Battle for the Badlands II
Posted on Tue Aug 11th, 2026 @ 10:05pm by Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Thriss Kla'ren & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Lieutenant JG Jacob Rosen & Lieutenant JG Micheal Stevens & Lieutenant JG T'Lar & Lieutenant JG Olivia Voight & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Remal Kajun
3,527 words; about a 18 minute read
Mission:
Pirates!
Location: Badlands
"A serpent does not overpower its prey. It simply leaves it with nowhere left to breathe."
USS Sunfire
"What the...All ships - Disengage!" Rhenora couldn't help but shout as suddenly there were 4 more sets of weapons eyeballing her ship.
There was an awkward silence as the ship held formation and dropped its weapons lock. On the viewscreen they had been using to communicate with the other Captains, 4 confused faces also were rechecking their data.
"We've been hacked"
"Our tactical network is compromised"
"Like hell they are." Dean glanced down, and his fingers started to fly across the console. Bonnie should be doing this, but it was in the moment. He thought he knew Bonnie well enough, that he could counter what the MU Bonnie was doing. Dean knew it was her; who else could pull that off?
The thing was, he never gave her, and hopefully the MU Dean didn't either, all the things he had up his sleeve. Setting a rootkit to infiltrate and piggyback on the same signal that the ISS was using. Throwing a security-compromising worm virus into their system. Though this time he knew it was going to come down to him and MU Bonnie having a 'fight' in real time back and forth for whom could counter whom at each turn.
ISS Sunfire
Mirror Bonnie's fingers paused over the console. The grin slipped from her face for exactly one heartbeat. A string of unauthorized instructions had just piggybacked onto her own intrusion routines, weaving through them instead of fighting them outright. She watched it unfold, head tilting with growing fascination. "Oh, that's clever."
It was not Prime Bonnie, but it was close enough to smell like her. The smile returned, brighter than before. "So..." she murmured almost affectionately, fingers already dancing across the controls. "The game's afoot, eh?"
A few rapid keystrokes later, every operational display aboard the U.S.S. Sunfire flickered. Then every screen aboard the I.S.S. Sunfire did the same. Bridge displays. Engineering monitors. Crew terminals. For a heartbeat, they all went black. Mirror Bonnie's face appeared on every single one of them. She rested her chin lazily in one hand as though she had invited herself into everyone's living room. "Oh, this is much more fun, don't you think?"
Her eyes drifted somewhere beyond the camera, watching code race past that which only she could see. "The Bonnie I know would've tried something... prettier." A slow smile spread across her lips. "So... who are you?" She paused, a crooked grin appearing on her face. "...And more importantly..." Her eyes lit with genuine excitement. "...what else can you do?" She laughed then. Just a bright, delighted laugh from someone who had unexpectedly found another person worth playing with. "Oh come now, don't disappoint me."
USS Sunfire
"What the hell is going on?" Rhenora demanded as the screens went dark and then resumed with the scarred image of MU Bonnie. One by one, the Sunfire's systems began to fail, beginning with the artificial gravity.
"Our computers have been hacked Captain." Savar replied as he gripped the arm of his chair to keep from floating about the bridge." He nodded at the computer screens showing mirror Bonnie's smiling, smug face. "And there is the culprit."
Bonnie's stomach lurched as the bridge lights flickered and every display surrendered to the scarred reflection smiling back at her. Around the bridge, gravity wavered reminding everyone how dependent a starship was on its computer core.
She stared at the grinning face for one long second before her own hands came alive across the operations console. "She's inside the operating kernel," Bonnie reported, her voice remarkably even despite the chaos. "Captain, she's interacting with us because she wants us distracted and looking at her."
Bonnie opened a secure engineering channel and began carving away network pathways as quickly as MU Bonnie claimed them. "You want to know who I am?" she muttered to herself under her breath as fresh code streamed across her display. "I'm the one who's about to kick your ass out of my computer."
"Go get her Bonnie," Rhenora encouraged. "Ops, Tactical, Helm - Full manual control - switch to emergency isolated backups. The less we rely on the main computer, the better." The Captain ordered, knowing that the isolated backup systems were removed from the central computer core - for a reason.
"Bonnie, subsection 3-J, rerouting to 89-Q, and applying secondary hunters to base game gamma-alpha," Dean called out without even looking, nor his hands pausing as they flew across the console panel.
Bonnie's eyes tracked the route through the network as Dean finished speaking. "I see it." Her fingers flew over the LCARS controls, rerouting the compromised processes through a maze of isolated data trunks before Mirror Bonnie could follow the trail. "She's treating the operating kernel like she owns it." Bonnie's jaw clenched into a determined grit.
