Poker Interrupted

"Why, are you scared?" That was Lugmilla, leaning forward, her jaw set.

"I do not follow your meaning."

"She means," said Sumati, "that the game has not finished."

It was as Edrilli had feared: she still might end up in her underwear. Unless, she realised, with an even greater shock, the other two were assuming that...

Varok just looked puzzled. "Not for you, perhaps," he said, "but..."

Sumati was already shuffling the cards, as Lugmilla sternly told the Vulcan, "not for you, either. You've still got a garment to bet."

"It is getting late, though," Edrilli broke in quickly, "perhaps we should call it a night?"

Varok visibly relaxed as she said it. She hadn't quite realised how tense he had become. This was affecting him even more than he had let on.

"I would concur," he said, "and may I recommend a more constructive use of your leisure periods in future? This game serves no logical purpose, and is a poor use of my valuable time, and, I dare say, even of your own."

That did it. Now she wanted to see him really suffer. She caught Lugmilla's eye and gave her a quick nod.

"Two more hands," said the Tellarite, "and we call it a night. Sound fair?"

Varok sat down, evidently reluctant, as Sumati dealt out the cards. Of course, thought Edrilli, two hands might not be enough, but the odds weren't bad. As she had time to reflect and calculate the probabilities, though, she realised what she had just agreed to. The likelihood was that either she or Sumati would end the night in bra and knickers, and there was even a fair chance that she would have to... no, don't even go there.

It did rather explain though, why Lugmilla, still in trousers and vest, had decided on two hands, rather than, say, three.

But Varok, wearing nothing but his shorts... he only had to lose once. Would he even go through with it? Perhaps not, for he was already starting to look as nervous as she'd ever seen one of his race. And backing out would, by definition, force him to show some sign of weakness or even true emotion.

Served him right, thinking he could come here and beat the women on their own game night.

Still, she thought to herself, you know what? I hope he doesn't back out. Let's see.

"Three cards," said Varok, stiffly.

Edrilli looked at her hand, and almost sighed with relief. "Just two," she said.

Lugmilla and Sumati took three each. Edrilli herself felt safe; she might not win the hand, but she couldn't believe she would come last with what she was holding. Which meant that there had to be a one in three chance that...

The door to the room swished open.

Edrilli was, as it happened, on the far side of the room, the table hiding her bare legs from the new arrival. But, even so, she hunched up, blue-grey calves and thighs pressed tightly together, hands suddenly clasped below her knees. At least, she realised, as the others turned to look, it wasn't a man.

Having said which, it would have certainly have been better had it not been Lieutenant Halvorsen.

"What is going on here?" snapped the security officer as she stepped into the room, ice-cold eyes immediately taking in Sumati and Varok's state of undress, and the various items of clothing lying about the room.

"We..." began Varok, but she didn't give him the chance.

"Stand up when I'm speaking to you! All of you!"

Lugmilla was the only one in the room that Halvorsen didn't outrank, but even she chose to comply, if a little more slowly than the others. At least she was decently dressed, thought Edrilli, as she received another glare from the security officer once the latter saw her bare legs, and the rather skimpy black knickers that the hem of her vest could no longer properly conceal.

"You may not be on duty," growled Halvorsen, "but you are serving on a Starfleet vessel. I have no idea what you thought you were doing, or what debauchery you had planned for later, but this is a disgrace to the uniform. You are officers, you should act like it!"

She looked Varok up and down, with a sneer that suggested she wasn't very impressed with what she saw. "By the looks of you, Ensign Varok, it is as well that I arrived when I did. I would have thought that a Vulcan would have had more sense."

"I will be making a report to your department heads tomorrow, and we shall see what they have to say about this." Edrilli could not help but think that the report would make things sound worse than they actually were. Halvorsen was not only a stickler for rules, and a fanatic about the 'honour' of Starfleet, but also a major prude. "Now clean everything up, and..." her lip curled with displeasure, "get dressed!"

They all rushed to comply.

Her trousers back on, Edrilli gathered up the cards from the table. She couldn't resist looking at the hands as she did so, just to see what would have happened, had they not been interrupted.

