Augment Gothic
Part 15
Starfleet Security Headquarters. Earth.
My last night of vacation with T'Maz had been interrupted by a call from Starfleet Security. Upon arriving at the Security headquarters I was informed by the officer in charge that Kira had been arrested on charges of Assault, Battery, Disturbing The Peace, Leading a Violent Protest, Assaulting a Diplomatic Party, as well as some other minor crimes that didn't really matter as they were only worth giving a verbal warning over and would have normally been handled by the local police. The more serious crimes were being handled by Starfleet because there was so little non-trivial crime on Earth, and because Kira wasn't a Federation citizen, nor a permanent resident of Earth. Starfleet was also dealing with this because it had happened right outside Federation Headquarters.
I should have really known that I couldn't leave Kira to her own devices without a handler for long, and while this wasn't at all my fault, never the less I was going to go bail her out, rather than leave her in lockup overnight, but only because I'd already given T'Maz a proper goodbye before heading to Paris. This was a good thing because I will probably need her to pull some strings with Section 31 to help smooth things over.
I'd not actually left my apartment in San Francisco until a few hours after I'd gotten the call. After a nice refreshing shower I'd arrived at the detention center to bail out Kira. A little extra time to stew would probably due the woman some good, time to reflect on her sins and all that. Hopefully I'd then be able to immediately take her off the planet and head back to Bajor. Once there she could commit all the crimes she wanted, blow up factories and kill Cardassians to her heart's content, oh, and be just plain rude to people all she liked. Good lord my life was strange!
Sadly, of course, things didn't go as smoothly as I'd wanted, as there was actual video evidence of Kira starting a fight with a Cardassian diplomatic party that took offense to the Bajoran protest. The video showed that they had suffered the worst of the injuries, but the real issue was that the Cardassians had had weapons in their possession that weren't cleared by Starfleet Security for the protection of their ambassador. Actual military grade heavy weapons. Wow, I had to laugh at that, the Cardassians were always so cliché.
So what should have been a simple case of making bail and calling in a few favors to get the charges dropped was compounded by the fact that they currently had the ENTIRE Cardassian diplomatic party in lock up. Considering the Federation/Cardassian treaty negotiations were still ongoing and the issue of their diplomatic immunity making it unclear if they could even be held, it was a giant fuck up with a lot of high level attention on the whole thing. So I really had my hands full with this one.
As for Kira, she was sharing a cell with Ro Laren, of all people, a Bajoran woman who appeared in a handful of episodes in the later seasons of TNG, and they were getting along like a house on fire.
When I got a chance to actually read through the police statements both of the Bajorans had made, I discovered that Ro Laren had only been a spectator at the protest, she hadn't even joined in, at least not at first, because her experience at Starfleet Academy had taught her just how little the rally would help the Bajorian cause. It was possible she might have realized that it could even actually end up hurting them, if, inexplicably, it proved successful. Her head had been filled with all that Prime Directive rubbish, but a wider perspective, read more cynical, on galactic politics was helping her.
Kira had been taking a little break from pointless yelling and sign waving at the protest, when she had run into Ro Laren, and had ended up giving the former Starfleet officer a good talking to about not joining the protest rally in earnest. I gathered that a grand argument had then broken out between the two women just as the Cardassians had shown up, insults were exchanged, tempers boiled over, and the rest is history, or in this case a well filled out police report. Unlike in my time when writing reports was the bane of a police officer's existence, I actually got the impression the officers had been having a grand old time reporting on an honest to goodness substantial crime. Again, Earth really had very little crime going on.
The good news about bailing someone out of jail in this time is that it cost nothing; on the other hand the amount of datapads I was forced to fill out in order to have Kira released into my care made me wish for a corrupt officer or two that I could quickly bribe with a few strips of latinum. Especially when I found out I had to fill out the forms a second time to get Ro Laren released into my custody.
And the only reason I'd even gotten this far was because I'd called in a favor from Starfleet Intelligence. They'd paid me in credits for helping out their agents, however there was that whole saving the whole of humanity thing, and when compared to that, letting me take a couple of Bajoran troublemakers off planet wasn't that big a deal. Thankfully, even in this hippie paradise called Earth and the Federation, SI still understood how the game of favors was played and this minor help they provided was understood to be nowhere near close enough to balance the scales. Saving the lives of tens of billions of humans throughout the galaxy and then keeping quiet about it was worth a hell of a lot more than that.
With SI's endorsement Starfleet Security was willing to let them go as long as they didn't come back to Earth any time soon. I certainly understood that, this little fiasco needed to be mostly forgotten about before they could come back, otherwise people might start to wonder why they had been released with no punishment for that sort of behavior. This would encourage other trouble makers, lead to people losing faith in the justice system, or start up some good old fashioned conspiracy theories, and that was just on Earth, the Cardassians would likely be pissed.
"Okay ladies," I said, while stepping over to the force field covered cell. "I've arranged things so that the charges will be dropped as long I take you both off Earth and you don't come back any time soon. This cost me a favor from people who I really liked having in my debt so I hope you're very grateful". They didn't really need to know that it was still far from being paid back in full.
