A/N: Ooooh boy we are pretty much right on the cusp of a minor story arc of sorts that I came up with way back in 2015, maybe? It was vastly different back then, but still, it's both very exciting and very strange to finally be writing it.

Time for a little wordlist:
A Nebula class is a big Starfleet ship, near the size of a Galaxy class (like the Enterprise-D, from Star Trek: The Next Generation). A picture is more than a whole lot of words tho, so search for an image if ya want a better idea of how it looks. (it is very pretty!)
A Saber class is way closer to a Nova class in size, but kinda flatter and not as cute. You can easily tell them apart because a Nova class starship is shaped like a friend!
Elaysians are humanoids living on a planet with very low gravity.

Also see the documentary Star Trek: Generations for a prime example on how not to land a starship.

Anyway, thanks as always for reading, please enjoy 3

Chapter 22: Mind if I join you?

Diaval ambled into the mess hall the next morning, hiding a wide yawn behind his hand. Between long hours, the planet's day and night cycle not matching the Fae's, and that whole mess with the sensors, his sleeping habits hadn't been stellar lately. Still, it hadn't gotten bad enough that some raktajino wouldn't get him mostly back in working order again.

After some fiddling with a less than agreeable replicator that seemed dead set on giving him nothing but cold soup, he managed to get his breakfast and set off to find a table. This late in the morning, the mess hall was comparatively empty, but one person in particular stood out, sitting at one of the tables at the far end, close to the windows.

"Care for some company?" he asked, stopping in front of Terei's table.

Terei, who had been staring out the window, looked up at him with an impassive expression. "Sure." Then she squinted, almost wincing. "You know, you look even worse than I do."

"Haven't got much of my beauty sleep lately," Diaval muttered between long sips of his raktajino.

Terei let out a hum in response before turning back to her breakfast. Going by the amount of food still left on her tray, she hadn't gotten there much earlier than he had.

They ate in easy silence for a while. Outside, the landscape was almost blindingly white, in stark contrast to the pitch black sky. It was odd to be on the ground, Diaval had come to realize, and not just because of the unusual planet they had landed on; the whole concept of being inside a ship and on the ground itself felt strange. Of course he knew Nova class ships had been designed for planetary missions from the start, but reading up on the specs and experiencing it were two entirely different things.

Looking over to Terei, he found her staring out through the window with a slight frown.

"It's weird to you too, isn't it?" he said.

"Hm?" Terei blinked, pulled out of whatever she had been musing over.

Diaval nodded at the window. "Having landed with the ship. I thought it'd be about the same as being docked at a station, but there's just something about having a horizon outside that feels... off."

"It's definitely not anything like landing a shuttle, at least," Terei muttered. She went quiet again, picking aimlessly at her food, and for a moment Diaval figured that would be all his attempts at conversation would give him. Then, almost reluctantly, she continued. "How'd the landing go, anyway?"

"Pretty good, I'd say. One of the landing feet didn't connect fully, but with the harpoons secure I don't think it matters. Honestly, you didn't miss all that much." He picked up his cup but halted his hand halfway to his lips, eager not to let the conversation fizzle out again. "I'm guessing you haven't landed with a ship before either?"

A faint, wry smile spread across Terei's lips. "Technically, I was on USS Birka when it landed, but it wasn't really built for that kind of thing. Saber class ships are pretty sturdy, but not that sturdy." Plopping a strawberry into her mouth, she chewed for a few seconds, giving a light shrug. "At least they put it down pretty carefully. Wasn't like the Enterprise-D or anything, but the nacelles still snapped like Elaysian toothpicks."

The light in the mess hall suddenly flickered and a brief tremble shook the ship.

"Speaking of nacelles," Terei murmured, leaning forward and craning her head a little to look outside. "Looks like they're taking them down right now."

Diaval – and everyone else in the mess hall, he noticed – stared through the mess hall's slanted windows at the two workbees that slowly flew by above them, each pulling one of the Fae's nacelles along with their tractor beams. The massive nacelles almost looked like strange shuttlecrafts in their own right, each dwarfing the workbees that held them up.

A few minutes later, the nacelles were mostly out of sight and the spectacle was over. Soon, the low chatter around them picked up again, and Diaval once more found himself at a loss on how to resume the conversation. Terei, for her part, didn't seem particularly bothered by the silence – at least as far as he could tell.

When Terei eventually finished her breakfast, pushed her chair back and got to her feet, they hadn't really shared much more than a few scattered words.

