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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 😜
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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."
3
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.
4
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."
5
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.
6
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. 
7
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.
8
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0800 hrs ] Maybe By Next Tuesday
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Ens. Doran | Docking Ring, Level 7 → Deck 7 | Starbase 234 / USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Hans Applegate @joshs1000 @Eirual  @rae  @Brutus  @RyeTanker  @Dumedion  @Stegro88  @chXinya  @Nesota Kynnovan

Doran came down Level 7 with his duffel on one shoulder and his transfer orders open on a PADD, checking berth numbers against the stencils on the bulkhead. Ahead of him a sled of containment cases, factory seals still blue, slid through her airlock and out of sight, and the dock crew watched it go before a few of them turned to watch him. He kept his eyes on the stencils.

His orders said to report to the officer of the watch on arrival, and nobody on the ring looked likely to know where a watch was being kept aboard a ship that had sat at dock with half her systems cold and most of her crew scattered across a station that wanted her gone.

A crewman in operations gold stood at the panel beside the airlock, where a ring of emitter housings sat flush in the frame without a label on any of them. His eyes went to the crease down the center of Doran's forehead, then to the PADD.

"Replacement?"

"Conn. Ensign Doran." He turned the PADD around. "I'm looking for the officer of the watch."

"Good luck." The crewman tipped his head at the threshold. "Hands clear of your sides, and one at a time."

The field came down over him pale from crown to boot and colder than he'd braced for. The panel sounded once, flat, and Doran stepped onto deck plating scrubbed back to bare metal and turned to ask which way the bridge was.

He got as far as "Which" before he heard boots on the ring, somebody coming at a dead run. The crewman shouted something incomprehensible at no one who was listening. The tone sounded a second time; a human came out of the field at full speed, and Doran's shoulders met the bulkhead hard enough to knock the duffel off and send it skidding across the deck.

A forearm settled across his collarbone. The man pinning him was breathing hard, sweat at his hairline, a stripe of something brown and glossy drying on his sleeve that smelled like station gravy. Doran left his hands where they were, open and flat against the bulkhead.

"Name, rank, and what you are stealing."

"I'm... what?"

"You came in behind the cases. There are assholes afoot trying to steal our ship!"

"I'm n-not stealing anything, I'm reporting. To the ship. Aboard it." It came out higher than Doran wanted, and he pulled a breath past the arm on his chest and brought his voice back down where it belonged. "Ensign Doran, conn. My orders are on the PADD."

"Where is the PADD?"

"Under your foot."

The man looked down. His lips moved as he read it upside down, and then he stepped back so fast that Doran slid a few centimeters down the bulkhead before his boots caught. The man brushed the front of Doran's uniform twice with the flat of his hand, as if a wrinkle there were the real injury.

"Knox. Petty officer second class. Welcome aboard." He said it the way someone might read a greeting off a card. "You are crew now, so you do not let another crew strip the ship. That is the rule." He appeared to consult something internal. "I am fairly sure that is the rule. Help me stop the assholes who are trying to take it apart."

"Which assholes?"

"All of them."

Then he was gone, running forward along the corridor, his voice going on ahead of him. "Hey assholes! Come out! It is a very big ship but I am going to find you anyway!" Halfway down, a door slid open and a crewman in a blue collar leaned out with a medical tricorder in one hand. Knox slowed long enough to look him over. "Are you an asshole?"

"I... no?"

"Good. Go back inside."

The door closed on the crewman's face, and Knox ran on without breaking stride.

Doran collected his duffel. The crewman at the panel was studying his console with the concentration of a man who intended to have seen none of it.

"Is he always like that?"

"Mostly." The crewman keyed something off. "Couple of the station teams went down to Engineering and the science labs about twenty minutes ago. Medical too, I think."

"Did anyone stop them?"

"They had orders," the crewman said, and bent back to his panel before Doran could ask whose.

When the reassignments requests went out just after the president's pardon, Doran had put in for the Theurgy over a survey cutter out of Deep Space 5 and a Nebula running quiet patrol along the Cardassian border, because she was the ship people on every docking ring he knew dropped their voices to talk about. His aunt had heard the news over subspace and told him that Acamarians had spent a hundred years learning which fights to walk away from. He had taken her to mean the old clan business. Standing in the airlock with his collarbone throbbing, on a ship he had been aboard for less than a minute, he started to suspect she had meant something more general.

