RECAP of Chapter 11:

Lorca has sex with Rubau, who turns out to be in cahoots with two other conspirators to take him down and deliver him to the Emperor by way of getting a pardon. Irsa and Culber save Lorca's naked ass from that part of the plan. I hope everyone's enjoyed the show.

The other part of the plan has the Defiant running into a trap when trying to drop off Zralisss on Arc, however, they manage to escape and fight off the boarding party.

Rubau is taken from the brig to the last working agoniser booth and left there to die by a co-conspirator.

Chapter 12: Bedouin and Gods

The bright lights bleached the corridor walls as they sprawled away from the cargo hold, painting the blood, if such there was, in grotesque neon colour. The remainders of the shock troops were dispersed through the ship, little puddles instead of a tidal wave. As Lorca stalked the hallways, he contemplated idly that his aid in cleanup wasn't needed. Shock troops had only one functional tactic and even if their individuality surfaced in the face of calamity, it would be only to the razor-sharp awareness of their own, immediate death.

The shock troops, as individuals, were young and inexperienced, mostly humans, though slaves and criminals and other impoverished. Some of them were aliens, vulcans who did better in the light and were tougher to kill, andorians, too, and all the other races the empire had conquered. Here was all the multiculturalism the empire had to offer, being eaten up by Lorca's knife as he rid his ship of their infestation.

It occurred to Lorca that he wasn't supposed to be good at this, much less enjoy it. And in truth, there was no pleasure, just the unrelenting edges of focus in his mind. A phaser blast had nearly killed him earlier, cutting across his back as he dove out of its trajectory. The material of his armour had fused to the skin of his shoulder blade, tucking on his skin and flesh as he moved, but the discomfort was minimal.

He'd already killed too many people before he'd come to this wretched universe, he thought. Brutal aggression substituting where his failure resided. He knew he could hunt, had done so on Tarsus all these years ago, with the same absolute focus then as now.

It hadn't been worth it on Tarsus in the end. It had saved not even one person because Kodos had already thrown them away. It hadn't saved himself, either, it seemed.

A trooper came screeching at him from a doorway, blood smeared all over it from an earlier wound. The noise was irritating, high-pitched and animalistic. In life, she had been a slim, tall woman, pretty, with eyes like a cat and he wondered what had brought her here as he casually caught her clumsy lunge and slit her throat before dropping her from his hands.

He supposed this was the easy part.

The corridor ended in the open double doors to a shuttle maintenance workshop. Here, with some residue of survival instinct, the troopers had tried to build barricades from storage crates. Their bodies and bodily fluids proved the plan hadn't worked and someone had got to them before Lorca could. Everything looked dead, but Lorca paced himself anyway as he ventured inside in case some panicked holdout was still there.

One of the troopers was still alive, trying to pull themselves along the floor and towards the door, a long trail of blood behind. Zralisss sat on the floor at the other end, head resting against a shelf. One of her legs was extended, the armour sheared off by whatever had cut all the way to the bone there.

The dying trooper didn't notice Lorca, who made a fastidious step to the side to avoid contact.

"That doesn't look so good," he said to Zralisss.

"Damn bitch had a Tarrant blade," she hissed. "It's still in his belly, by the way, if you want it."

Lorca glanced at the trooper, who had made it a scant few centimetres closer to the door.

"Hmm," Lorca made and sheathed his own blade in his boot.

The trooper was a deadweight against him as Lorca turned him over. The noise they made shouldn't have come from a living being. The blade had eviscerated their abdomen as they crawled along, burying deep into the ribcage, puncturing skin and flesh outward as it went, not all intestines were still where they belonged.

"What's a Tarrant blade?" Lorca asked, he crouched down next to the trooper.

"The most useless weapon in existence," Zralisss snorted. "Some rare metal alloy or treatment or whatever makes the little fuckers cut right through armour and it stops smart materials from re-forming. The blade also cuts right through almost any sheath, so… pretty useless at the end of the day. But a shock trooper shouldn't have one of these."

"Maybe a family keepsake," Lorca suggested.

Zralisss laughed and Lorca didn't need the struggling translator to interpret it for him.

