The captain woke to screams. Screams of agony. He opened his eyes. He could see only darkness and smoke. He drew a shallow breath. A sharp pain shot through him. He tried again. He got half a breath and a chest full of pain. His vision began to blur, and then darkness came again.

Even in a sea of anguish, the pain of three hundred souls crying out, Lieutenant Commander Ekkomas Eidran felt the pain of the captain as he came to, and then felt as he slipped away again. It was like deja vu. It was happening all over again. His crew was dying all around him, and his captain too. No, he couldn’t let his captain die. He couldn’t let any of them die. Not again. Not like last time.

A thick haze covered the bridge of the Serenity, illuminated only by the blue emergency running lights and an eerie orange glow from a small fire at the science station. The Betazoid first officer traced back in his mind where the captain had been standing when the pulse hit them amidship, and he followed where the momentum would have carried him. And then he saw Captain Jake Lewis lying there, motionless on the deck by a support pylon.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran rushed to the Captain’s side. He was still breathing. The worst had not befallen him. Not yet at least. But his breathing was shallow and labored. “Help! Help! Over here!” But who was going to respond? The bridge, from what little he could see make out through the deep smoke, was pure chaos. “Medic! Medic! Anyone!”

For a moment, no one came. Everyone was busy in their own little slice of hell. There was a figure over by the science station, fighting the fire that had broken out. Another looked like they were trying to get up, but then they fell back over. Their fall out of the Underspace corridor, the deceleration from 365,000 times the speed of light to a near stop, it was a miracle there was even anyone or anything left. 

But then a slender silhouette stepped out of the smoke, illuminated by the glow of the fire. Lieutenant Commander Eidran looked up. It was Lieutenant Irina Tarasova, their Chief Tactical Officer. She’d been strapped into her jumpseat when the resonance pulse hit them, and she’d come through relatively unscathed. In her hand, she held a first aid kit.

“The Captain?” she asked, squinting to make out Captain Lewis in the low light. She knelt down and began to scan him with a medical tricorder. “Punctured lung, head trauma, three fractured ribs, moderate internal bleeding. We need to get him to sickbay.” 

As if it was that easy.

“No way the turbolifts are still functional,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran frowned as he glanced around the broken bridge. “And even if we get down there, will there be anyone to help?” If the bridge was any indication, he could only fathom the state of the rest of the ship.

“Let me see what I can do from here to stabilize him,” Lieutenant Tarasova said as she began to pull lifesaving gear out of the kit.

The Serenity‘s Executive Officer just stood there in a stunned daze.

“I got this, Ekkomas,” Lieutenant Tarasova assured him. She’d spent enough time on the rim, beyond hospitals and clinics and support ships, to know how to save a life with little more than shoestring and good intentions. “Go deal with the rest of the ship.”

Meanwhile, below deck, Lieutenant Commander Sharpe was doing hero’s work with what was left of his team in Main Engineering. “Focus on stabilizing the core! Then we need to get power back to life support!” 

Prioritization, he knew, was everything in moments like this. You had to decide which of your children to save, and which to leave for later. Right now, avoiding being annihilated by an uncontrolled matter-antimatter reaction came first, followed by ensuring the ship remained habitable so they wouldn’t succumb to a lack of oxygen or a deregulation of temperature. Only then would they be able to worry about safely patching the rest back up.

”What about her?” an ensign in yellow asked as he cast his eyes at the body of a young warp core specialist who’d been too close to one of the plasma manifolds when it started venting superheated gas during the explosive decompression caused by the negative pressure gradient of their rapid deceleration.

Lieutenant Commander Sharpe glanced over. The young woman on the ground was covered in burns, head to toe, and her uniform had been fused into her skin. 

“There’s nothing we can do for her,” he said regretfully. She was already dead. Or so close they wouldn’t be able to save her in time with the limited medical equipment they had. “Just focus on getting that intermix pressure back under control.”

The ensign looked conflicted. How could they just leave her here?

“It’s our duty, Ensign, to ensure this ship survives,” Lieutenant Commander Sharpe pointed out. “Otherwise, we’ll all be joining her shortly in the afterlife.” He knew the young woman well. Her name was Jane Elliott, Petty Officer First Class, an excellent warp core specialist. He’d shared many a meal with her, as he made a habit of doing with all his staff. But they needed to put that in a little box and put it on a shelf until the ship was stable. “Later, there’ll be time to grieve, and to tend to our wounded, but for now, lifesaving comes secondary. The core comes first.”

The Chief Engineer’s message was clear. For now, the bodies were to be left where they were, both those that had passed and those just barely hanging on. They had to save the ship first. Once that was done, then they could worry about their wounded. And grieve their dead.

Back on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Eidran had left Lieutenant Tarasova with the Captain, and he’d rallied those who could still stand on their own two feet – even shakily – to put out the fires, to start trying to get critical control systems back online, and to tend to the others who, like Captain Lewis, had become casualties of their ejection from the Underspace.

