Chapter 10: Captain's Prerogative
Ellen Landry hung in her chair in a colonial offices conference room, clutching a cup in her hand. Just forcing her hand to lift the cup to her lips so she could sip the metallic tasting concoction took almost all the bodily strength she could muster. The only thing burning through the feeling was her sheer hatred of the drug's hangover. Nothing else in her life ever made her feel so feebly debilitated. It wasn't the same as being overpowered, everyone could be made weak, brought down to their knees. But only this damn drug made the deficiency come from within herself. There was no outside force to fight against and triumph over, or even to just submit to.
Nevertheless, she was glad Culber had pulled her from her near-comatose slumber the moment her injuries had been treated and she had responded to whatever other drug he had administered to put her back on her feet. She would claim she was in fighting condition, too, but she hoped no one would put it to the test.
Next to her, Kodos sat stiffly in his seat, PADDs laid out in front of him, in the perfect image of an imperial bureaucrat. She was surprised at how useful the type had turned out to be. The man seemed to know everything about the workings of the colony, every subsystem, every network node, every semi-public weapons' storage. Under his guiding hand the remaining soldiers, even the injured, had been beamed into New Anchorage, leaving that glorified outhouse they had had as a base abandoned. Now, the scattering field protected them against a direct invasion of Maddox's shock troops, though for how long was everybody's guess.
In fact, Landry was surprised Maddox hadn't taken the step yet. It seemed the most logical course of action. Having disabled the phaser banks, all he needed to do was get his troops down and finish them off. Something had happened that stopped him. Perhaps his ship had suffered worse damage than their sensors had been able to pick up — Maddox had methodically wiped out most of the satellites, making their data patchy — or he had received orders to stand down.
There was a chance he had some other, much grander plan that eluded Landry's understanding, but while Maddox was a competent enough captain, he was hardly a tactical genius. If he didn't take the most obvious step that lay right in front of him, someone else had altered his course.
"We're maintaining the lockdown, but it's getting brittle," Kodos said. "Some people have already fled the city and moved to other settlements. As governor, I've disabled all non-essential systems in other settlements, so their mayors can't do much but wait it out. They don't have the resources to move against us and I don't see any signs of organised resistance."
"Not yet," Ferasini said darkly from across the table. Landry turned bleary eyes on her and chuckled dryly to herself in agreement. The last thing they needed was an angry mob frothing at the mouth for their blood, but there didn't seem any obvious candidate to rally and lead a revolution.
"We have enough people under arms to maintain order," Kodos said. "The crisis will pass, they'll get used us."
Ferasini gave him a hard look, "We're not going to govern here, governor. Surely you're aware that your appointment is barely more than a sham and it'll last as long as the rest of us on Tarsus."
Maintaining a composed facade against her acid, Kodos said. "I know how precarious our — my — situation is, but that's no excuse to be sloppy. The more efficient I keep control of the colony, the less we all have to worry about."
"Well, yes," Ferasini agreed. "But I don't want you to be disappointed later."
Running out of patience with the banter, Landry flopped her head to the side, letting it rest on her shoulder as she looked at Kodos, glad Ferasini was smart enough to understand the silent gesture and shut her mouth.
"How long until the rubble's cleared?" Landry asked.
"If we keep moving at this speed, a few more hours," Kodos replied.
Without life signs under the two destroyed phaser batteries, it seemed a waste of effort, as Ferasini hadn't been slow to point out, entirely correctly. Interestingly enough, they found barely any bodies, not enough to account for the people they knew had been in the control rooms.
Ferasini's jaw tensed.
"I still don't see how it matters," she said. "If the fake Lorca's dead, what use is he?"
Landry chuckled at the incorrect descriptor, but dealing with the parallel universes mess gave her a headache even on a good day. She remembered her Captain Lorca detailing it to her in the days leading up to the jump into the other universe. His enthusiasm had been striking and contagious, outlining all the possibilities his daring plan would afford. It had been the same as mere months earlier, when he had fallen in love, wholly, with the spore drive and its unique abilities. He'd stolen Stamets' entire lab just to get his hands on it and he'd gone to an entirely different universe just to keep it. It had never seemed worth nearly as much to Landry, wars could be won in simpler ways than what he envisioned. But then, his entire career was testament to an extraordinary fate, he knew no other way and he didn't need to.
Landry took a sip from her cup, letting the brew slowly rejuvenate her empty bones. "It matters a great deal if he's not dead. Why's Maddox not coming down here?"
Ferasini said nothing, frowned, visibly displeased at her own lack of insight. It wouldn't take long for her to figure it out, but Landry had no patience to let her get there on her own.
