Chapter Text
The shuttle drifted in space, dark and unresponsive. Life support off, communications down. With a flip of the main power control Scotty worked to power the shuttle back on. Erica monitored the main console readouts as systems worked to reboot.
Checking down at his PADD Scotty checked the recording timings and measurements. “Life support power up lagging again,” Scotty reported, frowning at the data. “Same delay the last crew reported.”
Erica glanced down at her panel, “We are at a 20 second delay now from baseline after a reboot.”
“Clearly not a glitch,” Scotty muttered. “A pattern.”
“And here I was hoping for something boring,” Erica sighed.
“When does that ever happen?” Scotty asked.
The previous crew of the Currie had forced a shutdown after an unexplained power surge, nothing dramatic, but enough to be recorded in the log. Unusual restart delays. System normal after reboot cycle completed. After unsuccessful testing in the shuttle bay that didn’t replicate the error, Scotty and Erica took it out on a short trip to a nearby moon to investigate further.
Erica looked down. It had been a full two minutes past the expected restart of the life support system. Not a huge concern, the shuttle could support the two of them for some time without the system working and they had emergency space suits as well.
All at once the shuttle air began flowing again, the subtle movement immediately apparent to Scotty from both the readings and the warm air moving across his face. “163 seconds,” he reported.
“Worse than last time.”
“Aye, I am going to try rewiring a sensor, see if that solves the issue,” he explained as he opened up a panel.
Erica leaned back in the pilot seat and turned back to chat. “You going to the movie night later? Or will there be another “engineering emergency” again?”
“Look,” Scotty began, pausing from his work, “I know that Una loves musicals. Never been my thing, I can only take so many.”
“Then you have no excuse,” Erica stated. “This is an old movie called The Desperate Hours. 1950s.”
“That’s the home-invasion one, right?” He asked, turning back to the panel.
“Yep, apparently criminals take over a house with a family inside with everyone waiting for things to go wrong.”
“Doesn’t sound relaxing. Prefer a good comedy.”
“Pike did say it was a ‘classic study in tension in movies,’” Erica replied. “At least far better than the animated Vulcan film Spock suggested last week.”
Scotty huffed as he closed the panel, “I’ll grant you that. Another reboot?” He asked and Erica nodded.
The shuttle fell silent, plunging into darkness again. “So are you coming?” Erica asked again.
“Sure, I prefer to keep my tension fictional given the options,” Scotty admitted. Though he could feel his nerves rising in the shuttle. Sitting dead in space would never sit right with him. After a moment he powered the system back up.
Lights returning to the consoles, the vibration of the ship under the floorboard, and the slow movement of the air moving through the ship. “Everything looks normal,” Erica reported from the control panel.
“Aye, hopefully that fixes everything,” Scotty stated as he sat down at the neighboring chair.
“Enterprise, this is shuttle Currie, we have completed repairs and are returning to the ship,” Erica reported over the comms.
Static answered her. She looked down at the panel, there was no error displayed. “Issue with comms?” Scotty asked.
Erica shrugged, then tried again, toggling the system on and off.
“Still nothing?” Scotty asked, pulling out his PADD to get some more data.
“Nothing,” she said, “probably just a delayed start or a malfunctioning antenna from some related issue.” Though in her gut she was concerned.
“We should return to the ship. I don’t like these growing issues with the shuttle.”
Neither commented as they piloted the shuttle back to Enterprise. Remaining silent as it fell into view. The ship was on, powered up, but something was wrong. “You see that?” Erica asked, wanting to confirm her own fears.
“It’s drifting,” Scotty noticed. The movement was subtle. The pull from nearby stellar objects was not enough to move the ship much, but something they needed to constantly adjust for. Now, the ship was subtly drifting to starboard.
“Power down all unneeded systems, we’ll go in quiet,” Erica stated as they powered down most of the shuttle’s systems they had just brought online.
They entered the shuttlebay without ceremony, no comms pings from the ship, nothing. Erica eased the shuttle in as they both watched. As the ship lowered down with as much finesse as Erica could manage she first saw them, behind a neighboring shuttle, was a person lying on the ground and not moving. “Scotty,” she whispered motioning over.
Scotty tried to push down his growing panic not saying the words aloud that were running through his head. That something terrible had happened on the ship. Erica moved over to a locker on the shuttle, pulling out two phasers and handing one to him. “We need to assess, watch my back.”
She opened the back of the shuttle which lowered with a clank that seemed to echo loudly through the quiet space. The space was quiet, still. She moved over quickly to the crew member lying face down on the ground. Scotty next to her a moment later. “No signs of a struggle.”
Erica nodded, dropping to a knee, fingers on their neck. She felt a steady pulse under her fingertips and felt the tension in her drop the smallest amount. “Unconcious,” she stated. “Alive.”
The quiet seemed to press in on Scotty. No damage, but a crew member down. No alarms sounding through the space. Just silence. Someone should have seen this. The fact that no one had was innately alarming. “If this were an accident there’d be protocols running. Med teams. People shouting,” he stated, admitting the situation that Erica couldn’t bring herself to say.
