"Anything?"
Maximillion Walker lifted his head from the viewer and rubbed his tired eyes. Four hours of constant, highly detailed scanning of space had left him exhausted, defeated, and irritable. "Stuff all. Lots of space dust and some micro-meteors; no starship, no debris, no subspace or ion trails. Nothing interesting."
"Perhaps one of the other ships has found something," Navigation Officer Cartwright suggested hopefully, if not very optimistically.
"They'd have reported it if they had," said Brok, dismissing the thought.
That wasn't what Drake had wanted to hear. He sighed and sunk deeper into his chair. His lower back was starting to hurt from four hours of uninterrupted sitting. "Take us to the next scan point. Prepare for another sensor sweep."
Cartwright touched a button on his console, relaying course information to Alex's helm console. She fired up the impulse engines and the ship began its slow glide across the night.
"I've reached my limit," Maximillion said in no uncertain terms. He pushed himself to his feet and stretched. "Pini, take over here."
"Lieutenant…"
"Captain, my eyes are so badly strained I can barely see. I need a break. Twenty minutes."
"I can handle it, sir," Pini promised. She was the youngest crewman on the ship, unseasoned, and she had made more than a few mistakes since she had come aboard. She was intelligent, and Starfleet-trained, but her naivety weakened her. Walker and his number two, Carth Green, had wanted to leave her behind on VX-41 with Sarn and the other civilians.
Drake looked doubtful about the wisdom of leaving Pini in charge of the science console at such an important time. Maximillion saw the captain's doubt, and spoke up in support of her. "She'll be fine, sir. Anyway, the computer's programmed to flag up any contacts that match standard Starfleet hull materials. They'll appear on Brok's and Cartwright's panels as well."
"Very well. Get yourself some coffee."
Alex pivoted her seat around to face the captain. Her boredom threshold was notoriously low, and she had lost patience a long time ago. Her red eyes were frigid, a sure sign that she was fast running out of temper. "This might go faster if we sent out the shuttles. And you know how much I hate those things."
"Shuttle sensors are very basic," said Pini, without looking up from her sensor visor. Alex thought the young woman looked kind of cute with her face highlighted blue in the visor's glow. "They don't have nearly the resolution of our arrays."
"Yeah, but we can cover a lot more space with the shuttles flying. And all they have to do is scan for hull metals – duranium composites and that stuff. They can flag anything they find for a detailed scan by one of the starships."
Drake smiled at her, "Are you volunteering, Alex?"
"No chance in hell, Will," she assured him. "But I've got a list of people who've pissed me off lately…erm…pilots who've been inactive for too long and could really do with getting off the ship for a while."
He laughed. "Nice try, Alex."
"Thought I'd give it a shot." She tapped a series of commands into her console, and the impulse engines fired again, killing the starship's momentum. "We're in position."
"Beginning scan."
It seemed to take forever for the results to come in, and when they did Drake could tell that they weren't what he wanted from Pini's complete lack of reaction. If she had found anything, even a scrap of the Daedalus' paint, she would have been openly ecstatic.
"Nothing?"
"No, sir."
Drake was beginning to suspect that there was nothing to find. They had been at this for hours, all five ships combing the region where the Daedalus had disappeared, and so far not one of them had found anything to indicate the ship's location, or its fate. Hiro Matsura, his ship and crew, had simply fallen off the map.
Without needing to be prompted, Cartwright pressed a toggle. "Nav point relayed."
"Firing impulse engines."
"This is mind-numbing," opined Kana. She was draping her immaterial body across the helm-navigation desk, lying on her side so that she could stare at Alex and her host couldn't help seeing how bored she felt. "I thought scanning dust clouds was tedious, but this is a whole new league. There's not even anything to see!"
That was true. The Daedalus had disappeared in a stretch of open space, far from any solar system or spatial phenomena. All the view screen had to show was deep, dark space and a smattering of alien stars. The view had got boring almost as soon as it had appeared.
"Unless you've got any helpful suggestions to make," Alex said, without lifting her eyes from her instruments, "bugger off."
"So tetchy."
"I'm as bored as you are. Complaining about it isn't going to get us anywhere. Now, if you could offer some suggestions about what happened to the ship, something that could speed this process along, I'd happily listen to you."
"It's times like these that I think I chose the wrong host."
"Like anyone else would have you."
Kana looked peeved. "Now you're just being rude."
It made her feel better. Alex decelerated the ship to a relative stop and announced, "We're in position."
"Beginning scan," chimed Pini.
Again, their search was fruitless, as it was at the next four points. Walker returned to the bridge and took over from Pini, but he could find nothing that the young woman had missed. Yeoman Birch visited the bridge a few minutes later, bringing coffee that was gratefully accepted by all, and the ship proceeded to yet another search point.
"I'm starting to miss Sarn," Maximillion said a while later, as he took another break for his aching eyes.
Drake had never expected to hear that. "Why?"
His science officer had butted heads with the Vulcan scientist ever since she had come aboard. He had thrown a small party to celebrate her leaving.
"She was arrogant and stuck up, but she could sit at a console all day without suffering. Just the person we need right now."
Pini agreed with that. She was starting to feel a twitch in her spine from bending over the viewer so long, and the screen's glow was making her eyes burn. She was also feeling demoralised. Hours and hours of scanning, and what did they have to show for it? Less than nothing.
A light flashed on Sturnn's console, although it took the very bored communications officer a moment or two to notice. "Captain, we're receiving an incoming communiqué from the Patton."
"On screen."
Adis Mauva appeared on the screen. The Rigelian captain nodded a polite greeting to Drake, and began, "Captain, we have detected the remains of a warp trail. It is several days old and badly decayed. We can't get much information from it."
"Understood. Thank you, Captain. We'll converge on your location. With all ships working together, we might be able to learn more."
"We are of one mind. We await you, Endeavour. Patton out."
Drake had to work to keep the smile from his face. At last, a lead! "Ensign, plot course to the Patton; Alex, full impulse."
"With pleasure," she replied, not bothering to suppress her grin.
"About bloody time," grumbled Kana.
The Endeavour was the last ship to reach the Patton, and the others had already begun to run detailed scans. The Icarus had one of the best science officers in the fleet, and before Walker could even tune his instruments, she had pieced together the situation.
"There are four separate warp trails; three of them belonging to no ships I recognise," she told the taskforce. "The fourth is the Daedalus."
Alex didn't like what she was hearing. "If the ship's warp capable, why aren't they responding to Starfleet's signals?"
"Comm system damaged?" Offered Pini optimistically.
"That sound likely to you?"
Drake was not an optimistic man. "She's been captured."
Captain Alan Swift, U.S.S. Helios, appeared on the screen. Older than Drake, his black hair flaked with grey and the left side of his face badly burnt – the result of a particularly fierce battle of the Romulan War – he would have been the senior captain of the taskforce, if Rose hadn't given that honour to Drake. He resented being sidelined, but was determined to do his duty. "Agreed. Search and recovery?"
"You read my mind, Captain. All ships, form on us. We're going after the Daedalus."