Transactional Reciprocity

Posted on Sat Jul 26th, 2025 @ 7:40pm by The Narrator & Lieutenant Cassian Maritz & Lieutenant Tork & Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant Irynya
Edited on on Sat Jul 26th, 2025 @ 7:43pm

Mission: Seven Souls
Location: Approaching Engineering, Kordra-Lisrit
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 1952

[Maintenance Duct – Lower Tier Access]
[Approaching Engineering]
[Kordra-Lisrit]
[MD 1 - 1952 Hours]

Tucked in a maintenance shaft that fed into engineering at ground level, opening up just to the side of one of the engine room's many consoles, four Starfleet officers were clustered around the remains of a handful of spent hyposprays, a dermal regenerator that looked to be about two decades old, and various and sundry other bits and bobs that the four had managed to pocket upon leaving Sickbay.

It had taken a few minutes to reach their destination and then, before Irynya would let any of them go any further, they had paused and evaluated the tools she'd snatched. They were imperfect, but pain relief hypos for Cassian and Noah, and a bit of relief from the dermal regenerator for Irynya and Noah had them in at least somewhat better shape than they had been when they'd climbed back into the ventilation shaft. They were imperfect fixes, but then they weren't on a Starfleet vessel and none of them were doctors. It was hard to say just how well Kazon medical tools would work on human, Risian, or Ferengi, physiology.

With care, Irynya was folding the strips of Noah's pantleg that had previously been wrapped about her hands. She certainly hoped they'd not need them, but it seemed a poor idea to leave behind anything that could be helpful so she slid them into a pocket, feeling the the bulge of the fabric. An unused hypo went into another and then she looked up to meet each of their eyes.

"Ok," she said, injecting as much confidence into her tone as she could manage to dredge from the depths of herself. "Once we're in here we've got two jobs. Figure out where we are and, if possible, where the Sojourner is." She looked from face to face as she spoke. "And either figure out how to get ourselves out of here, or how to help to our people find us..." She pressed her lips together. "OK, three jobs. Wreck as much havoc as we can without getting ourselves caught."

"Yes ma'am." Noah nodded. He was holding on to the flashlight as if it were the most solid piece of anything, for stability. His eyes stayed on Irynya. He smiled at her, but it was a tired smile that didn't meet his eyes quite right. They were tired. They were all tired. He was tired. He could see she was too. He wished he'd had the energy to smile better, or something. But he was drained. He was about to see something that was, some ways, lose-lose.

If he'd done this right, there would be a lot of unconscious people, and some of them painfully disabled. If he'd failed, then they were about to have a very bad day. Or, the worsening of already a very bad day. "Ready." He wasn't ready. "Got it... I'll-I'll... um... I'll work on how to get us out of here or at least send a message... something to lock in on." His brows rose in a sort of lamenting flex. If there was anybody looking for them. He had to hope so.

Cassian nodded in agreement with what Iry said, feeling not just the relief the hypospray to eleviate the splitting pain in his head but also a spark of hope that this whole ordeal would soon be over for all of them. He echoed her in a tired tone, "Cause as much havoc as we can." He was holding onto the tool he'd found and was mentally preparing himself for whatever came next, he just hoped it wouldn't break on him.

Iry hadn't been able to return Noah's gaze the whole time, but she was aware of it, and of the smile that he was offering--tired as it was. Her heart ached a bit, knowing with some degree of certainty that no matter how successful he had been he would feel responsible for the outcome--for the havoc or harm created. It was one of the things she liked about him, but it was also one of the things she wished she could shield him from in that moment. When her friends hurt--when he hurt--she hurt too. It was a simple as that. Cassian's tone matched hers and Noah's and she wondered, absently as they held in the stretching limbo between tenuous safety and uncertainty, what Tork thought of them. She had only encountered a handful of Ferengi growing up, and while she knew something about them how they handled times like this was beyond her ken.

"Ok, Lieutenant," she said, addressing Tork directly. "Ready to use that skeleton key?"

The Ferengi gave the woman a rather toothy smile that would have set even the hairs of the back of a Klingon's neck on end, "I do enjoy seeing something I've cobbled together doing exactly as I intended it to. So yes, very much so."

The grate was kicked in to allow egress- a waft of chemical wove itself into a sickening cocktail- something chalky and medicinal with the harsh tang of ionized metal, Kazon sweat, heavy sweet lubricants and ozone. Immediately the effects of their work was evident as a dozen or more bodies were slumped in haphazard and strange poses around the engineering section.

When Noah was able to make his exit, his nostrils flared at the unpleasant scent that hang in the air, almost claustrophobically. The room did not feel safe... like radiation and unfiltered gases were a standard in this room. Noah almost tripped over a lean Kazon woman who laid supine in a position Noah normally attributed to newborn babies took on their back. He leaned down and pulled the devices from her loosened grips.