"Yeah, makes sense, heir of some lofty terran family, stepping on the wrong toes, ending up here. Life sucks like that sometimes."

Lorca saw the hilt of the knife, caught at the edge of a rib bone. Deftly he reached for it, fingers shifting through soft, still living tissue and the trooper's body twitched with each touch. Some uncoordinated jerks went up and down the body, a useless attempt to move away from the new spike in suffering.

The hilt settled into Lorca's hand despite the slippery gore and he felt no resistance from flesh and very little even from the bone.

Lorca looked up at what he could see of the trooper's face but found no recognisable humanity there, just a caricature of pain and terror, very nearly comical in its exaggeration. Lorca changed the grip on the handle and angled the blade towards the heart, sliced up and through. The trooper shrieked, but the sound faded into a moan of what must have been relief.

The blade itself was nondescript, unadorned. Lorca stood back up and turned it in his hand. Blood and gore were running down his fingers and over his hand, unable to stick to the blade.

He looked back at Zralisss.

"Well," she said, "sorry I wasn't as impressive as you thought."

He frowned and Zralisss added, "I know you wanted me to watch your back. Says a lot about you, doesn't it? That you preferred a complete stranger to your own crew. Is that why you asked me to stay? Because you can't trust them?"

"Yes, obviously."

She laughed again. "You're a strange man."

"I'm from a different universe," he said.

"It's a good pickup line," she conceded. A growl climbed up her throat as she shifted, she cursed under her breath and the translator failed again, giving out the sounds as they had come in.

"Are you going to get me a bandage, or what?" Zralisss asked when Lorca just kept looking at her thoughtfully.

Lorca nodded.

Fresh from the fight, Lorca looked delectably feral with enemy blood drying on the tightly-fitting combat armour, short hair tousled and expression darkly pensive. Not that he was ever not good enough to eat, but Lorca seemed to be picking his lovers exclusively on mutual dislike.

Culber, pretending to watch the data on the PADD in his hand, considered how serious Lorca's off-hand remark about sex had been, only to decide that friendship netted him the better deal by far. Less messy, to be sure, less political, too, because look at it. Still, he probably could have gone for it early in their relationship and what a damn wasted opportunity that was. He wondered if he should have a chat about it with Ferasini, see if he could piss her off a little and glean some salacious details in the process.

Regardless, Culber fared far better by being everyone's confidante, the hidden spider at the centre of the web, who everyone felt they could confide in. It had worked very well on Tarsus and put him neatly off to the side in the proverbial firing line, where no one bothered to aim.

Sickbay was in a state of vaguely organised chaos. Cleaning the ship of shock troops had battered their security forces and many had been carted by their colleagues to sickbay in the aftermath. So far, they'd only sustained four casualties, though some of the people currently occupying the beds weren't going to make it, either. Most others had suffered various degrees of injuries.

Lorca, too, for that matter, but he hadn't gone looking for aid yet. The fight still beat behind his eyes and he didn't care. The combat armour had done its best to seal itself shut over gaps made by phaser fire or blade, but it looked haphazard. A patch of it had visibly fused to Lorca's shoulder-blade, making itself known in the way Lorca suppressed a flinch when he moved a certain way.

Next to Culber, Ferasini stood with a sombre expression, watching Tyler across the bed and the dead woman on it. Lorca had poised himself at the foot of the bed, surveying them without looking at anyone in particular.

"You know," Culber said, "it's actually quite difficult to kill someone with an agony booth. They are designed to regulate their pain output to just below the threshold of fatality."

They had fished Rubau's dead body from the booth during cleanup when some energy fluctuation had alerted a tech that something was off in the brig. The booth had seemingly killed her gently, no blemishes on her body except for a few burst blood vessels. What marks there were had been left by Lorca's hands and teeth while she was still very much alive.

"It was overridden," Ferasini said. "Just like the access logs of the brig."

She looked across the bed.

"Do you have anything to say, Tyler?" she asked.

Tyler snapped his attention away from Rubau and at Ferasini. Up until recently, Rubau had been directly under his command and for some reason, losing her bothered him. It wasn't a good look, Culber thought, grieving over a dead traitor when your own name wasn't exactly cleared.

