“How you doing up there, Elyssia?” asked Commander Lee, aware that the flight controller hadn’t so much as been able to blink since they departed Vespara, save for that quick jaunt into the Free State’s territory.

“Starting to get the hang of it, ma’am,” Ensign Rel replied. And indeed she was. She’d finally started to get a feel for how the ship handled within the Underspace’s distortions. “When we’re at warp, we sort of glide in our bubble, agents of our fate, but here, it’s more like riding a wave as the gravimetric disturbances push us along.” Or was it pulling them along? She wasn’t really sure, but the semantics didn’t matter. Whatever the mechanics were, what she’d learned was that her inputs had to come earlier and with more deliberateness because the Underspace was adding additional acceleration along the ship’s primary axis.

Sitting at the tactical station behind the command island, Lieutenant JG Rafael Cruz stared at his scopes. He had no role to play in their current endeavors, at least until they emerged in the space of hostile enemy power again, so it wasn’t really necessary, but it was better than staring out the main viewer. When he stared forward at the viewer, that was when his nerves ran wild about what might happen if they hit one of those swirling orange-brown walls.

There was nothing on his displays, of course. No one else would be crazy enough to try this. It was only them, of course. But then it wasn’t.

Lieutenant Cruz quickly sat up in his chair as he spied something on his scopes. He quickly double checked. No, it wasn’t a sensor ghost. It was too distinct. Even through the distortions, he was pretty sure he recognized the silhouette. Knowing better than to interrupt the activities unfolding on the bridge as Ensign Rel coordinated their flight path with her colleagues, he silently fired off a note to Lieutenant Irina Tarasova over on the Serenity. Was she seeing it too?

Aboard the Serenity, Lieutenant Tarasova received the message and checked her instruments. Yep, she was seeing it too. “Captain, I’m sending something to your console,” she said when there was a pause in the back-and-forth between Lieutenant Commander Sena, Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel. “We’re not alone in here anymore. Recommend reducing speed to seventy percent of current.”

“It’s not that simple, Lieutenant,” Lieutenant Selik cautioned as his fingers continued to dance across the controls, fighting a constant battle to keep the Duderstadt from coming unstuck from the ideal glidepath. “Our interia is being driven, in large part, by the dynamics of the corridor itself, and if we back off thrust, we may come off-center.” With the intense gravimetric forces they were fighting, one could not simply slow the ship as in normal space. Forcibly slowing the ship would require him to reverse impulse and increase artificial drag, and if they slowed too much, they risked not having enough thrust to maintain control against the energy gradient.

Captain Lewis, looking down at the screen next to his chair, understood exactly why his Chief Tactical Officer had called for it though. “I don’t care how you do it, Selik, but find a way,” he ordered. “It’s either that, or you’re going to wedge the Serenity between a pair of Keldon cruisers in just a couple minutes here.” They were gaining swiftly on a pair of Cardassian signatures that Cruz and Tarasova had rightfully picked out in the distance.

“Aye sir,” Lieutenant Selik nodded. He’d find a way.

As Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel coordinate their move, Lieutenant Commander Eidran leaned over to the Captain. “The Cardassians, hmmm?” the Betazoid Executive Officer asked under his breath. “What the hell are they doing out here?”

“Probably the same thing we are,” Captain Lewis replied. “Think about it. If the Underspace is really here to stay, it completely redraws maps and redefines the meaning of borders.” It was a scary thought, and the more he thought about it, the more he was discomforted. How many apertures were there out there? Initial reports from Fleet Command were that a good many had already been discovered, and this was only the beginning. He thought back to how hard it had proven to defend one wormhole from one aggressor during the Dominion War. If there were dozens, or hundreds even, of these apertures, and they were accessible to all of those who might wish harm upon the Federation, how could one defend against that?

