Chapter Text
“You know, you don’t have to take it,” Marbog says from where he’s perched above the back of Piper’s head.
Piper continues to stay very still and doesn’t turn to look back at the Choblik. “Don’t be an idiot.”
“You sure you want to say that when I’m elbow deep in your cybernetics, smart guy?”
Piper stays still, letting Marbog continue to work on the cybernetics that surround the back and sides of his head, serving as replacements for his blast-damaged hearing and standing in to support some of the mental functions that were damaged by the head trauma … and the subsequent damage.
“There, you feel that?”
His skin prickles down his neck and the upper parts of his spine, where more cybernetics address spinal and nerve damage, replacing function and suppressing nerve pain.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Physical therapy was still getting him used to the extra weight of the redesigned cybernetics on his head, and the new nervous system functions, just like it’s getting him used to his new prosthetic legs. At least with cybernetics in his head, some muscle memory could be worked around with clever programming - which allowed for programming for new variants on his legs. As Marbog would say, human feet were boring (‘and you don’t even bother having prehensile tails!’)
The cybernetics - these cybernetics - weren’t a problem. One of the Starfleet Recovery Assistance officers suggested some people struggled with their sense of self, of personhood, with new artificial, mechanical parts, and he had nearly burst out laughing. Clearly no one had read his furious op-eds in the wake of Commander Data’s personhood being put on trial.
No, the more he and Marbog work on his cybernetics and prosthetics - and his new drone that interfaced with them, Gull - the more he felt like. Well, to sound like a Starfleet counselor, like he was regaining control of his life.
The problem was what happened when he hadn’t had control.
This wasn’t the first set of cybernetics in his head.
He bites his tongue. “What’s the alternative? We grab a ship and run off to the far edges of the quadrant?”
“Please. Like I could tolerate your company for that long.” Marbog says. “ You could take a ship, but…”
“Oh yeah, ‘Gee, I wonder why Hawthorne spooked and ran off to the ass end of nowhere. I wonder if he figured out the truth. Better go check on him, and while we’re at it, let’s have a poke at, oh, the cybernetics expert he knows.’ Yeah, I’ll definitely ditch you to that.”
Marbog snorts. “Yeah, right. And obviously being exactly where they want you on a ship full of - of whatever spies is less risky than being literally anywhere else.”
Piper groans.
“Don’t move!”
“I’m not!”
“You want me to fry your daft brains more than they already are?” Marbog says, ignoring him and his lack of movement.
Marbog’s not wrong. The Interpreter is exactly where they want him, and it will be full of spies, watching him.
Something about being blown up is that, if you survive, it tends to lead to a lot of time in recovery in Federation medical bays, and that’s a lot of time to think. He’s spent a lot of time trying to determine when it had all started to go wrong, and he’s pretty sure he’s figured it out.
There were faces he wouldn’t forget, the new, unfamiliar, supposed-Starfleet Officers that had walked on to the station - walked in to his research project. The face his cowardly worm of a boss had made when he’d gone from dismissive to - frightened.
He’d gone right back to dismissive, though, once Piper had voiced concerns about the ‘new direction and timeline’ for the project. The new orders claimed his team’s work would serve the Dominion War - while pushing forward with unacceptable risks, ignoring safety protocols and rushing forward. He’d spelled out his concerns, and then he’d spelled them out in writing. And again. And then he’d gone over his boss’s head, and over his boss’s boss’s.
And then he’d been demoted and sent to the ass-end of nowhere.
Looking back, he knows his boss - and almost certainly two rungs up the chain from him - had known about who those ‘officers’ really were. And had known enough to be frightened, and roll over.
Piper, on the other hand, didn’t even know what they called themselves.
Piper sighs. “Take your bets, when do you think she was recruited?”
“Chester? Oh jee, real tough call there, surely there’s nothing suspicious about the glossed over bit in the incident with the Intelligence officer - who, conveniently, is captaining another one of these monstrosities.”
