Season 1 - Episode 5: Acylurea
March 30, 2371 (15 days in the Delta Quadrant)
April 22, 2371 (38 Days in the Delta Quadrant)
After four hours in the ship's sickbay, being poked and prodded by a holographic doctor who was growing more and more irritated at the lack of progress on the quandary that was my mysterious headache, all I wanted to do was lay down and go to sleep.
The bed in my quarters sung to me like the sirens of old, promising sweet pleasures if I just rested atop it for but a few moments and allowed the comfortable covers to envelop me in a warm hug. Fortunately, like Odysseus before me, I took steps to keep myself safe from the call. Lacking earplugs, I made do with a large cup of coffee, replicated through the judicious use of my rations because I refused to drink the engine lubricant that insane Talaxian was calling coffee. It sat in my hand and shared its warmth with me. A small half-eaten ham sandwich joined me in the living room, carefully placed atop the table next to a smattering of data padds that I needed to read. I could trade food for sleep for a bit, but too long and I'd have to hit the gym or pay for it later. And last but not least:
"Computer, access musical archive. Earth, nineteen-hundreds. Play personal selection, Fallout, volume at sixty decibels." A quick series of chirps confirmed my request, and a few moments later the smooth voice of Nat King Cole's 'Orange Colored Sky' started to pipe through the rooms various speakers.
Sadly, whatever point of divergence in history that separated the Earth of my dimension from the one based in Star Trek effectively removed most of the music I was familiar with. My favorites from Rammestein, Metallica, Jonathan Young, Weird Al and everyone else I could think of had simply never existed, or had changed so much I didn't recognize them. Fortunately, those changes didn't really do much to the atomic-era musical generation, so I still had plenty of the older tunes I could relax into.
Maybe I should try to reintroduce heavy metal through holographic concerts? Something to consider, if only to see how Klingons reacted to Heavy Metal. Nothing against their 'modern' music, but while my reincarnation had plenty of fun memories of going to see live performances of what can best be described as retro-synthwave mixed with disco, the part of me that wasn't from around here just needed a bit of that familiar comfort from my past life.
The doctor, unable to come up with a diagnosis, had encouraged me to rest when he didn't find anything wrong, issuing strict instructions for me to go to bed. I agreed to take the rest of the day off, and had arrived at this piece of furniture, but sleep was the last thing I wanted right now. Instead my mind was running through the ramifications of what had just happened.
"Okay," I began to tell myself. Maybe it was the music, but the part of me that was the old me was coming a bit to the forefront, as Shepard would never be caught dead talking aloud in his cabin, even if he scanned for it for bugs every few days.
Bringing the cup of coffee to my lips and sipping carefully at the contents, I continued, "so let's work through this logically. I had known that the polaric planet event was going to happen soon, and while I knew it would be fine if I didn't interfere I also knew that if I didn't get involved then there was a good chance the species would kill themselves at some point. More than that, they had managed to take an extremely dangerous form of power generation and made it stable enough to use as a planet-wide source, " I muttered aloud, leaning back on the couch and staring up at the ceiling in thought.
What a source of energy that would be as well. Gram for gram polaric energy outperformed the standard fusion reactors of the Federation. It didn't quite outperform matter-antimatter reactions, but the fact that it was close wasn't something to laugh at either, and it could do so without the industrial infrastructure needed for antimatter creation and storage, not to mention dilithium crystals and everything else needed to power a warp engine that couldn't just be replicated. That alone would be a worthwhile reason to go down to the planet and recover the technical information for how they managed to make the technology safe enough for general use, but it wouldn't be easy to get that data.
"So," I mused, after taking a bite out of the sandwich, "that could've been my motivation to go down to the planet, which explains why I spent a point on subspace fractures. I would need more than just a single day, so I'd use that information to identify how far back in time the fracture would send me." From my old knowledge base, that would've been the height of stupidity, unable to figure out if I'd come out a year, a day, an hour, or a second before the explosion.
With my new knowledge however, pinpointing a fracture that'd drop me within a day or two of when I needed wouldn't be that difficult with a standard tricorder, now that I knew what to look for. I didn't know why I knew what to look for, that knowledge hadn't been included in the purchase, only what to look for.
That was nice enough to know, but I wasn't on the planet, I was still here. Voyager had already sped past the planet while I was in sick bay, I checked, and everything had gone as it had before, down to Kes coming onto the bridge. That meant we obviously weren't stuck in the effect-proceeding-cause loop of explosion-investigate-time-travel-cause-explosion. Most likely, knowing what happened in the original timeline, it happened again. Janeway shot the rift opened by the rescue party to seal the breach and prevent the polaric energy power plant from creating a cascade explosion.
Something wasn't adding up though.