"Thanks for the company." She picked up her tray and paused, considering Diaval for a moment. "We should do this again some time, if you feel like it."

Diaval blinked owlishly at her. "Sure, that'd be nice," he managed to say.

"Alright. See you around, Lieutenant."

When Terei had left the mess hall, Diaval leaned back in his chair and stared out at the horizon with unfocused eyes, his hands wrapped around his still lukewarm cup of raktajino and his brows furrowed in thought. Apparently – maybe – he had been going at this all wrong. He was a pretty talkative type, and as Maleficent had told him many times before, that was far from a universal trait. He knew this, of course, but if he really thought about it, the people he knew that he considered a bit more on the introverted side – Maleficent and Balthazar for example – were still, well, talkative, in their own ways: Balthazar usually only shunned small talk and needless chitchat, while Maleficent only seemed to exude an aura of quiet stiffness without actually being all that quiet in the end.

Terei, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy the silence, and that wasn't something Diaval was used to.

He sighed, practically sensing the smugness dripping off the eyebrow Maleficent would raise if he ever told her any of this. Not everyone is as enthusiastically conversational as you are, she'd probably say.

And she'd obviously be right, as well. Maybe there were things Terei would enjoy talking about without each sentence falling like a stone in high gravity, but for now, he'd simply have to try to enjoy the quiet.

Aurora's feet hit the ground of the broken planet for the second time, a little after lunch. This time Maleficent was back on the bridge and Aurora was outside for an in-person inspection of the repairs, but none of that did anything to dim her good mood. After their trip to watch the sunrise, Maleficent hadn't retreated back into her Vulcan shell as Aurora had feared; if anything, Maleficent had seemed to be in a better mood than usual herself as well since then.

The fact that nothing had shown up on sensors and the repairs were coming along nicely only brightened her mood further.

Looking up, Aurora came to a stop, and her breath caught. Even after seeing the Fae from their vantage point before on the edge of the crater, it was still awe-inspiring to walk beneath the hull of the Fae. It looked massive from below, making her feel small yet not insignificant. Its size wasn't as much imposing as it was overwhelming, and still it wasn't an unpleasant feeling. A smile spread across her lips as she stood there, gazing up at the curve of the saucer section. She felt small, but she felt safe. It wasn't like staring up at an oncoming tsunami, or a sheer cliff face threatening to rain stones and rocks down onto her, or a skyscraper looming over her; no, the Fae felt friendly and protective, and Aurora only felt safe underneath its hull.

Come to think of it, it was probably good that Maleficent wasn't with her, or the poor half-Vulcan would probably have gotten some kind of nervous breakdown from all the anthropomorphizing.

Still smiling, she continued her walk underneath the hull towards the two nacelles that had been lowered down onto the crater floor a few hundred meters away.

"Captain?" came Balthazar's voice over the comm system in her suit. "Is that you?"

Aurora squinted, seeing his tall outline next to the silhouettes of the nacelles against the far edge of the crater.

"Yes, I thought I'd come over to get a look at the repairs myself," she replied.

"Alright. I'll get you up to speed when you get here."

A couple of minutes of walking later, Aurora arrived at the end of one of the nacelles.

"Nice day for a stroll, eh?" Balthazar grinned, looking almost as upbeat as Aurora. "We've started to repair the microfractures and some micrometeoroid damage." He gestured at the half dozen or so other people spread out around the nacelle. "It's a lot of work but it shouldn't take too long, I think. A day in total, maybe."

Aurora looked out over the structure next to her, looking a lot bigger this close than when fastened on the ship. Around a hundred meters long and several meters tall, it was easy to feel small next to it.

"Do you think you'll have any issues remounting it when the repairs are finished?" she asked.

Balthazar shrugged. "We've got some good shuttle pilots with us, Captain, and the gravity is low enough that we can keep the shuttles up for as long as we need to get everything in place." He looked over towards the ship, looking rather odd without any nacelles. "I'd like to add some extra strength to the nacelle pylons, but that's a bit more than what we can get done out here. If you don't mind, I'd like to check with the engineers at Utopia Planitia when we get back there to get something like that done. Would be nice, especially if we're going to do any more atmospheric missions."

"Oh, thicker pylons?"

"Just as a precaution. Some Starfleet designers care far too much about sleek looks," Balthazar grumbled. "Sure, slim pylons looks nice and all, but one bad hit from a torpedo and you're down half your engine power."

Aurora gave a faint smile. "I definitely won't mind making the Fae a bit more resilient."

"Figured you wouldn't, Captain. I'll get you a more detailed plan when we're closer to home."

