Three Romulans Walk Into a Science Lab

Posted on Sun Mar 27th, 2022 @ 8:37am by Commander Kaleetha Sloan (*) & Chief Helmsman Kalahaeia t'Leiya & Liha t'Ehhelih

Mission: Mission 14: Holoworld
Location: Science Lab
Timeline: MD05 22:00
3917 words - 7.8 OF Standard Post Measure

Liha ushered Kali and Kaleetha into the lab, though she wasn't entirely sure what to do from here. She was familiar with the equipment but more from design and repair than use. She was an engineer, not a scientist or doctor. Or Tal'Shiar. Though at least this did give her the opportunity to interrogate them more closely.

"Take a seat," she said, picking up a tricorder. "Let's see what we can find."

"Do you need some help?" A voice called from the doorway. It was Cassie, she looked pale and drawn but eager to help and do something that was not sitting in her room thinking. Kaleetha looked over at the woman and then back to Liha as she sat down on a chair. She was pretty sure she could work the equipment more than the woman but she looked ready to interrogate them physically compared to the way that Gregnol wanted it to happen.

"Sure," Liha nodded, smiling to see Cassie up and around. She felt fairly confident she could handle these two if it came to a fight, but it was good to have someone she trusted here as back-up, and who was frankly better qualified for the science side of things. "The doctor scanned them in medbay but didn't find anything off, so I'm not sure where to start for finding whatever masked them from the holograms down there." She shook her head, a corner of her mouth turning downward. "My sister got the science bent from di'ranov [Romulan: father], not me. I just learned to fix my own engines."

Kali stretched languidly to her admittedly unimpressive height as she sat down near Kaleetha; and either she actually wasn't nervous, or she was deliberately broadcasting a feint of not being such, aggressively with that casual a move; that she expected this, whatever it was, would not escalate. If if did...Well. If it did, she still had one weapon, at least. She had yet to be able to track down and get the rest back. "Were you a pilot, too, then?" Kali smiled slightly at Liha's comment; thinking back to what had been - for all it had involved a dire multi-quadrant war for survival - perhaps one of the least complicated phases of her own life. "Though required skills aside, I admit my skill at destroying the other guy's engines definitely exceeded my skills at repairing my own."

Liha simply nodded, not about to get drawn into anything like camaraderie here. "Dominion War. I was pretty good at destroying the other side's engines too, but the Galae put some emphasis on being able to repair our own."

“Well if this was me and I was looking I would redo the scan to see if anything changed and…” She started as Kaleetha held up her hand distracting the woman from her trail of thoughts. “Um this is not a class and you can speak.” The hybrid said with a almost smile at the woman just stood there patiently waiting for a chance to jump into the conversation.

“I think I know what the issue is,” Kaleetha admitted thinking back to before the chaos and when she scanned herself and Kalahaeia before the Naked cowboy and woman in the bonnet had interrupted everyone.

"And that would be?" Liha asked, a reserve of suspicion plain in the lift of an eyebrow.

Kali bit down hard on the urge to roll her eyes; she knew she was...exceedingly open and trusting...for a Romulan; but so far, Liha appeared to be the other end of the spectrum, with an above average level of paranoia even for the species, that for one reason or another had focused on the two crash survivors; and she doubted saying anything here would help whatever conclusion or avenue to inquiry Kaleetha was about to suggest be taken seriously. If anything, her adding support to it or even expressing interest in was likely to be taken as a point against, so the most diminutive woman in the room mostly just focused on trying to keep her expression unchanged; something she had never been very good at to begin with outside the gaming tables, and that more than one fellow officer had remarked over the years mostly made her 'look like she was contemplating how to take half the room out'.

Kaleetha jumped off the table she was sitting on and looked around the lab. "When I scanned us in the final seconds before it all went a little crazy I spotted something." Kaleetha reminded Liha and Kali and revealed for Cassie who had not been there. "Can I?" She wondered softly indicating to the tricorder in Cassie's hand. The pale woman held it out but watched interested the interactions between the three. She had not overly met Romulans other than Liha so from a science point of view it was fulfilling to see the differences in them.

"Go on," Liha said, tipping her head slightly. She was curious, if not particularly trusting. "I'll have Cassie verify the results either way."

Kali thought back to what she could recall of right before things went south...well, south-er, really; to what Kaleetha had been in the midst of commenting on. "Is this about the pants?" She fingered the now-patched-over, barely noticeable little singed hole in her black leggings where she'd had her passenger badge stuffed in the pocket at the time of the crash.

