The Talk

Posted on 08 Mar 2016 @ 12:05am by Lieutenant Commander Temerant Bast & Lieutenant Commander Camila Di Pasquale

1,798 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Outbreak
Location: Brig

Camila sat in her office and kept turning the events which occurred on the T'Pring over and over in her mind. Why did Bast become Consortium? Unfortunately, she couldn't supply herself with the answers so she decided to head to medical to see the Lieutenant and see if she could get some answers from him. She turned the office over to her Assistant Chief and took the turbolift to the deck where the Lieutenant was in Medical and once there, she dismissed the guard and came to stand in front of his biobed without saying a word.

Temerant had been typing on a data padd when the ship's new Chief of Security walked in. He wanted to write up his version of events and submit it as an official report, if only to try and make sense of everything - if that was even possible. He looked up and saw the confusion on her face, the hurt, the betrayal, and the repressed anger.

"Lieutenant di Pasquale," he said simply.

"Lieutenant Bast," she said. "I would have expected to find you in the Brig by now. I take it that you still aren't well enough to leave the doctor's care?"

"Doctor Kij wants to keep me under observation for another day," he replied. "Besides, you've got your guard here to keep me company."

"Well, I'm here now," Camila said. "And you have a lot to answer for, Lieutenant."

Bast was silent for a moment, looking at her. He finally set aside his data padd, and took a deep breath. "I don't know what to tell you," he says. "I have conflicting memories of everything that happened. Doctor Kij tells me that I was poisoned by a substance that blocked the link to my symbiont, which left the door open for the Consortium to..." he searched for the right word, finally coming up with "brainwash me into turning against Starfleet. They say I was telepathically manipulated."

She continued to stare him for a moment. "I have heard that the only people who can be manipulated are those with weak wills," she said. "You struck me as being stronger than that and I'd like to think that I'm a good judge of character. However, seeing you on the T'Pring firing at me and my people and working with the other Consortium scum while trying to destroy evidence clearly indicates to me that you are not a strong willed person. Even now, you don't have a single look of remorse on your face for what you did."

Bast could hardly believe his ears. Weak will. Remorse. Her judgement was final and without appeal.

He pushed the data padd aside, and slowly got up off the biobed, avoiding to put too much weight on his injured ankle. "Weak will," he repeated, mouthing the words carefully. "You believe it was weakness on my part that allowed them to poison me. That allowed a telepath to force his way into my mind, and make me turn my back on everything I've upheld and defended for over a hundred years."

He could feel the anger rising inside him. His blood pressure spiked, and the veins on his arms and hands bulged and pulsed with every heartbeat. His mouth filled with saliva, and his nostrils flared as he approached the small Security chief. "I was told humans in this century had stopped being judgemental, but I guess I was wrong. Do you blame rape victims for not being able to defend themselves? You don't know the first thing about me. About Trills. Or about the telepath that did this to me."

"Well, excuse me, Mister High and Mighty," Camila said without stepping back. "I had no idea that you were so advanced that you no longer know what guilt or remorse is, let alone how others feel. Or is telepathy and empathy part of being a Trill, too? I may have my facts wrong considering that you seem to know everything about my people and I obviously no nothing about yours in your opinion."

"As for rape victims, unless you have ever been raped, you can't say a thing about them. I never called you a victim of any kind." She paused and took a breath before she met his eyes. "Look, Lieutenant. I apologize for the weak willed part of my tirade against you. All I have to go on for information is what I experienced when I faced you as an enemy. Enlighten me."

Bast looked at her, dumbfounded. He suddenly realized that she had no idea what was going on, she obviously hadn't read the report that Kij had showed her. The report that the Chief Medical Officer and nurse had written.

"You should read Doctor Kij's report," he said. "Back on Deep Space Eleven, before I was assigned to the Black Hawk, I was poisoned by Commodore Terlexa, and an Ambassador from Selam - a very powerful telepath. They gave me a poison that disrupts the link to my symbiont. They did it to isolate me from my symbiont, so that they could penetrate my mind, and turn me against my own people."

