Lieutenant Soren Liara stood hunched over a piece of laboratory equipment, her brow furrowed in mixture of displeasure and frustration. Over the past few weeks, she had been trying to replicate a crystal growth technique that had been discovered at one of the archeological dig sites she’d worked on a few years ago. While her project had seen results, Liara couldn’t exactly call them useful or aesthetically pleasing.

Sitting before her was a jumbled mass of sparkling crystal that, had the experiment not gone wrong, would have created an intricate and beautiful sculpture. What had been constructed instead wouldn’t have even qualified as trash, let alone an abstract piece of art. A heavy sigh escaped the Bajoran’s lips as she poured over the data that had been recorded during the night.

At first glance, everything seemed to be exactly as it should have been. The matter stream feeding the matrix was working, the emitter array didn’t seem to be having issues. All of the variables had been accounted for just like in all of the other failed attempts. And then it hit her as she almost passed over the temperature readout. Temperature! The lab had somehow exceeded the temperature range at some point during the experiment that sent everything askew.

Lieutenant Soren’s head whipped around to look over at one of her lab assistants, “Mister Ross, did you put in that maintenance request to Engineering about the lab running hot at odd intervals?”

The young Ensign looked up from his own work and seemed to mull the question over for a second before he nodded, “Yes ma’am, I’ve already sent down two. One two weeks ago when we first noticed the problem and then another one two days ago after the last experiment was ruined. Haven’t heard anything back about it though.”

“Wonderful…” Liara grumbled as she turned back toward the lump of silicate that was destined to be deconstructed in the nearby replicator, “I get that we’re kind of on the low end of the list, but you’d think someone would at least stop by to take a look…”

“With everything that’s happened, you can’t blame them for being a little backlogged,” Ensign Ross said with a shrug.

“No…” the Bajoran said with yet another sigh, “I suppose we can’t.”

As if summoned by their conversation, the main doors hissed open and a Trill woman with a mass of curly hair and peculiar gray-tinted glasses stood on the threshold. A quick scan of the room showed her the location of the environmental controls access panel, and she made a beeline for it. As she marched over, she spoke to the room at large: “Lieutenant Zel from engineering, here to see about your heat problem!”

With nimble fingers, she loosened the front of the panel and ripped it off the wall, setting it gingerly at her feet before leaning in to probe at the inputs with some sort of stylus. “Usually,” she said, still speaking loud enough for the whole lab to hear, “The culprit is a person and not a circuit; someone in this lab may have been fussing with the settings and accidentally–or purposely!–reprogrammed it.”

She kept her nose to the panel as she pulled up the access logs, waiting to see whether any accusations would fly while she did her work.

The room was silent as the two scientists watched the Trill work. Liara started to get restless while she waited for the repairs to be finished, turning back toward the failed experiment on her station and frowning at it. She took the mass of silicate into her hands and walked over to the large replicator that was situated at the back of the room, depositing the defective thing onto the empty device before activating the de-materialization command. The hum of the matter stream filled the room softly, adding a bit of background noise to the room before it faded away again.

“So other than people fiddling with it, what else could be wrong with the climate controls?” Ensign Ross asked while perched on his stool.

Lieutenant Soren walked back over to her own workstation, “While you can never rule out mischief from other labs… this doesn’t seem like a person’s doing. Each instance of the temperature changing has been pretty random, never at the same time in the experiment. So my guess would be there’s a fault somewhere… but I’m not an expert on that sort of thing.”

Zel finished scrolling through the access logs and nodded. “Maybe not, but in this case, you’re right. The programming is untouched, and the heat keeps spiking anyway. Well, then!”

She put her stylus away and pulled something that looked like a hand-held drill of her belt. “We’ll just have to dig deeper!”

The tool made a humming noise as she ran it along the seams of the interior panel, slowly tracing a large rectangle as wide as herself and half as tall. She glanced at Soren as she made a slow circuit with the device. “So, what’s this experiment you mentioned?”

