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writesandramblings · 7 years ago

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The Captain’s Secret - p.4

“Fortune Favors the Brave”

A/N: We now have the name of Lorca's previous ship! I'm going to stick with Triton for now, for reasons that shall become evident later. I will say I'm tickled pink so much of the episode that just aired was about Lorca and played well with what I've done so far and what I plan to do. You got to see his humor (played up more here in this pre-war period), his confidence and swagger, and that forceful insistence on having things done his way. Plus, didn't Lalana say the most important thing to a Lului is choosing how you die? Guess he took her words to heart. It explains so well the fate of the Buran...

Also, in the interests of clarifying any confusion, "lului" is single and plural, a noun and an adjective, and can be used in the same contexts as the following words (with corresponding variations on articles and capitalization): human, humans, the humans, humanity, Mankind, Canadian, the Canadians. (When your language largely consists of the consonant L, your words end up rather broad by necessity.) Any confusing variability is entirely intentional, because aliens! No matter how it appears, I hope the usage is clear from context, but I won't discount the possibility of going back and standardizing it one way or the down the line. For now I'm gonna keep playing with it as I have been. Thank you kindly for your indulgence.

Full Chapter List << 3 - First Contact 5 - Observable Phenomena >>

It was hours before Dr. Ek'Ez proclaimed Lalana cleared from medical isolation, giving Captain Lorca plenty of time to prep a first draft of his report for Starfleet, but he still had a lot of questions and blanks to fill in that only Lalana could provide the answers to. When the message finally came through that Lalana was ready to be released, Lorca's order was immediate: "Send her on up."

She arrived in the company of the security officers, chattering away at them. "...the incredible fun it must be to be a on spaceship, especially one as large as this."

"Lalana," Lorca greeted, and to the guards said, "Dismissed."

Lalana crossed into the ready room in two long steps. Seeing her move without the constrictive jumpsuit was a real treat. She had a loping gait that propelled her forward great distances in a single stride, her body balanced perfectly as one foot swept past the other, tail swaying in perfect time behind her. Thought she was now free of the jumpsuit and the full length of her legs had been revealed, she still stood at the same height as before, and Lorca wondered if that was a result of wearing the jumpsuit for a prolonged period, or just her species' natural standing pose.

"I am very pleased to see you again, Captain Lorca!"

"I hope the decontamination procedures weren't too much for you."

She hesitated before answering. "It was... not pleasant, but... I think it is done?"

"As done as can be. I have some questions for you if you're up for it. Have you eaten?"

"Not in a very long time. Dr. Ek'Ez gave me a... protein nutrient bar, which was..."

"God-awful," supplied Lorca, assuming she meant the standard-issue protein survival bars issued as emergency backup rations.

"Yes!" Lalana clicked her tongue in mirth.

The bars in question were made from synthetic protein and designed not for taste or palatability, but to be edible by as many species as possible. The prevailing theory among the ranks was that Starfleet made them taste so bad to prevent people from eating them except in cases of emergency and to cut down on any frivolous use. The byproduct of this brilliant piece of culinary engineering was that some people said they'd sooner eat their uniforms than those bars. A new recipe was said to be in the works, but that it wouldn't be rolled out until the current stocks were depleted, which would take decades at the rate people actually used them. Of course, every good captain and quartermaster managed to lose a few crates of the bars now and again in the interests of reducing the galaxy's stockpile for the greater good.

"Would you like to try a fortune cookie?" Lorca squinted thoughtfully. "Can you eat these? I should ask Ek'Ez."

"Lului can eat most anything. And if I cannot eat it, I will know as soon as I taste it."

"Then have a go."

Lalana hopped forward to the table and stretched up on her legs so her head was as tall as Lorca's chest, one hand gripping the edge of the table for support. Lorca took two cookies from the bowl and handed her one.

"Now what you do is you crack this open, and there's a little bit of paper inside. You don't eat the paper." Lorca demonstrated.

Lalana copied his example and deftly split the cookie in half with one four-fingered hand. Her tongue stretched out and pressed against one half of the cookie for several seconds. Then she withdrew her tongue and rolled it around in her mouth. "I can eat this!" she concluded. She deftly pinched one of the cookie halves between two fingers, then hooked it with her tongue and pulled it towards her mouth. She sucked on it without chewing, because she had no teeth. After a moment it sort of crumbled and dissolved into her mouth, so it seemed to be fine.

Lorca openly stared and watched this occur, unashamed of his blatant curiosity. He held up the fortune from his cookie. "The paper is supposed to be your fortune."

"Fortune?"

"A guess about what'll happen in your future, or a piece of advice." He read his aloud. "'The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.'"

"Hm, I do not know if I agree with that."

"Well, it's my fortune, not yours," Lorca said with a grin. He didn't particularly agree with it, either. He held his hand out for Lalana's fortune. "And you have... 'Your kindness will lead you to success.' That's a very good one." He handed it back.

