The Adventures of Augment Gothic (A Star Trek SI)

by Joe Lawyer

A present-day Star Trek fan is forcibly thrust into that dimension and made anew as an Augment, a genetically engineered superman, on the whim of a mischievous god. Armed with knowledge of this dimension's past and future, he's determined to live well, have fun with alien women, and make it look easy. Elements of DS9/TNG/Voy/Ent. Originally co-written with GothicJedi666.

40. Chapter 40

Disclaimer: I own nothing related to or part of Star Trek.

Last time on The Adventures of Augment Gothic

We all quickly reviewed the data.

"Are you suggesting that we steal the isodesium we need from them?" B'Elanna asked. "I'm not saying I'm against it, but let's be clear about what we're talking about here."

T'Maz looked unaffected by the question/accusation, "Yes, we should steal it, as you put it. My scans have not detected a source of the mineral in the quantities required to shield one of our smallest industrial replicators anywhere within range. Our survival and our ability to escape the dampening field depends on returning the ship to full power."

"I, too, am not opposed to stealing what we need, but can we not attempt to trade for what we need first?" Neela asked, playing devil's advocate. Given our history together in the Occupation, I knew that she had no issues making tough calls or getting her hands dirty, especially when our survival was on the line.

"Normally, I would try to trade for what we need first, but since this is such a rare and limited commodity in this space, there is a strong possibility that they'll say no, or ask for something that we would be unwilling to part with," I said. "Tipping them off to our intentions would make stealing it later many times harder, if not impossible."

My crew nodded in agreement, signaling their support of the plan to steal what we needed.

The Adventures of Augment Gothic

Chapter 40

The Flighty Temptress. Outside of Normal Space. Exact Location Unknown.

Once again I found myself in a small airlock, ready to suddenly open the outer door allowing me to be explosively shot out of the ship at truly ridiculous velocities on my way to perform a clandestine mission of great importance. What a life!

"Natasha, deactivate gravity plating in my location and prepare to open the outer airlock door," I ordered, my eyes taking in my omni-tool's latest real time report on the state of my armor and all its connected systems. The dampening field was affecting my armor's more advanced functions, the ones that required stored power from its onboard capacitors to complete, but it reported nearly 70% functionality.

"Gravity disengaged," Natasha dutifully reported, just as I began floating away from the floor. I carefully pitched forward and placed my feet on the wall opposite the external airlock door and immediately activated my magnetic boots to lock onto the metal surface. "We're in position and waiting for your order, father."

I merely nodded, knowing that she would be able to see it. I pulled my jury rigged Romulan disrupter pistol from my right side and visually confirmed that everything was in order. As this was not my normal sidearm, it was not linked to my armor's systems and thus capable of providing real-time information on its current operational status, including a current energy level or a damage report. B'Elanna had further improved its resistance to the dampening field by stripping the limited isodesium we had in our possession off that Vidiian weapon-which really didn't have the kind of functionality that would be useful to me for this mission-and applying the salvaged material to the outer casing of my improvised weapon through a modern form of powder coating and electrostatic bonding. The dampening field would still affect the disrupter beam as it left the weapon's firing aperture, of course, but it would still be more powerful than it was before as the dampening effect wasn't instantaneous.

On my left hip were several new combat knives that I had taken from the ship's main armory. In an energy dampening field, an unpowered blade worked just as well as it always did and was silent to boot, which may be necessary on this mission.

After our last staff meeting, my ship had slowly, but surely, crawled into position well outside the projected sensor range that we had calculated for our target. In this case, we were using the broken hull of a large cargo ship that was providing a nice bit of sensor cover for us, a ship that must have been transporting some kind of extremely hazardous irradiated waste before it had been pulled into this Godforsaken trap/graveyard/junkyard of a dimension.

The transition to this dimension hadn't done any favors for this vessel and it was steadily leaking waste into the surrounding area, creating a sensor blinding effect in the area that our target was probably also using to stay under the radar or to hide from the other predators in this region. Our sensors, even as diminished as they were, were advanced enough to see through this blinding effect. This hazardous waste that it was leaking into space was also why it hadn't been picked clean by the scavengers of the area. Even just a little exposure could prove lethal.

I pulled my blackened sword from my back and gave it a final onceover, finding it in perfect condition and ready for use. It was a bit of a ritual for me to cleanse the blade carefully after I had used it to take a life. Cleaning it of organic residue, sharpening and polishing it, though the advanced materials hardly needed it to remain sharp, and oiling it to ensure drawing it always remained preternaturally silent when I wanted it to be. Again, most of this care and maintenance wasn't even necessary given the advanced materials I had constructed my sword from, but it was a habit now, one that I had begun during my time on Bajor during the Occupation. Killing someone with a sword, versus an energy weapon, just hit you differently for some reason and the time caring for the weapon was a perfect time to reflect on things and find some peace with what I had done.

Putting it back into my integrated sheath on my back, I conducted one final test. Mentally commanding my armor, I attempted to activate my armor's onboard cloaking system. I sighed, as the cloaking field momentarily attempted to establish itself, before it fizzled out and I returned to full visibility. Establishing a stable cloaking field was a very power intensive feature of my armor and the dampening field was just not allowing the capacitors to store the requisite power necessary to accomplish it. Instead, I activated the adaptive camouflage, a much less power intensive system and the adaptive coloring of my armor's skin activated with little issue, just as I had suspected. The adaptive camouflage system required little power to change the armor's skin, the majority of the power being expended in the initial change, rather than in actively maintaining it, like with the cloaking system.

I knelt, arms tucked in tight to my sides to prevent them from hitting the sides of the airlock and shattering them terribly during the launch.

"Natasha, I'm ready. Orient the ship appropriately and give me a 5 second countdown when in position," I ordered.

"Understood, father," Natasha responded. "Firing thrusters now."

Through my link with the ship I could feel the Temptress subtly reorienting to provide me with a direct path towards my target and safely through the various bits of debris that littered the area.

"Opening airlock doors in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1."

The doors opened quickly and I was shot out of the side of the ship like a bullet from a gun, my adaptive camouflage systems rendering me as black as the surrounding space around me, rendering me near invisible to any visual sensors. Given my incredibly small size compared to any modern ship, the sensor dispersing properties of my armor's skin, and my active adaptive camouflage, simulations had concluded that it was extremely unlikely that I would be picked up by the sensors likely present on the target ship, given what we could see and deduce of the ship's technical capabilities. Since I had not been detected by the modern sensors of a Romulan colony world, one without tons of active debris in system and a constant source of leaking, irradiated waste, I felt pretty confident I wouldn't be detected.

Tilting my head up towards my target, my armor's HUD system helpfully outlined my distant target with a bright red circle. My target was so small, it could barely be seen at this distance. In the bottom right-hand corner of my visual field a distance to target readout was slowly, but steadily declining, with a time to target of 6 hours, 37 minutes, and 21 seconds ticking down as my speed brought me closer. I was traveling at a ridiculous speed, but my target was ridiculously far away as well, as the Temptress had been forced to launch me from quite a distance in order to be well outside our target's predicted sensor range. Hiding an object the size of a person from sensor detection was many orders of magnitude easier than hiding a giant starship, after all.

"Milla, probability of detection if I increase speed from current position," I asked my onboard VI, one that I rarely had reason or opportunity to interact with lately. For some reason, her personality matrix hadn't really developed as much as I had hoped it would. This was largely my fault, as I relied on Hermione and Natasha for most things and hadn't given her the level of interaction she required to truly develop a unique personality. Right now, though, I was being extremely careful by not linking back to the ship, just in case the energy from the transmissions or link made me easier to spot on sensors. The chance for detection due to that was low, but I didn't want to risk it if I didn't have to, especially since we really didn't know who was behind our arrival in this dimension in the first place, or what they were capable of.

'1.7% probability of target detection from current position and distance. Probability of detection increases as distance to target decreases,' Milla responded in bright, written text across my visual field, which was an interesting choice considering she could have spoken to me directly. A graph appeared showing how the probability of detection increased the longer the acceleration burn. Basically, given my extreme range to target, I would be able to do a full burn for perhaps 30 seconds, at most, then would need to cut off thrusters and fly the remaining distance on inertia.

"Thank you, Milla," I said, before I carefully corrected my course with several tiny micro bursts from my reaction control thrusters. Once I was back on the ideal course to reach my target, I locked my armor's limbs in position.

"Firing thrusters in 3, 2, 1," I said before the thrusters embedded in the soles of my armor's feet activated for 30 seconds and I was propelled forward even faster than before, my inertial dampers not fully negating the sensation of increased acceleration by my own design.

Once the 30 seconds had elapsed, my thrusters shut down and I continued to coast toward my target at insane speeds, the ship appearing a tiny bit larger than before. The readout in my HUD had helpfully been updated to show the new time to target, which had been halved and now read 3 hours 12 minutes and 2 seconds.

"Any indication that our target has detected us?" I asked Milla.

'Negative,' the text answer came.

"Engage autopilot."

This was the kind of thing they didn't show on a television show. Rather than waste these three hours of travel time I let my mind sink into the locally saved, narrative parameter file of my latest holonovel project.

XXXXX

"Very good, Potter, yes. Snape, unfortunately, wasn't fooled. While everyone else was running about the dungeon, he went to the third floor to head me off. He, of course, never trusted me again," Quirrell said, turning towards the Mirror or Erised again, gazing hungrily into its depths. Harry winced as his scar burned again.

"Pause!" I called out in this mental space, basically a stripped-down version of the holodeck that would allow me to mentally work on refining my Harry Potter holonovel, something that I had been doing for over two hours now. While much of the program had been auto-generated based on my knowledge of the books and movies, many elements needed to be adjusted or improved to take into account the immersive environment of the holodeck and how it could interact with the player in a way that a book or movie simply couldn't. "Adjust sensory parameter file, pain centered on scar at this final confrontation, received from proximity to Voldemort, needs to be 25% stronger than at any other point in the program. Is this still within most humanoid safety protocol limits?"

"Requested sensory parameter is within most safety tolerances," the default computer voice responded. Given the communications blackout I was operating under, neither Hermione or Natasha was here to assist me as my armor's systems were woefully insufficient to locally house either VI. I would have to do make do with what I had and Milla really hadn't been designed for this kind of work.

Thankfully, the same sensory capabilities the holodeck/holosuite used to convey pleasure to the user while they fucked holo-characters in a sex based holoprogram, the kinds of programs that Quark was famous for peddling on DS9, could be inversely used to cause pain to the user, in this case the pain/irritation Harry experienced whenever in close proximity or under the legillimency of Voldemort.

"Attenuate up or down the pain sensation per the age and species of player, as well as the local safety protocol limits," I ordered, a beep acknowledging the narrative change I had just made. "Resume."

Quirrell continued as if I had never stopped him in the first place.

"He rarely left me alone. But he doesn't understand. I'm never alone. Never. Now, what does this mirror do? I see what I desire. I see myself holding the stone. But how do I get it?!" Quirrell cried in irritation.

"Use the boy," Voldemort insidiously whispered aloud, Harry looking around, wondering where the voice was coming from.

"Computer, up reverberation on Voldemort's voice, have the voice sound as if coming from several directions with an echoey, ethereal quality," I ordered a change in the narrative character voice audio file, circling around the main players with a critical eye. It was the little details like this that made a 'good' program, a 'great' one. Asking the computer for something 'ethereal' was always going to be fraught with difficulty, or require answering endless follow-up questions, but I had the computer play several examples before I found one that I approved.

Quirrell turned to Harry with evil intent.

"Come here, Potter! Now!" Quirrell commanded. Harry slowly walked down the stairs, towards Quirrell and the mirror. "Tell me, what do you see?"

From my perspective behind Harry, I saw Harry look into the mirror, and for a few seconds, sees himself standing next to Quirrell, then his reflection reaches into its pocket and pulls out a gleaming red, ruby-like gem, the Philosopher's Stone. Harry stared in amazement as his reflection smiles and winks, then puts the stone back in its mirror-pocket. Harry feels his actual pocket and realizes the Stone really is there, then looks up again.

"What is it?" Quirrell asked insistently. "What do you see?"

"I-I'm shaking hands with Dumbledore. I've won the House Cup," Harry lied, desperately trying to hide the fact that he, in fact, had the stone in his pocket. But, in the end, he was only a child, unused to lying and deception and Voldemort was a master of both.

