Vanity Can Be One's Undoing

Posted on Sat May 18th, 2019 @ 12:18am by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Captain Enalia Telvan & Commander Rita Paris

Mission: Fractured Fairy Tales
Location: USS Hera, Deck 6, Holodeck 2
Timeline: 2395, en route to the Tribunal

"Lieutenant Dox to Commander Paris. Commander... can you come to Holodeck 2... I think it's important."

Tapping the ancient delta on her breast, the gold-clad commander replied as she headed for a turbolift in anticipation of having to be somewhere.

"On my way."

Nodding to a few passing crewmen, offering encouraging smiles, she saved tapping at her PaDD for turbolift rides. Crew morale looked good, most were moving with some sort of sense of purpose, and all seemed well on the organized and efficient starship. Which made Rita's old-fashioned heart happy. A good crew could pull off miracles, after all.

For the entirety of the turbolift ride and much of the stroll to the theatre-sized Holodeck 2, she mused about how that relationship worked, waxing philosophically, attempting to achieve some sort of understanding or epiphany about it. Ultimately, as she tapped her command code into the entry for the holodeck, she came up with a blank. A question answered of the universe with no answer for her, at least.

Stepping out onto the bridge of the Bloody Rose, the pirate queen Arenara Artan's personal craft, Rita Paris took it in with some degree of nostalgia. "This bridge was what we thought the future was going to look like. Ahh, nostalgia."

Smiling slightly, Mnhei'sahe Dox was standing off behind the helm of the holographic replica of the Miranda-Class starship. She was still wearing her black workout pants and a black tank top, but with her crimson uniform tunic over it, hanging open. She looked a bit sweaty and a little winded, but otherwise fine and almost excited. "Well, this particular one is horrible. But the class itself is an excellent design. I've practiced a lot on a simulation of the Captain's Miranda to get a feel for her controls and it's all very intuitive. But that's not what I called you for."

Walking over to Rita's position, Dox nodded slightly. "I was working out. I wanted to make sure my injuries were healed before the tribunal, but when it was over, something happened. Maru called up a message for me from Kodria."

"Ah, one of those sublime clues our time-traveling niece left behind. I swear, I will miss that kid until the day we meet her," Rita admitted. "Which brought you back here to the bridge of the enemy, rendered in high holographic display. Okay, I'll bite. What did Kodria have to say?"

Nodding slightly, Dox's smile softened as she thought about their Android niece from the future. "Yeah, me too." But then her focus shifted back to their purpose there.

"She told me three things... Here." Pulling down a holographic display from out of thin air that she clearly had ready for this exact reason, Dox replayed the segment of the message she had just received.

On the projected screen, the image of Kodria Mizu appeared, "There are three things you need to know. One is that you need to cherish the time you have with your mother. You only have one, young lady, so treat her well while you have her. That's what you always told me, after all. Two is that the Saurian brandy is poisoned. Three is that the evidence is where you least expect to find it."

As the message ended, the screen vanished. "So... It's the last two is what's relevant here. The Saurian Brandy thing is self-explanatory, but I kept getting stuck on the last part. So I started thinking about what we're trying to find evidence for. The assassination, the tampering with Schwein and Sarika's cybernetics, and the sabotage of the holodeck to try and kill Schwein."

Starting to pace as she talked, Dox was running her thoughts out loud. "THIS holodeck. With a perfect replica of her bridge programmed on it. And Kodia said that she had Maru deliver the message to me specifically after a number of specific things had happened. Things that made it so that I would be here, in the same holodeck where this all happened. I thought it might not be a coincidence."

"Well, I've had Science and Intel all over it, so every nook, cranny, nut and bolt has been inspected and catalogued," The extradimensional explorer wagged her finger at the Agonizer technology which was apparently designed to be used shipwide. "Those things. Those things are the devil."

"They can make Vulcans scream."

"It feels like you're being turned inside out then that gets turned inside out. It spasms all of your muscles so that you can't claw your skin off while it feels like you're being devoured by a million ants. And you can't yank your own teeth out as every nerve ending in them is on fire, and if you're lucky you can close your eyes so you can't see what it looks like when every nerve ending in your eyeballs become pain receptors," the experienced executive explained.

