The first reports reached us on a Tuesday. Technician Maren Voss flagged three anomalous pings on the sector-7 motion tracker array during her 0400 sweep — readings that registered as biological signatures moving through a sealed maintenance corridor at roughly 1.4 meters per second. The corridor had been depressurized for eleven days. I reviewed the sensor logs myself that afternoon and confirmed what Voss already suspected: the SC-4000 modules were generating phantom returns, indistinguishable from real motion in every parameter the system tracked.
The Calibration Protocol Nobody Followed
Every motion tracker aboard Sevastopol runs on the Seegson SC-4000 sensor module, a unit already three firmware revisions behind spec when the station commissioned it in 2134. The operating manual — all 412 pages of it — specifies recalibration every 72 hours in environments below 0.3 standard atmospheres. In practice, nobody followed this. The procedure requires opening the sensor housing with a proprietary Seegson wrench that weighs 4.2 kilograms and was back-ordered for most of 2136.
"The tracker doesn't lie. It also doesn't tell the truth. It tells you something is there. What you do with that information is your own engineering problem." — Seegson SC-4000 Field Manual, p. 87
What Deck 7's Logs Actually Show
When I finally accessed the Deck 7 maintenance logs in February, the data told a story the incident reports had carefully avoided. The motion tracker array had been reporting ghost signatures for six weeks before the first containment failure, and at least two technicians had filed calibration requests that were never processed.