Note: This is a two-chapter upload!

Chapter 7: … is the Shortest Way Home

The ferry could barely be called a ship. It consisted of three tubes, stuck together with a cockpit at the front and a warp engine strapped to the back, with a top speed of warp two. Each tube had room for rows of two seats on either side of a narrow aisle. Standing up, Lorca's head was precariously close to the ceiling, and Zralisss had to hunch forward as she walked.

The subtle scent of mould in the air ventilation filled the cabin space and the artificial gravity was shoddy and inconsistent, making walking difficult and sitting uncomfortable.

"I suggest you disengage the seat buckle," Sennai had said from next to Lorca once the ferry had left the dock and shuddered into impulse speed as it left the gravitational pull of Yemuro.

"They function similar to personal agonisers," Sennai had added at Lorca's questioning look.

There was only one other security feature on board, a bored-looking guard, heavily-armed right outside the door to the cockpit.

Looking around the cabin, most people had undone their seat belts as well, though some seem to prefer the slight comfort of them. Strapped in tight to the chair compensated for the iffy gravity and allowed them to doze more comfortably.

Lorca, with the buckle of the seat belt safely tucked away, did his best to settle into the seat. He watched his fellow passengers for a while. They were a quiet crowd, many sleeping some talking quietly and some just staring vacantly into empty air, waiting for the journey to end. Most of them were human, with a few aliens smattered throughout, but both were visibly a very different class of people than what Lorca had encountered in this universe's perversion of Starfleet. These were not arrogant and selfish, terran pride whittled down by the far more mundane daily grind of making it through the day.

The Terran Empire had been built on ruthless ambition and consequently left a majority of its citizens in the dirt. They didn't just enslave alien races, they enslaved their own as well and felt justified in doing it. After all, a terran who could not fight their way to the top deserved to be trodden on.

Lorca took his attention away from them to the narrow slit of a window running alongside the cabin to watch the empty black space outside. There was nothing soothing in it, however. The universe didn't care, not this universe and neither his own, it was just an endless expanse of darkness, hostile to life, perfectly bleak and utterly empty. Still, somehow he was glad to be off the planet and among the stars again.

About three hours in, the ferry docked at an asteroid mining station, some passengers left, new ones took their place. They were tired-looking, dragging their bags with them, clogging the aisle when the overhead compartment was already stuffed full.

In the next few hours, the ferry made several more stops. Habitat stations and orbiting factories, security outposts and refuelling stops. The view outside the window barely changed each time, too narrow to offer any kind of meaningful insight.

As they left the inner planetary systems, the stops grew fewer and the time between grew longer. They had another few twelve hours until they reached the outermost proximity of the ferry's course, where the Defiant could swoop in and pick them up.

Lorca felt the tuck of time on his alertness. Next to him, Sennai sat still with her eyes closed, her back perfectly straight. She was not sleeping, but meditating. Probably a better use of time than morosely passing judgement on the people around him, Lorca thought.

In the seat in front of him, Zralisss fidgeted. With her size and the heavy tail, the seat was far too small for her, but she didn't complain. Not that there would have been any use. Kodos was sunk in on himself, looking down on a PADD in his hand, playing chess against the computer.

Just as Lorca contemplated the use of a pin to keep himself sharp for the remainder of the journey, a slight shudder went through the ferry, the artificial gravity pulled on him, making itself felt deep in his chest.

In front of him, Zralisss tensed and leaned around to look at him.

"We've stopped," Lorca said. "Unscheduled."

"Yes," Zralisss confirmed. "There's nothing here to stop for."

"That's not quite true," Sennai said. "There's someone here to stop for, isn't there?"

The pieces clicked into place immediately. He didn't need a pin to be wide awake now.

"Me, I guess," Lorca said and Sennai arched one meaningful eyebrow in response.

Lorca gripped the back of the front seat, getting up and leaning towards Kodos.

"Signal the Defiant, we need pickup ASAP," he ordered and didn't wait for Kodos nod and split-second of worried hesitation. The Defiant could pick up the signal and they should be close enough to be there within minutes, but they were far closer to Yemuro's security station than they had planned to be. Tyler would know what it meant if the signal came to early and come ready to fight.

