Chapter Text
“Hey,” Chris says over the monitor.
“Hey yourself,” Marie responds, setting aside the pile of reports she’s supposed to be reading.
The problem with taking a casual hook up and turning it into a relationship, Marie realizes, is that just because you decided you’re going to be together doesn’t change all the years that you weren’t. The rate at which they both seem to be getting into life threatening situations doesn’t seem to be helping either.
Just because Chris says he’s committing doesn’t mean he doesn’t fall back into their old patterns of surface level conversations and a quick fuck to plaster over any problems.
Just because Marie says she’s committing doesn’t mean she doesn’t forget to call for weeks at a time while she gets caught up in work and just expects everything to be the same when she gets around to it.
Committing doesn’t make their lives any less busy, flying away in different directions every week. Doesn’t make it easier to find time together, to talk together.
Ironically, surviving an apocalypse together is probably more helpful to their relationship than any talking they might have done.
Chris is, at heart, a caregiver. He needs to feel like he’s helping, and Marie had definitely needed the help after Beta Parnassus. Not that Starfleet had given them much time, but the two weeks she’d recovered aboard the Enterprise had been crucial.
“There is something I need to talk to you about when you have some time,” Chris says, and then must realize how his words sound. “Not about us. Starfleet's sending us out your way. If we’re close, maybe we can make our schedules line up?”
“Sounds good,” she says, curious what Chris could need to talk about in person that wasn’t about their relationship.
“Captain, you’re needed on the bridge,” Kirk says over the comm.
“Gotta go,” she tells Chris, and he waves as she flips off the monitor and heads for the bridge.
***
Marie has finally gotten used to striding onto the bridge of the Farragut. No longer stumbles, expecting different people, a different set up. No longer looks for her XO instead of Kirk.
There’s a woman on the forward viewscreen, and she must recognize Starfleet ranks enough that she speaks to Marie immediately without letting Kirk do introductions.
“Commodore, they’re killing us,” the woman says, clearly desperate. The ship behind her has seen better days, and is crowded with children huddled together.
“I am Ardha Chiaru, cargo master of the Shemoldt out of Nadian. These children were slated to be ‘relocated.’ Except we were never able to find any of the children relocated. We believe that the NGO who said they were handling relocation actually sold the children to Orion pirates.”
“A local advocate group traced the comms parents received from their children, after suspicions were raised. All of them were staged, or at the very least coerced.”
“The Remu and the Nedu both want us dead, it’s just the Remu want to do it with their own hands. The Nedu just want us to quietly disappear.”
“Can you make it to Starbase 34?” Marie asks.
Chiaru puts her head together with her XO for a moment. “Yes, we’re a little short on supplies, but we have enough fuel to get there.”
“Engineering can beam over some matter synthesizers and power units to keep everyone fed until you get there. And we’ll loan you some medics and engineers.”
The woman sighs and deflates in relief. It occurs to Marie that they were not going to make it. Not if she hadn’t hailed them. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Cmdr. Kirk, prepare an away team and supplies for the Shemholdt,” Marie orders.
“Aye, Captain.”
“Dunbar, send HQ a message. We’re going to Nadian to investigate a possible genocide.”
The message won’t get to Starfleet in time to stop her. She knows what the Admirals will say, “It’s outside our jurisdiction.” What they’ll mean is, “The only good Illyrian is a dead Illyrian.” Marie isn’t going to let protocol stop her from saving these people. Starfleet is supposed to mean something, and as much as she’s recently been disillusioned, she still believes in those values. Believes that when anyone hurts, you should reach out a hand and help.
***
Nadian is a backwater world. One of those places she’d never have known existed if it wasn’t for some crisis that required her attention.
Kirk is tense, hovering beside her chair, like something is going to go wrong any second. He hasn’t relaxed since Chiaru appeared on their monitors, begging for any help that Starfleet could give them.
“T’Sana, geosynchronous orbit. Dunbarton, tap into the local nets. See if you can’t find any background for us.
“Dunbarton, get me the planetary government.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dunbarton works and Kirk hovers, which is concerning in and of itself. Kirk trusts Dunbarton, he’s a good kid who knows what he’s doing.
