"We shall at that," he said with the trace of a smile. They had done so under far worse conditions and managed well enough, he thought. "If I can get us into the system, I can show you what needs to be done." As for returning her to her true form, he was privately more skeptical. No technology of which he was aware could have done such a thing to her, and he had no idea of how to change her back.

He took them on a lift to the bridge and strode over to the command center. First he tried his access code once more, finding himself still locked out. However, after he added the most recent emergency access code, he found himself in the main system. "Ah!" The exclamation contained satisfaction.

Now he waited for her to come to his side so that she could see what he was doing. He pulled up the prompt for a self-diagnostic only to find it already in progress. Satisfaction gave way to a more puzzled expression. "I'm accessing external sensors now," he said. "Someone has already begun a diagnostic. This isn't on an automated sequence, so there is no way it should have been able to start itself."

It took some tweaking of the default instrumentation settings to get a clearer idea of what was going on outside the ship, gray fingers flying over the console. There were no other ships within scanning range. He modulated to adjust for what he knew of Klingon and Dominion style cloaking and still detected nothing. "Now this is..." He glanced at her with a shake of his head. "This is bizarre. Nothing. Nothing out there to the limitations of the sensors' ranges. No one in here but us according to the readings." Running a hand down his mouth, he gave it some thought.