storm would. Before he went back up the beach, he crouched at the waterline and put both hands in the sea to the wrist, and held them there while the backwash tugged at his fingers. The old men did that when they came in off the water with blood on them, any blood, a fish's or a friend's. He had watched them do it all his life and never once asked what it was for.

When he came up, Taev was on his knees beside Hirek with the kit open in the lee of his own body. The hypo was an old one with a brass collar, the kind every boat on the chain kept in a bladder of kelp-oil for the day a diver came up stitched. Taev set it under the jaw where the great vessel ran and pressed until it hissed empty.

"It keeps his chest going," he said, to neither of them. "The menders on the salt-stair at i-Korthre can draw it, if he's there inside the hour and lying flat." He worked his hands under Hirek's arms and stood with him. "Get the woman."

"Let me take his feet—"

"The woman, Earo."

Taev went down the beach backward with his cousin hauled against his chest, Hirek's heels plowing two furrows that the sea came up to fill.

"She'll fly!" Ovar hollered from the skiff's open hatch. "Port thruster's sick, but the drive answers. I could have her across to Cretak in twenty—"

"You'll fly her into the sea." Taev didn't break stride. "Load him in first. Every hull the Tal Shiar ever fitted out talks to somebody, and I'd have this one talking from under forty meters of water." He shifted Hirek's weight against him. "Rhaelu hwai'thrai." What the wall sees, the wall keeps. The saying was older than the Republic. In the years when the Tal Shiar kept a clerk on every quay in the chain, it had been the one law the islands obeyed without needing to be told twice.

"We'll fish you out after," Taev said.

Ovar looked at the thing on the sand, and then at his brother, and went to fetch it.

The woman fought. With its power gone, the armor weighed as much as a grown man, and when Earo lifted her, the ruined shoulder shifted in its socket. She came up off the sand at him with a sound he hoped never to hear again and put her good fist square into his ear. His head rang like a struck pan. He went down on one knee with her across his lap and held on, since letting go meant dropping her onto the arm.

"Fvai! Hwaelu, ssethei, hwaelu!" The words were no use to her, and he knew it, and he kept saying them through his teeth. Stop. Be still, you little eel. "This is the rescue. You're being rescued. Go and hit the one who strangled you; he's over there without a head."

She struck him once more, weaker, and then her hand opened on his collar and stayed there.

He got her across his shoulders and waded out, the swell shoving him sideways every third step, and laid her in the well on the oilskins Taev had thrown down beside his uncle. Her hair came off her face as he let her go. It was black and gritty with salt and sand, and down the back of it ran the ruin of a reef-braid: the three-strand lock over the crown that island mothers gave their daughters for the dyeing festival. Under the hair sat an ear curved like the inside of a shell, rounded at the top, with no point to it anywhere.

Earo crouched over the two of them with the sea running out of his sleeves.

"Round," he said. "Tuuvhe. She's round-eared. And somebody's put a reef-braid on her."

Hirek stared up at the lamp swinging under the spray dodger. Earo pulled off his headcloth, wrung rainwater into it from the dodger's lip, and laid it over his uncle's open eyes to keep them from drying.

"You went to Dartha to stand behind the dryfoot talkers and came home with a round-ears in Starfleet armor." He found the hole in her thigh by the heat coming off it and pressed a pad into it with the heel of his hand. She hissed and didn't swing. "Is she your thaiel, then? Mother says you've never brought anyone across the water. Not once since that Mirek hnoiyika. Grandmother still spits over the rail when anyone says her name, and she's been fifty years gone." He shifted his weight as the hull rolled under them. A gust drove the rain in sideways under the dodger, and he bent lower to keep it off the woman's face. "I'd have staked my rifle you'd gone over to men after her and meant to stay there. Everyone on Cretak would have. Ovar would have." He pressed harder, and her jaw clenched. "Grandmother will tell this one at every gathering till you're dead, same as the night you steered for home and fetched up on her dock instead."

The woman's eyes had opened while he talked, narrow slits fixed on the seam where the dodger met the rail. He had no notion how much she had understood. None, he hoped. It had all been reef dialect, and half the capital couldn't follow that.

"Don't die in the boat," he told her, and kept pressing.

