Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - The Cruelty of It All

[Carter Schimpff]

(( Hazardous Materials Lab, Deck 11 – USS Artemis-A ))

Bancroft: ::silencing his tricorder:: She’s gone. 

The tone died at a tap from his thumb and, for a moment, Dr. Roy Bancroft didn’t move.

The Romulan woman lay on the deck before him, her face turned slightly toward the lab ceiling, her eyes half-open in that awful, unfinished way the dead always had – as though the body had been interrupted mid-thought and hadn’t yet realized the conversation was at an end.

Green blood continued to spread beneath her, slow and obscene under the clinical lights. It had long since soaked into the knee of Roy’s uniform trousers and he could feel the warmth of it there, cooling by degrees.

Silveira: I want a damage report and status of the containment and forcefields. We won’t move until we are sure everything is in order.

Breys: The containment field took the hit and is still holding strong.

Cole: She dropped a data rod, I’ve isolated it from our already isolated system and I’m working on decrypting it now. We should have some kind of intel shortly.

Silveira: Secure all the information we can, full scans on the box and make sure it’s contained. It looks like it’s still active…

Cole: I’ll keep working the rod. If it ties back to the box or the Afalqi, we may finally have something useful.

Breys: I’m running a full scan of the internal components now, it’ll take some time due to the nature of the space. What’s the chances we can keep this held together? I don’t know if I have the time to do this.

Tarsan: ::finally speaking, quieter than before:: It’s on the way out, I think it’s achieved its last directive.

Roy heard them. Mostly.

The words reached him, passing through the narrow place his mind had made around the body before him. Containment. Data rod. Afalqi. Forcefields. He understood their meaning well enough to remain useful. He’d learned how to do that – how to keep one hand in the moment and one hand on the patient, one part of himself answering as an officer while another knelt in the ruin of what he couldn’t save.

It wasn’t composure so much as it was a triage of the soul.

Breys: Please, I just need a little more time!

Silveira: If we can’t find anything else, shut it down. Keep under the forcefields and compile all relevant data.

Cole: Understood. Let me see if the rod tells us what the box was moving or where it was meant to send our departed visitor.

Tarsan: It’s offline and stable. There’s no danger from it now.

Roy returned his instruments to the medkit with deliberate care. Vascular regenerator, cortical stimulator, then the hypospray he’d had no time to use.

He placed each one exactly where it belonged, because the small ceremony of order kept his hands from doing something useless with the frustration flowing through them. There was no dignity in slamming equipment into a case, and no resurrection from damaging lifesaving tools.

Bancroft: Commander, with your permission, I’d like to relocate her body to the morgue.

Silveira: Let’s examine the body and learn as much as we can before I report to the Captain.

Cole: Got it. I’ll work on the data. If there’s anything on here about the ship, the box, or anything else, we need it before this trail gets any colder.

Breys: ::to Cole:: Watch for any signs of Klingon encryption at this rate. I don’t think they’re working with the Klingons, but we saw it before and it seems like they’re using something from everyone.

Roy’s jaw tightened, but only slightly. 

The directive from Silveira was correct. Of course it was correct. The body was exactly where it had materialized, surrounded by blood untainted by the boots and hands of orderlies, transport residue, particulate traces, and whatever other microscopic clues her death had left behind.

Move her now, and they might lose that evidence.

He had no particular romance for Romulans over anyone else. He didn’t know her name. He didn’t know whether she had been accomplice, victim, courier, saboteur, dissident, murderer, patriot, traitor, or all of them at once in the complicated way people often were before history flattened their existence into single nouns.

But – she had been warm a minute ago. She had opened her eyes. She had tried to tell them something.

And now she was an object of investigation on a laboratory floor. That rankled. Professionally. Morally. Anatomically, almost, as though some private tendon in him had been plucked too hard.

Still, the Commander was right: the evidence had to come first because the evidence might be the only remaining part of her capable of helping anyone else.

Bancroft: ::softly:: Aye, Commander.

He reopened the medkit, this time removing tools of examination rather than rescue. It was a different kind of medicine – a colder one, too.

Cole: She wasn’t just carrying information. She was carrying instructions.

Breys: What type of instructions?

Tarsan: Do - do they talk about what she was doing in there?

Roy set his tricorder for forensic medical analysis and began the scan from the crown of her head downward. The instrument’s readings accumulated in orderly columns, which was offensive in its own small way. The body had suffered chaos. The computer in his hand rendered it as cold categories.

Species: Romulan*

Sex: Female

Status: Deceased

Cause of Death: Exsanguination compounded by catastrophic abdominal trauma.

Weapon Signature: Directed-energy discharge

Roy narrowed the scan parameters.

The disruptor wound was worse than it had appeared to the naked eye, which seemed unfair, given how bad it had already looked. The burn margins showed cellular rupture, vascular collapse, deep organ disruption, and energy signatures consistent with Da’al weaponry. 