I smirked at this little scene in front of the Mirror. Originally, when Harry first encounters and gazes into the infamous Mirror of Erised in that abandoned classroom, the actors originally seen in the movie, the ones portraying Harry's parents, appeared, because I was using the movies as my default template for the holoprogram. With a little bit of creative programming, though, I had changed the narrative so that the user's own real-life parents or guardians (or girlfriend or spouse, if they were older) would appear in the mirror. At the heart of every holodeck or holosuite was a powerful computer, so it was not overly difficult for the holodeck's computer to access image files of the player's parents in the public databases and have them appear in the Mirror instead. In my opinion, that would increase the overall emotional impact of the scene. I could have had the images of the player's parents even speak in their own voices, but as that had not happened in the original story and was beyond the capability of the mirror, I hadn't changed it. If a suitable option didn't present itself when that scene began, the program would default back to showing Harry's movie parents.

"He lies," Voldemort hissed.

"Tell the truth! What do you see?" Quirrell angrily shouted.

"Let me speak to him," Voldemort commanded.

Harry backed away at the spooky voice that seemingly came from nowhere.

"Master, you are not strong enough," Quirrell warned.

"I have strength enough for this," Voldemort replied, like a badass.

Quirrell reached up and started unwrapping his turban as he turned, so his back was to the mirror. Harry then turned toward the staircase into the room, as if wondering whether he should try to escape, then turns towards Quirrell again. He is almost finished unwrapping his turban, save for a piece covering the back of his head. Finally, he removes the turban, revealing a scary-looking chalk white human looking face. It was Voldemort. He cranes around and opens his eyes.

"Harry Potter, we meet again."

"Pause!" I called, exasperatedly. This was the problem when using something created on 21st century Earth, in a society that thought they were the sole sentient race in the universe, as your template. "Computer, not all my players are going to be fucking human. Adjust character parameter file for Voldemort, adjust facial characteristics visible to match the facial pattern of the player's species. If multiple species are present, use the species of the person playing Harry as the control race."

The computer beeped in acknowledgement, signaling that my change had been accepted.

"Resume."

"Voldemort," Harry whispered in shocked surprise.

"Yes. You see what I've become? See what I must do to survive? Live off another. A mere parasite. Unicorn blood can sustain me, but it cannot give me a body of my own. But there is something that can. Something that, conveniently enough, lies in your pocket!"

Realizing that Voldemort knew about the Stone, Harry turned around and ran back up the stairs.

"Now we're getting to the good part!" I said, still slowly circling the action taking place to continually change my perspective, hoping to spot anything that I needed to change or improve upon.

"Stop him!" Voldemort yelled. Quirrell snaps his fingers, instantly causing walls of flame to spring up, blocking the exit, trapping Harry in the room. "Don't be a fool. Why suffer a horrific death when you can join me and live?"

"Computer, pause," I called out, stepping close to the flame wall with my hand outstretched. "Adjust sensory parameter file, increase heat produced by flame wall by 10%."

The computer obediently complied. I still didn't feel like enough.

"Another 10%," I ordered, liking where it was at now. "Resume."

"Never!" Harry shouted, shaking his head in denial.

"Haha. Bravery. Your parents had it too. Tell me, Harry, would you like to see your mother and father again? Together, we can bring them back," he said. In the mirror, Harry's parents appear in the reflection. "All, I ask for is something in return."

Harry takes the Stone from his pocket.

"That's it, Harry. There is no good and evil. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it. Together, we'll do extraordinary things. Just give me the stone!" he commanded, Mirror James and Lily fading from the reflection.

"You liar!"

"Kill him!"

Quirrell soars into the air and grabs hold of Harry with one hand on his throat. They fall to the steps, causing the stone falls out of Harry's reach as Quirrell chokes him. Harry strains and squeaks. Suddenly, Harry puts his hand on Quirrell's hand in an attempt to get him off. Smoke furls from under his hand as Quirrell winces, shouting in pain.

"Ahh! Ahh!" Quirrell screams in pain and terror, backing up away from Harry. His hand is crumbling into ash and dust. "What is this magic?" he asks as his hand disintegrates.

"Fool, get the stone!" Voldemort shouts, uncaring of his servant's plight.

Quirrell walks forward towards Harry, who then desperately grabs his face with both hands, causing Quirrell to scream in pain, and Voldemort to wince. Harry looks on horrified as Quirrell backs up with his face horrendously burned. Quirrell crumbles to ash as he walks forward, turning his body completely into ash and dust as he falls to the floor, leaving only his clothing. Harry gasps as he looks at his own hands and hurries over to the stone. He picks it up and sighs. However, from behind, a cloud of dust takes form from Quirrell's corpse, causing Harry to turn around as the dust cloud with Voldemort's face rushes forward screaming and goes through Harry who also screams. Voldemort flies away, as Harry falls to the ground, unconscious. He holds the stone in an outstretched hand, victorious.

"Pause, computer, open and adjust sensory parameter file, I want the Harry character to experience a low-level temporary burst of pleasure at killing Quirrell, at surviving the day, saving the stone, and killing his enemy," I said, a wicked smile on my face at the potential implications of this. "When Voldemort escapes and goes through Harry, induce an acute pain in his scar, set pain level at maximum limit of local safety tolerance."

The computer beeped in acknowledgement.

I was pleased with the work I had managed to accomplish in the time I was traveling towards my target, but I had a striking realization. Some of my players, especially an adult one, might want to say 'fuck it' and go murder hobo on everybody and join Voldemort, which, admittedly, was something I might do after playing this program through straight, a time or two. That was the tricky part of writing a holonovel in which your players could do or say anything. You had to anticipate some unusual choices or make the narrative parameters and matrix adaptable enough to handle it. Some might even try to AK Voldemort, which I fully supported, but the primary narrative should be able to handle that choice, assuming I didn't make it impossible for a first year Hogwarts student to successfully cast an AK. It was an action in furtherance of good, or rejecting Voldemort's offer.

"Computer, open alternate narrative path and extrapolate based on the Harry player accepting Voldemort's offer. Go back to Voldemort's offer, adjust dialog accordingly," I ordered, curious to see what the computer came up with based on all the other material I had provided.

It was over 3 minutes later that the computer's processing finished and a new alternate narrative path was extrapolated, which made sense given the limited processing power that my armor systems possessed, at least in comparison to my ship or the ship with my island's processing power buttressing it.

"Resume."

The program reset and Quirrell/Voldemort and Harry were back again in front of the Mirror of Erised.

"That's it, Harry. There is no good and evil. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it. Together, we'll do extraordinary things. Just give me the stone!" he commanded, Mirror James and Lily fading from the reflection.

"Can you really give me back my parents?" Harry asked quietly, the longing in his voice clear to hear.

"I can."

"Then you can have the stone, my Lord," Harry replied quietly, outstretching his hand to give Quirrell/Voldemort the stone as Harry fell to his knees in front of his new Dark Lord.

"You have made the right decision, Harry," Voldemort said gently in response, approvingly, almost lovingly, if the man was capable of such a thing, as he carefully took the stone from Harry's outstretched hand. "You shall be my Dark Prince, second only to me in the ranks of my Death Eaters. We shall conquer this world and remake it as we will. All of magical Britain and then the world shall kneel before you as their prince. Power, freedom, wealth, women, whatever it is you desire shall be yours. All of my Death Eater's daughters your playthings, if you desire-"

"Pause! Seriously computer?" I asked, extremely amused at this unexpected bit of extrapolation. "Women? The Death Eater daughters as Harry's, presumably sexual, playthings? Where did that come from?"

"Alternative narrative path extrapolation is based on many factors including expected narrative developments based on author's personality and desires of other terrorist leaders throughout galactic history."

So, this extrapolation was based, partly, on me and other evil despots, being a bit hedonistic? Huh, well, I can't say I wouldn't be interested in having a bunch of the Death Eater daughters as my personal playthings if I went the Dark Harry route. If you were going to play the villain, why not get some of the benefits of not giving a shit about right and wrong. Going murder hobo was all about bucking convention, not following the obvious path, and essentially doing what you wanted, acting on your base impulses with no regard for morality.

"Carry on, computer. I like your style," I joked, a bit of respect in my voice. "Continue infinite extrapolation of alternate narrative path into book 2 when we return to the Temptress and have access to her greater processing power."

"Understood."

"Save program and close."

XXXXX

"Begin deceleration maneuvers," the computer advised. Just as I'd ordered it to, when within a 100 miles of my target, it had taken me out of the mental simulation I had been in for the last nearly 3 hours so that I could begin slowly decelerating and not go splat on my target at thousands of miles per hour.

Firing my thrusters, I reoriented my body armor to directly face my target, rather than the superman-like orientation I had been in before. This exposed more of my armor's forward-facing reaction control thrusters all along my chest and legs to slow me down more effectively.

Pulsing my forward-facing thrusters, I slowly began to decelerate as I got closer and closer to my target.

When within a mile of my target, I pulsed my thrusters to change course to reach my target destination, an airlock on the bottom of the ship, one that my crew and I felt was far away from any of the vital areas of the ship. My target was an airlock which led to an isolated cargo bay that my limited sensors told me was unoccupied.

With computer-controlled precision, my deceleration continued till I came to a slow, gradual stop within arm's length of the outer airlock that was my target. Another reason we had specifically chosen this airlock, in addition to being out of the way and isolated, was that this section of the ship belonged to the I.S.S. Hood, a Constitution-class starship, a design which the Imperial Starfleet had stolen from the Federation.

While my ship's database didn't contain the old command codes for this ship, it did have detailed design schematics that I was taking advantage of now and the long-overcome encryption code keys used in that era that I would need to overcome its security.

Pressing on a manual control, the panel next to the airlock depressed and slid aside, exposing the dark control mechanisms for the airlock door. As I expected, it was unpowered, but the Constitution design, like most races' designs, had the ability to receive external power in case of a catastrophic shipboard emergency in which main power was lost. The idea behind this was that this would allow external rescuers the ability to render assistance to ships in distress. Of course, there were numerous safeguards to prevent this from becoming a security vulnerability, but the Constitution-class was a ship 100 plus years out of date and its safeguards and command encryption style were woefully insufficient for modern computer systems.

Placing my hand on the control interface, I channeled power into the duotronic circuitry and Milla instantly went to work penetrating the ship's systems. This would not allow me access to the ship's main computer or other functions, those systems were rather sensibly not linked here, but it would allow me to open the outer hatch and fill the inner chamber with atmosphere.

Moments later the interface flashed green and the outer door smoothly opened. I maneuvered inside and toggled the control to close the hatch and fill the inner chamber with breathable air. Nothing happened. Life support must have been disabled in this part of the ship to preserve power, which perhaps I should have expected, the Constitution-class, while old, was a pretty big ship. The inner door opened into a pitch-black cargo bay.

I moved in silently and ducked to the side, pulling my weapon, just in case my entry into the ship had been detected. The first place an anti-boarding security team would look and fire at was the airlock. Since the ship was an unholy mish mash of multiple ships, there was no telling how they had ultimately integrated the computers and internal sensors of the ships together, so I really couldn't be sure that I had remained undetected, despite this entire area of the ship seemingly being unpowered and the life support deactivated.

My HUD immediately switched to a sensor vision mode, where my surroundings were rendered by my sensors, rather than through what little light was actually available. In fact, it was as dark as a cave in here, which was unusual for a normal ship, but made sense when a power dampening field was at work and available power was at a distinct premium.

I waited for several minutes for a response, all the while silently conducting a scan of my surroundings till I found a control console for a 23rd century style cargo transporter and inventory system that appeared to have been cannibalized for useable parts at some point in the distant past. Placing my hand on it, I again channeled power into the system and received all kinds of different error messages, but thankfully there was a database link that was still intact. In fact, the console had trace amounts of isodesium shielding still present, probably from what couldn't be easily removed when it had been 'decommissioned,' to put it gently. The reality was this cargo bay, and perhaps this entire area of the ship, had been abandoned a long time ago.

'Milla, use sensors and database link to update our map of the ship's interior. Plot fastest and most secure route to the isodesium storage area,' I ordered mentally.

