Fifteen hours before the Fresno would even reach Pieris IV and begin their assignment, the shuttle Huntington had docked to the exterior of the cargo ship Ardent Dawn.  The sound of the doors on the other end of the shuttle’s boarding hatch could be heard cycling.  Their noise confirmed that the crew of the civilian hauler had most definitely seen their approach and had transcribed Revek’s coded running light signals.  Dren Lor gave Lenara and Revek a look that seemed to say the hell with it, let’s get this started for better or worse!  He tapped the interface on the rear of their shuttle, and the hatch that often served as a rear boarding ramp instead had a smaller inlaid hatch within it that began to sound off.  It cycled to match the process of mating with the other vessel’s doors and then swung inwards towards the three Starfleet officers.

A pair of the Ardent Dawn’s crew were waiting for them.  They stood in a dark, rust colored corridor that was illuminated in a low amber lighting.  The deck plating at their feet were steel grates laid down to cover conduits and piping that ran beneath them.  The setup was one in favor of convenience when it came to getting at the innards of the ship to conduct maintenance.  This brief, initial glimpse inside was already telling Dren Lor that this vessel was likely an abused workhorse.  It lacked the pristine, organized layout one would find on a Starfleet vessel.  In Dren Lor’s experience, ships like this were barely organized chaos.  A mess of patchwork hotfixes stacked on top of older patched hotfixes, all made on the fly while pushing the limits of credulity.  He was by no means a seasoned engineer, and already he could spot several such patches under the gangplate decking of just this one corridor alone.  No wonder they were sitting blind in space.  There was probably some deep-rooted temporary fix to their sensors.  Long forgotten about until clinging to its last thread, it had more than likely given out with one final death rattle.  The Trill eyed his companions.  He could tell by the disapproving looks on their faces that they were drawing similar conclusions.

“From your ship, welcome!  I name, Captain Mektor!” came a cheery voice.  “You are being engineers, from Fresno?”  The speaker was from a humanoid race Dren Lor was not familiar with.  He wore a black industrial looking jumpsuit that had crimson lettering stenciled on his breast.  It was written in no language that Dren could recognize.  Maybe it bore his name in his own language, the Trill surmised.  Or else perhaps it read the name of the ship.  The mouth that had offered such oddly structured words presented a toothy grin behind black parted lips.  They contrasted starkly with pallid, pale skin.  Short, wild tufts of hair extruded from his eyebrows and chin, in a white and black infused color scheme that reminded the Trill of the patterns of an Earth canine known as a ‘husky’.  They appeared more like quills than hair follicles in their thickness.  While perhaps not quite as prominent as a Ferengi’s, the man had otherwise very large ears that possessed a numerous array of piercings.  A bald, shiny pate reflected the amber lighting of the Ardent Dawn and further exaggerated the size of his lobes.  Eyes with golden, speckled irises regarded the Starfleet trio eagerly.

“We’re from the Fresno, that’s right.” Dren confirmed.  “I’m Lieutenant Commander Dren Lor, science officer.  The Denobulan gentleman is Ensign Revek, our comms specialist.  The lovely lady is Lieutenant Lenara Rix, shuttle pilot and helmsman.”

The humanoid man visibly recoiled backwards.  The gesture was done somewhat dramatically in Dren’s estimation.  He put a hand to his breast flamboyantly.  “Excuse!?  Engineers, not?  Acceptable, not!  Engineers needed are many to fix ship!”  The dazzling grin had at once drooped now to reflect disappointment.

Dren Lor held his hands up reassuringly.  “I assure you, we’re more than quali-” his words were cut off as the captain of the Ardent Dawn curled his lips back in a sneer, and let off a rabid sounding hiss.  Dren pursed his lips awkwardly, giving his companions a look that begged for a sanity check.  Did that just happen?

“Excuse me?” Lenara put her hands on her hips, giving the man a cross look.  “Did he just hiss at us?!” she asked incredulously.

