What Is The Price Of Truth?
Posted on Sat Jun 29th, 2024 @ 1:03am by Commander Arianna Frost & Ferrofax & Captain Akiva ben-Avram
Mission:
S1E6: Where Skies End
Location: The Secret Lab
Timeline: MD 5 - Following **It Takes An Orchestra To Play A Symphony**
Getting from the Bay to the Lab could not take longer in Arianna's mind as she took the standard route there, making sure she acted casual and without raising too many eyebrows. The scene from mere moments ago kept replaying in her head. She was analyzing every word, every mannerism in her head, trying to garner as much as possible from it.
The conclusion she'd reached was that the reason he knew about it was a) because he was keeping surveillance on them as she'd originally predicted and/or b) his people were behind the turning of one Khaiel d'Hikatsi.
"Ferrofax, secure and isolate the lab." She said as she stepped in, having gone through the security process just seconds ago to gain entry.
"You say that like it's one size fits all command," Ferrofax muttered, his voice moving from one piece of lab equipment to the next. "But in reality what you mean to say is create a useful facsimile of reality for these devices to report so that our activities remain clandestine. Isolating everything at once would be a rather large red flag. So I am weaving a useful bit of fiction so that the central monitoring AI, which is laughable by the by, is none the wiser."
There was a pause.
"You can say thanking you, can't you?"
Arianna blinked as her mind processed his words, still tangled up in the encounter from before. "Yes, sorry. Thanking you."
To say she was a bit shakey and stressed was a huge understatement, but there was no time to dwell on it. DNA needed comparison and Taskmaster needed identifying. Now.
Ari placed the PADD he'd given her on a scanning dock, then she went over to a side panel and tapped in a few commands. With a whoosh and a whirl a side compartment opened up, slight mist/smoke like formation escaping it. The air around it grew a little colder.
There was a single vial of blood inside the small cold storage unit.
This vial of blood had been obtained after the discovery of the true nature of the borg butlers and had been sitting in cold storage since, waiting for DNA to be compared against. Now, there was another DNA sequence ready for it to be compared against.
"Ferrofax, are we air-gapped?" Ari asked as she put on a pair of gloves from a portable med kit they had stashed in the secret lab.
"We are as good as invisible, but I would recommend a modicum of haste. I have isolated a tiertary drive in the array to your left, when we're done remove it. All of the data we need will be there, and the missing drive is already post-dated as being missing from four weeks ago." Ferrofax said, again his voice shifting through the lab as though tweaking each piece of equipment.
"Understood." Arianna nodded.
The vial was placed in a holder and Ari took out a pipette and sucked up a small portion of the blood from the vial and placed a few droplets on the analysis palette.
"Alright Ferrofax, there will be at least two sets of DNA on the PADD that's in the scan dock. One of them is mine, so please eliminate that one from this comparison. Of the others, please compare any of the others to the DNA in the blood sample on the palette." Ari said as she stepped back and she had to force herself to breathe deep and slow, as she felt her heart racing, thundering in her ears and chest.
She had not entered either of the DNA samples into the current Memory Theta system, so as not to get either of them flagged by the system security measures, nor had she told anyone whose the blood in the vial was.
"I can make you a coffee if you like, laced with mild sedatives to keep your blood pressure from rising higher," he muttered the scan dock made a whirring sound, as a pair of scanning arms unfolded from above it and began to bathe the dock in fans of light. "Eliminating your DNA from the trace...running the pattern through a snapshot of known genetic databases so we're not flagged anymore than we have to be."
Data began to appear on the screen, twinned strands of DNA side by side with highlighted base pairs soon becoming linked between the two.
"Huum...definitely a familial match, fraternal given the common genetic markers...oh now this is interesting. Asa and Omri ben-Avram, the latter of which has got trap wires all over it for something called Project Lazurus. Which is a name I am sure is linked to some sort of vitamin shot program with Starfleet Medical. I am suddenly very keen to know more, given the fact only you and I know that these samples are here. Care to share?"
Arianna didn't respond at first. Internally her world had stopped at that moment.
She was right.
She had been right from the start.
Omri ben-Avram was Taskmaster. It was him. She'd cracked his cleanskin.
Were this any other person, any other op, she would be elated, patting herself on the back for a job well done. She'd be appreciating her gut feeling and congratulating it on still being as sharp as ever.
Now, however, she was coming to realize that since the suspicion started to occur, she'd been wishing she was wrong, she'd been not really believing she'd be proven right. Now, she wished her gut had failed.
Then in the back of her mind she heard Ferrofax's disembodied voice. She leaned against the console for a moment and took a deep breath and then exhaled.
