Part Two (Cont’d)
Prosecutor Gr’aja from Verillian Security Division Beta-Four was having a hell of a week.
Firstly, he had been led on a merry dance by a petty criminal and the ship he had escaped from Verillian space in. He and his adjutant, Deputy Prosecutor Ha’xil, had eventually lost the vessel they had been tracking after it had intercepted a radiation-covered Talarian freighter, and they had been forced to return to base empty handed.
And now, after that humbling, he was being confronted by an entirely different ship.
He and Ha’xil had intercepted the unidentified vessel as soon as it had entered the system. Both were used to protecting the tight borders of Verillian space from passing scavengers, pirates or unsavoury merchants, and this was nothing new.
But what was new was the unidentified vessel turning out to be a Federation starship.
The Ambassador-class ship dwarfed their Verillian cruiser. And despite the usually peaceful nature of such vessels, Gr’aja couldn’t help but feel unnerved at their unexpected appearance. Especially when the ship had actually made contact. And instead of the warm look of a fully-staffed starship bridge, they were confronted by a dimmed briefing room, empty save for a stern Starfleet admiral and a mysterious woman in a black jumpsuit.
And while Verillian Security usually handled the questions in such encounters with previously unidentified ships, the Starfleet side had quickly taken the lead in the conversation.
“Can you supply us with records of the course this ship took?” the woman in the jumpsuit asked.
Prosecutor Gr’aja had diligently answered the questions that had come his way from the two people on the screen. Most of which had revolved around the troublesome ship they had been tracking a few days earlier. None of the questions up to this point had been too intrusive. But this latest one did seem to cross a line. A Federation ship unofficially requesting physical data from a Verillian one.
“I, um,” Gr’aja began, a little flustered, “I would have to check with my superiors before—”
“Prosecutor,” the heavy-set admiral cut in, having clearly and readily taken up the role of the bad cop in the double act on screen, “I understand you have procedures to follow, but so do we. And right now, this vessel is operating under level zero Starfleet clearance.”
Gr’aja went to retort, but the admiral cut him off immediately.
“Which, I’m sure you’re about to tell me, has no bearing on a non-Federation system like this. And that’s true. But it does also give me, as commander of this vessel, a broad range of options to deal with such situations.”
The Verillian prosecutor audibly gulped and glanced over at Deputy Prosecutor Ha’xil, who looked similarly troubled by the implication carried in those words.
“W—What do you mean?” Gr’aja managed to stammer back at the screen.
“I’m not sure you want me to get too specific,” the implacable admiral replied, “But I think we both know that, given the relative strengths of our ships, it would end up with us being in possession of the information we’ve politely requested, and two members of Verillian Security in custody for obstructing a Starfleet investigation.”
“T—That would be—” Ha’xil began.
“A diplomatic incident. Yes, that’s true. But probably not that will end well for the Verillians, I think we can all agree.”
Neither Gr’aja nor Ha’xil had much of a response to that.
“So,” the admiral said again, “Can you supply us with the records of the course this ship took?”
****************************
A few minutes later, the Erebus was warping away from the Verillian system.
They had, much to everyone’s relief, managed to leave Prosecutor Gr’aja and Deputy Prosecutor Ha’xil entirely un-detained and a diplomatic incident entirely un-caused. The details that the entirely more compliant Verillians had sent over was displayed on a padd on the table of the briefing room, which Jenner, Taylor and Old Jirel were checking over.
Leaving Old Jirel to finish skimming the data, Taylor looked up at Jenner with a half-smile.
“You know, Admiral, I was wondering,” she offered, “In situations like that, what happens when someone calls your bluff?”
Jenner looked back at her with an inscrutable poker face.
“It’s never come up.”
Her half-smile became a full smile.
“This is them,” Old Jirel nodded, pointing at the course information on the padd, “They would’ve intercepted the Talarian freighter here to shield them from the Verillians, and then proceeded to the Vandor sector once they were clear. Everything is playing out as it should do.”
The craggy face of the Trill contorted into a sad look as he contemplated what that meant. While he was relieved the timeline was proceeding entirely unaffected by everything he had done, he was now another step closer to condemning himself to thirty years in the past.
Taylor spotted the look, and tried to steer him back to business.
“So, what now? Where do we head to in the Vandor sector?”
Old Jirel returned from his thoughts and tapped the screen of the padd.
“Right,” he nodded, “We need to head to these coordinates inside the sector. But I think it might make sense for us to take a…roundabout course. Just in case the Verillians try to track us.”
Jenner nodded.
“I’ll make sure to tell Commander T’Len to indulge herself.”
“And I’ll call in our backup,” Taylor added, eliciting a glare from the admiral.
