Not The Answers We Were Looking For...

Posted on Thu Dec 7th, 2017 @ 10:51pm by Lieutenant Commander Eneas Clio & Aewia Larani

Mission: When Iconians Deserve to Die
Location: Intel Pod, D Deck

The tracking program that Summers had flushed out of the computer systems had resided in the isolated computer core within the Intelligence storage area for several days before Clio had a chance to look at it. Now she was studying it rather intently, gently prodding it with a few data collection tools that also resided in the isolated core. It wasn't giving up much information yet, but she hadn't really expected it to. She was more interested in watching how it responded to potential threats in order to keep itself active. It was fascinating in that regard, casually rewriting itself to deflect each probe. Clio found herself wondering just how long it had really been running in the background on the Hera's computers before it was detected... and if it really was something that had been uploaded by Enalia's mother. It certainly wasn't like any tracking program she'd used or had seen in use before, but she knew of one person who might have an idea about how it worked and how to unravel it. "Eneas to Larani. Aewia, can you meet me in the pod near the isolated core? I have a puzzle you might enjoy working on."

Aewia gave a double tap to her comm badge to acknowledge the call since she was in the Intel lab and started shutting down her equipment. A few minutes later she was in the pod, her Intel scope visor still pushed up over her forehead. "Sorry for not properly replying, Commander. I was in the lab at the time. What's this puzzle you have?"

"You realize you're under no obligation to call me that, right?" Clio didn't enforce anyone in her department calling her 'commander' or 'sir' or any other formal term of address, but especially not Aewia. "Come look at this." There was only one chair where Clio was working, so she got up to retrieve another one. "I've never seen a program quite like this one."

"Commander... Chief... It sounds cool I guess, and it's a sign of respect." Aewia shrugged as she took a seat and started poking at the program herself. Scowling, she flipped her Intel visor down and started typing in several lines of polymorphic code and started prodding it with that - code that the tracking program didn't take too kindly to at all. "Very interesting... I haven't seen anything like this since my time undercover in the Tal Shiar..."

"It does look... vaguely Romulan." Pulling the other chair over, Clio sat down next to Aewia. "Enalia thinks her mother put it in our computers, but it doesn't look remotely Trill to me."

"It's also not really Romulan... This is Iconian." Aewia typed in a few more algorithms and prodded the program with them before pointing out the results to Clio. "These output lines are almost identical to sentient speech outputs of the Iconian monitoring virus the Tal Shiar used in my own systems that I found when I was undercover. I'm amazed we were able to isolate this at all, really. I had to trick mine into becoming a sort of pet, a bit like a pokemon or something." Poking it with another line of code, Aewia got an origin date code out of it finally. "And that's how long you've been in our computer... Since stardate.... oh my..."

Leaning back in her chair, Aewia flipped her Intel visor back up and looked over at Clio. "I think it was the day I was rescued."

"Iconian? Are you sure?" It was a worthless question since Clio knew Aewia would never suggest such a thing if she weren't sure. Besides, there was a more important question. "How many chiefs of intelligence has this ship had since then and why didn't any of them notice it?"

"Let's ask it," Aewia replied, flipping her visor back down and going back to typing, seemingly almost having a somewhat frustrating conversation with this tracking program for several minutes before getting any results she could actually report.

When Aewia did have info, she rattled it off. "It seems that it resided in a communication subsystem computer until the last refit, almost completely dormant. Then during the refit, it was able to activate during a system wipe and transfer out into the new secondary computer core before security was fully online. From there it just laid dormant until it was triggered."

Clio frowned, not liking the sound of it. "Triggered by what? Can you tell?" While she was handy enough with computers, she couldn't read Iconian, not if she wanted to keep her head clear anyway. Aewia seemed to have less trouble with it. "I don't remember running into any Iconian tech recently, and the only place we've been that's out of the ordinary is Artan Station."

"That's the strange thing..." Aewia began, typing more algorithms at the program. "It claims it was activated twice. The first time after the destruction of Selen VI and the second time after we left Artan Station."

"Are you... are you saying that this... Trojan horse activated twice and I missed it?" Clio could be downright judgmental about other people missing such things, and she was starting to feel like the universe's worst hypocrite. The first activation had been missed entirely, and it had been Summers who found it the second time.

Aewia prodded it with yet more complex looking algorithms. "The first time, it was active for twelve seconds, long enough for the Master to get away, it seems... The second time... It was an old Tal Shiar access code that activated it and it never got the shutdown code, it seems."

"Wait." Curious and puzzled, Clio pulled up a sensor file and overlaid it on top of the 'activation' log of the interloping Iconian program. She studied it for a moment before muttering a carefully selected Cervan curse under her breath. "There's twelve seconds of sensor data missing that lines up with the first activation of this... whatever this is. It doesn't just track us... it can manipulate our systems. And I don't like what this implies about the Master."

"Now that we know it's in here, I can run a line by line sweep of every shipboard system to make sure there isn't another copy hiding out somewhere." Aewia replied "But one thing I can't help but wonder... How did it get aboard in the first place?That's not something even it logs."

"I'm not seeing any other gaps that might give us a clue either." Trying to compare the sensor logs to the data the Iconian program stored was starting to make Clio's eyes cross, and she shut down the sensor log review. "You said it came aboard the same day you did. Was any technology brought back with you? Did anyone record anything out of a data bank?"

"As far as I know, just me and the rags I was wearing, which were promptly tossed into a replicator." Aewia replied. "I think Enalia mentioned something about a Romulan ship and pirates while the away team was rescuing me though."

"A Romulan ship..." Surely it couldn't be so simple as that, especially without evidence of tampering by said Romulan ship. But Clio was a careful student of history regarding the Romulan people, and she had an inkling of what might have happened. "The Romulans have always been interested in Iconia. I wonder if there's any way they could be using Iconian technology..."

