“Hey, Kiara… You installed the latest version of the standard firmware on this thing, right?” Captain Reed Westmoreland asked as he looked up from the console where he was performing forensics on the faulty injector control system that had almost destroyed the colony.

“Of course,” Captain Kiara Feng confirmed, but her curiosity was piqued by the question. “It should be running version 2401 mark 8 pulled from Starfleet Engineering during the last dump we pulled at Archanis Station. Why do you ask?”

“Because this most certainly isn’t running that,” Captain Westmoreland frowned. “Or, more specifically, it isn’t only running that.” Large portions of the bytecode were what he expected, but there was something else laced into it. Something definitely not of Starfleet origin.

Captain Feng walked over to his console. “What am I looking at?” It was some sort of low level quantum assembly code, but what it implied, she had no idea. As head of the infrastructure construction unit for the Archanis detachment of the Corps of Engineers, she was a seasoned engineer, but her specialties were in civil and industrial. What was on the screen might as well have been a foreign language to her, the finer nuances of computer science typically left to Captain Westmoreland and the cyberjunkies of the communications and information systems unit.

“It’s a mutated form of our core firmware, baked deep into the fabric of the bioneural processor,” Captain Westmoreland explained. “Essentially a rootkit, it’s all but undetectable without an external core dump as it overrides the system calls our built-in cybersecurity routines rely on to detect malware. How it got embedded here though, I have no idea.” Or more, he knew how it could have been embedded in a system, but he wasn’t sure how it had been embedded in this system.

Ensign Alessa Elara, standing awkwardly alongside the aged pair, didn’t understand the finer points of the technobabble, but what she did get were the implications of what Captain Westmoreland was implying. “Could this be the root cause of tonight’s fiasco?”

“This stuff is pretty advanced, maybe even beyond me,” Captain Westmoreland cautioned as he continued to page through the code, trying to infer its purpose. “All I can tell you for sure is that it’s not right, and it’s not supposed to be here. As for how long it’ll take me to reverse engineer to gather a full picture of its purpose, I…” 

But then he stopped scrolling as his voice droned off.

“What is it?” Captain Feng asked nervously, recognizing the expression on his face, one somewhere between discomfort and terror. And closer to the latter. And there wasn’t a lot that shook a guy who’d spent his career working along the messiest frontiers of the Federation.

“I’ve only seen something like this once before…”

“Where?”

“Salvage Facility 21-J.”

A shadow washed over both their faces. Their visit to that haunted place was what nightmares were made of, and the subroutines contained within that cursed mausoleum most definitely didn’t belong anywhere near a Federation fusion reactor. How had they ended up here?

Ensign Elara, though, had no idea what they were talking about. “Sorry, where?”

“It’s nowhere,” Captain Feng replied darkly. “And it’s nothing.” The ensign had neither the clearance to be briefed, nor had she been part of that mission in the aftermath of Beta Serpentis. “But are you certain, Reed?” Her eyes cut into him, the seriousness of his supposition lost on neither of them. “Are you absolutely fucking certain? The implications are…”

“Yeah, I know,” Captain Westmoreland nodded grimly as he continued to stare at the code. “But yes, I’m positive. Look at this here.” He pointed at a block that again neither of the women standing over him understood. “This is an adaptive synaptic routine with a signature that could only have originated from a single source.”

“And what source is that?” Ensign Elara asked, still lost in the cryptic exchange.

“The Borg.”

Ensign Elara’s face went white with fear. Did the captain just say the Borg? The memories of Frontier Day were still fresh in her mind, and while the USS Pacific Palisades had been spared from the battle for Sol, she’d seen the aftermath.

“How did a Borg subroutine end up embedded in my reactor?” Captain Feng asked. “These systems are completely isolated from the colonial network. You’d need physical access to even install it.” Had someone intentionally installed it? Or was this be more Frontier Day shenanigans, another trojan horse the Borg had left them somehow?

“You already know the answer, Kiara,” Captain Westmoreland observed. “It got here because someone wanted it here, and they went through a lot of work to install it here.” The security systems of the facility, while not insurmountable, were not insignificant. It’d take a fairly sophisticated threat actor to achieve physical access.

“Well that’s concerning,” Ensign Elara blurted out.

“Alessa, I’m proud to say that you win the biggest-understatement-of-the-night award,” chuckled Captain Westmoreland. “But if you wanna talk about just how concerning this really is, it’s that, unless there’s a Borg drone just posted up on Duraxis, it means someone who is very not-Borg knows how to weaponize these Borg subroutines.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because even if someone happened upon some Borg malware, what’s the likelihood that it was specifically designed to attack SCoE Mark XI planetary fusion reactor injector control system running the 2401 mark 8 version of our firmware?” Captain Westmoreland asked rhetorically. “Someone modified it specifically to do that, and then they compromised our physical security to install it.”

“This was intentional, wasn’t it?” Ensign Elara asked, although it too was mostly rhetorical as she was fairly certain she already knew the answer. It was just hard to process.

“Absolutely,” Captain Feng nodded grimly. “Someone set out tonight to kill tens of thousands.”

Ensign Elara just stood there, mouth agape. Sure, she’d seen the anger of the colony on full display in the town square, but it was the anger of a people that wanted to live their own lives. This, on the other hand, was nothing short of suicide. If Captain Feng and Lieutenant Commander Cho hadn’t pulled off a miracle, everyone in that town square, and everyone for a dozen kilometers in every direction, would have died on this cold December night.

“We need to tell Amit,” Captain Westmoreland concluded.

“Agreed,” Captain Feng nodded. “You two go back to the Palisades and let him know. I’m going to stay here with my reactor, just in case something else goes awry.”