Joint Duty Log | Ltg Cmdr Waterhouse, Cmdr Grant, LtCmdr Neyes, Captain Neyes, Noah (NPC) | "Immersed In Echoes" - Pt II

Posted on Fri Oct 31st, 2014 @ 7:59am by Commander Logan Grant, PhD. & Commander Amelia Waterhouse & Commander Tristan Neyes PhD.

3,395 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: All Hallows’

"Please identify this patient, based on blood sample 001." Neyes said, wetting a towel and moving to wipe away some of the filth from the man's face.

"Patient identified as Captain Landon Neyes. Starfleet registry number OmicronTheta6674. DNA and biometric data are 100% exact for this individual."

"But... Landon Neyes is dead..." Logan mused out loud, gesturing between the unconscious man and the very much awake Tristan. "You have his symbiont..." He said, incredulous as he took a bold step forward to study the ghost in detail. "I... We..." Logan looked back at Tristan, his eyes wide with a strong mixture of confusion and excitement. "We have to fix him up, but we can't tell Rochelle. Absolutely not. It'll kill her if he winds up not really being Landon or..." His voice hushed and his eyes dropped. "Or if he dies."

Tristan felt the walls of the room closing in. He crossed his arms in front of him, shooting glances to both the others and the unconscious Landon. Laying there on that bio-bed was either Landon Neyes or it wasn't... and either scenario was brimming with dangerous and complicated realities for everyone. For his part, Tristan knew everything he thought he should know about Landon. All the previous hosts' memories were there, Jazni, Toran, Hyane, and all of them before, after, or in between. If Landon was still alive, then the Neyes symbiont was still inside him, and Tristan had to be someone else. It didn't make sense.

It was then that Logan noticed a face in the door way and the bitter cold pangs of fear quickly attacked his system. They'd been caught, their goose cooked, by none other than Noah Waterhouse. "Shit."

Neyes was across the room, his right hand whipped out, grabbed the young pastafarian by the shirt and pulled him inside the room. Slamming his hand against the door pad, they slid shut behind Noah. Tristan's frustrated tone was more akin to angry impatience, rather than the normal friendly warmth, "What are you doing here?

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What's the problem?" Noah objected, spreading his hands wide to indicate he came in peace. "I saw you two in sickbay, where I'd been helping, and something seemed... well, wrong, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay."

Logan's eyes narrowed on the boy as he put himself between Noah and the body on the biobed. "You saw two doctors taking a body towards quarantine and you, a civilian, decided it was a brilliant idea to follow?" He asked, squaring his shoulders. He'd be impressed by Tristan's sudden display of testicular tenacity later, right now there were bigger issues at hand.

Noah Waterhouse wasn't a stupid or dull individual and neither man had been very quiet -- even if they had been, the computer wasn't when it chirped out with jovial confidence that Landon Neyes was the one laying on the biobed to them any any audience that was out past those open doors.

He sighed, heavily, and ran a worried hand through his hair. "Listen..." He said, his head shaking. "I know you know what we didn't want anyone else knowing right now. You're sworn to secrecy, got it? The Captain cannot know about this until we're completely sure of what's going on." Logan explained, folding his arms defensively over his bulky chest. "And don't ask why. You know why. This entire ship and anyone near the ship knows why and I know you and your sister are close." He added for good measure, acutely aware of the fact he was babbling like a brook as his own brain tried to sort out what was happening.

"I can keep a secret as well as the best of them," Noah insisted. "Besides, Pond considers Rochelle family, so she is family. I won't have a hand in breaking her heart again. I swear it to my noodley diety." Noah nodded seriously, taking his spaghetti colander off his head to hold over his heart.

Neyes moved up to Landon once again and ran a scan of his internal organs. Right where it should be, the heart and body of the symbiont slept peacefully in the man's abdomen. Quickly Tristan scanned himself with a tricorder, then compared the two. His heart sank with uncertain terror as the scans were nearly identical, only slight variations in irrelevant areas. "They're both Neyes, we're both Neyes."