“All of Starfleet Intelligence can’t be - whatever this - this is.”
“The project-taking-over, whistleblower-silencing, station-exploding, mind-control-attempting, changeling-bullshit-cover-story-devising, black-and-shiny-obsessed secret police?”
Well, that was one way to put it.
Because even after he’d been demoted, even after he’d been sent to a tiny, half-defunct research station at the end of nowhere, he’d still sent complaints. He’d still kept working independently on modeling exactly what was likely to go wrong.
What did go wrong.
And when he got to the station, to try one more time to make his case, to present his work …
Well. They’d stepped up the timeline again, and before he’d stepped off his shuttle -
Boom.
The next thing he’d known, he’d been waking up groggy and then immediately panicked, trapped in a tight, black box, black metal in place of his blown off legs, and wrapping around his head.
He’d kicked and clawed his way free, somehow. Sometimes he wakes up and thinks he still hasn’t, that he’s still in there.
It’s the sort of thing that Starfleet Recovery counselors want you talk about a lot, annoyingly.
“....I think just ‘secret police’ is more efficient.”
Marbog snorts. “I don’t know, Pip. I wouldn’t count on anything at this point. Does it matter? There’s no way that whatever got their hands on your project ‘for the war’ - and tried to get their hands in your head -”
Piper folds his hands to resist the urge to rub at the scar tissue around his cybernetics.
They had gotten their hands in his head, is the thing. They just hadn’t managed to do what they wanted in there.
At least, that’s what he thinks. Hopes.
When a Starfleet team had pulled him out of the barely-an-escape-pod that had surrounded the sleek black box he’d been folded up and stuck in, they’d taken him to a top-notch Federation medbay - the techs had told him that the technology in his head had been an attempt at cybernetic mind control. Remote control your very own covert officer. That part had been true.
The lie had been that it had been Dominion technology.
That had been the cover story. The supposed officers in his project had been changeling duplicates, who had deliberately sabotaged the project to hinder Starfleet research and war efforts. They’d taken his half-dead body and had attempted to use it as part of another failed Dominion plot.
It had made sense to think that. It had made sense to think his team had been killed by the Dominion.
And then Marbog, cybernetics research expert by long interest in understanding the technology behind his default-cyborg Choblik species, recovered Dominion technology best-we-can-get expert by necessity, deeply annoying best friend - and, okay, probably only friend - Marbog had come. And Marbog had looked at the sleek black technology that had been in his head, all part of the process of understanding what was needed for the replacement technology.
And Piper had decoded Marbog’s message. Not Dominion. Federation.
And then, for a while, nothing had made sense.
And then he had done the sensible thing and destroyed the paper message and the sheets of paper he had used to decode it, and got very, very angry.
“ - whatever did all of that - there’s no way that doesn’t have their hands on the next big thing in the Gamma Quadrant -”
The next big thing, or just a continuation of the same war. He shakes his head. “And that means all of the Captains. We’ve been over this.”
The ‘officers’ who had swanned on to his project. Whoever had passed on the lies about supposed Dominion technology in his head - he couldn’t trust any of the doctors there, they were all a risk. If they weren’t agents, there was a chance they were complicit, like his boss.
He didn’t know who he could trust; except Marbog.
And himself. If he was lucky about what was still in his head.
The newly minted captains they’d put in charge of this mission - that they’d be sending back into the Gamma Quadrant - both he and Marbog agreed, whatever this secret police was, this parasite inside Starfleet, there was no way they’d staffed the highest position on this ships with anything less than loyal agents, nevermind what other spies would be onboard.
“The point is, we know she’s been recruited by the secret police and they’re trusting her with this mission - and watching to put a phaser blast in the back of your head if you’re stupid enough to take the position. When she shoots your dumb ass it’s not going to matter when she was recruited. And it doesn’t matter that you’re already dead and managed to pop back up again, I don’t think you’ll manage it a second time.”