An updated interior corridor schematic began to fill in slowly, due to the poor data throughput of this long-abandoned console to the main computer database. I could tell that any attempt at speeding it up might actually trigger an alert on the bridge, which flagged unusual computer activity. That was a very common security measure in starship security, even during the heyday of the Constitution-class.

The map was filled in and I had a bright red path through the corridors and up service ladders to the highly secure isodesium storage area. I removed my hand from the console and it instantly went dark and silent as the power I was feeding to it was cut off.

Moving silently, I ghosted towards the doors and literally almost ran into the cargo bay doors which I had unconsciously assumed would open automatically upon my approach. Thankfully, no one would ever know how stupid I looked in that moment and how close I had come to running face first into the closed doors. Why I thought the doors would automatically open when this whole area was unpowered was a matter of some harsh internal debate.

'Milla, I'd rather not try to open these doors; please map out an alternate route. God knows how much noise that would make if I can even get these doors open, but closing them might be impossible and I'd rather not leave any sign that anything is out of the ordinary.

My map updated to show a path taking a service ladder up into the Jeffreys tubes, which would allow me to bypass this closed door.

I started going up the ladder like a monkey, nearly falling to the hard floor below, 20 feet down, as one of the rungs of the ladder broke under my weight and fell clattering to the floor below making an unholy racket, or it would have if the room wasn't stuck in vacuum. Using my immense upper body strength I pulled myself up and carefully made it up to the top, forcing open the hatch in the ceiling leading to the next deck. I quickly pulled my sidearm and remained still in the darkness, aiming down at the cargo bay below in case anyone came to investigate. There were other ways to detect something amiss than a loud clatter, after all. I really had no desire to kill anyone onboard, but I would do what I had to to prevent this mission from failing. Luckily, no one came looking. Perhaps shit randomly breaking on this ramshackle ship was common and not something that required investigation.

Letting out a slow breath in the confines of my armor, I carefully closed the hatch and continued on my way, following an ethereal red line that only I could see into the pitch-black service crawlways that were standard for Federation designed ships.

XXXXX

After a few hours of traveling through a truly labyrinthian network of crisscrossing and senseless Federation and then Klingon style service crawlways that were being held together with hope, dreams, and a hell of a lot of starship-grade duct tape, I finally reached the end of the line. And wasn't that a strange transition given the connection between the Federation and Klingon ship was a ragged hole cut between one ship and the next in this mashed together bit of MacGyvery engineering insanity. Thankfully, there were no more crawlways between my target and myself.

At several points on the journey, the crawlways had taken me within earshot of the residents of the ship, a deteriorating vent being the only thing that separated us at times. This ship was inhabited by a slew of different races, some I recognized, others that I had no clue about, even with all my Star Trek knowledge to draw upon. Somehow, though, they had all found a way to work together, shared adversity and the demands of survival being a very strong motivator for cooperation. There was something to admire there, but this was definitely no Starfleet crew. These people had seen hard times and fights broke out frequently, some even lethal, discipline being a little lackluster in my estimation. I shouldn't judge them as I really didn't know how long they had been stuck in this situation. Just a few years in the Delta quadrant and the Starfleet crew of the USS Equinox had resorted to killing aliens for extra propulsion, so, yeah, no judgement.

Looking down through an overhead vent high above the corridor below, I was hiding above the storeroom that had this ship's most valuable supplies, including its emergency supply of isodesium. Two guards stood ready, of races that I had never seen before, one by the door to the storeroom and the other on the other side of the corridor facing the storeroom entrance, the corridor below only dimly lit, probably to preserve as much of their energy reserves as possible.

It was a smart security precaution to keep the two guards separate to prevent them from being taken out simultaneously, but I had the distinct suspicion that this set up had also purposely been created so that they could watch each other, likely to prevent either one from getting any clever ideas and helping themselves to the valuable supplies they were guarding. It was a bit like the security in a casino, even the watchers had watchers of their own given the acute temptations involved. I suspected they were of two different races on purpose as well, to prevent the two guards from colluding together based on shared race in this highly mixed crew.

Under better circumstances, I would have taken the time to closely study the happenings on the ship, including learning the guard schedule and ultimately the day/night cycle of the ship itself to learn when most rested. Unfortunately, I didn't have that kind of time or patience. There was no telling when this ship might relocate or go on another resource gathering mission. The temptation to drop down and kill these two guards was high, but while I had no issue with killing, these people were not my enemies. In fact, while not saints by any means, these people were the closest thing to a stabilizing force in this crazy area of space, serving as a check on some of the other far more ruthless pirates that killed and stole with impunity, like the Remans we had already encountered.

Having an idea, I slowly backed away in the service crawlway and turned a corner to give myself a little distance to ensure that my actions wouldn't be heard.

'Milla, run power consumption analysis for two replicated tranquilizer darts filled with 50 cc's of tetrovaline,' I silently ordered, linking to the design schematics I had in my personal database. 'Is it possible to successfully replicate specified items using the onboard micro-replicator under the influence of this dampening field.'

'Analysis in progress,' Milla reported.

I waited patiently to see if this non-lethal plan of mine would even be an option given the many constraints I was operating under. Under normal circumstances it wouldn't be a question at all, my armor's micro-replicator had a stupid amount of power normally available to it. Thankfully, the darts were very low-tech, simple items, a little plastic, metal, and drugs really, and hopefully shouldn't require that much energy to replicate. Each dart was essentially a hypodermic needle filled with sedatives under pressure. Once the needle was shot and pierced the skin of the target, the sedative would be injected due to gas (air) compression, though there were other types to do the same thing. I had chosen the simplest delivery method to minimize the cost of replication.

The sedative I had chosen, though, was a modern one, used to knock a person unconscious. I had selected that one because it was both powerful and was effective on a wide variety of humanoid races with the only side effect being a temporarily lowered immune response. It was effective even on a hearty race like the Vulcans, so I was hoping it would both work on and not kill the two unknown aliens standing guard outside my target.

'Analysis complete, replication possible,' Milla reported, indicating that I would need to replicate one dart, then wait 30 seconds for the next. That was just fine and I proceeded to do just that.

Crawling back into position above the two bored guards, I carefully removed the vent cover, their voices covering up what little sound I inadvertently made. Then, like a sniper, I waited for over an hour for that perfect opportunity, for them to stop talking to each other and go mostly still, leaning back against the wall tiredly, each of them visibly fighting falling asleep. Someone must have long ago realized that if you provided these guards a chair that they would fall asleep for sure, which probably explained why they didn't have one.

Waiting for the perfect moment, a dart in each hand, I let my upper body silently fall through the hole, my legs gripping the crawlway above them to keep me from falling down and into the corridor below, which freed my arms to throw my replicated darts with extreme strength and precision into the unprotected necks of the two guards…while hanging upside down. Normally, compressed gas was needed to propel the darts with the required force to penetrate through skin and muscle, but an Augment like myself had more than enough strength and hand-eye coordination to do this with no other tools. Besides, replicating the additional equipment would probably have been impossible with the little power I had available.

The great surprise on their faces lasted only a moment before one went down hard, falling unconscious near instantly. Unfortunately, the other guard merely stumbled and fell to the ground, gripping the wall on his way down, hand going for his weapon, moving lethargically, but far from the instant knockout that should have resulted given the dosage I had used. It was just my luck that this guy's species was somewhat resistant to the effects of the tetrovaline.

I allowed myself to fall into the corridor on all fours, like a great cat, fingers splayed wide and flexing to support my weight, to minimize the sound of my fall to the deck plates below. Instantly, I was up and wrapped my strong arms around the still moving guard's throat in a classic sleeper hold, hoping that this guy's brain was housed in his head and that cutting off the blood flow would render the man unconscious like it would most other humanoid races. Perhaps thirty seconds later, the man's struggling came to a stop. Thankfully, my omni-tool's sensors told me that he was still alive.

Moving to the control pad, I placed my hand on the controls and let Milla do her thing, causing the door to open seconds later. What she had learned during her interaction with the ship's computer in the cargo bay had obviously assisted her greatly in speeding up the process.

The doors to the storage room opened and the lights came on from their power saving mode, lighting up the contents of the room. I grabbed a hand of each guard and easily dragged them into the room and out of the hallway, allowing the doors to close and relock before dropping their limbs unceremoniously to the ground. I had no idea how long I had before the next guard shift started. Should anyone come into the hallway, all they would see were the guards missing, rather than unconscious bodies and foul play. The missing guards abandoned their post early to go to the bathroom, or to get something to eat, they'd hopefully think, rather than getting an immediate confirmation that something was very wrong and sounding the ship's alarm.

Running a scan of the room, I swept my omni-tool from one side of the room to the other, finding nearly 150 kilograms of the isodesium in storage, along with a whole slew of emergency rations, including some that I immediately recognized as coming from my ship. This ship must trade with those other raiders or had acquired them some other way. Frankly, it didn't ultimately matter and retrieving them was irrelevant given I had a much higher priority.

Grabbing a small container at random, one large enough for my purposes, I opened it to discover bottles of what was almost certainly alien booze. In this time and place, I guess booze counted as valuable supplies or trade items that needed to be protected from both their crew and other parties, just like the food and the isodesium was. Getting an idea, I carefully removed the bottles and began filling the container with isodesium, stopping once I had reached the 20 kilograms that B'Elanna had asked for.

Before I snapped the box closed, I pulled the darts from the necks of the two guards and tossed them into the box and then locked it closed with a satisfying click. Looking back to the guards thoughtfully, I decided to further hide my tracks, so I propped them up against the wall and opened two bottles of booze, purposely spilling a generous amount on their clothes and in their mouths, massaging their throats so that they would unconsciously swallow the alcohol, then placing the two bottles next to them. I then ripped open a ration packet and ate some of the food myself, messily leaving crumbs all over the two men. When these two were discovered, it would be far more believable that they had somehow broken into the supply room to have a little party together, indulging in the food and booze inside, than it would be that someone had dropped from the ceiling out of nowhere and knocked them both out. Hopefully their investigation would end there and the missing isodesium would remain undetected, at least for a little while.

Looking down at my scanner, the corridor outside was still empty, so I carried the small box with my stolen isodesium about 10 feet down the corridor and thus outside the range of the transport inhibitor field which was centered on the storeroom. Setting it down on the floorplates, I placed my hand on the box, prayed to all the Gods willing to listen that this would work, and activated the dematerialization routine in my onboard transporter, essentially sending the container into my inventory matter buffer. Thank the Gods of Star Trek, because it worked, and I let out a great sigh of relief that I wouldn't need to carry that fucking container through the crawlways of the ship and away from the range of the transport inhibitor field. Jumping into the ceiling above, I carefully pulled the vent cover back into place and made the journey back to the depowered cargo bay and activated my transporter, beaming myself through the external hull the 3 feet or so I needed to get into space and began the long journey back to the Temptress.

XXXXX

The Flighty Temptress. Outside of Normal Space. Exact Location Unknown. Dimension Unknown.

"The isodesium is working, Captain," B'Elanna reported to me over the comm, sounding harried and overworked, but excited about defeating the challenge of getting this great ship back up and running, like a passionate and proud Chief Engineer should. "The amount you brought back allowed us to completely shield one of our smaller industrial replicators from the effects of the dampening field, which in turn allowed us to create more isodesium, but custom shaped to shield critical infrastructure."

"How soon can I expect to see increased functionality?" I asked.

"Our priority was environmental controls and main power, especially primary conduits. The isodesium enclosed conduits means more power is getting to those end systems. Most critical systems, like the replicators and transporters, will be back online soon, but, again, I don't know when we'll get main power fully restored."

It was heartening to see that my many hours of creeping around that dirty, smelly, junkyard of a ship hadn't been for nothing. It still pained me that I hadn't had time to really look around for any choice pieces of alien tech, or use any active scans really. The risk of detection if I used a high-power scan was just too great. Lacking resources to pretty up their ship didn't mean those people were stupid or without means.

"Sensors? Shields? Weapons?" I asked, though I suspected that I already knew what she was going to say. Still, I had to ask.

B'Elanna shook her head in resignation.

"As we continue to insulate the main power conduits with isodesium, more power is getting through to those systems, but we are still within an extremely powerful energy dampening field. Sensors, shields, weapons, all function essentially by projecting energy away from the ship," she explained. "We're still getting results, though. Sensor range will be greatly increased from our current limitations. Same with the range on our weapons."

"How long before we have warp drive back?" I asked. "I want to get as far away from this deathtrap as possible."