Varok had lost the hand.

Damn it. She glanced across at Lugmilla, inclining her head towards where the Vulcan had been sitting. The Tellarite seemed to get the message, and pursed her lips with annoyance. But then she gave a small smile, and a wink, before sitting to pull her boots back on.

Lugmilla, Edrill realised, had just come up with another plan.

She looked at the fuming security officer, whose arms were folded across her tall frame. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, she thought...

-***-

"Ready to beam across?" asked Ensign Sezrik, at the transporter console.

Halvorsen nodded, and straightened her already immaculate uniform. She was representing Starfleet, one of the greatest honours she could imagine. If only other people realised that, rather than engaging in... well, she didn't like to think what kind of depravity those other officers had been up to last night. Even had this not been a security mission, nobody would have picked any of them for the sort of role she was about to undertake.

It was a pity that, because of the other ship arriving early, she had not had time to put them on report, as she had promised. At least they would sweat about it, which was some consolation.

The Saurian transporter officer gave her a nod, and she felt the familiar sensation as the beam coalesced around her, and she vanished from the Endeavour to re-appear...

...on the other ship.

The room was not as well lit as the one she had just left, and it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dimmer, redder, lighting. It did not help that the walls were darker, bare metal in angular designs rather than the smooth functionality of Starfleet design.

There were five people waiting in the room for her. One, of course, was operating their transporter, and another stood near the exit, a chunky gun very visible at his hip. The other three, two women and a man, were standing in a group, an obviously formal welcoming party.

The man stepped forward, glancing her over. He did not seem impressed.

"Welcome," he said, "to the IKS Tarantula, starship of the Imperial Klingon Defence Force."

Not having had anything to do with the negotiations, she had not seen the captain of the other vessel before. He seemed to be a typical Klingon, tall and broad shouldered, with long hair and a short, but thick beard. A narrow scar cut across the brown skin of his cheek, just below his left eye. Even Klingon medicine ought to be able to seal that up, she thought, so he had to have kept it purposefully, as a badge of honour from some past conflict.

His armour seemed much the same as that she had seen on other Klingons; if he had a rank badge, it wasn't obvious. His gun, though, was as bluntly visible as that of the guard at the door.

"I am Lieutenant Astrid Halvorsen of the USS Endeavour," she said, "I hope that our cooperation will lead to a swift resolution in both our interests."

"Of course," he said, sounding a little reluctant, "but remember this is a Klingon vessel. You are here to observe. And to observe the operation only."

He was presumably warning her away from spending any time looking over the engines or weapon capabilities of the ship. Not that she could have told much without seeing them in action, which she was likely to do anyway; she wasn't an engineer. Halvorsen reflected that he did not seem happy to see her here, which seemed odd, if he had agreed to it. But, even so, she felt the need to remind him that her role was to do more than stand around and watch.

"And to take custody of the prisoner," she said.

He almost grimaced at that. Odd. "Of course," he growled, "but still..."

"But still, you are our guest."

That was one of the female Klingons, who she had almost forgotten. There were two of them, one a tall, bald woman whose skin was ebony black, dark even for one of her race. She looked imperious, Halvorsen thought, perhaps a senior officer. Yet, oddly, it was the other who had spoken, a small, slender, coffee-skinned Klingon in tight, decorative leathers.

And, when she had spoken, the male Klingon had been immediately silenced.

There was an uncomfortable pause, while they all stood, watching one another - except for the transporter officer and the man she assumed was a guard, both of them whom seemed to doing their best to pretend they were somewhere else.

It was the man that she had assumed was the captain who eventually broke the silence. "I am Commander Rel'kor, First Officer of the Tarantula," he said. "These, " he stood to one side, giving her a clearer view of the women, "are Captain Adjur zantai Khurless and Lieutenant -Commander Laska."

The small Klingon woman stepped forward, and Halvorsen realised with surprise that she was the captain. By human standards, she was not particularly short, even if, at around 160 cm, she was quite a bit shorter than Halvorsen herself. Compared with her fellow Klingons, though, she was tiny.

