"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops"

-Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) American journalist and essayist

Chapter Seven

"Should we …go outside?" Mychiko asked hesitantly.

Ty sighed, tapping her fingers anxiously on the tiny wooden desk she was sitting at in the basement of the Jasmine Dragon. All around them, barely visible in the dim candlelight, were wooden barrels, filled to the brim with various tea leaves. Not at all where she'd wanted the two of them to end up during this mess. They were originally supposed to go join their command in the bunker under one of the secondary barracks and were halfway there only for a runner to come up to her. Iroh had apparently gone to Zuko about sensitive White Lotus materials in his shop he needed secured before the inevitable post-disaster rioting, and which he had ordered her to secure. They'd debated briefly detailing a squad to get it, but she wanted to preserve as much of her combat power as possible for later and decided to risk trying to get out and back before anything worse hit.

Then there was another flash, and before she could stop herself, Mychi was physically shoving her down into the basement and closing the door behind them. Then fifteen minutes later, she found herself getting knocked to the floor by a loud crash that made the wave of sound that nearly dropped her in the palace feel like a slight breeze. The sounds of breaking glass and crashing stone didn't exactly fill her with confidence either.

Ty gestured with her head for the basement door, flicking a lock of brown hair out of her face as she did so. "Well," the youthful captain told her exec after a moment, ignoring the sinking feeling in her stomach at what she was probably going to see in the next few seconds. "We might as well take a look," The two women walked up the heavy wooden stairs to the set of double doors leading out into the square. They leaned against the door, facing each other, and Ty could see the fear and anxiety written all over her friend's face, mirroring her own.

"One," Ty counted, "two…three!" The two women pushed hard into their shoulders at the same time, and the sound of tumbling debris falling away from the doors filled the room as they opened outwards. Ty stepped out into the square, and felt the wind get knocked out of her, falling to her knees on the white stone square at the site that greeted her.

"Oh, sweet Kyoshi," she said softly, eyes widened in horror. The building in front of her, another prosperous shop like the Jasmine Dragon was half gone. All around her, every building was either knocked down entirely or had a third of the wall blown out. The sounds of wounded and trapped men and women pleading for help filled her ears.

We're doomed, she thought, her arms wrapping around her torso as she began to rock back and forth in place. We're doomed, we're doomed, we're doomed. How can the Avatar, how can I, fight an enemy who can do all this without even showing themselves?

"This," she said softly after a moment. "We never did this to this city." But Azula and her father were too damned willing to do this to every other Earth Kingdom city that hadn't surrendered, weren't they?

"Whoever did this, has a lot to answer for," her best friend growled, that aggression she'd always known was there ever since the Boiling Rock coming out.

Sheer shock and anger roiled through her. "Oh, come on!" Ty snapped, bolting to her feet and rising to face the taller, older girl, with a glare that should have reduced her to a carbon stain on the spot. Ordinarily she'd approved of that kind of response, but now? After seeing this?! "How can we 'pay them back for this' if we've never even seen them or their ships?! How do we fight that enemy, huh?"

"We will, okay?" Mychiko said, putting her hands on her shoulders. "I don't know when or how but we will."

Ty opened her mouth to retort, only to be interrupted by a loud crashing sound from the frame of the half-destroyed tea shop, the sound of something being thrown across a room. The two women looked next to them, curiosity and concern mirrored on each other's faces. Like the building in front of them, half the Jasmine Dragon's front wall was blown off and they could hear the unmistakable sounds of heavy booted feet moving along the floor. Ty gestured with her head, her right hand dropping to the hilt of her sword as they moved along the long wooden wall, stepping carefully around the bits of wooden rafter, unwilling to surprise whomever was looting in the front.

Then they saw them, three large bipedal shadows moving in the dark of the destroyed downstairs dining room, the furniture picked up and smashed by the blast wave scattered all over the paved square. Great, she thought with a pained sigh. It's started already.

"All right," Ty shouted. "Come on out! Yes, things are a mess right now, but that's no reason to start looting."

"tlhIngan jatlh!" A guttural voice shouted. She cocked her head. That did not sound like any local dialect she'd ever heard. Then they moved out of the building into the stone paved square, into the light of the moon, and Ty Lee's eyes widened. Three large, adult males, with darker skin, and… rigged foreheads?

