The Inquisition of Kevin Mitchell Pt.4

Posted on Fri Jun 12th, 2026 @ 8:33am by Lieutenant JG Kate Kono & Captain Shran dh'Klar

4,104 words; about a 21 minute read

Mission: Sins of the Empire
Location: Deep Space Twenty
Timeline: between missions

Kate entered the turbolift with three other security officers and let the doors close behind her. She holstered her phaser and leaned against the wall, the carpet padding cold against her shoulders.

“Takes about a minute to get there, even on Security Express,” the Officer said.

Kate let her eyes close. The hum of the turbolift filled the silence.

“Hunting one of your own. Sort of takes the small talk out of the equation, eh, Lieutenant?”

She opened her eyes at the ceiling for a moment before looking back down at nothing in particular. Her arms tightened across her chest.

“You probably have no idea,” she said. “I hope you never do.”

“Did you know him well,” a younger officer asked. He was standing close to the doors, watching them as though they might open at any moment.

Kate looked at the floor. Something like a smile crossed her face.

“I thought I did,” she said. “Hope I still do.”

The turbolift doors ground open with a tortured rasp, like metal teeth chewing through fiber—and immediately everything inside felt twisted, wrong. Kate’s gaze dropped to the source of a piercing tension: a rope, knotted and glistening, stretched taut through the parting doors. She jerked her eyes upward. Two figures lay collapsed against the control-room consoles, their uniforms blistered into ashen rags by vicious burn scars. The stench of charred flesh rolled in behind them, a suffocating tide that sent all three in the lift recoiling in horror.

“By the gods—” the young officer’s voice cracked.

Kate’s boots hit the deck plates as she hurdled into the control room. The nearest corpse was a woman, her arm extended toward the tractor-beam relay as though she had died reaching for it—which she had, in a way, the rope knotted at her wrist drawing her fingers across the console as the turbolift doors directed her last command on a tug of her extremity. Kate’s eyes traced the rope from the dead woman’s wrist back through the doors, measuring it. Someone had sat somewhere quiet and done the math: the exact distance from the turbolift threshold to the tractor-beam relay, the precise extension of a human arm, the give of the knot. Kevin probably tested it more than once. On the console, a schematic glowed: a pulsing beam aimed at a massive tug-pod. Beyond the thick viewport, a cobalt column of energy snaked outward, illuminating the yawning expanse of the interior bay. The maintenance tug-pod shuddered into view, growing at a breakneck pace as it hurtled straight for them. Behind her, the turbolift doors slid shut with a hollow clang and snapped; locked—triggered by the tricorder pad Kevin planted on the wall.

Kate ripped her phaser from her belt, dialed it to overload, then flung it behind her like a detonator. She yanked the two security officers, shouting, “Behind the console! Now!” Their faces were drained of color as the tug’s blue halo eclipsed the viewport. The turbolift doors buckled under the phasers explosion, then shattered inward, hurling shards of deck plating like razor shrapnel. Heat and dust roared around them in a single, savage heartbeat.

Kate sprinted for the open shaft. “RUN!” she screamed.

The rookie dove without hesitation; the veteran stilled for a heartbeat too long, eyes locked on the hulking tug as it smashed through the control-room windows in a cascade of twisted metal and glass. A thunderous boom tore through the hull as the air-pressure differential exploded outward. Kate and the young officer plummeted into the yawning shaft just as the cabin’s atmosphere surged out behind them. They slapped sweaty hands onto the ladder’s rungs, clinging as a hurricane of debris whipped past.

Above them, one security officer was yanked into the emptiness of the bay. Kate barely registered flailing body through the hull breach as he smacked against the outer hull of the USS Washington’s saucer section and spun weightless into the void. Below, the other guard screamed, tumbling down the shaft until a final, bone-jarring thud echoed as he struck the top of the turbolift car.

Kate’s fingers bled where they gripped metal. Her chest heaved with broken breaths; her eyes overflowed with raw disbelief and a helpless, hollow ache. The echo of that last scream hung in her ears as she clung to the ladder, trembling.

Kate’s hand went to her chest and found nothing. She worked her boots against the shaft wall until she found the top of the turbolift car and lowered herself down. The young officer was on his back, breathing in shallow, wet pulls, one arm stretched toward her. Blood had spread beneath him in a dark mirror. She took his hand in both of hers and held it. His lips moved. She leaned close, close enough to feel the faint warmth of his breath, but the words never came. His grip loosened. His eyes went somewhere she could not follow. She stayed crouched over him for a moment that felt very long, the dust still sifting down through her hair, a piece of debris ticking off the roof of the car every few seconds like a clock. Then she reached down and unclipped his comm badge and drew the phaser from his holster. She straightened and looked up through the ruined shaft at the gutted control room, at the gaping wound in the hull, at everything that one man had decided to destroy. Something in her chest that had still been undecided finally closed.

