“I know we’re just sitting in orbit, waiting, but where is my helmsman?” Captain Charles MacIntyre asked after stepping out of his ready room, surveying the bridge and finding one of the key stations vacant.

Jenu Trid, Republic’s Chief Operations Officer, pointed at the empty seat from her station beside it. “Doctor Pisani left you a message when she came up and took Willow away with her.”

“Okay,” Mac said dubiously. A few steps, an examination and he had a padd in hand, the display already lit up with a brief message. “Doctor’s note. That’s all it says.”

“Wait, like an actual note?” Trid asked.

“No, as in it just says ‘doctor’s note’.” Mac handed the padd over to Trid to look at, who chuckled briefly at it. “Likely has something to do with their visit to the Hysperian ship yesterday. Speaking of, I know they left early this morning. Where are they right now?”

“Let me check,” Trid said, handing the padd back before checking her console. Chirps, clicks and pops as keys were pressed, functions ran and then finished. “Weird. They aren’t on sensors at all.”

“Long range scan?”

“That’s what I did.” Trid sounded confused at the scan results herself, immediately rerunning them as she spoke. “They couldn’t have gone far enough to leave long-range sensors. They were only doing warp six point eight.”

“When did we last have them?” Mac asked, walking to stand behind Trid and look at her console over the young woman’s shoulder.

Trid’s fingers flew over her console as she scrubbed over the sensor logs, finding her prey. “Medium range sensors as they were leaving the system. They slipped out of our sensor range, showed up on the quarter-hour long-range scan, then…nothing.” She turned enough to look up at him. “Ship that big doesn’t just disappear.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Mac straightened up as he thought, pacing towards the viewscreen. The hologram that comprised the viewscreen was flawless. Almost distractingly so, as he looked out at the flying spider web that was Thames Station. “Contact Thames Station, see if they’ll share their sensors logs. They should be running long-range scans continuously. In the meantime, let’s go active with our scans.”

Mac’s attention immediately shifted away from Trid as the starboard turbolift hissed open, Matt Lake spilling forth with a padd raised high and looking like a man catching his breath. Unable to speak, Matt didn’t hesitate, giving the padd a gentle toss once he saw his captain had seen him, then bracing himself on a railing.

A two-handed catch, a brief quizzical look to Matt, who waved his eyes down and Mac was reading the new padd. “Hysperian Royal Intelligence?” he asked after reading just the header on the document before him. “Query into the Crashanburn family…no record of any siblings for Sir Otto Crashanburn.”

“Just got that,” Matt said, breathing heavily with each word. “Thought I’d query the Hysperians about their wayward ship and the Viscount. Keep reading.”

“An Orion visitor from foreign lands yestermonth, suspected to be a liaison from a criminal syndicate originating from the world of their birth. Royal Intelligence suspects the Viscount procured an obfuscator from this visitor.” Mac felt his own fingers clenching around the padd tightly. “God dammit,” he muttered. “Suspected to be Starfleet wizardry.”

“We don’t have cloaking devices,” Trid said from his side. “Do we?”

“We’re not supposed to,” Mac answered. “But we also don’t let pirates into the service, now do we?”

“Channelling the commander, sir, I believe she’d like me to say she thought of herself as a preemptive nautical salvage merchant.”

“Piracy with extra steps,” Mac answered. “Though who’s counting, right? From what I’ve read, I’d call her work…proactive vigilantism.”

“It gets worse,” Matt said, having finally caught his breath and descended to the helm and ops stations. “I was speaking with a colleague last night. One who worked at the Daystrom Institute a few years back. They confirmed that a Genesis device is missing from inventory. So, there is one potentially in play, not just rumours.”

“Let’s consider any rumours we hear to be worthy of consideration.” Mac paced for a moment. “So, he fed me a lie about a missing brother turned pirate, then we hear the Viscount had Orions visiting and might have bought a cloaking device and now we can’t find the Hohenzollern. Conclusions?”

“Viscount Crashanburn is the Last Pirate King?” Trid asked. “And he’s off to go meet the Orion Syndicate to finalise purchasing a Genesis Device.”

Mac snapped his fingers as he pointed to Trid, a smile on his face. “Fits the bill.”

“All right, so what do we do?” Matt asked. “Warn Commander Sadovu?”

“No,” Mac said. “No, we wait. If they’re monitoring, they might notice comms. And raiders might have a way of contacting their boss, so hopefully she gets something useful out of them. But…we shouldn’t be so far out of position. Which way was the Hohenzollern going last we saw her?”

“Straight for the Archanis Nebula,” Trid answered. “Straight and true.”

“Could be a deception,” Matt chimed in.

“Could be. But my gut says it isn’t. Trid, find us a merchant going roughly in the right direction. We’ll tag along as an escort until either the Hohenzollern shows up or Sidda hails us.”

“Shouldn’t we follow the Hohenzollern directly?” Matt asked, indicating the padd in Mac’s hand. “They’re after a Genesis device. We have to stop them.”

“So far, supposition on that front. Strong supposition, though. And besides, we’ve lost them. Add in that I told Crashanburn a lot about how we’d go about searching for his fake brother.” Mac’s fingers once more clenched around the padd. “Nothing technical, just broad strokes. But if we go charging after them, even Crashanburn will put two and two together and realise something is up. No, we want him as off guard as we can.”

“And right now he thinks he pulled one over on you, so is less on guard and feeling confident.” Matt said, which Mac nodded in agreement to.

“Right, you two go over everything there is in the records about searching for cloaked vessels. I’ll go make a few calls and see if I can’t find anything about this potential Daystrom cloaking device. Trid, get us underway once you’ve found us a freighter to follow. I want to be as close by as we can when Sidda calls. Once she has anything we can act on, we’ll commence searching for the Hohenzollern.”

“Yes sir,” Trid answered.

“And in the meantime, I’m going to go find out why my chief medical officer has stolen my chief helmsman.” Mac handed the padd with Hysperian communiques on it back to Matt. “Call me if anything happens.” And with that, he was headed for the turbolift, leaving his officers to their tasks.