Warnings: Violence, gore, dystopian themes, suggestive themes, somewhat tenuous canon compliance
Author's Note: A head's up because I have no plot for this, just a setting so it can go one of two ways: it grows a plot and gets eventually finished. Or it never grows a plot and I have to abandon it.
Some basic knowledge of Drastic Measures is probably required to understand some of the details. While this isn't really a direct sequel, I'm definitely building on Blindfold King. So check it out first, if you're so inclined.
Title: Don't think for a second I've ran out of chess references. The Immortal Game was a chess match characterised by bold sacrifices. But to say it with T. E. Lawrence: "Immorality I know. Immortality I cannot judge." And besides, it is the mirrorverse.
THE IMMORAL GAME
by glenarvon
Chapter 1: Look Alive
In Lorca's estimate, he spent roughly a week in sheer agony, though he'd be the first to admit it was hard to keep track of the passage of time. After that week, Landry got cold feet and had him transferred to the brig, apparently due to medical concerns.
"I thought you'd be made of stronger stuff," she had sneered as she oversaw his transfer. They could've just as easily beamed him from one confinement to another, but instead, two muscular terrans hauled him from the booth and dragged him to a cell, never waiting for him to get his legs to work.
He'd glanced at Landry and bared his teeth through the daze.
"Michael Burnham would beg to differ," he'd said, though his speech came out slurred like he was drunk or close to hysterics. He still wasn't sure the latter hadn't been the case, either. The mind broke different for everyone, after all, and maybe that was just his cracks starting to show.
Landry had huffed and the terrans tossed him into the cell. The energy field was up long before he'd found the edge of the narrow bed to pull himself up to his knees and struggle around. Settling his elbow on the thin mattress, he'd given Landry a slow smile.
"What? Not joining me?" he patted the bed suggestively "You sure?"
She'd taken a step forward, staring down at his slumped form.
"Free advice," she'd said. "Watch it."
She'd made a sharp gesture at the terrans and had marched off with them.
Only later, somewhat recovered from his time in the booth, when his head cleared, he realised her warning had been made in earnest. He had no rights in this place, no power of his own, and no leverage. There was a chance he could seduce his way out of the cell, but more than likely it would simply backfire and he'd end up raped. He wasn't feeling quite that desperate just yet. The only reason he had been left mostly unscathed was respect for and fear of their captain. There was no telling what resentment some of his subordinates might have stewing just underneath their loyalty. No point in giving them ideas.
It turned out, he was no longer on the ISS Buran, either, nor was he even on a spaceship. The subtle difference in gravity betrayed it, once he had the leisure to notice. He was either on a large space-station or possible a small moon. The brig was larger, too, long rows of cells were occupied, though the energy fields filtered sounds, so he couldn't even talk with anyone to learn more.
In many ways, the cell turned out to be worse than the booth.
It didn't take his mind very long to sling him right back into his memories and make him retrace all his steps of that fateful night on the Buran. He was left chasing a million branching off alternatives. Something, anything, he could've done to change the outcome. He found so many flaws in his logic, so many errors in the orders he'd given and the action he had taken.
The bitter truth was, he had not been ready for a fight. Certainly not for this one, but also not for any other. His crew had not been ready for one. A month into a brutal war, and neither he nor anyone under his command, were able to hold their own, leading him right into that one, last, desperate irrevocable decision. He'd set himself up for it. He'd made too many mistakes along the way and then there had been no other option left. It was on his head, all of it, forever.
Dimly, he knew he was suffering some interesting cocktail of various psychological issues. Depression, survivor's guilt, PTSD, and whatever it was that was causing him to find the self-diagnosis rather amusing. He tried to picture Kat Cornwell in their shared dorm room, all those years ago at the Academy, giving him an unimpressed glare at his interruption of her study, wondered what her commentary would be, but found he couldn't really recall her voice. He'd heard she'd made rear admiral just after the war broke out. No doubt a shrink was exactly who the war effort needed on the helm. He found that amusing, too and wondered if his counterpart might accidentally end up helping the Federation in an effort to maintain his cover. That terran taste for violence might actually come in handy.
