Joint Personal Log - Com Levine & Noah Waterhouse - "Coffin Nails"

Posted on Mon Nov 17th, 2014 @ 12:44am by Commodore Andrea Levine PhD

2,484 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: All Hallows’

In the chaos of the battle aftermath, and the unexpected discovery and containment of the presumed Captain Neyes, Noah had forgotten the PADD he'd found discarded on the floor of sickbay. The one near the Romulan patients, which he'd stuck into his pocket without thinking about it. If his sister found out about it, he suspected she'd give him a good chewing out; between being XO and having previously served as chief of security on another boat, he knew that she'd have problems with him picking up what could probably be considered evidence and not turning it in. However, when he'd looked at it later, using the translator program from Uncle Stace that Dad had loaded into his goggles, the mention of Landon Neyes and Symbiont told him that he'd actually done the right thing. So he ran it through the translator program properly, and went to hunt down Commodore Levine.

Andrea couldn't sleep again. Her brain was racing, playing out scenarios, asking endless questions, playing back events again and again; most from the past few days, but some, especially in the wee hours of the night, were from before, from Earth, from the escape, from the close-call scare with the children.

The battle and her frantic worry for the children, for Logan and for Rochelle didn't help any, either, and Andrea found herself restlessly unable to fall asleep for the second night in a row. So, slipping out of her bed, she took a walk, convincing herself of the stability and security of the ship by walking through it, touching its bulkheads, clearing her mind, trying to calm the storm of thoughts with a cup of hot chocolate in an all but deserted mess hall.

The replicator beeped, and she picked up the steaming cup, covering her mouth in an attempt to stifle a yawn. So many questions were raised in the past few days, and only an insufficient amount of answers, to a situation where real, valid answers — and the truth — were critical. She sighed and flopped into a chair, stirring the liquid in front of her with a stick of cinnamon.

The computer directed Noah to the mess hall when he asked it where to find the blond commodore, and as promised, there she was. The silence of a large ship at night was comforting and familiar to him, it was his childhood, as were the midnight mess hall visits. His mother's inclination towards odd duty shifts had sometimes left him with little time to visit with her unless he snuck out of bed in the middle of the night and ambushed her on her meal break. She'd always welcomed his quiet company, even when he'd only been five and his father should have been able to keep him in bed. Little boys and jefferies tubes sometimes made for a dangerous combination.

"May I join you?" he asked softly as he approached, and pulled the trademark spaghetti colander from his head to tuck under his arm.

Andrea licked foam off her upper lip and nodded, gesturing at one of the seats and trying to avoid staring at the man's weird appliance-turned-hat. "Having trouble sleeping, Mr. Waterhouse?" she smiled, and took another slow sip, letting the hot beverage wash through her throat and flood her with welcome warmth.

"Please, call me Noah," he insisted as he pulled out the chair across the table from her. "My sleep cycle's always been odd, transitory. I blame my mother," he insisted with a grin. "I found something you might find of interest." He pulled the PADD out of his back pocket as he sat down, sliding the Romulan technology across the table to sit next to the commodore's mug.

"Hm," she nodded noncommittally, examining his face from behind her cup. She wasn't entirely sure she was ready to start calling people their first names, sabbatical or no, but that may come with time. Maybe.

Her eyebrows perked up at his words, and then at the device he held. She put her cup down gently and reached for it, curious, her brain switching gears almost immediately as she picked it up, the cup forgotten, the sleeplessness set aside. She glanced up at Noah, her fingers sliding across the device, turning it on.

"You found this? Where did you find this?"

"Sickbay, near the Romulans when they were beamed in," Noah admitted, his eyes not meeting hers. "I stuck it in my pocket, and got swept up with the­- well, you know. Forgot about it, probably should have turned it in to security, but I couldn't resist looking at it first, and well, you'll see why it's better I didn't turn it in." He leaned back in his chair, waiting for her to skim the contents of the PADD.

