Teardown of the Problem
Posted on Wed Aug 27th, 2025 @ 6:08pm by Lieutenant Sarah Graesyn & Lieutenant James Constantine & Lieutenant JG Lwaxana Myles & Lieutenant T'Arel Madison PhD & Ensign Iren Th'ashianet & Ensign Connor Watts & Petty Officer 1st Class Damaris Rix
Edited on on Thu Aug 28th, 2025 @ 4:27pm
3,119 words; about a 16 minute read
Mission:
Episode 2 - The Sins of History
Location: Shuttle Repair Bay - Deck 8 - USS Artemis
Timeline: MD012 0700 hrs
Sarah stepped into the secondary shuttle bay where she had had the Leto shifted to and isolated from any others. She had no desire to risk anything that may have compromised its systems spreading to any of the other shuttlecraft. She sighed as she looked over the craft; the lateral exterior hull plates still missing from it. After a moment she nodded and clapped her hands before tapping her comm badge.
=/\= “Graesyn to Engineering team; report to shuttle bay 2.” =/\=
T'Arel entered shuttle bay 2, an engineering kit, in one hand and a carry mug of Chai tea, in the other. Her attention was immediately drawn to the shuttlecraft.
Lax did the same, holding a chocolate bar and a padd.
A tall, lean man came walking into the shuttle bay, his dark grey eyes having a look around then settled upon the shuttle that was set apart from the rest. Ensign Connor Watts frowned slightly, wondering just what was wrong with that shuttle. He then spoke, his frown disappearing. "Morning"
Sarah waited until a good portion of her team was present and then turned toward them all and indicated the Leto. “We have a lot of work to do. I want her stripped down to bolts and thoroughly inspected inch by inch; Mr. Watts I want you to pull her black box and do a deep dive on her computer and find out exactly why her sensors were unable to pick up the device that was attached to her hull. Feel free to grab anyone you need to assist you; I believe that Lieutenant Myles specializes in forensic analysis of Engineering.”
Connor gave a nod towards Graesyn.
Lax nodded. "Anything that I can do."
“T’Arel; can you handle the structural inspections alongside Th’ashienet? I want to ensure that nothing is compromised in the frame or hull plating before she flies again.” Sarah looked to the Vulcan and Andorian expectedly for a moment.
“Aye; I’ll take a look at her impulse and warp systems as well while I am at it.” The words were soft spoken as the Andorian answered; his Antennae twitching toward Sarah slightly.
"Will do, Boss." T'Arel said.
“Excellent; and that leaves the power systems and sensors themselves for me.” Sarah shook her head and motioned to a cart that she had had brought into the shuttlebay which sat nearby the Leto. “It’s gonna be a long couple days; the thermoses there contain a strong Jamaican blend coffee from my personal stock. Enjoy it as you need.”
T'Arel began with a visual inspection, the plating showed general signs of wear and tear. She then used her audio technique, which consisted of tapping the each plate and listening for the changes in frequency that would indicate damage. She then confirmed her work with tri-coder scans. That done, she began to remove the damaged plates and marking their positions with a laser cutter on a low setting. She could then examine them later and formulate what caused the damage.
Sarah picked up her toolkit and stepped toward the port nacelle and removed the shield for the access panel above it; setting up and quickly scanning the coils. After a few moments she began to hum I’ve been working on the railroad as she removed them one by one.
Connor looked over towards where the humming was, giving a slight smile, he turned his attention to the section he was needing to look at. One thing that was necessary to check into was communications his specialty. Taking the outside of the console which held the communication component, he frowned as his nose caught the faint trace of fused wires. It may have had time to cool off but, there was still that scent. Carefully with his deft fingers, Connor gingerly touched the outer wiring, it now being exposed for all to see.
Sarah looked over at Connor as he held up the wire and grimaced. “Yeah; I expected that somehow. Was that caused by a plasma discharge from the Badlands… or was it an internal source, Mr. Watts?” While she waited for an answer she pulled up the conduit grid on her PaDD and traced where that wire would flow with a finger on the screen.
Taking another look and running a scan then sniffing at it once more, Connor answered. "It was not from the plasma discharge from the Badlands. There is a difference in the scent." looking at Grayson. "It is from an internal source I see something that has been melted." pointing towards the lump of something there a mixture of metal and plastic.
“Can you trace it? Pull the entire circuit if you need to. We need to know how this happened and whether anything else dangerous awaits us in the Leto before we authorize her for use again.” Sarah shook her head and looked to T’Arel. “How’s your progress with the plating T’Arel?
"Most of the plating shows normal wear and tear, a few are damaged by the conditions found in the Badlands, but like Ensign Watts said, there is also signs of internal damage on some of plates, and is concentrated to a certain area, I'll have to analysis them further to get any more data, I'll keep you informed." T'Arel said.
Sarah nodded to T'Arel's initial assessment and groaned inwardly, fully expecting the job to be longer than she had anticipated already.
