Bottoms Forward - Part Three

Posted on 23 Dec 2014 @ 6:35pm by Commander Norvi Stace & Lieutenant Asahi Kita & Lieutenant Olsam Mott
Edited on on 26 Dec 2014 @ 6:24am

2,317 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 07 - Sojourn
Location: Starbase 84: Meeting Room, Deck 17 - Guest Administrative Office
Timeline: MD 31 - 2038 hrs

ON:

Stace awoke from a straight fourteen hour sleep like she had risen from the dead. There were certain states of rest that she fell into, usually in her energetic youth after partying so hard that she almost came out the other side without needing sleep at all, that were borderline comatose. But those Academy days were long gone now. She awoke now convinced that from the moment her head had hit the pillow she hadn't moved a muscle until her eyes blearily had opened and allowed in the artificial light from the aquarium.

She stirred and then slumped back into a light slumber as her consciousness came around. She knew that she needed a bath as soon as she could muster up the enthusiasm to run it and after dragging herself out from her warm sheets, she invested in its relaxing properties.

It was a further two hours before she managed to rendezvous with Asahi and Mott in a makeshift meeting room on board Starbase 84. And she had taken care to make sure that no association to Stace, Asahi, Mott or the Galileo was referenced in the room booking. In fact, she had taken up additional quarters on the station just to be sure. As she walked in, a much brighter light in her eyes than they had previously seen, she half smiled. But pushing aside the personal embarrassment of what had happened, a more pressing matter was now afoot.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," she said evenly, approaching the central control table where they both stood. "So, where do we go from here?"

"I thought we were meeting here," Olsam asked, looking questioningly from Norvi to Asahi and back again. "We have to go somewhere else now? I'm not very good at this cloak and dagger stuff. Was this meeting just a rouse? Is the real meeting later or something?"

After an attempt at a hangover recovery, Asahi seemed grumpier than when this whole incident started. He narrowed his eyes at the Bolian doctor, uncertain as to whether it was a jest he was making or if he was just clueless. "She meant with the plan, Mott."

"We've got a plan?" Olsam asked, sitting up in his chair like he'd been taken by surprise. When had they developed a plan? He certainly hadn't developed one.

Sighing, the engineer placed a small device on the table. It showed two blips on a small screen, one in orange and one in blue. "This is tracking down our comms using a low frequency ping that matches the Galileo's transporter lock-on frequency. Since we're only trying to find the comms and not beam them out of anywhere, it'll be hard to detect from the other end, and even more difficult to track it down. This is the best I could do given the situation, but... it's something."

"So we know where your commbadges are," Olsam said slowly, deliberately, trying to keep the questioning tone out of his voice, struggling to sound like he was following along perfectly. "Good. Good..."

"It's not so much where they are that's important, Mott," Stace replied evenly, allowing Asahi to absorb the frustration she would have normally have experienced was her mind not so frighteningly occupied. "It's who has them that concerns me. And why they took them." She sighed, and then picked up the PADD that Mott had brought with him detailing the full breakdown of the Cardassian-like sedative that had been administered to them both. "And where we were taken in the interim."

She placed down the PADD as she inhaled and turned away from the table, not allowing the two officers to see the heavy look of worry that now lined her features. She brought her slender fingers up to her mouth as if to steel herself from saying something and then composed herself as she spun back around to face them.

I'm going to have to play this safely, she silently concluded to herself. And at the first sign of this being what I think it might be, detatch myself from Mott and Kita.

"Mott," she then picked up the PADD again and waved it in front of him, "have you got any further with the compound?"

At first, he had in mind some sort of military compound. But then he remembered the compound they'd be drugged with and his face lit up as if a lightbulb had actually turned on in his mind. "Yes! I have. I thought it looked familiar, so I did a little checking in the Starfleet Medical Database and cross-referenced it with..." He trailed off, looking at Norvi, sensing she wouldn't have the patience to listen to the story as he wanted to tell it. "Well, anyway, it turns out it's a heavily modified derivative of merfadon, which is a drug of Cardassian origin ordinarily used as a sedative. But this had been modified to give it some hallucinogenic properties, as well as the half-life and all that."

Stace's eyes silently widened as she shook her head in a small effort to convey disbelief. There it was again: Cardassia. There existed hundreds of reasons why such a sedative would have been chosen and the link to Cardassia was only in its origin. But that sent a shiver down Norvi's spine that visibly shook her. But why modify it? To keep her alive? Her tolerance for certain chemicals drastically changed when she was Joined. But this wasn't specific to Norvi or the Stace Symbiont. She had numerous training seminars that detailed exactly what was known to cause injury to the Symbiont, host or the connection once the Joining had taken and these were emblazoned in her mind. But merfadon wasn't one of them. So why modify it?

The questions reeled around the Trill's mind so heavily that she almost became faint by it. "I think that we need to do some more digging, Doctor, if you could. I can help you with lab work but the biological aspect of this sedative may need your expertise."

"Okay, I can dig," Olsam replied cheerily, characteristically oblivious to the effect the revelation had on his colleague.

"Asahi," she then said, turning to face him and placing a soothing hand on her now burning forehead, "can we track the comm badges down safely?"

The engineer was determined to get to the bottom of everything, or at least a little to the lower right side. The politics of this, if what Stace's implications were correct, could have been sticky. If he wanted to call as little attention to himself as possible, jumping in headfirst was the last thing he wanted to do. "I can track them down no problem. Safely depends on how up-to-date their tech is. This device isn't in a Federation database either, so if whoever was after us had access to the databank, they won't find it." He frowned, furrowing his brow. "I've only had to use this one other time, and the only reason I was caught in the act is because their technology was above ours'. Wasn't pretty, but if it's Cardassians or something similar we're going to find... we should be alright."

