Team - For Bajor!
Posted on Wed Nov 12th, 2025 @ 1:46am by Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Remal Kajun & Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Ensign Kitiuas Thenis ie-Jia'anKahr & Commander Jennifer Baldric
2,965 words; about a 15 minute read
Mission:
For Bajor!
Location: Bajor - North Pole
On Approach to Bajor's Northern Pole.
The northern sky was a bruise of violet and iron, the kind of cold that bit through even a Starfleet flight suit. The aurora shimmered low on the horizon, streaks of green and gold bending in the charged air as the planet’s magnetic fields tangled around the storm above the pole. Somewhere within that dancing light, the portal pulsed, an impossible ring of fractured energy, flickering like a heartbeat between two worlds.
Two shuttles cut across the sky from opposite bearings, contrails of ionized vapor trailing behind them. One approached low and fast, hugging the mountain ridges that ringed the frozen basin. The other descended from the stratosphere, using the ion storms as cover. Both bore the same destination, and the same intent.
From the lead shuttle, the portal’s light began to fill the forward viewport, casting pale reflections across the crew’s faces. The snowfields below were gouged with black scorch marks where Vekar’s team had landed earlier, their tracks still barely visible in the drifting ice.
Static crackled through the comm channel. “Visual contact confirmed,” came the report from Bonnie in the second shuttle. “Energy readings are spiking, she’s wide open and unstable. I don’t think we have much time.”
In the silence that followed, the aurora flared brighter, rippling like a wound across the sky. The portal roared once, its center twisting inward like a whirlpool.
The hunt for Vekar Dane, and the reckoning between worlds, had begun.
"Tell us what you need us to do" Captain Kaylen called through the com system, their shuttle hugging the ground as they closed in on the target. If Bonnie's tram could close down the gateway, she was going to do her darndest to make sure these goonies went through it before it closed.
The shuttle bucked up and down like an untamed mustang. Kit was sweating from having to bring the shuttle under control, she was looking forward to handing off the flying to Commander Baldric so she could assist Bonnie. "Be ready in thirty seconds to take over flight control Commander." said Kit.
Savar sat stoically and silently in the shuttle's passenger compartment as it closed on the gate and their quarry Vekar Dane and his cohorts. He was ready to do what was needed to stop Dane's mad plans.
The Nausicaan leveled his massive shoulder cannon, the weapon whining as its power cells charged. Frost steamed from his breath as he took aim at the first shuttle, the battered, mismatched craft that once bore Yitka’s hand-painted emblem on its hull.
The cannon roared twice. The first bolt seared past the shuttle’s nose, trailing plasma across the sky. The second struck true, slamming into the port nacelle with a blinding flash. The shuttle lurched as the cannon blast tore into the port nacelle, the impact throwing Zio hard against the console. Sparks burst from a junction overhead, filling the cabin with smokeand flashing light. The inertial dampers groaned, then gave out entirely, gravity twisted sideways as the shuttle rolled into a spin.
“Port nacelle’s gone!” she shouted, fingers dancing across flickering controls. The readouts stuttered, half-dead. “Stabilizers offline, manual only!”
Loose equipment slammed against the bulkhead as she fought the stick, teeth bared against the centrifugal pull. The shuttle bucked again, alarms screaming their shrill chorus. Through the viewport, the white expanse of the pole blurred into streaks of blue and black.
“Hang on!” Zio barked. “We’re going down!”
"Where the hell did they get a cannon from?" Rhenora squeaked as she braced herself against the console in front of her. Her finger danced across the panel as she tried to reroute every ounce of power the failing shuttle had to its one remaining engine so they could survive the impact. The ice hurtled towards them at breakneck speed and Rhenora sent a prayer skyward for their survival.
Savar was thinking even as the shuttle spiraled toward the ice. They had their Bonnie and Dane had his mirror Bonnie. it might be wise to have their Bonnie think outside the box. He toggled a com switch. "Bonnie as your counterpart is undoubtedly watching. I suggest you abandon your conventual thinking and do more outside the box, illogical thinking so MU Bonnie cannot detect a pattern in your thought process."
Bonnie tapped her badge to respond, even as the other shuttle spiraled downwards, "I understand what you're trying to convey Commander, but that is as easy as asking a Leopard to change it's spots." There wasn't more she could say, but she was already trying to out-think her opponent(s).
The shuttle went down hard, bouncing and skidding along the ice and tossing those within like clothes in a tumble dryer. It left a path of destruction behind it before coming to rest on its side the sound of groaning hull plating.
Baldric was torn, between achieving their mission qnd checking on their companions. The mission and the greater good won out, they had to close this portal before more mirror universe cronies came through.
"Captain, please respond" she called through the comm as Bonnie and Kit worked the finer aspects of the gateway. Silence and static echoed.
Vekar turned from the portal’s furious light, his cloak snapping in the gale. Over the howl of wind and the grinding resonance of the gate, he bellowed, “What am I paying you for, Coy? Stop those shuttles from interfering!” The command echoed through the snowfield, half-lost beneath the magnetic hum of the open rift. His words carried more venom than authority, a tyrant watching his world unravel.