And, yet... thought the security officer, appraising her properly for the first time. There was something about her, something that belied her size. It wasn't just the air of confidence that was now apparent in her, but a hardness in her eyes, a set to her jaw that said 'here is a vicious terrier that will tear you apart given the chance'. The body under the tight leathers looked muscular too. Slender, yes, but compact and, Halvorsen suspected, the body of a natural athlete.

Klingons, the human believed, prized height and visible power. Even Laska showed that - the dark woman was over 180 cm tall, and built like an Amazon. But what, Halvorsen, wondered, did you have to be like to successfully take charge of a Klingon starship when everyone else towered above you? Just how much would this woman have had to prove - at every stage of her life - to have got anywhere near where she was today?

Halvorsen wondered how many Klingons had underestimated Adjur in the past, and now lay littered on the floor of history.

"I am sure," said the Klingon captain, her words clipped and precise, her dark eyes watching the human woman with an intense gaze that was almost unnerving, "that this will, as you say, prove beneficial to us both." She gave a small smile, a twitch of her lips that did not reach the rest of her face. "But for now, Laska will show you to your room. We will be leaving immediately."

Apparently satisfied with whatever she had been looking for, the small Klingon turned and left the room without another word, her first officer in tow.

Laska smiled, managing a much better job of it than her captain had. "Follow me," she said, speaking for the first time.

Halvorsen followed the dark-skinned officer into the ship's corridors. The Tarantula - she reflected that somebody must have programed the translator with that, since it clearly wasn't a Klingon word - was quite a bit smaller than the Endeavour. So far as she knew, it was a long-distance exploration and patrol ship, somewhere between a Bird of Prey and a full-size warship. Given that, it did not take long to reach the metal door that led to her temporary quarters.

"These will be yours," said Laska, "spartan, I know, but sufficient."

The room was decorated in the plain metal that Klingons seemed to like. It actually had a porthole above the low and rather rigid looking bed. That was an advantage of a small ship, she suspected; that it had less interior rooms far from the hull. Other than the bed, though, the room contained no more than a fold-down desk, a cupboard and a door leading to a shower cubicle and what could only be a Klingon toilet.

"Dinner will be served in the mess in four hours," Laska informed her. "In the meantime, once you have settled in, I can show you around. At least the parts of the ship that won't upset the Commander, anyway."

"Thank you," replied the human. Laska probably just wanted to keep an eye on her, but it seemed as good an idea as any. Besides, she could do with some sort of an ally, even if it was one she could not completely trust.

Halvorsen had originally assumed that the Klingon woman was bald. In fact, as had become apparent since she had turned to lead the human out of the transporter room, she had a shoulder-length pony-tail growing from the back of an otherwise shaven head, and bound with a leather cord. It leant at least something of an air of femininity to her, if only by default.

"You are a warrior, I understand?" asked the Klingon, "or security officer. Whatever the term is." Halvorsen nodded. "Good. Just remember that, and keep your wits about you. There will be some on this ship who want to show themselves superior to humans. They won't try anything directly, not while you're under the Captain's protection, but don't show weakness, or wander about where you shouldn't."

"And if you do somehow get injured... well, I'm the ship's medical officer."

-***-

The Tarantula was, as it turned out, not so different from a medium-sized Federation starship. Certainly the décor was different, but Klingons were basically humanoid, and seemed to have similar needs to any other humanoid race. Lighting, artificial gravity, crew quarters... the differences were all superficial, and even the organisation of the crew was similar to that on a Starfleet tactical vessel, if not a science ship like the Endeavour.

As she had indicated, Laska did not show Halvorsen the engine rooms or the torpedo launch tubes, nor, for that matter, the bridge. But she at least learned the basic layout of the ship, and which corridors she was probably better off not wandering down if she didn't want to be thought a spy. The medical centre was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first items on the agenda, and, while it was smaller than she might have expected, it didn't look notably under-equipped to her - admittedly inexpert - eye.

