Chapter 11: When You See a Good Move…
In many ways, Leighton had been lucky. The first round of interrogation he'd been subjected to had consisted of nothing worse than clever word-tricks aimed to trip him up. He'd eventually received a punch in the jaw, which swelled and bruised upward along his cheek and the corner of his mouth, but barely registered as pain when he knew so much worse was in stock for him.
The way he was left untethered when he was brought back to his cell to find Lorca absent was much worse in many ways. Clearly Lorca had been taken away, too, but to an interrogation or to an execution? To be alone, not knowing, left him anxious and tense, making him pace the length of the cell, for whatever it was worth. There was no time change in the brig, just the constant, too-bright light filling the small room. Somehow, the light had weight, forced him to push through it as through water, pressing down on his head and into his mind through his squinting eyes.
He had no way to tell how much time had passed, though he suspected it was a handful of hours, simply because he was getting irritated at his own pacing and beginning to consider sitting down, covering his eyes as well he could and try to sleep.
The low chirp of a comm channel being opened made him stop, perception slowed to a sudden, clear point. He stopped pacing in the hope his restless energy would have something to direct itself at.
"Lieutenant Leighton," unmistakable, it was Lorca's voice, coming full and spellbinding over the comm channel. "The Defiant has a new captain. I'm opening the cells and clearing you a way to the nearest armoury. Get yourselves set up and stand by for further orders."
Even as he spoke, the energy field collapsed and Leighton stepped out of the brightness of the cell and into the dimly lit corridor, glad for the soothing quality of the light. Other soldiers emerged from the other cells, dressed as he was in prison garb, some with the clear signs of recent, rough questioning or time in the booth, though all were on their feet.
"Everyone," Lorca said, switching the channel to make himself heard throughout the brig. "Leighton is in charge until you hear something else from me. And only from me. We have a ship to take over, move out."
The soldiers saluted towards Leighton and fell in line with him without any sign of resistance or argument, taking the path before them.
It might as well be magic. The energy fields on the now empty cells flickered back on and before they had even reached the doors, transporter beams began depositing guards into the cells. They looked puzzled for a moment, confused over where they suddenly found themselves at. The quicker-minded ones started shouting curses and threats at Leighton and his soldiers, but the really smart ones drew back and took in the scene, looking for a crack in the direness of their situation.
All the doors along the corridor outside the brig were closed, only certain bulkheads opened as they approached only to close again behind them. Through the wall and behind some of these doors, they could hear shouting and banging, even phaser fire as the crew of the Defiant realised they were trapped and tried to fight their way out. They encountered no person, though sometimes they heard the sound of a transporter beam as guards were being moved out of their way and into the brig.
"How the fuck did he do it?" a soldier asked, somewhere from the ranks behind Leighton. A bulkhead opened in front of them.
"Who cares?" another soldier answered. "I'm getting a chance to gut some of these fuckers, so I'm taking it."
A third soldier chuckled. "Feels like the good old days, doesn't it? Before we got stuck on that stupid rock out at the ass-end of the galaxy."
"Yeah," the second agreed.
"You know what they say about shit that's too good to be true?" the first one asked, far from convinced. "It's a trap."
"Don't go spoiling the fun," the second said.
"Well, I'll say 'I told you so' later then," the first one said.
"Please do."
"I mean, if you can still talk, it can't have turned out that bad…"
The banter continued in this vein as they trekked through the eerily empty portion of the ship, while an unseen hand opened doors for them and displaced any guards who might give them trouble.
Eventually, they were led to a double door, which slid open for them and revealed the sight of a small, but more than adequate armoury. Phasers and carbines, rifles, knives and longer daggers, a full rack of stun and agony batons. At the back of the room, an open doorway showed rows of lockers, their transparent fronts showing they were full of various pieces of combat armour. There was more than enough to outfit all of them.
"Get ready," Leighton ordered, though the soldiers were already spilling into the room and doing just that, as glad as he was to finally put on a protective layer and have a weapon in their hands again.
Lorca knew how he looked to his two junior officers. Keeping control of a hundred different threads at the tips of his finger-tips. Unhurried, but fast and precise. He didn't let them see how much it took, made it look easy for them, so they could focus on the tasks he set them with sharp orders. In truth, it was less than ideal to command a starship of the size and complexity of the Defiant with two inexperienced officers and a holo-display thrown over the input terminals of the computer mainframe. He hadn't touched any of the self-regulating systems, but he couldn't tell how much damage his rough intrusion into the software had done. A warp drive was always a delicate piece of machinery to keep balanced and he had neither the time nor the expertise to do it manually should he have accidentally shut it off.
