Author's note:
"Lost in the Styx" is Episode 4 in my on-going series, Star Trek: Odyssey, which began with "On the Isle of the Sun." It is optional, but recommended, to read the previous installments before starting this one. I do my best to work a bit of recapping into the narrative without disrupting the story though, so don't worry too much if you don't want to start at the beginning, or if you've read the previous installments but forgotten what happened.
"Lost in the Styx" is my most ambitious installment of Odyssey to date, centered around my original character Lucy Kang. Though this series began as an off shoot of Voyager, and the previous installments were published in the StarTrek: Voyager category, this latest work doesn't include any established Voyager characters or settings, and so is being published under StarTrek: Other. Expect weekly chapter updates every Monday. I hope you like it!
How didst thou come, my child, a living one,
Into this place of darkness? Difficult
It is for those who breathe the breath of life
To visit these abodes, through which are rolled
Great rivers, fearful floods…
…Hast thou come hither on thy way from Troy,
A weary wanderer with thy ship and crew?
- The Odyssey
CHAPTER 1
"It's called a Perseffex moonbeam."
The bartender held the pitcher fully sixty centimeters over Lucy's glass, letting a thin stream of ivory liquid cascade into the pool of black liquor at the bottom. Lucy leaned in close and watched the drink rise from eye level. The creamy concoction billowed like fog in the liquor and settled down to the bottom, bearing the dark spirits up nearly to the brim.
Monslaad tipped the pitcher back with an expert flourish to stop the last drops from running down the rim. Then he dipped a silver stirring rod into the glass and swirled the two liquids into each other, until they ran into a speckled gray, like cookies and cream. An oily sheen glazed the surface of the glass, refracting the dim lights of Hypereia's crew lounge into greasy rainbows. Lucy couldn't decide whether the drink was appealing or repulsive.
"Perseffex is a scion of… Plutis?" She made an educated guess, recollecting the books she'd copied from Dr. Haxle's computers. The information sat ready in her biosynthetic implants, just a hair's breadth from conscious thought. She could run a search for any term or concept with just an impulse, and any relevant content from her database would come to mind in an instant. But Lucy didn't want to rely on search algorithms. Her implant could show her any relevant memory if she only asked for it, but it couldn't hit her with sudden flashes of inspiration, nor stir up unbidden memories in moments when she didn't even know what she needed to remember. If she fell into relying on the implants for every little thing, she might lose the natural abilities that gave organic beings their edge over machines. So, she made a habit of studying the files in her free time and testing her natural memory first. "He's-"
"She," Monslaad corrected.
"Right," said Lucy. "She's charged with repurposing dead things to foster new life."
"Exactly right," said Monslaad. He favored her with a wide grin. "As Hypereia's new gardener, you should become intimately acquainted with her work."
Lucy mirrored his smile effortlessly, although she was cringing on the inside. Mythology and gardening; those were two of several topics she needed to conquer, and quick. It was a far less technical challenge than her last job, but no less daunting. At least the computer systems on the Delurididug station had been in a static state; not getting any worse while she was figuring out how to make them better. The garden, on the other hand, was still actively dying.
It would have been nice to have a friend she could unburden herself on, the way she could back on Voyager. She thought of those long nights in the commissary, just trying to decompress after another grueling day; the latest episode in an endless string of close shaves and minor disasters. Physically keyed up and mentally exhausted, still nursing a synthale long after the rest of alpha shift had called it a night, she'd poured her heart out to the friendly, spotted face of the ship's Talaxian cook.
In this place, though, Lucy had to keep her own counsel. Her life likely depended on the illusion that she was more capable, more confident, and more in control than she truly was. So, she only hid behind her friendly smile and replied with just a hint of self-deprecation, "I'm getting there."
"Hey Lucy!" called Ovan. She glanced over her shoulder at him and Raechi, sitting at a nearby booth. "Gettin' real thirsty over here."
Lucy scooped up the Perseffex moonbeam and the other two drinks Monslaad had poured for them. "Duty calls," she told the bartender, rolling her eyes in mock-longsuffering. Then she turned around and grinned at her drinking companions, holding up their drinks like hard-won prizes as she sauntered over to the booth.