The two Bajoran women didn't seem at all concerned about being behind a force field. I suppose Federation prison accommodations were a hell of a lot better than what they'd come to expect from the Cardassians.
"Oh, I'm sure we can find a way to express our thanks," Kira said, with a lustful look in her eyes.
While the rebel warrior was fine with having sex with me pretty much whenever I wanted, she rarely gave looks like that. She was quite practical about our sex life. I also didn't fail to notice her use of the word 'we' rather than 'I'.
"Maybe we should get out of here first," suggested Ro Laren. "Can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm eager to get back to Bajor".
I raised an eyebrow in a very Vulcan way.
"Well, I did promise Starfleet to take you both off Earth," I said. "Although I didn't say anything about taking anyone other than Kira to Bajor".
It was pretty clear that there was a distinct threesome possibility here, and that was great (I had gotten pretty spoiled on my trip back to Earth with regard to group sex), it was just that I didn't really know Ro Laren outside of her character's handful of appearances on TNG. What I could remember about her didn't exactly sell me on the idea of letting her on my ship, but on the other hand, she was still smoking hot with a very tight body and an academy graduate to boot. I also distinctly remembered her in that slinky get up she wore in the episode she banged Riker. My track record in banging hot female characters from the shows was cooking along nicely!
"Fine, you can come along," I decided, after thinking it over some more. "Just behave yourself".
To my surprise Ro Laren actually stood up and saluted in response, and not even in a mock fashion, she was serious, this being something that even active Starfleet officers didn't do. At least not to me anyway. My newly awakened dominant streak was rather tickled.
"Yes, Captain," Ro Laren responded. "I look forward to serving under you".
I was very amused by this, as was Kira apparently, the way Ro had spoken those words gave me lovely mental images of her being both under me and serving me, just not as a crewmember normally would. Seems like someone had a submissive streak in her, like Kira did more often lately.
(Line Break)
The Flighty Temptress. On Route to Bajor.
A few things had changed for my ship since visiting Earth, and letting the Starfleet engineers tinker with my only real female love, that being my ship. Though the various ladies in my life were quickly becoming a close second!
The big visible change on the outside was what the Starfleet engineers had done to the warp nacelles.
A nacelle was an outboard engine housing structure on a spacecraft. The nacelles in warp-capable shuttles and starships, which my ship was sort of in between in terms of overall size, housed the warp coils of the vessel's warp drive.
The warp coils in the warp nacelles created a subspace displacement field, which "warped" the space around the vessel allowing it to "ride" on an artificial spatial distortion, and travel faster than the speed of light.
While not always present on starships, warp nacelles were the most common component of warp flight, dating as far back as Zefram Cochrane's original warp ship, the Phoenix, launched in 2063. Which anyone who had seen Star Trek: First Contact would know about.
Aboard most warp-capable vessels, warp coils were fed by large plasma conduits from the warp core reactor assembly. Venting the plasma from the nacelles made warp drive impossible until the nacelles could be replenished. So it was not something you did unless you really had to, like in the case of an imminent overload and the ship was about to explode.
On Starfleet ship the nacelles were typically separated from the ship by large pylons, and usually housed a Bussard collector at the fore end, primarily used for collecting interstellar particles from space for fuel replenishment. My nacelles did that as well.
Most vessels typically had two nacelles, as did mine. That was because most vessels like that could operate with one nacelle completely disabled, albeit at reduced warp speeds. Given the randomness of space, interstellar anomalies and combat with hostile species, even reduced warp speed was better than no warp speed, lest you be stranded in deep space literally hundreds of years away at sublight speeds from the next starbase or planet. It was not unprecedented, though, for vessels to have have different nacelle configurations for whatever reason. For example, the Federation's Freedom-class, Saladin-class, Hermes-class, and the Kelvin-type starships had only one nacelle.
Even at sublight speeds serious impacts with the nacelles from weapons or other objects could spell disaster for a starship because of the potential feedback of energy throughout the vessel. Even the mighty Enterprise-D, for example, was completely destroyed by such an impact in an alternate timeline when the USS Bozeman collided with one of Enterprise's warp nacelles.
While all that was pretty important for a starship captain to know, what mattered right now was that not only could the nacelles be moved and tucked under my ship during a battle, for better protection of a pretty vital and vulnerable system, they could actually be positioned further away from the hull allowing for a larger and more complex warp field. The ability to move the nacelles like this was the only reason my little ship's potential top speed could be as high as the simulations said. After the Starfleet engineers worked their magic my ship's top speed went from warp 5 to warp 7, a very big jump in warp speeds, and a very respectable top speed for a smallish ship, which really cut down on travel time. A trip of several weeks before at warp 5 would now only take mere days at warp 7.
The engineers had also been able to make a few other improvements while they were in the guts of the ship and virtually the entire power system was in pieces. They'd left the weapons alone, instead focusing on strengthening the shields and adding additional processing power and memory to the computers. They'd even put in more comfortable seats, which I was looking forward to christening with Kira, and at my request some great harness style seat belts were added! No way was I going to be tossed around during a space battle and hit my head on something. That happened in every Star Trek show and movie ever made, yet they never seemed to do anything about it!
