Interrogation

Posted on Fri Jul 1st, 2022 @ 8:05am by Captain Bethsabée Leroux & Commander Benjamin Jamesson & Commander William Gerhard & Lieutenant Avira zh'Kenarh M.D. & Ensign Isaac 'Zac' Hughes & Ensign Luis Martinez

Mission: Mission 6 - Memory
Timeline: Day 300 15:00
2581 words - 5.2 OF Standard Post Measure

Beth took a deep breath as she stepped into the sickbay and easily spotted the pair she was looking for sat on the bio bed looking confused and bored to say the least. Lottie stood up as she saw the Captain, Armoury Chief, Doctor and Ensign Martinez come in. It was about time in her opinion she thought they would be let out hours ago but she suspected by the way everyone looked awkward it was going to be another long day. “I am going to get some coffee.” She said quickly escaping the senior officers with a passing glance at the two marines outside as she passed.

“Apologises gentlemen I had hoped to be quicker but the situation is not exactly an easy one to work out.” Beth said quickly.

“I understand Com… Captain.” Benjamin started but smiled at his mistake and loved on as he noticed the extra pip she held.

“I think you know everyone other that our Doctor. I would like her to check you both over properly and then we have some questions about what happened to try and piece it all together.” Beth said trying to be patient but the situation was possibly the weirdest she had dealt with so far.

William looked at the two men seated. He had brought along his recorder and a PADD for his notes. He would treat this as an after-action report, since he didn't believe it warranted a formal interview. He set the recorder on an adjacent bio bed before facing the two men. "Gentleman, I hope you don't mind, but I will be recording this interview for posterity. Don't consider this a formal interview, merely a after-action report," he said before looking to the captain for her approval to proceed. He then activated the recorder, stated the time and location, before looking to the two men. "To start, could you state your name, rank, and positions for the record," he said motioning for them to speak into the device.

Beth nodded as she hopped onto the free bio bed and got comfortable looking at the pair. She was there for answers but also for her communication skills. She knew Jamesson having worked together for years, she knew his speech pattern. “Commander Benjamin Jamesson. Chief Engineer and Executive Officer NX-05 Atlantis.” Benjamin said simply and indicated that it was fine from his point of view.

"Ensign Isaac Hughes," came the doctor's soft reply, slightly unfocused eyes fixated on the far wall. The next words out of his mouth brought up his chin slightly. "Chief Medical Officer, NX-05 Atlantis."

Avira's antennae perked up at that. Her presence on the ship had been a twist of fate, but it was still odd to hear there was another version of events where she hadn't been assigned to this vessel. She kept monitoring their vitals and it was clear that they where fatigued, malnourished, and that they had suffered multiple injuries in their way off the ship.

Still not believing what he was seeing, Luis kept his eyes on the new doctor. He remembered talking with their version of Isaac as he awaited the medical exam that approved him for service aboard the Atlantis. Ghosts were definitely something that the young armory officer did not expect to see, yet two of them were sitting in front of him.

"Let's just start from the beginning then," William said pulling his stylus from his pocket and readying himself to take notes on his PADD. "Commander, walk us through the situation that transpired for you to abandon ship," He said looking up expectantly.

“Ten days ago the crew started to suffer mental fatigue among other lesser symptoms and one by one they were killed off with no mark on them leaving us confused and terrified over the situation. The ship as you know is inoperable after a certain point with not enough crew and it got to that point. I found the creature that did all of this in the final seconds trying to feed on Hughes here why I think he might be having memory issues but his medical skills are top notch as usual.”

"Is there anything you wish to add, Ensign," William asked looking towards Isaac.

"My recollection is patchy," Hughes admitted softly. "My long term memory is less affected but I'm afraid I can't be much help, outside confirming what the Commander has said, to the best of my ability. My focus since he found me as been stabilising the other three we managed to pull out of Sickbay in time."

“The creature?” Beth demanded.