“Sure did.” Dren said, matter-of-factly.   He glanced over to Revek.  The young Denobulan Ensign was failing at an attempt to hide a nervous chuckle in his surprise, which only elicited a low growl from the captain of the cargo vessel.

The captain’s companion made quiet, soothing tsk tsk sounds as she stepped forward to interject.  Looking every bit a more feminine twin to the other in Dren’s estimation, she wore the same style of black jumpsuit.  Its top was partially open in quite a brazenly revealing manner.  She seductively ran a hand down Mektor’s chest.  “Being quiet now, darling.  Yes?” she purred.  “Assume I do that skills are adequate, these Starfleet crew of Fresno.”  She was clearly to be the voice of reason to quell the captain’s fire.

“That is correct, ma’am.” Dren nodded as he now appraised the woman.  “We didn’t mean to offend your good Captain,” he was saying smoothly.  “We’re only here to help, I promise.”

“I name, not ‘Ma’am’.  I name, Vashne.” she introduced herself coyly.  “Mate in many ways.  Of Ardent Dawn, First Mate.  Mate of Mektor, also.”  She looked back to the captain of the cargo vessel and patted his shoulder soothingly.  “Show Fresno crew sensors, yes?  Let them be taking looks.”

Mektor sized up the trio with a gaze that lingered just a beat too long, as if suspecting he’d just been swindled in some back-alley deal.  He finally huffed indignantly.  “More desirable, would engineers be.  No engineers being on big Starfleet vessel?  Your captain am thinking not worth the sparing, for I?  But taking any help, will I.  Follow we.”  He beckoned them all forward as he started down the dimly lit corridor.

“Sir, I promise it wasn’t like that,” Revek said, his voice apologetic but earnest as the trio followed behind Mektor and Vashne. “Captain Dart didn’t mean any offense, but the Fresno’s running on a tight schedule, and our chief engineer needed to be with them on Pieris IV.  The thing is, even though our titles aren’t ‘engineer,’ every one of us has a strong engineering background.  That’s the Fresno’s whole mission!  We’ll get things running for you, I guarantee it.”

“Promises you make, but difficult they may prove to keep.”  It was Vashne who spoke, cutting off what was sure to be another barbed and cynical response from her husband.  She went on to explain their predicament.  They had just finished a run that brought supplies to the very colony world Fresno was currently enroute to.  They had made nearly a day’s time at warp four when in an instant, the sensors had suddenly cut out.  With no means to navigate, a failsafe had triggered that brought them out of warp.  Even their communications system had been affected.  Mektor had gone below decks to investigate, and had come back with burnt out sensor cores.  The part of their communications array that handled visual and audio had also fried, leaving Vashne’s only option left to send out a written call for help.

Dren Lor’s eyes narrowed at the odd pair that crewed the Ardent Dawn as he regarded them to gauge their reaction to his next words.  “You know, Pieris IV is having sensor issues of their own.  We were just marveling at the coincidence of that before we came over.”

Genuine surprise registered on the captain’s face before it shifted to suspicion.  “Coincidences, unlikely.  Skeptical I being, with coincidence.”

Dren glanced Vashne’s way, noting a similar interest piqued with this news.  He didn’t suspect them of being complicit in anything, yet their consensus with Captain Dart’s inkling nevertheless was further raising his hackles over this whole thing.  ‘Keep your head on a swivel.’  His own captain’s advice before they had departed the shuttle bay of the Fresno was once more ringing in his ears.  He finally nodded an agreement.  “Yes, I do unfortunately agree with that sentiment.”

Lenara seemed skeptical.  “Wait, so you all are suggesting somebody sabotaged both the colony and this ship?  Why?  Who would even want to?”  She glanced apologetically towards Mektor and Vashne.  “No offense meant, but you guys do simple supply runs.  You’re not exactly a high profile target.  This is some old-assed cargo ship.  You see all the sloppy patchwork under these decks, don’t you?  It’s more likely we’ll find out some quick and shoddy work went to hell.”  That comment earned her a fiery glare from the strange cargo captain, but she pressed on.  “And Pieris IV is some dead world nobody would even be interested in if it weren’t for those creepy worms.  What’s the end game, here?”

