The Inquisition of Kevin Mitchell Pt.5

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

4,124 words; about a 21 minute read

Mission: Sins of the Empire
Location: The Cavilar

Kate’s head was still spinning, but Kevin’s cold grip on her arm kept her centered. He steered her down a corridor toward another section of the ship. Kate slipped her hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around the scalpel she’d lifted from the operating table.

“You’re going to kill me too?” she said, her expression a mix of pain and accusation. “Is that your new plan?”

“I don’t want to, but I have to,” Kevin replied as he kept her moving. At the end of the hall, Kate spotted an airlock.

“No! Are you serious?!” Her eyes went wide.

“Look, you knew what you were getting into. You already sucked vacuum once today! Just do it again, and it’ll all be over.” Kevin yanked her arm harder. Kate pretended to stumble. As he braced himself, she plunged the scalpel from its hiding place against his thigh, slicing deep into the meat of his thigh, feeling the blade catch and tear something vital before she yanked it free. Kevin barely registered it, assuming she’d slipped and scratched him while catching herself on his pants.

“Not anymore, girl… Just die with some dignity. I actually liked you, you know?”

“You have a strange way of showing it!” Kate shot back.

Kevin staggered and tightened his grip. “Geez…” he mumbled, each step more labored as he shivered against the air but it hadn’t really gotten colder, at least lot for anyone else.

“Yeah… A hard day when you spend the evening killing your friends,” Kate said coldly.

“You have no clue… But you’re the cause of this. All you had to do was agree to join Section 31. Sure, you’d suffer under that captain’s daughter for a few years, but do you even know what Section 31 means?”

“So, it was them? Lieutenant Commander Tapping and who else?” Kate asked, noting how his skin had gone gray, how his pupils had blown wide. “Kevin? You okay?”

“Kate… I hate to break it to you, but I need you out of my life to get today over with,” he gasped, losing strength. “What the hell…” He noticed his socks were wet before he noticed anything else. He looked down. His shoes had filled with blood the way a boot fills with water when you step too deep; quietly, completely, while you were thinking about something else entirely.

“Who wanted me to work with them?” Kate knelt at his side as he collapsed. He reached for his legs, couldn't feel them. He touched his thigh and his hand came away wet, dripping. The blood had pooled in his boot, sloshing with each movement he could no longer control. A crimson trail marked their path, arterial spurts timed to his fading heartbeat.

“What did you do to me, Kate?!” Kevin slurred.

Kate sighed and held the scalpel to his face. “I killed you, Kevin… Prove there’s still some good in you. Tell me who it was.”

“No! Not like this… Not like—” His eyes rolled back, his face paling. Kate slapped him.

“Tell me! Come on!”

“Em… Emily Braddock… Kate?” Kevin's eyes moved the way a drowning man's hands move, grabbing at everything and finding nothing until they found her face and stayed there. He lifted a shaky, bloodied hand.

Kate stayed knelt by his side. She looked at his outstretched hand for a moment, then back at his face, the way you look at someone you used to know well enough to be disappointed.

“I already held someone’s hand as they died today because of your actions. Goodbye, Kevin…”

Kevin's eyes stayed there, moving across her face the way you search a room you thought you knew for something that isn't there anymore. Kate watched the blood leave his face the way color leaves the sky after sunset; gradually, and then all at once. She did not move toward him. She did not look away either. She simply stayed knelt there while his fingers slowed against the floor and watched him go. She watched his expression glaze over and his head slump to the deck. After a moment, she retrieved her comm badge and phaser from his corpse, knowing she had only minutes before someone came to check on them.

She rounded the corner and came face to face with two Romulans and the Bolian doctor. The fear was gone. Something else had taken its place, something quieter and more certain, the way a door sounds when it latches shut. On rare days Kate arrived at this place, and today was one of them. She stood her ground and watched their faces, waiting with almost clinical patience for the moment they understood she was not going to run. When it came, she was already moving.

