1069: Give and Take, Part One

By Lara Valera Ryn and Denise Moreno
100331.10
Immediately After Mending a Broken HRT

-=USS Poseidon=-


Lara felt like she was a prisoner. She was silently being marched by an armed guard around the corridors and through the turbolifts from engineering to the bridge. All that was missing was the handcuffs.

Then again, she was a prisoner. She was not here of her own free will and if she did not behave according to the rules as defined by the ‘wardens,’ she or someone one else would suffer the consequences. And in this prison, there was only one alternative to playing nicely with the bad guys.

The concept bad guys rolled around her head. They were bad guys from her position, indeed from the position of anyone on the Sera. But from their own perspective, their actions made sense. In their own world, and according to their own morality, they felt that they were right and that their actions were justifiable.

Lara snapped her head and shook herself out of this reverie as the final turbolift door came to open and the guard used the business end of his phaser rifle to push her on to the bridge. Moral complexities aside, she had a job to do. She quickly scanned the bridge, and although she was clearly outnumbered, there appeared to only be a skeleton crew here. Either that, or this thing was rigged to run far more efficiently than any other ship in the fleet.

She found the science station and immediately began to walk toward it. She had not even gotten to it when a voice called out, "Don't try anything funny."

It wasn't the guard speaking, that was for sure. The voice was trying to sound confident, although the speaker was anything but. Lara turned her head toward the voice, toward the person who claimed to be the captain of the ship.

"There is nothing funny about taking sensor readings."

Denise shook her head in fatigue, having no time or energy for any of this. No one needed to get hurt here but this crew clearly had the stubbornness to ensure that some if not all of them would. This situation was a mess and she couldn’t afford to let it get worse. This was supposed to be her second chance and it was a miracle she got it. She didn’t believe she could ever expect a third.

“Let’s not play games here,” Denise insisted sternly, hiding how tired she was for the sake of her crew. “It’ll get us nowhere except extra time in each other’s company. We both know you don’t want to fix this ship.”

“Then why am I helping?” Lara asked, with what was not quite sarcasm but was certainly not an honest question, as she turned back and began to deliberately slowly input commands into the console before her. This entire situation was wrong, not just her conscience but the weight of Ryn’s in the pit of her stomach as well told her that, and if there was any chance she would actually be helping get the ship’s time travel capacity to work by what she was doing here then she would not hurry to do so.

“You think you’ll be able to get something past us. You think you’ll be to outsmart us right here before our eyes and that we won’t have the knowhow to realise until it’s too late,” Denise replied coldly and Lara ignored her, just continuing with her very slow work, as Denise’s eyes fell on her back. “That would be a very stupid decision. Make no mistake; every single thing you do over there passes right through here.”

Denise indicated the screen at the side of her Captain’s chair.

“If you so much as attempt to send an encoded signal to engineering to tell them my favourite coffee, I’ll know. I don’t need to be a science officer for this. I know how to pick a single falsified entry out of a million runs of data. Every member of this crew knows I have done what you are going to try on the scale of time itself. So remember however clever you may think you are, I am still smarter.”

The way Denise had said the last words was not with arrogance as one would expect; it was self assurance. It was like a nervous performer before a show telling themselves that ‘they’d done this all before’ even when it was something completely new. In part certainly her words were meant to remind the crew here why she was in charge, but more than anything else she was reminding herself why she had the right to be. It was almost pitiful but pity was not what Lara felt now.

Lara suddenly stopped what she was doing at the station, physically cringing as she was struck by an entirely unsteadying experience. She had fought the Ryn symbiont so much more than many who were joined because this was not her choice. At times it tempered the mind because waves made of her emotions crashed against those of Ryn’s wisdom causing them to weaken if not to die down to nothing before they’d ever strike and damage the land.

Now however it was not two minds against each other. Now those two waves merged together into a mighty tide that washed away the last of restraint she’d been forced to keep her emotions in check since she first set foot on this ship.

She turned so rapidly that she almost knocked the guard off balance and did force him to take a single step back.

“Then you should know a lot better than this,” Lara snapped, the man with the rifle turning to Denise with confusion as to whether he should just shoot her now.

Denise raised her hand as if to say ‘not yet’.

“There are no two ways about it. Messing with time is a bloody stupid and dangerous no matter who you are.” Lara realised for a moment that she sounded very little like the archaeologist who was always taught to consider how things might be different from another cultural perspective and so to not let her own morality and that of Ryn shine through. “You cannot justify causing the damage you will if you meddle with history. It’s not a right anyone has.”

All eyes on the bridge had now turned to Denise to see how she would respond to this accusation. They didn’t know whether she would yell back or even just have Lara killed on the spot. Had anyone on this bridge truly known her then they’d have realised she’d have done neither.

Unmoving, Denise just breathed in and out very slowly, and when finally she spoke her voice had only glimmers of the anger she’d felt as she’d listened to Lara speaking.

“Jacobs,” Denise said calmly as she rose from the chair, “you have the bridge.”

As the confused lieutenant moved to take command, the entire bridge fell into dead silence while Denise indicated with her hand towards her ready room.

Then she slowly walked towards the door of the still unfamiliar room beside them; on the outside utterly confident but on the inside just praying that people couldn’t see through her. A few seconds after Denise stepped through the door Lara was dragged in behind her by the guard. She knew there was no real reason to struggle against him, but that didn’t stop it from becoming tempting as he shoved his weapon in her back.

Those thoughts however were overtaken by the surprise as she stepped through the door she found the room was almost empty; just the most basic standard essentials that came when the ship was brand new. It was like no other ready room she’d seen in her and Ryn’s collective memory. There wasn’t even a coffee cup on the desk let alone a picture of a loved one. This was not the ready room of someone who had planned ahead to be Captain of this ship.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Lara loudly protested as she kept being pushed forward and Denise said nothing.

Denise simply indicated for the guard to leave them, and though confused he did as he was told. Then they were alone and much to Lara’s amazement she was suddenly out of the reach of a weapon. She didn’t know why she’d suddenly be trusted enough not to need an armed escort and though she knew she could still not leave, her exact status as prisoner suddenly felt uncertain. This whole thing felt very wrong.

Denise was even facing her back towards her as the Captain slowly moved to look out of the window to the darkness outside as she’d known so many captains to do, before deciding it wasn’t for her and turning back around again. There was almost, but not quite, a smile on her face.

“You took quite a risk out there,” Denise observed. “I could have had you killed.”

“I didn’t think you would,” Lara answered with as much certainty as she could muster, noting how much calmer Denise seemed the instant she was off the bridge. “You need me to help fix the ship and so unless I forced you to you have no motivation to kill me.”

Denise shook her head again. Though one would not realise it to look at her current situation, Denise truly didn’t understand why people take such risks.

She sighed sadly. Somehow she liked Lara, in spite of her youth, and she didn’t wish her to die at the hands of anyone on this ship; including her own.

“I don’t want to see you or your crew get hurt which is what’s going to happen if you resist us too much. You don’t want to see me get this ship fully operational as is going to happen even if I have to get someone else. Obviously we’re not both going to get what we want,” Denise acknowledged. “So one of us is going to have to change the other’s mind. That’s why I want you to try and convince me why I shouldn’t do this. Then I’ll try and convince you why I must.”

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Lt. Lara Valera Ryn
Science Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012

and

Ensign Denise Moreno
Commanding Officer
USS Poseidon