Let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court.
- William Shakespeare, King Richard the Second
"Ow! Watch it, will you?!?"
"Stop being such a big baby, West," grumbled Max, but her voice lacked its usual bite. In fact, West wondered if he hadn't detected an actual hint of compassion buried beneath the prickly crust.
Outside the Rocinanté's cockpit windows, the stars shone peacefully, and in the far distance, the outlying streamers of the Briar Patch could just be discerned. Whoever had been chasing them down on Serenity had been left behind when they'd taken off, and so far there was no sign of pursuit here in orbit. Neither West nor Max thought that would last very long.
Inside, West had his shirt off and was squirming in the pilot seat of the Rocinanté facing the rear of the cockpit where Max Vasser stood leaning over him, cleaning his wounds. The explosions in the old graveyard had cut his face and forearms in a dozen places where the flying stone chips had struck, and the disruptor beam that had grazed his arm had left a long streak of ruined and charred flesh along his left upper arm.
Lying on the copilot seat was the strange, black object, apparently built by the Ancients, which the pair had recovered from Claude Vasser's grave.
"It's a good thing you've got this old surplus Starfleet medical equipment," Max was saying. She applied an anabolic protoplaser to West's disruptor burn and watched it melt away, then swept a dermal regenerator over the area.
As she worked, she couldn't help but notice the signs of old scars all over West's upper body. His back was a roadmap of faint, white, crisscrossing furrows and ridges. She wondered what this man had been through in his life to have earned so much punishment and physical abuse.
A small, round tattoo on the small of his back caught her eye. It looked like a spiral bisected by several straight lines, but from the angle he was sitting she couldn't make out any details.
After she was done with the arm wound, she turned her attention to the cuts on his face. "Hold still so I can clean these out, unless you enjoy infections."
"Ow!"
"Oh shut up. Why don't you think of something else to take your mind off it," suggested Max. She leaned over him and resumed her ministrations.
West tried diverting his thoughts towards other subjects -- the latest Major League Springball scores from Bajor -- but suddenly and unexpectedly found himself with a new dilemma. As Max leaned over him, her long chestnut hair fell around his face. Her scent filled his nostrils and he quickly became intoxicated by her nearness. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the sensation.
He slipped his hand around her and planted it on her firm behind, then gave it a little squeeze.
The blinding slap that resounded through the cockpit was like a thunderclap, and the atomic red heat from the glowing handprint on West's face could have lit a small village for a week.
"I see you're feeling your old self again, West," growled Max. She'd taken a step backwards, though in the small cockpit she couldn't go far, but the glare in her eyes was more than enough to dissuade West from attempting any sort of suave follow-up. "I think for your sake it might be a real good idea to take me back down to Serenity so I can pick up my shuttle. It's still sitting out in the Cairn Hills where I abandoned it to come with you," she said.
West rubbed his smarting cheek and couldn't quite suppress a rueful grin. It had been worth it. Out loud though, he said, "That's probably a real bad idea. Those goons who were shooting at us--"
"At you," corrected Max.
"--probably blew the hell out of your shuttle," continued West ignoring Max's interruption. "And even if they didn't, I'm sure they're just waiting for you to return and pick it up. You wouldn't stand a chance."
"I can take care of myself, West," snapped Max testily. "I don't need advice from a scruffy, two-bit smuggler."
West's face darkened at Max's slanderous abuse but he kept his temper. She didn't know all the facts after all. "Not even your esper skills can save you from a dozen carefully concealed snipers with disruptor rifles, because that's the minimum you'd run into if you went back now."
"Yeah, about that..." said Max suspiciously. "You obviously know a lot more than you've told me. Just who were those guys back at the graveyard? What do they have to do with my father?"
West sighed. He stood and picked up his shirt and began putting it back on. "You won't like the truth," he said in a low voice without meeting Max's gaze.
"Tell me anyway," replied Max. Her tone left no room for compromise. She folded her arms stubbornly across her chest and waited impatiently as West went through the motions of buttoning up his shirt.
When he finally finished straightening his attire, he said, "I didn't actually see them in the dark, but I recognized their accents as they shouted to one another. They were Orions."
"Orions?!? Orion is on the other side of the galaxy! What are Orions doing here on this nowhere backwater planet? And that still doesn't explain how my father's involved."
West waved his hands to stop Max's torrential objections. "Those weren't just any Orions. You've just been informally introduced to the Orion Syndicate."
"Well that's just great," snapped Max. "As if we need another group of petty thugs in this sector. The Son'a, the Mullurans, the Breen, the Nausicaans weren't enough; now we can add Orion Pirates to the list!"
"This is going to take forever if you keep interrupting me," snipped West.
Max looked like she was going to continue her tirade, but thought better of it and shut her mouth. She'd save the rest for later.
