= Padassa Trading Station =
It had been approximately two hours since Giella and her team transporter onto the Quorom/Romulan station. The team had split up after the transporter, each going their separate ways in order to cover more ground in order to find clues as to what was going on on the starbase and where Commander Rangi Summers was being kept... if she was there at all. Their time window was six hours, after which they were required to transport back to the Detector, whether they met their goal or not. There was still four hours left.
The station was a strange place filled with at least four different species. She recognised Romulans and what she thought were Anxinar, but the other species she didn't recognise. There were also what appeared to be waist-high draped cylinders moving about. At the top of each cylinder was inset a spherical globe containing a gaseous substance that changed colour. Giella assumed it was an environmental suit of some kind for a non-corporeal being. When one passed her, it stopped and the sphere turned a deep purple, then it turned and continued. Where she was spotted, she couldn't tell.
Giella had managed to find her way down to an area of the station that looked different from the rest. Most of the station that she had seen was primitive by Federation standards. There were almost no computer terminals in sight; doors were opened and closed manually; lighting looked to be made from luminescent phosphorous crystals instead of electric plasma lighting.
It was when she spotted a distinctly Romulan looking terminal set in the wall and a heavy closed bulkhead at the end of a slightly dark corridor that she was beginning to suspect she'd found something.
Two Romulans armed and dressed in uniforms walked down the corridor towards the door. One of them tapped at the keypad besides the door and waited for it to open. Giella seized her chance and quickly followed behind the two Romulans as closed as she could without being detected. The door led into a brightly lit corridor which was considerably more upgraded than the rest of the station. It was clearly Romulan constructed and Giella suspected she'd found what she was looking for.
Cat-like, she crept down the long corridor, passing several intersections. She kept an eye on the heads-up display of her visor, which acted like a tricorder, signalling closeby life-signs and different types of energy readings. At the end of the corridor she stopped in front of what looked like a turbolift and peered closely at the keypad written in Romulan. She tapped a key and waited as the doors opened. Looking around to check if anyone was there, she slipped inside.
On the side of the lift was a shematic detailing the layout of the sub-facility on the station, and two decks down were what looked to be a collection of small rooms neatly structured around two corridors that led to a larger, circular room. They were either labs or detention cells, but either way Giella felt that's where she wanted to go, so she headed two decks down.
A few moments later the lift stopped and opened, but just as the doors part a green beam of light flashed past the entrance of the lift and Giella ducked against the door, keeping her pulse pistol ready. She read three lifesigns on her visor; two were green, signalling Romulan, and the other was blue, indicating Human. The Tollauran quickly peered out and down the corridor in the direction of the blue lifesign and saw a figure dressed in a dark tight-fitting suit with its back pressed against a corner, instantly recognising the attire as one of her team.
Quickly turning in the direction of the Romulans, she fired two blasts which to them seemingly came out of thin air. The firing of the pistol automatically disabled her personal cloak however and she ran across the intersection down to where her teammember hid. The one Romulan was down and the other was coming after them.
"Major," the voice said as she flattened herself against the wall. She recognised it immediately as belonging to Corporal Waters.
"Corporal," Giella replied. "Are you injured?"
"Negative," he said then suddenly stepped back and fired three times into the corridor, taking down the Romulan. "Can't say the same for the Romulans though."
Giella stopped for a moment and listened carefully. "Why is there no alarm going off?" she asked. Sure phaser fire would set off some kind of alarm, unless it was silent.
"Already taken care of, ma'am," he replied almost suavely. "Control room on the deck above. Was easier than I thought it would be. Also, in a few minutes there should be..."
He was interrupted by a short alarm sound which ended abruptly as lights in the corridors flashed a deep blue twice briefly. Giella turned around to look down the corridor and saw several deep set doorways opening, revealing on the inside darkened prison cells. "We need to get these people out of here," she said to Waters. "I'm going to try and see if I can find Commander Summers. If I don't run into you again, I'll see you back on the Detector."
Corporal Waters' masked figure nodded as Giella reactived her cloak and hurried down the corridor, passing several cells with baffled and battered prisoners in them who were slowly starting to make their way to the entrance of the cells, not quite sure what was happening. At the end of the corridor was a door that look different. Unlike the cells, the door had a viewer set into that allowed one to see into it. She peered through and saw a person strapped to a medical chair. Recognising the uniform and the features, she knew she'd found what she was looking for... Commander Summers.
= End Log =
Major Giellera Kinn
Adjunct Intelligence Advisor
1st Task Force, SSF
[NPC by Bren]