Watts gave a nod, "We'll be working through the night, just to hunt this down."
Sarah looked at her watch; a relic of a bygone age on Earth and sighed. It was the wee hours of the second day of investigation on the Leto and the only thing she had achieved was giving herself, and likely her team, a migraine.
She looked around the shuttle maintenance bay and sighed. “Time to get some outside help I think.” She said to herself.
She got up from the table she had had brought in to array parts and pieces for the investigation and replaced the conduit that she had had Connor pull. It displayed several areas where it had been melted and fused by some form of discharge but she had been unsuccessful in locating the source of the discharge thus far. She ran through her memory of the past few days and settled upon the fact that the Artemis was blessed with its own Criminal Investigations Team and for the first time in 12 hours she smiled.
"Graesyn to Lieutenant Constantine and Petty Officer Rix; can you meet me in the Shuttle Maintenance Bay?"
"On my way," Constantine's assurance was as blunt as ever as he responded to the call. It didn't take long for him to appear in the shuttle bay, and if he was perturbed at being called away from whatever he had been doing, it didn't show. On the contrary, he seemed alert and focused. "Lieutenant," he nodded a brisk greeting.
His nod was returned curtly; not out of a lack of respect but from the sheer exhaustion Sarah was facing. "Thanks for coming down; we have the Leto mostly disassembled but now we are facing the issue that we are growing weary from the work and I don't want us to miss anything... I can't figure out where the discharge we have discovered came from.. but we know that it came from within the Leto herself. It fried or short circuited several systems and forced the Leto into a reboot cycle for sensors, transporter control, and inertial stabilizers."
Rix stepped into the shuttle maintenance bay, eyes narrowing as he took in the scene. The Leto sat off to one side, systems powered down, while a nearby table held the scorched conduit and the fragmented remains of what looked suspiciously like an explosive charge.
He moved in for a closer look, crouching beside the evidence. “That’s not a simple power surge,” he muttered, running a gloved hand along the blackened edge of the conduit. “If this was stuck to her hull and the sensors didn’t even blink, we’re not talking debris... we’re talking sabotage. And yeah… that casing? Cardassian design. Crude, but effective. I’ll start a residue analysis and see what else it left behind.”
"Cardassian?" Constantine pursed his lips in thought, pushing his hand into his pocket as he looked over the clearly well organised chaos. He shook his head with an absent tsk. "Well, there's clear motive there at least. Either they don't want the humiliation of one of their own being taken by us...or they're worried about what he might say. Or both," he added the last with a slight half-shrug.
Sarah nodded, listening to Rix’ analysis. “Aye; I recognized it as Cardassian the moment I set eye upon it. When we first found it, the device was shielded somehow; which prevented any solid scans of it while it was active. The shielding didn’t seem Cardassian to me and I can’t figure out what was generating it… its one of my priorities in this teardown.”
She picked up the conduit again and pointed out specific points along it. “These marks are from an energy surge that originated in the shuttles own systems… something else that I can’t trace and locate.”
Finally; she pulled a PaDD out and pulled up an image of the scans she had gotten of the device. “There is traces of an odd temporal signature everywhere on the device itself. The oddity of it though… is that it very nearly matches our own frequency; its only .1 off.”
Connor watched as Graesyn pointed out what had been found, he had spent a lot of time going over the whole conduit, and was impressed by what the chief had put together.
"If I'm hearing right there was an attempt of killing of the team?" Connor giving a lopsided frown.
Rix crouched beside the scorched conduit, his gloved hand running along one of the blackened edges. “This wasn’t just damage from a stray surge,” he said evenly. “You’ve got deliberate overload markings... power fed into the grid from somewhere it shouldn’t have been. That’s no accident.”
He set up a compact forensic scanner and began swabbing for residue. “Casing’s Cardassian, but not all of it,” he added. “There’s a polymer layer fused in here—Starfleet-grade shielding. We use it to suppress signal bleed during device transport. Not the kind of thing you’d find on a battlefield-issue explosive.”
At the mention of the .1 frequency variance, he gave a slight shake of his head. “That close to our own signature? That’s above my clearance. Temporal signatures aren’t really my field, but if it was meant to blend in with our own systems, that suggests intent. Someone knew how close they could get before raising red flags.”
He stood up, locking eyes briefly with Constantine. “I’ll keep running samples, but I’d recommend checking internal logs. If this thing was prepped or installed here, before launch, we’re not looking at an external threat. We’re looking at someone inside.”
Constantine gave a measured, thoughtful nod to the words, his features not showing a verdict either way. As an investigator, he could see some mental jumps to match each piece of the puzzle to get to that conclusion. It was a plausible possibility, but his job had taught him he had to keep an open mind until all those gaps were filled. In this case though, he could see the other side of the coin, ensuring caution towards what would be a tangible threat if true. "It's worth looking into," he agreed cautiously.
