Battlestar Galactica x Star Trek XI fic: Rising Sign (pt. 7/8)
Title: Rising Sign
(7/8)
Characters/Pairings: Starbuck, Kirk, McCoy, Spock. (Kirk/)Kara/McCoy.
Rating: R for language.
Spoilers for Trek XI and BSG up through "Maelstrom," lots of references to the entire series.
Summary: Loosely in response to this prompt at st_xi_kink. In short: "When Kara Thrace flies through the wormhole near the end of Season Three, she finds Earth-- but not the Earth that Galactica's been searching for. Instead she finds herself hailed by a ship calling itself the USS Enterprise."
...Part One...Part Two...Part Three...Part Four... Part Five... Part Six...
It was perfectly possible, if you knew the astronomical layout, to plot courses the "old-fashioned way." Finding somebody who could do it, she'd assumed, was going to be the biggest hang-up in getting her off the ship. In part of the onrush Chekov had, in his twitching earnest mannerisms, rushed up to give one of the engineers the data chip which had the course laid out for her only ten minutes after Kirk had more or less given her mission the get-go. She'd demanded, "Wait...Who did those?"
Somehow, though it might have been a logical assumption, it had managed to escape her attention that the 19-year-old who'd been coyly stealing spoonfuls of her pashka for many weeks, supposedly, was some kind of frakking genius.
He'd better be, was all she was thinking as she commanded the Bird, in a way that felt very blind just from the short experience of practicing on test rides, to plot the course from scratch. It was a big override song and dance to deal with the computers when the default sensors weren't picking up anything, so most of it had been set up for her under preset voice commands.
The coordinates actually weren't that far away, and she needed a pretty low speed once she actually spotted them, so she was cruising in as fast as the vessel could go on pilot mode until she saw anything, which she'd been told could take anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. Space was a stifling, velvety quiet, not calming like it was when she had somebody to talk to. She initially hadn't known how she felt about her new viper being a two-seater but she'd really warmed up to the design, especially after the memorable ride she'd given Kirk; out in space with just the two of them away from the crew, they'd descended into the lowest gleeful throes of immaturity that reminded her of the lewder jokes the old pilots used to throw. She'd offered McCoy a joy ride a couple times, but he was always put off of the idea for some reason or another, using the excuse that it wasn't his job.
She tried to avoid that feeling that was tangling tighter somewhere around her esophagus, but in the dryness of her boredom, dwelled on it enough to innerly remark that she was a little disappointed in herself. She was usually better at this shit. Apparently she'd gone extremely out of practice, no longer used to the lingering possibility of death breathing down her neck all the time. Not death, really, but the whole...leaving part.
She didn't get it, was the thing. It just seemed like if things were meant to work out for her on what just happened to be the first slick-ass ship she ran into when she came out here, things would work out. She'd just not really had the time lately to even ask herself what she believed in anymore, but whether there was anything providential in the fact that her heart was still beating was even less relevant than it had been to her before. Somehow she'd stopped paying attention to any of that anyway.
She was already getting her hands too wet. After she'd landed in it had all started pretty fast; everybody had started talking at once, being nice, and she hadn't even thought about it, and there was no excuse now for the fact that she owed Scotty a beer and a game of backgammon for every time she called his ship an "it" and had a bet going with herself on whether she'd ever be able to make Spock laugh with his eyes the way the captain could do, that she'd made the kind of friend who doesn't throw out your toothbrush even though he knows you aren't coming over for that anymore; that there was a person who at some point had woken some impatiently scolding voice in her head that went Absolutely not, gods dammit, whatever you do. Do NOT sleep with him. It was all bad news, cause if she wasn't going to make officer she had to do something else, and it had been easier to throw that out in the midst of an argument with Kirk over something bigger than herself, because the very idea of leaving really was, quite pathetically, almost making her sick.
Bad, bad news.
Kara blinked, leaned forward: A ship in the distance. No, two ships, no...three.
With a sinking slow sigh, Kara squinted, making out one ship she was pretty sure fit the layout of the schematic image Gaila had decoded; the other ships were a murky dark grey against the background, matching smaller vessels that looked like they probably supported not much more capacity than the Orion vessel, which was situated between the others in a way that seemed to confirm this probably was a hostage take-up.
Kara's reaction was delayed; once she realized this was definitely it, she mumbled, "Dammit." Things were a lot more complicated with two enemy vessels if she wanted any hope of destroying their subspace toys.
She shook her head in disappointment, having known she would've been pretty damn lucky to be able to clear up the disruptions but unable to help the current frustration of figuring what she should do now. She had already started yielding and let the bird come to a hovering stop; as she did this, it was easier to note that the vessels were coming as a group slightly in her direction, slowly enough to confirm they weren't able to move any faster than the Enterprise. She checked the screen's functioning systems to see if anything had changed, confirming that the ship still couldn't map anything; tilting her vessel, she quickly acted on the hope that being outside of their communications bubble-presuming they were right about that-meant that they couldn't pick up on her presence yet. They were moving closer, and she planned as they passed to start moving parallel and far enough to be obscured, take a minute to figure out what her next step should be.
They were close enough to seem quite a bit faster now; Kara hitched her little vessel back a little, turning, waiting. She checked the systems again as they came sliding by, seeing no change, giving the slight thrust to start moving with the ships, syncing far out over the starboard shoulder of one of the darker vessels and just praying the size of the barrier was constant.
But this was no help. The offending ships looked like no model or diagram she'd ever seen before; on top of that, the cylindrical structure was all too sleek, far from looking like the somewhat basic and predictable layout of Starfleet vessels. For one thing, there was no indication of any kind of where the bridge would be; Kudos, guys, she thought dryly. She couldn't begin to guess where the warp core might be, but it was probably even more efficiently enclosed than Enterprise's...
This was frakked. New plan: Get into the bubble. If they attack watch how they move and try to observe what needs to be protected. If not go for cover and see if systems can help identify vessel. If not start shooting and see how they move. Or she could just get the hell out of here and not do anything.
She took a moment. She thought about the Enterprise trying to take on two vessels, possibly, maybe, with the aid of the hostage vessel, if they were capable of controlling their own ship. Possibly. She thought about the probability that the baddies were cowards and might not actually fire. And the possibility that they were the kinds of cowards that always fired. And the fact that they undoubtedly were coming either way, in no small part because of her.
