S03 E02: Chronicles of T'Avaya: Romulan Protocol

 

S03 E02: Chronicles of T'Avaya: Romulan Protocol

(This adventure was inspired by the campaign “Border Dispute” from These Are the Voyages: Mission Compendium Vol. 1.)

Mission log. Stardate 45135.3. Agent T’Avaya reporting. We are enroute to the Romulan Neutral Zone after receiving a subspace transmission from Lt. Gemma Albrecht of Starfleet Intelligence. A Starfleet ship, the USS Nightingale, has suffered a navigational error and entered the Romulan Neutral Zone. By the terms of the treaty with the Romulans, this may be considered an act of war. The Romulans have fired on the Nightingale, crippling her, and now claim the crew are prisoners of war. We have been ordered to assist the Nightingale and defuse the situation.

Aboard the runabout Shavokh, T’Avaya was reading the files from Lt. Albrecht, the liaison for her Starfleet Intelligence team. Lt. Albrecht had sent a series of files in her transmission that detailed the Nightingale and her crew, including several personnel files and info on Nova class ships in general. The Nova class was designed for science and/or survey missions. They had phaser arrays, photon torpedoes, and a low-strength tractor beam. They also had advanced sensor suites and high-resolution sensors. The Nightingale’s commanding officer, a human named Captain Laura Blake, was highly decorated and had had many missions involving the Romulans, something T’Avaya could relate to. The first officer was a human named Commander Alison Lewis, who was young, but with much potential.

T’Avaya took another sip of her beronga tea. The sweet taste had a soothing effect. Chio, her pet Kt’Chraann, was asleep in her lap. The other two members of her team, Miadere and Cassandra, joined her at the table. “Estimated arrival time at the Romulan Neutral Zone?” the Vulcan asked Cassandra. “Fifty-seven minutes,” Cassandra said. “In that case, we have time to review this video that the Nightingale’s commander sent to Starfleet Command.”

The Vulcan played the video on her pad. They could see that the bridge behind Commander Lewis was badly damaged. The disheveled commander spoke urgently. “This is a priority call to Starfleet Command. I am Commander Alison Lewis of the USS Nightingale. A navigational error has caused us to enter the Neutral Zone. We have exchanged fire with a Romulan warbird. Captain Blake and half the crew were killed. The ship has lost main power. Warp drive is offline. We have also lost shields, impulse drive, and weapons. Ship’s computer systems are down. The Romulans claim that we are prisoners of war and insist on taking our ship to Romulus for trial once their own ship is repaired. Please send help immediately!”

“A Starfleet ship entered the Neutral Zone due to navigational error?” said Cassandra. “If I were a Romulan, I would find that suspicious. But then, Starfleet should also be asking why a Romulan warbird was in the Neutral Zone.”

“Indeed,” said T’Avaya. “Starfleet ships seldom have navigational errors. It seems too coincidental that it happened when they were so close to the Neutral Zone. And we do not know why the warbird was there.”

“Why was the Nightingale in the area to begin with?” asked Miadere.

The Vulcan answered, “They were enroute to Contrudar for a survey mission. Their route took them the border of the Neutral Zone, in an area that is seldom traveled. There were no Starfleet ships in the vicinity because it is a low traffic area.”

“And why is Starfleet sending us?” asked Cassandra. “It seems like they would need a starship with a larger crew to treat their wounded and tow them back to Federation space.”

T’Avaya again answered, “Starfleet does not want the other patrol ships to leave their posts. There are no other ships close enough. Starfleet Intelligence is involved because they think the entire situation warrants it, as both ships wound up where they did not belong.”

All three women knew the situation was grave.

            Cassandra piloted the Shavokh to the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone. T’Avaya ordered her to hold position. They were in communication range of both the Nightingale and the warbird. They hailed the Starfleet ship. Commander Lewis answered the hail. She told them they still did not have warp drive or their computer systems working. Their sensors were also down, but Commander Mheven of the Romulan warbird said their warp drive was also down. The two ships had fired twice on each other.

            Miadere announced the Shavokh was being hailed by the warbird. T’Avaya told Commander Lewis to stand by. The Romulan Commander Mheven announced herself as commander of the IRW T’Varen. T’Avaya said she was on a Starfleet scout ship with civilians-at-large who were sent to assess and help the USS Nightingale. She told them a Starfleet ship was on the way. (It was a lie, but Mheven didn’t know that.) Commander Mheven said if T’Avaya’s ship entered the Zone, it would still be an act of war and that Nightingale and her crew were prisoners of war. T’Varen’s warp drive was down because it was hit by the Nightingale, but as soon as they got it repaired, they would tow the Nightingale to Romulus.