The only other available entertainment was the agony booth just in his line of sight, speculating on what minor transgression the occupant had committed to be left to its tender mercy.
Some two months into his imprisonment, he was ripped from an uneasy sleep by the shrill howl of an alarm. He opened his eyes to flickering lights and wasted no time. He swung from the narrow bed and rushed to the front of the cell, hoping the energy field had gone down, but it was holding solid, pushing back against him even as he leaned in, trying to get a better look at what was going on outside.
He spotted guards running back and forth outside, clearly mobilising at a moment's notice and leaving the brig unattended. The lights flickered again and for a moment, he felt the pressure of the energy field lessen just a little. The station rocked, the sound of a low and deep grumble vibrating up from the floor through his soft shoes.
The woman currently enjoying the agony booth suddenly shrieked, several octaves higher than the hoarse wailing she had been releasing for the past few hours, the sound barely human anymore, then she crumpled into an untidy heap, twitching as the booth continued to deliver its overcharge.
The station continued to shake, from somewhere out of sight, black smoke began to fill the room.
The energy field went down. Lorca threw himself past it, never wasting time on a coordinated landing. He dropped face first to the floor and felt a searing heat on the heel of his foot. He scrambled back up, glanced around to orient himself and found no immediate threat. The energy field had come back on and sheared off the back of his shoe, but only blistered the edge of his heel.
The man in the cell next to him hadn't been quite so lucky. The energy field had cut from his shoulder down the middle of his body, spilling his guts on the floor inside and outside his cell. At least he had been dead before he could even scream and the look on his face was nothing but bewilderment. Lorca arched his brows at him, silently congratulating the man's luck as well as his own.
He cast a glance over the rows of cells and contemplated giving his companions in misfortune a shot at freedom, but he decided against it. He didn't even know where the controls to the cells were, let alone how to override them. Besides, there was no telling if these people wouldn't just show their gratitude by turning against him. He ran towards where he knew the doors were, hissing at the pain in his heel.
The doors gaped open just wide enough to squeeze through into a hallway, several bodies lay on the floor, bearing the marks of terran weapons, not dissimilar to the sights he remembered from the Buran. Some terrans wore different uniforms, but he wasn't even sure if these denoted the attackers or just another branch of his counterpart's private army.
He snatched a carbine from the floor, checked its charge status and frowned at its nearly depleted state. Before he could look for another, the harsh snarl of a terran weapon made itself heard and a moment later, two women edged back into the corridor, keeping each other covered while someone unseen kept firing at them.
Lorca shrugged and fired at them, a blast to the back of their heads each and he jumped forward to pick one of their rifles from their fingers as they dropped down. He pressed his back against the wall by the corner.
It was rather liberating in a way, not having to worry about who he was shooting at. He had no friends in this place, so everyone was fair game.
He waited for a break in the shooting, ducked low and leaned around the corner, found his targets hiding behind metal support beams on either side of a tunnel of rough-hewn rock. One of the terrans had stepped his foot too far out and the rifle took off his leg by the knee. He howled and went down. His companion, rather than drop back into cover, fired at him. Lorca managed to twist back around the corner and the shot only took off the edge of the doorway, flinging splinters at him that cut easily through his flimsy prison clothes.
He paced himself and waited. The terran was the one with the proper equipment, the armour, and the secret weapons stashed around her person. She could be bothered to come for him if she wanted him that badly. It'd get her out of her protected position and give him a momentary edge to take her out.
He shot a glance down the hallway in the other direction. The tunnel ahead led deeper into the structure, an asteroid or moon, into which the base had been dug. The base shuddered under constant impacts — Lorca guessed they were most likely being bombarded — but structural damage seemed minimal, at least at his location. Something of the setup smacked of an inside job. If the base was built into a stellar object, sensitive systems, like computer mainframes and power sources would be deep inside the rock and no surface attack would be able to take them out in the way it had happened.