"Yes," Kaleetha said brightly as she realised that someone was on the same page as her. "You had your badge there and I had mine here." She pulled down her shirt to show the burned mark that was on her collar exactly where a Starfleet insignia would be. "I believe we have parts of the comm badge in us...masking it."

"Wait; just my pants, or in me?" Kali seemed distinctly more disturbed by the situation than Kaleetha did.

Liha crossed her arms, one eyebrow slanting further upward. "I'm more interested in why a bit of badge would be an explanation of any of this. Every passenger was wearing one after all, and it was presumably what the ship and holograms used to identify you. So how would having a bit of it stuck in your flesh make you invisible to them? It seems like that should have, if anything, made you more visible, or at least made it much harder for you than for the other passengers to hide."

“Not if there is a computer virus.” Kaleetha started with Cassie cut across her revealing that in her silence her mind had been whirling.

“Like an old fashioned inoculation.” Cassie said thoughtfully. It was part of the practice still when she had been alive. “When I was a child it was still common to have part of the dead virus injected into you to help your immune system.”

“Exactly. It is there inoculating us.” Kaleetha had so many questions over the comment around when she had been a child.

"Uh-huh." Liha wasn't a scientist, but she knew what inoculations were and how they were supposed to work. "So you think having a bit of comm badge in you somehow taught your body how to produce countermeasures against a computer virus? How would that even work?" she crossed her arms, her eyebrow somehow managing to ascended even higher. "Unless you're both ex-Borg."

"I am not." Kali said emphatically; in this, she had an attitude she knew was rather closer to the rest of her species than to most humans: On the few occasions in her past career the topic of the Borg had ever come up, she'd made it quite clear to colleagues that if she was the victim of a Borg assimilation attempt, she had a strong preference they just shoot her rather than condemn her to exist in such a compromised horror of living death as a drone. Sure, there was chance someone might eventually be able to retrieve you from them and free you, but those odds were about a billion to one, and the exponentially more likely outcome was far too awful to bet on such slim chances to avert it. "I'm 100 percent organic. Or, apparently, was." She shuddered, still hoping that it might just be in her leggings, whatever 'it' was, and looked at Liha and Cassie, who had ships' system access. "Someone replicate me some new pants please, so I can burn these ones."

“I do not believe it is effecting our bodies in a permanent way...” Kaleetha commented brightly. Cassie could see how it worked.

“It definitely needs some studying as it is out of my spear of experience.” Cassie conceded.

“So who fancies performing some micro surgery to get it out?” Kaleetha said brightly showing on the console where the micro bit of the device was on the third scan of her collar area.

"I vote for giving my pants to Burnie to blow up." Kali glowered at nothing in particular, and then looked nervously over at Kaleetha and her scans as she repeated a version of one of her earlier queries. "Is any of it in me too, or just the pants? Because if it's on me too, get it the hell out, or I'm going to town on my hip with my own blade to do so."

“Your pants are not going to be effected so it would have gotten into your b…you would have some of it in you..” Cassie said softly looking around the lab for something the woman could wear. She grabbed up a spare boiler suit and held it out. “We do not have any replicators down here and I do not believe you want to be walking about without bottom half of your clothing.”

Kali's response to Cassie's confirmation that it wasn't just the pants that had been contaminated was a creatively strung together litany of both Romulan and English curse words, the latter with a tinge of a Boston accent to them. "Thanks." She appended after that, taking the offered boiler suit and ducking behind a piece of equipment to strip off her leggings and shrug the suit on in their place, tying off the top at her waist and rolling the legs up significantly to fit her shorter than average frame. "Someone put those in a containment device or something please." Kali nudged the pants with one booted toe like you might nudge a poisonous snake you'd just killed, apparently not kidding about wanting them destroyed just in case. "...Alright. Now do me." She asked Kaleetha, settling back into her prior position. "Is there...This stuff is limited in how far it can spread in us or how it can impact us, right? Like, if we remove whatever it got into, we're clean? Or not?" Every muscle in Kali's body was slightly tensed now, as if waiting for a jury to finish deliberating her guilt or innocence on charges of treason; or perhaps more aptly, like a character in a zombie flick busy checking to see if they'd been bitten in a fight or not.