The setting had been high – far higher than necessary to simply end someone’s life.

Whoever fired had not merely needed her dead. They’d wanted her ruined. A crime of passion.

Bancroft: ::muttering to himself:: Absolutely unreasonable. Unnecessary. Savage. ::louder:: The disruptor signature matches known Da’al weaponry, Commander. The setting was… excessive. This was not a clean kill.

Silveira: Response

Cole: my engineering experience is limited, but if I’m reading these skimmer correctly, there are a minimum of two areas of the Afalqi that have been modified as hidden systems. ::turning to Tarsan:: Tarsan can you take a look at these to make sure I’m reading them correctly?

The Engineer nodded, hands flying across his console.

Tarsan: Yes, that matches what I saw with Lieutenant Imril in the hanger. Though I can’t quite make out what they are for.

Roy didn’t look up. His tricorder was still working through the damage, separating wound trauma from transport stress from the ambient contamination of a spatial trajector that had apparently decided the Hazardous Materials Lab was an acceptable delivery address for a dying woman.

Silveira: Response

Cole: I think the rods helped give us a trail to follow, at least something real to brief the Captain on.

The thought rose before Roy could stop it.

Bancroft: oO The dead Romulan being but an asterisk, of course. Oo

He disliked himself for it immediately. 

It was unkind and, worse, it was also highly unfair. Cole was doing her job. Silveira was doing his. Breys and Tarsan were trying to hold together evidence that might be collapsing under the weight of its own design, or potentially even by design. No one in the room was treating his dead patient as irrelevant.

But grief, even the brief professional grief of a physician who had lost a patient he never truly had to begin with, sometimes arrived wearing nothing but indignation.

Silveira: Response

A presence settled beside him.

Roy glanced over, expecting perhaps Cole, perhaps Silveira, perhaps someone with a question that needed an answer he didn’t yet have.

Instead, he found Ensign D’tin Breys.

For half a second he wondered if she’d been injured – then she spoke, and Roy understood.

Breys: I don’t know anything about Romulan physiology, but I’ve worked on Bajorans for almost a decade. How can I help?

Despite himself, Roy smiled.

He had first filed D’tin Breys under shy, with a secondary notation for technically capable and likely to apologize to furniture if she bumped into it.

Apparently, that file now required some revision.

Here she was: newly minted, probably shaken, and still ready to kneel in alien blood because help was needed and she had hands. The fleet survived on people like that more than it ever admitted in the glossy recruitment holos.

Bancroft: You surprise me, D’tin. In a good way. Grab a tricorder, start looking for clues. ::holding up his tricorder, indicating the control sequence:: Academy refresher: this toggles medical diagnostic mode, this narrows for xenophysiology, and this marks anything anomalous without trying to interpret it for you.

Silveira/Cole: Response

Breys: I think I see.

Roy continued the scan while Breys performed a visual inspection beside him. The work changed when another pair of eyes joined it. The corpse became, slightly, less alone.

He found that he was grateful for that.

Tarsan: The box is safe now. We should keep it in here for now, wrapped in the forcefields we have. Containment and forcefields are all operating within proper parameters.

A new cluster of readings appeared at the edge of Roy’s scan.

At first, he nearly dismissed them as transport artifacting. The spatial trajector had done enough violence to normal biology that half the tricorder’s return looked like a committee of physics professors fighting in a closet.

But this was different.

Cellular markers along the abdominal and thoracic tissues showed recent alteration. Not natural polymorphism. Not old surgical intervention. Not genetic drift. The changes were too fresh, too uneven, and too poorly integrated with the surrounding tissue.

Romulan baseline markers sat beneath them like the original text of a palimpsest.

Something else had been written overtop – and poorly.

Bancroft: I have genetic irregularities here. Recent ones. These are not inherited markers, and they are not standard Romulan variation. Someone altered her at the cellular level, and her body was actively rejecting the edits.

Silveira/Cole: Response

Breys: That isn’t supposed to be there, is it?

Breys removed her tricorder and began a closer scan.

Breys: The area around this tissue shows markers for other species, but it seems like it was being rejected.

Roy shifted his tricorder to match Breys’s scan region but, before he could answer, Tarsan's voice cut through the room.

Tarsan: She was hiding it from the others.

Roy looked up. For a moment, the sentence did not assemble properly.

Bancroft: Hiding what?

Breys/Silveira/Cole: Response

Tarsan: I uh, connected with her, before she ::voice catching and hating himself for it:: died

Roy’s first feeling was anger.

It came fast, hot, and paternal in the worst way. How dare he? How dare anyone reach into the mind of a dying woman without permission, without context, without even knowing her name?

Then the anger cracked.

