A/N: Thank you SnidgetHex, pallysAramisRios, and 29Pieces for reviewing! Only one more chapter after this and this prequel series will be complete! :'(

"Botched Job"

2395

"Where exactly did you find this new client?" Rios asked as he eyed the Arkarian and his large crate of cargo standing on the transporter pad that Raffi had beamed up without even consulting Rios first.

"Where we normally meet clients," she replied. "Ortero, this is Captain Rios. Rios, Ortero. He's heading to the Colaran sector."

"Captain," the man greeted genially enough.

Rios nodded back curtly. "Excuse us for a moment," he said, taking Raffi's elbow and drawing her halfway down the length of the deck. "What the hell are you doing randomly bringing passengers aboard?" he said in a low voice.

"We needed a gig," she said defensively. "What's the big deal?"

"Did you do a background check on this Ortero?"

Raffi waved a hand dismissively. "He's fine. Stop being so anal."

Rios glowered at her. "What are we transporting?"

She shrugged. "Some medical supplies or something."

"What, specifically?" he pressed.

"Would you lay off?" she hissed at him. "It's only a few hours to the Colaran sector. Easiest gig there is."

She shoved past him and sauntered back toward their "client," beaming brightly and offering to get him settled for the short trip.

Rios stewed where she'd left him. He didn't like this. They may have had dealings with unscrupulous people from time to time, but he always wanted to know when and who they were. What was Raffi thinking? The two of them had been at this for a few years now; they knew better than to just jump in bed with a stranger.

Rios wondered if that was the reason Raffi was being so lax. But after she finished giving Ortero the brief tour and directing him to the mess section below, she headed to her quarters alone.

Rios set in a course and kept a surreptitious eye on their passenger, who settled at one of the tables on the lower deck with a drink from the replicator. There was nothing overtly suspicious about him.

Still, Rios couldn't let it go. This was his goddamn ship, after all.

So with another glance at the Arkarian, he stood up from the pilot's chair and went to one of the bridge operations consoles to conduct a scan of the cargo container sitting in the rear of his ship. He was able to get an image of multiple canisters inside, and within those was some kind of biological matter, though his scans couldn't determine anything more precise than that.

He let out a vexed huff. Raffi better not have brought aboard any bio-hazardous material.

Rios double-checked the autopilot, then headed to her cabin. He had to knock twice before he heard a lazy, "Come in."

He jabbed the key to open the door and stepped inside, brows rising at the sight of Raffi sprawled out on her bed, a smoking pipe dangling precariously from her lips. He wrinkled his nose at the pungent aroma.

"Hey, babe," she said with an utterly wasted smile.

"Really? Now of all times?" He swiped the door closed behind him. Their guest didn't need to see her like this. "Raffi, what the hell kind of cargo did you bring us? There's bio material in that crate."

She took a deep inhalation of smoke and then puffed some of it back out. "You should try some of this, baby. It's got a waaay better kick than your cigars."

Rios sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over to grip her arms. "Raffi, focus. Who is this Ortero guy and what is he transporting?"

She lolled her head back and forth dazedly. "Ortero…" Her face split into a grin. "Ortero is nice. He hooked me up good."

Rios scowled at the pipe. "I can see that."

He stood up and left; there was no getting anything lucid out of her while she was this high. He'd have to handle this himself. …He'd have to open the container.

He rounded the corner, only to almost run straight into Ortero.

"Apologies," the Arkarian said, still with that genial manner. "Is everything all right, Captain?"

Rios wanted to snap at him that he didn't appreciate the man getting his friend bombed out of her mind, but Raffi's addiction wasn't anything new, though today's timing was certainly inconvenient.

Rios shrugged off his irritation and affected an equally casual demeanor. "Everything's fine. We should be in the Colaran sector in five hours."

"Excellent."

"Raffi mentioned you're transporting medical supplies," he went on. "Are you a doctor?"

Ortero smiled. "I am. I imagine a ship such as this comes equipped with one of those emergency medical holograms, but there are some specialities even those programs don't have the capacity for."

Maybe not, but Rios would rather have Emil patching him up any day over a real doctor he couldn't trust one hundred percent.

"And do you work in one of those specialities?" Rios asked.

"I work in many," Ortero replied. With that, he turned and strode off, unfortunately in the direction of his cargo, which meant Rios couldn't go nosing around it now.

He headed back to the helm instead and tried to let it go. It was just a short trip, like Raffi said. Just a few more hours to be over and done with it.

But something kept niggling at the back of his mind and history had taught him not to ignore his instinct.

So he kept checking for when he had an opportunity, and once Ortero seemed to have retired to the holosuite to pass the rest of the journey, Rios hurried across the deck to the man's shipping container. Curiously, it didn't have a coded lock attached to the seal, and Rios only had to open the lid. There was a small hiss from the decompression and vapor wafted up from the cold storage units inside. He reached in and pulled out one of the canisters. It was filled with a sickly green liquid, inside which was an organ.

Rios put it back and pulled out another, then another. Each of them contained different body parts. Their client was an organ trafficker.