"What…," Ty asked softly, trying to keep her voice from trembling out of the fear that suddenly ran down her spine at seeing creatures who looked human yet were clearly not. "Are you?"

The hiss of sliding steel sounded in the night as the three creatures drew short, curved swords and charged, a guttural roar filling the square.

Ty's eyes widened in shock, and she jumped back even as her training sent her hands to her war fans. The heavy ten-ribbed iron fan was designed for situations exactly like this. The length of her sword would only be a liability in a fight where she was outnumbered by opponents with short swords. If they were even, she and Mychiko could use that length advantage to fend them off all night if they had too. But they weren't, and she'd only be able to fend off one target at a time, allowing one of them to attack them from the side. She could take on more than one opponent with her fans however.

One thing was for damn certain, however and that was they couldn't leave. They weren't human, so she doubted the strikes she'd use to disable them would work, and she wouldn't leave these…creatures in a position to do Agni only knew what. Plus, the rubble all around them had either blocked off the square entirely or would force them to pick their way through it, meaning they'd still be on top of them. Oh, she was fairly sure she could make her escape. Uniform or no, she did enjoy her acrobatics, and she was almost as good as she thought she was. But once, not that long ago, she had made a promise to the scared girl who'd been beaten half to death before being dumped back into her cell never to leave her.

And she'd cheerfully die before doing that.

That being said, however, they were outnumbered so unless they managed to even the odds quickly, the odds were that staying, and fighting would only end one way.

The fan in Ty's left hand slammed into the back of the sword bearing down on her from that direction, turning the blade and diverting the force behind it into empty air. Wasting no time, she swung her shapely, muscular legs into a roundhouse kick that slammed into the side of the creature's face, turning it to the side as she followed the motion through and swung into a hard sidekick to his midsection that knocked him back hard on his heels.

Her opponent stumbled backwards before managing to right himself (at least she assumed it was a he, it had a beard) and smiled. The smile of someone who found a worthy opponent. That's one thing we share, at least, she thought idly, her brain almost in a daze. We love a good fight. Ty brought her fans down and charged her single. She had to get the odds even now or they were both dead. Behind her was the constant sound of feet moving and shifting, of metal clashing against metal as Mychiko held off two opponents at once and that couldn't last forever. Ty ducked under a vicious swing that would have taken her head half off, her right fan closing into a heavy iron club as she slammed it, front first, into his neck.

The creature, the man, crumpled to the ground gagging as he struggled to take in air. Leaving him to die she turned to charge one of the other warriors fighting them, to take the pressure off her friend. Right at that moment however, Mychiko's right hand was just a little two fast, and her fan failed to stop that wicked looking sword from smashing into her midsection with a sickening thud.

No, Ty thought, the shock and horror at her friend receiving what was almost certainly a mortal wound seemed to cause everything to slow even as she charged. Her right fan slammed hard into the neck of the man who'd killed her friend, causing more gagging sounds to fill the night air, as he collapsed like a ton of bricks to the ground. She ignored him, her left leg hooking around the last opponent's right, sending him crashing onto his back, his sword clattering out of his hand. She yelled, raising her arms to bring both her fans crashing down on his neck.

Right when a searing pain slammed into her abdomen, immediately followed by faint stink that she normally associated with shit. She lurched to a halt as though an earthbender had sprung up a wall in her path, resisting the urge to double over, looking down to see blood spreading out over her tunic.

Ty put one last burst of anger and rage and slammed her fans down on her killer's neck, screaming her anger and pain to the sky. She looked over at Mychi, struggling to rise to her feet even now. No, she thought, the pain at seeing that tall, seemingly indominable girl she'd relied on so much a mess of blood hurting almost worse than the wound in her abdomen. Dropping her fans to the packed dirt, she ran towards her friend, not even bothering to do anything to staunch her own bleeding. Stopping the bleeding here won't do any good. That's a gut stab. Even if I somehow manage to stop the bleeding, I'm dead in a week no matter what, and it won't be a pretty death.

"Hey," Mychiko said weakly as Ty closed the distance, trying to keep the wound pressed close to stem the tide of thick, dark arterial blood flowing down her tunic.

