Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The couple skirted along the back off the crowd and slunk out the side-door as the crowd remained enthralled by the performance. The moment they were free of the ballroom both let out huge breaths of relief. “That was too close,” Carol insisted as they hurried down the hall.

“No kidding. The sooner we’re upstairs and behind a locked door, the better.”

“Hnh, well I like the sound of tha– oh come on!” Carol cried as they rounded the corner and came to an abrupt halt in front of the turbolifts—or more accurately, in front of the brand-new signs, reading in the local language and FSE:

The lifts are closed until 8:15 due to the gravitational anomaly. We apologize for the inconvenience; please use the stairs.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she said with incredulity, turning to the right and left. “Where are the stairs?”

“Back by the ballroom,” Alonzo said, looking over his shoulder. Carol scoffed.

“Ohoh no way, we’re not risking that. Come on.” She lifted up the red rope and ducked under.

“Care, are you sure this is a good idea? We can probably make it back to the stairs in time–”

“You heard the band, this is the last dance for the night before they start on that new music the kids like! It’ll be ending any second; we go back now, we’re screwed.” She punched the button. “And not in the fun way.”

“Fair enough.” He crouched under the rope too as the lift arrived with a ding! “After you.”

They stepped inside and Alonzo tapped the button for their floor. “Finally,” Carol exhaled as the doors shut and the lift shot upwards with a pleasantly-announced “Floor thirteen!” “I’ll admit it, I was beginning to think we’d never get to the–”

The lift abruptly shuddered, and then stopped. The two looked at each other, startled. The lights snapped off.

There was a long, long beat of silence.

“...Sweetheart–”

“Yeah, Zo, I know!” The captain huffed, pinched the bridge of her nose in the darkness, and then shook her head. “You know what? Screw the hotel! I have perfectly fine quarters on my own ship; we’ll just beam back up there!” She reached up to tap the badge and then, feeling nothing, remembered that she’d put it in her clutch. The…clutch she’d left on the table. Back in the ballroom. “Uh…Zo, you still have your badge, right?”

“Yeah, of course I do– oh. Uh.” Carol groaned. “Damn, it must’ve come off while we were dancing…”

“So,” the captain sighed, “just to sum up our situation: we are stuck in a turbolift, in the dark, with no combadges, and even if we could comm for help we’d be the laughingstocks of Starfleet and make the morning news for FNN tomorrow.”

“I’m sure they’ll start running the lifts again once the anomaly is over,” her husband’s voice tried to reassure her.

“I’m sorry, Zo, you were right; we should have taken the stairs…”

“Yeah, I was,” he said a little smugly, but then quickly added: “But it’s fine, Carol, we’ve been in worse situations than stuck in a dark turbolift for an hour with nothing to– to do…”

There was another beat of silence as both re-processed this information.

“Uh– Carol, sweetheart,” the admiral resumed, voice one of forced nonchalance, “do you remember that time on Starbase 5 when we–”

The captain grabbed the lapels of his jacket and yanked his mouth down to hers.

The grate squeaked as it was moved aside, and then Mariner squinched her way out of the vent and dropped lightly, still holding the mesh, into the shadowy tube of a hallway below. “Brad, I– whoa!” The floor belt under her feet was slightly squishy, and with the gravity distortion it pushed her up like a trampoline for a second before she fell back to earth again, steadying herself. She looked down to see she was standing on a rubber conveyor belt.

“Yeah, careful, they’re meant to absorb weight,” Boimler grunted, hopping down after her and wobbling slightly as he got his balance; Mariner noticed that he still sounded annoyed with her. “Most of the materials for recycling get beamed down directly into here.” Along the sides of the large tube there were maintenance pathways of raised corrugated metal, but just as Boimler had promised, there were no security cameras that she could see. At the near end of the tunnel there was a closed industrial sliding door. “That’s the gate into the chute up there,” he added, nodding down the tunnel.

“How do we open it?”

“I just need to get the belt to start moving,” he said, climbing off the conveyor belt onto the maintenance path and tapping a computer screen embedded into the wall. A digit-screen in alien font was presented as it lit up, and he cursed. “Damn it, I totally forgot.”

“What?”

“You always have to swipe in, it’s a security thing. Even if I still remembered my old credentials it would be proof I was here.”

“So what, we came all this way for nothing?” Mariner demanded.

