Note: This is a two-chapter upload!

Chapter 6: The Longest Way Around…

Tyler relaxed back in the captain's chair, watching the readouts in his armrest display and listening to the status reports as they trickled in. He had to admit, Bell had done the impossible and fixed both the warp drive and the cloak in record time. She hadn't been slow to point out how everything was held together by duct-tape and curses and their worn down dilithium crystals were an ever-present problem.

They had patched the damage the torpedo had done with plates of scrap metal to lessen the power drain on the containment field and sealed off shuttle bay completely. It was hardly a permanent fix, but enough to guarantee structural integrity of the ship during warp.

Bell had recommended not going over warp four, but while Tyler agreed, he needed to know how far he could push the ship in an emergency.

They had been running simulations all day and he was beginning to detect a certain tired sluggishness in his bridge crew. It had been a problem from the start, of course, they were too few people for a ship this size, making double shifts both a regular and mandatory occurrence, aided liberally by Doctor Culber's pins, though Lorca was keeping tabs on everyone's consumption and wasn't shy to order an intervention when he deemed the pin use excessive.

Everyone's consumption but his own, as Tyler had discovered in Lorca's files, but what the Captain did or did not do was nobody's concern. Tyler had filed the information away for later use, just in case.

The results of the warp five test didn't look particularly good to Tyler's eyes, but he only had surface knowledge of engineering so it didn't concern him too much.

"Bridge to Engineering," he said.

"Kriger here, commander."

The current arrangement of the shift schedule placed Kriger firmly in charge of most of the simulation, the result — even if accidentally — of one of Lorca's policies. He knew the constant pressure on his crew and the overuse of drugs threatened to fray out his people, so one of the iron rules of shift schedules were non-negotiable rest periods. Kriger had a chance to shine while Bell slept, probably badly.

"Do we have enough data to extrapolate system stability on warp?"

"We should be save to jump to warp one to five even when cloaked, sir."

"What about higher warp speeds? We should be able to go to eight."

While looking at the shift schedules, Tyler had forgotten to pay attention to everyone, not that it made much of a difference. At the time, he wouldn't have considered how irritating Ferasini's presence on the bridge was going to be. He felt her gaze digging into the side of his head from where she had turned away from the science station, her objections obvious and entirely unvoiced.

"I wouldn't recommend it, sir," Kriger said in a tone of voice that suggested he was understating the issue.

"Well, can you recommend warp six or seven?"

"Sir, we might be able to, but not for long and it might reverse the progress we've made."

"It might?" Tyler asked.

He told himself he heard the slight shift of clothing, the indrawn breath just shy of a hiss before Ferasini spoke.

"Commander," she said with no apparent regard for his rank or current position. "What Commander Kriger is saying is that we could stress-test warp six, seven and eight. But then we'll probably not have warp six, seven and eight when we need them."

Tyler tilted his head at her and smiled a little, "I got that. Do you think I'm stupid?"

She thought everyone was stupid, of course, but he was curious to find out whether she had the guts to say it to him in public. He caught the annoyance flash across her expression, and she merely shook her head.

"I suggest we test the phaser banks," she said, doing the smart thing by ignoring his loaded question. She raised her hands in a placating gesture, then waved them in careless dismissal. "We now know we can run from a fight, but I would like to know if we can stand our ground and for how long."

Nice attempt at attacking his ability to lead, Tyler conceded. Fighting simulations were planned for later that day anyway, but she just had to put the finger on it early enough to make it seem irrelevant.

"I would like to know that, too," Tyler agreed. After all, if you can't beat them, join them. "Commander Kriger?"

"Yes, sir."

"Let's give the warp drive a break and put the impulse through its paces."

"Aye, sir."

Tyler got up from his seat, "But can you spare Lieutenant Alibali for a moment? I need to speak to her in my ready room."

"I'll send her right up."

Tyler looked around the bridge and Ferasini seemed to be the only one looking back. Well, Ferasini and Irsa who stood pinned and motionless next to the turbolift door. Tyler didn't know about Irsa's orders, or whether she simply assumed with Lorca off the ship, she was now supposed to guard Tyler. She made him slightly uncomfortable, but he assumed she was having the same effect on everyone, something Tyler quite appreciated.

