...she started to dissect the backlog of system behavior in the terminal, trying to parse what had been done to it preceding the teams arrival.
As the nanotech went to work the consoles began to stutter with life, drawing power from Hundred's systems while still cut off from the central core by some mechanical means further into the ship than the Gygan would be able to reach from this lower deck without extending all of her Dust into infiltrating the maze of wires and network connections, or lack thereof, between there and the control room she was physically inhabiting.
A surge of data flowed from the local back-up memory drive, files and reports covering over two years of continuous operation, most of which seemed trivially mundane and repetitive. An odd report or mislabelled link flagged up on Hundred's display every few seconds, only to be whisked away just as quickly as her search algorithms identified them as on-going activities or explainable damage suffered as part of the ship's journey.
As the algorithms closed in on the last days before the ship had fallen silent more and more of these seemingly trivial repair reports began to pile up and the algorithms began to compile a list. At first the faults seemed random; the temperature in a crewman's quarters turning freezing while he slept causing hypothermia, grav plating cutting out in the middle of a cargo transfer leading to the lose of some non-vital supplies, food replicators defaulting to producing only chilled tomato soup and other such minor mishaps.
Scanning back through the records the algorithms found the earliest of these anomalous events had occurred not long after a shuttle whose previous destination and departure details had been erased from the system had docked with the
Lone Star. Immediately the algorithms centred on the event, interrogating the system for any information on the shuttle that was available, but apart from the basic registration and identification details of the craft itself all other requests for data were pinged to the central computer, which at present was showing as disconnected from access.
Flagging the shuttle for future analysis the algorithms moved on, once again scanning the data files for anything of note until reaching the final recorded entries. A video file crackled into life on one of the damaged screen, the sound muted and illegible, showing a group of crewmembers rushing into the control room while bursts of light, possibly gunshots or explosions, flashed in the doorway behind them.
The group were all armed apart from one woman hiding in the middle of them as if being escorted or guarded. In her arms was what appeared to be a large box of some kind which she hugged to her chest tightly while the rest of the party spread out around the room. One of the men, a larger man with subtly different armour from the others, an officer perhaps, moved to access the control panel. After several seconds he began hitting the console with the butt of his rifle before turning the weapon round and firing several shots into the terminal. The woman with the box stepped forwards, apparently angered by the man's actions before her attention was called back out into the corridor. A moment later the party swarmed back out of the room as quickly as they'd entered, heading off elsewhere.
Further systems logs recorded the departure of a shuttle a few minutes later, the same one which seemed to have caused all the troubles on-board the ship, but no information was available as to who was piloting the small craft, or what its cargo could've been.
