Chapter III: Reunited

Alex hears Zephyr's roast chicken comment as she leaves and smiles cryptically. She'll just keep that one filed away for use at a later date.

Walking beside Cass, she says, "I'm pleased that the Lt. Commander seems to be recovering well, consider what he's been through. Imprisonment is bad enough, but that..." She shakes her head. "This is an extremely thorny situation we find ourselves in. Can I be of any assistance?"

Cass says, "Yes, I'm amazed at the progress Zephyr has made. I guess he's a lot stronger than I expected. I doubt I'd have bounced back so quickly in his place." She shakes her head and enters the turbolift to go to the bridge.

"I can definitely use your help with regard to our situation with the Four. I'm so paranoid that I keep waffling between thinking the captain is sincerely trying to establish relations and laying a trap for us. Although if Zephyr's parasite legitimately believed the captain was sincere, that's a serious piece of evidence. Maybe you can help me figure out what pitfalls to look for and lay out a plan for how to proceed from here. Hopefully, Spacefleet will respond with some guidance soon." She sighs. "But first, I have to take care of some unpleasant housekeeping."

The turbolift opens and she steps onto the bridge, presumably with Alex in tow. "Lt. Comm. Darcy, Kendall F'brei is in engineering trying to recruit crew members to build a weapon of mass destruction. I authorized an exploration of the theory of such a weapon, but it appears our guest is determined to have her finger on an actual trigger. Please strip her of her rank, comm badge, and access to restricted systems and place her under house arrest."

"If we can see them, they're fair game for decoding. I'm sure they tried to decode ours to Spacefleet, aren't you? And patch the reply to the terminal at the captain's station." Cass sits and prepares to access the reply, waving a hand to direct Alex to find a seat somewhere nearby.

Having some background in communications technology and usage, Alex sticks to that area of the bridge. "No one sends encrypted messages so obviously unless they want them to be read while still looking like they're sneaking about. Or they're idiots. I highly doubt it's the latter."

Marbo continues working in the silence of the cargobay, quietly cleaning up tools and medical waste from the bay floor. The silence is only broken by a very brief "Marbo-Arbo-arbo-bo-bo-oo-o" as he plays with the echo of the empty chamber.

After a little while, the gurney is loaded back up with most of the equipment, and all the garbage has been placed inside a steel cylindrical barrel, ready to be sealed and fired out the waste tubes for Consortium Trash Services to pick up.

He rolls the barrel over to the nearest ejection port, slides it inside the tube, presses the button that reads "Arm GPS pickup services" followed by the button on the panel that lists this barrel as medical waste, followed by his spacefleet officers number and rank. After a few minutes a little green light blinks to life, indicating that the chamber is pressurized and that the barrel has a safe flightpath 100 meters outside the ship, and Marbo hits the button.

with a breathy fwoosh, The barrel ejects itself from the tube and goes flying into space like a well thrown football, and at the 100 yards mark, the little green light on the barrel begins blinking, indicating a working pickup GPS.

After the waste is cleaned up, marbo will call some hands down to carry the gurney and equipment back to sickbay, and then we will stop working.

He checks to ensure the cargo bay is clear, and locks the doors. Sneaking over to a pile of boxes near the shuttle, he climbs up two layers of ration crates, then dangles between the two rows just enough to reach something hidden in the netting of a box of fresh socks. He pulls the small packet upwards and slides out a single, long, mint green cigarette.

He stashes it in his inside pocket near his breast, and begins to return up to sickbay.

Cass tries to contain her disappointment, but she knows that her shoulders are slumping a little. She realizes that she was kind of hoping to be told to hand the whole thing off to someone else - Captain Tulak, perhaps - and proceed to the Starbase to get Captain Darcy the medical attention he needs.

It was a nice fantasy.

She looks at Alex. "Well, at least you come highly recommended. Do you know Admiral Hao? She sounds familiar to me, but I can't place her voice."

Alex snorts indelicately. "Admiral Hao is a master of..."

She trails off, considering her general audience for a long silent moment before she continues. "In mixed company, I will say that she's an excellent politician. I will further say that Admiral Hao and I have had our differences of opinion. The politician gave you that recommendation. However, you might want to have yourself checked out for an abundance of sunshine that's been forcibly injected through... certain orifices."

She smiles thinly. "Not that I'm not an excellent diplomat, mind you. It merely comes as a surprise that the admiral would say so."

Cass snorts. "Let's take this to the ready room. Darcy, I give you the gift of conn."

Once she and Alex are in the ready room, she says, "Okay, what do you think is going on? Am I being hung out to dry? I mean, why are they entrusting this delicate situation to a freshly minted commander instead of turning it over to the captain of the freakin' Antarctica, who's nearby?"

Moira scraps the edible health monitor idea, gets an unused comm badge, and pops out the GPS locator. Now she just needs a stomach-acid safe capsule for it.