She looked back down at the young officer’s face, at the stillness of it, and felt the grief and the fury arrive together, indistinguishable from each other. She set the phaser well past stun.

She pressed the comm badge. “DS Twenty Command and Control, this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Kono, Kate, USS Washington. I am in possession of Lieutenant Junior Grade Park, Kenny’s comm badge, registry DS-Security. Requesting immediate credential transfer, authorization Kono-Seven-Alpha.”

A pause. A man’s voice, clipped and professional. “DS Twenty C-and-C, copy. Voiceprint matched, Lieutenant. We’re registering a significant pressure event in your sector. Please advise.”

“Confirmed. I need you to log the following. Contact and hull breach, ATC Interior Bay. Four KIA. DS Security, two unidentified, control room. DS Security, Junior Grade Park, Kenny, turbolift shaft. And Commander Yannis Rowan.” She kept her voice flat and even. “I need a site-to-site transport in seventeen seconds on my mark. I am at the breach threshold. Can you execute?”

There was a beat of silence that had nothing professional in it. “Commander Rowan.” The voice had gone quiet in a way that was not a question. Then, steadying: “Confirmed, Lieutenant. Seventeen seconds on your mark.”

She had already been moving. She climbed the last rungs of the ladder to the level of the breached hull, her fingers leaving smears on the metal, and found the emergency deactivation lever recessed in the wall. She wrapped both hands around it. Took one breath. Let it all the way out.

“Mark.”

She threw the lever and the seal gave way.

The atmosphere did not rush out so much as vanish. One moment there was air, and the next there was the concept of air, and then there was nothing at all. The silence was total and absolute in a way no silence ever is, because silence still has air moving through it, still has the small sounds of a living body, and this had none of that. Her eardrums flexed outward in a long, nauseating pull. The moisture on her eyes went first, a sudden burning rawness across both corneas, and then she felt it on her tongue, that horrible boiling sensation that was not heat but pressure, the saliva lifting off the surface of it in a way her brain had no category for. Her lips dried and cracked in seconds. The tear track on her cheek tightened and vanished.

Her chest locked. There was no air to exhale and no air to draw in, and her diaphragm spasmed against the vacuum in a long, useless contraction. The veins in her forearms stood out against her skin like cables pulled taut. Her vision began to tunnel from the outside in, the edges going dark and soft, and she used the last of her coordination to drag the tricorder Kevin had left on the wall and slam it against the console.

The display read TRANSFER COMPLETE.

The world came apart in pieces, the gutted control room dissolving panel by panel, the cold and the dark and the silence peeling away in layers, and she was already unconscious or nearly so when the transporter pad materialized under her boots and her knees buckled and the sound of the ship came back all at once, the red alert klaxon and recycled air and the Transporter Chief’s voice saying something urgent very close to her face as his hands caught her by the arms and kept her from hitting the floor.

The klaxon came back before anything else did. Kate’s first breath was not a breath so much as a convulsion, her whole torso seizing around the sudden presence of air, and she choked on it, coughed it back out, and seized again. Her eyes were open but not working yet, the overhead lights arriving as smeared halos through a film she couldn’t blink away. The Transporter Chief’s hands were on her shoulders and she shoved at them, not hard, just enough to get onto her back, because she needed her throat lower than her chest and she needed to swallow and she could not do either of those things while someone was holding her upright.

The saliva came back slowly. She swallowed once, failed, swallowed again. Her eardrums were still flexing with phantom pressure. She could feel her heartbeat in her corneas.

She found the tricorder by feel and got it up between them. “Download.” The word came out wrecked, barely a word at all. She tried again. “Last download. Relay it.” A cough tore through the middle of it. Medics were there now, hands on her wrists, a light crossing her eyes. She hit the transport lock on the stretcher before she fully understood she was on one. “Ben Dalton. Intelligence. USS Washington.” Each word arrived separately, like she was learning them. “Get it to him.”


Kate got a hand up and pointed at the replicator. One of the medics understood and pressed a cup into her fingers. She got it to her mouth and tipped it and the water hit the back of her throat like something being switched back on, every cracked and desiccated surface of her mouth and throat registering it all at once. She finished it in three swallows and held the cup out without looking up. A second appeared in her hand. She drank that one slower, feeling her saliva finally return to something like normal, feeling the rawness in her throat begin to dull from a burn to an ache. Her lips had split in at least two places. Her eyes still felt like sand. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth and concentrated on the fact that the air was there, that it would keep being there, that each inhale would be followed by another. She took the next glass and tipped it against her open eyes, one and then the other, blinking hard into the water, feeling it cut through the grit and rawness in a way that was almost violent in its relief. Her corneas were still burning. She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye and held it there. The medic said something. She held up a finger. Breathed. The air was still arriving in uneven pulls, her diaphragm not yet convinced it could trust the rhythm, each inhale still slightly too urgent, slightly too shallow, her body not quite believing yet that the next one would come.