Boots again. Knox came tearing back past the airlock in the opposite direction, overshot it, and reversed three steps.

"Which way is Engineering?"

Doran looked at the crewman. Without lifting his eyes from the console, the crewman pointed aft.

"Thank you." Knox fixed Doran with a look of complete sincerity. "You are coming."

He was off again, aft this time, and the shouting had started up before he reached the junction. Doran shoved the duffel into the alcove beside the panel, asked the crewman to keep an eye on it, and went after him at a jog that had become a run by the time the corridor bent.
Thanks @Hans Applegate for making this more fun!!!
9
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 02 [ 945 hrs ] Everything's Fine, So Far...
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Specialist Hirek tr'Aimne | Shuttlebay 2 | Deck 15 | Vector 01 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @rae  @RyeTanker  @Pierce  @Dumedion  @ob2lander961 @interested writers!

He heard her before he saw her: bare feet on the deck plate, heel to toe, a stride that held the same length from the far bulkhead all the way to the ramp. There was something off about her smell. He went back over it, looking for skin or breath, and still found nothing, and he had once stood downwind of a Breen whose suit had been breached, and even that had smelled of something.

She keyed the ramp, turned with her hair loose and her free hand making a small flourish in the air, and asked him in Rihan what he would like to be called and what he did. Northern standard, capital vowels, every case ending in its place. He had heard that dialect spoken that perfectly twice in his life, both times by people who had learned it from a recording. She seemed off...and not only from her mannerisms.

He answered in the island dialect, the lilt riding high and the particle dropped where a capital speaker would have kept it. "You have my name on the manifest under your arm. Call me what it says." He watched her face take in the dialect and waited to see whether it gave her any trouble.

The forward doors opened on the rest of them. Lieutenant zh'Eziarath came first, long-limbed and unhurried, antennae canted toward the shuttle. Behind her a chief in security yellow. The woman at his shoulder wore the same yellow. She held a PADD with privacy shrouding clipped along both edges tight against her ribs, and she walked the way the chief walked, which was not how security walked.

Hirek came off the landing strut and gave the Lieutenant the Starfleet nod, then the chief. He looked past both of them to the woman with the PADD, and the lilt went out of his voice entirely. "You're holding that as if it's loaded. The people on Romulus who notice that are exactly the ones you'd rather didn't. Let it hang from one hand and look bored by it." He lifted his own bag by the strap to show her, dangling off two fingers, and set it down again.

When the Lieutenant gave the order to board, he let the security crewmen go up ahead of him and the strange woman after them, and took a last look down the length of the bay before he followed: the scored deck, a repair cart abandoned by the aft doors with a coolant line still dripping into a bucket beneath it.

The cabin air tasted of new sealant and filter charcoal, a refit finished last night by people who had wanted to be asleep. He took the seat nearest the hatch, facing aft, the bag between his boots, which put the whole cabin in front of him and the door at his shoulder.

They cleared the bay on thrusters. Through the port he watched the Theurgy fall away beneath them and counted the dark sections along her hull, long runs of scorched plating with repair drones working slowly across them, the starbase hanging beyond her in its own lights. He had left his Infested notes locked to Dunne's access before he packed, with a note that would make sense to her if he didn't come back and read as fussiness if he did.

The cockpit partition stood open. Traffic Control cleared them to the outbound lane in the tone of a man who had been shouted over twice already this morning. A woman's drawl wanted to know whose ass they were meeting out here, and a second voice cut across hers with the escort check-in, Wolf 4 on station, port quarter. Talia. Hirek's hands stopped on the strap of his bag. He looked at the deck between his boots until the two fighters slid into the viewport off the port side, and then he looked at them instead, the nearer one holding so close and so level that its partner seemed to wander by comparison.

The pilot brought the corridor up on the board, the provisional lane the Coalition had opened through space that had been Romulan for as long as there had been maps of it. When the viewport went to streaks, he let out a breath he hadn't noticed holding and put it down to the dampers, which were lagging on every course change by a fraction he could feel in his inner ear.

He bent to the bag, pulled out a flat bottle of green glass bound in waxed cord, and worked the stopper free with his thumb. The smell rose into the cabin and pushed back the sealant: kelp smoke, and under it the fig he had spent three summers trying to bring forward in the blend. He poured a measure into the cap and held it across the aisle to Vanya.