Landry said, "I bet Maddox has him, and I bet he's alive. And that's why Maddox's not coming."
"You think he's figured out the big secret?" Culber asked.
"Fuck if I know," Landry would've shrugged, but didn't find the energy. She took a longer gulp from the cup. What Maddox would make of that piece of news was entirely beyond her imagination, but she decided it would probably be an amusing sight.
Culber looked at Ferasini as he distinctly considered her potential stance on what he was going to say, but when he spoke, his attention was back on Landry.
"Have you considered this Lorca making a deal with Maddox?" Culber asked seriously "He owes us nothing, especially not loyalty."
It bore thinking about, certainly, but just the mental image of Maddox sitting down with Lorca, any Lorca, was almost enough to make her laugh. Still, Culber and Ferasini had had the most experience with dealing with the other Lorca, at least since he'd been unleashed and Landry didn't like either of them considering the possibility. She noted Ferasini, who was confrontational seemingly on reflex and instinct, not offering any contradiction at all. Indeed, the woman's pretty face had taken on a severe, thoughtful expression.
Landry rubbed a damp palm over her forehead. "I'm too tired to speculate," she decided. "Let's stick to the facts."
She looked around the table, found some hitherto unknown reservoir of strength to sit up a little straighter as she found some tenuous lifeline.
"Fact, the Defiant has stopped attacking us, but it remains in orbit. We don't know why. Damaged ship, orders from the Emperor, Captain Maddox has his one good plan this decade. Fact, we're stuck on the planet. Fact, we've got a pretty sweet set-up, the bunkers under the colonial offices can withstand a lot, so we can just dig in for a while, stay alert and be prepared for the worst."
"You know," Culber mused. "People keep using that phrase as if anyone can ever be prepared for the worst."
Landry emptied the last few drops from her cup and set it down, then flattened her hands on the table to help push herself to her feet. She took a breath, steadying herself and for a tiny second, she was impossibly glad to be surrounded by people who were on her side, whom she could trust just a little further than she could actually see them. They would not exploit her moment of weakness but instead carry her through. She observed the thought, floating through her tired mind and asked herself if she was already far enough gone to give them all a hug.
"I don't care," she said through gritted teeth. "Just be prepared."
She found her legs just about willing to carry her without swaying as she let go of the table. "And since we're playing the waiting game anyway, I'm going to bed."
She didn't even get as far as the door before Kodos said, "That can't be everything we can do."
If she'd been fresh, she would've swung around and got right into his face, but as it was, she found she didn't want to bother. Instead, she just slowed down and said, "Every soldier knows that sometimes staying put is the smart thing to do, sometimes even the only thing. Wrap your civilian head around that and stop getting on my nerves when I need my beauty sleep."
She got another step before Ferasini's voice froze her in place.
"Unfortunately, there's something else," the scientist said. She sounded serious enough for Landry to warrant a turning around and a long moment of scanning the other woman's face and her stoic expression.
Landry grumbled, walked back to the chair and sat down. She reached for the cup, remembered it was empty and clutched it anyway.
"Let me show you," Ferasini said and took the PADD up from in front of her.
She opened a projection, hovering above the centre of the table, showing Tarsus' solar system. One after the other, Ferasini marked out Tarsus IV, where the asteroid base had been and the ring of the asteroid belt. Then she splattered in the last known location of the Khumaro and the Tarleton.
"The asteroid belt has been a source of concern for a long time. The asteroids' orbit brings them close to Tarsus and it's much less stable than a single, larger body would be. Even a small disturbance could knock a few rocks out of orbit. We've got a phaser grid that takes care of anything too large to burn up in the atmosphere, but there's always a chance that too many or a too large piece gets loose. In fact, there's a risk of a cascade effect. Statistically, the risk is minor, but…" she paused, looking from one to the other and Landry had the feeling everyone, herself included, already knew where Ferasini was going.
"There's been a lot shaken loose recently," Ferasini added. She changed the static display to animation and let them observe as the asteroid belt swung around the sun, more and more pieces dispersing away from their course as they collided with each other until, several revolutions in, a hail of them impacted the entire hemisphere of Tarsus. The next revolution brought the planet's other side into the still increasing shower.
"The asteroid belt has destabilised to the point where it's breaking up almost entirely. It'll form a new belt, eventually, or maybe even come together to become a moon, or both, but this," she flicked her fingers at the display, "is an extinction event."
"I'm more worried about Maddox's shock troops than a bunch of rocks," Landry said.