Ovan jumped to his feet and reached for the glasses as she approached.
"Careful with those!" he said.
She hadn't spilled a drop, of course, though the cups were quite full, and the way she carried them was cavalier; gripping one glass by the rim and balancing the other two on her slender palm. It must have looked precarious.
Ovan managed to splash one of the drinks over her fingers in his clumsy bid to take them off her hands, and as Lucy looked down at her damp fingers in dismay, he flashed a told-you-so look.
Lucy shrugged. "Oops." She licked her fingers clean and wiped them unpretentiously on the slate-gray accent stripe going up the side of her pristine white jumpsuit.
Her outfit did not get dirty, no matter what she got into. It never picked up an odor, and it had yet to lose a single stitch to the brambles that had sprung up in the garden. It was a little going-away present from Hux; as much a way to help her adapt to her surroundings as a way of setting her apart from them; a constant reminder of who she was to these people, and what she represented.
Lucy stepped past Ovan and took her seat in the booth. Ovan slid in after her, boxing her in.
"So, what was it like?" said Raechi. "Living in that… place."
Lucy tilted her head, considering how best to respond. "The work was very interesting. And demanding. I don't know if I could describe it, though."
"Well, what did you even do there?" said Ovan.
"I was repairing the station's computer systems."
"Computer repairs? I thought you were a biologist," said Raechi.
"Well at a certain point, the distinction gets fuzzy."
Ovan and Raechi traded a brief, confused glance. Ovan shrugged and changed the subject. "Did you leave a lot of friends behind?"
Lucy shook her head. Her thoughts flew to Voyager and her home in the Alpha Quadrant, but of course, that wasn't what he'd meant. As far as these people were concerned, she came from the Delurididug Trade Hub, and her time with the Delurididug had been, hands down, the loneliest time of her life. As far as she knew, there were no living Delurididug people left in the galaxy. There were only sophisticated computer programs. Her sole companion had been Hux, a hologram programmed to handle organic lifeforms for the benefit of an automated space station tucked in a pocket of subspace.
But no good could come of explaining all that to them. "To be honest, no. The people I worked with were pretty… hollow. And there's not much to life outside of work, there."
"Sounds lonely," said Ovan. He leaned in a little closer and put a comforting hand on Lucy's shoulder, gently stroking her arm with his blue-gray thumb.
Lucy shot him a glare that could cut glass, and he pulled back instantly, as if he'd been stung. She reverted instantly to the smiling and personable woman that the crew of Hypereia was getting to know, so seamlessly that the look she'd given him could have almost been a figment of his imagination.
"Yeah, I confess I was a little lonely. But the work kept me plenty busy, and I learned so, so much while I was there."
"How long were you there?" said Raechi. Ovan still looked rattled. He drank deeply from his cup and visibly relaxed.
"A couple years. And before that, I was an ensign in an organization called Starfleet. But none of that will mean much to you guys, right? I mean, that's all…" and she waved vaguely off into the distance, indicating the vast, relatively sparse galaxy beyond the dense stellar region that these people called home, "'The Void.' I'm much more interested in what life is like here in the Argus Cluster."
"Well…" said Ovan, scratching his chin thoughtfully, "outside of the temples and shrines of certain scions I could name… it's nowhere near as spectacular as what we saw in that Hub place. If that's the sort of life you're accustomed to, you're in for a rude awakening out here, believe me. For most folks in the cluster, life is rough."
"I've done my share of rough living," said Lucy. She spoke with a conviction that she didn't feel, aware that in many respects she'd lived a sheltered life in the Federation and Starfleet.
"If you say so, little chirik bird," said Ovan, playfully cuffing her arm.
Lucy restrained her cringe. Ovan took another swig from his glass and set it down a little too hard, splashing the red-orange spirits over the rim.
"Let me give you a little taste of what you're in for, though," he went on, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "Firstly, there's the ion storms. We can expect to hit one… every ten turns or so? It varies. This last one put about half the crew in the infirmary-for all the good the infirmary does when we don't have a shekking medic."
