The Mystery of the Sonic Burn
Posted on Wed Aug 12th, 2026 @ 8:29am by Lieutenant Samir Voss & Petty Officer 2nd Class Leah Rochester
Edited on on Wed Aug 12th, 2026 @ 8:39am
1,489 words; about a 7 minute read
Mission:
Episode 3 - The One Who Got Away
Location: The Quarters of Ensign Harlow - Deck 4 - USS Artemis
Timeline: MD006 1015 hrs
Leah Rochester pushed herself up to stand, letting out a long breath as she stepped back, scrolling through the scan results on her tricorder. "Well, this is a new one on me..." she said lightly, taking a moment to survey the markers that represented where the body was found. "I've never seen a death by sonic shower before. Water shower, yes, but not a sonic one..."
“I suppose it’s possible. A sudden power surge could cause the frequency to change, turning the Sonics deadly. Though you’d think the computer would’ve detected such a thing” Voss observed, looking around for anybody other signs of damage or struggle.
"There's also a huge amount of safeguards that are built into the technology to prevent that from happening, as you can imagine," Leah noted the way Voss glanced around the quarters. "Come on, let me give you a tour," Leah motioned for the other officer to join her, leading him to the bathroom, motioning to the marked outline where the body had been.
"This is where Harlow was found," Leah's tone shifted as she moved into professional mode. "We know there were no injuries. No signs of blunt force trauma. No thermal damage and no conventional energy weapons. And everything in the bathroom reflects that. There's no signs of struggle, just the expected disturbance of his collapse. As you can see, he fell in the shower. So this wasn't a prolonged struggle; the incident was contained here, in the shower cubical, and he must have been incapacitated almost immediately."
"But we also know the internal picture is...disturbing," Leah continued with a tight sigh as she brought up the initial scans on the body. "His soft tissue shows structural breakdown at a cellular level...it's gone as far as to cause micro-structural damage in his organs. There's also evidence of a cardiac arrest, but the full autopsy is highly likely to show that it was secondary to the cellular damage, not the cause of death. I would expect to see this kind of disruption from sustained, high-frequency resonance. Well beyond standard operational tolerances...and safety protocols."
Leah allowed that to sink in before pulling up another scan on her PADD, a gloved finger motioning across the results. "There's a timestamp here. The shower went into maintenance mode just over an hour before Harlow died. Now, maintenance mode suspends several automated safeguards while the system is being serviced. And the next recorded interaction with the shower is when Harlow activated the full cleanse cycle that caused his death," she met Voss' eyes, arching a delicate eyebrow. "I'd strongly suggest that once I'm done with the quarters, we bring in a Forensic Engineering Officer to take a closer look."
Soft, near silent steps, carried Freyja into the room as the door switched open and closed behind her. Brown eyes instantly started to roam over the area as she instantly started assessing everything. A slight nod was given to Samir before heading to the bathroom, having been given the heads up that it was where the death had happened.
In the living area, Lieutenant JG Samir Voss was keeping out of the way.
He had not gone into the bathroom. That was Rochester’s area for now, and he had no intention of stepping into the middle of her evidence markers or giving anyone a reason to complain about contamination. Instead, he had taken up position by the main door, his kit open on the floor beside him and the access panel carefully removed.
The door mechanism itself looked untouched. That was the first thing he noticed. There were no signs of forced entry, no scoring around the casing, no emergency release damage, nothing that suggested someone had tried to bully their way in.
Samir crouched beside the panel, one knee against the floor as he connected a probe to the local memory buffer. The readings came up slowly on his PADD, line by line, most of them exactly what he would have expected to see.
Harlow had entered his quarters using his own authorisation. His commbadge had been close enough for the system to confirm him. The door had sealed behind him. Later, there were internal activations from inside the room, also consistent with Harlow moving around his own quarters.
So far, ordinary.
Then Samir saw the problem.
It was not a missing log, not exactly. If someone had simply wiped the entry, that would have been obvious. This was more subtle. The access record was there, but part of the supporting data was thinner than it should have been. The door was reporting a normal sealed state during a period where the corridor sensors showed a slight pressure change outside the quarters.
Not much. Barely anything, really.
But enough to make him stop and look again.
He adjusted the probe and ran the comparison a second time. Same result.
“No forced entry,” he murmured, more to himself than anyone else. “No failed access attempt. No emergency override.”
He glanced towards the bathroom for a moment, then back to the exposed panel.
“But something doesn’t line up.”
Samir marked the timestamp and sent a copy of the discrepancy to his working file. It was not proof that someone had entered Harlow’s quarters. Not by itself. Starship systems produced tiny irregularities all the time: pressure shifts, sensor lag, environmental cycling, someone walking too close to a bulkhead at the wrong moment.
But with a dead officer in the next room and a sonic shower that had apparently turned lethal, he was not prepared to call it nothing.
He sat back on his heel and studied the panel again.
Whoever had done this, if someone had done it, had not made a mess of the door. They had not broken it, tricked it crudely, or left a nice obvious scar for him to find.
They had been careful.
That bothered him far more.
"You want to see another space oddity, Samir?" Leah made her way over to him, having had time to scan and sweep the space for organic tissue that that didn't belong. She held a little back though, not wanting to interrupt if he was in the middle of something important.
"What do you have?" Samir replied as he stood up. Leah talking to him had brought him back to the here and now as it were. Despite everything there seemed to be something wrong here. Something that he could not quite put his finger on.
Leah held up a small tube to the light, so he could see the single hair held in stasis. "A puzzle piece," she replied lightly, looking at it thoughtfully. "I'm just not sure which puzzle it comes from. It doesn't belong to Harlow. But the real mystery is why it's alone," she looked to Samir, tilting her head as she thought on it. "Hairs...fibres...debris...transfer happens through contact, friction or motion. It's not *impossible* for one single hair from a visitor or intruder to end up here. But it sure is unusual. I would definitely expect to see more hairs in here. But this is the only sample with this DNA that showed up in the entire sweep."
"Bag it and tag it. We can take it down to the lab and get a closer look. If it belongs to someone on the crew the computer will show us who it is." Samir said as he held out a small evidence bag.
"Already logged," she assured with a firm nod, pushing herself up to stand and slotting the vile into the evidence box. Truth was, there wasn't much more in there. And yet, enough peculiarities to leave question marks hanging over the death. The detectives were going to have a case on their hands, that was for sure.
Samir stood and took one last look around the room. "Well I think that is all we have for the moment. We should keep these quarters sealed until we have a definitive answer. Start the lab work as it were. Whaddya say Leah?" He smiled and nodded toward the door. As much as he loved his job, being in a dead person's quarters did send shivers up his spine.
"Sounds like a plan," Leah agreed swiftly, moving to pack up her kits. Like Samir, she found her job satisfying, but she had no desire to hang around in a crime scene longer than necessary. "I'll even get a round of coffees in ready to get going..." she slapped his shoulder on the way past.
A Joint Post By
Petty Officer Second Class Leah Rochester
Crime Scene Investigator, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
Lieutenant Samir Voss
Forensic Analyst, USS Pioneer
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
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