The Rescue

Posted on Sun Jun 7th, 2020 @ 11:18am by Commander Taeler Santu M.D. & Lieutenant Dessame Sar & Lieutenant Commander Savin & Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D & Hamilton Broll

Mission: In the Family
Location: Paratus IV - Streets
Timeline: MD-5
5322 words - 10.6 OF Standard Post Measure

The streets of the Paratan capital were chaos.

The quartet of beleaguered and confused Federation representatives could only watch as clashes were openly being joined in the streets and outside buildings. People were fighting with whatever they had to hand, improvised weapons clashing against one another.

"We can't stay out here," Hamilton protested, in the middle of the cluster. "Either we'll get attacked by the men or attacked by the women. We need to try to get hold of a communicator and contact the ship."

Sabre in one hand, and helping to hold up Dessame with the other, Savin felt lost. He couldn't keep an eye on everyone, and the chaos around them was overwhelming. His attention primarily on the XO, he missed Hamilton's protest. "Where to?" he asked, "we have nowhere to go. No way to contact the ship..."

Santu wasn't there when Bajor was liberated, but she imagined that it must've been much like this. She looked around and tried to find a quiet side street, or some sort of high ground, anywhere that would give them an advantage over the chaos. A moment of respite. "That way!" When she saw it, it seemed as if it was surrounded by a light, an alleyway going up a slight incline. Enough garbage containers and other stuff in the way to be able to take cover should it escalate further. She pulled Savin in the right direction, always aware that he couldn't hear her directions.

The Romulan nodded, feeling Dessame's weight shift as he was pulled along. "Just a little further," he admonished the injured security chief, "then you can sit and rest for a moment." His jaw was still throbbing, his head still spinning but he was using all the control he could muster to keep going. Now was not the time to give in to the lure of collapse. He shifted his arm around her waist, pulling her as close to him as was decently possible as he himself was dragged along.

- Rooftops - P’rel shed the morning cloak she had donned on her way out of the apartment she had been occupying for the past several weeks. Unethical perhaps, though necessary for cover, she had implanted the perception in the building owner’s mind of a lonely traveller in need of basic lodgings until she moved on again. Mastering the practice of melding had always been a tremendous asset as a field operative, and she suspected it was no small factor in being chosen for the assignments she had been sent to.

The cloak was typical morning wear for the Paratans in the major cities, thin and deceptively warm. Her original reason for the cloak had been to blend in, though running across rooftops somewhat nullified that measure and there seemed no logical sense to keep the interfering material which irritatingly wrapped around her calves as she ran. Dropping the cloak, she pressed herself against a stairwell wall to take a brief mental image of the scene. It was truly chaos, though very obviously organised chaos; rebels, all men, peppered rooftops firing energy weapons down into the narrow streets below. At female soldiers P’rel hoped, and not civilians; armed conflict was one thing but genocide was quite another. Her sense of urgency increased dramatically, and she calmed the anxious panic bubbling inside her with the logical conclusion that the diplomatic team from the Athena were statistically probably still alive, although how long that would remain so was a less than probable statistic.

There would be simply no way that the diplomatic team would be armed, and without weapons the chances of rescue dwindled. Logically, P’rel deduced, the away team would want to stay near the palace embassy facility’s; they wouldn’t want to go too far so that the Athena could locate them if they hadn’t already. On the face of things, it was also probable that Athena had simply beamed the team up, though it was by no means certain. Looking across the skyline, she plotted a route towards the palace, now billowing smoke from several of it’s grand spires. The route would require her to face one Paratan, which was an acceptable risk, and so she set off at the best speed her strong Vulcan legs could propel her.

The chaos surrounding them was thankfully pocketed, clearing one section usually meant that it gave you a bit of breathing room. But the pockets of violence kept moving, and so the diplomatic team also had to keep moving. Santu looked around for the path of least resistance. She knew that the Starfleet dress uniform they were wearing would only provide limited protection. These people were angry, and at that point it didn't really matter who was on the other end of the stick.