T’Avaya said she only had a crew of three and that they needed to dock their runabout in the Nightingale’s shuttle bay. Mheven said if anyone boarded the Starfleet ship, it would be seen as an act of aggression. T’Avaya accused Mheven and the warbird of being too close to the Zone, as if they were up to something, and Starfleet was going to investigate. The warbird had also committed an act of aggression that could be an act of war, not only by their presence in the Neutral Zone, but by firing first on a Starfleet ship that was on a peaceful mission. Plus, T’Avaya added, what could be the harm in letting her crew of only three people help the Nightingale? And if they could help with repairs, the warbird would expend less energy towing it home. Mheven paused. Then she agreed to let them enter the Neutral Zone. Mheven would not have fired on them, since reportedly their weapons had been damaged, but T’Avaya had wanted to be as diplomatic as possible in order to keep all options open.

Commander Mheven was proud that she had put on a good act. She had been willing to let the Vulcan and her team help the Starfleet ship all along. Good. She was thinking. Give them all the help you can. Then she spoke to one of her officers. “You believe he did not yet retrieve the data?”

“Their computer systems are down. He hasn’t activated his beacon, and our scans show he is alive and uninjured. He must need more time.”

“The Starfleet ship’s computers must be brought back online. We cannot go home empty handed,” Mheven said. She needed that data. She wished they could just beam over to the Starfleet ship. Her crew greatly outnumbered theirs. But the Starfleet crew had a better chance of getting their computers up without her people in their faces, threatening their lives. Mheven’s plans were in trouble. And she knew it.

 

Once they were onboard the Nightingale, T’Avaya told Lewis that Commander Mheven seemed nervous for a Romulan Commander. There must be more to the situation than the Romulans have told them.

Commander Alison Lewis explained to the Vulcan, T’Avaya, what happened to her ship. Lewis knew that T’Avaya and her team were from Starfleet Intelligence, though the Romulans did not know that. Their course to their new survey assignment took them along the edge of the Neutral Zone. They were ordered to take sensor sweeps of the Neutral Zone. The Nightingale had advanced sensor suites, so Starfleet wanted to take advantage of their route to their next mission. They thought they were on course, but a more detailed navigation check showed they had slid into the Neutral Zone. Before they could change course or raise shields, a Romulan D’deridex-class warbird decloaked and opened fire. The Nightingale returned fire. Nightingale took a direct hit to engineering and lost shields. Out of their crew compliment of eighty, nearly half were killed or injured in the attack. Among the dead was Captain Laura Blake. There was one more phaser blast from each ship before the Romulans hailed them and asked for a surrender. Lewis said she would surrender if she could apprise Starfleet of the situation. The Romulan commander agreed, and Lewis sent out a distress call.

Before Captain Blake died, she had gone to her quarters and activated Romulan Protocol, a new emergency procedure to ensure than an enemy could not claim too much Federation data should they capture the ship. It locked out and encrypted all data in the computer system. So most of the Nightingale’s computer systems were nonoperational due to the Romulan attack, and they were also locked and encrypted, though some manual control systems still worked. The protocol could be undone only by the captain’s orders or a Federation computer lab.

T'Avaya was familiar with the new protocol. However, the function of the protocol seemed to have been poorly tested by Starfleet programmers, as the current situation demonstrated. The ship had been crippled in the attack, and a computer lockdown only made it more difficult for the crew in a situation that was already tense.

T’Avaya asked Commander Lewis how the navigation system could have failed. Lewis said they did not have a chance to look into it before the warbird had decloaked, but she knew it was an unusual occurrence. T’Avaya didn’t say it at the moment, but she suspected sabotage. Perhaps Lewis suspected the same. She also asked what the warbird was doing in the Neutral Zone. Again, Lewis didn’t know. Furthermore, T’Avaya wondered to herself why the warbird did not have its shields up when the Nightingale fired. It seemed odd for a Romulan warbird. In fact, all of these issues seemed dubious to her.

