Lock It Down - BACKPOST

Posted on Fri Aug 14th, 2026 @ 5:48pm by Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Lieutenant Commander Thriss Kla'ren & Lieutenant Commander Rynn Upland

1,976 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Pirates!
Location: USS Sunfire
Timeline: Current

Bonnie disappeared into Main Engineering with the determined stride of someone arriving at the scene of a crime. The cheerful glow that had carried her through the morning briefing had long since evaporated, replaced by the quiet focus that usually preceded very long days and very uncomfortable discoveries.

She slid into the master systems console and rested both hands on the LCARS interface. "Computer, display all subsystem command pathways modified within the last fourteen days."

The familiar chime answered almost immediately. "Working... One hundred fifty thousand, three hundred and twelve subsystem command pathways have been modified during the specified timeframe."

Bonnie stared at the number for a heartbeat. "...Well then." Her fingers immediately came alive across the display. "Filter authorized maintenance updates." The number collapsed. "Filter scheduled software revisions." Smaller. "Filter Starfleet Security patches." Smaller again.

"Filter modifications performed by current engineering staff."

The list continued shrinking as layer after layer of legitimate work disappeared from the display. Bonnie leaned closer, following timestamps instead of filenames, looking for inconsistencies rather than anomalies. Mirror Baldric would have understood enough about engineering to hide her footprints inside routine maintenance. The trick lay in discovering work that looked ordinary until someone asked why it existed at all.

Nearly forty minutes passed before the list finally settled into a manageable collection. Twenty-three entries. "Now were getting down to brass tax..."

She opened the first entry and found a replicator routine carefully disguised as ordinary maintenance. The second concealed itself inside a transporter diagnostic. The third threaded quietly through the environmental controls. One by one she peeled back the layers, following each command pathway until the hidden instructions finally revealed themselves. Every routine had been designed to appear perfectly legitimate until someone looked closely enough to ask why it existed at all.

Each one contained tiny conditional commands buried several layers beneath normal operating code. Replicators would occasionally substitute incorrect ingredients during meal preparation. Transporters would randomly require additional pattern verification, delaying departures by several minutes. Environmental controls would fluctuate by a degree or two before correcting themselves.

Bonnie followed each routine all the way to its trigger conditions, allowing the logic to unfold exactly as its author intended. Random activation intervals. Infrequent execution. Maximum irritation for minimum effort. It was the sort of sabotage designed to waste an engineer's day rather than threaten a starship. She let out a quiet laugh and shook her head. "Amateur." The smile lingered as she moved to the next file, convinced she had already figured out Mirror Baldric's game.

Mirror Baldric had clearly intended to flood Engineering with nuisance problems. Hundreds of tiny distractions. Every engineer aboard the Sunfire would spend weeks chasing ghosts while believing the ship had simply developed a streak of bad luck.

The smile disappeared when she opened the twentieth entry. "...Well shit..." This one reached far deeper. Weapons control.

A carefully concealed timing routine waited inside the firing sequence for Phaser Bank Three. Under a very specific combination of firing duration, shield load, and EPS flow, the safeties would quietly disengage just long enough to allow an overload condition to develop. The cascading effect had the potential to destroy half the ship.

Bonnie's fingers became still. She immediately opened the next file. Photon torpedo guidance. A fractional correction had been inserted into the targeting algorithms. Tiny enough to escape casual inspection. Large enough to introduce a measurable deviation during ranged engagements.

The final remaining file sat alone at the bottom of the list. Sensor control. She opened it. A sophisticated masking routine intertwined itself with the sensor calibration software. Under heavy subspace interference, precisely the sort found throughout the Badlands, the routine would subtly distort incoming telemetry. Contacts would appear several thousand kilometers from their true positions while intermittently disappearing altogether.

Bonnie leaned back slowly, her gaze drifting from one highlighted subsystem to the next. Understanding arrived with quiet certainty. The replicator routines. The transporter glitches. The environmental controls. Every one of them had been designed to waste time. They invited discovery. They rewarded investigation. They encouraged an engineer to believe the hunt was over. Bonnie looked back at the three remaining files and felt the weight of them settle in her stomach. Those first discoveries had never been the attack. They had been camouflage.

She instinctively tapped her badge, "Lieutenant Commander Durnell to Lieutenant Commander Kla'ren."

She waited only a moment before continuing. "I've found our Christmas presents." Her eyes remained fixed on the three files glowing on the display. "They're considerably less amusing than we first thought. Would you like to have a look to see how we can maybe use them in our favor?"

Thriss was already on his way down to Main Engineering. He tapped his badge to reply. "Affirm Commander. I'm already on my way down. I'll loop in Rynn as well if you have no objections?" He said as he entered the turbolift and pressed a button.

"Um... no, of course not. The more minds the better, right?" Bonnie replied even as she stared into the console at the three files. She currently had no ideas on how to turn them into tools to use on their Mirror counterparts. If she had her way she'd wipe them away never to be seen again. One algorithm would be all it would take.

The turbolift swished open and Thriss stepped into the corridor of Deck 15 and walked towards the engineering hall. He tapped his badge to close the channel as he would be there in a few moments anyway. After entering Main Engineering, he borrowed Rynn from her current task before making a beeline towards Bonnie.

