Extracting Information

Posted on 26 Jul 2025 @ 12:33pm by Commodore Harvey Geisler & Lieutenant Commander Joey Geisler

2,937 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Imposters Among Us
Location: Somewhere In Space
Timeline: July 7, 2390 || 1500 hours

The light was merciless.

It burned down from overhead panels with the cold intensity of interrogation lamps, bleaching the room in sterile white and magnifying every detail of grime on the rust-streaked walls. Joey squinted against it, her pupils still trying to contract after what felt like endless darkness in the cell she'd been dragged from. Her arms were lashed behind the back of the chair with coarse bindings—too synthetic to break, too tight to ignore. Her ankles, too, were bound to the legs, leaving her rigid, exposed, and aching.

The chair creaked beneath her with every breath she took, each sound swallowed into the low groan of a failing ventilation unit overhead. Dust drifted like ash through the light shafts, settling on patches of scorched flooring and peeling panels. The room was silent, save for the occasional pop of distant systems misfiring somewhere in the ship’s bowels.

No one had spoken yet. No threats, no demands. Just the blinding light and the unseen gaze of whoever had put her here. Joey's jaw clenched as she straightened what little she could. If they wanted her scared, they were too late. She was past fear. Now, she was waiting. Watching. Planning.

Harvey couldn't dare tell whether or not Joey had grown accustomed to these nefarious activities. He'd been bound similarly, sitting on a chair that was an exact match to hers. Whatever drugs had been in his system before this moment had run their course, leaving Harvey with the echoes of pain, a sensation distracted by how tightly the ropes dug into his wrists, and also the water dripping slowly on his head. Enough of it had fallen in the last thirty minutes to run next to his mouth. All hope for something drinkable failed the moment he tasted the sewage that tainted the liquid.

What concerned him the most was the muffled sound of crackling electricity. He could not see it, no matter how hard he tried, but he could only sense that frayed wires or power terminals were dangerously close to either the pipe... or his damp form. Harvey tried to focus his energy into determining where the true danger was. His only distraction was how calm Joey seemed to be across from him.

Joey met Harvey’s gaze, steady despite the harsh lights and the filth clinging to her skin. Her face was pale, her burns barely hidden beneath the shredded collar of her shirt, but her eyes carried something far stronger than pain—resolve. She had a feeling she knew what he was thinking. It was likely the same thing she was. To protect him at all costs. Whatever was about to happen, she would try to endure this for both of them.

With the faintest breath, she shook her head. "We will get through this, Harvey," she said gently, her voice hoarse but firm. "Whatever they’re planning, we’ve already made it this far. You stay with me. No matter what.” Her lips curved faintly—not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. “We're going to get home. Alison and Jameson need us to.”

Just as the last word left her mouth, the door hissed open with mechanical indifference. A figure stepped through, towering and anonymous, encased in a thick insulated suit designed to protect against electricity. There was no hint of a face behind the mirrored visor. The modulated voice crackled with false politeness. "Commodore Harvey Geisler," the male voice said, pausing just inside the threshold. "The more you cooperate, the easier things will be on your wife." His gaze turned—if it could be called that—toward Joey. "And you wouldn’t want to complicate her recovery any further… would you?"

Harvey looked up, blinked by the light that shone from the open doorway. It was almost comical, the fact that their captor chose to not reveal themselves to the human captives. What exactly did they think, that Harvey and Joey were going to run off to the nearest Federation base and tell them who'd kept them captive? Did the humans actually have an upper hand here? "What the hell does that mean?" he fired at the tormentor.

The figure didn’t flinch. The voice that followed was smooth, almost amused beneath the helmet. “It means, Commodore, that pain is a currency—and your silence will make her very expensive.”

Joey’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t look away from him. “Harvey,” she said, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade. "Don’t give him what he wants. He’s trying to make you react. That’s all this is.” Her eyes locked with his, fierce despite the bruises and burns. “You're in control here. Not them."

The suited figure tilted his head slightly, as if studying them both. “Touching,” he said flatly. “But sentiment doesn’t override physics. And electricity doesn’t care about love.”

He stepped forward, the hum of his insulated boots echoing off the metal floor. “You’ll understand soon enough. One of you will talk. The other will scream.” He turned toward the door, pausing just long enough to let the threat settle like smoke in the air. Then he was gone, the door hissing shut behind him, leaving only the buzz of failing lights and the slow, steady drip of water.

Harvey struggled for a moment against the restraints, not in an effort to get free, but in an effort to right himself in the poor excuse for a chair. "So... this is control?" he asked softly. He certainly didn't understand it, this need to be so dramatic. He could barely remember any of the other questions he'd been asked in previous sessions, and even now there was not a clear request for what he should say.

