Infiltration (Part 2 of 3)

Posted on 15 Sep 2024 @ 10:35pm by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Ensign S'Ers-a M'Lyr'Zor & Chief Petty Officer Afthinam Naime

3,787 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Episode 20 - Reconstruction
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 7, Main Engineering
Timeline: MD 02, 2259 hrs

Previously, on Infiltration (Part 1)...

The ear-splitting trap had activated and Darius performed a quick visual check from behind his cover. He observed the two engineers gathered around his commbadge, or the remains of it, which was verified after he watched the Farian woman grind her boot into the metallic object and disable it. He caught a quick glimpse of his Vulcan nemesis who appeared to be on the ground much to his initial delight. The bigger their ears, the harder they fall, he smugly mused to himself before sprinting from his crouched position to the nearby ladder which led back up to the next engineering deck and the Jefferies tube from which he came. He began his rapid ascent while his distraction was still in play then cast another glance downward to see how far away his pursuers were. Something seemed wrong. Neither were in pursuit and it now appeared the Vulcan officer was incapacitated more seriously than he'd anticipated. He slowed his ascent then stopped. Shit! Why couldn't things just go according to plan?

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

Looking at her Vulcan colleague Naime suddenly felt anger. Someone had done this. The same someone who had hurt Locksley and had pointed a phaser at Amanda. This monster kept coming after her people, kept hurting her people. This distraction had surely given him some time to escape so all she could do was shout out after him, hoping her voice carried to whatever tube he was running down. "We'll find you Darius. You'll pay."

From his vantage point above the main deck where both engineers were, the conn officer could clearly recognize something was amiss. The CHENG still hadn't moved and the fetal position she donned was alarming. He shook his head to himself and grinded his teeth together before finally acknowledging his mistake. He'd never meant to hurt anyone, and as much as he disliked the arrogant Vulcan, he'd never meant her harm. Letting out a sigh of resignation, it became clear what he needed to do now. He shook his head to himself as he quickly descended back down the ladder to the main deck then approached both yellow-collared women with his hands semi-raised in the air to make himself visible. "Is she okay?" he queried with genuine concern.

"No, no, you don't come any closer." Naime raised a hand from her crouched position. Her emotions were running high and he was absolutely still considered a danger. "You stay right there."

Darius continued to approach, not because he didn't acknowledge or respect the senior NCO's prerogative, but because he was more worried about what he'd inadvertently done in his attempt to escape the engineering bay for such a petty matter. All of which, now, was coming to a head. "I didn't mean to hurt her."

"Well you have, so stop now before I call security." Naime hurriedly turned back to her superior on the floor. "Sera, can you hear me? It's Naime. You're safe." Was she safe? Was there something going on that Naime couldn't detect? If she didn't get a response then she'd have to call sickbay and for that matter why hadn't she contacted security already?

He slowed his paced but didn't stop until he stood next to Naime. The downed officer was still in trouble and he doubted the chief petty officer had the medical knowledge to properly assist aside from her verbal queries. Not that he was any order of magnitude better, but his SFMC training had at least encompassed basic triage techniques. "Roll her on her back," he said while kneeling down and observing the catatonic Vulcan.

Naime tapped her commbadge and glared at the man kneeling nearby. "Engineering to security, there's been an assault in main engineering and I require a security team and medical assistance immediately."

She turned back to Sera with concern in her eyes "I don't know what kind of harm you inflicted and we can't move her until we know it won't cause further injury." She wanted to push him away, to get up and fight and inflict vengeance but that would mean leaving Sera's side and something in Lamar's tone of voice cut through her protective instincts to say he wasn't a threat right now. "What did you do to your badge, what kind of weapon was that?"

He wiped a heavy hand across his face. The CPO had just summoned security and informed sickbay...and in the process, escalated the escalation. This wouldn't be good for anyone here, especially himself. Thankfully, B-K wasn't present and wouldn't have to take the fall, but his immediate priority remained focused on the Vulcan. Why did he care so much about her? He should have been long gone by now.

Darius scooted next to Naime then cast a sharp glare to her. If she wouldn't try to immediately help the ensign, then he would. "It wasn't a weapon," he shook his head to her in reply, "just a sonic pulse to distract the two of you. You're both engineers, you should have figured that out," he then chastised her for allowing her superior to fall victim to a simple trap.

"For something that you say isn't a weapon it certainly had the effect of one. It counts." Was this his playbook, just always say that it wasn't his fault. The cold station made him do it, it wasn't meant to hurt Sera, that was a mistake. Was Naime about to be the next victim of one of his mistakes?

