Chapter 8; Soup
"It's not as if we didn't expect this Imzadi." Deanna smiled sympathetically at her husband. "I think we know now why Q said that Tom was the key but not the most important character. Having him here is not as scary a proposition as it once was and we can handle social situations now, but I do not know how he will handle the reality of being active duty on your ship, and that we are both his superior officers. We don't know how long we are going to have to keep him so we deal with it. Now I am glad we took Tina up on that suggestion. I don't know how long we would have been able to keep him and Julie apart from each other."
"Speaking of my favorite Cajun, where did she assign him?"
"Here is where things begin to get interesting. Unless he tries to request a transfer, like he did right before he joined the Maquis, he is a very good bridge officer. Currently Tina has put him as senior conn officer and bumped Quenten Marks over to Sciences with Karen Heath." There was a slightly impish smirk that reminded Will of his first officer dancing under sparkling eyes. "I think that she feels that familiarity breeds contempt, for all of us."
Will chuckled inwardly at the jibe. Generally he was the one to offer levity into a situation, this time he found it turned around. Quenten and Karen had been openly dating for about four or five months now, how long they had played at avoiding the situation before Will did not know, but right now the were in the honeymoon phase and spending that much time together coupled with the two having to deal with one another being in the same command chain would either cement them as a couple or end the relationship. He did notice that the two of them had been much happier lately and he hoped that Tina was playing another of her hunches when she had done this. As for the last bit about all of them, he could only sigh. Again it was most likely Tina hedging a hunch, which usually proved to be only too accurate when it came to getting into trouble. He had been about to place the call to mother Troi when another chronic pain in the butt showed up on his couch.
"Captain Riker," Q began without preamble, "I take it you have not had a good day?"
"No I haven't Q. So let me guess, considering the way this day has gone, you have decided that it is time to gloat and tell me that I am taking too long to figure this out."
"Not exactly, although you are right. You should have figured this all out by now, and be on your way. No the reason that I am here is that I was curious to know how you are handling the new crew assignment?"
"Just fine Q. There are few people that are as qualified to fly the Titan as Tom." The statement was nowhere near a lie. Truth be told, aside from himself, there were only two people on this ship currently that he felt as confident of their piloting skills. One was Quenten and the other was Tom.
"And the Counselor?"
"I actually find it an interesting change Q. Rather pleasant. Now would you please tell me why you are in our quarters without a invitation or allow us to finish our business and get dinner?"
"I just want to tell you that you have merely begun. Watch carefully. Your big chance to get a jump on the puzzle is about to happen." With a smug look Q vanished.
"I hate it when he does that."
"Let me see if I get this straight," Nechayev continued, "Lwaxana Troi impersonates the First Officer of the Enterprise. Captain Picard, "Comdr." Troi, and Commander Buckley beamed into Risand Taldoran's lair. A firefight erupted when the security detail showed up. During the exchange Picard was mentally assaulted. Troi then proceeds to lock horns mentally with the guy. The Counselor took him out when he wasn't looking. But during the whole thing no one ever learned that he had any Genesis research. Or that he even had any outside communication before he was captured."
"That's correct."
"If Picard fell to his assault, how did Ambassador Troi avoid it, as well as the Counselor?"
"Buckley was never in a rapport with Taldoran, only Mrs. Troi. And as for my mother-in-law, she is a very formidable woman. One of the tricks that she learned during the liberation of her homeworld during the war was how to project emotions. With that she learned that if a person is aware that what they are seeing and feeling is just a telepathic projection, they can control their reactions. Most anyone with a strong will can do it, but it works much better if the person being attacked is also telepathic."
"So the gist of this story is that there is no one that has any idea how an ex-Tal Shiar mad scientist managed to get highly classified information from there into the hands of the Cardassians?"
"Unfortunately it would seem that way sir."
"I have to admit, when you gave me your full written report earlier, I can completely see why both Acting Captain Troi and Captain Picard left out a lot of the details. Picard may not be under Jellico's command directly, but you are. He is a very hard man to deal with. Even I have found myself stepping in on behalf of one of his captain's when the person did not feel they were being treated fairly. This log would have had you in his office for a very long time."
"Don't I know it." Will muttered.
She simply looked at him for the remark. "Since we haven't learned anything from this venue, you are now on to step two. You are heading straight for that colony. I will tell you this much, you will be within sensor range of the DMZ but you will be in secured Cardassian space. Commander Riker will fill you in on the details. Your orders are to secure as much of their data as possible and see just how much of Genesis is imbedded in their systems and research. You are also to locate the person or persons involved with getting that information into the hands of the Cardassians, and bring them down if possible." She frowned, offering a personally felt exasperation. "I just hope this is finally the end of it Will."
"So do I sir, so do I."
