Ship of the Valkryies (Part Seven)
A Star Trek crossover fanfic by Lt Taya 17 Janeway (TaTTooGaL™)
Correlation with Seven and Voyager's database had identified the building in their clue as one located in a snazzy downtown district on the largest continent of the planet they were in orbit around. This building was apparently what Janeway called a Smithsonian Institute. Ro wondered what this Smithsonian Institute was all about. Initially she'd imagined it to be an asylum of some kind.
Cass told them that the alien species that owned this institute was unawares of their grand plans to rob it. Ro felt slightly guilty about intruding in upon them and stealing all their valuables for no reason other than that she was being coerced into doing so. It was ethically questionable and was probably going to leave the curators with one hell of an image of Starfleet, but what the hell. She was a Maquis with a Starfleet commbadge- image was something she was going to leave to Janeway to worry about. She was just here to do her job and get her life back together. She snapped on the other boot.
Kira tossed Ro a glove. "If you're going to rob the Ferengi Treasury, I want in too."
Ro caught the glove and pulled it on, locking it onto the sleeve of the hazard suit. "You can go first. Getting skinned alive in bits by plasma whips isn't exactly my idea of fun."
"I'm not the one in the hazard suit," Kira reminded her.
Ro fastened her other glove and fanned herself impatiently, roasting in the heat of the suit's thermal non-conductivity. "They probably called it a hazard suit because it's a hazard to health. Who designed these, a bunch of canines? It's totally non-porous!"
Kira laughed, and Ro scowled. "Don't laugh. When we have to swim through a pool of hydrochloric acid, we'll see who has the last laugh."
"I'm not going, remember?" Kira told her, smirking.
"I'll find a way to pay this back to you," Ro promised her as she finished up with the hazard suit. Transported buffers in order, everything online, her body raring to go- she was ready. "I'm done! How's the shuttle?"
It was a daring plan they'd come up with to rob the building. Since transports in and out of the building were not permitted, thus Ro had to arrive and leave by shuttle or by foot. A handy little plot device, she thought. She'd first have to create a disturbance by, say, setting the forest on fire. Then she'd cloak the shuttle with the newfangled Borg whiz gitzbits Seven had installed in, and then she'd infiltrate the building by the back left door. From then on it would be pure, plain simple science: her computer and the building's would battle it out and ultimately one would win- the one on her side, preferably. She'd break into the central chamber and steal whatever treasure was in there, and scoot as fast as possible. From then on it'd just tracing her path back to the shuttle, get back to Voyager, hit paydirt. It sounded so possible, but possibility and probability were two different things altogether.
Torres exited from the shuttle. "It's done," she told her. "Shall I tell the captain you're leaving?"
"What, and let her blame you for allowing me to hop on and steal a shuttle?" joked Ro. "That would better be suited to implicate Nerys. "
"Hey!" protested Kira as she Ro sauntered into the shuttle. "If you don't come back in that shuttle, I will personally hunt you down and mow you into the ground."
"Don't worry," she replied. "By that time I'll be rolling in latinum and hire a dozen top-flight asassins to dispatch you." With a laugh she settled into the flight chair, thinking that ludicrous situations were at least bearable if one applied humor to them.
Twenty minutes later, however, she was ready to take those words back. The situation she found herself in could be humorous in many aspects, but that didn't make it any more bearable or less dangerous.
The first part of the plan had worked as predicted; she'd landed the shuttle, disturbed the area, and cloaked the shuttle. The next step of the plan, ideally, was infiltrating the building by the back left door.
Unfortunately, the plan had nothing to say about dogs guarding the back door.
Ro had never been one who was particularly good with animals, and the one standing before her didn't look particularly good either. A hulking, black-furred creature with a long, bristling snout, it snarled at her, hackles raised, the low growl emanating from his throat a deep-bellied, menacing sound.
Ro smiled weakly at the huge dog, and picked up a twig from the ground cautiously, holding it in front of her. "Nice dog… good dog." She held the gaze of the dog steady, then, with a lightning quick motion, tossed the stick over her shoulder. "Fetch!"
