Access Database Engine -

The Arcturus-7 disaster had killed twelve people. The official report blamed a cascading oxygen-valve failure. But the valve logs didn’t match the crew’s final transmissions. Elara suspected something else—something deliberately erased. The Access engine was her only hope because it stored everything , even the ghosts of deleted data.

She saved the query results to a read-only USB. “Leo,” she said, unplugging the drive, “send a thank-you note to Microsoft. Circa 2007.”

Elara’s fingers flew. She wrote a SQL query by hand, something she hadn’t done in a decade: access database engine

“But Commander Vera is dead,” Leo whispered.

“Opening ‘Arcturus_Master.accdb’…” the status bar crept forward. “Repairing corrupted table: tbl_CommandOverrides.” The Arcturus-7 disaster had killed twelve people

Ten minutes before the official “valve failure,” someone with admin credentials—UserID “CMDR_VERA”—had manually overridden the oxygen mixture. Not once. Three times. Each override pushed the mix toward a nitrogen-heavy ratio that would cause slow hypoxia: confusion, euphoria, then unconsciousness. The perfect, invisible murder.

The Last Query

Elara opened another hidden table: tbl_DeletedRecords . The Access Database Engine had a quirk—it didn’t truly delete data unless you forced a compact-and-repair. Vera had tried. But she’d missed a shadow copy.