Cerulean Stars - Chapter 139

Chapter 139 - Returning Home

A ship's warp drive couldn’t be engaged in an atmosphere, at least, not so long as the person piloting it wanted the ship to stay intact. Which meant their stolen Orion vessel needed to reach the planet's exosphere before they could engage its drive and escape to the rendezvous point.

Unfortunately that was turning out to be easier said than done, as it seemed Raine had significantly overestimated the Tendi family's care for their current prime daughter.

“Why are they firing at us!” D'Vana yelled, clutching onto the back of Raine's chair with a death grip as the ship deftly avoided the series of green disruptor bolts being fired at them by the pair of pursuing Orion Interceptors.

“I don't know!” Raine snapped a bit more intensely than she intended. “Maybe they're part of Jellaa's group and think we're helping you escape!”

The pair of ships had descended upon them shortly after passing through the planet's stratosphere, which suggested they'd either been waiting for someone to attempt what they were, or luck had finally just turned against their little group

A shudder ran through the ship as weaponsfire clipped the edge of their shields, and a quick glance at the altitude meter showed they were still a good forty kilometers short of the minimum safe height she wanted to chance before engaging their drive.

She jinked their ship into a hard right, momentarily causing the ships behind them to cease their fire as their trajectory momentarily intersected with that of one of Orion's orbital stations. 

They passed the thirty kilometer mark, then twenty, at which point the pursuing ships finished adjusting their angles enough that the stutter of weaponsfire once more began and Raine had to cut down the angle of their ascent to continue evasive maneuvers.

“This is why you should always include a weapon with a rear facing firing arc in your starship designs.” She growled.

“Sorry.” D’Vana mumbled into the back of her chair.

“Not your fault!” Raine returned.

A disruptor bolt struck their aft shields, and the recognizable staticky feeling of energy bleedthrough filled the as a quick glance showed the indicator for that portion of their defensive fields now flickering at a reddish-yellow instead of the steady green of all the others. 

“Red’s bad.” D’Vana put forward.

“I know!” Raine yelled, flicking on the internal coms. “Hold on tight! This is probably going to get bumpy.”

“That means you too.” She snapped, and D’ Vana scampered over to buckle into the small cabin's jump seat.

The altitude meter ticked down, each number feeling like an eternity even though they were traveling at speeds fast enough that they would have Earth’s early chemical rockets far in the dust.

As their ship reached below the point below half the single digit kilometer mark she began to line its vector up with the agreed upon rendezvous point, a location roughly thirteen light minutes below the Orion systems elliptic plane.

“Three, two, one.” She counted down under her breath, and the moment the nav system registered them clear slapped down on the control.

Everything began to vibrate as the ship accelerated, its deflector staining to push away the low but present trace gasses before the view out the window stabilized into the standard streaks of rainbow light.

It took their ship less than a minute to reach the rendezvous point, a small empty patch of space the Defiant was hopefully lurking cloaked within.

Switching to a side panel, she began to flip rapidly through various communication frequencies before finding the one she wanted. 

“Borrowed Orion escape vessel to Defiant, please tell me–”

The proximity alert interrupted her with a blared warning as twin streaks of light resolved themselves into the chasing interceptors. 

“No girl likes someone who doesn’t know how to take a hint.” She growled under her breath, throwing their ship into evasive maneuvers just as weaponsfire began to lance out from the enemy vessels.

They dodged around three bursts of disruptor fire before she was able to maneuver one of the enemy ships into their firing arc, at which point two beams of deep green shot out from their ship only to be deftly evaded by the targeted vessel.

“So not just fixed firing arcs, but limited targeting adjustment, joy.”

It took two more passes before her beams scored a glancing hit on one of the interceptors, but the amount of damage registered made it clear they weren’t going to win a slugging contest.

“If you make it back to Orion, D’Vana. Please, please tell your family to refit their escape ship at least once every decade or so.”

“It’s supposed to go through a maintenance and update cycle every ten years!” D’Vana squeaked. “Someone was probably diverting the money for it!”

The ship shuddered and an overhead conduit ruptured in a spray of sparks as a disruptor bolt hit their port shield, and a quick glance showed that they had lost about thirty percent of their strength from the strike.

“Good news, It looks like they've cut down their weapons power. So I think they want to take us alive now.”

She glanced over to the scanner readout hopefully as a series of beeps alerted her to an incoming vessel, only to grimace at the direction it was approaching from. 

