"Report, Chekov."

The swish of the turbo lift departing the bridge followed the captain's orders. He held his shoulders square, confident — a pillar of stability in the face of uncertainty.

"Still no sign, Keptin."

"Dammit."

Kirk fell into his captain's chair, snatching up his PADD to review the available data. What he glanced his eyes over didn't make any logical sense: in front of the entire bridge's eyes, and on record due to the whirring data sensors of the Enterprise, a foreign space vessel sputtered in the far distance less than a solar hour ago, a subtle hovering in an otherwise still sector.

It was skimming the horizon of the planet they were approaching, breaching the hazy mesosphere in an eerie spectacle. Perhaps the encounter wouldn't have been so alarming if this planet wasn't a planet which showed absolutely zero signs of life, mirroring the 746 million Earth miles of dead space that surrounded it. The nearest life besides themselves was on a blazing comet, pockets of organisms burrowed in the crevices. The ship had been sailing smoothly, relishing the simple tasks of research and data management of the lifeless stars, planets, and comets they passed.

This one, called D684, was supposed to be no different. It was dreary looking, it's exterior coated in a thick debris of dust and it's color resembling something like dried clay.

Kirk had slowly uncrossed his legs as he registered the moving vessel, leaning forward and muttering, "Is that a…?"

Chekov's alarms had answered him, their alarms blaring beneath the young Ensign's fingers, affronted by the bizarre performance feeding through the visual records.

As Kirk always did when he doubted himself, he had looked over to his first officer for affirmation. Spock nodded his head; yes. This was real, and he had seen it too. When the captain had looked back to the view screen, it was suddenly gone. The alarms had silenced.

Now, after a brief visit down to Engineering to convene with a Scottish man with a gift for guessing games, he found himself back in the chair in which he first spotted the strange receptacle. He pursed his lips in mild frustration, wishing his friend in Engineering had had some kind of hypothesis.

"Spock, where is the closest planet to this one?" He twisted his head back to look at the Vulcan leaning over a seotoscope. Spock, without taking his eyes off his data, answered without hesitation.

"The nearest planet containing intelligent life is 3.2 billion Earth miles from our location."

"Thought so," grumbled Kirk in reply. They were in the middle of an uncharacteristically uninhabited area of the galaxy, and it was highly unusual to see anyone besides themselves out in the middle of the void they charted. It was possible the satellites sent out preceding the Enterprise's arrival were wrong on the assumption of dead space. They weren't nearly as accurate as the Enterprise sensors, however, they were reliable in minimal information, including the yes or no question of inhabited space.

So the question remained: who, or what, was on that spaceship? They were over halfway through their five year mission, and the furthest a federation vessel had ever travelled. Every inch of space they sliced past was an unknown.

However, even unknowns were assumed to show certain aspects of consistency. The laws of physics are irrefutable throughout the universe, as it is how the universe came to be. It's various species, planets, and unique conformations of life were to be developed differently, but they were all to be developed by the same physics of space that surrounded Earth, Anguria, the Andromeda — everything. Therefore, in an interesting thing to witness, many aspects of alien life shared similarities. Many things could be unexpected, but not entirely surprising.

What they just observed — an alien ship in the middle of nameless nothingness, appearing and immediately disappearing — was both unexpected and surprising. Alarming was also something of an accurate thing to be within the mix.

Kirk grumbled in his throat as he read the little amount of data on his screen. They'd hardly had enough to time to record anything more than the amount of time the ship was detected, it's rough size, and how far it seemed to be from D684. He then felt the silent presence of his friend standing to the right of him. Kirk looked up to Spock, blinding hoping the Vulcan would have an answer.

"Speculation, Spock? Anything?"

The Vulcan sighed, a rare but definitive sign that he too was stumped.

"I have none, Captain. Clearly, there was a ship roughly 229,000 Earth miles away from our own. Our eyes cannot have betrayed us, as I have data recorded by the sensors that it did indeed exist, if only for a moment."

"Who could they be? Did you recognize the design at all?"

He shook his head. "It was too far to adequately observe… , please access those few seconds in which the ship is visible, put it on screen, and magnify."

Chekov had been staring deeply at the screen, his mouth slightly open as he was lost in his thought of what he saw before him. He blinked a few times and sat back at the commander's voice, punching his controls to do as requested. He attempted to access the records to do as he was told, but as he did so, his eyes bugged at the blinking of empty data banks. He hesitated as he processed the abrogating information.

"Uhhhhh…." he lifted his hands from the control board, his eyes glued to the confusing message, horrified, as if it were a wailing child he didn't know how to quiet.

"Is there a problem, Lieutenant?" inquired Spock, sensing the young man's confusing.

"I…the computer, Meester Spock! Zere's no signs of that ship, the entire data awailable during those few seconds…it's completely gone, sir! Zere is nothing!"

With that bold statement hanging in the air, Kirk rose from his chair and Spock stepped forward to Chekov's controls.

"That is impossible." Spock said, mostly to himself, as he reached for the control board. He had just looked over the sensor charts moments ago, with his own extremely reliable eyes — they couldn't simply disappear. A foreign ship disappearing was a thing in itself, but the eradication of recorded data on the USS Enterprise was entirely another.

Kirk looked between the data banks and Spock nervously, praying Chekov had made an innocent mistake and that Spock would fix it. He reached behind him, grabbed his own PADD, and checked the data screen he had recently abandoned. His breathing hitched as it read as completely empty, as had the control board in front of Chekov. Any hope remaining plummeted when he saw the minor shake of Spock's head.

"He's right, Captain…the recording, the data of that ship," he turned to look at Kirk, ''is gone."