Soon now.
He edged back a step from the corner and straightened up, anticipating the terran's approach. He couldn't hear her against the background noise, but his own impatience was a good enough indicator.
The terran swung around the corner a second faster than he had thought, opening fire without wasting time on marking his new location. He still had half a second before her shots actually reached him, enough to get one of his own in, although it wasn't a killing shot. The rifle blast punched into her armoured shoulder and knocked her sidearm from her hands and threw her back.
Lorca jumped after her, twisting the terran knife he had taken from a dead body. He expected her to fight back, his shot had injured her and thrown her off-balance but it wouldn't be enough to make the fight go out of her. Indeed, she'd already scrambled up a sidearm and pulled it half-way up to aim at him when she stopped, eyes going wide in shock.
He already knew what that meant. And it was already getting old.
He smacked her sidearm aside, dropped to a knee by her side and plunged the knife into her throat just to wipe that expression from her face. It was one thing to watch enemies run scared, it was entirely another if they only did so because they took him for somebody else entirely.
The noise of fighting grew louder behind him and ahead gaped the tunnel leading deeper into the base. Not an ideal direction, he thought as he hurried towards it. A moment's quiet and an unattended computer console, on the other hand, would be most welcome.
The fight had left him more winded than he would've liked, too, and he slowed down out of caution as much as necessity. Being confined in a cell barely large enough to stretch out in, insufficient nutrition and a depressive lack of motivation hadn't been kind to his state of fitness.
He moved forward carefully, keeping to the shadows where he could, biding his time with a sidearm or a terran knife when he came across someone. It took a stretch of quiet corridor to make him think how many people he'd just killed without a second thought. He'd labelled them as enemies and then it hadn't mattered anymore. Never mind that they were. This was an insidious place, further from home than he could ever imagine being and more alone than anyone else in this entire, damned universe. Made him wonder where the hell he was going, what would he even do with freedom?
He came past an open door and inside was exactly what he had been looking for, a computer console set against the wall of a storage room.
The door controls refused to work. He sighed and kept an eye on the doorway and the corridor while he went to the console. The computer refused his voice commands but accepted manual input without issue.
At a first glance, he found nothing of particular interest. A duty roster, some correspondence he had no time or patience to comb for clues. A little more searching revealed they were on a star-base dug into an S-type asteroid, towed into a stable orbit around a small, frozen planet far from its star. He found mention of a colony on the class M planet in the local solar system, but no further reference to it. It made sense to hide a space station in an otherwise inhabited system, it made ships coming and going much less conspicuous.
He heard voices and the quiet, telltale clattering of armoured and armed soldiers marching down an empty hallway. Four or more, by the sound of it.
The console still refused to spit out a layout for the base.
The steps got closer and Lorca abandoned the console and dipped into the darkness of the storage room to hide. The footsteps jostled outside and Lorca bared his teeth in a silent snarl. He'd cut it too close.
He listened to them call orders to each other, take up positions outside and then the first terran walked in, sidearm ready, a second following close behind. Under their cover, a third slipped inside and went to the console.
Lorca edged forward, unlike the terrans, he was able to move quietly enough to not be heard. Moving in slow-motion he brought his sidearm up and folded his other hand around for a steadier grip. Terran sidearms had a higher rate of fire than standard phasers, as well as shooting short sharp pulses, not unlike the bullets of the guns of centuries past.
The terran at the console found the light controls and a dim orange glow filled the room slowly, mindful of the terrans' eyesight.
Lorca fired three shots in quick succession, gave the nearest shelf a hard shove and it fell across the door, briefly blocking it, while he retreated further back into the room and took cover behind several crates.
The shelf prevented the terrans from easily flooding into the room and simply overwhelming him with their numbers, but he had merely postponed the inevitable.
He exchanged several more shots with them, deterring them from pushing through the door while he retreated, vaguely hoping to find a second exit.
A terran made it inside and managed to take cover before Lorca could take him out, giving covering fire for the others to squeeze past the shelf.