Most of the rising rebellion was fuelled by what appeared to be untrained civilians. Old furniture was used to block off roads, things were set on fire. Chaos reigned. A perfect opportunity for the more organised, and better trained, rebel insurgents to do their thing. Santu had spotted several of them taking up the high ground and cutting off Paratan patrols. They were armed, the weapons they were carrying varied from disruptors to phasers, most likely a result of black market suppliers. She remembered the days when she rejoiced when weapons arrived. Now she knew better.

"No time to rest just yet," it was getting more and more difficult to keep up their high pace with Dessame between her and Savin, Hamilton scouting out their path ahead. There was still too much fighting going on, they had to get to the outskirts of town.

"We will have to soon," Savin answered, "she needs rest. I am not feeling well either." The hold on his weapon tightened, as if he were afraid to lose it. The sight of the glinting steel alone was keeping some of the fighters at bay, making them think twice about engaging the strangely dressed party. But for how long that would happen, Savin didn't know. They were otherwise unarmed and he realised it wouldn't take that angry mob long to figure it out.

Dessame wrestled with the grip of her saviours. She was still bleeding with it trickling into her right eye forcing her to only to be able to see out her left. Her head throbbing, pounding as if there was construction going on within her mind itself, and I suppose if you look at the attempt to heal that analogy is accurate. Her mind was not as ordered as she wanted, thoughts of others slipped in her usually disciplined mind. In an attempt to push back she sent out waves of mental energy unknowingly.

She could hear the others talking, hear the weapons fire and yelling. Dessame could see someone running down the incline of the alley. No-one was paying attention, too busy looking up and trying to decide what to do next. She began to fumble down at her ankle. Savin must have thought she was falling and tried to right her but she fought him to grab her emergency phaser from holster. Taking aim was harder with one eye but she managed to hit the man square in the chest. "I may be injured but I can still be useful." she said with a soft smile offering the phaser to anyone who'd take it. "I always have a back-up."

-Rooftops

P”rel leaped across another narrow gap between buildings, rolling into a crouch behind the lip of some kind of machinery housing on the warm roof. She cautiously looked around the corner, focusing on the muscled Paratan man pacing the adjacent rooftop. Even a surprise attack would have a risk attached to it, and she didn’t much like the idea of using her phaser and drawing that level of attention. Her best bet would be sneak up in him and incapacitate the soldier with a nerve pinch. P’rel hurdled herself over the final gap, thankful for the change in wind which bought some smoke from the nearby burning palace spire and which gave her at least a little cover. This season on Parata IV seemed to have shorter days, though the temperature certainly didn’t feel like a winter, she thought it equally fortune to still have the cover of dim light as well.

P’rel crossed the gap on their shared roof pace in a few silent leaps; pressing down on where the occipital and transcranial nerves were, combined with the pressure from her thumb on the brain stem, the soldier dropped to a heap on the floor. P’rel took a look over the building edge to the chaotic street below. She could see one of the doors to the palace complex flung open. In a second of logical deduction, she noted the door was opened onto the street and not into the building, clearly someone had left instead of entering. The walls of government buildings being breached was hardly surprising, but it wouldn’t be at all logical that the palace guard had left the building. Someone else had left in a desperate hurry.

Her eyes caught a green flash a few buildings away, a soldier was firing into the street, deliberately hitting the ground. In the briefest moments, she saw why as her gaze fell upon a wider street, almost a market square; every exit she could see bar one had been blocked off with a crude barricade, and above the green flashes hitting the ground she caught sight of the unmistakable white of a Starfleet dress uniform. “Damn” P”rel said under her breath. She had only seen one person, and she had no idea the size of the diplomatic away team. She set aside a pang of frustration, it was entirely illogical for the team to have moved away from a location their ship knew they were. The logical course of action would have been to barricade themselves in a single spot, but now they had fallen into a trap. The barely visible silhouettes on several nearby rooftops of other soldiers against the dim red sky were not firing, they were trying to stay hidden from the streets below. The away team was being herded. A sudden orange flow billowed up from in between two buildings, then another further away from her but closer to another soldier’s position. The orange could be any starfleet weapon, P’rel knew, given the eclectic mix of black market weapons on Parata IV, but the balance of likelihood suggested it was her elusive away team.

