Team - For Bajor! - 3
Posted on Wed Nov 19th, 2025 @ 1:21pm by Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Remal Kajun & Patin & 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
2,180 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission:
For Bajor!
Location: Bajor - Northern Province
Timeline: Current
Patin stepped backward into a fold of time and space, slipping into a vantage point where minutes behaved like obedient pets and causality forgot it had teeth. She wanted to observe. After all, once you set a line of metaphysical charges, it’s polite to make sure the fuse burns the way you intended.
Below her, time resumed with a shudder.
The Nausicaan’s shot, once a perfect lance of death, veered, curving as though reconsidering its life choices. It sailed past Yitka’s shuttle, hissed through a narrow gap in fate, and slammed into a tower of fuel barrels someone had poorly stored in a snowstorm.
The explosion was magnificent.
Heat expanded through the cold air, arresting the snowfall mid-descent. The wind paused, baffled. Vekar Dane and Mirror Bonnie were tossed backward in a tangle of limbs and curses, while the portal’s rift rippled like a pond struck by a stone, absorbing a portion of the blast as though swallowing a scream.
Patin pressed a hand to her chest and sighed in satisfaction. A good boom was its own language.
She watched the five-person team crawl out of Yitka’s shuttle, stunned, shivering, but largely unhurt. And, better yet, now wearing insulated parkas the exact shade of a quiet miracle. New weapons hung at their sides, gleaming with that telltale shine of something that definitely did not exist thirty seconds ago.
A parting gift. Subtle. Necessary. Justifiable. At least, that would be the story if the Celestial Beings came asking.
Finally, she turned her attention to the sky.
Mirror Coy’s fighter, doomed, burning, spiraling, slammed into the Runabout and blossomed into a secondary explosion. The shockwave rolled across the horizon in a perfect expanding ring, like a signature flourish at the end of an artist’s canvas.
Patin didn’t interfere with that one.
She simply watched.
Just in case.
Rhenora stood, now not critically injured, warm, not cold, and armed with the latest weapons instead of a knife stashed in her boot. The rest of the team stood with her on the ice, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. The Bajoran cast her eyes skyward towards the Temple and nodded her thanks, appreciation and gratitude evident now as time moved forward. Dane and Bonnie stood near the portal, which was now flickering angrily. It was time to finish this off.
Remal, now free from the the debris of the shuttle, wearing a brand new parka and weilding a new weapon at his hip, was assisting Zio out of the shuttle. She hobbled on one leg, holding her prosthetic leg in one hand like she was ready to bludgeon someone to death with it. He helped her lean against the shuttle's broken nacelle, out of line of sight of the portal. Confident she could manage he walked up next to Savar and Rhen. "Not sure what in the Prophets' names just happened, not even going to ask."
Savar stood next to her on one side, Remal on her other side. "We are ready." He announced simply his economy of words having survived the crash. "Orders?" he inquired.
Aurora stood alongside her husband, ready to face whatever was going to happen next.
Above them, Mirror Coy’s crippled fighter finally gave up its last breath of sky and detonated—an abrupt, violent blossom of fire that scattered burning debris across the snow-blown plain. Shards hissed as they plunged into drifts, steam rising where metal met ice. The polar winds tore through the chaos, slicing cold straight to the bone and reminding everyone that the weather satellites were well and truly dead.
In the swirling whiteout, a shimmer of transporter light bloomed. Commander Dean House stepped into existence beside them, boots crunching into the frost as if he’d simply decided to walk in from another world.
Giving quick glances of the immediate area and evaluating what he could in that short of a time. Dean wasn't exactly sure what had transpired before he got there. He was evaluating things quickly though.
The portal, now hissing in its reversed alignment, shimmered like a wound in the air, open, hungry, and utterly indifferent to the chaos that had birthed it. Vekar stood at its edge, one step away from escape and one step away from abandoning the empire he’d tried to sculpt through fear and famine. His crates, his precious leverage, his wealth, sat untouched behind him, a dragon’s hoard waiting for a coward’s exit.
Mirror Bonnie watched him with the sharp intuition of a predator forced to trust another predator. She could feel the stupidity gathering in him, the kind of grand, ego-soaked declaration only a man teetering on the edge of failure would attempt. Her devotion wavered like candlelight in a storm. Survival whispered louder.
A shimmer snapped through the air. Mirror Coy re-materialized a few meters off, staggering but alive, one arm clutched to her ribs, the other leveling a plasma sidearm with the grim steadiness of someone too angry to die yet. Their numbers had just doubled; their chances, almost by accident, had improved.
Vekar drew breath to bark an order, too slow. Bonnie cut him off with a voice like cracked ice.
"We’ll buy you time. Take your damned fortune and get through the portal. We’ll follow."
She didn’t blink when she said it. Vekar didn’t breathe. And Coy, bleeding and furious, simply tightened her grip on the weapon and waited for the firing to start.
There was another break in the portal before it had reversed itself. At first it was hard to see who or what it was. The soft crunching of footsteps finally revealing first the tip of a sword, then the rest of the blade curved, in an oriental design. Next showing the curvature of a rounded object.
Seconds later, an almost spitting image of Commander House, two long scars adorning his face. One on his left cheek, the other running from through his eyebrow and under his right eye. "Always take to damn long."
"What the..." Rhenora swore. As another being emerged through the angry portal, adding to the odds against them. They needed to end this now, before things got worse or Dane escape to ruin another planet. She quickly raised her weapon, peering around the side of the wrecked shuttle, aimed, and fired a series of shots, one on each target.