They started to push forward, forcing him to keep his head down more than return fire. The crate he was leaning against melted right next to him and he dove behind a shelf, rolled into a crouch and brought the sidearm around to shoot at the nearest terran.
From closer to the door, a voice shouted, "Hold your fire!"
It took a long second for the order to register correctly and Lorca felt disinclined to follow it, leaned out of his cover, found a target and shot.
"It's him!" another terran shouted. By then, they had found cover and Lorca drew back a little more from them, scanning the room for a solution to his problem.
"Gabriel Lorca!" the first terran shouted, Lorca assumed he was the unit leader. "We've got you cornered! Surrender!"
Yeah right, Lorca sneered inwardly. Were they honestly dumb enough to think it would work? If he had Gabriel Lorca at gunpoint, he'd pull the trigger until he ran out of charge. He certainly wouldn't be giving him a chance to surrender. Which was, he supposed, their most marked difference. The other one had wanted to play first.
"You want me?" Lorca shouted back, too many teeth in his grin, carrying in his voice. "You've gotta come and get me!"
He sensed the terrans' indecision in the pause and the curious lack of movement from the rest of the room. He glanced down at the sidearm to check its charge level and pulled a grimace.
"You have—!" the unit leader started, but his voice dispersed into a surprised, pained scream, followed by several other, similar screams. An errand weapon beam cut into the shelf above Lorca and dislodged several smaller packages.
Lorca waited, blinked irritably.
Another shout came from outside, "Hey! Don't shoot! It's me!"
Lorca was still grinning, recognising Landry's deep voice. He laughed, "Why should I?" he asked.
"Because these are Imperial soldiers!" Landry sounded angry and impatient and not just a little winded. If he had to guess, she was as close to panic as she could ever get.
"You're all the same to me," he shouted back, edged forward and stole a glance around the room. Landry had dispatched the others with familiar efficiency. Under different circumstances, he might even admire it.
There was another pause, Landry gave orders to her soldiers he was too far away to understand, then she walked into the room. Her arms were raised, terran carbine loosely in one hand as she tried to appear non-threatening.
"You are the face of the emperor's greatest enemy," she said, doing her best to sound reasonable. She squinted into the room, trying to find where exactly he was. "They won't care that you're not him. All they want is the glory."
He laughed and Landry focussed in his direction.
"I'm trying to save you!" she insisted.
"Hardly."
He took a deep breath and levered himself to his feet and stepped out to face her. Her sight, if anything, justified his amusement. She was full of restrained anger and worn-out patience, breathing hard from combat adrenaline, tense to the breaking point when everything around her was falling apart. He almost believed she was sincere.
"I can help you," she said. "Whatever you think, you're not prepared for what they'll do to you. You couldn't handle the booth here, and we needed you alive and well."
He snorted at her choice of words but didn't interrupt her.
"What the emperor will do is nothing compared to this," Landry spoke urgently. "She will destroy you. Your body, your mind, everything. And it'll take years."
When he didn't respond, she added, "Please." Her voice had gone faint and if he hadn't been so focussed on her, he probably would've missed the plea entirely. Now, this was an interesting revelation. She was truly scared for him, or at least the man with his name and face, but he knew well enough that Landry had a hard time telling the difference sometimes.
He walked forward, swung his tired legs into a long-legged stride to cross the distance between them, brought up the sidearm and pressed it to her forehead. She flinched back, just slightly, before her neck went rigid against the pressure.
"So, Ellen," he drawled her name. "Why should I trust you?"
She blinked irritably as the sidearm made it hard for her to meet his gaze.
"We were betrayed," she spoke quickly. "Stamets and some others. We have no option but to scatter and hope we can regroup later. The Empire cannot have you, but…"
She hesitated, her tongue came out to wet her lips. She swallowed. "I'm letting you go, okay? We have agents down on the planet, they'll hide you."
"You didn't really answer the question," he said. "Why should I trust you?"
"What better offer do you have?" she asked back.