"Don't," Ty grunted through her own pain as she collapsed next to her, putting her other hand against her friend's wound. "Don't try to stand."

"See," Mychiko said gamely, her bottom lip trembling. "I told you we'd make somebody pay for this."

"Yeah," Ty said, huffing in pain as her stomach felt like it was on fire. "It only cost us our lives."

"Hey, I'm the one who's probably going to bleed to death in the next thirty minutes," Mychiko pointed out.

"Um, do you not smell that?" Ty said, hissing in pain, finally doubling over in the dirt. "That's me. I'm gut stabbed. You'll be dead in the next thirty minutes if we can't stop this. I'll die in agony in a week or so if I don't bleed out in the next few hours."
Mychiko huffed. "Look around us. Do you hear that?" Moans of varying levels of pain and the sounds of trapped men, women and children screaming for help filling the night air." Do you think there's anyone here in any position to help either of us?" She gave one sharp jerk of her head from left to right. "This is it for us. But we did not go down quietly and we did not go down alone, and I did it with you. No matter what, that's not a bad death for a soldier, especially a Kyoshi Warrior." She took one bloody hand off her wound and put it affectionately against Ty's right cheek. "And I also know that," she said, her voice already beginning to fade, " that whatever's next for us, I won't be facing it alone."

Ty blinked tears of soul-deep pain out of her eyes as she leaned in and kissed her friend's forehead then grabbed her friend by the shoulders and put her in her lap and continued trying to staunch her friend's bleeding. Even as she tried it, she knew they were dead. Both of them, but Mychi was right. She would not die alone.

It's like flying over hell, Archer thought as Lieutenant Mayweather piloted the shuttle over the vast city. It was a huge city, arranged in four concentric rings that got smaller as it got towards the center. With a population of approximately fifteen million, the explorer in him would have been fascinated to see such a city up close, on literally any other day. Today, however, was not that day. The larger belt of agricultural land surrounding the city in the midst of an out-of-control wildfire, and two-thirds of the outer ring had either been blown away entirely, in the middle of their own out-of-control wildfire, or both. The rest of the outer ring and the middle ring was still largely intact, though there were no doubt huge numbers of injured all over the place. They needed help as soon as possible.

I just wish we knew where to start, Archer thought, we're headed to that Palace at the center of the city because that's the most likely place for any central government to be, but it's not necessarily true. And every minute we're up here more people are dying in the ruins down there. In the meantime, the other shuttle flights are surveying the damage, trying to locate a decent place to set up a field hospital somewhere.

"Wait a minute, Travis," a Deep South accent said from in front of him, causing Archer to shake himself out of his reverie.

"I saw it too," his dark-skinnned conn officer said as he shifted the shuttle's course to the right, angling his searchlight at the large, half destroyed building in front of what was clearly some sort of public square.

"What is-oh" Archer began, then he stopped as he saw it.

Below him was a grisly scene. Five people, in front of the half-destroyed building. Three of them lying prone on the ground, clearly dead. Two of them...

Two humans, with fair skin, one with long brown hair and one with black hair, in some sort of green and red uniform. The one with brown hair was trying desperately to control the bleeding of the one with black hair.

"Set us down," Archer ordered, pointing towards the space between two half-destroyed buildings his voice edged with concern. "As soon as we're out, get back up and get that searchlight on them.

"Aye, sir," Mayweather immediately, his hands flying over his console. His senior pilot swung the ship around and brought down, settling it on the ground in a crunch of shattered wood. The doors to the cabin behind them swung open in a hydraulic whir and he, the MACO squad with him, and the four Starfleet medics tore out of the back of the shuttle and ran towards the two wounded as the shuttle shot back up like a homesick meteor, shining down it's searchlight on the macabre scene right when his medics dropped to their knees in front of them, fingers flying as they opened their cases. Archer's nose twitched as he smelled the odor coming from the two.

One or both of them as an intestinal injury, he thought, resisting the urge to tap his feet, my guess is the one still barely conscious.

They were women, he saw as his medics pulled out their scanners and hemostatic gauze. More than that, they were very young women, neither of them could be more than twenty if they were a day. The one on the ground, he noted, his lips pursed in concern, was already unconscious, her brownish skin paling alarmingly. One medic shoved hemostatic gauze into the wound as another hooked an IV to a bag of blood and lifted it above her head to get it flowing down. Her companion was not much better, she was bleeding profusely from her lower torso.

