Shuun’s two lackeys, the ugly Dopterian and the short Bolian had picked up their weapons again and looked around somewhat nervously. Star smirked when she noticed that their rifles were unsteady, unsure in which direction to point them at. It was a testimony mostly to her seemingly misplaced confidence, after all the odds appeared to be squarely in their favor.
The Ariolo stood like a salt statue, frozen in place his weapon perfectly aimed at the tiny spot in-between Shunn’s eyes while he carefully surveyed the room, wordlessly declaring that whoever dared to take the opening shot, their boss was going to hit the ground first.
Star counted twelve weapons against their mere two. Curiously the only person in the room who appeared to be unarmed was Shuun himself who had limited himself to piercing her with his insisting eyes. The Trill didn’t kid herself, the situation was decisively not in her favor. But all was not yet lost. All she needed were a few more seconds.
“It doesn’t have to end like this.” She began to step slowly sideways. The sudden movement had the desired effect as the henchmen were thrown off momentarily. Star kept her aim steady. “You can come back and things might be different this time.”
Shuun uttered a hollow laugh. “They’ll be different alright. But not in the way that will do me any favors, trust me. We both know they can only be one outcome here. Let’s not stall for any more time and finish this quickly, shall we?”
Star nodded. “Yes, let’s finish it.”
There was a renewed confidence in her eyes that did not go unnoticed by Shuun and a sudden panic crossed his face. “Kill them!”
And then the world turned black. Shuun had barely managed to say the words when all light in the room vanished from one instant to the other. If it had been a more modern and better maintained building perhaps some form of emergency lighting would have restored some illumination but not here. Without any windows it became entirely and completely pitch dark.
Not so for Star and N’ek’too. Their invisible eye lenses turned the body heat of their enemies into bright flares, leaving them with an advantage that would decide over life and death within the next few seconds.
Star had dropped to the floor the moment darkness had claimed the room. She performed a quick roll and fired two short burst which were instantly followed by two bodies slumping to the ground.
That was the moment when everybody started to fire no matter if they could see or not.
Star dove forward and under the table to finish off the Dopterian by kicking out his feet from under him and then shooting him at point blank range when he landed next to her.
The sound of firing weapons almost drowned out the cries and falling bodies. No doubt her plan had worked, some of the henchmen had shot each other in the confusion and the Ariolo was helping out plenty too.
There was just one problem. She had made the mistake of letting her primary target out of sight. She felt a movement behind her and whipped around only to see a blur of crimson body heat rush past her. She didn’t need to see his face to know it was him. Shuun was heading towards the Ariolo who was dispatching the unfortunate rouges with his massive fists now. Their comparably fragile heads never stood a chance.
But Shuun was approaching him from behind.
Star stood up to intervene and instantly took a stray phaser blast to her left shoulder. She tried to suppress it but a muffled cry still escaped her lips.
The blur that was Shuun stopped suddenly and looked in her direction, hesitating for the briefest moment almost as if her cry had changed something. It hadn’t and he proceeded swiftly to his target.
Star wanted to shout out a warning but by the time she had found her breath again it was too late. Shuun had moved behind the Ariolo and a sickening wet sound followed. The room fell quiet just long enough to hear the gushing of blood. The darkness hid the full cruelness of it but Star could tell that the Ariolo’s form suddenly appeared at least a head shorter before he fell to his knees.
That caused a fury inside her, so intense it surprised herself. N’ek’too was dead and it was her fault. And he hadn’t died in the line of duty, serving Starfleet but because she had tricked him into following her on a mission he had no business carrying out in the first place. It was the senselessness of it all that galled her at that moment. What the hell was she doing here? Why was she carrying out the orders of a man she despised to bring down somebody she had once loved? Nothing made sense anymore.
The adrenaline took care of that burning pain in her shoulder and gave her the strength to jump onto a chair, leap on the desk and run screaming towards Shuun. She fired three blasts towards figures which still appeared to be on their feet. After that she ignored everything else but the fury burning inside of her.
Shuun had plenty of warning but for whatever reason he was still unprepared when the Trill took to the air and landed on top of him, causing them both to crash painfully onto the hard floor.
They rolled in the Ariolo’s blood before she managed to come out on top, delivering stinging punches to his face.
Power was restored just then.
Star didn’t took any notice of the blood stained floor and the slaughter all around them. Everybody was dead or dying except for her and Shuun below her.
He looked up at her through swelling eyes. “I didn’t want it to come to this.”
“I’m taking you back,” she said through clenched teeth.
“You don’t get it, do you?” He spat out some blood. “There is no going back for me. You might as well kill me now because whatever Altee has in mind for me is going to be far worse.”
Star didn't doubt for a moment that he believed his words. And she was hard pressed not to believe them as well. As far as Altee was concerned Shuun was a traitor and a liability to him and his organization. Keeping him alive could only damage him in the long run. But her orders had been to bring him back not kill him and she now finally understood why. Altee had plans for him and when he was through with them, the person that had been Shapiree Shuun would no longer exist.
“I’m sorry Taz but this is as far as this goes.” His hand had found a phaser and he was bringing it up to shoot her.