"Cadet Moreau," Lorca said. "I'll put you in the transporter room, it's easier to clear the ship from there. Focus on security personnel and everyone not in their quarters. Then gradually everyone else until the brig is full."
"And then?"
"Stand by for orders."
"I could beam them into space…" she offered. "Cleans them out permanently."
He didn't even look at her, careful to let his inflexion not change. He said, "You've got your orders, cadet."
She paused and he was too preoccupied with the intricate workings of a Constitution-class spaceship in his hands to determine whether she was merely confused or whether she wanted a fight. There was movement from his other side, Tyler shifting in his seat, presumably to interfere. Before he could, however, Moreau left her share of the console and Lorca instantly rerouted the controls to Tyler and himself, though the display was getting cluttered and difficult to control.
"Aye, sir," Moreau confirmed, belatedly, but without any obvious misgiving. He nodded and initiated the site-to-site transport which put her in the transporter room. It took her a moment to confirm her presence from the other side and Lorca released the transporter controls to her, though it made so little impact on the displays, he barely noticed.
Through it all, Lorca finally got the confirmation that a channel had been established with the colonial offices down on Tarsus and the voice of its newly appointed governor came through with the sharpness of a paring blade.
The first thing Kodos said was, "Commander Landry is on the way."
It sounded like the first good news in a long while, when everything else had been narrowly averted disaster, split-second adaptions to situations that changed the ground under him at any given moment like an earthquake.
When a moment later, her laconic voice came on, Lorca almost forgot he wasn't talking to his Landry and this one wasn't to be trusted. She was also all he had, so he greeted her with as much warm camaraderie as he could muster and had time to fake.
"Glad you're still in one piece," he said. "I'm taking over the Defiant, but doing it as a one-man show is getting tiring. Can you send up some people? I need anyone with spaceflight experience to keep this thing afloat."
"You'll get the remainders of the Buran's crew," Landry said.
Inside, he felt like breaking. If only that were true and he'd be out here fighting alongside his real crew.
"Coordinate with cadet Moreau, she's got the transporter. We've isolated most of the crew in their quarters and moving them to the brig, but I don't want to leave critical areas unoccupied. Move in on engineering and life-support, anti-gravity generators…" He paused, smiled just a little. "You know the drill."
Landry chuckled darkly. "So do you," she said.
"Indeed," he agreed with much less bitterness than he expected. "But I won't be as gentle. Get going, before you lose me another ship."
There was another laugh, brief and possibly even darker than before.
"Captain?" Tyler asked.
Lorca thought for a moment, mapping out his next steps in his mind, tracing the different variables, quantifying the unknowns in his plan, even while several warning lights began to flash on the simulated console. With proper preparation, any starship could function fully autonomously for any length of time, but there had not been any proper preparation and the Defiant had already started out damaged from the earlier rounds of fighting. None of the warnings implied a truly dangerous situation, yet, but it would just keep escalating until taken care off permamently.
"We'll take the bridge," he said.
Mere five minutes ago, it might have been a lot easier, but in the time he had wasted by moving Moreau and Landry into place, the bridge had removed itself from the site-to-site coordination list, which the transporters used to ensure safe transport within the ship. Even as he watched, other areas of the ship vanished from the list. The medical quarantine remained intact, though, so while he couldn't beam anyone in or out of the blacked-out areas, the people there were still stuck.
Moreau reported she had the first few crew-members, formerly of the Buran, beamed up and was getting them close to where they needed, then bolstering their numbers with as many armed soldiers as she could transport.
Lorca amended what she was doing by telling her to get Tyler a strike team outside the turbo-lift ASAP.
When Tyler released his share of the controls, Lorca allowed the display to rearrange itself, the automatic streamlining not only allowing him to keep everything in sight, but also giving him half a second of a breather while it did.
He looked at Tyler when the commander said, "There'll be resistance on the bridge."
"I expect so."
"I don't think a firefight on the bridge would be a good thing."
Lorca tilted his head at Tyler, "Are you asking for a distraction?"
"It could be useful, sir."
