The Three Stooges

Posted on Tue May 5th, 2026 @ 5:08am by Ensign Vivienne Conrad & Lieutenant Kevan Dash & Ensign Kateyo Fenn

Mission: Aeon's End
Location: Shuttlebay, USS Athena
Timeline: MD3 - Invasion Day
4001 words - 8 OF Standard Post Measure

She'd never liked Sickbay at the best of times but it was hardly a surprise, under current circumstances, that Conrad had practically signed her own discharge. The place was bedlam and, up until recently, had been mostly full of people with superficial wounds rotating in and out, at least for the half hour she'd actually been sat there, triaged from a first aid point because of some bullshit regulation in regards to monitoring head wounds. An unsuccessful attempt to occupy herself repairing one of the damaged beds had seen her summarily chastised back into one and Viv had succumbed to the insistence of protocol with her usual graciousness.

It was hardly the time for throwing the book at her, not when there were usually so many other opportunities for that throughout the course of a week.

It had taken the arrival of actual critical cases for scrutiny to switch. Finally having an undisputedly good reason to surrender her bed, Vivienne had hesitated for only a minute upon recognising the newest emergency to arrive and had formulated an entire string of logical deductions before she reached the first working turbolift. Getting to where she intended to go had taken some rerouting but, after checking her instincts with the handful of personnel she passed on the way, Vivienne had arrived in Tertiary Engineering with only a slight residual headache, and a newly-healed wrist that had only protested once or twice at being used to shove fallen debris to the side.

That had been nearly forty minutes ago. She knew this because, having been relegated to monitoring the console whilst the man sprawled at her feet swore at its internal circuitry, she had a perfect view of the chronometer, which was possibly the only working thing in the entire room.

"Still nothing." Her tone, flat and weary, carried the expectation of someone who had already predicted the outcome and been shot down in flames.

"Then I give up," Teyo yelled, sitting up and discarding the hypospanner in his hand. The tool bounced across the deck plating, echoing off the walls of the almost silent room. Every reverb was like the mimicking laughs of a clown in one of those funhouses his sister took so much pleasure in bringing him to when he was way too young to be there. He wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. No matter what he tried, he just couldn't bring the power in this section back online and even though he didn't want to admit defeat, he felt very much defeated. "You try, I've had enough."

As if running on instinct, Conrad opened her mouth to protest...and then promptly closed it again. A first, many would likely claim, but not entirely without precedence when dealing with an unwinnable situation. From a purely practical outlook, the situation with this particularly repair effort was grim, but the same prescience that had drawn her towards the problem in the first place now gifted Vivienne the foresight to guess that this was more about keeping Fenn from putting more holes in the hull than it was actually making a dent in impossible task unscrambling components that had, as her father would have put it, 'completely shat themselves'.

It was a waste of two competent engineers but, for once, Viv couldn't bring herself to have the argument. Concussion, it turned out, clearly made you soft.

She should, at least, make him retrieve the hypospanner. This time, when her comment was cut short, it was not through the interference of her begruding sense of compassion but because the sudden insistence of an alert blasting right in her earhole provoked a litany of choice words whilst Conrad attempted to regather her wits.

"What the fuck..."

"Well, that's not good," Teyo said unnecessarily as he scrambled to his feet. He shone his torch around the dimly lit room, his heart pounding in his chest, as though he expected a borg drone to move from the shadows and straight into his field of view. He didn't know anything about this timeline or where they happened to find themselves, so for all he knew, that was a very real possibility. The way he was feeling right now, the mood he was in, a good trussle with a few drones might do him the world of good. But Viv, she was still recovering, not that she would admit it. "Are you armed?" He asked.

Even admist the sudden escalation of haste, Vivienne's reaction started as a slow turn of deadpan disbelief to fix her fellow engineer with a familiar look. Sometimes, the bullshit that came out of Fenn's mouth was more difficult to swallow than half of what he liked people to believe he shoved into it.

"With what, exactly? Sickbay wasn't handing out phasers."

Of course, she should have picked something up. She'd been a little more preoccupied with navigating her way through piles of debris to stop an idiot Trill from punching more holes in things.

"Here!" A voice rang out as a compression rifle slid along the floor towards her feet. Kevan, holding a second one in his other hand, gave a vaguely action-hero pose. "Come with me if you want to live..."

Conrad stared at the weapon, head still angled down as her eyes lifted to clock the pose of the second spotted man she was now supposedly stuck dealing with, and slumped in disgruntled resignation as she crouched to retrieve the rifle. If she didn't receive some kind of meritorious award for not immediately aiming it at Dash's head...

Well, actually, that'd be hardly any kind of surprise.