There was now even a place to hang a pair of fuzzy dice. Only in this case the rear view mirror was hanging from the cockpit's "windshield" and it didn't exactly allow me to see what was behind my ship, or to keep an eye on some kids, though it did let me see who was behind me at any given time in the cockpit. Mine was mostly decorative, and I had added it myself.
If they'd taken money I would have tipped the Starfleet guys for the really great job they had done; the ship even freaking smelt better than it had before! As it was I'd only been able to offer them my heartfelt thanks for their hard work and commending their amazing work to their supervisors.
Not that I'd needed to, as I was told by the engineering team. The team that had performed the upgrades had gushed about how much fun they'd had working on my vessel. Apparently they'd never had the opportunity to work on a ship that was so damn easy to upgrade. They were certain that whoever had designed the Temptress (and whoever they were was a freaking genius and they wanted to buy them drinks and pick their brain), had obviously done it expressly, from the ground up, with the idea of it being later upgraded and personalized to an insane degree. They emphasized that these possible upgrades weren't just in the ship's technology, but that the ship's hull was modular and in theory even the size of the ship itself could be added on to. They were blown away by this and said they'd only seen something like that on generational ships, ships meant to go on centuries long journeys, were adaptability was the key to survival.
While I didn't realize my ship had been designed to be so adaptable, I had certainly made my share of improvements over time and realized just how easy it was for totally new tech to be added on and actually work right out of the gate. My ship now even had a replicator and a one person transporter. It was a damn shame, though, that I couldn't just buy a cloaking device. Well, perhaps I could, but I lacked the contacts needed for such a deal. Perhaps in the future that would change.
My ship was also now much better stocked both for longer journeys and for my various combat missions on Bajor. While in space dock I'd made arrangements to acquire a new medkit, with stocks of the common medicines for hyposprays, emergency rations, plenty of tricorders, transport pattern enhancers, and an inbuilt transport scrambler from 31 with an independent power supply, which would prevent most anyone from successfully beaming onto my ship even when the shields were down, in fact even if my ship completely lost main power. Enemies beaming in when the shields were down was, again, another super common problem in the shows. A safety feature had also been installed to prevent my own transporter from being used while the scrambler was still on.
Another change on the inside was that I now had a crew of sorts. Kira had learned very fast and could help fly the ship in a pinch, at least when at impulse, but Ro, who was a graduate of Starfleet Academy with some experience under her belt, was able to do a heck of a lot more. She understood the weapon systems and how best to use them, how to raise and lower the shields, how to read and use the sensor output, how to set a course for warp, she even knew how to use the comm system and the scanners! I'd not even known how good my communication system apparently was. She couldn't, though, use the neural interface to pilot the ship like I did. We had tried but it had overwhelmed her and had actually knocked her unconscious within a minute. She was apparently fine, as she had woken up and vomited a few minutes later, but the sensory input had been overwhelming she said. I guess my neural interface was different than the kind the Dominion used.
What made this even better was that Ro and Kira apparently got along really, really well. There was some friction with the single bed and bathroom issue, of course, but they were both seemingly happy to have sex with me whenever and wherever I wanted. It was still somewhat bizarre to me, but Bajoran females just seemed to enjoy sex more than human women and my augment stamina and strength was a huge turn on for them. Also Ro had a lovely habit of 'forgetting' to get dressed, which was pretty nice all in all. In fact right now she was sitting naked in the cockpit, while looking over the scanners. I knew from experience that she could do this pretty competently even while I was balls deep in her. Meanwhile Kira sat on my lap, apparently getting in the spirit of this clothing optional thing that Ro had started and had stripped down to her bra and her very small, nearly transparent panties, something that made me glad the auto-pilot was on because she was pretty distracting wiggling in my lap with her back firmly to my chest and nibbling on my ear.
"Why do you have a whip?" Kira asked, as she finally noticed what I had been working on before she'd entered the cockpit. "Still mad at me for getting arrested?" She asked coyly.
While it had cost me a favor to get her and Ro set free, kind of, again I didn't imagine that anyone at Starfleet Intelligence would truly think it equaled saving the entire human race, so I wasn't that bothered.
"It's something I've been tinkering with," I explained. "It's based on a Ferengi energy whip."
The energy whip was a hand-held weapon used by the Ferengi. When lashed, it fired a pulse of energy that could stun the target, or kill. Apparently the energy could be sent like a projectile or be conducted through the whip itself when it physically hit a target. Using the whip physically could again be used to stun or kill. I was intrigued by its potential applications for torture and for going around corners and what not.
"Might be poetic justice to use them on the Cardassians," I then said.
I doubted that I ever would, the real reason I was making the whip was because I had a lot of ideas for cool bits of technology that I could create and it was best to start off with simpler things, like modifying an already existing weapon. The things I learned in tinkering with this design could lead to other stuff after all.