"I think I'd really rather hear it from you," Camila said. "I've been so busy setting up Security since Captain Geisler promoted me to Chief that I haven't had time to do more than run around like a lunatic. Still, I need to understand so I don't end up mistrusting everyone."

Bast noticed for the first time the new pips on the Lieutenant's collar. "Congratulations on your promotion, then," he said, sitting back down on the biobed, and massaging his now-throbbing ankle. "But I'm not really sure what else I can tell you. I'm not sure I fully understand it all myself."

"Thank you. I understand that they mind-controlled you and blocked your symbiont," she said. "But were you aware of what you were doing at the time?"

"The closest analogy I can think of, is that it was like being trapped in some sort of psychotic nightmare. They weren't controlling me continuously like a puppet, if that's what you're thinking. But they twisted my perceptions enough that they had me believing that through their policies and politics in the Gamma Quadrant, Starfleet would bring about the resurgence of the Dominion - stronger than ever. And that the Dominion would spark a new war with the Federation, one that would spread back to the Alpha Quadrant, and cause the downfall of the Federation. And that I had to do everything I could to stop that."

"So you really believed what you were doing was the right thing?" Camila asked him, watching him carefully. She still didn't trust him, but she never dragged anyone over the coals until she was proved right...or angry.

"Like I told you, it was like being trapped in a psychotic nightmare. There was no 'right thing'. There was only one thing. The only thing I could do to try to save the Federation from itself. Or so I told by Commodore Terlexa."

He paused, and took a sip of water from a glass on the bedside table. "If in your dream, your foot is stuck in a bear trap, and your only way out before a pack of wolves kills you, is to chop off your own foot, you reach for the axe."

Camila listened quietly. "I don't know...I think I'd try to kill the wolves first, then work my way out of the trap. At least I would go down swinging if I failed." She hesitated, realizing that she sounded like she was starting to accuse him again. "Then again, if I knew that my death would be even more painful, I might have used the axe on myself."

Bast remained silent for a moment, his mind working, still processing the anger he felt - at her, for her accusations, at himself, for allowing it to happen, at his crewmates, for failing to see his distress, but mostly at Terlexa and the Selamat, for assaulting him in the first place. His blood demanded revenge, and he would do everything he could to make it happen.

"I don't have all the answers you're looking for," he said. "I don't know why they made me do it. I don't know why they chose me, of all people. I don't know what their plans are. But I do know that they are dangerous, and they have to be stopped."

"Was it you that I talked to a few days before this went down when we had dinner?" Camila asked quietly.

"Of course," he said.

"I mean, I know it was you," she said. "But...was it you saying those things? The Consortium allowed some free will as long as it didn't compromise their objectives?"

Bast frowned. He was having trouble explaining it clearly, but he wasn't totally sure he understood it himself well enough so that he could explain it.

"Let me put it another way," he said. "You're sitting home alone, and you hear something in your house. It might be the wind. It might be the cold, contracting the roof materials, or a tree branch scraping against the roof. Or the house settling. Or a leaky faucet. But if I'm a telepath, and I could slip into your mind, I could plant the seed of doubt into your mind. What if there's someone else inside the house? Amplify that by about a thousand, and I think you'll get a rough idea of what it was like."

"I get that, sort of," Camila said. "I've had classes on it at the Academy and our Betazoid instructor hit all of us at one time or another on mental intrusion and what to expect...which is the unexpected. Still, I guess I'd like to know if you had any free will in some of the things you did that wasn't for the benefit of the Consortium."

"To an extent, yes," he said with a sigh.

"Then..." she took a breath. "I can forgive you."

Bast raised an eyebrow. He hadn't even considered asking forgiveness for the things that had happened, but he was surprised to discover that he was relieved to hear those words.

"Thank you," was all he could think to say.

"Then I'll let you get some rest," Camila said. "Don't forget the SAR training you agreed to or we'll be back to square one."

Bast didn't want to bring up the fact that Captain Geisler still hadn't ruled on whether or not to bring charges against him. He could be staying on board, spend some time in the brig, or be transferred off the ship. Time would tell.

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