Chapter 4
2364
She reached the area where the outpost was supposed to be according to the given intel twenty minutes later. She could see nothing but rocks. There was hardly any vegetation to serve her as excuse to be there. And when she reprogrammed the tricorder to search for any of the artificial compounds that were usually present in Romulan constructions, she was not surprised when the readings were negative. The intel could be wrong, or the intel could be right. Actually, the outpost could be right there, cloaked, and therefore almost impossible to find. So she went on, tricorder in one hand, phaser pistol in the other, and all her senses attentive to any sign of the outpost or danger.
Fifty minutes later she was still searching. She had covered a lot of range, getting further away than she was supposed to, registering every spot, and she had found absolutely nothing. She was getting nervous. She was preparing herself for the fearful possibility of returning to the ship without having accomplished anything.
While on the way to her real searching area, she had been taking samples of the plants she passed by. Now, she had even started to get readings of the vegetation in the area, as well as the materials she was looking for, even if it meant she had to take more time programming and reprogramming the device, so her tricorder would at least show that she was doing her job in case she failed, and the captain would demand to know about her whereabouts after disobeying his orders. He was going to question her anyway, and she had very little to offer in her defense.
A part of her mind was absorbed in those dark thoughts when she noticed the signal in her tricorder. It could be just a glitch, that appeared and disappeared in less than a second. She stopped. The tricorder had no glitch. She turned the device around, slowly, and tried again to get the signal. There it was. A positive reading on duritanium alloy, in a combination that could not be found in nature, but that was usually found in Romulan constructions. Ro smiled, and then frowned because she could see nothing but rocks in the place the tricorder marked. A very precise position, because if she moved it centimeters away, the reading was again negative. She placed the tricorder in its holster, there was no way she was leaving her phaser, and bent down. She reached for the exact spot and when her hand touched the stony surface, it swiftly changed to show a small access control. She moved her hand away, the fake stone was again in place and the surface she touched now was real rock. She turned again to the initial point. The holographic image that mimicked that of the surrounding area and hid the control disappeared again and let her see at the same time than touch the Romulan access control.
It was a bio scanner. It would get a sample of her DNA and compare it with the list of allowed personnel. She could not get in even if she were Romulan. She would certainly raise a general alarm if she tried to access, being Bajoran. But she was not going to try to access that way.
The Tal Shiar officers were paranoid, and very arrogant. Their arrogance was always their downfall.
The scanner was not automatic. It had a tactile panel that had to be pressed to be activated. A simple touch got it to work, but a precise series of touches in preset positions overrode it and allowed for a different sort of entrance: no DNA reading and no record of the action. You were just in.
The Tal Shiar agents used it to gain access to the government and military facilities without a trace. After all, they invested more time spying on their own people than they did on their potential external enemies.
Just a few touches to get the access control in override mode. It worked smoothly. And then the panel turned from blank to a series of symbols that were the Romulan alphabet. All she needed was a valid code from a Tal Shiar officer to get in. And she had one.
Starfleet Inteligence had been able to steal it at least six months earlier from a careless hight ranking agent that did not know that he was under surveillance. She had already used it in her previous mission. She guessed she had not been the only one. The Tal Shiar had not been aware of their breach of security that first time. She hoped they hadn't found out yet.
It would have been much safer for the Romulans to do the bioscan anyway as a mean of identification after the override, and then obliterate the record of it. But as previously stated, Romulan agents were arrogant, and they did not believe Starfleet or any other alien agency would be able to get their codes. And Romulan agents were paranoid, and they did not want their DNA sampled, not even if the reading was supposed to be erased afterward. If anything failed, only a code will be left behind as evidence, not their unmistakable identities.
Ro started pressing the letters she knew by heart, noting the tension building up as each of them was passed to the control, fearing the command code would be no longer valid and therefore would expose her. Ten digits. Twenty. That was it. She waited. She was not really surprised when she felt the transporter beam over her.
And so, Ro just bypassed all the advanced security measures as if they were never there and got in.
The moment she noticed the transporter's activation, she crouched further down and raised her phaser. As she materialized again, her eyes darted around, looking for enemies, but the small transporter room she had beamed into was empty. She took a quick glance to the tricorder, no life signs in the area. Apparently, she was alone, but she hardly relaxed.
