Cerulean Stars - Chapter 130

Chapter 130 - Family Part 2

Stardate 48532.9 - July 14, 2371 - 12:12:14

A little known fact outside of Starfleet was that away missions came in two categories, general and undercover. As the name implied, general required nothing more than the general qualifications all Starfleet officers received in the Academy.

Undercover however was different, it required a specific course qualification that needed to be renewed every five years. And without that qualification, you were never supposed to be allowed anywhere near a mission that involved going undercover.

That wasn't to say it didn't happen anyways of course, Starfleet was still Starfleet after all. But it limited those occurrences mostly to suddenly needed specialists, and victims of shuttle crashes.

Even though Raine's capabilities on the undercover front had been limited due to her staunch refusal to utilize cosmetic procedures, she had still kept her undercover qualifications up to date. The problem she was discovering however, was that most of the station's senior staff apparently hadn't decided to do similar.

Which was why she was currently in the medical bay arguing with Sisko about his insistent desire to bring Bashir along.

“This is not up for debate, Brooks." Sisko said, studying his currently green complexion in the mirror he'd been given with a critical eye. “I want a medical officer with us on this.”

“Lieutenant Sera is fully qualified as a field medic.” Raine countered, briefly glancing in the direction of the privacy field sectioned-off portion of the room the short Lieutenant was currently undergoing her own cosmetic procedure in. “And Bashir isn't going to be able to help anyone if he's stabbed. Which is what's going to happen the first time he looks judgementally at someone.”

Something they both knew the young Doctor wouldn't be able to stop himself from doing the first time he saw anything even remotely objectionable.

“Over exaggeration isn't helpful.” Sisko put forward with a frown.

“I'm not overexaggerating.” Raine shot back in exasperation. “Orion's are nearly as resistant to death by stabbing as Klingons, and throwing daggers at each other to punish minor transgressions is literally a basic part of their culture.”

An extraordinarily stupid part of their culture at that, though Raine would grudgingly admit that their dagger dances were damn impressive to watch.

Sisko turned away from the mirror to narrow his eyes at her. “There's nothing about that in the Federation’s dossier.”

Raine rolled her eyes. “The Federation’s Orion cultural dossier isn't worth the isolinear processors its data is held on.”

It wasn’t the Federation’s fault really, the only trustworthy source they likely had on things were undercover operatives that legally shouldn’t have been on Orion planets in the first place. 

“I’ve tried to update it half a dozen times, but Memory Alpha won’t accept any updated submissions about “known” races without either first hand experience or corroborated information from at least two verifiable sources.”

And ‘hey, I got this information from my ex-girlfriend’ wasn’t really what Federation archivists considered a verifiable source.

“You’d be better served at looking through the Starfleet encounter files.” She continued, well aware they absolutely didn’t have the time for that now. “And before you ask.” Because everyone always asked. “Yes, the pheromone thing is real. But it’s limited to certain specific family lines that we’re not likely to encounter unless one of the infiltration team gets the bright idea to follow someone into a pheromone den.”

There had been an upscale pheromone den on Risa that Jellaa had dragged her into during a vacation when Saya was eight that had left the older Asari giggling like a crazy person while the entire world seemingly morphed into an animated special. Jellaa had of course found the whole thing hilarious, at least, until Raine had decided she was a superhero and the Orion her damsel in distress in need of rescue.

“And the multitude of different recreational drugs?” Sisko floated idly.

“Sort of true.” Raine confirmed. “A lot of the planet's fruits contain high levels of certain chemicals that, while mostly ineffective on the Orions themselves, tend to have strong drug-like effects on other species.”

As Saya's existence could attest to.

“Seems like it would be a good idea then to have a medical officer along.” Sisko floated in an almost instructor-like tone that nonetheless managed to convey the idea that the matter was settled.

And like or not, Raine supposed it was since she couldn't actually override his decision on the matter.

“All right, sir.” She sighed. “But I'm going to assign Lieutenant Sera as his minder.”

She’d much rather have Jadzia do it, since Bashir would be a lot less likely to push back against her then the small Lieutenant. Unfortunately the cosmetic procedures needed for a Trill to pass as an Orion included several biochemical adjustments that were known to react badly with the combined biology of a joined Trill.

The corner of Sisko’s lips curled upwards into a wry grin. “After what happened with the Bell Riots I find it hard to argue against that.”

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Entering the Defiant’s shuttlebay, Raine was somewhat disappointed to find O’Brien’s team already finishing up the cosmetic modifications to the shuttle. 

Spotting the man in question standing next to one of the tool trolleys, Raine walked over. Noting in amusement as she did that one of the engineers was apparently taking it upon themselves to add some over the top nose art to the small vessel.

“Commander.” O’Brien greeted with a smile as he noticed her approach. “Finished up with the matrix modifications to that holo-emitter you brought back.”

“Already?” Raine asked in surprise, having figured it would take him a little longer to get that done.

“Wasn’t that hard.” O”Brien admitted humbly as he reached into one of the trolley's drawers and pulled out the armlet in question. “I called around after you first asked me to look into it, and a few days ago Commander La Forge finally got back to me with a message saying he recognized some of the alloys from something the Captain ran into last year during a diplomatic meetup with the Lyaarans.”

Wracking her memory to try and figure out why the name sounded so familiar, Raine felt a small twitch of annoyance when all she could come up with was a blank.