The man was fooling himself. Harvey knew there was a reason he'd been targeted. It was the single boxed pip he now wore, something he didn't receive until after Joey had been kidnapped. But he'd been commanding Belvedere since before the Black Hawk-B came into the picture. Ship deployments, cargo movements, and even sensitive details regarding the political state of the quadrant were under his purview.

But it was an interesting sensation now, Harvey thought as he looked across to Joey before him. Of the thousands of lives he was sworn to protect, the ones that concerned him the most he could count on a single hand. How far would he go to keep them safe?

Joey watched him shift in the chair. She could see the weight behind his eyes—not just the pain or the confusion, but the calculation. The burden of command. Of fatherhood. Of love. And she knew that look because she wore it too.

“This isn’t control,” she said quietly, answering the question he hadn’t really asked. “It’s desperation. Smoke and mirrors. They don’t know what to do with people who won’t break the way they expect.” Her voice was low, steady, but there was a flicker of fire behind it. “They think fear is leverage. That pain is persuasion. But they don’t understand what we’ve already survived.”

She leaned forward as much as the bindings would allow, her eyes locked on his. “You’re not alone in this, Harvey. You never were. And whatever they think they’re going to get from you—from me—they won’t. Because we won’t give what they want most.”

Hope.

The door hissed again, a subtle reminder that time was not on their side. But Joey didn’t flinch. Not this time. Because in that moment, across the space between them, she would go as far as she needed to, and had a feeling he would, too.

Harvey looked up to see the suited figure return. "Come to send us home?" he asked with a half-smile. "Or at least let us know our lawyer is here?"

The suited figure paused mid-stride, that mirrored visor reflecting Harvey’s half-smile with chilling indifference. “No lawyer,” he replied coolly, voice still filtered through that warbled modulator. “But I did come bearing gifts.”

He turned abruptly, stepping toward Joey with mechanical precision. She tensed immediately, her eyes locked onto him, already bracing for whatever cruel game he had planned. Without ceremony, the figure raised a small wand—nothing flashy, just a blunt piece of tech pulsing faintly with red light—and dragged it over the half-healed burns on her collarbone. The device let out a soft hiss.

Joey gasped, her spine arching as the searing sting returned, every nerve firing at once. The room filled with the acrid scent of activated dermal tissue. She clenched her teeth, refusing to scream, but the agony rippled through her frame, visible even in the sterile light.

“Just refreshing the canvas,” the figure remarked dryly, turning back to Harvey. “And giving you something to think about, Commodore. If you don't wish to cooperate, we can certainly get what we need regardless. We're all about giving chances.”

Joey sagged slightly in the restraints, breathing heavy but defiant. She shot the figure a sideways glance. ”Is that all you got?" She asked, each word strained, but if the focus was on her, it meant her husband was safe.

The figure paused, head cocked to one side as if analyzing Joey’s resilience like it was a malfunction in a system—something illogical, something unquantified. His gloved hand hovered over the device, its tip still glowing faintly with residual heat. “Curious response,” he mused, voice flat. “Pain thresholds differ. Yours... are inconveniently high.”

Harvey debated the value in teasing the man. Many times throughout his medical career, he'd been told that childbirth was the most painful experience a woman could endure. He was fortunate enough to bear witness to the delivery process on more than one occasion, not including the trauma-induced labor that Joey had endured with Jameson and Alison. All it would take would be a simple off-the-cuff remark, a statement that Joey had sustained much, much worse.

Deep down Harvey knew that would be a mistake. He was bound to a simple metal chair, as was Joey. And wires sparking around them and a damp floor beneath their feet, there was plenty of opportunity to quickly escalate the amount of torture. He certainly tried to push past the scent of burning flesh and focus on the sounds of breathing, the electric pulse, and even the drips in the distance.

A deep breath entered his lungs, a vain attempt by Harvey to calm himself. In the steeliest tone possible, he said, "It's a little hard to cooperate when you haven't asked a question. The clone... he's got access to ship deployments, tactical information. Nothing in my head is of use."

The suited figure stood motionless for a moment, the silence stretching long enough to feel deliberate—like he was savoring Harvey’s composure before slicing through it. Then, with a slow tilt of his helmet, he stepped forward, the hum of his boots vibrating faintly against the metal floor.

“You underestimate yourself, Commodore” the voice crackled, colder now, stripped of its earlier amusement. “The clone may have access to your systems, your codes, your command logs. But it doesn’t have everything.”

He turned slightly, pacing between the two prisoners like a predator circling wounded prey. “You managed to get to our Razmena,” He stopped in front of Harvey, visor inches from his face. “How?”

The question hung in the air like a blade.

“How did you get there? And more importantly—how did you make it back?”

He turned toward Joey now, the red glow of his device pulsing again in his hand. “You refused to give us the information, and fought against extraction. Let's hope your husband is more forthcoming."

