A Birth in Darkness

Posted on Sun 20th Sep, 2020 @ 5:37pm by Lieutenant Damion Ildaran

888 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Section 49A
Timeline: MD 3, evening

Previously on Starbase 109:

Damion nodded. "What was the next link in your chain?"

"A cry for help," Addams said. "From out of the darkness."

And now, the continuation!

"You must understand, Lieutenant, that the Addams legacy is one of genius... and of madness. The two are not always mutually exclusive. My second cousin, Perverto Addams, is a prime example. Ph.D.s in molecular chemistry, genetics, and knowledge of at least half a dozen other fields which could have earned him doctorates had he bothered." Addams shook her head slightly.

"A few months after the conclusion of the Deep Space 15 incident, I received a rambling letter from Cousin Perverto. It struck me as odd; the two of us had never been particularly close, despite his having spent more than one summer at the family's ancestral home in Sleepy Hollow. After two or three readings, I realized the letter used a rotating cypher based on a book the two of us had fought over on one of those occasions. Revealed? A call for help. Perverto had gotten in over his head, and needed rescue."

"I take it you went after him, then," Damion said. "You impress me as the sort who would."

Addams nodded. "One does not abandon Family, even if one dislikes them. Harry owed me significant favors, and I called them in. We took Archimedes over the borders of the Federation, to a place called 'The Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies.' Someone had dragged a Regula type station out to orbit a rogue brown dwarf. It was outside the Federation, outside the laws and customs thereof.

"Perverto had been studying psychic powers. Vulcan and Betazed telepathy; Rigelian spatial awareness; Kzinti precognition; Et alia. He discovered the genetic basis of such abilities, and devised a way to transcribe such genes into a common genetic alphabet. It was at that point he was hired by the Institute, charged to develop a genome for the perfect spy and assassin -- telepathic, telekinetic, precognitive."

"Not metamorphic?" Damion asked, recalling that the autopsy reports Elizabeth had found had mentioned Chameloid DNA.

"We will never know," Addams said, shrugging. "Perverto had called me to rescue his daughter. The girl was being used as leverage against him, and he was increasingly desperate as his work continued to bear none of the desired fruits. We made an assault against the Institute, aided by the child's holographic nanny. During the raid, however, two of our security personnel and Perverto himself were killed.

"I'm sorry about your cousin," Damion said. If she had cared enough to go after him, she had likely mourned him in at least some way.

"When we returned to Federation space, I took leave and brought the child home to Earth. With my sister Ischemia's assistance, I adopted her. Starfleet, in its infinite wisdom, elected to transfer me away from Archimedes, to Starbase 109."

Damion's eyes widened, and he smiled. "What's the nanny like? Did she come here with your daughter?"

"A short time after we left, Holly Day -- you may know her as Doctor Death, the Butcher of Clarvis -- destroyed the Institute." Addams sighed and rubbed her forehead. "The stories about what happened are garbled. Not only did no one escape alive, two rescue and salvage crews died attempting to reach the station. The station's computer has stopped responding to communication attempts. Whatever data was aboard that station -- including the holoprogram of the nanny -- is, for all intents and purposes, lost forever."

Damion winced. "I hate to think of the poor nanny being trapped there forever, alone. Was she fixed to the computer? She didn't have a mobile holo-emitter?"

"If you were an Evil Overlord, would you want the help to be able to potentially escape?" Addams shook her head, and made a brushing motion with her left hand. "But while the situation is lamentable, the nanny is irrelevant to the story at hand."

She's not irrelevant to me, Damion thought, but he nodded in agreement that the nanny was a sidebar to Addams' story. "The question is: who was the evil overlord? I'm thinking not your cousin. So you believe the IASS is connected to what we're facing," he said. "I'm getting the feel of many different goals here--perfect assassins, super-soldiers, a Borg-like hive mind, and this ability to remove the life-force from a person--though I do see how that ties in with the super-soldiers as you described them. Are there many different projects all leading into one goal, do you think, or is it prep work leading to a goal, with a couple of side-projects?"

"I think that there is one goal, but that the goal is not the achievement of a particular technical modality," Addams answered. "The goal is in how they are intended to be used."

"And that is as what--super-soldiers, perfect assassins, or both? And why just women?" Damion asked. "For all the years this has been going on--these workstations look at least twenty years old--the payoff has got to be staggering."

 

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