Another warning lit up, dragged Lorca's attention away from Tyler and back to what he needed to do. His control of the situation was running through his fingers like water, seemingly faster no matter what he did to stop it.
"It's about time Lieutenant Grife and I had a little chat anyway," Lorca said.
Tyler had the good sense not to ask for details, or perhaps he could already tell the dimensions of it, or at least he thought he did. Grife had been trying to make her fortune by bartering Lorca around like a piece of meat. It had done nothing but play into his hands, of course, and her just rewards were already on the way.
Tyler left and although they had been quiet before as they concentrated on their tasks, they fell into a different kind of silence once Lorca was alone, just him and a spaceship slowly sliding out of his hands.
He returned some of the controls to their original stations to ease the load and hoping he wasn't giving the Defiant's crew too many options to wriggle back in. A captain's override was never meant to take over a ship in this way, it was a last safety net, designed for a failure of the ship's semi-AI system, not to counter and reverse a hostile takeover. The computer also had a tendency to return to its default settings, especially when the failures of subsystems was imminent.
"Landry to Lorca."
"I'm here."
"We've taken engineering and sickbay, hand-off the controls."
His own chief engineer on the Buran had had the good sense to isolate herself the moment she realised they were under attack. Even with a far-reaching override in place, a quick-thinking engineer would know which wires to cut. Chief Bell had done her job that night flawlessly. It was far too late to do anything but hope she knew she had been successful. He was the one who had failed that night.
The Defiant's engineer in charge was nowhere near her level, it seemed, though Lorca supposed a terran's real skills lay in other areas.
"Done, I'm giving you most of the bridge controls, too, keep us afloat," he told Landry and dismissed large parts of the display along with the data they represented. Engineering could be used as a battle-bridge on ships this size, especially with a full crew complement ready to take the load.
"Move on to the next target," he added.
Landry snorted derisively, "Of course."
He closed the channel to Landry just when Tyler signalled he had rendezvoused with his strike team at the turbo-lift and was ready to go to the bridge.
Lorca told him to stand by for a moment and got himself a quick overview of the Defiant's status. With control transferred to engineering, he had gained a little time. He pulled up a schematic of the Defiant and let the computer mark all areas he was directly in charge off and those his people controlled.
His people? Now that was an interesting question for later.
He took his fingers from the controls and stood up. The sharp stab of pain along his chest was becoming so familiar, he barely noticed it anymore and it mattered only to show that if his enemies wanted him to stop, they had to do a better job at killing him.
He leaned back over the console and opened a channel to the bridge, overriding the system's requirement for confirmation on the other side.
A holographic display of the bridge flickered into existence around him, the ghostly shapes didn't allow for too much detail, he'd need a holodeck for that. It was enough to tell the bridge crew hadn't been passive. All around the circular room, the consoles had been opened and crew-members were busy rewiring what they could get their hands on. Groups of them standing around, facing displays — holographic and flat — and arguing attack vectors.
Ina Grife lounged in the captain's chair, brooding with her gaze digging holes into space in front of her.
His moment passed, as the crew became aware of him, where the display had put him in the open space behind the helm, facing the captain's chair. The crew ceased their work at the consoles to gape at him, sending questioning glances at Grife.
She propelled herself out of the chair and towards Lorca as if mere anger would be enough to enable her to strike him. She came to stand right in front of him, glaring and teeth bared, but he had no interest in letting her speak.
"Lieutenant Grife, you never had a working grasp of the bigger picture," Lorca said, arrogantly looking down the length of his nose, measuring her critically and finding her wanting. In truth, she didn't resemble the Ina Grife he remembered as much as he had feared. Perhaps the shock value of it had had a chance to wear off after consistent exposure to familiar-yet-not-quite faces. He could handle Landry and Balayna, he had been able to deal with Kodos, Ina Grife was just a minor discomfort in comparison.
"Commander Grife!" she corrected furiously.
"Not to my knowledge," he said.
"You don't remember me!" she snapped. "You never paid any attention to me."
Lorca gave her a toothy smile. "Oh no, not at all. You think I wouldn't know the inadequacies of an officer on my bridge?"
He could tell she wanted to dismiss the blow, but it connected anyway. Tyler had only told him Grife had served under the other Lorca at some point and left on her own when her ambitions weren't going anywhere. From there, everything was just a series of educated guesses, because he really did know the inadequacies of the people under his command. His Ina Grife he had supported as she figured out how to overcome her flaws, but this one deserved no such leniency.
