Inquisition, Part One

Posted on Tue Apr 22nd, 2025 @ 7:52am by Lieutenant JG Nayisa Wrea & Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D

Mission: Pandora's Box
Location: Intel Suite
Timeline: MD6 - after "Annoying Pencil Pushers"
2961 words - 5.9 OF Standard Post Measure

Nayisa had all of an hour after ranting to Darin before she was summoned to P'Rel's office. Due to the rather chaotic nature of their presence, especially over the last day and a half, she'd been slacking on her usual updates in favor of keeping up with the coordination between ships. Running a hand through her hair, she paused just outside the door to shake out her nerves and stress before pressing the chime.

It took a couple of seconds to be invited in, and Nayisa could almost feel the atmosphere change as she entered. Something was up, there was an underlying tension as she eyed P'Rel and the focused attention on her computer. "You asked to see me, Commander?" She asked, foregoing her usual level of optimism for a milder variant.

There were moments P'rel wished she had the emotional constraint of much of her species; try hard as she might it was difficult to contain the anger she felt rising up within her. "Sit. Down" she mustered. P'rel sat in her chair, behind her desk, with the small and sparsely decorated shelf underneath her large rear-wall monitor behind her also. There were six items on it; four from Vulcan, one from her late brother, and one little frog ornament; some vaguely anthropomorphised Earth species of some unknown genus. She reached back and lifted it, reading the words; "Hippity Hoppity Get Off My Proppity" before sliding it - a little more forcefully than intended - across the desk at Lieutenant Wrea. "What did you intend to convey with this gift?" she asked Wrea.

Confusion made Nayisa's little smile falter slightly as she took a seat. P'Rel was mad. She couldn’t recall a time where she saw P'Rel mad, but the first two stressed words spoke volumes. "I mean, it seemed fitting for the office?" She responded with a shrug. "This is your space and all, you know... stay off of P'Rel's Proppity...?" There was a pause where the silver-haired woman came to terms with her joke not landing before she added, "if you don't like it, I can take it back..."

P'rel decided it was best she had already skimmed it across the desk, lest she launch the damned thing through Wrea's face. "What did you intend to convey to me...?" she re-emphasised.

Nayisa could tell that P'Rel was looking for a specific answer, perhaps something not quite related to the trinket, but what? "I'm not sure what you're getting at. I just thought it suited you..." Tilting her head slightly, she reached for the trinket and added, "but it doesn't seem like the trinket is what you're really concerned about."

Wrea had missed the point though it mattered little. She had thought the 'trinket', as Wrea described it, had represented a deepening of a working relationship. Not friendship as such, but certainly elements of it such as trust, familiarity and honesty. "Betrayal" P'rel whispered. "Betrayal is what I am concerned about". It had been precisely seven minutes and fourty seven seconds since summoning Wrea, and only ten seconds less since she had ordered security to stand ready outside the internal office door. By now, she knew, one or two guards were presently waiting her command to enter.

That surprised Nayisa a little. Betrayal wasn't something to take lightly, especially in their world as it often costed lives. It didn't take much mental gymnastics to conclude that P'Rel suspected her of betrayal, though the point was still frustratingly out of reach. She knew better than to vocalise her own conclusions, unless she wanted to make herself look more guilty than P'Rel already saw her. However, too much ignorance could unintentionally give the same effect. "I usually love a good round of reading between the lines, but if there is a risk of betrayal then I honestly prefer straightforward, Commander. What's going on?"

The Vulcan opened the 3D holo display which hung in the air in front of her and between them. It would be a jumble to most people, but they both knew what they were looking at. Latent data streams being transmitted from Athena to the most local subspace relay buoy. Nothing unremarkable, and truly it was just bad luck - for Wrea - that P'rel was so obsessively diligent given the events against Kane and herself, by extension, over the past year. Each stream was just slightly larger than it ought to be, though still well within tolerance margins. When she overlaid that against the rest of the Task Group however, they were 4.7% in excess of the other ships. This was only the first piece of the uncovered puzzle however, and P'rel wanted to give Wrea chance to come clean. It was, in any case, best practice to do so; by not controlling the direction of the conversation Wrea might give something away from her own leadership of the topics. A final command flipped the holo display laterally so that it faced the right way for the Lieutenant to read.

"You tell me" the Vulcan dared.

There were a few seconds where Nayisa studied the data presented to her. It was unmistakable, the excess sizes were the result of the very data fragments she sent just hours ago. It didn't help that she was sending the same report twice, one copy to the rest of the squadron and a slightly altered copy to some pushover's desk. Despite a lack of outward reaction, she did feel her heart skip a beat.

She knew.