Gavrin Tarsan was young. He was gifted. He was standing in a room where reality had misbehaved, a woman had appeared out of impossible geometry, and her last breath had unfolded in front of him. Instinct did not always ask permission before it moved. Empathy, especially the telepathic kind, could be less a choice than a wound opened in the wrong direction.

Roy heard the break in the young engineer’s voice – that, too, changed his diagnosis of the man's intentions.

Bancroft: ::soothingly:: Take a moment to ground yourself, Gavrin. You are here. You are aboard the Artemis. You are alive, and you are not alone in your own head. If you need an anchor, you may reach out to my mind.

Breys/Silveira/Cole: Response

Tarsan: I wasn’t thinking, it was all instinct! ::pause:: Sir.

Roy turned fully toward him.

He met Tarsan’s eyes and, with careful intention, opened the surface of his mind the way he had done only a few times before with Alex: not flinging the door wide, not inviting invasion, but placing a hand on the latch and making it known that someone steady was on the other side.

He slowed his breathing.

In through the nose.

Hold.

Out through the mouth.

Again.

He let the pattern become the loudest thing in him.

There was no panic. No accusation. No dead woman on the deck. No green blood cooling through his trousers. Just breath, counted and measured: the body’s oldest argument that it was alive and intended to remain so.

He didn’t know if Gavrin could feel it. There was no familiar brush at the base of his skull, none of the strange electric intimacy that came with Alex’s presence. Trauma contact was not chosen contact; and minds, unlike bodies, bled differently.

Still, Roy offered the rhythm.

Bancroft: ~Through the nose, two, three, four – hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven – out through the mouth, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Now repeat.~

Breys/Silveira/Cole: Response

Tarsan: I’m still - still figuring out what she was trying to say, but I think she was against some part of the plan and they killed her for it. ::gesturing to the box:: That was her last chance to survive. Or get out whatever data she had.

Roy held Gavrin’s gaze for one more breath, long enough to make sure the Engineer had found the deck beneath his feet again.

Then he returned to the dead.

It felt cruel to think of it that way, but medicine had little patience for euphemism once the heart and brain stopped. The Romulan woman was no longer his patient in the urgent, pleading sense most physicians were accustomed to. She could not be saved. She could not be comforted. She could not answer – verbally – the room’s growing number of questions.

But she could still tell them things.

Beside him, Breys had gone very still – seemingly not out of fright, but focus. 

Her tricorder was angled at the abdominal cavity, but her eyes seemed to be doing the real work. Roy saw the shift in her expression – not comprehension, yet, but recognition that something present didn’t belong.

Bancroft: ::to Breys:: You saw something. Tell me about it. Not just what your tricorder tells you. Tell me what you see with your eyes, too. Our senses are incredibly powerful diagnostic tools.

Breys: Response

Silveira/Cole/Tarsan: Responses

Roy followed the line of Breys’ indication.

At first, he saw only ruin: burned tissue, pooled green blood, the savage malice left behind by the disruptor. Then – there.

Deep within the abdominal cavity, nearly swallowed by scar tissue and reactive inflammation, sat an object the body had clearly spent some time trying and failing to reject. It was small, irregular, and ugly in a way that felt decidedly personal. Its surface was dark and pitted, webbed with filament-thin leads that disappeared into tissue like roots forced into unwilling soil.

Roy’s eyes widened.

This hadn’t arrived with the wound. It had been in her long before she'd appeared in the lab.

Bancroft: You’re right. It’s not any sort of medical device I recognize. And if it were, I'd like to meet the surgeon responsible and personally revoke every license, certificate, and childhood merit badge they ever received. ::raising his voice without taking his eyes from the implant:: Commander, Lieutenant, Ensign, we’ve discovered an unknown device implanted inside her abdominal cavity. It may be connected to the genetic anomalies D’tin and I are seeing in the surrounding tissue, but that’s a working theory, not a conclusion.

Breys/Silveira/Cole/Tarsan: Response

Roy narrowed the scan field until the tricorder stopped trying to understand the entire corpse and began listening to the small wrong thing buried inside it.

The readings came reluctantly, distorted by tissue damage, blood loss, disruptor scarring, and whatever interference the device itself still emitted in faint, dying whispers. But the pattern emerged all the same.

Cellular rewriting.

The device had not changed who she was. But it could, it seemed, change what she looked like to eyes and scanners alike.

A biological disguise, written under the skin with all the delicacy of a forged signature scraped into bone.

Roy’s eyebrows rose nearly to his hairline.

Bancroft: The device is crude. Extremely crude… but effective. It appears capable of temporarily altering surface-level genetic expression and cellular markers – not just cosmetically, but enough to mislead most routine scans. I’m reading residual fragments consistent with both Da’al and Klingon genetic profiles in the surrounding tissue.

Breys/Silveira/Cole/Tarsan: Response

TAG/TBC!

===

Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft

Assistant Chief Medical Officer

USS Artemis-A

A240205RB1