The other woman had enough strength left to bat them away as they tried to apply the gauze, however. One of the medics had to grab her arm and hold it back so the other could work on her.

"It's okay, sir," the young woman said soothingly by rote. "We'll get you and your friend taken care of.". He registered the young corpsman's use of the regulation "sir" for commissioned officers regardless of gender. They did look like officers, probably the cut of their uniforms and the swords still sheathed at their hips.

She probably thinks she's dead either way, with that kind of injury, he thought with pained sympathy as he watched his medics tend to fellow servicemembers.

"Report," he ordered after a minute.

"This one has a nicked epigastric artery," the senior medic, a dark-skinned young man with petty officer's insignia not that much older than them, pointing at the woman on the ground. "She's hypotensive, blood pressure eighty over fifty-five. Her friend is also crashing, and she has a puncture in her lower GI tract. Recommend both of them for immediate surgery back on the ship."

His hand went for his communicator. "Should we use the transporter?"

The younger man shook his head decisively. "They're both two delicate right now for that. The QCG is taking effect on both of them, we should be able to get them back up to the ship alive via shuttlepod."

Archer wheeled around as the roar of another inbound shuttlecraft filled the square. Another shuttle, no doubt called in by Travis, dropped down into the square. Larger and boxier than the previous version of the shuttle, it was designed to be used to move large numbers of personnel quickly in situations exactly like this.

"Captain," a female voice called from behind them, and he turned to view Commander T'Pol, knelt over one of the other bodies in that debris covered square.

"Yes, Commander?" Archer asked, as he closed the distance between them.

She pointed at the body in front of her. "These bodies are Klingon," the Vulcan woman said without preamble.

Archer blinked in shock, and he whipped around, seeing the lifeless bodies with rigged foreheads, eyes staring into nothing. "I see," Archer whispered after a moment, impressed despite himself. These two managed to take on three Klingon warriors and not be killed outright.

The body below T'Pol was a large Klingon male, in a heavy brown overcoat. He also had his throat smashed in. Next to him was one of those nasty Klingon knives with the retractable blades in the hilt, red human blood staining it halfway down. There were two other dead Klingons, both with what looked to be their throats smashed in. They couldn't leave, he realized, impressed. Debris was blocking most of the path out of here, and it would have slowed them down and they would have been on top of them anyway. So, they stayed and fought what would have been a battle of annihilation if we hadn't shown up.

Taking a deep breath, the captain of the Enterprise made a decision. "You and I are returning to the ship with them," Archer ordered. "Once they're out of surgery they can help us understand what's going on. This has to have some connection to what we were sent out here to investigate. It can't be a coincidence."

"I agree," T'Pol said softly as she rose to her feet.

"Trip!" Archer called out to his chief engineer, and the blonde-haired younger man walked over to them. "Change of plans. T'Pol and I are going back to the ship with them, I'm leaving you in charge down here for right now. I'll get our deployment plan started now, and this is as good a place as any to start sending them down." He saw the corpsmen beginning to lay the two women out on stretchers. "Put together an evidence response team as soon as you have the people, I want to know as much as possible about what happened here and why."

"Yes, sir," Tucker said. "What about contacting their leaders?"

"That can wait," Archer shouted behind him as he and T'Pol followed the corpsmen and the two women they were bearing to safety. "Leaving aside that we needed to help them, these two may be able to help us do just that."

This is beautiful, Aang thought as he sat at the gold-framed glass table in the center of the room. The chair he was sitting in was small, and upholstered in red with white filigree designs running down the seat and back. In fact, he noted, red and white seemed to be the two primary colors in the room. The walls and the floor were covered in gold-fringed white marble. The square the stone table was sitting on was laced in red and blue colored marble, and the windows had thick and heavy red drapes. He looked at the document bound in blue leather sitting on the table in front of him. The document he had helped to craft, and one he was to sign in a few hours on behalf of his entire world. The heavy white double doors in the left hand corner of the room pushed open with a small thud, and he heard a familiar warm voice fill the room. "Aang?" The warm voice of the woman he loved filled the room.

