Downed -- SD 10304.12

[LoAmi 0]

Lt. Arphazad Lo'Ami was just beginning to recover from the initial shock of the shuttle's destruction.  Starfleet Academy training had tried to prepare him for cases like these, but none of the simulations approached the real feelings of loss and anger at the unknown.  He had to perform his duty.  Now, that duty involved the investigation of a debris field that used to be a shuttle containing his comrades.  He scanned the shuttle from space and methodically recorded the locations of all the debris for a future ballistics analysis.  From the looks of it, the shuttle had indeed exploded, although the explosion's source was unclear.  After receiving permission from Captain Moose, the shuttle parts were beamed aboard for closer analysis and reconstruction, if necessary.  There was no need to keep the Arcadia sitting at that ghastly locale.  He brought three teams into the cargo bay: science, engineering, and medical.  The shuttle's total mass was consistent with what it should have been, although small amounts were missing, but easily accounted for as the results of the energetics of uncontrolled matter-antimatter reactions from the shuttle's engines.  The first piece of good news came from medical.  No organic matter was present on the shuttle.  It would be highly unlikely that it was all destroyed by leaked antimatter, so it was likely that the shuttle crew had survived.  But, where had they gone?  And, what had caused the explosion?

 

Since the advent of the tricorder, science could be done in two ways.  The first, preferred by most Starfleet officers, involved fishing for facts by whatever data a widescan tricorder could pick up.  The second, preferred by academic scientists, involved testing a single hypothesis at a time with all the tricorder's scanning bandwidth looking for specific effects.  Lo'Ami preferred the latter as well.  He found that it allowed the scientist to better decompose the effect, step by step, although at the expense of a quick and dirty answer.

 

Lo'Ami started on the hypothesis that the antimatter had somehow generated the explosion, so he calibrated his tricorder to test the theoretical predictions against the results.  The engineer, Ensign Hawkins, meanwhile, had generated enough evidence pointing to a cobalt explosive having caused the initial explosion.  The antimatter had been a secondary effect.  The explosion had been internal and from a planted device.  This was no accident.  The next step was to find where the crew had gone.  Lo'Ami's first thought was to scan for a characteristic residual energy signature from a transporter signal.  After the amount of time the shuttle had been in space, the signal had ample time to degrade, so, finding it above the ambient energetic noise [or at least what he thought was ambient energetic noise] that pervaded the shuttle debris would require a finely-tuned tricorder.  

 

Lo'Ami tuned his tricorder for a transporter signal, and began a search.  With Arcadia's systems failing, Hawkins was recalled to engineering, leaving Lo'Ami temporarily alone in the cargo bay.  As he found a weak transporter residual signal, he reported the results to the Captain:

"Lo'Ami to Captain Moose, the shuttle exploded from the inside.  It was bombed.  I've detected a transporter signat--"

 

In the middle of the word, the tricorder's scanning beam set off some unexploded bomb residue.  A loud boom was heard over the comm, and Lo'Ami was thrown across the cargo bay.  Everything went dark.  When he was finally brought in to sickbay, the extensive external and internal damage necessitated emergency surgery.  Is this the end of the science officer?  Will he ever wake up from the post-surgical coma?  (To be continued...)