Kit couldn't recall the moment the transporter dematerialized her and the rest, not for that matter even recall that she had set a deadman's switch to transport them when the energy vented into her web. All she knew was it was cold as the abyss when she began to re-materialize.
Bonnie hit the ground in a scatter of transporter glitter that died far too quickly for her liking. The cold struck first, a knife-edge shock that stole her breath and raised every hair on her arms. The air rattled with the sharp, metallic crack of energy weapons trading fire somewhere ahead. Close.
Her body moved before the thought finished forming, darting toward a support strut from Vekar’s transport, boots sliding on frost-slick ground, pulse hammering high in her throat. Her breath fogged in quick bursts as she pressed her back to the cold metal.
~Why, why is it always some place where I freeze my butt off. Could be in some nice warm room with my daughter, but no not me.~ thought Kit as the snow and wind whipped around her. The sound of phaser fire brought her back to reality. She drew her phaser. "Is everyone here?" she shouted above the howl of the wind.
Bonnie lowered herself even closer to the strut, cheek brushing the frozen metal as she angled her head toward Kit’s silhouette. Kit's voice was a whisper on the wind, but Bonnie caught the words enough to answer.
“I’m here, Kit... by the shuttle,” she breathed back, voice tight but steady.
Kit hearing Bonnie's voice decided to move towards her. Light and fast she dashed over to her, praying to the Thousand Gods she wasn't shot.
Bonnie swallowed hard, knowing full well the universe didn’t reward bravery so much as punish noise, but she risked it anyway. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out, louder this time, “Kit! Commander Baldric!”
It was enough, as the response returned was a ball of plasma, fired in their basic direction. Reduced visibility provided at least, some cover.
Snow swept across the battlefield in vicious sheets, the wind snapping at exposed skin like a trainer disciplining a reluctant beast. Ice boulders jutted from the ground, monuments carved by storms older than memory, and between them, phaser fire stitched glowing scars through the air. Vekar didn’t wait to admire the chaos; he bolted, cloak whipping behind him as he sprinted for the crates holding his fractured legacy, like a Ferengi about to lose his fortune.
Mirror Bonnie tracked the angles with surgical clarity. The math was ugly, too many enemies, too little cover, and too much open ground. But she wasn’t hired to run away. She was hired to finish what she started. And her target, Rhenora Kaylen, stood like the eye of a storm, the one woman Bonnie had killed once already and fully intended to kill again. Fate had a twisted sense of humor.
Mirror Coy, blood drying on her jaw, dropped behind a slab of blown ice and snapped off plasma shots with the ferocity of a cornered wolf. Her blasts chewed splinters off the boulders where their attackers pressed, but she never noticed the tiny burst of transporter shimmer behind them.
Fifty yards off, near Vekar’s very transport, three new figures materialized, Kit, Bonnie Prime, and Commander Baldric, silent as a knife pulled from a sheath. Surrounded on all sides, with the portal snarling behind her and hostile fire ahead, Coy felt the weight of the moment settle like frost along her spine.
Why didn’t we leave when we had the chance? Her symbiont Coy asked from within. The question flickered across her mind, bitter but honest, then dissolved as the next volley screamed toward them. The battle had chosen its shape, and it demanded everything.
Rhenora paused after her initial shots, gauging the reaction if any lf them were hit. The snow ate her curse as she moved forward, determined to slow her breathing and deliberately aim this time, sighting along the powerful weapon and eyeing in on her target. Dane would fall first, then MU Bonnie and it appeared that MU Dean and MU Coy had entered the fray. Odds were stacking against them quicker than she liked.
"Remal, I love you" she spoke for his ears only as she rounded the nose of the shuttle and took her shots, fully acknowledging that she probably wouldn't make it out alive. Although Patin had given her insight, she just had to find the meaning in it.
Remal didn’t answer with words; they would have only cheapened the moment. He touched her shoulder, steady, grounding, a promise wrapped in silence, and moved in beside her, matching her pace as they rounded the shuttle’s nose together. His stance shifted, weapon raised, every line of his body saying what he didn’t: he was with her, to the last breath the winds would allow.
This should be interesting, since Dean hadn't brought his shield. He did have the cane sword. Looking across the distance, his head tilted back for just a moment. "Well isn't this just peachy," giving a sigh. "Have you got the rest taken care of?" pushed out towards the ones on their side.
On the Mirror Universe's group side, MU Dean just kind of slow walked forward, like thinking he was some kind of God, or omnipotent being and couldn't be touched at this point. Not even blinking at harsh conditions.
Aurora was doing her best to keep track of the mirror opposites, glad that there was no sign of her own opposite. That was if she had a living mirror opposite, though now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.
MU Bonnie slipped from one jagged outcrop to the next, letting Dean’s swaggering advance draw fire like a magnet. The man moved with all the subtlety of a charging Voleon bull, perfect for her purposes. A phaser bolt shrieked past her cover, spitting sparks off the ice; she leaned just far enough to glimpse two figures hunkered near the shuttle’s ruined flank. One tall, one slight. One of them her quarry.
She stabbed two fingers toward Coy, a silent command sharpened by urgency. Coy rolled her eyes, blood still drying along her temple, but shifted position without argument. Her plasma bursts carved blue-white scars across the snowpack, forcing the defenders to duck.
Bonnie exhaled once, slow and feral, then slid from her hiding place toward the next slice of shadow, closing the distance, one heartbeat at a time.
TBC
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