Monsters on the Wall

Posted on Mon Dec 14th, 2020 @ 9:32am by Lieutenant Xia Idris & Centurion Nancy Gable
Edited on on Mon Dec 14th, 2020 @ 9:33am

2,372 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Chapter II: Spreading our Wings
Location: Medbay
Timeline: 238701.05/Afternoon

Gable was monitoring their transplant patient from a discrete distance when the medbay doors opened. She didn't recognize the new arrival, but Raven was recruiting new crew, so that wasn't terribly alarming. The doctor still regarded her with caution though; after as long as she'd been out on the rough end of the galaxy, it didn't take much to recognize the type. The outfit alone was a giveaway, but even if she'd been in something much more conservative, the attitude came through. Add in that she was obviously Betazoid, and in an age range to have lived through the occupation...

Great, another one, she thought, but nodded at the newcomer. "Are you looking for a doctor?"

Xia wore a simple white tank top that was cut off just above her navel, and her black combat pants and boots, with a set of black suspenders where she had holstered a small phaser and a combat knife. Her hair was down at the moment, hiding the tattoo on her neck.

“Yes, I am,” she said, offering an attractive smile to the dark-skinned Human. “I’m new crew, and I figured if I ever got hurt, I’d want the local sawbones to have my medical files on hand.” She pulled a data rod out of her pocket. “Might need a converter for it,” she admitted. Romulans used different data storage technology than the Federation, after all. She was already having to get used to the differences with Romulan tech. Instead of carousing on the station at night, she tended to hole up and study the technical schematics. She hadn’t lied to the captain about her knowledge of Romulan technology; it had just been a while since she’d had to interface with it, and she needed some brushing up. It helped that her telepathic abilities made it faster, enabling her to quietly tap into the more knowledgeable crew around her, but it wasn’t the same as having the knowledge readily available herself.

“Are you who I see, or is there someone else?”

"Yes, I'm Dr. Gable, the CMO here," she said, taking the proffered data rod and walking over to a terminal. "I wish everyone thought ahead like this. I should be able to read it in. One thing you can say about mercenary outfits is that they work with all kinds, so there's generally multiple ways to handle new data. Ah, here we go." Nancy tapped the selection screen and inserted the rod into the reader. "While we wait on that, do you have any medical concerns or issues you want me to be particularly aware of?”

Xia considered. “The usual Betazoid concerns with psionic events,” she finally allowed. “Overwhelming, susceptibility, that kind of thing. Though I am trained to deal with them better than most of my kind,” she allowed, without going into the specifics of her special training. “Otherwise I am healthy. The medical evaluation is about a year old, though, so I suppose I am due for another soon.”

'Trained better,' Nancy wondered for a moment if she was like... but no, this girl would have barely been a teen by the war's end. "Why don't we take care of that now," she said, and nodded to the biobed. "A current baseline would be a good thing what with the amount of trouble this crew seems to get into."

Xia climbed onto the bed, sitting a moment as she tied her hair up out of the way, revealing the tattoo in black ink on the back of her neck of a circle with three wavy lines inside. Then she laid back on the bed to be scanned. “So I should expect to be getting into a lot of trouble?” she asked.

Gable glimpsed the tattoo, but while she was familiar with most of the ones associated with those who had formed the Resistance on Betazed, this wasn't a design she knew. Of course, there were thousands of symbols in the galaxy that people chose to put on their bodies; most of them only had meaning for the person wearing them.

"Depends on how you define 'a lot'," the doctor remarked as she started the scan. "But I only joined the crew a few weeks ago, and have already had to patch people up three times from various fights."

“That does seem...excessive,” Xia admitted. “I haven’t felt any excess of aggression the short time I have been on board.”

Xia’s medical records indicated she was very physically fit. She obviously exercised regularly, and bore the usual stress markers of that kind of activity. There were also indications of healed bone fractures and scarring indicative of torture, though most of that had been cosmetically healed on the surface. Her brain scans indicated heightened activity in the areas associated with Betazoid telepathic ability, and an adjacent part of her psionic cortex that was usually dormant or had little activity in most Betazoids. That area was also larger than in most of her species.

"All of it was fights off the ship. On board people mostly get along," Nancy replied, as she studied the medical records coming up. Hmm. Where had she seen that before? "I hope that will continue. Word of warning: Romulans tend to get very...cranky... about having their minds touched without explicit permission. You might be able to manage it without most of them knowing, but not all. They are cousins to Vulcans so some have latent telepathic senses, and the ones who've served with Remans have been known to develop a sensitivity to it."

“Trust me, I’m not looking to go poking around where I’m unwanted,” Xia said. “Surface thoughts are often enough warning. People broadcast more than they think.”

Xia squirmed slightly on the bed. “Not as comfortable as Federation sickbay,” she said, with an amused smile to Nancy. “So what brought you to a motley crew of mostly Romulans?” she asked.

"Romulans aren't big on comfort," Nancy remarked drolly, marking some notes on her PADD. "As for me, I joined Picard's rescue mission and resigned when he did. Except that I stayed out here instead of retiring to sulk in a vineyard. Me and few others joined refugee focused NGOs, or hooked up with less official groups." She shrugged. "Not a particularly unusual story for ex-Starfleet in this part of the galaxy.

"How about you? Based on your readings, I'd have thought you might have better job offers." She looked directly at Xia; there was no point in beating around the bush with someone who picked up thoughts so easily. "Unless this is cover for another job."