“Cardassians.”  Vashne snarled.  Mektor nodded emphatically with her.

“That’s a possibility.” Dren Lor admitted.  “We’re close to the border, and Federation citizens taking up on yet another world that happens to be able to see over the neighborly fence a good distance in their direction is something I doubt they’d be enthusiastic about.”  He shook his head.  “I had been going over all the data we have about this system’s sun with Lieutenant Commander Kiran.  He wasn’t willing to drop the matter just yet, but from what I’d seen its special little flavor of radiation shouldn’t have done anything to any equipment here or anywhere else.  And why, specifically, is it that the sensors were affected both on this ship and on Pieris IV?”

“Hey, I got sent here because of their comms, too.” Revek pointed out defensively.

“Sure,” Dren allowed.  “But their comms seem more like an unintended effect.  The Ardent Dawn was still able to get off some kind of message.”

“No eyes, no seeing.” Vashne said pointedly.  “Better the hiding, with all eyes gouged out.”

“So we’re going with Cardassians, and they’re hiding something from us in this system?” Lenara asked, again taking up the voice of a challenging opinion.  “Why would they brazenly risk a conflict with the Federation by coming over to our side of the border?  My latinum is still on this being an old ship that’s barely hanging on.”

Dren shook his head.  “I don’t know.  And you’re right, we don’t have any proof or any real idea yet if the Cardassians or anyone else is even behind all this.  But, if there’s anything to find here, we’re going to.”  Lenara’s point was the more plausible one.  But the Lor aspect of Dren was suspicious, and that sense was something that was a strangely confusing blend of being both old and reliable as well as new and uncertain while he was still adjusting to this joining.  While he possessed just enough uncertainty to question the sense, everything else in him screamed to follow this hunch in his gut.  Something here was amiss, and he was going to sniff it out like a bloodhound.   He pointed at both of his companions.  “You two tackle the comms issue.  See what you can do to get them working.  I’ll look into these sensors.”

“Vashne, the bridge you will be presenting to these ones for seeing to communications.” Mektor instructed.  “Showing this Trill the sensor array below, I am.”

As they approached a branch in the dark, amber lit corridors ahead the strange woman led Dren’s companions to the left.  They disappeared from his sight as they climbed up a flight of grated steps.  The odd, pale skinned captain wordlessly raised an arm with the palm of his hand raised upward to gesture towards the path to their right.  He inclined his head in a gracious pose, with the same sort of offputtingly exaggerated mannerisms he had exhibited since Dren had first boarded.  “How far is it?” Dren asked him.

“Not far, ship being small.” Mektor said.  “Sensor suite on bottom deck, going to most fore of ship nose.”

It wasn’t long before they arrived at a grated stairwell of their own.  They wound down for a few more decks and then took another long corridor that led them to the front end of the Ardent Dawn.  Dren recognized a set of service panels on the furthest wall, the sensor cores would be there.  The sensor array of the Ardent Dawn would jut out from the other side of this bulkhead and run like a series of antennae past the hull.  Dren expected the sensor cores themselves interfaced to some sort of fitting inside of the bulkhead that lay up against the outer hull, a suspicion that was confirmed when Mektor opened up the service panels.  There were 3 empty slots that had corroded, burnt contact leads.  Dren frowned.  “What did you do with the cores?”

“Here.” Mektor said, walking to a corner of the sensor suite.  Propped up diagonally against the wall were three long cylinders that stood roughly half as tall as the two gentlemen that regarded them.  “Cores working are not.  It’s putting back useless.”

Dren nodded.  “Don’t blame you for not bothering one bit, my backwards friend.”  He crossed the gap between the two to grab one of the cylindrical cores.  It had quite a bit of heft to it, and the Trill settled for letting it rest on the grated floor as he tilted it towards him.  He rolled it along its bottom edge, examining the carbon score marks that started at its contact points and ran upwards.  He gave a low whistle  “No point in putting these back, they’re done for.”  He reached to his right side and grabbed a tricorder.  It trilled as he pointed it at the scorched ship’s component and waved the device around to cover all the angles.  The readout confirmed what the two already knew, but more importantly he now had a full scan and schematic of the core pulled up on the device.  With a quick tap, Dren uploaded the data to the shuttle Huntington.  He tapped his combadge.  “Lenara?  Can Revek handle the comms on his own for a second?”

