Chapter III: Reunited

Moira is hard at work reviewing blips and bloops in the Engineering quarters when Kendall arrives.

Ah! Tha civvy lass. What'd'yeh need?

After much time in recovery, Zephyr begins to stir.

"Wha...where am I?"

He is feeling a sense of vertigo, even though he is lying down. He feels himself slipping in and out of consciousness, but fights to stay engaged with the world around him.

"Where is everyone?"

Cass leans forward from her chair beside the hospital bed and puts a hand on Zephyr's arm. "Zephyr, it's Cass. You're safe. You're back on the Potential in our temporary medbay. The symbiote is gone, and Dr. Zlam says you're going to be fine. Alex is here with me."

She offers him some water. "Can you tell us what you remember?"

Alex stands behind Cass’s chair. She watches Zephyr, hands clasped behind her back, but remains quiet. She does let out a quiet breath when Zephyr speaks, though.

"Well, it all started when I was but a boy. My papa would drink you see. Well one night my mama had had enough. He came home even more soused than usual, and she said to him, 'That's it Stefano, I've enough of you comin' home half drunk all the time!'

So papa, he says, 'I'm sorry Tesoro, but I keep runnin' out of money!'"

Zephyr looks solemn for a moment, and then without raising his head looks up at his Commander. "Thank you. For saving me," he says with a hint of a smile.

A look of seriousness settles back over his face. "I remember everything. From the point I woke up from sedation, until the end when I was about to fire that damn phaser and end the struggle. Being trapped inside was horrible. It was like living in a waking nightmare.

Imagine being paralyzed. You can't move your arms, you can't move your legs, you can't speak, all you can do is watch. Watch through your own eyes while someone else leads your life. Only this person is evil, or at the very least manipulative, and starts hurting everyone you care for. It is the most powerless I have ever felt in my life.

What do I remember? I remember it all."

Alex raises one hand to cover her face briefly, eyes closing for a moment. "I'm so sorry," she says quietly. "There should have been more I could have done."

"I had an idea for a slug killer cruise missile or torpedo or something. We should design this thing out."

Kendall will pull the old schematics for the cop killer hollow point bullets and say, "Basically, we need something that will punch a hole in their shield just large enough that this device would penetrate, and once inside, it would shoot the biofilter into the area of the surrounding shield. Optionally, we could also have a portable transporter sent in, which would transport everything within the area of the shield and transport them back into the exact same places on the ship.

"Do you think that this might be doable?"

Kendall will also show the logs from when she sent her ship to blow up the enemy slugship, "I suspect that they mod their ships often, causing these kinds of vulnerabilities. We should capitalize on them by having some sort of AI scanning device that senses the vulnerable spots in their shields and penetrates in those locations specifically."

At first, Cass is certain that Zephyr is in an altered state, becoming alarmed until she realizes that he's actually telling a joke. That he's capable of joking after what he's just been through is the first blow she feels, and even though it's one of relief, it's still jarring.

When he thanks her for saving him, she doesn't even process it at first, because she's still coping with the pain of that relief.

Listening to his description of being a prisoner in his own body is the second blow, a slow burn of horror that steadily snowballs until she is having trouble taking a full breath. Nothing he describes is different from what she'd been imagining, and that doesn't make it better.

And when he finishes with "I remember it all," that's when her mind has finally caught up with the fact that he'd thanked her for saving him, and that's absolutely the worst blow of all.

Because he'd thanked her.
For saving him.
From the fate she'd sent him to in the first place.

When she hears, as if from behind a thick wall instead of immediately behind her chair, Alex saying, "I'm so sorry. There should have been more I could have done," Cass is almost outraged, because Alex, a fellow prisoner of the parasites, couldn't possibly be more blameless. She raises a hand intending to run it through her hair, but when she sees that it's shaking pretty noticeably, she quickly lowers it.

Her lungs have somehow shrunken to about half their usual size, but she takes the deepest breath she can. She's acutely aware that there are a number of other people in the temporary medbay, and the acting captain can't be seen having a breakdown. Her voice is a little wheezy and she notices her lips feel numb, but she manages to ask, "Was the mutiny real, Zephyr? Was the parasite inside you convinced that the captain was sincere in his diplomatic efforts?"

While trying to get a feel for his new ship Lorq overhears Moira's plan to punch a whole through the shields and send in a portable transporter to kill the slugs.

Excuse me Moira, but if I may make a suggestion. The slug ship has requested your captain to join them. Why not tell them the captain has accepted and instead of beaming over the captain, we beam portable transporters to different locations, or just use our transporters? Then we have an intact ship to study. We can get shield info, schematics...everything we need.

Lorq stands there looking hopeful.

I hope I haven't missed something, and that I haven't over stepped any boundaries

With Kendall and Lorq

Moira's eyes widen as she listens to Kendall's theories, partially impressed, and partly disconcerted. She glances at her and speaks in a low voice.

Yeh aren't just a civvy lass. Are yeh.

When Lorq comments, she's shaken out of it, nodding her head as she processes the plan.

It's brutal. But with tha good doctor's considerations, we may be able ta make somethin' like that work. Holdin' off until we hear from higher up, a' course. An' dunnae worry. Ah'm always happy ta hear ideas.

Moira relays this information to Kendall and Lorq, gently but firmly emphasizing the genocide point.

Ah'm afraid there're too many ways this can go wrong, lookin' at tha paperwork. Let's think. We aren't able ta mess with their ship. We can only do so much on ours........

She starts tapping at her datapad again, looking at the schematics for the self-contained space suits that are Consortium-standard-issue for every away team.

Lorq, how's the look at humanoid compatibility? What if we put a biofilter on tha away team itself?