Aang looked up to see Katara, standing in the doorway, looking resplendent in her blue and white-

Aang started, and he found himself lying on his side on the floor, staring at the green, twirling orb before a big dark hand closed it shut. He looked up to see Sokka, Katara, and Zuko staring at him. Their faces, illuminated in the green light of the glowing crystals, were edged with concern.

"You all right?" Sokka asked as he held his hand out. Aang grabbed his hand and let Sokka pull him to his feet. Katara promptly picked up the ark and put it back on the huge wooden table with a painted model of the entire Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation that dominated the entire room.

"Yeah," Aang said distractedly, nodding jerkily. "The thing must have come open when that blast came through.

"What did you see this time?" Katara asked.

"I'm not sure," Aang responded, looking at the ark. "It's like a dream. We were in…a palace, somewhere? I'm not sure. You were there, Katara, and that's all I remember." Aang shook his head staring at the closed wooden box. "What is this thing?" Aang shouted angrily, resisting the urge to knock the damned thing off the table. "What was it doing at the Temple? And what exactly does it have to do with the Avatar?!"

"Maybe you should go into the Avatar State?" Zuko asked, a moderately reproving look on his face at his outburst. "Talk to your past lives, ask them why?"

Aang's face flushed in embarrassment. It was something he should have thought of. But so many things were happening, someone tried to murder his friends, the girl he'd had a crush on since that iceberg was seeing someone else, and now whatever had just happened outside! Aang took a deep breath. Speaking of which a lot of people probably need help right now.

"You're right, Zuko," Aang said after a moment. "But later. Right now, we should probably take a look at what happened outside."

"Exactly what I was going to say," Kuei said pointedly from behind him, causing Aang to jump. The Earth Kingdom's paramount monarch gestured to the door heavy wooden double doors at the head of the stairs, a mildly annoyed look on his face.

Aang bowed his head his face burning with embarrassment as the six of them walked up the stairs, Kuei at the lead. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty. Let's go tend to the needs of your subjects."

Kuei pushed the door open to a cacophony of sounds. Heavily booted feet running down stone corridors, orders being shouted, andthe wounded men and women crying for help.

"That's easier said than done," Katara muttered from next to him, her dry tone belying the worry on her voice.

The looming bulk of Lieutenant Chan appeared in the doorway. The annoyingly handsome officer breathed an obvious sigh of relief and stepped halfway down the stairs.

"Your Majesties," he said, quickly. "Avatar Aang. Lieutenant Telnori's respects and she begs to report that the company is intact and combat-ready if necessary."

"Wait, Lieutenant Telnori?" Sokka asked, concerned. "She's Ty's senior platoon commander, why she's giving the report and not her or Mychiko?"

"I'm sorry, sir," Chan responded, clearly resisting the urge to pace with worry. "Neither the Captain nor the Exec returned from their mission before the flash. Their status is unknown. But Lieutenant Telnori's already receiving reports from battalion runners from the other garrisons that managed to survive whatever happened. Reports are contradictory but there are reports of strange, unidentified aircraft all over Ba Sing Se's skies, and that some are landing in the Middle Ring, less than five miles from the palace."

Captain's Starlog, supplemental

I've started sending down my crew to provide what relief they can. The only people remaining on the ship will be a skeleton station-keeping crew and the surgical staff who won't be going down with the relief teams. Commander T'Pol and I will head back down to oversee those efforts shortly, but before we do, I want to talk to those first two survivors we rescued. They're barely more than girls, I doubt either of them is even twenty-one, but they managed to take on three Klingons and…well considering they were on death's door when we found them, I can't say they won, but they sure as hell didn't lose. They're skilled, despite their youth. Which means they're smart. Not that that ultimately matters, of course, we would have done everything possible to save them even if it turns out they're just a couple of kids who stole their parent's uniforms who are dumber than toast.

Still no word from Captain Hernandez or Columbia. Even if she comes charging back down that corridor with every Earth, Vulcan, and Andorian ship in and around Sol, we're still going to need a lot of local help to deal with his disaster. If nothing else, they can point us in the right direction to make contact with their leaders. But more than that, the odds of any of this being a coincidence are slim to none. The stolen weapons, this disaster on the planet's surface, it has to be connected. Nothing else makes sense. Which means we're also going to need all the local help we can get if we're going to get to the bottom of this entire mystery.

