Chapter Six: Espionage and Subterfuge
Author's Note: Thank you everyone who got past the words "Yu Yu Hakusho crossover," especially those out there who just chose to trust me for explanations. (sniff) It touches my heart. Ok…nothing else to say… except sorry that this chapter's been a while in coming.
ON WITH THE SHOW!
Up on Deck One, the comm-link crackled to life.
"Engineering to bridge," Commander Riker's voice hailed.
Captain Picard leaned slightly to the left and tapped a communications panel on the arm of his command chair.
"Go ahead, Number One," he said crisply.
"We've erected the forcefields around Main Engineering." Phaser fire could be heard in the background, and La Forge's voice chimed in.
"Our ghost is definitely here, Captain, and if he is a ghost, which I doubt, he's very skilled with computers."
Picard frowned. "Elaborate."
"He'd restored power to one console; only one, and rigged it to not emit light or sound in human sensory range. Whatever he was doing, it was set to wipe as soon as his hands left the keys. I can't retrieve the data from the console. I didn't get too good a look at him before we switched the lights back on, but the intruder's humanoid, possibly human."
"Try to avoid killing him, we need to know what he's doing here," Picard ordered unnecessarily.
"That's not really a problem, Captain; no one's even managed to get him in their sights yet," Riker told him wryly.
"The forcefields are at full power, completely surrounding Engineering," Geordi said, moving to the master situations board and looking over it; the machinery had restored itself to life not ten seconds ago. "There's no way for him to go very far."
"Understood. Report back once you've taken him into custody," the captain ordered over the commlink. "Picard out."
Riker clicked the intercom and surveyed the huge room. Simply put, it was chaos. Engineers with hand phasers, spooked by inexplicable blackouts, an intruder with the properties of a ghost, and Ten-Forward rumormongers, scattered everywhere, shooting at shadows and trying to avoid getting underfoot of the slightly more disciplined security officers. Already, recently repaired computer panels and the glass and duranium of the walls had been burnt and scorched in multiple places. Most people were shouting all at once, overlapping each other and raising a terrible din, which was abruptly augmented as a stray shot hit a freestanding console. It went up instantly in a flash of flame.
Geordi ducked abruptly as a phaser blast flashed over his head. "Watch where you're aiming that, Reg!" he shouted furiously.
"S-s-sorry, Commander!" Barclay stuttered, phaser trembling in suddenly limp hands, horrified at his mistake. "I th-thought I saw something by the Jefferies Tube…"
"Yeah, the wires for the lights," La Forge snapped back. He knelt to inspect what damage had been done. As he picked up part of the machinery to look it over, he realized that one of the main power lines had been burnt straight through.
"Lieutenant, what setting is your phaser on?" he asked, holding out his hand for the weapon.
"Level Five—middle stun, as ordered." Barclay replied, confused.
"That's odd. Level Five shouldn't be able to cut through a wire like this," he mused, checking the setting and finding it on Level Five, as the cacophony swelled momentarily. "Reg, what did you see?"
"A black blur, like a shadow, only it was gone an instant later," the engineer stuttered, accepting his weapon back.
"Lieutenant, well spotted," Geordi said, rising from his knees to clap him on the back.
"Huh?"
"You see any other shadows like that, fire at will," he continued.
The confused engineer nodded obediently and returned to his post as Geordi headed back to the master situation monitor, where Riker was still standing, having declined to join in the free-for-all.
"This was a bad idea," the second-in-command muttered as something else exploded.
"Hey! Keep those beams away from the core, or we'll all be blown to shreds!" Geordi hollered into the mess as someone's phaser veered a little too close to the warp core. "Engineers, hold your fire! Security, be a little more careful, would you! Sorry, Commander;" he added, "what did you say?"
Riker grimaced and rubbed his ears. "I said that this was a bad idea. We don't even know what we're shooting at, and all they're hitting is each other."
"If we stop, though, all we'll do is give him a chance to get away."
"Yeah; that's why this was a lousy idea." Riker drew his phaser and flipped it idly, catching it in his palm with a thunk.
As he spoke, the sounds of phaser fire and shouting died down, to be replaced with the noise of smoldering computers, low talking, and the steady tread of many boots.
"Thank you," Geordi called.
"Security, to me," Lieutenant Faber snapped over him. Small, wiry, and a dead shot, she was Worf's assistant security chief. Her people clustered around her almost instantaneously, drawn by the Command Tone evident in her voice. As they milled aimlessly around her, obscuring her from vision, her voice could be clearly made out, assigning teams of three to take up positions in the very outskirts of the forcefield-enclosed chambers.
