Team - For Bajor! - 2
Posted on Tue Nov 18th, 2025 @ 7:56am by Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Jennifer Baldric & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Ensign Kitiuas Thenis ie-Jia'anKahr & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Remal Kajun
2,152 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission:
For Bajor!
Location: Bajor - Northern Province
Timeline: Current
Vekar’s jaw clenched as the Nausicaan’s massive frame toppled into the snow, smoke rising from the wound in his chest. He turned just in time to see Coy’s nimble fighter jolt violently, the micro-torpedo slamming into her own hull, a flash of fire and debris bursting like a cruel joke of physics gone wrong. The roar of the portal behind him mixed with the shriek of metal and the howl of wind until even his thoughts came out as a growl. His composure cracked, the cold mask of command giving way to pure fury. His cheeks puffed as he bellowed over the chaos, voice raw and sharp as glass.
“Bonnie! Get us through that portal before they shut it down! Now! Do you hear me? Before we’re sealed in this frozen grave!”
MU Bonnie didn’t even flinch at Vekar’s rage, she’d seen men like him unravel before. Fingers danced across the control pad, eyes fixed on the seething rift ahead where reality itself seemed to pulse with defiance. Her voice came low but laced with that familiar, sardonic bite.
“Then stop screaming and let me work. You want a door through hell? I’ll get you one, just pray to your benevolent Prophets it doesn’t close on us.”
Static arced across her panel, the portal’s energy surging dangerously close to overload. She smirked, half to herself. “One wrong fluctuation and we’ll all be atoms in the wind. So maybe… hold your breath.”
Savar slowly regained consciousness. He was covered in material from the shuttle's viewscreen and he hurt all over. A painful sign he was alive. A hand to his forehead and he felt the blood, bringing his hand down green blood greeted him. He tore off a piece of his sleeve and pressed it to the wound to act like a dressing. His eyes moved across the inside of the shuttle and he saw disaster. Conduit hunk from the ceiling like long lazy snakes. Consoles spit and sputtered sparks across the cockpit. Sections of the shuttle's hull were missing. other sections were crumpled in on themselves like tin foil. Cold air filled the shuttle and was quickly lowering the cabin temperature.
He quickly looked for the others. Checking Aurora, he was pleased that she was unharmed and was unconscious but breathing normally. Remal looked to be half way pinned down by a piece of bulkhead. he saw Zio and her leg at inhuman angle and then realized it was her prosthetic leg. He heard tight lip swearing coming from her and concluded she would survive. His eyes fell on Rhenora, she was across from him, still holding the phaser in her hand. He crawled to her. "Captain?" He addressed her by rank. "Captain? Can you hear me?"
Aurora stirred with a groan, she had a pounding headache to contend with as she opened her eyes. “Savar?” She looked towards him noting his injury as she slowly got up.
Hearing Aurora's voice, Savar moved back to her. "Aurora, I am greatly relieved to see you awake. Are you alright?" He asked avoiding the unspoken look in her eyes about his injury.
Aurora nodded. “A little foggy, but I’m okay. You're hurt…”
"Just how long can you keep that thing open, so I can beam down and get a tight lock on the rest of our people. Try a higher subspace frequency and then lower it. Go back and forth so it takes strain off of the rift but then puts more on it to force it open again," Dean said. "Or, Kit, do you think you can reverse the polarity on the tractor beams if the Runabout is set right at the apex of the opening and use that to keep it from closing. We can't leave them down there. We know you all are needed up here, I can deal with down there."
“We can’t keep it open much longer. Dean, she’s bucking like a feral warp core! The Sat-Array link’s fluctuating, but I’m feeding your frequency cycle through the null field.” Her fingers danced over the console, each tap echoing like defiance.
“Kit, reverse the tractor polarity, if we time it right, it’ll hold the aperture just long enough for your transport window.” Another impact jolted the cabin. “Diabhal é! Hold steady... I have to run sim before we pop it! If the variance reads over three percent, we’re not pressing the big red button, got it?”
The micro-torpedo struck hard, on MU Coy's small fighter, dead center on her starboard thruster. The cockpit flashed red, alarms screaming as the fighter twisted violently through the air. Coy’s head cracked against the console, blood streaking down her temple. Smoke filled the cabin, acrid and blinding.
She snarled through gritted teeth, forcing the yoke back. “No… not yet.” Her voice was a rasp, thick with pain. The fighter bucked again, one wing sheared half-off and trailing fire. The engines coughed, stuttering on fumes. She was running out of sky.
Through the cracked viewport, the Runabout came into view. Coy’s lips split in a crimson grin. “If I’m going down…” She locked her trajectory straight toward the Runabout, a Kamikaze, the controls shaking apart under her hands. Warning lights flared one after another, engine failure, power loss, structural collapse.
Her finger hovered over the transporter. At the last possible instant, she hit the beam-out. A heartbeat later, her fighter smashed into the Runabout’s aft quarter, an explosion of light and ice scattering across the polar sky.
"Hull Breach! We're going down! Now or never Bonnie" Baldric shouted as all hell broke loose. The shuttle began to nosedive, Baldric shunting as much power as she could to the engines to stabilise their descent without compromising Bonnie's imminent miracle. An emergency forcefield flickered, keeping the frigid thin air outside the cockpit. Jen rigged for emergency transport for the team, but waited with her finger over the button until the last possible moment. They still needed to close the gate.
