Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [23]
He brought up the complete dossiers on the trio of Enterprise crewmembers, his eyes scanning over the files quickly. He processed the information almost as quickly as the files scrolled upward. Here were the details on every movement of the three crewmembers since they had entered Starfleet Academy; their grades and performance scores, teachers they had favored, or who had favored them, links to any personal logs that had been kept on Academy computers, travel itineraries for every trip they had ever taken. Here too were the complete records of their actions post-graduation, through whatever ships they had been assigned to prior to the Enterprise. Any mention of them in crew logs was flagged, and all duty and personal logs were catalogued. If he wanted to, Tabor could even find out what the crewmembers in question had eaten each day from the replicator, how often they used the sonic showers, and the intimate details of their personal holodeck programs.
Tabor had noted that some of his human counterparts in Section 31 were less than enthusiastic about poking into their subjects’ histories in such depth, especially if those subjects were Starfleet personnel. Invasive, they generally called it. But it was one of the reasons that Tabor made a good recruiter; as a Ullian, he was used to sifting through the clutter within people’s minds-memories of which they were not even consciously aware. He was not “invasive”; he was merely utilizing the abilities he had been born with. Because of their reticence, few human operatives could do what he did. One man, Luther Sloan, was among the handful of human Section 31 agents whose scruples were, like his, completely subjugated to his duties.
Tabor’s superiors had recently made the decision to recruit a new operative aboard the Enterprise. Given the crew’s illustrious history, and Captain Picard’s penchant for becoming involved in politically sensitive interstellar issues, having an operative here was an obvious choice. And while Section 31 could easily have transferred an officer onto the ship-they did that all the time, most recently on the Slayton-it seemed like a better idea to recruit from the existing crew. Trust was already established.
One of Tabor’s three choices was Lieutenant j.g. Kehvan Zydhek, a Balduk who worked in engineering, alongside his brother, Waltere. The Zydheks had entered Starfleet Academy upon completing their training as warriors on their homeworld. They were brilliant technicians, whose work on ships’ systems kept them close to Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge. The fact that they knew the Enterprise and its computers so intimately made them good prospects as agents, but Tabor felt that Kehvan held the stronger potential for Section 31 work because of disciplinary incidents in his past. Still, the odds of one brother not telling his sibling about his covert affiliations were slim; in cases of close familial contact, Tabor had learned to err on the side of caution.
Another choice was Jyme Soule, one of the barbers. A jocular older Bajoran, Jyme was well-liked by the command crew of the Enterprise-as was his colleague, the Bolian Mr. Mot. Jyme’s in-shop patter with the officers and crew while cutting or styling their hair meant that he knew a lot about what was going on aboard the ship. And his loose schedule-as well as his civilian status on the ship-would allow him to accomplish many types of covert missions more easily than could a crewmember who was constrained by Starfleet regulations and protocols. However, that same civilian status would mean that Jyme would require a great deal of training to keep abreast of Starfleet operations, which was a negative toward choosing him, as was