Red suddenly filled the window as a large ship dropped out of warp nearly on top of them. Desperately swerving the ship to avoid a collision, she caught the glow of weapons charging moments before a flat grey form shimmered into existence between them.

“I sweet to Q.” Raine muttered under her breath, taking a deep breath to steady her rapidly beating heart. “Jadzia better not have been waiting for a dramatic moment.”

Shields flared blue around the Defiant as its shields absorbed the twin green beams the large ship fired as the still open communications line burst to life.

“Drop your shields so we can beam you out.” Jadzia ordered.

“On it.” Raine said, rapidly entering the series of commands to lower the shields.

An instantly recognizable tingle began to engulf her before it abruptly cut off as the entire ship shook. 

“Did you get anyone?” Raine demanded, throwing the ship into evasive maneuvers to avoid further fire from the Interceptors while giving a silent prayer of thanks to whichever overcautious Orion had programmed the shields to automatically reactivate in the case of attack. 

“Everyone in the rear compartment.” Jadzia confirmed. “Give us a second to clear you some space and we can try again.”

At those words a quartet of phaser pulses shot out from the Defiant’s forward banks, slamming into one of the Interceptor's shields with enough force that they collapsed entirely. It broke away from its attack vector, moving to take shelter behind the large red vessel that was still peppering the Defiant with fire.

Taking a moment to make sure the other Interceptor wasn’t in a position to pull a repeat, Raine hovered a hand over the shield controls. “All right, let’s try that again, dropping shields.”

She tapped the button, and the dark interior of the Orion ship disappeared in blue sparkles to be replaced by the interior of the Defiant's small transporter room. The Asari stumbled, barely managing to catch herself before the sudden change from sitting to standing could send her tumbling to the floor.

“Wow!” D'Vana exclaimed in awe as she looked around the transporter room. “Everything’s so well lit!”

“Did Sisko head to the bridge or sickbay?” Raine asked as she straightened up, noting as she did that it was O'Brien himself at the controls.

“Sickbay.” O'Brien said, staring at the somewhat scruffy looking D'Vana with an odd look in his eyes.

“That's D'Vana, Saya's cousin.” Raine explained, stepping off the padd and motioning for the Orion to do the same. “We kind of temporarily kidnapped her.”

“Hi!” D'Vana waved cheerily to the engineer. “I like your transporter room!”

O’Brien glanced at Raine, who just offered the engineer a shrug since she had absolutely no idea what had gone right in the girl’s upbringing to produce that level of deviation from normal Orion personality types. “Thanks? Is this your first time aboard a starfleet vessel?”

“A working one!” D'Vana confirmed happily. “There's an old Aerie class ship in the scrapyard that my sister and I used to play in, but it's nothing like this.”

“Makes sense.” O’Brien nodded in seeming understanding. “The Aerie class was always more towards the civilian end of things then the Starfleet end.”

“Come on.” Raine said, grabbing the distracted teen's arm and pulling her along towards the door. “We need to get both of us checked out in the medbay.”

It was standard procedure after spending any time of note on undocumented alien worlds after all. And while Orion might not be quite that, it was close enough that the Asari wasn't going to take her chances. 

“Um…” D'Vana started as they passed into the corridor. “I'm fine. Really.”

“How comprehensive are your family's immunization standards?” Raine asked patiently.

“Standard?” D'Vana answered, clearly unaware of any deeper details about the subject. “But Orions have really good immune systems.”

“Which just means you could be carrying something not in our biofilters database and completely unaware of it.” Raine explained, that particular lesson having been hammered home by several different medical professionals over the years. “And I'm saying that as someone with an extremely unusual immune system themselves.”

One big benefit of her species basically being popped into existence by Quinn was that the various common viruses floating around the quadrant hadn’t had the time to adapt themselves to the Asari’s somewhat unique biology. Which meant that while she could be a carrier for a lot of things, actually getting sick from them was a much more rare affair having only really occurred a couple times across her career.

“Oh.” D’Vana muttered.

The Defiant’s medbay was only a few rooms down from its primary transporter room, something which Raine knew had been a purposeful design choice due to the battlefield conditions the ship had been regularly expected to encounter. So it took them almost no time to reach the doors through which the Asari could hear a rather vocal conversation happening.

“--a minor laceration that I already took care of!" Bashir huffed as they walked in.