P’rel shook her head; this was a mess of someone’s making but now was the time to remain solution focused. As she set off in a run towards the nearest dark figure, the one now closest to a third orange flash a few buildings away began to fire downward into the street, long green lances of energy this time like an old Romulan disruptor. Doubtlessly not hitting anyone, but once again herding the away team somewhere. She was moments away from her target, silence no longer a factor, her only goal to get to the away team.

Savin tilted his head as he sensed something, before wrenching his eyes shut as Dessame's emotions threatened to overwhelm him. "Dess please," he pleaded, unconsciously using a shortened version of her name. "Control your thoughts.." And yet flashes of memories seemed to wash over him, memories he was quite sure she had never wanted him to see. He needed to shut her out, needed to sever the link, but as he grasped at straws to do it, he realized it was barely there anymore. He didn't have the focus to do it, his head pounding, his vision swimming as he opened his eyes again. "Someone is coming," he said slowly, willing himself to focus. "High speed."

"I'm trying Savin." Dessame said with quite a short temper. It wasn't intentional but she was hurting. There was a flash of an Orion, a large man both in height and weight. He laughed as the screams and cries of Dessame rang out. 'Run Ubil!' heard as an echo through the mind. Weapons fire, the unusual smell of smoke from burning buildings and then the look of the Orion as he caught his prey.

'Enough!' Dessame internally yelled at herself as her most private memory, or nightmare in her case, began to surface to Savin. She needed to sever this link as much as he wanted her too. Her memories were private, and she had never shared them. "We should duck into that storefront just now for cover." Dessame said out loud. "We are pretty exposed in this alley and that exit is a choke point I don't want to walk towards." She admitted.

Hamilton just nodded amid the confusion - taking his lead from the trained security chief seemed like the wisest course of action right now. He gingerly followed their lead as they decided to take refuge inside the broken-down front of what looked like it had been a cafe of some kind.

P’rel raced across the roofs, she didn’t deserve the athletic build she benefited from. A natural element of being Vulcan certainly gave her dense musculature and a slender frame, but beyond that there was nothing especially earned about her physique. She slammed full speed into the soldier who had been firing off green flashes, from what she saw was a Klingon disruptor as he tumbled over the edge of the building. Her head snapped up, locking her view on the final soldier firing the Romulan disruptor style weapon. Now closer, she could see that he too was firing at the street floor and the walls of buildings, herding the white uniformed team that she could still only get brief glimpses of. One of them was clearly hurt, being carried by another; a Vulcan by the looks of things at the distance. Two that she could see, but possibly more, possibly no longer even with these two. This wasn’t right P’rel mused, as she vaulted off towards the next solider. The Duke’s movement had been gathering strength, and of course illegal weapons were commonplace among the Paratans, but her intelligence gathering had so far not indicated anything building of this nature, not to this scale.

Savin eased Dessame down on one of the few remaining undamaged chairs. "Rest," he told her, as he circled around to examine her headwound. Without pause, he laid his sabre aside and shrugged out of his jacket, instantly tearing it to strips to dress her injury. It wasn't the most sanitary option given their bedraggled appearance but it was better than nothing. Plus, it gave him something to focus on and suppress the unwanted images that had started to flow into his mind. When he was done, he briefly squeezed her shoulder before picking up his weapon again. "How long will we remain here," he asked, focusing on the other two in their group, "we cannot stay here indefinitely."

Once inside the room Santu went back into a mode she had not needed for quite some time, she immediately checked all the corners and closed doors. She didn't want to be jumped by the location's previous owners. Back in the main room she had managed to herd everyone into a safe corner and kicked over one of the tables, while it would easily be shot apart the benefit of not being visible was that one tended not to get shot at. With that in place she rushed over to the front of the café and tried to find if there was any way to close the large, broken, window. A gate or something that they would've used after closing. She saw one but the console directing it was broken.

