07-18-2024, 10:33 PM
==Later==
==They asked me for a statue of the general who died/
A sword raised in his iron fist, a warhorse sat astride./
And though I knew they’d try me for what I did decide/
I stuck a hammer in his fist and an anvil at his side.==
“So.”
Benjamin sat in his cell, looking out at the desk where LCdr Rabb sat, a padd in hand and a restrained number on the table - only a half-dozen today. They were arranged neatly and all visible, each lit up with information. He could only imagine what they contained. Or remember, really - after all, they were all about him and his past.
“To start with,” she said, “know that I’ve been read into your entire mission, so you can discuss it freely.” He nodded, glad he could actually talk about it. “Also, know that the recording devices in the room have been turned off due to the classified nature of said mission, and I’m running an active jamming protocol” - she indicated the padd at the top right, making Benjamin question whether he actually knew what was on all of the padds - “to make sure that no one picks it up with something that isn’t supposed to be here.”
“I understand, Commander,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “In that case, where do you want to start?”
“We might as well start at the beginning,” she said, “on Pomn.”
“Alright, then,” he said. And he began to recount it for her, from Nathan bringing news of his missing friend to him, to them heading towards the independent world. He told about their fight with the Klingons, and their capture and subsequent escape from them. And then he told about their capture of the Bird of Prey, which was of course the most relevant portion.
“So, you managed to knock out the skeleton crew,” she asked, “and take over the ship. What did you do with the people on board?”
“We beamed them back down to the planet,” he said. “It seemed like the only option; we couldn’t take them with us, and we weren’t going to kill them.”
“You beamed them, unconscious, back down to where the people they enslaved had just been freed,” Rabb said slowly, almost as if to a child. “Pomn, of course, doesn’t share investigative records so we don’t know if they were ever arrested or found, but the Klingons list that entire minor house as ended. Whether that means there were no survivors, or whether that just means that they dissolved the house once they found out they were trafficking sentients is also unclear.
“But either way,” she continued meaningfully, “I would not assume that you did them any favors by beaming them back down.”
Benjamin stopped for a moment, swallowed hard, and nodded. He’d known that, of course. Of course he had. But knowing it and having it said to you by someone else are two completely different things. Her words hit him like a brick to the head, and it took a moment to gather himself, which she gratefully allowed.
“We took the bird of prey with us,” he finally continued, “because it seemed likely that if we left it, it would either pose a hazard to orbital traffic or potentially even be recovered and used for more crimes.” He couldn’t help but notice her making notes, but pressed on anyway. “Not knowing what to do with it, we took it back towards Pioneer Station and rendezvoused with Captain Crawford.”
Rabb chuckled. “I’m sure that went splendidly,” she said, and drew a chuckle from Benjamin as well.
“If you want to call getting an ass-chewing first over vid screen and then in person once we got back to Artemis ‘splendid’, then sure,” he said. “Nathan went back with her while I disposed of the bird of prey in a nearby star.”
“How did you get back?”
“The shuttle we took to Pomn was in the cargo hold. It barely fit, but it worked,” he replied.
“And while they were away…”
He sighed. “Yes, this is when I did a little salvage. I recovered some pieces of weaponry and other bits and bobs for Nathan and myself, as well as some for Tyra once she calmed down. And, of course, this is when I stole the cloak.” He described how he hid the ship in the star’s magnetic pole while he disconnected the cloak and crated it up in the back of the shuttle, before launching and then making sure the bird of prey plunged straight into the star. He then had the crate marked as his personal effects and filed away on Gettysburg.
“Surely the quartermaster was going to scan the crate,” Rabb said. She looked at another padd before adding, “Lieutenant Morgan strikes me as a very efficient and curious sort.”
“Lieutenant Commander,” he corrected, “but yes. I got lucky that we, um… well, we had feelings for each other at the time,” he said, and tried to not let the past tense there hurt too much as he said it - you did it to yourself, you know, he reminded himself - “though I’m sure that she wound up looking anyway.”
“And yet there were no flags raised?”
“She may not have known what she was looking at,” he said, “or she may not have had time to look. I don’t know. She would never do anything to jeopardize Captain Crawford, so my firm belief is that she didn’t know at the time.” He sighed. “When she knew may be a matter for debate, but I don’t believe she knew at the outset.”
Rabb made a few notes while letting the silence linger, before signaling him to continue. “Shortly after that is when we got transferred to the Artemis, and at that point I saw a chance to hide it further.”
“What did you do then?”
“As the cargo was being transferred, I changed the labels on the crate,” he said. “I made sure it was moved to an area where I could get to it if needed, but made sure it was no longer labeled as it was on Gettysburg.”
Mackenzie nodded and ticked a note on her padd. “So that’s where they got the smuggling charge,” she said mostly to herself. “That one should be easy enough. Alright, anything else until we get to the Parhelia mission?”
Benjamin sighed and racked his brain for a moment. “No,” he said, “I can’t think of anything between the two.”
“And you’re sure no one else touched it?”
“Sure as I can be,” he said. “I’d included some small seals that would break if the crate was opened and send me an alert. Also, I may have kept some bottles nearby to make people think that I kept my still around there, just to throw anyone off if they noticed it.” That drew a grin, but just a grin.
“Alright, then,” she said, “let’s move on to the mission. How did you come to the decision that now was the time to use the cloak, after sitting on it for years?”
He stood up and started pacing, arms crossed and head down. “Well,” he started, “Captain Crawford called me into her office. She had just gotten our orders to retake the Callisto and prevent the Cardassians from getting the secrets of slipstream from it, and was trying to figure out the plan. She and Coleman had worked through most of the actual strategy of how to do it, but they were stumped on insertion. So she asked for help.
“We walked through the system defenses as laid out by SFI - how many enemy ships are in the area, shipping in and out is all Cardassian military, the station that they constructed…” He shook his head, looking over at her as he stopped. “The place was, if not a fortress, then at least as well defended as an outpost can be. Getting a Starfleet team in wasn’t going to be easy, particularly if we played by the book.”
“Did SFI give any assistance in this? Any preliminary findings or plans that could be adapted?”
Benjamin barked out a laugh and shook his head. “No, not a one,” he said. “As best as we could tell, they had decided that it couldn’t be done and kicked it to a different team so that they didn’t get stuck with the failure.”
“But you had an ace up your sleeve,” she prompted.
“Yes, I did. Like I said,” he continued, “going by the book it was basically impossible. So we went off-book. I told Captain Crawford about the cloak in my possession, and that I had already done some of the theoretical on getting it installed on Federation hardware - in this instance an Archangel, though we eventually put it on a Waverider which rendered a lot of that work useless.”
“Was Commander Coleman in this meeting?”
“No,” he said, “and I was specifically ordered not to tell anyone else about this plan - none of my engineers, no other departments, no one. Given the reactions I saw from everyone in the crew when we activated the cloak, I believe that she didn’t tell anyone either.”
“I presume that she must have told the quartermaster, at least, to get it moved to the Philadelphia for install?”
“It was just listed among the items needed from our stores,” he said. “So far as I’m aware, no one else knew anything before we actually turned the thing on.”
Mackenzie still continued to question. “Even on a ship as small as Philadelphia, and among so small a group from Artemis? You had to install it, how did you get it done?”
“We worked together on it, Captain Crawford and myself,” he answered. “We both wanted to compartmentalize the knowledge as best we could, to insulate the others.”
Rabb nodded, and moved between the padds on the table. “Presumably so that no one else would get in trouble.” He nodded in agreement. “So you used the device to insert in-system, and it was destroyed when you” - she tilted her head dramatically towards a padd - “detonated the Waverider’s warp core right next to the Nor’s fusion generators, taking out most of the Cardassian presence in the system.”
Benjamin stopped his pacing and looked at her blankly for a moment before just nodding. “To be fair, that wasn’t exactly plan A.”
“Maybe it should have been,” she said with a slight smile and a hardness to her eyes that made him uncomfortable. “Besides, doing that eliminated all of the evidence of the cloak’s existence, meaning that so long as everyone kept their mouths shut you were all off the hook.”
She stared at him for a moment as she picked up a padd, and he sighed and sat down on his bench again. “Yeah, well, like I said, it wasn’t exactly plan A.”
“No, evidently plan A involved you trying to go over your captain’s head and take all the blame for yourself.” She shook a padd - likely containing his confession, sent before they had departed the Philadelphia and held for a delayed transmission - and set it down solidly, carefully on the table. “Not the best plan.”
“Plan A involved me rescinding that transmission,” he said, “but I knew things could go sideways very fast with what we were being asked to do. So I sent that” - he pointed at the padd - “to make sure if I didn’t make it, someone besides Tyra would take the blame. She…” He sighed, knowing that he wasn’t going to win this argument, but needing to make it anyway. “She had too many people that needed her - the crew, obviously, but also her husband, her children. I don’t.”
“You know that it's likely that your message - even in a scenario where Command knew before receiving your confession - would only have made things worse for her? Showing a systemic failure of her leadership and her ability to develop the officers under her command?”
He sighed. He wasn’t exactly up-to-speed on what was happening on Artemis these days, but he’d heard that Tyra was gone, and for similar reasons. “Yeah,” he said. “I know now.”
“I get that your heart was in the right place,” Rabb told him, “but as an officer and not just your lawyer, you realize just how dumb of a decision it was?”
“Not the first dumb decision I’ve ever made,” he said, and then chuckled. “As you well know after all of this.”
She waggled an eyebrow and conceded the point. “Well,” she said, and picked up another padd. “Just so you are aware, the charges against you are as follows: Illegal possession and manufacture of a controlled substance - three counts for the stills you operated on Artemis, Gettysburg, and at the Academy, though I’m trying to get that reduced to two since you moved the same device between the two ships; possession of restricted technology under the Treaty of Algeron for your ownership of a cloaking device; illegal experimentation with a restricted technology under the Treaty of Algeron for your usage of said cloaking device; failure to report treaty violations, re the Treaty of Algeron; and conduct unbecoming an officer of Starfleet.”
Benjamin just listened and nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure what to say. What came out of his mouth, however, was “They really like trying to tie everything back to the Treaty of Algeron, don’t they?”
Rabb smiled and nodded. “They don’t get to use it much; you should have heard the wails of despair from the home office when the CINC declined to prosecute the Titan-A crew. If you listen very closely, though, you may still be able to hear the echoes of them once we get there.”
“Get where?” Benjamin asked, his stomach sinking.
“To Earth,” Rabb said as she stood up and began repacking her padds. “They’ve demanded to have your trial on Earth. I would say pack your bags, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
Benjamin sank along with his stomach, at least as far as the bench. It felt like his heart kept going, though. “I guess not.”
==TBC on Earth==
==And it’s sparks a’flying/
Passions strong/
I am the blacksmith singing/
The hammer and the anvil song.
—The Longest Johns, “Hammer and Anvil Song”==
==They asked me for a statue of the general who died/
A sword raised in his iron fist, a warhorse sat astride./
And though I knew they’d try me for what I did decide/
I stuck a hammer in his fist and an anvil at his side.==
“So.”
Benjamin sat in his cell, looking out at the desk where LCdr Rabb sat, a padd in hand and a restrained number on the table - only a half-dozen today. They were arranged neatly and all visible, each lit up with information. He could only imagine what they contained. Or remember, really - after all, they were all about him and his past.
“To start with,” she said, “know that I’ve been read into your entire mission, so you can discuss it freely.” He nodded, glad he could actually talk about it. “Also, know that the recording devices in the room have been turned off due to the classified nature of said mission, and I’m running an active jamming protocol” - she indicated the padd at the top right, making Benjamin question whether he actually knew what was on all of the padds - “to make sure that no one picks it up with something that isn’t supposed to be here.”
“I understand, Commander,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “In that case, where do you want to start?”
“We might as well start at the beginning,” she said, “on Pomn.”
“Alright, then,” he said. And he began to recount it for her, from Nathan bringing news of his missing friend to him, to them heading towards the independent world. He told about their fight with the Klingons, and their capture and subsequent escape from them. And then he told about their capture of the Bird of Prey, which was of course the most relevant portion.
“So, you managed to knock out the skeleton crew,” she asked, “and take over the ship. What did you do with the people on board?”
“We beamed them back down to the planet,” he said. “It seemed like the only option; we couldn’t take them with us, and we weren’t going to kill them.”
“You beamed them, unconscious, back down to where the people they enslaved had just been freed,” Rabb said slowly, almost as if to a child. “Pomn, of course, doesn’t share investigative records so we don’t know if they were ever arrested or found, but the Klingons list that entire minor house as ended. Whether that means there were no survivors, or whether that just means that they dissolved the house once they found out they were trafficking sentients is also unclear.
“But either way,” she continued meaningfully, “I would not assume that you did them any favors by beaming them back down.”
Benjamin stopped for a moment, swallowed hard, and nodded. He’d known that, of course. Of course he had. But knowing it and having it said to you by someone else are two completely different things. Her words hit him like a brick to the head, and it took a moment to gather himself, which she gratefully allowed.
“We took the bird of prey with us,” he finally continued, “because it seemed likely that if we left it, it would either pose a hazard to orbital traffic or potentially even be recovered and used for more crimes.” He couldn’t help but notice her making notes, but pressed on anyway. “Not knowing what to do with it, we took it back towards Pioneer Station and rendezvoused with Captain Crawford.”
Rabb chuckled. “I’m sure that went splendidly,” she said, and drew a chuckle from Benjamin as well.
“If you want to call getting an ass-chewing first over vid screen and then in person once we got back to Artemis ‘splendid’, then sure,” he said. “Nathan went back with her while I disposed of the bird of prey in a nearby star.”
“How did you get back?”
“The shuttle we took to Pomn was in the cargo hold. It barely fit, but it worked,” he replied.
“And while they were away…”
He sighed. “Yes, this is when I did a little salvage. I recovered some pieces of weaponry and other bits and bobs for Nathan and myself, as well as some for Tyra once she calmed down. And, of course, this is when I stole the cloak.” He described how he hid the ship in the star’s magnetic pole while he disconnected the cloak and crated it up in the back of the shuttle, before launching and then making sure the bird of prey plunged straight into the star. He then had the crate marked as his personal effects and filed away on Gettysburg.
“Surely the quartermaster was going to scan the crate,” Rabb said. She looked at another padd before adding, “Lieutenant Morgan strikes me as a very efficient and curious sort.”
“Lieutenant Commander,” he corrected, “but yes. I got lucky that we, um… well, we had feelings for each other at the time,” he said, and tried to not let the past tense there hurt too much as he said it - you did it to yourself, you know, he reminded himself - “though I’m sure that she wound up looking anyway.”
“And yet there were no flags raised?”
“She may not have known what she was looking at,” he said, “or she may not have had time to look. I don’t know. She would never do anything to jeopardize Captain Crawford, so my firm belief is that she didn’t know at the time.” He sighed. “When she knew may be a matter for debate, but I don’t believe she knew at the outset.”
Rabb made a few notes while letting the silence linger, before signaling him to continue. “Shortly after that is when we got transferred to the Artemis, and at that point I saw a chance to hide it further.”
“What did you do then?”
“As the cargo was being transferred, I changed the labels on the crate,” he said. “I made sure it was moved to an area where I could get to it if needed, but made sure it was no longer labeled as it was on Gettysburg.”
Mackenzie nodded and ticked a note on her padd. “So that’s where they got the smuggling charge,” she said mostly to herself. “That one should be easy enough. Alright, anything else until we get to the Parhelia mission?”
Benjamin sighed and racked his brain for a moment. “No,” he said, “I can’t think of anything between the two.”
“And you’re sure no one else touched it?”
“Sure as I can be,” he said. “I’d included some small seals that would break if the crate was opened and send me an alert. Also, I may have kept some bottles nearby to make people think that I kept my still around there, just to throw anyone off if they noticed it.” That drew a grin, but just a grin.
“Alright, then,” she said, “let’s move on to the mission. How did you come to the decision that now was the time to use the cloak, after sitting on it for years?”
He stood up and started pacing, arms crossed and head down. “Well,” he started, “Captain Crawford called me into her office. She had just gotten our orders to retake the Callisto and prevent the Cardassians from getting the secrets of slipstream from it, and was trying to figure out the plan. She and Coleman had worked through most of the actual strategy of how to do it, but they were stumped on insertion. So she asked for help.
“We walked through the system defenses as laid out by SFI - how many enemy ships are in the area, shipping in and out is all Cardassian military, the station that they constructed…” He shook his head, looking over at her as he stopped. “The place was, if not a fortress, then at least as well defended as an outpost can be. Getting a Starfleet team in wasn’t going to be easy, particularly if we played by the book.”
“Did SFI give any assistance in this? Any preliminary findings or plans that could be adapted?”
Benjamin barked out a laugh and shook his head. “No, not a one,” he said. “As best as we could tell, they had decided that it couldn’t be done and kicked it to a different team so that they didn’t get stuck with the failure.”
“But you had an ace up your sleeve,” she prompted.
“Yes, I did. Like I said,” he continued, “going by the book it was basically impossible. So we went off-book. I told Captain Crawford about the cloak in my possession, and that I had already done some of the theoretical on getting it installed on Federation hardware - in this instance an Archangel, though we eventually put it on a Waverider which rendered a lot of that work useless.”
