No Grave but the Stars - Part 2
Posted on Fri Apr 29th, 2022 @ 7:47am by Lieutenant JG Miraj Derani & Mal Garrison
Edited on on Tue Jan 3rd, 2023 @ 6:26am
Mission:
WHAT IF?
Location: Bassen Rift, Romulan Empire
Timeline: Another lifetime
Tags: #challenge mission
2281 words - 4.6 OF Standard Post Measure
Previously in No Grave But The Stars
(in a different lifetime...)
Mal Garrison stared past his outstretched, desperate, fingertips, and watched his life, the security of his friends, the safety of his sister, fall away. The crate of Romulan disruptors was tumbling the several thousand feet to the ground.
"We have to go back," he shouted over the screaming air. "Mij, turn us around! Z, go help Ilon get the shields up."
Which was when two small shuttles burst up through the fog, and opened fire. Zh'erim lunged for the door controls to get the cargo bay doors shut, and Mal scrambled to reach the bridge of his small ship. Someone had to get to the phasers.
Mij turned as he burst into the bridge, a cockpit really, big enough only for three people. "They're shooting at us! Why are they shooting at us?"
And now the continuation
Safely in warp and powering along towards the rendezvous, Miraj unclipped herself from the piloting cradle and stomped down to the engine room, where the three others were still trying to piece the deflector housing back together. "Davy Jones' hairy sack! What the fuck is going on? Why were the Myriad shooting at us? What happened to The Romulan's will be fine, Mij? Everything will be just smooth so don't worry, Mij?"
Her big brother did manage to look guilty, with considerable effort on his part. "Look. It was a calculated risk. I wouldn't have tried it if I didn't have absolute faith in the best pilot this galaxy has ever seen to get us out of it." He gave her one of his best smiles. It would have worked on anyone he wasn't related to by blood, but definitely wasn't having any effect on his baby sister.
"We have bigger problems," Zh'erim added, wiping grease stained hands on the front of his thighs. "We lost one of the crates."
It was Ilon who hissed with anger this time. "So we're going to turn up short? To the Syndicate? We're going to get skinned alive!"
"It will be fine," Mal assured him. "We just need to find fifty disruptors between now and next week."
"Can't we just find some more Myriad and buy from them again?" Miraj asked. "Nip along the neutral zone and find another outpost?"
"No, thats not going to be possible. In fact, we need to put as much space between us and the neutral zone as we can."
"Oh no!" Miraj suddenly figured out. "You didn't!? Did we just steal from the fucking Myriad? To pay off the Syndicate?"
"It was a calculated risk." Mal began.
Miraj clipped him round the ear. "It was stupid!"
"No arguments here," Zh'erim agreed, antenna twitching. "But the question is, now, what do we do about it? We can't go back to Rigel with only three quarters of what we said we'd deliver. Where can we find more Romulan disrupters, quickly?"
"FreeCloud?" Offered Ilon, "Or the Floating Market?"
"To risky," Mal said. "Don't want word getting back that we screwed this one up."
"Well, we can't just go back to source, can we? Have you got a better idea?"
Going back to source. Ilon had meant the Myriad, but there were a lot of Romulans, and a lot of disruptors. Where did things come from? Replicators. "Actually, I think I have one." Miraj said, "If we can find a Romulan ship, we can nick its replicator."
"We just established going to Romulan space was a bad idea. If the border patrol doesn't get us, the Myriad will." Ilon pointed out
"Hold on," Mal waved him down. "Mij is onto something. There's got to be a whole bunch of warbirds left over from the wars; Dad dragged dozens away from Cardassia just after. We just have to find one that's mostly whole. Get its replicator."
"Cardassia's the other side of the Quadrant. We won't get there in time." Ilon shook his head. "Its a good idea Mal, but it won't - "
"Bassen Rift" Zh'erim said suddenly. "Fifteen years ago, when the Romulan Senate got wiped out. They cornered the usurper in the rift, and he was killed there. Never pulled the ship out. Too much interference. Sensors don't work, systems are unreliable." His eyes slid to Miraj who was pulling at her bunches again. "But we've got a pilot who doesn't need that."
"That's right back in Romulan Territory, we just said we couldn't go in there." Ilon said.
"We don't have a choice." Mal said. "Myriad will kill us if we try a border port. We can't go to the free ports, someone will rat us out. Cardassia is too far to meet deadline. Mij can get us past the border, and we go someone the Myriad won't be." He looked up at his little sister. "Set course for the Bassen Rift. Fast as you can."
----
They slipped back across the Neutral Zone without hassle. It had been their bread and butter for several years now and Miraj could do it her sleep, knowing exactly where all the narrow gaps in the sensors buoys were, and they turned towards the rift, powering as hard as the warp engines could take them.
Miraj turned the con to auto pilot, and moved to the tactical panel, "This is the map of the Bassen Rift."
Ilon stepped next to her, "And these are all the problems." He overlaid his own data onto the star chart. "Its full of different types of radiation. Our sensors will be buggered. About the only thing we'll have is old fashioned optical sensors. Maybe some short reach on the main sensor pack. We won't have comms, either."
"Happy joy," Zh'erim muttered, then leant over the panel to stab his finger at a set of marked co-ordinates. "The last known position of the Scimitar, when it fought the Enterprise, and the Enterprise blew it in half. That was Seventy Nine, so add in nearly twenty years of Objects In Motion, our search area is approximately this big." He dragged a blue finger, and a potential range was shown on the star chart. It was large, most of a solar system.
"Thats a lot of space to cover with just optics," Miraj twisted the end of one her bunches in her fingers. "We need to narrow it down."
"The scimitar had a thaloran generator as a weapon." Zh'erim tried to remember lessons he'd only half paid attention to before dropping out of the Academy.
