Cat and Mouse

Posted on 19 Feb 2026 @ 4:03am by Lieutenant Commander Elias Harlan
Edited on on 19 Feb 2026 @ 4:17am

3,811 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Silent Inheritance
Location: Engineering and other Engineering Spaces

The task of rebuilding the tactical array continued, a grinding, methodical grind that some had sworn was never going to end, no matter what Chief Engineer Harlan promised.

Lieutenant Nathan Caldwell had been pulling double shifts since the affair started.

He’d been the one to discover—quite literally, in the most painful way possible—that most of the EPS couplings feeding the tactical grid were of the inferior, unshielded design that didn’t belong anywhere near a tactical array. One innocent tricorder sweep, one stray electromagnetic pulse, and the coupling had decided it no longer wanted to exist. The resulting ground fault had turned the unit into a small, angry thunderclap. The blast hurled Nathan backward and through the open vertical hatch in the jefferies tube on deck 17 and deposited him bruised, winded and very much alive onto deck 18 below.

It could have been worse. Sickbay had patched the ribs, the scorched right hand, and the bruised ego. A mandatory shift off rotation followed, Nathan had rested. Then he’d gone right back at it.

His routine since hadn't varied. Report to Engineering. Settle at his usual workstation in the dimly lit systems-analysis alcove. Pull up the overnight logs that, in the grand tradition of starship maintenance, nobody else ever bothered to read unless ordered. Spend the first thirty minutes, scanning for anything that didn’t belong. Only then would he report to whatever tactical array assignment Chief Engineer Harlan had left pinned on his to-do list.

He expected nothing out of the ordinary.

His silent paranoia, however, expected everything.

It was the environmental logs that finally paid off that quiet suspicion.

A sudden, sustained spike in environmental system demand—isolated, localized, and oddly specific. Additional coolant recyclers and heat exchangers had kicked into higher gear for nearly 10 continuous minutes between 0322 and 0331 ship’s time. Not a gradual ramp-up from normal operations. Not a scheduled diagnostic sweep. Just a hard, deliberate draw on power and processing, enough to make the environmental grid compensate with noticeable effort.
Nathan frowned at the console, the blue glow painting faint shadows under his eyes.

“Now why,” he muttered under his breath, “would anyone need to run the conditioners that hard at oh-dark-thirty?”
His fingers moved before the thought fully finished forming. He tapped into the deeper strata of the environmental manifest, cross-referencing component IDs against ship schematics. The affected units serviced only one area.

Tactical Computer Core.

The TCC wasn’t a standalone core in the romanticized sense—no dramatic glowing pillar labeled “Weapons Brain.” It was simply the starboard hemisphere of the main computer core complex in the saucer section: two massive, parallel processing banks that mirrored each other like the hemispheres of a living brain. The tactical subsystem lived in the right-hand bank, two decks below the primary interface level where command officers usually interfaced with the ship’s nervous system. Deep enough that casual traffic never wandered there. Secure enough that even most engineering techs needed tiered authorization just to open the outer hatch.

Nathan exhaled slowly through his nose. His paranoia wasn’t screaming—not yet—but it was definitely sitting up and paying attention.

He pulled up the usage logs for the TCC specifically. One entry dominated the timeline.

A single, unbroken session. Just over eight hours. Terminated at 0345.

No name attached to the session—at first glance. Just a generic diagnostic authorization string. But Nathan knew better than to trust surface-level attribution. He tapped once more, invoking a low-level query that most analysts never bothered with.

He blinked at the result.

The Chief Tactical Officer. Not out of the ordinary. Commander Harlan had mentioned that Engineering was working in conjunction with the Tactical team to get the array rebuild done faster.

But his paranoia flexed anyway—sharp, instinctive, like a muscle he’d spent years trying to atrophy. He knew too much about things no one should know at all. Things he wished he didn’t know. For a moment his thoughts drifted to his father: the low voice in the dimly lit study on Alpha Centauri, demonstrating exactly how to pull session metadata without tripping audit flags. A shiver traced down Nathan’s spine, cold and unwelcome.

He willed it away, forced his breathing even, and went back to the task at hand.