"Dash by name, dash by nature," Teyo said, brightening up slightly at the sight of his friend. If the ship was crawling with intruders, he preferred their odds with there being three of them instead of two. It also didn't hurt that Kevan was a kickass security officer and one of the few people aboard who wouldn't purposely shoot him in the back under the guise of friendly fire. "Where are we going?" He asked as he pulled his phaser out of his hip holster.

"Didn't you hear? Intruder alert!" Kevan nodded, feeling the rush of adrenaline that came before the shooting would start. "If I had to guess, it's those future-aliens that we were told about. Given what we know, they're nasty things and we're best sticking together." In a corner of his mind his thoughts were on Zia; despite knowing she could handle herself, he'd heard the reports about the 'Final Imperative' and how dangerous they were. He worried for her. But right now, he needed laser-focus on what was in front of them. "Heard shouting the other side of this deck, we should check it out."

"Great plan, top-notch; just run right towards the screaming."

The only thing that was more satisfying than the whine of the rifle's callibration sequence was the jarring protest of Vivienne's recently-repaired wrist as she smacked the weapon for good measure. Ordinarily, the discomfort would have warranted a grumble but, as things stood currently, further justification for shooting anything that looked at her weird was perfectly fine with her.

Holding the rifle ready, Conrad swung her gaze between the two men and raised her eyebrows. "Oh, that wasn't a protest," she reassured. She jerked her head towards the door. "Time for some pest control."

Teyo couldn't help the goofy grin that spread across his face as he followed the two down the corridor. No one made him smile the way she did, even in situations where he should be focused on his job. He wanted to protect her; he wanted to take point and rear and form a Teyo shield sandwich that would keep her safe. But the truth was, she didn't need him to; in fact, he needed her rather than the other way around, and that made him like her more. He felt his cheeks grow warm as he let his mind wander and didn't notice that the pair had stopped. "Ow," he said, as he walked into Viv's back. "Why'd ya stop?"

He was, Vivienne had drawn the conclusion a long time ago, an utterly helpless case. Still, she had to hand it to Fenn; she'd never known anyone who left her quite so inclined to simultaneously beat her head against a wall whilst snorting with laughter. That didn't make being barrelled into from behind high on her list of fun activities and so, as she whirled to fix him with her patented 'will you shut up already' glare, there was just enough time to return the favour with a nudge of her shoulder against his chest. "Ask Flash Gordon here."

"Who?" Kevan frowned. It was a reference he probably should've gotten, but the Trill was both oblivious and distracted by the sounds up ahead. "Think we're about to have company." Indeed; there was an ugly, chilling sort of sound from just past the next intersection. Something inhuman. He glanced over his shoulder. "Want to go first, Teyo? You know, introduce them to your friend like a good wingman..."

"This gold means engineering, not security," Teyo replied, pointing to his uniform. "Stop being a wuss." He looked past his fellow Trill as the noise continued to echo down the corridor. "Besides, it will be easier to face Zia and tell her you died in action rather than I tried to hook you up with... that!"

There wasn't a lot of time to admire the pair of roaming bugs, who seemed fresh out of somebody's idea of a blockbuster creature-feature, only uglier and a lot less susceptible to plotholes. The first shot glanced off the archway of the door they were attempting to size up; the second smacked the closest directly upside the head with just enough force to disorient it but without the satisfying squelch of bug-guts that Vivienne had been hoping for.

Well, that's no fun.

Reloading, she took aim and fired off another round, sparing not even a sideways glance for either of the men she'd pushed herself in between with the impatience of someone who had listened to their particularly brand of time-wasting banter more than enough already.

"We're best-guess years in the future, boys, the time for locating your balls has well and truly passed."

Her next shot managed a decent, if superficial, amount of damage to a singular wing, though it came with the caveat of leaving no doubt to the shifting attention of the duo of bugs as to where the current threat lie.

"If it helps," Vivienne's tone elevated in both volume and intensity, "I can save you the effort and confirm them not worth finding in any case! Now, shoot something, for fuck's sake!"

Teyo wanted to retort, he really did. He wanted to offer Viv the opportunity to find out for herself. He wanted to invite her to his shuttlebay so she could relish in its size and capacity and to see the equipment for herself, the equipment that he had honed all of his skills and talent. However, the creatures were now hurtling towards them, drawn like a moth to the flame thanks to her phaser fire. He gripped his phaser tighter and, after aiming, a long stream of orange light flashed down the corridor. It hit one of the things square in the "chest", but it did nothing to slow its approach.

"We might need to concentrate our fire on one beast at a time," Teyo said as he thumbed the power settings on his phaser.