If the massive download of information told me anything, other than the fact that the Inspired Inventor power does not play well with time travel shenanigans, it was that I must have had a plan. The subspace fracture purchase basically added another twenty-five or so years of research information on top of what I had already learned at the Academy. Checking the computer for what information was in its databanks, I found my knowledge outstripped everything there, but not by very much.
Federation research into polaric energy, on the other hand, could get a massive boost forward with the information I'd instantly leaned, largely because proper research into that field was too tightly restricted to get anywhere in a quick manner. Considering how dangerous it could be, I agreed with those restrictions, and even my previous colleagues agreed, S31 not touching it at all. The fact that any explosion caused by it was incredibly distinctive was likely the main reason, however.
Then there was the temporal mechanics data-dump that built extremely well on top of the subspace fracture information, the latter forming a large latticework of concepts and knowledge that the form clicked into. Temporal Mechanics, unlike tech or something specific like subspace fractures, was a broad topic. However, unlike Efficiency, which was a straightforward progress of knowledge, this was random, almost seemingly unconnected bits of knowledge, that only made sense in the barest sense. I was half-tempted to put another point in it, just to see what would happen, but time travel could, ironically, wait.
Those choices made sense if I went down to the planet. I would need the subspace information to find my way through time, and the polaric energy research along with temporal mechanics would allow me to find a way to not only end the loop, but to allow everyone to remember what happened. In theory. I could see how it would work, but it'd be tricky, requiring a device that would keep the fracture open and harmonize it, creating a temporal ripple that'd let the neural frequencies of those involved resonate, transferring the memory engrams backwards to the divergence point of the ripple itself. That obviously hadn't happened.
That theory, however, quickly fell flat with the introduction of the two other downloads. Planetary escape pods, and temporal isolation beacons, were both so far outside the realm of what I would have needed that I didn't see why I would need the information enough to go into the red for them, dipping into my 'I need this or we're all gonna die' reserves of Inspired Inventor charges.
Taking another sip of the coffee as the music started on Cole Porter's 'Anything Goes,' I shook my head ruefully. "Not exactly true, I could see the point of planetary escape pods. Assuming that something went wrong, I'd want to get off planet like a bat out of hell."
As I thought about it, how I'd likely go about things, and how Shepard would approach the same problem, it started to make a little more sense. S31 training instilled a certain set of rules into your behavior, such as always knowing where the exits were or assessing the threat level of every individual as they may be an enemy operative, that helped keep its agents alive. Since I'd be- since I was on a planet with a set termination date, I would want an emergency way off the planet in case Plan A failed for some reason.
In retrospect, that made my decision to download information on polaric energy systems make even more sense for me to download, since I'd need to use local materials to build the damn thing. If I had enough time I could've cobbled together something less dangerous, but without knowing the exact tech levels on the ground I couldn't know how long that would take, and with what I'd have to leave behind, if the planet didn't explode, it might give them technical information they wouldn't already have. While I had quite a few problems with the Prime Directive, it did have some places where it fit, and that meant I wanted to contaminate the culture with Federation technology as little as possible.
"So," I whispered aloud to organize my thoughts, "what the heck was the beacon for and what happened on that planet?"
Closing my eyes and focusing inwards, I tried to distinguish my new knowledge from my old. It wasn't easy, as the information I'd purchased blended in, as if I'd always known it. Only when I tried to remember how I'd learned it could I easily distinguish it from my normal knowledge. For things like efficiency or subspace fractures that was hard, because the knowledge added itself everywhere on the topic, like several feet of pristine snow covering the landscape of my knowledge base. The temporal isolation beacon was more distinguishable because it came with schematics, though it came with a bit of technical knowledge that synced up with both subspace fractures and temporal paradoxes. "Or did it just highlight the information I'd already received but hadn't fully understood yet?" I asked myself.
The information gain was slight, and checking it against the computers it was barely more information than Starfleet taught it's engineers, though I hadn't taken that class myself. Sure, combined with my own knowledge and the single point I'd spent on efficiency I could get the energy requirements and necessary materials reduced fractionally from the design I was provided, barely enough to matter, but with a polaric reactor the size of a car battery I could easily have had enough of an energy source to power it even without that boost. The problem was I didn't see why it would be paramount to need it, enough to drop myself down to a measly two points.
"Unless," I slowly drew out, "the point of the download was to provide a clue to what I did." Did I know I was going to fail? No, but I was still trying to look at this like myself, not the person I'd taken over. He was the other half of me know, and his actions and inclinations might've influenced my decisions. "Computer, play 'Sub-space blues'." The aforementioned disco-synthwave started playing, and as I tried to consider it.
It took a few minutes, but I felt the pattern of my thoughts shift slightly. I was still me, this wasn't mind control, but just like you'd feel different listening to classical than you would rock and roll, I considered the problem from the perspective of the S31 Agent I was.