"Someone who owns one of these is a sick, sick puppy. Someone who puts one on her bridge is a nasty piece of work. That's somebody staying in charge through some serious fear of failure in her underlings. Because she not only puts one of them in there," Paris was, of course, extrapolating on what she saw, but her logic was unshakable. "She makes the rest of the bridge crew listen, there at their posts. This woman's practically a Terran... ah, the mirror universe Federation earthlings."

Looking solemnly at it, Dox spoke more softly as she could see the anxiety on Rita's face. "Yet another reason we need to remove her from power and dismantle all of this."

"Science and Intel went all over this thing. We have their reports- feel like collating some data, Lieutenant?" Paris offered the helmsman with a grin. "Look for the clues we can find in the 8 second loop they could safely recover? It appeared to be 15 minutes of footage, but Sonak determined playing the loop as a full sequence was in and of itself a trap designed to space you, creating conditions of a vacuum inside the holodeck with the safeties off and the deck on full security lockdown. Ugly way to die."

"Of course it would have multiple levels of death trap." Dox grimaced as she thought of how depraved the Captain's mother was and it only strengthened her resolve. "And yes, let's see what we can see. I know I may be grasping at proverbial straws here... but I trust Kodria. She wanted us... me and you... to see something here. She would know I would have called you. I all but told her I would."

Pacing across the simulated bridge, Dox nodded. "Okay... what do we have?"

"What we have are reports. Computer, please give me a meter by half-meter screen in midair here with the science and intel reports in 16 point font on each of these panels, and give me the conclusive reports to me left and right of the captain's chair, on my mark... mark." The old-time officer had a tendency to use precision military determination at time, but it was at least applicable when it came to some of what they did here in the far-flung future. As the requested screens all phased into being, Paris nodded her approval

"Thank you, Computer. Well done."

=^=You're welcome, Commander Paris.=^=

"So let's see what we have here... where were we headed today, Mommy Dearest?" Paris stepped down to the tactical console to check the heading, then stepped over to the helm to confirm. "Well, this is interesting. Take a look."

Walking over, Dox looked at the displayed information from both stations. "Okay. We've got the ships speed. Warp 7. Starting coordinates look like the Kabul sector where the Artan Fortress is. And we've got heading, course data and destination coordinates."

As she spoke, Dox's attention went from the hovering information display to the actual simulation of the bridge consoles themselves, reading the same information off of them as she slowly ran her hands over the controls. "But... they were... These coordinates aren't set for anyplace in specific. This is just... dead space. A rendezvous, maybe?"

"Possibly..." Paris was tapping at a PaDD in hand, confirming. "Yup, looks like nothing out there in the database but spacelanes. Let's see what else we've got." Stepping away from the helm, Rita eyed the command chair, then skimmed over the science report. "Science verified Az'Prel's theory about the agony booth, surprise. Verified the veracity of the simulation, verified the eight second rule, verified the entire starship is reproduced in this simulation. That's kinda nuts, isn't it? She wanted to make sure the Baroness was killed she holographically reproduced her entire starship as a trap for her. This is one crazy driven woman who really wanted credit for being such a bitch."

"Indeed. There was no way she was going to kill Schwein without her knowing it was her. I'm willing to bet that Schwein's had some unpleasant experiences on this ship, hence the level of detail. It's sadistic for sure." Dox had begun pacing the simulated bridge, her mind running the information available. In front of the Communication station, Dox paused looking at the data on the screens and her eyebrows knitted.

"Commander... This is the communications officers station, right? These numbers here? Is this the readout for subspace frequencies?" While Dox had trained herself to fly a Miranda class ship, she was far less well versed on the full functions of the model of bridge so similar to ones Rita Paris had once served on in her own era.

