Beg, Steal or Borrow – And then there were three ... Part 2
by Commander Isha t'Vaurek & Lieutenant JG Opaka Jo'el
Post Details
As she saw it Isha was short on options; she was restrained and Merrok was not, Ruwon appeared to be breathing but unconscious, and Opaka was nowhere to be seen.
As the field came down Isha backed into the cell, “Now would be a good time, Opaka,” she said not taking her eyes off Merrok, then as he approached she tightened her shoulders and swung the metal restraints that bound her wrists hard into his face.
There was a satisfying crunch as Isha made contact, and a warm spurt of blood on her hands as his nose burst but despite his roar of pain it was not enough to prevent Merrok from grabbing her throat and shoving her back into the wall with his free hand. Her voice reduced to a gurgle as he held her, crushing the heel of his palm into her windpipe.
Jo'el started sprinting to the holding cells as soon as he heard disrupter fire over the comm. By the time he reached the outer doors, he heard Merrok grunting in pain and exertion as he struggled with Isha. He triggered the door open and stepped through. With no other available options, Jo'el shouted "Merrok."
Merrok glanced over his shoulder then turned releasing his hold on Isha; she wasn't struggling any more. She would wait.
“Who are you?” he asked in Rihannsu as he realised how this stranger must have come aboard. Not waiting for an answer he raised his weapon. “Never mind,” he said.
With Merrok's undivided attention, Jo'el threw his dak'tagh at his foe's outstretched disrupter. When it fell to the floor with a clatter, Jo'el rushed Merrok and leapt into the air, clearing the remaining five meters and planting both his feet solidly in Merrok's chest. He fell to the floor and watched Merrok collide with the bulkhead behind him and subsequently crumple to the floor. He secured the disrupter and drew his sword.
As an unexpected draught of air inflated her lungs Isha spluttered. Her eyes sprang open as she slid down the wall to her knees, each breath she drew rasping and burning in her throat. “I don’t think you need that,” she choked glancing from Merrok to Opaka’s blade. “He seems to have hit his head.”
"Remind me again why we split up?" Jo'el gasped.
“Get these things off me!” Isha shrieked raising her wrists. “We split up in the hope that I could get to someone who could help us – I did that. This ship hasn’t got half the crew it requires and half of them are acting under duress.”
The Bajoran examined the shackles briefly. "You wouldn't happen to know the keycode, would you?" he asked optimistically. "It's your ship, after all..."
Isha dropped her hands into her lap and tilted her head as though she was thinking, “You know, Opaka, usually when I take delivery of a state of the art piece of military hardware say ... like a starship the first thing I do is to sit down and take a full inventory of every set of manacles in the brig. Would you believe I forget to do it this time? How careless of me! Of COURSE I DON’T KNOW!”
"That's what I was afraid of," Jo'el said with a frown. "I guess it would be too easy to just use one code for every set on board. It's not as if the prisoner can reach the controls, you know." He considered his phaser and then picked up his newly acquired disrupter pistol. "Tell me how to adjust the beam settings on this thing. I assume the ships scanners will be more than happy to announce the use of Starfleet phaser fire onboard."
Isha nodded. “Use your thumb to slide that slip of metal along, you can do it with your hands tied behind … under the circumstances that could be the wrong metaphor,” she said trying not to notice that he had turned the setting up.
He smiled at her ubiquitous use of irony. "Alright, hold still," Jo'el said, testing the new beam on a bit of the wall. "This is going to be very hot."
She swallowed extending her wrists once again, her instinct when faced with the wrong end of a disruptor was to do the exact opposite of that, and she was running just a little short of self control. “Don’t slip,” Isha said softly as she closed her eyes and obeyed his request.
"Don't get too nervous. If these hands can get a bat on Javier Ishikawa's forkball, there's very little they can't do."
Jo'el bit the right corner of his bottom lip as he concentrated on welding with an alien piece of weaponry. After a few seconds, his head beaded with sweat from both nervousness and the heat of the beam.
"And..." they heard a metallic ping as the lights on the shackles died. The cuffs fell to the floor half a second latter. Jo'el readjusted the disrupter and handed it to Isha. He picked up the dead restraints and raised an eyebrow as he offered them to his charge. "Souvenir?"
Isha bit her lip. Her wrists stung, not only from the now blistered and discoloured skin, but also from the impact when she had hit Merrok. As soon as she pulled herself to her feet Isha snatched the restraints from Opaka’s hands.
