On The Artistry of Sabotage

Posted on Thu Dec 21st, 2023 @ 10:36pm by The Gentleman

955 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: The Rise of the Gentleman
Location: Various
Timeline: Unknown

If ever there was a misrepresented beast in the menagerie of crime, it is surely sabotage. When most people think of sabotage, they think of explosions and shuttlecraft crashes. They think of the most ham-fisted and brutish forms of the art. They don’t know the subtle nuance, the quiet danger slinking in the shadows of the background, hidden from view, until the sabotage has done it’s work. When it’s done well, no one notices until after the fact, and even then… they aren’t quite sure it was sabotage.

Sabotage is art. 

Most think of smashed screens and broken terminals to get around something pesky like a transporter inhibitor. But it doesn’t have to be. It can be a subtle piece of code, transmitted by means of a nearfield device made of a material that none of the facility's sensors would detect. Drop that code in a transporter inhibitor’s memory with a command to run at a specific time, that turns it off for exactly fifteen seconds. Have that same piece of code send a simple signal to four transporter beacons in the area that turns them on and activates their signal. Then have that same code erase it’s actions from the logs, and delete itself as soon as the inhibitor reactivates. They’d never see where anything went wrong.

Sabotage doesn’t have to be to a physical device either. You can take advantage of and sabotage routines and processes that are meant to prevent infiltration, if you’re clever enough.

I am clever enough. 

Sabotage can be carefully crafted distractions and disguises that allowed access to these areas to set these things up. It can be months of weekly trips to and from this particular station under legitimate names with legitimate business to fully vet the sensor range of that station. It can be carefully watching what crew goes where and when, but not doing so long enough to be noticed. 

It can be having a ship running on minimal power, just outside of that sensor range, already keyed to the signals of those transporter beacons, so that as soon as they activate…

You can beam four hundred military grade photon torpedoes into the cargo bay and casually fly away. 

It can be finding the right supply depot near the right kind of nebula to ensure that even if they find your warp trail it will be so muddled and distorted it may as well not be there at all. 

All of their precautions were in place and all of them worked perfectly – as near as they’ll be able to tell – but somehow their torpedoes are gone. The perfect act of sabotage. 

I’ll admit, it was my own arrogance that made me make sure I was inconspicuously there after it happened. You’ll have to forgive my lack of professionalism in this case. This one took so very long to setup and I was rather proud of how it turned out. Getting to hear the Starfleet investigator bark, “Well how the hell did he get in!?” When he was told that there was no undo entry, no forced access, nothing out of the ordinary at all. Literally nothing.

That was a feat in itself. I must have come to this station a dozen times, getting to know all of the staff. I learned their routines, I learned their business. I expressed enough interest in what they did that they all offered to show me first hand. Of course I accepted, graciously. 

They were kind. Unassuming. There’s a part of me that feels a bit bad that I took advantage of them… But this is just business for me. Very. Lucrative. Business. 

Over the course of that time I plotted out exactly who had what access to get me where I needed to go. I figured their schedules and I figured out a careful timeline that would work. 

It took a total of five key cards copies. The first to get me into the main area, the second to get me into the higher leveled secured areas. The next two allowed me to bypass two guard patrols, and the last one to open that beautifully glorious door into the torpedo storage unit. Every card I used was supposed to be where I was, when I was doing what I was doing. The latent room sensors were easily handled by simple scramblers. Nothing they'd notice until they went to look at the logs and found them completely useless.

My friends on the station - and I do consider them friends, oddly enough - had no idea I’d duplicated their cards, in fact they were in other areas working happily. I knew they’d be working alone in places that they wouldn’t be using them when I was, and that it wouldn’t sound any alarm with their next use or appear that they’d done anything unusual. 

I didn’t want to cause them trouble. They were very kind to me, after all.  

I have to admit, I had my doubts I could pull it off. I may be smart, but I’m also smart enough to know I’m not invincible and only human.  

Once everything was in place, out was easy. I only needed two of the key cards for that. 

Worked like a charm. 

The beacons were set, the malware was in place on the transporter inhibitor… All that was left was check mate. 

No one knew what I did. Still, no one knows what I did. There’s a strong chance that no one will ever figure out what I did. 

And that, my dears, is the art of sabotage.

 

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