Muttering complaints under his breath, Geordi hurriedly turned to the systems monitor and cut power to the damaged consoles, which ceased throwing sparks everywhere but continued to smoke, turning the already-claustrophobic Engineering compartment into a truly oppressive room. Across the way, Lieutenant Hayes upped the performance on the automatic air filters. Geordi waved to get her attention and mouthed thank you when she looked up, saluting her half-seriously. She gave him a thumbs-up in return before a security squad cut off their view of each other.
Faber situated herself in the middle of the room, setting her face to the entrance. She quickly deployed three of her best to stand around the warp core, the very center of Engineering, at the points of the compass, phasers out.
"Faber to engineering security; begin operation," she said shortly into the commbadge, cutting the channel before having to listen to multiple different versions of 'aye, sir'.
Silence pervaded Engineering, broken only by the occasional sparking computer, the steady tramping off boots, and the ever-present hum of the warp core, which had luckily remained undamaged by the free-for-all. Geordi and Riker watched in anticipation as the patrols came closer and closer. Riker found that he was even holding his breath.
Abruptly, a red beam shot out from the business end of Faber's weapon, accompanied a split second later by a curse and the sounds of a phaser being powered up several notches, lifting the energy to dangerous levels.
Riker took a step, thinking to call out to order her to take care, but before he could say anything, she swung her phaser rifle up to firing position and let it loose again. This time there was a distinct sound of phaser energy striking living flesh, and she let out a victory cry, stopping her people in their tracks as many emerged from Jefferies Tubes and corridors.
"Commander, he's down," she called, leaping for the one-man lift. She rode it upwards, closely followed by La Forge, who took the parallel ladder. The security teams relaxed, most lowering their weapons, except for a few, who headed off after their chief but were waved off impatiently.
The armed engineers, who had been merely bystanders to this last move, sheathed their smaller hand phasers and began trying to re-repair the damage they'd done to their own stations without even being told.
Four decks away, he winced as his friend's pain shot through him, communicated unconsciously. Damn, he thought as he bit his lip to avoid making any noise.
Geordi scaled the ladder to see Faber kneel by the side of an unconscious form, swathed in black, that was slumped loosely on the hard metal floor. She carefully touched the small figure, then placed two fingers on the side of his throat, assuming he was human to check his pulse. For an instant she looked worried, then nodded.
"He's alive, but out." she said, nodding to the Chief Engineer.
"What did you hit him with?" Geordi asked.
"Heavy Stun didn't even slow him down. I wagered that if I slid it up to 'Kill'…"
"You took a big risk there," Riker chided her, following Geordi close enough to hear this. "The captain insisted that we keep him alive."
"Sorry, sir," she said unrepentantly. As she removed her hand from his shoulder, Geordi joined her on the flooring to examine their prisoner.
He was, in appearance, a very small humanoid; possibly, La Forge thought, human. He had trouble placing his age, but guessed somewhere in human teens. He had black hair that looked like he ran his fingers through it often, with a splash of silverish-white just above the middle of his forehead, which was covered with a white bandana of thick cloth. A black cloak covered him completely.
"He's armed," Faber warned, touching the hilt of a sword. She pulled it from beneath the cloak and examined it. "Japanese katana. I haven't seen one of those since the last time I visited Terra."
"We'd better get him to sickbay," Geordi said. "Maybe he can take a phaser on Kill, but I doubt it, and the captain won't be able to talk to him if he dies of it."
"I'll report to Captain Picard," Commander Riker said, stepping over to the lift.
Geordi tapped his commbadge. "La Forge to Transporter Room 2."
"Transporter Room here," a female voice he didn't know off the top of his head replied.
"Three to beam directly to sickbay."
"Acknowledged. Energizing."
Lieutenant Faber, along with Geordi and their captive, dematerialized in a scatter of blue sparks.
Late that evening, Beverly Crusher relaxed in Ten-Forward, sitting at one of the shadowed tables very close to the enormous windows that displayed a panoramic view of the warped starscape ahead. Holding a half-drunk glass of lemonade in one hand, she watched her son Wesley enter the lounge, smiling as a young woman followed him in and he scanned the room looking for her. She waved with the hand that wasn't holding her drink and smiled even wider as he fumbled over his next move. She sipped the rest of her lemonade slowly, waiting for him to decide. Eventually he came across the room to greet her, friend in tow.
"Ah, hi, mom," he said.
