Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3305-07-17 01:12, Galactic Standard Time
Michael Krenshaw III sat in the dark in a storage room near the outfitting deck, looking at his hand terminal. It was showing live surveillance feeds of the corridor outside. He had been there for nearly an hour waiting for the last two workers on the outfitting deck to leave and finally they were doing so. He watched the two women walk down the corridor and turn the corner. The clunking of their mag boots was audible through the door as they passed. Michael waited a few minutes and then unfolded his tall athletic frame from his hiding place in the storage room. He picked up his small backpack and checked the feed again to make sure the corridor was clear. He then triggered a routine on his terminal that stopped the cameras recording and sent footage of an empty corridor to the central storage server to fill in the dead time. Only when monitoring routines in the station's network confirmed that his ruse was working did he leave the room and move quietly to the outfitting deck entrance. He had a job to do there and both he and his employer were best served if there was no evidence of him being here at all. So far, there was only one thing that placed him outside his hotel room: on the way here he had taken an obscure service corridor and when he was half way along it another man entered the corridor heading in the opposite direction. It was plain to see from his shocked face that the man was not expecting to see anyone. Michael had walked past muttering some generic greeting and started a background search, through multiple proxies and cut-off servers, to identify the man. Three minutes later it returned a name, George Smith, and work and home addresses. George was a loose end that he would take care of once his work here was done.
Michael quietly clamped a device over the handprint reader beside the outfitting deck entrance and activated it. He then typed a six digit number into the keypad beside it. The door opened. Michael quickly removed his device from the handprint reader and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. There would be a log of his entry, but as far as the security system was concerned it was chief engineer Kayleigh Rouse that had opened the door. He was an hour behind schedule, and he would only do two of the three tasks he had hoped to achieve, so tonight would only get him 2 MCr, rather than the full 3 MCr, unless he made up time. His employers wanted CMDRs from The Buur Pit to be assassinated, discretely, somewhere away from the station, and Michael had determined that ship sabotage was his best option for achieving that. His first target was the Krait Phantom, LCU: Split Infinitve, owned by CMDR Jon Tomasson.
Michael used the handprint replicator again on the maintenance console beside work bay which held the Krait Phantom. The ship's entrance door opened and he climbed the steps build into its front landing leg and entered the ship. He passed the door to the flight deck and headed aft, passed the door into the vehicle hangar, took the left branch when the corridor hit a tee junction, and stopped in front of an access panel. He plugged his terminal into a port beside the panel and, after issuing a few commands on the terminal, the access panel slid open for him. He pushed his backpack and his terminal inside and crawled in himself. The crawl space was lit with an weird blue glow which emanated from one of the two modules that this maintenance tube serviced. He was not familiar with what that module did, but he didn't care about it. It was plugged into the one he did care about: the ship's frameshift drive. He plugged his terminal into a port inside the maintenance tube and used it to close the access panel behind him. Then he got to work. He removed one of three disk shaped objects, about 10cm in diameter and 3cm deep, from his backpack, and a set of tools. The disk was a compact pulse field emitter, capable of generating a powerful energy field briefly. This was to be his murder weapon. The emitter would emit an energy pulse just as the frameshift drive activated, disrupting the spacetime bubble the drive created and causing a catastrophic misjump that would tear the ship apart. He had used this device six times previously and fulfilled all six termination contracts.
Normally, a pulse field emitter would need a large power source attached, but his didn't include one. The device would draw power from the frameshift drive itself. Without a power source included the device was very hard to detect in a scan - one more emitter device in a module that already included many. To avoid it being found during maintenance he was going to hide it in a submodule that normally wasn't used: the FSD injection reaction chamber. When a frame shft injection was prepared the chamber stored an injection mixture as a plasma, held in place by by fields, until it was injected into the main reaction chamber to augment the fuel for the next hyperspace jump. With the injection mixture it was possible to make hyperspace jumps up to twice the normal distance the drive was normally capable of. The downside was that many of the materials for the injection mixtures were extremely difficult to come by. For this reason, the vast majority of CMDRs never used this subsystem in their entire careers.
Before opening up the frameshift drive, Michael issued some commands to his terminal to gain control of the ships automation systems. To his chagrin, the ship's firmware and software were up to date with all the latest security patches and he wasn't able to do much beyond suppressing alarms for the framshift drive module. The events would still be logged, but someone would have to explicitly look at the audit logs to see that something had happened. Once this was done, he used his tools to open a panel on the FSD and then to open the reaction chamber. He unscrewed the four nozzles inside, to the sound of a brief quiet hiss, and screwed mounting brackets in the their place. Next he removed the power coupling at the back of the chamber and replaced it with one of his own that had connectors that his device would plug into. This also disarmed the beam laser in the chamber that converted the injection mixture to a plasma. The work took him about fifteen minutes. During this time he noticed the maintenance tube start to get a little stuffy. He worked through the discomfort. He had a job to do and the quicker he did it, the less likely he was to be detected. He picked up his device and was about to install it, when a wave of nausea swept over him. He felt dizzy. Then he vomited, violently. And again. Was that blood he saw in the vomit? He vomited again. Something was very wrong. He needed to get out of there. He picked up his terminal to open the little door and noticed that there were messages scrolling by in the ships audit logs.
CRITICAL Radiological alert : Catastrophic Polonium containment failure. Emergency FSD isolation protocols in effect.
With panic rising, Michael used his terminal to try open the hatch. The ship denied him access. He drew his laser pistol from its holster inside his overalls and fired it at the door. A shield flared and absorbed the energy. Michael tried to steady himself to fire again, but he was shaking badly. He vomited again - lots of blood this time - and started to convulse. He lost consciousness shortly afterwards and was dead a few minutes after that.
Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3305-07-17 07:31 AM, Galactic Standard Time
Frank Bonetti walked into his cubicle area on the outfitting deck to find a pale and worried looking Kayleigh. She was shaking slightly.
"Frank, we have a problem!"