Hand dropping to her weapon, Liha had circled a few steps to put herself in a better position to efficiently take out the other Romulans. The little one at least seemed to understand the gravity of situation, and the correct course of action if there was no absolute guarantee they could be cleaned of whatever had entered them. Thanks to Burnie she was also familiar with old earth zombie flicks, and given that the reference to 'inoculation' implied a process distributed throughout blood and lymph, she was inclined to view both of the affected parties as 'bitten'. "I'm going to need Cassie's answer to that question," she stated evenly, pinning Kaleetha with a stare that left no question as to the degree of trust her 'explanation', or rather lack there of, had inspired. "You have too vested an interest in claiming that simple microsurgery can fix you, and have provided far too little explanation as to why I should believe any of your claims."

In what was yet another bizarre intersection of the two sides of Kali's life, she threw an apologetic glance at Kaleetha, aware that her fellow crash survivor probably didn't share her viewpoint on this all, or the intensity she felt it with; followed by locking eyes with Liha and giving her a firm, measured nod: If Liha been around Burnie this long she probably understood Earth gestures; though the irony of giving a human signal to indicate her agreement with a thoroughly Romulan point of view wasn't lost on Kali; nor was the irony that if she was compromised in a way that couldn't be remedied, her life would end in the same convoluted mix of that overlap in which it had begun and been lived. Fitting, she supposed.

In response to Kali's nod, Liha's head inclined by a small but precise degree, not exactly a return nod, but an expression of a degree of respect and the first actual acknowledgement from the former Galae pilot that Kali, despite her upbringing in the Federation, might indeed have some concept of Romulan honor.

"Because I have two doctorates and I am the smartest person in the room other than her but I am trying to not blow my own trumpet so to speak," Kaleetha said pointing to Cassie. Cassie tutted in annoyance as she took the tricorder to scan them all.

"Liha back down I am confirming as fast as I can at the moment," Cassie said in a soft voice more of her accent showing through. Kaleetha quirked her head to the side as she heard the Scottish tone and then sighed.

"I am sorry for your loss." The woman said but got no response as the woman just focused on what she was doing.

'Not trying to blow your own trumpet' Riiight..., Liha thought, backing off only to the degree of not drawing her weapon. With both parents also possessing multiple ultimate degrees, Liha had grown up not just in an Academy town but practically in an Academy, and had not only seen the arguments - sometimes even violent arguments - between any number of self-proclaimed 'smartest people in the room' over whose theory was right, but had learned long ago that an advanced was absolutely no guarantee that the person holding it wasn't a lying, self-serving, fehill'curak. "Confirm it, and explain it so 'poor simple little brain'," she said with more that a touch of biting sarcasm aimed at the Kaleetha, "can understand." She leveled a hard look at the Starfleeter. "I can take a warp engine apart and rebuild it, so don't assume I'm stupid. I know people that have ultimate degrees - from Romulan Academies, not your 'go easy on people' Federation ones - and they taught me that an expert who waves a degree rather than answering questions is someone not to be trusted."

“I am not assuming you are stupid but I am assuming that you are caught up in your paranoia over meeting others of your species that you…” Kaleetha started wondering if this was how her Great grandfather had been on Atlantis. She had seen holograms of Centurion Alidar and he never had sounded or acted but looks could be deceiving. She was going to be doing a lot more checking on her family tree.

“Enough would you both.” Cassie cut across as she pulled Kaleetha’s collar to the side and went to work on getting out the piece of metal barely visible even on a scan. She put it and the rest of the items in a contamination tube to return to the ship for whatever Gregnol or whoever wanted to do with it.

“So...Do we pass?” Kaleetha asked holding her tone.

“She is correct. Cutting it out stops the signal but as I said if you want better answers I would need to study it more or give it to someone with more up to date knowledge of the last 150 odd years." Cassie said watching the scans for any change now the part had been removed. "If you are worried lock them in a VIP suite and I will check them in 12 hours,” Cassie said with a shrug.

"Then do me next." Kali had felt a preliminary moment of aborted relief at the first findings relayed, but had stomped down on it in her head at the qualifying statements made at the end; 'promising' and 'safe' were two different things. She pulled the tied off boiler suit pants slightly down just in one spot to the side of her left hip, exposing an area she honestly hadn't even realized had taken any injury at all at the time, with the others she'd had then far overpowering any notice of a tiny spot like this, somewhat less noticeable than the more visible larger mark the incident had left on Kaleetha.

