It had been about twelve hours since the three of them had been separated. Jenara had no idea where either Jenna or Wallace had been taken; something was blocking her telepathy. The water did taste rather unusual; she figured that the Niprons were using some sort of drug to inhibit her telepathic ability.
The cell, though spartan, had come equipped with a bathroom. The bathroom held an old-fashioned flush toilet and water shower which, though not exactly clean, were at least private. As far as Jenara could tell there were no video monitors anywhere in the cell or the bathroom that she could see.
She'd tried to shapeshift into something small enough to make it through the plumbing but encountered several filtration systems before she'd even made it out of the cell block. There was no way even her Tanzaran shapeshifting ability could shift her to a size small enough to pass through the filters.
Jenara was becoming frustrated and began pacing back and forth within her cell. As she paced, she noticed something. The closer she got to the door, the more a feeling of utter ennui overcame her. As she retreated from the door, the feeling passed. She'd read about enhanced empathic ability being present in certain Betazoid-human hybrids who weren't possessed of full telepathy. They haven't shut me down after all, she thought. I can read the guard outside the door!
She stayed by the door and began working on the guard, trying to derive any information she could get from him. The guard gave nothing away, which Jenara expected: he had nothing to give away. At one point, another more imposing but equally bored presence appeared. The guard's watch commander. Still, nothing useful.
A few minutes later, though, Jenara picked up a very different presence: malevolent, angry, almost sadistic. An interrogator, she thought. Quickly she turned on the shower and shifted into a small mass of chewing gum on the floor of the cell.
The interrogator entered the cell. Jenara, in her chewing gum persona, was revolted at the emotions she picked up from the interrogator. The interrogator heard the shower going, but for some reason did not enter the bathroom. Jenara suppressed an oomf as she adhered herself to the bottom of the interrogator's boot.
"The prisoner is not in this cell!" the interrogator berated the guard. "What have you done with her?"
"I've done nothing, sire! She was here when I got here! I've stayed outside this door at all times. There's no way she could have gotten out!"
"You moron! She's a shapeshifter! Sound the alarm!"
Immediately a phalanx of Nipron guards appeared in the hallway. "One of the Federation prisoners has escaped! Find her and return her to me alive!" the interrogator ordered.
Jenara chuckled as she detached herself from the interrogator's boot and waited for the hallway to clear. Then, shifting into the form of another guard, she began her search for Jenna and Wallace...
Jenna found herself in a large transparent tube. She was standing on a metal platform inside the tube. She looked up, and saw another metal plate immediately above her head. Jenna began to beat on the inner walls of the tube.
"I wouldn't even waste my energy if I were you," the Nipron interrogator warned her. "Those walls are of transparent duralloy--not even a phaser at full power can penetrate them."
"Up yours," Jenna said. "You think you can keep me here for long?"
"Oh, rest assured, your comrades have no knowledge of where you're at. And don't try shapeshifting either. You do, and this will happen..." the interrogator said as he turned a rheostat. Electricity crackled through the tube and through Jenna. Jenna screamed as the air in the tube glowed red.
"In your units, that's 25,000 volts. No amperes, though. I can increase the current if I so choose. You would do well to start answering my questions."
"I'll never answer any of your questions no matter how much voltage you put through me!"
The interrogator turned the rheostat again. Even more electricity shot through the tube. "That was 35,000 volts," he said as Jenna screamed again. "Now, tell me, what is your ship doing in this sector?"
"You know what you can do?" she said as she caught her breath, her voice filled with anger. But before she could answer they hit her again with another current of electricity. The pain was searing and it took her to her knees as the charge ended.
"What is your ship doing here?" he asked again, a bit more impatiently.
"Go $&%# yourself!" Jenna spat as she steeled herself for the next bolt of electricity that shot through her. She screamed out in pain again. "Bastards!" she yelled at them as they completely their current cycle.
"Answer the question and the pain will stop, Commander."
"Why my ship is here?" she said. "It's here to... plant appleseeds... No... It's here looking for intelligent life and we didn't find any!"
With that she got hit again, more painfully than the others and it seemed to last longer as well. By the time they stop their energy current, she was almost in tears, but she wasn't about to show it. She kept her face as straight as possible.