Before the Romulans could raise their disruptors, Kate's beam was already crossing the distance between them. She watched each impact tear through them and felt something open up in her chest: not relief, not quite satisfaction, but something older and more animal than either. The phaser in her hand had belonged to a man they had helped put in a Starfleet casket, and now its light was finding them, the same light, the same heat, the last gift of a dead man delivered through her grip and her fury and her refusal to let it mean nothing.

One Romulan lay smoldering on the deck plate and the Bolian cowered against the wall with his hands out as she tracked the injured Romulan running for more help.

"Wait!" the Bolian said as Kate aimed her phaser at his face. "I'm just a professional doing my job!"

Kate regarded him a moment, her dark eyes moving up and down before she stepped in close and seized his head in both hands. She twisted hard, rotating his chin past his shoulder while kneeling down quickly. He fell backwards and stopped suddenly, Kate, driving her knee into his spine from behind while simultaneously wrenching his head with her arms. The motion hyperextended his neck past its limit and she felt the ligaments tear at the C5-C6 vertebrae separating with a wet crunch that vibrated through her palms. The spinal cord severed clean.

Kate let go of his head.

She stayed crouched there a moment, her hands still open, fingers slightly curled, the warmth of him still in her palms. Her dark eyes moved down to his face, then to her own hands, then back. She had not expected the quiet. Not the quiet of the corridor, but the quiet inside her; the place where the noise had been. Her jaw was loose. Her breathing was slow and even in a way it had not been in hours. A long blink, the kind that comes after something is finally finished. She turned her hands over once, studying them the way you study a word you have written so many times it stops looking like itself, and felt something low and warm move in her soul that she did not have a name for and did not reach for one. The back of her neck prickled. She exhaled through her nose, slow and complete, and something in her shoulders came down that she had not known was up.

"I'm just a decent human being doing the galaxy a favor," Kate whispered raspy at the corpse in answer to his final question.

She stood, drove her boot hard into the small of his back, and felt the body roll against the deck grating with a sound she did not mind making. She spat on him. Then she stepped over him, put her back to the wall, and pulled her phaser.

A white-hot beam scorched the wall inches behind her head as a Bajoran woman closed the distance between them. Romulan mercenaries, every last one of them, and every last one of them wanted her dead. For putting herself what she had just been through, Kate's only regret was that Kevin could not be killed twice for this.

Kate reached the airlock and punched in her code. Nothing. They had changed it from the inside to something she didn't have. She drew her phaser and fired at the docking clamp release until the mechanism fused, locking the ship against the station whether they liked it or not. Then she found the control rod in the lever assembly and pulled it free, pocketing it. Without it, they weren't going anywhere. She turned and walked into the corridor, her footsteps steady.

She wasn't trapped in here with them.

They were trapped in here with her.


********


Captain Cross knelt over the body of Kevin Mitchell. He observed the blood that had emptied from him—two, maybe three liters pooled on the deck, the kind of volume that meant a major vessel and minutes, not hours without him realizing what was happening and regarded the Romulan that was with him. He held onto his arm and winced. There was nothing that could really be done about that considering their doctor was now dead.

"Tell me again, Selmek. Just a simple paper pusher intelligence officer? That's what Mitchell said?" Cross stood up and patted his jeans. He was middle-aged, coasting toward retirement, a lean military career padded out with mercenary work for the Romulan Empire. A bad call had cost him one of his best friends and the only doctor in the unit. He pressed his back teeth together and held them there.

Selmek nodded slowly.
"That's what it says here." He tapped the PaDD and held up the complete personnel file Kevin had smuggled over; one of many they planned to bring back to Romulus for a profit.

Cross snatched the PaDD from Selmek's hand without breaking stride.

"Blame it on her private life. Look at this. She trained with Jack the damn Ripper in the holodeck. Said it was to better her hand-to-hand skills."

Selmek straightened, his Romulan spine rigid. "Who is Jack the Ripper?"

Cross closed his eyes. Of all the moments to be one of the only Humans on this ship. He pressed two fingers hard into the bridge of his nose.