"Like what?" Tyler snapped. "You locked me up!"

He gestured at Rubau. "How should I have gotten to her!?"

"Someone took her out before she could point the finger," Ferasini insisted. "So, anything to say?"

Tyler slammed his hands on the bed in front of him and leaned over it towards Ferasini, teeth bared, "No! I have nothing to do with this!"

He smacked the bed again for emphasis.

Lorca moved like a wildcat from near-perfect stillness to grab Tyler's throat and haul him back, slam him down on the empty bed next to them and hold him there, keeping him pinned at an awkward angle with the edge of the metal bed digging into his back and Lorca's fingers digging into the arteries at his neck.

Tyler could have easily mounted a proper defence, but instead — out of surprise or some smart thinking — opted for raising his arms in surrender and staying put.

"Who else?" Lorca growled. "You know who else. The one who let you out. Who was it?"

It wasn't quite clear if Tyler didn't want to answer or whether Lorca's hold made it too difficult to, but he remained silent for barely a second — though it stretched long enough for the teeming occupants of sickbay to take notice.

Lorca tilted his head at Tyler in an alarmingly playful gesture, before he opened his hand and lifted it off Tyler's throat, but keeping his hand there, fingers splayed and ready. Lorca didn't move back, either, so Tyler had to stay where he was, too, or risk another escalation.

"Kriger," Tyler said roughly. "But I had nothing to with it. He came to me."

Lorca gave him an unpleasant smile, patted his chest and then turned away. He paused for only a moment to look over Rubau, some unrealised thought flitted across his expression, only to be replaced by cold fury. Without saying a word to any of them, or even looking at Tyler again, he marched for the door, people spilling hastily out of his way.

"Computer, locate Commander Kriger."

"Commander Kriger is in Engineering computer room."

Ferasini cursed under her breath and hurried after Lorca.

Culber exhaled, paused for a moment in which Tyler managed to straighten himself and clear some of the confusion from his face. He reluctantly met Culber's eyes and visibly struggled to find anything to say.

"Do you want a salve for the burn?" Culber inquired, amusing himself because no one else was going to do it.

If there was one thing Balayna Ferasini hated it was the sense of being intimidated. It grated her and made her lash out like an idiot to reassert her control. Even from a young age, she had suffered from these tendencies, biting off more than she could chew and suffering the consequences. Tarsus, she knew, had saved her life, because there she was a big fish in a small pond and the competition wasn't on her level. Captain Lorca putting Culber in charge on Tarsus had barely mattered, either, when they all knew the true competence lay with her.

That was, of course, until everything had changed.

Lorca had been a challenge to her in the beginning, someone defiant she could subdue. At least that's what she'd thought. Someone she could take, and manipulate, and enjoy at her leisure. Someone who would fight and die, never knowing he was doing it at her behest. She wouldn't have minded being the power behind his throne, the one — albeit secretly — in charge of all the important things.

She hadn't calculated with the debilitating sexual attraction between them, hadn't realised it was a weapon cutting both ways impartially. Every shred of control she had over him, he had over her in turn. It had burned itself down to a simmer as time passed. It still flared up sometimes, an unhealthy concoction of anger and desire consuming her. It had brought her to his door a few times in the middle of the night, eager, if nothing else, to take him down with her.

All of that, in the end, didn't bother her.

What bothered her was the primordial, animal instinct whisper at the back of her head telling her to keep her hands off Lorca as she caught up with him outside sickbay.

"Wait," she said sharply. A warning to him she was about to touch him because she expected him to lash out the moment she did. She gripped his upper arm, hard enough to pull him to a stop.

His head snapped back and there was the beginning of a retaliating move, he could swat her hand away, find her throat with his other hand the way he had done with Tyler just moments before. It could be playful, but this wasn't the time for such and he could easily hurt her.

He controlled himself, stopped just long enough to glance at her and force himself to relax so she let go of him.

"Comment, Doctor?" he asked, control strained in his voice.

"You don't want to confront Kriger right now," she said.

"I don't?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.

She affected barely concealed annoyance at his apparent stupidity. It had nothing to do with the reality of it, but it would serve.

