He should have listened. He should have returned to the bridge. But his curiosity got the better of him, and so he stood there in horror, watching the feed as his captain and the Romulan transformed into the worst versions of their past selves, intent on getting answers from their Vaadwaur captive no matter the lines crossed.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran knew what he was seeing was wrong, but he found himself torn. He had reviewed the intelligence ripped from the Romulan carrier waves, the desperation in their voices as isolated defense forces fought against impossible odds, the loss of life at an almost unfathomable scale, and, for those the enemy chose to capture rather than kill, the terror of the occupation that followed. He understood now why the Romulan commander in this system, facing an unwinnable situation, had turned the place into a graveyard rather than to allow the station to be captured. And this pilot, the one in their brig, he’d been party to that. With that as context, was what Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Commander Sena doing now actually all that wrong?

Yes, it still was. It was wrong to stab your prisoner, only to seal up his puncture wounds with a dermal regenerator so you could do it again, and it was wrong to pump him full of drugs to induce pain and disassociate him from reality.

What got him the most though was seeing his boss be the one to do it.

He had no doubt that Lieutenant Commander Sena had such villainy in her. She wore the uniform of a Starfleet officer now, but she was former Tal Shiar. 

Captain Lewis, on the other hand, was a Starfleet officer who always spoke about how he would give anything, even his life, to protect the Federation and its ideals. But now he was lighting those ideals on fire. He would say this was about protecting those ideals, but when did it become too much?

“You will tell us, or you will die.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran heard those words from his captain, and as he stared at the feed, he believed them too. Captain Lewis looked ready to take a life, and that was a more terrifying than anything else he’d heard or seen today.

The good news though, which the Betazoid could feel through his empathic senses, was that the Vaadwaur’s resolve was softening. Urged on by confidence that nothing Starfleet would do could stop their campaign, and broken by all the captain and the Romulan had just put him through, the Vaadwaur pilot gave in, his tone almost braggadocious as he spoke.

“There does happen to be such a place, a hub for our operations. It lies outside the galactic plane, accessible only through the labyrinth, and it is displaced from normal space by technology beyond your meager comprehension.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran breathed a sigh of relief, not just because they’d gotten an answer, but because he wasn’t going to have to see if his boss would make good on his threat.

“That’s a good start, but tell us more. How do we reach it?”

As the captain pressed, Lieutenant Commander Sena, sitting by his side, threaded a delicate blade between her fingers as if to accentuate the point. The Vaadwaur pilot knew they were serious too. He’d already felt the bite of that blade, and for all his conditioning and all his training, he didn’t want to feel it again.

“You’ll never be able to reach it.”

“Then there’s no harm in telling me.”

And so the Vaadwaur spilled the beans for, really, what harm was there in that? It wasn’t like their fortress could fall. He broke it down, piece by piece, describing the exact location of their command and control center that lay in a null space offset from the galactic plane, and bragging about how the they had used technology gifted to them by a benevolent benefactor to phase shift it out of the spacetime continuum. It could only be reached, the pilot explained proudly, through a convoluted maze of Underspace corridors, and even then, it was protected by two heavily-fortified alien arrays that would have to be destroyed in order to shift it back into the normal plane of existence.

Standing there in the security office, Lieutenant Commander Eidran found himself wondering if this was just how it was done, the stuff they didn’t teach in the Academy and didn’t talk about at Command.  He didn’t know what he was going to do about what he had just seen, but there were two things he knew for certain: first, they had just gotten their edge, a way to land a critical blow against their enemy, and second, the way they’d gotten it was absolutely and completely illegal.