The Inquisition of Kevin Mitchell Pt.6

Posted on Fri Jun 12th, 2026 @ 8:34am by Lieutenant JG Kate Kono & Captain Shran dh'Klar & Lieutenant JG Benjamin "Ben" Dalton

4,009 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Sins of the Empire
Location: Merc Ves. Cavilear/ Deep Space Twenty
Timeline: between missions

Captain Cross entered the turbolift alone. He had found a bottle of whiskey somewhere between Engineering and here—good whiskey, the real kind, not the replicated swill and the neck of it was already dark with fingerprints, the level already down by a few long pulls. The doors closed. He drove his fist into the controls and the lift lurched to a stop. He stood there a moment, chest heaving, jaw locked, and then something in him gave way—he opened his mouth and screamed, a raw, tearing sound that started as a word and became nothing, the cords of his neck standing out like cables under load, his whole body shaking with the force of it until the sound died and there was only the hum of the ship around him.

He shrugged out of his jacket, the worn fabric catching on his fingers, and pressed his cheek against the rough wool for a moment—then let it fall to the turbolift floor with a hollow thud. Around the corridor beyond the doors, on Deck Nine, his oldest friend of fourteen years lay in state: a bloated, purpling husk of flesh and bone, rotting inch by inch. Not far off was the man who’d called the killer “as incompetent as a Tarkalian sloth,” the same Andrew who’d snatched his lover away when he could have simply walked away—and now, because of that choice, Cross was losing everything that mattered. All he had left was his latinum.

“At least I have my god-damned latinum…” he muttered, voice low and bitter.

A sudden, mechanical titter shattered the silence. Cross’s heart jerked as he swiveled to the console’s dark screen. The computer had laughed. He swallowed hard, feeling the floor tilt beneath him. Was he cracking? Computers didn’t laugh.

He forced a crooked smile, damp with sweat, and stepped forward until his face filled the tiny camera lens. The camera recorded soullessly his fish-eye lens skewed head. His pulse thundered in his throat as he wiped a bead of moisture from his brow. He tried to appear calm, though his hands shook.

“Excuse me?” His tone sharpened to a growl… Serious, hungry with threat, even as his eyes widened in incredulity.

A quiet click, then a muffled laugh echoed from above. Cross’s gaze shot to the ceiling panels; one was loose, swinging slightly in its frame. Beyond it, he could just make out the polished barrel of a Romulan disruptor. A sudden hiss of energy-phase cutters, and a searing white flare of light.

… the turbolift plunged.


He had no time to brace himself. The ceiling yanked him upward, smashing his shoulder into the overhead conduit, the whiskey bottle shattering in his hand. Pain lanced through him, then gravity took over and slammed him into the floor. Darkness welled behind his eyelids as sparks danced in the sudden blackness and the emergency lights flickered like dying stars.


When he could breathe again, he forced himself up on shaking limbs. The turbolift shimmered with damaged circuitry, strands of exposed wire crackling in the gloom. He peered through the jagged hole where the panel had been torn away and bellowed upward, voice reverberating through the shaft:


“I left Earth to get away from you psychotic Asians! Ro’s going to bleed you out slow, you termite! You five-foot-nothing Oriental freak of nature! You god-damned Federation gremlin from hell!” Cross yelled again as he looked up toward the darkness of the shaft far above. Cross shouldered through the slider doors at the end of deck twelve. The wall panel was buzzing. He drove his palm into it.


“WHAT?!” He rolled his weight off the console and back onto his heels, then forward again, jaw working, head swinging side to side on the thick column of his neck like something that wanted to come loose.


“Sir, you said you were on the way to the bridge for that communiqué…”


Cross fired his disruptor into the communications panel without looking at it, the way a man swats a fly.