"Hold on, I'm seeing something on the sensors," Ro suddenly reported.
I sighed, knowing that my fun had come to a sudden end. I had to get Kira off my lap so I could bring us out of warp.
"And I'm picking up a distress call, no, two distress calls," Ro was saying. "One is from a Starfleet ship, it's very low powered, though, and not getting very far. The other... I have no idea, but I can play it for you".
I thought fast, letting my super human augmented mind work through my various options, and to make choices in mere seconds.
"Can you copy and retransmit the Starfleet distress call?" I asked Ro.
She nodded.
"Then do so," I ordered. "We may need back up".
As the former Starfleet officer carried out my orders, I played the other distress signal. We were near Cardassian space, so there could have been a skirmish between a Starfleet ship and a spoon-head one, but my computer would have immediately recognized a Cardassian signal. My ship has been hidden on Bajor for a long while now and had picked up tens of thousands of Cardassian messages being sent to and from Bajor and its local space.
It wasn't until I played the message, which was both audio and visual, that I understood just how bad things really were. The alien speaking was a Collector, one of the incredibly dangerous aliens that T'Maz and I had faced not so long ago. They were back.
"Well, fuck," I muttered.
(Line Break)
"We have a visual on the unknown ship," Ro informed me.
Now that we had something important to deal with my two women crew were taking this very seriously. They had both gotten dressed; putting on something like T'Maz would wear in combat for maximum movement. They were both covered from the neck down, but the outfits hugged their curves closely enough to show that both of them were definitely worth seeing nude, and since I had seen them both naked, a lot, I kept picturing them that way, which was a little distracting.
"I'm reading low emissions and standard automatic passive sensor scans coming from both ships, as well as life sign readings. Weapons on both ships are off line and their engines are cold," Ro then reported succinctly, obviously falling back on her tactical training on how to report to a superior officer during an emergency situation.
She might have been kicked out of Starfleet a while back, but it was clear that the Bajoran woman hadn't forgotten everything she had been taught. She knew exactly what to look for when using the sensors. Even I was getting a bit of an education here.
"That thing is massive," Kira commented.
It was truly an impressive and unique ship. In fact, the word 'ship' didn't really do it justice. The thing was a hallowed out asteroid with no visible engines or weapons, although there were buildings or maybe machines of some kind on the surface of the big rock, yet it had taken down a Galaxy Class ship with no visible damage, while the Starfleet ship looked like it had gone five losing rounds with three Romulan Warbirds.
The only conclusion I could come up with was that mere moments before being destroyed the crew of the Galaxy Class had either gotten off an incredibly lucky shot, disabling something truly important, or they'd used some overly complex, technobabble, hail maryish last second idea to save themselves. I would not be surprised in the least if it was the last one. The shows were replete with that kind of shit.
Given that the Enterprise, which was also a Galaxy class, had an overall length of 641 meters, an overall width of 473 meters, and an overall height of 190 meters, and that it was totally and completely dwarfed by the Collector ship, that gave me a sense of scale to work with in the vastness of space. It had to be the size of a fucking small moon or something.
"How the hell do you think one ship took something like that out?" Asked Ro, who had clearly been thinking along the exact same lines I had been.
I could only guess, and this wasn't the time for such things.
"You would have to ask them," I said.
Ro attempted to get her own answers using my ship's sensors.
"Scans do not detect any recognized weapons on the alien ship. I detect no warp field distortions either, so who knows how it actually moves. It appears as if their main power source is off line," she was soon reporting. "The Starfleet ship has lost life support on several decks. They also have a few large hull breeches. I don't think they'll be going to warp any time soon".
I read some more data on the display.
"The Starfleet ship is the USS Odyssey," I read.
Bit refreshing that it wasn't the Enterprise for once.
"What do we do?" asked Kira.
Again, I went through my options.
"Okay, figuring out what that giant ship is is the priority; we're going to board that giant floating rock, take a look around, gather some data and send it to Starfleet Intelligence," I decided. "They'll wipe your records spotless in exchange for sure, and we'll want to gather some of their tech so that we can sell it". Of course I meant we'd send it to Section 31 and 31 could then decide if they wanted to share it with Starfleet Intelligence. Given the mostly destroyed Galaxy-class out the window, a cover up might not be feasible or even desirable at this point.
The two Bajoran women looked at me oddly.
"We'll spend the money on helping to rebuild Bajor after the Occupation, or for our own purposes," I promised. "We'll hold an auction and invite people to bid for the exotic tech. As long as it's not weapons, we're going to keep those".
They needed a reason to risk their lives, but that wasn't enough, they had to understand that the whole Quadrant was at risk. Now what could I share here safely without exposing Section 31 or my status as a pseudo operative?
"Okay, I'll explain what I can as quickly as I can," I told the women. "But we have to get ready for an away mission".
(Line Break)
Shuttle Bay. Hive Ship.
As the ramp of my ship lowered, Kira, Ro and I quickly and quietly entered the shuttle bay of the alien ship, but there were no Collectors around, just an empty bay. I wasn't sure if this was a trap or if the xenos were simply too busy elsewhere trying to fix their craft to care about my little ship. Either way we had to be careful.
