Author's Note: I own nothing. All characters, objects and the entire world I am playing with is owned by Paramount productions. However, Jaylah's background is left almost entirely blank. I have tried to keep to her personality as closely as possible and have tried to ground what descriptions I add within the bounds of plausibility although I am definitely open to input as these details are laid out. (I also have a few paragraphs of my own on the star (a real one) that I am basing Jaylah's home off of and the planetary system (that I have entirely made up) that orbits it if anyone is interested. That being said any errors in this work are entirely my own and do not reflect upon Paramount, Justin Lin or Sofia Boutella.

This is a Jaylah centric fic and deals extensively with Star Trek Beyond. Moreover, some key lines have been taken directly from the screen play. As such, there will naturally be spoilers for the new movie, Star Trek Beyond, as well as the first two: Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek: Into Darkness.

She couldn't help grinning; her house - her house was really going to fly. She glanced over to her Engineer, the Montgomery Scotty; he had done it. He had fixed it so that her house would fly. The smile stretched wider, her long eyeteeth digging slightly into the corners of her mouth while her khutut alwajh flickered wildly in excitement. Some Babëreshë could, to an extent, control the bioluminescent cells that formed the stripes on their faces but for Jaylah, for as long as she could remember, as went her emotions so followed her coloring.

Hikaru Sulu's voice echoed slightly from the mostly synchronized mouths stationed through out the engineering room. "Hold on to something," he suggested. Jaylah wasn't quite sure, she was still having a hard time reading the blank faced aliens, but she thought he sounded excited, or maybe nervous. Montgomery Scotty's eyes dilated and turning on the ball of his foot he dashed off, grabbing the small rocky alien, Keynsler? and proceeded to wedge the two of them under a near by console. So...nervous then.

Turning the other way she ran toward a recessed section of wall that once housed some burned out electronics that she had cannibalized for parts. She braced the hide underside of her boots against the grating in the floor and just had time to reach out snag two cable ends that still jutted out from the wall before the ground in front of her tilted down sharply. For a moment she was staring out over a yawning chasm, the expanse of the reactor room falling away before her; instinctive terror of height flooded through her body, helping her clamp down on her hand holds, feeling the rubbery sheathing mold between her fingers.

Then her house began to fall with her and she was weightless. Pulling herself back deeper into the alcove she laughed delightedly as her hair floated out in front of her face. It reminder her of... images: her father laughing, her mother fussing nervously with Jaylah's hair, the reporter's camera flashing... A thrum ran through her house, her floor groaning softly rippling from her nose toward her rear, toward her: then her hair fell, her boots fell. There was gravity on the floor. No, the wall?

She could still feel the tug of the planet before her; her top still fluttered like it wanted to float away in the free fall but the grate was holding it, holding her... Before she could figure it out her house screamed, all of her jets firing. The white skinned girl spread her feet instinctively, planting them, holding herself steady as the force of gravity increased, pulsed. Montgomery Scotty yelled a series of words she didn't know as his assistant pressed into his lower abdomen as the g forces swung around and then the tug of the planet was behind her and receding but the pull of the floor remained. Her house...was making it's own gravity? Shaking her head slightly she resisted the immediate conclusion that her house was magic. Federation engineering magic.

She pulled her boot away and almost overbalanced as it separated from the deck easily. It wasn't magnetic, then, there was none of the local tug and it was very weak, maybe half of what Altamid had used to hold her to itself and walking on that planet had always felt like springing around on perpetually new shoes. She bounced along to a rear facing window and looked out. There hung the blue white curls that made the sky of her prison, its curve rapidly becoming more apparent. Her grin slowly faded into a neutral stoic line. She couldn't help but hate that world. It had trapped her. It had killed her family and it had made her a killer in turn, but, still, it had been the home of her home for so long. A third of her life maybe. There was the tug. The instinctive yearning for home in the deep bred knowledge that in this universe shelter is rare and scattered.

Montgomery Scotty walked slowly up behind her and placed his hand on her shoulder. Her muscles coiled in response, surprised at the sudden touch and she turned to study him but he stayed very still looking out the window and she gradually relaxed. As moments go it was nice, at least up until he spoke, "Are ye okay, lassie?"

She tensed and turned her finger pressing into his chest, "I have been fine, just fine, for months through whole season's changings without engineerings from Federation to pack me in."

Despite a slight wince, which she was not going to feel guilty about - she was not, the black clad man didn't turn away. "Aye, well. 'Tis still a hard thing leaving behind familiar skies. I have been stationed many a place with many an unsavory character," here, inexplicably he and the rocky alien shared a deeply confusing look both relaxed and belligerent at the same time, "it's like gravity, only," his hands fluttered looking for the right word before ending weakly with a, "not."

She studied him for a long moment her eyes gradually drifting down to the deck, the heat of her khutut alwajh fading from the hot ultraviolet of anger to a cooler almost blue tone. How did he do that? He didn't rage and lash out like all the aliens she had ever met...like she did herself. But he didn't back done either. Well, over things, yes. Not that she would have let him deny her them.

But when it came to his mates Montgomery Scotty just...carried you along with him. James T would fight for what he needed but Montgomery Scotty would just do it. He said he needed to rescue his mates and he said he would make her house fly and now his mates were flying away in her house. It reminded her of her father. They said you couldn't fly as fast as light but he said he could and then he did, faster even. They said it wasn't safe and he said it was and then he had taken her and...

