“Did you manage to track it down?”

Cade had managed to resist temptation for a couple of hours, but even he had his limits, and he found himself drifting closer to the Ops console. McGowan looked up, her expression distracted for just a moment. The pause was long enough to tell him he’d found her deep in thought. He was about to apologize for disturbing her when she smiled and shook her head, frustration washing over her expression.

“No, and to be honest it’s driving me more than a little nuts,” she admitted.

“You want me to take a look?” he asked lightly. She was Chief of Ops, and the look he’d gotten from her file said this definitely wasn’t her first rodeo, so he didn’t want to assume.

“Yeah, I could do with another pair of eyes on it, if you don’t mind, sir,” she offered with a wry smile. “I’m at the ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ stage.”

“Of course, I don’t mind at all.” 

He took her place at the console when she stepped aside, and a sense of familiarity washed over him. 

“What was bothering you?” he asked as he ran through all the reporting screens, getting a sense of what was going on. “Everything here looks to be perfectly within tolerances.”

She nodded. 

“Yeah, that’s exactly the problem. It’s perfect. Too perfect,” she kept her voice low, just between the two of them.

While Ops wasn’t as flashy as, say, Tactical or Helm, with engineering it formed the backbone of the ship. None of the fancy systems, like Helm or Weapons Control, worked without power from the warp core, or Ops getting it where it needed to be. If the power allocation system went on the fritz, it caused a whole heap of problems. Not necessarily the blow-the-ship-up type of problems, more the irritating and persistent kind. But problems were problems and it was his job to iron out problems.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” he mused as he looked at the readouts again. Really looked at them.

It was damn near perfect, which usually meant the calm before the storm and that things were about to screw up in a spectacular fashion. Looking up, he caught McGowan watching the captain. The glance they exchanged in the briefing room came back to mind, and curiosity filled him.

“I’m going to go ahead and tip engineering off for a level-six diagnostic on the systems,” he said. “Have you served with the captain before?” 

He kept his voice light. He wasn’t being nosy, not really. It was his job as XO to get to know the crew.

“What?” McGowan blinked at him and then shook her head. “Sorry, sir, I was miles away. No, we’ve never served together before.”

“Oh.” He tapped in his authorization and routed the request down to engineering. “In the briefing, it seemed like you knew each other.”

“We do,” she confirmed. “I’m in the same marriage group as her brother.”

“Oh.” Okay, he hadn’t expected that. “So… she’s your sister-in-law?”

McGowan shook her head, then frowned. “Yes… well, legally, no. I’m not married to her brother. He’s married to my husband.”

“Oh. That’s… different.” Cade tried to wrap his head around it and then smiled. “Not bad different though. You’re human though, aren’t you?” 

He couldn’t help a swift look across the bridge at the captain. There was no way McGowan was the same species as the captain. He’d never seen a woman that tall who wasn’t Klingon in some way.

McGowan chuckled at the look on his face as he moved aside and let her have her console back. 

“I am, and yes, it’s different. Multiple marriages are their custom. And really, it works well,” she shrugged. “I didn’t have much family of my own, and now I have this huge extended one.” She grinned. “You just have to make sure you don’t get lumped with the cooking at Christmas. They’re all built like that, and boy, can they eat.”

He blinked. “Yeah, I can see that. I mean, I would suspect as much.”

He should stop talking. Like, right now. 

“Captain.” The comms officer turned from her console. “We’re receiving a distress call.”

Cade’s head snapped up at the same time as the captain’s. 

“On screen,” she ordered, as Cade crossed the bridge to retake his seat at her side. 

The comms officer, an ensign currently on her first bridge duty, shook her head.

“It’s an automated signal, ma’am, from the USS Resolute.” 

You could have heard a pin drop on the bridge. The Resolute was Interceptor’s division ship, on a parallel patrol route so that between them they could cover more space. She was also a hardy little ship with an experienced captain. There wasn’t much they couldn’t handle, so to receive an automated distress call was concerning.

“What was the Resolute’s last known location?” the captain asked. “And where is the distress call originating from?”

Cade’s fingers flew over his chair’s arm console as he accessed the Resolute’s mission logs.

“They last made a stop in the Trenaris system,” he said, throwing the Resolute’s planned patrol route up on the main view screen. It overlaid the stars in front of them, a red line through several systems that followed the route the Rhode Island class had taken. 

“And their distress call is originating at these coordinates,” he said, adding a red dot on the screen where the Resolute’s path abruptly stopped.

Captain Mason studied the screen and then frowned. “There’s nothing there. And we’ve had nothing other than that automated signal?”

“No, sir, nothing.”

Her frown deepened. “So either whatever it was took them by surprise, or…”

“Captain, the signal’s gone.”

Mason leaned forward slightly. “Gone or stopped? Can you contact the Resolute?”

“No, sir.” For her first shift on the bridge, the ensign was holding up well, with only a slight hint of nerves as she found herself the sole recipient of the captain’s attention. “Gone, sir. The signal didn’t stop. It’s just gone.”

Mason nodded. “Excellent work. Thank you, ensign. Helm, plot us a course. Drop us just outside that system. If there’s a problem, I don’t want us dropping in right on top of it until we know what it is.”

“Aye, captain,” Lieutenant Cavendish replied. “How quickly do you want us there?”

“Yesterday. If you can do that without breaking either the engines or the laws of temporal mechanics.”