Taev came up the skiff's ramp with the rain sheeting off his shoulders and helped Ovar wrestle the body into the pilot's couch. They drew the harness across it and cinched it tight. In the closed cockpit, the dryfoot soap smelled stronger than the sea.

Taev's hand stopped at the dead man's side, under the ribs. He drew something out. It was black and hooked, as long as a hand, its base still ragged with whatever it had torn loose on the way in.

Ovar knew it, as any diver would. It came off a crownfish when a careless foot came down on one. It never came out of a wound easily, and it never came off a crownfish at all unless something cut it free. He looked back down the beach toward the lamp swinging in Providence's well, where the small woman with the ruined shoulder lay, and worked out where that spine had been before it went into a Tal Shiar agent's liver, and whose hand had pulled it out.

Taev pitched it through the hatch into the surf.

The sidearm Ovar had found half-buried in the churned sand went back into its holster, and Taev snapped the holster shut. A man taken from behind never gets to draw. Taev left the hatch standing open and scored the inner coaming twice with the pry-bar from the kit, the kind of marks a boarder's boots might leave coming through.

Then he ran his scanner over the frame. It chirped at the tail, again at the headrest, and once more at the dead man's wrist. He levered the recorder core out of the tail housing and snapped it across his knee, and the pieces went into his coat for the sea to take later. He ripped the cockpit eye above the headrest out by its wires. When he unbuckled the wrist unit, the screen woke under his thumb.

A woman, laughing, on a terrace hung with vines. Two boys in front of her, both younger than Earo. Text below, and a name in it. Ovar read Meira before Taev's thumb came down over the word. Taev stood looking at it with the rain running off the end of his nose and the scanner still chirping in his other hand, until he remembered it and switched it off. He cracked the unit's cell housing with the pry-bar and dropped the whole thing into his coat with the remains of the recorder. Then he leaned out of the hatch into the rain, cupped his palm, and let it fill from the sky. He came back in and set his wet thumb against the dead man's breastbone, above the heart.

"Hwai'mheuul," he said, low. The sea holds you.

Ovar had seen that given on the quay at i-Korthre to every diver the reef had kept and every fisherman who went out in the black season and came back as wreckage. He had never seen it given to a mainlander. He thought of Earo on the bow with his cheek laid to the stock.

"The Tooth," Taev said, and wiped his thumb on his coat. "Low and slow until you're past the reef line. A hundred meters off, pin the stick, give her full throttle, and go out that hatch before she's found her speed. If you're still aboard when she hits, I'll tell your mother it was your idea."

"It's yours."

"She won't believe you if you're dead."

The bow line came off the sea-pine. Earo hauled the anchor in hand over hand, and the outriders woke with a low roar that shook the ironwood under his knees. Providence backed off the sand into the swell. Ahead of them the skiff lifted, canted to port, its sick thruster coughing blue, and ran out low across the water with its floods dark.

Ovar flew it crouched in the open hatch, one arm reaching past the dead man's shoulder to the yoke. The stick dragged left no matter what he did, and every gust tried to lay the port skid in the wave-tops. Lightning showed him the Tooth. The old women called it Kaiul Uuvre, the widow's tooth: a black spire standing out of the white water at the mouth of the channel where the reef-wall broke, older than the clan and every name the clan had ever given it.

At a hundred meters he drove the lock-pin through the yoke collar, slapped the throttle full, and went out.

The sea met him like a floor. It knocked the air out of him and turned him over and over in the dark until he had no idea which way the sky lay. Somewhere above the churn came a flat, heavy boom, and orange bloomed through the water. He kicked toward it. He broke the surface in time to see the skiff folded against the foot of the Tooth, fire running along its spine and the rain hissing on the fire, and then the wreck slid off the rock and the sea closed over it.

The outriders came out of the rain, and a lamp came with them. A fist closed in the back of his collar and hauled, and he came over the gunwale like a netted fish and was sick into the bilge: sea and bile and the burnt-copper taste of the skiff's fuel. Earo was laughing. He laughed longer than there was any reason to, and Ovar, with his cheek on the wet planking, saw his brother's hands shaking and reached up and took hold of one.

Taev swung Providence north and opened the outriders to full. Far off through the rain, the lamp-towers of the reef watch burned along the chain one after another, green on the outer wall and white on the inner, as they had burned every night of every storm for four hundred years. When the hull had settled onto its heading, he passed the tiller to Ovar, soaked and shivering as he was, and went forward to crouch at the edge of the well, one hand braced on the rail as the bow rose and slammed. The woman's eyes were open. She was watching him.