Raechi looked like he wanted to disagree. "Well-"
Ovan talked over him. "Now, in any given storm, we can expect to hit turbulence bad enough to shear half the rivets off near every bulkhead, bow to stern. I tell you, it hardly fails. I am so damn sick of extracting sheared rivets!"
"I've been in ion storms before," said Lucy, although she knew full well that experiencing a storm in a ship with tritanium hull plating, structural integrity fields, emergency force fields, and inertial dampeners couldn't compare to riding out a storm in a fusion-powered, prewarp rocketship strapped to a tachyon sail.
"Good, good. But of course, that's not all. There's also the pirates, the warships of any little tinpot dictator who gets it in his head to annex a shipping lane, the roving cultists who claim to serve this cruel scion or that, the vexingly unpredictable cosmic winds, which will gale or sputter, bundle up or peter out by the whims of Neptis…"
Ovan drummed his fingers on the table for a moment and looked to Raechi. "What am I leaving out?"
Raechi shrugged and addressed Lucy. "It's not all like that," he said. "There's also the Halos."
Ovan snapped his fingers. "Right! The Halos! Well now, the Halo of Jovis is nice enough, so long as you're extremely rich, or you're lucky enough to be born on a rich planet. But for the rest of us? Not so much. People are packed into the Halo like mites in a prostitute's quillroots, so it shouldn't be any wonder it draws every grifter and cutthroat too quillcock-shit to brave the cross-currents or the trade winds. And sure, the winds of the Halo may move fast and reliable from port to port, but if you think that means it's safe to travel, think again. Anywhere else in the Cluster, travelers worry about stormfronts. In Jovis' cozy embrace, they worry about warfronts. Are Alcatea and Sbarda going at it again? Will I get mired in a refugee flotilla if I cross the Morden front? Is that old Antwerb minefield still swirling around in the Collade-Stallai L4 interchange? That's the sort of calculus a traveler has to take into consideration.
"And if you should ever meet a friendly stranger in the Halo of Jovis, heed my advice: guard your purse, and keep an eye on your drink. They're either looking to scam you or rob you blind, and that's if you're lucky. I had a friend, he shared a cup with a couple of chatty Refflik on Immaksu Starbase. He woke up in the cargo hold of a troop transport, collared and branded, bound in service to the Royal Foreign Legion of the Holy Reformist Imperium of Refflik Core."
Ovan paused to take a deep swig from his glass.
"He did ok for himself in the end, though. Wound up serving on a mid-weight frigate harassing Racchan trade routes. He plundered a pretty stockpile of Racchan banknotes and a cask of argivium-six besides. And the Refflik actually treated him pretty good, too; gave him a little pension and let him go on his way after four years. Last I heard, he'd settled down with a Pellan girl on some farming planet in Moyfiss Starstrand." Ovan took another drink. "The poor bastard."
A beat of silence passed as Ovan finished his recollection and sat staring into his near-empty glass, his mood suddenly subdued. Lucy picked up her own glass and took a sip. It tasted like lemons and watermelon and fresh milk and strong liquor. She took another sip and set down the glass, still unsure whether the Perseffex moonbeam appealed or repulsed.
"Is the Halo of Neptis any different?" she asked Raechi.
Raechi considered how to reply for a moment, but Ovan roused suddenly from his stupor and began to speak. "The Halo of Neptis is a filthy rutting jungle," he said, and he downed the last dregs of his drink and slammed the empty glass on the table. "The winds there are foul and distempered, like a short-changed whore with-" he belched, "-halitosis. Whole swaths of the sodded constellation are swamped in space dust, so a radioscope couldn't spot a gas giant a light-turn out. Pirates, cultists, and scionic beasts hide in that murk like fleas in a whore's bush. And if you manage to steer clear of the swamps and find a halfway civilized planet? The locals are bound to be stranger than a mongrel whore's cavernous-"
"Jovissake, Ovan!" Raechi interrupted. "You're already drunk!"
Ovan shook his head emphatically. "This is only my third drink," he said. "I'm not drunk, I'm just in a shek-reeking mood all of a sudden!"