The dampening field had a ridiculously large area of effect, this being a feat that was far beyond the known capabilities of any alpha quadrant technology, but it was not endless. If we could escape its range we might find ourselves somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. If we were still in our galaxy, and dimension, for that matter, we could use the slipstream drive to get home, even if we had to spend weeks doing fifty light year jumps till we fully sorted out how to best use the slipstream drive. While that would certainly be dull, and probably pretty dangerous, it would be better than staying here, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"I might be able to get it up and running again, but I can't guarantee we'll be able to establish a stable warp field with the constant power drain caused by the Forge's dampening field," she answered. "The isodesium is helping, but with just us four, it's still going to take weeks, at least, to finish the repairs and line all the power systems and conduits with a thin layer of isodesium."

This was bad news, while the ship now had some systems working we were still vulnerable to attack, and a short time ago we'd witnessed just what the Forge did when it wanted more raw materials. The Forge had sent out what I was calling 'Harvesters' to gather the desired raw materials from the ships in this place, tearing them apart in the process. I didn't think that my ship was currently capable of withstanding such an assault.

"T'Maz, what are sensors telling-" I started to ask before Neela interrupted.

"Captain, aren't we-" Neela interrupted.

When I fully turned my gaze and attention upon her she stopped talking pretty fast.

"Go ahead, Neela, what's on your mind?" I asked gently, trying to encourage her to speak up more.

"Well, aren't we going to attack the Forge?" she asked.

Maybe, if we had weapons and the rest of the ship was working just as I had designed it. With the dampening field constantly leaching power, my weapons fire would be diminished considerably.

"We are far from fully operational. We would struggle to defend ourselves against a concerted attack by the ships also stranded here, much less the Forge itself," I pointed out. "We need to get out of here."

I wasn't the only one with something to say on that particular topic.

"How would we mount such an attack without fully functioning engines, weapons, and shields?" T'Maz inquired of the young Bajoran woman. "My simulations suggest a less than 5% chance of success and survival under current conditions. The Forge's defenses will destroy us if we venture too close."

It would be nice if we could just blow up the bad guy base with our uber powerful weapons from a great distance, but it would be a suicide mission to do this the conventional way. Not when the deck was so thoroughly stacked against us and our capabilities were undermined and diminished by the energy dampening field.

"Even if we don't attack, we could still end up facing one of those Harvester ships," B'Elanna offered thoughtfully. "We don't even know what prompts it to act or how it chooses its targets."

"All the more reason to continue focusing on making repairs and bringing the ship back to full operational status," T'Maz responded calmly.

I brought up a flickering hologram of this area of space, my powerful mind already running through our best options for survival and/or escape. The usual brightness, color depth, contrast, and solidity I had gotten rather used to in my holograms was missing at the moment.

"We could use a Trojan Horse," I speculated aloud. "The Harvester ship itself is our best chance to get inside the Forge safely. And since we don't know how often it leaves the Forge to gather raw materials, we may not have another opportunity like this for a while."

Everyone looked at me.

"Even if B'Elanna can repair the warp drive itself, and we're not certain that she can, the dampening field's effect might prevent us from establishing a stable warp field. Leaving here on impulse might take months or years for all we know. That's also assuming that we're still in our home dimension and galaxy," I reasoned. "However, if we can shut down the dampening field at the source, we should be able to escape easily enough. At full power and capabilities none of the ships here that we've detected would be any match for us."

Sure, our weapons were offline, but we had enhanced the maximum range of our transporters, so the ship wouldn't need to get too close in order for me to be beamed out, and I might even find a way to open up a dimensional rift, which I could use to send us all home. I'd considered this plan before, but only now was it coming together in such a way that it didn't look like a suicide mission.

"Captain, Gothic, with sensor resolution and range so low, we really don't know what kind of internal defenses that thing might have," B'Elanna warned, sounding concerned for my well-being. "And we don't even know how to fly one of those Harvester ships."

I doubted we would need to pilot those vessels at all, as they seemed to be fully automated and always returned to the Forge when its tasks were complete, seemingly automatically. The real issue was getting onboard without triggering any kind of alarms or internal defenses. Thankfully, we had several means to hide life signs and the Harvester ship that was currently eating that Breen ship didn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere.

"Unless any of you have a better idea, I think the risks are worth braving these unknowns," I stated, looking around to see if anyone had a better idea. "T'Maz and I will go on this mission. Please continue to work on the high-priority systems."

It was a sign of their great respect for me that no one really protested my decision and instead went to carry out my orders.

Despite how quick my decision may seem; I'd chosen who would be going on this mission with great care. I would need T'Maz's expertise in science and engineering matters in that alien environment. She was also a skilled combatant with experience in battle. B'Elanna and Neela were best utilized here, working to repair the ship to it full capabilities.

Plus given my habit of looting alien tech I would need someone to carry an empty backpack. Normally I'd use transporter tags for all my looting needs, but transporting anything back to the ship would be impossible under the current circumstances. Better to stick anything I absolutely wanted in a backpack, or attempt to put it in my onboard inventory. I'd still put tags on, but if they weren't retrievable at the end of the mission, assuming we even survived, it wouldn't be an issue.

XXXXX

The Forge.

T'Maz and I immediately put some distance between us the moment after we left the confines of the automated Harvester ship and entered the Forge. The mission so far had been long, boring, and uneventful. Like the Borg in Star Trek canon, from the moment we transported onboard the Harvester, if the Harvester sensed that we were onboard, which I still wasn't sure about, it paid no mind to us, never confronted us, and gave no sign whatsoever that it even knew that we were there. I had a suspicion that those ships had very specific programming or a very narrow purpose and only had the capabilities to carry out its core function, with no ability to adapt to unusual circumstances. That suggested a very authoritarian culture had created it or leader had control of it. Those kinds of cultures/leaders just didn't allow for anything but strict compliance.

The inside of the Harvester we'd hitched a ride on had been lined with isodesium, allowing it to freely function in the power dampening field which permeated this region. My crew had wondered how the denizens of this region had figured out or otherwise realized that isodesium was capable of resisting the effects of the energy dampening field that permeated this entire area of space. It was a little known and rare material even to the science-oriented Federation, with no practical or known uses for it. Seeing it on this ship, though, suggested that someone had tried to do exactly what we were doing right now and had learned how it could be used to resist the effects of the power dampening field. Since the Forge still existed, it also suggested that perhaps many had tried to disable or destroy the source of the dampening field, maybe even in this manner, but no one had yet succeeded. I tried not to let that disappointing possibility affect me.

While I had hoped that the mission would continue with us being ignored as we gathered intelligence, whatever hopes we had for stealth were dashed immediately as several crab-like aerial drones saw us and began firing on us with cutting or maybe they were welding beams. T'Maz and I instantly returned precision fire, destroying many of these devices which hadn't seemingly been designed to withstand weapons fire.

While obviously dangerous and potentially lethal if it struck one of us, the energy beams they fired weren't really suited for this purpose either. Given how long it took the charge to buildup, how slow the overall discharge rate was, and how quickly the beam traveled once fired, it was relatively easy to avoid being hit. No, these cutting beams weren't ideal for use as weapons, but they were perfect for cutting apart even the densest of materials, or welding, or making repairs, which suggested that security was not these drones' primary purpose. They were obviously part of how the harvester or this facility did the work of taking apart the alien vessels they had captured/retrieved.

Only two of the legs of these spider drones, as I was calling them now in my head, actually had cutting beams, the other legs were specialized tools, which meant they likely also did the work of maintaining the systems of this gigantic space station. From the pattern of their movements, lack of overall coordination, and inability to adapt to our tactics, they didn't seem to be under any kind of intelligent control. There were still no audible alarms, either, so I wondered if this Forge was uninhabited and simply running on automatic, maybe even some vestige of a long dead civilization just doing what it was programmed to do before its creators all died. There were several examples of that kind of bullshit in the shows and movies.

Putting my curiosity aside for the time being, I took point, and led my tiny 'assault team' of two down a long corridor. T'Maz followed behind me, paying close attention to her surroundings and conducting targeted scans on her omnitool. This place was poorly lit and there was no air here, but we were equipped to deal with that. I, of course, was using my personal armor which had been heavily inspired by the Iron Man armor system, something I'd purposefully designed to work even in the vacuum of space, while T'Maz was wearing a space suit that was vastly superior to what Starfleet officers would have in this situation, more durable too and designed for light combat.

The suit was inspired by a Husnock design and used their more advanced technology, but I had redesigned it to better fit standard humanoid physiology. The underlying tech having been designed by a war-like race of conquerors, they not only offered a good deal of protection from weapons' fire, they also didn't limit movement, at least not in a way that mattered much, and of course the suit had many other useful features. It remained to be seen whether T'Maz would see the value of it and next time not require that I outright order her to use the fucking thing. Federation indoctrination was a powerful thing.

"Looks like a dead end," I reported quietly over our linked communication systems, eyes intently scanning for targets.

T'Maz did her science thing, examining what looked like an open shaft lit up by glowing and moving particles of neon blue light. My eyes had been inexorably drawn to this unusual bit of high technology, but we were in the belly of the beast and I needed to be vigilant, not geeking out over cool sci-fi shit.

"This is some kind of anti-gravity transportation beam or platform, likely used to transport large sections of starship hull or large volumes of loose material for further processing. It is a very efficient design," she complimented, while pointing to what looked like a hole in the ground. "We can ride this down."

I moved over to the circular opening in the floor, glancing down into the darkness, the bright particles of light streaming up from the hole gently, almost like a graviton fountain. My sensors were failing at telling me exactly how deep this hole was. That could mean that it was outside my sensors' currently limited range or the energetic particles were interfering somehow with my readings.

Part of me was so very tempted to yell out 'Geronimo!' as I stood at the lip, but I knew that bit of cultural humor would be utterly wasted on T'Maz.

Knowing that I had the best chance of surviving a fall from this height with my armor's propulsion systems, and that there might not be another way deeper into the station, I took a gamble and jumped into the void. As it turned out, T'Maz was correct and while I certainly fell, it was a very slow, controlled fall, my body caught in a tunnel of energy, probably a coherent graviton beam like a ship's tractor beam. As I reached the bottom, I slowed before automatically coming to a gentle stop, gently touching down on the surface of a new corridor.

"Gotta get me one of those," I said to myself, finding that to be very cool and eerily reminiscent of the Halo video games.

XXXXX

We soon entered a new section of the space station. It was still too dark to see much, but when I switched to the different vision modes that my armor's sensors could see in, which my HUD displayed, I realized that there really wasn't much to see. The space was cavernous, the dimension and angles and overall design just a little bit unsettling to humanoid sensibilities.

"There is a breathable atmosphere here," T'Maz reported, analyzing the sensor readings from the powerful and tricked out omnitool that I had gifted her with when she had first joined my crew. She had taken to its enhanced functions like a fish to water, finding the device far superior to the standard tricorder used in the Federation or even the basic omnitools that I was widely selling across the galaxy. Putting a small, but powerful Collector power cell inside it, from my finite collection of them, meant that I could cram all kinds of advanced and power-hungry alien technologies inside its casing, technologies that I was otherwise keeping to myself for now. "While I cannot be certain, I believe that that it is some sort of interface for this station's computers."

"Thank you for your amazing insight, T'Maz, I'm not sure what I would do without your assistance," I said sarcastically, which either flew right over T'Maz's head or she chose not to comment on it, continuing to work with her omnitool. I had tasked Milla with conducting scans for me, so I had no need to personally mess around with my own omnitool, leaving my attention where it should be, on keeping us alive.

T'Maz had pointed to a circular platform roughly 30 meters ahead of us. In the center was a rotating full color hologram depicting the entire Forge. My sensors could make out unrecognizable alien symbols of some sort, even at this distance, many of which remained static, however some changed, or they vanished to reappear a moment later, possibly providing a real time status report on various station systems. My armor's universal translator software was hard at work taking all this in, sampling every new character or symbol displayed, trying to identify it or at least find some common root language in its vast language database to extrapolate meaning, but it was not having any success translating the alien writing.