Her shoulders drooped and she dug her palms into her suddenly burning eyes. "It is not my home."

"Aye. I guess not. You said, you're father?"

She nodded and lifted her shoulders helplessly, "my family." There was his hand again on her shoulder. Her fang worried the inside of her lip but she resisted flinching away again and even allowed herself to lean into the touch a bit. They watched in silence as the planet fell away, drifting out of view as Hikaru Sulu turned her house to follow Krall and his swarm.

The material of the window gained a blue hue from reflected light and a resonant whine rapidly rising in pitch began to fill the air. She cocked her head over her shoulder and saw the undulating ripples of deep ultraviolet light working up the reactor core as entire ounces of antimatter mixed - the energy pulses directed through a crystal into the warp system itself: building a charge, preparing to release a multidimensional field that would drag her house out of normal space. The nacelles surged and the transition hit her with a strange stretching jolt as her body was dragged beneath, out of space, into a sustained superluminal bubble.

More memories flickered, racing through her head. She, still so small, wriggling out of her mother's lap to hold her father's hand while he explained how his ship, the Përpjekje, worked. Most of the words had washed over her beyond her understanding. What she did understand was that her dad had made the ship bubble sleeker so that it was more fuel efficient and so the science general should stop pestering him so much about fuel expense.

Of infinitely more importance to her, then, was the fact that they were really going out to Vëllai i Madh, the farthest planet from Shans dielli and the only one whose orbit was outside of her people's home world, Bariq. Just the night before he had taken her to the university and they had looked through the big telescope and seen the swirling storms and curling bands of color that painted the small marble in the sky, looking exactly like it did in the holoposters.

And then she was going there. Inside his ship for the first time ever since it had been completed, even if he had gotten to go lots of times. The space agency had sent one of their leaders, a science general she supposed, whose hot rippling khutut clearly broadcast his anxiety about their upcoming flight. But her daddy had made twelve trips already and anyways he would take her family if it wasn't safe.

And it was. The reactor had come online normally bathing the whole cabin in glittering ultraviolet ripples. They had been pulled away out of space and into the gleaming iridescent bubble of the outside and whisked away. Everything had worked perfectly. But everything had gone to hell just the same.

Her eyes stared unfocused at the rear of the same gently rippling space bubble as her house made a wake through the outside before her attention was drawn away by Montgomery Scotty walking away, pausing here and there to study one of the new banks of panels that had sprung to life when the newly reengaged reactor core had returned her house to full power. She listened to him and his assistant talk about something called tensor fields and their strengths while huddled over a couple of screens placed on an arch near the core.

She eventually wound her way over to study the panel, pawing at her nose. The thought flickered that something was off, punctuated by a hard sneeze that actually sprayed one of the screens. Her khutut flared with embarrassment but Montgomery Scotty didn't comment on them, instead frowning he asked her if she had caught Keenser's cold. She shrugged not sure what it meant to catch a temperature but not caring enough to pursue it.

Her fingers stroked over the screen tracing the mottle of colors ranging from soft violet through blues and into greens before fading into blackness. "What means these colors?"

She watched as he drew in a breath and exchanged a look with his assistant, Keenser she repeated in her mind trying to memorize the name. "Well, they represent a projection of the warp fields static tensile load along the curvature of the local manifold..." he trailed off looking at her, "they represent how stable the warp field is."

She nodded understanding this - a little at least. Her father had said something similar once. Something about conditions in the outside place changing and that was why they needed the science general to approve more funding for better computers that could keep up. "These blues are what we like to see," Montgomery Scotty continue, "they mean the field is brae and smooth and green means that nacelle's differentiated pattern selector can keep up with the modulation but these yellows and wisps of red," his finger slid over the black portioned of the screen, "have me a wee bit worried."

Jaylah furrowed her brow trying to follow as his fingers slipped into darkness catching onto to the salient word, "worried?"

"Aye, well. For now the inertial dampeners are handling it but I would nae suggest taking the long way about."

"So flying my house is breaking it?" She looked at him sharply placing her hands on her hips as he made a sound that she didn't quite understand save that it wasn't a denial. "You said that you could make my house fly, Montgomery Scotty."

"Aye, and I did. Here we are, out and flying, but the Franklin's been gathering dust these last hundred years and that's after taking an almighty wallop when she belly flopped on that heap of rock yon. I'm sorry I cannae have her floating along as smooth as a duck on a lake, but I am nae miracle worker." The engineer said, the fur above his eyes pulling together and his voice matching her own irritated tones.

Keenser walked back and touched a panel on the rear wall the ambient illumination within flaring at his touch. "Aye, here," agreed Montgomery Scotty his words still coming in a quick clipped huff, "a schemata of the Franklin's structural integrity. This screen is for the saucer and this is for the engineering section, such as it is. Same rules. Blue is good, red is bad."

Jaylah opened her mouth to say something back. She was annoyed. Why was she so annoyed? Because this was her house and her head, it would not stop aching. She took an unsteady step, her palms digging at her eyes again when the voice of the pointy eared one, Spock, she was pretty sure, chased away the gathering storm, "the swarm are utilizing a coherent harmonic frequency with each ship representing a unique note in order to calculate the position of each craft within the swarm..."

The pointy eared aliens voice continue in monotoned counterpoint to the more inflected voice of James T Kirk but Jaylah and Scotty after sharing one quick grinning look had already moved off to implement the plan. Jaylah pressed her feet into the grating soaring across the six meters in two quick skips, fingers skimming across the music screen looking for her favorite screamy thumpy music while Montgomery Scotty disconnected the cable leading to the mouth and redirecting it...elsewhere.

