The Trail Behind Them
Posted on Tue Jul 21st, 2026 @ 2:31pm by Lieutenant JG Liora Sen & Lieutenant Lorek & Lieutenant Wynning Pi & Lieutenant JG Daniella Fox & Lieutenant JG Melody Piper
2,828 words; about a 14 minute read
Mission:
Mission 1: Through the Janus Gate
Location: Intelligence Briefing Room, USS Resolute
Timeline: MD003 - 1000 hours
A PADD sat tucked beneath her arm, already loaded with the preliminary packet: Pakled vessel profile, known design irregularities, last confirmed movements, probable contact points and several gaps that bothered her more than the confirmed data did. The device itself remained outside her area of expertise, and Liora had no intention of dressing guesswork up as technical analysis. Science could speak for science. Engineering could speak for engineering. Operations could tell them what the ship could actually do with the information once they had it. Security and Tactical could help decide whether the pattern looked like carelessness, threat, or bait.
Her job was the trail.
Where the Pakled vessel had been. What sort of ship it really was beneath the ugly plating and stolen systems. Who it might have crossed paths with before arriving here. Whether its route suggested incompetence, luck, or someone else’s hand resting quietly on the board.
She placed the PADD on the table and activated the room display. A skeletal profile of the Pakled ship formed above the surface, slowly rotating in amber light. Around it, smaller windows waited empty for the supporting data she would load once the others were present.
Before doing anything else, Liora replicated a modest tray and set it in the centre of the table: coffee, tea, chilled water, and a few plain savoury things that would not crumble over a console. Nothing elaborate. Just enough to remove the small interruptions people used when a room needed time to settle.
Only then did she sit and open a comm channel.
“Send to Lieutenant Fox, Pi, Lieutenant Piper and Lieutenant Lorek,” she said, keeping her tone even. “When you have a moment, could you come to the Intelligence briefing room? I have some preliminary information on the Pakled vessel’s profile and recent movements that may be relevant to your work.”
She paused, glancing once at the rotating ship image.
Liora closed the channel and sat back, one hand resting lightly beside the untouched coffee.
The ship continued turning above the table, ungainly and stubbornly wrong.
She watched it in silence and waited.
Hearing the invitation to Intelligence Lorek secured the terminal in his office immediately; the one place you wouldn't often find him but for this mission he needed peace and quiet and that seemed the best place to meet his needs.
Exiting his office Lorek saw one of his senior security people as he paused a moment "Lieutenant I am meeting with intelligence and will be back when I am finished." he commented then left security.
After working years in security, he had developed an admiration for the Intelligence Department.....they had the uncanny ability to gather data and answer questions that no one else could. This was a very important mission coming up....firstly because this was his first since coming aboard a new ship.....secondly from what he had gathered at the briefing this particular one could go sideways very quickly and he wanted all contingencies covered as much as possible beforehand.
Walking into intelligence he saw Lieutenant Sen "Good morning Lieutenant. In case you are unaware I am Lieutenant Lorek, Chief of Security. I trust you may have some answers to an abundance of questions" he stated hoping for the best.
Liora stood as Lorek entered, her expression warming into a polite smile. “Good morning, Lieutenant. I know, but thank you. Liora Sen, Strategic Operations and Intelligence.” She gestured lightly toward the table, where the refreshments sat beside the rotating skeletal image of the Pakled ship. “Help yourself if you’d like. I thought it best to get everyone in the same room before the theories started breeding in separate corners.”
Her gaze moved briefly to the ship profile, then back to him. “I’ve got some answers, yes. More usefully, I think I’ve got a better sense of which questions matter. The Pakled vessel has been places it shouldn’t have reached easily, and there are gaps in its movement history that look less like bad record keeping and more like someone’s been sweeping footprints behind it.”
Wyn had just gotten himself orientated on the tube creeper he'd been fiddling with most of the morning watch. The micro anti-gravs were touchy and he'd boosted the power and added dorsal primary alignment as far as the technicians positioning was concerned. Wyn hadn't removed the safety straps yet. Slamming into a Jeffries tube wall a few times had dictated some safety precautions. Sitting the helmet down, he pushed the creeper into the tube, locked the magnetic brakes and touched his com, "Wyn here. On my way."
Then he peeled off his smock and tossed it into his office as he passed, telling one of the engineers he'd likely be back in an hour and adjusted the PADD wrapping his left forearm.
Five minutes later, he stepped into the intel briefing room and nodded hello, then self-directed into an open chair. "Oh hey. Coffee and fritters. Nice."
Liora glanced up from the table display, her smile flickering a little warmer at Wyn’s arrival. “I wasn’t sure if everyone had managed breakfast, and I didn’t want to take the chance. Hungry officers start making brave choices, and I’m trying to keep this meeting at least partially sensible.”
