Chapter Text
Okon Gale walked alongside Ulgar Detovo, one of the most respected men in the refugee camp. According to Ulgar, the local cell hideout had been cleverly hidden several miles north of the camp, in the Etlic Forest. Okon couldn’t help thinking that it was really an honor that Ulgar considered bringing him along.
The road was a seldom traveled one. It laid in disrepair ever since the massacre at the secluded hospital down the road. As the story went, eight years ago, a detachment from the Cardassian First Order’s Third Battalion arrived at the hospital on a fateful night. Without warning, they had rounded up the staff, the patients, and a visiting congregation of Vedeks. Then they shot them all, fulfilling their motto of “Death to All,” before they raided the hospital for supplies. Since then, as Okon recalled from the stories, no one ever traveled up this road or ever visited the cursed sight. It was rumoured Pah-Wraiths and ghostly aberrations possessed the place now. Okon had a feeling that was where Ulgar was taking him.
His assumption proved to be correct when the abandoned two-story concrete building came into view. Half its windows seemed to be broken and the outer walls were crumbling. Each step closer seemed to bring Okon ever closer to its deathly aura.
Ulgar took Okon through a low gap in the perimeter walls where several bricks had been removed and led him to the rear of the building. Okon could swear he was being watched by invisible observers in the darkened building, but each time he studied one window or another, there was nothing. He found himself uneasy as they walked on the cracked pavement, with nothing but the sound of their footsteps against the silent, deathly place.
Ulgar slipped a key into the large receiving doors that led underneath the hospital wing and opened one slightly. Okon jumped when he saw a figure in the darkness standing at the doorway. Ulgar nodded to it and opened the door a little further so he and Okon could enter. The ghastly figure in better light now turned out to simply be a gaunt Bajoran man with a phaser rifle who greeted them and let them through into a vast warehouse-like room. And there in the center of the room were two Bajoran raiders.
A thirty-or-so years old Bajoran mechanic atop one of the raiders, at least judging by his grease stained coveralls and upturned welding mask, nodded to the two of them and lowered himself from the top of the vessel.
“This young man here is Okon Gale. He’s from Rakantha Province,” Ulgar said, patting Okon on the back and introducing him to the man when he came close.
“Pleased to meet you, Gale,” the mechanic stated, offering his hand.
Okon hesitated in joining in a handshake with the man, considering it was covered in grime and some sort of motor oil, but he didn’t want to make a bad impression. He grabbed the mechanics hand and shook it firmly. Besides, in the camps, perfect cleanliness was a luxury practically no one could afford. And the few who could were, in all likelihood, collaborators and informants.
“So you’re bringing me another assistant, huh, Ulgar?” the mechanic chuckled, gripping on his toolbelt. “Okon’s part of the cobbler d’jarra, ain’t he? I could always use a new pair of shoes.”
“This is Vinsla, our chief engineer. He’s a wise ass.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, sir!” Okon said, standing straight.
Vinsla chuckled. “Engineer, huh. You flatter me once again. I’m as much an engineer as a tinkerer can be,” he said. “I’ve been working on the new upgrades as best I can, but with the resources we have right now, I can’t promise our ships’ll be ready in the next week. If I’m going to be real honest, I need more manpower.”
Ulgar put a hand to his chin to think.
“Okon, you work a lot with machinery where you’re from?”
“I mean...I’ve worked with farming equipment before, if that counts,” Okon replied after a moment of thought.
“Help Vinsla then,” he said. “The refit needs to be done in three days.”
Vinsla cocked his head at Ulgar suddenly. “Three days? I’ll try to work as--”
“Three days. Use as many people as you need, but it needs to be done then. We have new intel on our benevolent Cardassian overseers,” Ulgar said, the last few despicable words marked in his mouth with disgust. “Word has it, they’ll be moving some supplies off world and we’re going to intercept them before they have a chance to get away.”
