cedar_grove | Just a Little Vignette

In honour of Sherlock Holmes' birthday, and prompted by a challenge on

drabbles_o_fun a short piece revealing a snippet of Cally's alternate fate after Terminal.

//Move again before I tell you, and I will kill you!//

The words pressed into the communication centres of his mind, and flat on his back on the deck of the ship, staring up at the hooded and masked figure – and more importantly at the tip of the arrow aimed unerringly at his throat – Jiovan froze.

"Look, whatever it is we've done," Vila appealed, "I'm sure we can talk it over, work things out."

"Be silent," Jiovan repeated the words that were pressed against him, "and stay where you are."

"Why won't you talk to us?" Vila asked.

The masked woman's head tilted slightly to one side, but a moment later she shook it, denying the possibility.

"You would not understand," Jiovan relayed her words.

"What I don't understand," Tarrant offered, jerking his head proudly in the direction of the armed woman that stood boldly on Scorpio's crippled flight deck, "is how the hell you got here in the first place. Avon said—"

The woman flinched slightly, and drew back the bowstring just a little more.

"What Avon said does not matter," Jiovan could not hope to voice the same bitterness that surged into his mind at the mention of the computer specialist's name. "It matters only that I am here and that you will, all of you, do as I say."

"No," Tarrant refused to be cowed, as usual pushing his luck– or rather Jiovan's luck – to the limit. The supine man did not appreciate that. "She shouldn't even have been able to get in here. The security arrangements that Orac is running—"

"Make it perfectly reasonable that she should be here."

Jiovan glanced past the woman to the owner of the irritatingly nasal voice. He saw that Avon was armed, his gun pointing at the centre of the woman's back.

"But you said no one could get past Orac," Dayna whined.

"Correction," Avon snapped, moving closer the masked woman, but as yet making no move to disarm her, or even to dissuade her from pointing her weapon at Jiovan's throat, "what I said was that no one who was not registered as a friend within Orac's data banks would be able to bypass our security measures."

"But she—" Vila said.

"And of course," Avon continued as though Vila had never even spoken, addressing the woman directly, "that doesn't apply to you, does it… Cally?"

Jiovan's heart sank as Avon shifted his aim from the Auronar telepath, Cally to point the gun at his head. He should have realised that only someone known to Blake's dissidents and their computer watchdog would have been able to walk right into their midst and unmask him for the traitor he was.

Cally loosened the bowstring and reached up to take the hood from her head and pull off the mask. Even Jiovan winced at the burn scars that graced the left hand side of her face.

"This man," she said, using her voice for the first time, a low, smooth voice that carried with it a bitter strength, "is a Federation spy and unless you all come with me now, you are in great danger."