The creature snarled.
Oh well. No easy way out of this.
Ro carefully walked around the creature, giving it a wide berth. Its eyes never strayed from her, staring at her in cold hatred. She neared the door, and snuck her hand out towards the handle-
The beast promptly lunged forward with a roar, and it was only by a combination of skill, foresight and sheer luck that Ro managed to avoid getting her arm bitten off. She yelped as the beast advanced on her, growling. Not a very good sign. Ro backed away from the door desperately, hoping it would call the creature off her.
It didn't.
Panicky, Ro thought of the single best way to get rid of this creature. It struck her mind.
With a barely orchestrated wave of her hand, Ro tapped the controls for her personal shielding device on her belt She disappeared from the world before the dog, hidden by the same Borg cloak which shielded their shuttle, and quickly skittered to a side.
The dog was highly stumped by the disappearance of the Bajoran. It sniffed the air where Ro used to stand, probably wondering where all these strange sentient beings kept being taken away. Taking advantage of the confused moment, Ro opened the back door and slipped inside. Too late the dog realized it had let its guard down, and it lunged at the door just as Ro slipped past it and latched it behind her. Pressed on the cold metal door, she heard and felt the solid thump of the dog crashing into the door, and smiled. Too bad for them. She snapped the cloaking field off.
Then she realized someone was poking a phaser into her back.
Damn.
"Turn around slowly, and no monkey business," a stern voice instructed her.
Hands above her head, Ro did as she was told, trying to put on her best innocent face and not succeeding entirely. "Don't hurt me," she whined, "I was only running away from the big bad dog outside."
The man lowered his phaser rifle uncertainly. He was dressed in a khaki suit and had a tag attached to his left breast pocket that said "Security", although he handled the weapon in his hand like he'd never held a rifle in his life before. Ro was mildly annoyed. "You're holding your rifle wrongly."
"Pardon?" he looked nonplussed.
"You're holding it wrongly. Your hands are in the wrong position. How are you supposed to fire it like this? Space your hands together further apart," she replied with all the assurance of a mother chiding a child.
"Like this?" He fumbled with the weapon, trying to adjust his grip.
"No, like this." Ro reached out to snatch the weapon from his hands, and hit him on the head with it. He crumpled to the floor in a dazed heap.
"Dolt," muttered Ro as she stepped past him and down the corridor.
*****
On Voyager 's bridge, the women cheered as Ro made her way down the corridor towards the room where whatever they were supposed to get was kept. Ro's hazard suit was linked up with Voyager's computer so that they could see what was going on in the building. A small corner of the viewscreen was devoted to displaying a map overlay of the building's interior.
In Engineering, Torres had hijacked one of the consoles and rigged it to display whatever was on the viewscreen as well, and she was too engrossed in whatever was going on to even monitor the warp core's power output. After the first two unpleasant encounters, she wondered what Ro was going to have to face up to next. She was worried, and wished that the rules hadn't stipulated absolute silence between the ship and the planet. She figured Ro would do a lot better with them helping her.
But then again, Torres had worked together with Ro on several occasions in the Maquis, and she knew how resourceful the Bajoran could be. Plus, she had a fairly formidable reputation as well. A good operative, if need be.
Yet she was uneasy.
Back on the bridge, Beverly Crusher felt nervous at Tactical, partly because she didn't want Ro to get hurt and partly because she hated sitting at the weapons console. She now felt a deep empathy with Keiko, who also had the unpalatable task of being assigned to maiming and destroying during their first task. If the unnamed race they were robbing now decided to take offense and attack the ship, they were probably doomed. So she sat tensely on the edge of the swivel chair- they had a swivel chair on the bridge!- and waited. She glanced at the viewscreen, where Ro was marching down an interminably long, gray corridor. Please be careful, she implored the Bajoran silently. The last thing I need here is the perfect opportunity to screw up.