Without a word, Mirror Coy sprinted through the storm toward their transport. Snow and grit whipped around her boots as she vaulted into the side hatch. Moments later, the ship’s dorsal bay yawned open with a hydraulic hiss. From within, a one-man interceptor unfolded like a metal predator. Coy climbed into the cockpit, sealing the canopy with a hiss of pressurized air. The fighter’s engines flared to life, twin blue plumes cutting through the swirling frost as she blasted free of the hangar.
She banked sharply toward the second shuttle, weapons arming with a rising, hungry whine.
Vekar watched her streak skyward before turning to Mirror Bonnie, who stood poised at his flank, cold, unreadable, her dagger glinting against the aurora’s light. “Your counterpart obviously has a plan,” he snarled. “They’ve locked it open. If you were her, what would you be trying to do?”
Bonnie’s lips curved into something that might’ve been a smile. “I’d be trying to kill us,” she said evenly, eyes reflecting the portal’s glow. “But knowing her, she’s not here for blood. She’s here to seal the gate… and trap us where we stand.”
Kit saw the flash from the shoulder mounted launcher. "Gisjacheh" she cursed in Orion. "Commander seems our 'friends' on the surface have a portable phaser cannon..." She stopped mid-sentence when she detected . "Commander I believe it is time you take over the flight. We have an incoming vessel, Fighter type." Kit stated calmly as she began setting the forcefield up, as well as bringing the weapons on line.
"I'm powering up weapons, targeting the fighter as the priority" Baldric announced, locking the weapons on to their quarry who was all but dancing in the sky. "Locking on..."
The one-man fighter cut through the upper atmosphere like a splinter of flame, darting and rolling with impossible grace. Commander Rosa Coy, Mirror Rosa, handled the controls as if they were a living extension of her, her movements sharp and instinctive. The shuttle screamed in close, hugging the Runabout’s hull before flipping over it in a tight roll, particle cannons spitting white-hot tracer fire that chewed against the shields. Each hit flared and fizzled, not enough to destroy, but enough to sting, enough to let them know she was there.
“Dance for me, you fat bird,” she muttered, half-smiling as she yanked the throttle and slipped beneath the Runabout’s ventral arc. She skimmed the nacelle by meters, inverted, and launched a precision burst into the stabilizers before peeling away, her shuttle vanishing into cloud and glare. The Runabout lumbered to follow, but Coy was already gone, only to reappear a heartbeat later at their aft, diving through their sensor blind spot. The predator had become the mosquito, and she was loving every second of it.
Kit had a crazy idea, but it might just work. "Going to drop aft shields for a second, need that fighter to draw in close then I am going to slap a broad beam tractor beam on it, and then we fire full bore on it."
Bonnie gritted her teeth, forcing herself to focus as the Runabout rattled beneath the enemy’s fire. “Systems charging,” she muttered through clenched jaw, fingers flying over the console. Sparks flared from an overhead panel, showering her shoulder, but she didn’t flinch. “Almost there… just need the array to sync, come on, come on!” The hum beneath her feet deepened, rising toward a dangerous pitch. “Hold her steady! We've got one shot to make this pretty.”
Baldric throttled up the stabilizers, diverting power from just about everywhere for the smaller increment of time that Bonnie needed to pull this off. They were vulnerable and exposed.
Kit lowered the shields to draw in the fighter, already having programmed the systems to immediately raise the shields while simultaneously activating the tractor beam and firing the weapons.
Vekar’s eyes narrowed to cold slits as the crippled shuttle fishtailed across the ice, finally grinding itself to a stop in a flurry of sparks and sheared metal. The sight of broken hull and twisted glass pleased him like a prelude. He stepped forward, voice hard as split stone, and cut through the wind with an order that brooked no argument.
“Finish them,” he snapped, pointing at the smoking wreck. “Leave nothing that can crawl back to tell tales. Make the field tidy, no survivors, no traces. Move, you beast, do what you were made for.”
The Nausicaan answered with a growl, shoulders bunching as he hefted his cannon. He surged forward across the brittle ice, boots cracking the thin crust, a living battering ram heading for the downed craft. Vekar watched him go with a thin smile, then turned his face up to the wavering portal light as if savoring the moment before the storm closed around them. The winds around them already blowing with the force of a half meandering blizzard.
The interior of the shuttle was chaos given form, sparks bursting from ruptured conduits, acrid smoke curling through the cramped compartment, and the stench of scorched insulation clinging to every surface. Gravity had lost its argument with momentum, leaving the crew thrown against bulkheads and ceiling alike as the shuttle came to rest on its side.
Zio’s prosthetic leg had twisted unnaturally beneath her, metal sparking where it met shattered flooring, her jaw set in silent fury despite the pain.
Remal lay half-pinned under a collapsed panel, his breath shallow but steady, one hand instinctively braced against the hull as if he could will it to stillness.
The shuttle’s lights dimmed to emergency crimson, painting the scene in a pulsing heartbeat glow. Outside, the wind screamed, but inside was the quieter sound of survival, the drip of coolant, the crackle of dying circuits, and the uneven breathing of those who refused to die quietly.
