Posted by Lieutenant Commander Peter Sigmundsson (Chief Intelligence Officer) in CIO’s Office
The Office of the Chef Intelligence officer was simple, a single desk and chair with two chairs on the other side. A computer panel behind desk chair for further work, the basic office setup. Well, at least when the lights worked. The comically large former security chief was reading up on the newest arrival on the ship, well newest old arrival. Captain Nakuto, His old Commanding officer. He last saw her almost seven years earlier. The USS Curie, his first posting since rejoining Starfleet after the War. He leaned back and smiled to himself, a good ship with an even better crew, much like the Viking used to be… Used to.

He opened the Captain’s service record again, recently changed from missing in action to Active again. He leaned forward and looked at her picture with suspicion. He hadn’t been there, he didn’t know what happened, or better yet he didn’t completely understand the reports he’d read. He’d avoided her carefully, he wasn’t even sure that she was aware of him being on the ship. His position wasn’t exactly very noticeable. Mostly he just kept to himself giving his team directives. They were fairly isolated from the crew.

He stood up and walked to the replicator and just stood there for a few minutes, quietly pondering. After almost five minutes of just standing, he finally ordered a single Coffee. He was lucky as the replicator gave him what he ordered this time so he could sit down again and relax. It dawned on him that that was the first time he had spoken aloud for the entire day. Why was this bothering him so much he wondered.

CIO

They say speak of the devil and he will appear. And in those moments when Sigmundsson’s thoughts were occupied with former Captain Kara Nakuto, he had been like a dagger in her own mind also.

Her own words and thoughts might no longer possess any importance on this ship, but that did not mean that the half-Klingon no longer cared about events on the USS Viking. And so she had found herself studying the latest crew manifest to see who had survived and who had been lost in her absence.

GLaDOS. The former borg science chief had gone. So too had her protege, Reira. Had there been yet another mass exodus of staff? Or had they succumbed to the evil ever-present on the USS Viking.

But there were also new names, unfamiliar to her. Blakesley was a new addition to Maj’s security team. No…not Maj’s, her friend was gone, had not escaped the clutches of the void as she had done. Kalika Darz now headed that team. And two new doctors, Batario and Stein.

And then there was Peter Sigmundsson. Like the lingering tendrils of a long-forgotten nightmare he had clawed his way out of her shame-laden past and planted himself squarely in her present. Sigmundsson.

It had taken her exhausted mind some time to recall where she knew the man from. The USS Curie. There he had borne full witness to the first act of betrayal now wholly characteristic of her Starfleet career - the desertion from her post as Captain of that vessel. And now he had arrived to spectate the final act of her second abandoning. Why?

During her own short tenure as the head of this crew, she had never been assigned an Intelligence Officer. The last man to bear that title on the Viking, to her own meagre knowledge, had been James McHarrie - general mischief maker and conjuror of Reman Imps. Was this another of McHarrie’s tricks? Orchestrated from beyond the grave to plunge her back into utter confusion? Or was Sigmundsson similarly planted here by the devious Section 31 to gather intel on her return?

Either way, she needed to speak to the man, needed to look him in the eyes and prove to him and to all he reported to that she remained standing. That she remained strong and courageous and defiant, no matter what manner of hell they were preparing to cast her into next.

It was not a conversation that she welcomed but…it was one that needed to take place, to bury once and for all those ghosts who refused to stay dead.

And so it was that, on that quiet and hitherto calm evening, Peter Sigmundsson would find his soliloquy on his former Captain broken by a knock at his door from that very same hand.

Kara Nakuto