Chapter Text
“That shouldn’t be here,” Lieutenant La’an Noonian-Singh mused mostly to herself, though she deigned the comment also available for pickup by her co-pilot Jenna Mitchell—provided, of course, and as always, that Mitchell’s contribution was of any practical value.
It wasn’t.
“A new mystery for…the Lady Cops!” Jenna said, grinning, eyes alight, and after a momentary fantasy in which she slapped the back of Jenna’s head, La’an immediately realized she should have let Jenna fly the shuttle.
Rookie mistake, Noonian-Singh, she thought.
Parked behind the formidable helm-control bank of the USS Enterprise, Lieutenant Jenna Mitchell was cool and confident, and showed almost no sign of human agency beyond the obligatory “aye sir,” or relating back one of Captain Pike’s orders. True, there were occasional outliers when the circumstances called for more extemporaneous expression—“Klingon warship off the port side!” for example, or ”we’re trapped in the black hole’s gravity well,” or “twenty seconds to impact, Captain!” These could be forgiven, as they called the captain’s attention to the latest life-endangering threat he needed to be addressed. But outside of those rare (though not that rare) instances, Jenna Mitchell barely showed more personality than one of the ship’s automated systems. And La’an deeply appreciated that about her.
But take her out of that environment…
“Oh for fuck’s sake, we’re not…” La’an shook her head vigorously, not bothering to finish the admonishment which wouldn’t have done any good anyway. Freed from the prison of the mind that was the navigation station, Jenna’s creativity went into overdrive, casting herself as the hero in whatever adventure she overlaid atop real life. Even La’an’s best, most exasperated, annoyed, and irritated efforts failed to dispossess her of the fantasy that she was a detective from Earth’s dangerous and sexist 20th century. So, she tried a different tack.
“This isn’t a game. It already has the potential to be a dangerous situation and now we have that—” she gestured vaguely through the shuttlecraft’s cockpit to the small disc in the distance. The station that should not be there.
“Oh come on,” Jenna cajoled. “It’s an AWOL officer. You’ve slugged it out with much more dangerous types. Why, I bet once you corner this—” she consulted her screen—“Commander Landry—ooo! A superior officer—she won’t be able to surrender fast enough.”
“Don’t count on it,” La’an said.
“It’s true. You’re fearsome,” Jenna said brightly. “With your face--alabaster like a noh theater mask…”
“A what?”
“And your eyes deep, black shark’s eyes…”
“My eyes aren’t…I don’t look like a shark!” La’an protested, before reminding herself that there was a larger point t to be made here.
“She’ll probably wet herself.”
“Okay,” La’an turned in her seat to give Jenna the full force of her scowling Japanese-theater/swimming-killing-machine face. “Number one: gross. Number two: This Ellen Landry is a security officer. She’s had the same training I’ve had. More, even, since she’s had extensive planet bound assignments. If she chooses to make a fight of it, things could get very messy.”
“It’s all right,” Jenna said gravely. “I’ve got your back.”
“My ba…what does that even mean?” La’an shook her head. “Never mind, I don’t care. Even with your,” she looked over Jenna’s not-fragile, but certainly not formidable frame, “assistance, she could still be very, very dangerous. And with Enterprise responding to a planetary catastrophe on Zerothia Prime, we’re on our own.” She looked over at Jenna, who seemed to absorbing what La’an was telling her. “And that station,” she pointed out the canopy, “is not supposed to be there.”
“What do you mean? Like it’s…”
“Like this chunk of the system is supposed to be empty, but there appears to be a fairly apparent Starfleet outpost in it.”
“Maybe our cartography is out of date. You know they don’t always run the updates on the shuttle’s systems.” Jenna frowned at her console and she punched up various star charts and maps and navigational displays. “Oh,” she said. “No, it’s current. As of last week.”
“That’s what I mean,” La’an said tightly.
“But there’s more,” Jenna said. “Check your sensors.”
La’an looked over at her sensor display and was irritated to find it spitting out halfhearted, vague readings.” “Bloody system needs to be rebooted, standby…”
“No,” Jenna said with more authority than La’an was expecting. “The system’s working fine. It’s that station. It’s designed to be a ghost. Its hull deflects sensor scans. Probably has an active jamming system as well.”
“A stealth station?” La’an wondered aloud. “Why would Starfleet even have that here? Is it left over from the war?”
Jenna shrugged. “That would be my guess. But we’re pretty far behind where the lines were.” Her fingers slid across her controls, and the console made a happy noise. “Okay, got it. I told the sensors what to look for and what to weed out.”
La’an’s display gave her a decent look at the station now: essentially a dark, windowless hexagon in space with a central command core topped by a Ops dome. There was a landing bay on one side of the hexagon, still bleeding heat and energy.
“She landed there,” La’an said.
“Where else could she go?”
“Nowhere,” La’an said as she steered the shuttle to a course with the station’s bay. “Certainly nowhere better than a science station that doesn’t appear on sensors.”
“The plot thickens,” Jenna nodded. La’an rolled her eyes. The shuttle banked and glided toward the station’s open shuttle bay, open now like a gaping maw intent on swallowing them alive.