Ferasini said nothing, but neither did she attempt to hide her suspicion. Tyler wasn't sure what her endgame was. Lorca's decision to keep her from ever commanding the ship must still rankle. Ostensibly based on her lack of military or spaceflight experience, the true reason was obvious to everyone. Lorca might be sleeping with her, but he didn't trust her with the ship. That had to be a blow to her ego.

Perhaps she saw an opportunity to oust Tyler, thinking of him as a weaker link than Lorca. Either a chance to take over, as Lorca feared, or just to prove the truth of her loyalty and thus advance in rank. Both were possible and neither made Tyler particularly fond of her or her haughty, overbearing presence on his bridge.

Ferasini was, however, hardly the most pressing problem of his current command.

As Alibali stepped out of the turbolift and saluted, Tyler nodded at her and walked her into the quiet of the ready room, unwilling to admit the door closing behind him brought the slightest relief.

Alibali was another one of Lorca's private projects. Like Irsa. Or Bell. Or perhaps even Moreau, off on the Enterprise doing her thing for him.

As far as Tyler was concerned, Alibali was little more than a walking computer, one with the common human failings still attached to her, but it wasn't going to pay off to treat her as such. She would have got used to a certain level of respect under Lorca's oversight and might not relish being put in her place too harshly or too quickly.

She stopped in front of the standing desk and Tyler lingered for a moment in her blind spot before he stepped past her to lean on the desk.

"Lieutenant, I know you are needed in Engineering, so I'll be brief," Tyler said, doing his best to add some affable warmth into his tone.

She only inclined her head in response.

Tyler said, "We've all heard Captain Lorca's speech as he left for Yemuro. He has…"

Tyler stopped himself, unsure how to phrase it when he didn't know Alibali's feelings on the matter. Tyler took a breath, gave Alibali a slight smile.

"I'll be blunt, Lieutenant. I don't care why the Captain implemented a self-destruct option in case he didn't return, but I'm concerned if it might become an issue. We've suffered some serious damage and I'm worried whatever the Captain has done might be accidentally triggered."

He was also worried about the rift it was creating among the crew. There were those whose faith in Lorca was unwavering, but there were other voices, getting slightly louder every day, who whispered of how Lorca's promises to them had been empty and how he would simply destroy them at a whim, just like Emperor Georgiou was known to do.

Tyler doubted the more social aspects of the problem had much meaning to Alibali, so he kept it to himself.

"Has Captain Lorca spoken to you about the self-destruct?"

Alibali avoided his gaze, but it didn't necessarily mean she was hiding anything from him. She rarely made eye-contact, even when it would be appropriate to do so.

"He hasn't told me anything."

"Okay," Tyler said, unsure if he believed her or not. "Doesn't matter. But you agree with my assessment that there could be problems?"

Asking for her opinion and expertise would be exactly the kind of ego-stroking she would have become used to. It was important for Alibali to know she was just as important to Tyler's command as she had been to Lorca's.

"Without knowing how it was implemented, I couldn't say, sir. But I assume it would require the computer to monitor for Lorca's absence or at least the expected window of time of his return. We don't have any problems with the computer, so we should be safe."

"Maybe we are safe isn't a very good answer," Tyler pointed out. "This programme that has to be running, can you find it and turn it off?"

She flicked her gaze up at him, then immediately back down to the front edge of the desk.

"I'm not sure," she said.

Tyler leaned forward a little and kept his silence long enough that she was finally forced to look directly at him. It was difficult to hold her gaze and he didn't want to give her an order which might distract her from what he was saying. Alibali was able to focus on only one thing at any given time, everybody knew that.

"Let me be perfectly clear here," Tyler said. "No one intends to take Captain Lorca's ship from him. We have only ourselves to blame if he felt such a threat was necessary. But our loyalties, of every single person on this ship, are absolute and they're absolutely with Captain Lorca. I'm not asking you to betray him. I'm asking you to help protect his ship so we can hand it back to him in a somewhat decent condition."

"I can try," she said with a disconcerting lack of inflexion, none of her thoughts obvious to guess at.

"I'll talk to Chief Bell, get her to give you some spare time from Engineering to look into this. We're mostly up and running, there should be some leeway."

