Friday Full-Length: Diesto, Isle of Marauder
Posted in Bootleg Theater on November 5th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Good record.
Diesto was:
Chris Dunn – Guitar/Vocals
Mark Bassett – Guitar/Vocals
Steve Reno – Bass
Scott Ulrich – Drums
Recorded and Mixed by Adam Pike
Mastered by Carl Saff
Artwork by Mark McCormick and Matthew Mattison
—
A quick note: So, I was recently dared by a friend on Twitter to rewrite the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Fury.” S06E23. Maybe even double-dared to do so and to post it on the site. Same friend recommended I check out the Diesto record above, so I did that, and wrote the following while listening. I hope you enjoy. Or if you don’t, there’s always next week.
—
— Fury —
Even looking at it so far out, Captain Kathryn Janeway could tell the object coming toward them on the viewscreen was a ship.
Two words: “Tuvok, make?”
“Its hull is composed of an unknown alloy, captain,” the Vulcan answered. “They are on an intercept course.”
Harry spoke up from ops without being asked. “Captain, I’m reading one life sign. It’s… Ocampan.”
“Kes…?” mused the recently-demoted Ensign Tom Paris from the conn.
“We don’t know that yet,” Chakotay corrected him from the first officer’s seat next to the captain’s chair.
But Janeway knew. Kes was coming home.
“Hail her.”
The ship was still approaching. Coming in fast. Was Kes in a hurry to get to Voyager? For some reason, Janeway thought of her mother in Bloomington.
“She’s answering,” said Kim.
“Onscreen.”
—
The shock rippled around the bridge at the sight of Kes. When she’d left the ship four years earlier to develop her psionic powers in a safer environment, maybe even to return to her people, Kes was a vital young woman with a supernova smile and a genuinely caring manner that had led her to such accomplishments in supporting the doctor in sickbay. She was someone who had saved lives. So little time later, her skin hung in jowls as though melting from her face, and her eyes showed none of the same energy. She looked tired. Dying.
How short a season, thought Janeway.
When Kes spoke, though, her tone was urgent.
“Captain, you have to beam me aboard. Please.”
“What is it, Kes? What’s wrong?”
“Please. We can discuss it later. You have to bring me on board.”
Tuvok, from behind, “Her ship is set to collide with us in 30 seconds.”
Janeway turned her head to regard him, “Not much warning, eh commander?” That earned her a raised eyebrow.
She looked at the screen again, said as gently as she could, “Kes, you need to cut your engines and let us tractor your ship.”
Chakotay spoke up. “Phasers?”
It was too late.
Voyager was big enough that if the ship had hit somewhere farther off, they might not have felt more than a low rumble, but the impact was much closer than that to the main bridge. Maybe a deck or two down?
—
Kes walked through the hallway of deck two with hell following behind. Power conduits burst as she walked in explosions of sparks and smoke and wreckage. Her jaw was set, her eyes burning like the localized EPS grid. But she was aware of herself and where she was. It was her body dying, not her mind. More, she knew where she was going. She’d lived here for years.
Deck two. Mess Hall.
The doors opened on her approach.
A flood of memories came back and she wished she could burn every one of them.
With the collision of her ship, Voyager had gone to immediate red alert, and so all crew had reported to their stations. The Mess Hall was empty. Almost.
She could hear the banging of pots and pans in the galley. That voice, singing to itself some old Talaxian folk song. So light and carefree. Neelix. Everyone’s friend. The moral officer. The ambassador. The one who had taken her. Used her. Controlled her. Made her need him, not out of love, but fear and weakness.
Kes couldn’t hear him speak without thinking of all the times he’d manipulated her. She wasn’t yet one year old when they met on Ocampa, and suddenly he told her they were in love and he could take her away. Away from her family, away from young death. Away from life underground. To see a real sun. Neelix had a ship. He had it all figured out. They could be together. They would be. He said they would and that was all that mattered. He said he loved her. She said she loved him.
Her teeth were grinding. Kes closed her eyes. The singing stopped and something metal fell on the floor.
—
He tried to move his arms, but they wouldn’t budge. His legs the same. “Hello…?” He looked up and saw the ceiling, but it had changed. He was on one of the Mess Hall tables.
“Hello, Neelix.” said Kes.
He was confused, but elated. “Kes, is that you?” Oh sweeting how I’ve–”
“Don’t call me that!” Neelix felt a bone in his foot begin to twist. Kes hadn’t moved. “I am not your ‘sweeting.’ Do you understand?”
“Yes I’m sorry!” he said immediately and the pain eased. “Where are we, Kes? What’s going on?”
Neelix’s combadge chirped. “Bridge to Neelix. Are you okay?” The voice was scratchy, cutting through interference.
“I don’t know, Captain,” Neelix replied. “Kes is here. I seem to be under some kind of forcefield and–” his voice caught as his throat closed immediately. He choked his next word.
“Shut up,” Kes said with methodical calm. “I have him, Captain. It’s over.”
“What’s over, Kes? What is this? What’s happening?”
Kes could see inside the atoms of the combadge. Past the circuits that made it function, past the data stream that tied it through the ship’s main computer, through the transporter system. She moved the atoms faster and faster until the combadge melted through Neelix’s garish jacket and onto his skin. He screamed.
—
“Chakotay, Tuvok, Tom, go,” ordered Janeway. They nodded and were off the bridge.