To paraphrase one of my nation's greatest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, when he learned about another military officer, and future President named Ulysses S. Grant, who acquitted himself well at a grim and bloody field in Tennessee called Shiloh:

"I cannot spare these women. They fight."

Ty winced in pain at the bright, white light that greeted her, and the young captain squeezed her eyes shut. Wait a second, she thought. No light that isn't generated by the Avatar State is that bright. She opened her eyes slowly, not looking directly at it. She saw, enclosed by a circular glass fixture, a glowing bright white light, far brighter than any torch or gas lamp she's ever seen.

Wait, she thought, eyes widening in shock, I'm not in any pain. Her hand slid down, shoving aside the brown blanket covering her on the bed she had somehow gotten into after she'd finally blacked out from pain and loss of blood. Huh. She was in a blue gown, held together by ties down her front, and, she could feel, down her back.

More importantly, that smell, that godawful stench of a stabbed intestine that hailed an inevitable death was gone. She winced, as her brain registered a burning sensation in her left arm. She looked to see a sharp needle stuck into her left arm below her elbow. It was attached to a tube and a bag made of some clear substance, a bag full of what she could only assume was water that was draining into her body through her arm.

As she was staring at it, unsure what it was, and unsure whether or not it would be a good idea to pull it out, she heard the unmistakable sound of someone rustling under a blanket in a bed, and she looked to Mychi stirring herself awake, as though they were both just waking up from a restful sleep in their barracks. The older girl's brown eyes fluttered open, staring right at her, and a big warm, Mychi smile broke out on her friend's face. Overcome Ty huffed, blinking back tears as she smiled back. Her best friend was alive, one of the girls whom she'd seen so much pain and death with during those long dark days in the Rock, whom she'd given up for dead in the dirt was alive. There was another bag and tube hooked into Mychiko's arm, she noticed, that seemed to be draining blood into her.

"What happened?" Her exec asked weakly.

Ty swallowed the lump in her throat, as she thought back to the last things she remembered. "We were…bleeding out," she said after a minute. "You were going faster than I was, and you were so pale. I was slipping out of it, when I saw this bright light, and there were hands on me, and that's all I remember after the fight."

"Well," Mychiko said after a moment, staring around the room. "Whomever it was seems to have saved both our lives." She gestured with her hand, encompassing the semicircular room with it's too-bright lights and it's strange glowing panels. "But all this? I've never seen anything like this before. Never seen anyone like who we fought before either. All I can really say for certain is that they're not human?"

"That's because they're not," a deep male voice said, and they looked up to see a man and a woman walk into the room. The man was tall and in his forties, with fair skin and nutbrown hair and eyes. The woman was young, Mychiko's age, or hers, with black hair and a skin shade closer to Katara's. They both wore uniforms that were unfamiliar to her but were unmistakably military. The man, clearly the commander, wore a blue jacket and trousers with a gold undershirt with four silver pips over his left breast. The young woman was in gray and black mottled jacket and trousers with a brown undershirt, with brown boots. "They were Klingons. A species with a warrior culture from a world far away from here."

So naval officer and naval infantry soldier, probably here to protect her commander from the strange people they picked up, she thought quietly.

Then she saw it, her eyes widened, and her nostrils flared, that memory of that acrid stink of burned flesh filling her nose as though she was staring at her sergeant's body again. The rifle the soldier was carrying in her gloved hands was the same type as the one they had taken off that damned Lightning Sword.

The commander clearly noticed her reaction because he turned and looked down at the rifle than back at her, concern on his face.

"You've…seen one of these before, haven't you?"

"Yes…Commander?" Ty said questioningly after a moment. "It was used by a local rebel group to kill one of my sergeants. A friend of mine managed to kill her, and we have it."

"Damn it," the man swore before taking a deep breath. "And it's Captain. Captain Jonathan Archer, and you're on my ship, the Enterprise. We have a lot to talk about."

"I'm Captain Ty Lee," she said, His crew did save her and her friend's life after all. She owed him a chance to explain himself. "Albeit an infantry one. And I would say we do, sir. I'd say that's an understatement."