***
Marie’s gotten to know the quirks of her senior staff these last six months. Easier when they keep getting hit with crises. Their milk run had ended in a Gorn attack and a full systems failure, then there had been the bridge crew getting kidnapped, and that’d led to the foothold situation, and now this.
Ensign Alastair Dunbarton had been swept up in the whole kidnapping scheme, so they’d spent twelve days in a cell together. He’s usually a very put together officer, even with his laid back attitude toward life, but today he’s vibrating with tension as the rest of the bridge crew settles into the conference room.
Dunbarton says, “Play Nadian news clips,” and the room darkens slightly as the monitor flares to life, and Marie immediately knows that nothing he shows them will be good news.
“It was revealed today that the Deputy Prime Minister Alouwa Arkani hid his Illyrian heritage in order to run for political office. Arkani is a known supporter of toleration for Illyrians. An extra-judicial Remuan justice group–Remu Paracta–executed Arkani and his family for treason not an hour after this news was released in the capital,” the newscaster announces, the computer doing its best to translate the local dialect. Her voice has no sympathy for the dead. “Remuan patriots have surrounded 12 Oxster Street demanding the Prime Minister account for such a breach of the racial harmony laws.”
The screen switches to another clip. This time, a mob of people, all holding signs, seem to be marching down a central boulevard as a newscaster interviews them.
“Illyrians are hidden among us, trying to pervert our government and allow for the mutilation of infants. Just because the obvious Auggies have been exposed and relocated where they can live peaceably doesn’t mean others aren’t lurking among us,” an older woman says to the reporter.
The next interviewee says, “If we allow Illyrians to share a water system with us, they’ll infect our children with their genetic modifications. They steal all our own children out from under our noses and replace all us normal people.”
“Illyrians want to keep us out of the Federation. They want us to be poor and easy to subjugate so they can steal our babies and do terrible things to them! An Auggie almost kidnapped my daughter on her way home from school last week. Only, the Remu patriot guard was there and they saved her.”
“Our tax money goes to support indigent Auggies! The government built them their own city, gave them a nicer home than us normal citizens could ever afford!” the last protestor yells at the camera.
Dunbarton looks at her, his dark hands clenched around his PADD. “It’s all like that.”
Kirk audibly inhales next to her, clearly about to speak, before he decides otherwise.
“We managed to get in touch with the Prime Minister, Haulo Harira, and he’s willing to meet. Mostly, I think because then he can say that the Federation is in negotiations with the government even if it’s an exaggeration, which seems to be one of the Remu’s largest demands.
“Well, this is a clusterfuck,” Marie says. “I’m taking T’Sana, Perez, Colt and a full security team to speak with him.”
“I’m going with you,” Kirk says. “Nothing they have can hurt the Farragut, but they absolutely could attack us on the surface.”
“It’s not protocol,” Marie says half-heartedly.
“Sifyd will be fine,” Kirk replies. “If Starfleet could pry him away from xenobotany, he’d be a captain by now. Besides, you’ve never been on planet during a genocide before.”
Marie almost asks him what genocide he’d been present for, but the look on Kirk’s face stops her. “Okay, you’ll take Perez’s spot.”
***
The plan is to talk to the planetary governor, get more information. Instead they get a communication blackout, a transporter disruption field and a palace coup. If it means Marie has to reschedule that ‘talk’ with Sadhbh again, we’ll, it’ll just have to wait.
The Farragut was able to grab half the away team before the field was fully in place. Sadly, it was the better provisioned half, leaving Marie, Kirk, T’Sana and Colt on the surface alone.
“Okay,” Kirk says ruefully once they are clear of the ongoing firefight, “I was not counting on transport blockers.”
“I can hear you thinking ‘I told you so,’ Kirk,” Marie says, to cover up how the idea of being unable to transport off this planet terrifies her. Too similar to Beta Parnassus, too soon.
Jim just shrugs. He’s known as long as he can remember that you had to prepare for the worst because it was coming whether you wanted it or not.