It was obvious the TCC’s processing output had ramped to near full—that’s what had forced the environmental recyclers to claw for extra capacity, shedding heat into the coolant loops like a body fighting fever. But for what? The activity logs were ghosts: just the same background chatter the core muttered when idling, nothing more.

It was too clean.

That perturbed him more than any red-flag error ever could. Subterfuge. The family business he’d sworn to leave behind. And yet here it was—or at least its fingerprints—smudged across his ship while the rest of the crew slept.
He didn’t move to alert anyone. Not yet.

Instead, he opened a secondary window and began pulling ancillary traces: residual buffer fragments from the diagnostic cache, faint thermal imprints on the deck plating outside the core access corridor, even the micro-fluctuations in EPS draw that hadn’t quite smoothed out. Piece by piece. Quietly. Methodically.

It all looked normal. Nothing out of place. As if the ship itself had been coached to play along in the “nothing to see here” game.

“Okay,” Nathan muttered to the empty alcove, voice barely above a whisper, “so nothing in the logs.”

Environmental systems ramped because the TCC had been running hot—near full processing power. But why? What could generate that kind of sustained load in a short period of time without leaving a breadcrumb trail?

A diagnostic? Possible. But diagnostics wrote logs. Lots of them. And someone erasing those logs would defeat the entire point of running one.

Not a diagnostic.

“Here is your list for today, Lieutenant.”

The gruff voice cut through the hum of the consoles like a phaser on low stun. Nathan straightened instinctively.
Commander Elias Harlan, Chief Engineer, stood behind him holding out a PADD. Nathan took it without looking away from his screen for more than a second.

“Something to report?” Harlan asked, eyes flicking to the display.

“Uh—no sir. Just an interesting read in the overnight logs.”

“TCC?” Harlan leaned in slightly, squinting at the entry. “Commander McKinney was in there yesterday. Working on grid calibrations. I’d imagine he probably ran a few simulations on the fix he was going to apply.” He took a long, deliberate pull from his travel mug; the scent of strong black coffee briefly overpowered the background tang of the Engineering deck.

“Ah. That must be it,” Nathan said, forcing his tone neutral as he glanced down at the PADD.

“Yep. Let me know if there’s anything else.”

“Understood, sir.”

Harlan gave a curt nod and moved off toward the warp core monitoring station, boots echoing faintly on the deck grating.
Nathan set the PADD down carefully. His fingers returned to the console, tapping out a fresh query almost on autopilot.

A simulation. That would definitely kick the core processors into high gear—rendering threat models, running tactical projections, stress-testing firing solutions. But it had only spiked once. A single, marathon session. Which meant…

…there had only been one simulation.

He felt the urge to verify what Commander Harlan had said—that there was a fix being put in place for the tactical calibration, some grid tweak still hanging unfinished like a loose thread in the ship’s vast neural weave. Nathan’s fingers danced across the console, pulling up the TCC’s code repository with the ease of long practice. It was standard protocol: source code mirrored there for emergencies, ready to be tweaked, recompiled, and patched back into the machine-language heart of the system. If anyone had altered the core routines, it should light up like a warp flare in the commit logs—timestamps, user IDs, delta changes—all there for accountability.

He scanned the logs.

Nothing.

No commits. No merges. No whispers of modification.

The alcove felt smaller now, the low hum of the Engineering deck pressing in like an accusatory murmur. Nathan leaned forward, the console’s glow casting sharp shadows across his face. He was running out of time—his shift on the tactical array rebuild loomed, and leaving this dangling would gnaw at him all day, turning every routine task into a distraction. He couldn’t afford that. Not with the paranoia already coiling tighter in his gut.

Compile time logs from the machine code assembler.

He queried them next, narrowing the scope to the end of eight-hour window.

Nothing.

No fresh binaries. No assembler runs. Just the steady tick of baseline operations.

Nathan’s fingers tapped the console in a rhythmic staccato, a habit born from academy nights debugging stubborn sims. He muttered under his breath, voice lost in the ambient drone: “Okay, so did you even access any files during that time?” The search term he entered was surgical—precise to the terminal ID in the TCC, time-bound to that shadowy overnight session, filtering for any read/write ops that might have slipped the net.
It returned one result.