Moments later intense bursting flickers of light sparkled throughout engineering as the windows let in the strobe-light effect of the swarm ships careening into each other. Jaylah stumbled, disoriented, as her world changed into a series of still images. Even traveling at only a few light seconds per hour the collisions released bursts of energy equivalent to billions of tons of trinitrotoluene detonating...each. For a moment, Krall's dying swarm glowed as brightly as a star.

Flying through the heart of such a conflagration was not without consequence to the Franklin. Sparks and smoke flew through the confusing, flickering, air as the core surged, struggling to power the polarization of the hull plating to resist the radiative heating. Montgomery Scotty said more words she didn't know when the numbers on one panel crossed from hundred of k to thousands of k before fading to black. Both he and his stony assistant dashed from station to station tapping commands, altering settings, the drone of the core easing briefly each time before working up to an ever shriller note. She fell, sliding as the floor dropped away from her, her house turning faster than the magic could hold her to the deck she supposed.

Her nails failed to find purchase in the metal flooring as she fell sideways, catching the small assistant alien just as her house rapidly decelerated almost as if it had hit something. She smashed into the wall feeling her cushioned shoulder protector compress and then the bone of her shoulder deform and spring back, the tissue around it swelling into a severe bruise.

Pulling herself to her feet and loosing Keenser to attend to his duties she saw that she was in front of the hull integrity panel. There were no good blue lines left. There were still large swaths of green but it all faded toward black toward the outsides and especially toward the fore. "My house is breaking!" she yelled to the world at large gripping the railing, willing her house to hold together - to be okay.

This one thing. This, her house. Her one thing. Her most important thing. Her home. It had to be okay. She held onto the railing calling to her engineer when the panel started beeping. "Why is it doing?" she demanded. Montgomery Scotty glanced at the keening display briefly as he raced off to somewhere else.

"Thermal warning" he gasped pointing at what she swore was a black space above the color ship diagram picture before calling over his shoulder, "they are flying the damned thing through atmosphere. I told him she was ne'er designed to do that. Made in space I said. Clearly, I said it. Space. Ship. What does he do? Bleeding flies it out of space. Again. And now I am supposed to keep us from blowing up?"

"Blowing up?" she moaned. Her house... The light through the windows faded to black mirroring her mood.

"Space. Ship." he yelled, stumbling his way up some stairs shoving up a lever before grabbing the railing. Instinctively, she mimicked his action, clinging to the rail by her ship's health readout as the deck ran up to meet her; her house swinging up vertically from its last trajectory shuddering hard as it, apparently, ran into something thicker.

More of the screen went black and the green bits seemed to squinch down as if the front of her house had buckled. Before she could realize the implications of this, three distinct sharp claps flew through engineering but not from the electronic mouths; she could feel the over pressure waves as they moved through her chest blasting from somewhere high up the ship.

The magic that held her feet to the deck died and her boots slipped. She slid backwards onto the wall with the hull integrity panel. On her hands and knees she watched in shock as three circular black blots spread out from the middle fore of her house. For a couple of seconds all she could see was sparks as most of the panels and lights in engineering flared. Then darkness rained. Her mind struggled, sluggishly trying to keep up with the stimulation overload. Her head pounded and her heart raced. She sucked in a breath but it felt like there was no air to be had. She coughed wetly. The darkness... it meant...that...the core had gone quiet. Her house. It was dead.

She almost didn't notice when her house tipped forward depositing her hard, sprawled upon the floor. Her chest ached and she drew in a long ragged breath, pushing herself up onto hands and knees, barely connecting the heart broken wail filling her ears and the burn tearing at her throat. Her eyes burned and wetness coiled down her cheeks. Stunned, she drew her fingers over her eyes and stared at them. Tears. She honestly hadn't known she was still able to cry. To a degree, it startled it back to her senses; showing too much of any kind of emotion was deadly dangerous.

Slowly, slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, her muscles trembling. Glancing about, she saw Montgomery Scotty standing close by looking at the crushed...no. Flicking her eyes down she saw Keenser looking into the distance holding out a fabric square at her. Khutut alwajh flaring in embarrassment she took it, dabbing quickly at her eyes and under her nose. Glancing away while she waited for her running nose to still, she looked out the window and saw her house was in water. The reason it got dark in the windows earlier was that they had been flying under water her mind categorized uselessly, unconsciously fixated on the point because of the apparent impossibility of it.

She was about to return the fabric square when another sneezing fit rocked her. She probably didn't need the hand Montgomery Scotty put on her shoulder to remain upright but she didn't flinch away either. Much.

"Lass, I am worried you really did catch Keenser's cold." The small rocky alien's face drooped a little at this and it made a small whining sound that Jaylah took to be apologetic. The alien pointed at the fabric square it had given her and gestured at her before pulled open its pocket to show that it had a stack more.

She nodded gratefully before opening her mouth to inform Montgomery Scotty that she was not cold when the communication thing in Montgomery Scotty's belt chirped at her. Her hand flashed out catching the device while the engineering was still stuck in his thinking face pose. She flicked it the way James T had, only the top part only swung open and didn't go flying. From a small voice inside she heard running feet but nothing else happened. She stared at it in consternation. "Speak," she demanded.

"Scotty?" James T's voice came out slightly breathless and curiously inflected at the end.

