Scum And Villainy (Chapter Seven)

Posted on Jun 05, 2020 @ 3:49am by Raxl Dreyton
Edited on on Jun 05, 2020 @ 3:50am

Mission: Section 31

= Scum and Villainy, Chapter 7 =

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LOCATION: Modified luxury liner “Vorte’mol”
SCENE: Bridge


Crichton hung a few feet off the ground, his face already a deep red, as Kalenda the Black snarled at him again.

“I asked you a *question*, little duck!”

“*ggggkkh* not… *kkkkghhh*,” Crichton said, spittle shooting out to spatter against the Klingon woman’s face. Kalenda didn’t seem to notice.

When Kalenda had grabbed Crichton, all of the guards in the room had snapped to attention, including the two that had been holding Rax. Rax had slumped back to the floor, while all around him, Riss and Kalenda’s men drew their weapons, their eyes all darting furtively about the room, not sure where to aim. For his part, Riss looked terrified, and seemed to be tripping over his words as he demanded some kind of explanation. Buuzu, meanwhile, had instantly inserted himself between Riss and the commotion; the bodyguard looked ready to kill anyone who stepped too close to his employer. And, a few meters away, Rax saw the box that had started all this mess, still clutched tightly under the arm of one of Kalenda’s guards.

Now Rax looked at Selyara, and saw that her eyes were also fixed on the black box. He thought she might be getting ready to spring for it, but one wrong move at this moment would turn things into a bloodbath.

Crichton continued to rasp and choke, his face now going a hideous plum color.

“What is the meaning of this?!” Riss finally got out.

“Your courier stole a lot of latinum from me, Riss,” Kalenda said, without taking her eyes off Crichton. “More than that, he *dishonored* my ship, and my hospitality. A debt is owed.”

Now Brass stepped forward. “Uncle, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Crichton isn’t--”

But suddenly Selyara was moving. Her hands flashed out like cobras, fixing tightly on the exposed skin of the two Ferengi guards standing nearest to her. The guards went rigid as the thinkstrike bolted through their nervous systems, and their fingers, already dangerously close to the activators of their weapons, jerked. Phaser fire sizzled out, criss-crossing the bridge. One lanced into the chest of another Ferengi guard, knocking him to the deck, while the other etched a smoking line through the bicep of Kalenda the Black. Kalenda cried out, her grip on Crichton loosened, and Crichton was dumped to the floor, where he lay motionless.

The other guards began to return fire, some of them targeting Selyara, the rest targeting each other. But Selyara never stopped moving; she’d snatched a phaser out of one of her captors’ hands and rolled forward, somersaulting mere inches ahead of a disruptor beam that turned the luxury carpeting into a blackened ruin. Selyara came out of the roll in a crouch, firing her phaser at the Klingon holding the black box. The Klingon flew backward, hitting the bulkhead behind him, and the box flipped into the air.

Selyara’s eyes went wide, but she couldn’t slow her forward momentum in time to adjust her course. The box flipped over her head, even as she tried to twist, on hand reaching up to try to grab it. The box bounced off her fingertips, flipped again, and fell…

...into Raxl Dreyton’s outstretched hand.

“Stop!” Riss was yelling, as his men died around him. “Stop! Stop!!!”

One of the surviving Klingons saw Rax catch the box and spun towards him, bringing the tip of his disruptor in line with Rax’s chest. Rax tucked the box under one arm, and with the other, he seized the Klingon’s outstretched arm, pushing it up so the disruptor was pointed over his shoulder. The disruptor fired, the orange beam passing dangerously close to Rax’s neck, Rax hip-checked the Klingon and yanked down hard on the arm, pulling the Klingon up and over his shoulder in a judo throw. Rax felt something tear in his shoulder, and knew he’d barely be able to lift it the next day, but that only mattered on the rather optimistic basis that he was going to survive the next 30 seconds, so he immediately turned and tried to push his way towards the turbolift doors near the rear of the bridge.

Something seized him by the hair and yanked him backward, hard enough to send him clattering to the deck a few feet away. Rax looked up and saw Buuzu, Riss’s Nausicaan bodyguard, standing over him, raising one foot in preparation for smashing it down on Raxl’s head. Rax closed his eyes--

There was the sound of a hard impact. Rax opened his eyes again, and saw that Selyara had interposed herself between Raxl and Buuzu, and had driven the powerful Nausicaan backwards a step with a savage kick to his chin. Buuzu roared and came at her, but Selyara slipped easily to the side and gently lay her hand across the back of Buuzu’s neck. Buuzu’s body went rigid… and then, one of Buuzu’s trunklike arms swung backwards, catching Selyara off guard. His fist crunched into lips, her nose, sending her flipping to the side to land hard on her back against the bulkhead.

“Vulcan shit,” Buuzu spat as he lumbered towards her.

