Darkened Stars - Chapter 23

Darkened Stars - Chapter 23

Stardate 29392.7 - May 23, 2352 - 17:28:36

Consciousness returned to Rain as sharp spikes of pain radiated out from worryingly numerous places on her body.

Groaning, she forced her eyes open to see the rubble of a collapsed building surrounding her in a moderately spacious pocket, lit only by a few feebly burning fires and then occasional ray of moonlight streaming in through gaps in the debris.

“Guess that's three of us.” Sorren said, and Rain turned her head to see both the man in question and Nira looking remarkably untouched compared to the way the Asari currently felt. 

“How the hell are you two fine?” Rain growled out between clenched teeth as she tried to push herself up only for the movement to send a fresh spike of agony through her left leg.

“Bit of advice from an old hand.” Sorren offered as Rain lifted her head to see pieces of one of the large stone pillars that had lined the room pinning the pained appendage to the floor. “Don't cheap out on your personal force field.”

“I am somewhat surprised she had one at all.” Nira added in. “Klingons usually detest the things.”

“I like living.” Rain admitted as she tried to wiggle her leg free only to immediately regret it. 

She whimpered slightly. “Nope… Not doing that again…”

“It's good news if you can feel it.” Sorren told her as something above them groaned. “Means bloods still flowing through the limb.”

That sounded vaguely familiar to Rain from her original life, though she wasn't sure how accurate it might be for Asari given all the differences in their biology compared to regular humans.

“So, we wait for rescue?” Rain asked as she let her head fall back. Not wanting to risk anything else with how clearly unstable the wreckage was.

“Communications are jammed.” Nira informed her with a less than amused look to a flip-phone like device she was holding in her hands.

She could just make out Sorren shaking his head. “Thorough terrorists, always a pain.”

“I wouldn't know.” Rain deadpanned, not the least bit amused at how this sort of thing kept happening to her. “I try to avoid being caught in the middle of those types of events.”

“Didn't you blow up a building a little over a week ago?” Sorren returned in an accusatory tone.

“How do you even know about that!?” Rain growled out as she focused on the pain to try and keep from attempting to reach over and strangle the man.

“Oh please.” Nira muttered sarcastically. “As if we don't have enough Cardassian officers who owe us favors to pull up the files of a minor house functionary like yourself.”

Sheer annoyance momentarily drowned out everything else. “You know who I was this entire time!?”

“Of course we knew.” Nira shot back in exasperation. “You were anything but circumspect in your approach to our world or your desires when visiting here.”

“No need to be rude Nira.” Sorren interjected with a slightly amused lilt. “She was moderately circumspect with her actual desires, why, after everything I'm still not sure where exactly her preferences lie.”

Rain gritted her teeth to keep from screaming in frustration. “If you know why I was here, why the runaround?”

“Because that's the way it's done of course.” Nira returned as if that were obvious. “And really, if you wanted to do things faster you could have just done what any respectable trader does and bribed a few people.”

Sorren sighed. “Nira, love, she’s Klingon, if she was being a respectable trader she would have just showed up at your office and started knifing people.”

“I was this close.” Rain muttered angrily as she held two fingers apart about an inch. 

“It’s good that you didn’t.” Nira confessed. “It took me far too long to train up my current staff to their current standards, and I would hate to have to go through all that again."

Turning her head, Rain sent a death glare at the woman that she unfortunately suspected went completely unseen. “When we get out of here I’m going to sell you my cargo at an eighty percent markup. And you’re going to pay it.”

“Only eighty percent?” Sorren put forward, sounding oddly impressed for some reason Rain couldn’t fathom given that was nearly double the price she was previously planning to ask for. “Why Nira, I think she might actually like you.”

“I guess that answers your question about her preferences at least.” Nira mused, and Rain got the distinct sense the woman was smirking at Sorren even if she couldn’t actually see it. “Assuming they are all relatively intact, a hundred and forty-four thousand daresk each would be an acceptable price for the Orion’s in your bay.”

The Asari’s left eye ridge twitched as while that was a significant amount more than she’d originally been expecting to get, Sorren’s words suggested it was far under what she had been expected to ask for.

“Though while your interest in me is quite flattering.” Nira continued, apparently having decided her assumption was accurate despite Rain’s true feelings on the subject. “I’m sorry to say I do not perform Jamaharon with aliens.”

Closing her eyes, Rain took a calming breath to keep herself from snapping and trying to explode the woman's head through sheer force of will.

“Any idea what this whole blowing us up thing is about?” She asked to further distract herself once it seemed the pair themselves were content to wait silently. 

“What do you think, Nira?” Sorren put forward. “Terran pirates?”

“I’d say Tholian freedom fighters are more likely given the Imperator’s new centerpiece.” Nira returned in a bored tone.

“Wait… Hold on…” Rain interrupted as she tried to think back to what they might be talking about only to come up with a single option that couldn’t possibly be right. “You don’t mean that crystal statue of the Imperator by the drink fountain, do you?”

“She paid Son’a flesh sculptors a small fortune to have the princess reshaped like that.” Sorren confirmed in an amused tone.

Nira hummed slightly in disagreement. “More than a bit of a waste really given how rare Tholian Queens have been since Empress Sato decimated their Assembly.”