The figure removed his helmet revealing he was Selamat but then, the helmet was replaced just as quickly. “One way or another, we will get the information we want. And the longer you pretend otherwise, the worse this gets for her.”

All of Harvey's thoughts dissipated almost immediately. In this universe, the Selamat were telepathic creatures, capable of hypnosis-level command implementation. The Consortium had relied heavily on the Selamat to convert key Starfleet agents to their cause and almost tear Starfleet apart in the Gamma Quadrant. Even in this moment, Harvey could appreciate the irony of the moment. The Selamat had basically started this enterprise, without which the Black Hawk never would have crossed an interdimensional barrier. And now here he was, face-to-face with a Selamat from that same distant universe.

But Harvey immediately took stock of his thoughts and emotions. By the man's own admission, this was a Selamat from the other universe, otherwise why wouldn't he have attempted the same kind of implantation? Perhaps they hadn't developed the necessary skill to do so. Maybe his universe's Selamat had been engineered somehow by the Dominion, the process expanded and accelerated. It was incredible the feats evolution and genetic meddling could accomplish.

For now, Harvey had only one reaction to the Selamat's challenge, and even then it took a measure of strength to keep his laughter to more than a deep chuckle. "Really?" Harvey demanded. "You come from your universe over to mine and that's the question you ask? How we did it? Clearly you've got a gateway all your own, and it was just our luck that you had a Razmena right where ours was."

The Selamat remained still, but the silence sharpened—no longer passive, now simmering with intent. The visor glinted under the overhead glare, casting fractured reflections of Harvey’s restrained defiance.

Then the figure spoke, voice tight and stripped of pretense. “Luck is a comforting lie,” it said. “We have our reasons. Answer the questions, Commodore."

The Selamat’s visor barely shifted, but the tension in the room thickened. Without further warning, the figure raised the probe again—its light had dimmed, replaced now by a sickly red glow. It pulsed once, and then struck.

The tip jabbed directly into the raw, blistered edge of Joey’s burn, delivering a focused electrical surge meant not to kill, but to remind. Her body jerked involuntarily, the pain like liquid fire pouring through every frayed nerve. She clenched her jaw, a guttural sound torn from deep in her throat—not a scream, but a choked growl of defiance. Her fists strained uselessly against the restraints.

It was impossible for Harvey to ignore the struggle Joey faced. He pulled against his own restraints, threatening to free himself from the bindings and strike the Selamat's weapon away, or else turn the simple tool against its master. Alas, his hands remained unmoved, as were his ankles trapped against the legs of the chair.

Harvey did not comprehend the point of all of this. Why did this poor excuse for a Selamat need to hear something he already knew. Or at least, should have known already. The Black Hawk wasn't the only vessel to cross over and then return using the barrier. The USS Cochrane was the other, and the last Harvey knew, that vessel had lost most of its crew and was reassigned to the Alpha Quadrant. And while the Cochrane was over in the other universe, it had been captured by the Confederation and its crew interrogated.

Perhaps there was a detail or two they missed, or just didn't have time to get.

"You want answers?" Harvey mocked. "Weapons fire opened a rift in the Hadyn Nebula. We were sucked in, but nothing looked like it had changed. It wasn't until we left the nebula that we realized something was different. D'rimo tried to take my ship as a prize. I refused. Razmena..." Harvey chuckled, remembering the struggle with bounty hunters on that station. "Well, we were almost taken as prizes there too. We escaped, went home, and closed the rift behind us."

Or so I thought until all of this, thought Harvey.

The Selamat looked to Harvey, eyes fixed behind the visor. The silence that followed Harvey’s tale wasn’t idle—it was a calculated pause. "So you claim the rift was opened by weapons fire… and it was merely closed when you left?" His voice was low, almost coaxing. "Forgive me, Commodore, but a tricobalt blast alone doesn’t fracture space in that manner. Something else must have been at play."

The Selamat’s gaze hardened, though neither human could see it. "Did you record anything while inside the rift? Any fluctuations in your ship’s chronometers? External particle surges? Even the absence of change can be a clue." If they were going to succeed, they needed all of the components to make it happen.

If circumstances were different, Harvey might have offered a deep belly laugh. The threat of torture was enough to keep his humor in check. "My clone has access to the recordings. Hell, so does hers! All that data. You should ask him. But I'm no scientist. How the hell am I supposed to know what happens when you combine a tricobalt, a warp core breach, and a nebula?"

The Selamat turned on his heel and walked out of the room, leaving husband and wife alone with one another.

Harvey's eyes followed the Selamat until the door closed behind him. For a moment, it seemed like there would be a reprieve. Then the sounds of dripping and sparks tore through his filtered hearing, reminding both Harvey and Joey of the long journey ahead.

~to be continued~

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