She stepped clear of the cell as if considering the ‘gift’ “Just what I always wanted,” she said turning back and flinging them hard at Merrok’s head; a simple action which snapped her back from the looming despair that threatened to engulf her. “Get that field back up, we want him on the opposite side of it,” she told Opaka, now was not the time to allow herself to be crippled by the weaknesses of her own body.
Jo'el cleared the lip in the entryway and turned on the forcefield to the cell.
Isha crouched beside Ruwon, laying the disruptor aside before rolling him on his side so that she could examine his back. “We need to revive him,” she said, “without him it really is just the pair of us against them all.” Isha paused and twisted her neck back so that she could see Opaka. “Thank you,” she said, “He would have killed me,” an acknowledgement only made strange by the fact that she felt the need to say it. “If you don’t mind I think we’ll stick together for the rest of the journey … my old habit for getting myself into a little more trouble than I need seems to be with me today.”
Jo'el nodded. "I didn't know about your son. I'm sorry for your loss."
“You were listening,” Isha said as she layed her hand on Ruwon’s brow. “those two were so close when they were young, they grew apart as boys sometimes do but they retained a friendship … even allowing for a mother’s bias, Hexce was the finest of men,” Isha added wistfully. “His friends loved him and his enemies respected him. He would have been elected Praetor one day, and the Empire he would have shaped …” she drew in a breath that could have been mistaken for a sniff. “Come on, Ruwon, that wasn’t enough to kill you.”
"Isha," Jo'el said, "I don't carry a medkit. Even if I did, I don't have any knowledge of Vulcanoid anatomy that would be of any help. If Merrok wanted this man dead, he's dead."
Isha shook her head, without someone known to the dissenters among the crew her chances of influencing them to take her side were reduced. It was chance that Ruwon was known to her and the Elements would not grant such fortune a second time.
He frowned. Isha was still scrambling to help Ruwon. Hesistantly, Jo'el spoke up again. "Check his pulse."
Without Ruwon they were going to have to destroy the ship and everyone in it, Isha knew. “It's faint, like his breathing, but it is there,” she said. “Shock or something. I don’t know, I’m hardly a medic.”
Jo'el knelt next to the ambassador and put his fingers where hers were. "Get his feet, we'll put him on that table."
Get his feet, just like that! The man was twice the size of her, but Isha did as Opaka asked, “I used to be able to sit this man on my knee,” she grumbled through gritted teeth, suspecting that her efforts were not really adding much, “but he would never ever sit still.”
"I'm afraid that's a fairly universal trait for races that can sit." Jo'el slipped his arms under Ruwon's and hefted his head and torso upward. "Preadolescent -grunt- males contain the galaxy's highest concentration of kinetic energy. It makes me feel lazy to remember it now." Isha easily guided his dangling legs onto the monitor station that now served as an operating table.
Jo'el turned to the nearest light fixture and yanked out a length of optilithic wire. "Step back," he said with a frayed end in hand.
“This is barbaric!” Isha complained. She might have protested more firmly, but she did not have any better ideas. Instead she turned away and attempted to get access to a control panel to see if she could glean some information about what was happening. In frustration, she turned back, “Maybe when you’re done we can apply that to our friend Merrok in their and persuade him to give us his access codes,” she suggested with a sideways glance to the cell where her former captor still lay unconscious.
Honing in on Ruwon's middle abdomen, Jo'el touched the wire to the nearly depleted soldier. Ruwon grunted and shook briefly.
Forgetting Merrok, Isha dashed back to Ruwon, “That’s good, right?” she asked, her gaze almost begging Opaka to say ‘yes’.
"It's better than nothing. We'd have to consult the Prophets if that shock didn't do anything." Jo'el watched Ruwon's eyes flutter open. He took a step back and held his hands up in a placating gesture. "Jolan tru, soldier."
Isha barely gave Ruwon a moment to recover and as soon as he was sitting she took his hands in hers and began speaking to him in a torrent of impenetrable Rihannsu, pausing only to listen and to answer an occasional question, “Can you do this?” she asked finally.
Ruwon nodded as he passed a suspicious eye over Opaka, “I will find a way, Ihhei,” he said, sliding off the makeshift table and unsteadily to his feet. Isha’s shoulder dipped as he leaned his weight on her for support, but she said nothing about the discomfort that was so apparent in her face.
“We have cloaked,” Ruwon said, turning to a monitor.
Isha gazed as he input his access code slow enough for her to see and memorise it but hidden from watching eyes. Isha smiled, “Khnai’ru rhissiuy,” she said, “That will help. Now go, we’ll know if you were successful at the end.”