"My first instinct is that someone in Spacefleet already knows about the Four and has a response ready, but would like us to investigate further, negotiating as if indeed we had been hung out to dry in order to gain some manner of knowledge." Alex paces, words coming rapid fire as she does. "What that knowledge might be, I don't know. Something that they missed in an earlier attempt at negotiation? As for the Antarctica, could they be compromised in some way? Maybe they've been given a different -- or maybe even a similar mission -- already."

She stops, leans her hands onto the ready room table, drumming her fingers. "Maybe time is of the essence for some reason. Waiting a week to continue negotiations might be too long."

"Well, yeah. It's obviously too long for my human crew member we haven't recovered yet. If he's become a host, then he won't be salvageable in a week. And who knows what they're doing with Mike, our android." She plops into the chair behind the desk. "I don't know about the Antarctica. Their captain has a history of disregarding regs and protocols to rescue hostages, so maybe that's her assigned role in all of this. Send us in on a fool's errand, ostensibly trying to forge diplomatic relations, but we're actually just being used to flush out intel and the Antarctica's waiting to storm in at the optimal moment."

She folds her arms on the desk and pillows her head on them. "Please tell me that Spacefleet isn't risking the lives of my crew by letting me flail around stupidly just so they can gain a tactical advantage and crush the people we're trying to negotiate with."

Engineering stuff



Moira makes half a dozen or so of these capsules, as well as a set of remote control buttons for the transporters, saving them for when an away team is established. She smiles.

Thanks fer tha help, Doctor. Anythin' ah can help yeh with in return?

Alex chuckles dryly. "I've had my share of disagreements with Spacefleet brass, to put it mildly, but I can't go so far as to envision that we would be sacrificed in such a way. Problem-solving by sledgehammer is not Admiral Hao's style," she says, walking over to stand beside the desk. "It's mine. Or it was. I'm trying to be better."

She pauses, then adds, "If it helps any, the fact that we're all still alive after everything that's happened is a tremendous credit to you. I'd have gotten everyone killed or infected eighteen different ways by now had I been the one in charge."

"I'm saving that for my big finish," Cass says with a tired smile. "But thanks. I'm not sure how much is due to me and how much to dumb luck, but I'll take what I can get."

She frowns slightly and rests her chin on one hand, looking at Alex appraisingly. "Sledgehammer, huh? What kind of sledgehammer does a diplomat use, anyway?"

Alex purses her lips thoughtfully as she considers the commander’s question. The answer is a bit longer in coming than might be expected. Though her face is set in a neutral gaze, Alex can’t quite keep an internal struggle from showing in her eyes.

"I am not that person any more, Commander. That person was commissioned to a backwater surveying vessel with no need of a diplomat to have some time to ‘think about what she’s done’," Alex replies, her voice a fairly good mimic of Admiral Hao’s voice in full on lecture mode. Alex even wags her finger for effect.

After a moment, though, she sighs. "To be completely honest, Commander, I’m not entirely sure what to tell you. I know those tools — threats, blackmail, insinuation of the worst sorts of wrongdoing, anything to compel the other side to give in. I’ll use them if they’re judged the best tools for the job. Especially when the stakes are higher than just a mundane dispute over a lifeless rock of a moon, like they are now. I think with my gut, but if you’ll pardon the expression, I’ve started to worry that my gut has shit for brains."

Cass leans back in the chair and looks thoughtful for a while. "Since we're going to be partnering on this, and since - as you mentioned - the stakes are pretty high, we should probably press fast forward on getting to know each other's strengths and weaknesses. I think that will help us support and restrain each other when we're under pressure. Captain Darcy did this exercise in a meeting of the senior staff last year, and it really brought us a lot of clarity. Also a lot of material for mockery, but that was just a fringe benefit.

"The way it works is, you tell me what you think is your biggest weakness, and your biggest strength. Then I tell you what I see as your biggest weakness and biggest strength. That part probably has less value for people who haven't been on the same crew for months or years, but it may offer some insight, at least."

She gestures for Alex to sit down in the chair opposite hers. "Don't worry, I'll go first. But hang on, I need to think for a minute. Last time I did this, I was a pilot, not an acting captain." Cass closes her eyes for a while before taking a deep breath and letting it out in a little huff.

"Okay, I see my greatest weakness as not having enough command experience to make good decisions quickly. I feel like I'm spending a lot of time deliberating, which ends up being more like spinning my wheels. I'm afraid that's eventually going to lead to a catastrophically bad decision that gets people killed.

"I think my greatest strength is being able to react to a changing situation on the fly with creative ideas. That probably comes from my pilot training and experience. I think that came into play during the mutiny attempt on the Four." She smiles at Alex and gestures toward her with one hand. "Now, it's your turn."

marbo makes his way back to his office, typing away with whatever additional notes he can remember from zephyrs surgery.

"Commander. Zlam. what do uou suppose we do about the four? marbo has exhausted a lot of medical supplies on them and feels great concern."