“So you contacted the Lyaaran’s about it?”

“Figured why not.” O’Brien nodded, passing the armlet over to her. “They were really confused about how one of their holographic projectors got into Starfleet hands.”

Raine gave a rueful shake of her head. “Given the sheer number of unusual circumstances involved, they aren’t the only ones.”

“Well, better your problem then mine.” O’Brien agreed with a grin. “Anyways, I explained as much as I could without mentioning the whole time travel thing. And they were happy to send me a general user manual for it.” He grimaced and looked away in a clear sign that there had been more to their conversation then he was saying. “Though… They were maybe a tad too interested in learning about you.”

“Meh.” Raine shrugged, having long learned not to concern herself with that sort of attention. “As long as they don’t hire someone to try and collect me it’s fine.”

With that she slipped the armlet on, tapping the jewel shaped button that would activate it and then shuddering slightly at the tingling feeling of the holographic projection settling over her form.

Building a workable holographic matrix to overlay over a living subject wasn’t exactly an easy thing. So they had probably been lucky that the only thing needed to make the already programmed Human form look like an Orion was a slight tweaking of the skin and hair color.

“How’s my hair look?” She asked, not able to get a good look at it herself outside of the few strands that occasionally crossed her vision to show its color was no longer the near platinum blonde she had so disliked.

“It’s very… Black.” O’Brien offered uncertainly, only to hastily continue when he noticed the unamused stare Raine was now shooting him “It fits you better than the blonde at least.”

Raine rolled her eyes at the familiar answer. “Yes yes, I know, it should be blue.”

She knew everyone only thought that because her crest was blue and its shape lended itself well to mentally substituting it for hair. But it still irked her to constantly hear people say it.

“One of these days I’m going to show up to my duty shift as a human with electric blue hair just to mess you all.” 

“Warn me before you do.” O’Brien put forward in an amused tone as he turned back to the trolley. “Keiko’d want pictures.”

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“So then Aunt D'Rana released the hornbeast and said I better start running after it because that was going to be my dinner for the week.” D'Vana said, continuing on with the same level of energy she had been going on with for the past two hours. “Which was kind of silly because the forest was full of edible plants and fungus that were a lot less dangerous than an angry hornbeast. Only Aunt D'Rana got kind of angry when I pointed that out and started throwing daggers at me, which, okay, was kind of her response to a lot of things. But it wasn't my fault she didn't think to read through a wilderness primer before making her training plans.”

She gave a happy smile. “So anyways, that was what I did for my tenth birthday, what about you?”

“I… Kind of had to skip it…” Saya admitted, suddenly feeling more then a little guilty about just how angry she had been with her mother at the time now that she'd heard just how bad her cousin had apparently had things. “My mom was down on Minos Korva helping to disarm Cardassian boobytrapps. But she replicated me a cake when she got back.”

“Oooh!” D'Vana exclaimed. “Cakes are good! Was it one of the ones with assassins hiding in them? Or just a regular one?”

It took Saya a second to process the fact that the young Orion seemed to consider the first option a realistic example of what a cake was at all.

“A regular one… We don’t really have assassin cakes in the Federation.”

“Wow.” D’Vana gushed happily. “That must be nice, everytime we get a cake it feels like it’s a coin flip whether there will be assassins in it or not.”

“Have you considered switching to cupcakes?” Saya asked, cringing at how lame the question sounded.

D’Vana tilted her head slightly, staring at Saya with clear confusion in her eyes. “What are cupcakes?”

“Small cakes about this big.” Saya said, making an open half circle with her fingers. “They look kind of like muffins.” She grimaced. “Assuming you know what those are.”

“Yup!” D'Vana bobbed her head. “We have them here, but I’m not supposed to eat them till I’m older cause the grain they’re made with grows in symbiosis with a fungus that contains a large number of alkaloids that react badly with juvenile Orion brain chemistry."

A few seconds of silence passed after those words until the young Orion shuffled awkwardly in her chair. “So… Um… What’s it like having a mom in Starfleet?”

“Normal?” Saya shrugged, not sure how else to explain it given her mom had been in Starfleet her entire life. “She’s gone a lot on missions and stuff, so whenever that happens I end up having to stay with whoever’s available on the list.”

“The list?” D’Vana cocked her head.

“It’s a thing Starfleet parents do.” Saya explained. “Basically just a list of people who have volunteered to watch their kids while they’re off on missions.”

“Oooh.” D’Vana exclaimed in understanding. “That makes sense. It’s not like you’d have any family around to do that while flying around on a starship.” She pursed her lips. “I mean, we would, but that’s because we have rules that certain positions on our ships can only be held by members of the family, and I don’t think that would work for Starfleet given they have like a thousand times our ships.”

“Sometimes weird stuff happens.” Saya continued. “Like, there was this one time the ship we were on got stuck in a time fracture and a future version of my mom helped us escape. And another time, this weird super computer kidnapped all the humans onboard to perform manual labor for it because its creators did the same thing a thousand years ago.”

“That's… So… Cool!” D’Vana squealed in excitement. “Did you ever encounter any space-dwelling lifeforms? What about energy beings?”

Saya blinked, the sudden suspicion that she may have made a mistake briefly flitting across her mind before the urge to show off overpowered it. “Do Medusans count?”

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Author’s Notes: Next chapter, our intrepid four man away team infiltrates Orion.