Every time someone mentioned the word 'Cardassian' it seemed to impact her with more weight. It was almost like with each utterance, another steely blade was thrust into her abdomen, but she mustered every ounce of resolve to maintain her composure. She was just lucky that neither of these two were telepathic in any way.

"Then let's start with that." She sighed, and then looked somberly at them both. "I appreciate you both helping me with this. But I don't want either of you to record this anywhere until we have a clearer picture of what happened to us both. Not even personally. I'm asking you both as friends."

Olsam's eyes lit up. "Oooo, a secret mission! I won't breathe a word of it. I'm good at keeping secrets. Very good. Why, you'd be amazed by all the things I know. I could tell you, but then I wouldn't be very good at keeping...se...crets...." The last part of his sentence trailed off as he sensed patience was running thin in the room; apparently, being drugged, stripped of one's property and dignity and tossed into an unknown corridor could shake some people. "Right, so, nothing recorded. Got it."

"Secret-..." Asahi held his tongue on the rest of his statement, holding up a hand. "... This isn't the first time I've managed mischief without leaving a trace, so there won't be a problem from me." He left out the part that it had been fifteen years since his last 'prank,' but he figured that detail was neither here nor there. "There might not be any mischief involved on our end... unless...." Trailing off, the engineer stared down at his device a second. "... You know what might be safer than us finding them in what could be an advantage ground for them?... Them finding 'us.'"

"Is that wise?" Norvi asked taking in a deep breath. "This would need some careful planning. And I don't want to put anyone in unnecessary risk."

Asahi leaned forward, PADD set in front of everyone, shaking his head. "No more wise than us going to them. They could easily have a trap set up, knowing that we'd go looking for our badges. They wanted us-or at least you-alive. Whatever they do-or did-want, it wouldn't surprise me if they still want it, especially with our badges." He frowned. "If we find the right place on the Starbase to lead them to, we can catch them off guard and arouse the least suspicion, and if they're as... Cardassian as we all seem to think they are, it won't take much to get them to said location. You just have to find the right superstition, theoretically. They wouldn't even have to know we're on their trail until they're in our net."

He paused a beat. "Of course, if they're not Cardassian and they're just throwing us off, that could be another matter entirely, but we'd find that out too."

Norvi buried her head in her hands and swallowed hard. Her mind had raced so fast that it hadn't occurred to her seriously that it might not have a Cardassian hand in this whole affair. And for that spark of a moment, she agreed with Asahi. "I'd rather be in control of this than allow whatever is going on to play out by someone else's hands. Are we in agreement?"

Frowning, the engineer sat back, folding his arms against his chest. "I think we are." He eyed the Bolian doctor as if Mott knew the answers to the universe itself. He knew this to be untrue, of course, but that didn't stop his disposition.

"Yes, of course, we're in agreement," Olsam said confidently, adding his voice. He still wasn't entirely sure what they were in agreement about, but he felt certain those blanks - giant, yawning, gaping, empty blanks - would get filled in as time went on. And above all he didn't want to appear disagreeable; it might ruin his reputation as being an agreeable person.

Asahi pulled up a map of the Starbase on his PADD. "The question is then... where do we consider 'our hand' to be in this place?"

"It'll need to be somewhere isolated, but that could gain access to assistance if all doesn't go to plan." Stace sighed and took the data padd from Asahi. She scrolled through the schematics of the starbase and sighed. "As second officer to the Gally, I now have unrestricted clearance to the docking ports, and my Science clearance gets me access to the temporary labs on the base. Shall we consider something in that?"

"I think a temporary lab is the superior tactical choice. It's much easier for me to flood a space like that with anesthizine than a docking port. There are more environmental control conduits and fewer security protocols to override. And if we utilize one of the laboratories with holo-projectors then I can modify them to produce a concentrated, directed nadion pulse to disable an assailant, like a rigged one-time use phaser. It'll blow out the emitters, but it's better than nothing," Olsam said, suddenly sounding very cogent. Pushing on, he seemed to have little interest in explaining how he might know how to rig holoemitters to produce a nadion pulse or the proper security protocols to override to flood a compartment with an anesthetic agent most commonly used as a crowd-control measure.

"The docking ports are monitored more heavily by security personnel, and they're close to heavily trafficked areas. I'm guessing the last thing we want is some lost Bajoran stumbling into the middle of all this. By contrast, there are several laboratories on the station that are relatively isolated so we're dealing with fewer prying eyes from security and a reduced likelihood of unintended interference. Besides, I think it's easier to convince someone that the ship's chief science officer would be associated with a lab."

"Holo-projectors?" Asahi narrowed his eyes at the Bolian. "Not something I would have thought of. When we're out of this mess, we should compare notes."

"But until then, and while we're still deep into these woods, let's focus on this plan." Stace turned to both Asahi and Mott. "I don't want to jeapordise the starbase's security, or cross any lines that we shouldn't be. But let's see what we can set up and I'll requisition a few labs."

"Okay," Olsam said with a toothy grin, back to his jovial self.

OFF:

Lieutenant Olsam Mott, M.D.
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant Asahi Kita
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

AND

Lieutenant Commander Norvi Stace
Chief Science Officer & Second Officer
USS Galileo

RSS Feed