Early the next morning, after having been underway for several hours Riker had ordered a staff meeting to bring everyone up to speed. He had elected to wait this long to give everyone a chance to read up on Genesis. Alyssa, Deanna, and he had been on the front line of battling the thing, Deanna even logging time in the Brahms suit during an actual wave. All of the senior staff, except for Ben Varga and Tom had been involved directly with parts of the crisis. Unfortunately only the former Enterprise crew had learned the full scope of the crisis, as well as reading ALL of the classified reports that were shot out at them. The others needed the time to wrap their minds around the problem at hand. Between he and Deanna alone they had seen first hand all the devastation that was possible. Now he was heading into something related to it, without any backup.
"Ok people, let's get started shall we. By now you have all read up on the Genesis incident. This was something that we had thought had finally been put back into the bottle, and contained. However we have learned that the research is still out there and being used. Our mission is to return to the colony that the initial information came from, gain access to the database retrieve it and then get out of there. We think that we know where they got their information, but we do not know who the broker was that actually gave them the research from the original informant."
"Who was the original?" Shanar nursed a cup of coffee as he spoke. He had just rotated back to alpha shift after his rotation as night watch, and it always took him a few days to readjust.
"Risand Taldoran."
"But that was over six years ago. Why did it take so long for us to learn about it?"
"Commander," Will gestured to Tom to answer the question. It was not something that Will felt comfortable with, for over twenty years now he had managed to avoid dealing with his doppelganger. Now it had come back to haunt him. A lot of things had been doing that on this mission. The upside of the whole mess was that he had spent the last three days learning who his twin had become. While he had come to the conclusion that they could never be close friends he discovered he could in fact work with him and maintain a casual friendship.
Tom nodded in acknowledgement. He noted the uneasy looks that the other officers had given him since he came in the room. They had been briefed about his situation Tom had been certain that they would find him to be a freak and stare at him. While he had noticed the covert looks from them, he did not find himself as ostracized as he thought he would be. "From what I have learned, my guess would be the isolation involved. As far as I could ascertain, the few of us that went out there have been the only Federation citizens that have sent foot there in a very long time. And I am fairly positive that I am the only one with any Starfleet connections that has been there. What they have been doing is taking parts from what I now know are most of the recombination sequences of Genesis and combining them with a retrovirus. This is supposed to be specific only to Cardassian DNA. The theory is that it is supposed to trigger things like more muscle mass, denser bone structure and so forth.
"You said, 'now I know it was Genesis'. Why weren't you aware of what it was?" The remark came from Heath. She hadn't even been in the Fleet at that point and she knew most of the background of the crisis. She had even been on several of the missions that had included resurveying planets in the Genesis wake. As a matter of fact it was working with Starfleet during that period that led her to seeking becoming a Civilian Mission specialist in the first place. It was an unexpected plus. If it hadn't been for the devastation of that invention, she would not have ended up on the Titan, or in the Fleet.
"I wasn't even working for Admiral Nechayev at the time. Truthfully I never even knew that the original Maquis amnesty had been declared. The Admiral tends to keep things to herself when she wants to; she led me to believe that I was stuck there for the most part. Anyway, to make a long story short, we spent almost six months on the colony. I didn't know exactly what the Cardassians were doing until a week before I left. We had a computer expert with us on the last trip. He managed to crack into their database, which we had managed to gain access to. After that I did not have a chance to report what we had learned. We did not even get a chance to safely hide the data before some of the local military decided they wanted to question us. During our flight is when I learned where the data came from."
Will visibly blanched. Cardassian questioning was not a good thing even under the best of circumstances. He could well remember when he had been subjected to that lovely pastime. He had been mistaken for Tom and wound up on Lazon II, under the Cardassians' tender care. "Anything else we need to know?"
Shanar spoke up. "According to the data that the Commander has given me, we can expect the same amount of trouble as when we extracted him in the first place. There are only a few ships that patrol that area, and rather infrequently at that. The longer we are there, the more of a chance we have of finding that trouble. Fortunately we have a fairly accurate timetable as for when the patrols are in the area. One is due within two hours of our ETA, with a second coming about six hours after the first passes. If we manage to avoid both of them, we have about a day after that before the third and final patrol for a week shows up. I would suggest we wait it out, but since they know that someone was trying to steal the information, they would have more of a chance to increase security. My recommendation is to send no more than four people, leave them with a subspace radio and wait for them to signal them. As long as we are in the DMZ the local patrols might just go on without stopping for anything. That is about all the safety that I can offer, for us and the team."
"I take that recommendation. I want you, LeBeau, Ogawa and Riker. That's security, computers, medical, and local expert. Be ready to leave as so as we get there." Changing his focus over to Tom Will spoke again. "What's our ETA Commander?"
"Seventeen and a half hours." Tom Riker responded. While he still felt a little strange looking at himself across the table, he was beginning to fell like he really had become an individual person. For almost twenty years he had struggled with his identity. For him, this was the final hurdle. While still not on the most congenial terms they were now having conversations of over an hour without having so much as a cross word, or vying for superiority in a situation. Here he was in uniform again, and for the first time since his recovery from Nervala IV, he felt like he was a part of a team again. It was a good feeling.
What none of them noticed as the Captain drew the meeting to a close was a man standing in the corner wearing an enigmatic smile on his face.
