MD #015: Data, Deceased and Deceived
MD #015: Data, Deceased and Deceived
Summary: The data at hand indicates that not all of the deceased are not who they appeared to be.
Date: Sun 23/Apr/2017 (OOC Date)
Related Logs: http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/doctor-people http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/data-never-lies
Lleufer Samtara 
Master-At-Arms - Deck 3 - Battlestar Orion
A small nine foot by nine foot office. Most of the floor space is taken up by a desk with chairs on either side and filing cabinets. There is a coffee maker on low cabinet with a tray of cups and condiments. A large flat screen for meetings to project maps and charts from the Master at Arm's data terminal covers one grey bulkhead. Wall file slots for blank forms are mounted by the hatch beside the current MP roster. A large black and white aerial recon shot shows destruction of a city where Marines made intense battle. The caption reads: 'Santos Ridge, Picon, Liberated 0935 13 OCT 2005. 2500-3000 Centurions destroyed.'
Wed 08/Nov/2028 (IC Date)

The hatch to the current MaA's office is closed but not locked. It is after all much safer to leave hatches closed and sealed even if your office hours are 'open' in the event the deck suddenly lost pressure from a rupture. Ynyr himself is in his office standing off to one side as he posts the latest MP schedule to it's location on his wall for reference. It's already been sent out through their encrypted ship's internal network so people know what their duty assignments will be for the coming week.

When that's put up, Lleu checks it off of his 'to do list' on his dataslate and looks at the next item that requires his attention.

Carrying a file folder tucked against her side as she navigates through the ship, Sam moves through the corridor until stepping through the hatch into the security hub and, beyond, toward the office that she last remembers being Ynyr's. She raps her knuckles on the hatch frame and waits a beat before she tugs on it to wheel it open. "Got a moment?" she wonders through the hatch, the question paired with a smile.

As he starts to turn towards his desk, Samtara's knock stops him to look back. "Of course. Please come in, Colonel. What can I do for you? Coffee?" Look mom! Lleufer has his /own/ coffee maker in here now. It might even be drinkable.

His dataslate is set on his desk so that Ynyr may give Samtara his full attention.

"I may have had enough coffee already to possibly fuel this ship all on my own," Sam replies as she steps through and gives the hatch a solid nudge to swing it back into place. "That said, I can always add to what's already bouncing around in my system." She pauses to eye the coffee maker then Lleu then the coffee maker again, "Is that one of the new models that has the fancy touch screen and does everything but drink the coffee for you? Or is it a push button step back, wait for it to brew, then pour, kind? The first tends to make me want to bash it with a rock. The second, well, it's not quite as liable to draw a violent response at four A.M."

That elicits a smile out of the Master at Arms, "It's a bit older model far as I can tell but that suits me fine. I don't like to have to take out a specialized degree in coffee making to run the stupid machine." Lleu gives her a 'you are welcome to try it' gesture. As it happens, there's coffee already made, about half a pot. Though there is no telling how many hours ago, or if it's recent. It smells decent. If she's not going to tell him why she's come by right away, he can be patient. Ynyr leans his arse against his desk and waits, looking relaxed as he watches her with some slight amusement.

With the air of a coffee connoisseur, Sam hands the folder to Lleu while en route to the coffee maker, picks up the pot and sniffs at it before deeming it non toxic and hunts up a cup to pour it into. "Colt bought me a fantastic coffee maker a few years back. All the bells and whistles. The menu is in several handy languages. Programmable for several different coffee styles, time settings, coffee disbursement levels, all manner of this and that. The hand book with it is a solid inch thick, I swear it. The children all know how to use the blasted thing. Most mornings I just glare at it and get a cup at the cafe on campus, it's a lot less complex." Cup in hand, and coffee pot returned to the burner, Sam turns back and angles a nod at the folder she's handed Lleu. "Autopsy results and DNA results. Which do you want to go over first?"