"Zralisss, with me," Lorca snapped, already in the aisle. The aisle didn't allow for a full-speed sprint, but he hurried through the debris of luggage and extended legs as quickly as possible and made it to the front of the cabin just for the security guard to meet him with an aimed phaser rifle.

"Lorca! Down!" Zralisss shouted from behind him and Lorca dropped, but his forward momentum kept him going, sliding over the floor. Through the eyepatch's field of vision, he saw Zralisss yank a young woman from her seat and fling her right into the discharging rifle and the security guard behind it. Snarling, Zralisss closed in right behind, picked the lifeless woman off the security guard and tossed her aside, ripped the rifle from his hands before he had a chance to right it. Zralisss closed her hand around his throat and thrust him into the ceiling.

Lorca would have come back up close to the end of the aisle, but somebody punched his shoulder and knocked him off-course. The mere moments of confusion had passed too quickly and the passengers, it seemed, weren't going to take this lying down. They spilt from their seats, armed with weapons or just their fists. Lorca rolled onto his back and planted his boot into the nearest face, earned enough room to finally get to his feet and used the position to draw the long, slim terran knife from its sheath in his boot.

All moral failings aside, the terrans understood weapons, the knife's hilt moulded into the palm of his hand, making the blade nothing but an extension of his arm. The blade itself was tinted dark and reflected no light. Lorca aligned it against the back of his forearm, so the blade was perfectly concealed and perfectly ready to kill.

He snapped the blade back when someone approached him from behind, drove it into someone's gut with barely any resistance, then forward to punch the hilt into another's throat and make her topple back, gagging for breath.

He couldn't make the last few rows to the front without killing, the passengers were too incensed and too many, they kept piling on and he felt the situation beginning to tip. He didn't know what had them so riled up, not at first, not until a woman, driving at him with a knife of her own, spat 'traitor' in his face. He slashed her throat wide open, picked up her shoulder and turned her around so the majority of her blood sprayed over the other passengers.

He made it to Zralisss' side, pulled his phaser with his other hand and shot into the crowd indiscriminately, dropping some of them, leaving them screaming and filling the cabin with the scent of burnt flesh. He suppressed a wince and clenched his jaw, but the advance had been stilled. The passengers stopped coming but kept shouting insults in his direction. It wouldn't be long until they'd gathered enough courage for another attack.

"Get the door open," Lorca said, just as Zralisss dropped the security guard, unconscious or dead.

Zralisss tilted her head and said, "You just shoot the lock, I'll get the other two."

Lorca frowned at her, but she didn't seem impressed by his knee-jerk reaction of having his order countermanded. Instead, she walked toward the passengers. Some of them got out of her way, others she had to bodily push and shove, but no one was brave enough to attack her.

Smart choice, then, Lorca decided. If he'd tried to go back for Kodos and Sennai, the crowd would have been too tempted to try something, regardless of the threats he might make.

Time was running short, he knew, but he couldn't turn his back on them without backup, so he took one careful step forward, well out of range of an easy attack by anyone, fixed several people at the front with a bemused look.

"I see you know who I am," he said, conversational tone, but loud enough to carry in the claustrophobic cabin.

They hadn't had time to establish a hierarchy within them, no designated spokesperson, no plan for them to pursue, just a collection of reflexive anger. More insults hit him, some of them references to places and events he wasn't aware of it. He let it slide past him.

"Do you think," he said, dropped some of his casual mien. "Your lives matter to me?"

He raised an incredulous eyebrow. Those close to him were beginning to quieten, their expression still hostile, but at least they were listening at all, the first step to rethinking their course of action.

"You don't even matter enough to kill you," he added. He made a show of wiping the knife, dropped to one knee to sheath it. A moment of turning away from them, too short for them to do anything, but enough to make his point.

"Go back to your seats," Lorca said, harder now. "Sit down, wait it out and don't make me kill you."

It wasn't an immediate reaction, no one was keen to be the first to follow, but at the edges, the crowd's determination was beginning to fray, the shouting died down. Somewhere further back, Lorca saw a woman reach for another and say something into her ear, a sharp, calculating look in Lorca's direction.

Zralisss, with Kodos and Sennai in tow, had less trouble making her way back to the front. The moment she would be able to deflect an attack on him, Lorca turned his attention to the cockpit door.