We carefully moved over to the platform and that was when we learned that this station was not as entirely automated as we'd previously suspected. Heading towards us quickly, but in an awkward shuffling gait, were two tall, bipedal humanoid creatures with what appeared to be weapons, surgically, yet crudely, grafted onto each of their arms. One arm had an energy weapon of some sort, the other arm ended in a large set of wicked-looking grasping claws, that I suspected were sharp enough to slice right through even my armor if it got a hold of me. Thankfully I had a personal shield system as well, as I was a devout believer in the philosophy of overkill when it came to my survival.

Confronted with these monsters straight out of a cut-rate horror movie, rather than try to make contact peacefully, engage in a mutual dialogue, or attempt to deescalate the situation, as a group of goody Starfleet officers might have in this same situation, which would almost certainly have resulted in one or two of them dying for their ideals, T'Maz and I immediately opened fire with extreme prejudice, killing three of the alien monsters in a single volley. Unfortunately, there were a lot more of them and unlike mindless monsters, they took cover where they could.

Perhaps they wouldn't have simply killed us, perhaps we could have spoken with them and gotten some valuable intelligence. However, I was entirely unwilling to take that chance in this fucked up situation. T'Maz, who had seen the true dark side of the galaxy in her work with Section 31, hadn't hesitated to follow my lead, putting tight groupings of deadly energy into the chests and skulls of the aliens with her advanced phaser rifle. This entire situation was too fucked up, with everything we'd seen so far making it clear that the lifeforms in control of this place had no regard for the lives of sentient beings. Had the creatures been interested in peaceful communication, they could have tried speaking to us when brought here. Also, given that these creatures had clearly been painfully and permanently modified for heavy combat, I felt justified in opening fire first and asking questions later.

After I'd killed several more of the unknown aliens some of the walls moved, opening up new corridors. From there came a dozen more of the creatures along with a few drones that attacked us. These new combatants also moved awkwardly to my eyes, which made them easier to deal with. I threw a few of my plasma grenades in a wide dispersion arc to deal with the creatures hiding behind cover, the grenades landing exactly where I wanted them to. Most were incinerated and killed in the initial blast. In the seconds after the multiple explosions, the remaining wounded and disoriented survivors easily fell to our combined weapons fire, before they could even reenter the fight.

Once it had gone silent again, T'Maz secured the area around the interface. While T'Maz worked, I continued placing a few more bolts of antiproton energy into the chests and skulls of our downed enemies, ensuring that no one was pretending to be dead, or just waiting for us to lower our guard before somehow recovering. I also placed a few transporter tags on the few intact weapons remaining and various bits and pieces of technology in this area.

"These systems do not appear to have much in the way of security or encryption, but I am still having difficulty translating the language used. I do not think that I will be able to shut down this facility's internal security without raising an alarm," T'Maz reported. "Surprisingly, our presence here has not been widely reported, at least by any electronic means that I can detect."

These aliens, like the Collectors for that matter, didn't seem concerned about their systems security and protecting against unauthorized access. Perhaps they'd never had to deal with intruders before, ones that could actually reach them? Or perhaps they were so much more advanced than the races they had previously encountered that they weren't a real risk? Of course, it could also be that we were employing several ways of masking our life signs, that could be making us much harder to track and respond to if they relied entirely on their automated systems to do the work for them on this huge station. One of the fundamental weaknesses of automated systems was their inability to adapt. If condition A, which merited response B in its programming, was missing, then sometimes nothing happened.

"Based on my limited analysis of their systems and nascent understanding of their language, I believe that this may be a shipyard of some kind, or perhaps a factory," the Vulcan reported while pointing at a small section of the Forge on the hologram itself. "This could be where the probe we encountered was built as well as the Harvester vessels we've already seen."

That part of the station was so small compared to the rest of the station that it was clear to me that there was a lot more going on here than the building of a few spacecraft, I thought, as I continued to take small steps, rotating in a circle to spot any new targets. Being in the middle of this large freaking space was making me increasingly anxious, but these 'consoles' were the first we'd seen so far, so we couldn't waste this opportunity.

"I believe I have located the dampening field generator," T'Maz reported, her fingers awkwardly moving over the interface controls. "It is on the lowest level of the central core of the station."

"Download any information that you can access from here, especially any data on the design of the dampening field generator and how they travel to other dimensions," I ordered. "If you need additional memory storage or processing power, link our omnitools and my armor systems together. I want that data and I don't care how long we have to stand here vulnerable to get it."

T'Maz nodded in response, already working to carry out my order.

If this was a Starfleet facility, I'd highly doubt such valuable technical data would be available at a console like this, but as I'd already seen, aliens just thought differently. Stealing advanced alien technical data and technology had been a game changer for me in the past and had been the only thing that had allowed me to eventually build my current armor, weapons, the many systems on my island palace home, and the Flighty Temptress itself. So I had many excellent reasons to be especially vigilant to recognize and take advantage of any opportunities, no matter how likely or unlikely, that presented themselves to grab more, even if it was risky.

To that end, every omnitool my crew used and carried was the most advanced design I could produce, one with a Collector power cell powering them, enhanced memory storage and processing, and a powerful download and upload subspace transceiver, with micro-replicator module included. It blew Federation tricorders completely out of the water in terms of powerful sensors and functionality and had been meant for situations exactly like this. Our omnitools had even gotten a recent upgrade in the memory storage and compression arena with what we'd learned from the Vidiian weapon we'd acquired. The precise micro-transporter technology in that race's tool had also been a wonderful addition to our omnitool's functionality and had enhanced my transporters' function and the size of my inventory.

"I have downloaded all the information this console has access to on the station's technology," T'Maz reported.

Disabling or destroying the dampening field effecting this region was another top priority. Now that we knew where to go, roughly, it was time to get moving again, but not before we took a few moments to examine the aliens we'd killed. T'Maz ran her omnitool over one of the corpses while I examined the creature to determine how best to kill more of its kind. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Thankfully, unlike the last time I had boarded an alien ship, killing these creatures hadn't required multiple full power shots to overcome their advanced armor. In fact, they were naked, with no clothing at all, much less armor, which was pretty strange for combat-oriented troops. Thankfully, they didn't have external genitalia. If we weren't in some kind of nightmarish alien location, I'd wonder if our intrusion had had these guys roll right out of bed to confront us, unprepared beyond the weapons they had attached to their bodies.

"They appear to be some sort of humanoid/insectoid hybrid," T'Maz offered thoughtfully. "This creature has elements of grafted DNA from many of the strongest 'warrior' species known to the Federation as well as DNA from life forms for which we have no DNA records. It is unclear what is the cause of their poor performance thus far."

I noted that these warriors possessed strong legs, which could allow them to leap great distances. They also all carried an arm mounted energy weapon. It was a cybernetic enhancement, rather than genetic, not unlike those used by the Collectors. In fact, T'Maz informed me that she had detected Hur'q DNA in this thing.

"The claws are not a natural part of this creature's physiology," T'Maz continued. "I believe that it was grown and then surgically grafted onto this life form. The dense alloy it is composed of is not recognized."

"Take a few samples of the metal and the DNA," I ordered, intrigued but impatient to move on. "Then we need to move on."

As interesting as all this was, we'd ideally go over the data in more detail after this mission was over and we were safe.

XXXXX

"Where did all these people come from?" I asked quietly over our open comm link.

I suspected that this forge had been in operation for quite some time, centuries at the very least, and in that time many starships must have been brought here from all across the galaxy, possibly from multiple dimensions. Their crews had too, which I was beginning to suspect was the true treasure to whoever had built this place. While I was sure that a lot of ships ended up as space debris after coming through the rifts, others would have survived only to then be harvested and brought here for some other sinister purpose.

There were hundreds of people in stasis pods, from a myriad number of known and unknown races, and according to my sensor readings, every last one of them was brain dead. They'd obviously been lobotomized, and were technically alive only because the pods they were in were keeping their bodies going. It wasn't a pleasant sight to say the least.

There was no way to be certain what this was all about without more data, but I had some developing suspicions. These bodies were being kept fresh for some nefarious purpose, and I knew that the reasons behind it wouldn't be good ones.

"We should leave, now," I suggested.

There was nothing here of value. While no one here was technically dead, as their bodies were still functioning to some degree, it really was a graveyard or a tomb, or at least it felt as creepy as one could.

XXXXX

Together we continued down a hallway, only to encounter more of the strange bipedal creatures around the corner. This all had a very video game feel to it, like we were advancing through the level, engaging in a lot of small fights before we encountered the boss. I was having enough of this bullshit so I went full auto on these fuckers. All of them were quickly killed by a virtual hailstorm of energy blasts and grenades, before they had a chance to wise up and try to hide from me. The next area was physically blocked by a blue hued force field, which only turned off to let pieces of metallic debris pass through via gravity beams. So, again, less of a security field to stop us and another example of this station's automation.

"I'll bet you a 100 bricks of latinum that the control for this force field is on the other side," I joked to T'Maz. She didn't even bother to respond. "Wait here."

A few moments later I approached the force field, waiting for a piece of debris to come close enough to deactivate it. Then I took one big, quick step forward and was behind the force field before it reactivated again. At this point our universal translator had made some headway so I hit the appropriate control to deactivate the field, allowing T'Maz to join me.

Of course, more of the bipedal monster creatures showed up. And again they were quickly put down.

After that encounter we went down a short hall to another area, this one with a large hole in the floor. T'Maz checked with her omnitool to see if it was another anti-gravity lift, and it was, so I once again jumped in, again just in case something went wrong and I needed to activate my armor's thrusters. When I had successfully reached the bottom, T'Maz made the leap too. But before we could continue, more monsters ambushed us from behind.

After a short, but fierce firefight, we went down an incline and turned right to find an open door. As we went through this door, more of the bipedal creatures dropped from holes in the ceilings. They dropped to the floor and before they even hit the ground, they were gunned down.

"It's like they're not even trying," I offered to T'Maz. She merely nodded in response.

Moving on yet again we entered a large area which had dozens of open coffin-like containers on an elevator, like they had been hastily moved to this area of the station and reawakened. Inside those containers were more of the biped alien monsters, though they were unmoving and my sensors indicated that their metabolic activity was at a near standstill, but was slowly, but gradually, returning to humanoid norms. These readings were consistent with long-term stasis. Were these things stasis units? How long had they been kept in stasis before being awakened and directed at us?

I was finding this all to be incredibly strange, but it smacked of a hasty response to something unexpected, presumably our arrival on this station. It did at least offer a potential explanation for the lack of any real resistance so far and perhaps why these monsters were so lacking when physically, they had been designed for heavy combat and should have been far more of a threat in speed, strength, reflexes, and combat prowess.

These aliens were likely being kept in some sort of long-term stasis when unneeded, perhaps as a means of saving resources, and this could explain why we'd encountered so few of them, as well as why they were such crappy fighters who moved so awkwardly. Coming out of long-term stasis was no joke, as I could personally attest. When I had first awoken on the Enterprise after 300 plus years of stasis, my performance was pretty damn far from 'badass Augment.' It was a good while before I got anywhere near where I should have been.

A large group of the alien monsters had marched into this room with little in the way of warning. I'd long heard them coming, so I was already behind cover and coming up with a plan of action.

Three hand grenades were gently rolled out towards the hostiles, coming to a stop perfectly at their feet. The creatures, either unfamiliar with the dangers of such devices or for some reason choosing to ignore them, just stopped, peering down at the unfamiliar devices without fear. The grenades exploded, incinerating the large group in a plume of superheated neon green plasma. The rest were burned terribly, but still alive. From that point taking out the rest of them was simple enough. I dispassionately shot each one at least three times, stopping their movement. An insect race relied heavily on overwhelming their enemies with numbers, and that just wasn't the case right now.

As for their fellows still in the process of awakening in the stasis pods, well, I had no issue shooting every one of them in the head while sleeping to keep them from becoming a future threat. And neither did T'Maz.

XXXXX

As we got closer to our objective we ran into several new aliens of a different type than we'd seen before. There were again bipedal, but thinner than the ones we'd encountered earlier, like physical strength was no longer the goal. They lacked any visible weapons and the idea that they'd just rolled out of bed struck me again, before I was hit with some kind of telepathic attack. I felt a sort of pressure on my mind that I could barely describe, but otherwise felt no pain or was otherwise hindered at all by the attack. Luckily for me, either my enhanced mind, or whatever my patron and Q had done to my soul to protect me from high-level beings, had made me immune to telepathic attacks of that nature. T'Maz might seem as if she'd be vulnerable to that type of attack, not having my unique advantages, but then you remembered that Vulcans possessed very powerful minds and strong mental discipline, discipline achieved through a lifetime of practice and constant reinforcement.

