Over The Sea And Far Away

Posted on Nov 05, 2014 @ 5:56pm by Selyara Chen

Mission: Birth Of An Empire

“Over The Sea and Far Away”

(cont. The Undiscovered Country)


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Over the sea and far away she’s waiting like an iceberg, waiting to change,

But she’s cold inside, she wants to be like the water - “Other side of the world” KT Tunstall

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Location: Unknown

Scene: Unknown

Stardate: 2.141030.2005

Time Index: Five Months Ago

“Hold still… Nearly done.” The male Ferengi hovered over Selyara, his deepset eyes examining her face, his snaggle teeth set in a grin. “You’re becoming quite a frequent face here, my friend. Keep it up and you won’t even remember what you really look like anymore.”

“That would not, perhaps, be a bad thing.” Selyara suppressed an involuntary shudder. She’d expected her freedom, her secret knowledge, her growing network of informants would make her feel powerful, invincible, and help her regain some sense of self determination. But instead she’d found herself scared, deeply insecure, jumping at every shadow, seeing her stalker and conspiracies behind every door.

On her trip from RISA she’d passed right by Rawyvin Seth and the woman he’d been traveling with. She had to pass him, had to act as though all was normal, lest her fear and hesitation give her away. She passed within 10 feet of him, and he didn’t recognize her. How wonderful it was not to be Selyara Chen. How awful that even with a new toy, his obsession with her was undiminished.

“I would ask, but I don’t care.” The Ferengi said, as he reprogrammed her hair follicles to revert from the chestnut curls to Selyara’s natural raven locks. He took a pair of scissors and began to cut it with precise snips of his scissors.

“That nurturing bedside manner is why I picked you, and why you continue to live.” Selyara said sanguinely, looking at his work in the mirror. “Thank you, this will be more than adequate. As promised, here are the referrals I have made. They will be arriving to avail themselves of your unique talents. Thank you, doctor.”

“Always a pleasure, see you soon.”

“If I am lucky, you will not.” She stood and handed him the padd.

=/\=

Location: The Triangle, near the Romulan border.

Scene: THE PROSPERITY, a salvage ship

Time Index: Four months ago

Selyara watched Erik Chen in miniature as he lifted his granddaughter up onto his shoulders so she could help him pick the orange persimmons that dotted the now leafless tree in his backyard. She felt the familiar melencholy welling up in her chest, Lily Chen's daughter had been born a few years after Selyara had been locked up and had likely never even heard her name. She'd been effectively erased from the Chen family, and only existed in the house she grew up in as a ghost in Erik's memory.

Intellectually she knew she needed to stop her spying. Erik Chen was her Achilles heel, the one thing someone could use to hurt her. The one thing that kept her 'human' as it were, the one thing that kept her from crossing some invisible moral line, and the one thing that could keep her from living up to her potential. She terminated the data feed, and Selyara Chen faded away and she disappeared into the new name and identity she'd concocted for herself. She was not Selyara Chen, and she would likely never be again.

And that was fine.

Selyara was weak, Selyara had no purpose, no goals, Selyara didn't have enough backbone to do what was necessary, too concerned was she with pleasing everyone and protecting their feelings. Selyara was a woman who wielded the power of a Captain of a Starship with temerity and lack of conviction, choosing to lead with wheedling friendship, rather than with respect.

“You’ll want to come here and see this.” The captain of the salvage ship she had booked passage on said as he stuck his head into a small room that she had claimed as her own, breaking her train of thought. He was a decent man, old- too old to be working so hard still- with a still present kind twinkle in his eyes. His blue eyes were watery, nearly disappearing into the heavy wrinkles around them, and topped with impressive untamed eyebrows that reminded her of a cockatoo’s crest. His face was nut brown from planetside salvage operations, and so heavy with wrinkles that it reminded Selyara of a Sharpei her neighbor had when she was young. He reminded her of Erik Chen, kindly, fatherly, ineffably cheerful, but there was a sadness floating at the corner of his mind and mouth that she hoped her adopted father would never have. She shoved her feelings down again.

His story was like many of those out here, choosing to live in space protected by no empire, no government. He had lived on a colony world that had been directly within the path of the Dominion during the Second Dominion War. When they were threatened the Federation had abandoned them, choosing to keep their firepower centralized to protect the core worlds. Faced with the prospect of Dominion occupation, destruction of their settlements and death, he and many other of his fellow colonists chose to strike a bargain with the Dominion, supplying them with what resources their planet produced in exchange for life and limb.

