“Describe ‘weird’, Lieutenant,” came the voice of Lieutenant T’Val over the helmet-mounted comms unit. There was no Vulcan exasperation in her tone since T’Val had long, long ago gotten used to human half-formed expressions and needing to coax more out of her colleagues.

“Well ma’am, just that when tweaking the sensor settings, I get a far better response when narrowing the field of view, but only to a point, then it drops off again.” Kelly Tabaaha tapped at the cramped controls of the starfighter Corfu, confirming her suspicion. “Yup, best result is when the recon sensors are confined to six degrees.”

A few hours ago both women had been present when Commander Camargo had barged into the main shuttlebay, looking for T’Val. An explanation given, a plan devised, and both T’Val and Kelly had launched from Atlantis with the intent to investigate one of the phantom blips they’d been recording around the Betazed system’s slow zone periphery for a week now.

And now here they were, hanging in the void of space, right on the edge of where subspace became a turbulent mess and cutting Betazed off from the galaxy at large. The system primary was just a particularly bright dot behind them. The nearest planet was hours away at impulse, or minutes at the best warp speed the fighters could produce in the system at the moment.

“I do find it interesting that narrowing them further doesn’t continue to yield positive results,” T’Val commented. “We shall have to convey that finding to the Commander upon our return. It may prove useful.”

“Oh, like some sort of harmonic issue perhaps?” Kelly asked while she waited for a diagnostic program to finish running after her latest tweak to the sensors. A happy little chirp confirmed the recon sensors were back online after reverting their scan window to the optimal width she’d found. “Oh, wow. Okay, that is a big difference. Sensors are getting an extra 43 AU into the slow zone.”

The slow zone anomaly started at 12 AU from system primary, cutting a few of Betazed’s outer gas giants off from the perks and joys of warp drive and subspace comms. Kelly’s tweaks of Corfu’s sensors had just pierced the veil of the slow zone, but in an incredibly narrow view compared to Atlantis’ or Betazed’s near-omniscient sensor arrays inside the 12 AU limit.

And directly in front of her, she saw nothing. Just more space.

“A testament to the precise and specific nature of the Corfu’s sensors suite,” T’Val commented. “Have you picked anything up yet, Lieutenant?”

“Not yet,” she answered. “Give me a second. Going to have to sweep this bird around a bit.”

The sensor package mounted where Corfu would normally have torpedo magazines only had limited swivel space. Barely a few degrees off the fighter’s major axis. Which is to say that it necessitated actually pointing the fighter in the direction of whatever one wanted to scan. And they were specialised sensors as well, designed for identifying ships or obstacles. Getting a tactical picture of an area before an engagement. Kelly could look into the Slow Zone, but she could no more tell the scientist back on the ship what was going on with the zone than they could gleam from Atlantis’ sensors to date.

Both she and T’Val had spotted the ion trail from whatever Camargo had picked up as soon as they’d arrived on station. Its signature hinted at low power, such that by the time a probe would have gotten out here, it would have faded into nothingness. Someone had been trying to be sneaky, popping out of the slow zone before turning around and heading back into it.

At least as far as Kelly had speculated, and T’Val reminded her not to do, since they lacked suitable evidence to support just yet.

Precision was paramount, far more than what any person could do themselves right now. Kelly set the fighter’s autopilot to point at the ion trail in front of her, then tied in sensors, tasking the electronic brain with following the trail with its nose. Thrusters fired with exacting precision, keeping the sensors on the ion trail as it traipsed into the slow zone.

“That’s odd,” she said as the computer started spitting out errors, confusion from the sensor system causing the autopilot to disengage. “I’ve got multiple ion trails out there. And no, I can’t be more specific. Looks like a bunch are on top of each other.”

No response from T’Val just meant she had nothing to say on the matter. She knew Kelly would keep working on the issue, so why tell her to do so after all? Without a smarter computer or supporting sensors to assist, it took nearly ten minutes to sort out the ion trails, finding the one that matched the blip that had drawn them out here. The knot untangled; the autopilot was once more satisfied enough to continue gently moving Corfu around as it sniffed out its prey.

“That’s not good,” Kelly finally muttered as the fighter’s tactical display started to light up. The sensors had finally found something. Lots of somethings. Somethings that the little computer brain couldn’t exactly identify but had enough information to make conclusions about.

Alarming conclusions.

That information quickly spread to T’Val’s fighter over their tactical net, giving the Vulcan officer a view into what Kelly had just seen. And her response had been a purposeful drawing of breath. “Turn off your sensors,” she ordered immediately.

Kelly didn’t need to be told twice as killed the recon sensors. Her view into the Slow Zone immediately disappeared as she reverted to the more generalised sensors. The sensor blips all immediately disappeared, but a quick command to the computer saved the logs of what had just been seen.

Both women looked at each other through their canopies, across the mere handful of meters between them. A nod of heads communicated what needed to be said. Both fighters turned, pointing back the way they had come, back towards Betazed and space where the rules of physics behaved themselves.

Kelly then tapped at the controls to hail Atlantis, making sure to choose a tight beam setting and ensuring the signal was encrypted so only Starfleet ships could hear her.

“Harpy 2 to Atlantis. Possible bogeys in the slow zone. Repeat, possible bogeys in the slow zone. Returning to base.”