When their telepathic attacks failed against us, they died just as easily as the others had.

"Gifting powerful, but stable telepathic abilities in this patchwork amalgam of a creature indicates an extremely high level of genetic engineering capabilities," I speculated, my thoughts racing. Telepathy was a very useful ability and extremely difficult to grant to another. "Your thoughts, T'Maz?"

"The Federation has had a good deal of success in recent years at the Darwin Genetic Research Station on Gagarin IV, granting both telepathic and telekinetic abilities to humans through genetic engineering before conception," T'Maz answered, almost absentmindedly. "The number of genetic modifications each of these creatures has undergone is impressive. It is surprising these creatures have not suffered a complete genetic breakdown. Even your level of complete genetic enhancement pales in comparison."

I fought to keep my face blank as T'Maz just randomly dropped this information on me, something that I probably wasn't even supposed to know. This wasn't even the first time she had done something like this. The first time was when she had so casually revealed how Section 31 had caused the Klingon moon of Praxis to explode with a modified Genesis device, making it look like an industrial accident. This had been a Section 31 blackest of black ops that probably saved the Federation from defeat at the hands of the Klingons, but good luck getting uppity fools like Picard to admit something like that. Was there a purpose to it? Had Sloan told her that she could share stuff like this with me? Or was it just her personality or our closeness at work?

Of course, I already knew all about this Darwin Station bullshit, also known as utter Federation hypocrisy, from watching TNG, but this was not something the Federation spoke freely about in the real world. In this reality, it was actually a pretty well-kept little secret that only very high-level folks in the Federation and Starfleet were cleared to know about.

That episode of TNG had, likely so many others with such broad implications, been a one-off and had never made much sense to me, at least when I grew older and really gave it some thought. The Federation was anti-genetic engineering to a ridiculous degree, with Draconian laws and punishments for anyone that broke the ban and severe consequences for even the children who had no say in how they were changed, yet they had created genetically engineered children with telepathy, telekinesis, accelerated growth and maturity, and an aggressive immune system that had bit them in the ass in the end, though I wasn't sure if that had yet happened.

Talk about hypocrisy. Even in the TNG episode Picard and Dr. Pulaski had hemmed and hawed a little bit, but there had not been a lick of mention as to why the Federation did this in light of their otherwise draconian ban on the practice. Could it be the age ol' hypocrisy of 'when the government itself does some illegal thing, then it's not illegal', in other words thus completely ok? Or was it the other ol' chestnut of 'our enemies are researching this, so we can't be left behind, which justifies all manners of evil and violations of our own ideals' kind of thing?' Like most things, I suspected that it was a little bit of both. Perhaps even the planet name, Gagarin, had been a wink and a nod from the Star Trek writers, comparing it to the space race the United States had had with the Russians in the mid-20th century. In this case, it was a genetic arms race that the Federation might vociferously decry, but a capability that they still likely wanted in their back pocket if the need called for it.

"Elaborate," I said, continuing to take a myriad number of scans of these creatures. Milla requested that I retrieve several biological samples for a more in-depth analysis. Rather than even try to do that, I simply dematerialized one of the more intact corpses into my transporter inventory.

"The genetic engineering you underwent, fundamentally, were improvements on characteristics and abilities already present in the baseline human genome, rather than the addition of abilities taken from alien genomes and grafted into your genetic code, like was done with these creatures," she answered, gesturing to the many corpses we made. "It has been proven time and again that the more changes you make to the genome, the more likely unexpected negative outcomes and interactions can result."

"But you said the Darwin Station personnel were successful in adding abilities like telepathy and telekinesis to humans. Those abilities are not present in the human genome," I asked, hoping to illicit some more information here, which could justify me looking more into Darwin Station in the future. Normally I would not engage in this kind of conversation in the middle of an active combat situation, but I wasn't sure that I would have this opportunity again.

"That is a matter of some debate amongst geneticists," T'Maz answered, still unable to take her eyes away from her latest scans. She was a science officer to the core. "Many Federation geneticists, having closely studied the Betazoid genome and that of several other known telepathic races, believe the genetic potential is already present in the current prevalent human genome. In fact, there have been several confirmed examples of full humans being naturally born or having spontaneously developed both telepathy and/or telekinesis in response to some external stimulus which does lend credence to the argument.

Children of a human and betazoid parent have also produced viable and genetically stable children with telepathic or empathic abilities, which suggests that the two genomes are very compatible. To answer your question more directly, beyond the improvements the scientists and researchers made to their children on Darwin Station, the children do not possess any improvements to their intelligence, strength, speed, senses, or other human physical characteristics like you do. And yet still the unexpected negative outcome occurred which will likely leave them quarantined for the rest of their natural lives, forced to live apart from their entire species."

"Why were they quarantined?" I asked in a level voice, purposely trying to hide my knowledge but wanting to get this information out of her.

"The children were enhanced with an aggressive immune system, capable of proactively attacking disease organisms before they entered the body. When the children were brought into contact with a crewmember of a Starfleet supply vessel with the Thelusian flu, their immune system recognized the danger, then created and released an airborne antibody to fight the virus; this had the unexpected secondary effect of causing rapid aging in humans. The entire crew and ship were lost to the disease," she explained dispassionately, which tracked the episode that I had once watched years ago. "Any exposure to the children now means certain death from natural causes as a result of rapid aging, which will require the children to be quarantined for the rest of their lives. While the Enterprise did create a working cure, of sorts, it is not implementable on a wide scale in the timeframe necessary to prevent a high number of deaths, or to prevent the wide spread of the disease on a planetary or system level. No progress has yet been made to cure the disease in a more traditional manner or in freeing the children from quarantine."

"Hmm, unexpected outcomes, indeed. Otherwise successfully enhanced human children with powerful new abilities, yet which are deadly to the rest of their species. Forced to live apart," I summarized.

"Having learned of your existence, the researchers on Darwin Station have made several official requests to Starfleet to be allowed to contact you and ask for your assistance and help. Various power centers in Starfleet have so far blocked and denied their requests, citing security concerns amongst several other sometimes conflicting rationales," she admitted.

Now, that, I had not known.

"Why would they think I can help them?" I asked, not surprised that they didn't want me to know about their hypocrisy. I had some suspicions, but I'd rather T'Maz give me her answer in confirmation.

"Your immune system is the ideal they wish for in their children, powerful, aggressive, adaptive, yet not deadly to others in that aggressiveness," she explained. "Dr. Bashir's innovative use of the antibodies your body created in response to the Aphasia virus pandemic aboard Deep Space 9 have given them hope that the key to helping their children is in your DNA and the antibodies that your body will automatically create to the disease the children's immune systems inadvertently created. Beyond even those valid considerations, they believe you are a template for the future of the human genome and are curious to see if you will naturally develop both telekinesis and telepathy as time passes, which would confirm their hypothesis that the human genome already has the natural potential for such abilities."

That was something I, too, had wondered about, especially as my lifespan, apart from being killed through violence, was likely extremely long.

"Very interesting, though I'm not surprised Starfleet is denying their requests," I said. "They can't even see the inherent hypocrisy of sponsoring the research taking place on Darwin Station and the Draconian laws they impose on genetic manipulation in the Federation, much less the prejudice they feel towards me."

"No."

"I imagine Section 31 has already retrieved samples of this disease so that it can be weaponized and modified to effect more than humanity?" I asked.

"Of course, though it is unlikely to ever be used in that manner," she answered. "There are far better weapons of that variety already available, ones far less exotic or unique in their lethal effects that do not lead so directly back to the Federation as the perpetrator. Primary research priorities are aimed at developing a cure or vaccination that can be distributed quickly and widely, in case our enemies acquire a sample of the disease and use it on a human Federation world, or it is accidentally released."

That last reason almost seemed tacked on, like it was an afterthought that the release could be accidental, rather than the deliberate action of our enemies. Section 31 just thought differently.

"Of course," I replied with a smile, not at all surprised at Section 31's bullshit, but also impressed at their contingency planning. Many would believe that 31 was all about doing the evil shit, creating biological weapons to kill our enemies and all that, and while that was certainly true, a lot of their daily activities were in preventing, planning for, and/or mitigating the damage when others tried to carry out their evil shit on the Federation. Someone had to be the pessimist and plan accordingly. "Was your disclosure of this classified information, on a subject that you know I would be interested in, for obvious reasons, a prelude to asking me if I'd be willing to help you develop a cure or vaccination from my antibodies?"

"Yes," she shamelessly admitted. "That research, like so many other projects, had been deprioritized in light of the Collector invasion, but there are indications the Collectors are now harvesting worlds in the sector adjacent to Gagarin IV. The risk of the Collectors acquiring it and/or the accidental release of the disease has increased substantially."

"I'm surprised that Section 31 doesn't have the ability to just remotely trigger an overload of Darwin Station's fusion reactor?" I offered, chuckling at this bizarre conversation. "That would take care of the problem."

"Many times in the past we have considered implementing such a contingency function in Federation power control systems, but the risk of our enemies, or perhaps even a non-state actor, like a maladjusted computer genius or rogue AI, discovering, co-opting, and using this hidden functionality to destroy Federation facilities simultaneously and remotely across the galaxy, was considered too great a risk," she answered. "Section 31 internal special forces, like the Cleaners you once worked with, could be deployed to destroy the facility and eliminating all personnel, but they are otherwise tasked on far higher priority missions and operations throughout the galaxy combatting the Collectors and others seeking to take advantage of our current weakness and attention being elsewhere."

"Which Section 31 has done as well," I offered, remembering the operation I had went on against the Romulans.

Why did I have the feeling that I was being asked for something here.

"Section 31 will pay you generously for any assistance in developing a cure or vaccine for the disease," she informed me, not bothering to respond to my other statement; it likely felt obvious to her. "However, if the Collectors are in danger of taking Gagarin IV, alternately, we would request that you use your ship to destroy the facility entirely. An orbital strike would be satisfactory."

Wow, just wow. Was I really being asked to potentially destroy a Federation station, kill all its personnel, and get paid for it too? Life was strange sometimes.

"Besides the risk of exposure or release of that disease, I'm assuming that you do not want the Collectors to get their hands on your genetic engineering research, including the scientists and their children?" I asked instead, rather than directly answering her.

"Yes. The information you brought back from your time inside a Collector ship confirms that they are interested in adding abilities to their genome, improving their warriors and that of the other castes. The research stored on Gagarin IV and the children themselves, might be the key to advancing their knowledge and making them an even deadlier foe for us."

"I will consider it, though I'd much prefer trying to developing a cure or vaccine to the disease first," I admitted. "These children are much like me, Augments of a sort, and I would help them if I can."

"Our predictive models said as much," T'Maz stated, seemingly unable to realize just how offensive that was to say.

I rolled my eyes at T'Maz's abysmally low emotional IQ.

"Let's get moving. I'm amazed we were able to have this long a conversation without anything happening."

Moving into another area of the station, we entered a huge open space, like a warehouse storage filled with a variant of the coffin-like stasis pods we'd seen so far. The technology was similar, but not the same as what we'd seen before.

"How many are there?" I quietly asked, my rifle sweeping the room for targets, but finding nothing.

"Over ten thousand in this level alone," she answered. "My sensors indicate there are many more levels just like this, some far larger."

"Are they more stasis pods?" I asked.

"I believe these to be some kind of incubation and maturation pods, though it has stasis and other functions as well," she answered.

"What other functions?"

"Some kind of memory engram encoding, likely for flash training of some sort," she reported.

Vat grown warriors then and this was like a factory that printed them by the thousands. I suspected that once their growth was complete, they'd be put into long-term stasis only to be awoken and deployed when needed, likely given flash training only immediately before deployment, training specifically tailored to the current enemy.

This was all making more sense and fit what we'd seen so far. Judging by the ratio of telepathic aliens to warrior types, the telepaths were likely meant to be the officer class, designed to lead, telepathically coordinating in a way that couldn't be blocked by any known means, to direct the less intelligent, but more numerous shock troops. Which might also explain their rather crude fighting skills. None of the ones we'd killed so far had been directed by their officers.