The skinny one skulked the bay. It almost reminded him more of a cargo bay than an engine room. The warp core loomed at the heart, pulsing with a degree of un-shielded heat. With a sway and dance of outstretched fingers, his eyes scanned the alien controls for any schematic that seemed more like a systems interface than an engine interface. "If anyone sees, uh, something that looks like a computer core interface, shout... I'm-I'm coming up blank here. So far."

Iry had been the last one out of the confined space of the maintenance tube, eyes scanning the room immediately looking for something, anything, that might be a panel from which she could override bridge operations. Piloting from engineering was, above all things, far from ideal. But if all of the systems worked well enough to give her navigational readings she might be able to move them. Or, at least, to identify where exactly they were.

She stood poised on the balls of her feet as she took in the space, ready to move at the slightest indication that movement would be required. The Kazon--embodying the term akimbo in ways that made her flinch with the unnaturalness of it--lay about the room. They looked like puppets whose strings had been cut while they were being held and who had simply dropped where they were, losing any semblance of normal shape. She had an almost hysterical thought that Dravor might be proud of her situational awareness as she noted, and then re-noted, the locations of the three other officers. A third confirming glance for Noah. Because... because she felt like she needed it.

Cassian didn't know what to make of it all. As he looked around and made sure there was nothing else durable enough to become a weapon, he watched the door and then Iry as she looked to see where everyone was.

The Ferengi wandered off toward one of the many instrument panels, having been in the engineering section a few times already during his short stay. The console in question was currently spitting out data regarding core monitoring metrics and the like, nothing that Tork found remotely useful for his purposes. A few stabs at the control board beneath the displays brought up what he actually wanted to see, namely schematics of the places he had either only been once, or not at all. Several times, the crude Kazon programming tried to prevent his intrusion and block his accessing of 'critical information', but the attempts were... juvenile at best since it took him less and less time to circumvent them as he played with it. It wasn't long before he'd found a route from where they were to where he'd intended to go in the first place, namely the hanger bay where they were keeping the shuttle he'd been captured aboard along with many other half-scavenged craft.

After feeling confident she knew where everyone in the room was, she allowed herself to feel the alienness and wrongness of the space--too quiet except for the usual sounds engine room sounds and the pulse of the warp core at its center. She took a deep breath, nose wrinkling at the smell that pricked at her nostrils. She needed to decide where to go. Where to start. Something.

Finally she gave in to the impulse that was tugging at her anyway and she made a beeline for Noah, picking her way around the prone forms of Kazon until she was moving along beside him. "What would you look for to confirm it's the computer core?" She asked quietly. "I'm looking for navigational overrides."

Noah raised his hands, exasperated. He blew out breath. "I-I, don't know exactly. Something that looks like data storage... data retrieval systems... archives... data transfer systems." He blew another breath out. "Ok, I'll try and-and help you with navigation." He swung around an axis pillar that looked like where a group of people might work in unison. "Um... khag... khag-ra... I saw that on some of the lines we broke. I think that's power distribution." he swiveled around to another. "And this I think is... internal comms. I can see flashing where we damaged stuff." And again he shifted. Noah sighed. "I really wish... I really wish I had my battle music right now."

"Battle music?" she asked, more to make conversation while they looked than anything else. Her heart twisted a bit and she felt her own frustration echo his. She should have known the answer to her own question. Or at least she felt like she should have.

Noah grimaced. "Yeah... uhh..." He swayed with a rueful little smile. "See... ok, they do teach us how to do stuff like this at the Academy." he shrugged a shoulder with a blink, "I-I can't say it was my favorite class. And um. I used to sneak an-" He gestured at his ear, "Ear speaker into the simulation. And I... well.." he looked at her with a touch of his goofiness flashing, however briefly, out of the shell of exhaustion. "Most it was old music from an era when Humans, p-played games. Before the Holodeck. And the music was, you know, exciting."

Noah swiveled to the next station, his finger drawing out the lines and flashes. "More power distribution... to... I don't know exactly what. But I'm thinking weapons. Just a guess." He turned and started to walk. He passed some controls, halted and swayed a few steps back. "Mmm, hold on... haven't seen that before. Yalg-raw-pol..." His eyes narrowed. "Dispersing shield... maybe the navigational deflector?" He followed it with his finger. "Chug-d-bak... gas sucker..." He pointed at the controls and looked at Irynya. "Bussards, maybe?"

Lips pressed hard together she followed Noah's finger, picking out what bits and pieces she could along the way. She reached around him, tapping lightly against the interface. It took a few tries to find the right control, but after a moment a list appeared on the screen in Kazon script. Behind it followed what she had to assume were numbers--or some sort of numerical formulation. It was much more repetitive than the text portions. Next to those numbers were bars, lit up part way in a descending view. A moment later one of the bars in the chart shifted, and with it the number.