When the war ended, the Federation accused them of being conspirators with the Dominion, and those who did not run were sent to stockades, or registered in a database and their every movement tracked in perpetuity. Those who escaped were bitter, and decided that no government was better than a government who punished them for surviving.

The Salvager Captain had run, his wife and children had not, and in that instant their happy little family detonated. He confided he sent them little things when he could to let them know he was still thinking of them, but he never knew if his gifts ever made it there.

This, Selyara was learning, was the shameful underbelly of the Federation. It was something she never would have dreamed was happening when she was swanning around on the CENTURY, the DISCOVERY, the PATRIOT. She would have remained oblivious, too, had her circumstances not changed so drastically. She would have kept on enjoying the utopian society, unquestioning, content, and never suspecting there might be a price for it.

She stood and followed him to the front of the ship to look out of the cockpit. The breath caught in her throat.

Floating in the middle of space LIMBO stood like a piece of sculpture, a testament to nature’s beauty made of titanium and transparisteel. Shaped like a tulip shell from the beaches of earth, it shimmered, a pearl in the ocean of stars.

“Like it? I thought you might.” The Salvager Captain said with a wink. “Even a Romulan is not immune to beauty. Looks its best from here, unfortunately. Reality sets in once you get closer. And once you smell it. Especially smell it.”

* * *=/\=* * *

Location: LIMBO

Scene: The Docks

Time Index: Four Months ago.

As Selyara stepped off the ship her nose was assailed by the stench of too many beings crammed into a space that was never intended to accommodate their numbers. The elegant docking gantry, covered with a veneer of grime gave way to a landing tiled in black marble with deep blue flecks catching the light within it. The floor, as everything in LIMBO, had seen better days. The landing was twenty feet across, and a turbolift doorway decorated with an art deco style motif of some sort of blooming trees was across from her. In every available inch of floor cargo was being stacked, offloaded, and carried from ship to ship, and onto the elevators to go up to the marketplace, leaving only the smallest and most perfunctory of passageways between them to allow the mass of beings to ascend and descend the staircase.

Bedraggled, dirty, smelly, full of beggars, thieves and all sorts of the wrong crowd, LIMBO looked like freedom to Selyara. She paused, deciding to take the long walk to the upper levels, rather than riding the lift, and turned back to the Scavenger Captain and his crew who were setting up a stall to sell his scavenged bits and parts to other ships who had arrived looking to make repairs.

His eyebrows wiggled alarmingly as he looked at her with genuine concern.

“Here you are. But this isn’t a great place to exist, Sprout. It’s dangerous, even for a Romulan, don’t have illusions about that. You find yourself needing to get off of here quickly, or just plain old change your mind, you don’t hesitate to call me and my crew and we’ll come right back to pick you up. We’re always lookin’ for new family, it’s a hard life, but it’s a good one, and we’re free.”

A genuine smile flitted reflexively across Selyara’s face. He was a good person. She would have to make sure he ‘discovered’ some lucrative salvaging sites.

“I shall keep that in mind.” She said gravely, quashing the sentimentality that was starting to creep in. “Thank you, Captain. Please, let me know when you dock here next.”

She turned away and began her ascent up the cracked and uneven stone of the staircase.

The diversity of species calling LIMBO home eclipsed anything the Federation had, though the the mix was different. A spattering of humans dotted the crowd of Romulans, Remans, Orions, Klingons, and dozens of other species that Selyara could not identify that presumably called the Triangle and the Romulan Empire home.

Everything was on sale here, dilithium crystals for warp cores, objects d'art from a thousand planets, exotic alcohols whose palatability and safety for their buyer's species was 'not guaranteed,' and all manner of wares outlawed in the Federation.

This was the perfect place to disappear, and she hoped that Rawyvin Seth was not so obsessed that he would put himself in danger by going so close to the Romulan Empire where there was quite a significant bounty for proof of his death. Even HE would have to be leery of being hunted en mass by the Romulans, and his overblown ego would not allow him to do as she had and change his face and name to better skulk in the shadows.

Selyara slowly walked up the stairs, savoring the anonymity of being just another face in the crowd, sensitive ears catching snippets of gossip and shady deals as she passed by, mind snatching snippets of thoughts from those who bumped into her as they scurried up and down the stairs.

The stairs widened as she went further up, until at last she emerged into the Atria. She paused to marvel as her mind reconstructed how it must have looked in its glory days, before the ramshackle tenements were constructed from bits of shuttlecrafts, deck plating, shipping containers, wooden boxes and all manner of less identifiable junk.

* * *=/\=* * *

Location: The Black Nova (Orion Syndicate Vessel)

Scene: Slaves quarters.

