Michael sank deeper into the torture device they called a coach seat aboard this starliner.  Cramped and half numb from the ass down, he counted down to the inevitable; either madness or total leg amputation.  He tried to distract himself by going over the events of the past few days again. The Rigelian freighter had bolted from Pieris IV like a spooked animal, its ID transponder snuffed out to ghost mode.  The Fresno might as well have been wading through tar while the freighter burned on ahead of them, taunting from the void as its warp trail finally went cold.  But they had been able to make scans of the small and agile smuggling vessel. Sooner or later it’d have to blink into a more civilized system and flash its beacon if it wanted to conduct business.  And sure enough, it had done just that.

The intel bloodhounds of Starfleet were able to make a match to the Fresno’s scans of the fleeing vessel and sniff out a ping.  The stench of that particular ping had led them all the way to Freecloud.  A Rigelian freighter broadcasting under the name Hollow Sky matched the sort of profile the Fresno had collected, and had landed on this world just two days ago.  It had yet to dust off and leave the system.  A lot could rot or ripen either way in just forty-eight hours.  But with a touch of grace there would still be time to figure out just what that ship had been getting up to in the Pieris system, and whether it had anything at all to do with the free-for-all circus show that had spawned from the gutting of Daystrom Station’s trove of treasures.

This was now where his crew would be strolling in, an oddball troupe of mostly engineers pretending to play the spy game because Intelligence didn’t have enough operatives to chase down all their leads.  The Fresno’s crew had been the ones to accidentally step on this reeking turd and reveal its stink to the galaxy at large, so qualified or not they’d be the ones to scrape it off.  Starfleet Intelligence had at least spared the time to graciously toss them a bone, pointing them to their hit at Freecloud and sending them off to stumble towards their task with all the grace of a blindfolded drunk.  The Fresno couldn’t very well just swoop in like a bat out of hell and deposit them unnoticed on this hunk of rock, not when it could potentially hold a den crawling with Orion Syndicate rats.  So intel had quickly whipped up some slick new identities for the crew.  Passage was secured on the starliner where Michael was now enduring his own personal hell as he squirmed in a seat that was pure sadism in upholstery form.  Each member of his senior crew were paired off in teams of two, currently scattered aboard the passenger vessel like misfit toys.

A blue hand intimately brushed his, sending Michael’s mind spiraling into a pit of awkwardness.  Thalissa, meanwhile, was at least managing to dance through her role like a seasoned performer in this twisted theater of absurdity.  That made one of them, at least.  He supposed out of them all, she and Vorak would be the ones suited best to this task.  “You holding up, sweetheart?” she quietly asked.  The look in his wife’s eyes suggested she was both concerned and thoroughly entertained by his discomfort at the same time.  They were to play the wedded couple in this farce, a human engineer shacked up with an Andorian dabo girl, both seeking employment at the edge of the galaxy.  Intelligence had even gone as far as setting him up with a real job, at least.  The others would have to do with operating on more shaky pretense to back their stories.  Michael’s role in this had landed him employment at the very hangar that Hollow Sky was berthed, and his role would be to get the rest of his team inside unnoticed.  They would try to break into the ship and go through its guts, searching for whatever incriminating clues they could find like vultures working over a rotting carcass.  How the rest of things would go down depended on exactly what they would or wouldn’t find.

Michael instinctively pulled his hand back like he’d just touched a live EPS conduit, and belatedly realized that the motion was counter-intuitive to the show they were supposed to be putting on.  He tried to casually play it off, like a gambler who’d just lost his shirt and was trying to keep his dignity.  “Nothing, oh Dearest…”  He flinched inwardly at the awkward phrasing, he really was terrible at pretending this pretense.  “It’s these damn seats.  They’re an affront to anatomy, engineered by masochists.  I think I just need to get up and stretch my legs a minute, work out the kinks.”

Thalissa patted his shoulder knowingly and stood, offering sweet release from the seat’s sadistic clutches.  Michael wasted no time escaping to the open aisle like a convict on the run.  Every muscle in his back and legs sang with relief as he staggered past the rows of seats, angling towards the restroom like a wounded beast.  He knew full well it was just another wretched, coffin like-cell.  But at least the path to it was a temporary relief.  He caught a glimpse of Vorak and Lenara as he passed the pair, the Tellarite allowing a knowing and envious smirk at the sight of Michael’s temporary freedom to cross his lips as they briefly locked eyes.  T’Lan and Kiran Nivar would be somewhere behind him and facing the other direction, blissfully ignorant of the tortured grimace that clawed across their captain’s face.

As he arrived to the coffin-like restroom, Michael longingly stared at the closed door further back at the end of the aisle.  He might as well be a deranged soul lost in the middle of the desert, staring at the mirage of an oasis.  Somewhere beyond that hatchway would be Dren Lor and Revek, enjoying all the benefits of a more open and comfortable first-class compartment.  Reflecting back to their alcohol-soaked initiation aboard the Fresno, it might have been the pinnacle of poor decision to put that particular duo back there.  But while the rest of them would be busy raiding the Hollow Sky for clues, Dren Lor would be playing the part of a flamboyantly rich and hedonistic buyer.  The Trill’s personality and the eclectic experiences of his symbiont made him the most sensible choice for the part out of them all, and the character he was supposed to be playing would never stoop to second-rate choices.  First-class was the only choice that really made sense.  And while Revek was about as ill suited as Michael was at all this subterfuge, at least that young man’s discomfort would play perfectly into the role of mousy assistant to Dren’s persona.

If the Hollow Sky had indeed been smuggling purloined Daystrom tech when it had made its mad dash from the Pieris system, Michael was under no illusion that he and his team would find it still aboard after all this time.  All he really had hope for was that fate would find it in its sadistic heart to toss a morsel to his collection of circling buzzards gleaning this now cooled carcass of a lead.  The only thing they could possibly find in that ship at this point was something that might put a name to whatever the hell they were even looking for.  While they would be busy pecking at that corpse, Dren Lor and Revek would be prowling this underbelly with their noses to the grindstone, hunting for any whispers of shady auctions and black market treasures to spend their imagined wealth on like junkies looking for a fix.  That’s where they’d likely find this thing.

The hatchway to the narrow restroom slid open and presented its claustrophobic hellscape, the sound of the doorway’s exasperated hiss mirroring his own.  Just a few more hours to go languishing in this purgatory, and then they would be at Freecloud and free to plunge into the madness ahead of them.