"Unidentified cargo hauler, your last transmission was, uh, unclear. Your transponder beacon is not responding and you appear to be adrift. Do you need assistance?"
This wasn't the anomaly they were looking for, but it was out of place. Ensign Mides had been tracking the radar blip for several hours, figuring it was just a colonial freighter that'd lost its convoy. When the probe he'd sent returned, he initiated standard protocol for encountering unknown vessels adrift. Now that the ship was in visual range, the duty officer in charge of Comms deck 3 leaned over his shoulder to see the monitor at the right angle.
"Has there been any response?" he asked.
"Not since the profanity and the music sir. Someone is definitely on board. I was just getting ready to issue a contact probe to stop it from tumbling and get it under control to bring..." just as Ensign Mides was about to finish his sentence, the panel in front of him chirped and the cargo hauler that he'd been monitoring finally responded. It still appeared to be spinning out of control.
The radio crackled with static coming from the ship, the noise resolved into an electronic, distorted voice that said, "This is cargo hauler...uh, 'wereba-shhh-ahhh-brumples'," it was a very obvious attempt to feign static. "We're all good here. We're fine. We're only having a slight communications outage, but our technicians have repaired it," said the voice rather casually. "We'll be getting out you fella's way here shortly. Thanks for checking in. Bye-bye now."
The two crewmen looked at each other checking the other's face for any sign that this was a joke being played by him by the other. Not seeing any break, the ensign was the first to turn back to the panel to re-open the frequency. "No, that's not how it works 'werba...." Mides felt silly even trying to repeat what he'd heard, ..."uh...unidentified cargo hauler. You're supposed to respond with the Standardized Notifications & Interaction Protocol when you are hailed by an approaching Consortium vessel. Please transmit the proper SNIP or we will be forced to respond as though you are a hostile per Consortium Treaty 34, sub-section B."
After long moment of silence, the voice crackled back over the radio, "Oh yeah... SNIP.... let's see....Hold on, who are you again? Can we start over? I'm going to need you to go ahead and start from the beginning, and by the time you've gotten through your SNIP, I'll give you my SNIP."
"No, unidentified cargo hauler, we're the Consortium ship that has already established our interaction, we can't 'start over.'"
The ensign had again barely finished his sentence as the view screen he and the duty officer were looking at showing the vessel they were addressing flashed with a bright light. It wasn't an explosion, but the unidentified cargo hauler was no longer there.
"What happened? Where is she? Get her back," yelled the duty officer.
"She's gone, cap. There is a little debris out there, but, according to these scopes, she's not there. Dispatching a recycler ship is not even worth the fuel for the stuff out there."
"Were there any markings? I've never even seen a hauler that looked like that, have you? What system was that thing from?" he asked the ensign.
"There's no telling where it was from, no transponder and the telemetry we got from our probe didn't show any matching profiles for systems in the region. Looked like a derelict until I picked up the aberrant transmission. Frankly sir, that was the ugliest frankenship I've ever encountered in this job."
"Frankenship?"
"Yeah, that's what some of the guys call the ships that the colonists from the outer regions put together out of the space junk and derelicts they find."
"Does anything like it show up in the database? Have we ever seen it before?"
The ensign had already looked up the ship's profile, but the computer had not returned any results from the database of known vessels. "Well, similar incidents are in the database, but according to the other contact reports, the profiles of the ships involved don't match."
"After all the mods that tub has seen, I doubt she's really destroyed. Great, that means another unauthorized hyperspace drive...damn scavengers." His middle-management mind raced with possible ideas on how to turn this event into a feather in his cap with the brass, but he couldn't see any way to spin it in his favor.
He stood up straight and readjusted his upper uniform as he resolved not to let this incident end up as a black eye for him. Somehow, he'd make sure the ensign was found at fault. Even though he wasn't sure how he was going to do it yet, his decision to do so filled him with the confidence on which middle-managers feed. "File a report, ensign. Make sure you log all the data from the encounter and send it all to me and Commander Isail. I'll be getting together with him later."
"Yes sir." Ensign Mides answered as he was already compiling the files generated by his station since the encounter started and appended the official database. He read over the other entries and noted how all of them had the same official jargon he recognized as the ramblings of other ensigns like himself tasked with filing an official report for something that seemed explainable. Reading through them, he could see that they all had been filed and reported to Commander Isail. Switching over to the personnel rosters, he saw that all of the ensigns who sent them had been soon re-assigned to construction duty on some out-of-the-way colony.
He quickly logged out of the station and entered the back-door code that was passed around the ensigns which put the panel into admin mode, removed his login credentials, and changed user fields to 'AI Computer'. After he rebooted and the console came back up, all of the recording files of his voice were overwritten by newly synthesized voice files using the auto-generated transcripts. After logging back in using his credentials, he double checked the logs. The incident now appeared as though the duty officer had been observing the AI computer carrying out a normal SNIP.
"Mmm-hmmm," he thought, "I'm sure the Consortium brains will be right on top of this one, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be building shipyards on Vaticefiegi." With that thought, he sent the files and incident report, and put the matter out of his head.
The duty officer paced back through the control deck hoping the confidence he was sure he was exuding would motivate everyone who heard his grav-boots clunk across the floor.
"Alright everyone, let's get back to the task at hand," he announced firmly. "We have lost ship out there that we need to find." The ensigns that weren't rolling their eyes sneaked quick glances to each other in silent affirmation that he was an idiot.
Meanwhile on an upper-command deck, Commander Isail was concentrating on his own panel and reading the latest from intel probes hoping for a lead on their lost ship. When the upper panel chirped, Isail barely turned his head to look up at the notification of the receipt of a report from a junior duty officer on shift on the Comms deck.
"Damned rank-hoppers," he said out-loud to no one in particular, "We literally have thousands of ships coordinating a damned search and rescue mission and this guy has to tell me about another junking frankenship avoiding a SNIP?" He cleared the notifier so it wouldn't keep chirping and returned to the previous screen and the telemetry he'd been studying.
Isail was still muttering to himself, "Damned Eitypsenumentlan egg-heads. If you are going to build an undetectable ship, don't let a crazy person steal it."
The lieutenant sitting next to him knew his Commander well enough to know he was being rhetorical about the frankenship, but after overhearing him say that a 'crazy person' had stolen an 'undetectable ship,' his face turned grave as he realized they indeed were not on a normal search and rescue mission.