After a few minutes fighting chaos in the darkness, the lights suddenly came back up, and a moment later, the quiet din of the air circulation system returned, swiftly sucking into its recessed vents the smoke that covered the bridge. 

“Well, that’s a start,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran smiled meekly. “Looks like someone’s still kicking down in Main Engineering.” He looked over at Lieutenant Gadsen, who’d put out the fire at the science station and was now replacing a bio-neural circuit board that’d been burned by a sparking EPS relay. “Can we get a system check?”

The Chief Operations Officer nodded and moved back to his station. His console controls, he was pleased to see, were no longer dark. They’d come back online at the same time as the lights. Quickly, he queued up a status check and began rattling off details: “Core is stable. Power at forty percent. Hull breaches on decks three, four, eleven, fourteen, twenty one and thirty, but force fields are now online.” The undertone, which he didn’t say aloud, was that he was pretty sure they’d been offline until just a moment ago. He could only fathom how many sailors might have been sucked out into the cold void of space while they’d been down. “We have life support, deflector control, communications…”

That was all good, Lieutenant Commander Eidran thought to himself, but it wasn’t what was top of mind for him. “What about lifesigns?” He could still hear the screams in his subconscious, but they were less now. Was that because they’d recovered? Or because they’d passed beyond?

“Biosensors partially operable,” Lieutenant Gadsen cautioned. “I can give you the number of living beings aboard, but nothing more.” He looked over at Lieutenant Tarasova, who was tending to an unconscious captain, and then towards Commander Sena, who was applying a dermal regenerator to a large gash on Lieutenant Selik’s forehead. “We won’t be able to discern those wounded from those who are not.”

“I get that,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran dismissed it. “But how many are alive?” He needed to know.

Lieutenant Gadsen choked on the words as he said them: “Two hundred and thirty five.”

This was a ship of three hundred. 

Or it had been.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran stumbled back, catching himself against the railing of the command island. “I… I…” He couldn’t even process that loss of life. A quarter of the crew, gone in an instant. And how many more, like Captain Lewis, were just hanging on by a thread? He cast his eyes forward at the viewscreen, trying to stabilize himself with the familiar, but the starscape was foreign to him. “Where… where are we?”

“We are… we are…” Lieutenant Gadsen fumbled with his response as he rechecked what the navigational systems were suggesting from the relative position of the stars around them. “Six thousand, two hundred and forty light years spinward and coreward from Federation space, in the far reaches of the Beta Quadrant.”

They were unfathomably far from anyone or anything that could possibly help them.

“And the Ingenuity?” Lieutenant Commander Eidran asked. They’d been racing through the Underspace alongside Commander Lee’s ship when the Cardassians fired on them. Maybe she’d be able to help… no, that was probably too optimistic… maybe she’d survived. That was all he could rationally hope for, given their own state.

“Sensors are still offline, but I’m not seeing the ship on visual scans.”

They were truly and completely on their own. 

Purpose suddenly surged through the Betazoid. He knew what mattered most. Their people. They’d be the only way they got through this. The only way they survived. They needed to save all they could. He tapped his combadge: “Eidran to all who can respond. The ship is, for the moment, stable. As long as that holds, direct all priority to lifesaving efforts.”

He shot up in the bed, swung his feet around, and tried to get to his feet. But the blood left his head, the world began to spin, and he fell back against the bed. Pain coursed through his body, and he felt horribly weak.

“Woah there! Take it easy, cowboy!” Doctor Laurier exclaimed as she rushed to his side, steadying the Captain and coaxing him back to a seated position. “You’ve been through a lot. Let’s take it slow.”

As he stabilized, Captain Lewis looked around. He could see he wasn’t the only one. Every bed was taken, and by the weary eyes and bloodied gowns of the medical staff, he doubted he even knew the half of it. “What the fuck happened?”

”You don’t remember?” Doctor Laurier asked.

”The last thing I remember was racing the Underspace with Ingenuity and the Cardassians…” Captain Lewis began to say, and then the memories began flooding back. “They… they… they discovered us, didn’t they?” They’d been playing with fire, double crossing the Union while feeding intelligence back to the Polaris and the Klingons. The last thing he could remember was the call with the Cardassians, and the way Gul grimaced at them. It was the smile of a man who knew he’d won.

”They fired on us with a resonance pulse that ejected the ship from Underspace,” Doctor Laurier explained, her description severely understating the tragedy that had followed. “Inertial dampeners couldn’t keep up with the deceleration. You were launched into a support pylon. Hard.” If he hadn’t had the musculature he had, he likely wouldn’t have survived the impact.

“How long was I out?”

“Almost a day. Collapsed lung, three fractured ribs, spinal trauma, internal bleeding, and some head trauma,” Doctor Laurier rattled off the injuries. “But you’re a tough cookie, Cap.” Not everyone had walked away from their injuries.

”I suppose I have you to thank?” Captain Lewis asked with a light smile.

