SERENADE

A Star Trek/Metroid crossover

-Author-

Michael Lapine

-Co-Author-

Eric Duncanson

Disclaimer

Samus Aran, reporting for duty again, relating the disclaimer and such until I get called into action again. I'm sorry to say it won't be for a few chapters. So, stop haggling the Author already, Linkmaster! Ahem Anyway, the author and the co-author do not own Star Trek or Metroid, nor did they create either series.

I still come down with cold-chills just thinking about what they would do if they had.

The author and co-author sincerely hope you continue enjoy this most worthy of stories.

Of victories and losses

The frigate was lifting up after only a minor delay; after all they had collected more of the phazon ore than originally planed. And the prisoners had to be sealed safely away in their suits than put in restrictive bindings. They had to clear the moorings and the umbilical as well, but they were still ahead of schedule. This pleased the commando greatly, and so he allowed himself the leisure of strolling to the control room.

The troopers jumped to attention immediately and began reporting the readiness of different systems, not that he was worried. If the ship they came upon twenty years ago was any indication than they would have nothing to fear. "Weapon systems fully armed, all cannons are primed and ready sir!"

"Engines read ready, speeds up to warp five are available!"

"Cloaking device is ready sir!"

"We are clear for departure sir!"

The commando sneered, and his features somehow became sharper in the darkness, "Take us out, and prepare to engage the explosives as soon as we are free of the asteroid, we won't be needing it anymore."

Everyone jumped to it quickly, hoping not to follow the example of failure. The cargo ship came loose from its moorings and umbilicals; it shuddered and rattled as it fought the gravity of the asteroid. The commando's sneer widened even further as came clear until he saw Voyager… and then his sneer vanished. In twenty years it never occurred to him that the Starfleet ship they had encountered might have been obsolete. Voyager was considerably larger and looked like the spearhead of god, if such a creature existed.

The only similarities between this ship and the pill-shaped Seattle were the warp-nacelles and even those were radically different. His blood ran cold once more as he saw it on the view screen and he barely had enough breath to summon the courage to speak. "Set the charges off now!" he commanded, then he whirled to the combat officer, "What are you waiting for, engage the cloaking field!"

Regaining his composure, he eyed Voyager evilly. If he could only capture some of that technology… but he knew it would never happen. But still, he would need information on that technology. "I will be interrogating the prisoners, notify me when we get to the hub."

He did not even bother waiting for a response; the commando left the control room just as the asteroid exploded violently. As he expected Voyager was barely affected, but he knew their sensors would be clouded enough to allow them a silent escape. They would track the pirates down sooner or later, of that much he was certain…

Janeway sipped her hot coffee, trying to exude an aura of confidence and calm she did not feel. It had been over an hour since the shuttle left with the away team and still have yet to receive word from them. If the shuttle had only been equipped with subspace communications than the magnetic interference would not matter.

She got up and walked around the bridge to get a system check from each individual, an unnecessary tactic since everyone knew his or her jobs and would notify her if anything went wrong. But it would give her something to do besides simply sitting and worrying about something she had no control over. Captain Janeway started at astronomics where Seven was working on the scanners.

"Any progress?"

"Not much, Captain. The magnetic interference is too strong, which makes scanning difficult. I have refined the scans a little and noticed some small inconsistencies in the scans."

"Care to elaborate?"

"It appears as if the dilthium is in some kind of flux, like it's out of phase with the rest of reality. Its like nothing I've ever seen before," Seven replied, trying to interpret the readings but not having any luck. It was a puzzle all right, since dilithium did not naturally exist in a flux. There were artificial means of introducing dilithim into a flux, of course, some of which were inherently very dangerous if left uncontrolled.

"Captain!" ensign Him exclaimed, trying to get Janeway's attention, "The shuttle is leaving the asteroid and attempting to contact us."

"Put it onscreen."

The screen changed again, this time they were seeing inside the shuttlecraft, with ensign Sarah at the helm. "Mayday, mayday! Ground team has been attacked and captured by a hostile force. I recommend Voyager goes to red-alert status and prepare to send a rescue team."

Captain Janeway's mouth became a thin, hard line. Who would do such a thing and for what purpose? And, most importantly, how? She knew that she be able answer some of her questions when the shuttle returned with the sensor logs of the away team.

