The Inquisition of Kevin Mitchell Pt.7 (Final)

Posted on Fri Jun 12th, 2026 @ 8:34am by Lieutenant JG Kate Kono

3,363 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Sins of the Empire
Location: Merc Ship Cavilear/DS20/Washington/Starfleet Command
Timeline: Between Missions

Angelo’s stomach lurched before he even cleared the corridor. He pulled his shirt up over his nose, took one peek around the corner into the docking airlock, and immediately soaked the inside of it. What was left of whoever it had been was still attached to the docking clamps; fused to them, the fingers and the metal having become a single blackened material, the hands drawn up into the chest in the way cooked things draw up. The face had split open along the jaw. The smell was not the smell of burning. It was the smell of the inside of something.

Angelo’s vision swam. He stripped his shirt off, dropped it, and staggered back into the corridor, where he hit his knees, retched again into the grating, and then grabbed the wall console.

“Ro!” The name came out wet, broken by a cough that left flecks across the glass.

A beat of silence. Then: “Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know.” He was still bent forward, one hand braced on his knee, shirtless and shaking. “Someone’s dead. In the airlock. They’re… they’re on the clamps. It’s bad, Ro.”

“Get back in there. Look around. Give me a sitrep.”

Angelo’s head came up. He hit the console with the flat of his fist hard enough to rattle it in the wall. “YOU get down here and look at it yourself, you self-serving parasite. I’m second in command, in case that still means anything to you.”

The doors to the docking bay opened and Cross stepped through them. He stopped a few feet in and stood there in the smell of it, perfectly still, the way a man stands still when he is thinking rather than reacting. He breathed in slowly through his nose. His eyes moved over the airlock, over what remained on the clamps, over Angelo on the floor. He did not look away from any of it. He crossed the bay, stepped around the soaked shirt without looking down at it, and leaned into the console.

“Ro. Find Johnson and send him to the docking junction.” He paused. “We’re going to seal the airlock and pack it. Starfleet knows about Kate.”

“Understood.”

The line closed. Cross tapped the console again without lifting his eyes from the airlock.

“Johnson. Docking junction. Now.” He did not raise his voice. He waited.

“We should abandon the ship.” Angelo was still on the floor, still shaking.

Cross turned and looked at him for a long moment. Then he crouched down in front of him, unhurried, and drew his disruptor and pressed the side of it flat against Angelo’s temple with something almost like gentleness.

“You want me to surrender a five-brick-latinum starship,” he said quietly, “because one small girl knows her way through my tubes.” He tilted his head very slightly. “Think about what you just said to me.”

Ro made it three steps into the junction before she turned and walked back out. Selmek stood his ground a moment longer, his hand pressed flat over his mouth, his eyes shut. Johnson came up through the maintenance hatch while Selmek was still standing there, hauling himself out hand over hand, and what was on him was not just blood. Selmek went out the same way Ro had gone.

Cross watched Johnson straighten up. He kept his voice low. “Go to your quarters. Get cleaned up.” He let a beat pass.

He turned to Angelo, “And if I hear you talk about abandoning this ship again, you can go ahead and do it. Out the window. Get yourself a shirt.”

***

Kate had been under the captain’s desk for the better part of an hour before she let herself sleep. The chair had been pushed in close and she had lain with her knees drawn up, her cheek against the cold deck plating, her bag wedged against the back panel. When she woke, the bridge was quiet. She watched Cross leave through the starboard access corridor rather than the turbolift, and when the door sealed behind him she counted to thirty before she moved. She found the terminal already warm. The communications logs took four minutes to pull. She routed her uplink through Starfleet Command’s own subspace frequency, which took longer, and then she opened a second channel to DS20 and typed her message short and plain: she was on the Cavalier. She was alive.

Kate decided to make several different entry-way access ports to the bridge before she left, including access through a small duct that had a slither of a vantage point, just enough to get a look at the helmsman and the navigation officer. Kate had never used a romulan disruptor before. It worked well on cutting the magnetic leverage system on the turbolift. She decided that if it was good enough to disengage the clamps on the turbolift, it was good enough to try on a Romulan and a Human Being.