"There's a conspiracy on board. If you don't uproot it entirely, it'll just go on. Kriger, as of now, doesn't know he's found out."

"Kriger is second-in-command of Engineering," Lorca said. "I can't let him run loose, he has access to vital systems, unsupervised. He's a danger to the ship."

"That's why you'll watch him at all times. He's the key, don't you see? With him, we can flush out everyone else involved in this."

His face was always too expressive, she had found, as if some part of him was eager to reveal all his hidden thoughts and secrets. Now, she could watch the minuscule shift in his expression as he considered the wider implications of what she had said. There was a tiny spark of pleasure as she realised he was coming around to her point of view.

Then he said, "Who have you been watching?"

She tightened her lips, bearing the weight of his gaze. "I'm not ready to say."

"Why?"

"For the same reason, you shouldn't go after Kriger."

"You don't trust me around them."

She took a breath to answer, then exhaled slowly, gathering her thoughts before she answered. "That's not it. It's… it's just a bad feeling and I can't prove it."

When he just continued to watch her, she added, "We can't start flinging accusations around."

"What if I don't believe you?" he asked.

It was a challenge if she had ever heard one, aimed at some barely conscious part of their tangled relationship. She had given him no reason to trust her and plenty to be wary of her motivation.

She shrugged, "Well, you should. I'm not stupid enough to think there was any way back to the Empire for any of us."

"But what if it might?" he asked. His tone had shifted, some of the anger had faded and he seemed almost playful.

"Fuck the 'what ifs'. I was a traitor to the empire long before you and I'm not going back to them. I'm not going to grovel for forgiveness."

"You're a traitor to your Captain Lorca, too."

There was only a slight snarl at the mention of this other man, a habitual distaste briefly soiling his tongue.

She was almost certain he did trust her, but in light of recent events, he was understandably uncomfortable with it. She would have to give him something better than a cold calculation of risks and benefits.

"A choice I made in your favour. I don't play games like that. You're my only alternative. I picked this."

She closed her eyes before the admission. "I picked you. And there is nothing else."

He didn't immediately answer, did seem to want to acknowledge what she might truly mean by her words. Silently, he nodded. "Alright, we'll do it your way."

Some unspoken 'for now' hung in the air briefly, but it was entirely expected and nothing to fight him over.

He took a step back from her and said, "Lorca to senior staff, I expect you in the situation room in twenty-five minutes with preliminary reports of what the fuck just went down on my ship. Lorca out."

Lorca was the last to walk into the situation room. By that point, he had changed out of his armour and back into normal clothes, got his injuries treated and was beginning to feel the hollowness of fatigue. He compensated for it by having the lights up just slightly above terran comfort level, making his damaged eye sting enough to keep him sharp.

Alibali was there next to him, attention down in her PADD and ready to dissect the data and the interpretation as it was delivered. None of the senior staff would be able to sneak little white lies past her, just to make themselves look better. A habit survival under a terran commander dictated, and one they struggled to kick even now.

Lorca looked around them only briefly. He found he didn't particularly care to read the room, it would just have to adapt to him today. He knew their ins and outs well enough by now anyway. Culber, casually relaxed as always, Ferasini motionless and haughty, Zhang with his military precision and Chief Bell with her utter lack thereof. Knew them well enough to suspect none of them for treason, too, and he could easily be wrong about it.

None of them had been given enough time to analyse all the data and put it into any kind of context. None of them had had enough time to fabricate any coherent lies, either.

"Let's begin," Lorca said.

Ferasini took the thread up smoothly, summarising the events from her position on the bridge. Lorca hadn't been aware of all the details. The Draco ships had never been tethered to the stations as their original sensor reading had revealed. They had been cloaked and waiting to ambush the Defiant. Their sensors had been fooled by an energy projection. The Dracos had shot transporter spikes their the Defiant's hull while they were still cloaked and their shields were down. The spikes ensured that shock troop transport could continue even when the shields were raised, but the damage on the hull was comparatively minor.

Leighton rattled off the casualty list, which was thankfully short. Most people had suffered injuries, confining them to sickbay or their quarters for a week or two. Still, the crew was dwindling and there was nothing to replace them with. If this continued, eventually they would be too few to keep the ship functioning.