"Left-" Kevan said, hearing Viv utter "Right" at almost the same time. "I'm the damned senior officer here. Shoot the one on the left!" he whined more than ordered, taking aim a second time and trying to put some phaser fire into the thing's face - or whatever it called that space behind the mandibles.

It would be less painful, Vivienne contemplated, to just shoot the pair of them and let the bugs take her out. Adjusting her target in silence came at the expense of her jaw tension, aided just a little by the realisation that her eagerness had landed them in the midst of retaliation without adequate preparation. She would have argued black and blue that no amount of time would have resulted in either of the men coming up with anything productive but that was a little hard to prove now that she had rendered the possibility null and void.

A lucky shot from one of them, (she had a suspicion it was Fenn but wasn't in a hurry to point it out), finally disintegrated a wing and sent the insect floorward, unable to maintain elevation. The second bug seemed to likewise falter as if disoriented and, though it meant withdrawing fire from the agreed target, Conrad took an opportunistic blast with the rifle to launch the critter backwards.

"You see that? It reacted when the other went down."

"I did, but what does it mean?" Teyo asked. The handle on his phaser was growing warm from his constant use. He eased his finger off the trigger button and risked a quick look at the small panel to check when it was safe to use again. He hated phaser pistols in big fights and mentally cursed Dash for not having more rifles on him. "Hive mind, d'ya think?"

"If so, then not only are we hurting them, we're pissing them off too..." Kevan responded, noting the heat from his own weapon too. "Boy it sure would be nice if they allowed us to use grenades as standard, wouldn't it?"

The slow panning deadpan from Conrad wasn't something they necessarily had time for but, sometimes, on special occasions, the effort was warranted.

"Yeah, sure," she eventually agreed, her tone not so much laden by sarcasm as made buoyant by it. "I always said the best way to solve a problem was to blast yourself into the vaccuum of space and just hope for the best."

Against all hope, there was amusement to her smirk, a muted playfulness to the flick of a fingernail against the Trill's forehead to encourage a smidgen of commonsense before Vivienne hefted her weapon and motioned back down the way they'd come.

"Maybe a tactical retreat, see if we can find some reinforcements."

"Who needs reinforcements when you have Dash on your side?" Teyo said, firing his little phaser again. "You have given me an idea though, and no, it didn't hurt," he quickly added, giving Viv the side eye. "If we lure as many as these things into the cargo or shuttlebays and blast them out into space, we might just save the ship."

"Lower shuttle bay is back that way," Kevan replied. "If we can get them into the bay one of us can drop the forcefield. But that means someone's got to be the bait." He glanced between the two of them. "Aaaand I'm the senior officer here," he sighed, realising that he'd used that line just moments before in order to pull rank, and now it was acting against him. "Just make sure I'm out of the room when you drop the field, yeah?"

A swift pendulum-swing back and forth saw Viv's gaze eventually land on the recovering invaders, whose disorientation seemed unfortunately brief and not liable to be easily replicated. Creatures capable of mass extinction didn't get very far if they weren't adaptable. "Whatever we're doing, we better do it." Thrusting the rifle in her hands into Fenn's stomach, the pilot drew her phaser and adjusted the settings. "I'll go prep a shuttlebay for visitors." Without waiting for a response, Conrad took off back the way they'd come.

Kevan and Fenn looked at each other for a fraction. "Yeah." Kevan just shrugged, not arguing. "So, Ensign Animal Magnetism, got any ideas how we actually get them to follow us?"

Teyo turned the rifle over in his hands, checking the power and charge levels. Not much of either left, but if their plan worked, he wouldn't need it for much longer. "We do what I do best," he said with a smirk to his fellow Trill as he cocked the phaser and pointed it away from him. "We cause a ruckus."

"Just like Ceti Vega IV all over again. Those poor Risian girls never knew what hit them," Kevan grinned back.

The 'plan', such as it was, was about as subtle as the two Trill who devised it. However, the fact that it did in fact work and draw these invaders' attention did come with the consequence of actually being pursued at a pace neither of them expected.

The lower shuttlebay, spacious enough to attract attention into, only held one shuttle, the Demeter, on active standby. It was decent enough cover.

"Make sure you give us time to bail, Conrad..." Kevan urged, a hand on Fenn's arm to motion him towards the emergency access door on the far side. "I know we're both fond of thrilling heroics, but Teyo here needs to keep up."

There was some promise to the fact that the comment only drew a brief stare from Conrad before she returned her attention to stabilising her terminal's energy supply. Much as had been the case earlier, where Fenn's best attempts to scowl a console into submission had met with abject failure, the bay's systems were a little on the finnicky side.

Vivienne decided she probably didn't really need to point that out. If the 'open door, close door' button didn't work, it'd be very obvious.

"Ready when you are, Flash."

