It was supposed to be a calm time. Well sort of. It would have been if this were just another academy exercise. Work the problem, figure out a way to approach a solution, work the machinery, and arrive at THE approach. Work the approach and find the solution. Many times she had made this process work.
Tenson had made her task simple. "Work the problem Lieutenant Commander" How many times had she heard that before...only it had been "Work the problem Lieutenant". She still wasn't used to the new rank. But the message was the same. It implied the answer was there. It was merely an academic exercise that the authority figure already had figured out. Only in this real life case, the challenge was nefarious. No one knew the answer. It was just as motivational as at the Academy, but with added uncertainty and value. Lives depended on her now. Not somewhere "down the road", but perhaps only in hours or even minutes. So yes, it could have been a calm time, but it just wasn't going to be that way. She would simply deal with pressure and move on. Maybe later she could deflate and slough it off. But not right now.
Not that things had settled down around her either. Sarah knew it was only going to get worse. But she supposed she was an optimist. She knew she was onto something. A break was coming, she could feel it in her bones.
The idea had come to her as she watched the crew repairing the damage to the tube corridor where the Captain and Trang had almost been killed. While there were few cameras on board Station III, there were radiation sensors and equipment sensors. The equipment sensors were the key. An invisble infrared beam searched constantly for the microscopic bar codes on equipment carriers. They sensed humans as well, noting that an object interfered with their scan, yet did not yield a code. Primarily these sensors were used to sense contraband or improperly stowed gear as it was moved about the station. However, she had tumbled onto the idea that humans being noticed might help pinpoint areas of activity during the recent events. After all, someone had to set up the explosions, and of course had to travel to and from the zone of impact.
If she could find a movement to and from during the right time periods, she might be able to pinpoint where the activity was headquarted at least. The station wasn't that large, but with the limited security people she had, a door to door search would take weeks or maybe months. She knew she didn't have the time. Many more might be injured or killed and in any case she would be off the job by then. No she had to figure this out now.
The problem was that the logs were written for cargo handlers not security types. And for techies, not enforcers. She had written a short program to try to decipher the mess, but her skills weren't all that honed. It was taking too long as well. TIME. She didn't have any.
She pondered on that for a bit, staring at the offending lines of code. She had some data. Setting focus to the data dump window, she thought she had the beginnings of something readable. She stared at that for awhile too, hoping that her pea brain would pick out something. All it did was give her eyestrain.
She forced her vision to clear, knowing that the blurryness was destructive, and should be avoided. It was hard though when you were so tired. Time again. Not enough to sleep on. Too scared anyway.
She jerked back. She realized she had dozed off sitting there. In a panic her eyes jerked too. Off to the left to the clock at the bottom of the screen. Just a few minutes. But it was telling. She COULD have lost hours. She stood and forced herself to walk around her tiny quarters, trying to keep awake and push her mind into overtime. Clenching her hands expelled some new found energy, and then after awhile she found herself popping a fist into the other hand. This was getting no where. She resigned herself to trying a different approach.
Then a new idea flashed in her mind, the efforts to focus paying off. What if the cargo scanners had detected valid cargo codes. Surely a saboteur wasn't going to carry around a box marked with "Explosives". For certain they would disguise their deadly product.
She looked back now at all the data in the time period. This was no easy task, either, as the time codes weren't intended to give a second by second audit. No, the time stamps were by day and hour, and were within 30 minute segments. Time wasn't important, what was moving was the priority.
She scanned down the different classes of equipment detected and noted the times which were within an hour of the Captain's explosion. Then noting these, she looked for sequences of cargo movement. With a few programming changes she was able to further refine her probe. At last she had some 100 movements in the right timeframe. Now she tried to track them. With serial numbers on some equipment tags, she was able to group and either eliminate them as they vectored off to the wrong part of the station, or add them to her "possibles" list.
With a wild rush she realized there were only a few possibilities left after this scan through the data. She noted them down on her PADD, and then sat back to stare at them. Two corridors seemed to be a source of items moving in that direction. If she sent her guards to search door to door asking questions in these two corriders, maybe, just maybe, they would scare something up. Bad guys sometimes panicked when they saw the heavies moving in. It was worth the effort. And it would only cost her a small loss in time as the guys were taken off other duties. She made up her mind to do it. But she'd not let on. She didn't need to bother the exec either. Tenson had enough on his plate already. If her search bore fruit, then they'd all know about it soon enough. Best to low key it for now.