Commander Lewis said the warp core had been shut down, as the systems that kept it in check were in dire need of repair. There was also damage that caused power surges across the ship that had blown out the power (EPS) conduits and impacted several secondary systems. T’Avaya told the commander that she was an engineer and could help with repairs in engineering. Not only that, but T’Avaya had done the original designs for the communications systems for all Nova class ships. Lewis was grateful for her help, as her chief engineer and many of the engineering team had died in the attack. T’Avaya ordered Cassandra, who was a weapons expert, to accompany her to engineering. She ordered the third member of her team, Miadere, who was a biochemist, to sickbay to help heal the wounded.

Since the turbolifts were nonfunctional, T'Avaya and Cassandra went to engineering by way of ladders and Jeffries Tubes. They found Lt. Shavreth, a female Andorian, working on the warp core safety systems. If she could get the safety systems working, then the warp core could be repaired without fear of a breach. T’Avaya asked Shavreth if she would like some help with the safety systems, as Cassandra went over to help Lt. Dallon, a male unjoined Trill, repair the phaser banks and torpedo launchers. Dallon was the navigation officer, but he had some experience with weapons systems, and with so many deaths, engineering was short handed.

Shavreth told T’Avaya to go work in the impulse drive. T’Avaya said she thought the warp safety systems were more urgent, and it usually took at least two people to recalibrate the power cells. “I don’t need your help, Vulcan,” Shavreth said. T’Avaya’s expression did not change as she said, “Indeed.”

Cassandra said to Shavreth, “what’s your problem? You don’t like strangers?” T’Avaya had not wanted to push, as she knew some Andorians still carried the old beliefs—that Vulcans and Andorians could never be friends. But Cassandra was T’Avaya’s friend, and did not want to let it go.

Shavreth said, “What you don’t know, human, is that this ship had eighty people. Four of them Vulcans. Forty crewman died in the battle with the Romulan ship. You know how many of the forty were Vulcans? None. That just seems too convenient.”

T’Avaya found her statements to be highly illogical. “You are saying the Romulans fired on this ship, and knew exactly where to fire in order to kill half the crew and not harm any Vulcans? That would require great precision on their part, not to mention knowing the locations of crewmembers.”

“The Vulcans probably knew where to go to be safe. They knew the Romulans were coming. Vulcans and Romulans can’t be trusted.”

“Oh, I can tell who can’t be trusted around here,” Cassandra said, as she was tapping manual controls for the torpedo launchers to look for mechanical damage. T’Avaya walked ten feet away, over to the impulse drive controls to work on their repairs.

 

Lt. Tellek, a male Vulcan, told Commander Lewis he had important experimental scientific data in the ship’s computer. The data was important to his entire science team, not just to him as ship’s geologist. Therefore, he insisted, it was important to get the ship’s computer systems working again. Commander Lewis agreed to let him work on it. Lt. Carial, a male Tellarite who was working on secondary systems (lighting, replicators, internal scanners, and other minor systems), agreed to help Tellek. The Vulcan wanted to say that he didn’t need help. But he was a geologist. They would get suspicious if they knew just how good he was with computers.

Tellek and Carial went to the main computer core. They saw that both the ODN and the backups had been destroyed in the battle. Plus, they knew the captain had implemented the Romulan Protocol before she died. That meant that once the computer systems were functional, all but the most rudimentary data would be encrypted. But if they could get the computers working, they could get more manual functions back.

 

            In sickbay, Miadere was greeted by the chief medical officer, Lt. Commander G’Trel, a male Vulcan. The sickbay was undamaged, but it was overrun with wounded from all over the ship. Miadere said she was a biochemist, but had also been trained in some medical procedures. G’Trel said the surgical systems all worked, but with ship’s computer systems down, automation was gone. That meant scans had to be done more carefully. They were unable to activate the Emergency Medical Hologram.

Miadere started applying first aid to some of the wounded. If there were some people with minor wounds that she could get back up and working, those people could do more to help repair the ship. As she was applying a bandage to the lacerated head of a crewman, someone mentioned the bodies in the cargo bay. They said they had started a makeshift morgue in a cargo bay because there was no other place to store the bodies at the time. There was an ensign with a headwound who told Miadere that Ensign Costallan had gone to the cargo bay for an engineering toolkit and collapsed from dehydration. Miadere said she would find Costallan and help her.

