Uhura hesitated, unsure how to answer. Scott moved forward, almost shielding her, and fielded the question. “Argelius will always stand out for me, thanks to that demon Redjac and those poor women it tried to frame me for killing. And Deneva was a terrible time, what with the captain—Admiral Kirk losing his brother and sister-in-law to the damned parasites. Compared to those, though, the others were pretty routine. Aside from the hash those Cygneti pranksters made of our computer, thinking it needed ‘more personality.’ Took us two weeks to overhaul the system after that.” He chuckled. “Although the inauguration parties on Altair weren’t what I’d call routine. I wouldn’t expect anyone to remember much of what they did on that visit.”

“Scotty’s right, Captain,” Uhura said. “There’s nothing obvious setting those six visits apart. The systems’ stars are of different spectral types, different ages. Four of them have humanoid natives, but the other two are Earth colonies.”

“Any commonality in the planets’ magnetic fields?” Blake shrugged. “Maybe they had some weird resonance with the Enterprise’s warp reactor, or something like that.”

Uhura called up the data on the console. “Different field intensities, different inclinations and declinations, different activity levels during our visits.”

Blake chewed on her lip. “Well, this is getting us nowhere, and we’re near end of shift. I recommend you sleep on it, Nyota.”

Uhura smiled. “That sounds like a good idea, Captain.”

Nonetheless, Uhura had difficulty taking her mind off the analysis. Something about it stuck in her mind, as if there were some pattern in the vacuum flares just hovering on the edge of her awareness. Something about their radiometric and gravimetric oscillations felt almost familiar to her in some way.

Just before turning in, as she sang to herself in the sonic shower, she was struck by a new idea, a way to analyze the spectrum and structure of the flare oscillations in a manner akin to the analysis of musical patterns. She had already tried a basic Fourier analysis, but what if she tried organizing the data in terms of dynamics, texture, and articulation?

Setting sleep aside, Uhura threw on a kaftan and sat at the computer station in her quarters, setting up the new parameters for the flare analysis. Before long, she felt she was starting to tease out a recurring pattern hidden in the noise. Her hands moved on the controls, guided by some intuition she couldn’t articulate, and the pattern began to emerge. She began a computer search for similar patterns in the Starfleet database. On a strange impulse, she tied in her personal database as well.

When the result came up, Uhura stared in disbelief for a long time.

It was impossible, surely. She had done the analysis wrong, her assumptions leading her down a blind alley.

She rechecked her methodology, reran the analysis. The same conclusion emerged.