"I'd like to hear what you make of it." He kept his arm out, the cap full to the lip and steady against the dampers' lag. "There are hours yet to the border, and I've nothing else aboard to quench my thirst."

[ Crewman Marcus Tucker | Shuttle | En route to Romulus ]

Six hours out, the cabin had settled into the shape it would hold until they landed. Tucker had the aft bench on the starboard side, which put the hatch at his left shoulder and the cockpit partition dead ahead, with everybody else strung between the two where he could see them. His watch had ended forty minutes ago. He'd eaten a tray of replicated chicken and rice standing up by the food slot, the rice gone gummy where it had sat against the heating plate, and the salt was still at the back of his throat. Nobody had turned the cabin lights down.

Forward, on the port bench nearest the partition, the envoy sat with his two aides, and Lieutenant zh'Eziarath sat across from them; the four of them leaned in close enough that the warp hum swallowed whatever they were saying. The envoy wore civilian clothes with a good hang to them. In six hours he had not once looked aft. His aides passed PADDs between themselves and the Lieutenant, and once the younger of the two glanced back toward the security bench, met Tucker's eyes, and found something to read.

Being the youngest of five had taught Tucker that the question you didn't ask got asked eventually by somebody else, louder, at a worse time. Lewis would have asked it three hours ago. He leaned toward the crewman beside him and kept his voice under the hum.

"Anybody tell you what this guy sells?" The crewman shrugged without opening his eyes. "Merchant envoy. That's what it said on the order. So what's he sell?" Tucker rubbed his thumb along the seam of his holster. "Like, is it replicators, is it dilithium, is it—I don't know. Carpet."

"Access." The Romulan by the hatch hadn't looked up. He had the green bottle stoppered on his knee and was turning it slowly by the neck. "An ambassador is a flag planted on the Senate floor. A merchant is a man with something to sell, and a senator can tell his people he's only listening to an offer."

Tucker looked at him a while. He jerked his chin at the forward bench. "One guy, though. One guy and two assistants, to a whole new government. Back home you'd send more people than that to fix a transporter."

"Two would be a delegation." The bottle stopped turning. "A delegation expects an answer. One man can be ignored, and they need to be allowed to ignore him for a while, until they've decided they won't."

"And what are we walking into down there? Like, actually."

The Romulan looked at him then, straight on, and the song went out of his voice. "If I knew that, I'd be asleep." He went back to the bottle.

Since Azurite Station, Tucker had looked at faces longer than was polite. He looked at the envoy's back now, the careful set of the shoulders, the head that never turned, and then he pushed off the bench and went forward as far as the Chief, dropping into a crouch beside him so the question wouldn't carry to the port side.

"Chief. We getting a name on the principal before we land, or am I guarding the back of a guy's head the whole trip?"
10
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 02 [0815 hrs] We're Good, For Now
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[Ens. Torqh, son of Lorq | Ketha Market District, en route to Landing Field Nine | First City | Qo'noS] Attn: @Brutus   @Stegro88   @Hans Applegate   @any other writers interested!

The market district stank of charred targ fat and the wet-iron tang of rain still held in the low clouds, and Torqh breathed it in gladly after a morning in the embassy's filtered corridors, where the air smelled of nothing and the carpets deadened every footstep. The third one found him fifty meters past the point where the embassy's pale paving gave way to Klingon stone, black and slick and worn into shallow troughs by a thousand years of boots.

"Ensign. Ensign Torqh."

He heard the boots first, Starfleet soles slapping wet stone at the hurried clip of a man who wished to be seen hurrying, and he let his stride fall off by half so that he would be caught in the open lane rather than chased through the stalls. Lieutenant Commander Prewitt drew alongside with his breath coming short in the heavy air, gold at his shoulder and a PADD pressed flat to his chest the way a man holds something he expects to have taken from him.

"The ambassador's office said you'd gone."

"I had."

"I've been named liaison to the observer contingent. Command wants a Fleet presence with the Theurgy party from the moment they set down, and I—" He held out the PADD. "My authorization."

Torqh read it without taking it. The signature belonged to a captain whose name meant nothing to him, and the word LIAISON appeared four times in six lines, which struck him as more insistence than any honest order required.

"You are authorized to liaise with the delegation," he said. "They will be at the embassy by the evening meal. Liaise with them there."

