XO/CStratOps Lt. Evan Merlin | Paranoia?

Posted on Thu Jun 28th, 2018 @ 10:15pm by Commander Evan Merlin

Mission: Lacuna
Location: Cold Station Theta
Timeline: SD 241806.28

The turbolift took him down and down, deep inside the station. When it stopped, the Lieutenant exited and looked around. Something – the turbolift, the station itself, his own subconscious – had brought him here, but he had no idea why. These were the bowels of the station, where few people ever came. Here were the deep storage rooms. Somewhere around here, he suddenly realised, the escape pod in which he'd arrived at the station was stored. A few decks up, where people came with any sense of regularity. Down here, stuff ended up to be forgotten.

Forgotten. Just how many things were lying here, he suddenly wondered. And what kind of stuff? He wandered around, slowly, not looking for anything in particular but just taking everything in at once, letting his feet lead him to where he needed to go.
Cleaning bots even came here, more was the pity. The Lieutenant wondered if he'd seen something if that hadn't been the case. Footsteps in the dust, maybe, or smudges. For if nobody ever came here, this would be a great place to hide things, wouldn't it? Such as maybe something to overload capacitors and create critical cascades, or conductors made of old materials which should've been replaced long ago? It could be anything, and the only way to make sure was to check each and every storage unit against what the manifest said was supposed to be there.

Without looking it up, he knew that simply checking the station logs to see which units were opened when and by whom would be a bust. Those systems were low priority, therefore fairly easily altered.

"Why is there never a sign 'Baddies were here'?" he muttered, looking around in frustration. Then – suddenly, absurdly – he began to grin. "Except, of course, sometimes there is," he added. He whipped a hand scanner from a hidden pocket and began to scan. "Automatic cleaning systems are one thing, but down here they aren't activated as nearly as often as in the busier areas… so people still leave trails…" He continued to muse aloud as he walked, waving the scanner around. Instinct or whatever had brought him to the right place, indeed. It wasn't long before the scanner lit up, and directed him to one closed door which looked absolutely identical to all the others on this level. Humming a little tune, he stretched his hand out towards the door to key in his command override code…

And froze, his hand millimeters removed from the touch plate. If he was right, it wouldn't be surprising if the door would only open to the right person. Maybe fingerprint-based, or DNA-based… He bent over and looked at the touch plate. It looked normal, at first sight. Maybe he was just paranoid… But on the other hand, was it really paranoia if someone had tried to blow up his station once? If he wasn't wrong, and if the wrong person did try to open this door – what would be the worst case scenario? His skin crawled with the mere suggestion of it. He could think of quite a lot of worst case scenarios, starting with the destruction of this room and everything in it and quickly scaling up from there.

He made a careful scan of the area outside this room and slowly walked away. The room itself wasn't locked airtight, as was evidenced by the fact that his scanner told him someone had been in there less than a month ago. Maybe there were more trace elements there, of other things.

He sent the readings to Engineering and Science and entered the turbo lift again.

Lieutenant Evan 'Weirdo' Merlin
Chief Strategic Operations/XO
Cold Station Theta