Fellow Survivors Are Not Always There To Help You

Posted on Thu Nov 15th, 2012 @ 10:55pm by Captain Li Hawke & Suresh & Admiral Ricky Wegener

Mission: Sections of the Delta Quadrant
Location: Alternate Dimension SB900

* * * SB900 - Alternate Universe * * *

“Are you both ready?” Li looked from Ricky to Suresh. The change in her was already noticeable. The correct and proper XO had already given way to Li as she had been for years - the cagey field agent. She had shed her uniform jacket and now in just black pants and black undershirt, was not so easy to see in the dark. She shone the light from Ricky to Suresh and back.

"Let's do it," Rick said as he followed her lead and pulled off his own jacket. Even with the life support systems still running in parts of the station it had gotten pretty stuffy.

“What? No weapon?” Suresh asked. He turned his own light on Li as he spoke. “Don’t trust me yet? Surely after all our time together you know I --”

“No.” Li cut him off. “Not yet. You behave, we’ll see.”

Suresh’s eyes widened but he gave a surprisingly docile nod.

Li turned and stepped out into the corridor, stopping to listen before she began to move.

Not being too fond of Suresh having a weapon at all, no matter what type, Rick made a mental note to speak to Li about that later. Of course, they could have been having a full-on conversation now telepathically, but he knew they were in survival mode, not chit-chat mode, so he kept his thoughts as unobtrusive as he could.

He followed Suresh out into the corridor, who had followed Li who was on point. She moved slowly, working her way past obstacles and keeping an eye out for anyone that would not welcome there.

"It wouldn't hurt to try and find a working replicator or emergency rations," he mused aloud. "We'll need to eat at some point or this whole ordeal will be over sooner rather than later."

“That smaller group, weren't they down in the junior officers’ quarters area?” Li continued to move, all but silent as they went.

Suresh glanced at Rick as they followed. “She’s a little scary in this mode don’t you think?” he asked in hushed tones.

Rick ignored him and answered Li's question. "That's correct, Commander, which is about 45 decks down. It's gonna' be a long haul." They walked a few more yards. "I'm not too keen on trying out a turbolift with the station in these conditions, unless you think otherwise?" he asked of Li.

“Me either. If this place holds true to our station as other things have, there’s a junction just ahead. To the left is a jeffries tube entrance that we can take down.”

"Good thing I've kept myself in shape these four-hundred-some years." They found the jeffries tube entrance and began their descent, Rick going first, then Suresh with Li the last one in.

After they had gone down seven decks Rick stopped. "Hold it," he said.

"Wha--" Suresh started, but Rick shushed him.

"Quiet, I hear something." He pressed his ear up to the hatch on Deck 13. "Someone is...coughing?" he whispered. "Or crying? I can't tell."

Without waiting on input from his XO, he began unfastening the hatch.

“I’ll be glad to get out of here,” Li whispered. Ever since a run for her life through the tubes of the Berkeley, she’d avoided them as much as possible.

Suresh reached up above him to touch her ankle. “Claustrophobic?”

“No.” She left it at that as the hatch was opened and first Ricky then Suresh went through. Hurriedly she followed, taking a few deep breaths once they were out.

Rick made his way out onto the deck and when he found the source of the noise he froze in his tracks. There, in front of him, was the woman from the image he'd seen before. "Li?" he said on impulse. She looked almost exactly like his XO, or at least what she looked like when dressed as Isha.

Li stepped around Suresh and despite having witnessed countless horrors and lived through some terrifying times, none of them affected her as did the sight of the woman lying at her feet. It was absolutely too surreal - a part she had invented, and played for quite some time, then killed off was here before her, flesh and blood. The floor beneath her seemed to tilt as her knees buckled. Suresh caught her and turned her away from the woman, holding her up against him. His eyes were glued to the still form on the floor, however.

“How is this possible Admiral?” he whispered.

"I--" Rick started, then stopped. He had no words that could explain this. Nothing. It would be almost as if he could potentially see Mickey Mouse, a character from an old Earth cartoon of his youth, coming down the corridor next.

He simply shook his head and knelt next to her. The injuries were pretty bad, but weren't enough to have killed her immediately. She had what appeared to be a shard of the bulkhead material piercing her side, possibly missing vital organs to have kept her alive this long. She also had multiple cuts and contusions over the rest of her body.

