In the midst of an interminably long meeting with General Kraddock’s personal administrator, Bekk Valador, my crew contacted me with a shipboard situation, to which I gratefully retreated. “Gratefully” – so I thought.
It turned out that a member of our crew, an Engineer named Casanova, was actually an alien entity that had been electrically puppeteering Casanova’s body since long before arriving on the USS Stalwart.
When this was revealed, Nova reacted to the entity’s subterfuge with understandable concern, but found herself at odds with Commander Sivak’s assessment of the situation. As a result of their different interpretations, Sivak charged Nova with numerous violations of Starfleet rules and regulations. When she failed to follow the order to withdraw to her quarters, he locked her in the brig.
Once the senior staff were able to convene and discuss as a group, we realized we needed more information; I requested further reports of anyone who had visited the L-Class planet where Casanova had become inhabited. Were there any other crew members who had exhibited similar behavior, possibly been killed and now hosting electrical entities? Had other survey ships seen crew act strangely afterward?
We also investigated previous incidents where an alien energy entity had taken residence in a humanoid, and there were more reports than we had expected.
When Nova and Chief Tactical Officer Cool Cat finished their research, they came to report, and asked to do so in private. Once in my Ready Room, Nova directed a single-shot, kill-setting-only phaser derringer at me, which I managed to ablate partially with a flung PADD.
A “Crewman Smith” who identified himself as Starfleet Intelligence interrupted Nova’s research and convinced her that there was a possibility the First Officer and I were compromised by the electrical entity, and told her the derringer was a scanner that could determine the difference.
After the failed assassination attempt, my Tactical Officer suggested we build a ruse around faking my death before pursuing the “Starfleet Intelligence” operative. However, Security Chief Bulat used a PADD to allow Nova to identify which “Crewman Smith” was the one in question; the moment the crewman was identified, Stalwart’s ship systems immediately went haywire.
Crewman Smith began using Captain-level codes to control forcefieds within hallways to keep partitioning himself as he progressed towards the Shuttle Bay for presumed exfiltration and escape. Despite our best efforts, Smith had complete control of the ship.
En route, Smith encountered and repeatedly attempted to kill an uncooperative Casanova, but found his weapons ineffective at stopping the entity, which leapt into Smith, killing him.
Post-Action notes: Entity-in-Smith is now going by “Chris.” The entity noted the context differences between Sivak’s and Nova’s interpretations, and provided an understanding solution which viably addressed all concerns. Even with this, Adm. Clarke has declared that further insubordination or flouting of Starfleet rules and regs will not be tolerated.
Crewman Smith had a synaptic scrambler with a deadman’s switch in his brain. Reverse engineering revealed that this handmade device had likely been implanted voluntarily. While the contents were encrypted, the public key portion was identified as a passphrase containing text of Chapter 14, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter.