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First Impression, Chapter 11: Nausicaan Rations?—or— I'm Sure Whatever's in it…Tastes Like Chicken
"You must be joking—won't the alarms sound?" Una watched as Jack went around gathering small branches and sticks from what had once been a science lab. Now it much resembled a forest—a forest in which they were soon to be camping, apparently.
"The generator's online but none of the food sequencers work and it's not going to get warmer in here. All the ration packs are frozen—how do you suggest we heat them? Sit on them?"
Una desperately wanted to tell him to "sit on it" but refrained. He was right—they needed to build a fire.
"A cookout in space—this has to be a first." She started gathering wood along with him.
Less than half an hour later Una watched the ration packs baking slowly over the small fire they had concocted. The smoke drifted up a nearby airshaft—she wasn't sure where it was going and wouldn't be very surprised if they ended up dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Right now Jack was ignoring her, working on something out of one of the comm panels.
She waved to get his attention and motioned for the PADD.
What's the plan? she wrote, handing it to him.
I'm going to get this thing working and contact a friend who should be in the area. He'll get us out of here.
What about these things in our necks?
I don't know—maybe he can get them out. One step at a time.
He put the PADD down and went back to work. Una picked it up and started to write something but erased it. She was torn—should she tell him who she really was? The Orions would not find out, but then she didn't really know who this guy was or what his reaction would be. So far he had proven trustworthy, she argued with herself.
She snuck a look at him as he worked. He had shed his heavy outer coat and was wearing a v-necked undershirt, completely absorbed in what he was doing. He was very fit, she was dismayed to find herself noticing, in a wiry kind of way, and his dark hair was sticking out in crazy directions—a mirror to their current state, perhaps. To her embarrassment he looked up and caught her studying him. Refusing to back down, she just raised and eyebrow and shrugged. He did the same. They were dark blue, his eyes.
Oh for crying out loud…
No, better not tell him. Not yet. She had to figure out a way back to the station and therefore her ship. That was what she should be concentrating on. She stabbed at one of the ration packs and found it was hot.
"Soup's on," she announced halfheartedly.
She wasn't exactly what he was expecting. Or rather, she wasn't exactly what he remembered. He'd seen her only once before in person and she didn't have any idea who he was. They'd been at Starfleet Academy at the same time, though he had graduated the year she started.
Lt. VeJack Anderson, Jack to his friends, stared down at his charge curiously. Everyone knew who she was—her story was famous— and had heard the rumors about her attending the Academy. Jack had been on his way to class one day when he passed the open door of one of the Academy's practice rooms. Normally they were filled with sweaty cadets trying to learn the finer points of Klingon judo but this day the studio was quiet except for a few strains of music. It was a song he'd never heard before…and when he caught sight of the room's lone occupant he surmised that it was from long before his time.
She was ballet dancing. She wasn't the best he'd ever seen, though his knowledge of dance was slim to none, but she was graceful. Feeling uncomfortably voyeuristic, he'd caught himself quickly and moved on. He'd sometimes wondered about her, what she was like, how she got through the Academy…but he'd never spoken to her and hadn't thought of her at all for years—until she ended up on the Temura.
He looked at his hands, remembering the odd sensation of her eyelashes brushing against them. She stirred on the floor and he felt somewhat guilty about lying to her, but it had to be done. He remembered her Starfleet record and his remorse vanished. She was a First Contact officer—she knew the importance of keeping one's cover. She would understand.
She was exasperating, though. He had thought she would be straightforward and easy to work with but she seemed to insist on doing everything—everything—the hard way. If he said left she said right, if he said up she said down, if he said stop she asked why. It was getting ever more difficult to keep his frustration in check as well as his desire to show her up at every opportunity. Una was bringing out something in him, something he tried to keep buried whenever possible. She brought out his human side.