Lleufer smirks, "Our kids are the same way. Whatever is the newest, latest tech that they can lay hands to, they eat it right up. I stay on top of what I have to but otherwise? I'd rather step up into the saddle and go ride in the mountains, or hunt." He smiles and snags his own cup that has some dregs in the bottom of it before he gets himself a refill. "DNA. I want to know if the Major was the real Intel man or a fake put into his place. That first, and anything else related to various DNA samples you tested." The folder she handed to him gets opened but stays lying on his desk while he takes his first sip of the hot coffee. Ynyr begins to skim through itas he listens, going to the section she'll be covering.

<FS3> Samtara rolls Medicine: Success.

Sam makes a sound that is both commiserating and amused while nodding, "Precisely. It's not that I'm not perfectly capable of being tech savvy and reading the handbook. It's that it's boring, and I'd much rather be drinking the cup of coffee instead of reading how to get the blasted thing to spit OUT the brewed coffee in the first place." She sips from the coffee that she's holding, makes a wry face at it, but dives right into the question and answer portion with: "I can tell you one thing for certain, and this is 'as certain' as our science is at the moment, so there's a grain of salt to everything. The DNA analysis of the remains that we have on the slab do not match up with the fleet's records of the man that was walking around and answering to the name Hamilton. Neither fingerprint or dental record nor tissue samples of the unidentified man in the morgue are on fleet records anywhere."

"All right, that's what I expected and likely the real Major Hamilton's dead. If you recovered any teeth fragments, were you able to extract mineral deposit isotope data and find his planet of origin and probable city location? Or do you need to jump back to the Colonies for that?" Samtara may not have that kind of equipment on board. "Sure would like to know if he even came from one of /our/ worlds." Lleufer sighs, "Anyway, anything interesting in the MaA's autopsy reports?" He flips through a few more pages but clearly appreciates her quick summary over a detailed power point presentation.

"Unfortunately, no. Everything we've tested is inconclusive," Sam replies with a decisive shake of her head. "We can keep his DNA and all the other pertinent data in an open file, we'll keep it to compare against as a background run. Should we ever run across DNA that flags familial tie, it'll pull. But that's all I can tell you about the remains. Unless someone comes forward to claim the remains, we're going to cremate them and dispose of them accordingly. Now, as to the Master of Arms, that one is more intriguing, and by that I only mean that we have more data and equally less answers." She lets that stand for a moment, "I can tell you that he had a blood alcohol level of 0.091 at the time of his death, and I'd imagine that might've come down a bit from when he last imbibed to when his heart stopped beating. There's trace of scopolamine in his blood, in his organs, and it suggests he wasn't being dosed heavily but it would've been cumulative enough to ensure that he was amiable, if not outright docile, to commands. There's no conclusive way to determine how long he'd been ingesting it, but the we can say with a measure of certainty that it would've been at least three days prior to the bombing."

Lleufer blinks, digesting that information so to speak. "Scopolamine. Makes you wonder … if they could find a way to dose him, they could get to any of us, couldn't they? Any way we can get hold of a sample of that? Do you have any in medical stocks, do you?" Ynyr lifts a hand to scratch idly at stubble coming in along his jaw, "It might make me feel a little easier if we set up chemical sniffers for it to have MP's do random tests on coffee pots and things around the ship." Lleu sighs, "Probably grasping at staws though. If they used it once, they're probably too smart to keep using it. Still." He glances down at his cup of coffee but he made up that pot himself. Somebody could still slip it into the machine somewhere, or into the coffee itself maybe. /His/ coffee, or some other specific target's.

"Not being a forensic scientist, I can't really speak to the probability that the people behind this would or conversely would not keep using something that actually works. That said, I have a healthy dose of paranoia still, which means that we'll keep an eye out for behavior that is consistent with this sort of dosing. It's not a solution, and it certainly isn't conclusive evidence or useful other than nailing down the why without being able to pinpoint precisely the who and how," Sam replies and gives another of those decisive shakes of her head. "We don't keep any on hand, no. We could requisition some, though most facilities like ours don't need to keep it, we know what it looks like chemically and that's typically sufficient for the tests."

Lleufer thins his mouth, "I didn't think so. Don't worry about it. It's just pissing me off that they can do this and we have little or no recourse to prevent it. You'd think with all our tech, and the Arpay's constantly adding to it, that we'd be able to do more. Frustrating." He closes the folder, "Anything else, Doctor?"