Alibali nodded and for a moment, she looked like she was going to say something, perhaps an objection or even reveal something of her own thoughts and feelings. When nothing came, Tyler gave her another warm smile.

"Thank you, Lieutenant. Dismissed."

Perhaps Tyler was over-interpreting the minuscule reaction in her face, but he thought he saw a hint of the relief she felt at being let off the hook. She saluted with machine-like precision, leaving the ready room with a stiff-legged stride.

Tyler followed her out immediately, feeling a little self-satisfied at Ferasini's withering look. She was just dying to know what he had needed Alibali for. Yet, she would never reveal the vulnerability of her curiosity by asking. He pulled the chair towards himself and slouched back into a comfortable position.

"Let's see how well we fight, shall we?" he said.

Lorca watched his own hand as he reached upward as if it didn't quite belong to him, resting his fingers against the locking mechanism of the slave collar. Zralisss' warmth had seeped into it in the short hour she had been wearing it. He stood so close, he thought he could feel the slightest gravitational pull from her size, the resting strength of her far superior to his own. It must be terrifying to be a terran in this galaxy, to know you've set yourself up to be an enemy of so many species, many of them stronger than you are, or smarter, or more advanced, and still trying to delude yourself into being the apex predator when biology had made you, at best, uninviting prey.

Lorca was not used to such an instinctual fear of aliens, but he was beginning to understand how it might fuel the deep-seated hatred he saw.

He attached the leash from Zralisss' slave collar and held it limply in his hand, vaguely disgusted at its simple existence. Connected, it could deliver a debilitating charge.

"I'm sorry about that," he said and Zralisss looked at him.

"I cannot walk freely without a terran minder outside the alien quarters," she said. It didn't seem to bother her.

"I know," Lorca said, he wrapped the end of the leash around his hand and wrist for a secure hold. "I'm still sorry."

Zralisss made that sound again, which the universal translator managed to interpret as laughter only after a delay. Lorca supposed terrans just had never bothered to calibrate the device for Zralisss' species properly.

"Emm warned me you might say something like this."

Lorca sighed. "Just indulge me."

In much the same way the crew of the Defiant thought of it as a simple idiosyncrasy, he added to himself. A quirk of character, puzzling but ultimately too trivial to matter.

He stood back a good arms' length from Zralisss, considering the getup and running his mind through the next few steps.

Kodos and Emm were already at the bottom of the nearest space elevator and passage secured on a worker ferry. These ships carried workers to off world facilities around Yemuro's planetary system. They weren't warp capable, unarmed and unarmored, offering only the bare basics of facilities, just enough the faceless members of the workforce could be carted to and fro without too much die-off en route. Because the ferries didn't leave the system, they only ran minimal security checks upon boarding and their route took them to the outermost planet's orbit, the perfect spot for the Defiant to pick them up while the only opposition they would face out there were automated drones, at least for the few moments it took for the Defiant to beam them over.

Out in the street, the leashed gorn attracted somewhat more attention than Lorca on his own would have done, but none of it was openly hostile, or more than passing curiosity, which was unlikely to manifest into anything detrimental to his plan and he needed Zralisss to quickly subdue Sennai in case she still didn't want to see reason.

The plan was simple, much simpler than Emm had led him to believe when they struck their deal. He wasn't entirely sure if it was deception on her part or not. Certainly, if he meant to take a free alien specialist and force her into somebody else's employ, the steps he'd have to take were more complicated. He would need to change Sennai's work and living permits, make her old contract disappear so she could legally leave the planet and work somewhere else. None of these were Lorca's concern, but perhaps Emm hadn't grasped this fully. On the other hand, he wouldn't mind if she'd chosen to fleece him for whatever she could get from him. The replicator matrices cost him nothing to share and they might make a small difference to the people on Yemuro.

He wondered if Zralisss would give him a straight answer if he asked, idly twisting her leash in his hands. He decided it didn't matter to him and if Emm and Zralisss derived some small satisfaction if they felt they'd won something against him, it was an easy burden to bear.

Sennai commuted to and from her work-place daily. Zralisss had suggested the best place to pick her up would be before she reached the relative safety of the vulcan quarters.

Lorca sat at a small table outside a café, while Zralisss stood motionless, looming large and casting a diffuse shadow over him. He wanted to offer her a seat, but the baleful look the waiter had given the gorn when they'd arrived told him it might cause some issue.

