Cerulean Stars - Chapter 132

Chapter 132 - Infiltration Part 2

Stardate 48534.1 - July 14, 2371 - 22:42:57

The staging point Raine had arranged for them was a pair of adjacent rooms in one of the city's oddly numerous cheap hotels. Not the most auspicious of starting locations, but nobody was likely to look twice at an out of town group clearly planning some sort of crime there.

All four of them were currently packed into one of those rooms, huddling over one of the two beds where a pair of padd’s were laid out with the general outline of the less important of their two extraction missions.

“The Orions have prisons?” Bashir asked, looking down at the padd on his side of the bed as if he couldn't quite process that idea. “How does that work when the entire government is just various crime families?”

“According to the Subcommander, it's mainly for people with connections who try to run out on their debts.” Sisko explained. “They hold them till a representative can show up to pay off what they owe.”

“Only for a season.” Raine added in, having done what research she could since Sisko had informed her of the full details of the Romulan retrieval request. “After that they sell them off to recoup what they can.”

Those who had debts but lacked connections were usually just sold off immediately. With that whole system being the main source of the Orion slave girls and boys that were occasionally run into out in the greater galaxy.

“The important point though is that that means it's highly likely that the Romulan agent is an actual Orion.”

Sera frowned, causing Sisko to glance over to her and raise an eyebrow. “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

“I was just thinking, sir. How do we know this Neeva is actually a Romulan agent? Isn't it possible this whole request is just a trap to put us at odds with the Orions?”

As odd as it was to consider given the ways the Orions did things, Raine knew that was actually a good question. Because for all of the Orion's pirating, the only times they tended to push things past being a minor nuisance to the Federation. Was when they either thought the Federation wasn't 'playing fair’, or was being too egotistical about the way they treated them.

“Brooks?” Sisko asked expectantly as he turned back to her.

“It could go either way.” Raine admitted honestly. “Kidnapping rescue missions are an acceptable Orion standard, so there's no worries about blowback from our main mission so long as we go about it the right way.”

Which basically meant they had to treat them whole thing like a heist holonovel.

“Rescuing someone from a debtors prison however is the type of thing that can blow back on entire families.”

Orion’s were kind of Ferengi-like in that aspect, though woe be onto anyone who actually tried to point that out to either of the two species faces.

“Which is, oddly enough, a good thing for us.”

Reaching to grab the padd on her and Sisko’s side of the bed, she reoriented and zoomed in on the Romulan provided building schematics to focus on a point up against one of the outer walls.

“Because it means we can skip subtly and just do a quick smash and grab by blasting out one of the cell block’s outer walls.”

“Those things never end well.” Sera put forward with a frown as she picked up the padd on her and Bashir’s side and began to look over the layout. “Security beams in and then you have a full on firefight on your hands.”

Raine shook her head. “The only beaming in Orion cities is between landline points. There’s just too many conflicting parties with transporter scramblers around for anything else to work.”

Holding up a hand to forestall the obvious followup question she continued. “And before anyone asks, as far as I can tell from the blueprints the Subcommander gave us, there’s no landline point in the prison itself.”

That didn’t mean there wasn’t one, but it did move the likelihood down the list far enough that the Asari only considered it a low level possibility.

Sisko held out a hand for the padd, and Raine passed it to him. 

“What do you think the response will be?” He asked idly as he scrolled through the various blueprints and maps.

“Only whatever security the group overseeing the prison has on hand.” Raine said. “The closest the Orion’s have to any sort of police force are various family enforcers and the Pirate Queen’s royal guard. The latter is very unlikely to care, while the former is less effective than a Cardassian customs agent.”

“It sounds like you’re saying as long as we can get away from the prison we’ll be good.” Sisko mused as he handed the padd back. 

“We might have some problems with bounty hunters tracking us down if we were planning to stick around the planet for a couple of weeks.” Raine admitted. “But given the current plan has us hitting the Tendi estate either tomorrow or the day after, we’re sure to be off-world before that risks becoming an issue.”

“I still can’t believe you want to just drive through the front door.” Bashir muttered in exasperation.

“A delivery van carrying an assault team is one of the classic Orion ways of attacking another family.” Raine patiently explained. “Which means they’re code bound to respond in the classic Orion manner of fighting the assault team off with their own men instead of blasting us on approach with fixed weapon emplacements.”

She dramatically motioned to herself. “At which point they’ll run face first into the fact that, my current appearance aside, I’m actually an Asari who can toss their men around like ragdolls using her psionic powers.”

Then all they would have to do is hunt down Saya and Jake, take one or more of the important members of the Tendi family prisoner, and use them as a shield or bargaining chip to get everyone out.

Looking between the two junior officers across from her for a moment she let out a sigh and desperately hoped this next part of the mission wouldn’t result in Bashir being stabbed.

One of the big difficulties of modern undercover work was the language problem. Universal translators handled verbal languages, mostly at least, since a trained ear could sometimes pick out various indicators that a person was using one instead of speaking the language natively. 

Writing however was a different problem entirely, as outside of implants, the only thing you could really use to handle translating that sort of visual medium was something like a tricorder or overlay glasses.