Lorca put the thought out of his mind, there were more pressing concerns.

"How did they know we were coming?" Lorca asked, looking at no one in particular.

It was Zhang who answered, "I did look at it, but I'll need a little more time to be sure. At this time, it looks like we've been sending messages at regular intervals. The signals were hidden in low-band radio waves that are a side effect of the warp drive. It's not something we're looking for usually, and it's not a very efficient way to communicate. It's… think of it like a trail of messages in a bottle."

"But they knew we were going to Arc," Lorca said. "They expected us."

"I would guess, they expected us in more than one place. When we entered the Arc system, a message was dropped and they knew what to do next."

"Have you traced the origin point?"

Zhang shook his head, "No, I have no idea where it was sent from."

"Can you find out?"

"… yes."

Lorca noted the hesitation but left it uncommented for now.

"Are we still broadcasting?" he asked.

"No, I blanked out the signal."

Lorca stared at him across the table. "Are there others?"

"I don't think so."

Lorca tilted his head at him and watched him without saying anything immediately.

"Make sure," Lorca said gravelly. "Something like today cannot happen again. We are one lonely ship in the entirety of space. We cannot be found by our enemies, they cannot run us down, they cannot hunt us." He shrugged. "Unless, of course, we're broadcasting our current position to the Empire at large. Now, lieutenant, are we broadcasting our current position to the Empire at large?"

Put on the spot like this, Zhang reacted like an imperial officer, with a grating blend of subservience and bravado. "Of course not, sir. I'll make sure of it."

"Finally what I wanted to hear."

Lorca leant back in his seat, silently waiting. He knew none of the others would speak up, except for possibly Culber, who could be sure he hadn't fallen out of favour, and Ferasini just to assert her lack of fear.

Lorca took a slow breath. "Let's address the elephant," he said, letting the seething anger of it bleed into contempt in his voice. "Or is it targ? Let's address the war targ in the room. Scuttlebutt has been busy already. Just before the ambush, Lieutenant Rubau made an attempt at my life. It's obvious her attack and the ambush are connected. It's equally obvious that she was not acting alone. Someone on this ship, almost certainly more than one person, is trying their best to sell us out to the empire and deliver us before our bodies had a chance to get cold. I'm sure I don't have to stress how foolish such a betrayal is. I'm not the man whose corpse can earn anyone an imperial pardon. I checked the database, do you know how many imperial pardons have been granted since the founding? Four. And two of them were retracted later. I wouldn't gamble on those odds. I'm sure none of you would, either."

He looked at each of them to drive the point home. "Still, someone clearly is. I expect all of you to be vigilant to signs of treasons in your subordinates. I also expect and let me be clear, you to keep a level head about it. No pointing fingers without proof, no witch-hunts, no paranoia. We're not going to cannibalise crew cohesion and create more traitors in the process. Am I understood?"

He had circled back around and his gaze had come to rest on Zhang, who nodded sharply and said, "Understood, sir."

He couldn't detect any obvious signs of deceit in any of them, a look at Ferasini told him nothing, her face set in cool professionalism. She suspected someone to be involved, possibly someone in the room, and he had allowed her to refuse to tell him. He would give her a day or two to calm down and revisit the conversation. So soon after a near-disaster, nerves were too close to the surface, for her as well as him.

"Questions?" he asked the room. "Proposals?"

"I request Lieutenant Alibali's aid," Zhang said. "I need to go through our sensor logs with a fine-toothed comb and her expertise would speed things up."

He looked at her over Lorca's shoulder and a smile threatened his expression for a moment.

Lorca nodded, "You get her for a week, I expect results."

The tension in the room bled out to normal levels as the conversations continued. The Defiant would make a short hop to a nearby rogue D-class planet and stay in orbit around the rock. That way, they wouldn't have to worry about leaving warp signatures for anyone to find and could repair in peace.

"Smart idea, commander," Lorca told Ferasini, knowing she would find his praise condescending and irritating. She didn't work particularly well within hierarchies, something she had in common with his Balayna at least. The thought lacked the sting it normally would, but perhaps he was just tired.