“Communications are down throughout the base,” the Transporter Chief said. “Short range only.”

Kate pressed the cup against her eye socket and breathed through her nose. The air still felt like a gift she didn’t trust. She thought about Kevin. She thought about Rowan. She thought about the four bodies in the control room and the fact that Kevin had put them there and then walked out, and something in her chest that was not a cough and not a sob clenched hard and released into nothing. He had been thorough. Of course he had been thorough. He couldn’t stop her from getting the data so he had stopped the data from going anywhere. She tried her communicator anyway. The silence on the line was its own kind of vacuum.


Kate lowered the cup. Her split lips burnt every moment she wasn’t keeping water on them. Her eyes were still burning and her diaphragm still stuttered on every third breath like it was checking, still not convinced. She looked at the laying on the chief’s transporter console.

“Read me what’s on it,” she said. Her voice came out scraped raw, each word arriving separately, like gravel. “All of it.”

The Chief shook his head slowly. “It’s just a manifest. Ships on the exterior dock. The Cavalier, the USS Rothschild, and the Roanoke.”

Kate turned that over. Not a Starfleet ship. He couldn’t risk a Starfleet ship, not after this.

“Something for the headache,” she said, not looking at the medics. “The Cavalier and the Roanoke. Which of those is Federation registry?”

“The Roanoke. The Cavalier is privately owned.”

“Destination on the Cavalier.”

“Freecloud.”

One of the medics pressed a hypospray against her neck and the headache dropped from a white pressure to a dull throb that she could work behind. She replicated another glass of water at the wall unit and drank half of it crossing back to the pad, her diaphragm still hitching on every few breaths, her lips pulling and splitting where they had dried. Her eyes were still burning. She would need to keep blinking. She could do that.

“You need to come to Sickbay,” the medic said. “Vacuum exposure requires a full workup, there could be micro barotrauma to the”

Kate finished the water, set the glass down carefully on the edge of the pad, and pulled her phaser. Her hands were steadier than she expected. The Chief was already reading her and his fingers moved along the console without being asked. The transporter room dissolved in the familiar way, panel by panel, and she kept her feet under her this time, though her knees wanted badly to go again, and the corridor that assembled itself around her was dim and cold and smelled like recycled air, and she stood in it and breathed and let the next inhale come.

Kate tried her communicator. Two chirps, clipped and flat, and nothing after. She ignored it and stood still for a moment in the dim corridor, listening. The recycled air moved past her face in a thin current and she turned into it slightly, the way you turn toward water. Her lips had split again where she’d stopped keeping them wet and she ran her tongue across them and tasted copper. Her knees were holding. She took inventory of the rest: eyes still burning at the edges, diaphragm still catching every few breaths like a hitch in an engine, the particular loneliness of a corridor with no voices in it and a phaser in her hand and Kevin somewhere ahead of her on a ship called the Cavalier with a head start she couldn’t afford to think about.

She worked her way around the docking column and found a man guarding the airlock door with a phaser rifle across his chest. She holstered hers before she came around the corner. Her diaphragm hitched on the inhale. She made herself slow down.

“Hi.” The word came out wrong, too thin, the rawness in her throat turning it into something barely social. She cleared it carefully and tried again. “Sorry. Getting over something.” She pointed at her throat and produced what she hoped read as a rueful smile. Her split lips pulled and she felt one of them open again at the corner. “I’m with the inspection team. We had a man come aboard earlier and we think he may have brought something up from the zoology lab on fourteen. Secured species. You know how Romulus is about containment.”

She put her shoulder against the bulkhead beside the airlock and kept her weight there, which was less casual than she wanted it to look and more necessary than she wanted to admit. Her eyes were still burning at the edges. She kept blinking.

The man’s hand went to his communicator. “Let me check with Captain Cross.”

Two chirps. Nothing.

Kate kept her face where it was. Her corneas felt like gravel. Her lips were pulling at both split corners every time she moved her mouth and she could taste copper at the left one.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mine’s been doing that too. Something with the station.” She let a breath out slowly through her nose and looked up at him. “It’ll only take a minute.”

The man at the door smiled at her.

“Fine. One minute.”

She kept her face where it was until she was through the airlock. The panels directed her to sickbay without being asked and she followed them, her diaphragm still hitching, her eyes burning at the edges, blinking hard against it. The tricorder beeped at the door and she went in without slowing down.

Kevin was stepping off the exam table. The cuts from Na’Riss were already gone, pink new skin where they had been. He looked at her face and whatever he was about to say didn’t come out.

A Bolian doctor started toward her. “You need to put that”

She looked at him. He stopped. He didn’t leave.

