'Neath the Raptor's Wing part 2

Posted on Sun Apr 3rd, 2016 @ 10:06pm by Captain Charybdis MacGregor & Captain Patrick O'Connor

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Taking Chances
Location: USS Bonne Chance, Deck Five, Captain O'Conner's Quarters
Timeline: 2265
Tags: Patrick,1stlove,flashback

The Vulcan adepts learned to reach out and make contact with other minds by physical contact, usually making the placement of the fingers upon the temple of the party to be engaged a part of the ritual. In the case of Charybdis, very little actual knowledge was available to her, and what was there was had been somewhat repressed over time. But on an instinctive level she could feel the man beneath her, the handsome mass of muscle of which she had grown rather attached in a number of ways.

She loved him, and that terrified her... because anything that she had ever loved had been torn from her, and he made her happier than she had ever known.

So she pressed herself against him desperately, and her sleeping mind reached out to him. Because while her conscious mind was soothed, it was still afraid of losing him... and her subconscious mind wanted him to know the truth. Because he accepted her, and he deserved to know the whole truth... and she should have no barriers left.

And thus she dreamed, her mind filling in the blanks and imagining some of what had transpired, but ably constructing the tale for him of her life 'neath the Raptor's wing...




General Rakal looked displeased... but then, she seldom smiled, and when she did, it was not usually a reassuring sight to anyone. But in this case, she was exceptionally displeased, because one of her commanders had brought her something... insufficient.

The Preator and the Senate had agreed to her proposal to create infiltration agents. They would be seeded throughout the galaxy, pretending to be their cousins, the Vulcans. They would be inserted at various walks of life, in various circumstances as chance, fate and possibility allowed.

After all, no one knew what the Romulans looked like... well, almost no one. It certainly was not common knowledge amongst the Vulcan citizenry, Starfleet or the Klingon Empire just what form Romulans took. Stealth, duplicity and the shadows had served them well, and their enemies did not know them... there was advantage in that, which General Rakal suspected would not last. She had survived the First Romulan War with the Federation, and had been present for the subspace radio signing of the treaty that had established the Neutral Zone.

Now she had a plan, and it was a good plan that had worked before. She would train, recruit and create agents if need be... all she needed were opportunities, volunteers and raw materials.

Though she had not anticipated for the materials to be quite so raw, however.

Liviana Charvanek was a Commander in the Romulan Star Empire- her new 'Bird of Prey' design would revolutionize the fleet, and the cloaking device that it carried would act as a force multiplier in the conflicts that would inevitably come, as the Empire needed to expand. After all, a stagnant Empire was an Empire in decline- and that was not the way of the Romulan Empire. Chavarnek was the pride of the fleet- capable, brilliant, fit, seductive and charming while still ruthless and practical when need be. In short, she was exactly what one would expect from a Commander in the Romulan Star Empire, and the very model of a Romulan woman.

General Rakal admired Commander Charvanek, though she would never admit it. So the fact that her offspring was such a flabby and pathetic failure was rather disconcerting to her.

When she had come for the child initially, it had been cheerful and filled with stupid questions. Rakal had given her sufficient answers, but the child had persevered with inane questions about matters that were unimportant and would have no bearing on their mission. She had nattered on and on, until Rakal finally disciplined her curtly... and the child began to weep.

Weep. From a simple backhand across the face after being told to be silent by a superior.

And it kept on weeping, wailing that it wanted to go home, it wanted its mother, it wanted this and that and so very many demands to which it somehow felt entitled. Rakal was displeased with this one, and she was reminded why she had never spawned. She insured that the child was sterilized the next day, so that it would not reproduce and create more dilution of the bloodline.

It was a service to the family line. Commander Charvanek was still quite young and healthy, she could try again to bear another child to the Empire that would not be such a failure.

The first month was spent determining its capabilities, which were embarrassing. It was physically unfit, clumsy, slow in both physical activity as well as mental faculty. It did not learn quickly, either... both the intuitive as well as the calculating intelligences were actually both quite subpar. Not so low as to be eliminated, but it was barely above the minimums, and a disappointment to the Empire.

General Rakal blamed the father- obviously the genes of a political lobbyist in the Senate had polluted Chavarnek's gene pool to produce this embarrassment to the Empire. It complained incessantly, cried often, and was not advancing, even with the most basic of training. It begged to go home, and to see its mother... neither of which would be allowed.

None of this mattered to General Rakal, of course. This was one of dozens of future agents that she was grooming, and most of them were useless, bloated parasites suckling at the teats of the Empire. But the Tal Shiar had plans for them... she needed only to work and wait and be patient, and train them until their time came to insure that the one thing they did understand was unquestioning loyalty to the Romulan Empire.


Seven years after General Rakal had come for her, Scylla Charvanek was a very different child than she had once been. Taller, leaner, stronger, smarter... she had worked hard to overcome her deficiencies, and while she had never won approval from the General, she was certain that one day she would. She knew her duty- it had been drilled into her, and she worked for the glory of the Romulan Star Empire as a faithful daughter, to make the Empire proud. And one day she would get her chance to serve, if she was fortunate.

That day had now arrived.