Star’s distracting thoughts had caused her to let her guard down for a crucial moment but she made up for it by swiftly reaching for his neck. A spring blade shot out from underneath her wrist and pushed against his throat so hard it immediately drew blood.
Shuun was still trying to angle the phaser to point at her midsection, a difficult affair with her weight pressed against his. “It’s going to be one of us,” he said. “Kill or be killed, the most basic nature of sentient life.”
The blade dug deeper. “Drop the phaser.”
He shook his head ever so slightly. “I was sorry to see that you came for me but not because I didn’t want to kill you,” he said slowly. “But because I didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.”
The phaser was now pointed at her but Shuun did not fire. “You can’t do it, can you? Something within you is still”””
Star’s wristband began to vibrate. She cut him off. “You talk too damn much.” She brought her head down hard against his, causing her to nearly lose consciousness from the pain. It had the desired effect however and he let go of the phaser.
She reached for a hidden combadge and tapped it. Moments later their bodies dissolved together.
When she rematerialized she was still on top of Shuun who seemed to be coming around slowly. The pain from her wounded shoulder began to spread and she let herself fall down next to him, allowing herself to close her eyes for just a moment.
She had accomplished her goal, she had Shuun. That was all she wanted to think about. Not about disobeying orders, attacking fellow Starfleet officers, getting her security officer killed and almost taking out her former lover. No, she had to focus on the positive because she had made too many sacrifices not to believe that something, anything good could come out of this.
Star took a breath and slowly got back on her knees and then on her feet. She took a step towards the transporter console to get some of the security officers to take care of Shuun. She only ever managed that one step.
Something held her back and refused to let go. She looked down to see that Shuun had reached out for her ankle and was holding it tightly. He barely seemed conscious.
“It’s over, Peer.”
His head moved very slowly to catch her gaze. “No,” he said barely audible. “It isn’t.” Then, with surprising alacrity, he reached into his mouth and pulled on one of his back teeth.
Star had worked alongside Shuun long enough to realize what he had done. Foolishly she had not thought of it earlier and now it was too late. He held the white tooth between his thumb and index finger while keeping his eyes on her.
“Now everybody dies.” He squeezed the tooth as if it was made from a moldable material. It was.
Star was painfully aware that there was no force in the universe that could stop what was to come next. Desperately she tried to free herself from his grasp. She managed on the second attempt but she had put so much force into it that she landed hard on the floor.
“You should have killed me, you should have killed me when you had the chance.”
Star scrambled for the doors even while she could feel all the oxygen in the room rushing past her and towards the calm figure of Sharpeer Shuun. All the energy around her was being channeled to one place, concentrating and building up with such speed and force that the inevitable explosion would tear everything and everyone around it apart.
It was as if the very air had turned against her, preventing Star from escaping her doom. But she fought, she fought with everything she had just to make it out of those doors inches away. She dove forward and for a moment felt weightless as she leaped through the air.
The doors opened and she glided through, landing in the corridor outside with such force she heard her bones crack. It didn’t stop her from getting back onto her feet. She might as well not have bothered because the very next moment the transporter room doors collapsed outwards and the shockwave that had flattened them gripped Star as well and lifted her clean off the floor once more.
Within less of a second the world around her had turned into a fiery inferno. Explosions of super hot plasma approached from all directions. Debris rained down on her and loose electric wiring struck Star like a thousand burning whips.
She kept moving forward.
The ground under her feet fell away, revealing the deadly void of space just a mere inches from her. Explosive decompression pulled her off her feet and smashed her into a dissolving bulkhead only to bounce off it and be blown into open space.
For all intents and purposes Star knew that at this point she was dead. The temperature had dropped so rapidly, frost was beginning to form on her exposed skin and the tightness in her lungs felt like she would burst open momentarily. No Trill could survive in the vacuum of space.
It was however not her time to die.
Her eyes closed, accepting her fate and perhaps even welcoming it, she slammed against something hard. When she opened her eyes again she saw that she was back inside a corridor. The freighter had broken apart into pieces and the decompression had pushed her from one part into another. It was still open to space but””as if it had waited just for her””an emergency bulkhead was sealing off the compartment.
She was not yet saved.
For Star the bulkhead was not moving fast enough except for the fact that she had landed rather unfortunately with her body spread out across the threshold. And she couldn’t move. Her joints were frozen stiff and one of her legs had been entangled into loose wiring which kept her from being pulled back into space.
The bulkhead didn’t care for who or what was going to be in its path. It would shut with enough force to shatter skin and bones if necessary.
With a last force of will, Star pulled her body away by inches. It was not enough. In the end Star was left only with the choice between watching the impending disaster taking place right in front of her eyes or to turn away from it. The outcome was going to be the same.
She decided to look on as the massive bulkhead smashed her entire lower right arm.
The pain was more than she could bear.
The last thing she saw through the transparent aluminum partition were the few remaining parts of the freighter burning up in Eteron’s atmosphere. Her last conscious thought told her that she was soon to follow that fate or if she was less lucky she was going to bleed to death. In the end it didn’t really matter, she was not going to be awake for either death.