"We have just identified the target of Project Whytesand. The Taskmaster of Project Castermer." Ari said in a serious tone, her eyes still glued to the display.
Ferrofax had been read in to the whole situation, as he'd been present, so to speak at the discovery of the borg butlers and the deeper conspiracy.
"Before I remove the drive, can you please verify your findings. If we ever manage to get this to a court room we will need to show we have verified." Ari added as she headed over to the side pannel, ready to remove the drive, once Ferrofax was done verifying.
"Fuck...I...I really hoped I was wrong." Ari sighed as she leaned against the wall, waiting.
"SFI got struck by lightning once hunting out the Black Nagus, and you're shocked when they went back for a second slice of the cake their program went off the rails? I mean...no offence, but the statistical odds of a counter-espionage program not going sideways aren't exactly long. Something to do with the limitless budgets, lack of oversight, and self-assured moral authority are no doubt leading factors." Ferrofax opinioned. The console before them beep, and the scanner tray released its sample. "There. The original sample is forensically inert, short of a plasma jet its not going anywhere. I've downloaded the familial profile to that tertiary drive I told you about. I've also encoded a copy into your combadge so that should your biological signature cease to be, it'll upload everything to a back water colony world. Delphi Station, I think, was the name Starfleet Intelligence gave to that place."
Ari went through visible stages of annoyance at his words to relief at forethought. None of the others, except for Jaya and Storr knew how she'd even come to the idea that Tasmasker was Akiva's brother. All of this based on a moment of wishful thinking and gut feeling. All of this because she had feelings for a then married man.
"Fuck!" She cursed to herself and extracted the drive. "Smart choice on Leah's old crib, by the way. Thank you." Then, she sighed again and tapped her commbadge. "Frost to ben-Avram, I need your help with Humperdinkle. Can we meet?"
So many codes they had to use in open comms. Humperdinkle was yet another one. It was a pre-arranged code for when they had identified Taskmaster, it meant securing the site and clearing the schedule, and as always 'drop everything'.
=/\="On my way."=/\= Terse, brief, and to the point. That was Akiva.
"Princess Bride? We really are a top-tier intelligence outfit aren't we?" Ferrofax muttered.
Ari rolled her eyes. "If you check the tradecraft manual there is a good reason why, the less it reflects what the op is about the better. Regardless of how silly it sounds."
The doors opened. Akiva strolled in with clear purpose and intent. His palm came up in the simple hand sign for Whytesand. As much as he wanted to know what Ari had found, he knew they couldn't be too careful.
Ari's heart sank, now that he was finally here. She forced her emotions into a tiny box and threw the chain with the box over her shoulder as she returned the gesture.
"We're secure." She said finally, with a sigh, forcing cold detachment into herself. "Sir..." Ari forced formality back into her tone. "We have a familial DNA match for Taskmaster. Ferrofax, can you bring the just the DNA samples up? Hold other detail for the moment."
The two holographic spirals appeared, their similarities highlighted by glowing bonds between them.
"As you can see, we can determine that the two samples are a familial match...brothers." She said pointing to each, giving Akiva time to digest this information.
"With a familial match that's not...inconceivable," Ferrofax said quietly.
Akiva looked at Ari, then the DNA projections, then Ari again. "What are you trying to say?" His brow compressed in curious concern. "Does this help us in some way? Is this Taskmaster's brother someone important to our cause?"
Arianna held his eyes and sighed. "The most important." She said with a serious expression, her voice faltering a bit.
She raised a hand, then pointed to the left DNA pair from Akiva's point of view, from across the console display. "Taskmaster's DNA."
Several painful heartbeats later, she pointed to the second pair. "The control sample...." she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.
"Courage, Arianna. Courage." She told herself internally as she opened her mouth again. "Asa ben-Avram. Your Asa."
THUMP...THUMP...THUMP. Her heart thundered painfully as the rest of the world fell deathly silent. And waited.
As Arianna waited, the DNA samples were joined by holograph of the owners of said DNA.
"But..." Akiva's brow knit together in worried while his eyes began darting around faster and faster. The answer was both so obvious that it practically smacked him in the face while also being elusive enough that he couldn't quite wrap his mind around it. "But... Asa... that's not... David is..." After batting around the impossibilities, the one and only possibility finally broke through Akiva's cognitive dissonance. "No." The blanket denial was soft-spoken and resolute. It just wasn't possible. And yet his analytical mind had already deduced it was. "No, it can't... he can't..." Akiva started frantically shaking his head back and forth. "No, no, I saw... he can't... it's not..." He clutched his face with his hands and yelled, "Zine beh-seichel!" The profanity was an outcry of distress and agony that reached from his inner soul where childhood trauma was kept tightly packed away from his professional duties. Just when his frenzy seemed to be on the downturn, Akiva caught his second wind and screamed, "How?!!!"