"Proceed," I ordered quietly.
I watched as Kira's phaser rifle, which I had modified by adding a larger power supply and an advanced scope, since she was quite the skilled little sniper, moved to cover every direction visually, the Bajoran freedom fighter looking all over for threats. Ro, who only carried a standard issue Starfleet phaser, did likewise. I'd have to change that; if she was going to roll with me she'd better get used to heavier weaponry.
As for me I carried my dual plasma pulse pistols, both of which had been extensively modified to fire more deadly shots as it took a lot of energy to take down a Collector warrior. With my enhanced hand/eye coordination these two pistols were more deadly than even that rifle. I also had my sword on my belt, plenty of spare power packs, my holo tool, a tricorder, and even a good sharp knife. All this I wore over my body armor.
Since I'd faced the Collectors before, I knew that their bio-armor could take quite a bit of damage before giving up, that was why I was carrying so many spare power cells for my group. The amount of energy required to kill the warrior type of Collectors would drain the batteries pretty quickly.
We all also had tactical backpacks on full of blocks of C4. Though they weren't very destructive, at least compared to the bombs of this era, since they were simple chemical explosives they were easy to replicate in large quantities, easy to shape, to adjust the yield and detonate. With a simple enough trigger you could even detonate them in an energy dampening field and modern sensors probably wouldn't even recognize it. The idea wasn't to truly damage or destroy the Collector vessel with the stuff, nothing short of a giant nuke would do that and I didn't have the time or the tools to build one. Getting a modern explosive weapon in that range of power, like a tri-cobalt device, would be pretty hard and probably would set off a lot of alerts. 31 could probably get me one pretty easily, but even they would probably balk at letting me have one, especially as I was still just a free lance operative. Really the bombs were mostly distractions to help cover an escape, break down doors, and some light anti-personnel uses. I'd had limited time to prepare for this mission, the idea I'd be facing the Collectors again on some god forsaken moon sized ship hadn't really crossed my mind. Sue me!
"It's secure." Ro said.
Surprisingly, this landing bay was totally empty, and since I knew that the Collectors had support ships I figured that they must have been destroyed in the battle, or perhaps they had flown away to get help, or even as part of an evacuation. This race was so alien that I could only speculate on their thought processes.
At least they had what looked to be a control room for the shuttle bay, and while this was a good place to place a block of C4, it was disappointing that no one was here. I'd not even punched anyone for over a month now, and while I was not some kind of psychopath that needed regular killing, I really wanted a fight.
"Any volunteers to venture down the super dark and creepy corridor first?" I kidded as we moved out of the bay and into some adjacent hallways.
My joke was met with soft chuckles by the two very brave women at my side, lightening the mood nicely.
"This isn't spooky at all," Kira mumbled sarcastically, eyes still darting all around.
Even I was chilled in a way that had nothing to do with how cold it was.
"Is this ship really abandoned?" Ro asked. "I detected enough life signs to populate a small city, but there's no one here".
Again I was impressed by how the ladies were keeping things together, sure Kira was a rebel soldier who had gone into many other extremely dangerous situations at my side and Ro Laren was a former Starfleet officer, but this was a very freaking odd situation. They should have been at least a little overwhelmed. Was my presence that comforting to them?
I'd even dumped a load of unexpected information on them, telling them that I had encountered this race before while taking a Vulcan scientist to one of her people's outposts. This story didn't even compromise Section 31 as that was what was written in the official report I filed after the mission and it matched what T'Maz had told her superiors at the Vulcan Science Academy she worked at as part of her cover.
Any risk of either of the Bajoran women figuring out that I was a secret agent was something I put to the back of my mind as we continued down the corridor, taking a brief moment here and there to examine the ship's infrastructure.
The tricorders we each carried were set to continuous scan since the moment we left the Temptress, but Ro was directing active scans at anything and everything interesting that she saw so that she could send the info back to Starfleet Command. She was no fan of the Federation, but she understood that this could all be leading up to an invasion, and that sharing the data she was gathering could save many lives if it came to war.
For that reason I was going to send a copy of everything to Section 31, via T'Maz. No doubt she would be grateful for the extra data since she had gone back to working on the Collector issue full time. She and other agents were no doubt already planning what do in case of a full scale invasion, and what I learned here would undoubtedly help them.
Not only could this potentially save the Federation, which justified the danger despite my also not being the organization's greatest fan, there would be a really nice bonus in it for me from Sloan of that I was sure. He was a man who understood that while I didn't work just for a reward, it was important to me that I be given something commensurately valuable for my hard work. I doubted that anyone had ever gone into the spy business only for the money, but it was nice to see a ridiculously full bank account after saving the day.
While looking around I noted that the ground and the walls of the corridor were made with a material that none of us had ever encountered before. The color of the material was a light brown, and it looked to be organic in nature even though it didn't register as living to the tricorders, and given that the Collectors were pretty much bugs, I wondered if the stuff around us was something like beeswax. In other words, made from organic matter, but not alive.