The moment was over. She gripped the stick, readied her instincts; swerved.
She tore out, heading straight for the gap between the nearest vessel and the mud-red ship with a gigantic bat-like shape. She bit her lip hard, gracefully tucking the bird down and doing a couple spins to ease the speed of her sidling and lightly thrusting until she was under the ship; she flipped upside quickly, then slowed, slowed...She managed to land on the bottom side of one of the Orions' massive wings with a slow bop.
She instinctively paused, counted to ten. She even counted longer. Nothing had happened.
"Okay, okay, okay..." She muttered through her jumpy anxiety, dragging her tongue over her teeth as she noticed all the blinking and ticking on of different indicators on her data screen. She wasn't used to talking to computers still, but in the rush it all felt pretty user-friendly. "Computer, identify contacts."
She'd had it rigged for text-only responses: ORION VESSEL: HIRYA CLASS. The screen mapped out a visual outline of all the ships; the colors blinked a couple pulses around the mystery vessels...
"Come on, come on..."
2 UNKNOWN VESSELS: ANTI-MATTER POWER SOURCE DETECTED. ESTIMATED CAPACITIES: 200-300.
She waited to see if any more information came up. "Display unknown vessels' projected interior?" she commanded uncertainly.
UNABLE TO COMPLY. Okay. Shit.
Okay. She couldn't just start firing on them without any chance at negotiation, but she was obviously far from anything they would see as a threat. Unless she could manage to convince them...If she just fired a couple shots over their noses...
"Computer," she demanded nervously. "Open messaging system..."
Before she'd even finished, though, something blipped onto the screen:
RECEIVING MESSAGE...
Kara froze. A box came up on the screen, and a line of text appeared in an unfamiliar language before the letters scrambled and conjoined their pixels again, the computer translating to standard.
c#29915: hiding?
Her mouth fell open just a little; she still didn't move. Should she...What-
c#29915: friendly. if i was [:untranslatable:] Prenyd you'd be captured or worse
Kara didn't have time to react any more solidly before another message came through:
c#29915: don't know what you're doing but you should leave. lucky they haven't detected you. if they find out i saw you and didn't say anything...
Kara became decisive then. Her instincts were to question, to mistrust, but...
She said, "I'm here to help you." The words came spilling into lines automatically on the screen. "I'm not Starfleet, but I'm with Starfleet. We got a distress call from somebody on your ship. My vessel is armed. More help on the way. Send."
The system complied. She expected a moment, but was a little surprised by the apparent hesitation. She had a strange instinctive feeling that she was talking to somebody who was quick on their thoughts, a good planner.
c#29915: how much help?
"One vessel. Send."
Another hesitation.
c#29915: if you intend to aid them by partly disarming them should start with our vessel
Kara scoffed in her confusion. "Uh..."
c#29915: our leader too fearful of Prenyd to encode distress call but somebody disobeyed. when he found out he was paranoid that they would discover it and confessed
Kara squinted, but was interrupted by another couple lines before she could ask for an explanation.
c#29915: 12 of us have been murdered already on suspicion of conspiracy. he was hoping that a gesture of compliance would spare him. he and a few others have offered to assist attacking anyone who comes to aid the captured. we are now prisoners of our own leader as well as them
"Son of a bitch," Kara muttered, then, "Delete that. You should know I probably have two or three minutes before they catch up. Is there any way you know of to help stop the subspace distortions?"
She was shocked by the answer: c#29915: Yes. Stolen device, interferes with their engine. They put it on our ship. Heavily guarded. In case of distraction, someone else may try to destroy it
"I could help you with that distraction. Send."
c#29915: in the case of their defenses failing, that would take priority and they may even abandon the disruptor
"Where do I hit you? Send."
c#29915: bridge. back-up controls are compromised by the disruptor
It wasn't exactly a surprising answer. But it wasn't what she wanted to hear. She blinked, and what came out next surprised her: "What is your name. Send."
c#29915: parnev
"You can call me Starbuck," she replied. "Seeing as we're acquainted now...am I about to kill you? Send."
She was surprised by the hesitance.
c#29915: i would rather be dead than enslaved. it is likely that if i survive i will be forced to take part in attacking you anyway
"No," she muttered, a knee-jerk reaction. She egged herself on with more mumbles: "No. No, that isn't it. What is it. Come on. Come on...Ugh. Jim, I could use one of your plan C's right now..." Then, she sat up.
"Report me. Fake loyalty, or cowardice, whatever you need to do. Warn everyone to get out. Be very, very urgent, or they might make you stay. Now, send."
A short moment...
c#29915: no. your safety would be extremely compromised.
"I could still do some damage," she shot back. "I'm working up an escape course right now, do it, good luck, send."
She started getting to work, optimistically assuming she wouldn't hear back, snapping, "Computer, can you plot a course at warp speed?"
NEGATIVE. SUBSPACE DATA INCOMPLETE AT THIS TIME.
She was already shifting her ship right-side-back-up, letting it float over and up around the edge of the ship's wing, only vaguely registering at the back of her mind that that was pretty bad news. "Arms clutch," she commanded: the stick handle clicked open its upper compartment to reveal her armament controls, and she grappled the stick in familiar preparation. It only took a second for her to close her eyes, take in and let out a big breath.
Then she booted out, shooting quick along the side of the rusty-looking hull, watching the metal squares nailed together whip into a blur a handful of feet below her.
"Go, go, go. Okay. Be empty. Be empty, please..."
She'd noticed before that the bridge window was tinted from the outside and knew she wouldn't be able to tell if she was killing anybody until she started shooting. With her entire body wincing in protest, she blew around so that she was facing it stilled, and fired a line off. Once, twice, again.
The glass finally started to crack and well, no bodies were flying out. Four five six times, moving the bird along the broad length of the window; beyond it, sparks were flying, consoles blowing. Then the computer politely notified her she had incoming.