"Aye, I am here captain. I take it our wee belly flop did not drown all the vermin?"

"Krall" was all Jaylah heard James T say before dropping the communicator and springing from the engineering room. Everything in her body felt off and she felt like she was trying to breath through her trap mud but the ridiculous lightness of the gravity helped and she stumbled ahead hands gliding on the wall for balance.

"Wait, lass, wait" came Montgomery Scotty's panting voice from behind her. "Wait, you pure bawheided..." But she could not wait. Krall. Not again. He would not get away with taking everything again.

She knew her house. Knew it measure for measure. Knew exactly where the center of that first radiating fatal black blot would be and even in the almost pitch black...blurry...wreckage knew exactly the fastest way to get there. Stumbling around last the corner she saw it, the black metallic spike driven deep into her home's skin. Piercing its polarized armor. The nose of it was split open, having already disgorged its loathsome master.

Boots, lying on the floor. She knew what she was going to see. Knowing didn't help in the slightest. Her mouth twisted in irritation at her own selfishness when she realized in relief that she did not know the first shrunken corpse in black. The other, however, in the blue flaring tube was one of Bones McCoy's nurse doctors. She had given Jaylah a glass of water when she returned from the beaming with James T.

"Christabol, Alice," Montgomery Scotty shouted falling to his knees upon finding them, pressing his fingers to the tube wearer's neck. He pressed his lips to hers trying to breathe for her but Jaylah laid a hand on his shoulder. "There cannot be helping for them Montgomery Scotty. It is too late."

The engineer rounded on her saying nothing but the look in his eyes almost made her step back, instead flared up. Her hand flickered out, grabbing the engineering by his second outer black shirt and lifting him to his feet. "They cannot be made living. Krall took all the living out of them. They will not breathe by putting breath into them. Helping is not helping. We must be stopping Krall or we will all be not living."

Jaylah watched as the human's face fur pulled together. His skin first went almost as pale as her and then darkened, black patches forming on his cheeks. Wary, unable to interpret this, she watched him trying to find newer better words. She needed him to stop Krall. All her engineer did, however, was pull open his communicator, some of the paint a little chipped from where she had dropped it, and growl three words, "Where is he?"

Hikaru Sulu's voice came back, "The Captain has left the Franklin, pursuing Krall. They're in the plaza heading for one of the high rises." Nyota Uhuru's voice broke in, "Scotty...Krall has the device. We think its still active."

Montgomery Scotty muttered something under his breath, but she was certain she had misheard him. She certainly didn't see any blood on him anyhow.

"We need to get there, fast," her engineer said, turning to her, "we'll use the transporters." She grinned, elated that a Starfleet engineering needed her help. But using the transporters was silly. She pressed two fingers into her mouth between her fangs and whistled, khutut alwajh flickering cheekily before darting into the open craft penetrating into her house. Montgomery Scotty stuck his head in around one of the nose struts peering in. "This? Are ye sure?"

She didn't bother to answer sliding her fingers systematically over the panel in front of her: lights flared and the engine roared to life, water fell from the ceiling and wind blew in her face, the seat slid from beside the control panel to directly behind it and receding allowing Jaylah to brace her backside against it while her fingers continued to explore the panel. Finally, with the hiss of escaping pressurized gas, the opened nose module began to slide closed. The green eyed alien yelped and hurried into Krall's craft.

The interior was cramped with two but not unworkably so. Jaylah gripped the two bars that were mounted on either side of a manipulable stand. While she tried to decipher the controls her wrist accidentally twisted and she yelped in surprise as the small ship shot backwards out of the gore of her house and into the strange inside sky.

"Do ye know how to fly this thing, lassie?"

"No."

"Aye, wonderful."

She pushed the control stick forward and shrieked in surprise as the view in front of them arced down to point at the ground. Still screaming, she pulled back the bar twisting forward under her hand. The craft shot forward, nose slowly arching up. She saw the statue rising in front of her and she tried to avoid it, she really did, but the mining craft were agile in the sense that they could completely come about at speed in a few tens of meters. She wasn't nearly at the limit of the craft's speed but three meters still weren't nearly enough.

Montgomery Scotty moaned rubbing his face as the two of them lurched forward buffeted by the sudden impact. "I am beginning to think the good doctor has the right idea about flying, I will breathe a lot easier when… Wait, breathe" he said, almost too quietly for her to hear before abruptly snapping open his communicator, his voice shooting up in volume and pitch. Snapping open his communicator, "Chekhov how, no I'm certain, Captain! He is headed for the main air distribution complex. If he makes it there every breathing thing on Yorktown is dead."

"Great. I'm working on it Scotty"

"Great! Great? How is he saying great? I do not want to be dead Montgomery Scotty."

"No more do I, lass. We need to help him; we need to make it to the control room, quickly"

"Which one?"

"That one, up there."

She twisted her head around to peer where he was pointing, blinking treacherous eyes that would not focus. Taking her best guess, she pulled the nose of the craft around and snapped the hand grips forward grinning ferally while the thrusters wailed, entirety drowning out Montgomery Scotty's voice. That didn't stop him from gesturing, however shaking his head rapidly from side to side and crossing his arms at the forearms in front of his face.