And then came the sigh. It was deep, long, rushed and resigning and it came as the counselor turned to look back at Landon, watching his measured breathing. "As far as we're concerned Landon Neyes is still dead. Because if he's alive then situation normal is all fucked up and counselor Neyes over here shouldn't exist as a joined Trill." Logan was talking again, ranting and explaining and voicing his thoughts as he left Landon's bedside long enough to hunt for and obtain basic supplies from the replicator.

"But, since you're here, put yourself to work." He motioned to Noah and pointed at a tray of wet gauze and other debriding materials. "I'll heal what external injuries I can, we need an osteoregenerator and a hypo full of anti-biotics to start treating the infection." Each word was a grumble as he set about working to fix the heavy helping of burns and contusions. Landon's face would be his first target.

Tristan got a wet towel and started cleaning off the blackened filth from his brother, taking care not to injure him further. It was surreal in the most potent aspect of the word. Just being able to touch him felt like a lie. He'd watched Landon's corpse as the life left him on the table in the symbiosis commission, and his casket being lowered into the ground on their property on Trill. This person, whoever he was, couldn't be his brother. Landon was dead, and had been for months... but still, a flicker of hope ricocheted off his gut like a bullet. He wanted to believe it could be, but thinking Landon was somehow alive...

It wasn't possible.

"We can stabilize him here, but he can't stay here. If anyone else finds out Rochelle will be the first to know. We have to move him." Neyes said, injecting him with another drug then examining another injury.

"Ship this big, there have to be empty quarters, yeah?" Noah observed, following the directions given to him and using what little medical knowledge he had from his first aid experience to help however he could. "Do you think Pond should know? She might be able to find empty quarters without tipping Rochelle off?"

Logan sucked in a heavy breath as he moved the device away from Landon's face and settled on the next injury. "The only way we're going to get him out of here without someone noticing is arranging a site to site. There's three people on this ship who can do that without tipping everyone else off. One of them isn't an option. The other two? Amelia and Archer and right now... Archer isn't an option. Not until we know what we're dealing with." He nodded in agreement and paused long enough to pluck the combadge from his chest and hold it out to Noah.

"Call her. She's on the bridge, but this needs to happen now. As soon as she's up, Rochelle's going to be all giant eyes and pissed off as she tries to reassert her dominance after being knocked out during a crisis. That's going to keep main sickbay busy, but not for very long." He said and chewed his lower lip, running the regenerator over yet another laceration that Tristan had cleaned up. He could only hope that he was right and Rochelle's notoriously savage nature would shine and benefit them just a little longer before someone decided to move the Romulans into quarantine for safe keeping.

"See, the problem with me calling her," Noah started to protest, pushing the combadge back at the Witchdoctor, swallowing hard knowing that he wasn't going to be pleased being told no right now, "Is that if she's anything like our parents, she's absolutely in no-nonsense officer mode. She won't listen to me unless I can give her lots and lots of details... and we can't exactly do that over an open channel. She'll listen to you, even without details. She trusts you and you're one of her officers." Noah smiled nervously, hoping that it would help sell the truth of the matter.

Logan closed his eyes and froze, settling himself after listening to Noah backpedal. He could feel the vein in his left temple begin to throb as the stress and irritation reached a boiling point. "Fine. This is how you do it. Watch closely, I'm only doing it once." He seethed, reopening his eyes and depressing the combadge with one finger in a most pointed fashion. It dutifully chirped in response, ever so happy to assist. "Commander Waterhouse. You're late for an important date. Take a trip down the rabbit hole and don't forget to cover your mouth when you sneeze." Logan was quick to cut the channel and slapped his combadge back onto his chest and sighed heavily, returning his attention to Landon without bothering to look up at Tristan. "Done. Now put the fucking strainer down somewhere, you look like you escaped from a bloody funny farm." Though, he thought, it likely wasn't all that far from the truth.

The colander disappeared Flying Spaghetti Monster knows where, and Noah was attentively at the two counselor's elbows awaiting further direction on how to be of use. He took a second to look down at the man who had caused so much chaos just by being here and alive.