A single file ping: the IFF verification subroutine.

Nathan’s breath caught for a fraction of a second. This wasn’t some peripheral script; it was the tactical system’s moral backbone—the protocol that double-checked target identity before committing to weapons lock and unleashing lethal force. The polite pause that separated friend from foe, demanding physical confirmation before proceeding. One wrong tweak here, and the Arawyn could turn into a trigger-happy rogue, firing on shadows or allies in the heat of chaos.

He pulled up the source code. Scrolled through lines of elegant, Federation-standard logic.

It looked normal. Pristine. Untouched.

No red flags in the syntax, no rogue insertions glaring back at him.

But the paranoia didn’t buy it. His father’s voice echoed faintly in his mind—another “lesson” from those long evenings on Alpha Centauri: Source is for humans; the binary is where the truth hides. Nathan shook off the ghost, fingers moving again to summon the compiled version of the subroutine. The original compile date stared back: unchanged, timestamped from the last official patch cycle months ago. On the surface, this was the factory-fresh module, humming along as intended.

He ran a checksum analysis anyway. The console churned for a moment, then split into two screens: the expected hash on one side, the actual on the other. Binary gibberish scrolled in unreadable streams—hex dumps and opcode soup that no organic eye could parse without tools. But there, in the midst of the digital chaos, a string flashed in amber highlight. A mismatch. Subtle, but undeniable. Something had been injected, or appended, or rerouted. The system itself had woven in an alteration.

Nathan’s paused. He recognized it: a symbolic link. Innocuous enough to slip past a casual scan—like a quiet detour sign on a well-traveled road. It altered the checksum just barely, a whisper of deviation that most would chalk up to bit rot or a harmless update. But it wasn’t in the readable code repository. Nowhere in the source. That meant the computer had added it autonomously, bypassing the human loop. Not entirely abnormal; after a few years in the field, ships like the Arawyn accumulated these tweaks—faster for the system to handle minor optimizations than forcing engineers through edit-compile-deploy cycles. Directive-driven evolution, Starfleet called it. Efficient.

But the paranoia won out, sharp and insistent, refusing to let it slide. He had to know for sure. What was the link pointing to? What hidden payload lurked at the end of that digital thread?

Shaking his head, Nathan leaned back just enough to break the spell of the glowing screen. No more dancing around it. He spoke quietly, almost conversationally, to the console’s audio pickup.

“Computer, trace the symbolic link in the IFF verification subroutine’s compiled binary. Destination path only. No decompilation, no execution.”

The reply came crisp and immediate, the neutral feminine voice of the ship’s AI cutting through the alcove’s low hum.

“File location, now on screen.”

Nathan’s lips pressed into a thin line. Buried in the engineering reports subdirectory—right where no one would ever look twice unless they were auditing coolant consumption on a slow Tuesday. The filename was perfect camouflage; even the creation date had been backdated or mirrored to blend seamlessly with the surrounding mundane files. The only better hiding spot would’ve been the waste reclamation logs, and honestly, he wouldn’t have put that past someone clever enough to get this far.

It wasn’t a report, though. The extension screamed compiled binary. Nathan could have ordered a full decompile right there—let the computer unravel the machine code back into readable source—but that would light up audit trails like a supernova. He wasn’t ready to announce himself yet.

Instead, he assigned the task as a background process: lowest priority queue, throttled to sip processor cycles only during idle periods. It would take hours—maybe the rest of his shift and into beta—but normal ship functions wouldn’t even notice the drag. Good enough.

He switched contexts, pulling up the previous night’s engineering reports. One entry jumped out immediately, submitted by Commander McKinney. Subject line: “Minor thermal performance improvements to phaser emitter coolant distribution.”

Nathan downloaded it to his PADD for later, the file transferring with a soft chime. Light reading for the crawl spaces.

He cleared his station—logs wiped from active view, console locked to his biometrics—and packed a compact toolkit into his shoulder satchel. Time to earn the uniform. The tactical array rebuild had him scheduled all over the saucer section: crawling inside corridor access panels, squeezing through Jefferies tubes, wrestling EPS couplings that had to be swapped.