"I'm sure you understand the application of shock troops," Ferasini said, matching Landry's tone with a layer of arrogance. "But I have a pretty good understanding of rocks. I ran the prediction out of curiosity and it seems like I'm the only whose considered it so far. But the other settlements have the equipment to get this information and they have the scientist that can run the same calculations. It's no secret what has been going on above our planet. " she said and looked at Kodos. "We have one to two weeks until the impacts start. Even if the Empire sends ships, there won't be enough time to evacuate everyone. Such information is difficult to contain, especially in the current chaos. It'll leak and we'll have riots. We'll have hundreds of people trying to force their way on the only ship already in orbit and that's the Defiant."
"So we keep them from the transporters, what are they gonna do?" Landry asked.
Ferasini narrowed her eyes. "Yes, yes we will," she said as if it was obvious. "But normal security measures won't do it. I propose we arm the crowd control turrets, right now, and start thinning out the population."
Culber said, "Sounds like the best way to start the riots early."
Landry rubbed a hand across her forehead. She rather wished Ferasini hadn't run that prediction or at least hadn't told her about it, because now she knew and therefore had to deal with it.
"Or we let the crazed masses fight for us," Ferasini said. "Let them take the losses and we move in after them."
"You can't direct a riot," Landry said. "It never works." The dying embers of her willpower flared up, warming her just a little and she added, "That's how you know it's a party."
She had no patience to wait for the lot of them to muster their contradicting stances on the matter. She knew how to value her subordinates', but the feeling beating through her hollow bones demanded inexorably she finish this and put her head down somewhere horizontal before she found where the limits of their bite inhibition were.
"Let's keep it on the down low for now," Landry decided. "Triple security on the transporters, they're vital. And let's make absolutely sure everyone knows the lockdown's still in effect. Anyone caught outside will be shot. But make it a hands-on thing, don't use the turrets unless we have to. I don't want to be caught out in the open without any way to escalate my response."
She turned her gaze to Kodos, who sat silent and stiff next to her, his attention still fixed on the hologram in the middle of the table, looping through Ferasini's model endlessly, cold horror trying to take over his expression.
"I'm sorry you won't get to stay governor here," Landry said to him and almost meant it. "We'll find you another colony. After Captain Lorca has returned, there'll be a lot of vacancies across the Empire ."
Kodos didn't seem appeased, but he nodded, smart enough to understand the implication of what he was looking at.
"I'll make sure the announcements get out," he said. "No one will misunderstand them."
Landry narrowed her eyes and looked around the table. "Is there anything else?"
Looks passed between Ferasini and Culber, a silent accord, or discord considering their relationship, but they both said nothing. Landry took it as either agreement or at least acquiescence of her decision. She wasn't going to be picky about which.
"Finally," Landry said, hated the thought of having to get up again. This time, she made it to the door without any more bad news.
She even made it to the room with the bed she'd woken up in. It was dark and cool there and her mind shut down before she even had time to stash her phaser under her pillow.
#
Even across the length of a dimly lit room, Lorca's gaze was arctic and penetrating, fixed on Tyler as he sat down on the desk and called Commander Grife.
She snarled one word "wait!" and closed the channel.
Tyler had no time to second-guess the tone of her voice. His attention was caught and held as Lorca stood up. There was a tiny pause as he straightened and a flicker of pain as the movement pulled along the length of his injury. Though, when the pause had passed, Lorca prowled toward him with measured steps, full of tightly controlled power and menacing intent.
Lorca's gaze briefly crossed with Moreau's, some connection sparking there only to dissipate again when Lorca fixed on Tyler.
"Don't call on me like that," Grife hissed, barely waiting for the chirp of the opening comm channel to pass. "If the both of us want to have any advantage at all from this, I need to be seen as impartial."
"I'm sorry, Co- - -," Tyler said and jumped, taking a sudden, deep breath when Lorca suddenly put his hands around his neck and dragged him back against him. In a panicked second, Tyler's mind ran through a million different scenarios of why Lorca would be attacking him when he realised there was no actual pressure behind the touch, merely weight. Lorca's skin was cool to the touch, but feverish underneath, fingers strong but hiding a distant tremor.
Tyler's mind grappled with making sense of the situation and found it easiest to just suffer it, confused between being petrified and mesmerised by Lorca's looming vicinity.
"- - -mmander," Tyler finished through a daze, his voice muted and strained and close to wheezing, when Lorca's grip suddenly tightened a fraction. He realised that instant what Lorca was doing, adding that measure of reality to whatever idea Grife might be having.