"Here's for next time," he said as smugly as he could. "Observing the Geneva Conventions in regards to the treatment of POWs would've kept you safe."
"The what?"
The sheer, puzzled bewilderment caused by the reference had been entirely calculated. It kept her off-balance and made time tick away while she tried to adjust.
"Nevermind," Lorca said in a tone that implied she was merely too stupid to grasp his meaning. "But you shouldn't've let me out if you can't handle me."
The tidbit about Grife being somehow involved with Lorca sent a notable reaction through the bridge crew and Grife herself changed her stance, almost subconsciously, preparing herself for an attack.
Behind them, the doors to the turbo-lift hissed open. Tyler was the first, then the other soldiers piled into the room after him, spreading out immediately to disarm anyone they came across. The bridge crew's reaction was fast, though. Already wound too tightly, they instinctively fought back, but they had no time to prepare a workable defence.
Lorca watched them, pretending to see more than he actually did of the scene, surveying the take-over of the bridge.
Grife seethed, her hand resting on her phaser but she didn't draw it, staring at Lorca with utter, but impotent, hatred. Tyler came at her from behind, knocked her hand away and stepped into her knee to make her buckle and go down. She stabbed her elbow back at him, but the struggle was brief. Tyler divested her of her weapons. As a last insult, once stopped struggling, he weighed his hand down on her neck to keep her in a kneeling position in front of Lorca.
The rest of the bridge crew was similarly subdued, all lined up where they had been taken next to their disembowelled consoles, kneeling with a phaser at their heads and someone's triumphant hand at their necks.
Lorca looked them over and waited for some emotion to be stirred by the spectacle. When nothing came, only a slight sense of nausea which he could easily attribute to something as irrelevant as his injury and ongoing exhaustion, he raised his brows and sought out Tyler's gaze.
"Well done, commander," Lorca said. "Put them in the brig and clean up this mess. I'm on my way."
"Aye, sir."
Lorca looked around the room one last time, briefly making eye-contact with his soldiers and giving them an affirmative nod, letting them know he'd noticed their service. He stepped forward, reached for the mainframe console and closed the channel.
He allowed himself a moment when he was alone again, braced his hands on the console and just focussed on breathing, enjoying the quiet and the twilight. At some point he couldn't place, he had started to think of the ever-present, terran gloom as soothing. It hid so many things from sight. He wondered if these people had been shaped in some subtle way by this, if their sensitivity to bright lights had caused their civilisation to evolve to include so much darkness or if their biology had simply adapted to their natural tendency for shadows and those deeds best only done out of the light.
He looked up at the schematic of the Defiant, watched as the areas he controlled lit up and the others shrunk. He slipped his fingers over the console and found Captain Maddox had been confined to his quarters at the start of it and though there had been all sorts of attempts to get out, he hadn't yet managed to do so. Lorca thought of his own quarters, wondered how many holes he could've found to squeeze out of it, though medical quarantines were notoriously difficult to circumvent. The safety of the ship depended on it, including taking the captain out of the equation.
He pushed himself away from the console, dismissed the remaining displays and the schematic, making the dark nearly complete in the short time it took for his eyes to re-adjust. He wasn't done with this ship yet, not done with Maddox, either, or the whole of Tarsus. He didn't allow himself to bask in his victory, because it wasn't one quite yet when too much was still moving barely under his control.
He left the mainframe, found two guards positioned outside who saluted him smartly. He didn't know who had put them there, but he guessed it was Tyler rather than Landry. He nodded to them and made his way along the corridor towards the turbo-lift.
The invasion was in the messy stage between active fighting and cleanup, pockets of belligerent resistance remaining, though the Defiant's crew had been split up into bite-sized little pieces to be taken out one by one.
No one got in his way. His soldiers paused in subduing — or roughing up — those of the Defiant's crew in their clutches to salute him as he passed. He still needed to translate the gesture in his mind to be a show of respect, nothing more than that. Moreover, he was fairly sure for some time now, the gesture had been meant for him, rather than the man he resembled. He thought of what Culber had said, these people had chosen to follow one Gabriel Lorca, once. He could easily imagine the promises he had made them, some of them he must even have delivered on. How many of them could be made to make a different choice? He needed a crew of his own if he meant to keep going.
"Lorca."