Finally, Lorca leaned back in his chair, "Let's get to work. Dismissed."

In the aftermath of the assault, the Defiant and her crew slipped into an odd sense of peace. The ship held itself in a stable orbit around Ferasini's rogue planet, close enough to benefit from the planet's magnetic field hiding any energy signatures. No illicit broadcasts had been attempted, though it was likely the conspirators would keep quiet for the time being.

This evening, Lorca had invited Culber to join him — "Snacks and a glass of andorian wine," he'd said.

When Culber entered the captain's quarter, the lights were set to comfortable and the man himself was busy at the other end of the room, putting up a frame on the wall.

"Thanks for joining me," Lorca said as he stepped back to regard the frame. "Have some isaw, the scorpion sauce is replicated, so don't worry about toxins."

"It's not the toxins I'm worried about," Culber said. "It's the taste."

Scorpion sauce was originally a vulcan recipe, its name derived from an incorrect translation and its aggressively peculiar taste had made it stick across the empire.

"The wine helps neutralise the aftertaste," Lorca said. He nudged the frame with one finger, seemed satisfied and turned to Culber, smiling.

Culber held out his hand, the metallic casings of cigarettes caught the light playfully. "I've brought some cigarettes for later."

Lorca kept smiling and said nothing. He would almost certainly decline the cigarettes, he preferred his drugs to keep him up and on edge, the concept of winding down with them continued to escape him.

Culber picked up an isaw, the intestines were wrapped around the skewer in a spiral pattern, then grilled until it was almost black. He dipped it into the sauce just as Lorca finished filling two glasses.

"I've been doing some thinking," Lorca said between bites. "Maybe Tyler had a point, maybe I was wrong about the crew."

He paused for a moment to watch the wine slosh in his glass. "I need to show them trust if I expect to be trusted. Too many of them seem to think I am the one betraying them."

The scorpion sauce burned down Culber's throat as he looked back at Lorca, waiting for the man to get to the point.

"I don't intend to do that," Lorca said. "But I've not been very open about it."

"In fact," Culber said, a little sharper than he had wanted to. "You've derided and belittled them every chance you got."

Lorca let the slap connect and answered it with a rueful smile. "I know."

Culber considered pushing the point. If Lorca knew then he damn well knew enough to do something about it. But he didn't need to ask, the answer was quite clear: Lorca didn't want to be seen to compromise his values to accommodate the terrans. Instead, he thought he could have his cake and eat it, too. By insisting on either set of values depending on what suited him best at any given moment.

Tyler had wondered if Lorca was going mad, while a laughable idea, Culber understood how it might have come about.

"I don't know what they want from me," Lorca admitted finally, annoyed at his own inability rather than anyone else. "I tried leading them as I would at home and they saw it as a weakness they need to exploit, I tried giving them some terran… harshness and it's just made them respond in kind."

"They are not a hive mind, you know," Culber pointed out. "True, that's the idea behind a starship crew, everyone working like a well-oiled machine and all that poetry. I think, you know, you had to fail. It's a compromise you can't make. I know people here who liked your gentler approach. And there are those who, yeah, think they need to take advantage. And then you've gone and disappointed both types."

Lorca snorted a derisive laugh. "So I'm fucked either way?"

"I don't know how to be a pirate captain," Culber said, chuckling. "You tell me."

Lorca didn't immediately answer, tore some of the grilled intestines from the skewer with his teeth. A tiny drop of scorpion sauce settled at the corner of his mouth. He licked it off.

Later, Lorca didn't refuse the cigarettes. In retrospect, it should have been a warning, but by that point, Culber had mellowed out due to the alcohol and Lorca's rueful friendliness.

"You know what else I've been thinking about?" Lorca asked, one leg stretched out across the couch underneath the window, smoke lazily drifting across his expression.

Culber chuckled to himself. "I'm sure you'll tell me."

"What's your horse in this race?"

"I don't have a horse," Culber said with a grin, although he was sensing the mood had begun to shift.