Much as he hated to admit it, she made a better argument than he had expected her to. He eased the barrel from her forehead reluctantly, upper lip curling in disdain.
Landry never relaxed and for a moment he almost saw the moves of her attack choreographed hanging in the realm of possibilities between them. Not so long ago, he'd have been entirely confident he could take her on, but things had changed since then. If she wanted him back in that cell, she'd probably get him there.
"I'm keeping this," he said, indicating the sidearm.
She only shrugged as she turned back and motioned her soldiers in. "I'll give you an extra charge."
A young woman handed her a communicator and Landry flipped it open.
"All right, I've got him. Is the shuttle ready?"
Lorca scanned the terrans inside and outside the room, not sure if he was glad to see no familiar faces or disappointed. They were avoiding his gaze and not only because they were keeping watch of the corridor outside. For most of these, the novelty of him probably hadn't worn off yet.
"Okay, beam us over," Landry said and Lorca snapped his head around, but before he could make an argument, the transporter beam slipped over him.
His consciousness blinked.
He stood in the back of a shuttle, next to Landry. She hurried to the pilot's seat and the shuttle powered up. He strode after her and took the seat by her side. The shuttle hangar had suffered some damage and theirs seemed to be one of the last shuttles in it. The great hangar doors had been blast open, heavy metal curled away from the domed roof like aluminium foil, great pieces of debris had rained down and buried deep into the ground, leaving several damaged shuttles buried underneath.
"We can't fly directly," Landry said, hands resting on the controls, as she manoeuvred the shuttle upwards and through the destroyed doors. The view opened. Some distance away, two large starships hung in space, their phaser batteries still firing on the asteroid, chipping away at it.
"We'll follow the asteroid belt's orbit, using its sensor shadows to mask us. I'm setting a course so we'll be relative behind the sun and able to rendezvous with the fourth planet. The terran ships can't pick us up directly. They'll be able to sniff us out and come after us, but we've got some time."
"Good," he said and got up to walk to the back of the shuttle.
He went through the compartments along the roof, strewing the contents he didn't need untidily around him until he'd found a medkit. It was marked with a bleeding knife.
He sat down and sorted through its contents until he found what he was looking for and finally fixed his heel.
"Tell me about your agents," he said and flexed his foot before he got back up and resumed his search.
Landry swivelled her chair around and watched him.
"They'll help hide you."
"You've said that."
"They are… not what you expect terrans to be like."
"I like them already."
Landry huffed. "I doubt it. There was some trouble a few years ago, but it's been peaceful since. It's mostly a bunch of docile farmers and a few eggheads not ambitious enough to find a better position. It doesn't have much of a military presence, that works in our favour. Search parties won't be on their home turf."
His search finally paid off when he found a stack of shrink-wrapped engineer's jumpsuits, shirts, and boots.
"And your captain worked with them?" Lorca asked, unable and unwilling to keep the sarcasm from his voice. "Helpless farmers and lazy scientists?"
He ripped open the packaging of the clothes, then pulled the frazzled prison shirt over his head and tossed it away.
"No one is going to look at them twice," Landry said. She didn't sound convinced of the argument, so Lorca assumed she was only parroting her captain without realising the true importance of it. To terrans, power and ambition were everything. For someone like his counterpart to be willing to deal with people who had neither must be strange and foreign. Which, of course, just made it that much more effective.
He glanced over his shoulder and found Landry looking back at him with just a hint of smugness in her expression and a glint in her eyes. He arched a brow at her and continued to undress.
She watched him in silence and eventually said, "I'm going to beam you down outside the city. The military base is understaffed, but they would pick up an unscheduled transport. You'll need to hike into the city and make sure you get there before I'm picked up."
He zipped up the jumpsuit halfway up his chest and returned to the seat next to her.
"You're still not joining me?" he asked.
She scrunched her nose. "No, I'm going to take the shuttle back to the base and make sure you're covered. The Buran is inbound and she'll give the Imperial ships the fight they deserve, but until then, you need to be off the base."