She ducked, shooting under towards one of the wings, then looping over it, evaluating her next movement with a brisk check at which ship had fired just as the blast went under and licked just the corner of the Orions' tail. Righty fired, head for lefty: She shot a hard thrust and sped towards what she estimated was the opposite end of where the photon blast had been shot from the twin ship. She didn't stop moving when she got to the end of the vaguely bullet-shaped vessel, just started stenciling a rapid spiral around it to evade fire from the other ship, around and around, about eleven seconds per trip, godsdammit, she sure as hell couldn't keep this up, they had to be able to-
"-GAGH!" Kara yelped, haulting short as a lethal flash of red-white shot up just in front of her from one of the hull's bubble-like extensions. She noticed with a side glance that the other ship wasn't pursuing her, it was headed to the hostage vessel, maybe it was about to dock somebody, maybe it thought just one could take her on...
Yeah, well, one could. And she realized she was surrounded by the big iron bubbles under her just in time to flip into some escape speed as two of them fired; her heart leapt in dread when she saw her nose go flamy-white, but then it just blackened at the very tip. She kicked into speed, seeing flashes behind and around her, adrenaline surging through her as she went into barrel roll after barrel roll and just tried to go faster and frakking prayed...
Then as she murkily noticed it her mind screamed, SOMETHING IS BLINKING ON THE CONSOLE, and the computer notified her, "Subspace calculations operational. You may specify-"
"GET ME THE FRAK OUT OF HERE."
"Unable to comply-"
"SHIT SHIT SHIT FRAKKING FUCK, DON'T WANNA DIE DON'T WANNA DIE-GO TO WARP!"
"Parameters must be specified."
Somehow she managed to look at the screen, notice all the coordinates that had popped up with little symbols on her map.
"WARP SIX, UM, UM-"
Her mind was blanking; and then a torpedo blast was detected, coming up on her tail-
"PRESET COORDINATE ALPHA ONE." She remembered how it went on the bridge, could distinctly imagine Kirk commanding, 'Punch it.' And of course, she remembered now, because Scotty had that kind of sense of humor, that it was a big red button.
She reached to the far right where it was on the console and slammed her palm on it; there was a mechanical booting-up, a fractional hesitation just long enough for her to see that the blast was going to kill her, and she was wailing slightly when it felt like a gigantic force took its gargantuan fingers and just flicked her through the cosmos, and then her voice roared, in absolute glee.
"-WHOOOOOOOO HAHAAAAAAAAH! YEAH, THAT'S IT, YES!!! GODS DAMMIT, I love this baby, fuck, Scotty, THANK YOU....Whooo!"
The sight was an irregularly blurred sight of stars, some seeming to approach and move faster than others, and space seemed so very huge like this and damn, it was beautiful. When the Firebird reached a stable speed the seat automatically went into passenger mode, and she was still giving little giddy motions as it moved to elevate her out of the slight crouching position, even providing side surfaces that worked as armrests.
Kara leaned back a moment to catch her breath, closing her eyes for a minute, which felt weird to be able to do in a moving combat vessel. She relaxed over the sight outside for a second before saying, "Okay, slow down, it's not like we need to be anywhere. Warp two."
A slight clicking whirr sounded as the vessel began its slow process of decreasing speed.
"Vessel approaching warp 2 speed," the computer serenely intoned. "New calculated time of arrival is in approximately thirty-four hours and sixteen minutes."
Kara lowered her brows then, having forgotten that she'd set an actual destination besides the rendezvous point she wasn't supposed to head back to for at least an hour.
"Uh...Where do you think you're going?"
"Selected destination is planet catalogued under coordinates labeled Alpha 1; Starfleet designation: Sol III in Sector 001. Local designation: Earth."
.
.
.
.
When subspace technologies had started whirring back to life less than two hours after Kara had taken off, several people on the bridge had cheered, partly out of optimistically thinking it was because of her. Then they'd gotten the urgent message from only a few parsecs away, an explanation of the hostage and alliance situation and the general headache they wouldn't have been able to figure out nearly as easily had there not been communications. Like the fact that the vessel taken hostage strategically had been given most of the weapons in the hands of allied Orions, none of which they were currently able to use, because their bridge had been fired on at a close enough range to totally blow the place.
Jim didn't get how she'd done it, but he didn't think he'd ever wanted more to see the woman in a fleet uniform as fast as fucking possible, that is, once he got through boarding with plenty of back-up, holding up and disarming and reporting all the criminal behavior and then eventually shaking some hands once his crew figured out who the cowards and traitors weren't. Contrary to what people might assume about his reasons for loving his job, playing cop was really not his favorite part of keeping order throughout the galaxy. It usually started out fun and then just got tedious, teaching him that there were only so many times in one day he could shrug off somebody's bullshit with cocky authority; after a while it was just sighs, tapping back onto the communicator to report another name.
Still, the Prenyd were something new, and definitely interesting. They looked pretty human but with a sand-like bumpy skin, and from what they could tell from this bunch, they'd been making a living off of a parasitic approach to piracy for a long time, concocting various ways to smuggle themselves throughout the region on other people's ships without being openly detected. It wasn't until they'd gotten their hands on the disruptors (apparently Romulan devices that some elusive third party had tinkered with and then sold and were completely unique, which Kirk got some immense excitement out of confiscating into the possession of his security division) that this particular group had even bothered attaining their own vessels, and he couldn't wait to hear about what they'd been doing before that, but for now it was still the boring part.
Through all the mess of directing people here and there, some of whom got their last hoorahs out of simply being as uncooperative as possible, he eventually had the thought that Kara could probably do the cut and shove of it with more finesse, and it was the first moment he'd had to think about her in the last hour or so. It was still a good thirty minutes before there were enough officers with a handle on the situation for him to beam back to Enterprise and get to the bridge.
"How are we holding up?" Jim muttered one of his routine greetings. When he directly addressed Chekov, the navigator finally told him along with a few of the essential technical statuses that actually, they hadn't heard anything from Starbuck.
He'd been half assuming this entire time that he'd simply been too busy to hear directly about it when she showed up, figured that she'd be accepting some pats on the back and then heading directly to a pillow as soon as somebody had given her docking clearance. He didn't really know.
After a perplexed moment of troubled contemplation, he said, "Chekov, were you monitoring the system when we first came out of warp?"
"Yes, sir. Uh..." There was a 'well, kind of' in Chekov's uneasy shrug then, and Kirk knew what it meant. Of course he'd been monitoring everything, but it had been some immediate chaos as soon as they'd shown up, and looking out for a small speck of a Viper pilot shouldn't have been at the top of his priorities anyway. "I hafe been scanning for any signs of a damaged wessel, sir."