 

T'Avaya was able to get the impulse drive working. At least now the ship would be able to leave the Neutral Zone. She saw that Lt. Tyrell, a male Andorian, had gotten the partial shields back up. Lt. Shavreth had completed working on the warp core safety systems and had started work on the warp core. Lt. Moro, a female Tellarite, was assisting him. Repair on the warp core was not especially difficult, but it was time-consuming and needed to be done carefully.

            Lt. Shavreth called Commander Lewis from her comm badge. (Everyone on the Nightingale could still use their comm badges, which worked on an independent computer system, as long as they were using intraship communications.) She let the commander know what systems they had fixed. Lewis told them they were doing a good job and to continue. She told them to raise shields as best they could. The Romulan ship claimed their weapons had been damaged, but one never knew if they were lying, or when the weapons would be fixed, or worse, if another warbird might show up. But still, Lewis said she didn’t want to use impulse drive to leave just yet. She felt there was something fishy going on with the Romulans, and she wanted to wait them out and see what she could learn. Lt. Shavreth closed the comm channel.

Commander Lewis sat on the bridge and started wondering if she was in over her head. She wasn’t new to command, but this was her most harrowing experience in command so far. A navigation error at the worst time possible. A Romulan warbird showed up out of nowhere, whose commander seems to be playing the long game. And the captain was dead. Pull yourself together, Alison. She thought to herself. This is no time for self-doubt. The crew is counting on you. All of the Federation is counting on you. The last thing you need is to buckle under pressure and start an interstellar war with the Romulans, or to get your crew captured.

 

When Miadere got to the cargo bay, she found it hard to look at all the dead bodies. There was so much blood that it was staggering and heartbreaking. She found Ensign Costallan right inside the door. She was barely conscious. Miadere did a quick tricorder scan and gave her an injection of daxatrose. Costallan quickly recovered and said she was heading back to engineering to work on the propulsion systems.

Miadere realized that with Costallan having collapsed inside the cargo bay, she could have been taken for one of the dead bodies that had been brought there. She decided to scan all the bodies to make sure they were really dead. She turned on her tricorder and started walking among the bodies. It was a horrible sight, but she held herself together. This was a necessary task. It appeared there was no mistake. All the corpses really were corpses.

She happened to find the body of Captain Blake, identifiable by the four rank pips on her collar. She had a nasty wound on her head. Miadere had been told Captain Blake died when a bulkhead fell on her when she was in her quarters implementing the Romulan Protocol. But the tricorder scan showed the captain did not die from a head wound. The actual cause of death was asphyxiation. She did a visual examination of the captain’s neck and found marks on her neck consistent with strangulation. There were also wounds that could be from physical combat. The crew had been too busy with the Romulans to properly determine a cause of death. She knew the captain’s death was not an accident. It was murder.

 

T'Avaya asked Tellek and Carial how the work was coming on the computer systems. They said they had not made any progress. She asked if they needed help. Lt. Tellek said they did not need help. Since he seemed very sure of himself, she let them be. Even though she was a computer expert herself, she let Tellek and Carial work on the computer systems for now, so that she could investigate other problems the ship might have.

Then she got a call from Miadere on her Starfleet Intelligence communicator. She answered the call. Miadere asked if she was alone. The Vulcan walked down an empty corridor and said she was not where anyone could hear her. Miadere told her what she found about the captain’s death. T’Avaya said she would look into it. She closed the channel. They were already in a dire situation, but to find out the captain had been murdered was much worse. Why would someone kill the captain? Perhaps, T’Avaya thought, it had something to do with Blake’s past with the Romulans? She had no answers at this time. She needed to get the computers back online. If she could do that, Commander Lewis would be able to access the captain’s logs. Then she decided to check into something else.

T’Avaya went to the bridge and checked the navigation system. The ship’s problems had started with a navigational error. Even with the computer system down, she was able to see a record showing the ship had been on course to Contrudar when it entered the Zone. She examined the station and determined there was nothing wrong with the navigation console. So either the navigational sensor array was faulty or the officer on duty had been in error. She knew she had been introduced to the navigation officer, Lt. Dallon, when she was in engineering. She went back to engineering to speak with him.