"Do you wish to continue this game, Commander Wolf?"
"I'll play it as long as you like, you bastards, I won't tell you anything."
"Oh yes... you will..."
"You don't know me very well," Jenna replied, with an evil look in her eyes and the blood boiling in her veins.
"I see," Johnny said. "Do we have any idea where they're being held?"
"It's likely that Commodore Wallace has been separated from the others. He may not even be on this planet," Lataro replied. "We've not received any specific terms for their release from the Niprons so it's possible they may already be dead."
"Not likely," Captain Sharpe interjected. "The Niprons -- or their Mulluran handlers -- would have derived some propaganda value out of their executions. For Wallace at least we could have expected a show trial and a public execution for 'war crimes'. The others would have been on the undercard leading up to the main event. They're still being held and interrogated."
Johnny had a sick feeling that Wallace may have been on one of the Mulluran ships he'd destroyed aboard the Vanguard II. "How about those ships I intercepted in the system Oort cloud?"
Lataro shook his head. "They were part of the planetary defense picket. We've been tracking them for three days and never once have they gotten closer than six light-hours to Nipron III. You can count on the Mullurans responding, however."
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. "We'd better vacate the system as quickly as possible then," Sharpe said. "They're expendable at this point."
"We're not leaving our people behind," Lataro responded sharply. Johnny nodded.
"With all due respect, sir, two of those 'expendables' are my wife and one of my best friends," Johnny replied. "I will go down there alone and unarmed if necessary but I am getting them out!"
"Now you wait a minute, Mister--" Sharpe said, but Johnny had already left. "Chee, you son of a bitch, get back here now!"
"Let him go," Lataro interrupted. "If there's anyone who can pull off that kind of a mission, he's it. Johnny's bitch-slapped both the Obsidian Order and Section 31; the Niprons are amateurs. If they don't kill him, our people will be having dinner in the mess hall tonight."
Jenara had made herself inconspicuous by shifting into one of the small insects she had found in her cell. By crawling along the baseboards of the walls, she was the next best thing to invisible as she attempted to find Jenna Wolf. She heard guards grumbling about the food, making obscene comments about their commanding officer, and discussing liberty call, but nothing about another alien prisoner. They're either incredibly disciplined or entirely uninterested in their work.
The insect sensing organs she'd generated for herself were hundreds of times more powerful than those she used as a humanoid. The smell of ozone was extremely powerful and almost overwhelmed her. She could also see flashes in the ultraviolet. Ozone, UV radiation... someone's using a hell of a lot of electricity around here somewhere.
On a hunch, she followed the smell to its source. Tanzarans were susceptible to very little in the way of torture, but electrical shock was one of the few methods that would be productive. Of course, the way my luck has run on this mission it could just be a welding crew.
It wasn't a welding crew. It was a cell door guarded by two armed Nipron guards. Two, huh? she thought as she quickly formulated a plan.
In her insect form, she turned around and headed back to the main corridor, then shifted again.
The two guards didn't even have a chance to react as a saber-toothed cat from Earth's prehistory caught them unawares, driving its two powerful fangs into their necks and slashing their bodies open with its claws. She shifted back into humanoid form and grabbed the guards' rifles and gear.
Jenara fumbled and found a keycard, which opened the cell. The Nipron interrogator turned suddenly.
"Guard, I told you I was not to be distur--" he started to say before Jenara vaporized him with the guard's pulse rifle. She used the butt of the rifle to smash open the glass container holding Jenna.
"Are you okay?" she asked Jenna.
"Let's see... I've just been electrocuted almost continuously for the past three hours. Yes, I feel wonderful!" Jenna said sarcastically as she stepped out of the container. "Sorry, Lieutenant. Good work. Got another of those for me?" she asked. Jenara tossed her the rifle.
An alarm began to sound. "Okay, that means either someone's discovered the escape or someone's won the grand prize in the Nipron National Lottery," Jenna said. "Either way, we still have to find a way to contact the ship."
"The guards' communicators won't work; they're short-range, probably VHF radio. We need to find a main comm terminal."
"I don't suppose that they'll let us at one nicely if we turned into little green creatures with big yellow eyes and said 'E.T. phone home,' would they?" Jenna asked. Jenara replied with a blank expression, having not recognized the reference.