"Nothing?"
Chekov shook his head. It was only a slight relief; they had no solid reason yet to assume she was a goner, but where they were was just inching off the coordinate range of their rendezvous point, she should've been able to find them by now...
Kirk's mind was wickedly visiting ways in which she might have made it far out of the general area before her ship failed. One of the first things he'd said to her in the pod bay before she took off: "Even if we had time to set you up with a life signs frequency it wouldn't work right now anyway, so-just-"
He'd wanted to just say, 'Don't die, okay?'
"Spock has already sent out a search party of two pods." This slip of information came from Rand, who was making a round on the bridge. Kirk was always confused but grateful with her tendency to be able to inform him of things just minutes away from it becoming a case of 'Why the hell didn't anybody tell me this?' He smiled faintly at his first officer's confidence in the fact that he hadn't needed to bother the captain for authorization before acting on the problem.
Kirk got on the comm to talk to Lieutenant Giotto on the other ship, "Status report, commander?"
"Captain, hi, we think we've managed to figure out who was in command of the perpetrators. We're ready to move some of these people into our brig so that interrogations can start..."
Jim nodded. "Good. Listen, your biggest concern is finding out what they've been doing for the past few months or so. I wanna know what other damage they've done and if it's anything we can still clean up. Also..." He sighed. "See if you could find out any details about Thrace? If any of them were responsible for what happened to her after she attacked?..."
"Understood, sir."
A bit over an hour later, Jim felt overwhelmed and idle at once, instinctively heading down to sick bay after he heard that McCoy had returned from the Orion ship with some people to heal. He had three Orion patients, two male and one female all lying on three straight beds. Only one of them, a man, looked to be in very bad shape. Kirk gave his obligatory captainly greeting to the two others while Bones was tending to him and what looked to be a nasty stab wound. Shortly after Jim got there Uhura came in, looking like she was back from running to check on something and went straight for the female patient already explaining something to her in her own language; Jim got the idea Bones had randomly flagged her down to come help him communicate with the patients. He could only cock an impressed eyebrow at her rattling off something that seemed difficult to explain gently, occasionally worrying a hand over her brow when she forgot a word or two. When the woman finally gave some single questioning word, Uhura gave a nervous laugh and some affirmative statement, and they were speaking more conversationally from that point.
When he was satisfied he wasn't interrupting anything, Jim crossed his arms and came up next to McCoy where he was entering vitals at the foot of the man's bed, still occasionally attempting to respond to the mutters of his patient, who seemed pretty distraught and was stammering some very broken standard.
"Is he...?"
"He's alright, he's stressed out. When Uhura gets a chance she'll set him straight, I just don't know what to tell him, he doesn't understand..."
After another moment Jim's eyes went to Bones, a little searching. Mostly ignoring him, the captain's friend just sighed and muttered, "Whatever that look is you came in here with, I don't think I can deal with it right now."
"What is there to say?...She's not here."
He heard a quick exhale of breath; McCoy was about to say something, but they both turned when the male patient started speaking up again, insistently stuttering, "B'lenn kij...b'lenn, live?..."
Jim tilted his head to the right. "Should we just...?"
"Blui soit...b'lenn. 'Starbeck' krihsa-"
Two heads whipped forward. Jim prompted, "Starbuck...?"
"Vei-yes-Starbuck-"
"Uhura!"
She responded to the insistence with an apologetic word to the woman, came quickly over, sat down and kindly introduced herself to the man before looking at Jim or Bones. They didn't have to explain anything because the Orion started talking on his own accord; the captain and McCoy heard the slightly mispronounced call sign again in his rushed words. Uhura had her brows lowered in concentration, put up a hand to pause him, then started to translate. "Okay: 'I talked to a fighter calling himself 'Starbuck' and I'd like to know if he's alive'..."
"He?"
Uhura shrugged.
Looking at the Orion man, he interrupted, "No, no, Starbuck's a woman...Are you sure-?"
Uhura was already running off another question; he looked a bit startled before he responded. " 'We only communicated on a private channel, and quickly, we only had so much time before the Prenyd systems picked up on her vessel.'"
"Do you know what-?" Jim didn't get out all of his question before the man interrupted, getting out so much of his explanation at once that Uhura just patiently waited for him to come to a stop. When he did, she hesitated, processing it herself before explaining.
"When he first saw her, he intended just to warn her, tell her to leave before she was seen, but she promised him more help was coming and he explained about the alliance and-"
"He-He told her? To hit his own bridge?" Jim was moving around Bones to position himself closer to the man, a kind of reflexive reaction to a sudden realization of admiration.
"Yes, but that's not..." Uhura hesitated again. "He says it's his fault if she got hurt, and I haven't..."
She quickly worded a couple more questions, and the others waited in confusion before she sat up a bit straighter in a dawning understanding.
"Oh," she said. "She asked him to warn the others that they were about to be attacked and get the bridge cleared..."
The realization settled into all of them before she finished.
"She gave up her window of escape to save a handful of their crew?" Kirk said it with a tense, brittle sound in his voice, the whole thing not quite sinking in even though the facts of it made complete sense.
As if he had already decided as much, McCoy was only heard muttering a defeated, "Of course she did."
"Get his name?" Jim requested.
"He said already. It's Parnev," Uhura explained. Parnev was eager to explain even more, and she listened patiently, eventually interpreting to Kirk: "He's almost positive that she would've been fired at by the secondary ship, the one that's on our port right now. You might start with them if you think they'll give you any information."
Jim nodded gratefully at Parnev and said, "Thank you."
"...Wel-come," he replied uncertainly.
A moment after Jim returned to McCoy's side, the doctor asked, "What are you gonna do?"
"I don't think we can really coerce them into giving us any information any time soon, not unless it's supplemental to what I've got Giotto trying to harp out of them." Jim shook his head tiredly. "Reliant should be here soon and when they get here we need to head to the rendezvous point. If we get anything else on Kara from them, it'll be after time already tells."
Jim was a bit jumpy, already starting off to leave med bay; he was cut back by Bones saying, "Jim."
He turned and waited.
McCoy hesitated like he wasn't quite sure what he was about to say. He finally asked, "How long are we gonna wait?"
