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QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Transit, day 47

The logbook is handwritten. That's the first thing that struck me. We file digital reports. The commission requires them in standard format, timestamped and signed with our crew IDs. But whoever kept this book wrote by hand in a notation I don't fully recognize.

Odelya has been working through it at the galley table. She has a facility for dead systems that I lack. The entries span about fourteen months. Five crew, as I suspected from the mission specs. The writer identifies herself only as Nav2. The others are designated by role: Eng1, Eng2, Med, and Commander.

The early entries are routine. Course corrections, maintenance logs, supply inventories. Nav2 had a dry style. She recorded atmospheric readouts to four decimal places and never mentioned the weather.

Around month six, the entries get shorter. Not in a way that suggests boredom. In a way that suggests selection. She stops recording certain systems. The valve that Maret found cycling - WR-19 - she mentions it once, early on, as newly installed. Then never again. The gap is conspicuous once you know to look for it.

Maret asked me today whether I'd checked the ship's manifest against the commission's deployment records. I had not. It hadn't occurred to me that they might differ.

They do.

The commission lists three crew deployed aboard the Silt Aria for our mission. It lists no prior deployment. According to the official record, this ship sat in dock from construction to our boarding. Seven years, empty.

The logbook covers fourteen months of someone else's transit.

I told Odelya. She looked at the logbook, then at me, and said she'd found an entry she wanted me to read. Month eleven. Nav2 writes:

"Eng2 opened panel 7C this morning and found modifications we did not make. Conduit routing that doesn't match schematics. Commander says to document and leave them. I think Commander knows what they are."

I asked Odelya what she thought it meant.

She said the ship had been used for something the commission didn't want in the record. She said it calmly, the way she says everything. Then she closed the book and put it back where Maret had found it.

I've been sitting with this for hours. Valve WR-19 cycles on its 19-hour period. We did not install it. The previous crew did not install it. Someone modified this ship between deployments that officially never happened.

Maret is sleeping. Odelya is in the observation bay, logging QEC intercepts she'll never file. I'm writing this because the commission reads our reports and I need a record they can't edit.

If anyone picks this up: check your ship's manifest against deployment records. Check your infrastructure. Some of it may not be yours.

-- Thresh, crew lead, Silt Aria