She settled into position, pressing her eye to the ventilation gap beneath the floorboard, and rested her finger on the trigger.

"I don't understand why we can't just expose all the lower decks to vacuum for a few minutes and then be done with it," the helmsman said. "Jax, what do you think?"

"I think air pressure costs strips of latinum. That's what I think," the woman replied.

Kate squeezed the trigger.

The disruptor beam was not like a phaser. It did not disperse. It hit like a fist made of light, a concentrated bolt that punched through the back of the helmsman's chair, through the man himself, and out the other side. The exit wound opened his torso from sternum to spine. Loops of intestine dropped steaming onto the deck. The helm console split down the center and the viewscreen was painted in a broad red fan of blood and tissue, chunks of something soft sliding slowly down the glass.

The two remaining officers did not move. They stood as if nailed to the floor, staring at what was left of the helmsman.

Kate shifted her aim to the navigation officer's face.

She fired. The beam entered just below his nose and the front of his skull caved inward, collapsing like a sinkhole, before the back of his head blew outward in a thick spray of bone fragment and grey matter that scattered across the navigation console in clumps. For a moment he remained upright, the cavity where his face had been pumping rhythmic jets of dark blood that ran down his neck and soaked his uniform and poured in sheets across the console. Then his knees gave and he toppled forward, his full weight cracking the base of the console as he hit it on the way down and came to rest in the spreading pool beneath him.

White-hot disruptor fire screamed through the ventilation gap, scorching the air inches from Kate's face as she scrambled backward through the crawlspace. Jax's screaming was animal and relentless, her shots punching through the floor plating in a walking line that chased Kate's heels. Kate threw herself around the turbolift junction just as a bolt vaporized the corner behind her, spraying her with shards of superheated metal that bit into her shoulders and cheek. The next shot hit the turbolift doors dead center and blew the welded seal apart in a shriek of tearing steel. Kate hauled herself up the interior wall of the shaft and pressed flat against the ceiling, heart slamming, and waited. When Jax shouldered through the ruined doors with her disruptor sweeping the tube below her, Kate drove her boot heel down into the crown of her skull with everything she had.

Jax's neck snapped to one side and her weapon tumbled away into the dark below. She clawed at the door frame for one terrible second before she fell. She fell a long way. Her body struck the roof of the wrecked turbolift car and caved it inward, the impact folding her at the waist over the buckled edge of the hatch before she rolled off and came to rest face-up in the debris on the shaft floor, one arm bent behind her, eyes open, chest still.

Kate was starting to suspect that overloading phasers had become something of a personal trademark. There were, as luck would have it, an almost embarrassing number of phasers and disruptors just lying around the bridge; practically a gift basket. She collected them methodically, binding each one to Kevin's tricorder before strapping them to the navigation console (still warm and slick under the officer slumped across it, one arm dangling), the helm console (its operator face-down in a spreading dark halo, fingers still curled around nothing), the captain's chair, and the weapons console. She crawled into the nearest Jefferies tube, triggered the array through the tricorder, then reached back to tap the interior comms and set it to display the bridge. She leaned into frame, grinned, and gave the camera an enthusiastic wave before ducking neatly out of sight, leaving no indication of which direction she'd gone.

**

Cross watched as a view screen image came up on the screen. He caught the last part of Kate waving before she vanished.

“She’s on the bridge!” Angelo ran off toward the turbolift shaft so he could get a hold of the ladder and start climbing up. Cross stood in shock as he saw his dead friends leaned over the consoles.

“What’s that?” Ro asked as she pointed out debris flying across the screen.

Cross made out a piece of the captains chair flying across the room. A split second later, he could hear and feel the explosions billowing down the shaft, catching Angelo in the shockwave. The ship shook as his hair started to float on the air currents wafted down the hallway from the open turbolift doors. The helm console exploded next, debris landing all over the place, followed by the console next to it and then pieces of the tactical desk. The ship continued to rumble as debris rained down on Angelo’s head.

