Cadere a' gratia, Part Four

Posted on Sun Jun 19th, 2022 @ 8:22am by Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D

Mission: Character Development
Location: Romulan Warbird Tremex, Rondac System.
Timeline: In line with Deep Space Nine "A Time to Stand" S6E01.
3242 words - 6.5 OF Standard Post Measure

The Romulan Captain of the vessel guffawed as he continued his story in the ward room; another dull featureless box with three circular windows. Outside them, the purple backdrop of Rondac gave at least some minor element of beauty to the whole affair. Briefly eyeballing her similarly undercover colleague, she smiled in response Captain Slotan's latest derisory comment about Starfleet forces and his many experiences besting them from across the neutral zone over the years. Her colleague, an actual Romulan, was stood rigidly at the door to the room, on the opposite side to another guard who may as well have been a mirror image twin, so similar were their appearances and stances. The contact was a bodyguard to Senator Temek, and the reason that the whole operation was able to be executed. It was a simple enough, though highly risky, plan; posing as a genetic researcher P'rel - or Misal - would join the guest tour of Rondac, part of the Dominion's charm offensive with major and regional powers in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant.

It hadn't taken all that long, as many in the intelligence community had predicted, for Romulan and Dominion ties to grow and strengthen once the non-aggression pact had been signed; that in itself had almost immediately been followed by a mutual declaration of war when the Federation Alliance had invaded Torros III and destroyed the shipyard, and simultaneously the Dominion Alliance had invaded the Bajoran system and taken Deep Space Nine. With the Klingons and the Federation well and truly on the back foot, it certainly made sense that Romulus was building bridges with Cardassia.

It seemed that mutual tours like this were taking place across both territories; she had been briefed on several tours of capital cities, key facilities and the like and she was certain there were a great many more she hadn't needed to be made aware of. The only real challenge now, was finding an opportunity to impregnate the genetic seed code for the Jem'Hadar hatcheries without being discovered. Sitting at the table she found herself weighing it all up, perhaps Captain Bennett was right, perhaps she Jem'Hadar should die; it would shorten the war and probably save more lives overall. Just four days ago she had been aboard the USS Venture, taking a briefing from Bennett, when he had handed her a PADD...


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USS Venture, Four Days Ago
---

BREAKING: 98 Vessels destroyed as Dominion bulldoze through Tyrus System. Wolf 359 all over again?

Only 14 ships from the seventh fleet have made it back to Federation lines, a Starfleet spokesperson confirmed this morning. In an all out effort to hold off the Dominion invasion of the Tyrus System, a large force of brave service men and women was committed; though now with such a catastrophic loss insider sources are questioning if leadership should change.

Seemingly unstoppable, the evil tide of the Dominion continues to rise upon the peaceful shores of the Federation. With ships in the region now regrouping at Starbase 375, we are left to wonder: just how can this force of terror be stopped?

---

Dropping the PADD on Captain Bennett's desk nonchalantly, P'rel looked inappropriately calm whilst Captain Bennett - across the desk from her - had turned a shade of red. He picked up the PADD and threw it across the small office he had been given to work from aboard the enormous Galaxy Class starship. It hit the window with an almighty crack, so hard that just for a moment the Vulcan doctor thought that it might even smash, yet fell to the floor leaving not so much as a scuff on the reassuringly tough transparent aluminium.

"Do you have NOTHING to say?" he barked at her, referring not to the news story itself which he had only used to emphasise his point of how dangerous the Dominion are; but instead was referring to his recent discovery that the Vulcan had hidden a vital research breakthrough.

"Starfleet has a lot to answer for" she said coldly, no less disappointed in the tremendous loss of life; but far more rational in concluding that they had it coming to them.

"Starfleet! Has! WHAT?" Bennet spat, and P'rel was quite sure that his veins in his forehead were now swollen to a level approaching haemorrhage.

