“…and you were just firing off your disruptor down the street as he ran!” Trid barked out in shared laughter with Sidda just as the rest of Republic’s senior staff arrived in the conference room off the bridge. The laughter continued as both the Bajoran woman and her Orion senior took note of the new arrivals, then started to fade quickly with only a single attempted resurgence as some in-joke unspoken resonated between them.

The table had been set with a few carafes of hot and cold drinks, a few plates of what would happily counter a mid-afternoon snack, which for the host of this particular meeting it was. Sidda stood, abandoning the chair she’d been sitting in as she and Trid had been reminiscing about some point or another and waved a hand over the table with an accompanying welcoming smile.

“Afternoon, afternoon,” Sidda greeted them all as she stepped back to let Matt Lake past her, then circled around the table to the main display behind the seat that Captain MacIntyre had just sat himself down for.

“Sounded like a colourful story,” Mac said as he went about sorting out a cup of coffee for himself. “Might have to tell it to the rest of us some time, yes?”

“Oh, you don’t want the boss…Commander Sadovu, sorry, telling you the story, sir.” Trid was leaning forward to look down the table while refilling her cup. “She leaves all the good bits out.”

“You know,” Matt interjected, “Revin tells some rather interesting stories too.”

“Revin wasn’t there for most of them,” Trid replied straight away, just a touch defensively too. “I was.”

“Oh, joy.” The sudden damper on the friendly banter from Evan Malcolm had its desired effect – flattening the mood and killing the vibe. “Can we get on with this please?”

“Do you have somewhere else to be, Lieutenant Commander?” Mac asked as his attention shifted to his chief engineer. “Some dire engineering situation I need to be made aware of? Something to drag you away from a staff briefing where we’ll be told about our first mission?”

“No, sir.” The pause between the two words was pronounced and thick enough to cut with a knife.

Silence sat over the table for a few moments before being broken by a sheepish request from Lieutenant JG Willow Beckman to Trid at her left to pass a plate over so she could collect some of its bounty for herself. While most had stopped to see the outcome of the captain putting an officer in their place, one could rely on a junior officer to get to the important things – free food. “Sorry,” she said a bit louder when she noticed Mac’s attention shifted to her, but with nowhere the scalding intensity he had levelled at Evan.

“Don’t be Lieutenant,” Mac responded, his tone easing and a gentle smile coming to his face. He craned his head a moment to see what was on the plate Trid was setting back down. “Are those gingernuts on that plate?” he asked.

Trid’s noncommittal shrug was countered by Willow’s confirmation after a quick dip of one of her biscuits in her drink and a taste sample. “Good,” Mac immediately followed up. “Pass the plate would you please?”

It took a minute more for everyone to sort themselves out with drinks and snacks, save for Lieutenant Levne, who sorted herself out with a simple glass of water and some lightly salted crackers, set almost directly in front of her chair, prepared just for her. Coffee, hot chocolate and tea were claimed, plates of biscuits and small cakes had been portioned out to smaller plates and for now, forthcoming hunger was sated in preparation for the briefing.

Mac turned in his seat, pushing to the side and drawing alongside Matt who had been at his right. It left the viewscreen unobscured by himself and most importantly let him see it as well. “It’s your show Commander, take it away.”

Sidda took a moment, tugged on her uniform tunic, took a deep breath in and then tapped at the large monitor, bringing it to life immediately with a screed of text on one side and two images of an Andorian woman on the right – one in a bright blue uniform of the mid-2380s, the other a more recent image from a spaceport somewhere in the Federation showing her in a crowd of people. “This is Doctor T’Halla Shreln, a former Starfleet doctor turned Romulan sympathiser turned bioterrorist. And we’ve been tasked to bring her in by the Deputy Director of Fourth Fleet Intelligence.”

“I know that face,” Mac said, face scrunched up in thought for a moment, then realisation hitting him all at once. “Sonofabitch,” he hissed.

“Sir?” Sidda asked, eyebrows scrunched in concern at Mac’s sudden outburst.

“I met her only a few weeks back. She was on Atlantis.” Mac reached forward to set his coffee cup down on the brief table, a precaution to spilling it. “You’re telling me that we had a bioterrorist aboard Atlantis and we didn’t even know it?”