Ro went quickly to the transporter console and checked the logs. Her entrance had not been recorded, as expected. The last activity was from approximately four months ago, a beam out. She reviewed quickly the last movements to verify that all the people who had come in had later been transported out. Everything matched. She was really alone. Unless someone had used the same method she had to get in, of course.
She went for the only available door, her phaser still raised and checking the tricorder's readings. She didn't really get much from it. The same elements that avoided the complex to be detected from outside, also impaired the sensors once in, and she only could get readings from a narrow and quite irregular space that she supposed was the complex itself.
The door opened to a short corridor with more doors to both sides and another at the front. As she had guessed, her readings matched those of the rooms. She could read a lot of the components she had programmed the tricorder to search for before and still no life signs.
Ro checked the first room at the right. It turned out to be a small and spartan mess hall, with only a table and a few chairs and two replicators. The one at the left were the crew's quarters. There were bunks for six persons and their respective lockers. She opened some of them. Linens and uniforms were neatly folded on them. No personal objects were visible. She went for another door located at the end of the room and she was not surprised when a tiny and utilitarian restroom welcomed her.
She left the quarters to enter the next one at the right. It was a store room, but the amount of weapons stored there made her pause. Pistols and rifles, helmets and combat uniforms, grenades of every type, portable sensor scramblers and transport inhibitors, were neatly arranged in shelves. There was also medical equipment and she had to wonder if all the material was to treat possible injuries or if some of it, which she could nor really identify, had a darker purpose. She would have liked to scan everything with her tricoder so it could be checked later, but that was the Wellington's tricorder for the Wellington's fake mission, and she could not risk it, so she just tried to memorize everything she saw to report it and hope that someone later could identify the unknown equipment with her descriptions.
She left the store room and went to the last door. She had no doubt that would be the operations center and was surprised as the door simply opened when she neared it, as had the other ones, without any need of authenticating herself. Apparently, everyone who served in the facility had access to every part of it and the security measures taken to avoid any intruder's breaking in were considered enough.
The operations center, as she expected, was a cramped room full of different manning stations, all of them working in auto mode. She neared the first one and checked the controls and displays. Again, she was not surprised to discover it monitored a wide variety of short range and long range sensors, providing intel about the Federation's side of the Neutral Zone and beyond.
Ro neared the next one, and then froze. What she saw at first glance raised all her alarms. An instant later, she crouched over the controls, giving a series of quick commands, digesting everything. That was the tactical display. Weapons control. And those weapons weren't meant for self-defense. The facility has disruptors arrays, as well as photon torpedos, and far worse, long-range plasma torpedos. There had to be a larger facility cloaked somewhere, probably also enclosed in natural caves. Or maybe the weapons were not placed on the planet but somewhere else and it was a remote control. For a moment, Ro thought of giving further commands to try to locate it. Then she remembered she had a mission: planting the spyware that would tell Starfleet everything she wanted to know and much more. And she also realized she must had endangered that mission by giving commands to the tactical station and not just peeking at it, as she had done with the previous one. Those orders could have been registered and if they had not exposed her yet, they could do so in the near future if they were checked. She cursed her foolishness, and went looking for the station she was supposed to look for: maintenance.
All military Romulan ships and facilities were equipped with a self-repair system. It operated autonomously in the background, checking the rest of the systems and making the necessary changes to keep them at their peak performance. The self-repair system was also customizable and could be especifically programmed to be better adjusted to each place's necessities. In other words, the self-repair system could be the perfect Trojan, if you knew how to reprogram it and did so without leaving a trace. And Ro had the means to do so.
She finally holstered her weapon, she needed both her hands for the work ahead, and took out instead the padd containing the information Admiral Kennelly had given her. She followed the given instructions to get inside the self-repair system. She was reading from the padd, even if she knew all the steps by heart, but she was not taking unnecessary risks. The maintenance station asked for her to identify herself and show her credentials, again she overrode it using the Tal Shiar agent's codes. Finally, it showed her on screen the editable self-repair system program. And she scowled deeply, because it was not what she was supposed to expect.