Chapter Twelve
Plans of Mice and Men
The yellow and blue clad Security Chief stands over the green jacketed harridan who lies on her back upon the carpet, her disheveled fiery locks hiding much of her face and the Xelayan fights to restrain herself. One kick to the head will drive fractured skull through brain; one moderate stomp to the thoracic cavity will drive shattered ribs through heart, lungs, whatever. Or perhaps it'll be more fun to turn the termagant over, slam her fist through the back of her neck and sever the spinal column, leave the inconvenient firsnak alive but a quadriplegic.
Yes, alive but paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of her life, suitable punishment for her interference.
But no, that pisvaq Finn could probably put her back together. Better a quick but messy death. No one, nothing, can raise the dead.
x
No, she'd better let the others know. The Dastarn will decide, and if he makes the correct decision a sanctioned death is still a death.
She crosses the room to the Security Chief's – her – desk, where under some papers she'd secreted lengths of rope left over from dealing with the other prisoners and shoves the coil into her back pocket. She'd much rather wrap a length of it around this kzatch's neck and pull until either the vrinzk is dead or the rope breaks.
But delightful as this speculation is, she must report. It's past 0040 of course, but what care has she for that? If the man is asleep it'll be that much more satisfying in waking him. She activates the co link sewn into her uniform's black sleeve. "Alara Kitan to Captain Mercer and Commander Grayson."
"Go ahead," the Dastarn's voice responds a moment later. No, he doesn't sound freshly awakened. Too bad.
"I need you in my quarters." She decides it's very good that she had summoned both her partners, recalling last evening when the man had been (somewhat) alone with the blonde First Officer immediately following her capture.
Granted they'd helped with positioning and holding the battered woman, though she'd been an easy conquest, but if their leader ever forgets the distinctive aspects of a Xelayan, she'll be happy to remind him.
xx
It's less than four minutes spent standing over the body with mounting impatience, thinking of the many ways to kill the kanstat who had complicated her duty while she looks for signs of life, longing for the excuse to snuff it out. She would be the preserver of the mission, but knows she won't have the chance. Mercer is going to want her alive for interrogation.
Damn this Bitch!
She grabs the blinking device that had so ruined her plans, aggravated that the idiot pilot had suggested she wear it for their 'date' (what a disgusting idea, dating a weakling human, but she'd had to go along with it), opens it by the hinge under her hair and flings it spinning across the room.
Metal though it is, it is pounded out of true against the bulkhead, flattened on one side upon impact.
How could that stupid hngrat wear such a thing in public and why would her supposed boyfriend put the message about her out there for anyone to read?
Humans are Perverted.
x
Finally, the annunciator sounds and she stalks, stiff with frustration, to the locked door, stabs the button on the panel beside it. She'd snatched a database as she'd started over, though she doesn't trust this Union device any more than she trusts her 'fearless leader'.
It is, after all, only the idiocy of P.U. hierarchy that inflicted him on them.
She'd left the body where it lies supine upon the deck, so the door is barely closed behind them when Mercer sees the green jacketed woman face up on the deck between wall and couch, though her red hair obscures her features, and demands "What is this zarg?"
"She almost figured it out."
x
Mercer stalks to the body, flings her long red hair from her face. "Who is this?"
"I think she's the Schoolteacher." The Open Book emblem on the bitch's embroidered green and white circular Division patch had been an obvious clue that the idiot Dastarn should have picked up. The hint is as obvious as a smack on the face and she'd enjoy that.
"The Schoolteacher's a man."
"Then I don't know."
Outrage mingled with incredulity make him straighten and turn. "You don't Know?"
"She's not in our records," Kitan insists, displaying the datapad.
Mercer steps up to her, halts when he towers over her from inches away. "Find out."
"I say we should kill her, put her with the others."
"A Union Lieutenant," such being obvious to anyone, therefore to a grelznik like him, "and you would kill her without having any idea who she is, what she does or who'll miss her when!" Mercer raises his open right hand above his left shoulder.
"Try it and I'll start with that hand and crush every bone in your body."
Seething, face already red and surging to purple, Mercer lowers his hand. "This Operation was planned to the minute." He points to the device in her hand, his finger trembling in his rage. "We were given every detail there is on the Orville and her crew. How can we have an Unknown?" He shifts glares from Kitan to Grayson and back again. "FIND HER!"
xx
It's Grayson who pulls up the record from the desk computer. "Yesterday the ship picked up four new crewmen; Engineer, Botanist, Astrophysicist and Chaplain."
"Chaplain? What the miz is a 'chaplain'?"