After realizing I'd spent precious resources on a planet that would never help us, or the Federation, I started to get an inkling of what might've happened, but I needed more information than I had. For all of the destruction that S31 agents brought upon the Federation's enemies, we were data analysts and engineers more than the sociopathic killers Janeway had accused me of being. The fact that we engineered societies and politics didn't make the mindset any less valid, and I needed more to work with than just supposition.
Carefully setting the mug down, I walked over to the computer terminal on the other side of the room. Another thing I was going to have to change was how...lame, the Voyager-era personal computer was. Tiny monitor, with even tinier input panel, it could really do with an upgrade, and that was something both parts of me were in agreement over. Maybe I could reintroduce the idea of a gamer-setup to the crew? A pair of large eighty-centimeter monitors mounted on the wall, a larger ergonomic keyboard on the desk and a remote paired-padd would make this room much more comfortable for me and increase my productivity by a nearly obscene amount. It would draw suspicion, but having, for some reason, to out myself was likely inevitable.
I waved that errant thought away and called out, "Computer, access my personal database. Have I received any transmissions from outside the ship in the last twenty-four hours?"
There was a brief chirp of acknowledgement, followed by the background music dropping a few decibels as the computer replied in its usual synthetic voice, "Database accessed. Negative. No subspace transmissions received."
"Well, that was a dead end," I said to myself, before hesitating. There were certain systems that only Section 31 officers had access to. Bypasses and shunts that piggybacked on the Federations tech so smoothly that they didn't interfere and were never noticed. They were that smooth, because they were built to do so, instead of hastily added on afterwards like some sort of saboteur. "Computer," I tried again, giving it the proper access codes and clearance, "have there been any specialized transmissions from outside the ship in the last twenty-four hours?"
"Affirmative. Subspace transmission received on Four-Eight-Four-Two-Two-Point-Six-Nine."
"Display transmission." I commanded, thoroughly interested. That would've been just as we were passing by the polaric planet.
There was a brief amount of back and forth arguing with the computer about needing to provide my security codes again, verifying it was me, and then recovering and rebuilding the information received through one of our S31 decryption algorithms. While going through all this trouble, the only thing I could think of was, 'why the hell did they make this so difficult?'
Almost immediately I realized the answer was that I made this nearly impossible for anyone else because it was only intended for my eyes only. If I'd gotten any of it wrong, the ship would've 'deleted' the message, instead actually shunting it off to a secondary storage site where I'd have to retrieve it near manually. I could probably sneak into engineering to do so, but I'd rather not.
Soon enough the effort paid off, and I was greeted by a virtual treasure trove of information. Easily two petabytes of data had been sent to me, and instead of Voyager's main computer it had been compressed down and transmitted directly to my personal database. Which was nuts because I only had four petabytes of storage on the hidden partitions of my virtual drive. I was going to have to make room, maybe set up some additional storage. The trick would be doing so without Torres or Tuvok noticing.
Looking over the information provided, it seemed to be largely cultural in nature. History of the Makull people, which I presumed was the name of the species on that planet we passed, along with literature and music, biology, technological records and even records of the local flora and fauna. There were also maps of the locals polaric power plants and figures representing its future growth across the planet, as well as the safety measures they had in place to prevent the very kinds of accidents that would have drawn Voyager to it in the first place. Opening one of them showed notes that someone, likely myself, had made showing they were all functioning, along with an almost excessive amount of question marks. Continuing to troll through the records I'd also downloaded their literature, plays, movies, and serials, which, now that I had it, I could see the entertainment and cultural value of, though I wondered what had happened to make me considering grabbing those as well
I had to admit, I was impressed with my cataloging ability.
The most recent file was an audio/video file named 'Watch me first!', which I had of course ignored, searching for the S31 codes that brought up the video that was actually supposed to be watched, so I opened it to see what must be my other half had to say. It was bizarre to see my own face staring back at me, especially wearing strange clothing and sitting in a room I had never seen before. My past self looked tired, his eyes half closed and staring at something off-camera.
"Shepard," I said to me, "hopefully you figured out something was wrong and have received this transmission. If the Voyager picked this up, then this video will delete itself when you're done, and Janeway will have watched the video meant for her. Then again, if my plan worked then you already know all of this, so you can skip to the end. If you haven't, then take a seat, things have gone a bit off. If you're worried about the others finding this, or someone else, I've programmed the pod to head off into the star so there'll be no trace."