“I wasn’t aware we had any backup,” Jenner grunted guardedly.
He was still well aware that he was being kept on a need-to-know basis on their current mission. And that wasn’t something he was used to. Or happy with.
“Nothing to worry about,” Taylor replied calmly as she tapped a set of commands into a comms unit she had pulled from her belt, “But we have reason to believe that a set of plans for a particular vehicle were stolen from a Federation transport and brought here by Brooks and Rasmussen.”
She finished working on the device and looked back up at the admiral.
“I’m calling in a strike team from the DofTI. To trace the plans and ensure that any and every copy of them is destroyed.”
“Simple as that, hmm,” Jenner grunted, “Am I to assume that these plans that Temporal Investigations are so interested in are for—”
“A time machine,” Old Jirel nodded, “Yes.”
Taylor fixed the Trill with an unhappy look, but he merely shrugged back at her.
“I think we can trust him at this point.”
The temporal agent glanced from one man to the other and shook her head patiently.
“Is this the whole family ganging up on me?”
Old Jirel smiled at this, but Jenner didn’t do the same. He was still entirely uncomfortable about the fact that the man roughly his age was also his son.
After a moment of terse silence, Taylor decided to address the elephant in the room.
“So, the other big question is…how is our temporal subject doing? Have you been able to help him at all?”
This caused both of the men to entirely clam up. Any trace of confidence or authority seemingly melted away in an instant.
“Not so much,” Old Jirel admitted with a shrug.
Jenner merely shook his head silently.
Agent Taylor sighed.
“You know, all the miracles of the 24th century. The ability to travel across a sector of space in the blink of an eye. The means to magic up your evening meal from thin air. Everything. And still, we can’t get two grown men to have a conversation about their feelings.”
Despite the situation, she was slightly amused to see the sheepish expressions now present on the faces of the two men, and she shook her head again.
“Fine. I’m on it.”
“If it helps,” the aged Trill offered, “I know where he’ll be.”
****************************
Jirel sat in the centre seat of the Ju’Day-type raider’s cockpit and looked around.
None of the stations were manned. The entire ship was empty apart from him. The cockpit itself was silent save for the quiet hum of the warp engines.
He slowly swivelled around in the chair and let his eyes linger on the unerringly familiar space around him. The reassuring sense of the place, of the ship he had called home for so long.
The only place, he now realised, that had ever really felt like home.
And a place that he had left behind a long time ago.
His solitary reminiscence was interrupted by the sound of the heavy holodeck doors opening behind him, and a set of footsteps entering. He turned around, fully expecting to see his father. But he was surprised to see Agent Leona Taylor walk in and smile at him.
“Hi there,” she said, “I hear you’ve already argued with your father. And…yourself. I suppose I’m starting to feel left out.”
He didn’t match her smile, and just swivelled back around to the front of the cockpit. Undeterred by this reaction, she stepped around the facsimile of the room, taking in the detail.
“I’m going to guess that this is your ship?”
Jirel didn’t want a conversation. He wanted to be alone. But for some reason, instead of telling her that in no uncertain terms, he started to talk.
“No. Not really. Same type of ship, but this isn’t mine.”
He tugged at the pristine fabric on the armrests of the centre chair he was sitting in, part of the Erebus’s holographic recreation of the raider’s cockpit based on library images and details.
“Everything’s all still in one piece, for a start.”
He thought about the Bounty’s actual cockpit. The tattered fabric, the dented panelling, the mish-mash of components that had built up over thirty years of hard work, underfunded repairs and mismatched firefights.
And then he thought about the state the ship had been in when he had last seen it. After the fateful trip to Sector 374.
Thanks to a vengeful Ferengi called Grenk launching a surprise attack, the Bounty had been shot from the sky. And though it had been recovered from where it had crash-landed, it had still born the heavy scars of the violence when Jirel had walked away from it.
Just as they all had.
“Although,” he muttered sadly, “I’m not sure it was ever my ship.”
He pictured Maya Ortega. The woman who had bought the Bounty with him, many years ago, back in the Tyran Scrapyards. The woman he had never finished paying off before she had died. And the woman he was now sure he had loved.
It had never been his ship. But had it been his home?
The woman in the jumpsuit looked over at the Trill’s unhappy face, and saw someone that definitely needed to talk. It didn’t take a counsellor to see that.
“Well,” she offered eventually, “One way or another, I’d say you could use a drink.”
Jirel didn’t want a drink. Or specifically, he didn’t want company when he drank. He wanted to be alone.
But once again, he found his actions betraying his thoughts.
And he nodded back.
* The first part of Prosecutor Gr'aja from Verillian Security Division Beta-Four's difficult week is detailed in Star Trek: Bounty - 202 - "The Bat, the Birds and the Beasts".