The captain gave a hollow shrug. "As long as we told her we would."
... Part Eight...
(7/8)
Characters/Pairings: Starbuck, Kirk, McCoy, Spock. (Kirk/)Kara/McCoy.
Rating: R for language.
Spoilers for Trek XI and BSG up through "Maelstrom," lots of references to the entire series.
Summary: Loosely in response to this prompt at st_xi_kink. In short: "When Kara Thrace flies through the wormhole near the end of Season Three, she finds Earth-- but not the Earth that Galactica's been searching for. Instead she finds herself hailed by a ship calling itself the USS Enterprise."
...Part One...Part Two...Part Three...Part Four... Part Five... Part Six...
It was perfectly possible, if you knew the astronomical layout, to plot courses the "old-fashioned way." Finding somebody who could do it, she'd assumed, was going to be the biggest hang-up in getting her off the ship. In part of the onrush Chekov had, in his twitching earnest mannerisms, rushed up to give one of the engineers the data chip which had the course laid out for her only ten minutes after Kirk had more or less given her mission the get-go. She'd demanded, "Wait...Who did those?"
Somehow, though it might have been a logical assumption, it had managed to escape her attention that the 19-year-old who'd been coyly stealing spoonfuls of her pashka for many weeks, supposedly, was some kind of frakking genius.
He'd better be, was all she was thinking as she commanded the Bird, in a way that felt very blind just from the short experience of practicing on test rides, to plot the course from scratch. It was a big override song and dance to deal with the computers when the default sensors weren't picking up anything, so most of it had been set up for her under preset voice commands.
The coordinates actually weren't that far away, and she needed a pretty low speed once she actually spotted them, so she was cruising in as fast as the vessel could go on pilot mode until she saw anything, which she'd been told could take anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. Space was a stifling, velvety quiet, not calming like it was when she had somebody to talk to. She initially hadn't known how she felt about her new viper being a two-seater but she'd really warmed up to the design, especially after the memorable ride she'd given Kirk; out in space with just the two of them away from the crew, they'd descended into the lowest gleeful throes of immaturity that reminded her of the lewder jokes the old pilots used to throw. She'd offered McCoy a joy ride a couple times, but he was always put off of the idea for some reason or another, using the excuse that it wasn't his job.
She tried to avoid that feeling that was tangling tighter somewhere around her esophagus, but in the dryness of her boredom, dwelled on it enough to innerly remark that she was a little disappointed in herself. She was usually better at this shit. Apparently she'd gone extremely out of practice, no longer used to the lingering possibility of death breathing down her neck all the time. Not death, really, but the whole...leaving part.
She didn't get it, was the thing. It just seemed like if things were meant to work out for her on what just happened to be the first slick-ass ship she ran into when she came out here, things would work out. She'd just not really had the time lately to even ask herself what she believed in anymore, but whether there was anything providential in the fact that her heart was still beating was even less relevant than it had been to her before. Somehow she'd stopped paying attention to any of that anyway.
She was already getting her hands too wet. After she'd landed in it had all started pretty fast; everybody had started talking at once, being nice, and she hadn't even thought about it, and there was no excuse now for the fact that she owed Scotty a beer and a game of backgammon for every time she called his ship an "it" and had a bet going with herself on whether she'd ever be able to make Spock laugh with his eyes the way the captain could do, that she'd made the kind of friend who doesn't throw out your toothbrush even though he knows you aren't coming over for that anymore; that there was a person who at some point had woken some impatiently scolding voice in her head that went Absolutely not, gods dammit, whatever you do. Do NOT sleep with him. It was all bad news, cause if she wasn't going to make officer she had to do something else, and it had been easier to throw that out in the midst of an argument with Kirk over something bigger than herself, because the very idea of leaving really was, quite pathetically, almost making her sick.
Bad, bad news.
Kara blinked, leaned forward: A ship in the distance. No, two ships, no...three.
With a sinking slow sigh, Kara squinted, making out one ship she was pretty sure fit the layout of the schematic image Gaila had decoded; the other ships were a murky dark grey against the background, matching smaller vessels that looked like they probably supported not much more capacity than the Orion vessel, which was situated between the others in a way that seemed to confirm this probably was a hostage take-up.
Kara's reaction was delayed; once she realized this was definitely it, she mumbled, "Dammit." Things were a lot more complicated with two enemy vessels if she wanted any hope of destroying their subspace toys.
She shook her head in disappointment, having known she would've been pretty damn lucky to be able to clear up the disruptions but unable to help the current frustration of figuring what she should do now. She had already started yielding and let the bird come to a hovering stop; as she did this, it was easier to note that the vessels were coming as a group slightly in her direction, slowly enough to confirm they weren't able to move any faster than the Enterprise. She checked the screen's functioning systems to see if anything had changed, confirming that the ship still couldn't map anything; tilting her vessel, she quickly acted on the hope that being outside of their communications bubble-presuming they were right about that-meant that they couldn't pick up on her presence yet. They were moving closer, and she planned as they passed to start moving parallel and far enough to be obscured, take a minute to figure out what her next step should be.
They were close enough to seem quite a bit faster now; Kara hitched her little vessel back a little, turning, waiting. She checked the systems again as they came sliding by, seeing no change, giving the slight thrust to start moving with the ships, syncing far out over the starboard shoulder of one of the darker vessels and just praying the size of the barrier was constant.
But this was no help. The offending ships looked like no model or diagram she'd ever seen before; on top of that, the cylindrical structure was all too sleek, far from looking like the somewhat basic and predictable layout of Starfleet vessels. For one thing, there was no indication of any kind of where the bridge would be; Kudos, guys, she thought dryly. She couldn't begin to guess where the warp core might be, but it was probably even more efficiently enclosed than Enterprise's...
This was frakked. New plan: Get into the bubble. If they attack watch how they move and try to observe what needs to be protected. If not go for cover and see if systems can help identify vessel. If not start shooting and see how they move. Or she could just get the hell out of here and not do anything.
She took a moment. She thought about the Enterprise trying to take on two vessels, possibly, maybe, with the aid of the hostage vessel, if they were capable of controlling their own ship. Possibly. She thought about the probability that the baddies were cowards and might not actually fire. And the possibility that they were the kinds of cowards that always fired. And the fact that they undoubtedly were coming either way, in no small part because of her.