Andrea stared, clenching her teeth, her fingers hovering over the device. For a moment, two opposing forces fought in her head — the Commodore, and the Scientist, tugging this way and that, between the urge to demand what the hell he was thinking 'swiping' anything from the ship and the urge to slap the PADD onto his colander-free head and demand what the hell took him so long to bring this up.

She finally took a breath and tore her gaze away, returning it to the device, instantly shifting her thoughts back to the case at hand. Back to the device, the Romulans... the man in Sickbay. Landon... Rochelle.

She examined the data, sifting through pages of text, trying to make sense of it while her brain sang with science excitement. "These are experimental records, Mr. Waterhouse," she noted, with a voice that was somewhere between "the brig is about to be your second home for the next 50 years" and "you just got an A+ with extra credit".

"You just found this on the floor? Just... lying there on the floor," she shook her head, but her eyes remained on the text, "good thing you finally remembered it now."

"This covert stuff has always been Pond's thing, not mine," he returned quietly, leaning forward to keep the conversation hushed despite it being just the two of them. "All I can figure is it dropped out of the hand of one of the people recovered from the ship. If I hadn't been having to play at being a spy like my sister, I probably wouldn't have forgotten it."

Andrea waved her palm dismissively with a quick shake of her head. It didn't matter. It didn't matter why he didn't think of raising the issue earlier, or why he had felt the need to swipe a random PADD to begin with, for that matter. It didn't. All that mattered was the information.

She already had results from her own private investigation of the evidence; from the blood sample of the man they all wanted so desperately to believe was the real Landon, comparing it to the small specks of blood on the bracelet she and Pond had so casually stole from Rochelle's quarters. Stole... borrowed. She borrowed it. She'd return it, and with news. Hopefully with good ones.

And the results were pretty astonishing. There was little room for doubt, though Andrea ran them — as blindly as possible, making the computer randomly tag and then switch the results so she, herself, doesn't know what she's testing. She ran them five times. And five times, she got the same results.

There was little room for interpretation as it was, it seemed, but this... this...

She swiped her fingers on the surface of the PADD, switching between pages. This was the nail in the proverbial evidence coffin. It was the seal, the final piece that joined the other to state an undeniable conclusion.

"Oh my god," she muttered, quite unlike herself, and switched another page, staring at the records displayed in front of her in growing awe. "This is..." what? incredible? amazing? insane? "This is screwed up," she finished, not quite noticing what her brain chose to describe the thoughts that jumbled inside it.

"So, which of Schrödinger's Landons do we have?" Noah asked in almost a whisper, pretty sure his joke was getting all the details wrong, but certain she'd get the point of it anyways.

"Heh," she uttered, not paying attention. She was so absorbed in the text, in the meaning of it, that at first she didn't even comprehend the question — or make the mental link needed to figure out the joke. The PADD wasn't just a Romulan artifact, it was a research journal, and one that belonged to a scientist that, from the looks of it, did quite extensive work on the subject of cloning. It wasn't the complete jackpot she would have hoped for — that would have been the full research details, methodology, equations and diagrams — but it was damn close. A cloning experiment, involving not only a full adult Trill, but his symbiont, as well.

And then she took a breath, shut down the PADD screen and carefully placed it on the table, her fingers resting on its surface. Her brain processes worked overtime and then, finally, started quieting, allowing for some leeway in analyzing tertiary input.

She looked up at Noah, her eyes narrowing at first, and then slowly returning to their usual shape, her shoulders slumping slightly with a sarcastic shake of her head. The man should have practiced his timing on joking around, but Andrea, and especially the Professor-Scientist part of Andrea, had no problems turning this around for her own amusement. After all, the news in front of her were good. Great, even.

