Something is amiss

Posted on Sat Dec 9th, 2023 @ 1:47pm by Lieutenant Betaras K'ner

Mission: CSI: Chuck Norris
Location: USS Chuck Norris
Timeline: Current

[ Sickbay ]

K'ner slid around the corner and into sickbay, even more pissed off than she'd been earlier. Too much wasn't making sense.

Seeing, once again, that sickbay had no medical personnel, she continued inward, sighting the security ensign hovering over the downed commander, and in the morgue no less!

"Report!" She said as she knelt.

The man looked around and relayed that he was told to tell her Mira was shot with a phaser.

K'ner's eyes scrunched up a little bit, wondering what was going on. It looked like blunt force trauma to the side of Mira's head, but it was spread across her shoulder and neck as well. If this was a phaser hit, it was something new she hadn't seen before.

The fact that the XO was lying in the morgue sent her gaze towards the energy-encased body she'd been examining again just before being called away. She stepped over and flipped through the log. Someone had attempted to de-activate the field. Couldn't have been Mira, she could get in with her code...

Returning to Rodale's body she lifted it with care and carried her back to the biobed.

"You, maintain position in that morgue. Get right up against the wall inside and shout if there's anything that changes."

K'ner turned her attention to the XO again, carefully cleaning and sanitizing, then repairing tissue and dermal reconstruction. It didn't take her long, but during the procedures some of the medical staff showed up. She was quick with each report, and advised them that if they leave sickbay empty again, regardless of the reason, there would be discipline.

=/\= "Scanners picked up the phaser chief! We were following it but now it's in the Captain's ready room." =/\=

She acknowledged her teammate that had been monitoring for the errant phaser to show up. =/\= "Monitor and contain. i've got the XO with me so I'll let her know the assassin might be with the Captain at the moment." =/\=

She was shaking her head as she watched Mira's monitor as she returned to consciousness. As the XO's eyes fluttered open K'ner was prepared for the sudden grip that latched on to her arm and barely she held back the punch with the other. She locked the hold as she searched Mira's eyes for recognition... hopefully before she escalated, that would hurt.

She was relieved a half second later as the realization became clear and Mira slowly relaxed. K'ner opened her hands, keeping them in view as she took a step back, until Mira exhaled and rolled her head to loosen the tension. K'ner could see why she was the XO as quickly as she pulled herself together.

"Report."

"One, you haven't gotten nearly enough rest, and I gave you something to calm you down to help you sleep, so avoid any immediate conflicts if you can, you'll find yourself to be a bit more mellow than normal... Might affect your edge."

Mira looked at K'ner like that wasn't appreciated but understandable nonetheless.

"Two, there's some deeper stuff going on around here. You took a blunt force to your head, neck, and shoulder. Apparently Kronnelti found you and instructed the security ensign to tell me it was phaser fire. That's a new setting with this kind of injury. You'll be a little stiff for an hour or two."

K'ner prodded the commander's neck, then turned her head a little and nodded in satisfaction.

"Three, that's twice now that everyone in sickbay was called away. Someone has access into our comms. There was a communique each time, as if someone with authority sent it, and relayed to each medical team member in turn to respond to a remote incident on the ship. Each time, nothing was there or going on as indicated. Each time there was an attempt to access the DB.

"When I was first here today, someone was unwrapping the prep we'd started. I thought I'd seen something, barely a blur, but I saw nothing. I erected the energy barrier to secure the DB, command codes only. Then when you and I came in, I got you squared away and you fell asleep on me when I dropped the calming agent on you. Then I got a priority response from G'ginloss back to the shuttle bay.

"No one was there. When I got back here double-time, no medical staff, again, called out on bogus calls, again. The security ensign was standing over you. Someone had tried to hack the security barrier and Kronnelti had subdued someone according to the ensign. Another ensign took the perp to the brig while he went to see that Captain."

Mira shook her head, feeling calm and clear for once. "Just how long have I been out?"

K'ner shook her head as well, "Not long commander. and there's more."

Mira lost a bit of her calm and tightened her lips, nodding for K'ner to continue.

"Strange things are going on. We have some pretty heavy analysis to do in medical, especially right now, along with everything else the computer system has to do, but suddenly the knowledge base had doubled. Normally that's not an issue, we have more than enough storage even with that, but it's like everything was duplicated.

"The ship has security protocols of course, but with the current issues and protocol breeches, the geeks on my team that have been watching and analyzing are guessing that's focused on the original information and someone hacked a copy so that could be decrypted without as much trouble. Still, that takes time and I would bet there's something modified in the status reports to mask that extra capacity load. I noticed I had two dates on my personal logs."

Mira wondered what that had to do with the issue.

K'ner caught the expression. "The Haz team keeps regular personal logs accessible by the Psych team so they can evaluate any of us at any time as needed. So I keep an eye on those... There's a date when that's accessed but Psych hasn't, so who was it? Anyway, there's small anomalies popping up across the system, logs are missing entries, very deftly done and only noticed because someone physically knew it should be there... I'm only guessing, but there's gotta be more than one problem here we're dealing with."

K'ner took a breath and Mira stealed herself for the clincher.

"I saved this for last because you needed to get your head back and enough of that background to proceed." She helped Mira to a sitting position, knowing she would probably blow outta the sickbay in just a few seconds and didn't want her bobbling across the way with a moment of vertigo.

"The scanners picked up that phaser we've been watching for. A couple of the team followed the signal but it ended up in the Captain's ready room a few moments ago before they could close with whoever has it. They are monitoring for now and prepared to contain but I didn't want to escalate the situation unnecessarily until you were briefed..."


As she exited K'ner advised, "I'll keep an eye on the Grazerite aide and let you know when they're awake and find out what happened in the shuttle." As she re-ran the aide's vitals, she queued up the video footage of the last few hours, starting with Mira's incident to review, and working back from there...


:OFF