When she found Lt. Dallon, he was helping Cassandra with the weapons systems. She pulled Dallon to the side. Lt. Dallon was a male unjoined Trill. He had always been an exceptional officer, from what she had heard. However, he did not seem amenable to T’Avaya’s questions. He said he needed to go back to his repair duties. He did not feel that being questioned was helping anyone. She was disappointed he was not willing to talk to her, but she let him go back to the repairs. She found it difficult to tell if he was hiding something. He had done a position check right after entering the Zone, which had given the ship precious moments to prepare before the warbird had shown up. Was he feeling guilty because he had made an error? Or had he steered the ship into the Zone on purpose? Then she pulled Cassandra aside.

Cassandra said she had only engaged in casual conversation with Dallon. They were too busy working on repairs to concern themselves with anything else. With that, T’Avaya decided she had another task for Cassandra. She ordered her to inspect the navigation sensors. In order to do that, Cassandra would need to don an EV suit and go outside the ship. Cassandra was the offspring of genetically engineered humans, giving her much better ease in difficult environments and a much more likelihood of success than anyone else.

 

Cassandra opened the hatch and floated outside the ship. Even though she had no training in this sort of thing, unlike Starfleet officers, she felt very comfortable floating around in a spacesuit. She did several somersaults in the zero gravity. She had done gymnastics as a child, and loved the sensation of turning her body all different ways. She floated around the ship until she found the main deflector dish. The navigation array was above it. All the scanning systems outside the ship met at this juncture. She opened the box that contained the array. There were several isolinear chips that enabled the array to adjust the scan cycle, sensitivity, and coverage of the navigational sensors. The isolinear chips had been rearranged. Someone had to have done it manually. The array had been sabotaged.

She opened a communication to T’Avaya and used her Starfleet Intelligence tricorder to take readings and transmit them. T’Avaya, alone in a conference room, studied the readings. She and Cassandra had studied the workings of Nova-class ships in preparation for this mission. She could tell that the array had been altered to lengthen its scan cycle. The system was only checking its position every few minutes instead of constantly. As nothing was actually wrong, the fault remained undetected. She ordered Cassandra to put the isolinear chips back in their correct places, then to come back aboard the ship.

 

T'Avaya went back to the bridge. Commander Lewis was there, looking exhausted. The commander had not eaten or slept in over a day. As T’Avaya arrived, she heard Lewis receive a call from Lt. Shavreth in engineering that most of the systems had been restored. They had sensors, limited shields, and limited warp drive. T’Avaya saw Lewis’s instant look of relief. Then Lewis ordered a scan of the Romulan warbird, but with a narrow bandwidth, so the Romulans wouldn’t detect the scan. The scan showed only minor hull damage. The warbird had suffered no damage to shields or warp drive. Even if the warbird had been partially damaged and repaired, Nightingale’s scans would show that. So why had the Romulans lied? They must have needed an excuse to stay in the area. But why? Was there something on the Nightingale that they wanted?

T'Avaya asked to speak with Lewis in private. They went into the Ready Room. T’Avaya told her that Miadere had discovered that the captain had been murdered and that Cassandra had discovered the navigational array had been sabotaged. So there was a saboteur and a murderer on board. Most likely the same person, but more importantly, who and why? What was their objective? And it must have something to do with the lying Romulan commander. T’Avaya had experience in Romulan intelligence operations. She said it was likely the Romulans had a spy aboard the Nightingale, and they were staying put until they could either retrieve their operative or get intel from the operative. The sabotage was obviously to get the Nightingale into the Neutral Zone. And the reason for killing the captain was probably because she found out something she shouldn’t have—about the sabotage, or the fact that there was a spy aboard her ship, or even perhaps the identity of the spy.

 

Lt. Tellek sent Lt. Carial away to work on internal scanners. They had finally gotten the computer systems back up. So now Tellek needed to be alone. He did not report that computers were up, as he had told Carial he would do. Instead, he inserted a data chip and started downloading. The data he was downloading would be encrypted. There was nothing he could do about that. The Romulan Protocol was still in effect. But at least he would have the data. The Tal Shiar had people who would be able to decrypt it. His mission was to get the data. He had gotten it. He had been an undercover Tal Shiar agent in Starfleet for eight long years, two of those on the Nightingale. He was finally going to return home. Now the Romulan Star Empire would know the nature of the Federation forces lined up along the Neutral Zone. By conducting many sensor sweeps along the border, the science and survey vessel Nightingale had been privy to a large amount of highly useful data. While a military vessel might have proven more useful, the data would have been more secure and more difficult to obtain. It had only been two days ago when he informed his handler that he could get this data. The Tal Shiar decided this would be the perfect end to his deep cover mission. This was the data the Empire had wanted for years; everything about Starfleet’s deployment along the Neutral Zone. Now the Empire could plan their attack.