Against the increasing strain, Tyler croaked, "I need access to Lorca's personal agoniser…"
Lorca leaned in next to him, even it wasn't necessary for Grife to hear him and spoke in a darkly amused rasp that Tyler felt against the side of his neck.
"He's being difficult," Lorca said.
There was a momentary pause, then Lorca curled away from Tyler with a howl, back arching as if he could somehow get away from the agoniser latched onto his spine. Barely a second later, the pain impulse was gone, leaving Lorca panting, shoulders hunched forward and head hanging as a full-body shiver washed over him.
"Thanks," Tyler told Grife and she chuckled.
"I'm giving you full access," she said. "Should've thought of it, sorry about that, but it's not like you asked."
"My mistake, then," Tyler conceded, playing his gratitude up with a cough.
"I'll be on the Bridge, you have any more problems, don't come to me. Grife out."
Tyler made sure the channel really was closed before he stood up from the table and looked over at Lorca, who didn't seem quite as recovered as he should've been from just such a short shock.
"I still don't know how you people exist like this," Lorca muttered, more to himself than to the two terrans.
He looked like a man resigned to his own incomprehension, annoyed by it, but unable to find the will to fight it anymore. He flexed his shoulders in a failing attempt to relax the muscles the agoniser had tensed up.
"It always depends on what side you're on," Moreau said from the bed and leaned back on her elbows to watch him past her nose and a smile playing on her lips. She gave Tyler a meaningful look, probably thinking, like he did, of their last encounter before everything changed, when he'd made Leighton slap her. And the one after, when she'd kicked him repeatedly. Looking at it through Lorca's eyes, these things really might seem excessive and twisted.
Lorca angled his head as if he could catch a glimpse of the device, but, flicked that cold gaze back to Moreau and said, "This just shows how weak you are. It's nothing but fear. It's got nothing to do with power."
Moreau shrugged. "Depends on what side you're on," she said again.
"Of course it's fear," Tyler said to Lorca. "Everyone here is shit scared of you."
And once again, the image of Lorca oscillated between Tyler's expectation of a terran commander and whoever he claimed to be. To be feared was an achievement, an honour only admitted openly to the rarest of warriors. What it meant to this man, Tyler couldn't even begin to guess. He didn't quite get the answer to it, either. Lorca's misgiving remained, barely mollified by what should've appeased him, but he did let the topic go.
Shaking his head, Lorca closed his eyes to gather himself.
"Can you get it off, now that you've got full control?" he asked, opening his eyes again, the residue of pain still swimming in them.
Tyler grunted uncertainly before he answered.
"Theoretically yes, but personal agonisers attached on the spine can be tricky. You don't want to suffer any nerve damage."
"So every dumb guard can flick my off switch?" Lorca asked sharply, though the hint of resignation betrayed how he had already suspected the answer.
"Not while Grife doesn't retract the privileges she's given me," Tyler said. "You're better off than Moreau and me."
"Pretty much everyone can give us a shock," Moreau added, contradicting every single word she said, as she continued to sprawl on the bed.
"But you've got to stay in here," Tyler said. "I don't know how closely Grife's monitoring us, but I don't want to risk it. The Defiant suffered extensive damage, so it was pretty easy to disable monitoring for this room. I switched it on and off since I got here. It'll just look like an outage caused by the damage. But the rest of the ship's off limits to you."
"How extensive is the damage?" Lorca asked instantly with a new gleam in his eyes and an eagerness in his voice. Tyler thought he could see the plan taking shape behind those eyes and it was hard to resist the lure of it, even unspoken.
"It's hard to be sure, but every section has been hit, repair crews are everywhere, but it doesn't look they'll be done soon," he paused and smiled a little. "Guards have been detailed to support engineering, too. They're thinner staffed than normal, probably across most of the ship."
"Mainframe and memory cores should be on deck seven on a Constitution-class ship," Lorca said. "Two decks up from here."
He bared his teeth, "Unless I miscounted on the way from the brig because of that damn thing on my back." A pause, a tilt of his head, narrowed eyes. "And there's a Jeffries access hatch just down the corridor."
"We can't risk them figuring out where we're going. All they've got to do is go to yellow alert for it to lock itself shut," Tyler said. "It's close, but if they catch you walking there… and I have no way of figuring out when and how long the monitoring is off."
Lorca nodded. "Sounds like we need a guard," he said. "They should be back in forty or so minutes."
He returned to the seat he had taken before and sat down, carefully as he relaxed around the pain and sunk deeper into the chair, extending his legs out and stapling his fingers in front of him.