“What do you have stashed on you?” Marie asks him. She knows her first officer enough to know he has at least a ration bar squirreled away on him if not something more, even in their dress uniforms. Kirk had apparently learned a way to hack the Starfleet tailoring systems and now his uniforms have hidden clips and pockets that the rest of them should really adopt, too.
It paid off back when the bulkheads locked down and the matter synthesizers were offline. She’d given him an official commendation and added ration bars to all the first aid kits on the ship, which had paid off even more during the whole foothold thing.
Kirk, it turns out, has two ration bars, a water decom tab, and a permanent marker stashed on himself. It’s not going to get them very far, but still, better than nothing.
“Let's find somewhere defensible to hole up in until we can get a hold of the Farragut and get transports reestablished,” Marie says.
They pick what seems to be a public transport station. The outer walls have signs indicating that it serves as a severe weather shelter. It’s the best they can do with shelling still going on. Kirk checks, but communications are still down.
They manage to lay low for about twenty four hours before Kirk insists on moving them out of the city. Someone’s been dropping bombs, though Marie has no idea which side. Probably both. She’s become more and more cynical about the ways governments protect–or rather, fail to protect–their populaces these days.
Kirk and Lt. Colt both seem to have some sort of first hand experience with urban combat. Colt was at Nara II, but nothing in Kirk’s personnel file hinted at these skills. Of course, there’s nothing that explains half of what Kirk seems to know in there anyway. Someone with astronomical clearance has clearly scrubbed his file, someone with high enough clearance that even Marie can’t see what it once contained.
They walk, trying to steer clear of the Remu and the Nedu both. There are other refugees making their way out of the city, but mostly everyone is trying to avoid other groups, wary and watchful. Half the capital seems to be trying to leave the bombing area on foot.
“We should find shelter again,” Colt suggests, looking at the fading sun. It’s cold here on Nandian–not freezing but enough to be uncomfortable.
***
Marie dreams of the Cayuga disintegrating around her as her crew screams. Dreams of the Gorn, pulling apart their corpses, nesting in her crew. Turning their ashes into blankets for their young.
She wakes up to find she’s clawed a bloody gash in her arm, trying to dig the Gorn out of her in her sleep. The wound is ragged and ugly, bleeding sluggishly along lines that hadn’t healed properly after the fifth or sixth time she’d opened them.
Kirk takes her arm, more gently than she would have thought, and washed the wound with wet cloth. He wraps the wound with more clean scraps.
Kirk doesn’t say anything about the fact that her nightmares are so bad they leave her bleeding, but the next night, he does take the spot next to her when they sleep. She wakes to find his hand gently wrapped around her wounded arm, protecting her from herself.
In the morning they walk again. T’Sana checks communications every mile or so, hoping they’ll eventually find a hole in the communications blackout. So far no luck.
They have managed to follow the road far enough to find a residential area.
This once suburban neighborhood is eerily empty. The houses are arranged around an open square that once served as a community park. Now, it’s a graveyard.
Of all things that Marie has seen as a Starfleet officer, this is her first mass grave. There are bodies thrown atop bodies. Bodies who were people once. Who sipped their coffee and raised their children and loved someone. Bodies whom someone loved.
She doesn’t want to think about Beta Parnassus, doesn’t want to think of the planet that serves as the mass grave for her officers, for her ship. The place where their atoms slowly swirled to the ground, mixing with the dirt, turning the entire planet into their gravesite.
She doesn’t want to think about how damn small some of the bodies in those pits are either, or how many of the corpses are still wrapped around each other, desperately holding on even after all hope was gone.
She doesn’t want to, but Marie Batel is a Starfleet officer. Even more than other Starfleet officers, she knows the horrors that the universe can hold, that Starfleet itself can produce. She’s been a JAG prosecutor for most of her adult life. She has charged men and women with horrible crimes: murders and torture and rape. She looked at the evidence and made the decisions about whether to charge them over and over again. And here and now, it is her duty to bear witness. To remember for those who can no longer do so.
Kirk lays a hand on her elbow, “Hey, come away,” he says, so gently. “You can’t help them right now.”
He walks her back to where T’Sana and Colt are huddled.