“Oh yes!” Robert threw up his arms in clear exasperation. “Just run a dermal generator over it and call it a day. I shouldn't need to tell you all the ways that can go wrong.” He turned a judging stare on the other doctor “Or maybe I do mister preganglionic fiber.”

“Who told you about that!?” Bashir demanded.

Raine raised her hand and gave a light cough that had all eyes in the room turning to her. “That would have been me, but if you didn't want other doctors knowing about it you probably shouldn't be including it as part of your salutatorian pick up story.”

Bashir scowled. “He's a hologram, not a doctor!” 

“Now if only you could convince her of that.” Robert muttered testily as he walked over to the biobed Jake was sitting on and began running a medical tricorder over him. 

“Well.” He put forward after a moment. “I'm reading trace amounts of some sort of hallucinogenic compound in his system, but other than that he appears to be the picture of health.”

“Hallucinogenic compounds?” Sisko asked in concern. 

“I ate a pink pear last night.” Jake confessed guiltily, refusing to meet his fathers eyes.

“Ohhh.” D'Vana cringed. “A Delaq fruit… Yeah… That would do it…” She offered the boy an apologetic smile. “Don't worry though, if you're not seeing weird visions after a couple hours you should be fine.”

“I thought I warned you not to eat Orion stuff!?” Saya snapped, glaring at Jake from the biobed on the other side of the room.

“D'Erika said it was safe.” Jake whined.

“She wasn't technically lying.” D'Vana offered hesitantly, cringing again when various eyes turned to her. “Delaq fruit is perfectly safe.”

“Unless you're an Asari.” Raine added in, her memories of that particular additive still strong after all these years. “Then it causes a loss of procreative control when melding.”

D'Vana looked from Raine to the now blushing Saya and then back again before her eyes went wide. “Oooh…”

“Which is why you should always remember to perform the two S’s if you’re about to consume an unrecognized alien substance.” Robert lectured as he moved over to Saya and began repeating his previous actions.

“Stop and scan.” Raine explained at D'Vana's look of confusion. “It’s technically one of Starfleet’s regulations, but like the one on getting permission from your superior officer before sleeping with newly encountered alien species, it’s not followed very often.”

You could only micromanage Starfleet officers so much after all.

“To the detriment of doctors everywhere.” Robert stated drolly before turning to Raine. “She has some mild muscle strain and low electrosal levels that suggest she hasn’t been matching her caloric intake to her biotic exertions.”

Raine’s eyeridge twitched. “I should have punched Jellaa harder.”

“It wasn’t dad’s fault.” Saya sulked. “Most of the stuff her ship's replicators could make that was safe for us to eat tasted like packing foam.”

“That’s only because you can’t taste allyl isothiocyanate.” Jake muttered. “Some of that stuff was nearly as hot as what Grandpa makes when he's feeling experimental.”

“Oof.” Sisko winced. 

“Well.” He continued, smiling over at Jake. “Given you've both been cleared by the Doctor, if you want to head down to the mess hall and get something to eat I won't stop you.”

Saya turned pleading eyes to Raine. “Please, mom?”

“Go ahead.” She waved to the door, only to hold back a chuckle as the pair practically raced each other out of the room.

“It's good to see they don't seem to be overly affected by this whole thing.” Sisko said once the doors finished closing.

“Starfleet kids tend to be a breed of their own.” Raine agreed with a smile before giving D’Vana a small push forward. “Here’s your next patient, Robert.”

“And she would be?” Robert asked, raising an eyebrow at D'Vana.

“D'Vana.” The Orion smiled happily. “I'm Saya's cousin.”

Robert glanced over to Raine. “On her father's side, I take it?”

Raine nodded. “She's going to be staying with us till we can figure out a way to get her safely back to her family. So she'll need the standard medical workup to make sure she’s carrying anything unfortunate or missing any necessary vaccinations.”

“I can handle that.” Bashir volunteered, plucking a medical tricorder off one of the wall chargers before offering the teen a small smile. “Robert still needs to handle your own pre-mission checkup and then begin prep for the cosmetic reversal procedures.”

Pursing her lips, Raine glanced over at the holographic doctor who patted the biobed invitingly. “Hop on Commander, unless you’ve been eating things you shouldn’t, I’m sure this won’t take more than a moment.”

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Author’s Notes: Sorry for the lateness, but combat fights me, on the side, the delay did result in a chapter that was a bit longer than average.