“Whoever they were, they were thorough,” remarked Lieutenant Commander Rhodes. “Every log, every recording, all scrubbed clean.” But, for as much as the news he was sharing seemed disappointing, the cyberintelligence specialist seemed unperturbed by the apparent deadend.

“But you’re not worried?” Lieutenant Commander Koh inferred.

“Not at all,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes smiled. If deleted logs were the end of the road, his cybersecurity firm wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did in the eighties and nineties. “Whoever did this, they knew where to go and what to delete, but they didn’t know the deeper fundamentals of persistence architectures within modern bioneural systems.”

Neither did Lieutenant Commander Koh, though. She just used them.

“Think of it like the difference between affective and episodic memory,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes elaborated. “It’s like how, even as discrete memories fade from the hippocampus, the feelings and emotions evoked often live on in the amygdala.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m still not following,” Lieutenant Commander Koh admitted. “How does neurology apply here?”

“Have you ever heard of Narrative Exposure Therapy?”

She nodded. It was a technique all security officers trained on at the Academy as it related to investigations where one could walk a victim through a reconstructive process in order to pull forth forgotten details of a traumatic event. Still, she didn’t see how it applied to a digital system.

“We call these bioneural for a reason,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes smiled. “I’m essentially going to perform a NET-style technique on our digital friend here, using imprints within its engram stack to reconstruct the concrete data that was once encoded within.”

“Does that seriously work?” Lieutenant Commander Koh asked, her surprise apparent. “If it’s really that easy, why don’t they teach it as part of the security curriculum at the Academy?”

“It’s not in vogue because, if you’re too forceful, it can create false memories, sort of like leading a witness,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes explained. “A high quality match would be enough for probable cause, but it’s not admissible itself because of its potential fallibility.”

“Doesn’t Commander Drake eventually need to prosecute though?”

“Yeah, but that’s not today’s problem.”

That didn’t really reassure Lieutenant Commander Koh. She had no love for Commander Drake. She’d been there at Nasera, just like many aboard the Diligent. But that didn’t mean she wanted him to fail. There was someone out there who was proliferating Borg technology, and after Beta Serpentis, she was all too well aware of what could happen when Borg technology got in the hands of those who didn’t understand it. They needed to put a stop to this, and lock up the offender for a long, long time.

“This is how we get the lead, nothing more,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes clarified. “Without a lead, there’s no one to interrogate or to prosecute. If we can put them in front of Commander Drake, especially armed with video evidence, he’ll extract a confession from them and then the admissibility of what we get here doesn’t matter.” It wouldn’t be the first time he’d teamed up with the avaricious prosecutor, but it would be the first time since he’d donned pips of his own.

“What if the video is wrong though? What if they confess because, after weighing the potential for a life behind bars, they confess, even though it wasn’t them, just to get a reduced sentence?” Lieutenant Commander Koh asked. She’d seen it happen before. “We could lock up an innocent person, while the purveyor of this terror gets off scot free and can continue to do so.”

“That’s why you only apply a technique like this in specific circumstances,” the cybersecurity researcher acknowledged. “If I prompt it with details about you, I’ll get a reconstruction with you in it. However, in this case, I’m prompting it with details about the event, and then I’ll let it fill in the rest without bias. Even if it hallucinates a subject, there are tens of billions of combinations of facial features in the human species alone, so given the population of Duraxis, the probability it hallucinates a real subject is less than one in one million. In the other nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine cases that it hallucinates, we’ll just get no match.”

“Those aren’t bad odds,” the security chief agreed. “I guess I’d take those.”

And so off Linus Rhodes went, his practiced hands dancing across the keys as he coaxed the bioneural engrams to remember that which they had been compelled to forget. 

As he worked, the one thing that bothered him was that such tracks had been left. Although not a well known technique, given that even the Chief Security Officer of the Diligent was unaware of it, a threat actor with the sophistication necessary to convert Borg subroutines into an attack vector for the Starfleet fusion reactor should have known better.

After a good half hour and a few false starts though, they eventually had their answer. 

“Here we go,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes smiled as leaned back in his chair triumphantly, making room for her to see the screen. “A reconstruction of the surveillance recording.”

He hit play, and they were treated to a scene of the reactor’s interior. At first, everything sat motionless, the timestamp ticking by offering the only indication the video was even rolling. But then two scrawny and ragged juveniles sleuthed into the frame, bobbing and weaving around the mess of conduit and duranium plating that ran the interior of the superstructure. As they moved, they kept glancing over their shoulders skittishly, fear in their eyes.

“God, they look like emaciated street kids, not hardened criminals ready to end their colony in fire,” Lieutenant Commander Koh observed. “Crazy to think they got past our guys.”

“Not really,” shrugged Lieutenant Commander Rhodes. “We are so trusting of our technology that my guess would be that the Pacific Palisades only had a couple officers physically down here to cover the entire facility’s grounds.”

Eventually, the kids reached the terminal. One pulled a small device from his pack, a gunmetal slip with a quantum-optical port on it, while the other kept watch. The kid with the device fumbled around clumsily for a minute, trying to figure out how to connect it to the terminal’s device bus, but eventually he got it seated.

“They barely know how to connect a standard issue terminal,” Lieutenant Commander Koh added. “How is this the duo that almost blew the colony to bits?”