“If the smell is getting to you, there’s menthol-camphor in the pack,” Kirk offers. They’d hit a small storefront that had its windows smashed in for what little supplies hadn’t already been taken. Kirk has a backpack now, with all the food they could scavenge and a few other things he’d thought would come in handy.
“It was Tarsus, the genocide I was at,” Kirk says, sitting shoulder to shoulder with his captain.
“I was eleven, my dad was deployed, Sam was off at the prep Academy, and my mom came out of retirement to be Captain Rivka’s Chief of Engineering for some mission she still doesn’t talk about.”
“I was supposed to be living with my aunt and uncle. And then the crops failed. Kodos had this plan, and the fungus was just an excuse for him to create his own little eugenic utopia.”
“The thing is, if he’d just stuck to killing us all, nobody would’ve blinked. 8,000 people die on a backwater colony and it’s just a sad thing that happened. People shrug and move on. But he only killed half of us. He kept the other half to breed better humans. Might as well have changed his name to Khan Noonien-Singh.”
“That’s how I know Sadhbh, she was the medic on the ground team that found me.”
***
They join up with a band of refugees who are mostly teenagers being corralled only by a handful of adults.
“We were at school when the bombs started to fall,” a boy–Niraj–says to Jim. “The rest of our town is just… gone.”
The kid stares off into the sky for a while, and Jim just stands with him.
“It’s not even a real school, you know. Illyrians aren’t allowed in schools with normal kids. They don’t even want us breathing the same air as their kids. But Dr. M’khtar, she said that was no reason for us not to learn.”
For a moment all Jim sees is Kevin Riley. Remembers him practicing his multiplication tables as they hid.
“They run boarding schools for Illyrians, the Nedu do. Says it’s to keep down gang violence and to give us a ‘real chance at life’ but everyone knows that’s bullshit. Even if we were the perfect Nadians, they still wouldn’t let us have good jobs or live in nice houses. Even if the Nedu were actually the good guys, the Remu wouldn’t let them,” Niraj says.
“Most of the kids they take to the schools never come back. Their parents just get a message saying they’ve gotten a great job on the south continent, and that’s it. My parents hid me away for years so they wouldn’t take me.”
A girl chimes in, “My oldest brother and sister, they both went to the boarding schools. I’ve never even met them.”
“If we fight back, then the Remu will think everything they say about us is true,” the man says. He’d introduced himself as one of the teachers, Mr. Lanrei.
“If we don’t fight back, we’ll all be dead. And also, I don’t give a flying fuck what the people who want to murder me think of me,” Kasiya spits back, furious. “There’s nothing left to talk about. No way to be good enough or polite enough or cowed enough. The Remu are out there rounding up every Illyrian they can find.”
Kirk can’t blame her. Her people are already being killed, nothing is going to stop the Remu, nothing except violence. It’s something he’d understood even as a starving child.
Marie sits down next to the girl. She’s maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen, somewhere on that precipice of adulthood.
“Kasiya Laihi,” the girl says, sticking out her hand.
Bemused, Marie shakes it. “Marie Batel.”
“My parents scrimped and saved and raised enough money to send Imariya off planet. She’s young enough that some family will want to take her in. Me, I’ve got a record—anti-social behavior—and they couldn’t really even afford to send Imariya, so there was no way they could get me or my older sisters off planet.”
“So they sent me to the underground school and they hoped,” Kasiya says.
Marie nods.
“Our school is actually just Dr. M’khtar’s basement. She’s technically not supposed to be teaching us. It’s a ‘gang violence reduction program.’ Like any of us would even know how to find a gang.”
“The Remu call us malcontents, pests. They want us all dead. The Nedu talk a better game, but they aren’t. They want to ‘educate’ us. Teach us a lesson and make us into model citizens. Model slaves is what they really mean.” Kasiya looks away.
Jim's had his own experience with the kind of lessons people like the Nedu try to teach, and the kind that Kodos tried to give, and he knows it's always, always, about how the other person is better, stronger, more worthy of life.
“You know you’re risking your lives by helping us, right?” Kasiya asks Marie.
“We’re Starfleet and you need help. It's what we do,” Marie says simply.