Debriefed, Debunked and Demoralized
Posted on 28 Aug 2023 @ 9:15am by Admiral Zavareh Sepandiyar & Captain Corvus DeHavilland & Commander Thaddeus Zayne & Commander Anson Corduke MD & Major Declan Finn & Lieutenant Tahriik
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Location: Obsidian Command - Conference Room
Timeline: MD03 - 0945HRS
3401 words - 6.8 OF Standard Post Measure
The conference room had never felt so empty before. He’d been here dozens of times despite the relatively short life of his tenure on board the ship. But he’d never been here and felt so alone, or felt the room so empty. Pacing the long viewport that framed the back of the room didn’t help that feeling. But he couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t just sit there and wait to hear the next bit of devastating news.
How could the news be any worse? Everything he’d known. Everything he’d been taught as a child was now being challenged by information that no one claimed to know. But how was that possible? How was it an entire species didn’t know that they weren’t the only ones of their kind. Could they really have lost that information to the ages, or was someone keeping it secret from them? All his experience and training pointed firmly to the latter, he just couldn’t say whom had hidden it.
The doors to the conference room finally opened to admit a few faces, none of which he knew by sight though he suspected he knew of at least one of them. One was wearing a Starfleet uniform and he suspected that to be Admiral Sepandiyar. The other two wore Marine uniforms with five stars between them, three on one and two on the other, but he had no idea who they were.
“Good morning, Lieutenant. I am Zavareh Sepandiyar. This is Lieutenant General Kinghorn and Major General MacTaryn of the Starfleet Marine Corps,” he said, indicating that Tahriik should take a chair.
“Good morning,” Tahriik answered, cautiously taking the chair on the Admiral’s right while Kinghorn and MacTaryn sat across from him. The small, human sized chair, groaned slightly under his bulk.
The doors hissed open again and this time he recognized some of those joining the meeting. One he wasn’t expecting to be this populated. Captain DeHavilland and Major Finn were filing in, followed by a blonde-haired Commander he didn’t recognize.
“Morning, Tahriik,” Corvus offered brightly as she came around to the chair on his right, “You know Major Finn, this is Commander Zayne, my First Officer,” she said, introducing the last man that sat at the table right of Finn and DeHavilland.
“Are we all here?” Kinghorn grunted impatiently.
As if to answer his question, the door opened once more to admit Doctor Corduke who paused to see such a full room. He sighed, then walked to the other end of the table from the Admiral and sat down.
“Doctor Corduke, welcome,” the Admiral nodded, looking over to Kinghorn. “Now. We are all here,” Sepandiyar declared.
The Admiral accessed the terminal in the table in front of him and in a moment brought up a holo feed and began to play it for the benefit of all. Some had seen it before. Others, like Tahriik and Corduke, were seeing it for the first time.
The holo feed was clearly from the inside of a ship. They all watched as a tall, bulky, heavily armored warrior stepped into the corridor and charged at a Vulcan security officer who fired a half dozen shots at his enemy before resorting to hand to hand combat. The Vulcan fought well, as well as anyone would have expected of their kind, but the enemy was too strong. It resisted the ubiquitous nerve pinch and in the process pulled the Vulcan over his shoulder as if he were a rag doll, breaking his spine on his knee before tossing him aside like so much garbage.
While everyone else was watching, Sepandiyar was watching Tahriik. He had perked up immediately at the sight of the warrior and was watching his movements carefully.
Sepandiyar shifted the holo, moving that feed off to the side and bringing up another, this one of a single warrior in similar battle armor. The face was obscured despite the fact that whomever the warrior was talking to could see it clearly, but it was less the point of seeing the warriors face and more of seeing its companions. The same ape-like species they’d seen on Korin. Once more he could see Tahriik’s eyes locked on.
The Admiral once more changed the feed and this time it was a battlefield view from a Marines helmet that showed Tahriik and the Pyrryx battling with their short, wavy swords. It was a fierce bit of sparring and they all watched intrigued until the Admiral paused it, drawing everyone’s attention to him.
“This Vulcan was a Kareel-ifla master,” Sepandiyar said, gesturing at the first image. “Are we all familiar with this martial form?”
Corduke shook his head, “Like Vulcan karate?” He asked.
“More like Kung-fu,” Declan answered. “Damned effective.”