“It is hard to explain. The further we are away from it the clearer it is becoming. We had a crew member called Jan Kowalski but he wasn’t Jan Kowalski at all but a telepathic creature that was feeding on my crew.” Benjamin tightened his hands on the bio bed until his knuckles were white.

“I see.” Beth glanced at the pair. “Well we have nothing like that here so at the very least until we figure this all out you are safe.”

Leaning closer to William, Avira, and the Captain, Luis whispered, "We have been getting widespread reports of unusual fatigue with some crew requesting to miss shifts." He sort of let his voice trail off as he continued to watch. It was hard not to be afraid by what they were being told.

Beth looked at Luis blankly. “Ensign Sloan and Smith assured me earlier that it was to do with the air conditioning and things should be back to normal this evening.” Beth answered quickly before looking at Gerhard and indicating he could continue with his questioning as she blinked a few times.

There was a moment where Avira wanted to add to the discussion. The rash of symptoms had been to sudden and severe to be attributed to a simple AC malfunction. The thought faded before she could vocalise it.

William looked between the captain and Martinez before returning his gaze to the two men seated before them. "This...creature, were you able to determine his point of origin," William asked them both.

The chief engineer shook his head quickly. “We we’re not able to determine anything other than he is a slippery character but once you know him, his abilities do not work on you."

"From what the Commander has told me, me and our Science Chief were working on a few theories but I couldn't tell you now what they were." Nor was Isaac inclined to immediately want to disclose anything. He kept his gaze down and his brow slightly furrowed.

"On your Atlantis, was this Jan Kowalski an original member of the crew, and if so what was his billet," William asked making a few notes on his PADD.

“He took over as a communication officer. It was the spot that we had people available and it was easy to slip into it. We had a dead officer there and he made friends easily within the department. Looking back it was so obvious but we were under his spell..” Benjamin glanced at Beth and frowned. “It is really good to see you Beth.” He said honestly making Beth smile.

“You too, comrade.” Beth replied. The man had died nearly a year ago and been buried on the Babel world but every now and then she’s accidentally slip in her mind and tel herself to go and ask him something. “Even if you are not quite my version.”

"There's no proof yet that he's any version." Hughes, who was by all accounts typically an easy-going and amiable type, felt his hackles rise for the umpteenth time since sticking his head out of the escape pod. The events that Jamesson had outlined had started out like this; minimal resistance, casual acceptance despite glaring inconsistencies once you knew where to look for them. There was too much trust to Ben's easy acceptance of what was profoundly incomprehensible.

William looked from Beth to Jameson as he cleared his throat slightly and indicated the recording was still active. This whole situation was still slightly unsettling to William. While he knew the science division was currently working on trying to ascertain how they got here, William was still wary. He would need more proof before he could except these people were from an alternate reality. "And how were you able to determine this Jan Kowalski wasn't who he says he was? By all intents and purposes, it sounds as if he had most of you fooled right up till the end," William asked continuing his line of thought.

Beth said nothing. She was not overly caring about the recording and she stared back at Gerhard for a moment before she realised she was being to hard on the man, he was doing his job. It was just nice to have something unusual happen that gave them something they had lost even if like Sloan had suggested it was a variance to it all. She turned to look at the scans from Avira and saw that they were were 100% human so that was something to alleviate the tension in the room.

“He did that is why it went so badly for us.” The engineer admitted scrubbing his face feeling the stubbled under his fingertips. “People started to realise that things weren’t correct. O’Connery noticed translations were off, Nascimento noticed that there were strange readings onboard but nothing made sense until people started to drop like flies and…” he paused for a second trying to not visualise the scene that he had stumbled on after night shift. “I found ten crew members dead in the mess hall.” He said shaking the image off. “And as I ran away from the scene I found this one and well you know what happened as it led here.”