“They’re just the errand boys,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes concluded. “Someone else did the work.” There was no way these two kids had come into possession of and then successfully adapted the Borg subroutine to overload the ICRH injectors of the fusion reactor.

Not even twenty seconds passed before a little green light lit up on the device, and that was it. The kid unhooked the device and stuffed it back into his bag, and then they scurried off back the way they’d come, no one the wiser to the fact the integrity of a planetary fusion reactor had just been compromised.

“That was the entire hack,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes concluded. “Mighty impressive, that little chip.” He had the terminal’s system log up, scrolling it synchronously with the recording, and he was floored by what he saw. “It made all our cyberdefenses look like a child’s plaything. Less than five seconds from first contact until it was through the firewall, and the embeddings within the firmware were complete within the next ten seconds.” Not that he should have been all that surprised given its origins. No one could do it quite like the Borg.

“So who are the kids?” Lieutenant Commander Koh wondered. “If they’re locals, maybe colonial security could help us identify them?”

“I wouldn’t expect them to be particularly forthcoming,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes cautioned. “These sorts of places, when it comes to outsiders, they’re reluctant to throw their own under the bus without very good reason.”

“I mean, isn’t almost blowing up the colony a good reason?”

He tapped his combadge: “Rhodes to Drake.”

“Drake here. Go ahead Linus.”

“We’ve reconstructed the recordings from the reactor’s surveillance systems,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes reported. “It took a NET-style technique to get there so it will not, on its own, be admissible, but it should at least give us probable cause for a friendly pickup.”

“Agreed. What did you find?”

“Two perps, human adolescent males, likely in their teenage years, broke into the facility and embedded the malware into our systems,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes replied. “We’ve got them on B&E and unsanctioned access of Starfleet systems, and since the syslogs indicative of compromise line up precisely with the recording, likely a half dozen cybercrime statutes as well.”

“You think they’re our primary unsubs?”

“Errand boys is more likely,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes sighed. “Young, scraggly, and nervous, hardly the type to be masterminds of a reactor meltdown. Also, they struggled with how to even connect to a port on the device bus, so I just can’t see them being the wizards that adapted the Borg malware for our reactor. I’d wager a bet they know who or where our primary unsub is though.”

“So you want to pick them up?”

“Read my mind,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes chuckled. “Unfortunately, we don’t know yet who they are, but I’m assuming the locals would. Do we have a line to them?”

“We do, but I wouldn’t trust them. We have reason to believe the shooting last night was a false flag.”

“I see…” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes replied as he stroked his chin in quiet contemplation. “Well, you know that I have other ways I can get us an answer.” There was a twinkle in his eyes. 

“You want a no-knock for their systems, don’t you?”

“That I do, if you’ll authorize it,” confirmed Lieutenant Commander Rhodes. When Commander Drake was involved, he knew better than to do it without authorization.

“As a duly appointed representative of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, based on the threat posed to interstellar security, I hereby grant you authorization to covertly gain access to, and conduct a search of, any and all databases of the Duraxis colonial government and its agencies insofar as it pertains to ascertaining the identities of the individuals who illegally compromised the integrity of the Starfleet reactor facility on the surface of Duraxis.”

“Appreciate it, sir. Will keep you apprised. Rhodes out.”

“Well, that was certainly fancy-formal,” laughed Lieutenant Commander Koh once the link was closed. “Couldn’t he have just said ‘go for it’ or something?”

“Commander Drake does it by the book, always,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes offered. “Not my first swim with the shark.”

“Nor us,” Lieutenant Commander Koh sighed.

“Yes, I heard,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes nodded. “All I can say is that, for as much as we need people like Captain Lewis and Dr. Hall, so too do we need people like Commander Drake.”

She looked less than convinced.

“In cybersecurity, we have a term, gray hat, which refers to when you’re operating somewhere between legal and illegal, doing a good thing but in a bad way,” Lieutenant Commander Rhodes elaborated. “It’s a natural and convenient place to operate, but it’s earned me a couple ass chewings from our JAG friend. I don’t hold it against him though. He’s fighting the good fight, same as us, just a different part of it. If there weren’t people like him, admirals like Banda and Morgan would still be running the place.” Before Frontier Day, before the Lost Fleet, and before even the launch of the Osiris Initiative itself, a crisis within Fleet Command had nearly toppled the place, and people like Commander Drake had been essential to stopping it.

“Alright, well I’ll skeptically give him the benefit of the doubt for now,” Lieutenant Commander Koh conceded. In this situation, they were on the same side, but she still didn’t trust him, and she wondered if someday, just like Captain Lewis and Dr. Hall, she could find herself on the wrong side of him.

Back to work Lieutenant Commander Rhodes went, making quick work of the colonial firewall, slipping past their archaic cyberdefenses and into the colonial registrar’s data banks.

“Here we go, two hits, ninety seven percent match on one, ninety nine on the other, high enough to preclude the likelihood of a hallucination,” he declared as he projected a pair of headshots and biographical details up on the screen. “Meet the Teral brothers, Redrick and Devork, ages nineteen and sixteen respectively.  Addresses, parentage, and… yep, criminal records. Linked to a street clique and a string of petty thefts and small crimes.”

Now it was time to go shake the tree and see what fell out.