She gestured toward the tray. “Please, help yourself. I promise the food isn’t part of the briefing, though depending on what we find, it may become the most reassuring thing in the room.”
"Fuel is fuel. Most of the time I don't pay too much attention. Especially with the replicated stuff. Which reminds me," Wyn said, taking a marker from an arm pocket to make a note on the back of his hand. "I've been meaning to overhaul the food replicator programs to get something better than the standard fleet emissions to work. Need to bust a lot of that down to sub-molecular bits.." After the note was written, he put the marker back and looked up. "Oh. Thanks for the treats."
He grabbed a mug and fritter and paused. "Any super, semi-secret, spook stuff come up on this whole shi. Er. Problem child we're going to stick our curious beaks into?" Then Wyn popped the fritter into his mouth and tried to chew politely.
Dani entered in the middle of the conversation. "If you want to overhaul the replicators, let me help. I may have some ideas."
Then she said hello to the others and grabbed a fritter for herself. Breakfast was a while ago.
Liora’s mouth curved at Wyn’s attempted politeness around the fritter. “If it was super-secret spook stuff, I’d have dimmed the lights and made everyone sign three forms before touching the coffee,” she said, then glanced to Dani as she entered. “Lieutenant Fox, good morning. Help yourself. I wasn’t sure who’d managed breakfast, so I erred on the side of not letting Intelligence become responsible for low blood sugar.”
She looked around the table, noting who had arrived without making ceremony of it. “We’ll give Lieutenant Piper a moment before I start properly. For now, the short version is that our problem child has a trail, and that trail is a little too tidy in places it should be messy.”
Once more Melody made the holoprojection of the Pakled ship rotate a bit more, then turned her attention towards the infernal device the Pakleds had gotten hold of, her concentration, being fully upon it.
The call for her attendance startled her, giving a slight jump, then she quickly answered.
"On my way." Melody giving the images one more look before she left the science lab under the care of Jorren.
Once Lieutenant Piper had arrived and the brief greetings had settled, Liora touched the control beside her PADD. The rotating skeletal outline of the Pakled vessel expanded above the table, gaining layers of hull plating, component tags and a partial tactical overlay.
“The vessel is registered in three different systems under three different names, which is either deliberate deception or Pakled administration behaving exactly as expected.” Her tone stayed dry rather than dismissive. “The most recent and most consistent identifier is Good Fortune, a Pakled aggregate transport last scanned near the Mariah Drift, three days before our current intercept window.”
She brought up the scan record beside the ship profile. “The scan came from an automated trade buoy on the edge of the Drift. Low resolution, but clean enough to confirm the basics. Length approximately two hundred and eighty metres. Mass inconsistent with the hull size, which suggests dense internal retrofitting or badly distributed cargo. The outer hull is a composite mess: Pakled core frame, Cardassian-pattern plating in at least two sections, what looks like a stripped Bolian cargo spine, and several unconfirmed modules grafted on without much concern for elegance, safety, or symmetry.”
Another touch added weapons markers along the image. “Armaments are limited but awkward. Two forward disruptor emitters, probably Ferengi surplus. One aft-mounted plasma cannon with a poor traverse arc. Defensive systems are more interesting: patchwork shielding from at least three unrelated manufacturers, none of which should cooperate smoothly. And yet, on the buoy scan, their shield harmonics were stable.”
Liora let that sit for a moment, her gaze moving around the table.
“That’s what bothers me. Pakled ships are often ugly. They’re often dangerous by accident. But this one has started looking less like a junk drawer and more like someone has been quietly teaching the junk drawer where to put the knives.”
Listening to the Lieutenant's explanation, along with making some notes, Lorek interjected "Logically their weapons should not present a problem from a tactical standpoint; but their shielding is curious especially the shield harmonics" as he paused for a moment "My primary concern is where the device in question is into relation to the bridge if we have to breach."
"That mass makes me wonder what they're hauling and why that particular distribution," Dani said. "Even Pakleds should know the importance of cargo load and location."
Liora expanded the vessel’s central section, bringing a cluster of internal mass readings into focus. “I can’t give you an exact deck plan, Lieutenant. Pakled aggregate ships don’t follow a standard internal layout, and the buoy scan wasn’t detailed enough for that. The best estimate puts the densest anomaly low in the central hull, just aft of the primary command section and close to the main power runs. If that’s the device, breaching the bridge won’t put a team directly on top of it, but anything moving between the two would have to pass through the most heavily modified part of the ship.”