“Right here! I got your communiqué right here!” The baked glass face of the console exploded inward. He fired again into the hole while turning to give the console his undivided attention this time. The interior of the gaping damaged display lit up with sparks internally. “You getting this? Are you receiving me?” He fired again. “Loud and clear?!” A thin, acrid smoke began to climb toward the ceiling. He kicked the console’s lower housing until the panel buckled and a nest of circuitry spilled out onto the floor like entrails, then crouched and fired into it. “Because I feel like we are really—” he fired… “Starting to…” he fired… “BREAK THROUGH!” His disruptor gave a terminal whine and died in his hand. He looked at it. He jammed the backstock of the rifle into the flaming glass hole on the burning console with a kind of deliberate courtesy, drew his phaser, and resumed firing. “There it is. There’s that connection I was LOOKING FOR!”



**


The airlock on Deck Seven was a cramped cylinder of scuffed duranium, barely wide enough for two men to work shoulder-to-shoulder. Johnson knelt by the manual release housing, his grease-stained fingers picking at the fused mechanism like a man worrying a rotten tooth. The docking clamps had welded themselves into the station's collar during the firefight—plasma scoring had fused the alloys into something that wouldn't yield to conventional tools.

"Hand me that pry bar," Johnson said, not looking up.


Parker passed the tool over, then leaned against the bulkhead, arms crossed. "You know what? I'm counting this as a win."


"A win?" Johnson grunted, wedging the bar into the seam. "We're stranded on a ship full of corpses, our ride's welded to the bulkhead, and Cross is one communiqué away from shooting the walls."


"Exactly." Parker grinned, showing teeth yellowed by years of cheap Romulan ale.


"We're not the ones hunting that psycho Asian Starfleet bitch. Let the captain and Ro tear each other apart. We just need to get these clamps loose, float home through the Neutral Zone, and collect a bigger cut than we ever dreamed."


Johnson paused, considering. The crew deaths? what was it, seven men? Eight? ...meant the latinum split would be generous indeed. "Romulan Territory in three days," he said, almost to himself. "Hot food. Warm beds. Women who don't ask questions."


"Now you're seeing it." Parker pushed off the bulkhead and crouched beside him, peering at the clamp assembly. "The fused section's on the underside. I'll reach in, feel for the manual release. You cover the housing."

"Be careful. That whole assembly's live until we kill the auxiliary—"

"It's fine. I went down to the relay box two decks down and shut the whole pneumatic relay and power transceiver off." Parker reached into the gap, fingers probing for the release lever. "There’s nothing running through these circuits so I’m totally —"

The arc flash didn't warn them. It simply arrived.


A million volts found Parker's hand and treated his body like a conductor between hell and the bulkhead. The airlock exploded with light—white-hot, blinding, a sun born and dying in the space of a heartbeat. The sound came after: not a boom but a crackling hiss, the sizzle of moisture flash-boiling, the wet pop of pressurized fluids meeting superheated plasma.

Parker didn't scream. There wasn't time.

His body convulsed, spine arching backward in a grotesque parody of a dancer's pose, every muscle locked in tetanic spasm. The electricity didn't just burn him—it excavated him. Flesh blackened and split, revealing the wet architecture beneath: muscle, tendon, the ivory gleam of bone. His eyes boiled in their sockets, two small explosions of viscous fluid that steamed as they hit the deck.

"She's being a wasp. Causing as much damage as she can. getting that ship's crew to waste time and energy on looking for her and the damage she has caused." Ben stated while looking at the others. "She needs iur help."


Then the smell hit.


It was the smell of a butcher shop set ablaze—copper and char, the acrid sting of ozone mixing with the sweet, cloying stench of cooked meat. Urine and bowels released in the instant of death, adding their own sour notes to the symphony. Blood didn't just spill; it aerosolized, a fine red mist that painted the airlock housing in abstract patterns, droplets sizzling where they touched still-hot metal.

Johnson was thrown back by the concussive force, his shoulder slamming into the opposite bulkhead. He lay there, deafened, blinded by afterimages, while Parker's corpse continued to cook.