"Go to battle stations, and have the Marines prepare to be mobilized for an armed insertion!" Captain Janeway demanded. Meanwhile the shuttle had docked with the ship and Ensign Kim reported that the sensor logs were being uploaded. She made a manual check from the command chair and found that the shields were at maximum power, all weapons were ready and the Marines were ready to mobilize. At the moment she confirmed all this, a ship could be seen leaving the asteroid.

The ship was not much larger than Voyager's engineering section and looked like some angular beetle with stubs protruding from the back, which might have housed the propulsion systems, and the hull of the ship was made of a purple metal that made it hard to see against the stars. The ship, as soon as it saw Voyager, began to turn away as if to escape and it wavered in and out of sight. It was cloaking and quickly became invisible to the naked eye.

Captain Janeway turned toward Seven, but needed not to say anything because the woman was already running a full sensor sweep. In a moment she had it, "Detecting it on infrared." Seven changed the main viewer over to what the infrared sensors were seeing and the vessel could be seen again. Only this time it was in oranges, reds, and yellows and not just a little white, it was also radiating an orange aura.

"Man," Paris said, whistling through his teeth, "It must be getting hot as hell over there."

"Well, we're about to make it hotter over there. Close the gap and fire a warning shot!"

They moved on in closer slowly as to not provoke them unduly and a phaser shot lanced out hotter than anything on the other ship. It was a near miss but enough of the power was transmitted through subspace in order to toss it end over end. However the ship did not stop and corrected it course before leaping to warp.

"Lay in a pursuit course and engage!"

"Captain, they transmitted signal just before going to warp," Kim said from COMM, "It was directed at the asteroid."

"Sensors are reading a build up of some type of energy coming from the asteroid!"

"Evasive maneuvers mister Paris, get us out of here!" However it was to late, for no sooner than the captain give the than the asteroid exploded like a fiery sun hit the Voyager like an angry giant and tossed them like some kind of toy. Everyone got thrown about as the inertia dampeners, as well as all other systems went out one by one…

Tuvok woke up alone, or so he first thought, for none of the other away team members were immediately present and his captors were nowhere in sight. At first there was some confusion on his part as he tried to remember where he was and how he came to be there at all, but it came back to him quickly. The asteroid, the battle and being captured, all of it, but that did not answer any of his more pressing concerns.

He tried to get lose from his restraints, which looked vaguely like something out of Tom Paris's Captain Proton programs, but his considerable Vulcan strength had not yet recovered. Movement from outside revealed that he was not alone after all. The being that stepped into the dim lighting was like the others, an insect-like a creature. Its entire body was covered in blood red armor and of its face he could nothing for a re-breather apparatus obscured the face. The creature stopped in front of him and regarded him for moment.

"You are not like the others…"

It was a statement of fact, but there was a question in its voice. But Tuvoc let the creature continue. "You look like the Hunters, but you are different, what are you?"

"I am afraid I do not understand what you are referring to, what are Hunters?" Tuvoc responded, though he knew perfectly well.

"The sub-race of vermin we had caught you with! We call them Hunters for lack of a better name after that filth that hunts us and interferes with us. You will tell us what we want to know about them, starting with their weaknesses!"

"What you want is not a simple thing. Humans are… contradictory."

"Are you saying you won't tell us?"

"I am not saying anything."

The creature considered him some more for some time. "Is there something you desire to say?" Tuvoc asked at last, just a little irritated at having the creature's presence. Not that he would admit it. It was his natural impulse to suppress that emotion, and any others as well.

"How well do you think you know these vermin? We space pirates know them a little better than you might believe because we encountered them twenty years ago. We ran across one of their vessels, a decrepit piece of space trash that identified itself as Seattle. It did not look like a vessel worthy of taking but they were in orbit of the planet Zebes, the home of our eternal enemies. We came at them with superior numbers and managed to get a foothold on the space ship and killed a large contingent of the crew in the first few minutes. The ship was ours, and so was the victory!

"As we savored our victory the unforgivable happened! They stole our victory and delivered onto us defeat! They had activated the self-destruct mechanism and destroyed several of our own vessels in the process."

Tuvok nodded silently, knowing that it was standing procedure to destroy a spaceship as an extreme last measure. Acceptable uses of the self-destruct package were few and well laid out in Starfleet regulations, which was understandable.

"Were there any survivors?"