However, even if she had understood all the nuances of his message...and she was pretty sure the general thread centered around the concept of "no"...it was much too late to stop. The mining vehicle cut across the atmosphere of Yorktown under seven and a half g's of acceleration. It streaked across the gap in less than 4 seconds, the condensation cone presaging a sonic boom already beginning to coalesce. Transparent aluminum is a wonderful thing, stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum but nothing is meant to stand up to almost 500 billion joules per square meter.

The spike of the mining craft smoothly parted the invisible metal, impaling itself into the side of the skyscraper. The interior of the craft rapidly filled with with a diffuse foam, the precursor of the stone foam trap that had caught James T and Pavel Chekov, cushioning the deceleration to survivable, if not necessarily comfortable, levels. Long eye teeth worrying her lip she eyed the panel trying to find the symbols that had moved the seat and opened the nose before settling again on the touch everything until something useful happens approach.

Montgomery Scotty was still muttering as she finally managed to engage the boarding subroutines Krall had hacked into the swarm craft depositing the pair of them onto the carpet (and dust) covered floor of a long thin room. Jaylah's eyes immediately began to burn worse than ever and she would have doubled over into another helpless sneezing fit had the engineerings' long fingers not curled around her wrist, tugging her forward. They both stumbled forward into a lurching run, Jaylah tugged along and the alien briefly stumbling back when his arm pulled taut against his grip.

"Ooch, lassie, how much do you weigh?" he complained, but Jaylah merely shook her head neither able to talk through her coughing fit nor having any idea how to convert mass from her system into federation "kg"'s...whatever they were. Besides, she wasn't certain the question was entirely polite.

They made their way for most of the trip largely unimpeded. Montgomery Scotty waving his sleeves in the air gesturing at them and shouting at the few blurry shapes that crossed into their path scattering them easily enough. Jaylah tried to pay attention, she really did; getting lost was beyond a dangerous state of affairs but the farther they ran the tighter the iron bands that had begun encircling her chest upon leaving Altamid grew. As they rounded one last corner, however, into a much wider if just as long room they were finally challenged.

"Halt, or we will be forced to stun you." said a perfectly calm neutral voice.

"Stun me and we'll all die you bloody eejut" Montgomery Scotty replied neither calm nor neutral. "I have to shut down the main air intake."

"The station is in lock down. Protocol dictates that no non-command personnel are to be admitted onto..."

"I am command... lieutenant commander Montgomery Scott, SE 19754 T, chief bloody engineer of the NCC-1701 Enterprise!"

"Protocol dictates that no non-command personnel not registered to this station..." the voice amended still entirely monotoned.

"Aye, look, you can take your protocol and stuff..."

"Personal insults will have no effect on -" the voice began but Jaylah had had enough. Her Montgomery Scotty needed to get past these blurs so she would get him past them. Pulling her second to last holographic emitter out of her belt pouch she tossed it down the long room, planting her feet and springing forward swinging her jury rigged muazza albal'zima like a staff careful not to discharge any of the stored compressed plasma. She heard Montgomery Scotty shouting for her to stop but between the ridiculously low gravity and the spinning in her head it felt like she was falling sideways as much as bounding forward her feet barely skipping against the floor.

Beside her the holographic emitter projected three flickering copies of her self fanning out and "attacking" the gathered security officers. They leveled some kind of hand held device at them and the air was filled with trilling hums. One of them glanced across the insulated padding padding that protected her shoulders but even the back scattered energy from what ever invisible beam they were firing jolted her body, making her muscles all cramp painfully. She focused on the opponent who was standing a little ahead of the firing line, both because he was the only one her watering eyes could, more or less, clearly make out and to demoralize the remaining squad of four? Probably four.

She feinted with a potentially lethal overarm sweep before opting for a much more restrained forward thrust toward the alien's middle. But the creature didn't even seem to react to either. Rather, he leveled his hand device at her holographic emitter and the three dancing Jaylah's vanished in a short burst of sparks. His off hand lanced out, fast! faster than any of the federation aliens she had yet seen and caught her forward thrust.

There was definite resistance against her jab but it came far to late to meaningfully change the outcome. Her metallic staff slammed the dark skinned alien's hand hard into his middle forcing his breath out. The creature folded satisfactorily to its knees mouth open clearly thoroughly winded.

Then her engineer was there snatching at her weapon waving down the four remaining combatants. Behind them loomed a shouting shape that she hadn't notice emerge from the door behind the guards. She missed the start of the exchange, her breathing labored and spots dancing in front of her eyes. Montgomery Scotty tugged at her weapon again and she reluctantly surrendered it as the pitch and volume of his conversation with the shape gradually relaxed.

Lifting her head she tuned back into the conversation, "...can't. There are a lot of back ups and redundancies governing the thing that, you know, keep us all alive." This new alien looked more like Montgomery Scotty only rounder. It sounded like he was still arguing but he was allowing her and her engineer to enter waving back the still somewhat winded alien, who on closer inspection vaguely resembled the mate probably named Spock. The black clad being raised an eyebrow but did not otherwise object.

Montgomery Scotty's hand was on her shoulder and he steered her into the room. Displays blazed here and there and many anxious aliens were milling about. Many, many aliens. More than she had seen in any one place save, briefly, in the transporting room before all of the mates had dispersed. It made her decidedly uneasy but her companion pushed her forward, aiming for a large central display. At first she thought it was a large holographic emitter like her people used back on Bariq but then they passed beside it and she saw it was only projected onto a flat display. It seemed surprisingly old fashioned in the midst of all these other technological miracles.

