Halfway
Teegar
Work Text:
The pessimists said that if Galactic Ways Corporation ever left Halfway, the place would turn into a black hole within a week. The optimists claimed it could survive off sheer inertia for at least an eon. At this point, it looked like both sides had been right. Halfway was a shuttle station located at what used to be the most traveled crossing of passenger routes in the Federation. Even now, fifteen years after the last of the big blue Galway spaceliners had pulled out of its huge spacedocks, travelers on some of the smaller lines still caught a bite between changeovers or stayed the night in one of Halfway's hotels for longer connections.
On the other hand, in order to fuel this continued existence, the place had also turned into a black hole of sorts. Halfway had become the kind of a place that could swallow the unlucky or the unwary. Few innocents so consumed ever returned unscathed by the corrosive materials flowing in Halfway's voluminous bowels.
The station hung in space like a misshapen Christmas tree ornament. Its covering of reflective panels glittered as they fed off solar energy stolen from the sun Halfway orbited but had never thought enough of to give it any name other than Delta 795-I6.
Since the exodus of the commercial liners, it was not unusual to see Starfleet vessels like the U.S.S. Enterprise docked there for repairs that did not necessitate a visit to the more extensive facilities on Starbases 12 and 5 that it lay halfway between.
"This isn't at all what I remember," Lt. Sulu, helmsman of the Enterprise, said to his friend Lt. Kevin Riley, the ship's navigator, as they stood in front of a Halfway store front. While the Enterprise treated its forward shields for impact damage, they sought a cure for another type of ill.
"Maybe we're on the wrong level." Riley looked up at the four tiers visible above them in this section's open mall.
What should have been an Aldeberan-style diner/bar stubbornly persisted to be a grimy opaque windowed store front. It did not proclaim its business and sported a metal barricade that would have looked more at home on a border planet outpost. An "Open - Ring for Service" sign hung over a slotted port.
"It's the right level." Sulu's brow knit in frustration. "I know this place like the palm of my right hand."
Riley rolled his eyes heavenward. "This is what happens when you let the helmsman navigate."
"Okay." Sulu had to grin. "So maybe I haven't looked at my hand in fifteen years either."
"Oh, and I could just taste those brazed shoulder tips in Saurian pudding…!" Riley groaned. "Why did you have to tell me about it?"
Sulu took a critical look at his surroundings as his confidence in his bearings ebbed. What had once been an open mall that shone in Galway's glowing trademark colors of blue and gold now bore more resemblance to a combat zone.
Grit had collected on the sky-panels, dulling the starlight that shone through them. Many of the artificial lights were in disrepair. Large sections of paint had peeled away from the walls revealing the grey-green metal behind them. The walkways which had once been polished daily were now the greasy black of the decks of a mining scow. It disheartening to try to mentally superimpose the clean family-oriented station he remembered on this filthy den, but the call of real Aldeberan-style cooking prodded him on.
"It must be the wrong level," he said, resolutely squaring his shoulders and setting out for the nearest 'lift. "Let's try the starboard side."
"My stomach and I both hope you're right," Riley wished fervently as he followed him.
They hadn't gone far before Sulu recognized frontings of a pawn shop that used to be a souvenir store and a boutique that had transformed itself into a strip bar.
"No," he said sadly, turning around. "That was it."
Riley sighed. "I knew it was too good to be true. What now?"
They paused on the walkway to take stock of their possibilities. Garish signs promised every type of amusement imaginable to the sparse crowd of uniformed spacemen and ragtag civilians that peopled the walks. Kevin was reading one bar's description of their main attraction - Dee-Vankha and her Slime Devils - when the doors of that establishment flew open and someone flew out.
Unfortunately, Riley found himself straight in the path of that unguided humanoid missile and immediately found himself buried under a tangle of long arms and legs.
In a very surprising twist of fate that was to have a profound impact on the course of coming events, when the navigator pushed the stranger's calf off his face and turned to get a better look at who had tackled him, instead of saying something like "Watch where you're going, buddy," the Irishman blinked in astonishment. "Jeff?"
"Kev!" The stranger opened a pair of vividly blue eyes and grinned at Riley as if it were completely natural that the two of them should run into each other. "I was just thinking about you."
