Erratic Nerd Writings

{{I don't like the "name" I'm running with currently on this project, but it's going to do for now.  This is an original group of characters based in the Star Trek universe-not the Abrams/Pine one, either.  While a select few of these characters were not originally created by me (I used to RPG in a Trek group; yeah, world class nerd here!), only likenesses of those others will be featured (names, species, etc, used with permission).  My own unique take and fleshing out of those characters will be written by me, and originated by me.  The story and plot is all original.}}

He was lowering the body of the Cardassian to the metallic grated deck when a burly Naussican stepped out from the far side of a jutting bulkhead, refastening his pants.  At least that would explain the rancid piss smell.  He shifted his grip upon the Mek’leth as he closed in on the startled sentry.  Though his first kill aboard was silent, he was unable to prevent the sounds of this brief struggle from carrying.  Even as the Naussican slid down the bulkhead with vacant eyes, the communicator attached to the alien’s belt squawked.

“Belthor, what the hell are you two doing down there?”

Kanor cursed to himself as he wiped his blade upon a “clean” spot on the Naussican’s trousers.  He had been hoping to remain undetected aboard the pirate’s ship until he had at least found what he was looking for, but when he had appeared directly in front of the stupefied Cardassian guard, he hadn’t had much choice.  He quickly searched the guards for anything useful while the voice, becoming increasingly alarmed, finally stopped, only to be replaced by the blaring klaxon of an alarm.  No sense operating blindly now that he was found out.

“Cypher, make me a map of this garbage scow.”

The unseen pulse radiated out from his left forearm, pinging the vessel and creating a ship schematic in his holo-display.  His brow furrowed for a moment as he studied it, even as the sounds of booted footsteps rapidly approaching reached his ears.

“Naturally, the wrong deck.”

He ducked down into a crouched run as he headed towards the nearest access ramp with the least amount of noise coming from it.  The ship was small enough it didn’t even have turbolifts, just three access ramp wells.  One fore, one aft and one midway.  He had materialized on the middle deck of the ship, in between the mid and aft rampwells.

“Blessed Ul…!”

Kanor quickly silenced the startled Orion coming up the ramp, and then dispatched him, kicking his corpse back down the ramp.  He heard the heavy clanging of metal boots on the deck stopping back from where he had come from as he withdrew a couple of small yield grenades.  They must have found those two guards.

“Intruders!  We’ll need…”

The rest of the pirate’s words were drowned out as minor explosions shook the craft from below, where Kanor had tossed the grenades before hurriedly scaling the ramp upwards.  Smoke and heat shot up the rampwell, but Kanor, crouched with his back against the wall framing the doorway on the top deck, planned on using it.  He held out the extended mirror so he could see down the corridor without exposing himself, and was rewarded with the flaring lights of two disruptor blasts scorching the far wall.  Two alert guards not fazed by the smoke and confusion; check.

He resheathed the Mek’leth on his back and drew one of the two disruptors at his hips.  A guard on the left seemed to be crouched within an arched doorway, while his companion was on the right behind a bulkhead.  The door was sealed.  He reached down and withdrew a flashbang, then stood up.  He quickly shot around the edge of the door a couple of times, not caring about his aim, then dropped back down into a crouch, twisting the flashbang as a short, controlled volley of disruptor fire sizzled the doorframe he was against far above his head.  Visualizing the brief glances he had gotten of the corridor, he leaned out and threw the flashbang towards the opposing doorway.  A muted thud as the device magnetically attached to wherever it had landed, and then an explosion of light that was visible even through Kanor’s closed eyelids.

When it dissipated, he made his move.  The Cardassian in the doorway he shot first (those foreheads of theirs made such tempting targets, he had to bulls-eye them every time), but the Klingon that had been behind the bulkhead managed to snap off a couple of wild shots as he stumbled around blindly.  Kanor avoided them easily as he closed in, ramming his cranial plate against the equally ridged cranium of his foe before he fired the disruptor at point-blank range.  Klingons, with all their redundant biological features, you had to really ensure were dead; so he shot the guard again, despite the smoking crater in his chest. 

The firefight was sure to draw attention back from his grenade diversion.  He checked the guards for a key to the sealed door, though his search was fruitless.  He frowned as he stepped over to twist and remove his flashbang, studying the locking mechanism and the door itself.  He didn’t have explosives powerful enough on him to blast through the door, and while it looked like a simple enough interface to hack, speed was of the essence.  He was fast, but he wasn’t a machine.

“Cypher, get this thing opened.”

“Affirmative.” 

An inflectionless female voice responded in his pointed ear as he held up his left forearm to the lock interface on the door.   Within seconds, a series of clicks, followed by off-tone beeps, sounded; then the interface on the door flashed green and the door unlocked and hissed open.