The moment was over. She gripped the stick, readied her instincts; swerved.
She tore out, heading straight for the gap between the nearest vessel and the mud-red ship with a gigantic bat-like shape. She bit her lip hard, gracefully tucking the bird down and doing a couple spins to ease the speed of her sidling and lightly thrusting until she was under the ship; she flipped upside quickly, then slowed, slowed...She managed to land on the bottom side of one of the Orions' massive wings with a slow bop.
She instinctively paused, counted to ten. She even counted longer. Nothing had happened.
"Okay, okay, okay..." She muttered through her jumpy anxiety, dragging her tongue over her teeth as she noticed all the blinking and ticking on of different indicators on her data screen. She wasn't used to talking to computers still, but in the rush it all felt pretty user-friendly. "Computer, identify contacts."
She'd had it rigged for text-only responses: ORION VESSEL: HIRYA CLASS. The screen mapped out a visual outline of all the ships; the colors blinked a couple pulses around the mystery vessels...
"Come on, come on..."
2 UNKNOWN VESSELS: ANTI-MATTER POWER SOURCE DETECTED. ESTIMATED CAPACITIES: 200-300.
She waited to see if any more information came up. "Display unknown vessels' projected interior?" she commanded uncertainly.
UNABLE TO COMPLY. Okay. Shit.
Okay. She couldn't just start firing on them without any chance at negotiation, but she was obviously far from anything they would see as a threat. Unless she could manage to convince them...If she just fired a couple shots over their noses...
"Computer," she demanded nervously. "Open messaging system..."
Before she'd even finished, though, something blipped onto the screen:
RECEIVING MESSAGE...
Kara froze. A box came up on the screen, and a line of text appeared in an unfamiliar language before the letters scrambled and conjoined their pixels again, the computer translating to standard.
c#29915: hiding?
Her mouth fell open just a little; she still didn't move. Should she...What-
c#29915: friendly. if i was [:untranslatable:] Prenyd you'd be captured or worse
Kara didn't have time to react any more solidly before another message came through:
c#29915: don't know what you're doing but you should leave. lucky they haven't detected you. if they find out i saw you and didn't say anything...
Kara became decisive then. Her instincts were to question, to mistrust, but...
She said, "I'm here to help you." The words came spilling into lines automatically on the screen. "I'm not Starfleet, but I'm with Starfleet. We got a distress call from somebody on your ship. My vessel is armed. More help on the way. Send."
The system complied. She expected a moment, but was a little surprised by the apparent hesitation. She had a strange instinctive feeling that she was talking to somebody who was quick on their thoughts, a good planner.
c#29915: how much help?
"One vessel. Send."
Another hesitation.
c#29915: if you intend to aid them by partly disarming them should start with our vessel
Kara scoffed in her confusion. "Uh..."
c#29915: our leader too fearful of Prenyd to encode distress call but somebody disobeyed. when he found out he was paranoid that they would discover it and confessed
Kara squinted, but was interrupted by another couple lines before she could ask for an explanation.
c#29915: 12 of us have been murdered already on suspicion of conspiracy. he was hoping that a gesture of compliance would spare him. he and a few others have offered to assist attacking anyone who comes to aid the captured. we are now prisoners of our own leader as well as them
"Son of a bitch," Kara muttered, then, "Delete that. You should know I probably have two or three minutes before they catch up. Is there any way you know of to help stop the subspace distortions?"
She was shocked by the answer: c#29915: Yes. Stolen device, interferes with their engine. They put it on our ship. Heavily guarded. In case of distraction, someone else may try to destroy it
"I could help you with that distraction. Send."
c#29915: in the case of their defenses failing, that would take priority and they may even abandon the disruptor
"Where do I hit you? Send."
c#29915: bridge. back-up controls are compromised by the disruptor
It wasn't exactly a surprising answer. But it wasn't what she wanted to hear. She blinked, and what came out next surprised her: "What is your name. Send."
c#29915: parnev
"You can call me Starbuck," she replied. "Seeing as we're acquainted now...am I about to kill you? Send."
She was surprised by the hesitance.
c#29915: i would rather be dead than enslaved. it is likely that if i survive i will be forced to take part in attacking you anyway
"No," she muttered, a knee-jerk reaction. She egged herself on with more mumbles: "No. No, that isn't it. What is it. Come on. Come on...Ugh. Jim, I could use one of your plan C's right now..." Then, she sat up.
"Report me. Fake loyalty, or cowardice, whatever you need to do. Warn everyone to get out. Be very, very urgent, or they might make you stay. Now, send."
A short moment...
c#29915: no. your safety would be extremely compromised.
"I could still do some damage," she shot back. "I'm working up an escape course right now, do it, good luck, send."
She started getting to work, optimistically assuming she wouldn't hear back, snapping, "Computer, can you plot a course at warp speed?"
NEGATIVE. SUBSPACE DATA INCOMPLETE AT THIS TIME.
She was already shifting her ship right-side-back-up, letting it float over and up around the edge of the ship's wing, only vaguely registering at the back of her mind that that was pretty bad news. "Arms clutch," she commanded: the stick handle clicked open its upper compartment to reveal her armament controls, and she grappled the stick in familiar preparation. It only took a second for her to close her eyes, take in and let out a big breath.
Then she booted out, shooting quick along the side of the rusty-looking hull, watching the metal squares nailed together whip into a blur a handful of feet below her.
"Go, go, go. Okay. Be empty. Be empty, please..."
She'd noticed before that the bridge window was tinted from the outside and knew she wouldn't be able to tell if she was killing anybody until she started shooting. With her entire body wincing in protest, she blew around so that she was facing it stilled, and fired a line off. Once, twice, again.
The glass finally started to crack and well, no bodies were flying out. Four five six times, moving the bird along the broad length of the window; beyond it, sparks were flying, consoles blowing. Then the computer politely notified her she had incoming.