“We’re trying to replicate a crystal growing technique that was uncovered from a dig site I helped excavate. We’re using modern techniques to speed up the process, and fundamentally it works. But because of how sensitive it is because of the acceleration method, deviations in conditions end up making it look like some kind of… cancer cell is about the best analogy I can think of,” Liara responded to the question.

Ensign Ross chuckled, “You know, now that you say it like that, you’re right. It does look like a mutated cell formation.”

“Ha ha, yikes!” said Zel. “No wonder you’re so desperate to get environmental controls back under… well, control. Cancer cells, huh? Hey, do silicon-based lifeforms get cancer?”

“Couldn’t say, I’m a xeno-anthropologist, not a xeno-biologist,” Liara shrugged.

Once Zel had made a full circuit with the device, she returned the tool to her belt and gripped the edges of the interior panel. After a few grunts, she yanked it off the wall and gingerly set it aside. The myriad wires and coils of the system were packed together in an intricate maze that Zel seemed to navigate with ease.

“Speaking of crystals, the topaline conductors seem to be in one piece, so that’s not the problem either.”

She pulled a small PADD out of her tool belt next, and attached it to one of the wires. As she waited for her diagnostic to run, she glanced up at Soren again. “What an amazing thing to find at a dig site, though! A crystal growing technique?? And I thought it was all clay pots and jewelry, but I’m no archaeologist. So is that the coolest thing you’ve ever dug up, or what?”

“Actually no,” the Bajoran shook her head, “I think the find that I’m most proud of was the dig where we discovered a city dating back to just after the fall of Iconian civilization almost entirely intact. The fusion of Iconian and local architecture was breathtaking. And we did actually find some pottery and jewelry there too.”

“When was this?” Ensign Ross asked with sparkling eyes.

“It was my first expedition out of the Academy, probably the most grueling but rewarding dig I’ve been a part of in my career. My team lead used to tease me that because my first dig was so profound, I’d never do anything so grand the rest of my career,” Liara said with a chuckle.

“And have you?” the Ensign asked curiously.

“Not yet, no,” Lt. Soren said with a thin frown.

“Geez, you’re gonna give me a second-hand existential crisis,” said Zel, mirroring Soren’s frown.

With a determined grunt, she yanked her PADD off the connecting wire. The diagnostic hadn’t turned up anything, anyway.

“Well, you’ll show those yahoos who’s peaked once you complete your experiment, which you’ll be able to do as soon as I figure out what is wrong with this thing!” She punctuated her statement by pulling a small hand-lamp from her belt and pushing her tinted glasses up to the top of her head.

Zel shone the lamp into every nook and opening of the control system, her face so close to the coils that she might well have been literally sniffing out the problem. Then, her movements abruptly halted.

“Huh. I think something in there just… blinked at me.” She looked over her shoulder at the pair of scientists. “Could one of you two grab a tricorder?”

Liara grabbed a nearby tricorder from the charging rack and turned it on, making her way over to where the engineer was working. A quick sweep with the device caused it to chirp in a rather odd manner, prompting the Bajoran’s eyebrow to float upward in confusion.

“Tricorder says there’s something organic in there,” Lt. Soren muttered, tapping a few prompts on the device cradled in her hand, “Classification is coming up mammalian… rodent genus… Why would we have creatures living in the wall? We’re not even close to the biology labs…”

“Escaped specimen, maybe?” Ens. Ross offered as he scratched the back of his head.

“‘Flora and Fauna of Mellstoxx III’,” Zel muttered absently, as an idea flickered behind her eyes. “I remember reading a pamphlet on the shuttle that brought me here to Starbase Bravo. It was all about Mellstoxx III, and one of the animals it mentioned was a rodent-like creature that can detect and is attracted to electrical currents. It gave the original Betazoid colonists a rough time back in the 23rd century, at least on one continent.”

Zel jumped to her feet and tossed her hand-lamp to Ensign Ross. “Alright! If I’m wrong, we’ll need the Zoology department to evict this little criminal, but if I’m right, I just need to get one simple tool from engineering and we’re set! I’ll be right back! Assuming the turbolifts aren’t too crowded, that is.” The ‘engineering is 145 decks up’ part of her statement went unsaid.