There was also what seemed to be pipes all around. I had no idea what was in them, as the tricorder couldn't make sense of the stuff, but there was a chance that it was flammable so I secured a block of C4 to one of the pipes. I was banking on secondary explosions.
Upon leaving the corridor and entering a circular opening with a high up ceiling, we finally had something other than walls to look at. On the floor were several pods that were strewn about. Which was pretty odd. If this craft was some sort of mobile bug hive like I had thought then you'd think it would very well organized.
Concerns about messiness went right out the airlock when we entered the next room. Right in front of us was a small pile of human corpses lying haphazardly. No, not just human actually, there were some aliens mixed in too. Judging by the lack of decomposition and smell they hadn't been dead for very long, and they all wore Starfleet Uniforms.
There were simply too many people for this to have been an away team. It was possible that the Starfleet Officers had attempted some sort of desperate boarding action, but that wasn't how they usually fought. My other conclusion was that the Collectors had grabbed them, and then for some reason had gone and killed all their captives. Perhaps they had been a different ship than the disabled one and they had been taken as captives after a fight. I might never know the truth.
"I think I might be sick," Kira admitted.
This was coming from a terrorist who must have seen, and perhaps even caused, a lot more death than this. Maybe Cardassians didn't count? Ro looked ready to start crying, but still she somehow kept herself together. My respect for her went up another few notches.
My next action was to borrow Kira's phaser rifle and set it on a high enough setting to vaporize the pile of bodies after thoroughly scanning them. If we got out of this alive then we'd know who had died and their loved ones could properly mourn them.
"No one deserved that," I muttered, while wondering how my voice could be so calm and serious at this moment.
I wasn't the only one with an opinion.
"Few in life ever get what they deserve," Kira observed dryly, with the wisdom of a survivor.
True words.
(Line Break)
After only a few more steps we found ourselves in another open room with a very high ceiling and a path that led up a small embankment before the path snaked deeper into the ship.
Once we had followed that path we found something that simply took my breath away.
"Look at all of them," Kira said in awe.
There were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of these honeycomb cells that were embedded into the walls, some of them lit up while others were dark.
"On the ceiling too," I heard Ro mutter.
Above us were even more cells, many of which were lit up. I idly wondered if most of the Collectors were sleeping, like the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis did between cullings. Hopefully no one would try sucking the life force out of me.
"Gothic, I'm getting something on the tricorder; there are no life signs in any of those... whatever they are, that are dark, but they aren't empty," she told me.
Clearly there had been some real damage done to this mobile hive by the galaxy class starship, something that had effected the entire craft. It was a weakness we really needed to discover if possible and there was no telling if the Odyssey's sensor records and logs would be recoverable.
"If these aliens are bugs, or bug-like, like you mentioned, then they may use those... pods, I guess you could call them, to stay dormant in, maybe to conserve resources on long trips," Ro was now saying."I think the dark ones failed and the light ones are empty. So not all the Collectors died, some must have woken up".
That would explain why we'd seen no aliens so far, and why one room we'd been in had been so messy. The aliens who would normally clean up those messes, and keep an eye on the shuttle bay, must be dead. Those not in the combs, were probably busy repairing this craft.
Then I spotted some movement far off. A couple of Collectors were dragging what I guessed was a human, even for me it was hard to tell at this distance, over towards a door. The door then opened to show a giant bug, some sort of queen I guessed.
I didn't hear a scream, but I didn't need to as I knew the human, or at least the humanoid being, must have called out in fear as the queen bug swallowed him whole.
For a few moments I just stood there, not quite believing what I had just seen. That act had been far more horrific than anything that the Cardassians had done to the Bajorans.
"We should get out of sight," urged Kira fearfully. Seeing someone eaten whole was a completely justified source of fear.
Given how high up some of the combs were there was a distinct chance that there could be flying Collectors around who could spot us, so I decided to go with Kira's suggestion.
As it turned out near the shuttle bay were some rooms that would serve the needs of the Collectors who went out on missions. There was an armory, and what I guessed to be a restroom, although I tried not to think about that any more than I had to. There was also a chamber with bits of bio-armor in it. I was itching to get my hands on these weapons and armor and hopefully figure out what made them tick to improve my own equipment. I really needed to up my opportunistic looting skills and bring along transporter tags so that I could grab tons of these weapons and beam them back to my ship. My bag just wasn't big enough!
While in the armory I grabbed a rifle, it had a barrel and a trigger like a gun, and I'd used one before, yet it was still very alien to me. Still, I'd seen what these things could do and knew they packed a huge punch. I placed a block of C4 on one of the racks; the secondary explosions from these weapons should make quite a bang.
Next I picked up what I figured were grenades, however for all I knew they could be life form scanners, or transport pattern enchanters, or even emergency rations. Only proper study of the objects would let me determine their true purpose.
After that we ducked inside another room, and found what I guessed to be a sick bay of some kind. Only it was more like a dissection lab at Area 51 than anything else I could imagine. Instead of a Roswell Grey being taken apart, though, it was a human who had been dissected by the aliens.