Jo'el shook his head. "Get a dermal generator first chance you get. Find someone you trust to patch you up." After the doors closed behind Ruwon, Jo'el returned his attention to Isha. "I doubt there are many passable excuses for getting shot in the back during a starship battle."
“He only needs to stay on his feet long enough to convince enough people that now would be a good time for a little mutiny. I think the term you use to describe our regime is totalitarian, isn’t it,” Isha said as she examined the screen, “that it might be, and when there seems to be no alternative we will keep our heads down and pretend not to notice what is going on around our ears, but when Rihannsu revolt …well its like nothing you’ve ever seen before … in the last days of the Shinzon coup those creatures learned that to their eternal cost – you know, I was there in Ra'tleihfi on the day it happened, not at the Senate, obviously, just in the city … that was quite an experience, fortunately, my friends were able to extract me before they started rounding people up … Ruwon’s right, we are cloaked and moving,” Isha switched back to the present, “I don’t understand what that means – I’ve barely felt an impact on this ship, its like we weren’t even part of the battle … where are we going? I wonder how long it will be before Nniol remembers that I am here … and what do we do when he does? We can’t stay here.”
"In either case, I'd feel a lot better if we had him as a hostage, or at least a shield," Jo'el said, pointing at Merrok. "If he doesn't have any valuable information for us, then he's useless in that cell."
Isha’s gaze followed Opaka’s finger, “Really? I thought it was preferable to have him there than out here where he can cause trouble,” as she spoke her hand raised to her throat where Merrok had recently attempted to strangle her. “He’ll not co-operate, he has far too much to lose, but if you wish we can attempt to make him,” she suggested with a slight smile. “Personally I’d like nothing better than to ask you to take that dak'tagh of yours and introduce it to his stomach, but that would rather give the wrong impression, we’re not murderers – our mutineers can deal with him, as it appears to be his cronies who have been keeping them in line all these weeks.”
"Whatever you say, Madam Ambassador. I just hope I don't end up being the bargaining chip when the station figures out where we are."
OFF:
Ensign Opaka Jo'el
VIP Bodyguard
Ambassador Isha t’Khellian
by Commander Isha t'Vaurek & Lieutenant JG Opaka Jo'el
Post Details
| Title | And then there were three ... Part 2 | |
| Mission | Beg, Steal or Borrow | |
| Author(s) | Commander Isha t'Vaurek & Lieutenant JG Opaka Jo'el | |
| Posted | Fri Apr 17, 2009 @ 9:26am | |
| Location | Vrelnec | |
| Timeline | SD 8 - around 14:10 |
As the field came down Isha backed into the cell, “Now would be a good time, Opaka,” she said not taking her eyes off Merrok, then as he approached she tightened her shoulders and swung the metal restraints that bound her wrists hard into his face.
There was a satisfying crunch as Isha made contact, and a warm spurt of blood on her hands as his nose burst but despite his roar of pain it was not enough to prevent Merrok from grabbing her throat and shoving her back into the wall with his free hand. Her voice reduced to a gurgle as he held her, crushing the heel of his palm into her windpipe.
Jo'el started sprinting to the holding cells as soon as he heard disrupter fire over the comm. By the time he reached the outer doors, he heard Merrok grunting in pain and exertion as he struggled with Isha. He triggered the door open and stepped through. With no other available options, Jo'el shouted "Merrok."
Merrok glanced over his shoulder then turned releasing his hold on Isha; she wasn't struggling any more. She would wait.
“Who are you?” he asked in Rihannsu as he realised how this stranger must have come aboard. Not waiting for an answer he raised his weapon. “Never mind,” he said.
With Merrok's undivided attention, Jo'el threw his dak'tagh at his foe's outstretched disrupter. When it fell to the floor with a clatter, Jo'el rushed Merrok and leapt into the air, clearing the remaining five meters and planting both his feet solidly in Merrok's chest. He fell to the floor and watched Merrok collide with the bulkhead behind him and subsequently crumple to the floor. He secured the disrupter and drew his sword.
As an unexpected draught of air inflated her lungs Isha spluttered. Her eyes sprang open as she slid down the wall to her knees, each breath she drew rasping and burning in her throat. “I don’t think you need that,” she choked glancing from Merrok to Opaka’s blade. “He seems to have hit his head.”
"Remind me again why we split up?" Jo'el gasped.