“Captain, I don’t think they’re doing exactly the same thing we are,” Lieutenant Commander Sena interjected. “Or more specifically, I think they’re doing more than we are.” It was the second time in as many days that the Romulan xenotechnologist had gotten the feeling the others had the jump on them – first the Klingons, and now the Cardassians – and she didn’t like that feeling one bit.

“What do you mean?” Captain Lewis asked warily.

“Check this out,” Lieutenant Commander Sena replied as she cast some telemetry onto the main display. “At first, I didn’t notice it amongst all the debris.” The Underspace was littered with small particulates. The deflector shields shirked off the little stuff, and their flight controllers were nimbly dodging the bigger bits, but it did serve as a constant reminder of the consequences that awaited them if Lieutenant Selik or Ensign Rel bounced one of their ships off the corridor walls. “But, upon closer inspection, this isn’t debris. It’s powered, functional, and Cardassian in origin.” It was only after Lieutenant Tarasova had identified the Keldon cruisers that the Romulan science officer had put the pieces together.

“But what is it?” Captain Lewis asked as he squinted at the object in the display. It was so distorted he could hardly even make out its outer structure.

“It’s a probe.”

“Can you tell what it’s for?”

“Captain, I can barely tell you it’s a probe,” Lieutenant Commander Sena shrugged. It seemed such a silly question. Wasn’t he looking at the same readout she was? “But in better news, I just detected another one of these coming off one of the Keldon cruisers a moment ago.”

“And?”

“We’ll be passing it in approximately twenty seconds.”

They were both thinking the same thing, and Captain Lewis spun on his heels. “Tractor beam, Irina,” Captain Lewis said in the direction of his tactical officer. “Think you can grab it?”

“Flying at ungodly multiples of the speed of light, with our sensors blinded by radiation,” she cackled as she queued up tractor control. “Sure, why not?” She was overselling it a bit, they all knew, for while they might be moving at many thousands of times the speed of light relative to normal spacetime, they’d be moving within the corridor at little more than full impulse relative to the probe. Under normal conditions, it wouldn’t be a hard grab at all, but the emissions from the corridor’s walls were doing all sorts of funky things to the sensors. That meant she’d have to do it by hand, and that would be a good bit harder. “Going to manual.”

Now, suddenly, Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel took a backseat in the Captain’s mind, not because what they were doing was any less critical, but because they had a new mystery on their hands. One that was far more up his alley than astrometrics and flight control.

After a short pause as they continued to race towards their target, Lieutenant Commander Sena gave the countdown: “Coming up in five… four… three…”

Lieutenant Tarrasova tensed up, her fingers ready at the display.

“Two… one…”

Captain Lewis casted his eyes towards the main viewer. A tractor beam lanced out, sweeping across the bow in front of them as Lieutenant Tarasova fished for a small object no larger than an escape pod. And then, a moment later, the beam stabilized in place, having secured a hit.

“I’ve got it, sir,” Lieutenant Tarasova reported. “Bringing it in slow to shuttlebay one.”

“Nice grab, Irina,” Captain Lewis nodded. He glanced momentarily over at the Romulan science officer and then down at the conn. “Selik, tell me you’ve had enough time with this Underspace that you can navigate for a bit without our Romulan friend here?” He had a new task for the xenotechnologist from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Alright, Sena, get down to shuttlebay one and let us know what you find.”

She nodded and headed for the lift.

“Selik,” Captain Lewis ordered. “I know you’re going to hate me for this, but try to back us off a bit further, as far as we can while Irina can maintain a lock on those Keldons.” The Duderstadt class, in its long range surveillance configuration, could far outrange anything the Cardassians had, so he intended to use that advantage.

“What’re you thinking we do now?” Lieutenant Commander Eidran asked Captain Lewis under his breath as he leaned over again.

“We do what the Serenity was designed to do, and what we were trained to do,” Captain Lewis smiled. A mystery of subspace mechanics, as this had been until recently, was not really his calling, but stalking a foreign military vessel? That was very much what he knew how to do. “We follow the Cardassians and figure out what they’re up to.”