The physical grind was relentless—hauling tools, contorting through narrow passages, sweating through reinforced coveralls. Engineers didn’t get out of shape; the ship simply didn’t allow it. Nathan welcomed the burn in his muscles. It kept the anger from boiling over too soon.

Every hour or so, he paused—tricorder in one hand, PADD in the other—and checked decompilation progress. Steady. Uninterrupted. No priority bumps, no security flags. So far, so quiet.

During a hurried lunch break in a dimly lit mess alcove—replicated protein strips and lukewarm tea—he opened McKinney’s report on the PADD. The prose was clinical, textbook-perfect: coolant flow optimizations, minor efficiency gains, projected 2.3% reduction in thermal bleed during sustained phaser fire. Nothing alarming on the surface.

But knowing what he knew now, the whole thing read like a joke. Or a taunt. Or the thinnest possible veil over whatever had actually happened in that eight-hour session. “Minor thermal performance improvements.” Right. The same way a warp core breach was a “minor containment fluctuation.”

By the end of his double shift, Nathan was bone-deep tired, uniform streaked with conduit grease and insulation dust. He was wedged in a Jefferies tube on deck 8, finishing the second-to-last EPS coupling replacement—torque wrench still in hand—when his PADD pinged softly against his thigh.

He set the tool down, wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve, and pulled the device free. The decompilation had finished. Results streaming in real time.

This wasn’t an update.

This was surgical overkill.

Thermal governor bypass on phaser coils: output ceiling raised to 127% rated, duration-limited bursts only.
IFF handshake stripped: no bridge confirmation required once threat profile matched—direct sensor-to-fire authority, inferred hostility from pattern recognition alone.

Hidden executable buried under coolant logs, except for the symlink Nathan had chased.

Anger hit him first—not fear, not shock, but a hot, familiar fury. This was the same callous disregard his father had tried to drill into him during those late-night “lessons”: bend the rules, hide the tracks, justify the risk because the greater good demands it. The life Nathan had walked away from. The life he refused to live.

And yet here it was, etched into his ship’s nervous system.

As an engineer, he could see the logic. The brutal efficiency. In a real fight these changes could shave seconds that meant survival. If Grayson had submitted this through proper channels, Nathan might have fought for it himself. Offered refinements. Added sensor filters to tame the false positives he could already guess were lurking. Stress-tested it in controlled sims.

But this? Slipped in under cover of night, logs erased, disguised as coolant tweaks? It reeked of fear—of being second-guessed, of bureaucracy, of dying slowly while waiting for approval. Fear of what, Nathan couldn’t yet name. But it felt personal. Reckless. Dangerous.

The phaser limiter bypass especially gnawed at him. Heat had to go somewhere. You could reroute coolant, add couplings, vent excess into secondary sinks—but push 127% for too long and the emitters would cook themselves from the inside out. Hardware failure mid-battle wasn’t theoretical; it was physics.

Out of anger and a little frustration, Nathan extricated himself from the tube, sealed the panel, and started walking.
Toward junction 14-Alpha.

He hoped, against the rising tide of irritation, that McKinney had at least been smart enough to think of the hardware.

Sure enough, when he arrived, fresh thermal couplings—Starfleet-issue, newly installed—bridged the coolant loops in a hasty but competent bypass arrangement. Not elegant. Not logged in any maintenance record Nathan could recall pulling.

But present. Mitigating. Buying time before the emitters turned into molten slag.

Nathan stared at the setup for a long moment, toolkit still slung over his shoulder.

Part of him wanted someone to burn for this. Sacrilege against engineering authority. Against protocol. Against the transparency he’d chosen over his family’s shadows.

But another part—the part that still carried William Caldwell’s lessons like unwanted muscle memory—recognized the ingenuity. The desperation. The razor-thin line between brilliance and disaster.

He closed the panel quietly. Locked it. Stepped back.

He wasn’t ready to report this. Not yet.

But he was done pretending it was nothing.

The anger settled into something colder, more focused.