"You two better look properly fucked by then," he said in a tone that implied it was absolutely none of his problem. He looked at Moreau when she sniggered at the remark and the implication, still poised on the bed and Tyler could tell she was going to offer to just not play pretend. He couldn't quite tell how much vitriol Lorca's response would've contained.
"We'll need weapons," Tyler said. Neither he nor Moreau had been allowed to keep theirs. It didn't exactly make him feel better about walking the corridors.
"The guards have them. We're three to two and they won't expect you."
"Yeah, well," Tyler said as he walked across the room to the footlocker at the bottom of the bed. He crouched down, catching an amused look of Moreau as he did, but opened the footlocker.
"I've been collecting," Tyler said and took out sheathed knives to lay them on the blanket next to Moreau. He reached in again for a set of phasers, extra charges as well as holsters for them.
Moreau leaned forward, cooing to herself as she reached for a dagger and pulled it out of its sheath, turning it in her hand to make the blade catch the light.
"I couldn't steal any poison," Tyler told her. The thin grooves in the blade were meant to facilitate poison delivery, but they now gleamed clean and empty.
By then, Lorca had walked over and glided his hand over the straps of the holster, a scowl crawling onto his expression. He took the holster and stepped away to slip it on. The strap on his right shoulder came to rest right over the beginning to the injury, the edge, though padded, chafing on sore flesh.
Tyler observed him, using the moment to look him over again, trying to determine how long Lorca was going to last. He couldn't quite stop himself from wondering what he would be able to do on his own. He might be able to execute his original plan, free the other prisoners and fight the Defiant's crew for control of the ship. They didn't have the numbers, though, and he doubted the element of surprise alone could make up for it. They had few advantages and Lorca was the one aspect Maddox would be unable to account for. But it only mattered if Lorca was able to make it through at all.
When Tyler looked away, he caught Moreau giving Lorca the same gauging once-over, her obvious scrutiny neatly covering for Tyler's. Her shameless, leering attention even got Lorca to respond, if only by tilting his head at her. One eyebrow twitched upward a fraction, but neither amusement nor offence made it to his eyes or face.
Moreau fell back into movement smoothly when she'd looked her fill, unconcerned at being caught like this. She took one of the holsters and put it on without getting up from the bed and the dagger followed suit.
"One more thing," Lorca said, having wiped any apparent signs of pain from his face. He'd somehow fixed his posture, too, not slumping to one side to ease the strain on his injury, or favouring one shoulder over the other to lessen the weight of the holster.
"Is that 'Grife' as in Ina Grife?"
"Yes, why?"
Lorca took his time answering. He strode for the door, picked the spot Moreau had occupied earlier to sit in the shadows, carefully leaning into the wall without putting any additional pressure on the agoniser or pulling on the straps of the holster.
"She plays the saxophone," Lorca said and didn't offer any additional explanation.
#
They were watching him, his two junior officers. Sharks with the scent of blood in the water who didn't quite trust they had found the prey it was leaking from. They were mapping and memorising every single movement he made, every involuntary twitch of muscle, every split second of hesitation as he waited for sudden pain to subside. No amount of self-control was going to prevent these signs from showing up. The injury had been too severe to hide completely. And worse, he was too susceptible to the agoniser's effect, it never quite ceased to echo through him, even after having been turned off for minutes or even hours. It wasn't surprising. The pain from the agony booth had been with him for days afterwards.
Their crude hunger and naked intensity were different, but even at home, any subordinate would put all their focus on their captain in a crisis. He was their rock to lean on, their centre of the storm. He had control, even when everything else fell apart. Especially when everything else fell apart. The captain would stand his ground until it came apart under his feet.
The only real difference was the underlying dissent, the betrayal waiting to happen, the eagerness to drop him before the very end and latch onto someone more successful. Though, even at home, these things happened, they just hadn't been built into the system.
Lieutenant Ina Grife had been the navigation officer on duty the night Lorca took the Buran. He never learned her fate, except that she hadn't been among the surviving bridge staff. He raked his brain, but he couldn't even recall seeing her body, it must have been put on display somewhere he hadn't passed. And if he was honest, he had barely noticed the gory set-up after a time, too resentful of the scare tactic to validate it with attention. He should've honoured the victims, though, should've looked at them and remembered every single one of them. Instead, he'd been busy picturing what he would do to their killers only to end up in the company of people just like them.
He tilted his head and his eyes dropped fully into the shadows by the door. Acidly amused, he thought how terran, can't stand the light, but he really was tired. Exposed to constant battering, mentally and physically, he wasn't sure how much of a rock he was going to remain… Something Balayna had said about wind and rain and crashing ocean waves slowly turning the sharpest of coastlines into an unending beach. He was being eroded and already he felt brittle enough to snap. The force of his will had been reduced to a single live-wire, responsible to tug every insignificant fibre of his being into action. And what strength remained after that he needed to stop himself from simply closing his eyes and letting himself fall back into the darkness to stay there forever.
