A Wild Goose Chase?

[Jaden Praxx 0]

"This is asinine" Praxx mumbled to himself under his breath. Between his time in the security office prior to the department meeting and now here on the bridge he'd been closely monitoring the internal sensors and security grid for a solid hour and a half scanning for whatever it was that apparently was loose on the ship. Several crew members, including himself, had reported seeing someone on the ship that didn't belong there. Hell he'd stood no more than five feet away from himself not two hours ago. Yet despite the now over two dozen reports that had come in from various crewmembers throughout various parts of the ship, sensors hadn't detected a thing.

 

The first thought that had gone through his mind when he'd run into his 'duplicate'...he didn't know what else to call it...was "changeling." They were after all in the gamma quadrant, having frequent dealings with what remained of the Dominion, and they were in the midst of searching for the founders. He realized that the group of changelings who called themselves "the hundred" might not necessarily want Excalibur to succeed in that quest, and may have planted one of their number, or perhaps more than one? on the ship to attempt to interfere. Still it didn't make sense, crewmen had reported seeing people which means if it were a changeling, he'd found some way to mask himself from internal sensors. Even if the changeling had taken the form of one of the crew, the security net would still register that there was an extra body aboard and sound the alert. But it hadn't, and what's more, intense scans run of areas where sightings had been reported hadn't turned up a thing. It was beyond frustrating and he was genuinely starting to wonder if he and a good portion of the rest of the crew might be under the influence of some hallucinagenic that they'd picked up on the planet. That was not a very comforting thought. He did remember hearing about beings who could mask themselves to sensors, the prisoners of Angosia, such as Roga Danar who'd briefly been held aboard the Enterprise-D, Species 8472 which Voyager had encountered in the Delta Quadrant, but he'd never heard of a changeling exhibiting this ability. If they took the form of some inanimate object, sensors wouldn't detect anything but whatever object is had assumed the form of, but that was no inanimate object that had been sitting on his bunk. Maybe it wasn't a changeling...but if not a changeling, and not some hallucinagenic pollen from the planet, what the hell was it. He knew he wouldn't be able to get it out of his head until that question had been answered...