“I’ll pull the logs for the last… two weeks and comb through them. I am not terribly fond of that possibility but I would be remiss in my duties to ignore it.” Sarah gave a heavy sigh and shook her head slowly. “I knew this posting would be different than my previous ones; but somehow…” she paused and glanced back at the Leto “…somehow I did not expect this.”
She considered for a moment and glanced at Constantine. “I am fairly new to the ship and haven’t had a chance to get to know everyone. I may need a more experienced eye in that field going through those logs.”
"I've not been here long myself, but I'm happy to help with the mechanics of analysing logs and movement," Constantine assured with a slight nod to her. If anything, their not having been around long would help with impartiality.
Lax took a second to sort of read her own logs so to speak. Some of her mind was still in "Cardassian station" mode. However she didn't waste the opportunity to learn.
"Cardassian bomb, with a Starfleet polymer, is someone trying to frame the Cardassians?" T'Arel said aloud.
"To quote a rather famous Vulcan "it's logical" Lax said. "And coming from a Cardassian station, I'd probably say that too, and being a kid during the war to boot. But that could be a red herring. Somebody who wants us to think Cardassian.
Damaris didn’t say much as the data finally filtered in from the Leto’s recovered core. He stood slightly apart, reviewing the stream of low-level diagnostic entries on his padd — lines of code most people would never bother to look at. That was the point, he supposed. Whoever had done this knew exactly where no one else would.
He scrolled back six entries. Froze. Then again. His brow furrowed slightly.
There it was.
“Got it,” he muttered, stepping forward into the group’s circle without looking up. “It’s not just the Leto missing the device. It’s why.”
He held up the padd to Graesyn and Constantine, his tone low and deliberate.
“She received a transmission while your team was still on the station. Not a message — a packet. Small. Precise. Looked like a routine maintenance ping… but it forced a full sensor power cycle. Pulled them offline and dumped them into a self-diagnostic loop. Thirty-two seconds. Just enough time for the device to be physically placed without detection — maybe even transported aboard.”
He glanced back toward the dormant shuttle.
“She never saw it coming. Because, in that window, she was blind and she thought she was meant to be.”
His thumb tapped the screen again, bringing up the looped diagnostic flag. “There’s no warning. No alert. From the system’s perspective, it performed perfectly. Sensors entered a ‘scheduled’ maintenance mode. Except…” he gestured to the transmission code, “…that schedule never existed until after the Leto undocked.”
“That leaves someone in our own crew… or someone among the Cardassians that is familiar with Engineering protocols.” She thought for a moment and her lips turned into a small grimace as she mentally went through her roster. “Lieutenant Consantine… I need you to pull the crew roster for Engineering. There were a couple of Ensigns, Junior Grades that came aboard just after I did… and one of them had parents that were lost during the war. In fact… I think one of them is at least part Bajoran.” Sarah shook her head subtly. “Gods let me be wrong with that suspicion.”
Constantine gave a thoughtful nod as he glanced around the group. He still had misgivings about getting fixed to a theory when there could be plausible alternative explanations for some of the evidence found thus far. But he decided it was perhaps better to speak about it privately, when they'd had time to rest from the intense work. "I'll take a look," he assured, because despite his misgivings, if there was any chance of a traitor, they needed to safeguard themselves.
Connor felt a chill go over his body, could they possibly be thinking he had something to do with this sabotage? That wasn't in his nature, he didn't do it. Still though it seemed that maybe everyone was suspect until proven innocent.
Sarah looked back over the Leto behind her and nodded to Constantine. “That's all we can do; I don’t want to throw undue suspicion but I’d be remiss not to ensure every possible avenue was investigated.” She glanced to Connor and smiled. “Mr Watts; do you have anything to add to what we’ve assembled so far?”
Connor felt a sense of relief, he may not be under suspicion. Though, he did arrive after Graesyn had done so.
Clearing his throat, "There is one other thing that we could examine, and that is-um, see if there are any trace elements of DNA to look for. Yes we all touched this but...we can possibly scan for something like that? This way we can be taken out of the equation?"
"All our DNA scans are in the ship's medical database." T'Arel said. "It wouldn't take long to compare them to scan from the shuttle."
Connor nodded the worried expression, disappearing.
"Thank you, and glad to hear this."
"Exactly. Look into everything. To quote an ancient detective" If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains however improbable, must be the truth." Lax said
Connor Turner to regard Lax then towards the others. He was going to enjoy being on this ship.
A Joint Post By
Lieutenant Sarah Graesyn
Chief Engineering Officer, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Lieutenant T'Arel Madison
Forensic Engineering Officer, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Petty Officer First Class Damaris Rix
Ballistics Specialist, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Ensign Connor Watts
Communications Specialist, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Lieutenant James Constantine
Criminal Investigations Officer, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Lieutenant Junior Grade Lwaxana Myles
Forensic Engineering Officer, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Ensign Iren Th'ashianset
Engineering Officer, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Ensign Connor Watts
Communications Specialist, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Petty Officer First Class Damaris Rix
Ballistics Specialist, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
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