"What I will do is reach out to fleet records and find out when the last time is that the real Hamilton had to go through a medical clearance before reporting to a new duty station," Sam replies even as she frowns down into the cup of coffee she's holding. "Most influxes of new personnel are done in manageable size batches, enough for personnel to report to medical, report to their new command, get sorted into quarters and racks accordingly then be assimilated into the ships work flow. Which means that .. one of two things has happened, or possibly one of three. Option 1 is that the real Hamilton was substituted between his last duty station and here, in transit, and the new Hamilton was inserted into the group. It also would mean that he presented to medical all the necessary bonafides to make the medical staff here certain that the Hamilton that showed up is the Hamilton that the records stated he is. That's a security breach right there. Option 2 is that Hamilton that showed up here is the same one that was in his last duty assignment and even further back, again indicating a security breach but also calling into question how long the replacement has been in position. Lastly, or maybe just thirdly," and this is where Sam sets down the coffee mug and briefly curls her hands to shake the circulation back to her fingertips, "if there's a security breach in medical records, it calls in to question how many other records are not accurate. This is where I ask you if I'm being paranoid in suggesting that we re-scan everyone on ship. Dental, DNA, blood work, the whole lot to make certain there's no one else that isn't who they appear to be."

Lleufer grimaces, "That last one is up to you to decide, Doctor. As to how long it would take, what kind of man power hours it would put upon your staff. You'd have to speak with Commander Petra about that. While I don't want to leave any stone unturned so to speak, I also have to be realistic about what our options are here. And I'm definitely not qualified to make that decision as to retesting everyone on board." He tastes his coffee and thinks, "From what I have on Major Hamilton, he was transfering from Leonis only a few days before the bombing and was supposed to report for duty assignment on the Baker Bay. Our imposter turned up here on the Orion instead, and our former MaA signed him on board. But while in dry dock for some reason they were having the former MaA do the final sign off on everyone coming on board. That was two days before the bombing and it wouldn't have been too much trouble to dodge a physical in that short time. So my gut instinct suggests no fault with medical." (repose because it bugs me damn it)

"Mmmm, know equations," Sam agrees even as she makes a small gesture with both hands and indulges in a bit of a pace around the room and back. "The last time we did something of this sort, we were hunting cylons, well, skinjobs, lines. This time, we're just re-checking personnel to ensure that they are who they say that they are. Time consuming but not impossible, which is a null word at any rate. I'll bring it to Petra's attention and get his read on it; but I do believe that it's a pertinent safety measure all the same." She draws in a breath, exhaling a moment later as she nods at Lleu, "That rather neatly puts Hamilton's impostor on the suspect list. Not the only one, regrettably, but he's squarely on the list." Sam smiles suddenly, a wry sort of smile, "And now we're inspectors?"

Ynyr twists his mouth, "I am at least trained in investigation." To her last, first. Then Lleufer nods, "If you and the Commander think it's feasible, I'm certainly all for it. Starting with our most important people, and of course ourselves who are leading the investigations. I haven't even had my physical since I came on board and I'm overdue, but been really busy since the bombing." He considers and adds, "Might not be a bad idea to test for scopolamine while you are at it in the event someone else is already being made more … amenable." Clearly distaste that last word. "Unfortunately I have to agree that we likely have at least one more person involved, but we don't know of they may have been able to get off of the ship before everything was completely locked down and we jumped." Lleu sighs and adds low, "Thank you for your assistance in all of this, Samtara. I don't guess I have anything else to add at this time."

"Coming away with more questions than answers isn't actually unusual, in my line of work. I can't say that I'm tolerant of it, but it's par for the course, to use a sports metaphor," Sam remarks as she taps one fingertip against the cup that she'd emptied, "Thank you for the cup of coffee. I'll keep you in the loop once I have more data, and more real answers to work with."

"Thanks, Doc. I appreciate it, if you find anything." So far all Lleufer's gotten are little bits and pieces, but nothing enough to work with at this time. Lots of loose ends. If she wants the folder back, she's got it, or Ynyr can keep it to file with his other findings. Time for him to get back to his other duties.

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