"Bussards," she agreed, pointing. "That has to be the percentage readout of what is being collected, stored, or discarded." She tapped the topmost one. "See, this one has to be ionized hydrogen. We were right next to an emission nebula and these numbers are... if they're numbers I mean... as a composite that would make this a much higher number than normal space. Like we're... inside the hydrogen. Or maybe on the edge of it?"

"Like a nebula... or maybe even inside a large Jovian or system accretion disc." Noah murmured near her. "I've got an idea... I've got a fucking insane idea..." Noah suddenly smiled. "Come on... if we've got ionized gas... we've got electromagnetic fields... if we've got electromagnetic fields and we have a navigational deflector." He pointed. "If they're still around... we can tap out a message using the navigational shield harmonics against the ionized gas. The electro-magnetic field can carry it. It'll just look like weird variations in the field. But any navigational deflector system will detect it within... well I dunno range, but just time."

"Right," Irynya agreed, her own lips twitching toward a grin--the kind that only came from adrenaline fueled desperate hope. "If we do it right..." her tone was halting, processing even as she was speaking... "whoever gets the message might be able to figure out... at least in some kind of range.... how far away we are. Maybe even where we are depending on how far away they are." She twisted, burying her nose in Noah's throat before adjusting so she wasn't quite so close to him and could look him in the eye. "We can't have gone far if we're still in the nebula... and if Sojourner didn't either... I can't imagine they would have... Then... then... they might be able to come in and get us. Or... or figure a way to pull us out."

Her voice, still quiet, held a building energy to the point that she was almost vibrating with enthusiasm at the idea. And then her face screwed up again in consternation. "But what do we tell them... in the message I mean? It has to be short if they're going to be able to do anything with it."

Noah waggled a fingers at the display. "If we make it look like a system error... something sort of annoying..." Noah positioned himself in front of the controls more fully. "Who would they call if it looks like a problem... well... sometimes me... but probably Shelly." Noah mumbled. His fingers began to move on the controls. And then he began to tap in some kind of oddly melodic way. Noah tapped into his music side. The tapping he made was vaguely musical. And he began to mutter something along with, "You've. Got. The. Touch. You've. Got. The. Power. When. All. Hells. Breaking. Loose..." Each tap seemed to correspond to a beat around the lyric. "Shelly and I were watching an old movie my cypher friends found in some vault from way back." He repeated the pattern into the navigational deflector. "Called Transformers..."

He looked at Irynya and realized how close they were standing. He whispered, "Sorry... didn't mean to crowd in..." Noah grimaced, his hand put on his head with a quick run-through of his fingers.

Before the Risian could reply, an urgent blat-blat noise came from the Kazon data pad Noah had earlier commandeered. The device had been dead useful, allowing the group to see the locations of damage control teams and security teams as they were routed and--thanks to the efforts of the Starfleet saboteurs--sequentially rerouted throughout the Kordra-Lisrit. But now, on its display, a new damage control routing assignment had appeared, flashing in the dust-and-piss color scheme the Kazon apparently favored in their UI design architecture. "General Technician One"--whoever that was--was now being sent to Engineering.

On the data pad, a lone blinking light in amber was slowly flashing as it made its way through the corridors, headed unquestionably to the impromptu engine room party Irynya and the others were throwing. And, from the look of things, the technician's arrival was fairly imminent.

In the seconds before the the alarm--that was the only word Iry could think to give it when she tried to recall it later--she had been staring at the device's holder. Or more precisely at the side of his face. They'd somehow found themselves with only a few inches again despite her adjustment a few moments before. Even in the chaos and intensity of the moment it was impossible to miss the shift in Noah's demeanor from frustrated exhaustion into motion, and ideation, and just as quickly execution. She didn't know what the message meant or what Transformers was or why Shelly would recognize it so readily. For the briefest of seconds that didn't matter. Watching Noah, in his element, was mesmerizing... and then he was looking at her and shifting away and she had the wildest desire to put a hand on his forearm and stop him.

And the alarm on the device he was carrying bleated out its warning.

Her eyes went wide, finally leaving Noah's face and darting down to the device. "What..." she asked, spying the blinking moving light as alarm rose in her gut. She looked back up to Noah, scanned the room for Tork and Maritz, and returned to meet his gaze. "We're out of time."

"We-we're out of time," Noah agreed, mirroring urgent words with a hasty nod. "They'll be here in less than-than a minute." He looked at Irynya, then Cassian and Tork. Noah moved away, turning to pick up the datapad and the tools he had. Then he took a split second. He breathed out and looked down. His body had betrayed him with Irynya's proximity and he had scarcely a moment to even consider why aside from obviously.. obviously proximity. He bit his lip. "Maybe forty five seconds." He confirmed. "What do we do?"

