AN: Warning - POV whiplash ahead
Harriet moved quickly and efficiently toward the drill operations center. And by efficiently, she meant doors were optional and lifts were unnecessary. That's not to say she was walking through walls but, well, if she just so happened to create a few holes here and there on her way to her objective, who was there to complain?
As it happened, quite a few were there to complain – for a time at least. The Romulans on board the ship didn't always seem to notice her. Those who did however, always had the same reaction: a moment of fear in which they paused to process what they were seeing.
She suspected that the mantle of Death that had settled around her shoulders the moment she had rematerialized (bah!) on the Narada had something to do with it. But who was she to complain? It allowed her to react swiftly, wordlessly knocking the crew unconscious as she went about slipping in and out of the dimly lit corridors.
'And another one bites the dust.'
Was that somewhat callous? Why, yes, yes it was. However, in her current state – mind completely set on obtaining her objective – she was beset with a sort of martial clarity, unhindered by questions of morality or humanity.
Which explained the cool efficiency with which she was currently handling the personnel she was clinically picking off from a hole in the operations center ceiling.
Her original plan had been to two finger tap her way through initiating the drill shut off. However, given the sheer size of the cavernous room, and the MASSIVE drill in the center of it, she didn't know where to even begin intuiting where the emergency shut off button could be.
'Ok. New plan: find the red matter, cause as much destruction as possible after it's secure. Point me red matter.'
Her wand, rising to hover just above her right hand, spun immediately left and ever so slightly down.
'Accio container holding red matter.'
Because, clearly, it would be held in some form of container right?
Spock waited until he was relatively certain Kirk was clear of both the hangar and the surrounding corridors. It would not due for him to blast his way clear of the hangar only for the intrusion of the external environment to set off containment safety measures that would trap Kirk within an unknown radius of the hangar. No, the few minutes time he would likely need to clear the vicinity was best used to continue to familiarize himself with the vessel.
He spared a moment to properly appreciate the undertaking he was about to commence.
Then, after approximately two point three minutes, he let loose the ship's weapons, opening an exit just as effectively as any hangar command – with considerably more noise and accompanying destruction. As large sections of the hangar doors flew outward, the now fully activated Vulcan craft zipped through the opening that emerged.
Growing more and more familiar with the ship's instrumentation with every passing moment, he swooped in and out among the Narada's superstructure, firing at close range at all targets that presented themselves and some that did not. His intentions were simple: disable the Romulan vessel as much as possible from within the protective diameter of her defensive shields.
With its crew occupied and reeling from the destruction, he then left the Romulan ship behind and drove the remarkably responsive one-man starship toward Earth. Without breaching her atmosphere, he quickly observed Harriet's work, confirming that the drill was indeed in the process of being deactivated given the manner in which it was shuddering.
He saw no reason not to help her with the task.
Thus, with a carefully directed single burst from the craft's compact but powerful weapons, he roughly sliced through the complex tangle of cables supporting and powering the plasma drill. The few lines that remained when he was done, snapped and the drill platform plunged downward toward the planet's surface.
Task accomplished, Spock switched objectives once more and headed out system.
The Narada, he was pleased to note, followed.
Kirk worked his way through the vast and largely deserted reaches of the Romulan ship. Occasionally, he would pause to check the information that had been downloaded to his tricorder but otherwise kept a steady pace. Once he had to back up and retrace his steps, another time he took a wrong turn and was forced to correct his course. Still, he didn't run into any of the crew, which honestly put him on edge.
Nonetheless, he eventually confronted a closed doorway with the specific and unpleasant markings in Romulan that he sought. It granted his request for entry without hesitation, amplifying his hyper awareness.
The room he entered cautiously was dark and damp even for a Romulan interrogation chamber. All the same, he was able to quickly spot the captain laying fastened to a slightly tilted platform, still silent and unmoving.
When he reached the platform, he placed his hand in front of Pike's nose and just barely detected a breath. That single sensation of air softly hitting his hand was enough to uplift his spirits and reenergize his efforts.
He quickly began to study the restraints. In the end, he decided there was nothing elaborate about the straps. As traditional and straight forward as they were effective, they yielded rapidly to his determined hands and a bit of applied strength.
