Tea and Cruelty - Continued

Posted on Fri Oct 22nd, 2021 @ 12:28am by Lieutenant Resigned & Commodore Jacob Kane

Mission: With Gleaming Eyes
Location: Transporter Room & Security Office
813 words - 1.6 OF Standard Post Measure

[ON]

The moment they rematerialized in the Transporter room Bolingbroke tossed the Cardassian communicator to the Technician. "Run that down to Chief Mitchell would you. Tell her to check it over and I'll be along in a minute"

He turned to Kane, explained his meeting with Corak and the girl's warning.

"Cardassian occupation hasn't changed much over the last few decades, it seems," Kane mused. All the stories were usually the same; a typical Cardassian officer had a lot of leeway in the treatment of natives. "Something to monitor, but our purpose here is to provide humanitarian aid for a crisis, not help the locals with their conditions. Unfortunately we cannot interfere."

"I'm aware of that Sir. I was referring more to the girl's warning..." Bolingbroke replied.

"About us being unsafe?" Kane asked. "Well, we're in Cardassian territory, away from immediate reinforcements. However we have the most heavily armed starship for several light years in orbit. If anyone's in danger it's the Cardassians." He raised a hand before the security chief could speak. "Not that I'm dismissing the concerns entirely. If you find something beyond a traumatised Metis girl, then we can act on it. As it stands, that's all we have."

"Understood sir" Bolingbroke nodded. The Captain's summation was correct, but there was something about the girl and her warning that nagged at him and he intended to treat it seriously.

Satisfied the chief's concerns were noted, and for now directed in a useful direction, Kane left to check in with the rest of the landing crew.


[Security Office]

Bolingbroke found Mitchell and one of investigation officers who specialized in technical matters examining the Cardassian communication device. they had it in a dampening field on a bench.

"Where did this come from?" Mitchell asked with a smile "Did you pinch it from the Gul's pocket?"

"No, it's from the Colony's Security Glinn" Bolingbroke explained "Charming fellow called Corak, likes to beat up young girls and have them serve him tea"

Mitchell's brow furrowed. "What?"

"Lll tell you later. What have we got then?" He nodded at the communicator

"Well, its a standard Cardassian communicator, field model, later version. " The technical investigator explained, looking over the results of Security Tricorder. "Like ours it has positional data tracking, although they've limited it to just one of their security channels, one that they monitor but are are not currently using, so it won't relay any of their communications to us.

But...." He showed Bolingbroke the readout. "This is the sneaky bit, and it took me a while to figure it out. It's been tweaked so that the microphone is constantly recording. Stores it on a memory chip, then whenever it's activated it sends the recorded stuff as a burst signal hidden within the standard channel frequency.

Kind of ingenious, it's not providing real-time eves-dropping, but it's also not giving itself away by constantly transmitting" The tech concluded. "i can disable it for you if you want Chief?"

Bolingbroke thought for a moment. If they disabled the bug then Corak would know he had discovered it. "Can we rig it so that I can control when the microphone is working, so it's not recording all the time and then maybe tinker with the burst transmission so that most of what it transmitted is garbled?"

The tech rubbed his chin. "Yeah I can do that Chief, give me a couple of hours and I'll see what I can do"

Once the man had left Bolingbroke relayed events to Mitchell.

"They keep young girls as sex-slaves?" Mitchell commented " And we're supposed to be friendly with these people?" She shook her head "Makes you wonder how diplomats mange to sleep at night... As for her warning, well I guess they locals are not really in open resistance like on Bajor but I'm sure they'd probably prefer the Cardassians were not here."

"I agree" Bolingbroke nodded "There is probably some kind of opposition here, even if it's covert. They see us coming in to help the Cardassians they will be likely to group us in with them.

Alright, we need to be careful on this. Now the Captain has agreed matters with the Gul, Away Teams are going to be going down within the next few hours.

I want at least two Security personnel with each group. Pass the word, I want things low key, but be vigilant. And stress the hearts and minds stuff, especially towards the locals, I don't want us getting caught in between anything."

Mitchell nodded. "Understood Chief, I'll go down with one of the Teams myself, see what things are like down there"

They discussed options for a while longer, Mitchell left to get ready to join an Away team and Bolingbroke wrote up and filed a report on his meeting with the Cardassian Security chief.

[OFF]