Two minutes into the playback Dakal knew he’d had enough. At triple speed the halos seemed to explode across his screen like a sort of natural fireworks display. Except there was only one sort of explosion and they never lasted longer than a second or two. “Dull” simply didn’t come close to describing it. If triple speed was desirable to detect a pattern in the playback, septuple or octuple would be more so.

  Above him the chatter continued between the officers. Unable to give attention to the actual words, his peripheral awareness still managed to detect the tone of conversation as it swung from guarded optimism to total defeat and back again.

  “…wasted time,” said someone, probably Hsuuri.

  “…damned engineers,” said one of the Benzites.

  “…nothing but gears for brains.” That was aMershik for sure. He was well into yet another of his dissertations on the futility of optimism when something on Dakal’s display leaped out at him.

  A weird shimmering distortion had appeared in the darkling halos, faintly at first, but with steadily increasing effect.

   “Hope is an illusion,”aMershik droned on above him.

  Slowing the playback to its normal rate of progression caused the variances to disappear. Whatever they were, they inspired only minute incremental changes in the scans. They were nothing the sensors, even Titan’s sensors, would detect in the moment, but they stood out sharply when viewed at hyperspeed as he had done.

  This effect wasn’t new then and, therefore, probably not the result of the engineers’ tinkering.

  Accelerating the playback again to septuple speed brought out the pattern, now growing even more distinct as the time stamp progressed.

  He’d started on day one of their examinations and was now up to the dawn of day five. The distortion pattern vanished for several hours, only to reappear at roughly the same time as when it had made its debut. It vanished again at approximately the same interval and subsequently reappeared.

   “Hope in one digit cluster,”said aMershik. “Excrete in the other. Observe which fills first.”

  aMershik’s pronouncements were consistent if nothing else, but Dakal now had his own little maxim in mind, a Cardassian one.

   Pull the thread and watch the curtain unravel.

  The fireworks sped by, now very clearly examples of the same pattern of distortion discovered by Melora Pazlar. They vanished and reappeared at the same regular intervals but, sometime around the middle of day twenty, they became more severe, randomly shifting the colors of the halos from one end of the spectrum to the other.

  It was certainly unusual, but was it significant? If there was a hidden meaning to the pattern of the distortions, Dakal couldn’t see it.

  “What have you got there, Cadet?” said Jaza, suddenly standing beside him. Dakal had been so enraptured by the fiery halos he hadn’t heard the senior officer reenter the pod. From the sound of aMershik’s tedious monotone and Fell’s occasional pithy retorts, none of the others had either.

  “I’m not sure I know, sir,” said Dakal a bit more slowly than he would have liked. “It looks like some kind of quantum distortion, but it’s so diffuse-” He meant to slide into an explanation of the chore Roakn had set him, but Jaza was already nudging him aside.

  “Quick playback. Quantum distortion translated to the visual. Got it,” said Jaza absently, his hands whipping across the console so fast they were almost a blur. “Did you cross-link this with Pazlar’s boryon scans?”

  “I didn’t think to,” said Dakal. “I only just discovered this.”

  Jaza disappeared into himself for a few seconds as he processed what he saw, made changes and additions to the software he employed to dissect the data. When he looked up again he seemed like his normal self, as if this new mystery had somehow inoculated him against the fallout from the destruction of the original search. “Jaza to stellar cartography.”

   “Pazlar here. Go ahead.”

  “I’m linking you with the sensor pod’s documentary files of our mapping venture, Melora,” Jaza said. “Tell me what you see.”

  There was a short silence as Pazlar’s systems aligned themselves with Jaza’s, accepting and incorporating the new data. Then, simply, “Wow.”

  “Notions?”

  “ Sped up like this, it looks like EM spill from a faulty sensor beacon,”said Pazlar. “That could explain the boryon issue and the uniformity of the intervals, but it doesn’t account for the fluctuations in the distortion itself.”

  “Or why it’s spread out over weeks,” he finished for her.

   “But it definitely looks like a kind of signal-to-noise effect,”she said.

  It was obvious to Dakal that Commander Jaza was a good five steps ahead of Lieutenant Pazlar on that score. He was already shutting down most of the more esoteric sensor modifications in favor of those that specifically related to the boryon emissions and midrange quantum fluctuations.

  “Lieutenant Roakn!” said Jaza suddenly, loud enough to announce his presence to the whole room.

  “Sir!” boomed Roakn’s voice from above. Instantly he was peering over the edge of the upper tier, looking down at Jaza and Dakal. The rest of the team’s chatter was suddenly absent, as if the others’ voices had been blown into the vacuum beyond Titan’s hull. “You’re back.”

  “Yes,” said Jaza. “And I’d like to ask you why I found Cadet Dakal down here, running playback of the EM record instead of up there with the rest of the team.” Roakn’s hide roughed with embarrassment as he opened his mouth to reply, but Jaza cut him off. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. Right now, I need a probe reset to track quantum rippling.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yesterday, Mr. Roakn,” said Jaza, now splitting his attention between the viewer and the various control consoles around him. “I need it done yesterday.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Roakn. The upper tier actually vibrated beneath his feet as he thundered off to do as he’d been told.

  Forgotten again, Dakal contented himself with watching the senior officer work. Jaza’s fingers danced, systems deactivated or rerouted or realigned, causing the attendant displays to darken or spark, depending. All with a speed and precision Dakal would have never guessed the older man capable of achieving.

  On Cardassia he had once seen a broadcast of a performance of the virtuoso Winim Teekat. Teekat was the acknowledged master of the kynsleve, an instrument of hundreds of filaments strung tight in a sickle of therabone.

  When plucked by the maestro’s nimble fingers, it made the most haunting melodies. Watching his digits skip across the various control consoles, Dakal was sure that Jaza would be a natural for the kynsleve.

   “Bridge to sensor pod,”said a brisk voice.

  “Jaza here. Go ahead, Mr. Tuvok,” said Jaza, still working away.

   “It seems that you are, once again, reorienting ship’s main sensors into a new and fairly esoteric configuration.”

  “Yes,” said Jaza, distracted by a set of unexpected symbols that had appeared on a nearby display. “I was just about to inform you.”

   “In future, Commander,”said Tuvok. “Please apprise me of such modifications before implementation rather than during or after.”

  “Special circumstances,” said Jaza. “We’re tracking a signal, possibly sentient in origin.”

   “Then it would be logical to incorporateTitan ’s communication grid into your recalibration, would it not?”

  “That was next on the list,” said Jaza.

   “Proceed, Mr. Jaza,”said Tuvok. “I will adjust the communication system to fit your needs.”

  “Probe five prepped and in the tube, sir,” said Roakn from somewhere unseen. “Launching.”