The women with me didn't even look at the evil science project, which I soon vaporized, after again getting a visual record and DNA scan. And it was only after doing that for the second time that I began to wonder about the lack of any alarms. A weapon discharge strong enough to vaporize an entire body would have set off every alarm known to man on a Starfleet vessel after all.
Once that was done, and we'd planted some more C4, we got to work. Kira kept an eye on the door and corridor while Ro tried to interface with something that looked kind of like a computer. Meanwhile I pocketed a few more small things lying around. I had little clue what they were or what they did, but they looked exotic enough to be worth studying, reverse engineering and/or selling. Maybe all of the above.
"Anything?" I asked Ro after a few moments, sounding very hopeful.
The former Starfleet officer didn't immediately reply, and I was about to ask again when the Bajoran woman finally spoke.
"My tricorder was able to get some information, but only a fraction of what's in these databases," I was told.
I'd seen no other computers, but we'd only explored a tiny fraction of this giant craft so for all I knew there could be whole rooms full of the things somewhere around here.
"These aliens are somehow related to the Hur'q," I was then informed.
'Hur'q' was a Klingon word meaning 'outsider', it was the name given by the Klingons to a species from the Gamma Quadrant who had invaded and plundered Qo'noS in the 14th century. Among the most valuable artifacts stolen by the Hur'q was the Sword of Kahless.
This I already knew and I'd even seen pictures. The Hur'q were insectoid scavengers, whose physiology resembled that of army ants and who wore armor like that of a samurai.
They had plundered much of the galaxy before the majority of their race had been trapped in another dimension. With most of their fleet lost, the Hur'q would eventually vanish, but they did leave elite units of Kam'Jahtae warriors in stasis, to awaken in the distant future, perhaps in the hopes of bringing the Hur'q civilization back to its former glory.
T'Maz had reminded me recently, when we had been discussing her work on the Collectors, that Section 31 would go to just about any lengths to destroy the Kam'Jahtae warriors before they woke up, even sacrificing civilian lives to do so. They were that dangerous, that much of a threat to the galaxy.
The Collectors were like the Mirror Universe version of the Hur'q, or possibly the Hur'q that had been exiled now trying to return after changing their race greatly.
They now wore advanced bio-armour that covered their entire bodies. Making them look like the Collectors from Mass Effect 2, which was why I had given them that name. Only these aliens were far more advanced, and as far as I knew weren't under anyone's control.
"According to the data I can access these are no longer Hur'q, as they were once known," Ro was now saying. "Their DNA shows distinct signs of extensive genetic rewrite, and they've added cybernetic devices to their young. They probably went through generations of genetic engineering as well, but I'm no expert on alien biology".
Now I was starting to wonder if the Collectors were actually Hur'q augments. Which was a really scary thought.
"Their system is actually really easy to use once you understand the interface," Ro said next. "It's all one big computer system really. I have access to so much information".
I thought fast once again.
"Get the blueprints for this ship, and anything else you can find that might help if they attack the Federation," I ordered. "Like a file labeled 'Galactic Conquest Plans', stuff like that. Save it all locally and try to uplink to my ship and download the data there as well".
Ro grabbed my tricorder and placed it on the alien computer.
"I'll need the extra memory storage and bandwidth," she said by way of explanation.
Clearly the Collectors didn't worry much about outsiders getting into their computer systems, and their physical security was a joke too. There were no patrols, no intruder alarms, the only way this could have been more easy was if there were sign posts to guide us to all the really important places on the ship.
I was now again wondering if this could all be an overly elaborate trap, but it seemed unlikely as they should have sprung it by now. This whole situation didn't make sense, and not for the first time I wondered if the Collectors were a really alien species, in the truest sense of the word, as in the way they thought about and viewed the universe was fundamentally and profoundly different than our own.
For all their differences, races like Humanity, the Klingons, the Cardassians and the Romulans had a hell of a lot in common. I knew from TNG that was due to a race known as the Preservers, who'd long ago seeded virtually all life in this galaxy. When compared to the utter strangeness of the Collectors we might as well have all been considered the same species.
These augmented Hur'q, on the other hand, were nothing like the rest of us and were just as dangerous as the Borg, if not more so, but at least we knew they could be beaten. I'd killed enough of them to know that they were mortal and could die like anything else.
While I waited I did some more looking around and found some small creatures in vats of bubbling liquid. They looked like bugs of some kind, like a scorpion perhaps. Oddly, I was almost sure that I'd seen them somewhere before.
It took a while, as I had a lot of random bits of Trek knowledge stored in my head, and even after going through my memories I couldn't be totally sure, but I suspected that these bugs were the same parasites that had nearly taken over the Federation. I wondered if the Collectors had made them, or were just studying them. I also suddenly wondered how Section 31 had dropped the ball on that whole parasite fiasco. Section 31 had first shown up in Deep Space Nine, so they must have been around years before that as such they would have been active during that sort of invasion.
"Oh Prophets!" Ro suddenly called out. "We have to go!"