There was internal moment of panic that rolled through Cassian when the alarm started going off. He took a look at Noah and said, "Is there any way you can shut that thing off?" It was more to stop the ringing in his ears that still hadn't disappeared alongside the headache. "As for what do we do? We've got 45 seconds, right? My suggestion is to prepare to take on whoever is about to come through that door because that'llbe one less hurdle to us getting back home."

Cassian looked at them all, "I'd rather us all get out of here alive and in one piece if possible." It wasnt the most inspirational of things he could've said but it was the closest thing he could suggest in the small amount of time.

"Well, that could work," Tork said, "Or I can lock the door with my little tool here. Problem with that is... once I do, the thing won't open again without a plasma torch. I made this gadget to help me escape without being tailed too quickly... so if you're not a fan of crawling back through the tubes, maybe we don't go with that plan. If you are, that's fine with me. Managed to find a route that will take us back to the hanger they stuffed my shuttle in. Even found out what they took off it... which isn't anything important. It'll still fly, and more importantly, go to warp."

Irynya's eyes flitted from person to person, starting and ending with Tork. There wasn't time for much more discussion and they'd already been in and out of the tubes plenty of times. Another round couldn't hurt. "Lock it." She said, and hoped desperately she wasn't wrong.

With a shallow shrug, the Ferengi headed toward the door, and more specifically, the panel adjacent to the door that housed the locking mechanism. With his tool in hand, Tork pressed the power actuator and pressed the device against the housing. A loud clunk followed a sharp snap and a sizzling noise from within the wall gave audible proof that the device worked exactly as intended, though Tork hadn't actually gone through the door prior to frying the locking mechanism.

"Alright... that's that then. Is everything else good to go?" the Ferengi asked, smug smirk on his face.

A flushed Noah smiled exhausted at Tork. "Um. Tapping in to the navigational deflector. I'm trying to use it as a homing beacon. But... but..." Noah looked at Tork's tool. "Is there anything else you can break? Weapons or-or engines?" He looked around- it was like looking into a chaotic and labyrinthine place where one could scarcely even read the signs. Just the occasional symbol that was familiar.

Despite herself a tiny bit of pride at Noah's use of the deflector flared bright for a moment. There wasn't time to consider why, though, because even though Tork had locked the door--from the sounds of it, quite thoroughly--they still weren't out of the woods and still needed to find the rest of their crewmates. "Or," she piped up, "can you point me toward a console to figure out where the rest of our group is?"

"Internal sensors should display over there," Tork said, pointing at a station that looked innocuous among the other ones near it.

Several seconds passed after the door settled back into silence and then, with a stop-and-start jitter borne of Tork’s ingenuity, the door began to open and then immediately wiggled and groaned before falling motionless again. Clearly someone had tried to open the passage from the other side but the mechanisms had refused to budge.

Another attempt was apparently made as the machinery again attempted to open. But the Ferengi’s cobbled-together device had done exactly what Tork had promised it would, even if said device had been used in a way it had not originally been envisioned for.

Two more aborted attempts came in quick sequence, followed by exactly three seconds of rest before the door began jitter-wiggling over and over and over and over again. No doubt some overly-frustrated warrior or engineer was on the other side, repeatedly stabbing at the door’s actuator like an impatient child hoping brute force tenacity would overcome the door’s malfunction.

But after several more seconds of failure, the door must have been recognized as a lost cause because the aborted opening attempts ceased altogether, plunging the engine room back into silence.

"I-I don't think they're taking that as a no." Noah voiced with concern. "Do their teams carry plasma torches?"

Shifting a bit closer, Iry slid her hand to the side and took Noah's, squeezing. She'd done it earlier, in Sickbay, and now it just felt like the right thing. But she said nothing, merely watching the door and waiting.

"Torch... phaser... I'm not sure there's much of a difference if you use it wrongly enough," the Ferengi snorted.

Suddenly what could only be described as a hazy brown, grease-smear-esque cloud of energized particles appeared, hanging vertically like a tan oil slick. It was the same “dirty” transporter effect Iry, Noah, and Cassian had seen and experienced in the tubes some hours prior. Only this time, instead of trying to snatch the Starfleeters away, the transporter beam obviously meant to deposit someone instead.

The beam released with a final flicker, leaving behind a tall, angular figure standing just to the side of the sealed door. The Trabe man's frame was lean and slightly hunched from long hours bent over consoles, but his bearing was unmistakably aristocratic. His chin was tilted high, shoulders back, nose permanently set to superiority mode.