Buuzu leaned down, grabbed both sides of Selyara’s head, and lifted her off the ground. Selyara’s face twisted in agony as Buuzu began to apply pressure. Rax struggled to a kneeling position, his shoulder felt like it was on fire. He heard the distinct sound of disruptor fire, half-expected to feel his molecules begin to disintegrate, but instead it was Buuzu who cried out in pain. Rax turned, saw that Kalenda the Black had pulled her sidearm and fired at the Nausicaan, striking him on the side of his head. Selyara tumbled from his hands as the Nausicaan slumped to the deck, his body landing and a sickening and awkward angle.

Kalenda swung the disruptor around the room. Rax saw that she was the only armed person left standing. He felt the weight of the black box still clutched under one arm, the box that Kalenda had been there to purchase before all this had started, and thought, **This has not been my best day at work.**

Kalenda was laughing. “I did not expect such sport! I’m tempted to spare you all just as a thank-you!”

Riss stepped forward, his hands raised. “You’ve… already delivered the payment. You can still take your merchandise and go. No hard feelings.”

“And what about Crichton?” Kalenda asked. “Is he part of your bargain, Riss?”

“Anything you want,” Riss said. “It would hate to threaten our business relationship, Kalenda.”

Just then, Rax felt something hit him hard from behind. He toppled forward, the box slipping out of his grasp. This time, it was Jacob Crichton who seized it. His one eye was blazing as he lifted the box. Riss stepped back, while Kalenda turned to face him, her lips twisted in a hideous grin.

“Thanks for the referral, boss,” Crichton said. His face snapped to Kalenda. “Ah ah ah, back off. Or I’ll activate this thing and take everyone goddamn one of you with me.”

“No,” Selyara said, though the word came out slurred as she fought her wait to a sitting position.

“Crichton,” Brass said, his usually beady-eyes wide. “Be reasonable.”

“I’m not even the right Crichton, you idiot,” Crichton said to Kalenda. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“You will not fool me again, little duck,” Kalenda said. “You have wounded my honor. I will gladly die to repair it.”

She raised her weapon. Everyone on the bridge - Riss, Brass, Rax, and Selyara - yelled for her to stop. But before she could bring the disruptor to bear against Crichton, the one-eyed human opened the box.

A bright flash swept across the bridge, so bright that for several seconds all Raxl could make out was the fuzzy, frozen image of Crichton standing with his arm outstretched. Raxl blinked, and eventually his vision began to clear. He saw that everyone on the bridge was in roughly the same position they had been before, each of them also rapidly blinking to clear their own vision. Crichton and Kalenda each looked down at themselves for a moment, as if checking to make sure they were still all there.

Brass was the first one to speak. “That was it?”

Selyara, meanwhile, had gone deathly pale.

“You have no idea what you’ve just done,” she said quietly.

Kalenda the Black looked at Riss and snarled. “*This* is what you tried to sell me? You die next, you little toad.”

She turned back to Crichton, lifted her disruptor again, and fired.

The disruptor made an odd spitting sound, and a few tiny sparks of plasma sputtered from its tip, but that was all. Kalenda fired again, producing the same result. She lifted the disruptor and scowled.

Crichton had had enough. He threw the open box at her and spun on his heel pushing past Raxl and moving towards the turbolift. He desperately pawed at the control; the panel squelched angrily, but nothing else happened.

Rax, meanwhile, had crawled over to where Selyara was sitting. “Just how screwed are we?”

Selyara looked at him, her expression more grave than he’d ever seen it before.

“We need to get off this ship,” she said. “Now.”

Crichton kept trying the panel, cursing each time it responded with the angry squawking sound. Finally, he stepped back and kicked the panel in frustration.

“Why isn’t it working?” he said. “What the hell’s wrong with your ship, Riss?”

“It was working fine until *you* got here,” Riss shot back.

“My disruptor,” Kalenda said. “What did you do to it? What is this weapon, Riss?”

“I don’t know,” Riss said, looking between Crichton and Kalenda. “It’s supposed to be some kind of fleet-killer. I thought it was some kind of bomb--”

“You IDIOTS,” Selyara said. She pushed herself to her feet, swayed for a moment, then steadied herself. “You complete and utter fools.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Brass asked. “You sure know how to fight.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rax said, getting back to his own feet as well. His shoulder pulsed in pain with each beat of his heart, which was still pounding. “What matters is what exactly that doohickey is meant to do.”

He took a few shaky step forward so he could look Selyara in the face.

“‘Fleet-killer’? What the hell is he talking about?”

Selyara met his eye, slowly resuming her normally cool, calculating expression.

“How familiar are you with the Elandipole incident?”

=[/\]=

NRPG: Trying to get this story wrapped up too, technically all of this is happening way back during the first part of the “Last Days of Empire” mission, so I want to try to get it finished before it gets any more out of sync with the current timeline.

Why couldn’t Selyara thinkstrike Buuzu? What was inside the box? How is anyone going to make it out of this situation alive?

Shawn Putnam
A.k.a.
Raxl Dreyton
Elderly Bystander