Montgomery Scotty pushed her into a rolling chair next to the display with a snapped, "sit." She was confused. He sounded angry but why should he be? She had just fought for him. He slipped into the seat bolted to the display and, lacing his fingers together, pressed them forward the joints separating audibly. His foot caught the wheel of her chair and he brought her in close. Newly limbered fingers flew over the command board beneath the display causing it to flicker wildly with icons and text before a blue wire diagram came up on a gray background. Small near squares, with one partially extended line forming a small rectangle on their tops blinked into existence on the side of the display with text beneath them.

"You keep an eye on the diagram and tell me if anything changes." She nodded, her lungs fluttering unable to draw in a full breath and each gasp felt like she was sucking it through deep valley murk. Still, the adrenaline flooding her body helped her concentrate somewhat as she trembled trying to fight off an anxiety attack. The last time she had sat in front of an important panel she had been responsible for everybody losing everything.

Montgomery Scotty turned his attention to the small squares. "All right you wee beasties. Lets see what we can do to break you." His fingers touched the first square and the screen split, half showing Jaylah her display half showing a long column of text. The alien's finger flicked along the text his eyes twitching as he scanned through it. "Aye, there" he grunted jabbing his finger at one point of the text splitting it and typing in a few characters of text. He swiped it away and she saw that the box had disappeared from the screen. He tapped the next one scanning, grunting, and deleting a single symbol. That one too went dark.

The chirp of a communication device came from beside her and she reached to retrieve his communication device from his belt, but as Jaylah's fingers touched it the a hum of many voices came directly from the little pin on Montgomery Scotty's shirt. Then, "a little direction," James T's voice requested.

"He's headed for the air circulation processor. Big spherical chamber."

"Look up" she suggested.

"I see it." James T confirmed. She guessed that he left the communicator open, or at least she could hear foot steps and beeping and hums emitting from Montgomery Scotty's shirt. She kept her eyes glued to the display shaking her head hard every time the motes swimming through her version threatened to crowd out her sight entirely. The alien beside her worked steadily, sometimes adding text to and sometimes deleting a character or a line from the script behind the squares. Either way, he was steadily turning them black, maybe two thirds of the list had gone dark when, between one head shake and the next, she saw a blinking black dot working up into the middle of the display.

"What's that" she demanded pointing.

Montgomery Scotty took a second to glance over. "Weapon's in the chamber. Captain we have to stop that processor now or everything breathing in Yorktown is dead."

"Yeah. I think I have got that at this point. I'm working on it, Sco-."

Jaylah's eyes went wide as she heard James T's voice cut off gurgling, meaty thumps that she recognized as connecting blows filled the suddenly silent room before the transmission cut off with a crackling snap. Krall, it had to be Krall. Her head bowed. James T... He had caught her. She had jumped and he had caught her. Montgomery Scotty's hands continued to dance over the controls four squares to go. Three. Two. One. Abruptly the circles in the corners of the diagram in front of her began to pulse between pale blue and black. The entire diagram shrank revealing a second one depicting a large fan surrounded by blue green lights.

"The computer overrides are offline" the rounder alien said, "but the manual controls are still active. Here. He touched one of the black spots. There is a silver level behind each of these. You have to switch them off."

"I'll go," Jaylah said trying to force herself to her feet but her legs gave way immediately and she collapsed into the chair coughing violently. She wiped her now thoroughly soiled square cloth under her nose again trying to stem the irritated burning mucus.

"You aren't going anywhere, lass" Montgomery Scotty was frowning at her. That wasn't right. His face looked nice when his mouth was flat but this was...wrong.

And he was wrong. She had too. Levers. Krall was going to kill them all. "I have to."

"The captain will see to it."

"You don't know Krall. He's killed him."

"Nae. Captain Kirk is made of stiffer stuff than that."

She looked at him skepticism and grief writ large across her khutut alwajh but then with another chirping prelude James T's voice sounding healthy and strong filled the room. Jaylah gasped in surprised relief. "Scotty!"

"Captain, I think we can redirect it. There is a sealed compression hatch that will let you manually vent the weapon into space. Now we have over ridden the locks from up here but you will have to activate the manual control."

"So I just have to hit a damn button?"

"Its not a button sir. Its a silver level under a white panel."

"Got it."

"There's fore of them. Once you have readied the hatch you will have to exit the chamber immediately. If the hatch is open when the processor cycles with you in it, your going to get sucked into space."

"What happens if the hatch isn't open?"

"You get sucked into a giant fan with the weapon and we all die."

Jaylah gripped her piece of the console her muscles trembling world spinning violently. One then two then three of the blinking black dots stayed black but it was taking so long. She looked at Montgomery Scotty anxiously hoping to see his earlier confidence but his face looked angular and hard. It was not reassuring. Bones McCoy's broadcast opinion that James T would not make it didn't help.

Panting she watched as the second display image started to blink black and green the fan in the picture to the side beginning to spin. "The vent..." she moaned and then steeling herself to draw in a breath of the knife sharp air shouted, "Get out of there, James T!"

"This last hatch won't open."

One of the blue tube wearing aliens in a corner piped up. "Its the computer. It recognized your last over ride script as unsafe, sir, and its holding it in an overflow buffer not allowing it to execute. The magnetic lock on the manual release won't disengage otherwise!"

"Scotty!" James T shouted, grunting.

"Work fast Captain, time is running out." He was glanced over a black part of the display. Maybe there was something on the grayer background. She wasn't sure. It was so hard to focus. "He's not going to make it"

Not going. Not allowing. Power. She didn't have enough power. Power to make things go. Computer wouldn't let it go. Power. Computer. Did federation computers need power. "What if we make it not on?"