"Jefferson, what are you doing here?" Riley demanded as he accepted a helping hand up from Sulu.
The stranger raised himself to his elbows. "Don't call me that, Kev. You know that I don't like it."
Sulu couldn't tell if Riley was upset over the man having fallen on him or whether he just disliked the newcomer, but at any rate Riley didn't seem at all pleased to see his old acquaintance as he crossed his arms and asked sarcastically. "Well, who are you now?"
Sulu hoped beyond hope that they weren't going to end up trailing around all night with one of Kevin's old drinking buddies as he offered the man a hand up. He was particularly unenthusiastic about hooking up with an old chum who was prone to being thrown out of bars headfirst. However, knowing Riley and his usual taste in drinking pals, Sulu knew he now probably had as much hope of having a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant as he did of sprouting wings and flying away.
"T.J." the man introduced himself, shaking the hand that Sulu had offered before using it to rise to his feet. "T.J. Riley."
"Lt. Sulu," he managed to introduce himself in return as the man rose and kept on rising until he reached his full height of about seven feet.
"Sue and Lou," T.J. mused, scratching beneath his chin with a long forefinger. "I used to date twins named that."
Sulu gave Riley an `Is this guy for real?' look that the navigator missed by being too busy being unimpressed with the other's height.
"Well, I'm glad you still keep `Riley'," the Irishman was saying, apparently in an uncharacteristically scathing mood. "Or does that change by the month too?"
"Riley?" The connection of the last name suddenly supplied Sulu with an explanation of Kevin's rudeness. "Are the two of you related?"
Both men looked at him as if surprised that he should ask. They then turned and shared a long questioning look with each other as if trying to decide whether they were related or not.
Finally the taller man reached down and affectionately ruffled Riley's hair.
"Ah, ya ain't still mad at me, are ya, Irish?" he asked fondly, sounding and looking quite dissimilar from the brown haired, brown-eyed, five foot seven inch tall navigator. "Wait, don't answer that... Let me buy you a drink."
"You have money?" Riley asked incredulously.
`Oh, no,' Sulu groaned inwardly, resigning himself to the sad fate of spending the rest of his leave with Riley's loud, obnoxious, drinking buddy/cousin that not even the genial Riley seemed to particularly like.
"I've got better than money," the neanderthal in question was saying as he draped a long arm around Riley's shoulders. "I've got a tab."
"Hey, are you sure you want to go back in there?" Sulu stopped them as they turned towards the bar that the larger Riley had recently and dramatically exited.
"Best place in town," T.J. assured him as the door swooshed open to admit them.
Despite the smoke and purposefully ill lighting, Sulu could see that this reincarnated bookstore still carried vestiges of its former profession. The shielded shelves that once contained valuable antique volumes now housed a myriad collection of bottled substances of the usual description. The old high-fronted checkout counter was now a bar. And though the tape shelves were gone, the wide screen viewers once used to preview them were still being utilized.
Sulu couldn't help but feel saddened as he witnessed the very same viewer that had once introduced him to the delights of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Sitiskitig, The Lion Boy of Tumoth now peddling pleasures of a vastly different kind.
There were possibly more people in the long narrow room than they'd seen collectively on the station that night. Most seemed to be locals. From the looks of them, Sulu figured they'd all acquired their wardrobes at the gigantic, station-wide, going-out-of-business sale that must have taken place fifteen years ago. Few were distinguishable as fish or fowl, let alone male or female.
"I'm back!" the taller Riley announced into the combined din of blaring videos, over-loud music and conversation.
The only response he got was a half-empty bottle of Bursa crème wine that came hurtling down at him from one of the upper galleries and burst against the closed door behind them.
"I love this place!" T.J. grinned as Kevin and Sulu quickly attempted to brush the sticky purple stuff off their uniforms. He waded into the crowd as nonchalantly as a flamingo would into a mud puddle leaving Sulu and Riley to push through the living wake that squeezed shut behind him.
"Jeff! Where are we going?" Kevin yelled - and then yelped as a third person accidentally "brushed" into him with greater intimacy than his current girlfriend had ever attempted. "I don't think I like this place."
"C'mon," the other Riley replied although he was facing a wall. With a little jump, T.J. caught hold of the railing above and hauled himself up to the upper level.