"I didn't think so. Okay, we do this the hard way."
Johnny beamed down inside a heavily guarded and fortified area identified as a possible candidate for the prison complex. He switched on his tricorder just long enough to detect two Tanzaran life signs. And close to a thousand Nipron life signs.
"Hmmm... 333 to 1. I've faced worse odds," Johnny said to himself quietly as the alarm sounded. He unhooked an infrared smoke grenade from his battle harness and activated it as he heard footsteps approach. The footsteps rounded the corner and began to come his way. Johnny threw the grenade and immediately the hallway was filled with green smoke. In addition to choking the Niprons' breathing gills, the smoke also obscured the infrared signature of Johnny's body heat. Johnny took his compression phaser rifle -- so much more advanced than the model he'd used aboard the Virgo until earlier this year -- and blasted six guards into the Nipron afterlife.
"Okay, the odds are now 331 to 1. Doing better already!" he said as he continued to make his way through the labyrinth.
The numbers were tipping significantly into the escape/rescue attempt's favor as Jenna and Jenara began working their way out of the cell block where they'd been held. Four guards dropped as the two Tanzarans concluded a minor firefight at the intersection of two corridors. They shifted into cheetahs and ran to the next concentration of guards. This worked three times before the guards caught on and began erecting barricades at every intersection.
"These guys learn fast!" Jenara said as she began to lay down suppressing fire at one of the barricades.
"Really? I hadn't noticed!" Jenna answered as she threw a gas grenade over the barricade. Choking tear gas enveloped the guards as the two Tanzarans came over the barricade and finished them off.
"Wait!" Jenara said as they began to move on to the next obstacle. "My telepathy is working again! Either the drugs are wearing off or this gas caused an interaction."
"Are you picking up anything?" Jenna asked. "I'm starting to sense something too -- a single human lifesign. Definitely not another prisoner."
"It's Johnny! He's here!" Jenara said triumphantly.
"I was beginning to think they forgot us," Jenna said.
"Switch your radio to Channel 38," Jenara said. "Johnny should be able to pick that up with his communicator with the modifications I'm sending him."
Rather than bother with the modifications, Johnny simply killed his 17th guard and took the guard's radio, switching it to Channel 38. "This is Johnny. I'm using the tricorder to triangulate your position from your signal." The tricorder beeped when the solution had been plotted. "Got it! Should be there shortly!"
<Good! Things have been a little rough here!> Jenara said.
"Any injuries? Have you located Commodore Wallace?" Johnny asked.
<Nothing permanent,> Jenna replied. <No, we haven't found Wallace. Our telepathy was just suppressed until recently but you're the only other friendly we've found in the facility.>
"My tricorder concurs. They must have moved him. Let's get you out and we'll worry about the rest later."
Wallace had, in fact, been rendered unconscious and moved to another facility on the other side of the planet several days earlier. The Niprons used a regularly scheduled commercial flight to avoid raising the suspicion of the Hornet, in synchronous orbit above the capital city. No one aboard the Hornet noted the departure of a routine diplomatic packet from the system; even if they had, the packet was so heavily shielded as to make the detection of any life signs on board impossible. Beyond that, intercepting and boarding a diplomatic packet was an unmistakable act of war, which the Hornet crew was not prepared to make at this point.
It was only a matter of 150 meters between Johnny and the two escapees. 150 meters and thirty guards who had also come to the same conclusion. The guards, however, had not come with fragmentation grenades. The corridor cleared quickly after two or three of those. Johnny rushed past the wounded Nipron guards, heedless of their suffering. The guards could be gotten to a hospital quickly. Whether or not the Niprons would have extended the same courtesy to their captives was at best debatable.
Jenara and Johnny embraced. "Let's save the homecoming for later and get out of here!" Jenna said.
"Chee to Hornet -- three to beam up. Have a medical team on standby."
"We were unable to find Commodore Wallace, sir," Johnny reported to Sharpe. "The Niprons must have moved him."
"More than likely," Sharpe said. "The recording you picked up from the Mulluran vessels was a message to the former Nausicaan owners of that cutter you, ah, appropriated. It appears to have been an agreement to transport Commodore Wallace to a Mulluran prison planet roughly five light-years from Mullura. The Nausicaans have been doing a gangbuster business with the Mullurans."