“I didn’t say that,” he said, stepping back and rubbing his chin, and then snapped his fingers. “I can’t get the belt running, but the doors have emergency open and close codes. It’s been a decade, sure, but they wouldn’t have had any reason to change them…” He tapped the upper-left corner three times—presumably 111 —into the screen, and then looked over at her. “Here goes nothing?”

“Yeah, man, hurry up, we don’t have time to showboat here,” Mariner retorted (what? If he was going to be pissy then so was she). Boimler gave her a flat look and then hit the button on the keypad.

Immediately a loud klaxon siren went off, as did blazing red-alert lights all along the top of the belt. “Shit, shit!” he panicked, jabbing at the screen, but Mariner shouted over the din:

“No, look! It’s opening!”

She was right; the door at the end of the tunnel was sliding open from top to bottom. Boimler typed in the code again and then jumped back down onto the belt, and the two sprinted—well, alright, staggered and bounced—to the end, vaulting over the door’s ledge as the Klaxon died and the gate began to slide shut again. They landed on another shorter conveyor belt (this one made of kelbonite chainlinks instead of rubber) on the other side just as it closed behind them; the two stood there, panting for a moment in the remaining short length of tunnel, before Boimler slipped back into his natural panic mode. “Ohh man this is bad,” he moaned, rubbing his face. “Do you think that woke up the security guard?”

“How the hell should I know; why didn’t you mention the alarm!” she hissed back at him, stalking forward to the end of the tunnel. He trailed after her, caught between indignation and guilt:
“I didn’t think there’d be one! I learned about the emergency codes on orientation day, I never had to use them–”

“Whoa,” Mariner cut him off, blinking. She’d reached the edge of the conveyor belt and the mouth of the tunnel. 

The chute, which was shaped like a cut-off funnel with a flat bottom, was easily fifty meters in diameter from where she was standing, about the length of an American football field. Lining the walls in spiral pattern all the way down to the floor, she could see dotted here and there several dozen gates with their little conveyor belts, just like the one she was currently standing on, each flanked by ladders and maintenance platforms stretching the full height of the chute. Near the top of the chute was a large red line painted around the perimeter, and above this on the opposite side was what looked like an observation room with glass windows overlooking the entire recombinator.

At the bottom of the cute was a large forcefield, fizzling faintly with energy. Below the field lay massive versions of the parts of the matter-recyclers she’d fixed any number of times on the ship, and standing atop the barrier of crackling energy was–

The thieves spotted them at the same moment she saw them and immediately began shouting angrily at them in Ferengi; Mariner could see the case being carried between them, looking far lighter than it should have been. “Damn, they’ve already got it!”

“Maybe they’ll be willing to negotiate,” Boimler suggested, rubbing his chin.

“Negotiate with what, we don’t use money! Look, that’s Starfleet property and we’re Starfleet, let’s just go down there and make them give it back!”

“Starfleet property that we’re stealing to sell to the Ferengi! We don’t exactly have the moral high ground here, Marin–!”

He heard the phaser-fire only a split second before Mariner yanked him sideways and the blast rocketed straight through where his head had been. “ Aghah! Oh! Oh my gosh!” Boimler gasped, turning and looking at the badly-scorched kelbonite wall.

Another blast flashed to the side of Mariner as she jumped out of the way. “Hey! Ever heard of warning shots?!” she shouted as they scrambled back into the tunnel for cover.

The response they got was garbled, and Mariner poked her combadge. “They don’t work in here, remember?” Boimler panted, pressing himself as flat to the tunnel wall as possible while the Ferengis’ phaser-fire flashed into the ceiling above them, raining down sparks.

“Wait here,” she growled, dropping to a crouch on the conveyor belt and inching forward.

“Mariner what are you doing, you’re going to get shot!”

“No I’m not, Brad, now let me focus!”

The phaser-fire was still pounding into the ceiling at an angle as she inched forward under it, eventually getting down into an army-crawl. She waited until it had stopped and then, very carefully, peeked her head out over the edge of the belt.

There was more shouting and she yanked her head back, a moment before the blast of fire shot up through where her head had been. “They’re heading for the other side,” she complained, standing up again just beyond the range of fire.

“For Q's sake, Mariner, you need to be more careful–”

“Oh right, because I’m the one invoking the name of the trickster entity in the middle of a firefight–”

“It’s an expression–”

“Look, this is beside the point!” she snapped, waving her hands. “We need to get that case away from them somehow, or this will all have been completely pointless!”