"What is your name?" he tentatively asked, knowing full well what she was going to say.

She tried to focus her eyes and with a raspy voice she replied, "Rick?"

Okay, he didn't think she'd say that.

He nodded. "It's me, but...who are you?"

She looked past Rick to see the two behind him. Her eyes widened in panic. "No...NO! He's dead! I killed him, he can't be here!" Then a sense of remembrance hit her like a frying pan to the head. "But...but you're dead too, Rick! H-how can this be? I know you're dead." She began to cry. "I know it..."

“Why did you kill me, Isha?” Suresh had to ask, had to know the answer to that.

"Don't talk to me!" she shrieked. "Don't ever talk to me you murderer!" She looked to Rick. "Please, please..." she sobbed, "don't let him hurt me." She pulled on Rick's sleeve taking him in closer to her.

He hesitated, remembering how they'd been met earlier--with a phaser pointed at them. Checking her hands and feeling around behind her, he found nothing close to being a weapon. She kept tugging at him and, finally, he sat, her arms draped around him with her tears falling onto his shirt.

"You are Isha, correct?" he whispered. She looked up at him, still puzzled, but nodded.

“Isha.” Li spoke now and turned to look at the woman once more. “Unbelievable.” She stopped short of saying that she had invented the woman, obviously here she was real. But the connection was just too bizarre. Letting go of Suresh, she moved around besie Ricky and knelt down. “Let’s have a look at you.”

"You...are Eyas," Isha said, calling her by the name Rick used for her when Li had been young. "You do look like me," she said, trying to smile. "Rick told me stories of you, but we never met." She then frowned again, and winced in pain as she moved for Li to check her injuries. "But you...all three of you...you're all dead."

"So we've been told," Rick said.

"Then how are you here?" she asked. Turning to Suresh her face turned fiery. "And why is he still alive? He can't be." She winced again. "I made sure of that."

“It’s a long story, and a lot to do with him.” Li spoke as she pulled the regenerator from a pocket. “I need to get this shard out if we’re going to help her. Suresh, give me your shirt. Now.”

Her tone left little room for argument and so, Suresh peeled it off and tossed it over. He was still speechless. He’s lost one Isha, found another who had, apparently, killed his counterpart on this side and didn’t seem to care too much for him either. He watched as Li prepared to do what she could for the woman. “Careful e’lev.” He didn’t trust this woman suddenly, no matter who she was supposed to be.

“I have nothing to blunt the pain Admiral. Unless you want to doctor her and let me handle the rest? I can’t do both at once.”

"Just pull it out," Isha said, obviously in pain. "The pain can't last forever, unlike this thing being inside me."

Rick and Li exchanged glances. Rick nodded and Isha looked to Li, expecting her to do the work. Rick yanked the piece out while Isha was turned the other way. She screamed in pain, her body jerking and her muscles tensing throughout.

Suresh started toward her, still somehow caring for her, but he stopped dead in his tracks as Isha grabbed the piece from the ground and held it up at him like she held a knife. "Stay away from me!" she screamed through the pain. "I will kill you again! I will kill you a thousand times if I have to!"

Li whipped her head around to Suresh, warning him to keep his distance, while Rick put his hand on hers. He managed to bring her hand down and finally took the sliver and tossed it down the corridor.

"He won't touch you, Isha," Rick said softly, then looked at Suresh to confirm what he'd just said. After a beat, he had to know the answer to Suresh's question himself. As Li tried to stop the bleeding, he asked, "What happened? With you. With him," he said, jerking his head in Suresh's direction.

As Rick asked the question, Li folded Suresh’s shirt and pressed to the woman’s side, then held it in place with her knee. Isha was shaking now. It could have been from the immense pain or the immense hatred for Suresh, Rick couldn't tell. Through gritted teeth she replied.

"He is a thief," she said. "A criminal. A murderer!" She stopped short and inhaled sharply as Li worked on the major wound. "Salin," she said, "you remember--no, of course you don't."

