horizontal range, kindof

I'm trying to do a substitution in a 'horizontal/virtual column range'.

I have an ASCII table where the columns are separated by tab
characters (for now). I want to wrap the contents (which contain
space (U+0020) and \S characters, being of unequal length of
course!) of some specific table columns in asterisks (think
Markdown emphasis). I thought I could use a range and \%v to
match the text between two screen virtual columns and then use an
expression with substitute() to wrap instances of \T\+
inside the matched screen column range, something like

'a,'b s/\%13v.*\%46v/\=substitute(submatch(0),'\T\+','*&*','g')/

but apparently I've misunderstood \%v because I get no match.
So what is the right way to do this? I'm not looking forward to
changing three columns on some 70 lines manually!

/bpj

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