“Was Commander Coleman in this meeting?”
“No,” he said, “and I was specifically ordered not to tell anyone else about this plan - none of my engineers, no other departments, no one. Given the reactions I saw from everyone in the crew when we activated the cloak, I believe that she didn’t tell anyone either.”
“I presume that she must have told the quartermaster, at least, to get it moved to the Philadelphia for install?”
“It was just listed among the items needed from our stores,” he said. “So far as I’m aware, no one else knew anything before we actually turned the thing on.”
Mackenzie still continued to question. “Even on a ship as small as Philadelphia, and among so small a group from Artemis? You had to install it, how did you get it done?”
“We worked together on it, Captain Crawford and myself,” he answered. “We both wanted to compartmentalize the knowledge as best we could, to insulate the others.”
Rabb nodded, and moved between the padds on the table. “Presumably so that no one else would get in trouble.” He nodded in agreement. “So you used the device to insert in-system, and it was destroyed when you” - she tilted her head dramatically towards a padd - “detonated the Waverider’s warp core right next to the Nor’s fusion generators, taking out most of the Cardassian presence in the system.”
Benjamin stopped his pacing and looked at her blankly for a moment before just nodding. “To be fair, that wasn’t exactly plan A.”
“Maybe it should have been,” she said with a slight smile and a hardness to her eyes that made him uncomfortable. “Besides, doing that eliminated all of the evidence of the cloak’s existence, meaning that so long as everyone kept their mouths shut you were all off the hook.”
She stared at him for a moment as she picked up a padd, and he sighed and sat down on his bench again. “Yeah, well, like I said, it wasn’t exactly plan A.”
“No, evidently plan A involved you trying to go over your captain’s head and take all the blame for yourself.” She shook a padd - likely containing his confession, sent before they had departed the Philadelphia and held for a delayed transmission - and set it down solidly, carefully on the table. “Not the best plan.”
“Plan A involved me rescinding that transmission,” he said, “but I knew things could go sideways very fast with what we were being asked to do. So I sent that” - he pointed at the padd - “to make sure if I didn’t make it, someone besides Tyra would take the blame. She…” He sighed, knowing that he wasn’t going to win this argument, but needing to make it anyway. “She had too many people that needed her - the crew, obviously, but also her husband, her children. I don’t.”
“You know that it's likely that your message - even in a scenario where Command knew before receiving your confession - would only have made things worse for her? Showing a systemic failure of her leadership and her ability to develop the officers under her command?”
He sighed. He wasn’t exactly up-to-speed on what was happening on Artemis these days, but he’d heard that Tyra was gone, and for similar reasons. “Yeah,” he said. “I know now.”
“I get that your heart was in the right place,” Rabb told him, “but as an officer and not just your lawyer, you realize just how dumb of a decision it was?”
“Not the first dumb decision I’ve ever made,” he said, and then chuckled. “As you well know after all of this.”
She waggled an eyebrow and conceded the point. “Well,” she said, and picked up another padd. “Just so you are aware, the charges against you are as follows: Illegal possession and manufacture of a controlled substance - three counts for the stills you operated on Artemis, Gettysburg, and at the Academy, though I’m trying to get that reduced to two since you moved the same device between the two ships; possession of restricted technology under the Treaty of Algeron for your ownership of a cloaking device; illegal experimentation with a restricted technology under the Treaty of Algeron for your usage of said cloaking device; failure to report treaty violations, re the Treaty of Algeron; and conduct unbecoming an officer of Starfleet.”
Benjamin just listened and nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure what to say. What came out of his mouth, however, was “They really like trying to tie everything back to the Treaty of Algeron, don’t they?”
Rabb smiled and nodded. “They don’t get to use it much; you should have heard the wails of despair from the home office when the CINC declined to prosecute the Titan-A crew. If you listen very closely, though, you may still be able to hear the echoes of them once we get there.”
“Get where?” Benjamin asked, his stomach sinking.
“To Earth,” Rabb said as she stood up and began repacking her padds. “They’ve demanded to have your trial on Earth. I would say pack your bags, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
Benjamin sank along with his stomach, at least as far as the bench. It felt like his heart kept going, though. “I guess not.”
==TBC on Earth==
==And it’s sparks a’flying/
Passions strong/
I am the blacksmith singing/
The hammer and the anvil song.
—The Longest Johns, “Hammer and Anvil Song”==