[End act 1] LtCmdr Jovenan – I’m ready to leave as soon as you are
Jovenan
((Medical facility, New Hope))
Jovenan: =/\= Understood, Captain. Jovenan out. =/\=
The commlink ended. Jovenan looked around in the middle of the main room of the alien medical facility. It was still dark, without the torches and other light sources she would struggle to see the silhouettes of her teammates working with their respective tasks. With just the three of them, it would take a while to scan all the evidence and have it moved to the Artemis. The mysterious researcher, whoever it had been, had been thorough to clean up their person but left just enough clues for them to suspect things. She turned and looked around the otherwise empty medbay. For a moment, she wondered if there was something more hidden among the shadows the various medical equipment cast to the facility. It probably wouldn’t help them much if it were anything like the material they already found, useless unless they’d get it to the ship for a closer look. Jovenan walked back to the biohazard storage and joined her team for their efforts.
Running the tricorder past the neat lines of sample containers, she recorded them. A thorough documentation of the “crime scene”, as she had told her team to consider the area, might just help them decipher its secrets later. Anything minor could just as turn out to be crucial; the precise order of the containers, the state of decay of a tissue sample at this specific time, the composition of an object that would get contaminated or degraded when they transported it… She looked at the data the small scanner had gathered so far. It was all as Lt Imril had stated, containers upon containers of blood, bone marrow and other tissue. She was almost questioning if they were, after all, raiding an innocent storage of an innocent hospital. That because of them, a Boraxian wouldn’t find out their cholesterol level was slightly elevated.
Then, she noticed something. Adjusting the parameters of the displayed data, she isolated structures she hadn’t expected to see in a scan like this. Biological matter, except those of non-carbon based species and other similar rarities – Tholians and the Horta, for example – tended to follow certain patterns across the galaxy, and crystalline lattice was not among them. Instead, she was looking at a scan of a geological structure, stashed among the biomedical samples.
Jovenan: Richards, could you come have a look at this? ::waits:: I might have found you a cool rock to study.
Richards: You have my undivided attention. What’chu got?
Bergmen: Go on, Mrs. Richards. But please be careful, because it can be evidence.
Jovenan almost let out a chuckle. There hadn’t been much that would catch the interest of a planetary scientist in the medbay so far, but the “cool rock” – a deliberate choice of words from Jovenan – certainly seemed to excite Richards. She showed her the data she had gathered.
Jovenan: See this. That looks like a mineral structure to me, among all these biological samples.
Richards: It looks trigonal. ::squinting her eyes to continue reading:: Like a rhodochrosite. ::looking around:: What would that be doing here?
Imril: The Boraxians don't appear to be an avian species, so I’m guessing it’s not a gizzard stone.
Jovenan shrugged. A gizzard stone in the medical storage would make some sense. Such objects just were too much of a rarity among humanoid species, but it wouldn’t be the first time if that was the case. If that information was in the Federation file on the Boraxian biology, she had missed it. It could be anything else, too – it would have been too early to jump to any conclusions.
Bergmen: Maybe something from their homeworld? Something religious? Or technological, like datacrystal?
Jovenan: Could be. Or it could be just someone’s souvenir or keepsake. This is just a weird place to store one.
Richards: Well, there could be a few things, but none of them make much sense. ::Gesturing around:: Neither does any of this, so… ::Shaking her head:: My first thought is cross contamination. But that doesn’t seem likely if there’s only one. Second thought would be it’s integral to whatever they are doing here. We have to get this back to the lab. It could have answers.
Jovenan nodded while looking at the tricorder again. It was easy to come up with innocent reasons to have this stone here. Maybe someone had accidentally swallowed it and the doctors here had to remove it? But her suspicions weren’t allowing her to just accept the easiest explanation as the truth. There were too many unusual factors in the game here, from the oddly well cleaned makeshift laboratory to the secrecy among the Boraxians. At the corner of her eye, Jovenan noticed Richards staring at her. Turning her head, she now saw that the junior scientist had a peculiar expression on her face. She couldn’t tell exactly what Richards was trying to tell her with that face; to her, Richards looked a lot like Toto when she and Genkos had taken him to the vet on Betazed. She responded with a questioning look.
Imril: Here’s what doesn’t make sense to me. Would Ellise have directed us up here if she knew what’s been going on here? I don’t think so. She was being rather protective of her companions, so why wouldn't she be as protective of this secret as whoever cleared out the evidence? She seemed as eager to be rid of us as we were to investigate on our own. Which implies her ignorance of this situation.
Bergmen: They welded her and her team in that corridor. If what really happened was what she described to us, they let them die… or at least didn’t count them to survive the vent. She knew something; she hid something from us. Yet in the first chance to send us away, she gave us this place when we asked. I feel… (beat) I’m sure she didn’t know… ::points at their surroundings:: …about this.
Right. That did seem odd.
Jovenan: That’s true. She and her team seemed suspicious, but I don’t think they would have allowed us to get here if they had known there was something hidden here. ::shrug:: Or they couldn’t come up with a good enough a lie to keep us away at that spot.
Richards: Response
Imril: And if she doesn’t know about this experiment in refined chemistry, who else doesn’t?
Bergmen: And what else of what is happening on this vessel don’t we know?
Jovenan pointed her finger at Lt Bergmen and shook her hand for a few seconds, like she had seen a few professors do when a student answered a question right in a spectacular fashion.
Jovenan: It’s possible some of the odd readings and results we’ve got are unrelated, or related only by circumstance. But one of the Boraxian team – Remy, was it? – got us similar readings as something in this sickbay. That could be a connection, or maybe they didn’t know they were exposed to something while in here?
Richards: Response
Imril: Remy struck me as someone who wanted to say more than they did, but kept holding back. Anyone else get that impression?
Jovenan looked at the reactions of her other teammates, as she hadn’t spent as much time talking with the Boraxians. If Lt Imril was correct and Remy knew something, they might need to try and find them again for questioning – or maybe they’d be able to scan the other Boraxian crew on the Artemis and see if they, too, emitted similar readings. For all they knew, most of these people were involved with whatever was happening here… or none. She sighed inaudibly; being a detective was difficult.
Bergmen: He was the youngest of those Boraxians, enlisted or apprentice. He probably didn’t know much, but yes, we should press him when we had a chance. He would talk.
Jovenan: Um… I’m not sure. They weren’t necessarily the youngest of them, or just an enlisted or an apprentice, either.
Richards: Response
It was Bergmen’s turn to stare at the two scientists.
Bergmen: Yurum? Are you sure? (beat) But they should have been holy to those Boraxians, no? And they were with Damage Control Teams… On the frontlines of whatever happened to them…
Raising both her hands in an exaggerated shrug, Jovenan tried to remember what all they had in their files. The Federation–Boraxian contacts had been too sparse for a deep understanding of their societal and religious structures to be recorded anywhere. When they had encountered the Boraxian team and found the Yurum among them, she had just assumed that the files were just incomplete in that area, or that the emergency overwrote the typical standards.
Jovenan: The Captain said it was the Yurum faction that asked for an asylum. Perhaps there’s a connection.
Imril/Richards: Response
Bergmen: So, what now? Are we packing all of this and leaving? Or continue to investigate?
Jovenan’s eyes shifted from one team member to the other.
Jovenan: Can we transport material from here, or does the theta radiation block it?
Imril/Richards/Bergmen: Response
Jovenan: Right. Bergmen, please coordinate the transportation of evidence to the ship. Get us some biological sample kits as well. Richards, prepare as much evidence from the biohazard storage to be transported. Prioritise the rock and anything that gives off similar readings or anything else unusual. Imril and I will take the lab.
Imril/Richards/Bergmen: Response
She looked out at the dark sickbay once more, shining light to the corners and cracks. The damaged ship was eery, so much that she had to try and keep her imagination at bay, but more importantly, it was dangerous. Even if Vitor’s team were in full work with the repairs – assuming they hadn’t already turned to full-on investigation like they had – the old and shaken ship could suffer greater damage without a warning. Besides, someone must have caused this all, and that someone might still be out there. She turned back to her teammates.
Jovenan: Let’s get moving, then. I want to be out of here with as much evidence as possible when whoever attacked this ship comes back.
Imril/Richards/Bergmen: Response
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Lieutenant Commander Jovenan
Acting XO (Chief Science Officer)
USS Artemis-A
E239911J11