"I mean, we're in the middle of an investigation combined with ongoing research," Nayisa pointed out, choosing to not give the Vulcan what she suspected she was looking for. She had faced far more aggressive threats, the Ice Queen's chess game didn't intimidate her just yet, even as her boss. "As a liaison to an entire squadron, I touch a lot of data. Don't you read any of the reports I give you??"

P'rel leaned forward. If this were an interrogation, she would smell blood right now. Her prey was bleeding in the water. She was closing in. Her eyes locked Wrea's, whilst a hand operated the first line decryption algorithm for the additional transmission signatures. She didn't blink for a second, and operated the console from within her peripheral vision, flipping the holo display in her mind to see it correctly. A second algorithm, applied by isolating part of the stream and decompressing it as if it were biomolecular data from the sensor bandwidth it was attached to. The screen froze and bright red text flashed across; blinking every few seconds - 'ES5_Code_Input'.

P'rel remained silent; dead silent. She controlled even her breathing to add to the intensity; by now most subjects would be deafened by the sound of their own high pressure pulse thumping through their temporal arteries. Her eyes didn't break from Wrea's for a moment, as if tractor beams were firing from them. 'I can't read this one' said the intensity of her gaze.

Looking at the new information, Nayisa felt a heavy knot of dread grow in her stomach and fought to maintain her composure. The messages with 0502. Did the room warm up a little? A couple years ago, she had poked around inside the code that encrypted the data for her project to indulge her own curiosity, and recognised the code input message that she was seeing now. It was a special encryption that occurred when something had been sent, but there wasn't a record in the computer to tie the data back to. To the computer, the original data doesn't exist so the file was considered corrupted. The decryption needed verification in order to finish parsing the record so it could display the contents as it was captured in the transmission. While the contents of the message didn't really identify a crime, it certainly validated P'Rel's concerns over the silver-haired woman's involvement.

"Well... that's certainly suspicious."

The calm tone of Nayisa's voice carried an undercurrent of tension as her eyes skimmed the information several more times. There was only one thing she could do, something that all the project collaborators were told to do in this very scenario. Deny. "I've never seen an error like that before," she said, giving P'Rel a shrug.

The Vulcan was unconvinced, unphased and unimpressed. But Wrea was an intelligence officer, and far from naïve to the nuances of prompting subjects to divulge information. So; she sat. And glared. 'Bitch' was often a word she knew to be ascribed to herself; 'Cold', 'Scary', 'Ice Queen'; she cared little for the sardonic wit of others and took no efforts to dispel their trivial insults. She was, however, aware of the power that perceived character traits could wield and so, she simply glared. And waited.

How could she convince P'Rel, someone who had decades more knowledge than her, to let this go without giving anything away? Nayisa would be lying to herself if she claimed the woman's reputation, perceived or otherwise, didn't make her squirm. The glare forged by experience and unmatched Vulcan patience was heavy and uncomfortable, but she was no stranger to the tactic. Let the silence force the suspect to talk. While there was never any specific contractual vow of secrecy, just a pinky promise to someone who held much higher clearance, the stakes associated with disclosure, especially following such a recent sighting of a low-profile target, only reaffirmed the current calculated risk she was taking. Was this how Sam developed gastrointestinal issues? "... but yeah, I can try to find out what it is for you. Reel in that excitement a little, Commander," she slowly added, answering the unspoken demand with some light sarcasm. It did nothing to break the stifling tension that P'Rel was coiling around the silver-haired woman's throat.

Scooting forward a little, Nayisa reached for the controls, willing that nearly imperceptible tremor in her fingers to chill as she began to type. She knew she was under heavy scrutiny, so as she worked she focused on the perceived attention put into hacking this 'mystery' code input request. They hadn't accounted for this, never expecting anyone to dig so deep that they would stumble across the encryption protocol itself, protocol Echo Sigma 5. Hearing the computer beep in denial, she frowned, the action only partially staged. She knew what the encryption protocol was, but she had never actually tried to break into it. It had been tested by others and was probably the most robust thing she had worked with. "It seems like it's just some protocol that should be bypass-able with clearance," she eventually said, shifting her focus to P'Rel for just a second. Yeesh, those eyes could haunt someone's nightmares. Turning back to the display, she entered in her Athena authorisation code, resulting in a glaring 'ACCESS DENIED' message before the code input message returned. She typed again, looking for a way to bypass the protocol or at least break it down, before trying again, with no luck. "Hm. Neither of our clearances work, that's... really odd. You sure it's not like some dumb comms glitch or something?" While the idea of making more people aware of something very much meant to remain a secret was anxiety-inducing, a comms issue would be a logical thing to follow up on.

