Captain Scott Bowman was leaning on his desk, looking at a holographic display of his ship, which showed Engineering flashing red. Across from him, Lieutenants Dathasa and Tom Sargent stood with rapt attention, their expressions hard and focused. 

“I need you two to re-take engineering.” Scott said. His voice was calm, but the weight it carried was undeniable. “Tessara has completely locked it down, and she’s blinded us down here. The longer this goes, the less likely it becomes that we survive.”

Dathasa nodded. “What kind of resistance should we be expecting?”

“Unknown, but best to assume she isn’t alone.” Scott replied. “Transporter logs show momentary pattern disruption, so she probably beamed some people on board after she took the warp core offline.”

Tom frowned. “Internal transporters are still down?”

Scott nodded. “She’s locked out the primary pattern buffer. You’ll need to go the old fashioned way.” He looked at both of them for a moment, then added, “I trust your instincts, Lieutenants. Go get our ship back.”

Tom’s jaw tightened, and he flashed a look at Dathasa. “We will.” he said, and the pair turned and left the ready room for the armory. 

The armory was quiet except for the smooth clicks of power cells being locked into place. Dathasa had belted her twin disruptors around her waist, and pulled on her old armored Fenris Rangers jacket before sliding her knife into the top of her boot. Tom had pulled on his own body armor, and he had strapped a phaser rifle to his back, as well as his father’s Bat’leth. 

“I’m thinking we use the jefferies tube to get to Deck 9,” Tom said, his voice low, “There’s an inspection hatch that opens just inside the Engineering Hull.” 

“Sounds good to me.” Dathasa replied.

The crawl through the maintenance tunnel was tense and claustrophobic. Just before the hatch to the corridor, they paused. 

Voices. 

Dathasa raised her hand to signal silence. Tom stopped crawling immediately, and the two held their breath. Two voices were heard, one deeper one higher, talking in hushed tones as they moved past the hatch. The pair exhaled, then Dathasa closed her eyes and began counting. 

One… Two… Three…

She reached out to pop the hatch open, then silently rolled out into the corridor. The first guard didn’t even hear her coming, just the bright flash of light and the thrum of the stun blast from her disruptor. The second turned to fire on her, but Tom appeared from behind her and rushed him, tackling him into the bulkhead. There was a brief scuffle, with Dathasa’s disruptor trained on the pair in case Tom came out on the wrong side, but a well placed elbow from Tom to the middle of the chest took the Emerald Razor thug down to his knees gasping for air, and Tom stunned him with a handheld phaser.

“One corridor down,” he said, panting as he got to his feet. 

Dim emergency lighting painted the old console in a sickly orange light. The Eclipse Wind was barely holding power, and Garion was coaxing more from it than the old ship had any right giving. Bema stood in the middle of the derelict bridge with his arms folded, his mind running with contingencies. Vail turned up the brightness on a half-functional monitor, and Garion muttered to himself over an open panel. 

“There.” Vail said, straightening up.

Bema came over to stand beside her. “What is it?” he asked. 

Vail enlarged the readout. A stream of compressed signal code scrolled across the frequency band, masked as residual subspace noise. 

“Background chatter?” Bema asked, giving her a doubtful look. 

“Not just background chatter,” she replied, “It’s a handshake protocol. It looks like it’s buried in the nav buffer.”

Garion lifted his head like a gopher from its hole, then stood and walked over, putting in an effort to wipe the grease from his hands by slapping them against his overalls. His brow furrowed as he studied the screen. “That’s not a Starfleet signal.” he said, “That looks like Orion tech.” He worked fast, his eyes darting between panels. “They must have used this signal to talk to their cloaked interceptor. This is a real-time, low frequency comms tether.”

Bema looked from one to the other. “Which means…?”

Vail smiled at him. “Which means – We’ve got a wire straight into their systems.”

Bema looked at Garion. “Can you use it?” he asked. 

“Use it,” Garion chuckled, “I can infect it.”