The pilot had had enough time to prepare, so when Lorca shot the look, then pried his fingers into the gap at the side of the door, he fully expected a phaser blast. He stayed behind the door as it opened. Nothing happened.

Lorca shrugged inwardly, went low again and burst through the door. The phaser shot brushed over his head, harmlessly. Lorca got a hold of the wrist, yanked it aside, stepped in close to the pilot and smacked his fist into her face. She swayed, but the cockpit was too narrow and she was wedged between her seat and the wall, unable to fall. Lorca gave her a second hit, just for good measure, then made her drop the phaser before he dragged her out the door. Zralisss picked the pilot up on her collar and helped her further. There was no co-pilot.

Lorca looked back, took a second to review everyone's position.

He said, "Kodos, give Sennai the case." He motioned at Sennai. "And you're with me."

When Kodos had handed over the case, Lorca looked between him and Zralisss, then said, "You two, keep our audience entertained."

He put Sennai in the co-pilot seat and forced the door closed, leaving only a gap wide enough for him to slip through before he sat himself down at the controls.

Like the rest of the ferry, the cockpit system was rudimentary and badly maintained. The ferry barely had any sensors to speak of, shields only designed to protect against small scale space debris and a phaser turret to take handle the slightly larger pieces. The viewscreen projected a security alert message, ordering the pilot to an immediate stop and to await inspection. The alert had been issued seven minutes before, which meant gunboats from Yemuro could be here within twenty minutes or so, half an hour if Starfleet didn't make response an immediate priority. At least they weren't going to blow them up right-away, giving the Defiant a little more time to show up and save the day.

"I would advise against trying to flee," Sennai said.

"Oh yeah?" he asked and flashed her a toothy smile as he put the ferry back into motion, slowly trundle along its predetermined path. They weren't able to outrun the gunboat, but they could buy a few extra minutes for the Defiant.

Almost immediately, they were hailed by one of the gunboats on their tail.

Lorca said, "They are expecting a female voice."

"What do I tell them?"

Lorca shrugged, "My ship, my rules."

He gave her another split second to sort out her thoughts. Vulcans could think fast and on their feet, but usually didn't do so well with limited information. Lorca slipped his fingers over the com controls, found the channel they were on and misaligned it just so. It would lead to minor interference in the call, helping to mask the different voice and Sennai's undoubtedly precise and entire vulcan inflexion.

Sennai tensed ever so slightly, the muscles down her back pulling tight and her face on the verge of a frown. No more than that, and she focussed forward.

"I see," she said.

Lorca opened the channel.

"Outbound-Ferry-19 you were ordered to stop!"

"It's a stupid order," Sennai said, making a serviceable attempt at a casual human tone. "You think I didn't figure out who I've got stashed back in the passenger cabin?"

"You were not informed for a reason."

"But I have eyes, you moron."

"You will be punished for this insolence, captain. Stop immediately."

"Now you listen," Sennai said. "Stopping will rock the boat and you don't want that. You just sneak up on us, nobody notices, you beam the bastard off my ship and into an agony booth."

The answer didn't come immediately, a sure sign the officer on the other end was having an epiphany about his tactic and needed to come to terms to how it got dictated to him by a lowly ferry pilot.

Lorca motioned with his hand for Sennai to say something else.

"I mean, unless you want him to massacre everyone on board… I certainly don't."

"I get it now. You're just a coward," the gunboat officer said finally, just a little satisfied. "You will be punished, but I'm giving you new orders: maintain course, make sure the target remains unaware."

"Yes, of course."

When Lorca closed the channel, he smiled at her again. "Good job."

She gave no indication the slither of praise was touching her at all, but that was fine, Lorca hadn't expected her to. Winning her over would be a game in the dark anyway, when he would never know if he was making any progress or not. However, vulcans could usually be relied on to make you know if they disliked you.

Lorca leaned his back into the seat and watched the stars strewn out beyond the glaring alert message on the screen.

He had never been entirely comfortable with waiting passively for destiny to do a number on him, even back home. Early in his command, he had had the habit of pacing on the bridge. The chair was a nice symbol, but sitting in it had made him feel useless, which in turn made him moody and agitated. His ship's counsellor had told him in no uncertain terms he was creeping his bridge crew out and he needed to stop. So he'd sat himself down and braced himself. Looking back, Tarsus' trauma had still been fresh in him, looking for a way to express itself and staying on the move had been his way to cope. It had got easier as time went on, but there was always the passing thought of resentment, even today. He was old enough to be smart about these things, however. Sometimes the best thing to do was wait and conserve energy for the battles to come.