Grayson shrugs. Kitan points to the unconscious woman at their feet. The other disciplines use colored round patches on their uniforms that the trio know, this one wears the green embroidered outline of an open book. "Her?"
"Doesn't matter," Mercer decides. "We have four, three now, Unknowns out there and nothing we can do. The Engineer could be a problem and we know nothing about any of them, and couldn't do anything if we did. We're down for the Captain, First Officer and Security Chief; that should've been enough."
"Thank you, 'Captain'," Kitan gripes, "for that insightful glimpse into the bloody obvious."
"If I could replace you…."
Kitan barks a laugh. "Yeah you would, but you've got only one Xelayan and believe me, I'd be missed at Grand Base before either of you."
xxx
The trio had transported their doppelgangers during the previous Gamma shift to a Hold in the lower-most section of the ship, but this is now entering the second hour of the next Gamma and it's correspondingly more crowded as a third of the crew winds down from duty while a smaller number is at their places.
Kitan carries their green jacketed prisoner along the corridors to the nearest elevator while Mercer and Grayson precede and follow the quickly walking Security Chief, and if anyone had seen them then they were taking an injured Crew-woman to Sick Bay.
This story might have lost all veracity when, in going closely around a corner, the Xelayan takes the turn too closely and the woman's head collides with the bulkhead with a thump that is heard for meters.
x
Grayson, following them, had winced at the impact. "Be careful," she whispers, her words biting.
"Why?" Kitan shoots back at normal volume. "We're killing them all in seven hours and the universe will be a better place with them gone."
"Well right now we can't risk blowing our cover," Grayson cuts back with still lowered voice. "We're not ready to fight a whole shipload."
"You're not ready. Bring them on, singly or in a mob."
"Well, I don't want to draw attention, and disposing of random crewmen and -women is the best way to do that."
"Enough! Both of you Shut Up."
But they reach the elevator unobserved and unhindered. The car speakers drop down upon their heads a male rendition of something that gives greater emphasis to the words 'Oh, Holy Night' and something about the perception of stars, but this is a meaningless conjunction of verbal and orchestral notes.
xx
In Cargo Bay 2, packed with seven hundred large plastic crates which fill all but the forward ten feet and then from wall to wall, Ed Mercer, Kelly Grayson and Alara Kitan lie upon the deck.
Ed has managed to work his body to where he can sit up with his back to the crates so that he may face the wide doors.
To his right and two meters away Kelly lies naked and his first sight of her hours before had filled him with apocalyptic rage. The bruises and swelling that darken her face, the blood from her mouth and nose lining her face in multiple directions, had lit the inferno that has not diminished.
Unfortunately, little can be done, for they are bound by tight ropes, their ankles trussed and their arms tied behind them, bent so their hands are secured to their elbows and twisted upward holding those joints.
Alara, somewhat to his left, is bound in the same manner but not with ropes. Chains bind her with links of two inch thick duranium. The chain is designed for towing heavy machinery across a planet's surface and from the woman's determined though ineffectual struggles it's quite capable of overcoming even an enraged Xelayan's tremendous strength.
She'd worked so hard and long, quite evidently hurting herself in the process, that he'd finally instructed the woman to stop and to conserve her strength. But only her failure had made her comply, and that with little grace and a determination to come to grips with that other Xelayan in a rematch of cataclysmic proportions.
Unfortunately, in the hours which feel like much of a full day since they'd awoken to captivity and the sharing of little enough information, they'd been left alone and uninformed.
Now the large storage bay doors slide apart.
x
It is a difficult thing indeed to watch yourself enter the Cargo Bay, uniformed in proper attire, with absolutely nothing else as it should be. The captive man and women watch their mirror images, the invaders, with what private thoughts must remain secret, and yet they have an additional concern, for the fake Alara carries in her arms a green and black uniformed woman who lies slumped and still. Alive?
No one questions who their fellow prisoner is, for though there are many women in Sciences, only one sports such a conflagration of hair.
Not-Alara steps into the vacant area in the middle of the captive officers, lifts the woman and drops her on the deck with a wince-inducing bang.
x
"It's about time you three showed up." Despite his sympathy for the woman who had probably gotten deep into the unimaginable, Ed has to focus on the moment. They might not have many of them. "Now what do you want?" he demands as Alara's twin pulls lengths of rope from her rear pocket. He'd watched as she'd entered and if he'd ever needed confirmation that the woman is another Xelayan – he hadn't needed any since hearing the details of Alara's capture – his doubts had long ago bern removed. She'd handled the unconscious – thank God not dead – woman with all the effort needed to hold a length of rags.