Rain herself had thought it was probably Terrans, but the Asari was rapidly coming to realize that she may have underestimated just how many different groups might have wanted to attack the gallery if that was the standard importance level of their various 'living art’ exhibits.

“Great.” She muttered. “So there are a bunch of people who might be trying to kill us, and I'm stuck under rubble.”

“Oh. The fighting finished a while ago.” Sorren admitted as Rain's eye ridge began twitching. “You were out for nearly thirty minutes dear.”

“We honestly thought you were dead.” Nira added in, something that Rain knew should have been a near impossibility if they had at all bothered to check.

Sorren let out a sharp exhale. “Rather glad you're not all things considered. That Terran you have as your enforcer just doesn't have the personality to make a good long term business partner.”

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Stardate 29394.2 - May 24, 2352 - 06:39:10

Limping her way up the cargo ramp, Rain couldn't help but be glad that her time on Risa was almost over. Because another week of this would either drive her to become a shut in, or kill her.

“What happened?” Keiko asked in concern as Rain entered the cargo bay. 

“A multi-story building fell on me.” Rain confessed with a grimace. “Ended up with a broken leg, two cracked ribs, and enough bruises that if it wasn't for the frankly excellent medical care I'd probably be incapable of sitting down for the next week.”

Keiko shuddered slightly. “Ug. Hate broken broken bones. Regenerator treatments leave you feeling itchy for the whole week you gotta go through them.”

Rain blinked at that, taking a moment to process what Keiko had just said through the slight fuzziness of the painkillers before remembering just where the Japanese woman had grown up.

“They have top of the line medical technology here.” She explained as she passed by the slave pens, more than a little glad she would soon be able to get rid of the things. “I'll be good as new in three days at most.”

And even that was only because she apparently had a denser than average bone structure. Something which she supposed helped explain why she hadn't suffered more than heavy bruising when it came to her years of combat practice with Jel'ang.

“Huh.” Keiko muttered as she followed along. “So… Why'd a building fall on you?”

“Utter stupidity.” Rain deadpanned as they arrived at the lift.

“Crew deck.” She instructed once the other woman joined her inside.

“Utter stupidity?” Keiko repeated as the lift began to move, stopping moments later at the requested location.

“Civil rights protestors who decided to free the living art and punish the orthodoxy leadership who supported such horrible acts.” Rain explained with a near full body cringe at having to repeat that out loud.

“So… Idiots…” Keiko said in understanding.

“Yup.” Rain began as she limped towards her quarters only to pause mid step and turn to Keiko with a look of absolute seriousness on her face.

“If you see Demora Sulu, the lost Romulan princess, or a woman made of red crystal wash up on the beach, raise the cargo ramp immediately and pretend you didn't see anything. Because we don't want anything to do with the huge amount of trouble they would bring us.”

Was it unlikely in the extreme that any of the three would show up on their particular stretch of sand, absolutely. But if Q or something else was messing with her, that was absolutely the sort of thing she could see beings like that arranging.

And she was not going to play the hapless Isekai hero, no matter how bad she felt for the pair of princesses in question.

“I also think I might be more than a little high right now.” Rain confessed as the oddity of that particular thought hit her. “So I'm going to go eat a fourth of my body weight in bad food before passing out in bed for the next day or so.”

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“Guess they gave her the good drugs.” Keiko muttered in bemusement as the door closed behind the heavily battered looking woman.

While Keiko didn't know anything about women made of red crystals or a lost Romulan princess, the name Demora Sulu was somewhat familiar to her in the historical sense since she had been something of a legend. The last Captain of the Enterprise, who had continued to fight the Alliance using hit and run tactics till the day she and her ship had vanished without a trace.

Or at least, that was the story as the old drunks who had frequented the gambling parlor had tended to tell it. Personally Keiko figured the woman had probably just ran away when Terra had fallen and ended up biting off more than she could chew.

The real question though was if Raine's random bout of paranoia had just been the drugs talking or something more. Because if it was something more, Keiko was left with the question of whether Raine, when no longer impaired, would actually want them to avoid the problem or try to profit from it instead.

Truthfully, trying to profit from such an encounter sounded more like what Keiko would normally expect from the blue woman given she couldn't recall her ever actually trying to avoid trouble. So she pulled the communicator off her belt and thumbed it on.

“Strelka, tell anyone going out to be on the lookout for a woman made of red crystal or a young Romulan woman and call it in if they do. Could potentially be a big payday for us if we can find them.”

“Young Romulan woman is pretty vague.” Strelka returned after a moment. “If I tell them that someone is liable to grab the first Romulan they see off the boardwalk.”

Keiko took a moment to consider that before deciding that Strelka was probably right, not that anyone but the twins and T’Lyn were bothering to actually utilize their expanded wandering permissions for anything, but it was the point of the matter. “Just the red crystal woman then.”

She doubted they would find that particular woman, given anyone made of crystal would have to be a complete idiot not to cover up their everything, but she’d learned that with manhunts it never really hurt to get the word out to the men.

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Author’s Notes: I can’t blame this on Rain this time, except in the sense of her wanting to get out of the hospital and back to her ship before the space drugs wore off.