“I knew this Vulcan,” Tahriik declared solemnly before Sepandiyar could continue. “Suvar. He visited the Academy when I was there. Taught the senior cadets some of the Kareel-ifla forms. I watched him spar with a Klingon with it… he was a good…” Tahriik trailed off, looking over at the Admiral. “He will be missed,” he clarified simply.
“Until your return, Starfleet has known precious little about the Pyrryx,” Sepandiyar continued, “Outside of these two feeds. There are other known sightings and contacts but this is the only evidence we have,” he explained. “Now we know a great deal more. We know their physiology, in detail.”
“And we know they can be beat in single combat,” Kinghorn grunted over the Admiral. “I just don’t get how you didn’t know that this Pyrryx was one of you,” he said, jabbing a finger at Tahriik.
“He was not one of my people,” Tahriik fired back angrily.
Kinghorn smirked cruelly, “Doc begs to differ.”
“Well, technically, they’re the same root species. But it’s like comparing Vulcans and Romulans,” Corduke countered a bit.
“Andorians and Aenar,” he threw in.
“Close enough,” Kinghorn shook his head.
“Lieutenant Tahriik’s not our enemy, General,” Corvus chimed in, leaning on to the table. “Nor is he on trial here. He saved those men’s lives down there. Your Marines, no less,” she said defensively. “You should be thanking him. Not accusing him of being a Pyrryx.”
Kinghorn looked over at DeHavilland, finally breaking the glare from Tahriik. “Until you met him, had you even heard of the Geuraani?” He asked.
“Aye,” MacTaryn answered, snapping the General’s head his way. “Colonel Ravenn’ik was Chief Engineer on Falkirk,” he answered. “Damn fine officer. Brilliant engineer,” he added, well aware he was treading into the Lieutenant General’s line of fire. But DeHavilland was right. Tahriik had saved his Marines, he deserved a thank you, not a Spanish Inquisition. Plus, he knew that Chief Ravenn’ik, wherever she’d gone, would approve of defending one of her own.
Tahrrik nodded, glaring at Kinghorn with an upturned smirk. “My homeworld has been a member of the Federation for one-hundred and seventy-two years. Our contributions are many. We am not your enemy, nor should you wish us to be,” he piled on.
“Is that a threat, Lieutenant?” Kinghorn fired off.
“Enough, Ambrose,” Sepandiyar shut the man down, raising his voice to the Marine. Something he rarely did. “We are here to ask questions and learn more of these Pyrryx. Clearly the Geuraani know nothing about this, or that information would be in our databases. The computer would have paired scans and information to the Geueraani database had there been any known similarities.”
“The Admiral is correct,” Commander Zayne chimed in, pushing forward his own holo now. “Now that we’ve had more detailed scans of a Pyrryx, we were able to make correlations to the Geurrani records,” he said.
The holo he brought forward, moving the Admiral’s aside, was of an ancient painting. “This is approximately thirty-three hundred years old. It is a fresco said to have been painted by the ‘Great Fathers’ of Geuraan II. Notice what it is depicting?” He said, gesturing to the ape-like creature. For good measure, Thad brought up a holo still of one of the creatures from the Marine’s body camera’s and laid them side by side.
“If this was in the database, why did the computer not make the correlation?” MacTaryn asked in a low growl.
“Too many comparatives,” Zayne explained. “It's not specifically unique to Geuraani culture; an ape-like figure of scary proportions,” he went on. “It said something to you, did it not? One of these creatures?”
“It spoke it’s name,” Tahriik answered quietly, staring at the fresco. He knew this one, he’d seen it a thousand times. His Great Mother had been a leading member of the antiquities ministry and he’d spent many a lazy day in his youth wandering the museum she worked looking at such things. “Doru-maka,” he said. She’d told him the stories as a child, just like every Great Mother had for generations. Of the Po’rh’an. The blood-thirsty ones.
Thad nodded and now played the holo vid. The primate looking creature dropped down and bellowed, “DORUMAKA PO ROH AN!” Thad froze the feed, freezing the Doru-maka in its primal yell.
“I don’t understand. If this is a language from a Federation world, why didn’t the UT pick it up real time? What does this ‘po row an’ mean?”
“The literal translation is ‘blood feeds me’, or ‘blood feeds my soul’,” Tahriik answered. “But… this should be in the records. This is ancient Geuraani history. Were this creature to have shouted, ‘Sanguis pascit animam meam, the UT would pick it up as Latin,” he explained.