She remained silent, waiting for him to unravel whatever web he was about to unravel. He in turn mirrored her tactic, and so she broke first. "Starfleet had no business in the gamma quadrant. We saw the wormhole opened into a sovereign territory, and did we move out? No. We set up colonies and began destabilising the local economy". She was frustrated at how Starfleet championed principles it so blatantly abandoned whenever it suited. "Then, after years of dismissing Cardassia and sitting back whilst the Klingons ravaged them, we are suddenly surprised when the join the Dominion?"

Bennet snapped back, anger rising his voice "How are we to blame for Cardassia joining the Dominion? And HOW does it have any bearing on declarations of war!?"

Knowing it annoyed Bennett when she remained calm and logical in the face of his wholly emotional outburst, P'rel replied in a measured tone; "By abandoning our principles to suit, we drove Cardassia into a hopeless place Captain. There was really little other choice for them to make. Then we mined the wormhole."

"TO SAVE LIVES AND STOP A WAR!" he barked back at her.

"To save face, and stop a war we couldn't win" she corrected, clasping her hands behind her back. "Curious; if Cardassia joined the Federation and the Romulan Empire begun mining trade routes and shipping lanes, how would we have responded?". She adjusted her stance a little, and found herself shaking her head in disbelief; "the Federation started this war on the back of it's own sheer hubris and megalomania. If Romulus mined shipping lanes between a conjoined UFP and Cardassia, we would have attacked as well. The Dominion is only doing what we would have done."

Bennett dropped into his seat and sunk back, rubbing his temples with a single hand. "You're saying the Federation is as bad as the Dominion?" she asked exasperatedly.

"Quite". She replied calmly, sitting in the chair on the opposite side of his desk. "In the Gamma Quadrant, the members of the Dominion are broadly autonomous and self governing, able to make their own trade and local governmental arrangements, reporting to an overall unified body and protected by an overall unified military. Dissidents are shut down"

"We don't do that" he countered. "We embrace diversity of thought and encourage debate..."

"Until it arrives at answers you do not like. The Maquis for example; labelled terrorists and cut loose, now all of them have been virtually exterminated."

He glared at her, and she was aware she'd touched a nerve; he'd found out quite quickly about her arrangement with Maquis and chosen to hide it, needing her research progress more than a scandal in his department. "The less said about the Maquis the better...hm?"

She nodded in agreement; "my point only is, Captain, that good and evil, right and wrong, are hardly objective matters and we may be doing exactly the same thing were the situation reversed."

He let out a deep sigh, something she hadn't heard in him before; was it regret...acquiescence...? "Perhaps you're right...." he muttered.

===================

She looked up as a menacing Vorta with cruel eyes called for her attention; "and you, Doctor Misal?". Aware that her attention had wandered, she flashed a smile to him and bowed her head respectfully.

"My apologies Ambassador, my mind wandered to the fate of the Federation...an entertaining if somewhat obsessive thought trail".

The Vorta chuckled loudly and Captain Slotan immediately followed; as If given permission the remaining members of the party around the table followed suit. "Yes yes...quite...ha ha ha..." he beamed at her. "My apologies for distracting you, I was asking if you had much experience with cloning specifically?"

Her cover story well drilled, she shook her head slightly; "unfortunately not Mr. Ambassador. Of course, we regularly work with matters such as organ replacement, limb retrieval and the like, but full outright cloning of a sentient being....no sir, I am looking forward to seeing the facility greatly."

"Ahhh ha ha ha..." the Vorta verbalised back at her; "one of the great many benefits of our growing friendship Doctor...." he then took a second to acknowledge the men said either side of him "...Captain, Senator...is the opportunity to share knowledge and practices which can benefit both our proud and accomplished societies....imagine, legions of Romulan soldiers all wholly loyal, all unquestioningly responsive to whatever order they are given....why even the Klingon Empire would stand no chance."

"The filthy animals would crumble." The Senator spoke, his age evident in his voice alone let alone his visibly advanced years, "we would be in the Great Hall within a month...."