Sulu goggled in surprise, but none of the other patrons seemed to find this incongruous display of acrobatics worth a sideward glance.
T.J. dangled a long arm down to his kinsman. "My table's up here."
Kevin exchanged a look with Sulu who wasn't any more enthusiastic about wall scaling than he was. "Where's the stairs?"
"There aren't any," T.J. yelled back. "It makes it more private."
Riley gave Sulu an apologetic shrug. Sulu replied with a smile that was fatalistically cheerful and offered him a leg up.
Either the Bursa crème wine was not very good that night, or glass breaking was just the current behavioral rage, or the patrons felt that anyone in T.J. Riley's company needed to be doused with that substance, for two glasses and their contents splattered the wall as Kevin scrambled up. Another four - including the one that hit him in the back - graced Sulu's trip to the upper level.
"Well," T.J. remarked philosophically as they made disheartened swipes at their purple-stained uniforms, "As long as you smell like that, you might as well have a drink."
"Where's the Lexington, Jeff?" Riley demanded.
"I dunno," their host answered unconcernedly as he picked up an order pad. "What do you guys want? More of the same?"
"What do you mean you don't know?" the navigator persisted as he took a seat. "Are you ... Are you ...?"
"On vacation?" the other man substituted for the `A.W.O.L.' that they both knew was supposed to go there. "Yes. Yes, I am."
"Oh, Jeff…." Riley groaned as Sulu finally bent to the inevitable and sat down at the table.
"Oh, hell…" The other Riley's eyes were focused on someone in the crowd behind him. His face became tight despite his smile. "Company already? You guys just sit tight for a minute, okay? Don't look around. Everything's going to be O.K."
As soon as they were told not to look around, it became their most burning desire to do so. Kevin came slightly out of his chair as suddenly they were descended on from all directions by a group of amorphous shapes.
"Heyo, Riley," the one closest to T.J. said in an electronically augmented voice.
After his initial confusion, Sulu could tell that these beings were some sort of humanoids of slightly less than average height. Five of them positioned themselves around the table. All swathed from head to toe in thick layers of dark, padded clothing. With uncanny precision, they drew back their hoods revealing not faces but featureless black helmets. An eye visor ran around the circumference of the helmet making it impossible to determine where their faces were - if they had them at all. As if to purposefully compound his disorientation, the figures all spun around on a silent cue. It was now impossible to determine which of them were facing in and which were facing out. Sulu could feel the hair on the back of his neck rising in response to the bizarre-ness of their behavior, but Riley's cousin seemed to take it all in stride.
"Hello boys ... girls ... or whatever we are today," he said, leaning back in his chair. "You looking for me, or is this part of the floorshow?"
What could have been a hand under all its padding reached out and pushed Kevin back down into his seat.
"What's with the flitter and tripe?" another filtered voice buzzed from behind Sulu.
T.J. shrugged amiably and shook his head.
"Excessive inquisitiveness felled the feline they say," he warned pleasantly.
The figure behind Sulu made a barking noise that might have been a laugh. "Squirts of pissdom."
"Up for a little peek and poke?" the one closest to Riley's cousin asked.
"Maybe some other time," T.J. demurred pleasantly.
Again with unnatural precision, the figures spun around this time to face outward from the table. As they reached up together to pull up their hoods, Sulu thought he saw a glint of something as it dropped from the sleeve of one of the figures to Riley's cousin's lap.
"Who were they?" Riley asked as they melted back into the crowd.
"Do-nothing rich punks," his cousin dismissed them.
He was looking in the direction they'd disappeared in, but Sulu didn't fall for this magician's trick and saw him transfer the something that had been dropped from his lap to his pocket. "Local gang. I can't stand the little creeps."
"What language were they speaking?" Sulu asked quickly, in order to not appear to be particularly observant.
"That's a matter of opinion." T.J. punched an order into the electronic pad then passed it on. "Mostly rhyming slang today. You just have to know what they're saying to know what they're saying most of the time."
"Oh, I remember," Sulu recalled as Kevin scanned the list and punched in a selection. "Like `flitter and tripe' would be `glitter and stripe' - that was a nickname for the Security force."