They made their way down along the nacelle, with Balthazar going through both the damage to it and the overall status of the ship and the progress of the repairs.

"We're definitely not going to get more than warp seven," Balthazar said as they rounded the far end of the nacelle, "but even warp six would at least get us to Federation space in a decent amount of time. Besides, no matter the warp drive, the tactical systems will be in a much better state overall so we should have less risk of some lucky pirate taking us out with a potshot."

"Good. I–"

"Bridge to the Captain!" Her radio flared to life. "We've got an incoming ship! It just dropped out of warp halfway inside the planet's asteroid field, and it's headed right for us."

Aurora froze, sharing a wide-eyed look with Balthazar. "Have they spotted us yet?" If they were just searching, there was a small chance they weren't here for the Fae. Otherwise, things were not looking good. Either way, them dropping out of warp like that was... unsettling, to say the least.

"Unknown, Cap– wait–"

To Balthazar, Aurora said, "get your people back to the ship. Leave the nacelles; we won't be going anywhere anyway."

"Captain? The ship might be Starfleet."

She was already running along the nacelle. "Might?"

"Sorry, the rocks are interfering with the sensors, and we've got some big latency issues here, but it looks like the warp signature is Starfleet."

Aurora looked up, as if she could see more than the ship's sensors could. Although considering the abysmal state their sensors were in, that might not have been as implausible as it should've been.

"Do we have a visual? Or any shuttle in the air?" She was halfway past the nacelle, trailing behind the other engineers as they rushed back to the ship.

"No, sir. They're coming from the other side of the planetary fragment and our sensor probes haven't gotten a clear view of it yet. Wait– stand by." Another long, excruciating pause. "No, they're still too fast for the sensor probes to pick up. Whoever's flying that thing is maneuvering it like it's an attack fighter."

"Any idea how big it is?"

"It's... big. Might be larger than the Fae. Definitely not as small as a fighter, at least."

Swallowing hard, Aurora went through the possibilities. It could be a Starfleet vessel. It could also be someone masking their signature, pretending to be Starfleet. After all, whoever tried to blow them up had enough resources for a tricobalt device and had no qualms about blowing up parts of the station. She could trust the sensor readings – the hastily patched together, Frankenstein's monster of a sensor system they were using – or she could do something that was possibly a massive overreaction.

Overreactions, however, could be smoothed over. Hull breaches could not.

"Go to yellow alert, power weapons, and prepare to cut the harpoon cables. If there's any sign of hostility from the incoming ship, take off and raise shields. I'm not trusting sensor readings until we've got a clear image of who's showing up here."

"Aye, sir."

"And get everyone back inside the ship now."

By now, she was at the end of the nacelle, with several hundred meters left to the ship.

"Bridge, is any transporter working?"

"No, sir."

"Any shuttles with working transporters?"

"I– I'm not sure. There might be. Last report from there was hours ago."

"Understood." With a wary glance at the sky above them, Aurora cut the connection. "Rose to the shuttle bay. If anyone has a working transporter in there, beam Bailey and his team back to the ship, and then me directly to the bridge."

The voice that came back was a lot more crackly than the bridge. "Understood, Captain. We're on it."

A few seconds later, the first of Balthazar's team was transported away, then the second, one by one until Balthazar finally disappeared in a shimmer of blue.

And Aurora was alone. Her pulse pounded in her ears and her breath came fast and heavy. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as she waited for the transporter to get her back to the Fae.

Then something caught her eye above her: a flash of blue and gray coming over the horizon. She stared, mesmerized, as the ship neared them, still far enough to make any details impossible to make out, but close enough that she felt a sliver of hope that the blue and gray was a friendly face instead of yet another catastrophe.

A moment later, she was on the bridge again, quickly ripping off her helmet and dumping it on her seat behind her. Maleficent was already there, standing next to her.

"Captain," Maleficent greeted her. "We just got a visual confirmation of the new arrivals."

Aurora turned to look at the screen, her breath catching at the view. There was no mistaking the ship design: the large saucer section, the blue and red glow of the nacelles, and the bright gray hull.

"It's a Nebula class," the ops officer noted, trying to hold back a grin. "They're hailing us."

"On screen."

The main viewscreen flashed to life, showing a dark haired human woman in Starfleet uniform.

"I'm Captain Regina Mills of the USS Retribution. We got your distress call. Do you need assistance?"

Aurora couldn't help the breathy laughter that bubbled out of her. "This is Captain Aurora Rose of the USS Fae. And yes, we could definitely use some help."