Secrets

Posted on Thu Nov 3rd, 2022 @ 11:36pm by Richard Hale & Chief Helmsman Kalahaeia t'Leiya

Mission: Mission 16: Hysperia
Location: Rosie bar
Timeline: MD-02 (late)
4098 words - 8.2 OF Standard Post Measure

The bar on board was, unsurprisingly, quiet. Most of the ship's crew had found their way to the surface in preparation for 'mandatory fun' as ordered, which coupled with the reduced lighting of the ship's low-power mode, made for a weird vibe as though it were late at night instead of early evening. One might have guessed that it had been set up as some sort of romantic gesture, like a date booking out an entire restaurant to surprise their significant other, but that wasn't intentional at all.

Rick stood not far away from the bar for a couple of minutes, trying to figure out whether to set up a table or not, when he heard the doors open behind him.

"Ah. I guess we didn't plan this very well," he explained, motioning to the lack of background company or any kind of bar service. "But I suppose that means we can help ourselves to drinks..."

Kali still had one of the outfits she'd been wearing earlier on the planet on; velvety black leggings and knee-high leather boots with a long, flowing purple silk tunic cut higher in front than and the back and sides with touches of silver embroidered into it. The only piece missing was the weapons and belt she'd taken off and secured when she'd gotten back to the ship. If anything the incongruous outfit added to the bizarre vibe as she ever-so-slightly raised one eyebrow and slid behind the bar with zero hesitation, rummaging around with an ease that implied she'd done so before and coming up with a few bottles she laid out on the counter. As she had the time she'd met Jake here, Kali upended measures of Romulan ale, pineapple juice, and coconut rum into a shaker, then poured the combined light-sea-green result into a pair of glasses that she topped with a pair of drink umbrellas.

"Might as well start with the classics, then." Kali picked up one of the glasses and slid the other one towards Rick. She reached into the leather pouch hanging at one hip and pulled out a small glass flask of the dragonfire nectar he'd been commenting on earlier, but slid it off to one side. "Save that for a bit." She walked over to the dartboard on one wall, pulled out the darts, and laid them on the bar too before plucking one between her fingers and throwing it back, where it buried itself almost effortlessly in the center of the bullseye.

"Now you're just showing off," he remarked, feeling somewhat under-dressed in his jumpsuit by comparison to her more ostentatious clothing. That aside, he'd been left to himself all day and he wasn't so much bothered by it now he had the freedom to unwind. "I suppose this is where you think you can try to show me up with your 'superior hand-eye coordination'. Well..." he picked up one of the darts. "You're probably right. But the joke's on you: there's nobody else here to prove it to."

The eyebrow went up again slightly, along with one corner of Kali's mouth, amused. "I've never met a pilot who didn't like showing off in some way or another. As for the rest...well, as my father would put it; some things, you prove to and for yourself." She took a long pull of her drink. "Though don't feel too bad for humans; there are a few areas where you guys are the superior species. I think you call it 'winter'..." She grinned and for a moment wondered exactly how much, if any, he'd looked up on her; enough to know she was speaking from personal experience of Earth's winters or not.

"You really are keen on making observations about other species," he noted, tossing the dart through the air and hitting the upper portion of the dartboard. "Some would call that obsessive. Narcissistic, perhaps." He said it with just enough humour to be understood as a combination of a challenge and a joke. Though no doubt it could fall on either side of that. "One might even go so far as to wonder if you were somehow jealous..."

"Or, one might conclude that it's inevitable to develop that sort of habit when you've spent most of your entire life as the only one of your species around." Kali shrugged, eyebrows and shoulders in unison again, then threw a second dart that landed near her first. "One man's 'obsessive' is another man's 'observation'."

"You pretend it doesn't bother you," he said, lifting another dart to throw at the board. "But it does, doesn't it? Being the 'only one'. That's why you keep trying to prove it. Except you really don't need to be so forceful with it. Besides-" He watched as his dart caught the inside edge of the treble-twenty. "You still haven't proven anything yet."

Kali's hands almost dropped the next dart she was grasping, and only held onto it by the skin of her teeth; the throw she was in the middle of went off slightly, this one landing rather further from the center than the others had. "The alternative to pretending it doesn't bother me is to start breaking noses; so honestly, a good portion of the universe probably prefers this to the alternative; even if they don't realize it." For the most part, her voice still had the devil-may-care force to it, but it was tighter around the edges to a seasoned observer than before. The way the man had zeroed in on something that she'd found a decent portion of both humans and Romulans missed was unsettling, and she only pretended to take her next sip of her drink, suddenly aware of the fact that while she had poured the drinks, he had been alone in the room with the bottles beforehand. Maybe they should have started with the dragonfire nectar after all. "You pretend you don't know much about me; but that's not true either, is it...?"