"There were… prisoners. Not that they gave us anything useful, we had better luck getting information from their computer banks, which we had managed to download. That saved my neck since I was the one that lead that ill-fated raid. And now we face one of their ships again on the dawn a victory long in the making. Tell me; explain how it is that they had developed so quickly? The Seattle was just this side of being space debris before we even set eyes on it, and your ship is not."

"Because the ship you are talking about was lost with all hands nearly two-hundred years ago…"

……

Emergency power had been recovered not long after the enemies had blown up the asteroid. But that had been hours ago and they still did not have propulsions or sensors online. Engineering, which had been giving them half-hourly updates, said that the explosion had the characteristics of a sub-space explosion. They were quite lucky to be alive and mostly in one piece, it came as no surprise that they had lost power over much of the ship.

But that still left the problem of just whom they were dealing with, which is why Captin Janeway had left the bridge to get information from Neelix.

"To be honest I'm not really sure who they are. I think that they might be space pirates, but I can't be sure because I've heard recently that they were all wiped out. That could've been misinformation, of course. When I had been through here last I had heard that the space pirate problem had been taken care of, not that that had stopped them from attacking my ship. I tried to repel the boarders but were it not for the bounty hunter that had responded to my distress call I like to think that I would be dead.

"Through more reliable channels I have heard that she is still in the business, despite the rather large bounty on her own head."

"And how did she come to have this bounty on her head?" Janeway asked, wondering if she should be worried.

Neelix did not seem to believe it worth worrying over and said, "There was the BSL incident in which she destroyed a government facility and vaporized SR388, then there was the incident on Jerel where she destroyed another government facility. I have it on good authority that she was justified in her actions though. On BSL there was an outbreak of a virus and on Jerel a population of Metroids they had breed and engineered had escaped from captivity."

"Sounds like the government isn't entirely on the up-and-up."

"I'm sorry, up-and-up?"

"Don't worry about it, Neelix. Now, if you contacted this bounty hunter do you think that she'd agree to help us out?"

"She should, seeing how I've never heard her turn down a reasonable request. Though I think I should take a shuttle and find her, she might be a little nervous at meeting a vessel this size."

"You can take a shuttle, and take Tom with you just in case you need some… creative maneuvering."

Neelix nodded as he got up, he headed towards the door. "Oh, Neelix." He turned back toward the captain, "I don't care what you have to offer her, just get her to come." The man nodded once more and left the briefing room as Janeway took another sip from her coffee, it really was quite good. She just hoped that she would not wind up regretting this decision.

Tom looked up as Neelix exited the briefing room and called his name. "The captain would like for you to take me on a shuttle to collect an expert on this foe. We shouldn't be gone for long."

"Okay, I'll meet up with you over in the shuttle bay." Tom Paris left for the turbolift, presumably to go tell Lieutenant Torras that he would be leaving the ship. While Neelix did not understand why he did not simply use the COMM, it did not really bother him since it would give him time to prepare for the excursion.

He left for the turbolift and several minutes later he was in officer's lodge, where he spent most of his time. Neelix collected some food for the trip because he personally did not like the replicators, they could not be healthy. He also packed some chocolate cake, just in case the bounty hunter still had a weakness for sweets. Then he took the food and returned to the turbolift and rode it to the shuttle bay where Tom was waiting for him.

"Hey, you brought some chocolate cake," Tom said, reaching for it. Neelix pulled away from his reach and admonished him, "This is for the bounty hunter, and I've brought something along for you as well so wait patiently."

"That reminds me, just what is the name of the bounty hunter?"

"Her name is Samus Aran…"

It was not until the commando began walking along and he began following that he realized that some individually powered gravitational stretcher was holding him down, though it seemed to be of a primitive design. He tried to move again, but found himself unequal to the task. Looking to the left and to the right he could see the other members of the away team on the edge of his perceptive vision.

"Two-hundred years; that would explain it quite nicely. Not quite so nice for you or your companions or rest of their filthy race. That only leaves a more bitter taste in our mouth over that defeat from twenty years ago."

"What do you mean?"

"We are going to wipe them out for daring to steal victory from us, down to the last man, woman and child. Then we will crow out our victory to the entire galaxy and continue the campaign to conquer everything in existence."

"I have admit to feeling a little surprise and more than a little disbelief at your statement, may I inquire on just how you plan to carry that statement out?"

"We are going take control of the only wormhole weapon known to exist. We are going to capture Serenade…"

End Chapter