“How’s it going, boss?” Vance Hawkins said as he walked into the security office.

Corsi barely looked up from the readouts on her viewscreen. “Not good. The re-creation gave me a couple of leads, but nothing that looks like it could have caused the vibrations that Lense thinks happened.”

Hawkins slid into the chair opposite Corsi’s narrow desk. “You’re kidding.”

Shaking her head, she said, “He had a headache, got up, ordered aspirin from the replicator, and collapsed on the way back to his bed. It’s like something that nobody could hear or see caused his brain to start shaking and then burst about a thousand blood vessels at the same time. Our illustrious CMO has never even heard of something like that happening before, let alone seen it. Please tell me you had better luck.”

Hawkins’s dark fingers ran over the padd in his hand. “You were right. The latinum was a counterfeit, but the scans of the two padds on the bed show thatt they’re both standard-issue. As for the DNA traces, both padds had traces we couldn’t localize.”

That was unusual. There were only two ways that a DNA trace wouldn’t be identifiable. One would be if it were from a species that they hadn’t catalogued yet. The other would be if the creature that left them had been wearing something that hampered its ability to leave traces, like wearing gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints had been in the days before it was discovered that some alien races didn’t have fingerprints to leave behind. “What about the counterfeit latinum?”

“Besides human, there were traces of Ferengi, Cardassian, and Bajoran DNA. There were also three other traces that we couldn’t match.”

Corsi raised a blond eyebrow. “Three others?” Pressing the control to get a secure channel, she said, “Corsi to Lense.”

“Yes, Domenica?”

“I’m sending Hawkins down to you with three pieces that we need examined. We’ve got DNA traces that aren’t coming up in the database. I need to know if they’re for new species, or if someone’s trying to mask traces.”

“Understood.”

“Um, hi,” a tentative voice said from behind Hawkins. “You wanted to see me, Commander?”

Signing off with Lense, Corsi saw Ted Deverick standing in her office doorway, his eyes riveted to the floor in front of his feet. His short, sandy blond hair was rumpled, as though he’d just gotten out of bed. He shifted his weight from one spindly leg to the other. She’d only seen him a couple of times since he’d come on board, but he’d looked better. “How’re you doing, Deverick?” she asked, genuine concern in her voice. “Settling in to the new quarters?”

A bitter smile tried to work its way onto his face. “About as good as can be expected, I guess. Thank you for moving me.”

“When was the last time you slept?” Hawkins asked. Corsi couldn’t help but wonder if he’d also noticed the exhaustion in the young crewman’s eyes.

“Night before last. I keep wondering if what got Ken was really meant for me.”

That piqued Corsi’s interest. She gestured for him to sit down. “Do either of you have any enemies who might try something like this?”

Deverick sank into the other chair that faced Corsi’s desk. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I mean, I knew Ken pretty well from the Musgrave, but we’d both only been there about a year when we got transferred.”

“What about before the transfer? Did he take any vacations?”

Deverick shook his head. “Are you kidding? He was saving everything he could to retire on Risa. He didn’t leave the ship that often. I think the last time either one of us left before the transfer was an away mission near the Badlands. They actually found the Manning floating dead near a massive tachyon eddy. We got sent in on salvage.”

Corsi and Hawkins exchanged a look. She remembered something in her history class about that being one of the first ships lost in the Badlands almost fifty years ago. Starfleet had always assumed that all hands had gone down with the ship. A derelict, however, brought in a whole new level of possible causes, up to and including possible influence by the aliens that lived in the Bajoran wormhole. “Nothing strange happened while you were in the Badlands? Did you see any signs that he might have been sick?”

“No, ma’am. Nothing,” Deverick replied. “He was always making sure he was healthy. He went in for a checkup every six months, whether he needed to or not. He was in the gym every day. He always made sure he ate right. I bet he was probably in better shape than Captain Dayrit.”

Corsi’s lips pursed. That certainly jibed with what she’d learned from the files sent over from the Musgrave.

“Did he ever talk about anyone being mad at him? Someone who might have had a vendetta against him?”

Deverick shook his head.

Corsi cursed to herself. If there were no known enemies, and no foreign objects to point to, what was it?

Hawkins leaned forward. “Ted, did you ever touch his padds, or maybe his bar of latinum?”

The younger man’s expression turned even graver. “He almost broke one of my ships once. After that, we agreed that he wouldn’t touch anything of mine, and I wouldn’t touch anything of his.”

“Those ships mean a lot to you?” Corsi asked.

Deverick nodded. “I’m an engineer, Commander. Building and fixing ships is what I do. There’s a model of the Constitution-class Defiant at home that I built when I was twelve. I built both the Grayson and the Commonwealth.”

“The which?” Hawkins asked.

The young man turned sharp eyes on her deputy. “The two models in my quarters. They’re old pre-Federation explorer ships.” With a halfheartedly proud smile, he added, “My great-great-grandfather helped design the Grayson.”

“You don’t happen to know why he kept the bar of latinum on his shelf, do you?”

Deverick shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

Corsi leaned back in her chair, sure this discussion was going nowhere. Deverick’s file was about as empty as deep space—no reprimands, no warnings, nothing. She didn’t even see a note for his and Caitano’s bickering over the models. If it didn’t get out of hand when his precious models were nearly broken, could Caitano have actually provoked him to an attack? Could he have done a time-delay attack so he might look innocent?

Ultimately, all she could do was sigh. Too many questions, and too few answers. “Hawkins, get the evidence down to Lense. And see what she has on the glass, okay?”