As he worked, he quietly hoped Pike would come to and somehow assist him. Yet, the captain merely continued to stare upward, in no way acknowledging his efforts or silent pleas. His own movements became increasingly frantic and his hyper awareness of his surroundings slowly began to ebb in favor of heretofore unfelt, and growing, panic.
"Come on sir!" He whispered intensely, nearly overcome. "I came back. Just like you ordered."
The captain didn't so much as blink.
Spock was concentrating on preparing to enter warp when the computer announced an incoming hail. After a moment of consideration, he sat back, opened the channel, and looked directly into the ship's pickup. Nero's face quickly took up the screen.
"Spock, it is you. I should have killed you when I had the chance."
He imagined that a human would have reacted differently, perhaps with a counter threat, maybe with a word-string full of hatred and accusation and foul language. But he was also Vulcan, and as such, saw no logical reason why being direct could not be its own form of both revenge and provocation.
"Under authority granted me by the Europa Convention of Sentient Species, I hereby confiscate this illegally obtained ship and order you to surrender your vessel. No terms. No discussion. No deals."
"You can't cheat me again, Spock," Nero, to use a Harriet expression, snarled. "I know you better than you know yourself. I know what has to happen, what is preordained by the time stream, and you can't stop it!"
Spock knew this to be highly unlikely, especially given the holes he knew existed in Nero's knowledge of time travel and this time line in particular.
So, Spock chose to merely continue to gaze unflinchingly at Nero. He could not find it in himself or the situation to ignore a single fact: it was time to maneuver to end this – the game had gone on long enough.
"Last warning: unconditional surrender or you will be destroyed."
Nero seethed. Fury had long since overcome reason within his mind. From the moment he had seen the Vulcan's face on the screen, ensuring the Vulcan's death had become paramount.
He turned toward tactical. "Fire at will."
His new second-in-command was reluctant. "Sir, if a direct hit should occur, either phaser energy or photon torpedoes contain enough explosive force to momentarily duplicate the heat and pressure present in the core of a planet. A strike could cause a portion of the red matter to implode and ignite, thereby – "
"Don't talk back to me! This isn't a time for arcane scientific speculations – I want Spock dead!"
"He went into warp sir!"
"Go after him!"
"Yes, sir!"
Pike stared up quietly into the eyes of Death, all of his senses locked in an ongoing battle to understand what he was experiencing. Or had been experiencing. Was he truly experiencing anything at this point? Was he even still awake? Or had he passed out from the torture?
Should he be concerned?
He should be concerned. Wasn't he supposed to be fighting something?
Was not Dylan correct, when he said one should burn and rave at close of day?
But he didn't feel as if he had anything left to rage over. He was also wise enough to know the dark wished him no harm, had watched as it did nothing but offer him solace as his senses were overwhelmed and then shattered.
Though he thought himself a good man – at times wild, at times grave, on days older than his years – his eyes were neither blind nor blinded by sight. For all that had been done to him, his vision was clear, his soul … his soul was perhaps haunted but not tortured.
All, he was certain, because of the being that was staring down at him, now offering a skeletal hand out from the mass of darkness for him to take.
After all of this, would he go gentle into the night?
Even as the slightest sensation of his body being maneuvered filtered through, he knew the answer … and attempted to reach his tired hand out in gratitude.
As more straps were released, Kirk fought off his relief as his captain fought to move his arm. That relief quickly died when he realized it was only the one arm and that his eyes where still fixated on a single point above them.
"I'm not leaving here without you sir," he whispered, pulling at the last strap.
With his back to the entrance as it was, he didn't see the heavily armed guards that entered the room, so much as hear them. He had enough time to draw his sidearm before one of them triggered their weapons, then pain blossomed in his shoulder as he fell backward onto the captain.
There was a part of Spock that quietly acknowledged, with some small bit of pride, that he was handling both himself and the vessel exceptionally well. It was far more advanced than any vessel he had ever served upon, seen, or studied, and therefore executed evasive maneuvers remarkably well.
He was proving quite hard to hit.
Still, the slightly more frantic side of him quite knew the probability of his winning this engagement. It was simple calculus: the number of weapons the much larger Romulan ship could bring to bear could not be avoided forever.