Prosecutor Gr’aja from Verillian Security Division Beta-Four was having a hell of a week.
Firstly, he had been led on a merry dance by a petty criminal and the ship he had escaped from Verillian space in. He and his adjutant, Deputy Prosecutor Ha’xil, had eventually lost the vessel they had been tracking after it had intercepted a radiation-covered Talarian freighter, and they had been forced to return to base empty handed.
And now, after that humbling, he was being confronted by an entirely different ship.
He and Ha’xil had intercepted the unidentified vessel as soon as it had entered the system. Both were used to protecting the tight borders of Verillian space from passing scavengers, pirates or unsavoury merchants, and this was nothing new.
But what was new was the unidentified vessel turning out to be a Federation starship.
The Ambassador-class ship dwarfed their Verillian cruiser. And despite the usually peaceful nature of such vessels, Gr’aja couldn’t help but feel unnerved at their unexpected appearance. Especially when the ship had actually made contact. And instead of the warm look of a fully-staffed starship bridge, they were confronted by a dimmed briefing room, empty save for a stern Starfleet admiral and a mysterious woman in a black jumpsuit.
And while Verillian Security usually handled the questions in such encounters with previously unidentified ships, the Starfleet side had quickly taken the lead in the conversation.
“Can you supply us with records of the course this ship took?” the woman in the jumpsuit asked.
Prosecutor Gr’aja had diligently answered the questions that had come his way from the two people on the screen. Most of which had revolved around the troublesome ship they had been tracking a few days earlier. None of the questions up to this point had been too intrusive. But this latest one did seem to cross a line. A Federation ship unofficially requesting physical data from a Verillian one.
“I, um,” Gr’aja began, a little flustered, “I would have to check with my superiors before—”
“Prosecutor,” the heavy-set admiral cut in, having clearly and readily taken up the role of the bad cop in the double act on screen, “I understand you have procedures to follow, but so do we. And right now, this vessel is operating under level zero Starfleet clearance.”
Gr’aja went to retort, but the admiral cut him off immediately.
“Which, I’m sure you’re about to tell me, has no bearing on a non-Federation system like this. And that’s true. But it does also give me, as commander of this vessel, a broad range of options to deal with such situations.”
The Verillian prosecutor audibly gulped and glanced over at Deputy Prosecutor Ha’xil, who looked similarly troubled by the implication carried in those words.
“W—What do you mean?” Gr’aja managed to stammer back at the screen.
“I’m not sure you want me to get too specific,” the implacable admiral replied, “But I think we both know that, given the relative strengths of our ships, it would end up with us being in possession of the information we’ve politely requested, and two members of Verillian Security in custody for obstructing a Starfleet investigation.”
“T—That would be—” Ha’xil began.
“A diplomatic incident. Yes, that’s true. But probably not that will end well for the Verillians, I think we can all agree.”
Neither Gr’aja nor Ha’xil had much of a response to that.
“So,” the admiral said again, “Can you supply us with the records of the course this ship took?”
****************************
A few minutes later, the Erebus was warping away from the Verillian system.
They had, much to everyone’s relief, managed to leave Prosecutor Gr’aja and Deputy Prosecutor Ha’xil entirely un-detained and a diplomatic incident entirely un-caused. The details that the entirely more compliant Verillians had sent over was displayed on a padd on the table of the briefing room, which Jenner, Taylor and Old Jirel were checking over.
Leaving Old Jirel to finish skimming the data, Taylor looked up at Jenner with a half-smile.
“You know, Admiral, I was wondering,” she offered, “In situations like that, what happens when someone calls your bluff?”
Jenner looked back at her with an inscrutable poker face.
“It’s never come up.”
Her half-smile became a full smile.
“This is them,” Old Jirel nodded, pointing at the course information on the padd, “They would’ve intercepted the Talarian freighter here to shield them from the Verillians, and then proceeded to the Vandor sector once they were clear. Everything is playing out as it should do.”
The craggy face of the Trill contorted into a sad look as he contemplated what that meant. While he was relieved the timeline was proceeding entirely unaffected by everything he had done, he was now another step closer to condemning himself to thirty years in the past.
Taylor spotted the look, and tried to steer him back to business.
“So, what now? Where do we head to in the Vandor sector?”
Old Jirel returned from his thoughts and tapped the screen of the padd.
“Right,” he nodded, “We need to head to these coordinates inside the sector. But I think it might make sense for us to take a…roundabout course. Just in case the Verillians try to track us.”
Jenner nodded.
“I’ll make sure to tell Commander T’Len to indulge herself.”
“And I’ll call in our backup,” Taylor added, eliciting a glare from the admiral.
“I wasn’t aware we had any backup,” Jenner grunted guardedly.
