Refractions: Party Crashers
Posted on 13 Apr 2024 @ 5:12pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: SS Virgil
Timeline: concurrent with "Refractions: Deal or No Deal"
2017 words - 4 OF Standard Post Measure
The man found himself in and out of consciousness, his eyelids like lead curtains. Only one of his eyes could he even get opened. The other he felt was sealed shut. He was floating and disoriented. Sluggishly he tried to move a hand to his haggard, swollen face, but he found it likewise unable to move. Through his one bleary eye, he could at least see his hands, however. He could see them both attached to an overhead bolt in the Virgil’s Bridge ceiling with a length of packing strap. He wondered about that. How’d he come to be on the ceiling, and how, if he were anchored by his wrists on the ceiling, were his arms so slack?
“Cliff? Cliff?” someone was desperately whispering from behind him.
Clifford grunted and started to try and turn towards the voice, the one he recognized to be Bran Zeller, the Trill navigation guy. As he managed to swing himself into a twisting motion, he noticed some strangers floating around the Virgil’s bridge. He couldn’t make them out, and he realized it wasn’t entirely because of his own eyes not cooperating with him, so much as it was fairly dim on the bridge. They musta been on emergency power.
He winced as he twirled, the motion winding up his wrists and extending the muscles on one side of his rib cage, and Cliff discovered that his arm was throbbing badly and his side had a shooting pain. He tried to clear his mouth, but it felt cottony and his tongue felt thick. The feeling was familiar. He knew he must have been hit with phaser fire. It was coming back to him in bits and pieces. He didn’t remember being trussed up, but he recalled the incoming boarding party, and that he’d sent Matthers and Jav out ahead while he and Ralph had gone to the weapons locker. They’d lost comms with Matthers and Jav, and by the time he and Ralph had started down the passage there were already six pirates in the central passage. He’d told the bridge and engineering to lock down, and took up hidden positions with Ralph, aiming to pick off the pirates on approach. But there was a blinding pulse and smoke and Ralph, coughing, had given them both away. They fought in the hall, busting up the place. It all happened so fast, and Cliff remembered tussling with an orion in his own weight class until a sharp pain had made him arch his whole body. Like the pirates they were, one of ‘em had shot him in the back.
He wondered how much time had passed since that last waking memory. Not wanting to draw any attention to himself as his memory returned, he let his unswollen eye close to a bare slit and pretended to be as slack as he had been, not answering Bran, either. Instead he just listened, and watched, so far as he could.
“--one way or another we’re going to crack your lockout codes.” Cliff recognized the speaker who had Captain Brainard strapped to a console, the captain's shirt wound into his fist so tightly as to be nearly strangling the old man. “May as well unlock it for me now and I’ll consider not killing another one of your annoying little crew.”
That implied they’d already offed some of the crew. His heart beginning to race again, Cliff jogged his memory and tried to do a headcount. Matthers and Jav. They were probably dead first. He couldn’t see Ralph anywhere in his slow twisting turn to glance around the bridge. Either he was being held somewhere else or he hadn’t been lucky enough to make it out of the confrontation in the corridor. Captain Brainard was the one being questioned… Hassiret! He spotted her– she, too, was trussed to another peg in the ceiling. Her fur was looking even more nasty than usual, her hackles being raised, and Cliff thought he saw her biting at her restraint. The only other Virgil crew Cliff couldn’t account for would be the Engineer and his mate down below, and the kid, Neiman, on his training tour. Some first flight… Cliff wondered how close Hassiret was to freeing herself, and what her first move would be. Hopefully she had a plan to help retake the Bridge. He decided to be as ready as possible for her next move. She seemed to have gotten one hand free and he decided to let himself drift in another direction so as not to seem aware of the success the Caitian was having against the heavy duty packing straps.
No one else seemed to notice Hassiret’s effort. Not the big Orion, or the Naussican or Bajoran low lives on the Bridge with him. The pirates were all rather intent on getting the Virgil back up and running again. Heavily laden with expensive parts, gear, and equipment, the ship would be a real prize, but there was no way any of the little skiffs that had been plaguing the Virgil could do more than make off with a handful of loot if they tried to move it. The real steal was in taking the loaded cargo vessel, lock stock and barrel, with even the ship itself being part of the winnings. Cliff had been saving for over a decade to buy it himself. He was about to draw up the offer after this haul. Now these brigands thought they were just going to take it.
“Tergosa, try sensors now.” A very small voice sounded through the Orion’s suit. It was a woman’s voice with a certain chilly restraint to it. Clearly she was more than the average pirate knuckle dragger like the three on the bridge. “I think I’ve got through that computer lock out. Working on navigation next.”
Cliff saw as the tactical console’s lock released on sensors, the solid array of red switching a couple of lines to operative white. The sensor grids began to turn back online.