“You think I don’t know that? I’m all ears for suggestions here Mariner, because last I checked we didn’t bring weapons! Not to mention that would cause a major diplomatic incident and also be wildly immoral, since they beat us here fair and square–”

“They did not, they stole our heist plan! I can’t believe you’re just giving up, I should have just done this on my own!”

His face flushed with color. “Excuse me? In case you forgot, you wouldn’t have even gotten this far without me!”

“Wh– I didn’t need you,” she scoffed, her anger blazing into a fury-pitch. “What, you think I need your help, you think I can’t live without you?!” His glare solidified. “Well in case you forgot, I’ve survived just fine with you gone before, Bradward, so if you wanna bail on me now you can go right ahead and–”

She was cut off as another barrage of phaser-fire suddenly erupted over their heads, both of them ducking again for cover. There was an almighty din and an explosion of sparks from near the mouth of the tunnel, and then the loud echoing of a mechanical voice over the speakers talking in a language she didn’t recognize. “What the hell was that for?!” Mariner complained, looking over her shoulder once the shots had stopped, but Boimler’s face had gone white.

“Oh no,” he breathed, taking his hands off his head.

“What? What’s ‘oh no,’ don’t say ‘oh no!’”

“That’s the countdown. Th-those shots must have disabled the gravitational sensors and kicked the whole recycler into gear—Mariner, we need to get above the red line, right now!”

“Are you crazy, they’ll shoot us!”

“Yeah, and if we don’t, everything down here is going to recombinated, including us!”

She felt the blood drain out of her face. “Shit. Yeah, I’ll risk the phaser burns.”

“Come on!”

They scurried to the edge of the platform. At this point the gravity had become so unstable that Boimler misjudged his last step and shrieked as he staggered, pinwheeling, over the edge and began to float out and down over the expanse; Mariner’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist, yanking him back onto the conveyor belt. Both cringed and waited for the phaser-fire which never came; when they cracked their eyes open they saw that the two thieves had moved out of phaser-range and had pulled themselves up the maintenance ladders to one of the lower tunnels, the gate of which they were trying to pry open.

Boimler looked around wildly and then pointed. “There!” Just above the red safety line, next to the maintenance ladder, a scorched smoking access panel was hanging off its hinges. They grabbed hold of the ladder and, with the alien countdown echoing in their ears, they pulled themselves upwards, almost weightless in the near-zero-gravity. The massive machinery parts below them were beginning to chug and whirr, and an eerie blue-white light was zipping faster and faster through the components. As Mariner crossed over the safety line Brad pulled the panel door open and peered inside. “Oh, no. No no no, it’s totally fried!”

“Can you get it working again?!”

He stuck his fingers into the panel, but it only spat out sparks and caused him to yelp as he yanked them back. “Oh come on, I don’t want to see someone die tonight!” Boimler moaned, looking back over his shoulder at the Ferengi thieves, who were still struggling with the closed gate and bobbing around in the low gravity like ping-pong balls in a pool. “Hey!” he shouted, waving his free hand and pointing upwards. “You have to get out of there!” The Ferengi shouted something back at him that sounded decidedly non-cooperative. “ Leave the case behind and climb up! CLIMB UP!”

“Brad, stop,” Mariner urged, reaching up and catching his arm. “They’re Ferengi thieves, they’re not going to ditch the case. You’re wasting your time, we need to try something else–”

“Try what else, Mariner?!” he exploded at her, half-turning on the ladder so he was hanging on with one foot out in the air as he wrenched his hand free and gestured angrily to the situation in general. “We can’t turn the countdown off and I can’t get their gate open from here!”

“We could go–”

“Up the ladder to the control room and try to turn it off from there?! Yeah, I thought of that! Except we don’t read the language so I can’t use the computer! Or what, go get help?! The countdown is only two minutes long, we’ll never make it in time! For once in your life just accept that I might know more about a situation than you!”

She leaned back on the ladder, too stung to answer, and he took the opportunity to get another word in before she could come up with one of her trademark sarcastic retorts: “Practically every problem we’ve had tonight is because you didn’t listen to me! I’m not some baby-faced ensign anymore, Mariner; like I’ve stopped an evil supercomputer, I’ve gotten phase-cloned, hell I’ve died! Twice! I mean what is it going to take for you to treat me like an equal, do I have to go f–”

He cut himself off just in time, huffing and turning back to the panel with an angry shake of his head, but Mariner winced. She knew what he’d been about to say, and fighting in a war wasn’t something she even wanted to imagine happening to her best friend. “I just don’t get why you even asked me to come with you if you weren’t going to let me help,” he finished, frustrated. “And I hate feeling like my own best friend thinks I’m incompetent, okay? It really sucks.”

