Duty Log | Ens Barnes | WTF

Posted on Fri Feb 27th, 2015 @ 5:39am by Ensign

480 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: A Spot To Kill
Location: Intel Office

After leaving the hapless Petty Officer who had only been doing his job, Rocky went back to her station and entered her authentication codes and took a seat. What is Black getting me into? she wondered, knowing that she should have reported everything immediately to Commander Archer, even if he wasn't present on the ship. Department heads had a reach that extended far beyond the ship and he would have been able to put a stop to it before events had gone as far as they had.

Entering the information that the Petty Officer had given her, Rocky waited a minute until the computer revealed that the shadow image had originally been sent using old Starfleet communication codes. Who would use those when the new ones are updated automatically? she wondered. Ten minutes later, no more information was forthcoming, so she decided to put a tracer request on the terminal that they had been sent to before being downloaded to a PADD.

The response was much quicker for that and she frowned as Black's code was verified by the computer as the person who downloaded the package. Digging through the layers of encryption coding, Rocky was glad that she had chosen to study ancient Earth encryption methods as well as the new ones. It was a short time later when she discovered that the package had originated from the Zakdorn system near the Elorg Bloc border.

Pulling up a map, she saw that the closet starbase of any kind in that area was Starbase Five One Four between the Ferengi Alliance and the Elorg Bloc. The bad thing was that the starbase wasn't Federation and she would have to do some digging to find out if any messages had been sent from there to the Vindicator. This is where being an Ensign with no contacts sucks Rocky thought with a sour look on her face. Nothing to it but to do it.

"Of course, there's the entire Zakdorn System to scour, too," she reminded herself out loud. "No one said it came from a starbase, Barnes. Great, now I'm talking to myself." Shaking her head, she began to put a tracer on all subspace communications from the region using old Starfleet communication codes. Sitting back, she knew that she would have to report this to Commander Archer, but until then, all she could do was gather evidence.

An hour later, she finally got a positive result on her search, tracking down the communications as coming from an independent trader freighter on an old trade route between the Zakdorn System and Starbase Five One Four. "Here we go," Rocky said to no one. "Now to get this...information...together and see what comes of it." Downloading everything to a PADD, she secured it with her authentication codes and waited to make her report.

 

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