"I don't know your reef," Taev told her. His Standard came from a senator's house, careful and old-fashioned; the r's rolled hard, each word laid down like a stone in a wall. "Where you come from. Who your people are. I mean to learn it. He brought you over the water with his own hand, so tonight you sit under his salt, and under mine. That is island law." The bow slammed, and he rode it without taking his eyes off hers. "But if you came to this family meaning it harm, you won't leave these islands. I'll see to that myself."

Her good hand moved across the oilskin toward Hirek's and stopped a finger's width short of it. Taev looked at the hand for some time. Then he went back to the tiller and took it from Ovar. "Earo. Keep his eyes wet."

- hwaeh: gone under for good (reef-watch call)
- ra'uuvre: ride in on a breaker's back
- kaelth: luck-spiral cut into a hull, one per crew brought home
- vaela: the reef watch; the vaela tower
- ilhaan: home reef, meaning lineage
- tuuvhe: elder kinsman, used as a form of address
- hwaelu: be still
- ssethei: little eel
- thaiel: lover outside marriage
- rhaelu hwai'thrai: what the wall sees, the wall keeps
- hwai'mheuul: the sea holds you (rite for the drowned)
- Kaiul Uuvre: the widow's tooth
- dryfoot: slang for mainlanders

*Fvai* and *hnoiyika* come from Duane's Rihannsu.
9
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Day 02 | 2000hrs | Beachside Shenanigans
Last post by Nesota Kynnovan -
[Ensign Jaya Thorne | Holodeck 04 | Deck 21 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy]
Attn: @Brutus
Wearing: [Show/Hide]

Jaya had stumbled onto the ongoing program by pure happenstance, when the brown-haired Denevan came down to Deck 21 with the intention to practice some flight manoeuvres on one of the holodecks. After what had happened last time, when she brought Lauren Pierce along to practice their combat flight manoeuvres together and they subsequently ended up getting flagged as a security threat by the ship’s overzealous AI, Jaya wisely decided to go at it alone for now; lest she’d draw Thea’s attention again. However, it turned out that all holodecks on Deck 21 were locked down for a variety of reasons, ranging from ongoing repairs to energy conservation, with the sole exception of Holodeck 04, which happened to be running an ongoing program.

Given the fact that the doors of Holodeck 04 were unlocked and even opened automatically as Jaya strolled past, the curious brown-haired Denevan hadn’t been able to resist walking in to see what was going on. As soon as she’d crossed the threshold, she was met with the sight of a beautiful, wood-panelled room. A pair of glass sliding doors in the far side of the room treated the Assistant Chief CONN Officer to an impressive view of a very pretty beach and, as she walked closer towards the doors, a hologram appeared behind her.

”Hello, welcome to Chiffon Beach.” The woman’s voice held a distinct Martian accent and, as Jaya turned around to look at the hologram, she immediately recognised her as USS Theurgy’s resident morale officer; Lieutenant Junior Grade Amanda Ashby. ”Due to the ongoing work on our holodecks, the morale team reserved Holodeck 04 and arranged to keep this program running for the crew to enjoy.” Jaya watched how Lieutenant Junior Grade Ashby gestured towards the row of lockers that lined the right-hand side of the room. ”Please feel free to retrieve a set of bathing gear from the lockers and change in the changing rooms on the other side of the room.” While she spoke, the Martian morale officer gestured towards a set of changing booths on the left-hand side of the room. ”Please secure your belongings in the lockers after you exit the changing room, the morale team is not liable for anything that goes missing!”

[Fifteen minutes later]

While Jaya had initially hesitated to partake in the program, given how she actually came down to Deck 21 to practice her combat flight manoeuvres, a brief conversation with the holographic Lieutenant Ashby convinced her that it wasn’t going to happen. Not with the other holodecks on Deck 21 out of commission. So, in the end, the brown-haired Denevan relented and figured that spending her free time on the beach wasn’t the most terrible way to pass the evening.