"I'm surprised it took you that long to come to that conclusion," he nodded, a little amused that he had succeeded in riling her up. If only to throw out her aim. "Doing a little digging on prospective colleagues is a bit of a habit by this point. It would have been foolish to take this job on without at least some vetting beforehand. So, yeah, I did my homework. Your Starfleet Intelligence file made for some fun reading." He grinned. After letting that sink in, he raised a hand apologetically. "Cards on the table, we might have shared an employer at some point in the past."

This brought the eyebrow up higher than it had gone before, and a stubborn shadow passed over Kali's face. "If you're here to try and convince me to take another job from them; tell them - " Here, Kali's standard swapped effortlessly to Rihannsu; but the gist of the rest of what she said came down to 'tell them to go screw themselves'; albeit with a rather cruder mode than that.

He laughed, almost mid-throw of a dart, and had to reset himself. "Honestly, I'm glad to see the back of all that life. Not having to keep looking over your shoulder, it's a much less stressful existence." He finally tossed the dart. "Kinda surprising, though, to meet someone from that line of work in a place like this. Although I can see the distinct appeal of joining the Rangers if you were looking to reconnect with that part of your heritage."

"Had my eye on the Rangers for awhile but long story short, what you read in my file probably failed to mention that after I got kicked out of the fleet, our 'mutual former employer' decided to engage in a little light extortion; and kept me on the hook for an occasional job here and there on the promise of upgrading my discharge. Then when they did so finally after a few years, they kept dangling that they'd change it back if I didn't continue to play ball with them. Kinda cramped the ability to really make longer term associations or commitments." Now, the eyebrows twitched angrily; she was well aware that in that area she'd fallen victim to exactly what the people back at SFI who'd orchestrated the 'deal' had hoped she might; the basic cultural psychology of a species down in their own files as 'fearing disgrace over death'. When the disgrace was on paper for all to see, and you offered someone the ability to erase it... "At least till I decided to just tell them to frak off anyways."

Kali threw her next dart; it didn't land in the bullseye but kept a better track than the one she'd had go wild before it. "Your file, on the other hand - at least your readily available Starfleet file overall that is - would indicate you burned your career before it ever even really started, and doesn't indicate that association at all." The implication she was making was clear enough, if you were listening for it; that while her own such association had been in overt posts like headquarters gigs and starbase intelligence officer slots, she was laying her money that all of his roles - and his association there, period - had been otherwise. "So either they had something on you, too; or, you bought their recruiting pitch a lot earlier in life than I did, and they decided you'd make a way better covert agent than they thought I would."

He acknowledged the truth in that with a nod of his head. Or at the very least, he didn't deny her conclusions. "Covert work has a certain...lifespan?" he said. "After a while of playing characters and pretending to be friends with people..." his look became momentarily distant, but he shook it off and tossed his dart, which hit the board but nowhere near where he wanted it to. "You tend to want the freedom to find yourself, before you lose it all. And that's not a recommended trait in any line of intelligence work."

"I mean...Honestly, the predilection in a lot of Earth culture to believe people should have 'freedom to find themselves' is what my aunt and my parents would insist got me into half the trouble I've ever been in. Maybe not the universe's best concept for more...intense...species to try and exist in. But yeah, either covert work itself has a lifespan, or anyone in it does. Overstaying the first tends to lead to the end of the second if you do." Kali flipped her next dart into the board, then reached over and cracked open the flask of Hysperian liquor and poured a pair of shot glasses, leaving one on the bar for him.

"They tell you it's a great way to save the universe; sell it to you as something virtuous in the end regardless of the details, ends justify the means." Kali nodded and downed her shot of dragonfire liquor. "Or in my case; they'd been asking since I was a 16 year old cadet; I'd been telling them to go take a flying leap and focusing on flying myself But then other stuff happened, and they kept saying that I had something unique, that I could be part of the solution to helping the Federation and the Empire understand one another better; that I could help people understand their opposite numbers enough to extend or enhance the era of mostly-peace and dialogue they'd fallen into after the war. And after the attempted coup and mess in the Empire in '78, and the almost-hints of cooperation and discussion things turned into for the smallest time...Well. I was an idiot and I believed them enough--or maybe just hoped it was true enough--to say yes to them. In retrospect I'm pretty sure the higher ups considered me less of a 'useful, loyal officer with unique knowledge' and more of a 'useful, captive foreign asset with unique knowledge'."