Piper turns over the starfleet commbadge in his hands. It’s not really recognizable as such, three quarters melted, hardly more than slag. “I think it might have been after the Bedivere. You go through something like that - you think there’s any way to keep it from happening again, it’s hard not to take it. You could see secret police making that pitch.”
“And maybe all of that was cover-story bullshit they came up with to explain why they were putting someone so young in charge of one of those hulking monstrosities. The point is, you know you’re going to be under their watch on that ship, so -”
“That is the point - I know exactly where they’re putting one of their secret police officers on a major assignment. I have to do this - if I’m going to have any chance of actually stopping -”
“If you’re going to have the best chance of getting killed more like -”
“ They killed my entire team! They got them all blown to bits and blamed it on the war and the Dominion and - and now they’re sending these - absolutely batshit not-warships on missions into the Gamma Quadrant to start it all again or fuck knows what -”
“And the last time you tried to fix their mistakes for them you got blown up and barely crawled out of the box they put you in! I have been shoulder deep in what they did to you and I am not putting up with it again!” Marbog’s tail whips back, slamming a spanner into the wall.
“Mar…”
Marbog catches his breath. “Do you know how much of a pain in my ass it’s been checking and re-checking and re-designing everything? Do you have any idea how annoying human brains are? Do you? No idea why I put up with it. Not doing it again.”
“Uh-huh.” Piper sighs. “Sorry, Mar,” he adds, quietly.
“You want to say that again louder? I want to get it on record.”
“Oh, louder? Sure. Fuck off, Marbog.”
“You’re lucky I’ve already locked in the covers on your cybernetics, dumbass.”
Piper looks at the slagged commbadge in his hand again. “The captain will be one of them -”
“And they’ll have extra spies in engineering to keep an eye on you, and also medical, and probably some of the captain’s senior staff, plus whatever other spies everybody else’s secret police has onboard.”
“ But. Most of the people on that ship - they can’t be - they aren’t secret police. They’re Starfleet. They need someone who knows what’s happening, and who has the best chance of keeping that poor space-station-with-two-warp-cores they’ve Frankensteined into horrible jumbled existence from exploding.”
“Yes, and your track record is so great about keeping things from getting pushed into exploding.”
His grip tightens on the slag. “I won’t be just filing complaints paperwork this time.”
“Yeah, you’ll just be running right towards the most likely thing to blow you up - again.”
“Well…” maybe someone other than me will survive this time.
The people - most of the people - on the Interpreter, they had to be worth at least trying for.
There has to be at least that much of the Starfleet he signed up for. That he believed in. Whatever parasite was growing on it - that was all it was. A parasite.
And if he could stop a part of it - if he could actually save someone else -
Marbog comes around, sits next to him. “They want me to do some rotations on the Interpreter.”
“What?” He whips around, staring down at Marbog, who is staring down at the floor. “That’s not even -”
“Some crap about wanting an engineer with experience in medical tech to look over the medical expansions and the abilities of the new systems to deal with aid in large scale medical emergencies, as well as being on hand to analyze any newly recovered Dominion tech. They know perfectly well I’m mainly a cybernetics and prosthetics research specialist and I’m like, thirty or forty people down the line of expertise in large scale medical emergencies -”
But not, Piper notes, in recovered Dominion technologies.
“- but they definitely gave the impression that they’d be expecting me to check on how the cybernetics of ‘members of the crew’ - aka you - are functioning.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah. So they want a chance to take out you, aka the guy they tried to shove mind control tech into, and me, aka the guy who realized that gee, that actually looks like Federation tech, not Dominion tech.”
Piper’s whole body is tense. “They don’t know that. You didn’t say anything to anyone but me, and I’ve -”
“You said it yourself. I’m the cybernetics expert you know. I was the second opinion. If there’s a hole in their cover story - if there’s a reason you would have figured out that their cover story was bullshit - it’s me. Two loose ends in one place, and their hand-picked secret agent captain to tie the knot.”