“Do I want to know why you know Latin so well?” Corduke asked from the head of the table sarcastically.
“What can you tell us about them?” Sepandiyar asked, beating Kinghorn to a question and ignoring Corduke’s sarcasm.
“They are… like the bogey man of Terran lore. We tell stories to our children of them. That they seek out naughty children and take them in the night. Those who do not do as they’re told,” Tahriik explained. “It is… what do you call… a fairy tale.”
“Sounds more like a scary story you tell at a camp fire,” Declan offered.
“Yes. This,” Tahriik agreed.
“This isn’t the first time the Federation has encountered a creature like this,” Major General MacTaryn offered. “There was one of these that came to Falkirk. The medical teams attempted to save him.”
Thad was already navigating the controls on the table and had the information up quickly. The report was from Doctor Mazur outlining the patient that had come in with battlefield injuries but also seemed to be suffered from mass cellular degradation of a variety she could not identify. The patient had died and the post-mortem autopsy had been performed by one Doctor Corduke.
Sepandiyar looked down across the table at the Physician, “So have you seen these before?”
“The one I saw wasn’t nearly as… put together as these one’s,” Corduke replied, waving at the holo’s in front of him. “Doctor Mazur listed one of the causes of death to be cellular degradation. With respect to Doctor Mazur… she was incorrect. It was not cellular degradation. What we they were witnessing was, for lack of a better explanation… evolution of their species,” he explained patiently. “Whether this shift in biological structure in endemic to their species, I don’t know. I didn’t get a sample of anything from these guys. If I did, I could compare the data sets.”
“Wait. Doctor. You’re saying that these… Doru-maku… are evolving in front of our eyes?” DeHavilland asked, shaking her head.
That didn’t make any sense at all.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Corduke nodded.
“Is it possible,” Tahriik offered, turning everyone to him. “That this creature was… an experiment gone wrong?”
Corduke raised an eyebrow dramatically and cocked his head to the side, loin cup at the ceiling as he thought about it. He let out a sigh and then looked back to his friend, “That is … viable theory,” he agreed. “But we’re talking genetic manipulation beyond anything we’ve seen before.”
“What leads you to this question?” The Admiral asked, sitting back in his chair pensively.
“It is said in these stories that the Po’rh’an were created. That they are the minions of the Pier’loh - the soul reapers,” he explained.
“Is it possible these ‘soul reapers’ are the Pyrryx?” Commander Zayne asked. “And that they are genetically manipulating these Doru-maka to their needs?”
“That would fit the MO of these Pyrryx as we understand them so far,” Kinghorn replied, speaking for the first time in a while.
Tahriik sat there pensively, staring at the conference table, deep in his own thoughts, shaking his head all the while. He had been raised on these stories. These fairy tales of his people but he’d never once thought that they were true. He just thought they were kept alive as a tradition of his people. A way to connect with those that came before by sharing the stories that they had shared. He had never once considered that there would be truth in them.
“It is said,” Tahriik finally offered, “That we were once a savage people. That there were those of us who would see the world burned. Who would kill for the sake of killing. To reap the souls of the dead to fuel themselves. The Pier’loh and their Po’rh’an creations,” he explained slowly and carefully, remembering the deeper details. “The great warrior, Gal’dah and his Silver Guards defeated the Pier’loh in combat and his guards destroyed their creations. They were never seen again on Geuraan. More traditional families still celebrate the ‘Silver Shield’,” he continued. “The Silver Guards still exist. They guard our leaders and ambassadors,” he explained.
Everyone was listening intently as he spoke, but as he did Thad was quickly moving through data controls and found a reference for these Silver Guards and pulled up an image of one and put it on a holo for all to see. He then put it side by side with the Pyrryx Imperator that the marines had encountered some years ago.
The Silver Guard, as expected, wore a suit of silver plate armor from head to toe that covered their faces from view similar to the Pyrryx armor, but that was about where the similarities ended. There was nothing else to link the two, even when Thad forced the computer into it, it found nothing it couldn’t line up with a dozen other species as well. It couldn’t say with more than thirty-percent certainty that these two suits of armor were in any way related.
“How did the computer not see this similarity?” Kinghorn growled, looking as if he was trying to build a head of steam again.
Thad answered immediately, showing him the statistics. “According to the computer, it can only say with thirty-percent certainty that these two armors are related.”