"It's their job to know how to make the approach," he nodded. "I was barely out of my teens myself. Impressionable. And young enough for them to mould in their own image." The liquor was harder than he'd expected. Enough to at least make him wince and his eyes water. "So I guess we're both idiots to have believed them in the end, huh?"

"Yeah." Kali refilled both shot glasses. "I mean, I told them to frak off multiple times first, but, kinda get the feeling they were studying me all those years I did, till they had the data to come up with a good set of lines that I finally bit on like a freaking fishing rod. I dunno whatever they used you for; but in retrospect it's pretty clear to me that what they wanted to use me for - at least, once I quickly dashed their initial dreams of making me some undercover asset to be sent into Romulan space by, well, being bad it - was as an information source." Her face twisted into an unpleasant expression. "Not as one of their own so much as 'the native Rihannsu speaker' or 'the Romulan'. Didn't value me just what I knew and could tell them. Really different than being a pilot was. Made a huge mistake when I took that transfer." Kali threw another dart, the aim on this one truer than the two before it, landing near her first shots in the center. "What did they set you up for, anyways?"

He knocked back another hit of the dragonfire, then stared long and hard into the empty bottom, the tiny refractions creating a kaleidoscope of colours, combined with the droplets of the liquor. "Orion syndicate," he finally said. "It's...not a place that the reports and reference files can really do any kind of justice to." He glanced up at her. "Some of them use their slave girls as an entry passage; force you to bind yourself to her before they'll let you get anywhere close. So getting in is the easy part. Getting out..." He just shook his head. "Even with immunity shots, resisting those green-skinned women is like coming off a hard addiction."

Kali's eyes sharpened slightly at the mention of the Syndicate--spend enough time in disputed, chaotic space, let alone around casinos and other such emporiums like she had, and you'd learn about them firsthand. Luckily, she'd learned enough, mostly thanks to Divash's advice, quickly enough that she'd been able to avoid ticking them off badly enough to become a 'problem'. "That'd mess up your view of the universe quick yeah; getting into the insides of the Syndicate." Kali tilted her head slightly. "Or was it maybe more, seeing what sort of deals your superiors and handlers were willing to cut or to tolerate?"

"Starfleet has limits," he simply replied. There was a lot more to it than that, but those were things he wouldn't disclose. "After a while you reach a point where you aren't sure where they are anymore. Huh. Maybe that's worthy of a toast." He lifted the glass in a mock salute, touching the corner against hers. "What do you think. How about 'to a life without limits'?"

The eyebrow was back up again as Kali's shot glass lifted and clinked Rick's before she downed the contents of it in a single gulp again. "Sure. Though, while everyone I've ever ticked off will tell you I'm prone to pushing limits; unfortunately I can't say I haven't found any in life. Usually, unfortunately, after I've already crossed over them. A lot easier to push limits as a pilot than it was as an intelligence officer, actually: If I misjudged how far I could push a maneuver or a ship as a pilot, I'd have been dead, which is a lot easier to deal with than the SFI consequence of 'having to answer to some admiral or judge'. I'll grant you the limits you find around stuff like the Syndicate are probably the worst ones though - hardest to suss out, and worst consequences if you guess wrong."

Which was to say that much like with flight ops, you'd probably end up dead if you misjudged a situation or its limits around the Syndicate, but with the Syndicate, the process of getting there would take a lot longer and really suck. It was an ironic statement from a woman who had thousands of years of her own ancestors before her who had made a life of navigating their own sort of high-stakes veiled-judgements, though Kali had in the end - probably much to the chagrin of the bigwigs who'd hoped she'd have more hard data of use - learned about as much as she'd taught, during the time she'd spent at headquarters in the Romulan Affairs Section; lapping up information and tidbits here and there in reports and files and the knowledge of other officers on the operations of the Senate, or the history of the Empire where such was known to the Federation; while doling out her own assessments on and knowledge of cultural or linguistic pieces...And learning new ones of those here and there, too. Kali made a mental note to get ahold of a nice, recent secondhand copy of whatever the hell her files Rick was referencing said nowdays; they'd probably changed from the last time she'd seen them, and she couldn't be entirely sure what version he had or hadn't seen, anyways. Anyone with half a braincell and a news account though could unfortunately follow that trail in short order to the nature of her family line as a whole, especially in the last ten years, considering at least a few op-ed types or politicians had seen fit to write pieces objecting to the Federation granting asylum to the most recent member of the family to arrive, after all. There was not, in the end, generally much point in Kali's view to keeping it a secret since the lifespan of that secret was probably dead on arrival.