“There he is!”  A flurry of disruptor blasts erupted from the rampwell he had just vacated, a couple slamming into the personnel shield he had activated.  It was only good against energy projectiles, and even then, was not designed to withstand a full barrage.  He dived into the room he had just unlocked, quickly hitting the door-close indicator inside and relocking it.

His eyes swept around the room.  It seemed like a rudimentary office of some kind, with a desk and some chairs.  The place was a shambles; pirates weren’t known for their housekeeping, as evidenced by the Naussican guard below who had decided to relieve himself right there on the deck.  While no one had pissed in here at least (certainly not recently), even this room was clearly not used to impress.  Which made the gleaming case on the desk amidst a pile of other detritus, brazenly emblazoned with the Federation logo, stick out as if IT were the eyesore.

He ran over and grabbed the parcel, quickly opening the case, its locks already compromised, to check its contents.  Everything appeared to be here, though he didn’t have time for a detailed accounting.  He heard those telltale clicks coming from the doorway, and ducked behind the desk, training his disruptor on the door as he resealed the case with his other hand.

“Cypher, bodyslide by one, home.”

The door slid open as the green-hued line of light from his belt buckle expanded over his body, then snapped back into a line again, which shrunk to a green pinprick, which then disappeared altogether.  He was gone; package retrieved.

                                                                           *****

“Sir, the pirates are unleashing a broad volley of weapons fire into the surrounding area.”

“Evasive manu….”

Kanor’s words were cut off as the lights aboard his ship flickered, and the deck beneath him rocked, the inertial dampeners temporarily overpowered.

“Our cloak has been compromised.”

He cursed as he tossed the Federation package off to the side and rushed into the cockpit, his hazel eyes darting over all the readouts to assess the situation as he slid into the chair.  Cypher had, of course, disengaged the cloak entirely and raised the shields, but while she was capable of some maneuvering, she was not capable of flying the ship effectively during combat.

“Dammit, I was hoping those grenades would have done something to their engineering deck!”

“They are attempting a weapons lock; coming about on an intercept course, 397 mark 2…”

Kanor largely ignored the pirate ship’s intercept trajectory as he sent his own vessel spiraling into a complicated series of maneuvers that would hopefully defeat their weapon’s tracking abilities.  He certainly had a maneuverability advantage, but the pirate ship was no whale.  Bottom line, now that this had escalated into a ship-to-ship firefight, he was in trouble.  He was outgunned, and outnumbered.  Despite his foray onto their ship, the pirates were good, and even with the crew he had killed over there, they were rallying quickly to the intruder in their midst.  He only had himself and Cypher to rely upon; something was bound to give.

He gritted his teeth as he sent his ship, the Hunt, towards the small moon the pirates had been orbiting around the type-2 gas giant off in the distance.  Hopefully he would be able to lose the pirates along the moon’s rocky surface long enough to escape, though he’d have to make sure they hadn’t set up any traps.  He swerved to the left as he pulled up, only to promptly dive back down again, narrowly avoiding a volley from the pirate’s phaser banks.  His finger stabbed at his console, releasing some ghost drones from the Hunt, designed specifically to create sensor echoes and draw enemy fire.  He adjusted his course yet again, still maintaining the overall direction towards the moon’s surface, and beginning to think maybe, just maybe, he’d be able to pull this off yet, when Cypher rained on his parade.

“Sensors picking up an additional vessel circling around from the far side of the moon, cruiser class.”

“Oh fuck me…”

Cypher put the image up on an auxiliary screen to his left, and he spared a quick glance to assess himself.  The system’s star was shining from behind the large vessel as it crested the moon’s curvature, throwing the newcomer into a stark silhouette as it oriented itself towards the two smaller ships.  He recognized that configuration, only to have it confirmed by Cypher as she scanned the new arrival.

“Federation starship, Constitution class.  Identifying itself as the I.S.S. Enterprise.”

Kanor frowned.  “That’s not a Starfleet registry…”

“They’re broadcasting audio; routing.”

“…tified vessels; cease and desist, or you will be fired upon.  Repeat, this is the Independent Starship Enterprise to both unidentified vessels; cease and desist, or you will be fired upon.”

Kanor growled, though he was happy to see the pirate raider peel off from its pursuit and turn towards this new threat.  Their raider, modified as it was, was no match for the even bigger cruiser; which left his comparatively little scout vessel a gnat amongst giants, for all they cared.  The Independent Fleet were certainly not friendlies; a group of well-organized mercenaries, from what he could remember hearing.  He hadn’t encountered them face-to-face before, and he had no desire to, either; they had to be here for the same reason he was.