Darius reached out with his large hands and took hold of both of the chief engineer's shoulders to roll her torso onto its backside. Her unorthodox and striking blue eyes appeared distant and clouded which gave him momentary pause for concern. He closed his right hand into a fist then placed his knuckles firmly against her sternum and gave them a vigorous rub against her bone plate to stimulate her body's central pain centers and reinvigorate her. Whether or not such a technique worked on Vulcans? He was about to find out.

Sera's mind, meanwhile was trapped in the future of the past. The 'visions' she had been experiencing were--for the most part--fleeting...temporary. This latest hallucination was not anything like that. She had fallen down the shaft of the jefferies tube, her body felt utterly shattered; her death was imminent, and then, a...pressure-type pain spread throughout her chest which was new and decidedly unlike the sensations her brain was being fed after this 'imagined' fall. It felt tangible, somehow, so she focused upon it.

Slowly snippets of sound began to be processed by her brain...Naime...and...him. Eyes the color of glacier eyes focused on the umber skinned conn officer who was crouched over her, vigorously rubbing her sternum with enough force to elicit pain. Her hand shot out and gripped his throat, and growled in Vulkanhsu, "Du kre'nath!" while her facial expression was anything but the placid emotionlessness that she usually wore. It only was there for a fleeting instant before the lights went completely back on and Sera's face shuttered and she released her hold on Darius' neck and attempted to reconcile what had just occurred.

What was going on, here? Every additional episode felt like it was somehow chipping away at her hold on what was real. Was it real? Had she died? Was she dead? These were not ideal questions.

The chief engineer's momentary clutch of his thick neck and esophagus might have been fleeting but it was enough to suddenly send his conscious mind somewhere else, far away from the center of main engineering.

~~

Her beautiful face was now shadowed within the darkness yet the crystallized breaths from her mouth revealed her presence to him. Then one of her hands gripped his throat. Hard, and he felt his skin break from her sharp nails. "Sera..." he whispered in mild protest as she began to have sex with him on her own terms. Her rhythms weren't in line with anything he'd ever experienced before but when she tightened her thighs around his waist, his eyes closed and he leaned his head back on the mattress. Up and down, she now possessed him.

It was a wonderful sensation until her strong thighs squeezed tight around his pelvis. Then tighter. And even more tighter, until he could feel the pressure on his comparatively-fragile bones reaching their limits. And the hand she held on his throat? It tightened once more and he knew he was bleeding across her fingers. His breathing quickened as she shockingly increased her intensity beyond levels he'd ever experienced. "...Sera..." His vocal cords were becoming compressed while she kissed his chest and bit his nipple. He opened her eyes and reached up to caress her cheek to get her attention. "...my neck..." he managed to say.

His touch on her cheek, so gentle, brought a sensation of warmth against the chill of the air against her face. Her eyes focused down at him and she released her hold on his neck not out of any sense of compassion but so she could grab his wrist and force his arm up above his head, putting her weight against it, leaving him with only his weaker upper extremity to bear. He was utterly at her mercy, now.

However, his touch along her cheek ignited the now nearing irresistible urge to return the caress, to place her fingers on the proscribed points on his face...

~~

A flabbergasted wheeze sounded from Darius' chest when his sight returned back to Galileo's engineering bay, but the acute vision he'd just experienced was overwhelming. His mind tried to process what he'd just hallucinated and in the process he stumbled backward then lost his footing. He butt-planted onto the deck and now stared at M'Lyr'Zor from a sitting position, unable to make sense of how or why he'd just fantasized about her. "...What the hell is this...?" he audibly whispered with apprehension.

Sera heard Darius' soft utterance, but she was more focused on sitting up. She looked from the conn officer who was now on the ground and then over to Naime. "What has occurred?...my...my ears are ringing..."

It was not a gracious reply by any means, but Sera's recollection of what just happened felt a bit fractured. The sound the modified commbadge and then...then a most distressing hallucination. The most distressing one yet. She involuntarily shuddered as her forced her mind to skirt around the mental images of what she had just experienced.

Whatever was affecting the two of them was not currently giving Naime any problems. She moved to put herself between the two, berating herself for letting Lamar get close enough to Sera to touch her. "You stay back. I don't want you to move an inch before security gets here." Naime made herself clear with a glare.

She half turned to Sera so that she could direct her voice in her superior's direction without having to take her eyes off the interloper. "Still working that one out sir, I've got security and medical on their way. Are you hurt?"