"I included everything I've been able to find on these people, just in case the plan to stabilize Torres's subspace fracture goes to hell. As well as everything I've been able to quickly compile about the points I've spent. With any luck this will let us get extra knowledge from I. Without having to pay the cost." He sighed, long and wearily, before looking back at the camera and continuing, "Though something's off with it, and I don't know what it is. Janeway and Paris showed up today, as expected. Paris and Bell are both in their bedrooms, resting up. Janeway is standing by the window watching the nightlife and not saying anything. She's been there for three hours, and I don't know what to think."
My other self leaned forward, "I've thought about this, and I'm not sure she'll go with the plan. I remember what she's like, what she will be like, so I can't be sure, but I do know she'll talk. What she won't necessarily do is listen. There's no way I can see to tell her what she needs to know without revealing my own foreknowledge, though I might be able to excuse that through time-travel." His other self laughed grimly, "Though if we get through this, she might believe me. The more time I give her to mull over the specifics of the plan, the more time she has to come up with objections or to stab me in the back for the 'greater good'."
He glanced off camera, before shaking his head. "It skipped over so much time, what with only an hour per incident, so I can't be sure if this is normal for her or something I should be worried about, but I don't have time to worry about this. I've built subspace neurological harmonizer that should lance this paradox like a temporal boil, using the fractures around the power-plant to make the connection, piggybacking off Torres' device and returning to the day when we arrived, giving you a week's worth of memories for the four of us to work with. I'm so glad I brought a medical Tricorder with me instead of a normal one, or else this wouldn't have worked, though scanning Janeway without her noticing wasn't easy. Why am I explaining this?" he asked himself, the himself in the room, not the himself watching. "It'll either have worked, so I already know this, or it hasn't, in which case this doesn't matter. If it didn't work, that was my plan. Here's to hoping that it'll have worked, so you don't need to watch it at all. Shepard out."
I leaned back in my chair, and mentally replayed what I'd just heard, the file already gone. Killing the music, I sat in silence, turning it over again and again in my head.
Something had gone wrong. Obviously. The question is, what was it? I perused the encrypted notes on the information that was already sitting in my head and saved it to a hidden drive on my Padd, easily downloading the gigabyte of hastily made notes and removing them from the greater file. I could easily enough slip the rest into a portion of the ship's memory, claiming that an S31 exploratory vessel had ended up here before, but the information I had was fragmented and this was the only planet they'd been able to fully scope out before they'd found a wormhole back home. It'd give credence to any of my warnings, but that left me with the quandary of what had gone wrong with my own plan?
Had it been Janeway, like the other me had feared? My first thought had been that it must've been her, but not everything was the Captain's fault. Had the device malfunctioned, and we'd all suddenly get these memories in a day or two instead, the carrier wave not able to make the secondary jump back in time and coming out when B'Elanna made her attempt to retrieve us? I'd have to lay low for the next several days, just in case. Had it been something else entirely?
I'd always wondered about the events of this episode, as time loops required some inciting incident that wasn't the time loop to get started. If we'd only investigated because the planet was destroyed, and us investigating had what caused the planet to be destroyed in the first place, that made no sense. Temporal paradoxes just didn't work that way, you couldn't close a loop unless you stopped what started it in the first place, but that meant that if Janeway was right and it was our fault, that we'd done something to create the initial explosion in the first place.
What did fit a with temporal paradox theory, however, was that we hadn't started it at all but our actions had butterflied out to stop the events that would've caused the explosion, and Janeway had wanted to be so powerful and responsible for everything that happened around her that she'd stolen someone else's cross. For all of this supposition was worth, none of it told me what I'd done wrong, and what I could do in the future to stop it from happening again.
"Well, shit." I muttered.
==/\==
"Why am I drinking Red Leaf tea?" I asked no one in particular. It's a Cardassian drink, and something I'd never tried myself before. Not exactly popular in the Federation, it was very popular in Cardassian space due to its energizing effect on the body. For most of the species in their space, the drink was a mild stimulant. To most other humanoids though sipping it was like getting a low voltage electric charge run through you.
As I thought about Cardassians, and why I might have replicated one of their drinks without thinking about it, a brief flash of memory filled in the answer as an attractive smiling face flickered before my eyes before I banished it back to the past, where it belonged. I let out a small, "Oh, right. Her."
Torres was standing next to me, eyes focused on the monitor outside Holodeck Two alongside my own. Without glancing my way, the Klingon hybrid sniffed and asked, "How can you drink that stuff?"
I shrugged slightly, "Tastes a bit like Guinness to me." If you were drinking it with a phaser battery in the glass.
She paused her tapping on the padd in hand, looking at me with a slightly amused expression. I expounded, "I like various drinks. I'm a man of many cultures."
"Right," she huffed, smirking as her eyes turned back to the monitor. "Next thing you'll tell me is that you like Gagh!"
I shuddered theatrically, "No, I do not like eating worms. Anyone that does, has problems."
