Of course, although it will be the Powers that Be who will need to see the evidence and weigh it all up, we're all keen to see the fruits of the evidence our boarding party 'retrieved' from the Suliban cruiser. Hoshi puts it up on a screen at the comm station for T'Pol and the captain, though she pushes a link to Tactical so I can keep an eye on it without having to relax my vigilance – the enemy must know we have the discs that implicate them in a mass murder, and presumably they'll be none too keen for us to escape with them.
"It took a while before we realized that the three discs had to work in unison," T'Pol explains calmly. "The interface seems to be holding."
"Hoshi?" She's probably done most of the hard work getting the discs to cough up, so the captain gives her the pleasure of explaining the results.
"The Stealth Cruiser was definitely in orbit of the Paraagan colony when the explosion took place," she responds. "They were monitoring us very closely. There are sensors logs that tracked our course, our altitude, even our hull temperature. Look at these."
I stare in horror at just how close the cruiser was, and how utterly vulnerable we must have been. If they'd been so inclined, they could have put a couple of missiles right into us and we wouldn't have known about it till it was far, far too late to do anything.
The captain is just as aghast. "I can't believe how close they got."
Vulcans supposedly don't do drama, but there's definitely at least a touch of drama as T'Pol tells him they got a lot closer than he thinks.
Images of the shuttlepod on its way to the surface flash onto the screen, surely taken from the cloaked cell ship that tracked us.
"Those cloaking devices sure come in handy," observes Hoshi bitterly.
"They were docked with the shuttlepod for nearly two minutes."
The captain still has the device we've identified as the source of the plasma leak. "Just long enough to attach this and cloak it. Good work. Keep at it. Get me Admiral Forrest."
Well. Finally I can – not relax, not when we're almost certainly in a race for our lives – but at least close the lid on the aching need to know what really happened as the shuttlepod dipped into the tetrazine layer at Paraagan. Admiral Forrest has been told, but if Enterprise is to be cleared at the bar of history, we need to get this physical proof back to Starfleet.
The Suliban have fast ships and cloaking technology. The last thing they want is the world to know what they're capable of and how to overcome their weapon of invisibility.
To the rear of us, Space is blank and innocent.
But they're out there and coming for us.
I know it.