669: Hands On

by Lair Kellyn
81124.13
Immediately following Target Acquired

-=Lethus IV=-

Reece and Dengar’s scanner beeped at last, fixing on a frequency. The Hugreti box responded with a click.

“Hello, what have we here?” Reece asked.

He continued to survey the box in silence a moment.

Nothing more happened.

It didn't unlock, it didn't open, it didn't register anything else on the scanner. The scanner itself was once again silent.

"Wait," Reece frowned, his moment of triumph fizzling out quickly and without any actual victory involved.

"We don't really have time to wait, Reece!" Blane urged, growing increasingly uneasy. Something here just wasn't right, he could feel it. "Dengar?"

"There was something, for an instant, I thought. Then everything went back to baseline levels."

"Something must be jamming the signal." Lair Kellyn, who had remained uncharacteristically silent until this point, finally spoke. "This is ridiculous. Give me that thing."

She reached down, picked up the box with her bare hands and began to move away from the rest.

"Commander, I must object," Blane called, but Lair was already back down on the ground, on her knees.

She analyzed the box from all angles, held it up over her head to look at the bottom, and then she did something so utterly inconceivable that Dabin Reece screamed like a girl and Rada felt his stomach drop to his shoes.

She shook it fiercely.

"No! Don't. Not. NO! STOP! Bad Kellyn!" The Trill hyperventilated.

She ignored him, rattling it so hard that whatever the contents were, they were now thoroughly tossed in dinner salad fashion.

"It sounds like it's filled with rocks," she declared, as her stupefied crew mates continued to gape at her in horror. "Reece, stop whining, get over here and help me with this."

"Must I remind you that I have a child on the-"

"Move!" Kellyn shouted. Much like Blane, she was worrying that with every passing moment it was other living beings that would pose more of a danger to them than anything in the box.

"C'mon, Danger." Reece sighed. "Let's try again."

"Oh. Sure. Right away." Rada replied in a monotone that indicated he'd traveled so far beyond the point of sheer panic that there was nothing to do now but just get on with it. Courageously accepting that today was in fact the day he was going to die, he surged forward.

TC followed, still keeping his eye on their surroundings and his hand on his phaser.

"Give me the plasma torch." Kellyn demanded. "And the mask."

Reece and Dengar exchanged a look.

"You didn't bring a torch?" Kellyn snapped impatiently.

"Well we were told we had to baby this thing like the freakin' Ark of the Covenant!" Reece protested in their defense. "We didn't think that we'd go from that to cutting it into crisp, tasty bits so quickly!"

"Well, this is where we're at!" Kellyn announced grimly. "Someone is going to have to find me one. Enough is enough. You can all go hide behind something if you want, but I have a job to do and I intend to do it."

"Kellyn," Rada leaned forward and whispered to her softly, hoping to give her just a moment's pause about the danger she was so cavalierly taking on. "I'd hate for this to end with you taking another ride on that train."

Her expression changed entirely, and she simply stared at him, lips parted but unmoving as the seconds continued to tick by.

"Well somebody do something that will tell me whether or not we hazard taking that thing back to the Sera, pronto. I want this part of our mission to be over within the next five minutes and I mean that literally. Get going." Blane ordered.

"Rada," Kellyn began again, and he sighed.

"I brought a plasma torch." Rada sighed. He'd done what he could. "It's still on the Fortune." He tapped his badge. "Dengar to Hok, please locate the plasma torch and bring it down to us."

[Commander Blane told me to keep the shuttle engines running.]

Blane sighed. Did everything he said have to be taken so completely literally?

"It's all right, Mister Hok." Blane raised his voice to be heard over Dengar's communicator. "Bring the torch. Double time. Blane out." He turned his attention back to the box as Lair continued to try everything she could think of to get it open, without success.

"Do you really think someone is interfering with the sensor's signals?" Blane asked Dengar's opinion on the matter.

"I can't think of another explanation as to why it would just stop cold like that." Rada replied.

"Unless we just built a complete piece of..." Reece muttered, stopping as he saw Hok, out of breath but running as fast as his legs could carry him while brandishing the torch.