“Sure,” came an uncertain reply.  “What’s up, Dren?”

“I’d like you to go back to the Huntington and replicate something for me.  Three sensor cores, there’s no saving the ones down here.” Dren explained.  “I just uploaded a scan, shouldn’t have any trouble pulling them up.  Bring them down to me once you have ’em.”

“On it, Rix out.”  Dren’s badge chirped to indicate the channel was closed.

A terminal a few feet from them on the other bulkhead wall caught the Trill’s eye.  He turned back to the captain of the Ardent Dawn.  “Can I get at your diagnostic logs from that?” he asked, jamming a thumb behind him at the display.

“Finding any log will be nothing!  Very strange.  Time, wasted.” Mektor warned, shaking his head quite gravely.

“Care to indulge me?  We can replace your cores right now, and we will.  But I need to find the root of your problem, or else it’ll just happen again when we leave you.” Dren pressed.  The other gave off a flamboyant wave of his hand as he turned his face upwards and huffed.  Rolling his eyes, the science officer settled in front of the display and began tapping through screens.  The cargo captain had been correct, there was nothing to find.  But there should have been something, anything.  It was obvious that the sensor cores had overloaded.  But the surge at the contact points should have been logged and flagged, even if the notation of the event in the maintenance logs indicated a cause unknown.  As far as the Ardent Dawn’s systems were concerned, nothing had even happened at all except that the ship had registered a sudden lack of sensors and had prematurely ended their warp course as the safety override kicked in.  Dren wondered if the surge had also caused some kind of data corruption.  He left the sensor diagnostics readout and tapped through more screens until he arrived at a diagnostic for the ship’s memory core.  It would isolate any corrupted data and move it to a place where it could be analyzed later.  But Dren wasn’t finding any relevant files with a date stamp that would be recent enough to account for anything that had happened here.  “Wait, hold on a minute…” he muttered.

“You are finding?” Mektor eyed the Trill suspiciously, refusing to believe that something could be there that his own eyes had missed.

“Your memory cores are old.” Dren said tersely as he was focused on tapping some animated commands at the console.

The other’s mouth drooped in a snarl, as he let off another hiss.  “Well enough, is working.  Not art-of-state, like Starfleet.”  Mektor hurled that final word like an insult.  “Many generations be Ardent Dawn flying, in family.  Father.  Grandfather.  Father of Grandfather.  Now I.  Reliable, is very.”

Dren held up his hands.  “I wasn’t calling it old as an insult.  This is a good thing.  Means I can tell you what happened, here.”  The Trill’s hands flew as he continued to input commands into the terminal.  “Well, maybe.  If what I think is correct…”

The other’s eyes narrowed.  “Explain.” he said flatly, as if expecting the ship he was clearly so proud of to be further impugned by this haughty Starfleet officer.

“Well, your memory core still relies heavily on binary.” Dren said.  “I remember those days.  Everything was zeroes and ones.”

“Remembering, you can be how?  Core is being made generations ago, long time.”  Mektor was challenging as though Dren were making the whole thing up.

“Trill, here.” Dren paused his rapid typing to gesture at the spots running from his temple, down past his mutton chops, and along his neck, disappearing under his collar. “I’m a joined Trill, and trust me, I remember these things.” He gave a quick, knowing glance before turning back to the display. “When it comes to old memory cores like this one, nothing is truly erased. These older modules have physical byte sectors assigned either a value of zero or one. A ‘one’ means the data in that sector is active and in use, while a ‘zero’ signals it can be overwritten. But since the data is physically stored, it’s still there until new information replaces it.”

“Helping, this is how?” Mektor clearly wasn’t following how any of that information could be helpful.