She shifted the display towards Dani. “And I don’t think they’re carrying conventional cargo. The excess mass is concentrated around that same section and along the Bolian spine, not spread through the holds the way freight should be. It could be reinforcement, redundant machinery, or whatever they’ve built around the device, but the ship looks less like it’s transporting something and more like it’s been rebuilt around it.”
Hearing Liora's explanation Lorek interjected "I agree with your assessment Lieutenant that is why I will be proposing two security teams....one to protect whoever boards to get to the device in question and the second to hopefully contain the Pakleds on their bridge so they cannot set the device off from that location" he explained making a few more notations on his device.
Wyn had been listening, sifting through scans and picking the energy readings apart before relayering the information back and forth. The bulk of it went to the simulation-model he was running in engineering and that fed him more information. During a lull in the conversation, he said "Their containment fields are giving off odd readings. The primary power source, doesn't seem to be getting along with the containment field that's being used. The latest update is showing the field working at about sixty percent efficiency." His tone didn't indicate if he was talking to himself or the others. Easing back from his readouts, he almost started as his brain caught up and he remembered that he was in a meeting.
"The readouts are iffy. But it seems like the containment tech and the baby sitting computer are of different specifications, which fits fort the ship. But the energy differential shouldn't be that...messy. Power is power, but it's like the energy from the primary is soured, so to speak and the containment field itself doesn't really know how to handle it."
Then Wyn scrolled through more data on his PADD and said, "Oh. And your teams are likely going to run into spots where their life support systems are arguing with each other. Once we get closer and we can maybe tap in, we'll know for sure but the readouts indicate hot and cold spots that don't mesh from deck to deck and section to section. That means the whole list, air quality, oxygen mix for that matter and gravity could be all over the place. That whole ship is a...piece of..." Glancing around he colored slightly and shrugged slightly before finishing, "An engineering challenge."
Liora gave Lorek a small nod. “Two teams makes sense if we get the chance to board. I wouldn’t rely on that yet, though. If the device is active by then, it may throw out enough interference to make transport, sensors or communications unreliable. Science will be better placed to judge the likelihood once we have cleaner readings, but I’d plan for the possibility that we can’t reach either the bridge or the device at all.”
She looked towards Wyn’s readouts. “The rest fits what Intelligence knows about Pakled aggregate vessels. They’re assembled rather than designed, with systems forced to coexist whether they were ever meant to or not. Uneven life support, incompatible control architecture and unstable power routing are all believable.” Her gaze returned to the ship model. “What’s less believable is that this one has stayed functional long enough to reach us. Either they’ve been unusually lucky, or someone has been helping them.”
Reaching for his beverage, Wyn said, "Or there's a fairly talented engineering cadre that is resetting and calibrating each system sequentially. There is some indication of that. The power hasn't really spiked yet. From an engineering standpoint, I'm developing a theory that someone is riding herd on all those systems and has them more or less tripping over each other. It's.." Wyn thought for a moment to break it down as he added a visual coding to his model if anyone were to walk up to it. "Like toppling dominoes. Each system ebbs and flows, but it kinda looks like it's doing so in a particular order. They come close to burning some systems out probably, but on purpose. Then as the power shifts to the next system, they rush in and make fixes before the next surge or wave."
"We definitely need to do something soon," Dani said quietly, watching the different readouts. "This looks like the Pakleds found something powerful and tried to build something to either protect or contain it, but it may not be stable for long. Not with the way it's cobbled together."
Liora nodded, using the remark to draw the scattered threads back together. “Then I think we’ve reached the useful limit of what these scans can tell us. The vessel is unstable, but someone aboard appears to be actively keeping its systems in sequence. Any boarding plan will need to assume unreliable transport, communications, life support and gravity, with the added possibility that the device itself may interfere once active.”
She collapsed the display into a concise briefing packet. “I’ll combine the Intelligence trail with Lieutenant Pi’s model and Lieutenant Lorek’s tactical concerns, then forward the assessment to Captain Venn and Commander Vren’desh. Keep feeding any clearer readings through to Intelligence as we close the distance.” Her gaze moved around the table. “Unless anyone has something materially new, I won’t keep you from preparing for what we’ve just spent the morning worrying about.”
They all had good points being brought up, there still was the question as to how the Pakleds had gotten hold of said device. Now though, there was also the question of getting the device or whatever the thing truly looked like, away from the Pakleds safely.
"Thanks," Dani said to Liora. They still had more questions than answers, but at least they were all on the same page now.
Lieutenant JG Liora Sen
Strategic Operations/Assistant Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant Melody Piper
Chief Science Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant Lorek
Chief Security/Tactical Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant JG Daniella Fox
Chief Operations Officer
USS Resolute
Lieutenant Wynning Pi
Chief Engineer
USS Resolute
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