Engineering Voodoo

Posted on 22 Sep 2024 @ 6:05pm by 2nd Lieutenant Cassandra Mathews & Lieutenant JG Thex sh'Zoarhi

1,033 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: General Sim Postings
Location: Various
Timeline: Follow - A place for everything and everything in it's place.

ON:



Cassandra had never enjoyed doing inventory so much in her entire career. The doctor was truly a wonderful guy that had made the tedious task go by like a fresh breeze. Now it was back to work again though.

Cassandra was still peeved about the loss of her prior inventory lists. It bothered her to no end that there were items in the cargo hold that she was sure hadn't been there on her previous checks. She had no way to prove it though with the logs missing. Her only choice at this point was to go to engineering and see if there was any way at all to recover the lost records or maybe the main computer had possibly kept a copy.

Entering Engeerning Cassandra looked around and found herself looking at the familiar face of Lieutenant jg sh'Zoarhi. "Hey umm Lieutenant do you have a minute?" Cassandra asked. Knowing that engineers were generally busy as bees she'd rather ask first before dumping the problem on her.

" Sure I'm free what's up?" Thex said as she walked over to Cassandra dropping the dancing tune she had been humming to herself.

Cassandra offered up the Padd she carried with her. "I was going over the inventory and the files from when we boarded and all the follow up checks have been erased from the computer it seems. The inventory was checked last week. I know because I did it myself. Yet when we went to do a follow up check it says everything is out of date. It keeps giving me error message when I try to pull up who accesed it last. What do you think?" She asked Thex, perplexed at the whole ordeal.

Thex took the padd and her blue eyes began scanning over the results. " Has anyone else accessed the manifest? " She asked as she began to flick through the error messages.

Cassandra shrugged. "I can't check it. It as though my permissions have been stripped. Which if that was the case Captain Jackson or Captain Falk would have informed me. But this isn't the weirdest thing." Cassandra said, "there's crates in my cargo hold full of.. well robot junk. Arms, feet, legs, all of it. It wasn't there last week."

" Right." Thex said as she took a seat. " Get me a copy of all incoming supply drops and if they were automated supply pods. I'll take a look at the computer code and see if the computer's got a case of the mumps."

"I'm on it. I'll go through Ops they should have a record of that." Cassandra said with a nodd. She helped herself to an open terminal near by. Entering her pass codes and opening the access sheets the was met with a "Code not recognized, re enter code." She tried again slower thinking maybe in her haste she'd made a mistake. The ops list did come up now. Only it too was scrubbed back to before the Tomcat crew had boarded. "The heck?"

Meanwhile as Thex began to dig into the system it seemed to reset itself. An Error message from the computer read "unable to access, error 424. Unauthorized access."

Thex looked at the error before with a few taps from her figures brought up the computer's code. " Well well well what do we have here." She said as she got to work.

"Find something interesting?" Cassandra asked from her place nearby.

" Someones been very busy. Looks like someone has inserted a script to disrupt the computer manifest. It's fairly basic that you could get from any black market engineer. Most likely they forgot to remove it after they've finished." Thex explained her anntena leaning forward as she worked.

"Huh... Anyway to track it down? More importantly anyway to figure out who done it?" Cassie asked. "Ops files are missing too. They are sooo not going to be happy about that." Cassie knew Operations took their job seriously. Heads would roll. Cassandra didn't want it to be hers.

" Give me a sec." The andorian said as she worked. " There we go I've purged the script you should be able to access it now." She said bringing up computers logs. " Someone has been busy. They've been inserting it and removing it since we left the starbase. Guess they didn't have the opportunity to remove the script this time."

"Gavin and I logged in earlier then usual because I wanted to give the doctor a briefing on how ops wanted the inventory list checked off. It's possible we might have caught whoever it was off guard and they didn't have time to remove it yet." Cassandra suggested. "I don't know much about engineering voodoo to know if that's a possibility. Still if they think it's still in place we might be able to catch whoever it is when they try logging in to remove it. Anyway we could put something up to make it look like we haven't caught them yet?" Cassandra asked hopefully.

" I can start pulling off the times the security of the system was switched off so they could insert the script. It could give us a pattern to narrow it down but catching someone in the act would be a far more direct approach. " The blue girl said from her seat. I could rig the doors to close when someone removes the script from the computer. We could go and see what exactly there trying to smuggle on board the ship."

"Sounds good. I'm thinking about putting a couple Marines in the storage hold and that way when whoever it is returns we can arrest them and hand em over to security. You set up the door. I'll go get my men in place." Cassandra said. "I'll meet you down there when you're finished."


" Sounds like a plan. " Thex said closing the computer after making sure there was no trace of her being there.

TBC-
Hunting Ghosts





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