"What did you find?" Thriss asked the second he approached her.

Bonnie swiveled her chair toward the two engineers as they approached, one hand already gesturing toward the display. "It started with nuisance routines," she began, calling up the first group of files. "Replicators substituting ingredients, transporter diagnostics introducing random delays, environmental controls etcetera. Clever enough to look like minor glitches instead of sabotage." Her fingers moved across the interface, "Every one of them was hidden beneath legitimate maintenance, buried under conditional triggers with randomized activation intervals. They'd have kept us chasing intermittent faults for weeks. I actually thought..." She stopped herself with a frustrated shake of her head. "I thought that was the whole game."

Her explanation gathered speed and her hands gathered animation as the pieces returned to her in the order she had uncovered them. "The routines were designed to reward the first person who found them. You clear out the obvious problems, congratulate yourself, close the ticket, and move on while the real damage keeps hiding underneath." She brought up the final three files and rested both hands on the console. The nervous momentum drained from her voice. "These are the real targets."

She tapped the first file. "Phaser Bank Three. A conditional overload routine that waits before quietly removing the safeties." The second appeared beside it. "Photon torpedo guidance. Off by a few microns, large enough to miss a target when it matters." Finally, she opened the last file. "And this..." She looked from the display to Thriss. "...this one worries me the most." Her finger settled on the sensor routine. "It waits for heavy subspace interference. Like say, the Badlands. It scrambles incoming telemetry just enough that we'll believe our own sensors while they lie to us." At the end she took in a breath to both calm her nerves and to catch up.

Thriss showed a concerned look on his face, which wasn't too common. He scratched his chin. "The issues themselves shouldn't be too difficult to fix. I do think we can reverse-engineer the main three to somehow work on the mirror ships. Have you found any evidence of traps put in place in case we found the sabotages?"

Bonnie rested her fingertips against the edge of the console and looked back at the three highlighted routines. "Not yet," she admitted. "I started by assuming she was inept and just got lucky. Whoever wrote these knew exactly where an engineer would look." She was quiet for a moment, studying the sensor routine again before glancing back at Thriss.

"My instinct is to remove every line of it and never let it touch this ship again." A faint smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. "I also hate throwing away good code simply because the person who wrote it was awful." Her finger tapped lightly against the sensor algorithm.

"If we understand how this deceives our sensors, we may be able to teach theirs to lie instead. I'd rather make the Badlands confuse the Mirror Universe than the other way around." She looked between Thriss and Rynn. "I'm still missing the piece that turns these from sabotage into a weapon. That's where I'd appreciate another pair of eyes."

Rynn spoke up after she had a muse. "The photon torpedo guidance may have been off to miss a target, but was it by enough to come back and hit the ship?"

Confused, Bonnie entered the calculations into the system. "I don't think so." She admitted. "But then I didn't calculate the trajectory that far out." The computer returned the calculations in an arc shape that, under the right gravitic situation, would have caused the torpedo to circle back, striking the Sunfire. "How... how did you know?"

Rynn shrugged. "The subspace interference and the phaser overload can cause damage. A torpedo missing an enemy doesn't outright cause damage, outside of an enemy having more opportunity to fire, but sabotaging the guidance systems would. My point is, they need all three to be damaging otherwise we have more chances to get out unscathed."

Bonnie stared at the projected trajectories, watching the computer dutifully trace every possibility. Understanding one piece only seemed to create three more questions. She rubbed at her temple with the heel of her hand.

"If we know this," she began, "then we have to assume my counterpart anticipated we'd know it eventually. Which means she'll expect us to remove the routines. Unless she expected us to reverse engineer them. And if she expects that, then she'll expect us to assume she expects it, so whatever countermeasure we develop..." Her hands began sketching circles through the air as her words accelerated. "...she'll already have considered because she'd know we'd know she knew we'd know..."

Bonnie blinked and looked up. "...I'm doing it again, aren't I?" She let out an embarrassed laugh and rested both palms on the console. "Sorry. Sometimes my brain insists on playing three-dimensional chess with itself."

Rynn spoke up. "It's alright. It is a valid concern" she looked between her two colleagues.

"She's right Commander" Thriss said. "We can't discount the possibility that one of our counterparts is expecting us to know about it."

Bonnie nodded slowly, accepting both answers with a small, thoughtful smile. "Then we treat it as a possibility and build around it. I suppose that's what engineering is sometimes. Finding the thing that breaks your plan before someone else gets the opportunity."

She turned back toward the console and brought the three routines back onto the display. "All right. Let's assume she's already thought of everything we might do. Then we give her something she hasn't had a chance to even dream about yet."

Rynn leaned closer to the display, while Thriss began examining the underlying architecture. Bonnie settled between them, her earlier frustration giving way to something much more useful. Curiosity.

The three engineers continued working long into the night, pulling apart assumptions, challenging one another's solutions, and rebuilding their strategy piece by piece. Somewhere between the discarded ideas and the increasingly improbable possibilities, they began constructing a plan that belonged entirely to them, and only them. One the Mirror Universe would be forced to discover the hard way.

TBC

 

RSS Feed