“Bullshit,” he replied. “Just look at them!”
“You want to see the connection, but it’s not there. For comparative purposes. The computer can say with twenty-eight percent certainty that these were both derived from lorica segmentata armor. What the Roman Legionaries wore on Earth. Twenty-six percent certain that this was derived from an ancient Klingon armor set,” he continued, “Nothing definitive.”
“The blade is definitive,” Tahriik replied.
“Yeah, that is,” Thad nodded, moving more holo’s aside to show the image of the blade that the Imperator had been using compared to a Starfleet scan of Tahriik’s weapon that was on file.
“How uncertain is the computer on this?” Kinghorn grunted.
“Absolute match,” Thad smirked. “Database says that this is a Le’ur’ix blade. A traditional Geuraani weapon dating back before the fresco there,” he said, pulling that forward again. “Typically passed down family lines. Starfleet scanned Lieutenant Tahriik’s blade when he entered the service. Scans indicate that the weapon is nearly eight-hundred years old.”
“Is this correct?” Sepandiyar asked.
“Yes,” Tahriik nodded stoically. He was lost for words at this point. His head was a scramble of questions to which he had no answers. Nothing here made sense at all to what he thought he knew.
“Mr. Zayne. The challenge?” Sepandiyar asked, looking to the man as if they’d prepared this already.
“Yes, sir,” Thad nodded, once more manipulating it all to show them a new feed. This one was from the view of Declan, most likely, showing the Imperator facing off against Tahriik, who already had his Le’ur’ix blade out, having just killed a Doru-maka.
The Imperator drew the blade across his tongue, drawing blood and then spitting out a glob of red spit at his feet and cursing him in a language that the UT still couldn’t pick up.
“What does this mean?” Sepandiyar asked.
Tahriik stared at the feed, his blood raging as it had in the moment. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm his fury. “In Geuraani culture, to raise your Le’ur’ix against another is something that is not done. It is an insult and a challenge. To accept the challenge means one combatant will die,” he explained carefully. He pointed to the Imperator. “What he did…” he colored up, having to push down his emotions so he could continue. “He drew blood from his tongue, and spat it at me. It means, he speaks these words as an oath. To spill your own blood this way, gives… meaning to the words that follow. This is an ancient tradition,” he spoke on. “He called me a ‘Thalak-koorlh’ which, in the ancient tongue means: blood traitor. There is no higher insult to my people that to be called this.”
Tahriik’s words pretty well silenced the table of officers, all still looking at the feed uncertainly. For his part, he just wanted to leave. To grab a subspace call with his Great Mother and try to get some clarity. She was head of the antiquities ministry now, surely she would have something she could offer. Some pearl of wisdom or historical thread to pull on to try and unravel this. He just needed time - something he’d not had.
“The Pyrryx Imperium presents a real and credible threat to this sector of space and the Federation at large. There is no resource unavailable to deal with this. But what concerns me the most is the lack of information we have when, clearly, there is a connection to the Geuraani,” Admiral Sepandiyar pressed on as if trying to bring the meeting to something of a close. “Mr. Zayne, I would like you to work with Lieutenant Tahriik to try and ascertain why the collective knowledge of a world that has been a Federation member for this long is missing from the database. I would also like you to share all the information you have on the Pyrryx with Tahriik, in hopes that he may find congruences that we clearly cannot.”
“What about my duties on the Theseus?” Tahriik asked.
“I will let Captain Callum know that you are temporarily unavailable,” the Admiral answered.
“You’ll have access to every resource you need here,” Corvus tried to smile to the man. He looked beyond troubled at the moment and she couldn’t even begin to fathom what he was going through.
“Thank you,” he nodded gratefully.
“You’ve proven that these Pyrryx aren’t as invincible as they pretend to be,” Kinghorn admitted finally, “Any analysis on their weakness, how we might get past that armor or theirs, or other tactical tid bits would be welcome.”
“I’ll take that on,” Major Finn offered. “I owe Tahriik anyway. Saved my bacon out there.”
“Doctor, anything you wish to add?” Sepandiyar asked down the length of the table.
“Nope,” he fired back immediately. The less he said the better and he resisted the urge to look at Corvus as he thought that and betray for a second that there was more that wasn’t said.
“Very well,” Zavareh offered. “You have your orders. Dismissed.”