His father would laugh at that—he always thought his son's dedication to Vulcan principles was particularly amusing. But then his father seemed to think most things were funny, from the fact that Jack was serious about his Vulcan heritage to the genetic joke that had given Jack human ears and his brother Charlie the Vulcan ones. Charlie, taking after their father, thought this was hysterical. He said it made everyone at Starfleet Astrometrics take him more seriously. Their mother, who was fully half Vulcan, observed dryly that neither of them made appealing Vulcans when they bickered—Jack, she announced, was too serious and Charlie too blithe. Both sons concluded that the third, Mark, was clearly her favorite. It was one of the few things they agreed on.
She stirred again, flinging one arm above her head and tilting her chin up. Defiant even in sleep, he thought almost fondly. When she started to snore the fondness left him and he kicked her gently to shift her position. She snorted and rolled over.
That pretty much sums up our relationship, he thought, before settling in to sleep.
Arima downed the liquor in one fell swoop, which pleased the alien opposite him to no end.
"Ruush-daar!" he shouted happily, raising his own glass. The chief engineer slammed his own glass down on the table in front of them. So far he had consumed four drinks with the Iridian trader. A little wooziness was a small price to pay for the amount of information he had gotten so far, though.
"It's so pleasing," the Iridian was telling him now, leaning close over the table, causing it and the glasses atop it to sway and clink perilously, "to meet another businessman like myself. So many people," he waved a hand expansively, indicating most of the bar's other patrons, "deal in such finite, limited things. But information… information… always has a market…"
"And is so portable," Arima finished for the man.
"Yes!" The Iridian slammed a jovial hand on the table, making the glasses jump.
Arima surreptitiously scanned the bar for Bohemir. He and the first officer had hidden aboard the shuttle after Vesta brought it into the station and had been searching for their missing crewmate for the past hour and a half. Dressed in dark, nondescript clothing, Arima had only begun to make headway after passing himself off as an information trader to the Iridian who now sat across from him. Arima was a man of few words and little elaboration—his imagination was running out of "tidbits" to trade.
"Enough smalltalk—you still owe me something in return for the information I gave you about the Federation warp assembly defect."
The Iridian frowned. Clearly he did not favor giving over receiving.
"This is the first time I've been here to Par'at Nor. Tell me how it works and who runs it."
At such a simple request the Iridian brightened again. "Ah yes, our lovely Par'at Nor. Pevet runs it—he's an Orion, of course. It's been here for years—nobody really comes into the nebula, the Federation, the Klingons, whoever. A couple of years ago there were some big changes though. Rumor has it that Pevet took on some…silent partners."
"Silent partners? What were the changes?"
"There was always the odd being for sale here and there, but this place became a real hub of activity in the slave trade. Bad news for traders like us, I'm afraid. We deal with a different sort of client. It's become difficult to make a living."
Arima commiserated by pouring the two of them another drink.
"So the slave markets started up. New clientele." He wanted to keep the trader talking…and drinking.
"At first just the one. Now there are…" his eyes scrunched as he tried to remember through his foggy brain, "four. Plus the special auctions."
"Special auctions?"
"Yeah. Some slaves get sold right away to nobody knows who. I think it's the silent partners."
Bohemir appeared near the door of the establishment briefly. Arima downed the rest of his drink and bid his new friend farewell and good luck.
"Remember my name if you meet any potential clients—I'll do the same for you!" the pale alien saluted him with a half-full glass, contents sloshing.
Seeing as he and the Iridian had never exchanged names, Arima found this highly unlikely but nodded anyway before heading out the door.
Bohemir was wearing a long robe and had been given the facial features of a Denobulan. His artificially blue eyes darted about, making sure no one was listening. "No one's seen any aliens resembling the Dukin come through this station. Of course, considering the sources…""There may be another explanation. There's an additional slave auction somewhere on the station, or rather a standing order. Some beings bypass the regular auctions and go straight to this special sale."
"We didn't have much time to explore last time. We need to find that sale and see if our Dukin ended up there."
"What about Lt. Magis?"
Bohemir gave a crooked smile. "Well it seems there was a bit of a disruption on the station a while ago…"