He was dressed in what had once been a standard-issue Kazon technician’s uniform, though calling it “clothing” at this point was generous. It hung off him in tatters, scorched in some places, threadbare in others, and stained nearly head to toe with grease, coolant, and what looked suspiciously like blood—though whose, one couldn’t say. His sleeves were rolled to mismatched lengths, exposing forearms smudged with black residue and speckled burns.

His face—narrow, sharp, and expressive—was coated in a thin sheen of grime. His hair, once carefully parted, now curled in erratic wisps around his temples, sweat-plastered yet somehow still defiant. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept in two days and hadn’t had a civil conversation in two years.

And yet… there was precision in his stance. Intellect behind his eyes. And the barely concealed fury of someone who knew—without question—that he was the smartest man in any room and was deeply, deeply tired of having to pretend otherwise.

The figure’s eyes swept the room, his gaze skimming past the unconscious Kazon bodies like they were just discarded equipment and landing squarely on the four upright strangers. He said nothing for a moment and then sniffed once, sharply, as if the air itself had personally offended him.

And then his eyes locked onto Tork.

“You.” His tone was flat, but laced with disdain. “Of course it’s you.”

Tork gave a half-hearted shrug, "You make it sound like wanting to get away from bad food and even worse equipment is a crime."

He took a step forward, one gloved hand sweeping out toward the room in general, punctuating each word with venomous incredulity. “I should have known the trail of scorched relays and half-broken circuit boards would lead back to you.” Whoever this man was, clearly he was entirely too put out.

“You realize I’ve spent hours chasing down catastrophic malfunctions that looked like they were made by a blind Pakra grub with neurological rot, don’t you?” Somehow he crossed his arms so tightly, they looked like they might pull out of their shoulder sockets. “Only now do I learn the grub is wearing Starfleet pajamas…”

He turned slightly, eyes darting across the group without warmth. “And this is the team? This is your… sabotage collective? Brilliant.” Clearly that was meant as an insult, not a proclamation of the rag-tag team’s skill. “A human paper cut,“ his eyes flicked to Noah, “his trusty, spunky gal-pal,” they didn’t even stop on Irynya, “the poster-child for rhinoplasty-gone-wrong,” he sneered at Cassian, “and you.”

He jabbed a finger toward Tork again. “Look everyone. It’s the self-declared King of Kitbash Engineering. What are we doing today, hmm?” he asked incredulously, his arms gesturing with wild frustration. “Rewiring the warp core with dental floss and optimism?” He rolled his eyes so hard they almost came up from the bottom.

The still unnamed man—whom the Kazon computer had identified only as “General Technician One”—groaned and sagged like he was physically ill. “Well. If you’re going to kill me, do it now. You’ve made my life significantly harder today. Subrek and his lapdogs are going to be angry for weeks and guess who they’re going to take it out on? Not the ghost saboteurs who vanished into the ducts… Me,” he stabbed a finger at his chest. So hard, apparently, it hurt given the brief “ow” that followed.

He exhaled then—harsh and fast—and adopted a resigned tone full of icy sarcasm, “Well, congratulations. You’ve engineered a crisis so massive it finally requires my involvement. I hope you’re proud of that. I’ll probably end up dead for it, but at least you got to have some fun, hmm?”

He stared at the quartet like he’d run fully out of tirade-steam but something cold and wild and dangerous still gleamed in his gaze, even if obvious resignation at his newly-beamed-in-upon situation was tamping it down.

General Technician One quickly chewed through any sense of sympathy Noah would have extended to a fellow engineer, and their plight. His face complexioned with anxiety as Tork had locked the door and then only to have the technician beam in turned slowly hard and tired with recalcitrance. Noah was done. He was hot, he hurt, he was scared and exhausted and he still had no certainty that this had any good ending. A wise Ferengi had once pointed out that Humans were a kind and pleasant people- when they were safe and their bellies were full.

His face contorted with disgust. "Oh cry us a r-river!" Noah growled with a release of his hours-long tension exuding from a flare of his nostrils. "We were-were kidnapped off our ship, wa-watched friends get hurt, were beaten and tortured. We don't even know if our ship's still out there. And you-you want us to feel bad because we kicked around your ship?!" If Noah felt anything more than anger, it was a perverse pride that they had been so catastrophically inconvenient to this Subrek.

Noah's eyes narrowed. He was shaking. "You know what. F-fuck you, asshole." And he did something that Noah Balsam had never done in his entire life. Noah's springy chicken legs propelled him in to action. He made a running dash at the condescending Trabe.

Cass was surprised that one, Noah had it in him to use that kind of language, and two, that he was going to end up hurting himself more than he already was if some kind of intervention wasn't put in place and he continued to run at the Trabe. Also, this guy in front of him was really starting to piss Cassian off.