---

Up on the bridge, a silence fell at the cryptic message that issued from the XO's combadge, and she looked around meeting eyes with Almar at the engineering station. "Commander, you have the bridge." And within a blink of an eye, Amelia was into the turbolift, not waiting for a verbal acknowledgement.

---

A dull moan issued forth from Landon's position on the bio-bed. His fingers slowly tensed and moved beneath the white of the medical sheet draped over him. Landon was waking up. His mouth tightened, and his shoulders pulled back as his barely conscious mind began to take inventory of his status. It was weak, breathy, but movement and sound nonetheless. Tristan's heart felt as if it stopped as he snatched a hypo-spray off the shelf, clicking a small red vial into its underside. "Not yet."

Tristan pressed the hypo to his brother's neck and audibly sighed as Landon softened and fell back asleep. "It's a good sign, but he can't be awake before we've had a chance to secure him. His vitals look stable enough. Once Amelia gets here she can setup up a site to site transport for us, and lock down some quarters.

"I suspect she'll want to involve Mr. Archer at some point soon." He looked to the sleeping Landon, and worry painted his already haggard face.

Logan froze as he watched the scene unfold right under his nose. He'd moved to hold the man's arms down, knowing that even in a weakened state that the big Trill was a force of nature. Awake, they wouldn't be able to hide his identity and the counselor could feel his own panic beginning to rise up to tighten a hold around his throat. It would be thankfully short lived, Tristan's quick work with a hypospray had once again put their patient back to their place in dreamland. What it told Logan was that Landon was going to survive and he was going to be a handful. "We'll wake him up when we get things secured, see what he can tell us and how it correlates with what we know." Logan nodded, hoping his own affirmation would set Tristan's troubled mind to ease.

"She's going to have to. Archer's probably the only one who can for certain confirm that this is Landon without involving Rochelle." He grimaced, releasing his hold on the sleeping man once he knew for certain that he was worshiping the sandman. "He's also the only one who can smooth the whole thing over. JAG... Ah for fuck's sake. This is going to be a giant mess." He swore, setting back to healing a particularly nasty gash across Landon's ribs.

As if on cue there came a tapping at their chamber door. If Pond could find them that fast, it meant they'd forgotten just how powerful their combadges were and how easy it would be to find them as they worked on healing and concealing Landon. Something would need to be done about them and fast. "Noah... Go get her." It was show time.

Noah didn't have to be told twice, he palmed the controls to open the door, wrapped on hand around his sister's upper arm and yanked her inside even as he hit the controls to close the door again. Amelia opened her mouth to protest, pulled back against Noah's grip backing into the door as she recognized his face.

"Shit, what is going on here?" she demanded, looking around. Her eyes fell on the man on the biobed, and her jaw just dropped.

Tristan continued working, the urgency not lost to him. "He was beamed aboard with the Romulans. Cursory blood test confirms it's Landon." Neyes looked again to the monitors on the wall and nodded, looking back at the others. "I think he'll be ok to move now." Seeing the commander's reaction to Landon laying on the table was to be expected. He stopped and closed the distance between them, trying to put himself between the biobed and her. Locking eyes with Amelia, the panic in his voice had been long replaced by the desperate plea for help. He needed them all if this was really was who they hoped it was; he couldn't help Landon on his own.

"We need to move him out of here, Commander. If this is him... or if it isn't." Neyes turned back around to look at Landon, "Are there some secure quarters we can beam to?" Tristan's own knowledge of the ship was clouded, control over his thoughts was resting on a knife-edge. Most of the technical information he knew about Vindicator was carry-over from Landon's time with Neyes... At least that's what he'd thought. Now he wasn't so sure.

"Amelia." Logan snapped his fingers to work towards her attention and turned to rest beside Tristan. He'd learned to trust the nearly foot shorter Trill in the short time he'd come to know him and now tested it seemed that trust was there to stay and chose to encompass Landon. Maybe it was his faith in Tristan or his love for, and loyalty to, the little redhead who'd chosen - out of everyone in the universe - to fall for the enigma that lay on the biobed behind him, that made make the choice to partake in the events unfolding. Now he had to convince Amelia to take that same blind leap he had.