New windows blossomed across her console as she launched a swarm of autonomous hunter processes. Each carried a deliberately incomplete copy of the system map, forcing Mirror Bonnie to reveal herself every time she reached for another subsystem. "Deploying heuristic hunters now. No static signatures." She glanced toward Dean. "If she touches anything important, I want her leaving fingerprints."
A cascade of amber indicators suddenly erupted across the display. Bonnie's grin widened. "There you are... She's adapting."
"Bonnie, could you not freeze your Mirror counterpart in one of the systems she 'visits' and then lock and isolate that system from the rest?" Savar asked.
"Commander if you can keep her busy, I may be able to configure the probe swarm for an old cybersecurity threat." Jacob said, looking over at Bonnie. "If they're focused on countering you, I can ping flood them and set off a good old DDOS attack."
"I'm glad you said that. I'm going to start tracking the signal to its source and put a quantum torpedo straight up her ass." Dean smiled, continuing to work with Bonnie. The only pause was to switch his work and console data over next to Bonnie's console. They could glance at each others' work that way if necessary. "Got it, I'm about to run a better version of her ransomware attack she just hit us with. Gimme an image to send with it."
"Mr. Rosen, I shall endeavor to do just that." Savar remarked as he went to work at his console in an effort to keep MU Bonnie and distracted.
Bonnie never looked away from the torrent of code racing across her display. "I'm trying, Commander," she answered Savar, frustration creeping into her voice despite her best efforts to suppress it. "Every time I isolate one process, she's already moved to another. She's faster than I am."
Dean's routing solution appeared beside her own. Jacob's probe algorithms began flooding the intrusion with false traffic. Across the bridge, Savar forced Mirror Bonnie to divide her attention. Bonnie watched their work converge through the diagnostic overlays, each contribution closing another avenue of escape. The impossible problem she had been wrestling alone only moments earlier was quietly becoming a team effort.
A determined smile returned to her face. "Keep squeezing her," she said, her fingers moving with renewed confidence. "She's quick, but she can't outrun all of us."
"Keep at it" Rhenora encouraged, thankful and utterly proud of the amazing bridge crew working seamlessly together. The weapons fire from the mirror ships had slowly slightly, and with each passing minute, they regained more control over their ship.
ISS Sunfire
MU Bonnie barely reacted as the first intrusion pathway collapsed beneath her fingertips. One window vanished. Another immediately opened somewhere else. Her smile widened. "I see you..." Streams of Federation countermeasures unfolded across her display with surprising elegance. She recognized Prime Bonnie's fingerprints almost immediately. Dean House's routing logic arrived a heartbeat later, followed by Jacob Rosen's probe swarm. Independent attacks would have been trivial to dismantle. Together they overlapped, weaving themselves into something far more troublesome.
She laughed softly to herself. "Four against one?" Her fingers danced across the holographic controls, opening fresh exploits almost as quickly as the old ones disappeared. "Now this is a proper date."
Another access node collapsed. She barely noticed. Another followed. "...Cute." She slipped sideways through another subsystem, only to discover the exit already gone. Someone had anticipated the maneuver. Her head tilted. "OK..." There was admiration in the sound. "...that was... clever."
Across her display, the hunter processes changed behavior. They no longer pursued her through the operating kernel. They spread apart instead, closing lanes, forcing choices, quietly shepherding her toward smaller and smaller pieces of the network.
Bonnie's grin faded by degrees. "No you don't..." Her fingers accelerated until they became almost impossible to follow. "...that's mine." Another route disappeared. "...Mine." The interface erupted with amber and red warnings. Isolation routines. Process terminations. Heuristic locks. Every avenue she opened survived only moments before another hand slammed it shut.
She stopped laughing. Her jaw tightened. The bridge around her faded from awareness. There was only the code now. Prime Bonnie on one flank. Dean on another. Rosen flooding every opening with false traffic while Savar kept tugging at her attention like a persistent child refusing to be ignored.
She exhaled sharply through her nose. "Persistent little bastards..." One more process died. Her hand struck the console hard enough to scatter half the windows. Heads turned, only to quickly turn back. "Where the fuck is House with those torpedo sabotages?!"
No answer came. The silence irritated her almost as much as the Federation.
She abandoned another compromised subsystem before the hunters could seal it completely, stealing everything she could reach in the fraction of a second before the door slammed behind her. Technical diagnostics. Fleet telemetry. Encryption tables. Anything. If they insisted on pushing her out, she intended to leave carrying something valuable.
Another warning bloomed. Containment. Another. Isolation. Another. Purge.
Bonnie stared at the shrinking pathways still connecting her to the Federation network. The impossible had happened. Not because one of them had outplayed her, but because four exceptionally different minds had trusted each other enough to become something she could not predict.
For the first time all day... she was angry, not explosive, not theatrical, cold, calculating angry. Very slowly, she severed the connection herself a fraction of a second before the hunters reached her core process. The Operations station fell silent.