“You didn’t know it because Intelligence hadn’t disseminated the information to all commands. Let me explain,” Sidda tapped once more on the screen, bringing some of the text up in a window, enlarged for all to read. “Doctor Shreln is a –“

It took over an hour for Sidda to go through the full intelligence briefing regarding Doctor Shreln. The backstory, slightly edited by Commodore Sudari-Kravchik, her supposed death, disappearance into the Romulan underground movements, radicalization and eventual self-waged war against the surviving Romulan aristocracy from the days of the Star Empire.

Questions were asked, a number of them from Levne when Sidda started talking about the psychological profile for Shreln compiled to date. How so much of it was based on her prior Starfleet career and scant few interviews that the Free State had passed along. Simply too much was unknown or based on supposition.

“Though from what I recall of speaking with Doctor Shreln while she was on Atlantis she did seem a reasonable, cognisant woman in full control of her faculties.” Mac’s interjection reinforced Sidda’s position that Shreln was a manipulator of the highest order.

“Who makes engineered viruses and plagues in order to assassinate people with little to no regard of the collateral damage,” Evan Malcolm threw in.

“That Commander,” Levne spoke, cutting off Mac unseen, her eyes on the wall screen and the information displayed there, “is why I want to know as much of her way of thinking as I can. There is clearly a logic she is working towards.”

“A warped logic,” Matt threw in. “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” he followed up immediately, “she clearly has a goal, intentions and a drive and skillset to achieve them. But there’s a flaw in her thinking somewhere.”

“Emblematic of radicals everywhere,” Mac finally said.

“And we’re in the ideal position to track her down,” Sidda continued, having claimed a seat during the briefing at the far end of the table from Mac, having brought a moment of terror to young Beckman when she had sat down. “I worked with her back on the Surabaya and afterwards for a few years. And Intelligence had a tentative location on Doctor Shreln as somewhere in the Cardassian Union, which Captain MacIntyre has confirmed for us.”

Evan sat up, having leaned back his seat as far as he could to passively absorb, or endure, the briefing. “So in summary, crazy plague-wielding genocidal maniac on the run from the Tal Shiar has fled into the Cardassian Union and we’re being tasked with going and asking nicely to look around and try and arrest her.”

“Ask nicely,” Sidda said, head tilted to one side, “look around anyway,” she continued, head moving to the other.

“Magros?” Trid asked.

“Magros,” Sidda confirmed.

“Magros?” Mac asked.

“Situation where I tied up the local authority by asking nicely, being polite, keeping them busy while the crew of the Vondem Rose went skulking around in back alleys looking for the scumbag we were hunting for anyway.”

“Hmmm.” Mac’s barely verbal response to that was to squint slightly at both of his supposedly former Intelligence officers. “There will be no unauthorised manhunts while we’re in Cardassian space. The Union is a political quagmire I have no interest in making worse. For us or any other Starfleet crew.”

“Certainly captain,” Levne answered as she turned to face Sidda, her face expressionless in opposition to Sidda’s smile. She waited a moment, the two Orion women staring at each other, then turned back to Mac. “That said Captain, I would like to brief the Security personnel on our target on the minuscule chance we may spot her by chance and wish to apprehend her immediately.”

Mac answered the request with a gentle nod of his head a few times. “I want all departments ready for departure tomorrow morning during alpha shift.” A deadline which gave roughly eighteen hours to get Republic ready. “Commander Malcolm, we’ll try and not stress the engines as much over the next few weeks as Commander Sadovu has already done.”

“Appreciated,” Evan replied.

“In that case all, finish up any business you might have on Deep Space 47, get your departments ready and dismissed, save for you Commander Sadovu.” Mac’s order was greeted with a series of ‘thank you’s and ‘aye sir’ from the younger officers as everyone stood and filed out, leaving Mac and Sidda facing each other down the length of the table.

“Good briefing,” he said as soon as the door closed. “And I see what you mean about Malcolm. He was totally different in our one-on-one and last night. But you and he in the same room and he gets snippy.”

“As you said captain, he’s going to be a project.”

“Hmm.” Mac stood up, collecting his dishes and then stacking them on the nearest left behind, his going through the motions of cleaning a sign for Sidda to start cleaning as well. “Now, tell me about this Magros incident,” he said as he turned for the replicator to dispose of the plates and cups.

“Oh, Trid’s not kidding, you want to hear the stories from her perspective. She was the one after all running down the street chasing after a naked Nausicaan.”

“Okay, see, now I want to know anyway and I want to know now,” Mac said with a chuckle.

“Right, so it all started – “