Rhenora coughed as the acrid smoke roused her from whatever fresh hell had been thrown upon them. Snippets came back to her, Dane, Baldric and the shuttle, and who the heck had a cannon? From her position she could see through a hole in the shuttles windscreen, the poor ole beast was completely shot now. Thankfully Vitka had been spared the pain of seeing his favorite tin-can relegated to space junk.
Heavy boot lumbered towards the shuttle, way too large to be human, Vulcan or any of the other species that could have brought a positive outcome. She felt around, panic rising in their precarious position, they were worse than sitting ducks, they were trapped sitting ducks in a tin-can filling with smoke. A hand weapon had fallen out of wherever Vitka had stashed it, just beyond her fingertips. She leant as much as she could, feeling sharp pain in response to the movement. The options were limited. Move or die. She chose move, bit down on her lip against the tearing pain, got the weapon, and fired.
Savar had been thrown from his seat in the crash and slammed into a bulkhead. Green blood trickled from a cut om his forehead. He was dazed but consciousness he saw Rhenora straining, reaching for a hand weapon and her fingers circling around it just as heavy footsteps drew closer with each passing second. The heavy footsteps stopped and he heard the distinct sound of a phaser firing. The phaser Rhenora held.
The Nausicaan staggered backward as the blast caught him square in the chest, an ugly burst of crimson light searing through the snowstorm. His armor sizzled, smoking from the impact, the air around him filling with the metallic scent of burned plating and flesh. For a heartbeat, he froze mid-step, great shoulders heaving, a half-growl rumbling from deep in his throat. Then, against all reason, he laughed, a low, rasping chuckle that rolled out between bloodied teeth, his breath misting in the freezing air.
He dropped to one knee, strength leaking from him like heat into the cold, but his hand never left the trigger stud on his shoulder cannon. With a final flex of defiance, he locked his sights on the shattered wreck of the shuttle through the drifting snow. The weapon powered up with a throaty hum, light bleeding from its vents.
“Let’s… end this,” he rasped through a grin that was more snarl than smile. Two concussive blasts tore free in quick succession, burning lances of energy streaking toward the crippled craft, as the Nausicaan finally slumped forward, the laughter still echoing faintly from his throat as the ice began to swallow his motionless form.
"Aw crap" Rhenora swore as the Nausican fell, not before releasing two more blasts towards them. The first barrelled straight towards them like watching your fate approach on the face of an old fashioned train, dead on target. The second blast was short, kicking up the ice in front of the shuttle, a rare blessing from the Prophets. She had no time to braced or try and shield the rest of the battered crew as the first blast tore through the viewscreen covering them in the material designed to hold back the rigours of space. The Captain said a prayer for their daughter, and closed her eyes, accepting her fate.
Bonnie’s fingers raced across the console, trying to compensate for the violent shudder of the Runabout as another blast rocked the hull. Warning tones layered over each other like a discordant symphony. “Come on, come on, sync, Diabhal é!” she hissed, grabbing the edge of the console to steady herself as another hit threw her sideways. Her hair slipped loose from its tie, a dark curtain half-blinding her as she fought to couple the uplink to the gravitic null.
“Targeting field keeps drifting, hold her steady!” she called out, blinking through a strand that clung to her lip. Her hand darted back to the display, tapping in a manual override with muscle memory and pure adrenaline. “I’ve almost got the coupling stable, just need three more seconds without getting vaporized!” The ship lurched again, sparks bursting from a relay behind her. She didn’t flinch, just gritted her teeth and slammed her palm against the panel. “There... uplink coupled. We’ve got a window! Targeting the portal.”
Mirror Coy spotted the flicker on her sensor display, the Runabout’s rear shields dropping like a curtain lifted for invitation. Her lips twisted into a feral grin beneath the fighter’s canopy. “You think I’m that stupid?” she muttered, toggling her targeting sensors as the icy horizon shimmered with reflected portal light. Every instinct screamed trap, but instinct didn't pay the bills, and she’d been paid to finish this.
She rolled her small craft into a steep dive, engines howling as she cut across the Runabout’s aft quarter. The fighter danced over the turbulence of its own wake, an agile streak against the frozen clouds. With a tap of her console, a single micro-torpedo dropped from the belly rack, thrusters igniting blue before streaking straight toward the exposed shuttle, a glowing spear racing through the cold.
"We've got incoming, deploying countermeasures" Baldric announced with a note of urgency in her voice. The small but capable weapons system spat out a decoy with the shuttles engine signature, drifting 10 meters behind the shuttle itself and would shield them from the worst of the impact.
Kit smiled as the micro-torpedo streaked at them. She hit the buttons and the tractor beam snagged it mid flight. ~Mother was right, people are tiradosir in thinking their opponent's are idiots.~ Kit did the unthinkable and transported the missile behind their opponent. ~Simply must not piss off a scientist, especially one who understands three dimensional physics and aerospace weaponry.~
"She bought into my trick." shouted Kit, even as the countermeasures began deploying. Kit was rather pleased as the countermeasures would disguise what she had just done. She ensured the shields were back up. ~Orion's do not play by the established rules.~ Kit thought; ~never play by the rules.~
TBC
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