Cerulean Stars - Chapter 137

Chapter 137 - The Birthday Party - Part 4

It was clear to Benjamin from the first punch that V'inne didn't have any hand to hand training of note. What he did have however was a good fifteen centimeters of height, and a good ten kilograms of muscle. So when the punch came in, Benjamin made sure to dodge it.

The large Orion barely grunted when Benjamin's follow up punch landed in his gut, though the right hook to his chin at least made him stumble back a step.

“You got a good punch for a human wearing false green.” V'inne muttered, rubbing his jaw and eyeing Benjamin in a way he really didn't like.

Lunging forward suddenly, the Orion attempted to drag Benjamin into a grapple. He hadn’t been the captain of the Academy wrestling team for nothing though, and he grabbed one of the other man’s arms and swept his legs out in an almost textbook counter that sent V’inne crashing into one of the wooden posts of the room's overly fancy bed.

Taking his eyes momentarily off the groaning man to check on Bashir, Benjamin winced slightly at the sight of the man holding his hands out non-threateningly towards D'Erika in a very standard looking attempt at de-escalation. 

“You don't have to do this, you know. We just want to rescue Jake and go.”

“My mom told me to stay here and keep the hostage from running off!" D’Erika exclaimed as she darted forward to try and stab Bashir, only for him to nimbly step out of the young girl's limited reach. “That includes stopping rescue attempts!”

The sound of V’inne getting back to his feet dragged Benjamin’s attention back to his own opponent.

It was clear from the way he was wavering slightly on his feet that he hadn’t totally shrugged off the effects of the throw. “What the fuck was that!?”

“Wrestling.” Benjamin replied simply.

A right hook headed for his jaw, and he dodged around the punch to hit the Orion’s back with a double axe handle that sent him stumbling head first into the wall hard enough that Benjamin was actually a bit worried when he didn’t immediately get back up.

“Bashir!” He yelled out.

“I’m trying here!” Bashir returned. “But she’s surprisingly good with the knife.”

“That’s cause my mom's the warrior queen!" D'Erika bragged proudly, charging at Bashir only for him to once more step nimbly aside. “And that makes me the warrior princess! And all princesses need to train with daggers!” 

She lunged at the doctor with her knife held forward, however instead of dodging again the man caught her blade with the strap of this satchel in a surprising show of dexterity and twisted the weapon out of the young girl's grip.

“Hey! Give that back!” She yelled, pulling another much smaller knife out of a hidden pocket in her pants and then once again charging him.

“Seriously?” Bashir muttered in exasperation. 

Tossing the dagger he had grabbed from the girl out the door, he attempted a repeat of his previous disarmament only for her to throw a second small knife with her off hand that left a thin cut across the Doctor's upper arm.

“All right…” He muttered angrily under his breath. “That’s enough of this.”

With a surprising amount of speed for a man who had moments ago been struggling, he grabbed the girl's wrist. Holding her in place for a moment arm before with the hiss of a hypospray she collapsed bonelessly onto the ground.

Kneeling down next to her, he quickly pulled out his tricoder and ran it over her body for a moment before letting out a mild sigh of relief.

“I didn’t have time to calibrate the dosage for a pre-teens body weight.” He explained as he moved over to check the unconscious man.

“He’ll be fine, just a mild concussion, which doesn’t really have the same associated risks for an Orion as it does a Human.”

“All right.” Benjamin said, motioning for the tricorder and taking a moment to check its map of general lifesign signals. “Looks like Brooks is headed this way, let’s go.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Retreating to the castle had been an original part of Raine's plan as she knew from things Jellaa had let slip over the years that the Tendi family liked to keep some method of rapid transport available at all times.

Slamming the heavy door behind her, she slapped the lock panel and then tossed a low powered warp at it to short the entire mechanism out.

“I have so many questions right now.” Saya muttered before looking up at Raine. “How did you get here? Are you here alone? Did you already rescue Jake?”

“Spaceship, no, and no.” Raine answered in rapid succession. “Sisko and Bashir should be in the middle of rescuing him now.”

“They were supposed to be rescuing you too.” Raine muttered as she set the still frozen D’Vana down and carefully began maneuvering to disarm the girl of her sword once the inverse barrier was removed. “But how was I to know Jellaa would throw you into an arena fight.”

Dropping the inverse barrier, she quickly twisted the blade out of the girl's hand before tossing the weapon into the sword-stand next to the door. 

“Um? Could you not do that again please?” D'Vana begged, eyes flicking to where the sword was now resting before slowly reaching up to scratch her nose. “It was kind of hard to breathe, and I had a really bad itch on my nose that I couldn't scratch.”

“Are you going to try and escape?” Raine asked, eyeing the Orion teen on the ground with a frown.

D'Vana blinked up at her. “Escape? Why would I need to… Oh… You're actually kidnapping me?”

“Just till we're safely off Orion.” Raine confirmed with a nod, keeping the Orion teen in the corner of her eye as she glanced around the entryway. “And on that note, where does your family keep their emergency escape shuttle in this place?”

“How do you know about that?” D'Vana asked with a frown. “It's supposed to be a secret.”