"I'm pretty sure I can outdash you," Teyo said, smiling a little too hard at his own stupid joke. He moved into position, whilst firing in the direction of the oncoming onslaught. His phaser groaned under the constant use. It was getting warm again and every indicator was flashing at him to 'calm his ass down'. But he didn't let up, he couldn't. They were too close to this being over. "It's your show Kev, ready on your mark."

Kevan felt himself clench involuntarily as the hideous creature lumbered into the bay - not that he would admit to such in present company. Counting down a timer in his head, he took a blind shot before yelling out the go-order.

"Throw the damn switch, Conrad!" he shouted, bull-rushing the exit immediately behind Teyo.

"You don't fucking say!"

Had she not grown up bouncing from one vehicle hangar to the next and therefore owed most of anything she knew to the nomadic lifestyle she and her father had kept prior to his decision to settle down, Vivienne would have found it very tempting to consider them cursed and worthy of immediate blacklisting. In the space of a day, she'd been tossed around like a salt shaker and now, in the same damn shuttlebay, she was ripping the guts out of a control terminal because the unstable power supply kept tripping the fuse.

"Just do a lap or something!"

"Just do a lap?" Teyo replied indignantly. All the hours he had spent in the gym working on his muscle mass and low-fat count felt like a massive waste of time right now. He was built for power, strength, and generally kicking ass. What he was not built for was a lot of running, and his body was screaming at him to stop, even as adrenaline flooded his insides. "Have you forgotten how to open a door?!" He yelled between firing phaser shots.

The response Conrad uttered into the singed depths of the console she'd thrust her head inside didn't bear repeating, which was undoubtedly for the best because there wasn't exactly an abundance of time for putting Fenn in his place. A better use of sheer frustration was the expletive yelped as a shower of sparks left one leg of her uniform peppered with tiny little holes, at which point Vivienne gave up trying to negotiate and pulled out her phaser to commence Plan C. Possibly D at this point.

"Get out!" A wave of her hand directed a passing Trill back towards the exit. "It's about to get really chilly in here!"

Teyo didn't like the sound of this but Dash was already making his way to the door and so he had no choice but to follow. His legs burned and his breath was too short to ask Viv what in the universe she was up to. But she had that look in her eye, the look he had grown to recognise as one of pure chaotic mischief. He had no idea how he had a reputation for being the ship's troublemaker when she was considerably worse than he was. She somehow managed to fly under the radar - figuratively and literally. He made a mental note to ask her later how she managed to do that. If there is a later he thought to himself. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind. They were going to survive this; they had to!

"Okay, Conrad; now what."

Muttering to herself was something Vivienne rarely apologised for. Consulting the expert was worth the occasional raised eyebrow and that might have been some comfort now if she had even the faintest idea what she was actually going to do. The relentless barrage of phaser-fire had disoriented the bugs, who seemed somewhat more intent on hovering near the closed bay doors than offering any kind of pursuit, and Conrad may have found that interesting enough to question had it not seemed way too optimistic to expect them to be distracted for very long.

Heroics weren't Vivienne's idea of fun. She'd had a gutful of playing Prince Charming, even moreso because the only person on the whole damn ship who could give her any credit wanted to pretend nothing had happened. Fairytales always depicted last desperate acts has being suffused with courage and valor, noble sacrifices for the greater good from idiot martyrs who wanted their life's accomplishments to culiminate in one stupid act of lunacy. Some of them seemed downright joyous about the prospect of perishing in the place of others, as if death was some kind of ultimate prize.

Vivienne really didn't want to die. It was probably a hopeless case of wishful thinking but she really wanted to believe things would eventually get, if not better, then at least a lot less shit than they had been over the past few years. A scoff of resignation saw her pause just long enough to glare at the pair of drones who still hadn't seemed to figure out which was was up.

"Join Starfleet," she snarled, unholstering her phaser again and taking a second to check the setting. "It'll be more exciting." Her mocking tone seemed aimed squarely at a younger version of herself. Really, if time travel was going to insist on fucking things up this much, it could at least have given her a slight detour to go smack herself around the head. "So much for anyone giving two shits."

Two close-range shots were all it took for the terminal in front of her to burst into flames. Immediately, the cargo bay lit up with emergency klaxons as the fire systems prepared for a decompression purge.

"What the hell is she-" Kevan started, already near the door. He held it with one arm, assuming that it would make any difference if the bulkhead decided it was going to shut to block the decompression. But thankfully Teyo was close enough to make an overdramatic leap through the doorway before the emergency doors slammed shut. "I thought she knew how to work the controls...?" he mumbled, breathless. "Come on, let's regroup and figure out how the hell Viv never learned to operate the shuttle bay doors."