He eyed the diminutive Romulan over the tip of his glass. The alcohol was, admittedly, starting to hit him. Of course there was no chance he was going to be able to compete with her when it came to tolerance, but maybe that was part of the fun of getting drunk. "You talk a lot for someone who worked in the service..." he noted, yet another observation but one that was starting to sounding just faintly slurred. "Unless you're trying to get me to slip all of my secrets by getting me drunk first," he added, waving the glass loosely.

"I said I spent time as an intelligence officer; I never said I was much good at it." Kali chuckled somewhat morosely; her perfectly-enunciated words still clearly stone-cold-sober in comparison. The question of whether or not she was engaging in the sort of maneuvers he'd just suggested she left unanswered; because...Well, in part because it was something that had been a classic tactic of hers over the years, both the few times she'd needed it for 'work' and when she'd just been using it against third-rate hustlers: What seemed open, or even was in a select manner, could lure people into a false sense of security often, and net one at least as much as they gave. It wasn't exactly her primary goal here, but she wouldn't entirely put it off the table, either. "And as long as we're judging proclivities for our former profession; I'm surprised you didn't just pre-dose yourself with some anti-intoxicants." Kali picked the last dart up off the bar and absently flicked it towards the board.

"But then I wouldn't be able to get drunk," Rick reasoned. "Which is no fun at all. And that dragonfire stuff is hard. Those Hysperians know how to kill brain cells." He laughed at his own joke. "I'm not afraid of secrets. My old supervisor used to tell me that if you desire to hide something, you give it value by the very fact that you wish to conceal it. So," he spread his arms. "These days I'm an open book. No more secrets. That way I'm less valuable to people from the old days who might be worried about the things they want to keep hidden."

"Honestly I can't say I disagree with your old boss there." Kali nodded. "I've never gone in for the cultural standard of 'keep everything a secret just because'. Which you probably figured out already. Some things are worth it and some aren't." Her brow crept up a bit at the second bit though: It was, if he meant it genuinely, a similar tactic in some ways to what she'd often employed: An almost aggressive openness about certain things - mostly, the past, overt associations she had to figure were already out there; and the less-recorded under the table one that she did indeed perhaps remove some of the ability to use as leverage against her by getting out there - coupled with a general silence on certain more actually-secret-worthy items, like the contents or reports she might have written or read and the names or nature of most anyone else she'd worked with. But what might work measured against SFI might not exactly work, she suspected, with all parties. "Since your old associates involve members of or adjacents of the Syndicate though, I'd be careful with that game; from what I've heard sometimes they care less about secrets than they do about revenge."

"They're welcome to come looking. But they won't." He looked at his empty glass with another frown. "Those that aren't dead are long gone now." Rick wasn't going to elaborate too much on that. He didn't need to. She would understand. "Man, what a depressing subject," he slurred again. "So, Ms Romulan Spy Lady. What's your secret? C'mon...you can whisper in my ear..." he leaned forward, probably too far, almost losing his balance and toppling into her before he caught himself on the table, then badly played it off as intentional. When he righted himself, he looked expectantly for an answer.

"Wouldn't be much of a secret if I told anyone, now would it?" Kali arched the eyebrow again coyly, and tried hard to avoid snickering at the drunken lack of grace; or rather, at proof once again at how quickly humans tended to get intoxicated. "Think I should probably keep the last of this, though." She plucked up the nearly-empty little Hysperian flask, and resorted to downing the dregs of it straight out of it, not saving any for him. "Think you can make it back to your quarters; or do you want an assist?" It would be far from the first drunken human she'd shepherded over the years; though, it was a nice change of pace from the sorts in various less-than-stellar establishments who'd needed a kick in the nuts instead of an assist home.

"Because I'm a 'weak and inferior human who can't handle his drink'!?" he challenged back with mock affront. Wavering in place, he made a move to stand, only to lumber into another chair and end up in a semi-reversed seating position. After a slightly drawn-out pause, he waved an arm lazily. "Yeah. Okay. Maybe you've got a point."

Kali reached out one arm and grasped Rick by the forearm, levering him up out of the chair and guiding one arm to sling over her shoulder; one area where her rather unimpressive height was often an asset: She was a great height to effectively be a shelf to lean on for those of more typical stature. Not that this wouldn't look awkward as hell. Hopefully he remembered where he lived; or they'd have to test if the main computer was up to snuff in its ability to direct. As she guided them out of the bar into the corridor, she took the hand that wasn't stabilizing him and chucked the remains of the flask back into the replicator on the way out.