"You have to help us. Everyone in this room knows how important this is and how dangerous it is. We need to work together as a team. " He said softly, "Rochelle can't know... You need to help us and we need to keep him a secret until we know everything's safe and can figure out the how and the why. It'll break her if she finds out and something's wrong." The counselor nodded in time with his words, stressing each one with that affirmative action as if that would be what kept Amelia tethered to them and not free to run straight for the Captain. "Please?" He asked, finding that he wasn't above begging, "He's family by proxy, you know it. We're all bound together in some weird fucked up loop I can't even begin to explain."

"This is like a plot right out of Doctor Who," she muttered in amazement as her mind caught up with the tableau that lay before her. She shot a look at her brother, wondering how he got involved in this. "Site to site is going to leave a record, but I might be able to keep it off Rochelle's radar until one of us can sweet talk Archer into wiping it with his intel access. Just give me a second to look which quarters are available," she returned, moving to the computer terminal in the room.

Her fingers moved quickly, information flashed up on the screen and disappeared nearly as fast as she set to work. Some of the authorization codes she used would make Archer's eyebrow raise if he noticed their use -- she shouldn't still have access to them, but details like that had never kept a Waterhouse back when they needed to do something for family. She planned to talk to him before he had a chance to notice on his own anyways.

"Okay, when transporter beam releases us, you'll hand me your combadges. No questions," she directed, holding her finger above the control panel as she waited for their acknowledgements before energizing.

"You're a gem, Amelia." Logan grinned brightly when the realization that she was going to follow his path down the rabbit hole finally dawned on him. "We'll give you the combadges, no dramas." He drawled and looked between the two other men with a stern nod.

Neyes, looking more stressed by the minute, quickly nodded in agreement. "Yes, of course."

"Rochelle is going to be suspicious with us all running under the radar with this. I'm going to have to tell Andrea just so she doesn't start playing for the wrong team here." Logan noted and began to prepare for the move. Supplies would be hard to obtain unless Archer erased or locked down the records of the replicator where they held Landon. Medical supplies would be especially eyebrow raising. "Having her playing interference will make life a lot more simple and we can use her knowledge as we try and suss out the truth behind how there's now two Neyes symbionts." He explained and held up an osteogenerator to Amelia, "Would you be a love? I know you have room for all this crap."

Noah cleared his throat at the Witchdoctor's question, and Amelia shot him a look. "If Uncle Spiegel complains that this violates terms of use, I'll build Mama her set of pockets myself," she snapped at him, and he snorted. She accepted the device from Logan as she looked at Tristan wondering what his reaction was going to be when it disappeared into her small -- and hardly regulation -- pocket on the waistband of her uniform.

Opening a large container, Neyes quickly gathered the last of the many medical supplies they would need once they left sickbay. The room was hardly equipped to provide them with a full medical suite, but hopefully it wouldn't need to. He clipped the last item into place and snapped the case shut, placing it on the bed at Landon's feet. "Ready."

Amelia's finger tapped the screen on the panel with her hand waiting in front of her to be available for combadges upon rematerialization. As directed, the the computer locked onto the three combadges, two other biosignatures, and the biobed under Landon. Once they dematerialized, the door slid open on the room, and other than a spaghetti colander sitting at the bottom of the med cart and a few missing supplies, it was as if no one had been there to start with. Amelia had flagged the transporter cycle as maintenance, with the authorization code listed as klavaatu in hopes that if somehow Almar noticed it before she could go talk to him he'd come to her before going to Rochelle, recognizing the name of the fruit that had been featured in the moonshine she'd given him back when she first arrived on the ship.

== to be continued ==

Lt Commander Amelia Waterhouse
Executive Officer
USS Vindicator

Lt Commander Tristan Neyes
Chief Counselor
USS Vindicator

Commander Logan Grant
Counselor
USS Vindicator

Captain Landon Neyes
Former Commanding Officer
USS Vindicator

Noah Waterhouse
Pastafarian Minister
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

 

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