Taking a step forward just as Noah came past him, Cass threw out an arm and grabbed him by the waist to halt him in his tracks. "Ensign, don't do something you'll regret." Once Noah was out of the way, Cass surprised even himself and launched a right hook at GT1 that had quite a decent amount of strength behind it. Like everyone else, he was tired, sore and completely over it. "Fuck you, buddy." he said as he withdrew his hand and clenched his fist.

Noah had been easily co-opted, the strong arm of the security officer around his slim middle was enough to bring Noah to a begrudged halt- and then backed up as the momentary of anger, the flare of wanting to lash out at a physical embodiment of the suffering they'd been through, passed. Noah blinked, his look sour at the Trabe. But he was feeling a sourness at himself inside. He'd lost himself for a moment. Noah put his hands on his hips and started to walk away- and then Cassian landed the Trabe on his butt.

For all his sharp-tongued sarcasm and theatrical exhaustion, the Trabe hadn’t expected to be punched.

One second he was sneering and monologuing. The next, a blur of chaotic motion that heralded a fist aimed squarely at his head. A sickening crack of cartilage followed as Cassian’s punch connected and the Trabe’s head snapped back. Blood gushed, warm and immediate, down over his lip and into his mouth. In a panic, he sputtered and spat the blood out as he fell back and slumped down the wall toward the floor, a wet, guttural wail escaping as he went.

He sagged there, stunned, pain blooming like wildfire across his face and ribs. One eye twitched. His breath came in gasps. But panic was doing its job: his fear response snapped into place and drove him to do whatever he had to in order to keep himself alive.

With shaking hands, he fumbled inside his tattered tunic, fingers curling around the small object he’d kept hidden there for well over a year. Looking like nothing more than a sentimental keepsake, it was the one thing Subrek’s thugs hadn’t confiscated from him. It was oblong, etched in Trabe design beneath the grime, and its once-rough edges had worn smooth from his all-too-anxious handling of it as a fidget toy.

The Trabe yanked the device free and activated it with a thumbpress. Then, like a terrified child holding up a flashlight to ward off monsters in the dark, he raised the emitter with both hands and crouched behind it, eyes squeezed shut so tightly it made the burning behind them worse. His arms trembled wildly with the effort, with the fear, with the bruising pain already setting in. All he could do now was hope the device would do what he’d designed it to—and that the specially-modified ear plugs he’d been wearing ‘just in case’ for a year did their job too.

The engine room suddenly erupted with sound.

Not just noise: it was sound as a weapon. A cacophony of overlapping frequencies, each screeching just off natural resonance, rebounded off metal bulkheads and inner ear canals alike. It bypassed hearing and went straight to the skull, vibrating bone, blurring vision, warping equilibrium. The pressure it would generate behind the eyes came in pulses, like tides of nausea swelling toward rupture.

But for the Ferengi and his very finely tuned ears and lobes? It would likely be like absolute agony.

The emitter’s output was layered: ultrasonic harmonics were woven into lower tones, calibrated specifically to disorient hostile Kazon in close quarters. For ears evolved to pick up subharmonic detail across extreme ranges—like Tork’s—the sound was not just disorienting, it would likely be entirely debilitating if the Ferengi wasn’t wearing any kind of ear protection.

It had all happened so quickly and yet to Irynya it felt like she was seeing it in slow motion. Noah, hurling himself at the Trabe only to be stopped by Cassian. And then Cassian, stepping in and finishing the thing that Noah clearly had intended to start. And then blood.

There were a lot of things that Irynya didn't mind. Blood was among them, but the sudden bright spurt of it flowing from the nose of the Trabe wrenched a gasp of alarm from her and a hand indecorously raised to cover mouth while her eyes gave away all of the shock she felt. For a second there was an unspoken moment of indecision where everyone seemed to freeze. The Trabe, gasping on the ground, Maritz still on the balls of his feet after his fist had connected with the other man. Noah, just behind and Tork only a matter of yards away still in the place he'd been when General Technician 1 had materialized.

And then the world sped up. The Trabe was scrabbling in his clothes for... something... A second too late her brain registered the motion as threatening and by then it was too late. The explosion of sound filled the room, pulsing with intensity and making her ear drums quaver with it. Without a moment's thought she clapped her hands over her ears, but even that small coverage was barely a mercy and she doubled over as the pitch and intensity of the noise that surrounded them pounded into her head. A moment later she was on her knees, bent forward with her forehead against the ground and her arms clasped around her ears. Everything... everything in her seemed to thrum with the cacophony and for the briefest of seconds she thought she might be sick.