Thirty minutes later, the data transfer had completed. He put the data chip in his pocket. Then he used his Tal Shiar beacon to emit a short pulse on a specific wavelength that the IRW T’Varen would be looking for. Now he just needed to wait. Commander Mheven knew the plan. Everything I do, I do for Romulus, Tellek said proudly to himself.

Then a voice from behind him said, “Put your hands up and turn around slowly.” Tellek obeyed. When he turned around, he saw T’Avaya holding a phaser at him. “You are a Romulan spy,” she said. “You just downloaded data about Starfleet’s initiative along the Neutral Zone.” Tellek knew it was no use trying to deny it. “And you. Starfleet Intelligence—I presume?”

“Correct.”

“I knew it all along. No doubt your two cohorts are also Starfleet Intelligence. It’s the only reason they would send you and not one of their over bloated starships to the rescue. No matter,” he smiled. “I have already transmitted the data to the T’Varen. It will be decrypted in no time.”

She knew he was bluffing. She was monitoring his transmissions to the warbird. He had sent a short energy burst just before she arrived. It was too short to have been a data stream. It had to be a location beacon, telling them his exact location on the ship. And, she knew he had to have the data stored on a chip.

Tellek continued, “How did you know I was a spy and that I downloaded the data?”

“I ran into Lt. Carial on his way to engineering. He told me you had the computer systems back online. But I knew you hadn’t reported it to Commander Lewis. Then I ran internal sensors and found you were here. And, I found that you had downloaded something. Now. Hand over the data chip,” she said. He only stared at her. She still had the phaser pointed at him. She touched the computer controls and tapped something in. “What are you doing?” he asked. Then T’Avaya heard a loud “BOOM!”. She thought she saw a flash of light--then, something hit her on the head and knocked her unconscious.

 

The operations officer reported that the Romulan ship had just emitted a weak tractor beam signal aimed at the Nightingale. Lewis left the Ready Room and entered the bridge. Then, suddenly, the officer reported there had just been an explosion on deck five, the same area the Romulan tractor beam had targeted.

Lewis asked how many casualties. Apparently, just one: Lt. Tellek. T’Avaya had also been close to the explosion and was injured and taken to sickbay. Then the Nightingale received a hail from the Romulan ship. Lewis ordered her tactical officer to put it onscreen. Commander Mheven appeared on the main viewscreen. By this point, Lewis was furious with the Romulans.

“What is the meaning of this?” she yelled at Mheven. “You sent a tractor beam that caused an explosion and killed one of my people!”

Mheven was unusually calm. She was no longer nervous like she had been before. “I apologize, Commander Lewis. We detected a structural failure in your ship’s hull. There was no time to warn you. We used a tractor beam to try to maintain cohesion in the hull. Unfortunately, we were too late. My condolences, commander. We were trying to keep the explosion from happening.”

“You used a tractor beam at the same time there just happened to be an explosion, and you try to tell me you were trying to prevent it? That hardly seems likely. You offered no help with any of our ship’s repairs.”

“I assure you, commander, we do not wish to cause a diplomatic incident. In fact, we have finally repaired our warp drive and are returning to Romulan space. In consideration for all your troubles, we will leave you in peace. Good day, commander.” And the Romulan ended the transmission.

“Who does she think she is!?!” Commander Lewis said. “Get her back onscreen immediately!”

“The Romulans are powering up their engines, sir. They are leaving.”

“The audacity!!” said Lewis.

“We have limited warp drive, sir,” said the tactical officer. “Should we try to follow them?”

Lewis tried to calm down. She did not think her ship had sufficient warp capability at this time to catch up with them. “No,” she said. She ordered a security team to investigate the explosion. Navigation officer Lt. Dallon, who was back at his station, asked if she wanted to leave the Neutral Zone now. Lewis did not want to leave until she knew what was going on. But then, there was nothing more she could do here. She thought they should get the ship out before they ran into any more warbirds and had another “incident”. She ordered the ship back to Federation space.

 

T'Avaya woke up in sickbay to see Commander Lewis and Dr. G’Trel staring down at her. She looked around and saw Miadere and Cassandra also standing beside her medical bed. The doctor told her she had suffered a mild concussion and would make a full recovery. Then the doctor asked her how she felt. “I am fine,” she said. “What happened to Tellek?”