The pirate raider unleashed some torpedoes before it attempted to dodge a volley of return phaser fire from the Enterprise, only to have one of its nacelles abruptly sputter and fail, causing the ship to spin out of control.  Of course; now the grenades he had chucked into their engineering deck would make something happen.  Couldn’t have been any sooner.  A surgical phaser shot from the Enterprise to the other pirate’s nacelle made the raider dead in space.

Meanwhile, Kanor had altered course again, angling away from the massive Enterprise, continuing to juke, weave, spin, and dive in an attempt to prove more difficult to target.  After finishing with the pirate, the Enterprise crew dedicated themselves exclusively to his vessel, though.  He was temporarily elated to see a wide swath of phaser fire shoot in front of his ship; a clear miss.  However, when he instinctively pulled his ship up to clear the deadly fire and the resultant cloud of moon debris it had unleashed from the nearby surface, he felt his ship lurch and shudder, and realized his mistake.  The Enterprise had captured him in a tractor beam, anticipating his reaction.  He punched his control board in frustration.  He hadn’t had a choice anyways; if he had flown straight through, the damage to the Hunt would have slowed him down enough so that the Enterprise still would have been able to lock on a tractor beam.  He hadn’t deluded himself into thinking he’d be able to avoid them, but he had still been hoping for a miracle.  He sighed, leaning back into his well-worn chair as he disengaged his engines. 

“I’m willing to guess breaking free of their tractor beam and trying to run off again isn’t going to make them too pleased with me.”

“I would think not.”

“Any chance we could hit warp speed before their tractor reacquired us?”

“Minimal, at best.  The odds would favor a solar flare striking their ship and missing us entirely more, in actuality.”

Kanor snorted.  “A ‘no’ would have been quite sufficient.”

“You stated I should add unnecessary elaborations and hypothetical scenarios in my conversations and responses to appear more ‘organic’ on stardate…”

He rolled his eyes as he got to his feet, the hull of the Enterprise looming closer outside the viewport as they were drawn towards the shuttle bay at the ships stern.  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know…my own damn fault.  Triple-encrypt all data files, then re-sync to the arm.  Once we’re aboard, I don’t want you revealing your presence at all.  Reserve vocalizations to emergency situations only.  Assume we’re in a hostile takeover scenario.”

“Affirmative.  Should I monitor your vital signs and engage an emergency bodyslide if necessary?”

Kanor stopped to reload his ammunitions as he talked before moving over to where he had tossed the Federation package.  “Unless I specifically say, or attempt to, negative.  Even if I got back here, I wouldn’t be going anywhere unless I disabled some things while I was over there, too.  Speaking of, we need to work on the targeting system for the bodyslide process.  No, I don’t materialize into anything, but materializing in front of someone ruins the covert aspect.”

“Given current technological understanding and applications, I do not believe we can account for biological’s visual orientations or lines of sight.”

He was opening his best smuggler’s hidey-hole to place the Federation package inside, and idly hoped the Enterprise captain would not decide to simply kill him on the spot and disassemble his ship to find what they were certainly looking for.  “I’d have to agree, you’re probably right.  Still, if we get out of this, I want to make certain there’s nothing else we can do.”

He glanced towards the cockpit, noting out the front viewport they were being taxied into the Enterprise’s shuttlebay.  He closed and secured the hidey-hole, then got to his feet.  “Anything in our database about these Independent Fleet folks, other than the fact they’re mercs?”  He reached up to run his fingers through his shiny, dreadlocked black hair, doing a mental rundown of the belongings on his person.  This was a dicey situation he was walking into.

“Their flagship is reported to be the I.S.S. Independent; however, the reports on that ship alone seem to fluctuate drastically as to what class of ship it is.  Other information is vague and unverifiable.”

“Great.  Still, if the flagship is the Independent, odds are the captain of this ship isn’t the group leader or anything.  Maybe that will prove useful, somehow.”

There was a clanging noise, followed by a brief shudder, as the Hunt was released from the tractor beam and settled on the shuttlebay’s flight deck.  Cypher’s voice responded in his embedded ear piece.

“Encryption, synchronization, and hostile takeover parameters engaged.”

“Excellent.”  He paused as he heard the ship-to-ship comm squawk from the cockpit, some male voice informing him he was about to be boarded.  He activated the inner airlock door, stepping inside and letting the door close behind him.  “And Cypher?  If…things go awry, take care of yourself.  In whatever way possible.  You’re too unique to be trashed.”

He settled his left hand on his left disruptor “casually”, and punched the airlock controls with his right hand, stepping through the outer door as it opened into the Enterprise’s shuttlebay.