As she presented the area for Cassie to work on, Kali held herself as still as she could while it was done, except for the glance she threw over at Liha again. "...If something happens in that 12 hours, then; or in those final results we get back; come find me." Kali said to the pilot-turned-engineer, keeping the statement vague both because she'd found humans tended to react badly to anything more explicit, and because she was all but certain nothing else had to be said; and that in this particular area, she could actually count on the woman she had yet to even make a proper introduction to more than she could have on those she had known far longer, like Burnie.

Again, Liha gave a small precise nod, acknowledging a commitment to provide an honorable death if necessary. It raised an issue in the Romulan's mind though. "You should scan me, and all those who went down to the ship as well," she told Cassie. "These two might have been inoculated, whatever that might mean for biological beings and a software virus, but we need to know if any of the rest of us have been infected. We cannot allow whatever caused what happened down there to spread."

Cassie silently moved to scan Liha. It was an easy sweep and nothing out of the ordinary came up. “None of them have vulcoid blood but I will. That is the only thing I can think of without looking more into it and that will take much more time. You need more fruit but other than that you pass.” She announced holding the scan out to the woman. “Just to be safe better check me then.”

Taking the scanner, Liha ran it over Cassie and checked the results, both against her own and the other two women. " 'Signal'..." she muttered to herself and seemed to squint, half frowning as she looked back and forth at the sets of readings, then both eyebrows darted up well into the middle of her forehead. "Fvadt! There was no inoculation against a virus, the only biological element was that copper-based blood interacted with a partial damaged circuit and produced interference - literally changed the badge output to cancel rather than amplify an alert to the holomatrix of your presence." And then as if to truly confirm that she was indeed a Romulan - a 'creature of extremes' as a Starfleet specialist had once described them - she burst out laughing.

Kali's own eyebrows pinched together and down a bit for a moment rather than up like Liha's, as her decidedly non-engineer's head and training parsed the statement and the implications; followed a moment later by most of the tension in her muscles and the grave, determined visage she'd had since halfway through their time in the lab melting away into an equally intense grin as she bent forward and retrieved the leggings she'd earlier treated like the source of a deadly galactic plague. "Guess I get to keep my favorite pants, then." If it might seem to some an abrupt shift from 'making contingency plans to arrange your own death' a minute or two earlier to her current mood, well, one only had to look at the set of perfectly-pointed ears Kali shared with Liha to guess at a potential explanation of how and why.

"Some you win with science... sometimes you are wrong," Kaleetha said with a smile just as big as Cassie shrugged. She liked being wrong, you did not grow as a person or a scientist without being wrong. Sometimes simpler was better than complicated. "Are you okay?" Kaleetha asked Cassie as she slammed the items down and headed out the room.

Kali gave a brief glance to Cassie's exit with a moment of concern or curiosity, but otherwise seemed unperturbed with it; as if she considered it a given well within the norm that people would occasionally exit a room or situation in such a way; then busied herself with ducking back behind the equipment again to do the reverse of her earlier exchange and swap the boiler suit back for her own pants again.

"I was going from what I saw from the readings from the fragments - tech I understand - but I'm not a doctor. I've heard Starfleet puts various chips and bioactive stuff in personnel..." Liha grimaced at the idea of having anything that could keep a record or be tracked inside you, "...if so you two should probably have the doctor scan you just to be sure none of that got compromised by whatever fragged the badge pieces into you."

"Not a bad idea; though if those readings are right on the mechanism there; I expect anything else will come back fine." Kali nodded and glanced at Kaleetha for a moment. "If you still have any, that is. I had mine removed years ago."

Exactly why that was Kali left silent and let it speak for itself; while having an ID on you no one could shake had been of potential benefit for a combat pilot, it would have been a compromising state for an intelligence officer, and so she'd had nothing from the regrettable day she'd told SFI she'd take their transfer. And once she got discharged, well: Better to be an enigma, sometimes, in the sort of territories she'd spent much time in since. Apparently, it was about to now perhaps be a rare instance of something in her life actually going her way in a beneficial manner. The universe possibly had a sense of humor, but if so, it was definitely a twisted one.

“I’ll get mine checked as it is still there and hopefully thriving,” Kaleetha assured with a shrug. She felt fine but she could appease the crew and get herself looked at. “Well am I free to go find a shower and a bed to sleep in?” She wondered quietly.

Liha paused a moment, considering. She still didn't quite trust them, but there was no cause (that the humans running this ship) would understand for putting them in the brig. "Yes. There are passenger quarters you can use. I'll take you to them."