He let time wash over him, unconcerned over the occasional pulses of fresh pain and the shards in the exchanges between Tyler and Moreau, the darkness soothing on his mind and his body beginning to feel the cold.
When time was up and the door opened to allow two guards inside, everything was instinct. He moved exactly as he needed to. Got hold of the guard nearest him, just when he was out of sensor range and the door slid closed. He punched the hilt of the dagger into the side of his head and knocked him off his feet. The guard kept struggling, shouting curses and somewhere, Lorca thought he didn't have the strength to keep this opponent down, his reservoirs had been depleted long ago. Still, he hit him a few times, the side of the neck, the cheek, the nose. And the guard eventually stopped fighting back, arms raised to protect his head, though he still had enough guts to snarl insults.
By then, Tyler or Moreau — Lorca barely cared who — had subdued the second guard. Lorca dragged his own to his feet with a grip at his collar. Still amused in a way that made Lorca think she needed a fist in her face, too, Moreau came over and slapped the handcuffs on one of the guard's wrists, then Tyler shoved the second close enough so the other part of the cuff could go on him.
They disarmed the guards and took their communicators, but most of their other equipment, especially their armour, fit none of them properly. Lorca tried on a pair of gloves, remembering how useful they had been in a knife fight, but he couldn't get them on. The guard nearest to him tried kicking at his legs. It was a clumsy attempt, easily evaded. Lorca tossed the gloves back in his face and turned away.
He was going to give the order to move out, but he remembered where he was so he said, "Kill them."
Behind him, Moreau and Tyler moved. He heard the sounds of a brief struggle, fresh curses and voices tipping from anger into hysteria at the very end. The guards voices faded into ugly gargling, their throats cut and their lives bleeding out fast. Lorca took a careful step away to avoid the spreading puddle of blood.
"Let's get moving," Lorca said, holstered one of the phasers and kept another in his hand, sparing himself the trouble of having to reload in the middle of a firefight. Although it was a short trek to the Jeffries tube access hatch and from there to the mainframe, Lorca refused to hope it was going to be any easier than anything else so far.
At least for the moment, Lorca's presence in the corridors wouldn't raise any alarms, when the systems checked his proximity to the guards' communicators and reasoned he was allowed to be out and about.
At the access hatch, Tyler and Moreau were watching him again, timing the tiny hesitation before he hauled himself up and inside the Jeffries tube, memorising yet another sign of weakness. He said nothing, not even an order to follow, because what else were they going to do?
Even assuming the Defiant had more sophisticated internal sensors than the ships Lorca was familiar with — from your future, Landry had said — the Jeffries tubes were difficult to navigate for security guards and transporter beams alike. For a little while, they would be safe, but it was no opportunity to relax.
By some miracle, they didn't emerge from the Jeffries tube on deck seven into a fight and no alarm had been raised, yet. If Grife had been engineering Lorca's excursion to Tyler's quarters under the radar, it was quite possible she had only limited options to monitor his movements. Sloppy to be sure, but the Ina Grife Lorca knew — had known — had always had a single-minded focus which made her bad at multitasking effectively.
The Constitution line of ships had been conceived for deep-space exploration, but where Lorca knew labs and offices should be, they found additional crew quarters to house the numerous shock troops the ship's new primary focus of warfare.
A safe distance away from shift change, they didn't meet anyone at first, even in the very heart of the lion's den. In order to keep her machinations secret from as many curious eyes as possible, Grife probably had timed it just like this.
They crossed paths with few people in the corridors from the crew quarters to the mainframe and those unfortunate enough to cross their paths received a quick slash of a knife, so as not to set off a phaser discharge alert.
The irony of littering a starship corridor with sliced-up corpses was not lost on Lorca, but he didn't know what to do with it. What use would it be to second-guess the only decision he had been able to make? He'd always been good at doing what was necessary, at taking the hard choice right in front of him, at whatever cost there might be to pay later. He'd thought, years ago, he was ready for that. Better him than somebody else, better it was him with such a burden on his conscience. And there was another small part of him, which he had always carefully hidden away and dressed-up as measured and reasoned confidence, but he had no use for such modesty here. There was no one better to make these choices in his mind.