Rios quickly replaced the canisters and sealed the crate again, then made his way back to Raffi's room. She needed to sober up, now.

But when he barged into her cabin without knocking, he found it empty. He went to the bathroom but the door was open and she wasn't in there either. Not wanting to alert their passenger that something was up by yelling for her across the deck, Rios leaned over the computer in her room and did a search for her on the ship. He frowned when it said she was in the med bay. Had she overdosed? At least she had gotten herself down there.

Rios hurried out of her room and down the stairs, rushing into the medical bay. He immediately spotted Raffi lying on the bio-bed, unconscious. There was no sign of Emil, though, so maybe this wasn't as big of an emergency. Or in her drugged stupor, she'd managed to deactivate him.

"Activate EMH," Rios said, but before he could take a step toward Raffi, a hypospray jabbed him in the neck from behind. He staggered as something ice cold flooded his arteries. His limbs almost instantly went slack and he collapsed to the floor on his side. Emil didn't appear, but Ortero did, stepping around him into view. Rios flicked his gaze up, unable to move any other part of his body.

The Arkarian tutted. "You shouldn't have opened the container, Captain." He moved to the side and set the hypospray down, then started sorting through the med bay's other instruments. "But I'm not surprised," Ortero went on. "Human curiosity can be insatiable sometimes. Even deadly." He paused to cast a smirk down at Rios. "No matter. The ship will be at our destination soon, and now I have two human specimens full of organ tissue to harvest before we arrive."

Rios tried to get his body to move, but nothing responded, not even with a twitch. He was completely paralyzed, unable to do anything but watch as Ortero picked up a laser scalpel and moved toward Raffi. Rios's heart lurched inside his sternum, struggling with panic against the drug simultaneously suppressing his autonomic functions.

"I disabled the EMH," Ortero added. "Can't have a pesky hologram interrupting when her vitals crash. Normally I save the heart for last, but let's face it, her kidneys and liver probably aren't in the best of shape. Probably won't make a huge profit off of her, but you never know."

Tears welled in Rios's eyes as he mentally strained with all his might and Ortero lowered the scalpel to Raffi's chest.

"Emmet, ayuda," he managed to get out, his voice barely above a whisper, but it was enough.

The tactical EH shimmered into view, and a split second later materialized a phaser rifle in his hands.

"¡Oy, pico conchetumadre!"

The sound of the plasma shot echoed loudly in the med bay, and Ortero fell backward, a smoking hole in the center of his chest.

Rios could see Emmet standing at a computer terminal, and a moment later, Emil shimmered into view as well.

"What is the nature of your—bloody hell."

Rios heard vague cussing in two different languages as he lost consciousness.

…

Emmet beamed their dead passenger and his cargo into space while Emil tended to Rios and Raffi. The ETH hadn't even bothered to consult with Rios before doing it, not that Cris would have known what he wanted to do with the Arkarian and his haul of organs. Presumably somebody somewhere could have used one of them, but getting them to a hospital would have invited unwanted questions and it was probably just better this way, even if it left a sour taste in Cris's mouth.

It took a couple of hours for the paralyzing agent to wear off, and a few hours longer for Raffi to come down from her high, in which time Enoch had picked a direction and simply cast La Sirena to the cosmic currents.

Rios ordered two coffees from the mess replicator and brought them over to the table, taking a seat across from Raffi. She barely acknowledged the offering, her gaze downcast through the grates of the table to the floor. They sat in silence for a long time, nursing the coffee until the brew went cold.

"I'm sorry," Raffi finally rasped.

"You didn't know he was an organ trafficker," Rios responded.

She shook her head, expression awash with guilt and self-loathing. "I didn't do a background check. I…" Face pinching, she curled her fingers into the grate holes. "He said he had some good stuff, pure, ya know? And he'd…he'd give it to me as partial payment for the transport."

Rios didn't say anything; he'd suspected as much after he'd found her high as a kite.

"I almost got you killed," she went on, breath hitching.

"Yeah, well, you didn't." He cared more about her life anyway.

Raffi looked away, expression twisting with obvious anguish. "I don't know how to stop. I…I don't want to stop," she whispered. She clutched a fist against her stomach. "There's a hollow pit inside me, Cris, and this is all I've got to fill it."

He wanted to say she had him, but he held that same cold, emptiness inside. They kept each other afloat sometimes, but the truth was they were both just drifting in and out of each other's orbits, caught in the gravities of their own black holes.

Raffi reached out to grasp his hand with desperate fervency, eyes welling with tears. "You don't need me around," she said, filling the silence between them that echoed off the walls of the ship. "You're doing well for yourself," she added with a forced smile and flick of her gaze around La Sirena. "You don't need me holding you back."

He turned his hand over to clasp hers in return. "You've never held me back, Raffi," he said softly. "You don't have to leave."

She gave him a pained half smile and dropped her gaze. "Yes, I do. I'll go back to Earth, find a place in the desert, where I can't hurt anyone. Or myself." She flashed him a rueful smile at that, then a tentative one. "Trouble you for one last ride?"

He nodded numbly. He supposed it was inevitable; everything eventually came to an end.

"For you, always."