West bent down and picked up the Ancient device from the copilot's seat and held it between himself and Max, turning it slowly. The faintly luminous lettering on its side shimmered in and out of view, always seeming to be hovering just on the edge of perception.
"Do you have any idea what this is? What it represents?" he asked.
Max shrugged. "Beyond the fact that it has Ancient script on it? No, and I don't really care."
West shook his head in disapproval of Max's attitude. "It's the power of the universe! Power beyond the dreams of gods! The Ancients understood. Six billion years ago, they knew the answers. The secrets of existence are locked away in this box -- the very Fires of Creation!" His voice had risen in pitch and fervor throughout and he cast a long covetous gaze at the thing in his hand. "I've spent my life looking for this," he continued softly, almost to himself. He caressed the inky black slab with his eyes as he continued to turn it around and around in his hand. "It cost me a lot... and it cost your father more."
Max frowned. She wasn't sure if she liked what she saw in West's eyes or heard in his voice. A change had come over the man since he'd picked up the black box -- a darkness, as if the shadowy aura of the object was infusing itself into his soul. A sudden chill ran its icy fingers up her spine. What are you talking about, West?" she demanded, but her voice came out a lot thinner than she intended.
West turned his stare from the Ancients' device to the woman in front of him. "I was in Starfleet Intel in those days. Me and--" West stole a glance at Max's uneasy expression and chose his next words carefully. "--my 'partner' were assigned to a top secret project to search for and recover technology left over from the Ancients or other antiquarian super-races. We managed to bring back a few Preserver artifacts, even a Slaver stasis box, but this..." he hefted the box in his hand. "This was the Holy Grail. We'd heard rumors about devices like this for years but none of them ever panned out.
"Then one day we were approached by a representative of a certain covert organization. They called themselves 'Section 31'."
"Never heard of them."
"Of course not," replied West. A weariness crept into his voice as he recounted his experiences with the nefarious group. "They're a shadow organization. Not even the uppermost levels of Starfleet brass know about them. They operate far above the law, answer to no one, taking it upon themselves to safeguard the Federation by any means necessary, and if that means breaking a few rules, well... the end justifies the means in their book." He looked at the Ancient device in his hand as if seeing it for the first time, and this time Max saw loathing in his eyes. The sinister aura in his eyes had gone. West tossed the thing back onto the copilot's seat.
"Anyway, the recruiter wanted us to go on a dangerous mission to recover an Ancient artifact of unbelievable power, and all we had to do was join their little club."
"Why did they want you?"
"My rugged good looks, why else? How should I know? They saw something in me and my partner that they thought they could use and this was supposed to be a test or something."
"What did you do?" asked Max. She'd forgotten her earlier skepticism and had become entranced by West's tale. "You didn't join them, did you?" For reasons she didn't want to admit to herself, she didn't want to think that West would ever willingly go along with an organization like the one he had described. It went against everything that the Federation stood for.
West thought about the question. "I can't say I wasn't tempted," he finally admitted. "To have Starfleet's resources at my disposal with none of those pesky restrictions Starfleet imposes -- like the Prime Directive... But in the end -- no, I walked away. My uh... 'partner' chose otherwise. We had a terrible argument and it ended our friendship. I never saw him again."
West lapsed into silence and Max stared with knit brow at the floor. After a while, she broke the silence in an uncharacteristically quiet voice. "My father didn't work on a freighter, did he?" She sounded resigned to believe anything West's claimed at this point.
"No," said West. "He was my partner. He went to work for Section 31 looking for this Ancient artifact."
"I see," said Max simply. "And the Orions? How do they fit into all this?"
"Section 31 weren't the only ones hot on the trail of this device. The Orion Syndicate had gotten wind of it through their intelligence network. Whoever got the prize first would wield the most powerful energy source in the Galaxy!"
"And my father found it," said Max. "Twenty years ago..."
"So it would seem," replied West. "And it also seems the Syndicate never stopped looking for it. What I don't understand is why he chose to keep it and hide it. Why didn't he turn it over to Section 31?"
Max let out a gigantic breath, then brought up both hands to rub at her eyes. "This is just too much," she said. "So much still doesn't make sense. I'm so tired... I need some shuteye -- some time to sort all this out."
"Take the bunk in my cabin," offered West. I've got a hammock back in the hold."
At the mention of going to bed on board the Rocinanté, Max's expression turned suspicious again. West saw it and headed off her objections with quick reassurances. "The door's got a lock, and besides, I'm a gentleman."
Max looked into his eyes and saw only genuine sincerity there. She nodded agreement and stepped through the cockpit hatch back into the short, bent corridor leading aft to the hold and the ship's single, small cabin, leaving West alone in the cockpit with the Ancient's black box.
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