"They identified you in the space elevator hub," Sennai said after a stretch of silence.

Before he could check his response, he lifted his hand to rub at his neck. The thin layer there felt undamaged, but it didn't mean much in the face of the facts.

"Must have."

"The pressure on you will increase."

"Empress… Emperor? Airiam has done fuck-all to get me declared dead, anyway," he shrugged.

"Yes, but you were a piece of propaganda, she has not expected you to be actually alive. This will change things."

He glanced at her, but only briefly, there was nothing to see in her face if he couldn't hear it in her voice.

"The best course of action, then, is to get me back home, wouldn't you agree?"

"Disregarding the complexities of building what you require," Sennai said. "You do not intend to take anyone with you."

He let the hidden accusation brush off him. He had no handle to determine what Sennai intended with her words, if it was to rile or trip him up. Either way, he had settled himself down to wait patiently, she wasn't a worse stressor than the situation itself already was.

"The other Buran, it was a ship, it travelled between universes. I expect that's what you'll build for me and that's what'll take me home."

"A drive is far more complicated than the one-off displacement of one person."

That did make him look at her, but only to give her a little smile.

"We don't know each other very well yet," he said. "There's no logic in making guesses about my motives."

A tiny muscle between her eyebrows twitched in displeasure at the insult.

He turned his attention back to the console and watched as the gunships closed in on them, the second ticking away. He had gone through the specs of the ferry twice already and found nothing useful there. He briefly considered overcharging what shields they had to stop the gunboats' transporter, or at least stall it for a moment, but he couldn't figure out where the energy for it would be coming from, at least not without blowing the ferry up.

Sucking in a deep breath in resignation he couldn't quite contain, Lorca leaned back in his chair and pulled a small knife from his sleeve. It was barely the length of his hand, bleached white, hilt and blade, with not glint to its edge. He'd spent more time with — and in — the Defiant's otherwise unoccupied agony booths, looking for its weaknesses. The knife had been the first step in a solution, devised to mimic organic structures, it would be difficult for a transporter to tell apart from the actual person. Every other weapon could be filtered out during transport, but this would stay. The next step was the tiny moment after transport and before the booth was activated. The only time when there was a chance the little knife could make a difference.

Lorca hadn't figured out yet how to be fast enough, but perhaps all he needed was the right incentive.

The ferry's scanner finally registered the gunboats and read their IFF. Lorca had hoped there would be another call to the ferry, but all he got was the prickling sensation of the transporter beam washing over him. Sometimes, he thought, beaming should hurt more, being torn apart on a molecular level, transformed entirely into energy. He forced his eyes open, he needed to see where he ended up at, see and act.

The transport aborted, leaving him briefly disoriented and nauseous.

Turbulence picked up the ferry, stuttered it from its feeble warp speed into untethered stillness, motion dampeners unable to keep up. An alarm started blaring in the cockpit and then died down again when the ferry lost power.

But Lorca didn't need sensors. The Defiant had dropped out of warp right above them, so close the collapse of her warp bubble had caused the distortion. Close enough, too, to extend her shields around the ferry.

Lorca's communicator beeped and he flipped it open.

"Lorca."

"Ready for transport?" Tyler asked.

"There's one gorn and one vulcan on board, beam them over, too. They are guests."

"We have their life signs."

"And take me straight to the bridge."

"Aye, captain."

The transport felt no different than just a moment before, but it left Lorca standing on the bridge of the Defiant, in the empty space by the turbolift door. The red alert siren beat into his head, comforting in its familiarity regardless of what it meant.

"Captain on the bridge," Tyler announced with a quick grin as he relinquished the captain's chair and retreated to the security station.

"Thank you, commander," Lorca said, fully aware good manners unsettled his terran crew. "Status report." He forced himself down in the captain's chair and settled his hand on the controls there. The screen was set to tactical view, showing the two gunboats which had been in pursuit of the ferry scatter in different directions in an obvious evasive manoeuvre.

"Our structural integrity is only at seventy-three per cent, we've suffered some damage dropping you off. Shields and weapons fully functional, cloak… uh…" Tyler hesitated.

