The Rainbow Protocol
Posted on 21 Mar 2026 @ 9:28pm by Lieutenant Commander Grayson McKinney
1,510 words; about a 8 minute read
Mission:
Arawyn’s Itchy Trigger Finger
Location: Deck 2 Quarters / Main Engineering / Bridge
Grayson McKinney’s quarters held the scent of dark roast coffee and gun oil, layered into the walls. He sat in a battered leather armchair, the kind that remembered other rooms and older storms, and worked a solvent patch through the barrel of a Starfleet Type 19 Laser Pistol, mid-23rd-century issue.
The diagnostic PADD on his workbench chimed, a precise note threading through the quiet.
He set the pistol aside on a microfiber cloth. His hands, broad and careful, moved over the PADD’s interface, following the signal’s path. Whoever sent it had scattered the trail through sensor nodes, environmental sub-processors, and even dead replicator queues. It was elegant misdirection. The trail ended at a diagnostic port on Deck 10, one that the system insisted had been destroyed in a power surge.
He leaned back, reading the message once, then again, slower, the way he would study a targeting solution that looked too good to be true.
His first thought surfaced in Portuguese, a word his mother would have recognized and ignored. The second was tactical.
They found it.
The file he had hidden in the diagnostic subsystem was not a virus. Not malicious.Elegant, if he allowed himself the word. Forty-seven lines, folded into the tactical suite’s EPS buffer, compensating for a fault Engineering had already fixed. No one was supposed to find it, much less go looking there, at that hour, with that kind of precision.
Yet someone had.
Paranoia arrived first, sharp and instinctive, then faded. Not a breach. Not an enemy. He knew the signature of hostile work; this was something else. Clean, professional. The message had landed with precision, not escalated, not flagged for JAG. Whoever found the file understood it and used only the leverage required to make the point.
A half-smile found its way in, unbidden.
He read the message again. Grayson’s mind translated it to:
“Clever bypass, Ranger. But the EPS conduits don’t like it when you tickle the primary plasma relays. The main tactical suite is fixed. Take your toys and go home. — The Grease Monkeys.”
The chuckle was low, genuine, private. Alone in his quarters, he let it out. The engineering crew had outmaneuvered a Fenris Ranger at 0047 on a Wednesday, without fuss or fanfare. That earned respect.
He set the mug aside, picked up the PADD, and drummed two fingers along its edge.
The file had served its purpose. The tactical suite was repaired properly by the right hands. His calibration loop was obsolete. The only reason to keep it now was stubbornness, and he knew himself well enough to let go.
He opened a comm channel to Starbase 369’s engineering annex. The hour was poor. He considered it for four seconds, three more than he usually allowed a call at 0100.
He made the call.
Two minutes later, a tired face appeared on the screen, one expecting this call: Lt. Commander Rennick Daas, Starbase 369 engineering support. Years of keeping Starfleet running showed in his weathered look, as did the regret of once helping Grayson install a non-standard targeting mod on the Agincourt’s port array.
"Daas." Grayson kept it short.
"McKinney. Don't tell me you need another favor. I'm buried in outpost requisitions."
"I need a scalpel, Rennick. Left a shadow-patch in Arawyn’s tactical buffer during targeting issues. Local engineers fixed it but found my... unauthorized code. I need it out, without hitting their tripwires."
A heavy sigh. "Patched Sovereign tactical with Ranger code? Are you insane? Bio-neural packs could vent your torpedoes if they misread that."
"That’s why I need you. Use Starbase 369’s handshake to scrub it. If I delete from here, my ID gets logged. If you ‘flush the buffer’ during a diagnostic, it looks like maintenance."
"You owe me. Big. Initializing handshake… Got the file, good encryption. But you used environmental controls? That’s just sloppy."
“It was efficient,” Grayson muttered. “Just kill it, Daas.”
"Flushing now. Phantom code’s gone. Systems are clean. Don’t do it again. Daas out."
The channel closed. Grayson checked his tactical readouts. The ghost file was gone, erased without a trace. Thermal governors restored to spec. IFF protocols in place. The zero-day exemption vanished, as if it had never existed. The EPS flow to the targeting arrays held steady at full. The ship was whole.
Now it was time to pay his respects.