"No, Chief, I am not. Other than some residual tinnitus which already appears to be dissipating, I am unharmed." She made no attempt to stand yet; the success of such an act was not yet certain. So, instead she focused her unreadable gaze over to the interloper...to him. Darius certainly did not have the pompous expression on his face like the last time they can interacted. Instead he appeared...worried?

"You are some distance from your shuttlebay, Mr. Darius. I demand to know what you are doing here...and with unsigned for equipment on your person." Her brow shot up as she saw a number of handles sticking out from various pockets on his uniformed pants. Her eyes were tempted to peruse his form far more thoroughly, but she refrained from giving into that sudden madness.

"Yeah, well," he grunted while moving to one knee then slowly stood up just as a waveform discriminator fell from one of his bulging pockets and landed on the deck, "I came down here to get some tools to finish updating the maintenance logs." There was no use trying to hide his involvement now. But it was still her fault. "You remember, the logs you gave me 48 hours to finish under the threat of grounding support craft flight ops?" His eyes narrowed at her for that passive-aggressive stunt which he was still dealing with.

"I have an eidetic memory, Mr. Darius." Came Sera's terse response in his presumption that she would need to be reminded of their previous interaction.

Pushing herself up to standing, Sera found her movements lacking in their usual grace. Suddenly feeling her body unharmed after experiencing a most convincing vision in which she experienced her own death was quite...disconcerting. It took almost all of her control to maintain an outward calm.

"What does my deadline have to do with your...unauthorized appropriation of this department's tools?"

He rolled his eyes at her. Feigned ignorance wasn't attractive. Her unorthodox eyes, long brown hair, plush lips and lean physique, on the other hand... He suppressed a sudden and impulsive inappropriate urge then grit his teeth while refocusing on her question. "Don't play dumb, you know you set me up...knew I needed these tools to finish your orders then banked on me coming down here to grovel for permission to use them from you." Butter bars were always the same even across branches.

Sera tilted her head slightly in confusion. Setting him up? Groveling? What exactly was he talking about? "I attempted to inspect Virginia to get your logs into compliance. It was you who refused my assistance. You chose...a more difficult path. I thought your decision to be a highly inefficient use of your time--and illogical. However, you are human, it is to be expected."

"Now. What tools do you require to complete your work, Mr. Darius?"

He shook his head to himself at the chief engineer's manipulatory attempt to portray herself as the benevolent party in all of this. However, hidden behind her cold outer layer, was a compromising element he subtly recognized. Or so he interpreted. It didn't make it any easier to acquiesce to her question. "I don't know...you tell me. You're the engineer," he folded his arms defiantly across his chest as another instrument fell from his pocket next to his foot which he faux-stoically ignored. "I just need a plasma flow regulator," he finally admitted after a following pause.

Naime's eyes followed the ODN recoupler as it ungraciously fell from Darius' pocket, clattering to the floor. There was clearly something going on between the other two that she didn't have the context to grasp but her attitude to the whole situation remained incredulous. "That is not a plasma flow regulator. And neither was that." She tilted her head in the direction of the poor Hötzendorf manifolding torquator that had suffered the ignoble fate of being thrown across the room. Even with the missing context she didn't believe any of this story. She crossed her arms and added to the ensign's questioning, "I've been here all evening, you couldn't have asked me either? You had to resort to theft?"

No, he couldn't have asked the chief petty officer, because then she'd make a note in the log with his name in it which she - the one with the pointy ears - would then read with prideful smugness. He could envision it now: the self-congratulatory glint in her eyes which sparkled knowing that she'd won and defeated him. Nope. Not on his watch. "It's not stealing, I was going to return it once I finished. Don't be so dramatic."

Dramatic?

"Chief Darius, theft is defined as the physical removal of an object that is capable of being stolen without the consent of the owner. The thief need not intend to keep the property himself; the intention to deprive the owner of the property temporarily is also sufficient to constitute theft."

Sera looked thoughtful, even gesturing with her hands in a human manner to pantomime serious consideration. "It would be most...unfortunate for the Captain to discover your recent actions."

Recent distressing hallucination aside, Sera's eyes glimmered in an unexpressed emotion. Knowledge was power after all...

She glanced behind her to Naime, making eye contact with her Chief. "Would you agree, Chief Naime?"

"I would indeed sir." Name nodded, she could see that the ensign was making a play here and she was would do what she could to play her part. "Security will be here any moment now, we will have to tell them something."