"I suspected as much. We captured a Mulluran officer alive at Hygar; he's back at SB901 awaiting interrogation. Any chance we could make an exchange -- Wallace for their 'advisor'?"
"It's a good idea, but not likely to happen. The Mullurans have already written their man off for dead, and Wallace is just too big a prize for them to let go easily just on rank alone. Unless you know of any Mulluran flag officers in custody, an exchange is out of the question."
"So we're going to have to get him ourselves," Johnny said.
"That would appear to be our only option. Fantastic piece of work you did on Nipron -- wouldn't have thought it possible myself," Sharpe said.
"Thank you, sir," Johnny replied, making the only acceptable response to praise from a superior officer.
"I will warn you only this once, Chee. I've read your record. I know what you're capable of, and how you ended up here. A bad break, but you're making the best of it. But no more hotdogging -- another stupid cowboy stunt like this rescue mission and you'll spend the rest of your career at Starbase 805 scraping paint from bulkheads!"
"Understood, sir."
Jenara held Adrianna as she slept and was greatly relieved. For a brief time, her daughter had been without her mother and father. Jenara was troubled by this, but knew that this was the life she had chosen and this was the life she was meant to lead. She looked down into her daughter's sleeping face and caressed it.
As Johnny came in and saw her, their gaze met and she smiled. Carefully, she stood up and carried Adrianna to her crib. As she continued to gaze down as her sleeping daughter, Johnny's hands tenderly gripped her shoulders. She leaded back against him. They were a family again. They were together... That's all that mattered in that moment of time.
Jenna was trapped in a glass tube. She couldn't get out not matter what she did. There was hardly room to move. She began to panic. She knew what was coming next. She could feel it coming. She could almost hear it... Just as she could feel the pain of the volts going through her, her eyes bolted open.
She was sitting on her couch. Angel was in her lap, curled up and purring. She took a deep cleansing breath and heard the music of Bach's Piano Concerto in F minor playing. She had looped it in an attempt to relax after her ordeal on Nipron. In fact, because of her interrogation, though she had strenuously objected, Dr. Redinium still felt it necessary to place her off duty for a couple of days to give her a chance to recover. But what was there to recover, she thought? She wasn't physically hurt, though she did ache a bit... Nothing a good anti-inflammatory couldn't stop. But as she touched her forehead she found it damp. The nightmare had been bad, she realized. Maybe he just wanted to give her time to process the events... Either way, she was sure she could still handle her job... And she wanted to make plans to find Commodore Wallace and get him out. If her treatment was any indicator as to how he might be treated then she knew it was imperative they get him out immediately... If only they even knew where he was... She sighed with frustration. She couldn't even help with this for a couple of days... She started out the porthole and into the darkness beyond as she stroked Angel's fur.
Suddenly, the door to her quarters opened. She knew who it would be before she turned to look. She smiled softly, trying to push her own concerns to the back of her mind.
"Hello, Tyrran, what brings you here?" she asked.
"Just checking on my sister... seeing how you are after your ordeal..." he replied.
"You mean after my shocking experience?" she smirked. "I'll be all right, I promise."
"You want me to catch you up on current affairs on the ship since you've been away?" he asked with a mischievous grin, his blue eyes glinting.
She smirked. "Sure!" she replied, "Enlighten me..."
His smile faded. "Jenna, are you really all right?" he asked, staring into her light brown eyes as he took a seat on the couch beside her.
"Well, besides being used as the filament in a light bulb, I'm fine," she smiled.
He touched her forehead and noted the dampness of her hair at her hairline. "Sure... Anything you want to talk about?"
"Tyrran, it was just a nightmare... They happen..." she replied, taking his hand in his.
"I just worry about you, that's all..."
"I know," she replied as she smiled gently and sighed. "But there are some things even you can't help with. Don't worry... I'll be all right." She tried to reassure him. Gently, she picked up Angel and moved him to the floor. "Since you're here would you like something to drink?"
"Sure," he replied with a smile knowing that for the moment he would get nothing more out of her. Whatever she was going through, she was going through alone.