Dathasa moved through the corridors like a wraith, gliding silently from alcove to alcove. Tom followed close behind her, crouched low, his phaser rifle sweeping in smooth arcs. They passed a crewmember crumpled against a bulkhead, stunned, but not dead. 

Tom hissed from behind her, “Two more voices up ahead.”

“They’re holding this deck.” Dathasa whispered back, “but they’re being loud, which means they aren’t expecting us to be stupid enough to try and retake it.” 

Tom grinned at her. “They don’t know you very well.” The pair slid along the wall, the carpeted floors muffling their footsteps to near silence. Tom moved into an alcove with a view of the pair, and Dathasa moved in behind him. “I’ll take the one on the left,” he said over his shoulder. 

“If you think you’re fast enough.” She replied with a smile, then darted out from behind him and ran towards the pair. Tom blinked in disbelief for a moment as she got right in behind the gangsters, delivering a blow to the back of the first one’s head with the butt of her disruptor. She moved in for the second one, ducking low and lunging out of the way of his barrel as he spun around angrily to catch the culprit when he was hit in the chest with a stun from Tom’s phaser, dropping instantly to the floor like a sack of potatoes. 

“Are you nuts?” he asked as he left the alcove.

“I mean, we might as well have a little fun while we’re handling bad guys.” she replied, a devilish smile curling the corners of her mouth. “I bet I can take down more than you can.”

Tom laughed. “You’re on petaQ. Loser pays for drinks.”

Garion’s fingers worked across the console like a blur. His face was screwed up in concentration, and his tongue was sticking out just a bit from between his teeth.

“Okay, I’m injecting the code now,” he said, straightening up, “I’ve masked the virus as an update request. Once it’s in, it’ll ping their internal systems like crazy.”

“What will that do?” Bema asked.

“At minimum?” Garion answered, “It’ll confuse the hell out of their targeting. It may even scramble power routing. Basically, I’ve let the Tasmanian Devil loose upon their conduits.”

The screen flashed a successful download.

“Aaaaaand… it’s in.” Garion said, clapping his hands together once and leaning back in his chair. “Let’s see what they do when their ship starts coughing up static.”

Vail leaned in, watching system activity jump. “The bridge comms are glitching.” she said, a smile creeping across her face. “Now their weapons control just hard cycled. And now we’ve got instability in their EPS grid –”

Thunk.

Something reverberated through the hull of the Eclipse Wind. 

Bema’s head turned towards the viewport. “I think they know something is wrong.”

Garion cracked his knuckles. “Let’s make them keep wondering how wrong.”

The next Emerald Razor thug didn’t even get to raise his pistol. Tom stepped out from the shadows and dropped him clean with a stun from his phaser. 

“Another one for me,” he said, smiling. 

Dathasa wheeled around from behind him and pulled her disruptor in one smooth motion, then fired a shot at a second thug as she came running around the corner. “Oops, tied again big guy.” 

They were getting close to engineering, which was reflected in just how many gangsters there were. They came upon another group, probably four or five, who were talking and laughing loudly about ‘The Caldera Job.’ Dathasa went first this time, walking towards them casually until she was right on the edge of the group. She crouched low, and threw a sweeping kick around, catching one of the group by his ankles and taking him clear off his feet, landing splayed out on his back. She pulled one disruptor and stunned him on the floor,  then whipped out her second disruptor and fired them both into the crowd, stunning two more. 

Tom barrelled down the corridor, tackling one into the bulkhead with a sickening crunch, then he flipped over, phaser in hand, and stunned the last one. Dathasa holstered her disruptors. “That’s four for me.”

“Fine.” Tom growled, “But if you stun the next guy while he’s tying his boots too, it doesn’t count.”

She gave him a look. “It absolutely counts.” she replied, and they took off once again, ducking into a maintenance tunnel along the corridor. 

“Something’s happening.” Vail said, pointing at the flickering telemetry on her console. The Razor Ship’s output has started spiking unevenly, and she saw power surges blinking across some of its key systems: weapons, shield integrity, secondary EPS grid relays. 

“The ship is trying to fight the infection.” Garion said, his eyes gleaming. “But the code is deeper than it looks.” 