“... that metaphor went places,” Piper says, dully. Finally, after he catches his breath a little, “You sure you wouldn’t come with me, if I took a ship and got the hell out of here?”
Marbog is quiet for a long time. “You’re going to take the position, aren’t you?”
“You’re the one who said I’d be an idiot to take it. That it’s going to get me killed.”
“Yeah. But you’ve got the same look as you did when I told you it was idiotic to stay on a project you knew was doomed just in the hopes that maybe you could mitigate the damage.”
“With my complaints reports.” He says, the words sour in his mouth. He had been so stupid.
“ And you look the same as when I told you that it was stupid to go…”
That it was stupid to go back. That if they hadn’t listened to you before demoting you and throwing you to the ass end of nowhere they wouldn’t listen to you now. That there was no reason being there in person would make a difference.
He hadn’t listened that time either. And his shuttle had made it there. And then the station had exploded.
“Well.” Marbog says finally. “We’ve been here before. I know you, regrettably, and I know what you look like when you’re about to be stupid and you aren’t going to be stopped.”
“No.” Piper shakes his head. “We haven’t been here before. I know more now.”
“And knowing what you know, if … if you didn’t take any chance at all that you could be in a position to stop it, if you ran away from that - you’d hate yourself.” Marbog does his best to sound matter-of-fact; Piper knows him too well for that. Marbog adds. “And if you think I’m dumb enough to stick myself in a runaway ship with you when you’re in your self-loathing angst bullshit, I fucked up something with your cybernetics. Which I didn’t, because I’m me, and I am actually very good at what I do.”
“This isn’t like before.” I’m not going to come back a fraction of myself this time. “I know too much for it to be. And I’ve got no intentions of letting them kill me.”
“People rarely do.” Marbog deadpans. “You won’t be dragging me down with you, that’s for sure.”
He knows that isn’t true. That’s what scares him. “You don’t have to take the rotations on Interpreter.”
“Yeah, I know.” Marbog says. Piper wishes he wouldn’t, for the same reason Marbog wishes he wouldn’t take the position on the Interpreter. If they got Marbog… well. If Piper had the power and authority to protect Marbog, it would be different. A lot of things would be different. But he doesn’t.
And Piper is taking the position. So he can’t ask Marbog not to take the rotations.
“Besides,” Marbog continues, “I can’t let some hotshot surgeon go thinking he knows better about your cybernetics than me. Gotta take pride in my work.”
“It won’t be like before.” he says again. “We know the shape of the threat. We know to watch our backs. And as far as they know, their cover story worked and everything’s fine. We won’t be doing anything to raise suspicion and send them after us. That keeps us… safer.” He hopes. “Besides, I have Gull now.” He points up to the floating drone. “No one can sneak up behind me. Or you, when you’re onboard.”
“Yeah, you’re going to look out for Pip, right Gull? Someone with sense has to.”
Gull beeps.
“Good for you.” Marbog looks back at Piper, and after a moment, laughs. “No idea how you managed to get cleared for duty. Especially with a Betazoid counselor.”
“Well, they made me take the pointy bits off Gull.” He says, and Marbog laughs. “Turns out, just because someone can tell you’re angry, doesn’t mean they can tell what you're angry at. So. Lying. That thing.”
“That thing you’re notoriously so good at.”
A lot of - most of - what he had said to Starfleet Recovery had been true. Not that it had been easy to keep the important truths from them - Marbog’s not wrong - but he had managed somehow. He’d lie through his teeth as much as it took if it kept him and Marbog alive.
Odds are, there are worse things he’ll do to keep them both alive. Or, at least, to keep Marbog alive.
And when it came to keeping the Starfleet crew of the Interpreter alive -
“Well,” Marbog starts. “If you’re going to go off onto some half functioning ship, let’s get in some holodeck time while we’re both by one that works. Lord of the Rings?”
Piper smiles. “Sure.”
He certainly feels a bit like Pippin, with Merry, in the hands of the Uruk-Hai. Maybe it would feel better when it was just pretend.