The waiter gave Zralisss a wide berth as he brought Lorca the scotch he'd ordered and withdrew without so much as a word.

The synthehol left the expected aftertaste in his mouth, Lorca had never found it unpleasant as such, but it certainly couldn't pass for the real thing.

The seat offered a nearly unobstructed view of the transport hub Sennai used in her daily commute and he'd picked it so she would be forced to pass him by. Zralisss would be easy to spot and draw the eye, he was confident Sennai would see him and come to him.

In the end, this was exactly what she did. Lorca tagged her in the middle of the crowd spilling from the platform just a second before she spotted him in turn and stopped, turned into the stillness of a statue in the middle of a moving sea. Her gaze sharp enough to penetrate the distance. In her stillness, someone else moved in close by her shoulder, another vulcan, taking position next to her.

Lorca took a leisurely sip off the scotch, keeping his own gaze fixed on them, watched as Sennai broke the stillness and began walking towards him, the other vulcan trailing behind her with badly concealed reluctance. As they got closer, Lorca recognised the other vulcan as one of the gang who had attacked him outside Sennai's quarters. Well…

Sennai stopped by his table, fixed on him and ignoring the gorn completely. Her young companion was less discreet, giving Zralisss a long once-over before he, too, looked at Lorca.

"There is no point in asking again," Sennai said.

"Oh, I disagree," he said and smiled a little. "You see, I made a deal."

"A deal for my aid, but without my involvement?"

"Hmm," Lorca shrugged.

"You've come to force me, haven't you?" Sennai asked.

"It doesn't have to be force," Lorca said. "The deal is this: Your aid for replicator matrices that will feed hundreds. Or are you more important than the needs of so many?"

Sennai looked at Zralisss and the gorn nodded.

"Nobody believes a liar!" Sennai's young companion said.

"Ah, but have I lied?" Lorca asked.

"Terrans always lie."

"I'm not terran."

"Hah!" the vulcan snorted, unable to stop the triumph from breaking through his veneer of vulcan control. "A lie!"

He took a step forward, bringing him level with Sennai and right up against the table. Lorca dropped his head back so he could meet his gaze, knowing he was posing a challenge the other might not be able to resist when he looked this ready to spring.

"Mejek," Sennai said quietly and her companion's response was instantaneous. "This is not the place."

Lorca took another sip off the scotch, hiding the sudden urge to bait the young vulcan into action. His posturing was irritating, his complete lack of understanding of the world he was living in grated on Lorca's nerves. Here this young vulcan stood, barely more than a slave and surrounded by the slave-keepers, thinking he had anything to bargain with. Didn't he understand he had to be smarter than this?

Sennai's face gave nothing away when she said, "I will come."

"It's a mistake," Mejek said, but did so quietly.

Sennai looked at him. "The logic here is obvious. Think on it until you understand."

She turned her attention back to Lorca. "I'll need some time to prepare."

"You had time," he said. "We're leaving now."

When he got up, it shook Mejek into motion, a curious combination of fight or flight, before he forced himself to not react.

Sennai creased her eyebrows, displeased with it, but she only took a moment to understand the nature of the deal she had made. She turned to Mejek and said, "Please take care of my possessions, but be careful. Once I'm found to be missing, there will be an investigation. It's best if no one knows about you."

"I don't care about the logic," Mejek said with a sneer. "It's a mistake." He gave Lorca a baleful look. "He'll betray you."

"No," Sennai said. "He'll use my skills until he has no need for them anymore, just like my employers here. Go home, Mejek, and know you have my gratitude."

Mejek looked perfectly willing to keep arguing, but he seemed at least smart enough to recognise when a discussion wasn't going to go anywhere. The gaze he dropped on Lorca was full or rage, kept badly in check by Sennai's words and the pervasive, ever-present power imbalance dictated by the society he lived in.

It was amusing to think, if he'd chosen to make a scene, Lorca's feeble camouflage would have come off, leaving him exposed and defenceless.

Lorca made a gesture back towards the transport hub Sennai had come from and she preceded him in that direction, Lorca following behind with Zralisss on her leash trailing behind. Mejek's glare followed them all the way until they were out of sight.