Suddenly, a burst of static filled the freighter’s cramped cockpit. 

…engineering console just rebooted…we lost comms to deck three…that wasn’t an order –

Garion leaned forward in his chair. “They’re not in control anymore.” he said softly, and his fingers began flying across the console again. He entered a few more commands, and the console flashed to green. He let out a loud, exaggerated laugh, like a villain from a movie. “Now we’re really having fun.” he said, turning to Bema and Vail with a slightly crazed glint in his eyes, “Watch this.” 

He keyed in a command on the console, and the Emerald Razor ship disappeared from sight. Another command, and it reappeared. His hands danced, and the most amazing display unfolded in front of their eyes. All of the ship’s lights went out, then back on, then out again. It began spinning laterally, starting slow then spinning faster and faster, until it stopped dead, almost at once. 

“You are the best damn power systems guy in all of Starfleet.” Bema said, awestruck. 

Garion beamed. Bema tapped his combadge. “Commander Saberwyn to Captain Bowman. You’re not going to believe this, but Garion just gained control of the Razor ship.”

Excellent news, Commander. Scott replied. Let’s keep that to ourselves for now.

Tom and Dathasa were meters away from the Engineering Blast Doors now. They had fought their way through another seven guards, and were now at a dead tie. As they stood in the safety of an alcove, Tom let out a soft chuckle. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a while.” he said. “How did you manage to stun that guy while you were crawling backwards?”  

“Core strength.” she said, smirking and nodding sagely.

Tom peered out from the corner, down the hallway. Four guards, more alert and heavily armed than the rest, were standing guard outside the blast doors, watching down the corridor vigilantly. “This is gonna be tough.” Tom muttered, turning back to Dathasa. His tone wasn’t playful anymore, but gravely serious. “There are four, and they mean business. We are going to have to work together to get past these ones.”

“What’s the play?” she asked him, pulling her disruptors out of their holsters.

“You go low, I go high.” he replied. “I’ll go first and draw their fire, you cover me.”

“I got you, big guy.”

Tom took a deep breath, and then pulled himself off the wall, turned, and ran down the corridor towards the next alcove. The hallway lit up spectacularly, as bursts from phasers and disruptors streaked through the air. Dathasa crouched low and swung herself around the corner, aiming her disruptor at the first person she saw not in a uniform. Two shots, in quick succession, dropped the Klingon gang member to the floor, just as Tom made it to the next alcove. 

Dathasa ducked back behind the corner as a red streak burned through the air she was just occupying, swearing under breath. “These guys really do mean business.” she called out over her shoulder. She couldn’t hear Tom’s reply over the renewed barrage of energy projectiles. She stood, holding both disruptors up by her face, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She opened them again, then wheeled around the corner, levelling her pistols at the gang of thugs, pulling both triggers with reckless abandon. Tom turned out of his alcove as well, adding his phaser fire to Dathasa’s disruptor fire. Flashes of red and green left their weapons and slammed into every surface across from them, hitting door, bulkhead, floor and gangster alike. 

The overhead lights were flickering, and the corridor was filled with smoke and the smell of ozone when the firing had finally stopped. Dathasa stood coughing in the smoke, waving her hand in front of her face to clear the air in front of her. Tom stood beside her, his once tidy hair dishevelled and falling about his shoulders. 

“You’ve been hit.” she said, examining a singed hole in the arm of his uniform. “Does that mean I win?”

“Hardly.” he replied, pulling his arm away from her. “But since I can’t be sure who dropped whom, we’ll call it a draw.”

“I’ll buy your drinks, you buy mine.” Dathasa said, then tapped her combadge. “Lieutenant Dathasa to Bridge, We’ve made it to engineering. I’m sending Tom to sickbay, he’s been hit.”

“It’s not serious.” he said, his voice full of pride and indignation.

This is Captain Bowman. Understood Lieutenant, Tom, report to sickbay please. Dathasa, can you carry on alone, or do you need backup?

“I’ll be fine, Captain.” Dathasa replied, balling her fists. “This bitch isn’t getting away from me this time.”