2454.

The blackness of space was broken up by the small white/silver/blue/grey ringed sphere, that was crossing the galactic void at faster-than-light speeds, in a weak warp field. It was too small to be a shuttlecraft, an Alpha or Beta Dart, or a Delta Flyer or a runabout. It was a probe, spherical and supporting three metallic rings held together by struts. Protruding from the hull were several aerial masts, some of them were still operating, barely, but some of them had been smashed to pieces. The sphere itself was covered with hexagonal panels which sucked in exotic particles and hydrogen for fuel for the small reactor inside.

And it was old.

It had travelled in space for decades, and it showed; its surface was covered with small, deep dents from where clouds of dust or meteorites had smashed into them. The probe was travelling through the Milky Way galaxy, never stopping as it homed in on a single star, in a distant corner of the galaxy.

But it would never reach there, not under its power.

The probe had been noticed, by other probes sent out into the galaxy; some were exploratory, others were defensive and offensive, built in a time where optimism about a future in space was moderated by the awareness they were in danger in the galaxy.

Once the strange probe was detected, instantly there was a mission assembled to find it and recover it for examination when they realised it was one of theirs.

The probe was hunted down and its engines were deactivated, and then it was grappled inside one of the ships before the small group of ships warped back to Earth.

Xxxxx

The technical crew walked around the probe in the launch bay after the bay was re-pressurised and the captain fired several questions at them.

"It's got Earth markings," she said thoughtfully, "but I don't recognise them, so where did it come from?"

"It's an Intrepid-class starship's warp probe; we checked it on the database."

"Intrepid-class? Wasn't that one of the deep-space mission ships in the 24th century?"

"That's right, they were launched to cover more ground than the Galaxy-class starships and they were three times faster, too. They were equipped with bio-neural circuitry, highly advanced for the time, but primitive by today's standards. The class was mass-produced following the Dominion War. We've checked the registration codes of this probe, and it looks like we've found a probe launched by the UES Voyager."

"UES Voyager?" The first officer repeated. "I think I've heard of that one, wasn't she declared missing?"

"Yep. She was an Intrepid-class starship, launched from Earth before the Dominion Wars, and she vanished and nobody ever found out what happened to her. Nobody knows what happened. Several expeditions and long-range probes were launched, but nothing came from their searches," a technician replied. "Until now."

"The obvious question is what happened to the ship and her crew," the captain said thoughtfully, "any theories?"

"None, and before you say anything, we can't exactly download the database; this thing is a century out of date, and its computers are incompatible with ours."

"Are you sure there's nothing we can do?"

"We could rig something up," a technician said thoughtfully, "but there's a chance everything will be wiped."

"A very big chance," another tech added. "I wouldn't recommend it. If we build a computer and get something wrong, we would be losing the chance to find out what happened to the crew of the Voyager; now, they launched this probe and it likely has locked in its database, a record of what happened. If we take the probe home, to Earth, we have a chance to recover it. But this ship doesn't have anything that can restore the computer database."

The captain mulled it over in her mind thoughtfully. She wanted nothing more than to have the glory of discovering what happened to a lost starship, but she was also a practical woman - she wouldn't have reached her rank without it, and she had no intention of losing such information.

'Besides, if the Voyager crew survived then the destination of the final resting place for the ship is likely gonna be the first place the intergalactic mission will head,' she thought to herself.

Raising her voice she said to her first officer, "He's right. Number One set a course for Earth. Engage when ready."

"You're not going to see what's in the probes data-core?" The first officer, Number One was surprised.

"No. That job will be Earth's. We will take the probe back home and give it to Space Fleet Command. They can handle it," the captain said. "Set a course for Earth, engage at max warp."

Seeing the matter was settled the first officer nodded. "Aye, captain," he replied and he tapped his communications headset and relayed the command.

Xxxxx

Earth - the capital of the United Earth Federation.

The hanger in Space Fleet Headquarters was dominated by the ringed globe of the probe. The technical crews had gone over it and they had found Intrepid-class ships in the mothball yards that could readily access the contained database inside the probe and download it.

"Voyager was lost," Natalie Archer said to her fellow captain, Georgina Paris. "Look," she accessed the file PDF which had been transferred to her wrist computer, she pressed the controls and a holograph of text appeared. Many log entries.

"Voyager," Georgina whispered, as she kept one eye on the text while her mind went back in time. "One of my family was lost on Voyager. Tom Paris. He was convicted and sent to prison for falsifying reports after a runabout disaster. When he vanished, it broke my granddad's heart because he missed out on the chance to make amends. Now it looks like Tom survived for a time after all. Do we have any idea what happened?"

"We will once we've gone through this lot. We're still taking the database apart, piece by piece while making sure we don't fry anything."

Georgina shook her head in dismay. "It's so irritating we have this problem, especially with access to an Intrepid-class ship around."

"Originally they were fitted with bio-neural tech, Georgina, but when the Dominion war came along we had to switch to isolinear hardware and we didn't go back to the gel packs. The Dominion created several viruses after seeing the weakness and they exploited it. We turned to crystallography after that, as it's much more resilient. But it's too advanced and incompatible," Natalie replied.

Georgina was not in the mood to talk about the history of Starfleet's computers. "How long before we find out what happened?"

"Soon."