The lone Ferengi crouched in a storeroom hunched over a small crate like a deranged Grevidan spider monkey.  It was a sad scene, really, as Grek Tok squatted tensely and stared at the short container turned makeshift table top as if it might sprout legs and run right out of the room.  If he didn’t portion things out just right, then the crate may yet do just that!  It was likely that Grek would come to regret envisioning that sort of scene play out.  The hallucinations that were sure to come didn’t need to be encouraged by thoughts concocted in sobriety.  A glass pipe sat on the crate’s plasteel surface like some forbidden treasure.  Clumsy, shaky hands reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew a small vial.  He awkwardly shook a portion of its contents down onto the crate next to the pipe.  A black, shiny resin glistened alluringly at him and there he sat, an addict trying to look dignified – like a Klingon with a martini.  The crate was his altar, the Klavor Resin was his dubious sacrament.

He portioned off small scrap of the glob-like substance by cutting into it with an abnormally long pinky nail that bore the stains of this frequently committed sin.  Scooping up the remainder with the defiled cuticle, he clutched the vial close like Moogie holding a babe to her breast as he gingerly deposited it back from where it had come.  Now the pipe was in his hand, and he raised this last line of defense against the unbearable dullness of sobriety.  His mouth parted like a savage ready to taste blood, this starved animal eyeing a final scrap of meat.  His other hand brought a micro-plasma igniter up to the bowl.

“Grek?  Grek!” the shout outside nearly made him fumble as the sticky black substance crackled and popped.  Startled, he choked on the sickly sweet smoke more than he inhaled it, every breath a collision with lunacy.  He froze like prey caught in the jaws of a targ, every frantic thought tangling into a cacophony of excuses that wouldn’t matter as he realized he was caught.  But Klavor Resin had a way of compressing reality, squishing it into a tight and hot little ball of madness.  Colors poured in, sounds poured out, and the thrill of his fear was quickly drowned out by an invisible beat that thrummed through his very bones.  The resin was hot and angry, climbing down his lungs like liquid fire.  A wave of euphoria washed over him.  The trouble he was about to find himself in no longer mattered as the narcotic ran its course.

“Grek, get your lazy ass out here and work with the rest of us or so help me!  I’ll gladly smash that ugly gremlin nose the wrong way past your idiot ears!”  Grek was just lucid enough to wonder whether or not there even was a proper direction for his nose to be smashed as the towering figure of a large, bald and muscle bound Orion appeared in the doorway.  The disdainful and judging look that Arvok was sending his way was all too familiar by now.  He took one gaze at the now lethargic Ferengi and an expression of utter disgust washed over his face.  Such was his anger at discovering Grek in this compromised, disheveled state he couldn’t even bring himself to speak coherently.  Instead, he made strangled, gurgling sounds.  Blood escaped from his lips to dribble down his chin and soak the Orion’s tunic, although it certainly didn’t deflower the already stained and sullied garment.

As he set the pipe and igniter down, Grek noticed with a detached sort of disinterest that a long, barbed spike now jutted from the crate to impale Arvok in the chest.  Well, he thought in some distant cold and reptilian part of his mind, that spike couldn’t be more at home as it was sticking into this particular vile bastard.  It was an unexpected and sick twist of fate that had deviated from his earlier imaginings.  The damn crate was still firmly rooted in place, after all, instead of sprouting legs and skittering off to defy sanity by taking a victory lap around the whole bloody place.  Not that its present state was doing anything to keep any semblance of sanity together, regardless.  It would seem that he had misjudged how small of a resin chunk would be required to keep the demons at bay.  With the arrival of the hallucinations, the Ferengi was distantly aware that now he would be of no use to his companions as they scrambled out there in the hangar to get everything ready for their hasty departure.  He’d only meant to do just enough to take the edge off, and then get back out there.  He was no longer in any state to be able to go back out there and lend a hand, and this fact only evoked inside of him a perverted cocktail that was somehow laced with both regret and apathy at the same time.  Arvok’s disgust in him had been well deserved.