The torpedo that had just managed to rip into the hull of his vessel was proof of this fact.
"Warning," the ship announced in deceptively calm tones, "all shields off-line."
This was the end then.
But it would not be the end just for him.
He took a deep breath.
Logic and reason reasserted their control over his mind, and he allowed himself to forget everything but a single lesson that every Vulcan learned when they were young: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
"Computer, prepare to execute General Order Thirteen."
"General Order Thirteen," it repeated. "Self-destruct sequence confirmed."
He redirected the ship's course toward the pursuing Narada.
"Execute," he finished.
The hesitation in his voice was perfectly natural.
The red matter had, thank Circe, indeed been inside a container – of sorts. Did what amounted to a high tech hamster ball count as a qualified containment system? It certainly wasn't her idea of secured containment vessel…
At the very least, it was small, which allowed her to securely tuck it under one arm when she dropped from the hole in the operations room ceiling and went about unleashing chaos.
Controlled chaos, of course!
But with her magic whipping about her, there was really no better word for the destruction and confusion that was unleashed. She saw no need for finesse or true caution. Her war shields were honed over ages, her battle senses forged under the finest teacher – excessive experience. So long as she kept the red matter in its little pocket of peace within her shields, she was safe.
The electronics however? Not so safe. Really, true, wild magic just did not mesh well with electronics, no matter how advanced they claimed to be. So she simply allowed her magic to unfurl to its heart's content, and focused more so on the crew running at her.
The traces of flying hexes and curses, many she had developed herself over the years, mixed freely with sparks shot from control panels and the electrical fire that had started to her right, creating the appearance of a war zone.
Chaos truly erupted when the drill caught fire, seemingly from below. She wasn't even sure how that happened but did it truly matter? The whole point was to dismantle the thing.
'Right. Time to get a bit closer to it then. Maybe a few direct shots and we'll be done here.'
Then one of the frantic, desperate crew must have activated a failsafe as the drill she was far too close to was suddenly, and violently, ejected, cables and moorings included. Harriet's eyes blew wide in true, unbidden surprise as she was caught in the resultant vacuum and the wind knocked out of her.
She subconsciously darted a hand out to catch hold of a barely intact rail in the split second she was sailing past. Franticly, she began silently willing her magic to stick and not let the hell go. As her range of vision began to contract, she began to register the lack of oxygen in her lungs – a point that was probably in her favor if the growing pressure on her lungs was any indication.
She couldn't breathe.
She didn't hear or see so much as feel the rail twist under the pressure and pull of open space.
She couldn't breathe. And her vision was beginning to narrow into a point.
Or was that just the Narada getting farther away against a back drop of black?
Her magic was flailing, trying, and failing, to do something.
And she couldn't breathe. Was this finally the end?
The last thing she registered as she fought to maintain consciousness was a raspy whisper utter a resounding:
"NO."
It was possible there was someone on board the Enterprise who was not fully engaged in some critical task or another, but they were more than likely amongst the wounded in sickbay. Every other member of the crew was on station, their entire being devoted to a particular task at hand. Tactical was pouring as much debilitating fire into the Romulan ship as possible. The helm controllers were executing a ferocious combination of evasive and assaulting actions.
And the technicians in the transporter room were sweating profusely as a very focused Montgomery Scott was directing three equally perilous and life-threatening actions at the same time.
A figure began to materialize on one of the transporter pads. As it started to flicker dangerously, Scotty's attention darted from platform to instrumentation to those assisting him.
"Hold it, hold it," he muttered tensely. "Full power – NOW!"
Just as the first shape began to solidify, two more started to appear beside it on the next transporter pad.
Fingers raced over controls as telltales on the main console flashed in warning. Then, the second pair of silhouettes began to steady and everyone turned their eyes to the third transporter pad, waiting for the fourth and final figure to take shape – only for a technician to begin franticly calling out:
"I'VE LOST HER! I can't lock on!"
Prompt: Epic Rap Battles of History: Game of Thrones: "My readers fall in love with every character I've written! Then I kill 'em! (Aaaah!) And they're like, "No, he didn't!"