I could only guess that the reason we hadn't encountered any of the telepathic officer-types coordinating the warrior-types, was because we were dealing with this facility's hastily and unexpectedly deployed internal security forces and not their military or equivalent. Given the sheer size of the Forge and their inability to detect our life signs, they most likely were also spread pretty thin.

'Milla, do I have enough storage space left in my inventory to grab one of these pods entirely?' I mentally inquired, intrigued at this technology and how I could potentially use it for my own purposes.

'Affirmative, though storage capacity would be nearly exhausted,' Milla succinctly replied via text across my HUD's screen, so I dematerialized one of the many pods in front of me. Perhaps it was time to do some spring cleaning in there.

"Whoever or whatever is behind this seems to be getting ready for some kind of invasion," I speculated. "There are enough of them just on this floor to take a colony world, easily."

That was undoubtedly true for the many lightly populated and defended colony worlds in Federation space, but only because the people of this galaxy had seemingly forgotten so much of what they had once known about war, and really had no proper dedicated fighting forces when compared to the humans of my time. The Federation has also seemingly forgotten that the galaxy was not a nice place and they should not colonize worlds that they could not easily defend. Oh, the Federation as a whole had fleets of powerful starships, crewed by fine officers, but they'd be no match for an endless horde such as this. Not when these aliens had proper leadership directing them and could gain some actual experience in fighting. Even quantity could get better with experience. The Collectors were eerily similar and already too much of a threat to the united forces of the alpha quadrant. Adding this shit sandwich to the mix would be the end of everyone.

Had the Collectors encountered whoever was behind this station and been defeated by them? Were they forced to flee from some other dimension they were operating in? Were the Collectors emulating these guys? Or the other way around?

"Haha. Not just a planet, but an entire galaxy!" said a loud booming voice that seemed to come from everywhere. "Our 'Reavers' are the ultimate killing machines. We have spent thousands of your years abducting species and sampling technology from all over this galaxy. Our probes have found worlds your puny Federation would never dream existed. We've tested and dissected them all, taking the best traits and abilities you have to offer, combining and manipulating DNA till we designed the ultimate warrior race, perfectly suited to combat your galaxy. You and your galaxy shall fall to the Vorsoth! Like so many others have before you."

Wow, an evil villain monologue. Those weren't very common in the Star Trek universe, when compared to others.

That seemed rather silly at first, but once I considered it more seriously, the more I realized that it was definitely possible. Whoever was in charge of this place had a hidden and unknown base of operations, located in a separate dimension, one that was protected by a massive power dampening field which would stymie any modern force or fleet of ships sent to destroy it, assuming they could even get here, which was a very big if. They could keep churning out troops here in this dimension until every resisting race was simply overwhelmed.

The only reason we had done as well as we had was due to the Collector power cells that powered most of my ship and protected us against the worst of the dampening field's effects. Again, the coincidences abounded. Had the Collectors encountered these Vorsoth before in their dimensional travels and adapted their technology accordingly?

Sure, these Vorsoth didn't appear to have any ships of their own other than probes and harvester vessels, but given their ability to open up dimensional rifts/portals for travel, they might not really need many. Plus, given the sheer size of the Forge, they could be building warships and troop carriers here for all we knew. In all our wandering, we probably only explored perhaps a few percent of its volume, after all. Underestimating your enemy was the fastest way to end up dead.

Large multi-planet and multi-race political entities like the Federation, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, and the Dominion, would be much harder to conquer, but if these Vorsoth had access to the Delta Quadrant, and it looked like they did if they had captured Vidiians, they could conquer the many disorganized and solitary worlds in that part of the galaxy. That would give them all the resources they would need to take on the major powers. It was funny and maybe ironic too that the Borg, who didn't exist in this dimension anymore, would have been the perfect counter for them. In fact, in the Star Trek prime universe, the canon one, perhaps the Borg had already destroyed, discouraged, or driven off these Vorsoth.

The Collectors and Dominion would be a good match up as well for them, now that I thought about it more, since both powers grew their soldiers and thus could quickly scale up their armies.

Yes, the pieces of this particular puzzle were finally coming together. The Vorsoth inhabit a space station known as The Forge, located in an area of space which was filled with the debris of starships they'd purposely drawn here. The Forge projects a dampening field that drained or suppressed the energy of nearby ships, thereby preventing any FTL capabilities, effective retreat, or the ability to fight back effectively.

Ships were tricked into entering this death trap by probes that would attack traveling starships. If the starship could not defend itself, the probe would destroy or disable the ship and simply transport the raw materials and technology back to the Forge. If, instead, the starship destroyed the probe, then the probe's destruction would unleash an energy wave that would transport the victorious ship into the graveyard to be picked up at their leisure. I suppose if the alien race was capable of destroying the probe, they were advanced enough to attract the Vorsoth's interest and attention.

These ships, if they survived the entry, were then crippled by the dampening field in the graveyard. They'd be incapable of resisting an attack from the Vorsoth Harvesters and drones who would kill all the crew and 'harvest' the genetic material for their use. This genetic material would then be taken back to the Forge where it was studied, the best traits and abilities taken, and then mixed into creating perfect Vorsoth Warriors to subjugate this galaxy.

I suspected the telepathic Vorsoth we had encountered so far, were themselves under the control of more powerful minds, who in turn answered to a single mighty intelligence, perhaps even this villain.

"I recommend we destroy this station, even at the cost of our own lives," T'Maz urgently advised, fully in Section 31 mode when it came to such an extreme threat to the Federation.

No doubt she'd been thinking along the same lines I had and had come to the same conclusions regarding our chances of surviving such an enemy.

"Okay," I answered, sounding far cheerier than I really felt. "Let's blow this thing up and go home."

If it were only that easy.

XXXXX

A door opened and six Reavers came out of it. Before they could find any decent cover I threw one of my remaining plasma grenades which incinerated three of them in a beautiful explosion of acid green light. The rest dropped from concentrated weapons' fire. These warriors might contain the best DNA of multiple warrior races from across the galaxy, but they were still mortal creatures, likely coming out of long-term stasis, probably before they had time to receive their flash advanced combat training or had thrown off the effects of long-term stasis.

T'Maz and I then moved on through the now undefended door. As we advanced we dropped two more Reavers. There seemed to be a lot of more of them in this part of the Forge, suggesting that we were finally getting close to our objective, which was to bring down the dampening field. Once we did that it would be a hell of a lot easier to destroy this Forge.

There was a generator of sorts here and the space beyond that looked like a large arena. When we entered the arena the door closed behind us and locked, just like in a bad movie. It seems we had found the creature that was in control of the station and whom I assumed was telepathically controlling all the other aliens, at least to some extent. It was large, probably ten feet tall, with several red eyes, and six big leg-like appendages.

"Foolish humans! You cannot hope to stop the Vorsoth!" it cried aloud, in true super villain cliché.

Having seen more than enough movies to know a super villain when I saw one I knew that we'd found the boss. I also knew that super villains had massive egos and could never resist talking when asked about stuff, even their super-secret plans.

"Who and what are you?" I asked, resisting the urge to open fire immediately like normal, hoping to both gain information and give me time to better analyze this situation and come up with a plan that saw me and T'Maz making it out of here alive.

Just as expected the Super Villain alien answered me.

"I am the Vorsoth for your galaxy. I was created by the ancient ones! I shall carry out their will and programming! The seed will soon be launched to create a new Forge and another galaxy will fall! We can never be stopped!" it answered. "We are engineered for perfection! We are created to adapt and conquer!"

While it continued to rant about its superiority and awesomeness I readied myself to act.

"The Seed will be launched! You shall be destroyed!" it yelled.

Again, just as I'd expected, the boss fight began when Reavers, Harvesters, and the telepaths began to beam into the room, but by now we had more than enough experience with their kind to know how to deal with them.

Everyone know you should attack the supervillain mid-monologue if you felt you had learned everything substantive they were giving away, so that's what I did, my thumb swiping the selector wheel on my rifle and selecting full auto.

In a long stream of neon blue deadly energy pulses set to maximum power, I hit this bastard a few dozen times over. To my surprise, they were all absorbed by a protective forcefield. This was the first time I had encountered an enemy who used the same defense as I did. While slightly more impressed than I had been before, I quickly adapted to the situation, my rifle dematerializing in my hands. I had long ago prepared for someone recognizing how smart it'd be to have a personal shield in an era of energy weapons. If you were using something that you yourself couldn't figure out how to overcome, then you were truly a fool.

"Did you really think it would be that easy?" the boss asked, the insanity that had been in his voice and his laughter seemingly gone for a moment, before it came back in his sinister smile.

Pulling my sword from its sheath with my right hand and holding it at my side like a badass, I smiled a bloodthirsty grin of my own and said nothing; my actions would speak for me. My pseudo-lightsaber lit up, like it was coated with a blue living flame, the antiproton energy coating making it preternaturally sharp and deadly. I quickly waded into the midst of my enemies at close range, putting their full attention on me, and started taking off heads and limbs in wide sweeping arcs. The wrist mounted blaster on my left arm strafing the enemy, firing hundreds and hundreds of deadly disrupter bolts of energy per second at more distant enemies in my eyeline or to give the death blow to somebody I had only wounded. It was a symphony of death and destruction. T'Maz, in good cover, played the perfect support fighter, picking off enemies who got too close to me or were otherwise good targets of opportunity.

"NO! The Seed! This cannot be! Impudent wretch! Relish this minor victory! For you may have stopped the Seed, but now I will show you just how insignificant you are!" yelled the Vorsoth leader.

I had no ideas how we'd stopped 'the Seed,' perhaps we'd damaged something important without even noticing, not that it really mattered as right now I had more important things to worry about, like the boss battle.

The force field around him deactivated and the creature detached himself from his 'throne' and jumped down in front of two soldiers, causing tremors that shook the floor when it landed, which was an indication of just how big and heavy this guy actually was.

We fired on it together, thinking that perhaps the forcefield we'd seen before now no longer protected him as it may have been connected to the throne itself, but it seemed he had a personal forcefield as well. The attacks were merely absorbed, seeming to just annoy the creature, so I knew I would have to continue with my original plan to get in close and do some real, physical damage. I idly wonder what would happen to a heavy bastard like him if I cut off his legs with my sword. And that's just what I did.

After mentally connecting with the small computer inside the hilt of my sword, I commanded the sword to switch from an antiproton edge to a positronic energy field perfect for penetrating electromagnetic shields. My various sensors supplied the best frequency for the energy to take to penetrate the boss' specific shield harmonics.

Forcefields, like energy weapons, had been around for a long time, created by many different races with many different forms and styles and ways of doing virtually the same thing. Just as long as forcefields had been around, so too had many races developed ways to counter them. In this instance I was borrowing from the Husnock tech base, whose shipboard weapons used antiproton energy pulses encased in a shell of positrons to disrupt enemy shield integrity when they engaged in ship-to-ship combat. The same philosophy, with a twist, worked here.

While T'Maz laid down precise to its head, trying to distract it from what I was doing, I sprinted forward and dove in a roll and came up on my knees, my sword arcing horizontally at speeds so fast the air practically whistled as it sliced through the air and then flesh. Though there was some resistance, the positronic energy my blade was coated with penetrated the personal shield and the sharpness and density of the advanced metals did the rest, severing three of its six legs from its body. Like the powerful AT-AT Walkers from the Star Wars universe, the bigger it was, the harder it fell.

"Fools… this is just a minor… setback… for the Vorsoth… we shall return," it said as it died the death of all monologuing supervillains throughout the multiverse after I'd cut off its legs with my sword, then followed up with severing its arms from its body as it raised them to block the death blow I had been going for. And people wondered what the utility of a sword was in this day and age. Shows what they know.

"We'll be ready for you," I promised grimly, hopefully looking as badass as I felt.

With that I drove my blade deep into the creature's head and out the back, ending its existence.

Then I beheaded it, for good measure, cut off all its remaining limbs, then went full auto with my rifle into its chest cavity and dropped a newly replicated plasma grenade in for good measure. Then T'Maz and I vaporized all the leftover bits of blood and gore with wide sweeping beams of our rifles. T'Maz hadn't offered a word of protest at the illogic of this as she assisted me in making sure that this guy was well and truly dead and gone.

What? This was an ALIEN super villain. You don't take chances when killing those guys, you go for super overkill.

XXXXX

Bridge. Onboard The Flighty Temptress.