"And what do you do with a fortune?"

"Keep it or throw it away, the choice is yours. And the trash can's right over here." Lorca disposed of his alongside the paper fortune from earlier. Lalana examined her bit of paper a moment, then added it to the little pile as well. "Help yourself to another if you like. Now, as our first order of business..."

Lalana was more than happy to fill in every gap in Lorca's report, and then some, all for the low price of three more fortune cookies.

Her species, she explained, abhorred technology, which clearly classified them as pre-warp, but in a way that meant they were not likely to ever become warp-capable, despite possessing the intelligence for it. Their society was not highly stratified. They lived in communal groups which usually had three leaders, chosen based on age, but the groups were not very rigid, and lului could and did splinter off to form new groups, or merge existing groups, and there was very little formality to any of it. Lului came and went in these groups as they pleased. There was no central government, but in times of great crisis, many lului might come together and work towards a common goal in the interests of the greater good.

One such crisis involved the Lului's first contact with off-worlders. (The word "lului" itself could be contextually interpreted as the species, the people, or their national society in a familial or tribal sense, and the translator and computer formatting Lorca's report seemed to render the word with every combination of articles and capitalization imaginable. Lorca let the computer deal with it as it willed.)

Hundreds of years earlier, a group of either colonists or explorers had landed on Luluan and tried to set up a base, completely oblivious to the presence of an intelligent alien society around them. The Lului, observing the technology of these interlopers, massed and attacked, tearing down structures, destroying tools and weapons, and even going so far as to tear off the aliens' clothing. They didn't kill the off-worlders, but from their perspective at least, the meaning was clear: your technology isn't welcome here.

Of course, the off-worlders missed the message and instead decided their brand new planet was home to vicious native animals in need of eradication.

Thus began an ongoing campaign by the off-worlders to establish a permanent presence on the planet. Each attempt was met with failure. Since lului didn't show up on any sensors, it was impossible to know where they were, or how many, but everywhere the off-worlders landed, the lului emerged from the treetops and the rocks and the forests, bashing all the offending technology to bits.

Various animal control solutions were attempted by the off-worlders to deal with the situation. Mechanized and automated armaments, poisons, mercenary armies, biological agents, wholesale destruction of the environment. Many lului died, but no method was successful against their population as a whole. The lului, being generally highly intelligent, countered every move, and did so without compromising their own morality, which forbade the killing of another living creature for any purpose except eating.

Finally, after dozens of attempts, the off-worlders abandoned their folly.

In their place, the hunters came.

As Lalana later discovered from her time with Margeh and T'rond'n, after the first group of off-worlders had failed, Luluan had been bought by some enterprising traders who realized the planet made a lucrative destination for hunting tourism. They carefully restricted all access, obfuscated records of its location and history, and charged exorbitant fees for the chance to hunt the universe's most exclusive, elusive prey. Luluan became a whispered rumor in the highest echelons of interstellar society, the most exclusive experience money could buy.

The more mythical this rumor became, the more the traders could charge for the opportunity to hunt, and the fewer trips they could make. The economics of it were staggeringly simple.

The traders also claimed that Lului were a rare species to drive up demand. Lalana was certain her people numbered into the tens if not hundreds of millions, spread across every corner of Luluan, but since they excelled at camouflage, they were only rarely actually seen, helping to sell the lie and further build up the mythos of hunting them.

Despite all this exclusivity, Lalana was not the first lului to be captured alive. Over the years, almost three dozen lului had been captured and taken away by various high-paying patrons, and stories occasionally trickled around of what had happened to them. One had been sold to a zoo, mislabeled as some other entity, and perhaps lived there still. Others had become private pets, some conforming to this fate while others killed themselves, and at least one had been eaten alive by a species that preferred to consume their food that way.

Most ended up with tongues docked, because the moment they were captured alive, the traders would suggest docking to their clients "to make the creature more docile." The truth was to keep their ability to speak hidden, of course. While it wasn't always clear how much the clients knew, the traders at least were fully aware they were trafficking in a sentient species. Lalana had escaped this mutilation by feigning an inability to fully speak, restricting herself to small, simple noises to communicate things to the Dartarans and their various guests.

"For six years?" asked Lorca, trying to imagine what it would be like not to have a single real conversation for that length of time. (Based on the astrometrics data for the Tederek moon and Lalana's count of sunrises, the computer had crunched the numbers and calculated Lalana's time with Margeh and T'rond'n to be six years and three months.)

"Yes," confirmed Lalana. "Is that very long to a human?"

Though there were monks that did that sort of thing, it would probably drive the average human insane. Lorca wasn't sure it was the sort of thing he could have managed, and normally he felt like he was capable of anything. "To a human, yes. And to most species I can think of off-hand. Maybe not Vulcans. But continue."