The Vorta beamed an identical smile at the Senator, and P'rel wondered if the Romulan guests had identified the false expression of friendship as being as cloned as the man himself. "And you may yet Senator.....now, shall we to the shuttles...? he gestured to the doors and P'rel noticed that none of the Romulan officers seemed to have even the slightest objection to the Vorta commanding the room and speaking as this were his ship and he were the host. The walk to the shuttle bay was largely silent, with only the Senator, Ambassador and the Captain speaking politely to each other; the others: Romulans scientists, a Cardassian Legate and his two aides, the Senator's aides, the two Jem'Hadar guarding the Vorta and the Captain's yeoman all walked silently. It gave P'rel a brief pause to centre herself, and try to suppress a troubling memory...

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USS Warspite; two weeks ago

P'rel gathered herself and tried to regain some composure as the sight before her began to sink in. On a corridor blocked by armed guards she stood at the entrance to a holodeck with Captain Bennett. Though he wasn't in command of this vessel, he certainly seemed to have at least as much as influence as the actual CO, with at least some of the crew - herself included - reporting only time, as did the corridor guards she suspected. Instead of the yellow grid pattern she expected on the older ship, was a long straight corridor filled with medical personnel and lined with holding cells. The cells had the forcefields tinted and did not permit anyone to see inside them, as both she and Bennett stepped further in she could see that a few random cells were not activated and had personnel coming and going looking as though they were cleaning them. "This is why must end the war..." Bennett explained, in his now predictable way of trying to manipulate her; "...this is why your Ketracel White addiction research is so important...".

She hadn't reported to him that she had concluded her research. She and her team had found exactly to manipulate the Jem'Hadar genome to effectively dial up or dial down the level of addiction to the White, but she had failed to report it and had buried the conclusive data, instead giving her team enough false leads to follow up which would keep them busy - at least for now. It had become blatantly clear to her that Captain Bennett and whomever he reported to had no interest in curing the Jem'Hadar of their addiction - far from it - instead they obviously intended to devise some way to deliver the genetic manipulation to make them even more addicted, putting strain on the White supply and quite possibly leading to chaos within the Dominion until a new supply could be brought from the Gamma Quadrant. "What exactly is....'this'?" P'rel asked, genuinely curios to see why anyone would bother to effectively hide a prison in a holodeck when a cargo bay could be easily converted.

Bennett entered a command key into a panel next to one the tinted cells, and the tint fell away to reveal a roughly standard cell sized space, but the walls were made of sheer rock. Inside, a lone Jem'Hadar soldier in a brown jumpsuit sat on a bench. He looked old. Frail. A long tube protruded from his neck and fed a white substance from something on the wall which looked vaguely like a molecular pump. The device was no more than a square meter, and stood out in Federation silver from the mottled brown rocky wall, all across it were the marks where someone had been desperately clawing at it. Looking the soldier up and down, it didn't take P'rel long to notice from the bloodied and cracked fingernails on the man that he had been the one clawing at it. She looked quizzically to Bennett who smiled that horrid, antagonising smile he had.

"He can't hear you." Bennett begun, returning the tint to the forcefield and moving further down the corridor to stand at another cell. "We could obviously have used a physical space to hold these P.O.W.s, but that would tell them we are on a starship - god only knows how well the Jem'Hadar are drilled to recognise colour schemes, shapes, sizes....they could have very well even determined which ship they were on..."

P'rel looked at him suspiciously, as he made eye contact with a different Doctor who nodded to him.

"I'm not being paranoid Doctor P'rel...if one of them escaped...beamed away....well..." He shook his head. "Instead, they all believe they're in some kind of underground facility...it minimises risk at least....". He tapped another panel and the new cell lost the tint. Inside a practically naked Jem'Hadar sat shivering in a corner, his modesty - not that she was aware if it were even necessary in a species of genetically bred people - was barely covered by a torn and filthy set of undergarments. A ripped soldier's uniform lay in pieces over the cell, which had been trashed. The few pieces of functional furniture had been destroyed, and the holographic rock walls showed signs of being physically torn at; damage which matched the soldier's bloody hands and face. Bennett nodded at the dismal form sat in the corner, he was very thin at this point and looked as if he had been malnourished for several months. "He hasn't had any Ketracel White for two weeks..." Bennett informed her, studying the poor soul with curious eyes; "...estimates are he'll be dead by the end of the week which is consistent with our established baseline".