"The whole area is awash with thaloron energy," Ilon was prodding at the controls now, running some maths. "Presumably the ship pieces are still hot... so... I can probably try and do something to the sensor pack that can get us better readings on the thalaron."
"And if I get us to the original blast point, we can probably work it out form there, one way or the other." Miraj turned the star chart round so she could look at it from underneath. "If we go through at this angle, we'll stay away from the two star systems that are nearest, minimise our chances of being picked up by long range sensors in those systems."
Mal looked at them, Zh'erim's long white hair falling against Miraj's bubblegum pink, bright against Ilon's dark brown curls, as they huddled over the chart, pointing out things, making plans to get them through. His friends. His family. He couldn't let anything happen to them. Feeling fond, he squeezed in between Zh'erim and his baby sister, and joined in the planning.
-----------------------
When the Bassen Rift pinged their sensors, the Stranger Tides fell silent. Having a plan to avert disaster had buoyed them all somewhat, but now that false cheer fell away. The men crowded into the bridge as Miraj dropped them out of warp. The view screen filled with green, the gases in the Rift catching the feint light from the surrounding stars.
"Looks okay," Ilon said, after a long minute split between staring out of the bridge window and staring at his sensors. "Thalaron radiation, electromagnetic static. Everything we were expecting."
They weren't close enough for any of that to be affecting the Tides directly, but something was tickling at her. Miraj frowned. Something was just ever so slightly off about the feel of the Tides.
Mal glanced at her, "Lets get inside there, see what we're dealing with. Can we warp inside it?"
"Yes," Miraj looked up at him. "It shouldn't mess with any course that gets us in, at least. Once inside?" she shrugged. "Suck it and see?"
"Fine. Do it." Mal settled into the captains chair and let her do her thing.
Her first stop was about twenty light years in. Ilon checked the instruments, and reported that again, all was as it should be, thalaron, electromagnetics, and bugger all else. "Actually," he said after a moment, "I tell a lie. I'm picking up some tetryons too. And that's all we're going to get."
They jumped again, this time to the center of Zh'erim's search field. "Guess what," Ilon said. "We can't see shit. Thalaron and static and not much else.
No, wait, the tetryons again too."
"To be honest, Zh'erim said from the bridge doorway, "I'm surprised we're getting that. From what I recall we shouldn't be able to sense our own fingers if they were stuffed up our butts."
"Eww," Miraj giggled.
"Don't knock it till you've tried it," he grinned back.
"What I wouldn't give for the whisker's on the Forlorn Hope right now." Mal sighed. His father's ship, the Forlorn Hope was, designed for search and recovery and its sensors were powerful and well shielded.
Ilon was already heading to the cargo area where his booster for the optical sensors was "Well, all you've got is me. Give me a few minutes to get the shroud working, and then we'll see what we can find. "
Miraj nodded, already trying to make sense of the thalaron readings, trying to guess the best decision to head in, and after a minute listening to Ilon banging and swearing, a hiss of static was added to the Stranger Tidesgeneral hum, laying in with the strange tickle she'd felt before. Then there was a whine and a whumping sound as Ilon's sensor booster fired, pulling a huge burst of plasma from the fusion reactors to clear the local radiation enough that the optical sensors could get a good look through the cloud.
"Is that it?" Miraj asked when nothing more seemed to happen.
"Give it a second," Zh'erim said as the optical sensors across the Stranger Tides span in their housings. Then the computer pinged. "And we have something." He threw it to the view screen, showing the picture with a small, indistinct blur blocking out the green of the rift. "That's a regular shape, and dense. I bet you a bottle of Kali-fal, that's a chunk of Scimitar-class warbird."
"Okay, heading?" Miraj settled back into her pilots seat.
"Three-ten mark twelve." Zh'erim leaned out of the bridge door to tell Ilon to return the power to the engines.
Miraj felt the energies of the Tides shift back to where they should be. The whispered tickle as well. And a thought occurred to her. "If we can't sense our own butts in this cloud, why are we picking up tetryons? Wouldn't they have to be up our butts at this point?"
Mal kept the sudden worry off his face. "I'm not sure. Tetryons do what?"
"I'm not sure," Zh'erim antennae gave an anxious flex, "I flunked Engineering 101 along with everything else. Something to do with Subspace particles I think. Ilon?"
"Normally I'd say its a sign our warp core is in trouble -"
"Its fine." Miraj knew that from the sensation of the ship as surely as Ilon knew from playing with the engine.
"As you said, its fine. Maybe its just background stuff, and they're just attracted to the warp signature. Bits of subspace do that."
Mal and Zh'erim exchanged glances. "Could we be being followed? Is that a beacon of some sort?" Mal asked.
"No, we'd pick up the signal," Zh'erim said. "Besides, in here, no-one could find it anyway."
"Then what is it?" Miraj asked again. Ilon shrugged. She began to spin the ship around, trying to see if there was anything out there. But nothing,
"Let's go Mij," Mal said with more certainty than he felt. "No point getting paranoid. But maybe a little haste?"
Still frowning as best she could, they jumped again, and they reached their destination ten minutes later having powered through as fast as the ship could manage. At which point all the proximity alerts screamed, and she wrenched the helm into a hard climb as their space was suddenly filled with masses of giant ducts and pipes and plating.
The wreck filled their view screen. It was mostly intact, but several gaping holes showed the extent of the damage. Miraj's jaw fell open as she leant forward trying to see the extent of it. It towered over The Stranger Tides, ducting and vents in a random lattice that made it look cobbled together from a thousand different ships stripped for parts. Because it was. It wasn't a Scimitar-class Warbird, all elegance and curves. It was almost the complete opposite.
She was skimming the surface of a Borg Cube.
To be Continued…
