It had taken Lieutenant Commander Barker and Marine 1st Lieutenant Jack Truman nearly two days to access all the systems in the armband emitter that the mirror ASHER had been using. The sub-space interface control systems had taken them six hours to disable and when they did, a secondary interface system had been discovered, which took another two hours to trace and three hours to disable. Once that had been done, they had called it a day.

The next day, they had started bright and early on the emitter, hoping that with both sub-space interface control systems disabled, finding the homing signal interface would have been easy. I wasn't. Whether ASHER had foreseen the possibility of being 'captured' or had deliberately de-activated the system when he had hidden onboard the Par Maru, finding it had proved harder than either of them had thought.

It had taken nearly twelve hours of closely examining the micro-circuitry of the emitter before they had found what they had been looking for. And it had taken two hours to gain access to the systems. By that time, both officers had become tired once more and had left the re-activation of the system until the following day.

Now that day had come and they started to work on the emitter, finally gaining access to the homing signal frequency.

"Got it." Jack Truman announced. "It's on a very high sub-space band, one that Starfleet or any other race uses."

"Check to see if you can detect a second signal interlaced with the homing signal." Chu suggested.

"Wow." Jack exclaimed. "There is a second signal, but how did you know ?."

"It's a data transfer signal." Chu stated. "ASHER is trying to download its current status to the nearest computer."

"A data dump." Jack enquired.

"Exactly. Set your tricorder to receive the frequency and we'll download it and see what we've got." Chu suggested.

Jack adjusted his tricorder and watched as the screen filled and scrolled with masses of data. Finally the signal ceased and Jack handed the tricorder over to Commander Barker.

Chu started to check through the data download.

"Well the matrix is still intact, as is the main database, just as we thought." Chu stated, reading the data. "The emitters have suffered eighty percent damage and he's reporting that both primary and secondary sub-space interface systems are off-line. There also appears to be damage to the primary memory systems, it looks like the pass three weeks have been erased. He has no recollection of what happened to him, nor what's happening now. We may just have had a piece of good luck."

"So what next." Jack enquired.

"We take this data to the Captain and then start our search." Chu replied.