"Hello, Wesley. Hello," she added to the girl.
"Oh, right; Mom, this is Cassandra," he said quickly. Cassandra nodded at her and smiled. "Hi."
Beverly broke the developing awkward moment by rising and lifting her glass slightly. "An empty glass. Not good." She left them alone and headed towards Guinan's bar, which took up the entire wall opposite the enormous windows.
About to ask for a refill, she abruptly caught sight of a clock. 22:53… oh! My experiment! She hurriedly passed Guinan the glass, made her excuses, and hurried out the double doors.
The turbolift ride seemed unusually slow, although it was most likely only her imagination. When the doors whooshed open on Deck Twelve, she made her way quickly down the corridors, darkened in respect to the ship's night cycle, which was closely patterned on Earth's twenty-four hour day.
She entered her lab quietly, not wanting to disturb the Gamma shift as they went about their own business. Grabbing an empty PADD from a nearby table, she consulted the science computer that had been slaved to her project. It was merely the work of a minute to download and record the information onto her PADD. With that done, and the next step initiated, which took slightly longer, she adjourned to her office to cross-reference a variable.
Sitting down at her desk, she activated her computer. It flickered to life slowly, but brought up her information as programmed. She fed the information in carefully, and it displayed a 'processing new data' screen. As it worked, Beverly rose and stretched, rubbing her eyes. Realizing that the automatically bright lights were hurting her dim-accustomed eyes, she switched them all the way off. She scanned sickbay, or as much of it as she could see from her office. The isolation ward caught the tail of her eye, and she looked over at it.
The area was dark; the only light cast was from the computer monitors and from the powerful forcefield over the threshold. Lieutenant Faber's prisoner, the rumored 'ghost', had not yet woken. Dr. Crusher had not been able to identify even what he was, and security, especially Worf, had pushed for guards. Almost everyone in sickbay had protested. In the past, security guards had been merely underfoot, and rarely served any purpose. They'd compromised with the isolation ward.
She was about to go back to her computer when a brief increase in light keyed her in to the other entrance to the ward, the one that was supposedly triple computer-locked, opening. It stayed open for only a brief second, but that was enough.
Staying perfectly still and quiet, she squinted hard but could only make out the vaguest outline; a man or teenage boy, who reached out to touch the small captive on the shoulder.
"'I won't get caught,' you said," the newcomer murmured. "I don't suppose you care to explain this?"
To Crusher's surprise, the prisoner sat up, clearly awake, to no reaction from the state-of-the-art monitors that had been programmed to tell her if he regained consciousness.
"I suppose you haveanexplanation already," he retorted quietly.
"So what happened?"
"The engineer, the blind one."
"Ah." Apparently no further information was required.
"My sword?"
"Yes." If that meant that he had it with him, they were standing too close together for Crusher to see the weapon change hands.
"What next?"
"We try something different. I'm not leaving you in here for the rest of the voyage."
"So we come out into the open?"
"That's the next plan."
"It's going to go wrong."
At that point, Beverly couldn't stand it anymore. Without thinking it through, she flicked the lights on and leapt to the threshold of the isolation ward, to see…
Nothing. No one. Her captive was unconscious on the bed, the monitors showing no change at any time. The young man who had gotten in so impossibly had vanished as quickly as he had come. And when she walked around to check the lock on the other door, it showed that it had never been opened.
Surveillance tapes were blank.
"I'm going crazy," she said bleakly, and sat down at her desk. She never even noticed the light touch on a certain nerve, nor did she smell the odd powder that she inhaled as she slumped forward on her desk unconscious.
By next morning she would remember nothing except falling asleep over her work.
Author's Note: Ok, everyone who's seriously confused, raise your hand! (counts) Wow, I'd better explain some stuff soon. When I check my plans (yes, I have the entire story planned out) I find "explanations" spread out between the next three chapters, so don't leave yet. One thing I probably won't have the chance to explain later: yes, Kurama did just nerve-pinch her. For everything else, in the words of the window washer, all will be made clear…I've said that before.
If anyone cares, the 'Conversation In the Shadows' scene was one of the two original images that sparked this story. The other was a YYH picture Kokoro Sabishii sent me, entitled 'looks like Star Wars in the background'. It did, too.
The title could also be read as 'Spies and Deceptions' although I liked the published version better. Oh, and I'm so not good at descriptions, but I am trying. Anyone who doesn't know what Hiei and Kurama look like and isn't happy with my lame descriptions can look them up on Google Image; there are tons of pictures.