"Good eye, Lieutenant. First bridge post I served was at comms- I didn't have the scores to go pilot in my third year so I switched to Communications as a major. Not proud of it, but it got me through the Academy. Let's see here..." Paris hands tapped across the displays, reacquainting herself with the console. "This is the subspace frequency... it's an open channel, see, that's what it looked like on the console. All we've got is the frequency but... " Paris checked the reports hovering beside the consoles. "Nothing really significant about- oh, there we go, the channel ID on the other end is..."

Suddenly Dox cut her Commander of with a wide-eyed curse, "Imirrhlhhse! I can't believe I missed that!"

Turning around, Dox ran back over to the data readout above the navigation workstation, scrolling through the projected data with her hand until the star maps of the ship's heading was shown. "There! Okay... That subspace frequency. It's a dead channel. Static. Except it's not. It's a smugglers channel. Code hidden under static."

Dox gesticulated with her hands as she talked. "And THIS isn't dead space, Commander! It's the location of the Aehallh station. It's a cloaked Romulan smuggling station. My mother and I were there... half a dozen times. That's where the Captain's mother was going when this was recorded."

"All right... setting aside the fact that there's a cloaked Romulan smuggling station out there..." Even in an investigation, Rita Paris was still keeping one eye on her duty. "Smuggler channel, smuggler destination. Still just puzzle pieces that don't connect to anything. Think, old lady, think..." Pacing past a few of the other stations, Rita scanned the reports, hunting for a clue to make the information they had gleaned make sense before returning to the comm panel.

Trying to follow along, Dox was listening intently and watching what Rita was doing as the throwback First Officer worked, calling up information at the Communications Station that she manipulated like she was born to it. "There has to be something here... ."

Dox cricked an eyebrow for a moment. "Commander..." the former Smuggler turned Starfleet Officer pointed at a sequence of numbers on the console display. "What's that?"

"That's the transceiver code of the other party..." Paris explained absently as she attempted to approach the problem from another angle. "Think of it as an identifier tag on communications, so that if you had multiple parties on a frequency you could identify them all individually. It may be a few too many years since I've manned this console or the future is a bit different, but I don't recognize that transceiver code. It's definitely not Starfleet, I know that much..."

Leaning over Paris's shoulder with one hand on the back of her seat and the other on the console, Dox stared at the sequence of numbers, her mind struggling to make the connection that was itching at the back of her mind. After a few seconds, a slight smile crept up on her cheeks. "Commander, It's not you or the console. It's NOT Starfleet for sure. And it's not Artan."

Standing back upright, Dox ran a finger across her chin as she talked. "I might be wrong as I've not seen these codes in years, but that 6 digit prefix at the beginning of the code... that's an Orion Syndicate prefix. When I was a kid, my orders from my Mother were to go silent and go the other way if we got too near any ship communicating on those frequencies."

"Ahaaa... well, that's definitely another piece of the puzzle. So this isn't admissible as evidence per se, but it might just lead us somewhere. We already knew she was communicating with the Syndicate and here we have more evidence of that. Let's see..." Paris poked at the rocker switches and turned a dial or two. "I can't pinpoint the location without the panel being active... let's see what Science and Intel came up with." Shifting her attention to the reports hovering over the station, Paris scanned for more clues.

"It's not admissible in a Federation court, but it's proof she's at least communicating with the syndicate." Dox added. "This could give the Captain serious leverage in the tribunal for sure. Maybe the investigation teams got us some audio or text communication. Even a snippet could be something to go on."

"We'll have to send a message to the Syndicate away team to be on the lookout for comm logs- if we could get a copy of the datafile from the Syndicate end, that could definitely clinch it," Paris turned to grin at the former smuggler turned Starfleet pilot. "Good work, Miss Dox."

Blushing a slight bit green, Dox smiled lightly back. "Thank you, Commander. I just hope it bears fruit. Perhaps convey to them to look at the Aehallh station. It's where the Captain's Mother was heading when she was talking to the Syndicate and it's exactly the kind of place one would go to have a very private meeting. My mother knows the coordinates."

"I'll send the message out as soon as we're done," Paris promised. "Shall we finish the inspection here to see if we can make any more connections that might help our away teams?"

Nodding, Dox replied confidently. "Aye, Commander. Let's see what we can see."