[Begin Act 1] Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - PCE-4
Carter Schimpff
(( The Afalqi Project, Hangar 1659 – Meranuge IV ))
The hangar registered first as scale, then as absence.
Roy slowed a fraction as he stepped fully onto the deck, giving his eyes just enough time to adjust before his training caught up and began assigning function to what he was seeing. The central gantry structure still stood in place – intact, aligned, and conspicuously untroubled by the fact that the vessel it had been built to support was no longer there. Consoles along the perimeter remained active, their displays steady and unhurried, as though whatever had occurred here had done so without asking the room to react to it.
Which, in his experience, was not how events of this magnitude tended to behave.
Munro: The Captain -
The word carried, fractured, and returned to them in pieces that arrived just out of sequence with one another, as though the hangar had strong opinions about their presence here.
Munro: :: slightly lower :: The Captain has ordered us to find any clues as to what may have happened to the Afalqi. If you need to refresh yourselves on the file, please take the time. Now is not the time to make mistakes. Even being here is an important step in the Federation’s relationship with the Da'al.
Cole: Understood. We’ll keep it clean, keep it respectful, and we won’t assume anything until we can verify.
Tarsan: Understood Commander.
Bancroft: ::single nod:: Aye, Commander.
Imril: Response
Munro: Lieutenant Imril and Ensign Tarsan focus on the ship. I'd like to know if there was anything about the Afalqi that made it especially valuable to outsiders. The Da'al have given us temporary access to the basic Afalqi schematics, but a lot of that has been redacted. ::shrugs:: Let's see if we can fill in the gaps ourselves without causing a diplomatic incident.
Roy’s gaze shifted briefly toward Imril, the recognition there quiet but immediate. If there was a version of the Afalqi that could be reconstructed from partial data and stubborn implication, Imril would find it – likely with a running commentary on what they’d done wrong the first time.
Or does that only apply to the things I build?
Tarsan: Yes ::voice coming out higher pitched than normal before he cleared his throat:: Yes Commander!
Aw, bless.
Roy didn’t, as a rule, dislike very many people. But given the first few seconds of data available to him, he was already comfortable classifying Ensign Tarsan as someone he was going to like very much.
Imril: Response
Munro: :: to Cole and Bancroft :: We're going to have a look around the hangar, see if we can find anything interesting. Roy I'd like you to run some bio scans. Cole, I'd like a timeline of what happened here. If we're going to go chasing after that ship, I need some answers to a lot of questions.
Cole: Got it. I’ll build you a timeline from whatever the room tells me.
Roy slipped the medkit from his shoulder and set it down with a quiet, practiced motion, releasing the clasps and letting the case open into its organized interior. The additional instrumentation he’d packed sat alongside the standard equipment without fanfare – tools meant less for treatment than for interpretation, the sort that became useful when biology refused to stay neatly contained within a body and instead lingered in places like this.
He selected a tricorder and, after a brief consideration, added a biospectral sampler to his grip.
Bancroft: On it, ma’am.
Munro: :: to them all :: Any questions?
Cole: Just one. Do we know who had authorized access to this hangar in the last seventy-two hours, or is that one of the things our hosts will be… selective about? ::beat:: One more thing, have the Da’al already collected anything from the scene, or are we looking at how it was discovered?
Tarsan: Will the Da'al allow us to speak to any of the engineers who didn't leave with the ship... ::pausing:: if there are any left, that is?
Roy considered the questions alongside several others that would have to wait their turn.
Bancroft: No questions, Commander. ::beat:: Yet. I’m sure that won’t last long.
Imril/Munro: Response
Cole: Then let’s not waste the chance to look before procedure turns into a wall.
Roy glanced sideways at her, the corner of his mouth shifting just enough to register amusement.
Bancroft: That happen often to you, Nat?
Imril/Munro: Response
Cole: I’m going to work the perimeter and spiral inward. People notice the middle. Mistakes usually happen at the edges.
Bancroft: ::pointing:: I like the look of that console over there as my starting point.
Imril/Munro: Response
The team separated without discussion, each of them angling toward a different interpretation of where the answers might be hiding. Roy did not follow the center. Instead, he drifted along the outer arc of the gantry structure before selecting a lone console set just far enough back to be overlooked by anyone drawn to the obvious absence in the middle of the room.
From across the hangar, he heard Ensign Tarsan’s voice echo.
Tarsan: ::to Imril:: Lieutenant, where would you like to start? If- uh if you don't mind, I can pick up the engine specs?
Imril: response
Tarsan: I was thinking that I might check for any technology that would have allowed them to escape from the hanger without being seen, wormhole generators, and so on?
Not my Ensign. Not my circus.
Imril/Munro/Cole: Response
He activated the tricorder as he moved, allowing the initial sweep to run broad before narrowing its parameters with deliberate care. Atmospheric composition settled into expected ranges, particulate distribution showed no recent disturbance, and the first pass of biological trace returned exactly what the eye suggested it should: evidence of recent presence, but nothing remarkable in how that presence had behaved.
That, more than anything else, slowed him.
He shifted the scan profile, layering in higher-resolution biospectral analysis and isolating for stress-linked markers – adrenaline metabolites, cortisol traces, microcellular damage patterns consistent with sudden exertion or uncontrolled movement. The readout populated steadily, cleanly, without hesitation.
And without deviation. Nothing.
That wasn’t entirely unexpected. In a facility like this, environmental systems would begin scrubbing trace biochemical signatures almost immediately, and whatever had been here would have had time to fade into statistical irrelevance. Still, the absence registered – not as evidence so much as the lack of it.
Cole was not far off, moving along the perimeter with a focus that made the process look less like searching and more like hunting. Roy found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it would be a particularly poor decision to ever find oneself on the wrong side of her attention.
Bancroft: ::idly:: Place seems pretty intact for having just hosted a large-scale heist, no?
Cole: Response
Imril/Munro/Tarsan: Responses?
Roy adjusted the sampling radius, drawing in additional points from the surrounding deck and the base of the console itself, watching for clustering, outliers, anything that suggested urgency had ever existed here in a measurable form. The data continued to return in the same unremarkable range, consistent across multiple vectors in a way that was difficult to reconcile with the scenario they had been given.
Bancroft: Right. I mean – even the chairs at the consoles. Not a single one out of place. They’re all even pointed the right direction.
Cole: Response
Imril/Munro/Tarsan: Responses?
If a group of engineers had taken the most advanced prototype their species had ever constructed, the act had been remarkably orderly. Unless–
His tricorder trilled.
A trace amount of Proteolytic Chelation Enzyme 4 had registered on the readout. A miniscule amount, to be sure, but there it was all the same – standard-issue for breaking down and sterilizing residual biological material in a sickbay.
Overkill, in his opinion, for janitorial staff. But perhaps that was just the protocol here.
Bancroft: ::frowning:: PCE-4? A tiny amount, but it’s definitely PCE-4. This is just a hangar, right? Not a clean room?
Cole: Response
Imril/Munro/Tarsan: Responses?
TAG/TBC!
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Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1