Backup Plan

Posted on Sat Sep 19th, 2020 @ 1:08am by Lieutenant Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell

Mission: Welcome Aboard!
Location: USS Liberty
Timeline: Current

Backup Plan
https://youtu.be/L4Xqs95wlSs

They were everywhere. Junior grades. Ensigns and crewmen but not a single Commander or Lt. Commander in sight. There were even other Lieutenants aplenty, each in charge of their own area of expertise, but on the whole it was chaos. On the other side of that coin, she was responsible for the Computer crew who currently had no leadership. True it was like three people, but that was three individuals with no clear direction.

With no clear leader in sight she made her way to the nearest team working on repairs. They didn't acknowledge her presence at first, just continued their discussion about disruptor blast holes and such. She cleared her throat. No one looked. She cleared it again, louder. No one looked.

Frustrated she asked probably louder than she had intended. "Excuse me but who is in charge here?" They each turned and looked at her, clearly irritated that she had interrupted their current work.

A rather young looking ensign peered back at her and dared ask, "Aren't you?"

She quickly glanced around, not liking being put on the spot, "No, I'm just, i'm just… looking for my team." She didn't know the names of her team since the reports she read were based on the wrong ship. "I'm supposed to figure out the problem with the warp drive."

All three of the crewmen laughed until one of them responded, "Look, we've all been trying to figure out what's wrong with her. No one has a clue where to even begin except Trevoe over there who thought a cold start of the core would work, but we reminded him cold starts were dangerous and required Senior officer approval."

They were right and depending on the problem it would probably not fix the situation anyway. No, what she needed was time to think, to analyze the problem based on the facts at hand. And right now she needed the noise to stop so she could think.

She moved off to a side station, sat down and closed her eyes. She could hear the constant hum of the engine, much like a heartbeat it had a steady rhythm. She tapped her hand to the beat much like she did during her three months he papa let her play the drums. She often wondered what had happened to those drums. One day they simply disappeared and the beat was gone.

She counted beats. 1. 2. 3. The fourth beat was delayed significantly 1. 2. 3. Again a delay. Her eyes shot open. "Computer, identify the source of the power draw on the warp core." She asked the air, as if it could be that easy.

"Working." Came the reply which seemed slow for a Sovereign class ship. "Unable to determine the source for a power draw."

Clearly something was drawing power. It could be all of the work being done to repair and restore ship systems, but Bonnie suspected something more. She thought about what she knew. This was a possible sabotage. This may or may not have been Federation sanctioned sabotage. The Captain mentioned rebooting the system. A reboot creates a backup in the system memory.

“Computer access backup logs of U.S.S. Liberty, display all logs on screen.”

“Working.” The computer took a moment and then displayed one entry on the console screen in front of Bonnie. One entry. There should have been multiple daily entries and their redundancies, but the system only had one entry. The time stamp correlated with when the Captain said they had ‘tried turning it off and back onn again’.

“Computer, query, where are the rest of the backup files being stored?”

“Working.” Was the computer getting slower? There was a piece Bonnie felt like she was missing. She knew when the computer booted, it checked it’s routines and subroutines against it’s multitude of backups and redundancies. If it found unsaved discrepancies, they were shunted into a holding folder and a new file structure was created using a good backup. But if there were no backups to pull from, the computer could only use what it was given to work with.

The problem lied with the fact that only an overhaul or command authorized purge could wipe a system of its backup routine, unless of course there was something she didn’t know about.

“No further backups are stored at this location. Starfleet records indicated a download and purge took effect on stardate 083220 at approximately Zero-Three-Hundred Hours.”

“Under whose authority?” Bonnie asked, her curiosity raised despite having an idea of who.

“That information is classified.” Came the disappointing response.

“Ugh… Computer display power grid and overlay any abnormally high consumptions over the past 24 hours.”

“Working.” This caused a great strain on the system as the lights dimmed ever so slightly as she worked. After two minutes she responded, “Unable to display power grid due to a localized energy field distortion in place.”

More questions, “Source?”

Silence. And then, “Approximate source is located in the main shuttle bay.”

Bonnie's heart sank. She understood the shuttle bay was a main source of traffic and someone could easily have placed a device there to suckle power and files from the ship, but the likelihood of a coincidence that she would be led back to the bay, back to him, was illogical.

***

TBC