“Get these things off me!” Isha shrieked raising her wrists. “We split up in the hope that I could get to someone who could help us – I did that. This ship hasn’t got half the crew it requires and half of them are acting under duress.”
The Bajoran examined the shackles briefly. "You wouldn't happen to know the keycode, would you?" he asked optimistically. "It's your ship, after all..."
Isha dropped her hands into her lap and tilted her head as though she was thinking, “You know, Opaka, usually when I take delivery of a state of the art piece of military hardware say ... like a starship the first thing I do is to sit down and take a full inventory of every set of manacles in the brig. Would you believe I forget to do it this time? How careless of me! Of COURSE I DON’T KNOW!”
"That's what I was afraid of," Jo'el said with a frown. "I guess it would be too easy to just use one code for every set on board. It's not as if the prisoner can reach the controls, you know." He considered his phaser and then picked up his newly acquired disrupter pistol. "Tell me how to adjust the beam settings on this thing. I assume the ships scanners will be more than happy to announce the use of Starfleet phaser fire onboard."
Isha nodded. “Use your thumb to slide that slip of metal along, you can do it with your hands tied behind … under the circumstances that could be the wrong metaphor,” she said trying not to notice that he had turned the setting up.
He smiled at her ubiquitous use of irony. "Alright, hold still," Jo'el said, testing the new beam on a bit of the wall. "This is going to be very hot."
She swallowed extending her wrists once again, her instinct when faced with the wrong end of a disruptor was to do the exact opposite of that, and she was running just a little short of self control. “Don’t slip,” Isha said softly as she closed her eyes and obeyed his request.
"Don't get too nervous. If these hands can get a bat on Javier Ishikawa's forkball, there's very little they can't do."
Jo'el bit the right corner of his bottom lip as he concentrated on welding with an alien piece of weaponry. After a few seconds, his head beaded with sweat from both nervousness and the heat of the beam.
"And..." they heard a metallic ping as the lights on the shackles died. The cuffs fell to the floor half a second latter. Jo'el readjusted the disrupter and handed it to Isha. He picked up the dead restraints and raised an eyebrow as he offered them to his charge. "Souvenir?"
Isha bit her lip. Her wrists stung, not only from the now blistered and discoloured skin, but also from the impact when she had hit Merrok. As soon as she pulled herself to her feet Isha snatched the restraints from Opaka’s hands.
She stepped clear of the cell as if considering the ‘gift’ “Just what I always wanted,” she said turning back and flinging them hard at Merrok’s head; a simple action which snapped her back from the looming despair that threatened to engulf her. “Get that field back up, we want him on the opposite side of it,” she told Opaka, now was not the time to allow herself to be crippled by the weaknesses of her own body.
Jo'el cleared the lip in the entryway and turned on the forcefield to the cell.
Isha crouched beside Ruwon, laying the disruptor aside before rolling him on his side so that she could examine his back. “We need to revive him,” she said, “without him it really is just the pair of us against them all.” Isha paused and twisted her neck back so that she could see Opaka. “Thank you,” she said, “He would have killed me,” an acknowledgement only made strange by the fact that she felt the need to say it. “If you don’t mind I think we’ll stick together for the rest of the journey … my old habit for getting myself into a little more trouble than I need seems to be with me today.”
Jo'el nodded. "I didn't know about your son. I'm sorry for your loss."
“You were listening,” Isha said as she layed her hand on Ruwon’s brow. “those two were so close when they were young, they grew apart as boys sometimes do but they retained a friendship … even allowing for a mother’s bias, Hexce was the finest of men,” Isha added wistfully. “His friends loved him and his enemies respected him. He would have been elected Praetor one day, and the Empire he would have shaped …” she drew in a breath that could have been mistaken for a sniff. “Come on, Ruwon, that wasn’t enough to kill you.”
"Isha," Jo'el said, "I don't carry a medkit. Even if I did, I don't have any knowledge of Vulcanoid anatomy that would be of any help. If Merrok wanted this man dead, he's dead."
Isha shook her head, without someone known to the dissenters among the crew her chances of influencing them to take her side were reduced. It was chance that Ruwon was known to her and the Elements would not grant such fortune a second time.
He frowned. Isha was still scrambling to help Ruwon. Hesistantly, Jo'el spoke up again. "Check his pulse."
Without Ruwon they were going to have to destroy the ship and everyone in it, Isha knew. “It's faint, like his breathing, but it is there,” she said. “Shock or something. I don’t know, I’m hardly a medic.”
Jo'el knelt next to the ambassador and put his fingers where hers were. "Get his feet, we'll put him on that table."