"What?"

"Computer. What if we made it not on?"

"Yes...that would work..." the blue tube said, "only... there are almost as many fail safes keeping the computer on as life support."

"Power." She gasped, her world reeling "undirect the power."

"Yes, shut it down. Black out that entire sector."

"One of the back up computers would activate almost instantly"

"Aye. A computer that is not holding my subroutine in digital purgatory."

"Do it" the rounder alien said.

Blurs of motion scurried in her peripheral vision even as the foreground all faded to white. James T grunting "No, no!" Then screaming. Jaylah slipped from her chair. Krall had won again. They were all going to die. Montgomery Scotty and all his mates. She couldn't save them. Everyone was going to die all over again because she just wasn't good enough.

She fell back on the floor her head bouncing on the carpet, James T's fading screams... She lost control of her body. Muscles trembling out of her control, limbs flailing. Montgomery Scotty's voice calling her name chased her down as she tumbled away into unconsciousness.

Something was wrong. Hands were on her, carrying her somewhere. The world hung, spinning beneath her. Her eyes burned and her vision swam fading in and out as motes...

Something was wrong. Her big brother, Benhamin, wasn't there. No...yes he was. He was right there with her mother and her little sister, Eilah. No, that wasn't it. Vëllai i Madh, the wise older brother, it wasn't hanging out the view port. That meant her father and the science general were arguing. There wasn't anything to see, that's right. No that was wrong. Her father's recalibration to make the warp bubble sleeker; it had let the Përpjekje carry them out of the Shans dielli system entirely and into the nearby nebula, the necro cloud - some 21 light days in just over 5 hours.

Her eyes were killing her and it felt like she trying to breathe through a towel. Her father was saying that it was okay. They just had to wait for the interlockerthingies to degauss and then they could just warp back the way they had come. Everything was going to be okay. Nothing was going to be okay. Her father said it was going to be okay and she went limp into the hands carrying her.

Time had passed; her surroundings had changed. The lights were brighter now, but all she could see was a disorienting white glare. Her lungs labored frantically. Air. There was something wrong with the air. Glare, the light, the swarm. Her house, her house was breaking. Thrashing, she tried to free herself to go rescue her house but more hands came and grabbed her dragging her along...Manas come to drag her back to the quarry, the cave, the low place, the place of death.

She tried to open her eyes but they burned so. Pure terror flooded through her. Her eyes, what had they done to her eyes? Blindness was death on death on Altamid, any weakness was, really. She dug her eyeteeth sharply into her tongue to still the scream, stilling the retching coughs. She tried to break away, to flee, to find a river and wash her eyes, but her muscles were confused, trembling. Her fingers were starting to spasm and she couldn't make them stop. Her wrists held by the hands, pinning her arms to her sides, they couldn't help but see. Krall would see. He would suck the life from her. Manas would kill her for weakness. Her father was going to be so disappointed. The hands, they lifted her boots into the air. They were carrying her away. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, her torso aching, contorting, her diaphragm starting to bruise from repeated coughs and sneezes.

Time seemed to hang in the necro cloud. Fine particles of dust collided with the ship from all sides, producing a soft hiss just at the limits of Jaylah's hearing. It was a little like the hiss of her mother frying fatty breakfast meats in the distant kitchen as heard through the cocoon of her pillow and comforter. She had been afraid, at first, when her father explained to her what the sound meant but he had taken them over to the radar station and dragged her into his lap. The screen glowed with swirls of ultraviolet, shifting from deep to near, he said, as the computer estimated the relative kinetic energy of the local cloud. "There is nothing out there bigger than a few microns, pet. Përpjekje's skin is thick aluminum…Përpjekje has strong armor, like one of the Knights but better. That silly dust can bounce off us forever and it won't ever do a thing but polish us up so that we gleam, okay?"

She nodded, not entirely understanding but willing to go along with her daddy as long as he seemed calm and confident. Her legs weren't quite long enough to reach the floor when her daddy picked her up and placed her onto the stool bolted to the radar work station so she folded her legs in, sitting lotus style in the adult sized seat. Curious, she alternated between watching the shifting colors of the display and glancing around the cabin. The interior was a little cramped width wise but it was very long. All and all it was fairly comfortable. The walls were painted white and extended up just to the reach of her fingers when she stretched out on her toes.

The bottom half of the walls were lined with an endless series of drawers each with a little knob you had to twist to release the bolt that held them closed and a little placard listing the contents inside. Next to each item was a small dial that you could click down with your thumb when you removed one. Set here and there along the wall above the doors were computer panels, like the radar display she was sitting in front of, as well as all sorts of lights and switches. Each was neatly labeled with its function allowing you to control how power moved through the ship.

Earlier, before they had taken off, her Daddy had been telling the reporter people about redundancies and how his creation had two or three ways of doing the same job in case one of them broke. Beyond the walls, the ceiling arched overhead. Where the ceiling and the walls met ran a long strip of blue LEDs, angled so that they shone the silver metallic coating of the ceiling above diffusing the light evenly through the entire room.

This smooth even light stood in counterpoint to the seemingly random blue pulses of cherenkov radiation as the energy from tiny little bits of antimatter was forced to travel...elsewise...down the warp reactor core lying sideways along the Përpjekje's beam. The flickers gradually began to come faster as her daddy readied the ship to warp them back home.