He was still well aware that he was being kept on a need-to-know basis on their current mission. And that wasn’t something he was used to. Or happy with.
“Nothing to worry about,” Taylor replied calmly as she tapped a set of commands into a comms unit she had pulled from her belt, “But we have reason to believe that a set of plans for a particular vehicle were stolen from a Federation transport and brought here by Brooks and Rasmussen.”
She finished working on the device and looked back up at the admiral.
“I’m calling in a strike team from the DofTI. To trace the plans and ensure that any and every copy of them is destroyed.”
“Simple as that, hmm,” Jenner grunted, “Am I to assume that these plans that Temporal Investigations are so interested in are for—”
“A time machine,” Old Jirel nodded, “Yes.”
Taylor fixed the Trill with an unhappy look, but he merely shrugged back at her.
“I think we can trust him at this point.”
The temporal agent glanced from one man to the other and shook her head patiently.
“Is this the whole family ganging up on me?”
Old Jirel smiled at this, but Jenner didn’t do the same. He was still entirely uncomfortable about the fact that the man roughly his age was also his son.
After a moment of terse silence, Taylor decided to address the elephant in the room.
“So, the other big question is…how is our temporal subject doing? Have you been able to help him at all?”
This caused both of the men to entirely clam up. Any trace of confidence or authority seemingly melted away in an instant.
“Not so much,” Old Jirel admitted with a shrug.
Jenner merely shook his head silently.
Agent Taylor sighed.
“You know, all the miracles of the 24th century. The ability to travel across a sector of space in the blink of an eye. The means to magic up your evening meal from thin air. Everything. And still, we can’t get two grown men to have a conversation about their feelings.”
Despite the situation, she was slightly amused to see the sheepish expressions now present on the faces of the two men, and she shook her head again.
“Fine. I’m on it.”
“If it helps,” the aged Trill offered, “I know where he’ll be.”
****************************
Jirel sat in the centre seat of the Ju’Day-type raider’s cockpit and looked around.
None of the stations were manned. The entire ship was empty apart from him. The cockpit itself was silent save for the quiet hum of the warp engines.
He slowly swivelled around in the chair and let his eyes linger on the unerringly familiar space around him. The reassuring sense of the place, of the ship he had called home for so long.
The only place, he now realised, that had ever really felt like home.
And a place that he had left behind a long time ago.
His solitary reminiscence was interrupted by the sound of the heavy holodeck doors opening behind him, and a set of footsteps entering. He turned around, fully expecting to see his father. But he was surprised to see Agent Leona Taylor walk in and smile at him.
“Hi there,” she said, “I hear you’ve already argued with your father. And…yourself. I suppose I’m starting to feel left out.”
He didn’t match her smile, and just swivelled back around to the front of the cockpit. Undeterred by this reaction, she stepped around the facsimile of the room, taking in the detail.
“I’m going to guess that this is your ship?”
Jirel didn’t want a conversation. He wanted to be alone. But for some reason, instead of telling her that in no uncertain terms, he started to talk.
“No. Not really. Same type of ship, but this isn’t mine.”
He tugged at the pristine fabric on the armrests of the centre chair he was sitting in, part of the Erebus’s holographic recreation of the raider’s cockpit based on library images and details.
“Everything’s all still in one piece, for a start.”
He thought about the Bounty’s actual cockpit. The tattered fabric, the dented panelling, the mish-mash of components that had built up over thirty years of hard work, underfunded repairs and mismatched firefights.
And then he thought about the state the ship had been in when he had last seen it. After the fateful trip to Sector 374.
Thanks to a vengeful Ferengi called Grenk launching a surprise attack, the Bounty had been shot from the sky. And though it had been recovered from where it had crash-landed, it had still born the heavy scars of the violence when Jirel had walked away from it.
Just as they all had.
“Although,” he muttered sadly, “I’m not sure it was ever my ship.”
He pictured Maya Ortega. The woman who had bought the Bounty with him, many years ago, back in the Tyran Scrapyards. The woman he had never finished paying off before she had died. And the woman he was now sure he had loved.
It had never been his ship. But had it been his home?
The woman in the jumpsuit looked over at the Trill’s unhappy face, and saw someone that definitely needed to talk. It didn’t take a counsellor to see that.
“Well,” she offered eventually, “One way or another, I’d say you could use a drink.”
Jirel didn’t want a drink. Or specifically, he didn’t want company when he drank. He wanted to be alone.
But once again, he found his actions betraying his thoughts.
And he nodded back.
* The first part of Prosecutor Gr'aja from Verillian Security Division Beta-Four's difficult week is detailed in Star Trek: Bounty - 202 - "The Bat, the Birds and the Beasts".
