Alex rounded the corner, PADD in hand. He returned a polite nod hello from a Lieutenant in an operations gold uniform, not recalling who she was. In the two weeks since the Galaxy‘s little adventure into Underspace, the ship had been in orbit of SB-72 undergoing repairs and some final crew shuffling. As of yesterday, they were at 973 crew, a number he had been updated on daily during the morning command briefing. With Demar MIA, Myers had appointed him as acting executive officer and that was a role he didn’t relish. He had no idea how Gedan did it without repeatedly hitting his head on the bulkhead in frustration.

He rounded yet another corner, stopping at the turbolift and pressing a button to call the lift to his location. He spent the last two weeks pouring over the data they collected when trying to map out the underspace in an effort to locate the missing runabouts. It had been slow going at first; limited by data and a million other things that had to be attended to but over the last six or so days more and more data came in from other ships that had uploaded their data to the main Starfleet Sciences database. 

The doors in front of him opened. “Bridge.” He said as he stepped in.

He finally had a somewhat decent picture of the area around the corridor of space they took to get back home but it still left more questions than it answered. The lift slowed and he stepped onto the Bridge. Normally a bustling hub of activity and noise, it was fairly quiet. A few junior officers manned a few stations as regulations required but for the most part, there wasn’t much going on. The turbolift had helpfully deposited him at the lift doors that were next to the ready room; he turned on his heels and tapped the bell button.

“Enter.”

Captain Clara Myers looked up from the stack of PADDs on her desk, offering a smile to the man as he entered. “Alex, please, have a seat.”

Alex nodded and sat down, sinking into the soft chair, his body letting go of a small portion of his stress as he did so. “Good news and bad news. I have a pretty decent idea of where the Runabouts went.” He paused for a moment. “Ok, well, I have a semi-decent idea of where the Runabouts went. Narrowed it down to two possibilities.” He offered the PADD to Myers.

“And the bad?” She asked as she took the PADD.

“I don’t have anything close to an exact location and the two regions I did narrow it down to? Neither one is surrounded by friendly faces.”

Clara cocked an eyebrow as she viewed the map on the PADD. “So those tunnels led to either the Thomar Expanse, beyond the Rolor Nebula, or no mans land sandwiched between the Tholians and the Cardassians? That’s a pretty wide area in opposite directions.”

All Alex could offer was a shrug. “Sensor data from the Westminister indicated that the tunnel split again after the runabouts pulled off from the main corridor. It’s a Parliament Class ship and was heavily damaged, so they didn’t catch much data but they passed by those corridors roughly 30 minutes before we did and took a nearby corridor out. They ended up popping out near the Talarian/Cardassian border. We also got some data from the Boccaccio as they passed through; they took a corridor just south of the one that runabouts took and they ended up popping out between Free Haven and DS-47. There were also multiple exit apertures detected on long range sensors in both areas.”

Clara sighed and put the PADD on her desk. “So corridors just north and south of the ones taken by the runabouts lead to opposite sides of the Cardassian Union while the one we took dumped us out near the Tong Beak Nebula. The data makes sense but it doesn’t make getting to them any easier. We’d have to get passage through Cardassian space unless we wanted to take weeks to take the long way around to the Thomar Expsanse and I don’t like the idea of trying to traverse through a very narrow passage of open space between the Tholains and Cardassians. ”

Alex shuffled in his seat. The current and always changing interstellar affairs of the day were not his strong suit but he had a hard time believing that there would be objections to rescuing Starfleet Officers. “I know we aren’t on the best of terms with the Union right now but surely they would grant us passage to locate our officers.”

Clara gestured to the assortment of PADDs on her desk. “Most of all the clutter on my desk relates to the Cardassians. It’s a tense situation right now. The truth is, if we want to petition them for passage we need a better reason than ‘we want to do a six-week long search pattern and maybe we’ll find our missing crew.’ Not only is it a tall order to let a capital ship like the Galaxy run through their space, even with an escort, but to ask to hang out in unclaimed space right outside their borders for possibly weeks? It won’t fly with Starfleet or the Cardassians. We need to narrow down that location.”

Alex rubbed his face, exhaustion setting in. “I don’t know how we’d do that. We have access to all the data Starfleet has but it’s not enough. Nobody has data about that specific tunnel. Perhaps the Cardassians would let us take a peek at their sensor data.” He said with a small laugh. 

Clara knew he meant it as a joke but she pursed her lips in thought. She’d spent a few years post-war in the Union when Starfleet was assisting them to rebuild when she had been Captain of the Van Leeuwenhoek and had picked up a few contacts in the civilian government and the military. These days those contacts were few and far between but she still knew a few were active. “I’ll see what strings I can pull. I’ll reach out to Task Force 47 and ask that they keep their eyes open for the Runabouts and then see what I can do about getting some more sensor data. You don’t serve as long as I have without racking up a few favors.”

Alex gave her a small smile. “Sounds like a wonderful plan. I’m just worried we’re running out of time; those runabouts only carry enough emergency supplies for thirty days and that’s if they didn’t take any damage.”

She returned his smile. The stress was visible on his face; new lines showing around his eyes. His hair had been put up into a messy bun; something she’d never seen before in the last decade or so. He was in work mode, not much else mattered. “I promised you we would get them back and we will.”

The doors to the ready room opened with a swish as CPO Westland entered. “Captain, I was able to.” She looked up from the PADD in her hand and stopped in her tracks as she saw Conklin sitting in the chair. “Oh. My apologies.”

Alex waved a hand around. “No worries. I have things to attend to anyway.” He gave the Captain and Petty Officer a nod as he left the room.

Alana watched him leave before turning around and picking up where she left off. “I was able to get you out of that diplomatic reception taking place this evening.”

Clara furrowed her brow. She had forgotten about that. “The one to welcome the Mackdorans?” They were a species that had attained warp technology about 6 months ago and while they had opened to not join the Federation at the present moment, the diplomatic office was still rolling out the red carpet to woo them into a trade agreement for the dilithium deposits present on the planet. 

“Yes ma’am. It’s turning into quite the event; several other governments are now sending envoys.”

Clara cocked her head to the side. Perhaps that stuffy diplomatic reception would come in handy after all. “Not surprising, everyone loves dilithium. Just who is showing up?”

She glanced at the PADD in her hand. “The Talarians, The Ferengi, the Cardassians are sending a few Guls, looks like a few diplomats from the Romulan Republic. Long way out of them but who knows that they have planned. A few other representatives from independent systems will be there as well.”

Clara gave the woman a bright smile as she crossed her hands on the desk. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

Alana remained expressionless. “You want back on the invite list? I had to call in favors with two of Commodore Logan’s aides to get you off the list. Turns out that a forty some odd year Starleet veteran Captain that commands a Galaxy Class ship tends to be in high demand; especially when the brass doesn’t want to show up themselves.”

Clara offered the woman an apologetic smile.

Alana sighed. “Very well. I’ll get you back on the list. I’ll also send you the attire requirements; the Mackdorans are very picky.” With that, she left the room before the Captain could ask for anything else.

Clara turned to the console on her desk, tapping in a few commands to set up a secure channel and bury it in other comm traffic. Hopefully nobody important would catch onto a comm link that went directly to a Cardassian ship. 

With any luck, a little diplomacy would go a long way.