The thin engineer crumpled. Noah held his ears with his palms so flush that it almost felt like suction. He thought he was about to die. His eyeballs were pulsing. He could feel the pressure in his head throbbing, like waves were threatening to break out. His anxiety crashed through his system, revving up the imbalance of cortisol until all Noah Balsam could literally do was curl into the fetal position on the disgusting, dirty floor bulkhead. The dizziness was perhaps the worst part- when it didn't abate immediately, it redoubled the whole sensation of impending doom. He screamed. He screamed the kind of full-throated bloody murder of someone who had to release.

Screaming. Pressure change. Pain. He searched his body for the cold. The deathly cold from his memory. His eyelids fluttered. When it ended, all he could do was tremble. Aya responded with all it could do as a program- increase his antihistamines to snap the panic.

Whatever advantage Cassian had gained over the Trabe was gone in the blink of an eye. The sound released from the device in the guys hands was enough to send Cassian to the ground as the ringing in his ears got amplified significantly, with the spots he sometimes saw in normal bright light merge into one like a rapid macular degeneration and blacking out his vision until he squeezed his eyes shut to try and relieve some of the pressure.

He let out a strained yell and gripped his hands tightly over his ears to try and block it all out but it was still no use, and he vaguely heard someone scream, presumably Noah, which meant he was in just as much pain as him. Shit.

In the midst of all the action, Tork had taken it upon himself to pass out, the ringing and thrumming of the weird sonic device rebounding through his lobes and brain in a rather roughshod and insidious fashion. He did, at least, have the presence of mind to crumple down behind a stack of crates, becoming obscured from view as he lay motionless against the deck.

Finally, training overtook the instinct to hide and Irynya forced herself to look up and open her eyes. Around her the rest of them were in various paroxysms of pain. Another wave of nausea rippled through her. This one more intense than the last and she sucked in a deep breath, fighting to push back the impulse to wretch. Forcing herself to take long, deep breaths with her hands still clapped to her ears, she scanned again and finally settled on the Trabe.

He was a bundle of rags, and long limbs, and shaking hands. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut and even from where she crouched she could see the way he clutched at the device in his hand--like a child clinging to a life preserver even as he is about to be swamped by the swell of a wave. It had to be that device, though. It was held in front of him as if the small device would ward them all off. Gone was the aloof manner and sharp tongue. In their place on the shell of terrified man.

And he was not covering his ears.

Skull ringing with a force she could barely fathom, the Risian made a decision and pulled herself forward. The time it took to cross the half dozen or so feet between herself and the Trabe felt like an age and when she did reach him she thought, again, that she might vomit. She opened her mouth to speak, but realized just as quickly that it would to no good and so instead, she reluctantly removed her hands from her ears. One went for her pocket where she'd stuffed the last few medical supplies they had collected in Sickbay and had not yet needed.

The other settled softly, almost tenderly, on the Trabe's forearm, a few inches from his wrist and the device clutched in his outstretched arms.

The Trabe flinched at the touch. His eyes snapped open, wild and rimmed with red, though even then they didn’t quite find her. They darted past her at first, scanning for danger, for another punch, for any hint of movement that might signal he was about to die. But no second assault came. No weapon. No fist. No raised voice. Just the soft pressure of a hand on his forearm: light, steady, deliberate. His whole body trembled, a livewire current running through muscle and bone, but that single point of contact grounded him more effectively than the deck plating beneath his boots. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. She wasn’t trying to take the emitter. She was calming him. He blinked hard, the motion strained and salt-stung, and for just a second the entire engine room flickered into brutal clarity. Pain, heat, blood, and her face, just inches away. Not furious. Not afraid. Just present. Intentional.

With a choking breath, the Trabe’s thumb finally jerked against the button. A sharp chirp. Then, blessed silence. The screech vanished so fast the absence left a void in its place, like a pressure system collapsing. His whole body sagged with it. Shoulders bowed. His arms fell, lowering the device to his lap as if it had suddenly doubled in weight. A gasp shook loose from his chest, wet and guttural. And then another. “I thought,” he started but didn't immediately finish, some blood sputtering at Iry from his cut upper lip. He swallowed, the tang of his blood sharp in his mouth. With a blink, he said, “I--I thought you were going to kill me after all.”

He didn’t let go of the emitter. If anything, he clutched it harder now, pressed it to his sternum like a lifeline, a holy relic, something small and breakable that could stave off execution if he just held on tightly enough. But still he looked at her. Just Irynya. Not the others. His voice was raw when it returned. “I’ll--I'll use it again if you try anything,” he said, tone wavering and eyes still a little wild. But there was no confidence in the threat for some reason. It sounded hollow, perhaps. Or uncertain, maybe? Like someone leveling a phaser and hoping the target didn't know the power cell was empty...