As the engineer started to laugh at me, I softly added, "Shell Squid on the other hand, on a nice bed of rice, is delicious. I don't know why so few people outside Qo'noS have ever heard of it."
"When did you try Shell Squid?" B'Elanna confronted me, her eyes narrowing. "That is practically impossible to find anywhere. It's one of the few Klingon foods I'll happily eat," she added, almost as an afterthought.
I gave a little shrug. "I spent a couple of weeks on the Empire's homeworld a few years ago. Wasn't what I would call fun, but once I managed to acclimate it wasn't so bad."
"What were you doing there?"
I just looked at the woman's interrogative stare and smirked, before turning back to monitor.
On the screen were two views of the current holodeck program in progress. On the left, the one that Torres was focused on, was a tactical map that displayed a small town. There were approximately fifty buildings of various shapes and sizes arrayed around a circular central courtyard. Roughly three thousand people represented on the screen, the vast majority showing up as grey blips as they moved about the town and went about their business. Represented by blue dots, was the three-person security away team currently using this simulation. It was Alpha Squad's turn to play, and Lt. Andrews had picked LtJG Luis Gonzalez along with Ensign Daaje Yaso to join him. What I thought was interesting was that Andrews had rounded his team out with two former-Maquis, rather than his own people, but I would ask him about that later. He had been free to pick whomever he wanted from his Squad, and he had.
The three blue blips were currently in a triangular formation around a green one on the tactical screen, but on my half of the monitor I had a live display of where they were and what they were doing. My frown grew as I saw that all three members of the Squad were correctly placed around their holographic VIP, but like idiots all three of them were facing the young woman they were sent in to extract, all of them keeping an eye on her. Andrews and Gonzalez, who were in front of the VIP, kept glancing back at her instead of where they were going.
This was a fairly standard Starfleet Intelligence training simulator, but, unsurprisingly, no one on Security had been run through it until I started two weeks ago. It was a clever program, and adapted well to changing situations and requirements with hundreds of variables that can be adjusted on the fly. Weather, time of day, population, size of the town or city it was set in, how alien the locals' appearance - which affect how badly you may stand out – was, level of technological development, and so much more were all easily changed values, allowing the program to be re-run in hundreds of different ways without having to build a new one.
Yesterday I'd ran Beta though the same village, but it had been during the middle of the day and during a thunderstorm. Less people in the town were willing to go outside, which made it easier for the local defense forces to find their team and apprehend them, but cut down slightly on visibility and gave the team a few seconds longer to be noticed as the soldiers didn't want to be out in the rain either. I made the locals look human for them so they might have had a chance of blending in, but for whatever reason the idea of merging into one of the more populated buildings to avoid detection didn't occur to Lt. Dalal. They were forced to give up when they were surrounded by two dozen enemies near the extraction point, though they had done so without a single 'fatality', on either side.
On Torres's screen I could see a hundred red dots scattered around the town. Most of them were in teams of two, and they were systematically patrolling their standard routes. Thanks to the two Maquis, the three of them had managed to find their VIP informant without their presence being picked up, something only Lt. Wood and team Beta had managed thus far, but time would tell how successful they were.
"So how far do you think they're going to get?" Torres asked, going back to her screen.
I frowned in concentration. "That is going to depend on how well Andrews listens to the other's advice. I've noticed that your former conspirators are much better at this type of scenario than normal Starfleet officers."
Torres gave an accepting nod of the head, and then smirked at me once more. "And I'll begrudgingly accept that Starfleet personnel are much better at the whole running around once they're caught thing."
"Ouch," I declared, making a show of holding my chin and staring at the woman. "Eh, I'll take it. Running can tell you a lot of things about the group that's chasing you. Vulcans break off and encircle while Romulans go after you through shortcuts while pretending to break off and encircle. Besides, sometimes being able to outrun your enemy is more important than being able to outgun them. Not that I've ever prescribed to that theory."
Over the last few weeks Torres and I have been working a lot together, building trust and a dialogue between the two of us. The omni-tool project had gone through ten more redesigns to make it easier to use and more robust to prevent accidental breakage while in engineering. Because of that, thanks to Torres, we now had three more people in that department who were serving as beta-testers before we rolled out the final product. Everyone who had anything to do with Operations were excited for it as word of the new toy had swept through the ship.
It was impossible to keep a secret on this ship. As that old saying goes, two people are able to keep a secret if one of them is dead. I was just glad I hadn't been called to the carpet by Janeway yet. I'd breathed a sigh of relief when no one regained the memories of the paradox, but that just meant I had other things to worry about.
