[snip]

Matthew nodded. “Aye, Boss,” he responded, eyes still on the display as it switched to another algorithm. He sighed, fingers tapping on the table top. This would take forever. =^= Alert me when results are ready, =^= he said, then swiped away the signal data and back to the stellar map. He stared as more data scrolled in from the probe.

=^= Computer, are the passive gamma detectors functioning? =^= he asked, stroking his chin. Long range, even short range, active sensors used subspace based beams, reflectors, and detectors to scan at multiple light years of distance - but passive detectors that detected the light and radiation directly impacting the sensor pallets didn’t need that.

=/\= Affirmative, passive gamma detection scanners are online. =/\= The computer intoned.

Pulsars, he thought. Pulsars are always the answer.

• Ensign Riley, Science

After making the rounds, Fayth returned. “Alright Riley, you’ve got your hands full down here. I’m heading up to my office and see if I can make any leeway on those pulses. If you’ve got an idea keep going with it, but I’ll add myself to the minds working on that one.”

Lt. jg Fayth, CSO

Riley did not respond, sifting through the sensor data, trying to determine what sensors were working and which were not. Suddenly the words clicked in his head and he turned. He grimaced, watching her walk through the doors. Not a good look, Matthew. He turned back to the display, leaning both palms on the table.

He sighed and swiped away the data he’d been scrolling through, the map of the nearby star cluster appearing. The pattern was unrecognizable to him, of course, and to the computer. Local star formations were only one way of determining location, though; on a galactic, even intergalactic scale, pulsars were a better positioning system. Starfleet had never had to use extragalactic pulsars for determining location; there were enough in the Milky Way to determine location with precision; but the theory had been around for hundreds of years that the same could be done to determine location outside their own galaxy, using the periodicity, distance, and light shift of known extragalactic pulsars.

If only he could get the sensors to tell him something about them.

• Ensign Riley, Science

Scans finally came up, they were distorted of course due to the nebula’s interference, but on the edge of their scan radius they picked up signals of a distant pulsar. The pattern and location did not match any known pulsar in the database. But going off the pulse rate the object was about 2 days distant from them at warp 6. Running this through the computer, things took a bit of a worrying tone when the computer began to take quite a time to compute a possible location for them.

Almost 5 minutes passed before a result finally pinged up on the holo-screen before Riley. =/\= Computations complete. Displaying current extrapolated location along all known galactic and extragalactic objects. =/\= The computer intoned. Drawing a 3d Model of the Milky Way of their previous location highlighted near the northern edge of the Beta Quadrant then spanning further and further out. First the Milky Way zoomed out to nothing, then more nearby galaxies. Till finally at the edge of the known cataloged galactic objects a simple dot highlighted over an object impossibly distant, the GN-z11 galaxy in a southern most reach. They were effectively over 32 billion light years from their last known location. This result was echoed by the computer =/\= Current extroplated location, GN-z11 galaxy, rough positioning equatorial to this objects galactic alpha quadrant by known standards.=/\= It said.

GM CockRoach