Grek gave a careless shrug as the spike melted back into the crate, which seemed to decide, just for the moment, to look like a real crate again.  Innocent, inanimate, businesslike.  Grek reached for the pipe and micro-plasma igniter once more, intending to pack the bowl with the remainder of that resin chunk he’d seperated.  Too late, now.  If reality truly was set on unraveling, then he may as well lean into the madness and keep the thread going.  Double down on this surreal ride.  But the crate seemed to have other plans, as a spike once more leapt out.  Grek noted in a slothful manner that this time, the demented appendage was reaching out towards himself.  A sharp pain resonated in his chest and he noticed in a strange detached haze that this particular hallucination had teeth.  It was a thing with substance, razor sharp and painfully real clawing its way into daylight.  He coughed up a billowing cloud of smoke, which was odd considering that he hadn’t yet taken another toke.  Now he was jumping in and out of time, arriving to results that he had yet to take any action for.  Hallucinations and time travel, what a ride!  No, he realized with a horror that managed to somehow be both abject and numb at the same time, that wasn’t smoke that had been expelled from his lungs.  It had been a spray of blood that painted the walls.  The experience was like watching it all happen to someone else, but he was beginning to suspect that this trip wasn’t one he could just simply blink away.

Grek’s grip slackened.  The igniter clattered on the cold steel floor.  The glass pipe shattered into countless shards that would never be used again.  The crate recoiled, retracting the spike as though satisfied with a job well done.  Impossibly, it briefly took on a liquid sheen as it shifted and contorted.  It finally settled on a shape that was unmistakably… him!  The realization settled in a coldly distant way that perhaps he in turn would become the crate.  The lines were blurred, reality was peeling away in yawning chunks.  He looked down at himself to be sure that the sight of the crate wouldn’t be there to greet him.  He was only met with a gory hole in his chest and an intense burning in his lungs that was slowly numbing to spread to his shoulders and beyond.  He crumpled to the floor, spots dancing to fill the edges of his vision.  He fought as long as he could to keep the darkness at bay, but only succeeded far enough to watch the thing wearing his skin and clothing walk out the door to the storage room.  He could barely make out the rising cacophony, the sounds of violence and the panicked screams of his companions tearing through the hangar outside like wildfire.  And then, as the last of the light in his vision ebbed away there was nothing at all.

Captain Michael Dart sat at the desk to his ready room.  It was still a stale, naked shell of a place.  It had all the warmth of an unclaimed rental, bereft of anything but the furniture and the hollow echoes of captains past.  Whatever life was to be brought into this sterile box located just outside of the main bridge was still waiting to be unpacked.  Until the dust of the past few days could settle and Michael was given the chance to make this place his own, the only warmth to be found here lay in the ceramic cup that rest next to his computer console.  As he sipped the mocha infused coffee, he noticed that even the warmth of this was ebbing and slowly succumbing to the stale tepidness of its surroundings.

A chime jolted Michael out of his thoughts.  “Enter,” he called, leaning back in his chair.  The doors slid open with a whispered hiss and in walked Commander Thalissa Zheen, her stride sharp as ever.  His face lit up in a surprised grin as he took her in, a welcome diversion from the drab, bare surroundings.  “Well, if it ain’t Commander Zheen, right as rain and sharper than a skeeter’s stinger!”  It was a clear, mocking imitation of the man who had set her off during her last moments on the surface of Pieris IV.

His eyes gleamed with mirthful mischief as her eyes narrowed into venomous slits, the Andorian’s antennae twitching in exasperation.  “And here I thought I’d escaped these sorts of inane, yammering sayings back on that godforsaken dustbowl.”

Michael erupted into peals of laughter.  “Lieutenant Commander Kiran told me you didn’t just give Pieris IV’s chief engineer a piece of your mind, you delivered the whole damn inferno.”

Thalissa sighed.  “I’m sorry, sir.  I got a little out of hand, admittedly.  Frankly, I’m surprised you’re here laughing it off instead of logging a reprimand into my file.”