"Schroedinger's equation describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time," she looked at him carefully, hiding a small smile, "What you probably meant to refer to is quantum entanglement, the case where the quantum state of a group particles is connected. What Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'," she finally allowed the smile to bloom, slightly. "But that isn't entirely accurate for the case of..." she was going to say clones, but stopped herself, looked around, and then back at Noah, her eyes filling slowly with the essence-of-win only an act of counter-"pwn" can bring up.

"Stick to theistic studies, Mr. Waterhouse," she finished, finally smiling fully. "But yes. This supports the data I've analyzed. We have the real man in our sickbay, and we have a big problem with at least one of the symbionts involved," she added, keeping her voice quiet.

Noah had smiled when she seemed to laugh at his joke — his humor had gotten through. But then she'd narrowed her eyes and shook her head. His humor shot down in flames. He didn't have time to mourn, back pedal, or attempt to revive it; his eyes went big as a wall of science hit him like a bucket of cold water. Then there it was, a ray of sunshine to dry him off, that smile and the look of someone who knew she stood with her boot on top of him... and he couldn't help a chuckle as he easily accepted defeat. No wonder his sister considered this woman to be her hero and role model.

"Is it a threat to the counselor's health, or are we talking a security problem?" Noah knew enough about Trill physiology from his mother's rantings about her own dealing with the Symbiosis commission to know the Romulans almost certainly couldn't have pulled the original slug out of the original Landon without killing him... but they shouldn't have been able to clone it with all its memories too. He was still inclined to move in the direction of his best understanding of the situation unless corrected by the Commodore.

Andrea picked up her cup again and shook her head thoughtfully. "No, I don't see how it would be a problem for the health of either of them," she took a careful sip, the liquid surprisingly warm still. "As for security concerns," her lips tightened. "I don't know. It doesn't seem to have been their goal," she pointed at the PADD, "But I am fairly sure Starfleet will disagree with my assessment. We may have troubles on that end."

"The symbiosis commission is going to be a problem too," Noah added with a sigh, "They'll probably want to take the counselor back to Trill and pick him apart to see how the Romulans made his slug tick. They can't yank it out without it killing him, so it's either a jail sentence on Trill, or worse, a death sentence if he tries to fight it without someone bigger and badder than the commission to back it." He didn't believe that Vindicator alone could hold those spotted vipers back if they came hunting, and the fleet would have to trust Tristan Neyes to be willing to defend him ­— and would the cloned symbiont even still be called Neyes once the brothers were told of what had happened?

"Yes." Andrea nodded slowly, looking into her cup. The trouble will be big, and sequential, and will likely pile up and require a gentle — and effective — masterful hand to tend to. She may have a couple of connections she could help in pulling a couple of strings, but she was by far not equipped to do anything remotely as effective as would be required. "This isn't something you or I will be able to do. We'll have to hope someone will get some creative ideas."

"Yeah," was all Noah could muster. All that other stuff, it was outside his league. He didn't have the fleet connections, he didn't know the politics... he just made art and gave spiritual guidance to those who wanted it. He did know one thing, that the phoenix had a second chance with... her dragon? Landon was truly a dragon to her phoenix, and the romantic in Noah couldn't help but gush at the thought of it, just a little. He stood up, dropping the colander on top of his head again. "I'll leave you to your hot chocolate, Commodore. Have a good rest of your evening."

"Hm," Andrea nodded through a sip, and watched the man get up from his seat. "Good night. Oh, and Mr. Waterhouse?" She watched him pause and look at her, his colander hat bobbing slightly, "do me a favor, and the next time you feel an urge to 'swipe' some random object you find," she lifted the cup to her lips again, using it to hide the small smile that spread on her lips, "make sure to give it to your sister right away."

Silently he pulled the colander from his head again, holding it to his chest for a quick half bow, then off he went into the silence of the starship at night, whistling a sea shanty.

=/\= End Log =/\=

Commodore Andrea Levine-Grant
Science Liaison
USS Vindicator

Noah Waterhouse
Pastafarian Minister and Artist
apb Pond

 

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