He didn't slow down at the sound of his name but tilted his head towards her to indicate he'd heard her. She shifted out of her spot next to the turbo-lift to plant herself right in his way.
He gave her a smile and said, "Ellen."
Her posture was resolute, but not so challenging he would have to respond in kind while there were soldiers around to observe him. Her brows twitched at his intimate address. If she had expected him to play her captain and commander game now that they were on the home stretch, she was mistaken. He had known there was a confrontation with her coming. He'd have preferred to make it to the bridge beforehand, just for the symbolism, but it was all the same in the end.
"We've got to talk," she said, unusually indirect, perhaps sensing she didn't have quite the upper hand with him as she had had when she deposited him on Tarsus mere days before.
"How about we take this somewhere more private?" he asked with a drawl.
They were right next to the living quarters, most of which had already been cleared out. He didn't wait for her acquiescence but stepped into the corridor branching off to the right. The doors on either side stood open, some to reveal the signs of struggle, tossed and dropped furniture, litter on the floor. He walked into one of them, then turned around to watch Landry follow him. She stopped by the door where she flicked the button and the door slid closed behind her, locking them in with each other.
At this point in time, Landry had resigned herself to never feeling anything but exhausted ever again. In fact, she was starting to get used to it. There was a strange sense of clarity waiting for her on the other side of her tiredness, it seemed, borne from having no energy to spare for irrelevant issues.
But Lorca was anything but irrelevant. She had no desire to ease his obvious tension, taking her time to regard him after the locking mechanism of the door had engaged. She suspected he'd agree to her assessment over the benefits of utter exhaustion. He'd been on his feet for as long as she herself, fighting for his life during all that time. It looked like it suited him, too, the gaunt cheeks and pallid skin leaving a dangerous fever glow in his eyes. There was something at rest about him now, none of that disconnected, vulnerable confusion she had sensed from him in the beginning, his brittle arrogance replaced by solid confidence. He looked like someone who had fully adapted to a new and hostile environment, slowly coming to the conclusion he might be enjoying it more than he should.
He looked back at her with a piercing gaze which, no doubt, had already mapped all her obvious and most of her less-than-obvious weaknesses. He was ready for a fight and she was in two minds over whether she should let him have it. More than one argument she had had with Captain Lorca they'd resolved on the mat, and eventually the bedroom, but no matter how brutal it had become, it had always been just play, mostly pleasure, even if it was the rough kind, and no lasting damage. But for all she knew, this one would just straight-up beat her until she stopped moving. In light of his history, his willingness to use violence had surprised her and he'd not just used it, either, he'd been pushing it to a point where many terran commanders wouldn't have the guts to go. She would respect anyone who could take nothing — which was all she'd given him — and turn it into a series of victories. If nothing else, he had earned the right to be regarded without disdain for his origins in an entirely emasculated universe. Looking at him now, it seemed like it had been a bad fit from the start.
"Talk," he said, voice rough. "I'm expected on the bridge."
"What are you going to do?" she asked. "These are still not your people."
"It's my ship."
"But you don't have a crew."
Something flickered across his expression, quickly hidden, but he knew the truth of her words. He said nothing at first, then the corner of his mouth flickered and he raised one eyebrow.
"Are you willing to test that?" he asked.
Stupid of her to assume he wouldn't have picked up on how power dynamics worked around here. Just from how he'd played the council in New Anchorage was proof he knew how it worked. It wasn't to say that Captain Lorca's followers would throw their allegiance at just anyone's feet, but this one? Landry couldn't blame them if some of them were confused over whether it even constituted a betrayal in the first place. In a way, she supposed, both this Lorca and herself were running the operation on the strength of the same, absent, man. His absence was the problem, though. She had no idea how long it would take for the captain to make his way back and because of that, she couldn't bring herself to call the other one's challenge a bluff.
"No," she said, quite truthfully. "I'm not tearing us apart. I got a better idea."
He feigned surprise, though his stance relaxed just slightly, now that he thought he might be able to avoid a direct confrontation. Or at least postpone it to a date in the far future.
"Let us work together," she said. "The captain has resources and followers all across the galaxy, you'll need my help to survive."
"And you're offering them?" he asked and painted an unpleasant smirk on his face. "Your captain would never approve. He wanted me alive just to torture me, remember?"
"He'd approve of success," Landry said. "And, yeah, our survival as a movement. When he's back, he'll decide what to do with you. Until then, he's put me in charge and I make the call I think is right."
