Seeds of Sabotage

Posted on 17 Sep 2025 @ 6:53pm by Lieutenant Aev Flammia

1,113 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Fractured Accord
Location: Newton, Bridge
Timeline: Current

= USS Newton Bridge =

If the explosion hadn’t been enough, now nanobots were infesting the Newton. Aev could almost taste the tension on the bridge, sharp and metallic, like salt carried in on an ocean breeze. Fear and strain clung to the crew, prickling against his skin like static just before the spark. While the Newton’s officers worked to contain the spreading infestation, Aev anchored himself at the auxiliary tactical console the captain had opened to him. His violet eyes swept the sensor logs, drinking in lines of telemetry as fast as they streamed past. There were countless questions, but one eclipsed the rest: how had the buoy been set off?

He tapped the ring at his finger, a familiar habit. “Ignis,” he murmured, “run a cross-check on these logs. Compare the buoy’s regular comm bursts against anything irregular. Let’s see if you can spot an anomaly I’ve missed.”

The faint shimmer of Ignis’ avatar appeared at the edge of the console, his expression uncharacteristically subdued.
“Already on it,” he replied softly. His hands moved in mimicry of data streams, weaving patterns only he could see. “Most of the comm bursts are routine… except this one. A carrier wave, subtle, piggybacking on the buoy’s beacon just seconds before detonation. It doesn’t match Starfleet protocols.”

His image flickered, tilting his head toward Aev with a sly but quieter grin. “Someone rang the doorbell, Lieutenant and the buoy answered with a bang.”

“Indeed it did,” Aev murmured, finding the discovery more compelling than he’d expected. Remotely triggered but from where?

He fixed on the carrier wave Ignis had highlighted, pulling Newton’s telemetry into a cross-reference. His eyes narrowed as the data resolved. Unusual. The signal’s point of origin traced back to a subspace relay at the system’s edge.

He flicked a glance at Ignis, who was humming faintly beside him. “Think you can brute-force the relay logs,” Aev asked quietly, “without leaving fingerprints?”

Ignis’s avatar brightened into a grin that didn’t match the gravity of the bridge. “Brute force? Please. I prefer to call it a polite lock-pick,” he said, voice silk and mischievous. “Give me thirty seconds and a cup of figurative tea.” He folded his hands in the air; the console responded as if the gesture were a key. Lines of dark code unfurled across the display, tiny fractal sparks unweaving the carrier wave Ignis had isolated. He worked not in blunt bursts but in smooth, surgical passes: probing authentication handshakes, testing edge ports, slipping stealth fingers into archived buffers.

A soft chorus of system chimes marked each successful hop. Every time a gateway asked for provenance, Ignis left a polite nothing in return, ghost traces that dissolved on inspection. He routed his queries through three throwaway relays and folded the trail into noise so even a forensic sweep would shrug and move on.

“Logs acquired,” Ignis announced after a measured breath, amusement still in his tone. “No fingerprints you can take to a tribunal, and I kept the breadcrumbs tasty only for us.” He projected the relay’s timestamped packet. Anomalous carrier bursts, a half-second handoff, then a relay-bounce toward the system edge.

Aev leaned closer, eyeing the data. “What did you find? Where did it originate?”

Ignis’s grin softened into a line of concentration as he filtered the dataset into a readable feed. “Not a ship, not directly. The trigger rode through a covert relay array. One of those little listening posts tucked on the system’s fringe. Someone used it as a proxy. I’m pulling the bounce chain now; give me another minute and I’ll see who paid the toll.”

Ignis sifted the final strands of code until the lattice collapsed into a single glowing point on the tactical map. “Not the planet after all,” he said, his tone sly. “Our little saboteur is fond of stagecraft. The relay was only a mirror. The true signal origin is right here-”

A red marker pulsed over a minor asteroid on the system’s edge. Officially, it registered as dormant, nothing more than rock and trace metals.

“Unremarkable at first glance,” Ignis continued, “but I don’t buy coincidences. Telemetry shows low-level power fluctuations, intermittent and carefully buried beneath natural interference. Someone has dressed this rock up as just another dead lump, but I’d wager it hides a relay node or even a staffed outpost.”

He folded his arms, a grin tugging at the edge of his projection. “And the encryption flavor? Very Vethari Combine. Ornate, wasteful, and expensive. If I were a betting man, Lieutenant, I’d say we’ve found their outpost.”

Aev frowned, eyes narrowing as he parsed the stream of data. So they’d been under watch the entire time. He wasn’t surprised, but the confirmation carried an unsettling weight.

“This nanobot technology,” he said at last, fingers pulling up the latest reports from Engineering, “bears the hallmarks of Borg design. It was modified and stripped down but still carrying their precision. Based on the infection pattern, they likely rode in on debris from the buoy. Very deliberate.” His jaw tightened. “The Vethari could acquire something like this easily enough through the black markets.”

He glanced toward Ignis, expression unreadable. “What’s your take on that analysis?”

Ignis tilted his head, the projection’s violet shimmer catching like candlelight. “I’d say your instincts are sharp, Lieutenant. These aren’t pure Borg nanoprobes, too crude in some places, too deliberately tuned in others. They’ve been… domesticated. Dangerous, but controllable. Exactly the sort of thing a Combine trade house would love to get their hands on.”

His grin flickered, wry and edged. “Black market provenance fits. The Vethari have the wealth to buy toys that should never be for sale, and the arrogance to use them in plain sight. Seed a convoy with infected debris, watch Starfleet scramble.”

“And scramble we are,” Aev said wryly. With a quiet sigh, he tapped his commbadge. “Captain Corbin, this is Lieutenant Flammia. The logs from Newton point to a remote trigger. We traced it through a relay chain to an asteroid on the system’s fringe. Officially dormant, but telemetry says otherwise. The nanobots in Newton’s nacelle weren’t an accident. Modified Borg tech, likely smuggled and seeded by debris from the buoy. The Combine has both the credits and the arrogance for this. My suggestion is to send a strike team to that asteroid. If the Vethari are hiding proscribed systems there, we need proof and containment before they set off another trap.”

= TBC =

Lieutenant Aev Flammia
Chief Tactical/Security
USS Arawyn

 

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