And why not? Klingons might be happy to keep scars as tokens of past battles, but it made sense to get them back onto the front lines again if you could. It was hard to remember sometimes that the Klingons were a technically advanced race, with engineering almost the equal of the Federation's own. In human history, war had often been a spur to technological advancement, and the Klingons had plenty of the former, so why not the latter? She recalled, from her lectures at the Academy, that you couldn't build something like a disruptor beam bank without a sound understanding of electromagnetic wave theory, computing, and quantum mechanics. Even if the only thing you wanted to do was build a bigger gun, the knowledge you gained in doing so had knock-on effects elsewhere.

"These are recreation areas," said Laska, as another door slid open, "you might..."

"Ha! I had heard there was a human on board! What do you think you can possibly gain here, other than a quick death?"

The speaker was a squat, heavily built man, one of two Klingons in the room they had just entered. It was clearly a combat training area, with a wide open space in the centre, and a rack of bat'leths and other hand weapons on one wall. It looked as if the two warriors has just finished a bout, and that it was the silent man who had just lost - the bruises and contusions showed that it had been a rather rougher fight than would have been normal on a Starfleet vessel.

"The human officer is here at the Captain's invitation," said Laska stiffly.

The squat Klingon snorted. He was ugly, even for a Klingon, with a couple of scars across his face and chest that did nothing to add to his looks, at least from a human perspective. He was currently, like his companion, stripped to the waist, a sheen of sweat across his muscular torso, and still holding his bat'leth - with specks of blood on it, she noticed - in one hand.

He snorted derisively. "Of course," he said, "but then, such a coward and weakling would need protection, would she not? You can see she is no warrior... but then, no human truly is. They hide inside their ships or behind their phasers, never willing to enter true combat. The entire race are an evolutionary dead-end, little better than Ferengi."

"Come on," Laska said to Halvorsen, "we don't need to..."

"I'm not frightened of you," said the human security officer, taking a step forward into the room. "So there's no point in trying to provoke me."

"This might not be..." began Laska, before being interrupted for the third time.

"Not frightened? Ha! I can smell the fear on you. The cringing terror that fills your very being. If you were truly as brave as you say, you would fight me, one on one, but you have not the guts, nor the strength to do so."

Halvorsen looked him straight in the eye, noting that she was actually a couple of centimetres taller than he. "I accept your challenge," she said, simply.

At that, Laska took a step back, away from them, her face suddenly formal. It was clear she would not intervene now. Halvorsen needed to show her character to these people, for her own safety, and for the honour of Starfleet. She could only hope that she had not made a mistake in choosing to do so at this point.

"Very well," said the Klingon, with a grin, readying his bat'leth as his former sparring partner also left the fighting area.

Halvorsen took off her tunic and passed it to Laska before walking forward onto the mat. She had no experience with a bat'leth, and the Klingon surely knew it.

"You can put that away," she told him, dropping into a fighting crouch, "unless, of course, you're too frightened to face me without a weapon."

That did it. The Klingon dropped the bat'leth and hurled himself at her, a roar of fury on his lips. Perhaps he was blinded by anger, or perhaps by his own overconfidence and bias about human weakness. Perhaps he had just taken more of a battering from his sparring partner than was visible at first glance. Maybe it was even a combination of all of these, but either way, he left himself wide open for a counterstrike.

Halvorsen kicked out at his leg, grabbed an arm, and threw him over her shoulder in a classic move. The Klingon's speed and strength counted against him, slamming him hard into the floor with a loud crash that actually shook the metal plating beneath the mat.

Any human would have been at least momentarily stunned by the force of that impact, but her opponent was not human. He rolled over and prepared to rise to his feet... just as Halvorsen spun round and kicked him with all her might in his jaw.

His head snapped back, and she wondered for a second if she'd overdone it. A human would have been seriously injured by a blow like that, and certainly should have been out cold. But not, it seemed, a Klingon. He shook his head, and staggered to his feet, visibly groggy, but more conscious than he had any right to be.

He lunged for her, and this time she could not quite evade him, caught with his arm about her shoulder. But she had the advantage now, after that last blow. They wrestled, her vest rucking and coming loose from her trousers as she kicked at his legs and pulled at his arms.