The body settled slowly, joints unclenching as the current finally found ground. What remained slumped against the clamp assembly—a thing no longer recognizably human. The hair had burned away completely. The clothing had fused to charred skin in patches, while other sections had simply vaporized, leaving naked, broiled meat that wept clear fluid. One hand still gripped the clamp, fingers curled into a claw, the nails blackened stubs.


Johnson crawled backward, heels scrabbling for purchase on the deck, until his spine hit the airlock door. He stared at the remains of his crewmate—at the pinkish-gray matter spattered across the bulkhead, at the strips of something that might have been scalp hanging from a conduit like wet wallpaper.


The smell wouldn't leave. It had weight, substance, a physical presence that crawled into his nostrils and coated the back of his throat. He gagged, turned his head, and vomited onto the deck—thin bile that mixed with Parker's blood and made new patterns on the scuffed metal.


Somewhere in the station, a klaxon began to wail. The fire suppression system engaged, spraying white chemical foam that hissed against the superheated clamp and turned pink as it absorbed what was left of Parker.


Johnson wiped his mouth with a shaking hand and looked at the docking clamp. The manual release had melted into slag. They weren't going anywhere.


He sat in it. The foam. The blood. The smell that had gotten into his teeth somehow. He wept without deciding to, the tears cutting clean lines through the particulate on his face. The afterimage of the arc flash had burned a white sun into the center of his vision and everything around it was dark and swimming. He moved by memory and by hand, fingers reading the deck until they found the lip of the maintenance hatch. He dropped into it. Puked again on the way down, mostly nothing.


The relay corridor was narrow and low and he had to move through it on his elbows. He could hear his own breathing. He could hear it too loud. He found the airlock controller housing by its shape in the dark and began feeling along the relay board for the auxiliary cutoff, the one Parker had claimed to have thrown. The one Parker had been wrong about.


His fingers found something that was not a switch.


A PaDD, wedged deliberately between the control housings. He held still for a moment and listened to the corridor. Nothing. He worked it free and held it close to his face, blinking until the letters resolved.



Thought I would leave the light on for you!
— Kate"


**

Ro, Selmek, and Angelo moved through the lower corridors of the Cavalier, past storage bays that hadn't been opened in years and conduit junctions that smelled of rust and recycled air. The lights down here ran on a dimmer cycle, flickering at long intervals, and their footsteps were the only sound.

"You're wasting our time," Angelo said, not for the first time. "She's not hiding in a cargo hold. She knows we're looking for her. She's going to be where the crew is, moving with them, using them as cover."


"Or she wants us to think that," Selmek said.


"That's not strategy, that's paranoia."


Ro kept walking. She knew Angelo was right. She had known it since the second deck, when the corridor had narrowed and the life sign readings had thinned to nothing. But turning back meant saying so out loud, and she wasn't ready to give him that.

"Remember Armak's daughter," Angelo said. "The Ledarian job. We had her for six days and she got loose and killed Mark before we even knew she was out. You remember what she did after? She stayed with the body. Sat with it for hours, right there in the dark, because she knew the internal sensors would ping his life sign location and we'd go looking for him instead of her." He paused. "She was eleven years old."


"We all remember Mark," Selmek said. "Get to the point."

Ro was already walking back toward the turbolift. She didn't say anything. The turbolift button came up red. She pressed it again. Nothing.

She reached for her comm badge out of habit, then remembered the jamming and moved to the side console instead.

"Ro to Bridge. Is the turbolift online?"

The comm opened. A beat of static, then Jax's voice, thin and slightly wrong at this distance.


"The lift controls have been dark for about ten minutes. We don't know why. There's nobody left to send down and look."


"Understood." Ro closed the channel. She opened it again. "Ro to Cross."

The console returned nothing. Not static. Not interference. Just the particular quality of silence that meant the other end was no longer there.