She ducked, shooting under towards one of the wings, then looping over it, evaluating her next movement with a brisk check at which ship had fired just as the blast went under and licked just the corner of the Orions' tail. Righty fired, head for lefty: She shot a hard thrust and sped towards what she estimated was the opposite end of where the photon blast had been shot from the twin ship. She didn't stop moving when she got to the end of the vaguely bullet-shaped vessel, just started stenciling a rapid spiral around it to evade fire from the other ship, around and around, about eleven seconds per trip, godsdammit, she sure as hell couldn't keep this up, they had to be able to-
"-GAGH!" Kara yelped, haulting short as a lethal flash of red-white shot up just in front of her from one of the hull's bubble-like extensions. She noticed with a side glance that the other ship wasn't pursuing her, it was headed to the hostage vessel, maybe it was about to dock somebody, maybe it thought just one could take her on...
Yeah, well, one could. And she realized she was surrounded by the big iron bubbles under her just in time to flip into some escape speed as two of them fired; her heart leapt in dread when she saw her nose go flamy-white, but then it just blackened at the very tip. She kicked into speed, seeing flashes behind and around her, adrenaline surging through her as she went into barrel roll after barrel roll and just tried to go faster and frakking prayed...
Then as she murkily noticed it her mind screamed, SOMETHING IS BLINKING ON THE CONSOLE, and the computer notified her, "Subspace calculations operational. You may specify-"
"GET ME THE FRAK OUT OF HERE."
"Unable to comply-"
"SHIT SHIT SHIT FRAKKING FUCK, DON'T WANNA DIE DON'T WANNA DIE-GO TO WARP!"
"Parameters must be specified."
Somehow she managed to look at the screen, notice all the coordinates that had popped up with little symbols on her map.
"WARP SIX, UM, UM-"
Her mind was blanking; and then a torpedo blast was detected, coming up on her tail-
"PRESET COORDINATE ALPHA ONE." She remembered how it went on the bridge, could distinctly imagine Kirk commanding, 'Punch it.' And of course, she remembered now, because Scotty had that kind of sense of humor, that it was a big red button.
She reached to the far right where it was on the console and slammed her palm on it; there was a mechanical booting-up, a fractional hesitation just long enough for her to see that the blast was going to kill her, and she was wailing slightly when it felt like a gigantic force took its gargantuan fingers and just flicked her through the cosmos, and then her voice roared, in absolute glee.
"-WHOOOOOOOO HAHAAAAAAAAH! YEAH, THAT'S IT, YES!!! GODS DAMMIT, I love this baby, fuck, Scotty, THANK YOU....Whooo!"
The sight was an irregularly blurred sight of stars, some seeming to approach and move faster than others, and space seemed so very huge like this and damn, it was beautiful. When the Firebird reached a stable speed the seat automatically went into passenger mode, and she was still giving little giddy motions as it moved to elevate her out of the slight crouching position, even providing side surfaces that worked as armrests.
Kara leaned back a moment to catch her breath, closing her eyes for a minute, which felt weird to be able to do in a moving combat vessel. She relaxed over the sight outside for a second before saying, "Okay, slow down, it's not like we need to be anywhere. Warp two."
A slight clicking whirr sounded as the vessel began its slow process of decreasing speed.
"Vessel approaching warp 2 speed," the computer serenely intoned. "New calculated time of arrival is in approximately thirty-four hours and sixteen minutes."
Kara lowered her brows then, having forgotten that she'd set an actual destination besides the rendezvous point she wasn't supposed to head back to for at least an hour.
"Uh...Where do you think you're going?"
"Selected destination is planet catalogued under coordinates labeled Alpha 1; Starfleet designation: Sol III in Sector 001. Local designation: Earth."
.
.
.
.
When subspace technologies had started whirring back to life less than two hours after Kara had taken off, several people on the bridge had cheered, partly out of optimistically thinking it was because of her. Then they'd gotten the urgent message from only a few parsecs away, an explanation of the hostage and alliance situation and the general headache they wouldn't have been able to figure out nearly as easily had there not been communications. Like the fact that the vessel taken hostage strategically had been given most of the weapons in the hands of allied Orions, none of which they were currently able to use, because their bridge had been fired on at a close enough range to totally blow the place.
Jim didn't get how she'd done it, but he didn't think he'd ever wanted more to see the woman in a fleet uniform as fast as fucking possible, that is, once he got through boarding with plenty of back-up, holding up and disarming and reporting all the criminal behavior and then eventually shaking some hands once his crew figured out who the cowards and traitors weren't. Contrary to what people might assume about his reasons for loving his job, playing cop was really not his favorite part of keeping order throughout the galaxy. It usually started out fun and then just got tedious, teaching him that there were only so many times in one day he could shrug off somebody's bullshit with cocky authority; after a while it was just sighs, tapping back onto the communicator to report another name.
Still, the Prenyd were something new, and definitely interesting. They looked pretty human but with a sand-like bumpy skin, and from what they could tell from this bunch, they'd been making a living off of a parasitic approach to piracy for a long time, concocting various ways to smuggle themselves throughout the region on other people's ships without being openly detected. It wasn't until they'd gotten their hands on the disruptors (apparently Romulan devices that some elusive third party had tinkered with and then sold and were completely unique, which Kirk got some immense excitement out of confiscating into the possession of his security division) that this particular group had even bothered attaining their own vessels, and he couldn't wait to hear about what they'd been doing before that, but for now it was still the boring part.
Through all the mess of directing people here and there, some of whom got their last hoorahs out of simply being as uncooperative as possible, he eventually had the thought that Kara could probably do the cut and shove of it with more finesse, and it was the first moment he'd had to think about her in the last hour or so. It was still a good thirty minutes before there were enough officers with a handle on the situation for him to beam back to Enterprise and get to the bridge.
"How are we holding up?" Jim muttered one of his routine greetings. When he directly addressed Chekov, the navigator finally told him along with a few of the essential technical statuses that actually, they hadn't heard anything from Starbuck.
He'd been half assuming this entire time that he'd simply been too busy to hear directly about it when she showed up, figured that she'd be accepting some pats on the back and then heading directly to a pillow as soon as somebody had given her docking clearance. He didn't really know.
After a perplexed moment of troubled contemplation, he said, "Chekov, were you monitoring the system when we first came out of warp?"
"Yes, sir. Uh..." There was a 'well, kind of' in Chekov's uneasy shrug then, and Kirk knew what it meant. Of course he'd been monitoring everything, but it had been some immediate chaos as soon as they'd shown up, and looking out for a small speck of a Viper pilot shouldn't have been at the top of his priorities anyway. "I hafe been scanning for any signs of a damaged wessel, sir."