Time Index: 9 years ago

“Well? How soon will she be ready?” Xon demanded of Telandra, his Betazed right hand woman.

“Patience, Xon.” The older woman crossed her arms and frowned at him. “It’s difficult work to reshape a mind so that it willingly does something that goes against its very grain.”

“I still don’t see why you don’t just take over her mind and force her to do it.” Xon groused half heartedly. Telandra had been with the Syndicate for 39 years, and during that time she had proven herself a fearsome telepath. She’d been an informant on a remote Federation intelligence outpost masquerading as a science station. With her help, the Syndicate had attacked, killed the inhabitants, and stolen the intel contained in the data banks to sell on the black market. Since then, she’d distinguished herself at creating sleeper agents for assassinations and inside men for heists.

“Because, if you just use brute force like that then the subject becomes little better than a mindless zombie.” The woman’s green eyes glittered at him with that creepy way she had. She was still a beautiful woman, despite her age, but she sometimes had a hint of insanity behind those eyes. He’d heard other telepaths whisper it was because she had spent too much time inside other people’s minds, and that telepaths who did this began to have the edges of their sense of identity blur. “Making someone do something they would not normally do shatters their psyche. Convincing them they want to do it takes longer, but is ultimately more likely to succeed.”

He waited for her to continue. If there was one thing Telandra loved, it was to show off her intellect.

“Right now, I have her drugged with something to make her more suggestible, to lower her mental resistance, and I have convinced her that I am her long lost mother- and that we could be together again if only she would deliver her ship to you on a silver plate. Tomorrow, I’ll begin to break down her sense of morality, cut her off from her empathy and compassion, make it easier for her to consider hurting her crew. Then I’ll begin to build her narcissism, and sever her connection to her sense of identity. When I’m done, she’ll think it was her idea. It takes time to build a sociopath.”

“She’s a telepath too, won’t she realize what you’ve done?” Xon looked into the cell at the young woman within. He’d read the Syndicate’s intelligence on her, knew that she’d been orphaned about the same time Telandra had come to them, and he wondered if perhaps Telandra’s ruse was less fiction than she’d care to admit. He searched the glazed green eyes and the soft features of the Starfleet Captain for similarities to Telandra.

“Maybe, but by the time Captain Selyara Chen realizes, it will be far, far too late.”

* * *=/\=* * *

Location: LIMBO

Scene: Ferengi Trade Mission

“And you just came here, and decided to come to me?” DaiMon Snek looked suspiciously at the Romulan woman standing in front of him, Aella Navarron, she said her name was. But she was an odd one, for a Romulan, and he was wary of those lumpy headed pointy eared warmongering pains in the ass.

“I don’t like Orions,” she said simply, a delicate shrug sending her body writhing in an enticing way. “And everything I have heard indicates that you are far better at your job than Harad-Sar. And I like being on the winning team.”

“All this is true,” DaiMon Snek was becoming distracted by the Romulan’s assets… Which were on display to their best advantage. “But Romulans don’t usually concern themselves with money and profits.”

“But Romulans do like revenge, DaiMon,” she leaned close in and traced the edge of his lobes as her breath tickled sensuously past his ear. “What is it the Klingons say? Revenge is a dish best served cold? Well in my experience nothing is colder than gold pressed latinum, and we are talking a whole lot of Latinum. Besides, who else on Limbo is ruthless enough to do what needs to be done to turn a profit?”

“Good point. Ten percent cut?” He tried not to be distracted.

“Nothing less than forty percent of total profit after overhead costs have been deducted. You won’t even get a taste of it if you don’t have me, while I could always go to my second choice and talk to the Orions, despite my distaste,” she pulled back from him, her dark eyes hard.

“Thirty.”

“Thirty five,” he nodded his assent, and they shook on it.

“The Romulan Incursion into Federation Space was staged,” she leaned back and crossed her long legs elegantly. “Staged by elements within the Federation that wanted to institute martial law. The incursion will not last long, but in the meantime, the market prices and company values of several planets have tanked and could be bought, or traded, for little more than a song. When the incursion ends, the beings left holding controlling interests in those commodities and companies would be left with quite the profitable stock, especially if they knew where to sell what they had acquired. I have all this information.”

“It will be a pleasure to do business with you, then.” The DiaMon’s sharp teeth curved up into a smile as he realized exactly what he was getting.

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NRPG: OK, just posting a little something before we eventually get to LIMBO. Let’s get to it ;)

Alix Fowler
as
??? a.k.a Selyara
Unknown occupation
LIMBO