Once the 'boss battle' was over, it didn't take us long to find the systems responsible for generating the power dampening field and shutting it down. We basically just looked for the most ridiculously power draining system on the station and there it was, like a giant neon yellow sign had been pointing at it. You better believe that I stole every bit of alien data I could as well, locking it down so tightly in my ship's quarantined memory storage that no one but myself (and my VI girls) could access it. From a preliminary glance at it, most of the power dampening and dimensional travel technology was utterly beyond my current understanding. It'd be the work of months if not years, most likely, before I figured any of it out enough to do something with it beyond operating it like a monkey. Hopefully this monkey wouldn't end up dead because he hit the wrong button.

I had half expected the other shoe to drop when the boss died, maybe some sort of dead man switch kind of thing which activated the station's self-destruct upon his death, but nope. Arrogance truly was a wonderful thing to have in one's enemies.

With the dampening field down, B'Elanna and Neela, along with dozens of holo-engineers and Minosian repair drones working all over the ship, had a much easier time completing most of the repair work on and off the ship, even outside on the hull itself. It was actually a pretty cool sight to watch holographic human looking men and women working on the hull without a spacesuit, just working in the vacuum of space like it was any other environment.

While they worked on repairing the ship itself, T'Maz and I were able to put our heads together and figure out how to trigger the opening of a dimensional rift so that we could return to Federation Space in our native dimension. Thankfully, considering the multiverse was apparently infinite, the Forge kept meticulous records of that kind of thing, carefully logging the dimensional coordinates of the target dimension it was tasked with conquering. Of course, even the most basic understanding of the science underlying how a 'dimensional coordinate system' even worked was beyond us for the moment.

My/our ignorance was making me intensely uncomfortable, but if we wanted to return home, what could we do? Considering how out of our depth we truly were, we would be forced to use the Vorsoth dimensional technology on the station itself to get home. We simply didn't understand the underlying science well enough, and when I mean 'well enough' it'd probably be more accurate to say 'virtually at all.' In some ways, it would be like a person from the 1850s, say a farmer, encountering a modern microwave. With some trial and error, sure, they could probably relatively quickly figure out how to use it to heat up their food. It had been designed to be used by anyone, after all, not just by someone who understood the science underlying it. But enough to actually reproduce it on their own or repair it or maintain it or to change the way it functioned in some significant way? No way.

I had absolutely considered trying to carefully remove the technology and keep it for myself, but I had fought off my more mercenary instinct. The technology was closely integrated into the Forge's systems, was gigantic, as it was meant to potentially move huge fleets of ships, and quite simply we just didn't understand the technology well enough to risk being left stranded here if we fucked something up beyond our ability to repair. While I'd love to travel around the multiverse freely, it was still a very bad idea for many, many good reasons. The same good reasons that had made me destroy the dimensional rift device to keep it out of Section 31's hands (and their enemies' hands, potentially) were still entirely valid. Even my crew knowing that I had taken technical data on these subjects from the Forge's systems, despite how much I trusted them, was risky enough and could see us all hunted down and killed for it if anyone found out. I would have to impress upon T'Maz that she was to report none of this to Section 31.

Sigh.

Before we left, however, we had to deal with this alien installation chock full of literally hundreds of millions of enemy soldiers in stasis. Leaving that place intact was a disaster just waiting to happen. The boss Vorsoth seemed to be operating alone, or was an offshoot of other entities, so we definitely did not want anyone picking up where he left off. We also didn't want some crazy warrior race to stumble upon this facility and its army waiting in stasis, ready to release on an unsuspecting galaxy.

So I was once again in a situation where I needed to blow up an extremely dangerous and truly gigantic alien installation. Thankfully, unlike all those Federation fuckers in the shows, I learned from my past mistakes and didn't repeat them over and over again and act surprised when it came up again. Since my mission on the Collector moon-sized vessel, I'd looked into what kind of explosive device that I could safely obtain and keep on hand for just this kind of situation.

Unfortunately, getting a hold of tricobalt explosives was not going to fly, even with my Section 31 connections. It was a heavily monitored substance and I'd set off every alert in every intelligence organization throughout the alpha quadrant if I tried to get ahold of some, especially since I was a scary Augment. I didn't need any more scrutiny, thank you very much, I had plenty enough as it was. So, instead of going modern, I looked to the past for inspiration and went old school and built myself an H-bomb, or a hydrogen bomb, the atomic bomb's more advanced cousin. I named it Shiva, the Destroyer. Since I was a proud believer in the religion of overkill, of course I had built two of the things.

Common radioactive materials like uranium and plutonium were far easier to obtain when you had a galaxy full of star systems and asteroid belts to find them in. For some reason, those substances were also far less tracked than the more modern stuff. Add in holographic design, advanced precision replication, and all the bomb design specs from a slew of planet's historical databases, meant that it hadn't taken me all that long to build something that would explode with incredible force. Thank goodness the people of this time were so lacking in creativity and blind to the effectiveness of old tech and solutions.

I was still leery about having giant nuclear bombs in my armory capable of killing me if someone got their hands on it and managed to activate it, so I put in a ton of safeguards that meant that only I could set it off. If anyone messed with it, it'd vaporize itself before it exploded. You could even fire at it multiple times with a phaser rifle and it wouldn't do anything. You could drop it from space to a planet and it still wouldn't go off. I even installed three different triggering mechanisms, electronic, mechanical, and chemical, so even if the dampening field had still been in effect, it would still would work. The thing even had a variable yield setting, which worked by essentially making the reaction less efficient, so it could go from a 50-megaton yield to over a 1,000 megatons of explosive force. A quantum torpedo, for example, had a maximum explosive yield of about 100 megatons.

We remotely triggered the Forge to open us a dimensional gateway home. As we flew into it, the Forge went up like a miniature sun with my crew having no idea how I'd done it and I wasn't telling. It was space dust now. With the dampening field down the ships trapped here, most of which were native to this dimension, should be able to make their own way home. As for the non-native ones, well, unlike what a Federation ship would have done, I didn't offer anyone help getting home. It was too risky and I didn't need anyone learning of my involvement here.

I'd not forgotten the Vorsoth leader's last words, but I'd seen no evidence of a further threat at this time. If we took his words at face value, this was a race which planned in the truly long-term, plans spanning millennia, so I suspected if there was still a threat it wouldn't come to fruition till long after I was gone. However, in case I was wrong, I was still going to share some information with Section 31 so that they could be prepared. With the Collectors a known threat now I suspected it wouldn't be a hard sell that there was yet another alien race waiting in the wings to kill us all. Maybe I'd try to share this information with the other powers too.

Now that we'd gone through the rift we began the work of trying to figure out exactly where we were. We should be close to Earth, but we didn't exactly know much about these dimensional rifts, despite having taken all the information on them that we could from the Forge. We also got a ton of data on their dampening field technology, remembering the Breen weapon used during the Dominion war. The Temptress was not going to be destroyed that easily motherfuckers!

"Sensors confirm that we are in Federation space, Captain," T'Maz reported, to my delight and cheers from my girls in engineering who had opened a comm link with the bridge. "Syncing with Federation time beacons."

A moment later I heard several insistent beeps. After several years in the Star Trek dimension, I could tell when the beeps were bad.

Sigh…

"The nearest Federation time beacon shows a significant temporal inconsistency from internal ship chronometer," T'Maz reported just as stoically as she did everything else, besides sex with me. Thankfully, we were only reading the data from the time beacon, rather than giving it any information on us.

"Why am I not surprised?" I said, after a long-drawn-out sigh. "What year is it? And are we even in the right dimension?" I asked tiredly, but only after closing my eyes, putting my feet up in the recliner, and sinking deep into my captain's chair and activating its massage function at maximum. I don't care how un-captainly my quiet groans of pleasure sounded.

Didn't the Gods of the Star Trek multiverse understand anything about narrative pacing? Going from one action packed adventure to another was just bad writing. You don't narrowly escape from the alien super villain only to find your triumphant return spoiled by unexpected time travel in real life. No, that was the stupid melodrama of an episodic television show.

I fucking hated time travel, at least the random and unexpected variety. No one else seemed eager to be experiencing it either.

"2256 AD, in your old Earth calendar, according to the time beacon," T'Maz answered. "I lack the required data or scientific understanding to answer your second question, Captain."

Huh, I was surprised we weren't in the late 20th century like most of the Star Trek shows did to save money. 2256 was before Kirk even became Captain of the Enterprise, if my knowledge of the Trek timeline was correct.

" I think it's safe to assume that something went wrong with the dimensional rift we created," offered B'Elanna, after my silent thinking went on a bit too long. Her previous excitement at getting back home now long gone.

Yes, well, that was certainly plausible. It was also plausible, maybe even probable, given my Star Trek knowledge, that a God-like being like Q was having a bit of fun with us, or those temporal agents from the Federation's 31st century were drafting us to do a mission for them, like they had with Archer, or energy from the bomb's explosion had thrown us off course, or it could be a slew of other possibilities. Or, fuck, we could be in an alternate universe altogether and the time streams didn't match up. I'd seen a Terran Empire starship in the Forge's junkyard, so perhaps the rifts were doorways through time as well. This was Star Trek; I wouldn't even be slightly surprised.

"Any ships in the area?" I asked tiredly.

If the answer was yes, we needed to avoid them so as to not tamper with the timeline. I was less inclined to give a fuck if we were in an entirely different dimension, but if this was Star Trek that didn't mean temporal agents couldn't come and try to kill us if we messed around too much and changed shit.

"Yes, I am detecting a cloaked Klingon vessel within sensor range," T'Maz reported, after ten seconds of scanning.

That was surprising.

"We can detect cloaked Klingon ships?" I asked.

Well, obviously we could, I just wanted to know how we did it. I knew these Husnock sensors were more advanced, but we hadn't had the opportunity to really test them against modern cloaking devices.

"It appears we can, at least with regards to older models of Klingon vessels," the Vulcan emphasized, somehow conveying that I was an idiot for asking, even in her stoicism. "The ones present in this era."

Ah, maybe I was more tired than I was willing to admit, if I made such an obvious mistake. Obviously the Klingon cloaking device of this time period would be far inferior to the modern versions. I rubbed my chin, noting that I was already growing a beard. The Klingons of this time were hostile to humans, and while my ship was vastly superior to anything those crinkle headed fuckers had at this point, the Temptress still wasn't fully repaired. It would be wise to avoid contact so as to avoid bloodshed and possibly contaminate the timeline. I wouldn't want to kill Worf's grandfather or something.

"2256? We arrived right at the beginning of the Federation-Klingon War? Yeah, we'd best cloak and hope that they haven't detected the rift or our ship yet," I said to my crew. "Assuming that we can cloak?" I asked, this question clearly directed to my engineering crew.

Even B'Elanna Torres couldn't fix everything in the time she'd had, not with that dampening field keeping the holo-engineers and replicators offline for so long. Thankfully, the Temptress had been built in such a way that every part of the original ship was part of this one, so we had two systems dedicated to cloaking the ship, a conventional cloak that I'd earned as payment from the Klingon empire for delivering them the Duras sisters alive, and a phase cloak that I'd partially stolen/partially recreated from the design schematics onboard the Pegasus. We had double the chances that at least one of the ship's two cloaking systems was still functional.

"We can cloak, Captain," B'Elanna reported with a smile in her voice.

"Activate cloak," I ordered.

We cloaked, but there was no visible sign of it on the bridge, as there was no reason for the lights to dim, or change color, or anything like that. Every console on the bridge would tell you that we were cloaked.

"Excellent, some good news for once! Now, everyone, let's get to work assisting B'Elanna and her holo-engineers with the repairs. I want to be fully operational as soon as possible. Then we can start working on figuring out exactly how we ended up in the past," I ordered, everyone jumping to begin making needed repairs.

If we were displaced in both time and dimension, well, then we had a significant problem on our hands as we'd be forced to figure out and recreate the dimension shifting technology that I had already decided was just too fucking dangerous for us to possess, use, or even know much about. Yet here I was, perhaps going to be forced to do all that. The universe had a sense of humor or was this irony?

As excited as the ability to dimension travel was, a big part of me was rather hoping that Q was just fucking around with me right now.

XXXXX

Author's Note:

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Chapter 41: 15,497 words

Chapter 42: 13,302 words