The USS Serenity and the USS Ingenuity continued to race the Underspace, stalking the Keldons they’d picked up a half hour prior. They had the pacing down now. The corridors beneath subspace, as dangerous as they were, had become familiar to Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel after a few hours within the labyrinth, and now it was just a matter of following the twists and turns while keeping their prey in sight.

“Divergence, T plus eighteen,” Lieutenant Selik announced from the conn. The telemetry, while distorted by the contours of the Underspace, was no longer disorienting, and he could see clearly that the corridor was about to split. He just needed to know which way the Cardassians went. “Direction?”

“Left,” Lieutenant Tarasova reported from tactical. She’d been tracking the cruisers ever since they picked up the pair. At this distance, she could see little more than the glint of their hulls on her scopes, but that was all she needed to do. Down below deck, Lieutenant Commander Sena, meanwhile, was dissecting the probe they’d caught with their tractor a half hour ago.

“Ingenuity, going left, bearing three one one at eleven,” Lieutenant Selik reported over the ship-to-ship line he had open with the Ingenuity‘s flight controller. The Pathfinder cruiser was tight on their tail, but in the Underspace, even a split second of delay could cause the two ships to get split, and if they lost each other in the Underspace, they’d likely never reunite, at least not until they returned home. That meant careful coordination was critical.

“Three one one at nine, confirm.”

Ensign Elyssia Rel, at the conn of the Ingenuity, had seen the same split that Lieutenant Selik had announced, and she’d just been waiting on his call as to which direction the Serenity would go. She queued it up, ready to follow.

While the scene unfolded before him, Captain Lewis heard the doors of the turbolift hiss open behind him. He turned with anticipation as Lieutenant Commander Sena stepped through. “Tell me you found something?” Captain Lewis asked the Research Fellow in Xenotechnology from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity.

“The probe is purpose built to monitor the flow of the tetryon field within the network,” Lieutenant Commander Sena replied as she retook her position at the science station. The probe, she’d found, carried a very specific sensor suite, and she had no doubt to its purpose.

“Meaning?” Captain Lewis asked.

“Meaning the Cardassians are way ahead of us here.”

Behind the Captain, the ship veered left, following the course that Lieutenant Selik had called out a moment earlier. Captain Lewis didn’t even turn to watch, nor to confirm that Ingenuity had made the turn with them. Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel, he knew, had the matter handled. What he was more concerned with was what the Romulan had just said. “How do you figure?”

“Captain, we’re just starting to map out these corridors,” Lieutenant Commander Sena pointed out. While they’d started to get the feel for travel through the network, as evidenced by the smoothness with which Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel were navigating, they’d only followed one branch to its end. They were a long way from having a good map of the network, let alone understanding its dynamics. “The Cardassians are already instrumenting it.”

“To what ends?”

“I’m not sure, and frankly, that goes to my point,” Lieutenant Commander Sena replied. “After Outpost C-91 and the saber rattling in the DMZ, I can think of only bad outcomes if the Central Command and the Obsidian Order have turned their attention to the Underspace.” 

The former Tal’Shiar agent had her own reasons for distrust of the Cardassians, but so did Captain Lewis for that matter. And while he didn’t trust her in the slightest, he found himself appreciating the way she thought. “On that, I’ll agree with you.” He looked back towards the viewscreen. “So for now, we continue to follow, and see where it takes us.”

“Yeah, about that…” Lieutenant Tarasova jumped in. “I’ve got some bad news. A couple seconds ago, I just lost the Keldons.” Her fingers moved swiftly across the controls as she worked to reacquire them, but they were just gone. “Cruz confirms the same.”

“The fuck?” Captain Lewis asked of no one in particular. How did one simply lose their prey when the Underspace corridor was very much a one-way, no-deviation affair?

It was Lieutenant Commander Sena, now settled back into her station, that had the answer: “I’m detecting another negative energy density tetryonic nodule ahead.”

Captain Lewis looked at her frustratedly. Human or Romulan, these damn scientists all talked in technobabble. Couldn’t any of them just give it to him straight?

“Aperture incoming,” Lieutenant Commander Sena clarified. “T minus twelve.”

Now that the Captain understood. The Cardassians had vanished because they’d gone through an aperture, and now the Serenity and the Ingenuity were about to go through as well. It wasn’t like they could just stop or turn around, and that meant, in just a few seconds, they’d be face to face with their prey, plus whatever lay waiting for them in normal space beyond that aperture. Somehow, he doubted that the Cardassians would take kindly to being tailed.

“Red alert!” Captain Lewis declared. “All hands to battle stations!”