by Salvek and Lair
81004.23
Following Judge, Jury, and Executioner
-=Bridge, USS Serendipity=-
81004.23
Following Judge, Jury, and Executioner
-=Bridge, USS Serendipity=-
Immediately upon his departure from Admiral Lassiter’s presence, Rada Dengar felt the need to call his friends and colleagues to inform them of what he had just heard. He tapped his comm badge, and ordered a channel to both Salvek and Lair Kellyn.
He wasn’t sure what to expect from Salvek, but he knew Kellyn’s reaction would be nothing short of explosive. Perhaps even implosive, like a black hole that threatened to pull the entire ship in on itself, crushing everything and everyone inside.
With his feet firmly planted on the deck and braced for impact, he delivered the bad news. Lassiter intended to rip the Alchemy to pieces to find out how they had traveled back in time.
[Illogical.]
[Over my dead body.]
*Don’t shoot the messenger.* Rada thought. *Or nerve pinch or trap me in a time bubble, or whatever it is you two do to people you don’t like.*
“Good luck, Rada out.”
He hastily closed the channel, and waited to see if he was going to get a call back. Upon hearing nothing, he decided he needed to get as far away from the doors to the ready room as he could, before Salvek and Kellyn showed up.
It did not take either of them long to arrive.
Salvek waited outside the ready room door, believing it best to intercept Kellyn before she burst in behind him, and expressed her true feelings to the Admiral. Years of being with her had taught him that when she expressed her feelings, she held nothing back. For Salvek, this was a source of great pleasure. For the Admiral, it could be a source of great pain.
She arrived a few moments later, and Rada made himself look very busy as the couple began to talk.
He was calm, she was adamant.
“What is there to hear out Salvek? They aren’t taking our ship!” Lair knew she was shouting, and she didn’t give a vole’s ass who heard her.
“Of course, this cannot be allowed. I’m merely asking you to let her speak her case, before we make ours.”
“Fine,” she glared straight ahead, arms folded and foot tapping impatiently in the manner that told him that it was anything but ‘fine’. “Whatever she says, it’s going to fall on deaf ears.”
Salvek accepted that was the best he was going to get, and pressed the chime to the ready room.
“Enter.”
They stepped into the room, and Lassiter seemed pleasantly surprised.
“My, my. You two are efficient aren’t you? I haven’t even called for you, and yet here you are.”
“Mr. Dengar felt it was his duty to inform us of your plans.” Salvek explained. Kellyn paced with her arms still tightly folded, her Bajoran temper contained as efficiently by the action as a volcano could be covered by a sheet of paper.
“Who the hell are you?” Kellyn demanded, not caring how many bars the woman had on her collar. She was trying to take the Alchemy away, and Lair was determined that whatever the outcome, this woman would know that she’d been in a fight.
“Admiral Gemini Lassiter, Commander Lair. I’m the new Director in charge of The Alchemy Project.”
Kellyn scoffed. “You’re not serious. Where’s Vox?”
“He’s…unavailable.” As she replied, Lassiter tried to conceal how pleased she was to hear of Dengar’s actions in alerting the pair to her intentions. She suppressed a smile, and continued after clearing her throat.
“Yes, well, your research is exemplary.Congratulations, Commanders. You’ve accomplished your goal and breached the time barrier.”
“Our goal wasn’t to breach the time barrier,” Kellyn interjected. “Transwarp. All this time, all they’ve been saying was that we were supposed to focus on transwarp.”
“Yes I know that.” Lassiter lifted her arm and tossed Kellyn a dismissive wave. “But our goal has been breaching the time barrier all along. Thanks to the brilliance of your husband, Lair Kellyn, we’ve reached it.”
Salvek and Kellyn exchanged a glance. Suddenly, all the talk of Salvek’s place in history, the constant interference from Temporal Investigations in The Alchemy Project…all made sense.
Salvek had to ask himself, how had he not seen this coming?
“Your goal was transwarp, and you are still perfecting that. Our goal was time travel, no matter how small an amount. Now it is time for our people to study, duplicate and complete your work.” Lassiter said. “The easiest way to accomplish this is to tear it all apart.”
Salvek found himself too momentarily stunned to speak.
He thought about the work his parents had done…about Zanh Liis, about all that had been done to bring Arie into this timeline to complete their family…and as he repeated Lassiter’s words in his mind, he couldn’t help but wonder what else he didn’t know about his own life.