He waved off the apology.  “Don’t worry about that, it was a pretty gnarly looking injury.  I wouldn’t have been in a very accommodating mood, either.  How’s the arm holding up?”

“Fight or flight.” Thalissa simply said, still feeling as though an explanation for her actions were owed.  “Think it’s pretty clear where my mind tends to go when it comes between the two.  It’s become a habit of mine now to transform the pain of debilitating injury into aggression and still get the job done, but it’s never a pretty thing to be around.”  She raised her arm like a soldier hoisting a flag after a long battle, flexing the newly mended forearm with care.  She clenched her fist a few times, squeezing slowly as if trying to negotiate a truce between her ambition and the remnants of her injury.  “It’s still very tender, but Doctor T’Lan did a pretty good job of fixing it up.  The pain of it when it happened, though…  It nearly had me ripping that other engineer’s tongue out until Kiran shot me up with that hypo.  What was with that guy, anyway?  It was less like talking to a human and more like listening to a Tamarian through a glitchy universal translator.”

Michael just grinned, and rather than answer immediately he raised his mug to his lips.  It had lost all temperature now, just a lukewarm cup of regret that was now only vaguely reminiscent of something that should have been far more potent and invigorating.  He swallowed it with a blanched expression and then stood to make his way to the replicator recessed in the wall just behind him.  “Oh, I don’t know,” he finally said as he set the cold drink down into the alcove and allowed it to be reclaimed.  “It’s a regional thing, with us.  Earth is full of a myriad of backgrounds and strange accents.  We seem to have a more divided past than many.”  He seemed about to speak to the replicator before recalling his manners and turning back towards her.  “You want anything, Commander?”

Thalissa shook her head.  “No, sir.  I’m fine, but thanks.”

“Well, at least indulge me with taking a seat.  I need to get you caught up on the delightful chaos that transpired while you were busy floating through the clouds of your pain meds.” Michael gestured in an exaggeratedly gracious manner at one of the two padded chairs at the other side of his desk, like some sort of carnival showman unveiling the final act.  He faced the replicator once more, finally directing it to summon forth a fresh cup of mocha cappuccino.  It materialized into existence, this one properly hot enough to singe the eyebrows right off of a less daring soul.  He cupped it in both hands and briefly held it close to his lips, giving off a few experimental blows and basking in the feel of the fresh, steamy warmth.  He rejoined his Andorian first officer, resuming his place at the desk.

“Well, where to start?” he leaned forward, fingers steepled.  “I had the Fresno just out of range and powered down to the lowest sensor profile.  We watched that ship warp back into the system and shoot its signal off.  We were all half expecting the damn Cardassians, but it turned out to be some kind of smaller variant of a Rigelian freighter.”

“Smugglers.” Thalissa smirked, a flicker of recognition in her gaze.  “I’ve seen its type plenty enough while I was on the Vendetta patrolling the lanes.  It strips down the heavier version and reduces the hull down to about a third of the size.  These kinds of vessels could slip through our fingers plenty enough while we were still fumbling with the idea of a proper pursuit.  It’s almost commendable, really, if it weren’t so damn frustrating.  You came from a Freedom class too, didn’t you sir?”

“Yeah,” Michael acknowledged, a glimmer of hard-won wisdom in his eyes.  “I was chief engineer and then XO on the Adroit.  And the Fresno?  I know it’s not a picket ship by any stretch.  We sure as hell didn’t keep up with this crafty bastard, either.  But I’ll get to that in a second.”  He leveled a questioning gaze in her direction.  “What exactly do you remember before your injury?”