“What do you think, Lieutenant?” Ross asked, his brow drawn down in thought.

The Bajoran shrugged softly, “Not sure. Never really had to deal with nuisance animals on digs, we always left that sort of thing to our biology teams. I suppose we could set up an isolation field to keep it from burrowing deeper into the cabling and such. I think we still have those portable emitters from our experiments a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re right! I think I left them in the storage locker,” Ross said, pushing off the stool and moving to the other end of the lab. “Yep, they’re here,” the Ensign called out, pulling one of the long tube-like objects from its place in the cabinet he’d opened.

“Let me help you with that,” Liara said, crossing the room to take two of the emitters needed to construct the field. The two scientists got to work, each of them putting two of the four devices in various places, including one outside the lab to get complete coverage. Lt. Soren started poking away at a tricorder, setting the parameters of the small isolation field that would keep the critter contained.

“Think we should try to coax it out by moving the field?” Ross asked after the barrier finally fizzled to life.

Liara frowned, “I’m not entirely sure how much electrical stimulation would be too much for this animal. I’d rather not kill it doing something like that. Let’s just wait for our engineering friend to make it back. It’s not going to escape on us, so we can afford a bit of patience.”

“Yeah, good call,” the Ensign nodded as he perched himself back on his stool.

Zel was huffing and puffing when she darted back into the lab, as if she’d run the whole 145 decks and not just back-and-forth from the turbolifts. The goods she held under each arm were dumped unceremoniously on the ground as she crouched in front of the control panel again. Her eyebrows shot up as she peered back and forth between the panel and the shield emitters.

“Ha! Did you jail the little guy? Good work!”

The first item she’d dropped was a wide cylinder in black and silver casing that would have been knee-height had she been standing. “So, I brought us a battery pack from engineering,” she said as she stood it upright.

“And I replicated a trap. It’s a little big…” Indeed, the plastic box looked large enough to carry a cat. “But it’s still sensitive enough for something mouse-sized to set it off. Oh, and I replicated these, too.”

She tossed a handful of barley seeds into the trap, set the spring, and stood up. “Sort of a consolation prize for the little thing, I guess.”

Zel reached for a set of red switches on the control panel, but hesitated. She turned to Soren and Ross. “Will you two be alright if I shut this off for a few minutes? It won’t ruin any more experiments, will it?”

“No, the only experiment we had running is already back to being replicator sludge,” Liara said with a shake of her head.

One firm nod and a cut in local power later, the small rodent found itself in a power devoid environment. With the battery that had been placed just beyond the cage being the only active source of power nearby, and any routes of escape that might have circumvented the trap now cut off, the small animal had little choice but to follow its nose and the faint thrum of electrical energy that sat at a tantalizing distance away. The little creature started moving slowly, sniffing at the air and looking around with the enhanced caution that was instilled in almost all prey animals. Once it was satisfied that there was, in fact, nothing waiting to pounce, it scurried forward and entered the trap, the entrance snapping shut just a few seconds after it had crossed the threshold.

“That was…” Ensign Ross said while scratching his head, “a little anticlimactic.”

“Maybe,” Lieutenant Soren said with a small shrug, “But at least the issue is resolved, and we can get back to work. Thank you, Lieutenant, your admittedly unorthodox trap seems to be been just what we needed.”

“Don’t thank me just yet,” said Zel as she meandered over to the trap. “I still have to send a minibot up here to squeeze in between the coils and repair the wires this little fellow was chewing on.”

She tucked the battery pack under one arm and lifted the trap to eye level. The creature was startled by the sudden movement, but quickly became distracted by the barley seeds.

“Those repairs should be done by end-of-day, though! We don’t want to keep you waiting another two weeks. Good luck with your crystals, Lieutenant Soren, and the next time you need maintenance done, just call for Lieutenant Zel directly!”

She nodded to the scientists as she left the lab, and her voice carried down the corridor as she walked: “C’mon, little buddy, I’m gonna show you the Zoology department.”