She turned to look at Selmek and Angelo. Neither of them spoke. The lights cycled through their long dim interval and did not come back up all the way

"Ro to Parker." She kept her hand on the panel after she said it, as if contact with the metal might coax something back. It didn't. The silence from Parker's end had a different texture than Cross's silence. She told herself that was not a meaningful distinction. The lights ran through their dim cycle. She became aware that she was listening to her own breathing, and that the corridor, which had felt merely unpleasant an hour ago, now felt like the inside of something that had swallowed her whole. She cursed under her breath and looked to Angelo.

"Go down to the docking bay," Ro said. "Check on their progress. Report back the moment you know something."

Angelo looked at her for a moment, then looked at the dark corridor behind her, then went without arguing. She watched him until the dim cycle swallowed him.

Selmek stayed where he was. Ro did not look at him.

She had always preferred sending men into the dark. There was something clarifying about it, watching them go without protest, without the particular brand of hesitation they reserved for orders that came from her. She had learned to read that hesitation the way a navigator reads weather. Angelo had barely shown any. She filed that away.

The corridor gave nothing back. Just the slow flicker of the lights, and the recycled air, and the quality of silence that had been accumulating around her since Parker's end of the channel went dead.


**

On the bridge, Jax shuddered as the lights went into emergency mode. At the same time, there as a thud at the turbolift doors. One bang, followed by another, and another. Jax had her hand on her phaser and relaxed its grip when Captain Cross appeared in the dim light.

“What — the hell… Do they want this time?” Cross said while turning back around to squeeze the two ends of the door back shut again. Jax winced as Cross fired his phaser at the turbolift door to keep it sealed shut by welding both ends together. He cursed at the door before turning around and taking a deep breath.

“Sir, it’s Deep Space Twenty again. They’re asking that we disable the communications block for all of the open-air communicators and to surrender to Starfleet authorities for disruption of station commerce and operations.”

“Oh they do, do they?” Cross scoffed. “Put them on screen.” Cross held two fingers up in the air in a slicing motion toward the view screen in a comedic gesture of control as the screen activated. On the other end were two distinct figures but it wasn’t Captain nine-names this time… It was an Andorian, and a young man in an intelligence uniform.

"State your identity and purpose and if you don't annoy me, I'll consider not reducing you into a few vaporous atoms" the Andorian said, his voicing giving away hints of annoyance.

ben was silent as Shran spoke, his attention was on the man on viewscreen and the nervousness he was trying to conceal.

Cross clasped his hands behind his back and faced the viewscreen. He stood very still. A bead of sweat traced a line down his temple and he did not wipe it away.

"Gentlemen." He let the word sit for a moment. "I want you to know that I am listening to you very carefully." He moved to the side of the captain's chair and rested one hand on the headrest, not sitting, just touching it. His eyes moved between the two of them with something that was almost patience. "We are a legitimate commercial vessel. We have always been a legitimate commercial vessel." A small smile. "If one of yours has gone missing, that is… and I mean this… a, genuine, tragedy. I hope you find her." He tilted his head slightly. "I hope she's somewhere safe."

He held the smile just a beat too long.

Shran was now showing his growing annoyance and lack of patience. "Assuming that this uniform will save you from me doing things to you your species has no words for is a mistake." he looked to Ben, allowing him to be the voice of reason.

Ben locked eyes with cross and spoke evenly and firmly. "I think it is in your best interest to stop this charade and come clean."

"The other one." Cross said it quietly, as if he were trying to remember where he'd left his keys. He turned away from the screen and walked three slow steps toward the helm console, then stopped and looked at his own hand resting on it. He turned back around. "You know what I find interesting?" He did not wait for an answer. "You'll find it interesting too. That's why you're both on this channel instead of one of you." He clasped his hands in front of him. "I run a clean ship. I run a very clean ship. If your people are on it, that is a question I would be directing inward." A small laugh through the nose. "Two of them. That's not an accident, that's a program." He looked at the Andorian for a moment, then the younger one, then back. "I want to help you. I want very much to help you. The moment I know something, you will know something." He smiled with his whole face. "That is a promise from me to you."