Xia smiled. “Circles within circles?” she queried. “How very Romulan. But no. Did some freelance work, a lot of it with Blackwatch. But after some...promotions, my team was breaking up, and I didn’t want to break in a new team.” Her gaze grew distant. “I let them get too close. I needed a change, something less...personal that still paid well.” She refocused, looking back up at Nancy. “It hurts less when you lose someone that way. And in this line of work…”

"It probably helped the Romulans accept me, but I picked that way of thinking up in Starfleet. I've seen more Section 31 fallout than I care to think about," Nancy responded tersely. What the woman was implying about loss might be real, but she was skeptical. She'd seen too much to give sympathy too easily, especially to an operator. "Can't say I have any better opinion of Blackwatch. But as far as emotional distance goes, that's something doctors learn early on if they don't want to burn out."

“Section 31 was before my time,” Xia said. “They were dismantled before I ever started this business.” Oh, she couldn’t help knowing about Artemis Pierce -- the founder of Blackwatch -- and his association with the covert organization. It had been all over the news, after all, very public -- and then minimal punishment beyond a dishonorable discharge. Prison time reduced to time served. But that was ancient history, and he was back in Starfleet now in the captain’s chair of the USS Nemesis a decade later.

“One thing I learned during my time in occupied Betazed is that Starfleet is often too concerned in not getting its lily white gloves dirty,” Xia told Nancy. “Sometimes you have to do things for yourselves, and not wait for the cavalry to come running.” She gave a wry smile. “You could say Crell Mossett was one of my best teachers.”

"'Dismantled'," Nancy hmphed. "I've heard that five or six times before. The Section is the organizational equivalent of the Phage. Every time you think you have a way to eradicate it, it adapts and comes back stronger. And from what I heard, Blackwatch was just another mutated strain." She shook her head, thinking of how many of the times Rogers or one of her friends had wound up in medbay because a supposedly defunct Sec31 had reared its ugly head again. "But I understand why it keeps coming back. Sometimes the guy in the white hat is not going to win the shoot out unless someone is up on a roof to take out the bad guy in the street." Her mouth went a little sideways. "Or at least the guys the black hat also has on the roofs."

“Blackwatch is a licensed and public private security and intelligence company,” Xia said. Of course, she was fairly certain not every mission she was sent on was above board or put out for public scrutiny, but that was what such organizations were for, to allow Starfleet and the Federation to have plausible deniability, though a good part of the company also handled contracting services with Starfleet, and private protection details to celebrities and politicians. “But yes, you’re right. The universe doesn’t play fair, so why should we have one hand tied behind our back? There are those of us on Betazed that learned that we don’t want to stick our heads back in the sand.”

"If you say so," Gable remarked flatly, barely resisting an eye roll at the idea that fig leaf to legality meant anything with respect to Blackwatch's actual backers, aims, or methods. But the kid seemed to need to believe it, and it wasn't a debate Nancy saw a worth having. "Sometimes taking the high road ultimately gives you more advantage," she said, thinking of how for all she saw Arnason's attitude as naive, his refusal to abandon his ideals had persuaded a Klingon he was the one acting honorably, and that had made quite the difference. "But seldom in a shooting war. Betazed was hardly the only place where that was learned."

“I wouldn’t say the lesson was learned that well,” Xia admitted. “Only some seemed to have learned that.” She shook her head. “I tried the Starfleet way, and they seemed just as naive. And even they pulled out of the Romulan evacuation,” she pointed out.

Nancy made a noise in her throat. "Ironic then that what made me leave Starfleet was them being all hardheaded pragmatic rather than sticking to their ideals. Ironic too that you see things that way when Starfleet being pragmatic was exactly why liberating Betazed was held off so long. I was a cadet, but assigned to a combat vessel toward the end of the war. Losses were heavy and, trust me, no one was being naive about it being a war of survival." She closed out her scans. "But while I am all for fighting dirty when necessary, honor means something to me. It may not be obvious, but I'm part Klingon. I was alienated from that side when I was young because for a long time Klingon society considered hybrids abominations, but that changed during the war, in large part because of the way Starfleet fought, with both the total commitment of warriors and with honor."

“I guess when you have electrodes stuck into your brain, you don’t really have that luxury,” Xia said with a shrug. “I survived. That’s all that mattered to me, and better than what happened to many. I won’t let it happen again,” she said coolly. “The sheep can sleep because the sheepdogs are on the watch for wolves. Sometimes you need the monster on the wall to prevent the worse monsters from getting in the closet or under the bed. I don’t have the luxury of naivete.”

Xia sighed. “Are we done? You got what you need, Doctor?” she asked Nancy.

The Klingon in her, and maybe the Starfleet officer too, wanted to say that honor is never a luxury. It was something you held to no matter what you faced, or you never had it to begin with. Nancy didn't say it though. She'd seen enough torture survivors to pity this one. It was always the ones who thought it had made them hard who were the most broken, and Xia maybe more than most. It sounded as though Blackwatch had picked her up and used her need for some sense of power and control after that trauma to make her willing weapon in their hands. So she had never gotten the help she should have, and now would refuse and deny rather than admit any such need. Like Rogers, she'd been taught to think of herself as a monster, but in a way that fed her ego and gave her the sense of power that she had been so ruthlessly denied when those electrodes were being stuck in her brain.

But even if she thought Xia would accept help, Nancy was a doctor, not a counselor. There was no point in doing more than noting it and keeping an eye out. In her experience, the monster on the wall was protection only as long as it didn't turn on you. "Yes, we're done." She handed the data rod back. "I have what I need."

Xia nodded, and pushed herself off the bed, leaving without another word.

FIN

Lieutenant Xia Idris
Chief Communications Officer

Centurion Nancy Gable
Chief Medical Officer

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