A short time later, Chakotay stood outside what used to be the Mess Hall. Where the door used to be, the wall was now black and reflective. He could see his own confusion. Tom stood with his mouth open as Tuvok conducted a tricorder scan.
“Commander, report,” came Janeway’s order from the comm.
Chakotay was about to answer when Tuvok cut in, “Captain, somehow the wall and door of the Mess Hall have been transformed into an unidentifiable neutronium alloy. If these readings are correct, nothing in our current arsenal can penetrate it. Further, I’m reading the same material on all sides, including the outside wall of the ship. Somehow, it has become a windowless box that we cannot enter.”
That wasn’t good enough. “Janeway to Torres.”
“Torres here.”
“B’Elanna, take a team to deck two and help Tuvok try to find a way through this thing. Inform Seven as well.”
The lieutenant responded with a quick “aye” and called to Taurik and Jenkins to follow her before tapping her combadge and calling Seven of Nine. Engineering had been monitoring the situation and registered the change in the hull, but had yet to come up with a solution. She doubted being in front of it would make a difference, but orders were orders.
In the meantime, the captain had an idea of her own. “Janeway to the Doctor,” she called to sickbay.
“Doctor here. Yes, captain?”
“I’d like to have Ensign Kim try to transport you to the Mess Hall to talk to Kes. Something is wrong and she has Neelix. We think he might be in trouble and we don’t know why, but she cut off communication with us. I’m hoping she might respond to you given your past friendship. A familiar face, as it were.”
“Of course,” said the doctor. “I’ll bring a medkit.”
“Negative,” Janeway answered quickly. “We won’t be able to transport more physical matter than your mobile emitter, if we can even do that. If you need supplies, you’ll have to convince Kes to let you bring them in. Presumably, if she altered the hull configuration once, she can do it again, however she’s done it.”
“Understood.”
The captain turned. “Harry?”
Harry Kim looked down at his console and began to run his hands over the interface. “Energizing…”
Why am I holding my breath?
Kim sighed. “Captain, I’m unable to get a cohesive pattern through that alloy. Whatever it is, even something as small as the Doctor’s mobile emitter can’t get through it.”
“Stand by, Doctor. Harry, keep trying. Computer, shut down power to the Mess Hall,” ordered Janeway.
“Unable to comply,” came the automated response. “Command functions for deck two have been disabled.”
The captain rolled her eyes.
“So I guess we’re waiting for B’Elanna and the others,” she said, resigned for the moment. “Anybody know how to play pinochle?”
At his station, Harry shrugged and shook his head.
—
She could feel their presence outside but knew her former friends would be unable to get in. On the table in front of her, Neelix’s voice had faded to whispers. He pleaded with her.
“Please, swee–I mean Kes. Please. Tell me what’s wrong. Let me help.”
“Help!” Kes shouted back at him. “Like you helped me on Ocampa? You took me away from my family and then abandoned me to the Kazon.” She cringed thinking what had been done to her in the harsh desert light on the surface of her world. “It wasn’t until you met Voyager that you even bothered to come for me.”
“I was always going to come back. I was–” Neelix cut off. Kes had closed her eyes and found the fire in the whiskers on his face. She let it out and they were gone in an instant. It didn’t rob Neelix of sight or hearing, but he could no longer feel the room the same way, understand the vibrations in the air. He felt lost, one of his senses impaired. “Kes please.”
She didn’t seem to hear him.
“You told me loved me.”
“I did love you. I do love you. Let me help you.”
She could taste the poison of his words now and it sickened her. How easily he’d shaped her into what he thought she should be. The little pixie growing plants in the aeroponics bay. The little nurse. She thought about his petty jealousies. His controlling her. The decisions he made for them both. About their lives. About hers.
It was time to be done with this.
In that moment, Kes understood everything. She could see the past, hers and before her, and the future, both her own and that after. She knew every dimension and every outcome of every possibility. It fed through her expanded mind, past corporeality and into an unnamed otherness that was both Kes and Beyond Kes. What would happen could only happen. Her eyes and mind were clear.
She put a withered hand on either side of Neelix’s now-bare face, thought of mind-melding with Tuvok as she only began to understand her abilities those years ago.
“My mind to your mind,” she said, though she didn’t need to say it. “I’m going to show you what you did to me.”
And she did. She showed Neelix the child she had been, only months old. She showed him his own cruelty, all the tiny ways he belittled her, made her subservient to his needs, his will, his wretched fantasies of what she was. She gave it all back to him. The underlying spite. The hate. The rape he called their love and her own powerlessness to question it. It was an instant, but Neelix saw everything she had lived through in those years, saw her try to break away from him time and again until finally her mind’s destructive force set out against the rest of the ship in its own, subconscious violence.
Then his skin burned. His eyes opened wide and burned. The last thing he saw was Kes’ face hating him, taking his life away, and then Neelix saw nothing at all.
—
Tuvok, Seven, Torres and the others were still outside when the walls changed back. The Doctor had been transported in and they found him alone, scanning a table covered with what looked to be ash.
“Stand back,” said the Doctor as the captain came in behind, finding the Mess Hall restored to its former order. The lights were still dimmed for the red alert as power routed to the shields and weapons, neither of which they’d needed. The tricorder in his hand hummed and the room smelled like burnt meat. “These would appear to be the remains of Mr. Neelix.”
“What?” asked Janeway, shocked. “Where is Kes?”
No one had an answer.