"The most notorious serial killer in Earth's history," he said quietly. "Gutted women in the dark. Was never caught." He pulled up the simulation logs and felt the blood drain from his face. "Four hundred and thirty-two hours." His voice dropped to nothing. Then: "FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO HOURS." He let the PaDD fall. It clattered onto the chest of the dead Romulan on the floor, whose skin had been burned so badly it had split open at the shoulders like overcooked meat.

"Eighteen days worth of instruction from the most notorious —- god dang —- freaking serial killer in the local cluster—and Kevin put her on this ship! MY ship." He turned to Selmek. His fingers found the collar of the Romulan uniform and twisted, yanking him close. “What kind of a psycho Starfleet officer spends her time with a serial killer and calls it RECREATION?!” The Captain's face was long and pale, with deep-set eyes that had gone somewhere far away and cold, framed by dark hair plastered in strings across his forehead with sweat. "Get her off. Put some men together."

Selmek waited.

"How many men can I take from their tasks, Captain."

Cross's jaw worked silently. His eyes dropped to the floor. Something moved through him; a tremor, barely visible, like a fault line settling. He turned back toward Selmek.

"EVERYONEEE."

The word left him slowly, like pressure escaping a hull breach, and took the better part of five seconds to finish. The last echo died against the bulkheads, and Selmek's heel found the deck a step behind where it had been.

Cross stepped into the turbolift and jabbed the button for the bridge. A few decks. He used the time to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

"Captain, we're being hailed by Deep Space Twenty," the communications officer announced as Cross emerged onto the bridge.

"Put the filters up," Cross said, dropping into his chair. "Last thing I need is some Starfleet desk jockey seeing a bridge full of Romulans." He exhaled slowly through his nose.

The viewscreen filled with a man in a Starfleet captain's uniform, pressed and spotless in a way that made Cross's jaw tighten.

"Captain Cross, this is Captain Ramon Garcia Castaldo Romero Ramirez of Deep Space Twenty. We've lost two officers and our internal communications are down. They were last seen in your general area. Can you confirm a full account of souls aboard?"

Cross stared at him for a moment. "I'm sorry,” Cross allowed himself a fictitious grin, “…how many of you are there?"

"Just myself," Ramirez said. "Captain Ramirez. Why?"

"You'll have to forgive me, I thought I was being hailed by an entire dynasty." A few quiet laughs rippled behind him. Cross let them settle before continuing. "As for souls aboard,” Captain Cross raised his arms with the deliberate, savoring slowness of a man who had rehearsed this moment many times; sharp-featured and imperious, his jacket hanging off him like a proclamation., “I can promise you there aren't many. Though I will admit there are quite a lot of people."

Ramirez did not laugh. "We have missing officers, Captain. This is a serious matter. Once communications are restored, if we detect any Starfleet personnel signatures originating from your vessel, we are within our rights to detain you for questioning. So I'll ask you plainly."

Cross felt the muscles in his neck tighten. He kept his voice level. "Captain Whatever-Ramirez, we don't allow Starfleet personnel aboard this ship. We never have. We never will. You have my word, for whatever that's worth to a man with four last names." He reached over and cut the feed, then sat back and stared at the blank viewscreen for a moment longer than he needed to.

“Kate locked us in here so she could find a way off. Keep the transporter dampening field active as well as the communications jammer. If Starfleet finds any proof that we abducted one of their own, we will never be allowed to trade on this side of the neutral zone ever again and we can’t have that,” Cross said with annoyance in his voice.

“Sir,” Internal sensors have gone offline,” Seti, his Romulan Operations Officer stated. Cross took a breath and breathed out slowly. “Send Angelo and get Parker and Johnson to restore sensors,” Cross said with an edge to his voice.


*********


Angelo and Selmek stepped into the turbolift together. Angelo fixed his gaze on the floor indicator above the doors. Selmek clasped his hands in front of him and studied the middle distance. The doors slid shut.

“When we get there, I contact the Captain.” Selmek stated it as a matter of fact.