Enough people in his own time and in the long and bloody past of the Federation worlds had fallen prey to the same misplaced sense of entitlement. It had been an abstract thought for most of his life, secure in the knowledge that he whatever dark urge he might have, it would be tempered and reined in by the entirety of the Starfleet brass. Of course, then he had seen and experienced who he was at his worst. And he had done nothing at all since which would disprove even a fraction of it. A better man would've taken his principles to the grave long before because the only moral choice left was to stop fighting.
Just outside the wide doors leading to the mainframe, Tyler and Moreau stopped in their tracks and broke down screaming and everything else happened almost at the same time. The door sensor picked up Lorca, who had taken that one crucial step just within its reach and opened the door for him. Security teams appeared on both ends of the corridor with their phasers at the ready and the howl of the red alert siren filled what space remained.
In a handful of moments, Grife would put the pieces together and flick the switch on Lorca's agoniser, too, rendering him completely and thoroughly immobile for as long as she pleased. Before that moment, Lorca pulled the second phaser and opened fire up and down the corridor, without taking aim past the one, quick look he'd had of his enemies' positioning. The barrage of phaser fire had to be hard enough to make them retreat fast enough and one more step than they would otherwise have taken, gaining him the millisecond more time.
Adrenaline stretched that shortest of timeframes, seemingly enough for Moreau to get to her hands and knees, whimpering but pulling herself up against the wall, her face full of agony, but its effects already fading into anger and determination as the agoniser shock subsided. Tyler was off no better and struggling to his feet the same way, enough senses left in the both of them to realise they needed to get through the mainframe door before Lorca's was taken out and the feeble protection of his covering fire was lost.
Lorca himself got as far as the door before the agoniser on his back stabbed him through the heart, up along his spine and into his head, down to snarl into the joints on his hips and all the way down the length of his legs, searing fresh pain through the injury over his chest. He stumbled, vision going white at the sudden and absolute laceration of his self-control. He hated the animal sound he made almost as much as the agony itself.
He was dimly aware of the hiss of the door, Moreau and Tyler shouting something at each other he had not enough presence of mind to hear. Another shock carved through his senses, then a third, each time worse than the one before until the last clear thought in his mind was that he wished these terrans would finally make good on their constant threats and finally kill him.
A hand on his arm, pulling rudely on him, forcing him to his feet before he even knew he was still conscious. He breathed hard through his nose, teeth clenched too tightly for his mouth to open.
"Captain," Tyler's voice said, quiet and soothing, sounded almost like affection to Lorca's drowning mind.
"I've cranked up the memory core shields to filter out the agoniser signal, but they'll override the door control any minute."
Lorca pulled his head up, steadied himself and only then opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was Moreau's face, smooth and flawless again, expression as playful as when she'd contemplated how to seduce him. There was perhaps just a hint of concern, not in her face, but in the way she kept her hold on him firmly. He didn't have it in him to just shrug her off, though he knew he should, pretending he wasn't still shaking at his core from the shock.
As a compromise, he simply ignored her and took in the room. It was a large crescent, centred on the tall pillar of the mainframe and the walls behind it housing the memory cores. Two dead crew-members lay on the floor, Lorca couldn't remember them, but they had been taken care of, so they didn't matter.
He swallowed dryly and forced himself into motion, tiny pinpricks of pain sizzling inside his muscles, but Moreau let him go when she thought he wasn't going to fall over. Behind him, he knew, she was exchanging a meaningful look with Tyler. But it, too, didn't matter. She was with him, or she was not, neither was in his hands and he hadn't come so far just to impress a cocky cadet.
He reached the control terminal, put the phasers down on top of the console and planted both hands on either side of its centre, bracing himself instead of just taking the chair right-away.
"Computer," he said. His voice burned raw in his throat, fresh from screaming. "Identify me by voice print."
"Result inconclusive," the computer announced instantly.
Wryly, Lorca asked, "What are my options?"
"Result No. 1: Captain Gabriel Lorca, USS Discovery, died 2257. Result No. 2: Fleet Captain Gabriel Lorca, ISS Buran, dishonourable discharge, enemy of the empire."
"Discovery?" Lorca asked, more to himself, unable to identify the ship. The date of his death didn't match, either. Did it mean he'd gone back only to die? Something his counterpart had done? Sounded like neither of them had made a particularly long run of it, though.
Deciding he'd been holding out for long enough, he sidled into the nearest chair but didn't allow all the tension to bleed from his body. He pulled out the keyboard and put up a direct input command line on the 2d screen set into the console right in front of him.
The duotronic's operating system had either barely been altered from its Federation original, or the Terran Empire had developed the same system on its own. Either way, it made the application of his rusty computer engineering knowledge much easier than he had dared hope. The underlying code he was looking for had suffered through repeated attempts to alter or delete it or simply deteriorated by the passage of time, he wasn't sure he could get it to execute the command he needed it to.