He continued trying to fix the sensor, leaving her feeling like absolute shit. He was clearly waiting for an answer; the problem was, Mariner had no idea how to reply. Obviously she couldn’t tell him the true truth, because she didn’t even know what the truth was. Her motives were still unclear, even to herself.

But…maybe she could tell him part of the truth.

“Look, it’s not that I think you're incompetent, Brad, I swear,” she began, voice pleading. “It’s just that– look, after you left for the Titan there was like, a hole in our little group, okay? We had to make do without you, I had to make do without you.”

“You’re seriously still mad about the Titan? I thought we were past that!”

“I’m not mad, Brad, I’m–” she took a deep breath, “I’m scared, okay?”

“What do you mean, scared of what?”

“Of being helpless if you leave again!”

The words echoed around the metallic chute, and Brad was so startled that he actually stopped and looked down at her for a moment. Mariner looked away, unable to meet his eyes. “I’d started relying on you, okay? And then you just– you just left. I don’t let myself rely on others very often, you know?” She squeezed her eyes shut in a cringe: “And I guess I’m…scared that if you leave again, I won’t be able to manage without you this time. Like I asked you here tonight because you’re my best friend, I always want you around, but I feel like I have to prove to myself I don’t need you around in case I lose you again and…ugh, it’s all twisted up in my head,” she groaned. “I’m sorry, it’s been so long since the Titan and I said I forgave you and I swear I meant it—I shouldn’t be putting all this on you again.”

There was a beat of silence, punctuated only by the continuing countdown of the timer, and then a rueful sigh. “Look—Mariner, I get it,” Boimler said, and she looked up in surprise. He’d gone back to trying to fix the panel and therefore wasn’t able to look at her, but the pinch in his brow looked more guilty now than angry. “I did leave you behind. But for what it’s worth, back then we’d only just become friends; I-I didn’t realize how much it would hurt you and I was…honestly, kind of scared too.”

“Wait, you were scared? Of what, of me?”

“Not really you, just of…I guess how close we’d gotten, in such a short amount of time,” he admitted, much to her surprise. “Mariner, I’ve never had a friend like you before, okay? Or Tendi or Rutherford, or even T’Lyn now—but especially you.”

Mariner swallowed, hard. A lump was growing in her throat, and she didn’t know why—or maybe she did, but she was afraid to admit it.

“For most of my life I told myself I didn’t need friends, because it made me feel better about not having any,” he continued. “Part of the reason I left for the Titan without saying goodbye, heck part of the reason I left at all was that I…I told myself it was time to rip off the bandaid, y’know, that this wasn’t going to last and I’d probably built it up in my head anyway. That there was no way someone like you was actually going to stay friends with me, so it was better to prioritize my career than let myself get any more attached to people who were just going to leave eventually.” He yanked his fingers back as the panel zapped him again, and then rubbed the back of his neck, wincing. “Friends come and go, but personal accomplishments are forever, right?”

“Brad–”

“I know, it was stupid. But my point is, that’s not going to happen again, okay?” he insisted, looking down at her. “If there’s one thing I learned from that whole disaster, it’s that I was way happier with you on the Cerritos than I was without you on the Titan. Even a shiny new ship and rank can’t really replace a whole best friend.” Mariner half-smiled despite herself. “So– is there anything I can do to prove to you that I’m staying put this time?”

“Hah. Believe me, Boims, if there was some way for you to fix my abandonment issues, I’d tell you.” She took a deep breath. “So I guess I’m just going to have to…take a leap of faith and trust you.”

“Yeah…yeah, sa–” His eyes suddenly shot wide as something occurred to him. “–Wait. Wait wait wait, a leap of faith! Mariner, that’s it!”

There was an uproar of applause as the Tam Vluhn concluded, and the couple was left panting for a moment, eyeing each other, before noticing their audience and quickly exiting stage right in a flutter of poppy-red.

As the applause died down, the band’s lead singer announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the anomaly is fast approaching.” It was true; people’s hair and clothes were rippling and floating gently as people moved, footsteps literally feather-light. “We have prepared a special rendition of a Terran classic piece for the event, so if you wish, please find your partner and take your place on the dance floor.”

