"USS
Impala
, Captain's Log, Stardate 36521.31, Captain Lucille Arrington recording: We are
en route
to the Ophelius Cluster to investigate subspace anomalies detected by a Starfleet communications station established in this sector. Intelligence reports indicate Ferasan vessels have passed through this region, and though they are on an authorised diplomatic mission, and we are not currently in a state of hostilities with them, we cannot dismiss this as a mere coincidence."
Lucille gritted her teeth as she entered her office. She had a headache. It was something that had been needling her behind her eyes for days now, waning and ebbing day and night, eroding her sleep, her appetite. And now her reflexes; she was usually a champion at Pareses Squares, but had just ended up landing on her tailbone.
Hard.
She should have gone straight to Sickbay, but she had already been there about the headache, had been given a look from the staff like she had come in complaining about gout or consumption, and had eventually lied about their treatments helping her to avoid further scrutiny. She poured herself a shot of Aldebaran whiskey and sat down in her chair - but then bolted up in pain and yelped.
"And I thought your chair on the bridge was the Hot Seat."
She spun in place at the unfamiliar voice, swearing.
A man was perched like a bird of prey on the top of her couch, smoking a cigar. "If I'd known I was gonna hear language like that, I'd have brought my mother along to wash your mouth out with soap. Assuming there was any left after dealing with me." He was humanoid, dark-haired, with a thick moustache and round-rimmed old-fashioned spectacles, and dressed in a dark vintage Terran outfit from centuries past. He also seemed strangely pale, devoid of colour, almost monochrome in appearance. "But then I've always said women should be obscene and not heard."
Lucille smacked the combadge on her uniform. "Security to my quarters! Intruder alert!" When no one responded, she tried again. "McMahon! Answer!"
"Save it, Captain, I slipped a Mickey to your communications so we wouldn't be disturbed," the intruder informed her.
She moved back towards her office door - but it refused to open. "Computer: Command Override! Open this door!"
"You're just wasting your breath, Captain, and that's no great loss either," the man added, waggling his thick eyebrows as he flicked ash from his cigar onto her couch.
She moved back to her desk, sliding open a drawer to retrieve... nothing.
"And your secret phaser," he concluded genially. "You know, Captain, I'm beginning to think I'm not welcome here."
Panicking, she moved to her chair, lifted it up and flung it in his direction.
It passed through the intruder, struck the wall behind him and tumbled to the floor. The intruder, meanwhile, hopped off the couch and stood before her, though he stooped a little, the tails of his black longcoat swishing behind him. "You keep this up, Captain, and I'll leave in a huff. Or maybe in a minute and a huff."
She kept her desk between them. "Who the hell are you?
What
are you?"
"For the purposes of advancing this meeting - and who wouldn't want to make advances with you, my little wildflower?" He paused to waggle his eyebrows again and leer at her. "You can call me Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, the Alpha Quadrant Explorer. And I am what the eggheads in my organisation call an isomorphic projection." He stepped forward, made a show of tapping the lit end of his cigar on her desktop - and only succeeded in passing it through the surface. "I'm not all here. But then people have been telling me that for years."
She studied him more closely; the moustache and eyebrows weren't real, but more painted than anything else, but now she could almost see through him. "You're a... projection? That's not possible! We're light years from any ship or planet that could send something like that!"
Spaulding shrugged. "Well, it's either that or you've been nipping at a particularly nasty batch of bathtub gin at your local speakeasy." He began pacing around the room, hands folded behind him, occasionally stopping to puff on his cigar. "Speaking of speaking easy... has Matthew ever spoken to you about things best not spoken of?"
"Matthew? You know my brother?"
"We've kept a keen watch on his work in Starfleet Intelligence. Starfleet Intelligence: now
there's
a contradiction in terms." Spaulding stopped and peered into a large glass globe with a golden model of the USS
Columbia
, Lucille's first posting, suspended in the centre. "Did Matthew ever tell you about a covert organisation watching over the Federation? All cloak and dagger, eyeholes in the newspapers, secret decoder rings and lemon juice invisible ink?"
Her eyes widened. Mention of her brother did bring back a memory of a clandestine talk about- "Section 31?" Her voice was almost a whisper, as if she was afraid to say it aloud and possibly conjure them into being. No one ever admitted to knowing anything about that cabal of agents working outside of Federation rules in order to protect its interests. "Is that the answer?"
Spaulding puffed on his cigar before replying. "That depends on the question. But the game isn't
The $64 Question
, it's
You Bet Your Life
, and on tonight's show, the Secret Word is... Hrelle."
Her hackles rose. "Captain Esek Hrelle?"
He pointed his cigar at her. "And the young lady says the Secret Word and wins a hundred dollars. Of course, she said Three Secret Words, but I'm allowing for inflation."
She scowled, having learned to ignore his distracting patter and glean the essence of his communication. The Caitian Hrelle had been a thorn in her side since their Academy days, when he refused to see sense and resign despite her efforts to convince him otherwise, thus earning her the ire of her father, the then-Superintendent of the Academy.
Since then Hrelle has proven to be a malcontent, a maverick, and though his story of escaping alleged slavery after so many years have made the Galaxy proclaim him a hero, she knew the truth: he was a coward at best, a traitor and threat to the Federation at worst. And in her last encounter with Hrelle, the man had managed to turn her nephew Giles away from the rest of the family, and even physically threatened her life - and got away with both. "What about him?"
Now Spaulding's cigar smoke seemed to coalesce between them, taking shape, solidity, until the image of Hrelle's scarred Caitian head took form. "Quite a mug on him, huh? I never forget a face, but in his case I'll make an exception. You know, for a man who says he wants to live an ordinary life and do ordinary work, he gets into some extraordinary scrapes: escaping from captivity, uncovering Malurian child trafficking, surviving the destruction of the Tyche Station in the Malbruk system, encountering the
Rising Star
. He must have rabbit's feet instead of cat's."
Lucille swallowed; some of those incidents were highly classified, but this... individual... knew about them, further evidence of his connections with Section 31. "I'm not a fan. I don't trust him."
He nodded. "Trust is earned, and if anyone should be trussed up and hit with an urn, it's him. And to top it all off, there he is, influencing the Best and the Brightest from the Academy; like my psychiatrist always says, get 'em when they're Jung. Don't look now, Captain, but there's one too many threats in this room, and I think it's him."
Lucille stared at him, her shock at his appearance and manner overcome by his warnings about Hrelle. "What can I do?"
Spaulding smiled, and blew the smoky image of Hrelle out of existence. "You'll have to put the Cat in the Bag, for good. And there's no time like the present. So here's your present: he's about to have an unauthorised meeting with the Ferasans currently in this sector."
"What?"