The transport hub just underneath the towering structure of the space elevator was host to a somewhat different bustle than the city streets themselves. It was quieter, people weren't so much milling about as they were standing in untidy lines, waiting for their ferry to begin boarding.

Lorca eyed the small, hovering drones just below the ceiling, his every step closely watched by a computer algorithm, ready to spring the moment he did something suspicious.

At least the trade with Emm had gone through without a hitch. A small favour he hadn't dared to hope for. A heavy strap crossed Kodos' chest to the metal suitcase by his hip, containing the precious dilithium crystals. Next to him, Emm stood in her female alien form, a slave collar around her neck, but without a leash attached. It made it easier to move around here, she'd said. She'd be screened at the entrance of the hub and trying to pass for human would just cause trouble.

"You're booked," Emm said. "Security checks have all come up clean, the suitcase is insulated, the dilithium won't show up on the scanner."

"Thank you," Lorca said, tracking the strap on Kodos to the case. "We…"

From his expanded field of vision, he spotted the drone drop down behind him to hove near his head, a red light flicking to alarm, but before Lorca could do anything with the tiny advance warning, the drone shot an energy beam at his neck and collapsed. Unexpectedly, there was very little pain, except for hitting the ground without being able to brace for it. His body wasn't even entirely numb, but his muscles were weak and sluggish, allowing him to do little else than stroke his arms over the dirty floor, feebly looking for purchase.

He saw Emm reach for Kodos' arm and tuck him a few steps away. She made eye contact with Lorca and mouthed a 'keep calm' at him.

He hoped Zralisss was taking Sennai away somewhere, too. He wasn't ready to trust the vulcan this early, not when a chance to shatter his disguise was presented to her. Even a vulcan might gather favour by delivering Gabriel Lorca to the empire, after all.

The drone kept hovering over him, a threatening red light shining in his face, ready to stun him again. He forced himself to relax. He wasn't going anywhere for the time being.

A small, but empty circle had formed around him, but what he could make out from people's reaction, the incident wasn't special enough to warrant much interest. Many simply stepped around him on the way to their ferries or shuttles, giving him just a quick glance.

He couldn't see the others anymore and wondered what Kodos would do if Lorca were captured. Take the dilithium back to the Defiant, if he could, and then what? Tyler would want to mount a rescue, but his chances of success would be slim. But even if he managed it, Sennai could the chance to slip away and be lost to him. With no way home, what would he do?

A security guard marched through the crowd as they shuffled hastily out of his way. He stopped over Lorca and irritably waved the drone away before he looked down at Lorca. If he had recognised who he was looking at, his vexed boredom, no doubt, would have given way to something far more dangerous.

"Ah fuck this," the guard muttered, got down to one knee next to Lorca and yanked the side of his coat aside to press a hypospray into his neck. Immediately a tingling spread through Lorca's limbs and he was hauled roughly to his feet by the guard and found he could hold himself up, even if he was swaying slightly.

The guard didn't wait for Lorca to find his balance, he gripped the flap of Lorca's coat and pushed it aside so he could reach for the phaser in its holster at Lorca's left hip to retrieve it.

He held the phaser in his hand, checked its setting before giving Lorca a judging once-over.

"Illegal mods," the guard said. "You should know better."

He gave Lorca a shove against his chest with the phaser, hard enough to nearly make him topple again.

"It's confiscated," the guard said. "Now move the fuck on."

Lorca merely frowned, the scenario assembling itself in his head.

It was Emm's phaser, the one which didn't cause an alert on discharge. Emm had never taken it back when he'd offered it to her in the hotel. It had seemed like a useful tool to keep around.

Lorca swallowed dry, waiting a moment longer until he tried a step forward.

"That could have gone much worse," he said, more to himself, though by then the others had stepped back towards him.

Emm's look was unsympathetic, "He's right, you should've known better."

"Are you concerned for my safety now?" Lorca asked with a slight smile.

"Technically," Emm said, never returning the smile. "We aren't done. You still owe us the matrices and they are important."

She gave him a hard look, some insult ready on the tip of her tongue, but she never delivered it. He didn't think she doubted his intention of going through with the deal fully. Neither she nor Zralisss would have agreed to Zralisss coming with Lorca to the Defiant if either of them expected him to betray them. He would have liked to know which aspect of his story had won her over, but he knew asking wouldn't yield a straight answer. She could simply point at the importance of feeding a lot of people and call it a desperate measure.