Pulling the panel aside, fumbling with the small phaser in one hand, Santu tried to dig through the wires. Perhaps there was some way to short circuit it and have the gate drop. She grabbed onto a wire and got shocked, "Kosst!" she hissed under her breath, shaking her hand and waving it a bit trying to get rid of the tingling sensation, before pulling the wire back out and trying to look for the place to jam it into. Suddenly she felt as if someone was watching her and she held the phaser out, aiming at the figure that had just appeared in the corner of her eye, "Stand down! I'm Lieutenant Commander Taeler of the USS Athena, a dignitary of the United Federation of Planets."

P’rel skirted the last of the jumps needed to get to the rebel with the Romulan disruptor, he had stopped firing and seemed momentarily perplexed - had something gone wrong? In his peripheral vision, he must have caught sight of the Pantaran woman charging him at full speed. In the instant he raised his weapon, the speeding woman deflected his arm by extending it outwards beside her and used his shift in balance to sweep a foot out from under him. They both hit the floor hard, but P’rel had the upper hand; rolling them both so that she was underneath his back, she used all her strength to squeeze at his neck. A few moments of the panicking rebel passed as he frantically felt for his dropped disruptor, then the movement stopped and P’rel rolled the unconscious soldier away from her.

She tried to take stock of the situation around her, only seconds had passed in her tussle with the Pantaran man, but in a critical situation like this a lot could happen in those seconds. She peered cautiously over to the streets below, it was another market square of sorts, the kind where busy cafes would be bustling with customers on a warm day. Silhouettes on rooftops further away were still there, and they too seemed to be gingerly scouting the streets below them as if looking for something, the diplomatic away team she hoped. P’rel had no sight of them, and it seemed their would-be ambushers didn’t either.

There were a small handful of shop fronts that the team might have gone into to hide P’rel deduced as her eyes scanned the square below. She set off for the far edge of the building, scrambling down some kind of service ladder to the narrow alley below. As she approached the end of the alley which opened into the square, she cautiously drew her phaser. Two tall and well armed Paratan men, with Cardassian disruptor pistols on their hips and some kind of rifle each stocked into the shoulders slowly moved past her, their weapons aimed at a cafe front with broken windows. Hidden by the shadows of the tightly packed in buildings, she tilted her head to better focus on what they were saying, as the first of the two men stepped onto crunching glass as he passed the threshold of the building’s large window frame. Both he and his compatriot snapped around suddenly a few degrees, both aiming their rifles into the cafe at the same spot, though P’rel couldn’t see what or who they were both aiming at, it was a reasonable assumption that the diplomatic team from the Athena had been located.

At best P’rel decided, it would be unlikely that a diplomatic team would have even one weapon amongst them, let alone two. In any case, the odds were not in the favour of whomever the rebel soldiers were aiming at. P’rel levelled her phaser at the closer of the two, she just about caught the words “ -of Planets” coming from a woman’s voice inside the gutted cafe. He shifted his feet mere centimetre as if to balance himself to shoot. P’rel fired an unmistakably Starfleet phaser beam at his back, and another in quick succession at the second man. The surprise had caught them completely off guard and both dropped to the ground, a fading orange glow on their backs. Her eyes darting for other targets, P’rel left the relative safety of the alley’s shadows, crouched and ran to the broken cafe where the two Paratans now lay.

"By the Prophets, did you have to shoot them?" Santu called out to whoever had just shot the two people in front of her. She tried to aim her phaser at wherever the shot had come from but couldn't properly spot anyone. She inched back, hoping to be able to find a corner to duck into if their saviour had less than honourable intentions with them.

P’rel habitually quirked an eyebrow beneath the Paratan dermal prosthetics; “No” she answered factually, stepping slowly around the broken window frame, to see a woman in a white Starfleet dress uniform backing into a more tactically sound area. “Although I suspect you would be dead if I hadn’t” she continued truthfully. P’rel lowered her phaser, wondering if anyone else had made it this far. She had seen two officers, were there more? Was the other dead somewhere? P’rel noticed that the Bajoran was still aiming squarely at her. “Lieutenant P’rel. Starfleet Command, Field Intelligence.” she introduced, somewhat hopeful that the Bajoran wouldn’t fire. “Are you alone Commander?” she asked, noticing the three metallic glimmers on the young woman’s collar.