“No one understands that ship like we do.” Kellyn objected, breaking her silence. “Even we don’t fully understand yet what happened. If you take the Alchemy now and let your chimpanzees tear it apart, we’ll never be able to duplicate what happened.”
“I think you underestimate our abilities, Commander. Hold your tongue.” Lassiter showed not a scrap of fear before Lair Kellyn.
“Admiral Vox understood our role in this, that we, Kellyn and I personally, were necessary in performing this research.” Salvek said at last.
“Yes but as I said before, Admiral Vox is no longer in Command of this project. And frankly, he understands very little.”
“He apparently understood one thing clearly enough.” Lair Kellyn had fire in her eyes as she strode forward, taking note with annoyance that this woman who had marched in to try to wrestle the Alchemy away from them had also taken over the Captain’s office.
“He understood that this is a team project, and that our crew, Rada Dengar, Jamie Halliday, and all the others…” She leaned down with both of her hands flat against the desk, invading Lassiter’s personal space with a purpose. “We are a family, and we are not going to let you take away what we have worked so hard to build.”
“You have no choice, Lair Kellyn. The decision has been made, and it’s final.” Lassiter ignored Lair’s proximity, continuing to work on the computer. “You will be given another prototype in which to continue working on perfecting your transwarp drive, but the Alchemy NX 53099 is mine.”
“That is simply not acceptable.”
Salvek was the one who spoke up now. Without a thought, he removed his combadge and held it out toward Lassiter.
“If you are determined to take the Alchemy out from underneath us, then, Admiral, I regret to inform you that I cannot continue my work on another transwarp prototype for The Alchemy Project.”
Kellyn followed his lead and ripped the badge from her chest. “That makes two of us.”
Lassiter finally looked up and this time, she was unable to remove the smile from her face.
“Outstanding!”
She leapt up from behind the desk, behaving entirely differently than she had just seconds before.
“Sir?” Salvek asked, beyond confusion.
“I had to be sure, you understand? I just couldn’t risk it.”
She rushed up to Lair, who frankly looked like she wanted to punch her out.
“I had to see whether your loyalties were to the Project, or to Jonas Vox. If you had quit just for his sake, I would have been unnerved. He had spoken so highly of you in his reports, Lair Kellyn, that I had to see just how dedicated you are.”
Kellyn’s eyes grew even larger at the thought anyone would question her loyalty to the prototype that she had, quite literally, almost died to protect more than once since they’d received it.
“Are you SERIOUS?”
“Kellyn, hear her out,” Salvek said softly, placing a firm hand on her shoulder to calm her.
“Yes, take a breath Commander Lair. We’re not going to dismantle the Alchemy. We are, however, going to run a series of sophisticated tests upon it once we get back to the shipyards and I need you both to assist me with that. We have to find out exactly what happened, and how. We’ll need Dengar too.”
“Dengar,” Lair thought about how frantic Rada had been when he contacted them, and how much of his own love and care he’d put into the Alchemy as it now existed. “Did you question his loyalties too? Or is there another reason you scared him half to death over this?”
“Call it my own personal version of the Kobayashi Maru,” Lassiter answered. “Consider this; Rada Dengar, faced with the potential of either upsetting an Admiral, or disappointing his colleagues. I wanted to see which would win in him; fear, or loyalty. He passed the test with flying colors the moment he walked out of this room and activated his combadge.”
Still at a loss, Kellyn threw her hands into the air in a hopeless gesture.
“I don’t have time for it now, I’m expecting company but, could you two take me on a tour of the Alchemy tomorrow afternoon?” Lassiter requested. “I have yet to see her interior in person, and I am most anxious to do so.”
“At the Admiral’s convenience,” Salvek replied, ushering Kellyn quickly toward the door before she said anything more that might cause the Admiral’s opinion of them to change. “Simply notify us when you are ready, and we will be pleased to take you on an exhaustive tour.”
“Dismissed,” Lassiter volunteered, though Salvek already had his wife halfway out of the room.
“You weren’t kidding when you said she was a hot-head, were you, Jonas?” Lassiter sighed, returning once again to her paperwork.
Commander Salvek
First Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
Commander Lair
Engineering Research and Development
The Alchemy Project
First Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
Commander Lair
Engineering Research and Development
The Alchemy Project