"You seriously think you'll get me back into the bottle?" he asked. "You said you'll let me go."
A small smile threatened her serious expression. "I am, just not for very long."
He shook his head and leaned back in the seat, finding a ledge on the side to rest his leg up on as he reclined. Silence fell again as he waited for her to work out what his lack of denial might mean.
She gave him a sharp look, gaze running up and down in a far more serious scrutiny than when she'd observed him change. "You have nowhere to go."
He wanted to go home, but there was no point in trying to make her understand the sentiment. He inclined his head and continued to say nothing.
Landry frowned, took her gaze away from him and settled it back on the controls, adjusting their course slightly. The shuttle dipped into the shadow of an asteroid.
"What am I looking for down there?" he said finally. "Don't give me the runaround. You want me alive, you tell me everything."
She took a deep breath and said nothing, clearly still dissembling what information she was willing to let him have, suspecting he was going to take everything and use it against her eventually. She was absolutely right about it.
"Commander," he said, unyielding command in his voice. "Now."
It did make her jump, she managed to cover it, but he was going to take any victory he could with as much glee as he could muster.
"I'm beaming you down outside the city," she said.
"Yes, and I'll walk from there. Next."
She squared her shoulders at his tone. "We'll be coming in on the night-side, you'll probably make it to the city before curfew ends at 4 am. They run sensor sweeps across the city. Under absolutely no circumstances can you let anyone try to ID you."
She hit a key on the controls and got up, waded through the mess he'd left in the back of the shuttle and returned a moment later with a PADD in hand. She tapped on it a few times, then handed it to him.
"Memorise it," she said. "That's where you need to go and the sensor sweep search pattern."
It was a city layout, mapping out where he needed to go and the blind timing for sensor blind-spots. He scrolled through it, main avenues and side streets. It looked familiar in the way too many things in this universe did, something he'd seen before that didn't quite match up with his expectation.
Landry continued to speak. "You're wearing an Imperial uniform, so that should give you some leeway, you don't have to conceal your weapon and don't be afraid to use it."
"When am I ever," he muttered, but he was barely paying attention anymore, engrossed in the map in his hands.
Landry made an unimpressed snort. "Once you reach the agent, do whatever he says, it's in your own best interest. He's a doctor at the research institute. He has some traction with the colonial administration and heads our network on the planet. You'll be safe."
"How many members does your network have?"
"You don't need to know."
He growled in irritation. "Are you really going to make me ask again?"
"Six," she answered, reluctantly.
"What's the military complement?"
"Nineteen soldiers and their commanding officer, their home base is in the city, but they're responsible for all settlements on the planet, which is mostly farmland anyway and just about a fifty-thousand permanent population across the planet. I heard their commander might be a sympathiser, but that's just hearsay."
He nodded and lowered the PADD to look outside and watch the asteroids glide by. "You said there was trouble a few years ago," he prompted.
"A rebel group engineered a fungal infection of the crops and released it. It destroyed most of the harvest and infected food stocks, causing a famine."
He looked at her, frowning. He passed another glance over the PADD and the map still displayed on it. He said, "No."
"What do you mean 'no'?" Landry asked. "Of course it did. There was unrest, but the administration got it under control." She chuckled a little. "Are you sure you're ready to hear how it went down? Your Federation sensibilities aren't going to like it."
"There was a famine," he said.
Confusion slowly crept into her voice at his changed demeanour and she chose to interpret it as a challenge. He didn't care.
Landry said, "You asked for it. It went down in two stages. First, the governor ordered the alien population corralled, killed and recycled as raw material for the food replicators. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough, so she and her staff worked out who of the remaining people was valuable. Everyone who wasn't…"
"Was killed," he finished. "You ate them?"
Landry shrugged. "It was a sacrifice for the greater good. Governor Ribiero has been awarded for her quick thinking and decisive action in a crisis. She saved the colony."
"Ribiero," he repeated. "This is Tarsus IV."
"Yes, and?"
Lorca brought his head around and narrowed his eyes at her. A moment later, he said, "Nothing, keep talking."