A Vulcan exploration vessel was captured reasonably intact not too far distant from the Neutral Zone, from a raiding party scouting out Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone. The crew, a family of three, were captured alive, and General Rakal had a golden opportunity to put her plans in motion. They were being debriefed, of course, and they were attempting to be stoic, as Vulcans would... but the youngest was still a child. Only fifteen cycles, her mind was not as highly developed as her parents, and her will nowhere near as strong. While the parents would be interrogated for details to use in other agents and then forced to submit to the Empire and bred, the child was another matter. General Rakal's technicians assured her that the mapping of her neural pathways was proceeding apace, and as it stripped the information from her mind the screams were quite unsettling, even to the battle-hardened General.

The Charvanek whelp would finally be of use to her after all. She was just the right age... and Rakal knew this would be painful.

She had spent time training the useless creature so that at least some knowledge and unquestioning loyalty might be inlaid, which kept it busy while Rakal waited for an opportunity. But with recent advances in genetics wrought from a captured cryoship which had escaped Earth centuries before, her Tal Shiar scientists assured her they could work wonders, and now was the time to find out of they were correct. She had the Charvanek child brought in, and the treatments began.

Her intelligence leapt up the scale, as her reflexes became honed, and her strength and balance improved dramatically. Within a few days, without any additional training, she was now quite the acrobat. Within a week Rakal found that she could almost hold an intelligent conversation, and by the end of the second week, the child seemed practically brilliant. Tal Shiar training had long ago worn away the body fat the child had once carried, and she was now a lean and rangy young woman as she increased six inches in height within that two week period.

General Rakal was pleased. There were reports of minor side effects from the treatments, but those were of no consequence. The second phase of the plan would take care of that.

The Vulcan child, her mind emptied after the neural mapping, was an easy subject within to implant new memories- after all, it was a virgin landscape now. Her family's capture at the hands of Klingon raiders was a simple task to simulate in her memories with basic brainwashing techniques, and the dramatic tale of her parent's sacrifice to save their only child made for a touching tale, to her mind- the stuff of which opera was made. Since the parents' stronger egos had proven too resistant to the neural mapping, they would never leave Romulus again; thus they could not be used for this experiment. With the false memories implanted in the daughter, those neural pathways were overlaid and copied as well, and the experiment was ready to begin.

The young Vulcan, this Charybdis... she would live on, in a fashion, once hers and Scylla's minds had been blended. The Tal Shiar scientists assured General Rakal on their lives that not only could the loyalty of Scylla- who had known nothing but the training Rakal had drilled into her for fully half her life- be combined with the memories and intellect of Charybdis, the Vulcan child, but that the two would even be somewhat interchangeable, to the point where at times even the agent herself might not know the difference. She would be programmable, trainable, and best of all, if their suspicions were correct- she would have a defense against the dread mind meld.

General Rakal gave her blessing, of course. If they failed then they had lost two children, and the Empire would weep for neither. But if they succeeded then they might manage to land an agent on Vulcan that would be undetectable, and from there, who knew where it might lead? The genetic engineering had succeeded for the most part, which made her all the more valuable now. It was a gamble worth risking..

Charvanek reported dutifully for her assignment, and Rakal was almost unwilling to let her go. Tall, proud, confident and brilliant, she was an ideal soldier of the Empire now... even if a few indiscretions had already occurred. She was a bit violently reactive now it seemed, and she had been caught having seduced a centurion and engaging in coitus. But those were of no consequence- it was the mission which was tantamount. She explained the entirety of the situation then ordered the Charvanek child to report to Biolab Three, knowing that she most likely had signed her death warrant. But the greater the risk, the greater the glory.

The Tal Shiar scientists slid her into the neural pathway generator, and bound her securely. She could not be allowed to thrash about, and for her to have the potential defense for the mind meld in the future, they would need for her to be conscious. The technicians chuckled at just what some unsuspecting Vulcan would find inside the young girl's mind... the soul-searing agony of this experience might in theory wear the face of some other trauma, but the raw emotional terror and physical agony would be provided by this experience, compounded by that of the original Charybdis when her mind and soul had been initially torn apart, neuron by neuron.

The machinery started with a hum, and despite the Charvanek child's best efforts to steel herself and face her duty bravely, the screaming began a moment later. General Rakal removed herself from the area. She had heard the screams of the dying and the screams of those in pain, from being tortured or injured beyond measure... but this was something entirely different. This was a scream torn from the very depths of the soul as it was disassembled and rewritten, piece by piece in the brain of what had once been a child, taken from its home to serve a greater purpose, a terrible glory.

Scylla Charvanek died screaming that night... she screamed until her throat was raw and her voice was gone, then she continued screaming inside her own mind, where only she could hear it as the relentless and insidious intruder systematically erased all that she was, making her solely into General Rakal's manufactured creature. The loyal daughter of the Empire who was just not useful enough to it perished that night, her last thoughts of her mother. A child screaming in terror for the one salvation she could imagine, a heroine who was too far away, and would have been far too late. As she died what she had been was broken down, as had the Vulcan girl Charybdis, and components of both were used to build what would replace them. Someone... something... else.

In her quarters on the Feathers of Alth'Indor, Liviana Charvanek awoke in a sweat from a nightmare she could not remember, disruptor in hand... but there was no danger. She inspected her quarters and could find nothing amiss, so she lay back down.

But she could not return to sleep that night, haunted by a profound sense of loss that she could not identify.



In the Captain's Quarters of the USS Bonne Chance, the body of his lover twitched helplessly in place as he woke from the nightmare she had inadvertently shared with him whilst she slept, and he held her tightly, and rocked her gently. It took a few moments, far longer than usual to calm her enough to return to dreamless, peaceful sleep, and again he debated the wisdom of his actions.

For him, sleep would be far more elusive this night.

 

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