Get his feet, just like that! The man was twice the size of her, but Isha did as Opaka asked, “I used to be able to sit this man on my knee,” she grumbled through gritted teeth, suspecting that her efforts were not really adding much, “but he would never ever sit still.”
"I'm afraid that's a fairly universal trait for races that can sit." Jo'el slipped his arms under Ruwon's and hefted his head and torso upward. "Preadolescent -grunt- males contain the galaxy's highest concentration of kinetic energy. It makes me feel lazy to remember it now." Isha easily guided his dangling legs onto the monitor station that now served as an operating table.
Jo'el turned to the nearest light fixture and yanked out a length of optilithic wire. "Step back," he said with a frayed end in hand.
“This is barbaric!” Isha complained. She might have protested more firmly, but she did not have any better ideas. Instead she turned away and attempted to get access to a control panel to see if she could glean some information about what was happening. In frustration, she turned back, “Maybe when you’re done we can apply that to our friend Merrok in their and persuade him to give us his access codes,” she suggested with a sideways glance to the cell where her former captor still lay unconscious.
Honing in on Ruwon's middle abdomen, Jo'el touched the wire to the nearly depleted soldier. Ruwon grunted and shook briefly.
Forgetting Merrok, Isha dashed back to Ruwon, “That’s good, right?” she asked, her gaze almost begging Opaka to say ‘yes’.
"It's better than nothing. We'd have to consult the Prophets if that shock didn't do anything." Jo'el watched Ruwon's eyes flutter open. He took a step back and held his hands up in a placating gesture. "Jolan tru, soldier."
Isha barely gave Ruwon a moment to recover and as soon as he was sitting she took his hands in hers and began speaking to him in a torrent of impenetrable Rihannsu, pausing only to listen and to answer an occasional question, “Can you do this?” she asked finally.
Ruwon nodded as he passed a suspicious eye over Opaka, “I will find a way, Ihhei,” he said, sliding off the makeshift table and unsteadily to his feet. Isha’s shoulder dipped as he leaned his weight on her for support, but she said nothing about the discomfort that was so apparent in her face.
“We have cloaked,” Ruwon said, turning to a monitor.
Isha gazed as he input his access code slow enough for her to see and memorise it but hidden from watching eyes. Isha smiled, “Khnai’ru rhissiuy,” she said, “That will help. Now go, we’ll know if you were successful at the end.”
Jo'el shook his head. "Get a dermal generator first chance you get. Find someone you trust to patch you up." After the doors closed behind Ruwon, Jo'el returned his attention to Isha. "I doubt there are many passable excuses for getting shot in the back during a starship battle."
“He only needs to stay on his feet long enough to convince enough people that now would be a good time for a little mutiny. I think the term you use to describe our regime is totalitarian, isn’t it,” Isha said as she examined the screen, “that it might be, and when there seems to be no alternative we will keep our heads down and pretend not to notice what is going on around our ears, but when Rihannsu revolt …well its like nothing you’ve ever seen before … in the last days of the Shinzon coup those creatures learned that to their eternal cost – you know, I was there in Ra'tleihfi on the day it happened, not at the Senate, obviously, just in the city … that was quite an experience, fortunately, my friends were able to extract me before they started rounding people up … Ruwon’s right, we are cloaked and moving,” Isha switched back to the present, “I don’t understand what that means – I’ve barely felt an impact on this ship, its like we weren’t even part of the battle … where are we going? I wonder how long it will be before Nniol remembers that I am here … and what do we do when he does? We can’t stay here.”
"In either case, I'd feel a lot better if we had him as a hostage, or at least a shield," Jo'el said, pointing at Merrok. "If he doesn't have any valuable information for us, then he's useless in that cell."
Isha’s gaze followed Opaka’s finger, “Really? I thought it was preferable to have him there than out here where he can cause trouble,” as she spoke her hand raised to her throat where Merrok had recently attempted to strangle her. “He’ll not co-operate, he has far too much to lose, but if you wish we can attempt to make him,” she suggested with a slight smile. “Personally I’d like nothing better than to ask you to take that dak'tagh of yours and introduce it to his stomach, but that would rather give the wrong impression, we’re not murderers – our mutineers can deal with him, as it appears to be his cronies who have been keeping them in line all these weeks.”
"Whatever you say, Madam Ambassador. I just hope I don't end up being the bargaining chip when the station figures out where we are."
OFF:
Ensign Opaka Jo'el
VIP Bodyguard
Ambassador Isha t’Khellian