He let Landry's voice wash over him as she outlined further details about the city, the military complement and his contact. She even threw in a few tips on terran etiquette he barely paid attention to. From what he understood about terrans was that almost every issue could be dealt with by applying violence. It wasn't such a difficult lesson to remember.
Of all the places in the universe, his own and possibly this one even more so, Tarsus IV was the last place he ever wanted to see again. On some especially bad nights, he'd found the thought of its mere existence unbearable. To realise that his bitter memories of the massacre didn't represent even remotely the worse case scenario didn't help in the least.
"Get some sleep," Landry said. "You need to be up and running when we get there. You look like fucking death."
Sleep was the furthest from his mind, even though he felt like fucking death, too. He forced himself to relax, push his shoulders back into the seat and pretend to be casually unaffected. He pulled a leg up and wedged his knee against the console for an even more insolent position.
"What about the situation on the base?" he asked to distract Landry's growing suspicions, but mostly to distract himself.
"Don't worry about it," Landry said, clearly unhappy at the direction.
He pursed his lips in a sneer and shook his head. "Let's see if I get it straight, shall we?" he said. "You got sold out and your emperor has pounced on you with two starships which, last we've heard, have put your station under constant fire. It's going to take the base apart and probably the whole damn asteroid, too. At the same time, they've got quite a lot of boots on the ground. Don't go telling me you've had contingencies for this, you haven't. I wouldn't be here and neither would you. This is a panic reaction."
Landry made a low sound at the back of her throat but didn't answer. She fiddled with the controls, but even without checking, he could tell she was only doing it to occupy her hands.
"Your chain of command has broken down and you don't know who you can trust anymore."
"Should we self-destruct, then?" Landry asked, just a little too satisfied with having found a dagger she could launch at his heart. As far he was concerned, it was entirely too predictable to have any impact.
"Isn't that what you're doing?"
"We'll regroup," she said, the implication clear. None of his ever could. "The Buran's weapons are going to make short work of the Imperial starships."
"Unless her crew's compromised, too."
"Captain Lorca hand-picked them, they can be trusted absolutely."
"Everything I've seen of your universe tells me absolute trust is a shortcut to an early grave. Hell, even in my universe I'd be stingy with who I'd trust absolutely."
"You have no idea what the captain means to us all."
Lorca waved it away. "Something different for everyone, but you're all the same to him."
He turned his head towards her, waited a moment until she stopped making unnecessary adjustments with her hands and he knew he had her attention.
"Just look at you," he said. "You should be thanking me. After all, I got rid of your competition."
The way she went still for just a moment told him the blow had connected, though he wasn't even sure anymore himself what the point of needling her was. He'd had his suspicions about her promise to let him go. Even if she'd been serious about it, he still had nowhere to go in this universe and a host of enemies that weren't his to contend with no matter what he did.
Landry's mouth twitched as she tried to smooth her expression into a sardonic smile.
"You're very proud of that, aren't you," she said. "I'll tell you something about terrans that you don't seem to have figured out yet."
She turned her head, faced him and the smile crawled up her face to her eyes. "Every single one with a rank has killed a dozen formidable warriors. You've killed only one. No one's impressed."
Lorca chuckled, shrugged and settled into the seat again. He crossed his legs at the ankles, resting them comfortably high on the console.
"Well, I was incarcerated," he said. He tried not to think about the tiny dot of light ahead of them, slowly growing in size as they got closer. The lush meadows and dark jungles spanning the continents of Tarsus IV, the deep-blue ocean and the boiling clouds being whipped across the sky. Memories of a spring evening on the beach, longer ago and further away than the heart could bear.
"I'll catch up soon enough."
End of Chapter 1: Look Alive
Author's Note: Look, I probably shouldn't be posting this so soon. I really wanted to be more careful with these things and pace myself, but I seem to be all out of self-discipline. You see, the time's ticking. Canon is coming! And it will ruin prime Lorca, too. So it's either now or never.
Last revised on 18/Nov/2018