"We're not wearing that kind of uniform," Kevin protested as he passed the order pad to Sulu.
His cousin smiled patronizingly. "Not on the outside."
"`Squirts of pissdom' would be `words of wisdom'," the helmsman speculated.
T.J. nodded. "That's how I took it."
"I don't get `peek and poke' though," Sulu said. "What did they mean by that?"
Riley's cousin smiled a Cheshire cat smile and shook his head. "Like I told the young ones, curiosity is a social disease that can sometimes take a fatal turn around here."
Despite the fact that this statement was delivered in the same mode and manner he'd been using all along, the threat implicit in his words made them seem violently out of character. Sulu looked at Riley who in turn frowned at his cousin. "Jeff, what's going on with you?"
"Too little and too much," he answered cryptically as the noise level from below rose noticeably. "I think I'm going to have to excuse myself."
"Now wait a minute," Kevin protested as he rose. "Where do you think you're going?"
"Just to the gents. Don't worry," he replied, then took Sulu's hand into both of his. "It's so good to meet you, Lt. Sulu."
As Riley's cousin pumped his hand, Sulu could feel something being pressed against his palm. "I like to see Kev hanging out with sensible, stable fellows like you," he continued and then instead of releasing Sulu, he put his hand down on the table and held it there. "Kevin's so impulsive. He needs to be around someone who's patient - who's not going to jump into things. You understand?"
"Yeah, sure." Sulu casually slipped whatever had been passed to him off the table under his hand and tucked it inside the top of his boot.
"Oh, come off it, Jeff," Riley complained, oblivious to the transfer.
A blinding beam of blue light buzzed past their heads and crackled against the ceiling. Someone from below with the aid of a universal translator and a powerful amplifier shouted, "Hold it!" into the split second of silence that shot though the bar. The noise level then screamed up to twice its normal decibel range as the patrons scrambled for cover. Riley's cousin unhesitatingly stretched his extraordinary height into a flying dive in the direction opposite the one where the blasts had originated. He'd almost completely disappeared into the writhing murk at the back of the balcony when three figures in black body armor emerged over the wall.
"Sit down!" This command issued at bullhorn volume from the armored plates protecting the face of one of the black-clad figures. It echoed in four other languages as the built-in translator did its duty.
One of the armored beings covered the crowd while the other two kicked open the doors at the back of the balcony - in the same general direction that Riley's cousin had so recently exited.
On the shoulder of the laser rifle brandishing things, Sulu was surprised to see the glittering blue insignia and gold rank stripes that were an unmistakable vestige of the gaudy uniforms once worn by the station's security force. `Halfway Security' - even their name had been a joke. They bore no resemblance to the malevolent creatures that stood here now.
"Shut up!" the deafening, multi-voiced command came in response to the low murmur that had sprung up among the patrons. Behind them, there were the sounds of multiple doors being kicked in. Below them, Sulu could see that the vast majority of the crowd was exercising the better part of valor just as he himself longed to do under these circumstances.
One of the black-clad figures emerged from the back. It removed the blast shield from its face revealing that "it" was an attractive young woman with black hair and blue eyes. "No luck."
The person guarding them also turned out to be female - this time a red-head with a feminine voice that didn't sound at all like a bullhorn when she pulled away her face plate to say, "Damn!"
The third guard was actually a man with unimposing Asian features who returned to announce, "He's gone."
"How can he be gone?" the red-haired woman demanded. "There's nothing back there except those bathrooms."
"Freeze," the brunette ordered, swinging her rifle to cover some patrons who'd begun to inch away. "Nobody's going anywhere yet."
"Who was with Riley?" the red-head asked and was immediately answered by a babble of voices and a myriad of appendages pointing out Sulu and Kevin.
Sulu swallowed, wondering how much worse this bad evening could get.
"Okay. Let's see some I.D., you two." The brunette and the Asian man trained their guns on them. "What's your connection to Terrance J. Riley?"
Sulu glanced at Riley who looked like he was just about to confess something really terrible.
"He's my brother," Riley said after a moment, admitting something that did seem pretty terrible at that moment.
"Congratulations, Mr. Riley," the red-headed cop retorted humorlessly. "You've got a brother who's wanted for murder."