"You do," Lorca countered. "You're on the ship. The ship goes down, you go with it. Everyone has something to lose here. If I'm looking for a conspiracy that aims to turn me over to the empire for some imagined amnesty, I have to look everywhere. Don't I?"

Culber rocked back from him, honestly startled at the naked implication suddenly levelled at him. "Are you serious?"

"You've been very supportive of me, almost since the beginning. And I don't know why. I don't know what you want out of this."

Lorca paused for a moment, seemed to think and then softened his tone. "I don't think you are part of the conspiracy. If you wanted me dead, I would be ten times over. Yet, here we are."

Culber eyed him through the smoke, momentarily undecided whether he should be offended or not.

"I'm not so complicated," he said eventually. "I have no ambitions, all I want is to end the day in comfort, that's all."

"If that were all, you wouldn't have thrown your lot in with Lorca, would you?"

Culber took a drag off the cigarette, playing for time as his thoughts tried and failed to settle. He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling.

"Alright, full disclosure time," he sighed. "I wasn't recruited by Lorca. I met Paul… Stamets during an off-world conference years before. We just… Some people, you meet them and it's like coming home."

He took another breath and looked back at Lorca. "I would have followed him everywhere. Took that damn commission on Tarsus because Lorca needed someone on the ground there. I took that, and I did that, and Paul just walked right out of my life."

Abruptly, he got to his feet, some aborted flight instinct kicking in and telling him to get away, but he curbed it to walk only as far as the wine bottle. Something to do. The wine was empty.

"There's a second bottle in the cabinet," Lorca said quietly.

Culber sighed again, "I don't want a drink."

He pulled a chair out and sat himself back down. "So there, that's the original sin of how I ended up with Captain Lorca. Tragic, lost love."

He spread his arms out in mocking drama. He shook his head. "I really don't have a horse."

"Would you come home with me?" Lorca asked. "Back to my universe?"

"There's an option?" Culber snorted. Paul was dead now, of course, and the story was old, all dried up of any real emotion. Didn't mean it didn't cause some phantom pain every once in a while.

Lorca said, "Everyone says I'm going to leave the crew behind when I go home. But I don't want to. If this works as planned, we can all go."

Lorca reached for a PADD that had been laying on the couch, glanced over it as if to assure himself. He made to toss it at Culber, thought better of it and got up to hand it to him.

"The old Defiant database was incomplete," Lorca said. "Several attempts have been made to erase it, but I've reconstructed what I could, put it into a coherent context. It should give everyone a decent idea of what life is like where I'm from."

Culber frowned.

Lorca continued, "The question isn't if I would take my crew with me, the question is if they want me to. Life is different there. I have adapted to this place," he smiled ruefully, "Perhaps a little too much. But the other way around, it's a lot harder. They have to know what they are signing up for. I want to make this data available to everyone, but I want you to look over it first."

Culber nodded, "I will, for what it's worth, is a good idea. Sends the right message."

"One more thing," Lorca said. "There's probably a Paul Stamets in my universe. It's not worth looking for him. Nothing good can come from it."

Culber found some elusive humour and another chuckle, "You and Ferasini make that pretty clear."

Lorca looked like he was going to say something to that, something less friendly, but he decided not to. He took a drag off the cigarette as if savouring the taste for the first time.

"Will it even work?" Culber asked into the comfortable silence.

"I don't know," Lorca said. "Dr Sennai is not giving me a straight answer because she doesn't want to tell me 'no'. The 'no' is merely inferred. But I'm not giving up on the concept stage."

"What's next?"

"We need spores," Lorca said, a slow feral grin crawled over his expression. The fight, it seemed, still hadn't left his system entirely. "The only place we're sure they can be found is in the wreck of the Charon."

"A heavily guarded exclusion zone," Culber pointed out.

"Yes, it's going to be fun."

End of Chapter 12

Reference

"Lawrence, only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert: Bedouins and gods, and you're neither. Take it from me, for ordinary men, it's a burning, fiery furnace."

"No, Dryden, it's going to be fun."

"It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun."

— Lawrence of Arabia

Author's Note: I feel bad for not replying to reviews last time. I don't know what's up with my brain sometimes… Regardless, anyone got any good Lorca fics to recommend? I miss him.