“Chance?” Ghorqan sounded worried. I didn’t blame him, I was too.

Up until now, I’d had it easy. With the database of knowledge — no experiences, no memories, I was entirely ‘me’ — at my proverbial fingertips, I’d mastered my Mobility Platform in moments, had taken no real time at all to learn to pilot my humanoid avatar, although granted fine motor controls and such had taken longer, and had generally been able to overcome most if not all difficulties presented in record time. I’d even become a shuttle as if I was born one… discounting that I kind of had been, but still! I had only a tangential understanding of the hardships Winter had gone through as he began to write our species’ instincts at one-to-one human speed, he would never have believed it then if he’d seen me now.

This, though. This was something new. Sure, tactics and whatnot, I could pick out cold facts, but living it? Experiencing it? No database could prepare one for such a thing.

I moved to my klingon childhood friend and pulled him down against a boulder, aware that if almost any of a thousand, thousand different things went wrong in the next few hours, I might never hold him again. I shook myself, I couldn’t think that way. I turned to the mission at hand.

With luck, even if everything went sideways, now that they’d set off whatever-it-was, their own sensors would be too busy to know we two were here-here until it was too late. Okay, hope that is so, tweak things back at Shuttle Chance and go straight to plan B.

Maybe I had a chance… get everyone onboard, Picard Maneuver my way to a game of hide and seek until Buran realizes something is wrong? Cause some sort of solar or similar disruption so Buran puts the pedal to the metal? Think, Chance! You’re a Jovian! I clocked up as high as I could go on both my Cores, ran some scenarios. I was just too young to know how to deal with this! It wasn’t that there were pirates — Orion, from their comms chatter — but that they could injure or even kill any of us faster than I could deal with an entire gunship in orbit. I’d come out alright, but… no, I’d not be alright if my friends weren’t.

Okay, plan B is ‘do your best and improvise’. Start working on plans C through Z.

“We’re under attack,” I said coolly to Ghorqan as I started transporting all the children onboard. “Get down, stay out of view. I’ll get us last. It’ll be tight but I’ll have us all out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s…”

The three fighter craft rocketed overhead, the signatures I’d picked up, they were here. They targeted the shuttle and fired warning blasts that had the children screaming and scattering. Absolute bastards!

“I see them!” he hissed, changing the grip on his dagger. I saw his muscles bunch up long before he knew he was going to try to use them, and I threw myself at him and we rolled into the long grass as the three fightercraft came in for a landing.

They were firing bloody phaser blasts as warning shots, at children! I was going to summarily disassemble these very naughty people into their component atoms if it was the last thing I did!

I’d thought I had more time! I wouldn’t be able to get everybody on board before they had control of the ground, which meant I couldn’t make orbit in time to have a hope of avoiding the gunship and its fighters on the way up and out. Damn it! Okay, stall, stall… be a good Starfleet cadet. Stall for time, cooperate, hope they want us alive rather than dead, keep calm… it all felt so wrong. I felt sick. I couldn’t get everyone onboard and the shields up in time, so instead I had to lock out the shuttle’s controls and leave my classmates vulnerable to the advancing pirates. I was a monster. I hated myself. Even now, I could make a run for it, I’d probably be fine. I’d definitely be fine, I was still onboard Buran!

I mentally snorted. The only reason to bring up that whole idea was to ridicule it. I could never do that.

Plan B it was then, make sure they can’t take the assets and hope they’ll stick around long enough to give me time to think up something clever for plan C and onwards. They’ll want the shuttle and the kids, but they’ll settle for just the kids if they don’t think they can get away with anything else, so what could be better than inviting them to steal me twice?

Biting my lip, I set on a course of action.

***

Thollir tried very, very hard to quiet his beating heart. It had been easier than they’d expected. It would be more profitable than expected. It would also bring them so much more trouble than expected. But so much more profitable!

“Oh, beautiful, beautiful! Pretty little boys and girls, you’ll all go for a very nice price!” Madrav stalked around the crying, sobbing group of children as the pirates kept them in a loose group in the center of the clearing.

“You bastards! You’ll not touch—”

Madrav slammed the butt of her rifle into John’s head and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

“Leave him alone!” screamed Megan, running to his side and checking his pulse. “Leave us all alone! They’re children! Can’t you see they’re just children!”

“Oh I can see that my lovely,” said Jurrah, sharing a wicked grin with Madrav, as he slicked back his hair. “Children are worth so much more, are so much more desirable. Captain, beam us all up. I’ve done a headcount, they’re all here. Twenty eight children, two adults. It matches the manifest.”

“Well done, Lisks Jurrah, Madrav, Fentok. Twenty eight little calves, one cow and one bull, fat and ready for market. Prepare to beam up.”

“Twenty… twenty eight? No! There are—” Megan looked up, eyes wide, as she began to stand.

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“Silence!” Madrav slapped her, and the woman cried out as she fell, spitting blood. Whatever else she was going to say was lost as the transporter beam engaged.

***

Vizzok and Sellus immediately unholstered their disruptors as their transporter sequence completed. They looked around the deserted clearing, then finally holstered their weapons once more. The three fighters had taken off already, heading for a swift docking with the Bloodied Dagger.

“Looks clear,” said Vizzok. “Let’s grab the shuttle and get out of here.” He radioed the ship. “All clear Captain, we’re proceeding to take the shuttle.”