P'rel continued to glare, her inner eyelids only occasionally involuntarily blinking whilst she maintained the rigid and unwavering stare with her piercing eyes. Without breaking her phaser-like gaze she softly spoke; "Perhaps Commander Keating could run a full, detailed and exceptionally thorough analysis of this encryption protocol, the files attached to it, and how that links to increased transmission bandwidth on the latent communication frequencies". She raised her hand as if to tap her comm badge.

The flinch that Nayisa forced herself to keep in check gave away the instinct to keep P'Rel from tapping her communicator, the simultaneous verbal 'wait' only providing an unnecessary redundancy. Knowing that another department head, especially one who was close enough to Didrea to share the details of such work with her, left the silver-haired woman even more anxious that her friend would find out. She took in a slow breath as she stared at the ES5_Code_Input that continued to flash on the display. Darin was going to kill her for this. "I know what it is," she quietly admitted, forcing herself to meet P'Rel's unwavering death glare. "I don't have the clearance to disclose much else beyond that it's an encryption protocol specific to some work I happen to be involved in. I know my word doesn't mean much when I just lied to your face, but I promise that it does not pose a threat to this ship or its crew, or to any of the other ships in the squadron."

Were she human, she believed her eye would have twitched in response. It wasn't ego, not so much, but at least part of P'rel was irked by the idea that as a Lieutenant Commander, Chief Intelligence Officer and with the handful of additional clearances granted as Second Officer, that she didn't have clearance to receive whatever it was Wrea was holding onto. She also wasn't naïve, there were often parallel command structures which existed in exception from eachother; her own time working on a way to hyper-addict the Jem'Hadar to ketracel white certainly being one of them. Under normal circumstances - a relative term in Starfleet, admittedly - she could have overlooked the hardly surprising notion that one of her officers belonged to one of those parallel command structures, but not today.

Today, decent people lay dead and dying; a device of tremendous power was essentially up for grabs by whomever ultimately rocked up with the biggest guns and sharpest guile; and these transmissions were partially intra-ship suggesting a wider network which could undermine Kane. Though in truth, she did largely believe Wrea the Vulcan couldn't take the chance that things were getting away from the Lieutenant. Though it would certainly have been inadvertent there was a real chance that whatever this was all about, had contributed to the attack on the surface. Banking on the wild theatrics making a profound impact, P'rel - though in full control really - snapped up to her feet and screamed at Wrea, who flinched as both fists crashed into the desk "Not Good Enough!".

Her purposefully angered cheeks flushed olive, contrasting against the otherwise calm green-grey skin. The desk, not designed for the density of Vulcan muscular strength, had buckled underneath her balled fists which sat in small craters in the metal as if the surface of a moon had been impacted, as her piercing eyes had yet to break contact for so much as a nanosecond.

A flinch was an understatement; Nayisa had interpreted the sudden movement as a sign that she needed to protect herself, so she also jumped to her feet, a hand on the chair behind her ready to throw it out of the way in case she needed to make space. The outburst certainly surprised her, she had never seen a Vulcan snap as P'Rel did, and that being the first thing she said after such a long and uncomfortable silence only amplified the impact. She knew the situation she was putting P'Rel in, and she didn't blame her for being extra cautious at the moment, or for being angry at the lack of information.

It was a lose-lose scenario. If she told P'Rel, she'd be declassifying information she technically didn't have the clearance to even know, and it could put her involvement in the project at risk. If she didn't concede, she'd likely be put in the brig and an internal investiation could force the project to light, which would absolutely kick her off the project. She trusted P'Rel with such information, but she also trusted the Vulcan to do what was necessary to determine if the information Nayisa refused to disclose posed a threat.

"Alright," Nayisa said, raising her hand in a 'hold it' gesture. Containment had to be the priority, she'd much rather P'Rel know than half the ship. "I can explain, at least partially, if it means it won't escalate things, but on the condition that it never leaves this room." It was bold to request even something as simple as privacy from a Vulcan who used her desk as an example of what Nayisa's face could look like in a few seconds, but she couldn’t risk anything. The silver-haired woman was well aware of the security features of the office, how if needed the entire room could be locked down so nothing could get in or out.

"I will give you no such guarantee" P'rel replied, retaking her seat and resuming her controlled composure. She steepled her fingers again and felt the odd sensation of damp upon the outer sides of her hands. At least one of them had been cut to a smell degree in her deliberate display to Wrea. There was a strong thread to pull on in the background connections between Wrea and Zade, who lay injured in sickbay. Perhaps if she tugged that thread enough, it would throw Wrea off balance and into emotional chaos; enough to slip and divulge more than she intended to. Wrea's coming disclosure was likely a well measured and rehearsed fall-back option; a protocol within a protocol designed for when this....whatever it was...became compromised. If she could destabilise that just enough......

"Lieutenant Zade has died. Her injuries were simply too severe. I found out a little before you arrived".

To Be Continued.....