Arianna's heart broke for him, but she stayed where she was. It was all she could do to stop herself from breaking down with him. Initially she'd wanted to be right, a way to possibly reunite long lost brothers. Before things changed, before the Borg butlers. Since then she'd been hoping her gut feeling had been wrong, that what she saw that day on Corridan III was just wishful thinking and her mind seeing what she'd wanted to see rather than her trained eye picking up clues.
"I don't know how they would have gotten a hold of his body...not yet anyway." Ari finally said, trying very hard to keep emotions out of her voice. "But the only clear answer do have is that he", she pointed to Omri's DNA, "was the one successful subject of Lazarus. The one whose entries we know were erased/removed from the file we got our hands on."
"Asa's DNA was covertly retrieved, he wasn't injured on any way on the process. He's alive and well and unsuspecting at his Starbase." She wasn't sure why she felt the need to mention that, but it was out now.
Taskmaster had killed people, assimilated them, turned them into playthings for some sick, twisted game that eluded them all. This was a villainous person guilty of crimes against nature. How could he be the same person he had grown up with. This monster couldn't be...
"... Omri," Akiva whispered, tears in his eyes locked away behind emotional strain. "What happened to you? What have you done?"
Ari's heart broke further at Akiva's painful gestation of the information he'd just been given. Her heart ached to step over and embrace him. Yet still she stayed in place. She would not be selfish.
To be fair she also wasn't sure if he would accept her comfort or if he would pull away from her.
"I would imagine Lazarus is largely responsible for this change in psyche." Ari said in a quiet, gravelly tone, her hands gripping the sides of the console, to stop herself from moving. "Lazarus and...well, Intel. He's been in the Service since at least '75. Longer that I've been in. Long careers like ours do influence our personalities and psyches." She then took a deep breath. "His own mentality would round it off, more than likely," Ari said with a sigh.
"I'm sorry." Frost added quietly as an after thought.
Akiva just stood there, absently shaking his head with a thousand-yard stare. His eyes began to glisten. "I can't..." His lips began to quiver. "I'm sorry but I just can't." A lone whimper eked from his mouth before he wiped his face with his sleeve. When his arm came down, his smoldering exterior had returned. Except for the pained look in his eyes, he was Captain ben-Avram once more. "Thank you for the update..." He paused to still the quake in his voice before continuing. "If there's anything else, I'll... be in my office."
Arianna nodded, unable to say anything. She tapped a few controls and went over and began storing the drive into Byinah's corpse. She was their special hidey hole, as it were. At the moment she needed literally anything to keep herself from breaking down and weeping for her own collapsed world.
"Ari..." Whatever Akiva had tried to say stalled somewhere between his throat and his lips. He shook his head, silently gesturing for her to forget about it. There was nothing more he could say, not right now. Words had failed him and so he took his leave.
As the doors closed behind her, Ari let out a shaky breath. Then another, and another. It wouldn't stop. The shaking, the pain, the sorrow, the empathy. One hand clutched at her chest, the other held onto the console for support. Then, the dam broke and tears started flowing.
Stinging, salty, angry tears. How much of the evil they knew he'd committed was she an unwitting party to? How many clues that were right in front of her did she miss? If only she'd seen sooner, she may have been able to stop it before.
Slowly Ari's knees buckled and she slid down to the floor, leaned sideways against the under-console. Vokau, the effect it had on Teejay. Could she have stopped Zora being turned into a traitor? Her old team? Sebastian? What would they do if they ever knew that they may have been part of the evil they were meant to fight? How could he fool them all so completely?
Ari had always prided herself on being able to see the truth of things very quickly, to pick up on the little tell tale signs. She'd sure as hell missed these. In her rational mind she knew that she's not the best investigator and that there is always someone better or at least as good.
Reality hurt though, especially her own complicity in it.
Such as telling the man she had feelings for his long-thought-dead brother was the big bad. Jaya had once told her to trust Akiva and she did. Surprisingly, he'd taken in better than she'd thought. Exept maybe only in public.
He was probably doing the exact same thing she was now, weeping for opportunities missed and realizing just how much reality hurt.
Sat there, Ari continued being, elbows on her pulled-up knees, her face covered in her hands as the hurt, the stress, the anxiety and grief continued its outward spiral.