"During my time there, the Master made sure to keep anything Iconian out of their reach. That seemed to be sort of a secondary goal for him." Aewia brought up logs of that space battle on another monitor and ran through them, looking for anything unusual. Then she spotted it. "Right here... Aft shields go down for forty seven seconds and for nineteen of them there's a slight rise in tachyon radiation right next to the aft comm systems in question."

Clio looked up from the console, her puzzlement slowly being replaced by serious concern. "Aewia. Say what you just said again."

Aewia repeated herself slowly while pointing at the trademark signs of a cloaked Romulan shuttle landing almost directly on an aft sensor platform. "During the battle... Aft shields were down for forty seven seconds... During that time, there was a nine percent rise in background tachyon radiation... around the aft comm system... for around nineteen seconds."

Clio gave her quite a bemused look, though she had to admit she'd opened herself up for that sort of response. "I understood that. You mentioned a master, while you were with the Romulans."

"Oh yeah. The Master is who I learned Iconian from. I was undercover in his lab for quite some time, though looking back, I'm not sure if I was spying on him so much as he was using me. Either way, even with my amazing empathic abilities, there was little I could get out of him other than basic language skills and a few surface thoughts. I think I probably learned the most about him during his time interrogating me." As Aewia spoke, a haunted and hollow look came over her - one that only those that have seen beyond death know. "He made sure I kept those memories."

Suddenly, the entire debacle with the Master's escape made sense. "Why didn't you mention any of this before?" Clio knew such a question might be hard for Aewia to answer, but she couldn't help asking. "We're going to have to talk to Mal and Enalia."

"I did... I told Nexi. It's also in the profile of the Master that I've extensively added to..." Aewia spoke quietly and chose to keep her eyes on the monitor with the tracking program rather than looking at Clio. "He lobotomized me... cut out parts of my brain... in a room full of mirrors... while I was awake and aware... no numbing or anything... he wanted me to suffer... to feel every cut... every loss..."

Aewia shuddered at the memory but continued quietly. "He kept me lucid with Romulan tech somehow... explained what he was doing... preserving each piece perfectly... all the while... all the while... demonic dogs... with seven red eyes watched me... staring... he knew who I was... said I was bait... the eyes..."

"Okay." Clio put her hand on Aewia's arm, squeezing gently. "You don't have to say any more. I'll read what you've written." She wasn't sure if the demonic dogs were the Baskervilles that the Master trained or if they were the 'zombie dogs' mentioned in the logs that had been left behind by Commander Fairchild, but she supposed it didn't matter. It was all connected. "I'll talk to Enalia by myself, okay? I won't make you do that."

Aewia nodded silently, thankful for the warmth and the kindness and the reminder that she really wasn't back in that cold, sterile chamber again. Nexi did her best to keep emotional secrets from Aewia... But this was the one thing that Aewia tried to keep an emotional secret from Nexi at all costs. She even buried it so far in her mind, it had only surfaced in her dreams and had only fully come back to her during the recent Selen VI mission.

Placing a hand on Clio's comforting hand, Aewia smiled weakly, as if all her former energy since her rescue these past years had been drained out of her. "Thank you. Let's get something to eat later though, ok?"

"Sure. Just let's take it easy on the cake this time. Real food first." Clio chuckled a little. "Enalia's going to be pissed when she finds out just how far back this bullshit with the Master goes."

"Yeah, I've put all I can remember of that timeline in his profile as well. As for food, I think I could use some dera noodles with cheese." Aewia typed in a few more algorithms into the program, then leaned back in her chair and sighed heavily. "As near as I could figure, he met Nexi in the past, figured out I was her half sister by my DNA after I was found out, set a trap... And the rest is in the file."

"Yeah, it all makes sense now. Kind of. In a... twisted sort of way." Clio didn't really like how this was shaping up, but at least they were making some connections in all this mess.

Aewia nodded. "Yeah, this whole thing has proven to be as complex as anything Arachnia's woven. I wouldn't be surprised if she had a hand in things, honestly. We have met actual Gods and demons now, after all. Why wouldn't Arachnia be real as well?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if she turned up eventually." Clio grinned a bit at the thought. After all, they had a satyr for a first officer and she'd personally conversed with both Hermes and Hephaestus.

"Personally, I want to meet Danu. I think it's funny how that on over a hundred worlds, she's known by the same name and for about the same things. Different appearance... But she's somehow still Danu." Aewia was starting to look more relaxed now as she was talking about these ancient beings she thought were just myths just a few months prior.

"She could be an interesting one. And if the Greek pantheon and the Asgardians exist, I see no reason why she couldn't." Clio hadn't laid eyes on any Asgardians, but Odin had come up in conversation with Hermes.

"Anyway, was there anything else, you needed me for?" Aewia asked, flipping her Intel visor up and finally looking over at Clio.

Clio shook her head. "No, you've figured out more in the last few minutes than I was able to in several days. All that's left is for me to do some reading and talk to Enalia."

Stretching her arms above her head, Aewia groaned a bit before relaxing again. "Then I guess I'm going to go lay down a bit. I promised I'd try not to overdo things and this was a bit more draining than I probably should have let it be."

"Get some rest, Aewia." Clio knew she should follow her own advice in that matter, but she had other things to work on before she could have that chance. "Take the rest of the day if you need it."

"I will, thank you. You get some rest too." Standing, Aewia twisted her back a bit to stretch it as well before heading out of the Intel lab, leaving Clio to her own thoughts and devices.

As Aewia left, Clio sat down at the console and pulled up the ever-evolving file on the Master. She needed to see what else Aewia had added to it before she went to see Enalia.