She didn't bother to explain, and I didn't ask anything more, we just ran back to the ship as fast as our legs allowed.
(Line Break)
Cockpit. The Flighty Temptress.
As it turned out following Ro's directions had been a very wise decision, as mere seconds after flying my ship out of the shuttle bay of the Collector Hive, at a very unsafe speed I might add, the whole thing had gone to warp. We'd flown out so fast that I wasn't even sure that I had actually set off the C4 as the detonator had limited range. Not that it mattered too much, as I'd put the detonators on a backup timer as well, just in case we'd been captured and needed a handy distraction while escaping. I wasn't making any overconfident rookie mistakes if I could help it, those I'll leave for my enemies.
I was still in disbelief, though. The Hive was the size of a fucking small moon and it had just warped away like it was a normal ship. From what little I knew about the science of this time, it shouldn't have even been possible for something that large to do that. The subspace field required would have to be massive, and the power requirements staggering. These aliens obviously had technology that was far more advanced than our own and that was scary.
I had now planned to go aid the Starfleet ship, only we hadn't needed to as another ship had soon turned up. The second Federation vessel had noticed us leaving the Collector Hive, and its captain had questioned us. To ease the building tension I'd been forced to send them a copy of the information Ro had gathered on our tricorders, the scans we'd taken, not the database. 31 could deal with retrieving it if they didn't want Starfleet to have it.
Once that had been done tensions eased somewhat and the captain of the new ship had pretty much told us to bugger off, saying that the system was now off limits to civilians and that Starfleet would take over the investigation. Either they didn't like civilians doing their job, or they knew I was an augment. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was both. Thankfully our ship hadn't been searched so they'd not realized that we had stolen quite a bit of stuff from the alien vessel.
The disdain in the captain's voice had been annoying, but so far the only people I'd met who even cared that I had modified genes were in Starfleet. Talk about prejudice from unexpected sources! Everyone else barely found it worth talking about, and as for the two Bajoran women I was with it barely merited a reaction after I'd told them, though they did express happiness at how it improved my sex game.
Those two Bajoran females were currently flying the ship as we travelled through the solar system at half impulse, since I wasn't exactly eager to leave in case something else happened.
This was also buying me some time to quickly read through a little of the information Ro had been able to get out of the Collector's computer, my augmented mind working overtime to take as much in as I could. Thank goodness my ship's computers and processing power had been upgraded recently.
As I suspected the craft we'd encountered was, in fact, a mobile hive. According to the blueprints of the hive, it wasn't armed or even shielded though. It was armored, in a sense, but only through virtue of so much rock. This wasn't as odd as it might seem as the Collectors, or Hur'q, or whatever, were bugs, and the primary defense of a beehive were the bees themselves.
I'd seen the Collectors fight before; they used expendable fighter craft, so expendable that they would literally throw themselves at the enemy in whatever numbers it took to destroy them should their weapons be insufficient, caring nothing for their own lives. That was a very dangerous enemy to fight, especially since it was so contrary to the prevailing combat doctrine of the alpha quadrant. Our ships and defenses just weren't designed for an enemy using those kinds of tactics.
That must have been how the Galaxy Class had been crippled so badly against a ship with no weapons of its own. The fighters would have rammed it in great numbers, thinking to destroy it like they had the Klingon Bird of Prey, only the bigger and tougher Federation starship had not been blown apart.
The hive's lack of any real shields also explained how the Odyssey could have disabled it. I didn't know for sure, but it seemed likely that the Starfleet ship had transported a bunch of photon torpedos near whatever they had in place of a warp core on the Hur'q hive ship. That would explain why the hive had lost power.
Another thing I found out, and this was pretty shocking by itself, was that the Hur'q hive we were just on was only a freaking scout ship. Its only mission had been to come to this dimension, look around and confirm that it was really home. Which meant that not only were there more hives out there, but that they also had much bigger ships. Wasn't that just plain horrifying? There was even a reference to something called a 'world ship,' which my guess was a planet-sized version of the craft I'd just been onboard.
Given that the Hur'q of legend had been exiled to another dimension, it made sense that they'd want to come home. They could have been scouting many universes before they had found the right one; that might actually explain why the ones I'd encountered before had taken the rift making device to what had to have been an old Terran Empire outpost. Some of them must have already scouted out that particular galaxy.
There was a lot more information in the files Ro had downloaded, as tricorders had a lot of memory space, but it would take months, if not years, to study it all in detail, and that wasn't my job, nor what I was really best at.
Section 31 would be better able to make use of the information. As for me, I still had my mission on Bajor. There was little I could do about the Collectors' coming invasion, which I was sure would happen one day, other than to help build a stronger Bajor to eventually join the Federation.
Still, that wouldn't stop me from studying this information when I got the chance so that I could use my enhanced mind to come up with ideas to counter these pseudo Hur'q. I doubted anyone outside of Section 31 would even listen to me, but I had to try. In the meantime I had a ton of information to sell, technology to scan and reverse engineer and use to create wonderful new things, and an urge to have an epic tension relieving threesome with my beautiful Bajoran girls.