“Well in that case, by all means. I’d better be getting back to work then. Come on, Okon, let’s go.”
Ulgar nodded a farewell to Okon and Vinsla, then turned to exit the warehouse.
“You and Ulgar seem like good friends,” Okon said, trying to make some small conversation with the engineer tinkerer.
“Yep, he’s a good guy. Saved me from a prisoner convoy headed to Gallitep.”
“Gallitep?” Okon asked quizzically. The name sounded familiar, but he didn’t quite know what it was.
Vinsla’s face turned rigid as a stone, as if he didn’t wish to discuss it outside of that one sentence.
“A hellhole. Labor camp near Kendra Province overseen by Gul Darhe’el. No one comes out of there alive,” he mumbled, before adding with an even lower tone, “my father died there.”
Okon nodded. He wouldn’t press the subject further.
Vinsla gave Okon the equivalent of a crash-course in starship engineering--flux capacitors, anodyne relays, plasma conduits...the works. Granted, Okon didn’t understand much of the vocabulary Vinsla used, but he did what he was told the way he was told. Admittedly, the way Vinsla talked about all this engineering was impressive; he seemed to know just about everything there was. They were extremely valuable skills for any resistance cell.
Okon started installing what Vinsla called pre-fire ignition matrices, something that he had no idea even did, using a set of self-sealing stem bolts.
“Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, how’d you learn so much about ships?” Okon called towards Vinsla, who was working near the dual engines at the back of the craft.
Vinsla laughed. “Don’t worry about it. You pick up a lot of skills along the way when you need them!”
It wasn’t a very thorough answer, but Okon took it for what it was worth despite the vagueness. He reasoned he shouldn’t bother their chief engineer with unnecessary conversation.
Minutes passed, then hours, until Okon lost track of the time. Vinsla kept at it by giving Okon a new task after another the moment he finished one thing. There wasn’t a clock nearby and there wasn’t any window or opening to the outside world to even see the color of the sky. Likewise, the broken watch on his wrist that had been handed down from man to man in his family hadn’t worked since he inherited it.
He wondered how the other man--the one he mistook for a wraith--standing guard must’ve felt standing in one place for so long at the singular entrance to this place.
“Hey, Gale..”
Okon almost let out an internal groan as he fastened in the last EPS line, knowing Vinsla probably had something else in store for him to do.
“...you’ve been working a long while there. You could use a break. Come with me, all right?”
“Sure,” Okon said, relieved.
Vinsla led Okon through a narrow hallway to the rear of the hospital’s basement and grabbed a chunk of flat metal with several wires leading out of it and into a phaser rifle.
He placed the metal slab onto a table and released his hands from it to touch a few of the buttons on the phaser rifle.
The metal contraption started to glow a low orange as heat began to emanate from it.
“Uh, Vinsla, sir?”
“You don’t have to call me sir, Gale.” Vinsla shook his head playfully. “But this, it’s a trick I learned a few years back. Phasers, especially those unstable as that shoddily-made rifle there,” he pointed once more to the weapon, “can let off a lot of heat when they need to charge their power cells. So what better thing to do than put that to use?”
He retrieved a kettle from one of the cabinets and filled it with water from a nearby barrel, setting it on top of the improvised stove.
Within a few minutes of them sitting down, the kettle was gently screaming with boiling water and Vinsla procured some rudimentary tea bags from the same cabinet to place them in two mugs sitting on the nearby counter. He poured the boiling water over the bags and handed one of the cups to Okon.
“Tarkalean tea. I would offer you a jumja stick or piece of moba fruit, but you know how it is. We’re low on everything.”
Besides providing the means for a hot refreshment, the contraption did seem to also work as a room heater.
“Maybe that convoy will have a shipment of food too?” Okon suggested as he took the cup Vinsla offered.
“Maybe, just maybe. We can always pray, can’t we? May the Prophets smile upon us,” Vinsla replied, filling a cup for himself too.