It sounded hollow to her own ears. She couldn't imagine her captain willingly — or even unwillingly —joining forces with the murderer of Michael Burnham. No doubt the man in front of her knew it, too, and she hoped he would understand the limits of what she had to offer.
He let her offer hang in the air as he took a look around the room. It wasn't a luxury quarter, just enough space for two bunk-beds, a hygiene cubicle set into the wall and a small table and chairs off to the side. An unmarked bottle had tipped over on the table, sitting in a puddle of alcohol. He regarded it, then stepped forward to pick up the bottle and took a whiff.
"Moonshine," Landry said. "Every ship with a chem lab produces it."
He chuckled, shook the bottle to test what remained of its contents before he pulled out the nearest chair and sat down.
He said, "That's the first good thing our universes have in common."
He swiped his thumb over the top of the bottle and said, "Have a drink? With me?"
The add-on was pointed, drawing a clear line between him and the other him, in case Landry had forgotten who she was dealing with. So far, he'd played it mostly the other way around, making her follow his orders because they were the same her captain would've given her. This time, he wanted her to know exactly who he was. And who he was not.
Yet, he seemed to misinterpret her hesitation and he tilted his head to the side, said, "Lorca to the bridge."
"Commander Tyler here. We are only waiting for you. Are you in trouble?"
"Not at all," Lorca said. "But something important came up. Call me in an emergency, otherwise I'll be up shortly."
"Aye, sir."
Tyler didn't sound entirely convinced, but Landry's impression of Tyler was that he was this Lorca's man without reservations. Culber had said something to that effect, too. It was worth keeping an eye on, in case this went south worse than expected. Lorca was good at keeping all the attention on him, giving one loyal follower all the time in the world to wreak what havoc he could.
"Come on, Ellen," he said.
She resented the sound of her name on his lips. It made it far too clear that he and her counterpart in his universe had known each other just as intimately as she and her captain. It forced her to wonder what she was like, what Ellen Landry was like in that strange universe and the mere thought was sickening. Though, perhaps not everything was its perfect opposite on that other side. Lorca, quite obviously, wasn't.
She gave a slight nod, picked the second chair and sat down, facing him.
He smiled and took a swig from the bottle, pulled a face as he swallowed, then offered the bottle to her. She drank, and nearly coughed.
"Oh shit, that's bad," she said. "You should check out Lieutenant Bell's stuff."
Lorca chuckled in agreement. "Yeah, I should."
She missed the bright flare in his eyes. Even though the alcohol tasted like klingon bathwater, it trailed a pleasant heat down her throat and into her belly. Across from her, Lorca resettled himself in his seat and tucked on the strap of the holster, easing it away from the fresh scar over his chest.
"Let's hash this out," Lorca said, the alcohol almost the only warmth left between them. "I need a crew for the ship. You give me that, a skeleton crew will do and I'll prefer volunteers."
"What's in it for the rest of us?"
"I'll take you where you wanna go. I'm sure there are places in the galaxy your empire has never completely controlled. I'll recruit a new crew and I'll let you all go."
She handed him the bottle back and he took it but didn't drink immediately. He made a small gesture, but it encompassed the width of the galaxy around them. "And you do what you want to do."
"Do you know what sort of asset a ship like the Defiant is for our cause?"
He took a sip from the bottle and set it down between them. "The Defiant is mine. You want it, you come take it."
There was a note of finality in his voice and because she'd expected it, she knew not to push him on it.
"There's a war coming," she said. "We could use you as an ally."
"You don't want me," he snorted. "Every deal you make with me, it's gonna be void when your Captain Lorca returns. We both know it, so let's just focus on the here and now."
She found herself chewing on her lower lip, stopped herself and reached for the bottle instead. It was almost empty by now, barely more than a sip remaining.
"You'll have to evacuate the planet," she said. "Half the damn asteroid belt is going to hit it in a few days. All our people need to be off it by then. You take us to Risa. It's a cesspool for mercenaries and pirates, we'll all get what we want there."
He arched his brows. "That's Risa for you."
"Anything we run across on the way, we decide together, you and I. But I won't interfere in ship operations."
She watched him, looking for anything familiar in his face and the problem wasn't that she didn't find it, the problem was that there was too much of it. She didn't like it, he looked like she'd somehow lost some contest she thought she'd been breaking even in.