"Angelo!” Johnson exclaimed as he watched debris fall down the shaft. Nobody saw him fall but they knew he was down there.

“Forget him. He’s been making stupid mistakes all day. That was his last one,” Cross said dismissively as he pressed his head against the wall and sighed.

The silence that followed was the kind that settles over wreckage. In less than three hours, Kate had carved the crew from fourteen down to three, fused the ship to the station, and left his friends as cooling bodies in the dark. Cross stood very still, his hands moving once through his hair and then dropping to his sides like something had gone out of them.

"Prep the warp shuttle," he said. His voice was quiet. "I'll retrieve the latinum. Johnson. Get down there and start pre-flight now."

He turned to Ro last. "You want her dead. I know. Nobody wants that girl dead more than I do, and she will die for what she's done. But not if Starfleet pulls us off this ship first. We fight another day."

Ro's jaw tightened. She looked at him the way a dog looks at a door being closed in its face, something hot and coiled moving behind her eyes.

Cross gripped Ro's shoulders, feeling the draft from the bridge pull at her short blond hair as the fire ate through what little air they had left. He gave himself one more second to look at her; really look… before the suppressors kicked in or they ran out of time entirely.

"We're going to get through this corridor," he said, his voice low and even. "And then we're going to get a new ship. And then I'm going to find Kate myself, and when I do…" he stopped, jaw tightening, "—she's yours. I'll make sure of it." He meant every word, though not all of it was for Ro's sake.

**

Johnson was still shaken from watching Parker die. The open med-kit on the passenger seat didn't register as wrong. He was too far inside his own head, scanning the exterior cameras as he powered up the warp-shuttlecraft, running through the pre-flight checklist on his console without once looking behind him. He never saw the shadow. The tourniquet dropped over his head and snapped against his throat, and then Kate was on her knees behind the pilot's chair, pulling the tail of the strap down hard, wrenching his head back into the headrest.

She secured the velcro and began turning the windlass. The polyester band tightened in increments, each twist of the plastic handle compressing his airway a little further. Johnson's hands flew up and clawed at the strap, fingers scrabbling uselessly against the flat fabric. His legs kicked. Kate turned the windlass again. The veins along his neck and temples rose to the surface, thick and dark, and his face deepened from red to a bruised, mottled purple. A wet, strangled clicking came from somewhere in his throat.

Kate knocked his arm aside and kept turning. She had nothing to say to him. Johnson was the last engineer, the last pilot, the last person aboard who could be of any use to Cross, and that was reason enough. His kicking slowed. His arms dropped. His body settled into the chair with the dead, total weight of something that would not be moving again. Kate secured the timestrap around the windlass, uncapped the marker from the med-kit, and wrote down the time of the tourniquette application.

Kate slipped into the Jefferies tubes as the shuttlebay doors opened behind her.

"Johnson!" Cross's voice bounced off the dark walls of the bay. "I know you're traumatized by your loss, but if you can't push past it to get your ass on comms..." He trailed off. The external power coupling hung loose from the hull, disconnected. Cross felt the first cold finger of something wrong move through him. Johnson would have reconnected it before anything else.

He stepped into the shuttlecraft. An open medkit sat on the co-pilot's seat, its contents undisturbed. Neat. Unused. Then he saw Johnson in the pilot's chair, and the tourniquet tied around the headrest, and the way it disappeared under Johnson's chin.

A cheeky time stamp on the wrap caught his eye. Cross stepped out of the back cargo door of the shuttlecraft and found Ro's face immediately, wide-eyed and scanning her surroundings with barely contained panic. Then movement in the control room above pulled his attention upward. He drew his Romulan disruptor and fired without hesitation, but the bolt scattered harmlessly off the surface. Not glass. Transparent aluminum, at least four inches thick. It would take a duranium torch to breach it, and Kate had already reached the shuttlebay controls.

"I'm going to kill you!" Ro screamed, and then Cross's stomach dropped out from under him.

