Stand and Deliver

Posted on Sun Feb 26th, 2023 @ 8:13pm by Lieutenant Commander TaijanSuda ch'Thulhu & Lieutenant Jayla Kij MD

1,339 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: World Wide Web
Location: Sickbay/Various
Timeline: MD 2

"What the fuck is this shit?!"

Suda had marched into Jayla's office without so much as a how-do-ya-do and slammed a PADD onto her desk. It auto-played a feedback loop of her entering and exiting the mess hall alongside a fixed image of a graffito on a standard starship door.

"You were the only one seen coming or going from the mess hall at that interval. There's no use denying it was you." Suda fixed her with a stern glare. "What I wanna know is what the fuck were you thinking, Doctor, and who in the burning shithole of all that is fuck did you get to erase the security log? Was it Finch? I swear to any god you worship that if I catch you collaborating with that venereally infected cum bubble in subversive action against the operational security of this mission, there will be hell to pay."

Jayla blinked. She hadn’t asked anybody to erase any footage. And if it had been erased, how did he have it? And why would he suspect Finch would help her? “Okay, wait,” she replied. “First of all, Finch hates me. And the feeling is mutual. And I don’t plan on denying it. You and I both know that Finch is the only person on the crew crude enough to write that original limerick. I added my notes to it to piss him off further. Also, you will note that while he burned it into the wall, I used an easily erased ink for mine. Please tell me you didn’t erase it until he saw it,” she added.

The more she talked, the more purple Suda's face turned. By the time she finished, he pounded her disk with his fist. "That is not what you should have done! You contaminated the scene of a crime, doctor. There was no organic residue at the scene except for yours. Unless some goddamn ghost or..." He trailed off. "Fuck! Those fucking robot things! It had to be one of those..." But that didn't make his scowl let up at all. "You need to report this shit, Doctor, not up the fucking ante." He sighed harder. "You tell me who would erase the footage of you going into the lavatory and I will leave you out of my report."

“I didn’t tell anybody to erase it,” she promised. “I told a couple of people, but they wouldn’t have… wait.” She puzzled for a moment and then gasped. “Oh, she wouldn’t. No. I refuse to believe it.” She glanced up at him, brow winkled. “One of the people I told is in security. Molly Abernathy. But I can’t believe someone that fresh out of the academy would screw up her career that quickly.”

Suda grabbed the PADD and stormed over to the emergency transporter reserved exclusively for Sickbay. He pulled up Ensign Molly Abernathy from the ship manifest and had her transported into a private ICU bay.

"Doctor, on me." Suda abandoned the transporter and marched into the ICU bay before Molly had a chance to reorient herself. "Ensign!" He shoved the PADD into her face which displayed the same data as before. "Explain yourself. Now."

Molly, who had been below decks hanging out with the folks in maintenance, was completely confused at being beamed away at once. “Where the hell am I?” she demanded instead of looking at the PADD.

"Answer the fucking question, Ensign!" Suda shoved the PADD even closer to her face. "What were you thinking, tampering with the ship's security logs?"

“What are you talking about?” she asked, confuse, finally looking at the PADD. “Has this been tampered with? It looks fine to me. What’s wrong with it? Is this some sort of test?”

Suda lowered the PADD and replaced it with a finger in her face. "Are you fucking kidding me? You'd better be fucking kidding me! The time stamp! The motherfucking time stamp jumps between clips in the loop! Someone deleted five minutes of footage which coincide with the commission of a crime. The person of interest in the case says it was you. Now you're playing dumb with me. What would you do in my position, Ensign? Would you believe that an ensign under your command is too dumb to know her ass from a hole in the ground, or would you bring her up on obstruction charges?"

At that, Molly really looked at the PADD, panic in her eyes. “I did’t!” she insisted. “I promise I didn’t! Why would I do that? What possible motive would I have for doing anything like that?”

'"It was on your watch, Ensign!" Suda shot back. "If not you, then who?"

“How am I supposed to know that?” demanded Molly.

“Finch.”

Jayla had followed Suda when he’d told her to, but had stood silently until now. “It was Finch,” replied Jayla. “He’s trying to get back at me for crushing his camera.”

"Thank you, Doctor." Suda's tone was anything but grateful. "But Finch has not gone anywhere near the Security office."

“As much as it pains me to admit this, Finch is smart,” Jayla replied. “He wouldn’t have to be in security to tamper with your files.”

Suda shook his head. "Not a matter of smarts. The Security office runs off an air-gapped internal grid that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the ship. The little bastard would have to physically walk in and manually access my system. That means someone on my team shit the bed."

“We’re talking about Finch,” Jayla pointed out. “The guy who managed to tamper with the programming of an AI that was supposed to be tamper-proof.”

“The FELINE!” exclaimed Molly. “That stupid FELINE of his! It came into the security office while I was there and kept asking if he could put his balls in my face.”

"Damn it." Suda resisted the urge to spit. "I guess I need to pay Engineering a visit." He looked at Molly. "We're done here and without the wall-to-wall counseling I had planned. As you were, Ensign."

Without another word, Molly ducked past him and hurried from Sick Bay.

“Be careful,” Jayla advised him. “Finch has a way of making it look like you’re the perpetrator. That camera I mentioned smashing? It was assigned to me. And it definitely was not my camera.”

Suda blew a snort out both nostrils. "Finch doesn't know who he is fucking with." He threw a skeptical look at Jayla. "Are you going to be any more trouble?"

She couldn’t resist giving him a mischievous smirk. “That depends on what you consider trouble,” she said cheekily.

"From now on, you don't fuck with crime scenes," Suda said flatly. "You report them. Understood?"

Crime scene? Graffiti was not a crime scene. It was just graffiti. But, Jayla resisted the urge to roll her eyes and simply nodded solemnly- an expression that came off almost comical on her usually smiling face. "Yes, sir," she promised.

"That goes double for that worm inside you and any of its future hosts." Suda pointed a stern finger at Jayla's midsection. "Pass that on to whoever comes next because I don't give warnings twice."

Jayla didn’t bother to point out that the odds of him ever knowing any other of Kij’s hosts were very long, but decided against it. Partly because he couldn’t care and partly because her parents had known Kij’s last host, so the odds weren’t zero. “Kij will carry all the memories of Jayla,” she pointed out. “They’ll all know.” And they’d remember this meeting with an amused grin on their faces, just as she would.

"Good." It was more of a grunt than a statement, but Suda didn't stick around long enough for it to matter either way.

 

RSS Feed