A group of assassins attack the USS Enterprise-C and USS Admonitor; the spy is once again called into question.

SummaryEdit

Chapter OneEdit

The USS Enterprise-C has entered orbit over Betazed. Lianna Young is still adamant that this is a bad idea. Shield tells her, in private, that he needs to show some kind of good will to his father's widowed lover, and the only thing he can think of would be taking her here for an extended leave of absence to see her counterpart.

Ten minutes later, with K'hallA at the helm, Edward Shield goes to the transporter pad to bid Liin farewell on her leave of absence. She says nothing but only gives him ice-cold glares and deposits her few belongings onto the transporter pad despite his offers to aid her. However, she is quite adamant in making certain that the lock of Leo's hair is always present whenever the captain looks at her. Just as the transporter beam washes over her, she flips her captain the finger before dematerializing.

A few hours later, Edward Shield is having an inner crisis. The memories of what he did to his father keep crawling back into his head, along with strange whisperings from the "voice". The voice acts both as a conscience and as a tormentor, making Shield unsure which words it says are true and which are simply lies. He begins to wonder if he is losing his mind.

At that very moment, the ship falls under attack!

Chapter TwoEdit

An unmarked ship came out of warp and then exploded right between the Admonitor and the Enterprise. Upon returning to the bridge of his ship, Shield asks for a damage report. The damage to the Enterprise was wide-spread but superficial. The Admonitor, however, took the brunt of the explosion dead-on to the Bridge and saucer section. Shield hails the USS Admonitor over and over, but gets no response: their communications array was damaged, so they won't know for some time if anyone lived or died.

Meanwhile, Loghri detects one hundred-twenty unknown life-signs on the ship. Shield tells Rookwood and Loghri to deal with the situation, while he tries to contact the Admonitor again. The two find exactly what the life-signs belong to: one hundred-twenty Gorn assassins who were beamed onto the Enterprise-C when the exploding ship temporarily interrupted the shields. Single-handedly, Loghri charges into the lines of the Gorn, swatting them like flies. One hundred-nineteen are killed within one hour, and one wounded Gorn is taken prisoner.

Rookwood reports to Shield on what has just happened (which there was absolutely no need, considering that the noise of Loghri's epic battle could be heard throughout the ship), to which Shield tells her to remind him to award Loghri the Pike Medal of Valor when this is over with. He then attempts for, what some call, the 100th time to contact the USS Admonitor. He is about to announce the ship and its crew as KIA...

Finally, some static comes on the audio channel. Nox's voice can be very faintly heard saying some profanity in his greeting to them, and informs them that they have some very serious problems.

Chapter ThreeEdit

Shield, Loghri, K'hallA, Rookwood and their prisoner beam onto the USS Admonitor. They see already that the damage was quite substantial. All the Bridge crew save for Wess are in a coma, including Lianna Young. Nox only sustained severe burns and lacerations, but nothing his Romulan biology couldn't handle. Y'Radu, on the other hand, was closest to the explosion and therefore is also in a coma as well. As the proxy-commander of the USS Admonitor, Nox gives his assessment of the situation. K'hallA says that she believes it to be espionage, the work of a spy on one of the ships leaking information to an outside source who then hired assassins to kill them.

Shield says that Sanders may have been in on this, but the fact that the Federation has been out of touch with the Gorn since 2267. Nox asks Loghri permission to interrogate the Gorn in order to learn what he might about his mission. Meanwhile, Shield and Rookwood head to the Bridge to help affect repairs on the Admonitor.

After some brutal interrogations with the Gorn, named Krall who seems to be enjoying this little bout of torture - which he considers "fun" - Nox resorts to the only weapon he has available: using T'Mar's katra to mind-meld with Krall. After receiving many disturbing images, he witnesses an elderly man in a Starfleet admiral's uniform making a deal with the captain of the Gorn assassin coven.

Chapter FourEdit

K'hallA, meanwhile, who hasn't taken to anything just yet, is currently searching for the spy. Just then, a revelation comes to her: the Betazoid Liin was beamed off the ship just before the suicide ship exploded, and Wess is the only human crew-member of the Admonitor who remained unharmed by the explosion (this in addition to what she could gather from some of the crew who mentioned his pro-Federation sentiments), making them, in her mind, suspects.

She beams down onto Betazed with a tricorder and her bat'leth and goes searching for Liin. Upon finding her, she denounces her for the traitor she is and challenges her to a fight to the death. Liin insults the Klingons, their rituals, their honor and even insults Kahless, which sets K'hallA into a fit of rage. The two fight, during which Liin steals K'hallA's bat'leth and tries to fight her with it.

Armed only with a d'k tahg, K'hallA is still a fierce opponent. In the fight that insues, both deal and receive many blows from each other. Liin taunts the Klingon for marrying a weak, snot-nosed brat, saying that his step-brother will be a greater man than he ever was, and will continue on in his father's noble work. As the battle progresses, Liin sees that she can't win this fight fairly, so she stuns both of K'hallA's legs with her phaser. When asked why she didn't just kill her, Liin says that she wanted to bring her broken corpse back to the false captain as proof of her death and as a trophy to her new lover.

Liin raises K'hallA's bat'leth up above her head, ready to bring the blade down into the chest of its owner, when a flash of transporter energy passes between them: too late, Liin has already brought the blade down...right into the stomach of the person who beamed directly in between them to take the blow...

Y'Radu.

Chapter FiveEdit

Weak and bleeding from the explosion, and now mortally wounded from Liin's death-stroke, Y'Radu tries to fight. With her she has Nox's shot-gun, which she is successful at landing one hit on Liin. But its only a light flesh-wound, and Y'Radu has lost strength to fire again. Liin limps away, swearing that she will finish K'hallA off later. With her last dying breath, Y'Radu says that the reason she saved K'hallA was that Nox had told her everything about her, so she figured that she would want to save her for him to do with him as she saw fit. Y'Radu says that she has no regrets, having lived a good, long life, but only wishes she could have met her father before she died. K'hallA gives Y'Radu the Klingon death ritual, saying that, despite their racial prejudices, Kahless would be honored to have such a warrior in Sto-vo-kor.

She beams back to the USS Admonitor and gives Nox the bad news. Upon presenting to him his shot-gun that Y'Radu took, she says that she was honored to have Y'Radu, for what short time it was. Nox simply nods and departs to his quarters. Afterwards, she tells Shield that Liin was the spy. Upset over his own foolishness in letting her go (with all the information Sanders could ever want on the crew), he finds satisfaction that she won't be able to spy on them again.

Meanwhile, Beverly Howard is so busy with the many injuries that she does not notice Yare'ma Liin walk into Sick Bay. Secretly, Liin takes an in-vitro canister and, using a hypospray, extracts something from inside her. This she then injects into Lianna Young, saying that it is both vengeance for the treatment given to her by her counterpart and irony that, someone who hates men, should have to bear a man's child (whom she claims will be a male child as well).