Santu immediately rushed forward to the two people that were hit by the intell officer, "Is this a joke to you?!" She checked their pulse, feeling none "these people are fighting for their liberties and you shoot them in the back with a lethal setting." She looked up from the two bodies at the Paratan victims, "Starfleet personnel number?"

P’rel rolled her eyes, ‘all the militarised commanders in the galaxy and I find the one pacifist...’ she mused, quite annoyed that the Bajoran Commander wasn’t more enthused about not herself being shot. “72818 dash Charlie Juliet” she replied, “and this” she added sharply, presenting her knee, damp and green with Vulcan blood. They didn’t have time to play operational ethics with each other; “Commander, this planet is erupting in civil war. You appear to be stuck. Come with me if you want to live...” P’rel plainly said, gesturing outside the cafe onto the presently quiet square outside.

Santu made a quick mental note of the code, though quite sure she'd forget it before they got out of the café, "I have two wounded and a non-combatant," She looked over her shoulder to check in on the people inside, "Our best bet is to find a communications device and repurpose it to hail the USS Athena in orbit."

"I vote we go with the scary woman carrying the phaser," Hamilton offered. Although she'd been a bit ruthless on the way in, she'd saved their lives. But she didn't seem particularly Vulcan, despite the blood. Romulan, maybe? Hard to tell - and rude to ask. He looked at the others. "Come on, we can't stay here."

"With all due respect, Mister Broll, you're not in command here," Santu immediately interjected before turning back to the intell operative, "Where's your base of operations? You must have a device available there for your reports back to HQ."

Savin reached to help Dessame to her feet. "We cannot move fast," he spoke up once he understood what was goin on, "perhaps you should go, and we will hide until it is safe for us to be picked up. We will only hold you back."

P’rel surveyed the scene in front of her. Four people, one of them badly wounded. She made a quick mental check of how far they needed to go and how fast they could move. A larger target with this volume of people also didn’t present wonderful odds. She turned her attention to the Commander, “Ma’am, I appreciate you’re the senior officer here, but I have considerable experience exfiltrating from hostile theatres”. She reached into a small pocket and pulled out a button like device; “this is a single personnel transporter. It will take the user to a nearby lake. A submerged sensor drone will recognise a non Paratan life sign and recall a Type 18 shuttle pod from one of the moons. We can use that to hail your starship”. This was clearly the genius commander who had left the relatively safety of a known location and taken her team trekking through a war zone, and she wasn’t keen on the idea of placing her own life in that of the Bajoran commander’s.

"So what do you suggest? We wait here, crossing our fingers and praying to the Prophets that you'll return with your shuttle?" Santu moved further back into the café, trying to stay out of sight from anyone on the streets, facing Savin now, "You have got to be kidding me with this nonsense. I'm not leaving anyone behind."

"Not nonsense ma'am," the counselor objected, "it is logical. We will slow you down. I have every faith you will not leave us behind but logic dictates that you must leave us for now, and go with her to find the shuttle." He wasn't one to often - if ever - quote logic, but now seemed like a good a time as any.

"Your objections have been noted, Lieutenant," Santu remarked towards the counsellor, making absolutely sure that she was being understood, including the subtext that the officer should drop that particular train of thought. "I will not leave any of you behind, for whatever reason. We will find a way to go together, or we don't go." She turned to the intel operative, "So, how long do you think before you'll be back?"

P’rel suppressed her desire to express her disdain towards the Commander. She would have preferred the odds of sending the Commander off to fetch the shuttle, instead of leaving her here to practice her operational theatre skills some more with this unfortunate group of people. P’rel regarded the one who spoke, the Vulcan she spotted from the rooftop earlier, though there was something off about this one. He spoke of logic, but there was an air of him which was distinctly not Vulcan, ‘curious’ she noted. “I will return in short order” she said finally, after several seconds of eyeing the Commander. “Remain here”, P’rel stated as though it were an axiom, technically unable to give orders to the Bajoran. P’rel tapped the transporter, it emitted a dysfunctional chirp; again, and still just a chirp. “It appears the Paratans have blocked sub space communication”. She looked to the Commander as if to say ‘you come up with a better idea then’.