“Acknowledged. Our cargo is safe and secure in the holding pens. Docking bay will be ready when you are. Be ready quickly. Razzan out.”

“It’ll take a while,” Sellus replied, poking her head into the back of the vehicle. “Standard Starfleet lockouts.” She took a device from her pocket. “Not that long though.”

The pair walked into the shuttle. Vizzok headed for the cockpit, sat down, and started punching up various controls. Sellus joined him, placed the limpet-like device on one of the consoles and turned it on. Immediately the dim displays brightened.

“Ohh yes, this is pretty tasty. Older hull, but she’s had a complete refit. Newest transwarp nacelles,” Vizzok whistled. “Still uses a standard warp core of course, but I’ll bet… yup, it’s encrypted but there’s the plans for what looks like the Starfleet Pulse Singularity Drive in here. Think you can break into their database?”

“I can try. First though, I wanna get this bird off the ground,” Sellos said, tapping at the screens. Giving a grunt of annoyance, she switched to a different bank of displays.

“I can probably get impulse going in a few minutes, that’ll get us anywhere we need to be.” Vizzok set to unlocking the systems, with some slow amount of success.

“It’ll take me about that long to get any homing beacons or other comms offline, we don’t want Mommy finding us, do we?” murmured Sellos.

“Mommy?” Vizzok raised an eyebrow.

“The mothership,” Sellus replied, as she headed to the back of the crew compartment. “It’s a Federation ship, they have… whatever. Help me get the relays exposed. I need to get into the isolinear arrays.”

The pair grabbed some tools and worked at an internal hull plate until it popped off to show some relay linkages and optronic pathways behind. Just as Sellus switched some chips around, there was a rather quiet noise, like vweeeep.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

“Yep, where is… there it is again!”

Vweeep.

This time there was a brief clatter, too. Vizzok turned and peered, confused, at the replicator. “It’s spitting out little boxes? What did you do?”

“Me? Nothing. Must be just some program the officers had running.”

There was another short vweeep and another box appeared.

“Computer, halt replicator program.”

The computer blip-beep-buzzed its usual semi-melodic chirps and the replicator went dark.

“What do you think it is?” Sellos asked. Vizzok opened the box, and saw three long, tubular objects made of apparently some semi-organic material in bright, pleasing colors.

“I think these are Terran party favors,” he replied. He picked up the tube nearest to him, and pulled it apart. Snap! Something inside it exploded and some things fell out of one end of the tube as the other end ripped off. As he bent to pick them up, Sellos grabbed the third and pulled her own crackling tube apart, then pulled out the objects inside.

“There is some sort of ridiculous hat,” she said, ripping it apart. “And a piece of paper, and some sort of… object?”

“What does your piece of paper say? Mine has a nonsensical verse on it.”

“Why did the yeti not go to… the Christmas party? Because he had snowbody to go with.” Sellos furrowed her brow. “I do not get it.”

“I do not understand my piece of paper either. What is a mistletoad? Is it some Terran animal? What about your trinket? Mine is a… gold? Ring, with a large diamond in it. Why are we being given useless baubles wrapped in exploding cardboard?”

“I have a model Federation starship, it is probably made out of silver. Most peculiar.”

As one, they peered at the third crackling tube. A short ‘snap!’ later, and a piece of paper and a miniature PADD were picked up between the pair of them.

“This piece of paper is even more useless. It merely says ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’. What of the miniature PADD, is it at least functional?”

Sellos peered at it closer. “It does appear to be functional. However it only displays one small message… please read me very carefully, I am a distraction.”

“What?”

“A dist—!”

It was at that point that Vizzok found out what the sound of one hand clapping was as a petite, seemingly human hand attached to a petite seemingly human arm slapped him so hard he spun around twice before sinking to the ground like a wet towel.

Sellos for her part had the distinctly unpleasant but brief experience of having a klingon impact her at a flat run before slamming their head into hers. She slumped to the ground, rode down by Ghorqan as he punched her again for good measure.

“Woah, woah, woah, nice shootin’ there Tex, she’s out,” said Chance, gently but firmly preventing her friend from landing another Klingon Haymaker Special.

“I am a distraction?” Ghorqan asked, raising one eyebrow. He put his arm down.

“It worked didn’t it?” Chance grinned. Ghorqan couldn’t help but grin back. “Now, let me get this right… attention, attention… she sells sea shells on the sea shore… Peter Piper picked… Oh there we go.”

Ghorqan startled as his friend suddenly sounded like the female Orion pirate. “What is the plan?”

“Well, Mommy would turn me into a toaster if I suggested this, but she’s not here, so my plan is to get onboard the pirates’ ship, find out why I didn’t see them earlier, signal Mommy, take over their vessel, capture the pirates, save the day and then stop them spacing everybody. Not necessarily in that order.”

“How many do we have to kill, do you think?”

“Hopefully none. If we kill someone, they kill someone. Right now they want us alive so they can sell us off. Think of it as playing on hard mode. You’re good enough to play on hard mode, right?”

Ghorqan narrowed his eyes. “Are you being sneaky and human again?”

“Uh huh, it’s working too.”

“Tell me more of this plan before I regret it.”

“First of all, they don’t know we’re coming…”