Just like a Vulcan, thought Lewis. Always down to business.

“Tellek was a Romulan spy,” said Lewis. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

T’Avaya nodded, not surprised that they had figured it out by the time she had recovered.

“Unfortunately,” Lewis said, “he’s back on the Romulan warbird, headed back for Romulan space. AND, he has our data on Starfleet’s initiative along the Neutral Zone.”

“When I found out he had the data, I tried to stop him. But then the explosion happened,” T’Avaya said. “How did he cause the explosion?”

Lewis told her what their investigation had revealed. “Tellek set a relay to explode just at the right time. He sent a short pulse to the warbird from a Tal Shiar beacon he had. The pulse let the Romulans know his exact location on our ship. Then they sent a narrow, concentrated tractor beam to the origin location of the pulse. They sent a transporter signal to the same location and beamed him over. The transporter signal was masked by the tractor beam. The relay exploded immediately after he was transported away. At first, we thought Tellek had died in the explosion. When I hailed Commander Mheven, she gave me some story about how her ship had detected a structural failure in our ship’s hull, and she sent the tractor beam to reinforce it, and the structural failure was so weak there was no time to hail us. And then, of course, she said the explosion happened before the tractor beam could maintain the cohesion of the structural failure.”

That was a maneuver the Romulans had used before. T’Avaya recalled reading a report of a warbird retrieving their undercover agent known to Starfleet as T’Pel, by faking a transporter accident so that Starfleet would think she had died, while she secretly beamed aboard a Romulan warbird. In that case, Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise had discovered their deception, but it had been too late to recover the Romulan agent. Just as it was too late now to recover Tellek and all the data he had stolen. She still had to ask, “I know that the shields were not fully operational, so a transporter beam could have been used, but how do you know they beamed Tellek away, and that he wasn’t killed in the explosion and his body completely vaporized?”

Lewis answered, “Well, internal sensors are back online. So are the computer systems, thanks to Tellek. Which, now we know he only did that so he could retrieve his data. And then there’s the Romulan Protocol, which had encrypted all our data. But thanks to YOU,” she looked knowingly at T’Avaya, “it’s all decrypted now.”

T’Avaya still waited patiently for her question about Tellek to be answered. She knew that once the crew had access to the decrypted computer systems, they could trace the decryption source back to her.

Lewis continued, “The sensors had been fixed a few minutes before the Romulans started their tractor beam. As soon as the sensors were online, I had ordered my operations officer to keep running an active internal scan, as a means of testing them and sending power to the external sensors. With the discovery that the computers were up and decrypted—which happened because my crack officer Lt. Carial was constantly checking—we were able to check sensor logs and see that the Romulans sent a transporter beam to Tellek’s exact location a half second before the explosion.”

Miadere said, “We’re just glad you weren’t hurt in the explosion.”

“Yeah. Because if we lost you, we would have to break in a new leader,” Cassandra chimed in.

“That would be a shame indeed,” said T’Avaya.

“I take it these two have to keep you in line?” Lewis said to T’Avaya.

“She wouldn’t know a Romulan from a pet Targ without us,” Miadere said, laughingly.

Commander Lewis was glad to see the easy camaraderie among the three women. She had been told that Starfleet Intelligence dubbed their team the “Shadow Centurions”. She thought that was a little ominous. As if all intel teams had to have a dramatic code name. Still, she was very grateful for the work they had done to help her.

“So how did you lift the Romulan Protocol encryption?” Lewis asked the Vulcan woman. T’Avaya said, “Starfleet Intelligence gave me the decryption codes in case I ever needed them. It is part of the standard arsenal for agents who specialize in Romulan missions. I implemented the decryption sequence right before I was injured in the explosion, but AFTER Tellek had downloaded the data.”

“So WE didn’t get the decryption codes?” Cassandra asked.

“I am your team leader,” the Vulcan said. “I was the only one given the codes, for security reasons.”

 

/--------------------------------------------------------/

Commander Lewis and T’Avaya considered the events that had just happened. Lt. Tellek had been a loyal officer on this ship for two years. Lewis had considered him a friend. She had never suspected he was a spy.

She ordered his medical records from Dr. G’Trel. She also checked the computer records for his whereabouts for the last few days. She suspected, but had to be sure, that he was the one who tampered with the navigational array and the one who murdered the captain.