The couples gathered as the lights dimmed; there was a fizzling, almost glittering feeling in the air. The human drummer waited a moment, as if timing out the exact second, and then pounded the beat into the snare. The crowd let out gasps and laughter as their feet drifted up off the dance floor, and the couples pulled each other close, clinging to each other in the sparkling night. The band, too, was lifting off from earth; the drummer gave a nod to the singer and hit the lick again as they and their instruments drifted upwards:

“Every time I think of you,

I feel a shot right through with a bolt of blue.

It’s no problem of mine, but it’s a problem I find,

Living a life that I can’t leave behind…”

“Anomaly reaching its peak; all instruments reporting,” the head scientist of the Lemaître called from the front of the astronomics center.

“Wow,” Tendi breathed, watching the screen; the planets were far closer than should have been possible, and the computer readings pouring over the side were off the charts, yet the two celestial bodies remained stable. The floor was giving little shudders under their feet as the ship compensated for the increasing gravity distortions. “It’s incredible.”

“Yeah,” Rutherford agreed softly. “It is.”

T’Lyn raised an eyebrow at them, and then glanced down. The two were standing so close that the backs of their hands were nearly brushing against each other. The Vulcan stifled the urge to raise the other eyebrow, considered her options, and decided to acknowledge that tonight, science would unfortunately have to take a back seat.

With a slight “stumble” on the floor’s next shudder, she nudged Tendi sideways; the hands collided and then interlaced, and the Orion and human looked at each other in surprise. As their eyes met, twin pink blushes arose on their cheeks.

“Apologies,” T’Lyn said dryly as she straightened up—not that either were paying her any attention.

“There’s no sense in telling me

The wisdom of the fool won’t set you free.

But that’s the way that it goes, and it’s what nobody knows,

Every day my confusion grows.”

The couple in the turbolift found themselves interrupted as their feet touched off from earth; in the pitch-darkness both let out noises of surprise and grabbed even tighter hold of each other, clinging together against the unexpected disruption. “The anomaly,” the admiral realized. “Carol, maybe we should–”

“Don’t you dare stop kissing me,” she ordered. She heard a chuckle and an “Aye, Captain” before he obliged.

[Instrumentals]

Back in the reactor chute, Mariner was staring at Boimler with the same look of disbelief he usually gave her crazy plans, clinging to the ladder as her hair floated around her. “You seriously want to jump out over a running recombinator?! Are you crazy?!”

“It should work,” he said, sounding far less certain than she would have liked. “In theory.”

Mariner looked out over the charging machine. It let out a violent blue-white crackle. “Can’t we just, like, drop a shoe or something?” she suggested weakly.

“Even if they could see it from over there they, might not realize our point until it’s too late. If we jump they definitely will.” At her hesitation he urged: “Mariner, I know what I’m doing, alright? This is gonna work!"

She looked back at his desperate face. “And if this doesn’t work?” she demanded. “You want our deaths on your conscience, too?”

“If this doesn’t work,” he said firmly, “then there’s no one I’d rather be turned into an atom smoothie with than you.”

He held out a hand to her. She looked down at it, and then back up into his eyes. "Trust me," Brad insisted.

Mariner hesitated, and then sighed. “Ugh, dammit, that is so not fair, using my big epiphany against me like that,” she groaned, and then grabbed his hand—and jumped.

“Every time I see you falling,

I get down on my knees and pray.

I’m waiting for that final moment, you

Say the words I can’t say…”

The momentum of the action carried them out away from the ladder; years of training took over and the two lieutenants flattened out into the starburst formation, their free hands fumbling and then linking together, fingers interlacing as they spun in the low gravity. For one brief moment they hung, suspended, over the crackling generator, the countdown and their hearts pounding in their ears.

[ Beat.]

And then, Mariner realized, they were drifting upwards. She let out a whoop of delight and Boimler crowded out a “Yes!” as below (above?) them, the Ferengi thieves caught onto the idea and themselves leapt from the platform tunnel with the case in-hand, their own momentum carrying them towards the ceiling.

As the thieves cleared the red safety line, the countdown timed out and the recombinator lit up with a brilliant white light and the roar of a thousand freight trains; crackling blue and yellow bolts of energy erupted out of the bottom of the chute as even the air inside the chamber seemed to disintegrate in a static fizz. It was a dazzling, and ultimately harmless, fireworks display as the four of them were pulled towards the ceiling; Boimler grinned triumphantly at her, and Mariner found herself smiling sheepishly back, their hair whipped around by the wind and the light dancing in their eyes as they drifted safely skywards.