"I can make that work," he said and she noted the many qualifiers in his choice of words and especially in the unspoken lines between, the angle of his jaw and the glint in his eyes. He relished the way the power had shifted between them and he wasn't going to let her forget it.
He waited for another long moment, picked up the bottle and found that it was empty, put it back down. He regained his feet and flexed his shoulders, groaned a little at the stiffness in tired muscles, but the minor show of weakness did nothing for her confidence.
Looking down at her, he smiled again and this time with slightly fewer razors, leaving a different sort of heat lower than her belly. "Let's head to the bridge."
For a second, something underneath his smile made the dilapidated crew quarters with the spilt, inferior alcohol an inviting location for a quick fuck. It'd release some tension, connect them and allow her to test him in some new way. The thought had crossed his mind, she could tell, lingering in his gaze, but his energy was too restless. It would take a much better lure to keep him from the bridge after having fought so hard for it.
Maybe there was some opportunity on the way to Risa, just out of curiosity. She returned the smile, somewhat less warmly, but moved to join him. The invitation was rather hard to resist, after all.
Their deal, precarious as it was, still danced through Landry's thoughts as they left the crew quarters and went back to the turbo-lift. But Lorca seemed to have no such second thoughts. The moment their relationship had — at least for the moment — been resolved into something like allies, he was back to business, treating her like a second-in-command and valued advisor. He never let her have any doubts about who was going to have the final say. It grated, but she knew how to pick her battles and would only oppose him if his orders contradicted her best judgement.
"The brig's full," he said. "And it's difficult to contain people in their quarters for a longer time, too many ways to get out. We need to figure out a solution."
The turbo-lift slipped smoothly into motion, carrying them upward.
"Shuttle-bay two has been outfitted with an emergency quarantine setup," Landry said. "The Defiant was in charge of containing a plague that escaped from a research lab a few years ago. The Buran was helping out, too, we had a similar setup. Splits the shuttle bay up into one-square-metre cells."
"That should do it," Lorca said. "Set it up and begin moving our prisoners there."
The turbo-lift slid to a halt and the doors opened. Landry indulged herself by putting her attention on Lorca rather than the bridge. She'd seen the Defiant before, even been on it a few times, and while it was larger than the Buran, it had never quite impressed her.
Lorca took one step, right into the doorway, then stopped to take it in. He tilted his head just slightly towards the voice that announced, "Captain on the bridge."
Tyler turned the captain's chair and got up, making sure the chair rotated towards Lorca invitingly, but his gaze wasn't immediately on it. Instead, he trailed it over the workstation as if he could look inside them, or at least through the terran changes that had been made on his Federation ship. The thought was a minor revelation to Landry. No wonder he was so adamant about having it. It wasn't just that he was a captain and wanted a ship, he wanted this one. It opened the interesting opportunity to get rid of him, too, because such attachment could easily be turned against him.
Not now, though. Now she watched him swing back into motion and stride towards the chair, settled a hand on the armrest and levered himself into it, giving it a little shove to centre it.
The newly-minted crew members Landry had dispatched had served on the bridge of the Buran and had no issue adapting, but they all stood to attention now, sometimes giving Landry quick, questioning looks to assure themselves things were going as they should.
Lorca angled his head so he could catch a glimpse at Landry and said, "Set-up shuttle-bay two."
Just to see what would happen, she only nodded, refusing any verbal confirmation and holding his gaze, but he dismissed her unspoken challenge completely, turning instead to Tyler who still stood next to him.
"Give me a status report," he demanded. "The Defiant has been through a lot."
He paused for a tiny moment. "More than we know. Let's treat her right."
End of Chapter 11: When You See A Good Move...
Author's Note: Some news for you guys.
Firstly, the story is heading for a close and I'm pretty sure it'll be done before Discovery season 2 hits, which has been my aim (and worry) for a while now. This is also a warning of sorts for those of you who find my endings too open. The premise of this story is "Prime Lorca frees himself and sets himself up in the mirrorverse." Everything that happens after, happens after. I know this is irritating to those who prefer more concise endings, but I can only serve one master. I hope it's not too bad as a journey otherwise.
Secondly, I'm gradually uploading revised chapters. It's taking longer than I'd like, but it's happening. Shout-out and thanks to Dendi (on ao3) who keeps me honest!
Last revised on 02/February/2019