Ship’s logs showed that Lt. Tellek had visited Captain Blake’s quarters five minutes before her death. No one else had visited her that day. So Tellek was the last person to see her alive. Further scans of Blake’s body showed Tellek’s DNA on her neck. So he had been the one who strangled her. Her death occurred seconds after the implementation of the Romulan Protocol. He must have found out she was implementing it and tried to stop her, or killed her in frustration when he realized it was too late.

A look at Tellek’s medical file showed he rarely had physicals. He always used the excuse that Vulcans were always healthy. No one had done a deep enough scan to know if he was actually a Romulan. His file did indicate his paternal grandfather was Romulan. So, Lewis thought, that was how he would be able to explain it if he ever WAS accused of being a Romulan. Vulcan and Romulan physiologies were very similar. It would have required a deep scan to know which was which. He could have been a Romulan disguised as a Vulcan, or a Vulcan who was a Romulan sympathizer. The latter was rare, but not unheard of. But transporter records would be able to tell. She would have Dr. G’Trel do an investigation. Even transporter records would have to be researched to tell the difference between a Vulcan and a Romulan. The two were so similar that a transporter could not be programmed to flag a Romulan only.

Furthermore, they had not found any incriminating evidence in Tellek’s quarters aboard the Nightingale.

Lewis did find a period of time when part of the ship’s external sensors had been disengaged for “testing”. At that same time, there were no ship’s records of the whereabouts of Lt. Tellek. His disappearance from ship’s sensors could have been found before if someone had been looking, but it was always possible for someone to disappear from the sensor log and get away with it if no one actually checked the logs. So that must have been the time when Tellek was outside the ship rearranging the isolinear chips to cause the navigational error.

 

T'Avaya had a word again with Lt. Dallon. No one had had a chance to tell him yet about what Cassandra had found in the navigational array. He was surprised. He said there was no way he would have known that from his console. T’Avaya saw how relieved he was. She asked him why he had been so nervous when she talked to him before. He said he had felt guilty about the navigational error. He thought it could have been his fault. He was scared he may have read the readings wrong, or simply missed something. She told him she understood. She thought to herself about how emotions can cause insecurities. But she had also questioned herself at times. It was all a part of living life and doing the best you could do.

Dallon had been there during the confrontation T’Avaya had had with Lt. Shavreth in engineering. He said he was sorry he hadn’t gotten involved. He had never cared for Shavreth. T’Avaya said she understood. She had dealt with the likes of Shavreth before. Some Andorians were like that. Others were much more open-minded.

 

T'Avaya had one last word with Commander Lewis before the Shavokh left the shuttlebay. The Vulcan said Starfleet Intelligence would comb through all the reports of this incident. They would certainly look into the past of Lt. Tellek, or whatever his real name was, and see how much intelligence information he had stolen and given to the Romulans during his eight years of service in Starfleet. Of course, all the evidence against him so far was circumstantial. Tal Shiar agents were well trained. He was not the first Romulan undercover agent in Starfleet, and would probably not be the last.

As for future relations with the Romulans, it didn’t look promising. The Federation and the Romulans had been allies during the Dominion War. But since the war ended, the Romulans went back to their secretive and distrustful ways. They had never fully trusted the Federation, and the alliance had simply been one of convenience for them. And now the Romulans knew everything about Starfleet’s military initiative along the Neutral Zone. Even though it would take time for the Romulans to form and implement an invasion plan, Starfleet would have to make changes quickly along the Neutral Zone, including sending reinforcements.

Lewis thanked T’Avaya for her help and the help of her team. T’Avaya complimented Lewis on her command skills and said she would make an excellent captain. Lewis said she hoped to honor the memory of Captain Blake by being the best captain she possibly could. If Starfleet decided to put her in command, Lewis had been unsure if the change from second-in-command to command was one she was ready for. T’Avaya quoted the Vulcan philosopher T’Mee’an, “Change is the essential process of existence.” Lewis agreed with her. This change had been unexpected and unwelcome, but she had to embrace it. It was part of her life now. T’Avaya had no doubt she would do well.

 

-by the Honorable Kavura, 1/13/25

 

Thank you for reading my Star Trek Adventures: Captain’s Log mission report. Captain’s Log is a solo role-playing game by Modiphius Entertainment.