“Nice Jamie.” The hefty Orion said, grinning through his ruddy colored beard. He moved to the console to appreciate the new features he could access, opening the various observational images in the holding blocks and down the corridors, before accessing exterior sensors.
The Orion looked at Brainard menacingly. “I’ll see how the ‘ol captain feels about cooperating again, while he still has anything left to—” He was interrupted by a new urgent buzzing sound. There was an alarm on the console as an exterior anomaly was detected on the waking sensors. Tergosa’s attention returned to the display and he opened the alert and retrieved the image. There, attached to the Virgil’s hull, was a shuttle, one that Tergosa knew wasn’t the ship he’d dispatched from, or even another of the competition who had all converged on the Virgil, thanks probably to the same tip. No, unless it had been a stolen vessel itself, that was a Fleeter shuttle.
“Heads up!” Tergosa shouted into the commlink on his collar. “We’ve got a shuttle on the hull!”
“Someone has followed us aboard?” came the reply from his comelier sounding compatriot, likely down in Engineering, Cliff thought, seeing as she had been breaking the ship lockouts.
“It’s a Starfleet shuttle!” Tergosa called out over the link. “Take up defensive positions!”
The nausicaan looked impatient and took up his rifle, and the Bajoran, who had been rewiring a console, now slid out from behind it to gather his own weapon.
Cliff listened intently as the link remained open. The sound was small, as it was emanating from the little listening piece the orion was sporting. The sound below decks was not implying things were going the way Tergosa would have liked. There had been one voice saying he would shoot the boy if they came any closer. But a peel of phaser fire had made that the last time that particular voice said anything, threatening or otherwise. Then a great deal of scrambling, with Jamie shouting out directions to cover her, and firing– her own pistol sounding much nearer.
In less than a minute, Jamie wasn’t heard from any more either. Her mic pisces up other strange voices, who called out to one another to secure the prisoners, and another seemed to be asking the Virgil’s engineering crew if they were okay. Cliff could hear Neiman sobbing and he felt bad for the kid, but relieved to know he was alive.
“We’re going to get pinned down, here!” The Bajoran hissed to Tergosa, realizing they had lost their hold on the Engine room, and probably no longer had the strength of the other half of their boarding party.
“Guess so.” Tergosa, accepting he was right, decided that a retreat was in order. “If we can clear the ice rings in this ship’s hopper, maybe we can get back to Harv. He’ll be spittin’ mud that we couldn’t nab the whole haul, but at least we’ve got prisoners to trade, and that spittin’ Cait with the bounty on her ugly head. Gather up our captives and let's make for the hopper on the subdeck.”
Cliff felt the Naussican at his neck, detaching the restraints and he took that opportunity to come alive.
He’d never wrestled a Naussicaan before, much less in zero gravity. The first thing that he knew he had a tusk thrust through his shoulder. Cliff howled and yanked at the hair braids so as to use the naussicaan’s mass to propel himself outward while sending the brute’s face into a support strut. Cliff surprised himself when it worked and a bunch of globules of spit and blood came cascading out from the impact.
Cliff tried to break his own flight into an upper conduit, and then scamper … up? Down to the deck, using his hands to grab the seating and furnishings like monkey bars overhead. He pulled himself up to the console and tried to get into a seat that he was floating out of. Before he could do anything, Tergosa had him by the neck and Cliff found himself in a new tumble, until Tergosa turned on gravity boots and started marching along the deck, towing him like a balloon being strung along at the neck. They approached the airlock at the Virgil’s hopper- the little craft for making atmospheric landings… But there was no craft on the other side. Just the view of the ice field through the window.
“It was here when we arrived!” The Bajoran shouted, a gun in the back of Captain Brainard, who he was directing in front of himself.
“What have you done with it?” Tergosa shouted, shaking Cliff violently, choking him. Cliff tried to grasp at Tergosa’s arm, but he didn’t have the strength to break the hold on his collar, his ribs and one arm broken, and the opposite shoulder impaled. Cliff felt himself getting faint again.
The Naussicaan with a broken nose had caught up to them, the Trill Navigator in his own grip now.
The three pirates continued to bicker, none of which was going to produce another shuttle to escape on. As they blamed everyone else, Cliff had one look back at the bridge. A single strap floated languidly like a shredded banner.
Hassiret. Cliff realized then that she had taken the shuttle. While the Feds had supplied the distraction below decks, that damn cat had saved her own skin and no one else’s.
It was at that moment that the entire ship seemed to sigh and the power went out. For a moment, the bridge and the adjoining sub deck was blacker than Cliff’s bad eye…
A series of small explosions popped around the formerly secured bridge door, presaging the precision light show of Marine phaser fire which ultimately and decisively ended the heated debate between Tergosa and his accomplices.