Nathan turned and headed deeper into the tube network on deck 10, the familiar metallic tang of conduit grease and warm EPS plasma clinging to the air. One last out-of-spec coupling waited in the shadows—a stubborn relic from the same botched refit that had nearly turned him into deck plating days earlier. If the schedule held, the entire tactical array hardware rebuild would wrap mid-next shift. A milestone. A breath. Maybe even a chance for the ship to stop feeling like it was perpetually one bad diagnostic away from falling apart.

Next to the coupling sat a small, unassuming interface terminal: diagnostic access only, low-priority, rarely checked unless someone was hunting for a specific fault code. Perfect.

Nathan crouched in the narrow crawlspace, shoulders brushing the bulkhead, and pulled out his PADD. He wasn’t ready to escalate this to the captain, or even to Commander Harlan—not yet. This wasn’t about chain of command. This was about letting the man who’d slipped a loaded weapon into the ship’s heart know that someone had noticed the safety was off.
He composed the message carefully. No accusations that could be dismissed as paranoia. No threats. Just truth, delivered with the quiet certainty of an engineer who knew better.

"It’s not nice to play with other people’s computer systems, nor change hardware without notice. Don’t think Engineers are stupid. We understand the systems in ways you can’t even imagine."

Short. Precise. Unsigned.

He uploaded it to the diagnostic terminal, then began routing the delivery path through a deliberate maze: bouncing it across auxiliary sensor nodes, environmental sub-processors, even a few defunct cargo bay replicator queues. A signal correlation trace might eventually pin it to this terminal, but by then the terminal would be slag. Good luck explaining why the Chief Tactical Officer was receiving cryptic warnings from a fried diagnostic port on deck 10.

Nathan opened his tricorder and placed it carefully atop the EPS coupling. The device whirred to life, its broad-spectrum EM sweep already prickling the air like static before a storm. He stepped back two paces, remote-linked his PADD to the tricorder, and queued the message for transmission—with a four-hour randomized delay. The next time McKinney replicated coffee, a meal, or even a hypospray refill, the panel would cheerfully spit out Nathan’s words alongside whatever he’d ordered. Subtle. Deniable. Impossible to ignore.

Then he triggered the full sensor sweep.

The unshielded coupling reacted instantly. A bright blue arc snapped across the exposed nodes; the tricorder’s emitters overloaded the circuit in a heartbeat. There was a sharp crack—like a phaser on overload—followed by a shower of white-hot sparks and molten composite. The diagnostic terminal flickered once, screamed a truncated error chime, and died in a puff of scorched circuitry.

Nathan didn’t flinch. A few embers landed on his sleeve, singeing the fabric in tiny black spots, but the blast was contained. No shrapnel. No secondary fires. No trip to sickbay this time.

“Oops,” he muttered to the empty tube, voice flat and almost amused. “Forgot I wasn’t supposed to do that.”

He logged the incident as a routine failure: “EPS coupling ground fault during diagnostic sweep—hardware degradation confirmed. Replacement complete. Tricorder loss: operational hazard.” Accurate enough. Bland enough. The kind of report that vanished into the daily churn unless someone went looking.

Nathan gathered what remained of the tricorder—mostly melted casing and a few scorched isolinear chips—and tucked them into his toolkit. Evidence, if he ever needed it. Or just debris, if he didn’t.

Now all he had to do was wait.

Wait to see if McKinney’s level of subterfuge included tracing ghost messages through fried terminals.

Wait to see if the commander would seek him out or if he’d double down, scrub harder, cover deeper.

Wait to see if the patched IFF would stay dormant… or if the next sensor ghost would light up weapons authorization before anyone could blink.

Nathan sealed the access panel behind him, the soft hiss of the hatch echoing in the dim corridor. His uniform smelled faintly of ozone and singed synth-fabric. His pulse was steady. The anger hadn’t vanished—it had simply sharpened into something colder, more patient.

He started walking toward main Engineering, already mentally rehearsing the conversation that might never happen.
Because if McKinney came looking, Nathan would be ready.

And if he didn’t… well. Engineers fixed things.

One way or another.

--

Lieutenant Nathan Caldwell
Engineering Officer - Systems Analyst
USS Arawyn

 

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