Kevin took a step back. She crossed to the exam table without looking away from him and picked up the dermal regenerator and ran it across her lips. The splitting stopped. She kept walking toward him and he kept backing up, circling the perimeter of the room the way people do when there is nowhere to go.

“Kate.” His voice had something careful in it. “What happened to you?”

Her diaphragm hitched on the inhale. She let it. She thought about the four bodies in the control room. She thought about seventeen seconds. She thought about how thorough he had been and how long he had been being thorough and how many people had needed to be in his way for him to have gotten this far.

“You know what happened to me,” she said. Her voice came out quiet, which was not what she intended, but her throat was still raw and she didn’t have enough air yet to put anything behind it. She kept walking. He kept circling. “Tell me about the Glass House.”

“The — what?” Kevin asked.

“The control room.” She stopped walking. He stopped circling. “You rigged it. You knew we were coming for the records, and you rigged it.” Her diaphragm hitched and she let it and kept her eyes on him. “Four people. Four people who wanted to be out here, who signed up to explore, and you put them to death.” She crossed the remaining distance, and he had nowhere left to go and she put the phaser against his chest. Her voice was still quiet. She didn’t have enough air yet to make it anything else and she was done pretending that was a problem. “Tell me it was worth it. Tell me getting to Freecloud was worth four of them. Tell me you think get to walk away from this!”

Kate pushed the phaser harder into his chest. Kate winced and gasped. Something pulled badly in her side, and she let both happen while keeping her gaze on him. She thought about saying something and didn’t. The Bolian doctor had not moved. She could hear the ventilation. She thought about the Kevin she knew from the replimat, the way he used to slide things across the table toward her without being asked, the particular quality of his attention then. She thought about the four bodies. She kept the phaser where it was. “What happened to you,” she said finally. It didn’t come out like a question.

Kevin rolled his eyes and sighed at Kate. She could see that he was pretending like she didn’t matter but it was obvious he was in some way affected by the way she treated him now. She just didn’t know if it was because he had to look her in the eye, or if it was genuine remorse, in some way, over what he had done.

“Kate.” Something shifted in his face. “Maybe I was always this way. Maybe you just weren’t good enough to see it.” He kept his voice level. It cost him something. “Ben would have. Ben would have seen it in the first week.”

She didn’t move the phaser.

“Section 31 cut you loose,” she said. “That’s what this is.” Her twitched momentarily in pain and she let it. “I’ve stood in front of actual monsters. You don’t look like them. You look like someone who needed to matter and ran out of legitimate ways to do it.” She pressed the phaser harder into his chest. “Four people. For Freecloud. For whatever you think you’re proving.” Her voice was still quiet. She still didn’t have enough air. “Say their names.”

Kevin said nothing.

“Say them.”

Kate shoved him back and put distance between them, the phaser coming up level with his face. Her thumb found the discharge button. She felt the give in it, the small amount of pressure it would take. Her diaphragm hitched. She held it there.

The Bolian had not moved.

She breathed out through her nose. Her thumb stayed where it was for another second, and then another, and then she lowered the phaser to her side.

“I met two of them,” she said. Her voice was still quiet. “But you knew none of them. You are going to spend the rest of your life in a nine by nine trying to figure out what that means.” Kate’s eyes watered and she let them. Her throat closed on the next inhale, and she held the phaser level and blinked hard, once, and the burning at the edges came back and she let that be true too. She kept her eyes on him. Her throat was raw and she still didn’t have enough air, and she let both of those things be true. “A metal bunk. A PaDD. A force field. That is what four people’s lives bought you.”

The doors to sickbay opened. Four of them, weapons she didn’t recognize, not Starfleet issue, not anything with a stun setting. She dropped the phaser before she had finished deciding to. It skittered across the floor and a Romulan she hadn’t seen coming stepped out from behind the security detail and kicked it the rest of the way under the exam table.

“Starfleet officers do not have jurisdiction onboard civilian vessels,” the Romulan said. He looked past her at Kevin. “You’ve tested my patience for the last time, Mitchell. She’s seen the operations. Kill her.”

Kevin looked at her. Something moved through his face that she couldn’t name. He held up a hand toward the Romulan.

“Let me.” His voice had gone easy, almost warm. “She’s not going anywhere. Look at her.” He took a step toward her and his expression did something she recognized from the replimat, from the way he used to slide things across the table. “You’re smart, Kate. You’ve always been smart. You know how this ends if Torvelle handles it.” Another step. “Let me get you somewhere you can breathe. You can ask me anything you want. The real version.”

Kate breathed in through her nose. She looked at him the way she had looked at the phaser discharge button, with the same quality of attention, the same small and specific knowledge of what it would take.

“Kevin,” she said. “I’m going to show you what getting real is all about.”

TO BE CONTINUED IN PT.5

 

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