"That always happens when you drink, you cretin," said a newcomer. Lucy recognized Movek, the ship's chief rudder operator, standing now at the end of their booth, by his unusually long, scruffy quills.
Ovan's quills bristled slightly at the interruption. He turned in his seat to look Movek in the eye, saying nothing.
There was an awkward beat in which the two of them only stared at each other. Then Movek nodded towards the door. "Why don't you go sleep it off? Before you do something to embarrass yourself."
"I said I'm fine," said Ovan.
"And I said hit the bricks," said Movek.
Ovan cast a humiliated glance back at Lucy, then braced himself on the table and pushed himself to his feet. He sidled his way out of the booth without taking his eyes off of Movek, until they stood nose-to-nose at the end of the booth. The gangly rudder operator stood a couple centimeters taller, and his ungainly quills made him look taller still. He held Ovan's challenging gaze with a faint air of contempt.
Slowly, with his head held stubbornly high, Ovan turned away and stalked out of the crew lounge, bristling with agitation. Movek watched him leave with a self-satisfied smirk. Then he turned to Lucy, and his smirk became something closer to a friendly smile. "Sorry about Ovan," he said. "He's a terrible light-weight. I hope he didn't put too much of a damper on your evening."
"On the contrary," said Lucy, mirroring his almost-friendly smile. "He was just giving me a… somewhat colorful description of the Argus Cluster."
"So I heard," said Movek. "'Whores' this and 'whores' that. At the rate he was putting on, he'd have been railing against Holy Artema and leveling defamations against the whole race of Pellans or Cochinians in a spann. Raechi knows how he gets," he added, tilting his head in Raechi's direction.
Raechi was holding his glass in both hands, his eyes boring into the drink, his shoulders hunched up under his quills, but Movek didn't notice. He never took his eyes off of Lucy.
When Raechi didn't chime in on cue, Movek changed the subject. "I'm sorry, I haven't introduced myself."
Lucy crossed her hands over her chest and bowed her head. "Mr. Movek, I presume. The rudder operator."
"Chief of rudder operations," Movek corrected her, executing a similar bow while fanning out his quills around his head. For Faiacians, the quill fan display was a polite form of introduction, but Lucy suspected the roots of the practice went much deeper. The gesture reminded her of a tom turkey, trying to impress a rival or a mate.
Movek's long, ungainly quills gave the gesture an added edge of menace. "And you are Ms. Lucy Kang, the… 'helper' given to us by the Delurididug Trade Station."
Lucy nodded thoughtfully. She took a ponderous sip of her drink and set it on the table. Then she made ready to stand. "Well, this has been fun…"
Movek put a hand on her wrist. "Stay a little longer," he said. "Let's at least have a drink before you go. Raechi, why don't you get the next round."
Raechi was caught off guard. "Actually… I was just going to call it a night."
Movek made an unconvincing face of disappointment. "Oh, that's too bad. Well, maybe you ought to. We can't have you reporting late in the morning, can we?"
"No, Mr. Movek. Have a good night. You too, Lucy." He flashed her a look of sincere apology, stood, and bolted for the door.
For a moment, Lucy studied the hand that still held her wrist, then she flashed Movek the same venomous look that had repelled Ovan's advances so effectively.
Movek pulled back and laughed. "Woah! She bites! Listen, now, don't be cross. I'm just looking to get to know you a little. I'm a senior officer on this ship, you know."
"Oh, wow," Lucy deadpanned, but Movek proved impervious to sarcasm.
"And I wasn't just picking on them for the sake of it, if that's what got your quills in a bristle. Those two have a history of getting drunk and rowdy in here. Be grateful I nipped it in the bud."
"My 'quills' aren't bristling, Mr. Movek." She lifted a lock of her silky black hair and let it fall to her shoulder. "See? I just don't like people putting hands on me."
Movek studied her closely for a second, his shrewd eyes raking her up and down. "Hm. You're not what I expected at all. How can you seem so warm, yet sound so cold?" he practically purred, and he ran his hand lightly over the same lock of hair Lucy had just shown him.