Thalissa’s antennae twitched, her face scrunching up in recollection.  “I remember very clearly Vorak telling me that the ship had returned.”  She paused her tale with a start, and withdrew a PADD as an afterthought.  “Oh, I was stopping by here to file my version of the official report, but I’ll spare you the read.  I’d climbed up that bloody cliffside and replaced the fried sensor core before installing Kiran’s shunt.  He reminded me over the comms to do the shunt first, but he hadn’t realized I’d already popped the fresh core in.  Then Vorak came over the comm and informed us that the ship had returned.  He hadn’t yet neutralized their virus, and warned us that another power surge was coming.  So I ripped out the new core to keep it from getting fried.”  She tossed her arms up like a gambler that had lost a rigged poker game, the weight of absurdity pressing down on her shoulders.  “I’m no engineer.  I hadn’t given any thought to the possibility that without something in there to absorb all that building energy…”

Michael’s face twisted in a rueful cringe, the way it might at the sight of a train wreck he’d seen coming from miles away.  “With nowhere else to go, it sought out the nearest thing – you.”

She gave her injured arm another testy flex, probing it like a loaded weapon that just might misfire.  “Exactly.  I did the only fast thing I could, I tried to kick the cover plate shut.  I don’t know if that helped or not, that fucker popped back open just as fast and all that energy shot out of there and came into contact for just the barest of moments.  But it hurt like hell.  I got the rest of the job done with one arm and rappelled back down the cliff to Kiran and that other Pieris engineer.  I also think I vaguely remember Vorak telling us that the ship was landing right here on Pieris IV somewhere.”  She faltered now, her attention drifting to the viewport.  With a faint, unsettled shift she registered the rapid smear of stars.  White-hot trails blurred into some mad highway stretching through endless black.  They were no longer in orbit above Pieris IV.

Michael followed her gaze and gave a slow nod.  “Correct.”  It was both an affirmation to her observation regarding the landing of the rogue ship, as well as a silent confirmation of what her eyes were now working out on their own just outside of the ship.  He took over the narrative now, knowing that at this point she’d have been under the heavy spell of Kiran’s pharmaceutical handiwork by then, drifting somewhere between clarity and dream.  “So this Rigelian freighter?  Thing set down on the edge of nowhere, some old cliffside mining base that hadn’t seen any action since the late 2200s.  It was crumbling away, but the hangar was still big enough.”  He paused, as if sizing up the sight himself, and then shifted back with eyes sharp.  “We geared up a team to storm the place, and Vorak comms in.  Tells us it was a massacre down there.  Blood, bodies, the whole place painted red.”

Thalissa’s eyes went wide in shock.  “A deal gone bad?  Or else they were sacrificed to keep secret whatever it was they had going on.”

Michael nodded approvingly.  “Both are possibilities we’re looking into, right now.  Apparently there’s a rash of stolen items from Daystrom station hitting the black markets.  Command thinks the timing of this is way too convenient to not be related.  Vorak and his guys had just broken in when the freighter blasted off, damn near barbequed everyone.  And yeah, Fresno didn’t stand a chance.  She was long gone by the time we could even begin the chase.”  He exhaled, defeatedly.  “We’re scanning for those damned signal pulses she was shooting off to activate the virus, but let’s be honest.  They’re no fools.  If they’ve got half a brain, that signal’s long shut down by now.  We’re in pursuit towards the direction they shot off, and waiting for further direction from Intelligence.”

Thalissa’s brow furrowed in disbelief.  “Waiting for further direction from Intel?  What the hell do they expect us to do?  We’re an engineering ship, we’re not equipped to mount this kind of operation.”

Michael exhaled sharply, a shrug rippling through him like a wave crashing against the shore of his sanity.  “You think I didn’t raise that flag?  I’ve been told our once-feared intelligence has crumbled like stale bread with Stafleet’s constant security breaches.  The fourth fleet is all that’s left, and they’re tossing every scrap of it into this mad circus.  Even us.”  He leveled an unyielding gaze at his first officer.  “Let’s not mince words here.  I’m just a simple engineer, grappling with gears and gadgets.  If we’re diving into this madness, I’m going to be counting on you and Vorak to pull us through.  I’m not afraid to admit that.”

Thalissa inhaled sharply, the sound a mix of frustration and resignation.  “It’s the hand we’ve been dealt.  We’ll slog through this mess, and then get back to business as usual.”