"Mr. Basora," Kodos said. "The ferry has been boarding for a while. We should get going."

Lorca nodded, but kept looking at Emm.

"I'd tell you you can trust me," he said. "But where's the point?"

"If I didn't trust you enough," Emm said. "We wouldn't be here."

"Point taken."

He turned to go.

"Take care," he said and meant it.

In the quiet solitude of the mainframe control room, the harsh tucks of the Defiant's combat manoeuvres were distant and inconsequential. Alibali had tuned it out completely to focus on the computer terminals hovering in front of her, looking for the self-destruct Lorca had implemented.

It seemed strange he would not have asked her aid in such a complex task, but perhaps he had simply chosen not to trust her with it. She wouldn't have said so to his face, but she had doubts of his skill to implement such a programme without error, so perhaps Tyler was right in his concern.

So far, however, she had found no trace of it. The hardcoded, original self-destruct programme was entirely untouched, still with the alterations Lorca had made Alibali put in so only he and he alone could activate and deactivate the sequence.

The door hissed open behind her and she rotated her chair to watch Zhang walk in with an apologetic smile and a tray from the mess hall.

"Hey, I hope you can handle a little distraction," he said as walked towards her and set the tray on an empty spot at the corner of the console.

"Egg salad sandwiches and a strawberry milkshake," Zhang added sheepishly, as if she couldn't tell. "Because I missed lunch."

"They already let you out?" Alibali asked, unable to keep the smile from forming on her face. She reached for one of the sandwiches, only now becoming aware of how hungry she was. Between skipping lunch, helping out in Engineering and this new task Tyler had given her, she'd simply forgotten to eat.

"The benefits of workforce shortage," Zhang said and leaned at the console.

"What did you and Rubau fight over?"

Zhang made a long-suffering sigh. "We have different opinions on the captain," he said. "She thinks if he doesn't like us, there's no reason to like him, so to speak. That it's time to leave him behind and turn to someone better."

"She was advocating for treason?"

"Well, not so openly, but yeah, that's the gist of it. So I told her to shut her mouth, because her shit's ruining my appetite."

"Did you tell Commander Tyler?"

"About losing my appetite?" he grinned.

"No! About Rubau's treasonous talk?"

"I think he already knows," Zhang shook his head sadly. "It's not the first time, I keep hearing this sort of bullshit a lot. More and more, actually and that's never a good sign. Something's going to happen, I guess, let's just hope the captain is back to handle it."

He looked over her screens and after a moment he said, "I guess you aren't allowed to tell me what you're working on?"

"Guessed correctly," she confirmed, but thought of how his expertise might be helpful in finding what she was looking for. She knew she had a certain fixed approach to computer engineering, subhuman as an instructor once called it — and her. The insult notwithstanding, he had had a point. Whatever Lorca had done might be more obvious to a mind untainted by technology.

"Okay then," he smiled at her again and pushed away from the console. "I'll leave you in peace. Are we trying for lunch again tomorrow? I sure hope there are less shitty people there this time."

"Of course."

"It's a date!"

He slipped a hand down her back as he left, somewhere between a friendly gesture and something that made her feel uncharacteristically giddy inside. She wasn't quite sure what to do with the feeling so she just basked in its novelty.

The door opened and he left, just before the door closed, she heard him greet Doctor Ferasini, passing her by in the corridor outside.

Meanwhile, in the security station at the bottom of the space elevator, a surveillance console began signalling for manual review, as it could not quite make sense of some of the results it was receiving from the security station's own DNA sniffer. The security tech, charged to monitor too many of the damn things was slow to respond. Usually, the alerts were barely more than a malfunction and she had just got herself a freshly brewed cup of coffee. She'd spilled the coffee on a console not so long ago, she was still a little bruised from the punch she'd received from the guy who had to fix it, so she felt she should keep the coffee to the break room until everyone had forgotten about it.

Eventually, the judging look of her colleague got her to put the cup down. No doubt he was going to report her lack of enthusiasm. She sighed in resignation and left the room to see what irrelevant bug had got the system in a twist this time.

End of Chapter 6