As such, Jaya was now walking on a wood-panelled path that was leading her down the sand dunes and towards the beautiful beach itself. She had exchanged her standard-issue Starfleet uniform for a yellow bikini that perfectly fit and even accentuated her modest natural curves, along with a semi-transparent cream-coloured wrap-around skirt and an unbuttoned white button-down blouse. Even with her much lighter attire, the scorching hot temperature had engulfed her like a thick blanket and Jaya was already starting to sweat. Through the thick overhead vegetation and the large, overhanging palm-like trees, which provided her with some welcome shade, Jaya’s brown eyes could make out two dual suns high in the sky, and it made her realize that she was most likely on one of Risa’s many tropical beaches.

Despite the scorching temperatures, Jaya nevertheless smirked and began to whistle a soft tune; knowing that not even Thea, in all her overzealousness, would be able to consider her a danger to ship-wide security while she was sunbathing on Risa. 
10
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 03 [ 1330hrs ] Back Channel Operations
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[Ensign Gruzhak | Docking Ring Three, Halkar Anchorage] Attn:  @Krajin , @Hans Applegate , @Eirual , @Nesota Kynnovan  & pertinent writers

The noodle stall on Ring Three fried everything in the same oil, and by the smell of it the oil had been in service since before the ring froze, dark as tea and faintly singed where somebody's hair had come too close to the vat. The noodles tasted of it, salt-heavy, with a sourness underneath that Gruzhak had decided not to ask about, and he had eaten two bowls standing and paid for one, boots braced against what Halkar's builders had meant for a bulkhead and one shoulder propped on what they had meant for a deck, because the stall's only stool was sized for a Yridian and he had no wish to buy the Yridian a new one.

He had been aboard the anchorage since 0900, long enough to learn which merchants on the ring sold what their signs claimed and long enough for the ring to stop looking at him. In truth, the second part took less time than the first. A Nausicaan eating fried things in a corridor was scenery on a station like Halkar, and no one asked what he was waiting for, because on Halkar the answer was usually a fight.

The three women came up the ring a little after 1400 by the station clock, and he had them picked out before they reached the first shop. Everyone walked badly on Ring Three, but the regulars walked badly with the ease of long practice, and these three crossed the doorways in the wide, deliberate steps of people who had spent more time on plating that stayed where it was put. King's message had reached him through a relay three jumps removed from anything Starfleet would admit to owning, and it had said what King's messages always said, in fewer words than a man would need to argue with: a freighter's name, a berth, a manifest, and SEE THEY GET IT. Gruzhak had read the manifest twice over his first bowl. Bioneural gel, EPS relay stock, torpedo casings, exosuit parts. Suffice it to say nobody bought those in that quantity for a hobby, and he had spent the morning pricing all of it along the ring so that whoever Theurgy sent would not have to learn the hard way which dealers were thieves and which were merely greedy.

Inside Moab Medical Supplies, the Bajoran had begun insulting the proprietor's eyesight. Gruzhak listened with some professional sympathy. The Tellarite behind the counter received it with the wounded dignity of a connoisseur served a bad vintage, and he was drawing breath to explain at length how it ought to have been done when a smell came down the ring on the scrubber draft, sour leather and the sweetish ketone breath of men who had not eaten in a while, and behind it two voices he knew, arguing about lettuce.

"Nobody on this station has a salad," Grorgei was saying, in the aggrieved Nausicaan of a man who had checked.

"The Bolian on Ring One grows lettuce."

"In a boot."

"It's a clean boot." Yurdz ducked under a conduit the listing ring had brought down to head height and came out the other side still making his case. "He showed me."

They came down from the spoke with the rolling, impecunious swagger of mercenaries who had nothing left to sell but the swagger. Gruzhak had worked a Boslic escort contract beside them two years back, under a name he had since let lapse, and it had been long enough to learn that Grorgei led with his left, that Yurdz did the thinking for both of them and was more cunning than clever, and that neither had ever once been in on a joke, including the ones they told. Every hired gun on Halkar had heard about the Orion outpost by now. Federation women had walked out of that business with their jobs and their friends intact, and Yurdz and Grorgei had walked out with neither, and the story had traveled a good deal faster than they had.

He watched Yurdz find the three women in the shop and read them the way he had, only quicker, because hunger shortens the road between noticing a thing and deciding what to do about it. Grorgei got there a moment behind and planted himself in the doorway of Moab Medical Supplies with one arm braced along the frame, which on this deck ran sideways above his head, filling it so thoroughly that the corridor light had to go around him. Yurdz stepped past his partner's elbow, reached for the dark haired woman's collar, and hooked one thick finger under the chain of the tag she wore.

