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Your investigation into the engine room and Evgeniy Cardoso continues slowly. Your duties to the base suffer as you spend long nights trawling over engine reports and reading long feeds of historic sensor data. Both scientists and support staff begin voicing more complaints about your poor showing in meetings and a growing list of minor problems that need seeing to.

At last, your hard work pays off. You spot a sensor blip in the internal engine: a brief registering of a foreign material before the sensors resume normal functioning. The blip is dated to a time on the Asterion shortly before the thruster malfunction.

You spend an hour crawling through the bowels of the engine room with magnifying spectacles, a high-powered flashlight, and rubber gloves. Eventually you spot it, a tiny gray hair. With tweezers, you carefully take it out. It's the right color to be one of Evgeniy's but it's not conclusive evidence of anything. Without proper scientific facilities, you won't be able to analyze it any further.

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