Burning The Midnight Oil

Posted on Fri May 26th, 2023 @ 4:17am by Lieutenant JG Nayisa Wrea & Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D

Mission: Wrath of the People
Location: Intel Offices
Timeline: MD 6, 0100 hours :: After 'Exitus Acta Probat'
1657 words - 3.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Not knowing when P'Rel would return her call left Nayisa with the decision that she was going to spend the night in P'Rel's office, likely working. She had told the Vulcan to give her 12 hours, which ended up being a drastic over-estimation. Preparing for the infiltration, collecting her samples, and running the analysis only took about about four hours. The tricky part was finding that window of opportunity where the corridors would be less busy. She easily could have waited hours for the activity to die down, but today the crew activity was lower. While she waited, she had chipped away at the deskwork, hoping to reduce the workload for her chief when she returned.

If she returned.

The silver-haired woman was currently taking a nap, leaning back slightly in the desk chair with her arms crossed. Knowing she'd be up for a while yet, and possibly most of the night, she got her rest in where she could. It was a light sleep, the result of years of practice to make sure she'd never be ambushed at her most vulnerable, and the faint sounds of the ship snuck their way into her dreams. Her 'dream' was hardly some story that defied the known laws of physics, but rather her mind going over what happened with Zade, her subconscious trying to make sense of her friend's reaction.

She was desperately running out of time. The Vulcan had mere minutes - if that - to get a hold of Ensign Wrea and confirm her suspicions. It was ship's night aboard Athena, and P'rel only hoped that Ensign Wrea wouldn't be stupid enough not to sleep in the office, nor unlucky enough to be using the bathroom at this precise moment. Huddling down in a San Fransisco alleyway, she sent flash diagrams of DS7, USS Serena, USS Endeavour and USS Pioneer to her primary display screen. Wrea would understand, and if anyone else saw them they would probably just look like incoming flash traffic.

Nayisa's eyes opened when she heard a beep, a more jarring sound compared to the droning hum of the ship. Blinking a couple times and even slapping her cheeks to dissolve the sleep trying to fog her brain, she saw that there was an incoming transmission on P'Rel's primary display screen and sat up in the desk chair. Accepting the transmission, the silver-haired woman studied the flash diagrams, immediately recognizing each one as places she had been previously stationed at. Anyone would have access to her file, but this was a very specific message.

It was from P'Rel.

The results of the analysis were ready to transmit, Nayisa just needed to know when, and it looked like now was the time. The number of stations was significant, it referred to the number of compounds Nayisa had been asked to search for. But where to send them? Quickly jotting down the postings the Vulcan had referenced, Nayisa took a few seconds to stare at the names and think of any other significance. Nayisa had been stationed in five different places before the Athena, why did P'Rel chose those four? It took a moment, but it became clear once she added up the number of letters in each vessel's name.

3697. That was the channel Nayisa would transmit on. Wanting to send the information as soon as possible, Nayisa quickly opened up the diagrams of each vessel P'Rel referenced and put a series of dots on each one. To the untrained eye, each one looked like a report made by some unlucky operations officer tasked with system-wide maintenance. Once she skimmed the modifications, she opened the channel and flashed the diagrams, but in reverse order. She had momentarily considered looking through P'Rel's file to find something else she could use, but it would take too much time to come up with an understandable reply. The method P'Rel used to communicate was very specific, too specific.

USS Pioneer. USS Endeavour. USS Serena. DS7.

P'rel sat still in the alley, hoping the few minutes she had of piggybacking the Starfleet Medical interchange relay was going to be enough. Sure enough, Ensign Wrea understood and sent back the information she needed. All four diagrams had four locations marked on them, each corresponding to something to do with a Commanding Officer; the command chair on one, a ready room on another, the CO's yacht from DS7, and the Endeavour's primary command processors. Good, she thought. Each of the four had been found in connection to Kane. There being time for maybe two or three more exchanges before Starfleet Security detected the anomaly, she moved onto her next question and submitted a recent Daystrom journal paper on particle decay rates. If there ionic decay didn't match the timeframe, it was a smoking gun that Kane had been framed.