Dessame grumbled as she listened to the people around her. She groggily rose to her feet and looked at the room with her one good eye. "I will not wait here to die in this bug infested cesspit of a building!" she spoke with slight venom in her voice as she held on to Savin. "With the firing of that weapon, and the death of those two, we need to move from this position before we are discovered. Staying in one place too long is as well as paining a target on our back."

P’rel shook her head in vehement disagreement. “We should remain in one spot until your vessel can locate us. It is far harder to locate a moving target”, she looked accusingly at the Commander, still bemused as to why she had moved the team. “It is obviously too late to remain where your vessel actually knows where you are, we should not worsen that situation”. All eyes were now on the Commander, waiting for the next move.

"You know we have communication badges for a reason?" Dessame argued back. "They aren't just pretty ornaments that make us look pretty. Regardless of where we are the Athena can locate us because they have locator chips in them." Dessame sighed. "To stay in one location, providing they do not know where we are, is more dangerous as we are boxed in here like animals in a cage. At the very least we should look to move higher in this structure, if we get to the roof it may be possible to get a signal to the Athena." Dessame wasn't trying to be difficult she was just in pain and as a result a grumpy, aggressive woman. She was also pissed at herself for getting injured when she was there to stop that in the others.

"Dess, we do not have our comm-badges," Savin told her, "there is no way the Athena knows where we are now. And you are in no condition to move anywhere."

Santu took in a deep breath, she was forced into a situation that was way out of her depth and the only person they had taken with them on the away mission that was capable of dealing with this was so disoriented that they didn't realise their comm-badges had been taken in the scuffle inside the castle. It had been a wonder that they had made it out this far and moving through the streets was definitely not an option. She thought back of the leader of her resistance cell, and how he led their rag-tag group through similarly hopeless situations, "Alright, time for debate is over. I am the ranking officer. I call the shots." she stepped outside quickly and grabbed the two weapons left on the ground by the killed Paratans, "We set our weapons to maximum stun." She lobbed one of the weapons over to Hamilton before she looked over at the Intell asset, as if to drive home her order, "we will make our way to the nearest underground passageway. There's an extensive underground railway system in the city that I read about during our prep." She looked back over at Hamilton for confirmation, but he seemed preoccupied with the weapon she had just passed to him, "that's what we will take. We will use the maintenance tunnels to get as close to the lake, or our base of operations, as possible. Since you've been on the ground the longest you'll take point." She took a moment to let all of that sink in before adding, "the next words out of your mouths had better been 'aye-aye ma'am'"

Dessame smirked a little. "Follow you anywhere ma'am." she said as she shuffled forward to stand near her.

P’rel locked eyes with the Commander; a good example of the Starfleet paradox, incessantly getting involved in conflicts and then trying to operate one’s way out of it with operationally inept, pacifist leaders. Nonetheless, there five of them now under this woman’s command, and there was at least some element of logic to retreating underground. P’rel scrolled her phaser to maximum setting and fired two quick bursts into the rebel bodies, vaporising them; if they were going on the run then was no logical need to give their pursuers any clues as to where the five of them had been. She scrolled back to ‘heavy stun’ and held the display towards the Commander so she could see it. “Aye aye ma’am”, she retorted unsure of exactly how much disrespect and sarcasm had escaped into her tone unwittingly.

As he was again fussing over the security chief, Savin at first didn't notice the order. However as she suddenly moved away from him, he realized they'd been addressed. "Ma'am?" He asked, somewhat apologetically.

:: OFF ::

Lieutenant Commander Taeler Santu M.D.
Executive Officer

Lieutenant Savin
Chief Counselling Officer

Lieutenant Dessame Sar
Chief Security Officer

Lieutenant P’Rel M.D.
Starfleet Command, Field Intelligence.

Hamilton Broll
Federation Envoy
(PNPC Kane)