"What's this?" He tilted the tag toward the light. "Federation tags its women now? Like cargo?"

Grorgei leaned in from the doorway to look, earnest as a scholar. "Or in case she wanders off. So they know where to send her back."

"Grorgei. I'm doing this."

"I'm helping."

"You're not helping." Grorgei, undeterred, drew a long breath through his teeth and announced that it smelled like Federation in here, clean, like the boot. Behind the counter, the Tellarite abandoned his lecture halfway through a sentence, which from a Tellarite was about as good as a scream, and one of his hands slid under the counter toward whatever he kept there for occasions like this one.

Gruzhak set his bowl on the lip of the stall. He could see how the next ten seconds would go without him: the dark-haired woman reaching for that clean holster, Yurdz breaking her wrist for it, the Tellarite's hand coming up with something worse, and station security arriving afterward to walk the lot of them back up the Folly's ramp. He crossed the corridor along the seam where wall met deck, where the footing was surest and five hours of loitering had taught his knees the angle, and he sent his voice ahead of him in Nausicaan, loud and flat, with the contumely that passed among his father's people for a greeting.

"Yurdz. Who let you off the leash?"

Yurdz let the tag drop and turned. "You."

Grorgei squinted past his partner's shoulder. "Who is it?"

"The Boslic job."

It took Grorgei longer, and Gruzhak watched it arrive on his face by stages until it reached the part that mattered to him. "You ate my eels."

"They were my eels." Gruzhak stopped close enough that Grorgei had to choose between the doorway and his partner, and Grorgei chose his partner. "And these are mine. Paid through the end of the day."

"Nobody posted a claim," Yurdz said.

"I'm posting it."

Grorgei leaned toward Yurdz without troubling to lower his voice. "Can he do that?"

"He's doing it."

Gruzhak kept his gaze on Yurdz and his hands loose at his sides. "Find your own work. Or did the Orions take that off you along with everything else?"

"We don't talk about the Orion outpost," Grorgei said.

"Grorgei."

"We DON'T."

Pride would win with Yurdz, as it generally did, and so Gruzhak gave it a door to walk through that did not open onto three Starfleet officers in bad costumes.

"You want it settled, we settle it on the ore-chute landing up the spoke. Not in here." He tipped his head at the counter. "He'll bill you for every scratch on his merchandise, and you can't pay for a bowl of noodles."

Yurdz considered this with the gravity of a man reviewing a contract. "If we win, you buy the stew."

"And if you lose?"

"Then you buy the stew." Yurdz rolled his neck until it cracked. "You'll have made us hungrier."

Grorgei shoved off the door frame to follow, put his whole weight on the downhill side of the deck, and went sideways into a rack of antique tricorders that came down around him in a long clattering avalanche of cracked casings and loose styluses. He sat up in the wreckage, pointed at the deck with a grave and accusing finger, and informed the room that it had been the floor, and the Tellarite, restored at once to full health and volume, came out from behind his counter to explain that the floor had not been for sale and the tricorders had.

Gruzhak used the noise. He leaned toward the three women, close enough to be heard under the tirade, and let his voice drop into Standard, where twelve years of Federation schooling came out in every consonant no matter how he roughed them up.

"King sends his regards. I'm here to see you get what's on your list." He angled his chin toward the back of the shop. "The gel packs in his back room are sound. Leave the cold case alone, somebody's re-crimped the seals. Stay inside until I'm off this ring, and tell whoever's running you." He straightened before any of them could answer.

Anderson had fostered him at nine years old with no one left to claim him, and in the twenty-odd years since, Gruzhak had never managed to make his Nausicaan as coarse as he wanted it or his Standard as smooth as the Admiral's, so he had made a life in the gap between the two and found it, on the whole, more useful than otherwise. Ahead of him Grorgei limped up the spoke still shedding styluses and still insisting to Yurdz that the station ought to be made to pay, and behind him the Yridian at the noodle stall was shouting that he had eaten two bowls and paid for one, and Gruzhak raised a hand over his shoulder without looking back, which on Halkar counted as a promise, then followed the Nausicaans toward the ore-chute landing, where Grorgei, if two years had taught him nothing, would lead with his left.
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