Ghost Rider in the Sky

Posted on 01 Jan 2024 @ 1:54am by Petty Officer 2nd Class Alizabeth Omari

757 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Miranda
Location: Plaetside
Tags: Research, connection, Teague

It had started with the information Aliza had sent to Ensign Walker, the enigma of their attacker. She wanted to know every step this Merchant Teague had taken since the day he was born, if she had a choice. It was good for her mind, laying in sick bay with her hallucinations and dreams had left her feeling damaged, she would certainly talk to Elieese in a professional setting once they were all back on the ship, well once the hubbub had worn down a little, she was sure that the counselor would have a very busy schedule after what had happened. For now though? She had a focus and she had been pouring herself into it when she wasn’t helping to organize the trip off ship, research could be done anywhere afterall.

And it /had/ been done wherever she was, until she had been treated by medical she had been engrossed in the minutiae of what Starfleet had as far as records for Teague. All of it was in order, not a word out of line, that just was not how merchants worked, there was always something out of order, paperwork not matching manifests exactly, travels changing, even her mother who was fastidious about her records never matched Starfleet, Aliza knew as she had once checked into her mother’s records for fun.

That had just been his business records, the rest was as troubling as those were when it came to his life this man’s records read like the perfect mid-level person, no accolades, no demerits, just middle of the line, no one was this…mid, no one could possibly be that perfectly mediocre. Anything she tracked down seemed perfectly arranged to just get him where he wanted to be, aboard this group of ships.

In her shelter Aliza laid on her cot and looked up into her PADD. There was a joke on her first tour that she had a secret partner that she spent all her time talking to because she was never seen without her PADD, then the joke shifted to her having a relationship with an AI system that she was connected to. Both were equally amusing to her, both were equally invalid, so she didn’t fight to stymie the jokes. She even overheard someone say that there was no room in Aliza’s bed unless you wanted to share a pillow with the device, since she got one back in her hands in sick bay, the last had become true.

A great deal of time had her diving through records and rumors. What good was having a well connected family if you couldn’t trade on that status? Looking for traces of him through the back channels of the traders she had access to showed a different story, he was a ghost. No records of trades matched the information she got from Starfleet or public records, no visits to merchant families on his supposed travels no rumors of what he might be carrying of interest to anyone. At the very least there would be a trading record from the merchants on the planets he landed on and there just wasn’t. What did a merchant ghost mean? It meant he wasn’t a merchant at all. There was no way someone did business with no record of them in her connections showing, so if he wasn’t really a merchant, what was he? Or who?

The who gave her much the same from the surface, mid mid mid mid mid, no way anyone was this boring. That meant a deep dive, asshe had to get past all those public records systems to try and find his origins and where he had been to acquire the virus. It was a good thing she was plagued with odd dreams still and some of the insomnia, whether it was fear of the dreams or just a viral remnant that would unravel soon that caused it, because this chase was becoming fascinating. Merchant Teague clearly was anything but. No records of where he might have stopped and gotten this virus because he hadn’t actually been to those places. Everything that gave him access to the ships was crafted, none of it was true.

After the bonfire she confirmed all the information she had gathered one last time and verified all her notes. Tapping her comms she spoke softly, “Captain? Report incoming.” Then she sent a synopsis to him of everything she found, or more importantly, all she hadn’t found.

 

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