So if there was one thing she really loved about being an Asari, other than her biotic powers. It was the fact that Asari brains had an intrinsic ability to quickly learn new languages and writing systems. It wasn’t as good as the translation matrix in a universal translator, which was why she continued to use one. However what took months if not years for a human, tended to take weeks for her instead.

Though of course that wasn’t counting the possibility of using a high level meld to actually exchange language understanding with a person. Something she’d done a grand total of twice. The first by accident when she was exploring her melding abilities in psionics 101. And the second during an unfortunate shuttle crash on a planet with an interference field that had made the universal translators return everything in Aaamazzarite.

Learning written and spoken Orion in specific had taken her a little over two weeks, something she’d accomplished while on limited duty during the last stages of her pregnancy with the sole intention of being able to properly convey her feelings to Jellaa for getting her into that position in the first place.

“Given only one of us here can read their writing without pulling out a tricorder, which in a lot of cases will get you stabbed by an Orion for being nosey. We’re going to have to split up if we want to get everything ready to go as quickly as possible.”

“So that means everyone is going to need to keep their heads down.” Sisko interjected before the Asari could say more.

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When the call had come down for Sera to report to the Defiant's medbay for an infiltration mission it had been like a phaser beam to the gut. Oh, she'd put her name on the away mission list of course. But like her last posting, she'd expected that would be more of a perfunctory thing that would occasionally have her going down to Bajor for whatever reasons might come up. Not something that would have her infiltrating a planet full of aggressively hostile Orions to rescue her two Commanders kidnapped kids.

She could have said no, she probably should have said no. Unfortunately a little voice in the back of her head that sounded suspiciously like her mother, had pointed out that these were exactly the types of missions that got someone noticed by the command staff in such a way that a promotion might be in their near future.

Which left her, and the unfortunately handsome Doctor Bashir, to scout out the various escape routes for their coming prison break to make sure they matched up to the digital street maps they had access to.

It hadn’t seemed likely to her, after all, the only thing you needed to keep a map up to date was an occasional sensor sweep over the area. However minimal effort seemed to be the name of the game for the Orion’s when it came to certain things. Because the two of them had already run into two dead ends where the streetmaps had said there should have been clear ways through.

The Orion’s themselves were kind of odd, most seemed to just ignore their existence, and in the few cases of those who didn’t, their eyes would without fail focus on Sera flicking from her weapons, to her cleavage, and then finally settling on Bashir. Only to seemingly write them off in a way she distinctly recognized as someone who considered whatever they were up to not their problem.

The sound of a metal slamming into metal had her turn to the building they were walking past just in time to see a small woman maybe ten centimeters taller than her with half spiked bright purple hair stalk out with a bald heavily muscled man a good forty centimeters taller in chase.

“Hey!” The large man exclaimed as he caught up and grabbed the woman by her shoulder. “You don’t get to just walk away like that!”

Sera twitched, her training pushing her to step in to try and deescalate the situation. And she glanced over at Bashir only to see the man frowning at the pair of Orion’s in a way that made it clear he was mentally debating whether to step in to try and save the girl.

A look of rage flashed across the woman’s face before she spun around with a speed that made the man lose his grip. “You did not just fucking grab me.”

Metal flashed as one of the streetlights briefly caught the object the woman pulled from her belt in its light, and the large Orion staggered back clutching at the small dagger Sera could see now lodged in his shoulder.

Bashir sucked in an audible breath, causing the nearby woman’s attention to shoot to him and Sera had to hold back a groan at the sheer level of indignation the Orion's body language was radiating. “What are you staring at fuck boy?”

Grimicing, the Doctor’s eyes flicked from the Orion woman, to the man who was propping himself up on the doorway while holding his wounds, and then back again. “Nothing.”

Tension began to bleed out of Sera at the answer, only to flow back in with a vengeance at the doctor’s next words.

“It’s just…” He focused back on the man who looked to be trying to carefully work the weapon out of his shoulder. “Is he going to be okay?”

Sera punched him in the jaw, letting out an internal sigh of relief as the woman’s hand that was reaching for another dagger paused in its trek.

“Not our problem, idiot.” She snapped, grabbing the arm that wasn’t massaging his jaw and dragging him away from the confrontation.

Commander Brooks had warned her that Bashir wasn’t the best when it came to knowing better than to stick his nose in places it shouldn’t be. However, hearing about a problem and getting a front row seat to just how bad it actually was were two entirely different things.

“What were you thinking?” She hissed once they rounded the corner of the building into one of the many dimly lit alleyways the Orion’s seemed to like to include as part of their construction. 

“I just asked if he was going to be okay.” Bashir sulked. “You didn’t have to punch me.”

“If I didn’t she probably would have thrown a knife at you.” Sera growled out, trying not to imagine just how much trouble they would have been in if Bashir had actually gotten himself stabbed like the Commander was afraid of. 

“Yes, I saw her reaching for one of the other weapons on her belt.” Bashir confessed. “However I’m moderately sure I could have defused the situation without you needing to punch me.”

“Maybe if you were a woman.” Sera said, enjoying the uncommon dichotomy of that more than she probably should. “But even then I doubt it, because that girl was just looking for an excuse to stab you.”

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Author’s Notes: She was, and she probably would have done it after Bashir admitted he was paying attention and concerned if Sera didn’t radiate “I’m a professional ass kicker” energy.