Decay in the Extreme: Using Charge Inversion and High-Energy Isotopic Transformations to Quantify Elemental Decay Rates. Daystrom Institute. Published Stardate 43558.6.

Nayisa silently wondered why she had to think at such a late hour when the next "question" came in. She knew what P'Rel was asking simply from the title of the journal, but the details of the question, as well as the answer, would be slightly more in-depth than the previous one, and she wasn't a particle physicist. Typing on the computer, she searched for specific keywords in the journal, hoping to narrow down the options.

A groan escaped Nayisa when she fought the temptation to let her eyes gloss over while reading the results that littered the screen. She was aware of each element's generic properties but she never looked this far into any of them. Glancing at the clock, she decided to change tactics and search for things in the paper she could use to send a reply. The stress of providing a timely reply started to challenge her composure, and she took a deep breath to remind herself to be calm. It wasn't like she was diffusing a bomb or something. Nothing was standing out in the paper, however, so she glanced at the title again, then facepalmed a moment later as she nearly missed the obvious.

The stardate. It was just over a month ago. P'Rel was asking if the bomb's components were sourced within the last month. While it took only a minute, it was way more time than even she preferred to spend on this. Nayisa quickly found an article from Daystrom that contained a different stardate, one that more accurately reflected the decay rates, and sent it back.

P'rel darted her eyes around as new journal appeared on the screen in her hand; Cascading reactions in a post-reactive control state; A Longitudinal Study to Assess Anomalous Decay States; Study between Stardates 41256 and 43559. She double checked the dates, the concluding date of the study was close, but slightly off from the date Wrea had transmitted. Good, she thought. The decay rates didn't match; Wrea was telling her that the trace chemicals placed in Kane's quarters were close enough to not be detected without a thorough and specific scan - which doubtlessly had been 'overlooked' by the investigating authorities - but not an exact match.

The next steps were going to be risky, and there was really only one likely outcome; Starfleet Security were going to absolutely know that someone hailed the Athena, but if Wrea was on her toes they'd have no idea to whom the transmission was sent, or the content. She prepared to run, it would be only minutes once the encoded ping was sent before yellow-shirts were all over this area. Typing in her private encryption code, she compiled the access link to the readings transmissions sent to her cloud storage from the tricorder at the bomb site; the file itself had doubtlessly been deleted by now. But, if Wrea could somehow recover the readings taken from her access login from the tricorder, if she could get a hold of those scans taken of Nerak... it was worth the risk. And if there was anything Wrea was particularly good at, from what P'rel knew of her file anyway, it was getting into where shouldn't be.

She pressed the slowly flashing transmission command button on the PADD; TRANS: 1221.8 ID-E9. That was it. She had minutes at best, and broke into a run down her planned escape route into the pre-World War 3 tunnel system.

For a brief moment, Nayisa was confused by the next transmission as it flashed on the monitor before downloading itself onto the computer. Then she saw the telltale 'warning' from the Athena's incoming communication feed that someone was trying to trace the transmission and she quickly cut off the channel, leading their search to a dead end. Typing in a command, the office then locked down, securing everything in the room and further reducing the chance of the transmission being traced to her. Nayisa refocused and read the information that got downloaded. 1221.8 ID-E9. It looked like an access link to some cloud storage, but not much else beyond that. P'Rel must have been in a rush. Accessing the link, the first thing she saw was a firewall asking for credentials. Assuming ID-E9 referred to an authorization level, Nayisa tried the elevated authorization code granted to her by her interim role. She was a little surprised that it worked, and she saw a good number of files and folders.

What was she meant to look for?

Given the context of the situation, the silver-haired woman began a search for files where the contents matched the components of the bomb. After a few minutes of the computer working, no results came back, making Nayisa frown. P'Rel wouldn't have sent this for no reason. She briefly stood to get some coffee from the office's replicator before slumping back into the desk chair with a sigh.

It was going to be a long night.