Lucy swatted his hand away and stood up. Movek stood too, but he made no move to exit the booth, keeping Lucy trapped.
"You can't strike me, I'm an officer!" he hissed. They stood eye to eye, but his bristled quills made him tower over her. "You have to do what I tell you! I read your contract, Lucy Kang."
"Like hell!" Lucy growled. "Get out of my way, now."
"'The envoy is to be at the disposal of the employees of Hypereia Shuttle and Freight, LLC-'" Movek began quoting. Lucy raised her voice over his, reciting the rest of the term herself.
"'-to the extent that tasks required of the envoy do not interfere with the envoy's higher priority objectives!'" Lucy stabbed the table with her finger for emphasis. "In my judgment, fraternizing with an overbearing mid-level officer would directly interfere with my role as this ship's gardener and mission specialist."
"That's a load of shek! How-"
"And if you disagree," Lucy went on, "We can go and speak to the captain. Together. Right now."
He hesitated, just for a moment. His face lightened by a shade, and she was sure she had him.
And yet, after just a fleeting hesitation, Movek's expression hardened. He put his hand on her arm and said, "You should change your tone, Lucy, or I might just call your bluff."
Lucy took a moment to gauge just how hard she ought to hit him to put him on his ass without breaking his jaw. She balled her fist and stepped back on her right foot.
Movek had no way of knowing how lucky he was when someone came up behind him, grabbed him by one of his overgrown quills, and dragged him out of the booth.
His quills puffed out like Lucy had never seen, a comb of spikes almost half a meter high. He thrashed against his assailant and whipped around to face him, fists balled and ready to swing.
He found himself standing face-to-chest with Dr. Haxle Ezen. The Alixindrian towered over the Faiacian rudder operator. Even his quills, fully puffed up, only came up to Haxle's nose. The archeologist stared down that nose at Movek, lip curled as if smelling something rotten. A bright red line across Haxle's copper-toned cheek betrayed the place where one of Movek's quills had scratched him, but it hadn't quite drawn blood.
Movek restrained himself when he saw who he was dealing with, but he didn't back down. "What the shek, Doc! This has nothing to do with you!"
Haxle looked off to his right, where the ship's first mate, Rajak, and the requisition and supply officer, Neska, sat at the end of the bar, halfway across the ship's spacious crew lounge. They were watching intently as the altercation unfolded.
"You see what's happening here," said Dr. Haxle. "You're just going to watch while your subordinate behaves this way?"
Neska looked to Rajak, but Rajak just kept studying the three of them with shrewd eyes.
"Mr. Rajak, did you see?" Movek's voice was oddly shrill. "Haxle just assaulted-"
"Movek!" Rajak interrupted him forcefully. He paused for effect, then went on in a casual tone. "Take a hike."
"But I demand-"
"I said!" Rajak shouted again, and he waited to see if Movek would really make him repeat himself.
Movek heaved a frustrated sigh, and his quills shuddered back down, settling uneasily against his scalp and down the length of his back. He gave Lucy a profoundly stymied look and stalked off.
Haxle watched him go, and Lucy noticed that his hackles had been up, too. His close-cropped, gunmetal-gray hair bristled all down the back of his neck. Taken with his pronounced canines and his intense, golden-brown eyes, Lucy was beginning to suspect his species had evolved from some xeno-analog of wolves. And yet, the angle of his jaw was very… human. And his large hands, too, were almost perfectly suited to a human male almost two meters tall.
It never ceased to amaze Lucy how countless evolutionary pathways, each uniquely molded by the chaotic conditions of a planet, could converge again and again, all over the galaxy, giving rise each time to an unmistakably humanoid lifeform. According to some, convergent evolution was irrefutable evidence that the hand of some higher power was at work in the galaxy. A recently more popular theory, though, had it that the formula for humanity was meta-encoded in the oldest genes of biomes throughout the cosmos. Supposedly, it was the work of an ancient, mysterious race of 'first humanoids.' That story sounded a bit far-fetched to Lucy, though, and anyways, it amounted to pretty much the same thing.