For several long seconds Bonnie simply stood there, one hand resting against the console. No smile. No joke. No quip. Then, almost absentmindedly, she reached into her sleeve. The dagger slid into her hand. It rolled once across her knuckles. Stopped.
Her eyes wandered across the bridge until they settled on a junior technician who had made the unfortunate mistake of looking in her direction. He froze where he stood. She regarded him for a long, uncomfortable moment. "...Not you. You haven't earned it, yet."
The crewman swallowed.
Bonnie turned away before relief had fully settled over him. "Ugh! ... Find House." Her voice was calm again. "I have the overwhelming urge to stab someone."
Remal considered her for a brief moment before declaring, "Continue firing. This is not over yet."
USS Sunfire
"Is she out?" The person is reference was implied and completely understood as the MU Bonnie vanished from their consoles and monitors.
Bonnie's hands hovered for one final verification pass before she let out the breath she'd been unconsciously holding. "Yes... yes, I think so." A relieved smile found its way onto her face. "She's out. She managed to wreak a little havoc on the way through, but the intrusion has been purged. Systems are coming back online now." Her fingers resumed their dance across the LCARS interface. "Restoring verified backups and reestablishing normal command pathways."
A quiet wave of relief rippled across the bridge as consoles returned to their familiar displays and status indicators shifted from amber back to reassuring greens. For one brief moment, it felt as though they had won a hard-fought battle together. Then the tactical warning sounded. Fresh incoming torpedoes.
"Good timing," Jenna murmured as the helm controls finally obeyed her touch again. The satisfaction lasted exactly one heartbeat before new threat vectors flooded her display. "Incoming torpedoes. They're wasting absolutely no time. Evasive maneuver Kaylen-Delta Three."
Jacob pivoted back to general Ops seamlessly, swiping his console back to ship configuration. "Commander, I'm giving you as much power as I can spare, but I need to save some for the shields." He said, briefly nodding to Jenna as he adjusted the distribution between systems.
The ship ducked and wove, but bucked violently as the torpedoes crashed into their tattered shields, the hull taking the brunt of the impact. The shields flickered before restoring, and a dozen different systems went back into the red.
"We need to find another advantage; they must be using visuals now," Rhenora thought aloud. The photonic decoys had bought them time.
Jenna's grin sharpened as her eyes tracked the incoming targeting solutions. The Sunfire was wounded, the helm was running on whatever power Jacob could spare, and every conventional advantage had already been stripped away. That simply left the part of the fight she understood best.
"Then I'll make do with what I've got." She began rapidly plotting a tight series of interlocking vectors around the dreadnought. "If they're targeting us visually, let's play a game of 'ring around the rosie'. I'll keep us close enough that they can't get a clean lock, and I'll put their big friend between us every time they try to line up a shot."
She glanced toward Rhenora, the cocky grin still lingering. "We keep circling the dreadnought, make them chase us around their own ship, and let the two Sunfires use it as cover from each other. They want a visual fight, Captain. Let's give them one they can't see."
"Love your work Jenna" Rhenora replied as the Sunfire arced towards the Dreadnought, a series of phaser fire lancing towards them as they did so. The first one hit... the second missed and hit the Dreadnought. "I think I'm going to like this game." She murmured as she manually calculated targeting vectors and fed them through to both the helm and tactical.
"As we get to the aft of the Dreadnought, drop a series of mines. If they move to retreat they'll get a nasty reminder. Any else you can space can be dropped as we circle them." Rhenora ordered, coming up with another idea.
Jenna rolled the Sunfire tightly around the dreadnought's stern, thrusters firing in rapid bursts as she matched the massive vessel's movement and kept the ISS Sunfire trapped on the opposite side. "And around we go," she murmured, her grin widening as another blast collapsed against the dreadnaught's hull. She adjusted their vector by a few degrees and slipped them beneath the dreadnought's aft quarter.
Where were the fucking torpedo sabotages? Wouldn't they like to know. Wait. The timer was set for four seconds. Mirror Universe House barreled his ass out of the torpedo room and trying to get clear of the whole deck before they went off. "Bouncing Bonnie or whatever my ass."
Bonnie's attention snapped to the tactical diagnostics screens as another cascade of warnings appeared across her console. She filtered the noise from the damaged systems and narrowed the display to weapons inventory, then frowned as one section of the torpedo pod reported an energy draw that had no business being there. She tried isolating the compartment and pulled the internal telemetry into view. "Captain, I'm seeing a power buildup inside the weapons pod. It's increasing rapidly."
The computer answered before she could dig any deeper. INTRUDER ALERT. WEAPONS POD. TORPEDO ROOM 2. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED.