Speaking of which, the weapons projects between Torres and I had grown a bit more complex. Our initial design for the phaser pistol had hit a brick wall because of size issues. More specifically, our new firing mechanism couldn't fit the required safety and secondary systems inside the proposed housing unit. Not without a redesign of the internal mechanism that neither of us had time for, or without forgoing them which neither of us would risk. On the other hand, we didn't have that problem with the new Torres-Shepard Seventy-One Phaser Rifle we cooked up. Well, rifle was a rather grand and inaccurate term for the faux-submachine gun we co-developed. Andrews was currently fielding a holographic prototype in the simulator, along with the most recent version of the omni-tool design. For the purpose of the exercise, I hoped he wouldn't need to use it, but if he did I was looking forward to how it would fare.
We wanted one person on each team who went through the simulator to have the new equipment on hand so we could see how it might handle under real-world conditions, or as real world as we could get.
On top of the hand weapons, I'd been giving Torres some minor help with increasing the efficiency of the phaser arrays. Her team of people were the one doing the work, I was just passing along some "things I've picked up in the field" notes to her, but it was getting me an in with the rest of engineering. Her occasional "why didn't we think of that!" was so amusing that I considered putting another point in it, but I'd just finished refilling my reserves and it could be better spent elsewhere.
I suppose what surprised me the most was how much fun I was having with them.
"Here we go," I announced as I looked over at my screen once more and saw the three members of the squad careful working their way around some of the building. It looked like they were trying to skirt their way around the outer edge of the town to avoid most of the people as well as the guards.
It was a cautious approach, and might even work if they kept their eyes open, but I didn't think it was going to be that easy for them.
Sure enough, halfway through their movement, a guard patrol walked by the alley they were using and one glanced inside, spotted them, and shouted a warning. His partner took cover and fired a green blast of hot plasma at the four of them, the guards in this scenario wanting the informant dead rather than captured, as was sometimes the case. I watched, interested, as Andrew's shoved the VIP behind a low wall attached to the building and brought up his weapon, the hot plasma missing them both but close enough to note that Andrews would've received superficial burns. The Lieutenant pulled the trigger, and TS-71 unleashed a five-round burst of polarized phaser bolts at their enemy, three out of the five hitting. The second guard was out of their path, but the first went flying off his feet and fell to the ground unconscious.
"You know," I started as I looked over at my partner, "if any of them had their tricorders out they would have seen the guards coming."
"Shut up," Torres good naturedly shot back. "You're just saying that after what happened to me when I ran through this." The woman hadn't so much as glanced at hers, despite being the chief engineer, something I was still having fun teasing her about.
Of course, before we unleashed this program on the rest of Security, Torres had been insistent that she would run through it first, and I'd let her pick anyone from Security, or anyone else from Engineering that volunteered. She'd picked one from each, both of them Maquis. Her play through had been set up so she was the VIP and had to get herself out of the city to a waiting shuttle, and her solution to the problem had been to literally stun or knock out everyone she saw, accidentally killing one trooper who'd tried to shoot her from a rooftop and fallen down several stories, but she'd been gone before he'd fallen, and had missed it. Guard or civilian, didn't matter. They were in her way.
The three had managed to get within fifty meters of the shuttle before the remaining forty eight guards swarmed her team. Impressive, but still foolish.
"Besides," she indicated my screen. "I think they realized their mistake."
The other guard had been stunned before he could get another shot off, and I could see Andrews using his omnitool and its large screen to get a detailed map of the area around them, while Yaso was dealing with her smaller tricorder screen. Gonzalez had been moved to rear guard to protect the VIP while the other two tried to clear a path. Instead of circling the town and avoiding the patrols, now that their cover was blown, they were trying to fight door-to-door in as straight a line to their goal as possible.
"Excellent job of improvising, but I think the person with the VIP should have the tricorder out, not the two on point." I shrugged.
As if to prove my point, one of the guards leapt out from behind the corner of a building, blindly firing their energy weapons at Gonzalez and the VIP. The two figures went down easily, forcing Andrews and Yaso to take cover and return fire if they wanted any chance of recovering their comrades. Given that the enemy was using plasma weapons, they'd likely only be recovering their remains if this had been real.
"And that is why I hate escort missions," I muttered.
Torres smirked at me once more, "Too difficult for you, Shepard?"
"Yes and no," I answered honestly, not looking away from the screen. "It is much easier to worry about myself or a few people with similar training. Imagine if, for your run, you'd had to babysit a noncombatant. As soon as you throw in requirements to protect someone like this, it just makes everything so much more difficult."
"Had to do something like this before, huh?"
I shrugged nonchalantly, letting the blatant question about my past go by without much comment. "Once or twice. I never lost anyone, thankfully, but that doesn't mean I liked it any better." I ran a hand down my face, memories flooding back up to the surface to remind me of things I've had to do in training, and the things I'd had to do out of it. "Sims were always much worse than the real thing, which was kind of the point, but what we have been putting the Squads through lately would have been considered basic training by my old bosses, if not light duty."