The moment Movek left his sight, Haxle visibly relaxed, and the hackles on his neck subsided. He turned around and studied Lucy with apparent concern, drawing her out of her tangential thoughts. "Are you ok?"
Lucy wanted to roll her eyes. She didn't. "I'm just dandy, thank you very much."
His brow furrowed, trying to interpret her ambivalent tone, but he pushed on. "Good. Listen, if any of Solaad's men give you grief again-"
"Then I'll handle it," Lucy said forcefully, and she slid out of the booth. Haxle took a step back to let her by. She took two steps towards the door and stopped. She was being rude. And anyways, it wouldn't be good to leave things up in the air. She turned back. "I appreciate your intent, Dr. Haxle, thank you. But the thing is, I don't actually need your help in these matters. And I'm not going to play favorites while I'm here, you understand. It's nothing personal. Have a good night." And with that, she headed for the door.
-o-o-o-
As he watched her go, Haxle wondered just what kind of thing she was, this strange envoy the Delurididug had saddled on him. She'd admitted, in their first private conversation, that she was, in fact, partially cybernetic. Which parts and to what extent, she hadn't said, nor did he feel the right to inquire. What was more; even her organic aspects weren't wholly natural. She'd been genetically engineered; an homunculus or an augment, he wasn't sure which. By her very nature, she rubbed against every taboo in Promithine's Admonition-about the peril, the insanity, the perversion of violating the natural order to try and become more like the scions.
On the other hand, Lucy didn't behave anything like the abominations described in Promithine's Admonition. She acted for all the world as if she were simply a haughty, headstrong young woman. He'd known her exact type among those young nobles of modest pedigree, fresh out of university and flush with unearned confidence, out to take on the whole cluster. He'd known a girl, once…
Come to think of it, something about the way Lucy looked at him reminded him very much of Inirva. Now, there was someone Haxle hadn't thought about in a long time. He'd loved her quite a bit, for a little while…
Haxle took a step towards the exit Lucy had just passed through, and stopped. He needed to have her on his side if things went pear-shaped with Solaad, but now was not the time to go chasing after her. He had the sense that he'd managed to make a rather poor impression, but if he just stepped back and let her get a clearer sense of things, she would surely see that her interests and his were aligned. Especially if Solaad's crew kept sniffing after her like the barbarians they were. Haxle made a mental note to drive it home to his own men that she was firmly out of bounds.
Haxle turned around and headed for the exit at the other end of the lounge, passing by Rajak and Neska on the way. They were leaning over their drinks, talking to each other in low voices. Haxle didn't deign to look their way as he passed.
-o-o-o-
"Well, what did you make of that?" said Rajak, watching the Alixindrian stalk out of the lounge. The moment he rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, the whole bar seemed to sigh in relief. The volume of ambient conversation rose noticeably as the dozen or so off-duty crew members relaxed back into their evenings.
"You were curious how she interacts with the crew," said Neska. "Seems like she'll have us all at each other's throats by the end of the eight-turn."
Rajak took a sip of his drink and thought for a moment. "I'm starting to like the girl."
Neska gave him a disgusted look. "Of course you do."
"Not like that, Neska, come on. I like how she looked about ready to cave Movek's teeth in, and how she sent Haxle chasing his tail. That girl's got moxie."
Neska snorted in derision. "Is that what you call them?"
Rajak gave Neska a questioning look. "Are you jealous of that hairhead?"
Neska made another derisive noise and fidgeted unconsciously with the quill that dangled over her left temple, framing one side of her pretty face. Lucy was pretty too, in an… alien sort of way, but she didn't have quills that perfectly framed her face like Neska did. "That soft-scalped errand girl? Not on your life. But I'm wary of her motives. You should be, too."
Rajak nodded. "I am. And not only hers."
Neska took a drink from her cup. Rajak pondered over the deal the captain had struck with the Delurididug. Striking any kind of bargain with a shifty extra-celestial computer program wouldn't have been anyone's first choice, but necessity had forced their hand. Rajak wondered how long the deal would hold. And he wondered what tricks the Delurididug's envoy had up her sleeve when it all inevitably fell to pieces.