“I think I have something.”  Sadie Fowler turned in her chair at the science station, her eyes weary from reading the various amounts of scans and reports the science teams were collecting and sorting.

Ambrose glanced up from the consoles in his chair, “Something good, I hope.”  He stood and walked to stand beside her.

She pointed to the screen, “We’ve been tracing warp trails, impulse remnants, and whatever else we could find.  There is something…interesting in the patterns we’ve found.”  She tapped at the console, and the screen showed various paths through the sector.  She highlighted two of them, “These two are the most recent, and while one goes off in a random direction…this one made a straight line out to here.”  Another tap revealed a sector that hadn’t been mapped recently.  “It’s about two hours from here…but there’s a good chance we’ll find an answer there.”

The FO pointed to the other line, “Are you sure that’s as random as you say?”

Fowler frowned and felt her heart rate pick up speed suddenly.  She looked at the trace and followed it until it faded.  “I’m not sure what you’re…oh.”  She zoomed in on the last few parts of the trace, “There’s a sudden turn there.”  She glanced back at Harris, “You think there’s something that way too?”

Ambrose contemplated for a moment as he wondered if he was reading too much into what he was seeing.  He answered with, “Gul Hasara is a smart Gul.  He’d never put his people in danger.  Some Guls, sure.  But he struck me as a different kind…I wonder if he sent them away and did his best to hide their trail.  Anyone looks at that, and they might dismiss it out of hand as some random ship coming through the sector.  But you see the seemingly random changes in course?  There’s an odd symmetry to it if you spend a second more looking at it.  There, there…and there.”

Sadie nodded slowly as she began to see what the commander was seeing, “That makes sense.  So you think the colonists are in one direction and Gul Hasara is in the other?”

He shrugged, “Or the other way around.  What I do know is that eventually, whoever took Hasara is going to get tired of trying to get the information out of him, and they’re going to come back looking for answers.  They might take a closer look at this and make the connection we did.”  He returned to the center chair, “Set a course for the random trail.  Let’s see where it takes us.  I’ll advise the captain of our progress.”

Soon enough, the Edinburgh jumped to warp speed on the hunt.