Torres looked back at the screen in front of her, apparently noting the large number of red blips converging on the two conscious members of the team, the holodeck having knocked them out when they 'died'. "Want to call it quits here?"
Shaking my head, I answered, "No. We keep going until they call it quits or are all incapacitated. The program doesn't stop when one of them dies, but also covers what happens next. Dalal, even though she gave up, could've been recovered along with her team and the informant. They might've been tortured, or one of them killed, but it was that or certain death. Only way they are going to learn is if they play it out to the end, whatever that is."
"What was your time on this Sim anyway?" She asked, turning her attention back to me. "I know you ran through it just like I did."
"Twelve minutes, sixteen seconds, alone. Fourteen minutes, thirty-six seconds with a VIP," I answered, looking back at the young woman blandly. "Made it off planet both times."
"What?" Torres snapped at me. "It took me forty minutes just to get within sight of the shuttle! How did you get through there so quickly?"
I raised an eyebrow at her, and simply said, "If I tell you how, you won't be able to run that same course again."
Growing silent for a few moments, the two of us looked back at the monitor and watched as Yaso was the next to fall under the barrage of energy attacks, 'dying' as she took a shot to the shoulder. Andrews was leaning in and out behind cover, smartly using his omni-tool to locate targets before popping out and firing with his rifle. However, the numbers soon became untenable and the big man fell to a barrage of weapons fire when two groups of guards flanked him from either side. If this had been real, there wouldn't have been enough left of him to be recognizable from the slag of melted concrete and metal.
I was actually impressed. Andrews might be a pain in my side but he knew how to fight, just not when to quit. That TS-71 design had also proved its worth in each of the simulations as every time combat began the shooters were able to lay down suppressing fire much more effectively than the type-two phasers, and to hit more accurately as well. The slight reduction in accuracy that came with the rapid-fire design was more than made up for by putting more energy downrange. I'd look into a sniper variant, but selling these was going to hard enough without something that screamed 'tool of assassination' to Janeway's sensitive Starfleet sensibilities.
I was also happy to see I didn't have to instruct anyone to combine the new weapon with the omni-tool either. Each squad and almost instinctively combined the two, increasing their effective ability.
With everyone down, the holoprogram ended and statistical data was correlated and transmitted back to my padd for review. The doors for Holodeck Two opened automatically, and I walked into the bare room to find our three Security personnel asleep on the floor. The holograms' shots brought no pain, being instantly 'lethal', and any program designed to inflict pain required direct permission of the Captain which I knew I wasn't going to get. On the other hand, it was safe and extremely effective to teach people to avoid being hit instead of tanking a potential lethal blow.
Torres supervised me as I strolled over to each fallen form and pressed a hypospray to each neck, injecting a small amount of stimulant to wake them. Each of them was still groggy, but they would be able to listen to me and make it back to their beds afterward so they could sleep it off.
Once they had all stood back up, I gave them their results, "Congrats, you all died."
The two Maquis groaned, Andrews scowled, but no one said anything. I continued, "Your infiltration to find the VIP went well. There were a few minor places you could have improved on, but otherwise it was well done. Problems for you really started during the exfiltration."
B'Elana typed away at her pad, and a window opened, displaying the governmental office building they'd picked up the informant at. "Exactly five minutes after you left with the VIP, her supervisor noticed she was missing and called security. A minute after that, they'd checked the cameras and saw you three meeting up with her and escorting her out, wearing completely alien clothing. A minute after that, the city guards were informed she was missing and began to hunt for her. Three minutes after that, one of the patrols literally ran into you. Any of you have any idea how to stop that from happening again?"
Yaso stood up as straight as her tired form could manage, sheepishly admitting "We used our tricorders too late. We put them away to keep from drawing attention to ourselves, but that basically blinded us to what was happening around us."
I shook my head. "Not at all," came out of my mouth, and surprise crossed all their faces. "There are times when you won't be able to use a tricorder, and it is a good habit to get into to not rely on it and use your natural senses instead. But since you had them, and they worked, you could have used them when no one was around. There were four of you, three of you could bodily hide the fourth from view while they check to make sure the path is clear."
Andrews cracked his neck before asking, "And after the alarm was raised, how do you escape with so many after you?"
"By withdrawing." I declared with conviction. "You don't always win the fight by standing and shooting. Your goal was to get your VIP and yourselves off the planet, not to defeat the planet's corrupt military. Once the VIP was down and unrecoverable, the next priority was getting away with your lives. Instead you bunkered yourself behind some cover and tried to take as many of them with you as you went down."
