The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 1 : Eye of the Beholder
Scene 19: Message in a Bottle
1.19
Message in a Bottle
.
While the captains were conferencing aboard the U.S.S. Beagle, Project Director Pel had returned to the U.S.S. Mako and was in the galley, enjoying a large platter of live tube grubs. The diminutive ferengi was playing with his food - chasing the wriggling grubs back onto his plate and into a foul smelling sauce that made sog seem appetizing by comparison. With the predictable result that he was afforded a wide perimeter - even the sight of him toying with his food was enough to cause the Mako's stalwart crew to avert their eyes in order to not be put further off their lunch.
As he seasoned his squirming food, his delicate fingers moved a series of tiny switches on the bottle - switches too tiny to be visible to the unaided eye for most species. Upending the bottle and shaking it hard over his food to get out a few drops of seasoning caused those controls to recess seamlessly into the bottle. The best place to get away with secret operations was in public.
Pel set the bottle carelessly aside and savored his food. Maybe savoring it a bit more in light of the evident, poorly disguised disgust of the mostly human crew who had relegated themselves to the edges of the room as his table was deliberately smack in the middle of the room.
It was only three minutes later, as the spice bottle sat carelessly perched near the edge of the table, that the device activated - right as the diminutive ferengi had his fingers full of tube grubs and the thick, putrid sauce - licking both off his fingers. Even if the Mako's alert crew were to notice the ship's sensors being used for just a micro-second to transmit a signal, the security feed would show the ferengi behaving as innocently as a ferengi possibly could.
The compressed file being sent was a thorough report, encoded, encrypted, and set up to use the ship's warp bubble to to create a subspace carrier wave to send the report to a relay station that would then send it to Pel's secret task master in the Grand Exchequer on Ferenginar.
.
1.19