P'rel shook her head, and looked around the corridors for some sign that another officer was equally horrified by this, yet no reciprocating horror came. The personnel in the corridors simply got on with their business, apparently entirely untroubled by the appalling acts going own here. The anger inside her converted to courage; a newfound courage to finally challenge the Captain about her addiction tction research - "My research into Ketracel White addition was never to cure them of it, never to prevent scenes like this...it was meant to accelerate it...you wanted to make the Jem'Hadar hyper addicted to the drug, to make this happen sooner". Her words came bluntly, and she didn't make any attempted to pose them as a question.

Bennett looked at her and returned the tint to the forcefield, the look on his face was too ambiguous to read - part surprise, well hidden of course; part admiration that she'd figured it out; concern at what he would have to do next. He whirled around quickly and motioned for her to follow him. Once they were back in the corridor he stopped and turned to face her. "And you hid your findings" he stated, in an equally flat tone which clearly wasn't posed as a question. "You discovered weeks ago how to manipulate the Jem'Hadar seed code to alter the receptivity to the white, and how to increase the addiction".

The two stared at each other as if it were some kind of quick draw phaser duel, waiting to see who would flinch first. As it turned out, Bennett did. "There will be a briefing tomorrow at 1500 on the Starbase when we arrive, check the administration officer for the correct room. Be there". Bennett turned around and quickly walked off, leaving P'rel to wonder what was going on, and how Bennett had discovered that she had suppressed the research findings. Perhaps she would be able to influence some logical thought at the briefing at least...


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P'rel immediately noticed that the Dominion transporter beam was considerably quicker and more comfortable than both the Starfleet and Romulan beams. Having had the most cursory look around the orbital facility to which the warbird was docked, the entourage had been beamed down to the planetary installation on Rondac. The former was apparently still under construction, or at least much of the interior structure was, but the latter was a tremendous departure from that. Materialising in a large cargo bay of sorts, P'rel and the other guests were clearly taken aback by the scale of the operation. Standing on a gantry way overlooking the chamber, they looked down upon hundreds of rows of bipods for growing soldiers and Vorta, some of them were offline but almost all were lit from underneath with humanoid forms bobbing around in a translucent liquid, all connected to various pipework and breathing apparatus. "Incredible" she muttered entirely involuntarily.

"Oh quite" the Vorta said through a beaming smile. "Here we grow Vorta, conduct genetic research, editing, and grow the Jem'Hadar. Whilst some soldiers do fully form here, we simply don't have the training capacity for them once they emerge, so we create the seed code, germinate, and then pass the proto-humanoids to various other facilities to complete the process. If you'll follow me, I'd be happy to show you the primary nucleus where we retain the Jem'Hadar seed code..." he gestured for them all to follow and they took several steps with many of their heads still turning around to look at the awesome sight below. "...it is, if you like, our primordial soup from which all Jem'Hadar life in the Alpha Quadrant is created".

P'rel's fingers twitched, it was exactly what she had hoped to find and it was an almost impossible turn of luck that the ambassador was going to lead them all right to it. The miniature hypospray concealed in her bulky Romulan military uniform had not been detected at least, attuned to her own biosignature, and the mention of the primordial seed matrix had almost caused her to involuntarily reach for it to make sure it was still there. She walked along with the rest of the delegation, genuinely impressed at the vast facility they were moving through, with several chambers like the one they beamed into, and some of the most sophisticated genetic equipment she'd ever seen. The Vorta espoused smug platitudes and bragged of the innate superiority of Dominion technology as they walked, though P'rel wasn't listening, instead her mind had wondered back to the briefing on board the Warspite, the briefing she'd found out everything she'd unwittingly been working towards, the briefing where Starfleet and the Federation had become finally dead to her...

To Be Continued...