But the Captain's outrage at this situation is nothing compared to that of the naked, bruised and bloody woman laying upon the deck, and his twin turns a too-explicit look at the bound blonde.
"You bastard," is unsatisfying but Kelly's words carry far more venom.
"…when I get out of these," Kelly swears when her first deluge of vitriol winds down, the blood and darkened bruises forming a mask of vengeance, "I'll make certain you'll never be able to do this to another woman."
The man looks at the blonde woman who'd entered with him, a chilling copy of the ship's real First Officer. Both women watch the unhidden thoughts in the man's face and Kelly has confirmation of her belief that she had been a brutalized substitute. "I see now. You can't touch her," she finishes with a mocking sneer, driving home the thought of impotence.
"But I touched you." He bends over her, close enough to touch. "And you're never getting out of those ropes, gonna die in them. Though I could indulge us both before this mission is over."
x
This is getting no one anywhere, and outraged though Ed is there is more to do than to plot revenge. He hopes that he can take part in said vengeance but now he needs to know "What mission?"
Mercer looks to his bound twin. "Oh, I'm not the villain of the ancient AV shows who reveals his dastardly plans to the helpless non-hero."
"Why not?" Grayson asks as she comes down on the balls of her feet beside her nude and brutalized doppelganger. "Could be fun when they realize how helpless they are."
She laughs, looking down and up the length of Kelly's body. "You know, I can see what they both see in you. Sorry, though, to leave you down on the cold deck." She flicks a fingernail on Kelly's right nipple, erect in the chill.
"What plan?" Kelly demands through gritted teeth. That pain had been sharp.
"At a little after eight all those Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers and what-have-you are going to get a 'Christmas Eve' surprise they're really going to hate." She's heard about this 'Christmas' thing from too many of the crew to give a kritchju what it is, just that it's the last thing those idiots will ever celebrate. "They're aboard Luna Base 4 and this morning we're gonna hit it so fast the impact and explosion could split the planetoid in two.
"Full speed. Splat. The irresistible force and the immovable object question will be answered for all time. You just won't see it."
"And when the dust clears," Kitan says, straightening to her feet from binding the green uniformed woman as the others are tied, forearms horizontal behind back and hands to elbows, ankles tied so tightly they would make her lose her feet if she were going to live long enough, but they're over an hour into Gamma shift, "and they discover that the Krill have taken hundreds of worlds' leaders out and reduced your Union to temporary chaos, at least half your worlds will fall within a month."
"Wait," Ed demands, glaring upward and studying the face he normally sees in his mirror, "you're Krill?"
Mercer rams his foot into Ed's stomach, though the bound man grits his teeth to silence the pain. "How'd they put someone so Stupid in command of a Starship? No, we are not animals, but the evidence your people will find will send you off on a false fight while we dismantle you piece by piece until we're finally ready to smash you."
Ed hadn't cared about playing ignorant, even stupid if it would keep their captors talking, but he senses their time may well be running out. His twin had said 'no information' but he appears to have little effective control over his subordinates. This can be good on many levels.
"Such a pity," Kitan sneers, "you and your people will be the first to die and will not see the glory."
"Nor will you, not with this Kamikaze plan."
"Don't be naive," the red uniformed woman taunts, but before she can say more –
"Enough of this," Mercer bites. "We've been out of sight for too long." He herds the women out, saying before the door closes "I'd tell you to enjoy the fireworks, but you won't."
The doors slide shut.
x
"Well, I'd like to have known how they plan to get off," Ed says.
"Maybe she knows something," Alara says, glancing at the still unconscious woman between them.
xx
Outside the Hold, Mercer must snap at the women twice before they turn, before they give him any attention.
"Filter through the ship, make sure no one has any suspicions. You," he looks to Grayson, "come with me."
"It's the middle of the night. Only 19% of the crew is on 'Night Watch', and they don't have a wrintiz clue what's happening," Grayson snaps back. "We have been up and working for a Solar day, and if we're going to be alert and sharp come Alpha Shift, we should be in bed like our counterparts would be."
"The more we do anything they wouldn't do," Kitan bites, "the more we risk alerting someone's attention."
Dastarn Mercer steps so close to the petite Xelayan's face that she must lean back to focus. "ASSESS THE SITUATION AND REPORT."
"Aayyee, aayyee," comes slowly from her mouth, but her eyes, her whole body carries her thoughts. "Sss i r."
They walk away from the man. Though Grayson had been told to accompany Mercer this is of greater importance. She keeps her voice quiet. "We can't be seen to oppose each other. It will blow our cover."
"The man's –"
"Your Dastarn, if you want to live."
"Grayson!" explodes from up the corridor.