Lorca didn't bother to look at him, he had been trying to train this unwillingness to give bad news out of Tyler and had only partially succeeded.

"Cloak?" Lorca prompted sharply.

"Up to warp five, the cloak may compromise the shields if we use both for… longer."

On screen, the sensors picked out the full force of Yemuro's defences as they mobilise, ready to take on the Defiant within moments. Automated drones, full of photon torpedoes, capable of metaphasic sweeps to render the cloak ineffective. Three Shamshir-class combat vessels, otherwise trailing Yemuro's orbit around the sun, turned towards them, following a swarm of gunboats dispersed from the stations around the system. They were too far out for the stationary phaser canons of the inner planetary system, at least.

The smart thing to do would be to leave before that wave arrived and crushed them. "Target the gunboats," Lorca said. "Strip their shields and disable their engines."

The marks on the screen flickered as the computer struggled to compensate for the small ships fast movements but eventually worked out a serviceable predictive pattern, confirming the target lock.

"Fire."

Two short, precise phaser bursts from the Defiant clawed over the gunboats and burned out the power of their shields. One more each took out their engines and set them helplessly adrift. They returned fire instantly, but their phasers glanced off the Defiant's shields with nothing but a slight tremor going through its powerful frame.

"We're being hailed," Zhang said. "One of the Shamshir ships."

"Audio only."

"Aye."

"This is Captain Ella Gilmartin of the ISS Erlik Khan, surrender immediately or be destroyed. This is your only warning."

The very fact that they had bothered to even give a warning betrayed their confusion. Lorca wondered briefly what the story about the Defiant actually was, which had been fed to the Empire, who they thought commanded it. He would have to ask Marlena about it when he had a chance to speak with her. Either way, they certainly didn't really know how to handle it.

"We both know that's not how it works, Captain Gilmartin," Lorca said. He closed the channel directly through his armrest, not wanting to waste any more time.

"Destroy both gunboats and set course towards Yemuro, impulse only."

The gunboats, already dead in the water and defenceless, had nothing left to fight with. The Defiant's phasers rendered them apart effortlessly, scattering their smouldering remains.

The Defiant turned away and took a casual pace towards the advancing defence fleet.

"We're within their weapon's range in one minute, seventeen seconds."

"On my mark, cloak and go to warp three, take us out of here," Lorca said, watching the ships. The first smattering of gunboats would be there before that, but it was only the combat vessels he had to worry about.

Time crawled as the enemy ships came closer, a testament to the sheer enormity of space that at their speed, they still needed so much time just to get from one end of a planetary system to another. Lorca barely bothered to listen to Tyler giving periodic checks of the time, of the combat ships charging their weapons. He felt the first hits of the gunboats as they opened fire. The tremors got stronger each time, now that there were more of them. For a second, Lorca thought of what it would be like to stay and fight, it would be a difficult battle, one he might not win, though by no means impossible. Certainly not if the Defiant were at full strength.

But they weren't and now was not the time. Besides, there was nothing really to gain.

"Now," Lorca ordered.

Just ahead of the first salvo of phaser fire, the Defiant flickered into invisibility, sudden alarms blaring on the bridge as the ship went to warp, taxed systems complained in sprays of blue sparks.

Lorca ordered the ship to maintain cruising speed and not drop the cloak until ordered. He checked with Engineering to learn that Kodos had already delivered the dilithium crystals and they were ready to begin work as soon as Lorca dropped the ship out of warp. Tyler had used the time he'd spent waiting for Lorca to map the area of space for suitable hiding spots, where they could park the Defiant and take care of much-needed repairs.

Lorca left the chair with a nod towards Tyler and retreated to his ready room. Lorca would have preferred to go to his quarters and take a shower, get rid of the damn eyepatch and the costume he'd been wearing. He would do that later, he needed to read the full reports first, make sure Zralisss and Sennai were taken care of and plan the next few steps.

He shrugged off the overcoat and left it on the floor by the door as he stepped to the replicator.

"Cà phê trứng, make it large."

A little slice of home, for once leaving no bitter aftertaste in his mouth, now that he had something tangible to keep him occupied.

End of Chapter 7

Author's Note: Strange times we are living in right now. Take care of yourselves, my friends, and hopefully I offered a momentary distraction.