“Unlike me Saya didn’t pop out of thin air fully formed.” Raine deadpanned. “And Jellaa likes to rant about family excess as pillow talk.”

Saya visibly cringed. “Eww, mom.”

Raine rolled her eyes at the overreaction before focusing back fully on the Orion teen who was slowly picking herself up off the floor. “Now come, where’s the ship?”

Licking her lips in clear nervousness, D’Vana’s eyes flicked across the two of them to their surroundings.

“And consider for a moment that I am fully capable of crushing this entire castle into a pancake. So getting us all out of here before that occurs is very much in your family’s best interest.”

It wasn’t a thing Raine wanted to do of course, but D’Vana was still several years away from being the girl who would run away from her family to join Starfleet so planting the idea that she could would probably be enough to shift things in the girl's mind.

“She can.” Saya confirmed with an empathic nod when D’Vana glanced over to her. “One time, there were these aliens in the gamma quadrant who tried to kidnap her so they could replace her with a replicant. And she totally crushed their entire ministry of security.”

“It was more like a third.” Raine idly corrected. “But the building was a lot larger than this castle so the difference would even out.”

“...I really can't tell if you're bluffing.” D'Vana muttered unhappily as she cautiously pushed herself up to her feet. “But the escape shuttle can be accessed through a secret passage behind the plotting room's fireplace.”

Raine felt her eye ridge twitch. “Did your people just lift ideas wholesale from Earth fiction?”

“Maybe?” D'Vana answered, seemingly unsure of the answer to that herself. “Grandmother kidnapped the architect from one of those weird human planets where people pretend everything's magic.”

“Of course she did.” Raine sighed.

“The last time mom visited one of those they tried to make her be the lady on the lake.” Saya offered helpfully.

“Remember this when you're older girls.” Raine warned in a joking tone.  “After a certain point hotness can be a curse.”

“Yeah…” D'Vana shuffled awkwardly. “I'm an Orion… So that sort of thing is kind of a standard for us when dealing with other species.”

Several decades had passed since Raine had last seen Lower Decks, so she’d almost forgotten that D’Vana had been a giant bundle of barely restrained neuroses by the time she’d shown up on the Ceritos. 

“That was a joke… Hotness is such a useful tool in the Starfleet officers handbag that our uniforms are scientifically tailored to showcase our bodies in the best possible light.”

There were actually a lot of little mostly unknown things like that in Starfleet, though she had only found out about that specific one because she’d gone down the hole of trying to find out why v-necks and skirts were allowed as a uniform option.

“Now come on, we need to get going before D’Vana’s mom finishes up with Jellaa’s rebellion and comes after us with an army.”

“Without Aunt D’Rana around that’s probably going to take a couple hours at least.” D’Vana put forward as they headed deeper into the castle. “Not that she could take all those people herself.” She quickly added in. “But a lot of the family is really scared of her so they probably would have just slunk away when the fight started instead of backing one side or the other.”

“Well, pride goeth before the fall and all that.” Raine said, not feeling particularly guilty about tossing the aggressive woman across out of the arena like she had.

A few seconds of silence passed before D’Vana spoke up again. “So… Um… Do you mind if I call you Aunt Raine?”

“Go ahead.” Raine told her, feeling her slight twinge of guilt at basically using the teen as a human shield get a little bit stronger at the new familiarity. 

“Great!” D'Vana practically cheered as they came upon a split in the hall. 

“Jake is being held in the east wing.” She said, pointing to the left passageway. “But my little sister D'Erika's supposed to be watching him. And um…”

“Don't worry.” Raine reassured her, heading down the indicated direction. “Sisko and Bashir are Starfleet officers, violence is literally the last choice in their playbook.”

D'Vana furrowed her brow. “Didn’t you just sort of blow away a bunch of people?”

“She's in the security division.” Saya interjected. “It's different for them.”

An overly ornate stairway looked to be their destination, and they began to head up only to stop as a voice called down in the distinctive inflection of a native speaker of Federation standard.

“Brooks?”

“Unless you know any other Asari.” Raine yelled up.

The sound of descending boots proceed the sight of the three by seconds, and she began to let out a sigh of relief at the sight of Sisko and Jake being okay only to suck her breath back in at seeing Bashir in the middle of giving a quick pass of a dermal regenerator over his arm. 

“There was a young girl with knives.” He explained upon seeing her look.

“Oh!” D’Vana exclaimed. “That must have been D’Erika… She’s all right… Isn’t she?”

“She’s sleeping off an adult dose of Anesthizine.” Bashir reassured her as he sowed the regenerator back in his satchel. “She’ll wake up with a bit of a headache in a couple of hours.”

“Brooks?” Sisko repeated, staring at D’Vana with a questioning look in his eye.

“She’s Saya’s cousin D’Vana.” Raine explained. “I’m holding her hostage so her family doesn’t shoot us down while escaping the planet in their secret escape shuttle.”

“It’s my first time being on this end of that sort of thing.” D’Vana offered in a happy tone that had all three of the men giving her odd looks. 

Raine shook her head in bemusement. “I told you, kidnappings are standard Orion cultural practice.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author’s Notes: To be fair to them, that’s so outside the norm for most species that it’s kind of hard to believe unless you experience it first hand.