Erica swallowed, the ship felt not broken, but absent. She made her way cautiously over to a panel. “Status report,” she requested from the ship itself. The Enterprise remained quiet, no voices, no footsteps. “If anything happened here specifically it has moved on.” She gripped her phaser tighter in her hand. “Scotty,” she said, turning to him, “we assume the ship’s compromised. We move quietly. I’ll take point, you are looking for any clues. We don’t take risks even if we see something we don’t like. Right now we assume we are the only ones who can help and we can’t risk that.”
They moved to the shuttle bay doors, opening them before cautiously moving out. The doors closed behind them with a soft hiss.
The Enterprise remained silent.
---
The corridors were too quiet. Not the gentle lights and the quiet voices of the night shift, it felt abandoned, the stark bright lights only amplifying the emptiness of the space.
Erica and Scotty moved through the hallways quietly, with caution, hand gripping their phasers. Ahead was another unconscious crew member, slumped against the wall, no sign of injury or fight.
Erica paused next to him, the panel above him open, clearly in the middle of some diagnostic task when he collapsed. Erica placed two fingers against his neck, checking his pulse. “They are all just sleeping, or close enough,” she whispered, feeling the slow steady beat under his skin.
“Gassed, maybe. Something efficient,” Scotty suggested.
“Sickbay,” Erica proposed. The space promised hypos, tricorders, something that could give them information or wake someone else up.
The ship remained silent and then a sound. A metallic crash, something being knocked down, abrupt and out of place. It echoed through the corridor. Erica and Scotty froze.
Another noise followed, layered voices. Not federation standard, the universal translators failing to translate the sounds coming in.
They didn’t approach sickbay together, deciding that separation left open the possibility that if one of them was caught the other was free to get help. Scotty slipped up one of the ladders, waiting out of sight, phaser at the ready.
Erica moved forward. The door to sickbay remained open and a crew member passed out near the entrance. This was an opportunity to assess what was happening. She crept down low, easing forward on her hands and knees until she could just see past the doorway. Sickbay was in disarray. Panels removed from the walls, drawers and cabinets open and empty, the smell of chemicals spilled in a rush to take anything they could. Her hope of finding anything useful was diminishing by the second.
Clearly the invaders knew what to take. Across the way by one of the biobeds she spotted Chapel and M’Benga unconscious on the floor.
Erica crept forward on her stomach, inching just a tiny bit past the unconscious crew member. In the back of the space, raiding M’Benga’s office space, were four aliens of a species she didn’t know. Their backs half-turned as they worked, methodically tipping anything they could remove into large crates. They talked as they worked, the actions looking methodical, not a panicked scavenging of the space.
Suddenly one of the aliens turned and Erica very slowly lowered herself to the floor the last bit next to the other crew member, her phaser clutched under her, ready to pull it out and shoot if needed.
He said something to two of the other aliens and they moved over to Chapel and M’Benga. One of them picked up Chapel first with ease, her arms dangling down as she was hoisted over the alien’s shoulder. The other dragging M’Benga up. They were both unconscious, but seemingly still alive and being taken somewhere else. As they exited the space with the two crew members, Erica’s hand gripped her phaser tighter.
Four targets, close quarters. Two of them were occupied with the people they were carrying. If she moved now—
No. She would lose their cover. She slowly closed her eyes, feigning unconsciousness. Hoping they hadn’t spent much time really noticing where the crew of the ship had fallen, that another had appeared. She needed to not get caught. She knew Scotty would agree.
Chapel and M’Benga were alive, right now she had to assume the whole crew was alive. That was a positive.
The two aliens walked by, not responding to her presence. Confident in the fact that the crew was all asleep. Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Receding into the distance. Erica stayed down, she hoped Scotty was doing the same. The two others in sickbay were quiet, but not silent.
A couple of minutes later two other sets of footsteps approached, then receded. Erica stayed down. One moment of waiting and then a second. Nothing. Only then did she crack one eye open. Sickbay and the corridor was empty. She pushed herself up and crept back to the access ladder as Scotty made his way down.
“You all right?” he whispered.
Erica nodded. “They took everything from sickbay and the medical staff,” she whispered.
“Sounds calculated.” They moved forward quietly, back into sickbay. Standing in the doorway the room looked even worse than it did in Erica’s initial scan. Every diagnostic station dismantled, all the cabinets stripped bare. Empty containers and storage racks tossed to the floor. But it was worth looking for anything that might help.
“I might be able to get internal diagnostics,” Scotty suggested, picking up a dropped PADD that had fallen, wedged under a biobed, and moving over to wire it up to an empty wall panel.
Erica held her phaser down, but ready, moving through the space quietly, looking for any medical devices that may have been dropped. Hypospays, emergency medikits, dermal regenerators, everything was gone. Meticulous was right. They had gone into the room with a purpose and mission.