With a bit more warmth in my voice, I informed all three, "We are alone out here. Every one of us is irreplaceable, so we need to make sure we do what we can to stay alive. I don't want to lose any one of you, which is why we run these sims. To get us used to overcoming the worst so everything else is just another day. So everyone can come back safe. Leave the desperate last stands to the holo-novels."
"Anyway," I sighed, "I'm going to write up a full review of your performances, highlight areas for improvement, and have it for you in your inbox in the morning." I perked up to add, "Oh, Andrews, how did the gear perform for you?"
The Lieutenant blinked when I called on him, but then squared his shoulders and nodded, "The Tool took a few minutes to get used to, but once I did, I couldn't stop using it. Too useful if anything. The '71 is comfortable, and I have to admit it's easier to use than a type two."
Yaso nodded at that last part, "Wish I was using one. Might have made a difference in getting away."
"Okay," I nodded at them. "Head back to your rooms and rest up. You had a hard day, so eat hardy and get a good night's sleep. Dismissed."
The three shuffled out of the Holodeck, looking just as tired as you would expect after running an exhausting combat sim for the last hour. And before that having done a morning of exercise with their entire team, another practice which had fallen by the wayside.
"Armor might be my next project," I muttered to myself, making a note. "Powered armor could help keep people from getting tired as well as provide some protection to weapons fire."
Before the three had left, I saw Tuvok casually wait for the tired security officers to pass before he calmly walked inside the room and towards me. He raised an eyebrow at the presence of B'Elanna, but otherwise did little more than note her presence.
"I observed this afternoon's training," the Vulcan announced without preamble. "When Captain Janeway assigned you under me as Voyager's Chief of Security, I had assumed, with your background, you would be cavalier with the lives of those assigned to you. Based on what I have observed for the passing weeks, I am pleased to admit that I have been proven wrong."
I didn't really know how to respond to that, mentally translating it from Vulcan to Human. Basically, he'd just said, 'I'm glad you aren't willing to let our people die, because I thought you wouldn't care about their lives.' I'd assumed, from his professional demeanor and willingness to let me run things as I see fit, that he hadn't bought into Janeway's 'Section 31 are all evil and like to kill innocents because they can' rhetoric, but I'd apparently been wrong.
Reigning in my justified indignation, and frankly anger, I called on my training and smiled genially. With good humor, I replied, "I'm not sure if I should take that as an apology, or a backhanded compliment, but for now I'll just say thank you."
The Vulcan just tilted his head slightly and stated, "I believe it was neither. How are you proceeding with your goal of bringing ship's security up to your standards?"
I huffed a brief laugh, finding the man's brisk nature amusing, and noting how he'd dodged the topic of what he actually meant altogether. "So far, so good. I'm taking it slower on them than the organization was with me, but I'm also starting from a lower baseline. How about you? The former Maquis integrating with the ship well enough in the rest of operations?"
"As well as can be expected at this point," Tuvok stated, nodding to B'Elana, who leaned against the wall, arms crossed and expression stony. "There is the occasional issue, but they are usually dealt with easily enough. I have come by to remind you that your monthly security report and review is due on my desk by oh-nine-hundred tomorrow."
He took a step back, nodded at the two of us, and marched back out of the holodeck as swiftly as he had entered, the door closing behind him.
"What an asshole." B'Elanna stated into the oppressive silence.
I couldn't help it. I broke down laughing. The statement was just so, her.
"On that," I gasped out a minute later, just barely getting my laughter under control as the Chief Engineer gave me a glare, "I absolutely agree with you. He isn't always like that, though. Tuvok must have been more agitated than usual about something."
"Only thing on this ship that gets to him seems to be Neelix," Torres deadpanned, her anger fading as she realized I wasn't laughing at her, but at the Head of Operations. She went on in a simpering voice, somehow patronizing and pleading at the same time, "Mr. Vulcan, please tell me more about how your species is boring."
More chuckles erupted from me. "You do a decent Neelix impression."
"Don't you dare get any ideas." The woman narrowed her eyes at me, but I could see a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
As we saved the records of the program, me for planning purposes and Torres so she could refine the weapon's design a little more, the young woman next to me finally said, "Okay, tell me how you did it. I'll promise to not use that exact sim variable again. I need to know."
I held my tongue for a long moment, just looking at the half-Klingon in anticipation for her reaction, before finally admitting, "I ran across the rooftops. If you look there are large sections that are the same size, since they were all built to the same standard, and where I couldn't go over I could clamber down an alley, cross the street, and go back up. If you go this way," I drew a jagged line across the map, "They mostly line up, and the gaps are small enough they can be jumped, even carrying someone else. You'd be surprised how little people think to look up, and by the time they realized what I was doing I was practically at the landing pad. From there I shot my way in, jumped in the ship, and flew away."
B'Elanna's inarticulate yell of rage was priceless.