The top of the core extended into the cabin space but was covered for much of its length by wide repeated arches so you could walk from the right side to the left quickly enough from pretty much anywhere. The rest of it extended into the engineering crawl space beneath the panels of carpeted steel that made up the floor.

She wasn't moving any more. Squirting through her streaming eyes Jaylah tried to figure out where the hands had taking her. Gone were the familiar curving walls and grated floors of her house. Had she been outside at one point? Outside? Was she still on Altamid? She squinted, above her... shadowed faces surrounding one very bright central light. Grey expanses, walls? on either side...she should string her hammock across them she was so tired.

Focus. She held her breath letting her head fall back eyes spinning looking across the space she was in. It was wide and square, blurry darker patches adorned what she was almost certain were the walls. Blinking furiously, her vision cleared slightly as she held her breath. Beside her were tall long and very narrow soft looking tables with much smaller tables metallic? next to them. That tickled something in her memory but the need to exhale the carbon dioxide in her lungs became overwhelming and her world flared in hacking and pain and delirium again.

Jaylah's eyes followed the split of the floor forward to where it came together right before the cabin space. There, sitting in one of the big comfortable takeoff chairs, was her mother holding her sister, Eilah, in her lap, braiding her hair. Her mother had brushed her sister's hair, still the deep rusty black of childhood, back from where it surged up into the spaces between her khutut alwajh (hey, Jaylah's hair wasn't still black...not really...she had found a couple of wisps of adult white growing in even if her daddy did insist they were spider webs).

The khutut on her sister's face were a soft even near blue as she cuddled, but Jaylah caught the occasional flicker of hot ultraviolet in her mother's markings, betraying her internal unease. She could just hear the two of them singing an old lilting ballad about a foreign King coming to rid his ally of a terrible monster. The king and his 14 warriors braved the terrible dangers of descending into a valley and slew the giant murk breather that dwelled there.

Her mother's voice was softly melodic and soothing while Eilah hadn't quite managed to learn to add tone to her words yet. Still, she shouted along with the rhythm, giggling, swinging a pretend sword and momentarily drowning out the menacing hiss of the necro cloud. Turning slightly in her stool, Jaylah folded her arms onto the console, pillowing her face upon them and fell asleep to the sound of her mother's voice.

But her dream had become a nightmare hadn't it? A nightmare for so long. But, no, aliens. Aliens had come into it and made her house fly; they had rescued her or had she rescued them? They were...they were...who were they? She fought to remember, something something, blue green eyes, her mates, everyone she had ever mated with was dead? coming for her, coming for her, beam me up. Stirring weakly she shook her head from side to side trying to clear it, fighting for lucidity. Her mind latched onto that last idea repeating it over and over in a thick slurring mantra. "Beam me up. Please, please, beam me up."

A voice, familiar. "Just lay easy, lassie. You're safe. You've beamed home." Something, one of the dark spots split turning gray coupled with a wooshing sound. "Its about bloody time. What the hell's..."

Her father. He had come back and was standing there before her shaking her. No, he was still standing with her brother and the scientist general in the rear of the cabin talking anxiously about something while under the pretext of making food. No, he was shaking her pointing at something behind her animatedly, his khutut flickering so hotly that they almost faded back to black. His mouth was open but he wasn't saying anything. Why couldn't she hear him? Because he was over in the distant corner whispering with her brother obviously. He was right there index finger jabbing at the screen.

Why wasn't she looking where her father was pointing? Why was she just sitting there sleeping in the chair. Something important was happening on the screen and she was just sleeping there. Her daddy was so angry - gesturing behind her. There, on the screen, one then five then many; hot angry greed dots screaming through the ultraviolet nebular mist. She opened her mouth to shout, to warn them, to tell her Daddy to engage the warp now! But she couldn't, she was sleeping and it was all her fault.

Another voice brusque yet warm and soft somehow. "All right darling, all right. We've got you. Don't fight me now. Its..." She never heard what it was. The hands heaved and she was falling, an electric tingle passing over her skin, humming, a tingle of static electricity in the air, inside her, filling her, the taste of ozone subtle but caustic on her tongue, then her head burrowed into the shockingly soft ground and her world spun back into blackness.

The impact threw her meters through the air, smashing down on her knees, feeling the bone flex into a deep sprain almost breaking outright. There was no sound, just a single solid shock wave that tore everything in her father's ship to pieces.

Cabinets burst open, electronics flared, sparking, some even exploded - tongues of flame devouring the wire coatings within. In the desperately flickering light of the mortally wounded Përpjekje she saw that there was something actually piercing in through the skin of the craft. She stared dumbstruck and then started to scream when the craft split open. Deep virulent green light poured out streaming in toxic shafts around the emerging form of him.

Benhamin rushed at it but there was a flare of light. Her mother was shrieking. Benhamen was falling, aging, drying out before her. Manas looked at her. Right into her eyes and he grinned. In his eyes glittered countless torments, pains, deaths. Her dream shattered in denial, her world exploded in pain, her body convulsed in horror drawing in a sharp breath. One breath to many. Something in her broke and her entire body flailed, her right side screaming in pain as it battered, burning against an electric wall, seizing out of her control. Consciousness was ripped away and she fell into an infinitely faceted diamond each face holding a moment of agony: physical or emotional, pure and eternal. Manas. Stripping everything away from her. Stripping away her family, her innocence, her childhood, her soul.