He opened the storage cabinet above the workbench, between the Klingon bat’leth and the Ferengi energy whip. The inventory was precise, each item in its place. He selected a bottle from the back: single malt Scotch, Islay, amber and serious, the kind his grandfather would have known by sight. He set it on the workbench and regarded it.
He glanced around his quarters, realizing he had not planned for the next logistical hurdle.
He needed a bow.
The replicator produced a large, iridescent red-and-yellow ribbon. He was not above a little theater when the gesture mattered. He fixed the bow to the bottle with the same care he gave his mutton chops. Details made the difference.
Before his bridge shift, Grayson checked and re-tied the oversized bow. The bright ribbon clashed with the serious bottle. He shrugged into his uniform jacket, stepped into the corridor, and moved with a veteran’s deliberate pace to the turbolift, down to Deck 15.
The doors opened on Main Engineering, a cavern of focused chaos. The warp core pulsed like a caged star, blue light flickering across the deck plates. The air was warmer, dense with the scent of circuitry and plasma.
Grayson crossed the floor, scanning faces but not searching for Caldwell. He preferred to thank the department, not the individual. He found Chief Engineer Elias Harlan at the primary monitoring station.
“Commander Harlan,” Grayson said, his voice cutting cleanly through the ambient drone of the warp core.
Harlan turned, his expression guarded. He looked at the Chief Tactical Officer, then down at the bottle of whisky held casually in Grayson’s right hand.
Grayson held the bottle out. “A token of my appreciation. For you and your entire team.”
Harlan eyed the red bow, skepticism plain on his face. Engineers rarely trusted gifts from Tactical, especially those wrapped like a child’s birthday present.
Grayson allowed his lopsided, knowing half-smile to surface. “I wanted to personally thank the engineering crews for completing the rebuild on the tactical suites. I also want to say that I deeply appreciate the profound sense of humor in your department, as well as your impressive, hyper-vigilant monitoring of the ship’s computer systems.”
He echoed Caldwell’s hidden message, word for word. He let the words hang in the warm air, a polite, unbreakable acknowledgment of their victory. The game was over. Engineering had won this round, and Grayson conceded the field with grace.
He clapped the Chief Engineer on the shoulder, turned, and left Main Engineering before Harlan could ask for an explanation.
The turbolift ride to Deck 1 offered Grayson a rare moment of quiet. Relief settled in. The Arawyn was no longer a liability. Hardware and software finally matched. He could treat the Sovereign-class ship as the explorer she was meant to be, not a patched-up border cutter. The doors parted. Grayson stepped onto the bridge.
The space delivered on every recruitment holo promise. Sleek, modern, bathed in the glow of LCARS interfaces. The viewscreen dominated the forward bulkhead, rendering the local star system in crystalline detail.
Grayson crossed to the tactical arch. Lieutenants Reyna Keagan and Sal Denari were already at their stations, reviewing the morning sensor logs. Grayson glanced at the primary tactical monitor.
The yellow sticky note was gone.
The console was unlocked, waiting for his biometric confirmation. He placed his hand on the panel. The interface chimed, blooming to life in crisp, responsive color.
“All right, let us see what we have,” Grayson said.
His hands moved across the interface, initiating a full diagnostic of the targeting grid, phaser arrays, and torpedo launch cycles. He ran the sequence manually, station by station, not because the computer could not, but because his hands needed to verify what the system was about to confirm.
Primary phasers: nominal. Secondary arrays: nominal. Torpedo guidance: nominal. EPS feeds to the pre-fire chambers: nominal, clean, standard configuration, with no variance more or less than the specification demands.
He ran the targeting acquisition drill next. Single target, standard range. The solution fell within Starfleet parameters. He ran it again at extended range, then multiple-target acquisition, then the rapid-cycling sequence he had built for his team, the one that pushed the suite to saturation and revealed whether the ship could respond faster than the threat could move.
Every result landed exactly where it was supposed to.
Grayson stepped back. He looked at his two junior officers, posture relaxed, his smile anchoring the room.
“Diagnostic is green across the board,” Grayson said, his voice steady and calm. “The systems are functioning exactly as specified. Let us get to work.”
End Log
Lt.Commander Grayson McKinney
Chief Tactical Officer
USS Arawyn
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