The ceiling was frustratingly low in the tiny junction room, expected to be occupied rarely if at all, and it pressed down on the pair of officers with an oppressive gloom. Cramped for any but the smallest members of the crew, it seemed doubly difficult for Lieutenant Commander Saba as she twisted her tall form awkwardly to run her tricorder closer to the deck plates.

“Anything?” Atil’ika asked again, steadying herself on the room’s single console as she too found herself stooping slightly.

“When I have something, I will inform you, Commander.” Saba hissed with a polite curtness. They had been at it for several hours now, scouring every room on the corridor that led down the belly of Ascension towards the shuttlebay Atil’ika had presumed the old Yomaji woman had been removed to. As yet, no luck in finding any trace of her.

“So, is that a no?”

“This space is filled with large amounts of electromagnetic interference due to the plasma conduit.” Saba tilted her slender neck towards the glowing yellow conduits that ran from floor to ceiling at the opposite end of the room. “It is difficult to divine the different energy signature.”

“So, you do have something?”

“A possibility only, and not one I am currently willing to put a claim on.” Saba looked towards the weary commander, whose brow continued to tighten in frustration at their lack of success. “I do not wish to place a flag in the ground without double-checking.”

“Not even a tiny little flag?” Atil’ika held up a pinched set of fingers. “The tiniest of flags. Barely a flag at all, just a little pencil mark?”

Saba stood from her crouching position, though in the small confines of the junction room, she inevitably was still slouched slightly.

“I thought you prized my high standard of interrogation.” She stated matter-of-factly.

“I do.”

“Was that not why you asked me to join the ship from my geophysics lab on Tiklo Prime?”

“It was.”

“And would relaying inaccurate information not be counter to that value?”

“I’m just wondering if there are any leads. This is the last room on the list.” Atil’ika chewed her lip in frustration. They had started in the shuttlebay as the most obvious location for the visitor’s disappearance; then the pilots’ lounge, four separate storage lockers, a waste exchanger and an atmospheric cycler containing one surprised petty officer looking for a quiet place to nap.

Saba sighed heavily, her thin body heaving visibly beneath her long, flowing version of a Starfleet uniform as she let out a deep breath. Despite her misgivings, she offered the tricorder towards the senior officer, whose eyes lit with a hopeful glow.

“It is an almost microscopic flag,” Saba warned through slightly gritted teeth.

On the tricorder screen, a steady stream of almost incomprehensible data trundled lazily. Atil’ika scoured the numbers for any sort of inconsistency but found her science skills severely lacking as the series of data chunks merged into a geometric blur.

“I don’t see anything, not even the hint of a flag,” Atil’ika griped, tapping the screen with a gnarled blue finger in the vain hope of a scientific epiphany.

The lieutenant commander’s lanky form curled herself over Atil’ika’s shoulder, a not unwelcome aroma of sandalwood and oud accompanying her sudden closeness. The pair stood in silence for a moment as the data continued to flow across the screen.

“There,” Saba whispered as she reached out with an almost impossibly long digit. “Do you see it?”

It took Atil’ika’s eyes a moment, her aged orbs struggling to work through the magic eye puzzle of the tricorder’s scan data. It all seemed rather normal, even mundane, through the lens of her fairly uneducated eye. Then suddenly, for the briefest moment, it flashed with a sudden inconsistency, a glimmer of gold amongst the dull mud of data.

Atil’ika let out a short snort of confused surprise.

“There, again,” Saba whispered as the pair narrowed their focus into the small screen.

“What is it?”

“A glimpse of some ionised energy,” Saba clarified, pressing a control to isolate the readings. “Just a glimpse.”

“Ionised from what?” Atil’ika asked.

“That I cannot say for certain.”

“Saba?”

The science officer sighed again with frustration, sending a mesmerising miasma of her scent into the older woman’s nostrils.

“If I had to guess-” Saba began.

“-Which I would very much appreciate-”

“- it is some sort of residual transporter trace,” the woman finished, her nervousness at conjecture audible to the ear.

Atil’ika’s brow knitted tighter in confusion, forcing her two large cranial ridges closer together as she considered the new information.

“But the Yomaji don’t use transporter technology, I didn’t even see any sign of it on the surface of the colony,” the commander mused, closing the tricorder and handing it back to the still stooping Saba.

“You are correct, the Yomaji believe it to be a direct contradiction to their faith. In the process of molecular disassembly, they believe a being ceases to exist. To use the technology is tantamount to a death sentence.” Saba slotted the tricorder back into the loose leather belt that hung across her bony waist. “Moreover, it is a widely held belief amongst them that reconstitution is a perversion of life.”

A spark of thought shot between Atil’ika’s ears, causing her antenna to twitch nervously.

“Does the scan indicate whether it was a dematerialisation or materialisation?” The commander murmured, her mind leading her to dark thoughts.

“That is not something I can confirm with such little data, only that a transport seems to have taken place here,” Saba motioned to the small room. “We are lucky the space is not regularly used; otherwise, the passage of crewmembers would have likely dispelled any trace.”

Atil’ika took a few long steps forward, measuring the room by her wobbly stride. It was only a few metres at most, but for the diminutive Yomaji, it could be plenty of space, enough for three people.

“Can we access the internal sensors for this area at the time we think the woman disappeared?” Atil’ika asked.

With one long arm, Saba reached to the nearby console and summoned it to life, a dull glow illuminating both their faces. A few simple commands later, and a top-down map of the room and adjoining corridors appeared on the screen. As the time index rolled past for the evening prior, three glowing dots entered the room from the corridor and stood for all of thirty seconds before, quite unexpectedly, three dots became two.

“That seems like a transport to me,” Atil’ika announced with a raised eyebrow.

“It would seem so, commander, but to where?” Saba turned her head to face the woman. “We went to warp moments after the Yomaji shuttle landed, and to my knowledge, there have been no other vessels in close enough range to receive a transporter signal.”

“Perhaps, Saba, she never went anywhere.” Atil’ika’s antenna twitched again. She was on to something; she was sure of it.

“You suggest the transport was never completed?” Saba hissed with shock. Such a thing was possible, to store a person’s signature in the digital sphere, and had been undertaken by Starfleet officers multiple times, but only in the most extreme circumstances. It was, in essence, a digital purgatory.

“Possibly, but dematerialisation is beginning to sound an awful lot like being dismissed.”

“You believe they killed her then?”

“Or stored her for a later punishment.”

“That sounds truly heinous,” Saba shuddered visibly at the suggestion. “You think The Divine would order such a thing?”

“I think there’s the possibility she doesn’t even know.” Atil’ika frowned again, the familiar furrows of her wrinkled brow easing into place after half a century’s worth of repeated action.

A sharp trill interrupted the pair’s uncomfortable musings as a long strip of light in the bulkhead turned yellow and began to flash with nervous energy.

“All hands, yellow alert. Command team to the bridge.”