She exhaled and began again. "I was married once. I was very, very young, more so than I should have been, but Salin and I were in love. We came here to escape our parents. That was ten years ago." Her eyes began to fill with tears as she told her story. "I took work down below the equator. For him," she said, nodding in Suresh's direction. "He would not stop pestering me. He wanted me to leave Salin. I refused." Her eyes turned cold. "Suresh butchered him."

More than ever Rick wanted to kill that man. He was a bastard in any timeline.

"He forced me to become his slave, his...his whore," she said. "He forced me to be with other men. But I got my revenge. I seduced him, I took him to my quarters promising him that I would be a good little whore," she said in a mocking voice. "He is stupid! He was putty for me. Then he was nothing but butchered meat." Her eyes never left Suresh's direction. "Meat, I said, you fucking murderer! I cut you into pieces like you did my husband!"

When she finished there was no sound to be heard. It was like the silence immediately after a storm. But this storm was inside Isha.

Li leaned closer, resting her hands against the woman’s temples in a gesture Suresh knew very well. Closing her eyes, she focused then reached into Isha’s thoughts, slowly calming her, easing the pain with a feeling far better. Behind her, a sound escaped Suresh, one of longing. He knew exactly what Li was doing for the woman, something he’d craved since his own Isha’s death.

“It wasn’t me.” His voice was hoarse as he spoke. Granted, killing had never bothered him at all and while he had one husband he’d like to kill, that husband didn’t belong to this woman.

Rick whipped his head around. "It very well could have been!" he roared. "Do you mean to tell me that you're so much different in our reality than her description of you here?" He remembered their doctor, Connor McKinney, the kidnapping of Oz, his shuttle almost being destroyed and what brought them all here: Suresh's attempt at killing Rick in his very own office.

“Perhaps not but what was done here was not me, any more than this woman is the Isha I knew. She didn’t even really exist for us!” Suresh turned away to get a grip on himself. He was getting mental whiplash from all the weirdness that had happened since he’d jumped out of Li’s closet. It was damn near too much to take.

“Easy,” Li spoke softly to Isha. Now that the pain was gone, she set to work on healing up the wounds. Suresh’s emotions were hitting her hard but she showed no outward signs of it.

Thinking that Li was talking to him, Rick tried to cool his temper and turned back to Isha. "As much as I hate to admit it, Suresh is right. He didn't kill your husband. He's no saint, that's for sure, but..." he hesitated before continuing, "...but in our reality, you weren't real."

She was hazy, relaxed from Li's touch, but she still caught Rick's words. "Not real? Wh--but you recognized me. If I'm not real, how did you recognize me?"

“In our reality, I was the CIO at the time. Isha was a disguise I made up, a part I played to get close to Suresh to get information. When it was time to pull out, I faked my death as Isha and returned to my normal life. Suresh never knew who I really was until.....”

“Yesterday,” he filled in for her. “I saw your father at the Nexus after you died. Something about his smile seemed so familiar and it wouldn’t leave me. I knew I’d seen it before. When I asked Seyla who that man was, she showed me a picture of him...and you were in it. There was no mistaking your face once I really looked at you - the face I saw so often, dreamed of every night. And I knew.” Emotion choked his voice. “And I came to get you back.”

Isha shook her head. "Stop..." she said, almost in a whisper. "S-stop saying...that."

Rick looked at Li. “You must have really worked your magic on her,” he said. “She’s almost out.”

“One of the side effects,” Li answered. “She’ll be able to walk when she wakes I think but she’ll be out for a few hours. Do you want to wait here or leave her in one of these quarters and come back for her?”

As the trio focused on the revelations of Isha, none of them noticed five strangers lurking in the darkness and slowly creeping up to their location. They had been listening to the conversation and heard enough to know that at least two of these people didn't belong, despite all appearances. That made them the enemy.

"Neither," one of the men said as the five quickly darted out of the darkness and surrounded them. "You will surrender any weapons, submit to search and come with us." He was dressed in a blue Starfleet uniform, a Lieutenant, and was armed with a phaser of his own. Looking down at Isha, he said, "We will take her with us and provide medical care. As for you three, consider yourselves prisoners."

________________

Vice Admiral Ricky Wegener
Seeing His Friend, The Prostitute

Commander Li Hawke
Seeing Life Imitate Art

Suresh
Seeing Reality Become Nightmare

Isha
Seeing The Nightmare Become Reality