Moreau slid into the chair next to him, prompting him to send a look over his shoulder. Tyler was still stationed by the door, the control panel next to it exposed as he pulled the wires free with his dagger. It would prevent the computer to unlock the door, but it would make it easier just to mechanically force it. The mainframe's protective shielding might slow them down, though. It had to last just long enough.
Lorca isolated the two conflicting results of his voice print, severing the newer entries in the database about his counterpart and his exploits in the empire. Whatever access privileges this Lorca had once had, they had been completely erased when Lorca had been torn from his terran pedestal.
There was another issue with the timestamps. Because the database was from the future, Lorca was considered dead and his captain's override revoked. He needed to convince the computer to ignore the death date on the simple logic that its own system time dictated it couldn't have happened yet.
When he was done, he tried again, "Computer, identify me by voice print."
Unexpectedly, the computer voice changed from its terran iteration to the much more familiar one. He hadn't calculated on the pang of homesickness at the sound of her and the realisation that this ship had travelled the same distance as him, possibly even further and they were the only remnants to each other. He was touching home, it was probably the closest he would ever come.
"Captain Gabriel Lorca, commanding officer USS Discovery."
"Computer, set privileges based on voice print, authorisation code follows."
"Confirmed. Awaiting authorisation code."
Despite himself, Lorca hesitated. If it didn't work, he had nothing left to offer.
"Five-H-three-P-four-R-D-five-P-V-R-3-R-oh-sixty-four-seven-thirteen. Confirm."
The memory cores' access lights flashed and skittered as the mainframe crawled through the data, some of it would have been corrupted over time, deleted or otherwise damaged by whatever the terrans had tried doing to it. Lorca suspected the terran computer engineers who had worked on the mainframe had found the access point of the authorisation code and might even have realised what it was meant to do. It would've seemed like a negligible vulnerability. No one in the empire knew the code and would've had a voice to match, much less would ever get into the heart of the Defiant's computer system.
It took an agonisingly long time. The computer was silent, running its calculations, determining the validity of Lorca's voice, the inflexion in how he'd pronounced every digit and letter of the code.
"Captain's override failed."
Maybe it was time to make that final choice, be that better man at least at the end. The thought swam idly through his mind while he just hissed a curse, anger worn into tired embers, finding a few remnant sparks.
"It was never going to work the first time," he said dismissively. "Computer, set privileges based on voice print, authorisation code: Five-H-three-P-four-R-D-five-P-V-R-3-R-oh-sixty-four-seven-thirteen. Confirm."
Again, the memory banks lit up in a wild pattern, retrieving the information, discarding all the compromised parts and the hack-job Lorca had made of its memory banks when he pulled the other captain with his name from it.
It took longer this time and the quiet in the room became suffocating.
The computer said, "Captain's override accepted."
Lorca smacked a fist into the console in triumph, hissing "yes" through his teeth. In an instant, all exhaustion, all his bone-deep weariness and the depleting echo of the agoniser pain drew back from him. Still there, at the back, behind the shock of adrenaline, almost better than that drugged pin Culber had offered him.
"You have it?" Tyler asked as he drew back from the door and took the seat on Lorca's other side.
Lorca changed the input fields on the screen to the more familiar, hovering holo display and set it up to mimic the more efficient battle bridge layout for himself and Tyler and Moreau before he redacted the Bridge controls and transferred it to them. This way, they could control the entire ship without compromising underlying control systems, such as the wrap core regulation and life support.
"Oh, I have it," Lorca said, unable and unwilling to keep the mad satisfaction from his voice.
He sealed the mainframe, disabled site-to-site transporters and then enacted a quarantine lockdown that sealed everyone in the rooms they were in without any option to override it themselves. They would eventually get out, using Jeffries tubes or brute force, but it would take a good long while until they had regained enough momentum to threaten Lorca's command.
"It's my ship now. And we're gonna do this my way."
End of Chapter 10: Captain's Prerogative
Alternative Summary: Wherein I'm coming to the conclusion I may have a captain fetish (and Lorca still doesn't put a shirt on.)
Author's Note: Jeffries tubes: best plot device ever! They are neither cool nor creative, but incredibly useful.
Yes, I do have a full bridge crew and senior officer roster for the Buran. Most of which was never used.
I promoted Lorca to fleet captain, how he hasn't got some loftier rank in canon I don't know, but far be it from me to expect any coherence from canon.
Last revised on 09/December/2018