Bonnie's face drained of color as the countdown appeared across her display. "That isn't a weapons system malfunction." She stared at the timer. "Someone's rigged a torpedo to overload." The seconds vanished far too quickly. She was trying to establish an isolation command, but the system rejected her first attempt. "I can't stop it from here. We have seconds before that pod takes explodes and takes the ship with it."
"Flush the torpedo tubes - NOW" Rhenora ordered, with any luck said overloading torpedo would detonate next to the dreadnought and cause a not insignificant amount of damage due to the close proximity. Problem was, it would also cause heavy damage to the Sunfire. "Jenna, create some distance once it's been dumped. Security, Torpedo Room 2 - lock down that entire section"
Dean glanced a moment, "Force fields. It should minimize external damage."
"We need distance as well" Rhenora reminded, as Jenna wheeled the ship around.
"Can you flush the tubes?" She looked at Dean with a question in her eyes, "Failing that, sacrifice the entire weapons pod" they would be defenseless, but alive. Maybe.
"I just did." Dean did actually just flush the secondary torpedo bay and put up force fields for good measure. He also tapped into one of the tractor beams to help push them away by reversing the polarity as a repulsor beam. "How the hell did someone get on board. Everyone brace!"
Bonnie looked toward Dean as the weapons pod energy reading continued climbing. "The buildup continues inside the pod." She drew one sharp breath, forced her hands to steady, and carried through with the Captain's order. "Weapons pod released."
She immediately ducked beneath the console and braced herself against the deck plating, one arm wrapped around the base of the station as the pod disappeared from the ship's systems.
Jenna threw the Sunfire into a hard turn, driving the ship toward the far side of the dreadnought while pouring every available fraction of impulse into the maneuver. She worked the controls almost instinctively as she calculated distance, velocity, blast radius, and the seconds remaining. "Forty kilometers," she reported, her voice tightening despite herself. "It's going to be tight." She pushed the ship farther around the dreadnought, putting its enormous bulk between them and the weapons pod. "Hold on!"
Rhenora wrapped her legs around the base of her chair, and hoped they would survive what happened next.
ISS Sunfire
The ISS Sunfire came around the dreadnought's stern again, weapons firing in disciplined bursts before slipping back beneath the enormous warship's armored silhouette. Remal watched the Prime vessel move across the forward viewport, tracking its course with the same patient attention he gave every battlefield problem.
Then it happened again. The Prime Sunfire crossed behind the dreadnought, disappeared from sight, and reappeared on the opposite side seconds later. Another phaser volley struck the dreadnought's shields. The Imperial warship answered, forcing the Prime vessel to peel away before circling back into the same maneuver.
Remal's eyes narrowed. "They're toying with us."
Bonnie glanced up from her console. "I thought that was what we were supposedly doing."
"They are using the Marshal's ship as cover." Remal stepped closer to the forward viewport, watching the pattern develop. "They know we can't bring our heavier weapons to bear without risking our own vessel."
A brief smile touched Bonnie's lips. "Clever."
"An annoyance," Remal corrected.
The next pass came faster. The Prime Sunfire slipped beneath the dreadnought again, forcing the ISS Sunfire to rotate its hull to maintain visual contact. Phasers flashed across the crimson haze. One struck the dreadnought's shields. Another disappeared into the Badlands.
Bonnie tracked the weapons telemetry. Then she stopped, her expression changed. "Captain?"
Remal turned.
"Something's wrong."
"Define wrong."
Bonnie pulled the weapons telemetry onto the main display. A single energy signature pulsed beneath the clutter of the battle. "I'm reading a massive power buildup aboard the Prime Sunfire. Weapons pod, secondary bay."
Remal stared at the display. "That isn't their weapon?"
"No." Bonnie's fingers moved rapidly across the controls. "House finally delivered." The implication settled over the bridge.
Remal looked through the viewport toward the Prime Sunfire. The vessel was still circling, still drawing the ISS Sunfire around the dreadnought like a predator forcing prey toward a chosen killing ground.
Then the telemetry changed. "Pod separation!" Bonnie said. The weapons pod detached from the Prime Sunfire.
Remal's eyes followed its trajectory. For the first time, something resembling urgency entered his voice. "Hard to starboard!"
The helmsman reacted instantly. The ISS Sunfire rolled violently, bringing its enormous armored belly toward the drifting pod while the dreadnought's bulk remained beyond them.
"Full impulse!" Remal ordered. "Put our hull between the pod and the Marshal!"
The deck tilted beneath their feet. Bonnie grabbed the edge of her console as the inertial dampers struggled to compensate. Her eyes remained fixed on the weapons pod as its energy signature climbed beyond anything resembling a safe threshold. "Captain..."
Remal did not look away. "How long?"
Bonnie swallowed. "Seconds."
Then silence as the pod ignited in a flash of brilliant blinding light.
TBC
RSS Feed