Bonnie’s knuckles whitened as the Runabout screamed through the atmosphere, alarms wailing like banshees. The deck pitched violently, tossing loose gear and sparks across the cabin. She clung to her console, muscles straining against the G-forces. “Inertial dampeners failing!” she shouted over the chaos, the words clipped and breathless. “I’ve lost the targeting, satellite link’s dead! Even if I could reacquire, there’s no way to contain the discharge!” A warning klaxon cut through her voice as the hull groaned. She slammed a hand against the console, forcing it to respond. “We’re out of time... Plan B’s our only shot, but if she comes apart before I trigger it, we’re all done for!”
"What was plan B?" Baldric shouted over the chaos, finger still poised over the emergency beam out button. If they waited too much longer they'd all explode as the shuttle disintegrated around them.
Bonnie was trying to force control back into systems that barely listened. She steadied her voice despite the chaos. “Manual node collapse means a localized energy burn at the rift’s anchor point,” she explained, eyes fixed on the readouts. “We decouple the quantum stabilizers, redirect their feedback loop into the core, and force a contained implosion. It severs the gate without triggering a cascade into Bajor’s atmosphere.” The console vibrated under her hands. “But it has to be done manually from this station, remote access is already gone.”
"Do it, I'll get you every second we have" Baldric said with finality, making the decision to stay behind and beam everyone else out if necessary.
She hesitated before continuing, “One other thing... if the feedback surge exceeds the capacitor thresholds, and we can’t reestablish the uplink to vent it, the overload will vaporize the Runabout, and us with it. Starfleet won’t even have debris to analyze.”
Kit shook her head, she knew damn well the pilot had beamed out. Now she was franticly searching for a solution to their dilemma. She smiled as the idea came to her in the form of a Dopterian Archer Spider. She frantically began typing commands into the system. Out spread the forcefield like a spider web, “Bonnie launch the discharge at this focal point. Going to shot it like a missile into our target, should reduce our risk.” With that she shunted the information to Bonnie’s station. “Oh and be ready, any blowback will be caught in the ‘web’ lines.”
"What is that?" Baldric looked over, watching Bonnie's expression to see if this was a go or no go situation. "We've got about 30 seconds till the hull integrity is below minimal threshold and we tear apart. "Dean, I'm beaming you on the Captain's shuttle, then you can deal with this Dane person. Hopefully we'll join you in about 45 seconds...or we explode"
"I could probably use their shuttle to beam the rest of you down also." Dean frowned just slightly, "Better be right behind me."
"Max one minute behind you...one way or another" Baldric agreed, tossing Dean the medkit. "You may need this they went down pretty hard. Stay safe"
Dean caught the medkit, also grabbing a phaser just in case. Giving a little nod and stepping onto the singular pad.
Bonnie’s world had narrowed to a flickering console, and the others were talking, deciding, planning, but everything funneled through her hands. The “web” Kit had conjured wasn’t just clever; it was the only option left above the abyss. She watched the data packet arrive on her display, the lattice coordinates, the harmonic spread, the phase variance. The engineering equivalent of a lifeline flung across a collapsing cliff.
She wiped her hair from her eyes with a sharp flick of her wrist and answered Baldric without looking up. “It’s viable,” she said, voice steady against the chaos. “Kit’s turned the shields into a containment lattice, like bracing a fault line with tensile anchors. If we fire the discharge into her focal point, the web’ll catch the rebound and funnel it out along the shield lines. Think of it as… shaping the explosion instead of eating it.”
The runabout groaned like an animal in pain, noisy-loud, hull plates shear-flexing under stress. “Synchronizing now,” she murmured, fingertips flying. “Once the capacitors hit threshold, the whole system goes non-linear.”
Dean stepped onto the transporter pad. Bonnie kept her eyes locked on the readout, but she knew exactly when he did it, the room seemed to tilt toward inevitability. The energy build climbed. Hull integrity dropped. The clock burned itself down. She braced both feet, tightened her shoulders, and called out the only update that mattered. “Web field locked. Discharge primed. On your mark, Commander.”
Kit held her breath but had already input the data for them to be transported off the shuttle as soon as the discharge was sent. With luck they would survive this and have a story to tell, if not; well as the Klingon's say, Today is a GOOD day to die. Kit smiled she had lived a good life.
"Engaging transporter" Baldric announced as Dean shimmered from the shuttle, only to appear in the wrecked shuttle below them. At least someone would live to tell the tale of what was about to happen. "Hull integrity at critically, failure in 15 seconds"
Bonnie whispered, "Go n-éirí leat!" under her breath, a thread of inherited luck wrapped tight around terror, and slammed her palm onto the final control. The emitter answered with a rising hum, a note that sharpened into a spear of inverted resonance. The standing wave lashed clean into the portal’s heart, slicing through its feed line like a scalpel through a pulse. The gate’s hunger for Bajor’s atmosphere snapped, reversed, recoiled.
A heartbeat later, reality bit back.
The redirected current ripped along the new tether, straight into the Runabout, flooding the capacitors as if the ship had been plugged directly into a newborn star. The deck plates rang. Every console stuttered. Everyone instinctively held their breath and hope in equal measure.
Bonnie didn’t blink. At ninety-seven percent she hit the charge release, teeth clenched as the excess bled outward. The energy vented into Kit’s web, a crackling lattice of heat and force, spreading out in branching paths until the brilliant lines dimmed and finally guttered to nothing.
Silence. Then one long, shuddering exhale shared by the living.
Far below, in the snow-scored valley, Vekar Dane hauled himself upright beside Mirror Bonnie. Mirror Coy staggered into view, battered but alive. Above them, the portal shivered like a wounded beast, diminishing, unlocking, its pull unwinding. The flow reversed in an elegant, violent shrug.
The threshold yawned open in retreat. All they had to do now was step through.
TBC
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