The Trabe didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. He just braced himself for Irynya to hurt him, too, even though he'd let her touch linger instead pulling away protectively. He didn't quite understand why he allowed the contact to linger but something about her reaction versus the others made the Risian feel almost...safe? "I'm sorry about him," he nodded towards the fallen form of Tork. "I--I made this thing for Kazon ears..." he tried to explain, guilt infusing a voice that, a minute earlier, had been full of venom and blame for the Ferengi. "Not his," he tried to clarify, hoping she would understand what he was trying to say.

Slowly, with the kind of movement you used around a frightened cornered animal, Irynya lowered her hand. Her ears rang even though the absolute wall of sound was gone and her head ached, throbbing behind her eyes. Still, she met and held the gaze of the man next to her. She took him in, the way she'd been taught growing up -- noticing details and cataloging them as if she could unlock some truth about this man without even speaking. To some this kind of attention was unnerving, but the Trabe didn't seem inclined to withdraw and so she held her ground, settling onto her knees and withdrawing one of the hyposprays with slow care.

"I understand," she confirmed offering neither absolution nor blame with her words. "I'll check on him in a moment." Truth be told, Tork wasn't the first person she wanted to check on. Even the Trabe wasn't. But she shoved that impulse to the back of her mind, telling herself that if there was any change this terrified man could hurt them like that again, she had to prevent it. "Would it be alright if I took a look at that?" she asked then, indicating the still bleeding wound where Cassian had hit him.

The Trabe eyed her like a saber cat afraid to have a thorn pulled from its paw but something about Irynya, again, made him trusting of her. He nodded slowly.

Quick, gentle hands made light work of things - running the small dermal regenerator over the man's face and depressing the hypospray into his neck. She spoke as she worked. "We thought you were here to capture us," she said, her tone gentle and conversational--full of a calm and ease that she didn't particularly feel. It was the way she might have spoken to an injured child. "I don't know what you've been through," she said with a sad twist of a smile at the edges of her mouth, "but we were only captured today. And we are trying to get away. I understand if you don't want to help us, but... please..."

She set down the now empty hypo and returned the regenerator to her pocket, meeting the Trabe's gaze again. "Please let us find our people and get out of here."

The silence stretched longer than he expected. When no retaliation came, no stun blast, no rush of arms to finish what that first hit had started, the Trabe’s grip on the emitter slowly slackened. His shoulders stayed curled, his chest still hitched with erratic breath, but something began to settle in the line of his spine. The device remained pressed to his chest like a talisman, but his eyes flicked up again, not frantic now, just guarded. Still crouched low and bloodied, he studied the one who had reached for him. Then the others. Then finally the unconscious Ferengi, sprawled in a heap on the deck like a discarded tool. The Trabe exhaled hard through his nose, which only reignited the fire blooming across the shattered bridge of it, and a grimace twisted his face.

“General Technician One,” he said after a beat, spitting the designation like it offended him to have to say it aloud. “That is what the system calls me. What the crew calls me. What Subrek calls me when he bothers to acknowledge I exist.” He pulled himself upright, wincing as he did, and wiped a sleeve across his mouth, smearing blood instead of removing it. “My name is Ikade Uvari. And if you want to get off this ship alive, then you’re going to need my help. That's a fact, as immutable as physics themselves. Luckily for you," some of his haughtiness began to return, "I am not above a little transactional reciprocity.”

He stepped closer to them, the emitter still cradled loosely in one hand, not quite threatening now but not quite forgotten either. His voice dropped a note, still caustic, but steadier. “Help me get out of here, and I will do the same. I know every wire, every bypass, every failure point on this floating scrapyard. I put most of them there myself. If anyone can get you to the heart of this ship and keep Subrek from locking you down on the way, it’s me. Well, me and whatever he did to that door," he chucked a thumb at the rendered-impenetrable door from before. Ikade paused, his gaze sweeping toward the fallen Ferengi, and his tone soured again. “At least, I assume it was him. But before we go anywhere, we need to wake him up. Gently. Preferably with your hands and not mine. Pretty sure he's going to be very upset with me,” he reached up to nervously gnaw at the fingernails of his left hand.

“He took the brunt of it. Ear structure like that? He’s lucky his brains didn’t liquefy," Ikade said, dropping his hand. "Throne room’s doable from here. But if we are going, we need to go quickly.” He stood and rubbed at his temples even as Iry moved to attend Tork. He glanced then at Noah and Cassian, then gestured...well...at the entirely of the Kordra-Lisrit, it seemed. “You all made this mess. Now let’s see if you can clean it up..."


=/\= A joint post by... =/\=

Ensign Noah Balsam
Computer Specialist

Lieutenant Irynya
Chief Flight Controller

Lieutenant Cassian Maritz
Security Officer

Lieutenant Tork
Unconscious Ferengi (and Engineer)

Ikade Uvari (General Technician One)
Trabe Engineer