"Screw you," Angelo said. "He asked for me. I've been on this ship longer than you have, and you only know about it because you were listening at the wall-comm."

Selmek's fist came down on the control panel and the lift shuddered to a stop. He turned to face Angelo with the full weight of his body.

"I run security on this ship. We are on a security alert. That means you follow my lead." He held Angelo's eyes. "I'm in charge."

"Then why did he come to me?” Angelo leaned over the Romulan, close enough to smell the recycled ship's air between them, his eyes searching the Romulan's face for something; a flinch, a tell, anything. All the while some part of him, a part he didn't entirely trust, hoped he would actually find it. The turbolift doors stood closed behind them both. “You go talk to the Captain and get this sorted out. I'm going in there. Those were my orders. You had your chance and people are dropping.”

“No,” I’m in charge.” Selmek demanded again as he made the turbolift active again.

“Kevin gave you an entire dossier on this psycho and you didn’t see it! You didn’t see his incompetence in deciding to bring her aboard, you didn’t stop Andrew from letting her in, and now she’s in here killing us.

The turbolift doors opened to Parker and Johnson, mid-argument about something involving a batting average. The Operations officer and the Intelligence officer exchanged a glance, the kind that carried the specific weight of classified information, then both moved at once to step off first, shouldering past the engineers toward the sensors and engineering bay, their mutual irritation with each other apparently no obstacle to their shared instinct to be ahead of everyone else.

"Hey!" Johnson called after them. "We're not following you unless you tell us what the hell is going on. Why did the Captain sound so upset?"

"I mean…" Parker started, then stopped, glancing between the two of them with a lopsided grin. "The captain always sounds like that, so." He scratched the back of his neck. "What I'm more curious about is why you two are doing the thing again?"

The doors opened on darkness. Emergency lighting only, casting long shadows across the warp core chamber. Johnson led with his phaser, sweeping the beam across consoles that flickered with dying power.

"Internal sensors are definitely down," Parker said. "She killed them from here."

They found the first body at the environmental controls. Crewman Dax, Andorian, antennae gone limp, head resting on the console like he'd fallen asleep on duty. Selmek's tricorder buzzed.

"Cervical dislocation. C5-C6. Just like Doctor Kulivan. The spinal cord severed clean." The Romulan intelligence officer looked up. "He was facing his console. She approached from behind, seized his head, and twisted. He would have lost consciousness instantly. Death within seconds."

"Silent," Angelo said. "No alarm."

They moved deeper, finding the pattern. Lopez at the plasma regulation station, trachea crushed - forearm across the throat from behind, pressure held until the cartilage collapsed. Yuki at the damage control board, carotid arteries compressed until her brain starved. Each one at their post. Each one unaware.

"She watched them work," Parker said, his voice hollow. "Stood right behind them while they ran diagnostics, and they never knew she was there."

Johnson found the last two together at the warp core monitor. Two engineers, one human, one Tellarite, both dead from identical neck trauma - heads snapped back, vertebrae separated. Side by side. Killed simultaneously or in quick succession.

"She's efficient," Selmek said. "Seven targets. Seven methods. No wasted energy. No hesitation marks." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was lower. "There is no logical defense against this. She understands anatomy the way we understand intelligence, operations - engineering. She sees weakness and she acts on it without conscious deliberation."

"She's a twenty-something year old girl," Angelo said. "She's just a kid."

"She is a predator," Selmek corrected. "Age is irrelevant. Training is irrelevant. She has killed seven-armed Mercenaries and support personnel in their place of expertise, and she has done it without raising an alarm, without leaving evidence of struggle, without any of them having time to react."

Johnson looked at the bodies, at the precision, at the silence of the room where seven people had died and nobody had heard a thing.

"She's not trying to escape," he said. "She's taking the entire ship. One compartment at a time."

"Then we stop her," Parker said.

Johnson didn't answer. He was looking at the jefferies tube hatch, slightly ajar, and wondering if Kate was already behind them, already moving, already choosing her next target from the shadows.