Shran offered only a half smile as obvious anger looked to be taking over. "You are trying my patience with these transparent falsehoods and equivocations. You sound like a Romulan."

Ben's eyes stayed in Cross, "He sounds like a Romulan because he works with them and is just as deceiving as they are. Now, what about the dampening field your ship is putting out? Care to explain?"


Cross let out a short breath through his nose. Something close to a laugh.

"The dampening field." He said it the way a man repeats a word he already knows the definition of. He took two steps toward the viewscreen and stopped. His hand found the back of the captain's chair and gripped it. "Yes. An experiment. It got away from us." He released the chair. "Cost me my entire engineering crew." He looked at the floor for a moment, then back up. "I would have requested your assistance on that matter, I want you to know that, but as you can see the field itself is preventing any transport on or off the ship. It is also, as I'm sure you've noticed, causing the communication difficulties." He clasped both hands in front of him and was still. "I will pay every fine. Every fee. Whatever the station has lost, I will make whole." A small nod, almost to himself. "And I do wish you luck." His eyes settled on the Andorian, then moved to the younger one. "Finding your people. I mean that sincerely." He did not move. "I mean all of it sincerely."

Jax cut the screen without being asked. Seven years.

Cross stood with his back to the viewscreen for a moment. He pressed two fingers to his mouth and looked at nothing in particular. Then he walked to the box behind the captain's chair, opened it, and began laying weapons on the console one at a time, with a kind of deliberate quiet. He kept a Romulan disruptor for himself, turned it over once in his hand, and set it down. He slid another across to Jax without looking at her. Klingon rifle to the helm. Andorian phase shifter to navigation. He picked his disruptor back up.

"Nobody leaves this bridge." He said it to the floor, almost to himself, then looked up at all three of them in one slow pass. "Not for anything. Not for any reason." A small pause. "We clear on that?"


****


Back on Deep Space Twenty, the four of them stood at the dead screen. Around them the station moved at a frequency it wasn't built for; personnel cutting across each other's paths, someone barking into a handheld unit that wasn't responding, a cargo loader abandoned mid-corridor.

AJ sucked his teeth. "Intelligence seh de hull of de Cavalier too thick an deh cyaan cut through in time." He folded his arms. "But ask me why deh still sittin' right deh so, pretty as yuh please." He glanced at the screen that switched to the docked Cavalier. "Somethin' keepin' dem. Deh woulda gone already if deh could."

"I want all information you have. Schematics, personnel files, intelligence and tactical reports, all of it" Shran said sternly.

Na'Riss nodded and pulled up a schematic of the docking column on the nearest console, the outer airlock layout rendering in pale blue lines against the dark display.

"I have been in contact with station damage control. Their surface heat sensors are registering a six-degree Celsius increase at the outer docking lugs." Na'Riss looked at Shran. "The logical implication is a triple digit differential on the interior end, consistent with sustained thermal distribution. There is only one conclusion. Their docking clamps have been fused to the station hull. Deliberately." She turned to face AJ. "You asked why they have not undocked and left. That is your answer. Sabotage. Carried out from within the vessel."

AJ let out a slow breath and unfolded his arms. "From de inside." He looked at the schematic, then back at Na'Riss. "So somebody on dat ship fuse dem own clamps." He nodded once, turning it over. "Dat is somebody who did not want to go nowhere wit dem."

"It's Kate." Ben said with quiet certainty. "She's keeping that ship right where it is. Sabotaging it from within."

Na'Riss turned to Ben. "The probability is not negligible. If the sabotage originated from within the vessel, the field of candidates narrows considerably. Lieutenant Kono's absence from this station, combined with the timing, suggests a non-random correlation." She folded her hands. "I would not characterize it as certainty. I would characterize it as the most defensible conclusion available to us at this time."

"She is being a wasp. Causing has much damage as she can from within while having the ship's crew expend time and energy trying to find her and correct the damage she has done." Ben said looking at the others. "We need to help her."


*****
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