“Because it means that any data that was purposefully deleted can be brought back, as long as nothing else came along later to overwrite it.”  The Trill patiently explained.  “And this all happened recent enough, that it shouldn’t have…” he trailed off.  “I’ve got you now, you bastard!”  He pointed triumphantly at the screen.  “There’s your surge.  Your systems did in fact log the command.  Your reactor was instructed to send a brief, concentrated surge of a specific frequency through your conduits.  It fried your sensors, and obviously much of your comms too.  But the cores used in most general sensors are powered by this specific frequency in particular.  Your sensors were purposefully targeted.”

“Why?” the cargo captain posed the simple question.

“Why, indeed?”  Dren mused, his fingers working the console as he keyed in more commands.  “Let’s see what files we can recover that might’ve been wiped around the time your sensors went dark.”  Mektor, now intrigued, leaned in closer, watching over the Trill’s shoulder with growing interest.  After a few minutes, Dren paused, nodding to himself.  “I’ve restored every byte that was deleted from the moment you dropped out of warp up until now,” he said, scanning the data.  “Looks like your sensors briefly picked up a ship.  It was headed toward the colony, in the opposite direction of the Ardent Dawn.”  He continued, explaining that while little was recorded about the mystery vessel, the moment it appeared on sensors, an instantaneous transmission had been received.  That was when an automated command had been sent to the ship’s reactor, and the specific frequency had surged through the ship’s conduits, overloading the sensor cores.  Immediately after, a second command erased all traces of the event.  All logs of the commands, the surge itself, the ship’s brief appearance, and the transmission that triggered it.  “They didn’t account for the older style of your memory core still being able to expose their actions, because all they’d have had to do was add in one more command to overwrite the deleted sectors with something mundane.  I’d have never caught any of this.”

“Another ship sending those commands can not, when access forbidden!” Mektor protested.  “Security very tight.”

Dren shrugged.  “Not tight enough.  But to happen that fast?  Has to be some kind of virus, or implanted code.”

“Being same code for colony ground sensors, fried?” the cargo captain asked.

“Yeah, has to be.”  Dren agreed.  “It’s all too damned coincidental.  My guess is you picked this up when you visited the colony.  You need to purge your system before you stick the new sensor cores in or else you’ll find yourself stuck all over again.”  The Trill tapped his combadge.  “Revek, buddy.  How are those comms coming along?”

“Fine.  Almost done.” came the reply.

“Great.  We gotta go, like now.” Dren said flatly.  “Wrap it up as fast as you can.”

“I’ve got the last of those cores replicated.” Lenara cut in.  “What’s going on?”

“I have a feeling I know what is happening with those sensors on Pieris IV.” the Trill said tersely.  “Captain Dart and Lieutenant Commander Kiran need to know what I’ve found.  Prepare the shuttle for departure, we’ve got to haul ass.  I’ll come up and get those new cores from you, myself.”  He turned to the cargo captain next to him.  “Ensign Revek and I will help you carry the heavy things down here, but you’ll have to purge your computers and install them yourself.  Time is short, we have to leave.”

“Understanding, am I.” Mektor nodded.  “Sorry also, being I for earlier conduct.  Much help am I thanking you for being, after all.”  The captain of the Arden Dawn reached out and firmly shook the Trill’s hand.  Dren got the sense that the other was bothered that he and his companions had to suddenly depart.  No doubt, he wanted to be a part of whatever retribution Starfleet would administer once the culprits had been found.  But Dren wasn’t going to put them at any further risk, this ship had virtually no armaments if this did turn out to be Cardassians.  Hell, he didn’t even think the Fresno would even be able to hold up to a potential Cardassian warship.  He hoped to hell it wasn’t the damn Cardassians.  They would be in way over their heads.  Which was why they needed to make haste and warn them all, now.  The Ardent Dawn could probably travel to Pieris IV faster than the shuttle, but not when they would have to wait for the whole computer system to be purged before it could depart.  There wasn’t any time to stick around for any of that.