The door opened and the Bajoran woman stopped dead at the threshold. Her eyes moved across the room once, taking in the bodies, the emergency lighting, the silence.

"Where is he?"

Selmek pointed toward the warp core.

She crossed the room and dropped to her knees beside Lopez. His face was turned slightly to one side, mouth open, eyes not quite shut. She looked at his throat. There were faint pressure marks along the sides of the neck—fingertip bruising, barely visible—and then, lower, the deep transverse contusion where the forearm had locked in and held. She thought about what that meant. The pressure building. The narrowing. The moment he understood what was happening and could do nothing about it.

"I'm sorry for your loss," Johnson said quietly.

Ro didn't look up. Her jaw was tight.

"I had her in my sights." She didn't move from where she knelt. Her hand found Lopez's and closed around it. The fingers were already cooling. She held on anyway, her thumb moving once across his knuckles, and then she stopped moving entirely, and the room was very quiet, and then her shoulders dropped forward, and she made a sound that was not crying, exactly; more like something tearing loose from somewhere deep. She pressed her forehead to his hand. When she finally lifted her head, her face was dry. "Sher hahr kosst," she said softly. Then: "Who is she?" Nobody answered. "She's mine."

"She seems obsessed with just one type of killing," Parker said, kneeling at the internal sensor console. He opened the panel and went still for a moment before he spoke. "She didn't disable it. She destroyed it." He sat back on his heels, looking at the scorched circuitry. "Johnson. Check the jammer."

Johnson crossed to the environmental controls access and pulled the panel aside. The jamming station sat undisturbed behind it, every indicator green. He stared at it for a long moment.

"Still running," he said. "She walked right past it. Didn't even know it was there."

Nobody said what that meant: that she hadn't needed it.

"Johnson, Parker. Get to the docked airlock. Everything you need, take it. We are getting off this station before Starfleet finds a reason to board us." Selmek's voice carried the flat certainty of someone who had already decided the argument was over before it had started.

Angelo stepped away from the console. "You don't give orders to my people." His voice was low and controlled, which was worse than shouting. "You want to move this crew, you come through me. That's not a preference, that's how this ship functions."

Selmek turned to face him fully. Neither of them moved. The bodies of seven dead engineers lay in the dark around them and the two men stood there measuring each other like the room wasn't a graveyard.

Ro stepped between them and shoved, hard, both palms, one into each chest.

"Stop it." Her voice was raw. "Both of you." She looked at Angelo. "He's right. We need to move." Then, quieter: "Lopez isn't going anywhere. But we are. Right now."

"Say we disconnect from the station and take care of this girl," Johnson gestured at the bodies around them, "… we've got nobody left who knows which end of a plasma relay to hold. No doctor, no engineers. We're a flying coffin."

The voice of Captain Cross emitted from the open Engineering Doors.

“The only way you’re getting off this ship is through an undocked airlock…”

Cross walked in and the room changed.

"Listen to me." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "The neutral zone is two hours out. We are going to make those two hours. Johnson, Parker, I don't care if you have to rip those docking latches out by hand and leave them on the deck. We undock. We move. We deal with the rest when we're home." He looked at Angelo. "No doctor. No engineers. You think I don't know that? Work the problem." He crossed to Ro and took her face in both hands, not gently. His eyes went into hers like he was looking for something specific and had just found it. "There she is," he said quietly. "You still want her."

It wasn't a question.

"Yes," Ro said.

Cross held her gaze another moment. His thumbs pressed against her jaw.

"Good." He didn't let go of her face. "Stay angry. I need it." Then he dropped his hands and turned, and whatever had been in his eyes when he looked at Ro was gone, replaced by something colder. He looked at Angelo. He looked at Selmek. He didn't point. He didn't have to. "You two are with her." A beat. "Move."

A chime cut through the silence. Cross stepped over one of his dead crewmates to reach the wall panel and tapped it.

"What now."

"Sir, we have Deep Space Twenty hailing."

Cross looked at the room; the bodies, the scorched console, the emergency lighting still throwing everything in red and then back at the panel.

"I'll be there."

 

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