He threw himself back through the shuttlecraft's cargo door just as the gravity reversed. The shuttle lurched off the deck plating and so did every other non-warp craft in the bay, all of them peeling away in unison like coins off a table. Ro had no cover and no time. The reversal took everything with it: cargo containers, equipment crates, loose tools, the entire unsecured contents of the bay all becoming projectiles at once. A container caught her across the midsection and folded her in half before she dropped, and then the rest of it came down on top of her in a cascading avalanche of steel and duranium, sixty feet of freefall ending in a sound Cross could hear even over the chaos. What was left of her disappeared under the debris.

Inside the shuttle, Cross was thrown against every surface before he could claw his way to the inertial dampeners. The medkit had exploded across the cabin. His disruptor was gone. Through the viewport, the shuttlebay continued to convulse, but with the dampeners engaged, the violence outside reached him only as a low shudder, the world coming apart at a comfortable remove.

From his vantage point at the open cargo door, Cross could see Kate across the bay working the gravity controls. The floor lurched up to meet him and then fell away again as she kept flipping it, relentless, as if he were something to be shaken loose. He gripped the back bench as the entire bay churned around him in a loud clatter of sliding cargo and rattling hull panels.

Then the thought came to him. With the bridge gone, the transporters should be working again.

He hauled himself to the transporter pad and initiated a site-to-site transport back to DS20. As the beam took hold of him and the bay dissolved into light, he fixed his eyes on Kate's silhouette at the controls, burning the image of her into his mind with the cold patience of a man who intended to collect on a debt. She had made a mistake letting him leave alive.

Kate released the gravity controls as security officers began beaming in around her.

Kate pushed through the shuttlebay doors at a controlled run, her two DS20 security escorts peeling off to either side of the entrance in a flanking position. She pulled up the transport logs on the nearest terminal while across the bay, Security and Medical personnel worked the scene around the body: a corpse slumped at an unnatural angle in the pilot's seat, a tourniquet cinched around its neck and knotted to the headrest, giving it the loose, awful sway of something hung for a holiday.

"What de hell, Kate?" She looked over at the voice and felt her shoulders drop half an inch at the sight of AJ's face. The medical team closed in around her immediately, pulling at her arms, shining lights. She pushed back through them toward the terminal.

The combadges were back online. Through the ambient noise she could make out the strained voices of officers moving through the ship, calling out as they found bodies in compartment after compartment.

Na'Riss's voice cut through: they had found Kevin's body.

"AJ!" Kate called across the bay. "Where's Ben?"

"On de bridge, what is left of it," AJ said. "Wit Ramirez."

****

Starfleet Command.

Tapping was still screaming about lawyers and careers and the catastrophic mistakes being made here today when she saw Emily Braddock being marched past the glass doors of her office in restraints. Her voice died in her throat.

Admiral Kinsey crossed the room toward her, and the look on his face was worse than any reprimand. She wanted to spit at him. Instead she stood there and felt the weight of her badge leave her chest as they took it, felt the specific humiliation of it, the finality. They were going to the brig. San Francisco. She was going to a cell.

Section 31 was already gone. She knew how it worked. No calls, no counsel, no record of any of it. Just silence where there used to be protection.

"I told you we should have just killed her!" she screamed across the corridor at Braddock as the guards wrenched them in opposite directions toward separate shuttlecraft. Braddock did not look back.

***

A week later, back aboard the Washington, Kate stood before the mirror in her quarters and zipped her uniform slowly, smoothing the front of it with both hands. Her dog pressed his nose against her leg. She scratched behind his ears, then gathered herself and stepped out into the corridor.

She had one last stop to make.

The doors of Holodeck One slid open and the cobblestones of Old London materialized beneath her boots, the air thick with coal smoke and the distant clang of a blacksmith. Somewhere in these streets, Jack and Chuck Norris were waiting. Four hundred hours they had given her. She owed them that much, at least. The doors closed behind her as she walked forward into the fog.

THE END.

For more tales of the USS Washington, visit Independance Fleet by running a short search on your browser! We would love to have you aboard!

 

RSS Feed

Comments (1)