Scotty powered on the PADD. He tapped it awake, the power system wavered unusually. They had done something to impact the ship, its systems not responding as expected. But he knew the information would still be there.
Erica stepped over. “Anything?”
“Give me a moment,” he said, eyes locked on the PADD. “All right…there.” His expression shifted, focused. “Ten life-signs that don’t belong to the crew, spread across the ship, but mostly clustered around engineering and the transporter.”
“Ten.” Erica repeated. The number sounded possible. Ten was something they could work with. “They clearly came here with a mission, medical supplies and staff, possibly other smaller parts and materials.”
“We need to disable the transporters.”
“Can you do it from here?”
“No, only the medical one. The systems are self-contained.” He felt the worry grow in his chest, engineering often meant being responsible for the ship and the safety of the crew, but he was no stealth agent trained to infiltrate. He couldn’t help, but feel doubt in their ability to take back the ship.
Erica could see him waver, “We do this. Don’t give them time. Disable to transporters. Figure out how they got on board. And we stop them from leaving.”
Scotty met her eyes with grim determination. “Aye, that we do.”
Erica and Scotty made their way through the corridors, pausing and stopping as they rounded each bend and turn, doing their best to not worry about their crew members lying unconscious. They needed to disable the transporters. That was the current mission.
Scotty stayed back, PADD in his hand watching the biosigns as Erica crept forward. There were four of the aliens in the transporter room. Two of them she recognized having taken Chapel and M’Benga who were currently propped up against a crate as the aliens transported a load of material from the transporter platform clearing it for more items.
They worked with unsettling coordination, Erica could only guess this wasn’t their first time stealing from a ship, as they passed bags and crates hand to hand onto the transporter platform, loading it up again.
Footsteps along the hallway suggested another and Erica crept back slightly, lying down to reduce her chance of being noticed.
Even compared to the others this alien walked in like it owned the place. Unhurried as it moved in. Erica tightened her fingers around the phaser. If they loaded up Chapel and M’Benga she would stop them, she told herself. She had to do something.
The lead alien gruffly yelled, “Engineering.” The universal translators finally parsed enough of the language to translate it. Another of their group continued to move items, nearing Chapel and M’Benga. “Now. More there.”
Following his cue they all turned as a unit, moving from the room, boots echoing along the silent ship as they followed the corridor to the turbolift and engineering. The footsteps faded to silence and Erica turned, motioning for Scotty to follow. She moved forward cautiously, phaser ready, taking point as she moved into the transporter room.
---
Pelia awoke to the feel of a hypospray against her neck and found herself lying against the floor of engineering. Her world snapped back to a sharp focus, not the slow return to reality of some of her wilder and slightly younger days.
As she pushed herself up she saw two of her ensigns unconscious at their stations and felt a presence looming behind her. She slowly turned as she rose, her joints protesting slightly, sore from the time unconscious on the hard metal floor.
Intruders. A species she didn’t recognize.
One of them leaned down to face her, eye to eye. It held up the empty hypo, as if showing her it was the one who brought her back.
“Captain,” the universal translators stated, though she questioned the accuracy.
Pelia blinked. “Captain? Well, I guess that works.” Her voice was rough, dry from whatever drug knocked them out. Nothing she’d tried before.
Another alien stepped towards her, tilting its head as it studied her. A handheld scanner chiming as it passed it over her. “Scans indicate you are oldest aboard the vessel. Age denotes authority, correct?”
Pelia’s expression settled on something both confident and noncommittal. Best to not outright lie to them. She didn’t correct their assumption. “Yes, I am the oldest.” She glanced around the space. Right now all she knew is that she was awake and everyone else wasn’t. She wasn’t about to jeopardize that. “And what is your reason for being aboard…my ship?”
“Vessel entered designated salvage region,” the second alien explained. “Valuables are forfeit.”
Pelia processed the situation. They were in deep space, away from any federation outposts. Any rescue was likely too far away to be of any help. She had to assume the rest of the crew was incapacitated, hopefully just unconscious.
“Well you have come to the right person,” she began, shifting her tone to more enthusiastic, hiding away any worry. “What sort of valuables?”
“Medical supplies. Engineering parts. Raw materials. Individuals with specialized knowledge. Anything with good resale value.”
Pelia’s jaw tightened a fraction at the suggestion of taking individuals, but the alien didn’t seem to notice. “If I refused?”
“You are awake. Others might not be.”
Pelia took a slow breath as she felt a tension in her chest with the threat. She couldn’t let her concern show. She’d survived a dozen true disasters, she was determined to keep this at just a bad day. They could replace things, the crew was her only priority. “If you want my cooperation, no resistance, I have my own demands.”
“Yes?”
“I will help you locate items of value. In return, you leave the crew alive and unharmed. All of them.”
The two aliens exchanged looks. Pelia didn’t trust them. But for now taking them around the ship to find values would give her time to think.
“You will guide us. No interference.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, friends. I have no desire to see anyone hurt today. Very well, shall we begin.”