Thinking back on it, Zel wasn’t sure if Grek ever realized how deeply he was in over his head.  He certainly didn’t see it coming when he was shot in his own bathtub.  While Grek had the lobes for profit, he never did as much running – or looking over his shoulder – as Zel did.  That honed a different set of skills, one which was probably the reason why Zel was still breathing and Grek wasn’t.  Well, at least breathing for now.

A baleful alarm rang out down the corridor of the Orion Spacedock, a gut-wrenching reminder that no, they had not forgotten about him.

Pressed up against a stack of unused conduit, Zel Rohan felt his breath rattle through his lungs in hot dry pants.  His mind was racing with possibilities, most of them ending in one dead-end conclusion: he was going to die.

Not that he wanted to die.  He most certainly didn’t want to be in this predicament.  His glory days of being an adrenaline junkie had faded into the distant past.  He was too old, too sore and certainly too tired to enjoy running for his life anymore.  The worst was that he didn’t even try to put himself in mortal danger this time.  He actually tried to do the exact opposite, pay off some debts with old fashioned hard work and it had blown up in his face.

Literally.

He had the sinking feeling from the very moment the cargo ship Annabelle’s Lament had blown itself to smithereens half a parsec from being loaded up at the Geneva IV spaceport that something was very, very wrong with the universe and his place in it.  And now, alarms blaring, and entire squadron of vicious, humorless and beefy private security guards on his tail, he was very, very sure.

As the ring of boots against the polished floor rang out in a side corridor Zel ducked down under a shelf of spanners and rolled to the edge of the wall, feeling for an escape route.  Bulkhead…bulkhead…bulkhead… ah ha!  Ventilation duct.

He pulled his old Cardassian hand pistol from his boot, set it to the finest beam possible and sheared the heads of the bolts that locked the grate across the duct.  Sliding it to one side, he tucked the disruptor into his vest and slid down, praying this duct had a gentle slope.

Slope, yes.  Gentle, not so much.  Careening like a suicidal Olympian down Satan’s personal luge course, the little hybrid bit his lip in a desperate attempt to not shriek and give away his position.  When the duct suddenly ended in a 40-foot drop, with a lazily turning fan below, Zel lost his resolve and decided that screaming his fool head off was, in fact, entirely justified.

“Oh Prophets…”  he cursed, snatching the sharp metal edge of the ductwork and dangling from it over a pit of certain doom.  Taking a quick stock of the situation Zel was pretty sure that no matter what else, the Prophets were not on his side.  The duct had no visible handholds for climbing up, so he took in a breath and looked downwards.  He could see other ventilation shafts intersecting this place, as well as the massive nemesis of the fan below.  And one lone access ladder running along the wall.

Narrowing his eyes Zel started to calculate the odds of making that jump before deciding screw it, he had no choice.  His options were dangle here until his fingers slipped and die chopped to bits by a giant fan or try for the jump.  With the sharp metal from the duct already cutting into his hands and making his handhold increasingly bloodstained – and slippery, the decision to jump was ensured.

Swinging his legs, the motion fueled by a surge of adrenaline, Zel Rohan launched himself at the wall and reached out for anything he could get his hands on.  As his chest made a dull impact with the rungs of the ladder, he forced in a breath and his hands clawed for purchase.  He felt a surge of victory of he found something to grab a hold of, if he could only get a grip.

Sliding downwards, blood-slicked hands trying to stay stuck on any rung they caught, he felt bile rising in his throat until he decided to simply lean forward and catch as much of the ladder as he could with his arm.

Coming to a sudden stop, he gave a groan as his shoulder wrenched upward, catching his body.  He locked his arm around the rung, hanging on for dear life.  As the haze of panic and pain cleared, he slowly righted himself on the ladder and laboriously started to crawl down.

“Well… I’m not dead.  Yet.” He muttered to himself, using his disruptor to negotiate some hinges on a door at the bottom of the shaft.  It gave him a little hope, but he still hadn’t cleared off the station and every minute he lingered here was another minute closer to losing the goal of staying alive.  The echo of the alarms still rang morosely through the back hallways.  He knew darn well that the cargo ships and passenger liners wouldn’t be cleared to leave until they had him dead or captured, and that didn’t give him a whole lot of wiggle room.  If only…

What if he was ‘dead?’  The thought smacked into his brain, a growing kernel of a good idea.  If he faked his death, they would release the docked ships and he could hitch a ride or smuggle himself out.  All he would need was a little DNA and a nice, good plasma fire.  Maybe it wouldn’t pass due with decent investigators like the Cardassian Empire or Starfleet, but for a backwater civilian spaceport run by a criminal boss who had more latinum than brains it would most likely work.  Or at least work long enough to be long gone.