"It lead somewhere." Once again, Hughes applied the brakes to the Commander's dove-tail into fantasy land. Lifting his gaze finally, he made eye contact with Gerhard and, those his tone kept its gentle cadence, there was a stoniness that sat behind it that the doctor took no pains to hide. "With all due respect, and in light of recent events, I don't have the Commander's nostalgia to lean into. If you are all who you say you are then surely we should be basing opinions on data, not sentiment."

"The data suggests that the place you're from is very similar but not quite the same as the place you are currently residing." Avira pulled up the limited records they had available in the database. The fact that he bowed out last minute made that the information had already been transferred to their medical databases. "Very minor differences in environmental pressures." With a press of the button she highlighted the few differences between the Hughes in their records and the one sitting on her bio bed. "Has caused significant deviations in your biological make up."

As had become a reoccurring issue after the initial confusion, Hughes sat up and shifted his posture to angle slightly away from the approaching doctor, a wariness that translated to the look he gave her too. For the most part, his affected memory seemed to be anything that hadn't made it properly from short-term to longer-term storage and so, despite feeling oddly disconnected, he at least recognised the crew he'd encountered before. This doctor, however, didn't even register as a blip on their side of the fence. Slowly, he drew his gaze from scrutinising her to focus on the information she was referencing and Isaac allowed himself a moment to stare and absorb.

It could still all be in your head.

Squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, Hughes navigated the wave of vertigo that seemed to accompany any attempt he made at pushing through his disorientation to grasp at crucial recollections that would better inform not only what had happened to him, but the three other victims they'd pulled from the carnage. How was he meant to trust explanations this extreme when he couldn't guarantee his own clarity?

"You should check your crew for abnormal glutamate levels," he eventually offered, once against subdued. "Our creature stimulated excessive levels to speed up its feeding process. Scrambled their brains," he added in layman's terms, looking up, "Not something lack of air conditioning could be blamed for, at least."

Taking a note of that specific indicator Avira her antennae curled a bit, one of the crew with vague symptoms had shown abnormal glutamate levels. It hadn't shown up in any others, at least not outside of acceptable parameters. "Thank you, doctor, that's very helpful."

"Thank you, gentlemen. I think I have enough for now," William said as he turned his recorder off and picked it up before turning to the captain, "With your permission ma'am, I'd like to run a forensic analysis on the pod in the launch bay. We might come up with some more information to verify all this."

“Team up with Sloan. He already has started looking through the pod.” Beth replied not leaving room for that argument to start. Sloan and Gerhard would just have to work together. Michael had said she had to be alright with sending him into danger so there was her doing it.

With a slight bow of his head, William motioned for Ensign Martinez to accompany him. Once they were out of sickbay, William handed the recorder to Martinez. "Get that transcribed but go into the computer database and pull one of Jameson's personal logs and do a voice comparison," he said keeping his voice low before looking back towards sickbay. "I think we should adhere to that age old saying, 'trust but verify'," he continued before looking back to Martinez.

"My favorite form of honesty," Luis replied as he slid the recorder into the unzipped pocket of his uniform. He did trust computers as a tool to help, but he also liked to compare certain phrases and commonly used words himself. Martinez would be in the computer room for a couple of hours. Leaning forward to whisper in a voice that only William would hear, the Armory officer warned, "Watch out for the traitor." He knew William felt the same way about the Romulan among them.

"I always do," William said with a nod before turning and heading down the passageway to the nearest turbolift. He wanted to see the pod again, hoping there would be something more to corroborate the stories of the two men within its logs.

Beth watched the two men walk away and shook her head. She might not have heard the words but she could read body language and read the tension in the room between them easy enough. "Doctor do you need a bit more time with them."

"I just wanted to run one more quick test," Avira looked at the two as she spoke as if seeking permission. Though the situation was such that even without permission they would probably force the procedures anyway.

"Okay... perfect. Gentleman as soon as the doctor is done with you and checking fully that you are healthy enough to be released I will arrange for some quarters and get you out of here." Beth said nodding to the pair before leaving herself. She still needed to figure out where Samantha was and try and bring all the pieces together to work out the mystery.