There it was...the glint in the Vulcan's eyes he'd just prophesied accompanied by the smug expression of power and a not-so-veiled threat. If this was how Darius was going to go out, he'd be sure to take both of them with him. Each of his large hands reached into his pockets and pulled the combined contents of all the engineering tools from them. He released his grip and let them all fall to the floor in a small cacophony of clinks, then he turned his palms open for both yellow-collared women to see. "Say whatever you want - I'll tell the captain the full truth that you'll omit...that you came into my shuttlebay, started poking around without permission or authorization, then got defensive when I confronted you. And then I'll tell her about your unreasonable maintenance demands of my flight team..." He shrugged his shoulders while recognizing blackmail when he saw it. Two could play that game.

Sera made a sub-vocal oscillation and turned completely from the obviously unhinged conn officer to Naime. "It would be prudent to begin documenting your observations regarding this incident for when security arrives. Then you are free to go, Chief."

"Aye sir, it will all be noted down, in complete detail." Naime gave an affirmative nod and grin as she took out a fresh PADD and began to make notes in as menacing a way as she could manage.

Sera then turned back to Darius, "Your behavior continues to be irrational even with the option of compromise made available to you. Your ongoing refusal to see the errors in your actions are quite concerning. I question whether you are fit for duty."

She looked about the strewn tools all over her floor along with the scattered remains of his comm badge. "By all means, Mr. Darius...tell Captain Tarin whatever you feel necessary. I...anticipate the demonstration of the mental gymnastics that will be necessary to twist your actions--in the shuttle bay along with what has just occurred here--to somehow position yourself into a favorable position."

His behavior was irrational? The targ was now calling the tribble hairy. It'd be a tough sell to the captain to make his case, he silently agreed, but she wasn't beyond reproach herself. And her insinuation of his degraded mental state... "You started all this," he gesticulated to the air surrounding them, "by coming into my place of work uninvited. Now you're just mad when the tables got turned. Can't have your cake and eat it too. If you really want to help me like you said, give me the tools I need to finish the job you gave me." He predicted she wouldn't. Couldn't.

"I started this?" Sera parroted back, bewildered by his statement. There was so much to unpack in what Darius had just said to her she wasn't certain where to start. Therefore she did not. "As you say Chief. I am unable to accede to your demand."

Darius puffed his lips then let a soft flutter of air through them in a dismissive manner. "Yeah whatever, S'Ers-a..." He suddenly paused after realizing he'd spoken her given name in a unnatural yet pure Vulcan accent. What?

"You may call me by my position or my rank, Chief Darius. I have earned both, and you should know better." Enough. This was a most inefficient use of her time. She wanted nothing more than to get out of this scenario. Where was security?

"Yes, ensign, sir, " he half-saluted her with subtle mockery now that she was pulling rank. He wished he still had communication with B-K to help him escape the impossible. Maybe it hadn't been the best idea to sacrifice his commbadge for the sake of distraction. "Can I borrow your plasma flow regulator, sir?" His eyes trained themselves above the top of her head in a professional manner, like she apparently demanded.

Sera was just starting her shift and now her ears were ringing, and a massive headache was beginning to form behind her eyes making her stomach churn. Darius was testing the limits of her controls. She grit her teeth, but knew that to refuse would only set the man off further and she wanted nothing more at this point than to have him leave.

Whipping around, Sera strode--listing slightly--to the disturbed tool cabinet and grabbed the 'requested' item. She stalked back and stopped exactly an arm's length away from the conn officer and held out the plasma flow regulator. "Your requested item, Chief."

He looked down at the engineering instrument's unique physical properties and matched it with the image he'd seen of the device on his PADD before he'd entered the warp core bay. Finally. He reached out to take the offered took but instead of taking it from her palm, his hand gripped her wrist then suddenly pulled her forward. Before either of them could speak, his left hand manipulated its dark-skinned fingers into a triple-pointed posture then swiftly pressed the tips along the sensitive pressure points on the side of her temple and cheek. His dark brown eyes revealed a new layer below the mask he'd represented to her and which also seemed almost inhuman.

"My mind to you mind...my thoughts to your thoughts..." he whispered while pulling the engineer closer and pressing his fingers deep into her cranial tissue. How he knew to perform this process? He had no idea. His chin suddenly raised as his gaze glossed over and he left the present world.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

Ensign S'Ers-a M'Lyr'Zor
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A

CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Tarin]

CPO Afthinam Niame
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Ullswater]

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