It was a chance he had to take.

~*~

Rule number one of faking you own death: stroke your pursuer’s ego. 

Vanobio Saan, owner of Spacedock Quastris was, like so many other petty mob bosses, a vain man.  He liked to know that the plans he made and the security measures he set into place were worth the latinum he spent on them.  Of course, he put an electrified forcefield around the docking bay doors where Zel’s Triton runner was impounded.  Zel expected no less.  It would be a rookie mistake to try to make a run for it in his own ship – it would be the first place a numbskull like Vanobio would guard.

Which is exactly why he chose it to stage his demise.

The little hybrid didn’t need to check for a forcefield, he could feel the electric crackle as he got near it.  Oh, he could make sure it was there by simply tossing something at it, but that would surely set off more alarms.  Yes, that could wait.

He checked the corridor for any signs of guards, doublechecked and got to work.  Popping off a side panel, he exposed the door controls.  Shielding his eyes, he saw the pulsating glow of the plasma conduit just behind the relays for the door control.

“Too easy.” Zel murmured.  He dug in his pocket, pulling out a spanner and jimmied the door controls just enough to, well, tamper with them.  Beside him the door whined, and lights flashed inside the panel.  With a gentle touch, he eased out the circuitry which controlled the power to the forefield, feeling a crackle across his fingers as he touched it.  Decent security – it would be a difficult field to crack – if he was actually going to crack it.  As it was, he simply drew the circuits out, so they were within easy line-of-sight.

Rule number two of faking your own death: leave enough of you behind to let them think you were all there at one time.

The next step was easy.  He stripped off his vest and anything else he could live without.  He smeared his bloody hands over the vest, and left a few telltale handprints on the wall by the panel before he took a few strips of cloth from his shirt and bound the cuts so they wouldn’t start bleeding again.  He spat on the wall, partially for luck and partially for just a bit more biological matter that the scanners might ping upon and checked his set up.

Then he slunk down the hallway, pulling his disruptor.   Heading to the spot where he had marked Vanobio’s security cameras on his way in.  He paused in the camera’s eye space just long enough so it could get a nice shot of him, raising his weapon and firing.  The little electronic eye sizzled and erupted in a satisfying burst of sparks.  Yep, now they knew he was here.  Time to act fast.

Rule number three of faking your own death: act quickly and run like hell.

Really the last step was the easiest of the three.  And the most dangerous.  Wasn’t that always how it went?  Zel turned from the wreckage of the camera, walking back towards the scene of his inevitable death, and pulled one of the sheared off heads from the bolts he had unceremoniously removed in his escape route and tossed it towards the cargo bay doors.  The little chunk of metal crackled with an electric discharge as it hit the security forcefield, and a siren sounded out immediately thereafter.

“Gee, that looks nasty.  Glad I’m not trying to break in there…” he muttered, backpedaling from the scene.  He made another check to make sure his escape route was free of guards and leveled his disruptor at the exposed circuitry.  He focused and pulled the trigger with all the calmness of a zen monk, before turning and hauling ass like an irate cat hopped up on amphetamines with its tail on fire.

Well, honestly if he wasn’t running so fast his tail end would have been on fire.

The force of the explosion plastered Zel against the opposite side of the hallway junction, even with his head start.  Staggered, he kept his feet moving enough to turn a corner as tongues of flames licked at the intersection.  The wail of emergency alarms went off creating a deafening cacophony mingles with the security alert.  The lights flickered and died, and the flash of red backup lighting cast jagged shadows across the corridors.  Boots were ringing on the deck in every direction as Zel slipped into a supply closet.  As the boots passed, he peered out and made a dash for the maintenance walkway that linked this section to the central core.  Time to get as far away from the scene of his death as possible.

The going was easier the farther he got.  The patrols lessened and security eased up.  The key now, he chided himself, was to disappear.  Dead people didn’t get caught sneaking around.  If they bought his death, he had all the time he needed to get himself off the station.

The wail of the emergency alarms ceased, letting Zel know that the fire was under control.  It took several minutes more before the security alarms were silenced.  He paused, hiding under the counter of an old closed-down shop, holding his breath until the security alert flashed green, and an announcement that ships would be cleared for departure within the hour.

“I have never been so happy to be dead before…” Zel murmured.