"Here..it...is...Sir." Hok puffed, skidding to a stop beside Blane. "One plasma torch. And mask." Hok was pleased with himself that he'd thought to bring the second item even though they had not specifically asked him to do so.

"Good. Give them to the lady."

Hok's eyes widened in horror as he observed Lair, crouched over the Hugreti box. "She's not going to..."

"Oh yes I am." Kellyn growled as she snatched the torch and mask. "One thing is for sure, if you ever needed a safe place to keep your latinum, this thing would do the job." She offered to Hok, trying to soothe him with thoughts of Profit.

The four men before her all stared at her with a mixture of dread and a twisted form of something akin to admiration of her sheer intestinal fortitude.

"You can go over there, if you want. No sense in me blowing us all up today." Sadly, she was only half joking. As Reece and Dengar continued to simply stare back and forth between Lair and the box, Hok accepted her words at face value and backed up several paces.

The others held their position.

"All right then." Kellyn put on the mask to shield her eyes and ignited the torch. It had a much finer beam than anything she could generate with her phaser, and would, she hoped, minimize the damage inflicted upon the artifact.

"Here, can I help?" Rada asked, dropping down beside her.

"Hold that end steady. I'll try my best to leave your fingers intact." She teased, to put him at ease, but her words seemed to have exactly the opposite effect.

"Appreciated." He gulped.

She didn't have to warn him not to look at the beam, and he averted his eyes to protect them as she set to work.

With the precision of a surgeon, she touched the beam of the torch to the very edge of what appeared to be a seam in the box.

Nothing happened.

With a small sigh of relief, she pressed the beam down closer and turned the intensity up slightly. "Here goes."

Sparks flew from the torch as it contacted the metal but much to her shock and dismay...

...nothing else happened.

Not a cut, not a nick, not even a scratch appeared as a result of the beam.

"What the hell?" Reece was beside her on the ground now as well.

"Dabin you'll fry your eyeballs," Kellyn warned.

"Give me that." He grabbed the torch from her hands and the mask from her head, taking several strands of her hair along with it.

"OW!" She complained, "Trill, I swear to the Prophets..."

Dabin was already trying to breach the exterior of the box, but no matter how high he turned up the beam on the torch, it was just not penetrating whatever it was that the box was made of.

"You know you're at four minutes and ten seconds," Blane warned.

"That's IT!" Kellyn shouted. She wrestled the torch back from Reece and switched it off. She began banging it ferociously against the box, and then in a final fit of frustration and display of pure temper, she drew back her foot.

"Oh." Hok's eyes flew open.

"My." Dengar added, horrified at what he was sure she was about to do.

"AHHHHHH!" Reece emitted another high-pitched scream as Kellyn hauled off and with the steel-toe of her boot, kicked the box as hard as she could.

All three men dove in the opposite direction, face first into the dirt.

TC Blane barely flinched, figuring that if the box was about to explode upon impact then they were all done, anyway. No sense in trying to move.

Kellyn shouted as her foot made contact with the priceless Hugreti artifact. She watched as it traveled several feet away, and then landed with a thud.

Slowly, one after another of her crew mates slowly poked their heads up from the ground, realizing that again, nothing had happened.

Reece coughed in a vain attempt to expel the mouthful of dirt he'd just ingested.

"I think," Lair Kellyn droned, her expression completely blank," that I just broke all of my toes."

"I think that we're going to have to let the archaeologists back home figure out what's in that thing." Blane announced. "We can't stay here any longer. "Reece. Dengar. Pick it up. Let's go."

"Aye, Sir." Dengar was first to the box, and he laughed once with utter disbelief as he reached it. "Sir, you're not going to believe this."

Blane rushed over. Kellyn limped up behind him, and Reece and Hok finally joined them.

"Look." Rada declared, nodding toward the box. "The lid, it's open."

---------------------
Commander Lair Kellyn
One Tough Cookie with a Blow Torch
The Alchemy Project
Currently on Lethus IV

NRPG: Hok had the vision of Kellyn kicking the box and everyone diving out of the way. I hope I did it justice, Hok!