******
This is easier than I thought, mused Ro as she breezed down a another corridor which branched off the first one leading to the treasure. A strange, bubbly kind of euphoria rose within her as she approached the door leading to the end of her quest. One ugly dog and one ugly man- Q must have gone soft.
She turned a corner, and realized that in actual fact, it was her mind that had gone soft. For what she saw spanning before her was no less than a spider's web of forcefields. It was actually more or less a hundred meters worth of laser generators embedded into the walls on both sides. Each generator on one side was connected to another on the other side, and this resulted in the formation of a thin monomolecular line that was both fine and deadly. Combined with all the other lines and lines arrayed down the fifty-meter stretch of corridor, it resulted in a tangled web of horrifying complexity.
Ro's eyes bugged out.
Now what?
She picked out a tricorder and began scanning. Great. Any movement in that area also triggered off a timer alarm which would sound if she didn't clear the area within thirty seconds. And considering that she'd just abused one of their members she was quite certain that the security officers wouldn't exactly be a welcoming party. So she basically either moved real fast and got her ass fried by lasers, else she moved nice and slow and got her ass fried by security forces. She thought that she preferred the lasers.
She quickly charted a courted a course through the laser stretch before her, memorizing it fully, rehearsing how she should move when frantically leaping through the lasers. She would have preferred having a practice run, but short of performing incredible on-the-spot aerial acrobatics, she didn't see any conceivable way of doing so.
Ro said a brief but fervent prayer to the Prophets, then she leaped above the first laser, which was at waist level. From then on it was pandemonium unlimited.
Over and under. Over and under. Ro leaped across the first three lasers, ducked under the lowest one for the fourth layer, did a horizontal flip through a narrow space between two lasers, then dropped to the floor and barrel-rolled past five more layers of such lasers. Then she was up again, and hurdled over another laser, ducked under three more lasers, then more of the lateral spins through even spaced pairs narrowing the passage to a meter in the middle in what she tended to think of as Frisbee moves, grazing the end of her left boot on the upper boundary laser at the last pair. Then she took a deep a breath and took a nosedive through the last three hurdles, skimming through successively lower and smaller triangular apertures formed by three intersecting lasers. Then she hit the floor rolling, quite painfully, past a red line that marked the end of the fifty meters, turning the timer off.
Breathing hard, she stood up, dusted herself off, and bowed deeply to an imaginary audience. "Wow, that was quite something," she muttered to herself.
Then she turned, and saw that the doorway at the end of the corridor was blocked by a set of thin lasers, spaced closely to each other.
"Damn!" She walked over to examine the doorway. These laser were single sided affairs, all lined up against one side of the door. The spacing between each pair of lasers was barely thick enough for her to stick a finger through. Even without a scanner she could feel the heat they gave off. Her left boot was already a victim of cautery, its sole a syrupy goop which was just slowly hardening. She wasn't exactly interested in turning the rest of her body into a similar mess.
She walked to the other side of the doorway, hoping that a change of perspective would help her think though this one.
It didn't. The laser doorway still looked as unpassable as ever.
Damn. What had she been expecting anyway? Would a different angle of viewing the lasers have changed the way it was?
A different angle.
A thought suddenly struck her. Did she have a piece of glass anywhere? No matter. Punching up her transporter buffer index, she searched for a clear material of the largest refractive index and found one, a dense, heavy duty plastic which had higher tensile strength than even transparent aluminum. She procured a triangular lump of it, about ten inches high, then carefully slid it in front of the bottom few laser generators.
It worked. The prism refracted the laser light at an obtuse angle, away from the median, leaving Ro with a space to crawl under. Which she promptly did. Then she just as carefully pulled the triangular prism out of the laser matrix and vanished it back into her transporter buffer. "I am a genius," she muttered to herself.
She was standing in a cul-de-sac of sorts. Walking through the other arched doorway, she guessed she didn't know what to expect.
Certainly not the absolute darkness she was abruptly plunged into.