"It'd be more efficient to meet them on the ground."

"More efficient for whom?"

Prewitt smiled with his mouth and left his eyes out of it. "For everyone, Ensign. That crew's been a long time outside proper oversight. Some of them are going to have trouble readjusting, and it helps to have somebody on hand who knows how things are—"

"Which ship, Commander?"

"—done. Excuse me?"

"Before this posting."

Torqh stopped in the middle of the lane. He stood half a head taller than Prewitt, and the commander had to tip his chin up to hold his gaze, blinking against the first fine needles of rain.

"The Hollis," Prewitt said. "Why?"

Torqh had read the pursuit rosters the week they reached the embassy, twice for the names on them and once more for the names that had been scrubbed, since four years among the Houses had taught him that a list is most honest in what it leaves out. The Hollis had flown with the pursuit group last spring, three lines below the Aldrin, when Prewitt had worn one pip fewer on his collar.

"The Hollis flew with the task force."

Prewitt's jaw worked once. "We followed orders."

"I have said nothing about your orders." Torqh resumed walking and left the commander to decide whether to follow. "The ambassador's instruction is that I meet the delegation alone and escort them for the length of their stay. If you want that instruction changed, the ambassador keeps audience after the midday meal."

"You're an ENSIGN."

"I am. You are a lieutenant commander standing without escort in the Ketha market, asking a Klingon to set aside his ambassador's word in front of a bloodwine merchant who understands a good deal more Standard than he admits to." Torqh tipped his head toward the stall on their left, where a one-eared old warrior raised a clay mug to them both and drank without moving his rheumy stare from Prewitt's face. "Every House on this street will have heard of it before you reach the embassy gate."

Prewitt looked at the merchant, and then at Torqh, and tucked the PADD beneath his arm. "This goes in my report."

"Torqh is spelled with an H."

The footsteps retreated behind him, uneven now on the slick stone.

The first two had been more mannerly than Prewitt and every bit as importunate. A counselor off the Aldrin had turned up at his office before dawn wanting to "assess reintegration readiness" before the crew had so much as cleared their own landing ramp. An aide from the JAG annex had asked him twice for the delegation's manifest in advance of arrival, rephrasing the second time as though the fault lay in her grammar. All three had wanted names. Torqh had spent more hours than he liked to remember in the anterooms of the Great Hall, and he had learned there that a man who asks who is coming before he asks why has usually settled on what he means to do with the answer. Behind any of those three sets of eyes there might sit one of the things Theurgy had spent two years hunting, and he had no instrument on this planet that would tell him which. But Theurgy's people had been screened for the parasites.

The commissary screens ran the Federation News Service on a loop above the steam of the raktajino urns. For the better part of a year the story had been a stolen prototype crewed by mutineers, told in the calm, well-lit voices the anchors kept for casualty figures, until President Bacco spoke and the same anchors executed a volte-face overnight with no visible embarrassment. Torqh had watched both versions over the rim of his mug and could not make either of them fit the people he had met, even if briefly.

Landing Field Nine smelled of scorched ferrocrete and old coolant. It was a flat grey slab on the eastern edge of the city, ringed with cargo haulers and a handful of Defense Force guards, who looked over the purple on his collar with the boredom soldiers keep for anyone who fights with words and waved him through without troubling to scan his credentials. He walked to the center of the field and waited with his hands clasped at the small of his back while the rain thickened.

The shuttle broke through the cloud ceiling a few minutes later, running lights smearing red across the overcast, and came down in a howl of thrusters that flattened the puddles into spray. Torqh was still squaring his shoulders when the downwash drove a sheet of grit and cold water across the field and into his open mouth, and he spent the next several seconds bent at the waist, spitting ferrocrete onto his boots and swearing, Qu'vatlh first and then something coarser in Standard, while the hatch cycled.

By the time the ramp lowered, he had wiped his mouth on the back of his glove and arranged his face into something fit for an embassy, and he stepped forward through the thinning dust to incline his head to the first person he recognized.

"Ensign Eloi-Danvers. Welcome back to Qo'noS." He glanced once toward the embassy spires, dim with rain on the skyline, and then back at her. "Before we go anywhere, you should know that three officers have tried to attach themselves to this escort since dawn. And I'm not entirely certain they were acting in good faith. Do you have a means of scanning individuals for potential infestation with you? We may need it."
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