Act 3:
"Ripple fire torpedos, four-tenth intervals! Janein, signal armory to reload the conveyors with magnetic chaff rounds and then get us in front of that shuttle!" I ordered as I leaned over the railing. Part of me wanted to jump clear over it, to get closer to the screen.
I resisted.
With each nuclear detonation a flash temporarily dimmed the viewscreen as electrical discharges danced across the hull plating; the high energy particle discharge of the weapons playing across our energized hull plating. Without it we'd cook ourselves with radiation.
It was a slow fight, but surely as the sun would rise we were chipping away at them. Their energy shields were formidable, but already down by a third in the minute since combat had begun, and we'd yet to take a hit. That Janein was the best pilot we had was no small part of either fact.
Through the viewscreen I could see that we were only moments away from overtaking the Starfleet shuttle, with any luck they'd see our open shuttle bay as an invitation, as the sanctuary that we indended.
A glance down to my arm rest screen, showing the rear hemisphere view, showed the other ship holding its distance as the two pronged attack of nuclear weapons and magnetic chaff kept their targeting scanners too busy to see us.
And just behind our secondary hull, the shuttle looked to be aligning with our approach markers.
The deck plating 'popped' under my feet as dozens of precision thruster applications per second kept the Odyssey aligned with the shuttle while Janein's fingers pecked across the helm almost faster than I could follow. She piloted better than any Baseline I'd ever met. If not for that and another thing there would have been no indication she was an Aberrant.
At least not like--
"Captain, the shuttle has touched down!" Janein announce from her station.
"Close the barn doors, resume our original course and engage at maximum warp!"
The vibrations through the deck increased as our reactor throttled up and the attitude control thrusters slung the ship around in a wide arc towards our original course. The whine of the warp coils energizing reverberated throughout the ship and I could feel it in my
teeth.
Out of the rear view I watched the dark green hull of the avian ship start to emit a glow from its bow, and then a moment later it fired what I could only assume was a torpedo, directly at us. "Serine, fire aft tubes one and two, set detonation distance at five hundred and one thousand meters, full yield!"
The rear screen showed the pair of torpedos leaving their launch tubes before the high-boost hydrogen/chlorine triflouride engines lit up and they became little more than specks of blue light, an instant before they burned so brightly that the rear viewscreen whited out completely--
And with the sound of a whip crack our warp field formed and we left the system as the shockwave reached the tips our our nacelles. I found myself tossed back into my chair, knocking my head against the headrest hard enough to send me crosseyed for a moment.
"
Captain Orchai, this is Leryl. You're needed in sick bay."
***
I walked through the sick bay doors with my hat tucked under my left arm and my right hand rubbing at the back of my head. I a quick scan just to make sure I didn't hurt anything important wouldn't be a bad idea. "Doc!"
The familiar face that came through the office door belonged to Leryl, a physician of some fifty years experience. Command had wanted to keep him off of the ship but I had insisted. His age be damned, I could not in good conscience crew my ship with anyone but the best.
Alongside him, however, was a new face. A younger girl, red hair, green eyes. Human, adolescent. It was easy enough to identify a human as we'd been looking at them on holovids for a hundred years. They didn't look too dissimilar from my own species. We, like the humans, had a variety of skin, eye, and hair colors, often the very same colors as the humans.
Our general body plan was more or less the same, along with our facial structure and though we were not genetically compatible, we were
physically compatible. That particular revelation had what scientists we did have at the time re-evaluating everything they'd previously believed about how alien life would be configured.
There were of course differences, our hands were constructed in a four finger and thumb layout, though with entirely different bone structure that allowed for… different applications.
There was another difference, one that the girl must have noticed immediately when we locked eyes. The growing shock and fear that we had hoped to avoid in our first contact. That was what the hats had been for, and I'd gone and taken mine off.
The girl tore her arm away from Leryl and ducked back into the office as I jammed my hat back onto my head and swore under my breath. "I've got this," I said to the doctor as I stepped past him and through the doorway.
An anatomy textbook struck my forehead and carried my hat with it as it continued on into the wall behind me. So much for that. I locked my left hand and held it up in front of my face, palm in, as the girl sized me up. She could catch me off guard, but only once.
The girl might have come up to my nose, if she was within the standard human deviation that would have put her around eleven to thirteen years old, and her strength matched that assessment. That I could beat her in a fight was without question, though that was not and would never be my goal.
"Do you speak English?" I asked her, not quite lowering my guard but in a gentle enough tone.
"Y-yeah… but how do you?" She asked me in a deeper voice that I would have expected from her frame. She might have been forcing it, but I didn't have a lot of experience with humans, let alone their children.
I couldn't help but laugh at her question. "That's kind of the story of my entire people. Can we try with an easier question?" I asked in return.
She was still hiding behind a veritable cache of throwable heavy objects, but she seemed slightly more at ease, if only just that. "Where am I?"
I relaxed my left hand and lowered it, so she could see my face. "This is the starship
Odyssey, and I am Captain Orchai. We rescued your shuttle from an attacker. We're at warp right now, and we got away so don't worry about that, you're safe."
She came out from behind the edge of Leryl's desk and came a few steps closer, though her body language was still very guarded, "Okay… but why do you look like the devil?"
I winced at the accusation and rubbed at my forehead. That question. I'd been hoping she wouldn't have brought it up. I looked to the side and caught my reflection in the mirrored wall, the two obsidian horns rising our of the top of my forehead, through my black hair.
The resemblance was uncanny but it had not been a mystery that our people had been able to unlock. The Original had contained much data, but it did not contain the whole of human history, there were many things we simply did not and could not know.
"Well I don't really know, but I'm not. I'm just the captain of a starship. Think you can stop throwing books at me now?" I asked with a half smile at her.
"Well… Maybe for now but I might change my mind later." She finally relented as she came closer, seeming a little more relaxed.
"Captain, she is actually
not the reason I asked you down here, though I do thank you for solving the problem you caused. It is the
pilot of the shuttle that I am far more concerned with. You are an engineer, you should take a look."
I turned to look at the old man, and then past him. There was an adult male, human but… but not. I looked back at the girl and gestured for her to follow as the doctor lead us to the patient.
As we got closer I noticed the myriad metallic devices seemingly built into his flesh, and even more scars that suggested that other devices had been removed.
"What are we looking at? Are these implants correcting some disability?"
The doctor shook his head, "Initial scans showed that the infiltration is deep within his neural structures. If not for the difference in age between the grafts and the host I would have said he was grown this way. That, of course, isn't the strangest thing, internal and external scarring suggests that he was once in a far more advanced state of cybernetic augmentation."
And I can't wake him up." he added, as if an afterthought.
The young girl stepped between the two of us and turned around to face us, the look on her face back to that same fearful look she'd first given me, "Do you guys
not know about the Borg?"
