Yet another glitch...

Posted on Sun May 31st, 2020 @ 10:36am by Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D

Mission: In the Family
Location: Paratan Homeworld. 2340 Local Time.
Timeline: MD6
1443 words - 2.9 OF Standard Post Measure

The slender Paratan gently placed her tea down on the bedside table. Greeting an itch, she raised her hand up to her left temple where a firm and unfamiliar ridge of tightly bound scales carpeted a deeply set brow line. Not unlike Cardassians, the Paratans had some kind of strange hybridisation of reptilian and mammalian ancestry; fairly obvious to notice at a glance but it had nonetheless been fascinating to learn more about the biological history of this world over the past several weeks.

Unlike Cardassians however, the Paratan reptilian heritage had become increasingly recessive over the past millennia or so, leaving little now but a handful of telltale traits such as the deep and slightly pointed brow ridges, which she supposed at some point would have hosted eyes set far further apart with two arcs of 180* vision. Aside from that and the residual webbing between three fingers and thumb of sorts, and the Paratans weren’t all that dissimilar from the likes of Humans, Bajorans and indeed Vulcans.

Taking a final sip of tea, the tired woman replaced the empty cup in her hand with a dermal regenerator and moved to the bathroom mirror in her small apartment overlooking a particularly distasteful area of a smaller town on the main continent. It had been a long day, with near endless complications and failures to one degree or another. Humans had a saying, “Murphy’s Law”, and today most certainly seemed to be some kind of divine celestial homage to this Murphy person. Not only had her universal translator failed right in the middle of ordering breakfast, but the sub-dermal communicator implanted in her skull had at the same time let out an awful whine. Far from blending into the background, she had clutched her head in searing pain and, not able to actually speak Paratan, had hurried off with an unconvincing polite smile; drawing more attention than she would have liked.

The malfunctioning communicator it turned out, had been from a coded packet sent to her by San Francisco, which of course on this day of Murphy had crashed the transceiver assembly. Alongside losing her apartment keys and being unable to fix the transceiver for several hours, it hadn’t been the best of days. As she moved the regenerator over her face, her more familiar Vulcan features began to reappear. A hyposray to her neck and the somewhat golden complexion of her Paratan alias faded away to the pinker skin of her normal self. Only the hands remained Paratan, and would have to wait until her assignment was over and surgery could return her Vulcan digits. The return of all her fingers was something she looked forward to, although the small and generationally receding trail of spines running from the smallest finger, along the outer edge of the arm and up to the elbow looked quite pretty and she would miss them.

She walked back to her bed, an odd circle affair with raised sets of bumps increasing in height towards the “head’ of the bed; something vaguely reminiscent of a soft and cushioned rock and consistent with the reptilian, desert like architecture and design logic across Paratan culture. It was oddly comfortable, though imagined curled up as a lizard it might have been more so. At least the communication device was fixed, and she would make a progress report in the morning; Lieutenant P’rel of Starfleet glanced at the potted red plant in the corner of the room which was taking the holographic form of a compact computer terminal. An Ambassador was on the way, escorted by a flying phaser array no less. Yet another example of the absurd expansionism of the Federation, whereby this backwards and sexist culture deeply set in rebellion and political disunity might actually become the next federation member. P’rel really didn’t know why Starfleet bothered to send advance field operatives to potential member worlds; it’s not like it made any difference. Every world she had been sent to, in order to gather covert ethnographic data on the species, had no business being a Federation member and yet all of them had either become so, or were in the final stages of ratification. There seemed to be little point in acquiring unfiltered data from the ground, if it would be totally disregarded in case.

Anyway, she thought, it suited her aims to live amongst different cultures and met her personal ambitions for exploration and it would do for now. She reclined backwards into the bumpy bed and felt the day’s tension lift from her body, and prepared herself to enter a sleeping state. A deep breath in to relax and -

“Incoming Transmission. Priority One.” came the uncaring voice from the potted plant in the corner.

“Oh for f...” she muttered, standing up and waving once at the plant which turned into a slender upright black communications console. P’rel tapped in the brief set of commands to access the data transmission coming in. It was from one of the sensor drones that the electronic resources intelligence team had dropped throughout the system months earlier. This particular drone, like a truncated tripod stand, was clinging to an asteroid on a long orbit of the system and was well placed enough to give a good view of the system. As she opened the live data packet, a visual sensor screen dominated the display, with gauges displaying various types of energy readings on the right of the screen. The downside with this particular drone was the rotation of the asteroid, and as much as she could tell from the spiking readings that some kind of weapons fire was taking place, it was impossible to accurately get a good reading of what was going on. To have placed more powerful in these drones would be to risk detection, and so field operatives had to make do visual scans and basic energy outputs.

“Come on...” P’rel whispered, having become instantly alert. Decades of work as an on call doctor and intelligence operative had given her the honed ability to switch off tiredness and replace it with alertness when the situation called for it. Although in recent years that ability had waned a little both with age and with the less taxing assignments she had been selected for. After what would have seemed like an eternity to most species, although what was actually 2 minutes and fourteen seconds, the visual scanner was able to pick up the burning hulk of civilian transport. It wasn’t Starfleet, though it clearly had Federation design influences with a bulbous front akin to a saucer section, and trailing twin nacelles. The largest area of flat surface on the transport was now effectively gone on the port side and open to space, clearly there had been a significant weapons discharge or more likely a collision, based on the way the hull breach trailed off.

In her current situation there was very little she could do. Even less, that she was allowed to do. There was no logical need to break cover and alert the ship of her presence, and in any case the Prometheus, or the Apollo or Artemis or whatever it was called would be here soon if it were not already. P’rel prepared a low frequency packet on a Starfleet frequency; it would at least alert the Artemis CO that there was a Starfleet Officer planetside if needed; though Captain what’s his name would probably already be aware in case, that Starfleet intelligence sent advance scouts to potential member worlds as a matter of course. She quickly coded up the packet and prepared it for transmission when the Artemis came into range - ‘Is it Artemis...?’ she pondered for a second, or something else... ‘Artemis’ she settled on, without being entirely sure.

P’rel had become used to the missing finger, though it was still a bit cumbersome when in a hurry. She pressed the send button...and the console shut down in a disappointing whirr. Now instead of just the transceiver, the whole thing seemed to be offline.

“And...great” she exclaimed with frustration, which would have looked odd to anyone familiar with Vulcans and their usually stoic emotionless appearance. She could only now try to employ her Person Intelligence PERSINT sources, to see what was going on and whether her position here was in some way compromised. Combat during a diplomatic mission was rarely a good thing. P’rel picked up the dermal regenerator to return to her Paratan alias; “Just.....great” she concluded, beginning the process.

OFF

LT. P’rel
Intelligence Division.
Starfleet Command.