"Nothing?"
Chekov shook his head. It was only a slight relief; they had no solid reason yet to assume she was a goner, but where they were was just inching off the coordinate range of their rendezvous point, she should've been able to find them by now...
Kirk's mind was wickedly visiting ways in which she might have made it far out of the general area before her ship failed. One of the first things he'd said to her in the pod bay before she took off: "Even if we had time to set you up with a life signs frequency it wouldn't work right now anyway, so-just-"
He'd wanted to just say, 'Don't die, okay?'
"Spock has already sent out a search party of two pods." This slip of information came from Rand, who was making a round on the bridge. Kirk was always confused but grateful with her tendency to be able to inform him of things just minutes away from it becoming a case of 'Why the hell didn't anybody tell me this?' He smiled faintly at his first officer's confidence in the fact that he hadn't needed to bother the captain for authorization before acting on the problem.
Kirk got on the comm to talk to Lieutenant Giotto on the other ship, "Status report, commander?"
"Captain, hi, we think we've managed to figure out who was in command of the perpetrators. We're ready to move some of these people into our brig so that interrogations can start..."
Jim nodded. "Good. Listen, your biggest concern is finding out what they've been doing for the past few months or so. I wanna know what other damage they've done and if it's anything we can still clean up. Also..." He sighed. "See if you could find out any details about Thrace? If any of them were responsible for what happened to her after she attacked?..."
"Understood, sir."
A bit over an hour later, Jim felt overwhelmed and idle at once, instinctively heading down to sick bay after he heard that McCoy had returned from the Orion ship with some people to heal. He had three Orion patients, two male and one female all lying on three straight beds. Only one of them, a man, looked to be in very bad shape. Kirk gave his obligatory captainly greeting to the two others while Bones was tending to him and what looked to be a nasty stab wound. Shortly after Jim got there Uhura came in, looking like she was back from running to check on something and went straight for the female patient already explaining something to her in her own language; Jim got the idea Bones had randomly flagged her down to come help him communicate with the patients. He could only cock an impressed eyebrow at her rattling off something that seemed difficult to explain gently, occasionally worrying a hand over her brow when she forgot a word or two. When the woman finally gave some single questioning word, Uhura gave a nervous laugh and some affirmative statement, and they were speaking more conversationally from that point.
When he was satisfied he wasn't interrupting anything, Jim crossed his arms and came up next to McCoy where he was entering vitals at the foot of the man's bed, still occasionally attempting to respond to the mutters of his patient, who seemed pretty distraught and was stammering some very broken standard.
"Is he...?"
"He's alright, he's stressed out. When Uhura gets a chance she'll set him straight, I just don't know what to tell him, he doesn't understand..."
After another moment Jim's eyes went to Bones, a little searching. Mostly ignoring him, the captain's friend just sighed and muttered, "Whatever that look is you came in here with, I don't think I can deal with it right now."
"What is there to say?...She's not here."
He heard a quick exhale of breath; McCoy was about to say something, but they both turned when the male patient started speaking up again, insistently stuttering, "B'lenn kij...b'lenn, live?..."
Jim tilted his head to the right. "Should we just...?"
"Blui soit...b'lenn. 'Starbeck' krihsa-"
Two heads whipped forward. Jim prompted, "Starbuck...?"
"Vei-yes-Starbuck-"
"Uhura!"
She responded to the insistence with an apologetic word to the woman, came quickly over, sat down and kindly introduced herself to the man before looking at Jim or Bones. They didn't have to explain anything because the Orion started talking on his own accord; the captain and McCoy heard the slightly mispronounced call sign again in his rushed words. Uhura had her brows lowered in concentration, put up a hand to pause him, then started to translate. "Okay: 'I talked to a fighter calling himself 'Starbuck' and I'd like to know if he's alive'..."
"He?"
Uhura shrugged.
Looking at the Orion man, he interrupted, "No, no, Starbuck's a woman...Are you sure-?"
Uhura was already running off another question; he looked a bit startled before he responded. " 'We only communicated on a private channel, and quickly, we only had so much time before the Prenyd systems picked up on her vessel.'"
"Do you know what-?" Jim didn't get out all of his question before the man interrupted, getting out so much of his explanation at once that Uhura just patiently waited for him to come to a stop. When he did, she hesitated, processing it herself before explaining.
"When he first saw her, he intended just to warn her, tell her to leave before she was seen, but she promised him more help was coming and he explained about the alliance and-"
"He-He told her? To hit his own bridge?" Jim was moving around Bones to position himself closer to the man, a kind of reflexive reaction to a sudden realization of admiration.
"Yes, but that's not..." Uhura hesitated again. "He says it's his fault if she got hurt, and I haven't..."
She quickly worded a couple more questions, and the others waited in confusion before she sat up a bit straighter in a dawning understanding.
"Oh," she said. "She asked him to warn the others that they were about to be attacked and get the bridge cleared..."
The realization settled into all of them before she finished.
"She gave up her window of escape to save a handful of their crew?" Kirk said it with a tense, brittle sound in his voice, the whole thing not quite sinking in even though the facts of it made complete sense.
As if he had already decided as much, McCoy was only heard muttering a defeated, "Of course she did."
"Get his name?" Jim requested.
"He said already. It's Parnev," Uhura explained. Parnev was eager to explain even more, and she listened patiently, eventually interpreting to Kirk: "He's almost positive that she would've been fired at by the secondary ship, the one that's on our port right now. You might start with them if you think they'll give you any information."
Jim nodded gratefully at Parnev and said, "Thank you."
"...Wel-come," he replied uncertainly.
A moment after Jim returned to McCoy's side, the doctor asked, "What are you gonna do?"
"I don't think we can really coerce them into giving us any information any time soon, not unless it's supplemental to what I've got Giotto trying to harp out of them." Jim shook his head tiredly. "Reliant should be here soon and when they get here we need to head to the rendezvous point. If we get anything else on Kara from them, it'll be after time already tells."
Jim was a bit jumpy, already starting off to leave med bay; he was cut back by Bones saying, "Jim."
He turned and waited.
McCoy hesitated like he wasn't quite sure what he was about to say. He finally asked, "How long are we gonna wait?"
The captain gave a hollow shrug. "As long as we told her we would."
... Part Eight...