Regarding Lalana's former captors, Margeh and T'rond'n were members of the upper echelons of Dartaran society. They owned a mining corporation, one of Dartar's largest, and controlled several lucrative asteroid mining operations. They were also avid recreational hunters and maintained a large estate upon which they hunted all manner of game, both native and imported. They ticked every demographic box the traders could want in a customer, so the traders had solicited them directly for the lului hunting experience.

But the list of species which Lalana knew to have visited Luluan for hunting expeditions extended far beyond a single pair of Dartarans. Lorca ended up summarizing it as "at least 20 known species plus unknown others, including Gorn, Klingons, K'zinti, Andorians, Eska, Dartarans, and humans." Some of the species Lalana mentioned were completely mysterious-sounding, like the Ferengi, which he imagined to be some sort of walking fungus monsters, especially given that Lalana described them as having hired professional hunters to do the work for them.

"You've seen all these species on your homeworld personally?"

"Yes, and I was lucky it was the Dartarans who caught me. Most hunters do not care about a live capture. Dartarans are more interested in the hunt than the kill. On the estate, Margeh and T'rond'n usually release their catches to be caught again another day."

Lorca grimaced. "But they didn't release you."

"No. If they had, who would believe they had even caught a lului?"

Lalana then explained the mechanics of her escape. After six years of playing the perfect, docile pet, she had earned a degree of freedom around the house. Her "masters" mistook her docility for loyalty and stopped worrying so much about locking her up. They certainly didn't think her capable of operating a spaceship. (Which, to be fair, she had only managed in a very limited capacity.)

Until two days ago, when Margeh and T'rond'n had gone out on one of their regular hunting excursions on their property and left one of the transports unlocked. Lalana waited until they were a good few hours into the hunt, then hopped into the ship and off she went. That, she explained, had been crucial, because it meant that even if they saw her take off in the transport, it would take them at least an hour or two to make it back to the house and pursue.

Lorca was decently impressed by the thought and planning that had gone into Lalana's endeavor. As it happened, she got lucky and the Dartarans did not discover the transport was gone until they returned at the hunt's end, giving her a good 5-hour head start.

Unfortunately, it had not been hard for them to track her, and they had the advantage of understanding how to reroute power to boost the speed of their engines, so what had started as a decent head start had gradually eroded into not much of a lead at all.

It was only after they hailed her and she realized they were gaining that she had started broadcasting loudly out into the nothingness, hoping that someone else would hear her.

The report was well and done at this point. Lorca stretched his arms out and groaned. Even though his ready room was configured for standing, he had been largely standing in one spot working on the report for too many hours now. "I need a walk. I suppose we should get you situated in some quarters, you must be tired."

"Mm, I would like to walk as well. It is ever so lovely to be able to fully move again. If I could, I would leap to the trees with joy, but there are no trees on a spaceship." Her tongue clicked lightly.

Lorca hummed thoughtfully. "We don't have trees, but we do have some plants."

"Human plants? I would very much like to see them!"

"Human and otherwise." Plants weren't human, but Lorca understood what she meant.

Out on the bridge, the shift had changed. Benford was in command and Carver was still at the helm, but everyone else involved in the initial Dartaran incident had cycled out.

"Captain!" Lt. Russo, the senior communications officer. "If I can talk to you... about the... new..." He trailed off when he saw Lalana. Apparently he wasn't prepared for her appearance, and judging by the expressions on the rest of the bridge crew's faces, neither was anyone else.

"Can it wait, Lt. Russo?"

"Uh... Y-Yes, sir."

"And the rest of you, eyes out there, please. You never know who might be watching." It was a gentle reprimand, but a reprimand all the same. The bridge crew sheepishly returned their attentions to their stations.

As Lorca and Lalana stepped into the turbolift, Benford flashed Lorca a knowing smile and winked. Lorca scowled lightly and shot back a "gimme a break" frown in reply. "Deck 8." The doors closed and the turbolift hummed towards its destination. Lorca rocked on his heels thoughtfully. "I had Commander Benford ready some guest quarters for you. I hope you'll find them to your liking. I'll assign an ensign to look after you in the morning." In his mind, he had already preselected Kerrigan, who could work on fleshing out the gaps in the translation matrix while minding Lalana.

"Thank you. That's very kind."

"Believe me, it's the bare minimum we could do," said Lorca, and received several tongue clicks in amused reply.

The turbolift came to a stop and the doors opened. They walked out into the corridor.

Lalana matched her pace to Lorca's perfectly, shortening her gait. Noting it was well short of what she seemed to be capable of, Lorca suggested, "We could also drop by the gym. Then you could really stretch your legs."

Lalana didn't know what a gym was, but true to form, if it was a place to stretch, it sounded good to her. "Yes, please!"

Lorca smiled. "Hell, I'll just show you the whole ship."

Part 5

#Star Trek Discovery #fanfiction #fanfic #Captain Lorca #Star Trek #writing

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