The Don't Tempt Me exited hyperspace an hour's conventional travel from the region of space the Rhyming Diamond had identified. It immediately engaged torch drives and blasted off towards its intended target.

Once it arrived the silver escort, under the expert control of Bob, began to hop in and out of hyperspace like a dolphin jumping along the surface of the water. It traversed the entire cubic light-year of space in this way, spilling out clouds of microscopic scanning probes the whole time. When it was finished the Don't Tempt Me had such probes spread out evenly across the whole region.

It was a brute force method of analysis but it was relatively quick. Data started to come in immediately. More interestingly, however, was the data that wasn't coming back. None of the probes that entered a certain sphere of seemingly empty space reported back.

<Right there,> signaled Ophelia.

She indicated the conspicuous sphere of absence, a few hundred thousand clicks in diameter, in the mind's eye of her fellow rangers (and one dolphin). The rangers stood in a circle, watching the space outside in their heads. Bob was still on his own in the underwater section of the ship.

<Looks like we weren't barking up the wrong tree after all,> signaled Decker.

<We should report this back to the Tyrannis,> signaled Ophelia, excitedly, <This is a violation of Cooperative Territory. The Parliament->

<The Parliament of Stars will tie us up in red tape and then sit on their hands,> interjected Gagnon. <Since when has the Parliament ever consented to humanity defending itself?>

<This is a blatant violation of galactic law!> signaled Decker. <They won't ignore this.>

<That presupposes that, by the time the Parliament investigators get around to looking, there will be anything left here to find.>

Neither Decker nor Ophelia had an answer for that.

<What's your alternative then?> asked Ophelia.

<We take matters into our own hands,> replied Gagnon. <We're A.R.C. rangers are we not? We should take advantage of the opportunity that has presented itself and stop whatever plot the Old Ones are engaged in. Then we can gather all the evidence we need to take to the Tribunal of Civilized Warfare and bring the full force of the galactic community down on them. The Old Ones have shown us their neck; I swore an oath not to let the opportunity to step on it pass.>

Ophelia and Decker exchanged a look.

<Alright,> signaled Ophelia, after a brief silence, <we do it your way. How do we approach this?>

<It seems reasonable to conclude that the reason our probes are disappearing is they've fallen under the area of effect of a wide-cast Old One cloaking field. It wouldn't be prudent to just fly straight into it; we have no idea what's going on under there.>

<For all we know this is an elaborate trap,> added Ophelia.

<Exactly. The first thing we need to do is pinpoint the cloak's origin point.>

<We don't have anything capable of piercing an equivtech cloaking device,> observed Decker. <Not if it remains stationary in the middle of the interstellar medium.>

<Of course we do,> retorted Ophelia, <psychology!>

<How do you mean?> asked Decker.

<Well, if we don't have any way of exactly finding them we can just make them think they want to find us. We've been blasting around using a torch drive flinging probes left and right; we're easy to find.>

<I see where you're going with this,> signaled Gagnon. <If we can appear suspicious enough they might send their own probe beyond of range of their cloaking field. It would likely have its own cloak but it would be moving.>

<And that we could detect. I mean, probably. At least we'd have a shot,> signaled Ophelia.

<And once we've detected the probes we should be able to trace them back to their point of origin.>

<Then what?> asked Decker, his mental tone a little more harsh than he had intended.

<We'll have to figure that out once we know what we're working with,> signaled Gagnon, <but you can't infiltrate what you can't see.>

<I think it's a great plan,> added Bob, out of nowhere. <This is all so exciting! I'm pumped!>

* * *

The Don't Tempt Me stayed in the area for a few hours, collecting a number of the probes that had been closest to the cloaked area without actually entering it, then they left. The ship flew just outside of the range of most conventional active scanners and sat.

If things went according to plan the Old Ones would conclude that they were establishing a fatline with their superiors and didn't want it to be intercepted. More importantly, however, is the Old Ones wouldn't know what they were up to.

Just as the rangers had suspected the bait was too tempting to ignore. Two Old One probes, so expertly cloaked that they would have escaped notice had the Don't Tempt Me not been already on the lookout for them, flew to just within sensor range and attempted a battery of their least obtrusive scans.

"Gotcha!" exclaimed Ophelia, along with her signature grin.

Her smile soon melted into a look of concern, however, as the ship blared a warning in her mind. A spherical Old One military space station, something capable of destroying a small fleet of Don't Tempt Me's without risk of significant damage, decloaked. None of the rangers imagined the Old Ones would have risked sending something like that so deep into Cooperative Space, especially given the recent censure of the Old Ones by the Parliament.

Before they could react the station immediately caught them in a shockingly long range tractor beam using the probes as a relay. This was soon followed by a full spectrum equivtech jamming field.

This left them unable to move and equally unable to call for help.

"Wounds of Tellus look at the size of that thing!" said Decker.

<The unmitigated gall,> signaled Gagnon. <Right inside Cooperative Space!>

<We never should have tried this alone,> signaled Decker. <We should have reported back to the Tyrannis.>

<No time for second guesses now, Sam,> signaled Ophelia.

<This is still salvageable,> signaled Gagnon. <We just need to make sure we play our cards right.>

<They're reeling us in,> Ophelia observed.

That's exactly what was happening; the tractor beam lived entirely up to its name and began to attract the Don't Tempt Me into an open docking bay. Soon they were going to be inside the space station whether they wanted to be or not.

<We don't have a lot of time to prepare...> Gagnon began.

* * *

Three Old Ones floated in the control room of Prescience Star Fastness BF.8 watching a holobubble showing the image of the tractoring of the alien spacecraft. The bubble emitted small bursts of Old One communication chemicals, giving relevant mathematical data and elaborating on points of interest.

"This is highly concerning," excreted Elder Omenscar. "How could they have possibly found us?"

"We appear to be experiencing a negative probability discrepancy. However we have reason to believe the ship had not made contact with any other humans at the time we applied our jamming field," Whitewake added to the broth of conversation, "We would have detected the fatline when we scanned it. Based on their actions it's reasonable to believe that they did not expect to find us here. Otherwise they wouldn't have sent a single escort-class ship. I conclude that the secrecy of the Fastness has not yet been compromised."

"Were you able to identify the human vessel? It's an A.R.C. ship is it not?"

"It is," agreed Whitewake. "According to our datapools the captured ship is an A.R.C.-pattern Partisan-class with the absurd name the 'Don't Tempt Me'. The ranger to which it belongs is known as Ophelia Annesdaughter. We have an extensive dossier on it. It is a sworn enemy of the Grand Design."

"Annesdaughter? Why does that taste familiar? Aliens have such ugly ways of communicating; their names taste like dirt in my mouths."

"It is one of the humans who played a significant role in our recent humiliation in the Home/Click-*-Click-*-Click-Click system," Deepnotion added. "We also have reason to believe it might be related to the butcheress Sybil Annesdaughter based on human familial naming conventions."

Omenscar released a chemical that wasn't so much a sentence as it was an emotion: hate.

"How fortunate for us, then, that we will finally have the opportunity to exact a double revenge," he added. "In the short term I want the human prisoners defanged and their mind-states copied. It would be inefficient to waste such valuable material. Once we have exhausted their usefulness their deaths should be slow and exquisite. Do not allow them to die until I have had a chance to personally observe their suffering. In the long term I want to begin preparations to move the Fastness to a new location. Our current one can no longer be considered secure."

The other two Old Ones shot off through the murky waters, ready to set about their newly assigned tasks. Elder Omenscar savored the anticipation of a not-quite-alien-enough emotion directly analogous to sexual sadism.