“For your recovery, maybe, but not for your life. That was all Lieutenant Tarasova. She kept you alive for over an hour before we could get up to the bridge,” Doctor Laurier explained. The fall from Underspace had knocked them completely out of commission, and it had been a struggle to even restore force fields and life support, let alone turbolifts and communications. “Even if we could have gotten to you sooner though, we had no one to send.” Her eyes fell to the ground, overcome by a mix of exhaustion and mourning.

“How’s the ship?”

”She’s built tough, just like you,” Doctor Laurier smiled. “Lieutenant Commander Eidran and those still able-bodied, they’ve been doing a remarkable job getting systems back online. The immediate damage was so bad that this whole deck was uninhabitable for a while even.” A shadow came across her face. She’d been one of the first to arrive when the force fields had gone back up and a breathable atmosphere had been restored.

“Uninhabitable?” Captain Lewis asked. How bad had it really been?

“There was a hull breach… a few actually… but one down just a couple junctions on this deck,” Doctor Laurier explained, her voice trailing off and her expression haunted by what had happened. “Everyone who was down here then, they’re… they’re gone.”

Captain Lewis looked around. There was someone missing. He’d never be away from his sickbay with this many patients, unless… “Doctor Bailey?”

”Him, and four others, plus two patients being seen at the time,” Doctor Laurier confirmed as a tear ran down her cheek. “Before power could be restored… before the force fields came up… they… they… they suffocated on vacuum.” She saw their faces, full of terror, frozen in time as they struggled for oxygen that wasn’t there, oxygen that had been sucked into void. She began to sob. “I… I’m the acting CMO now.” That thought made her shudder. “I’d give anything not to be though, to have traded place with him…”

”I’m sorry, Ashlynn,” Captain Lewis said as he reached out a hand and grabbed hold of hers. “I know how close you two were.” She’d followed Doctor Bailey, her mentor, aboard the Serenity after Frontier Day. Captain Lewis had seen the bond between them, and he knew all too well how loss and guilt felt. Over the decades, he’d seen so much himself.

After a moment, Doctor Laurier released his hand. “But now we must move forward, for our shipmates, if nothing else, right?”

Captain Lewis nodded. That was all you could do.

“I’ll be honest though, sir,” Doctor Laurier admitted darkly. “It’s not good. We lost sixty five in the blink of an eye, and another thirty since the power came back…”

Ninety five, dead.

A third of the crew, gone. 

Those were numbers typically reserved for war.

“Some, there was nothing we could do,” Doctor Laurier continued. “Others, it’s been a matter of triage since we’re down med staff and the ship is only semi-operable. But we’re doing everything we can, sir. I promise you that.” She meant it too. With every ounce of her being.

Before Captain Lewis could respond, the doors of sickbay slid open, and a woman strode through briskly. You couldn’t tell by the vigor in her step, but like Doctor Laurier, the Lieutenant in yellow hadn’t slept either since their ejection from the Underspace twenty one hours prior. Purpose and adrenaline were keeping her going.

“It’s good to see you, boss,” Lieutenant Tarasova smiled as she came to a stop at his bedside. “You’re looking significantly more lively than the last time I saw you.” She’d spent over an hour fighting to keep the Captain alive with nothing more than a handheld medkit, but that had been the last she’d seen of him. As soon as he was ferried away, she’d gotten right back at trying to fix the ship with the others.

”I hear I have you to thank, in large part, for that.”

”Phasers and torpedoes were down, so I had to entertain myself somehow, didn’t I?” Lieutenant Tarasova laughed with her typical dark sense of humor. “I know you would have done the same for any of us.”

It was true, Captain Lewis told himself. But this time he hadn’t. This time, he’d been lying motionless on the deck as nearly a hundred of his sailors died around him. He’d failed them. Or at least that was how it felt. “I gather you didn’t come down here just to bat those beady eyes at me though?”

She shot him an icy stare. Her eyes were anything but beady. “No, I come with news. We’ve found the Ingenuity.”

”We lost her?” Captain Lewis asked. There was so much he didn’t know yet.

”Yes, when we fell out of Underspace, we were split and had no idea where she wound up, or if she’d even made it,” Lieutenant Tarasova explained. “But Sharpe and Gadsen just got long range sensors working again, and we found her. She’s not moving, but she appears to be powered and in one piece.”

”Where is she?” Captain Lewis asked, his mind wandering to Commander Lee and her crew.

”Thankfully, just the other side of the system where we’re marooned,” Lieutenant Tarasova reported. It was much better than they’d initially feared. Commander Sena had initially warned they might have been scattered light years apart, but this was mere AUs. “We can only make 0.9c, but Selik has set a course.”

”And what system have we found ourselves within?” 

”An uninhabited and unremarkable system,” Lieutenant Tarasova replied. “Not named by our astronomers, and beyond reach of our explorers.” At least, it had been until the Underspace changed everything.

Captain Lewis noted her choice in words. They had been deep in the labyrinth, far from known space, when the Cardassians fired on them. They could be anywhere, in theory, based on how the Underspace worked. “How far out are we, Irina?”

”Six thousand, four hundred and twenty light years.”

”And I suppose it would be too convenient for an aperture to be out here?” Captain Lewis laughed. They might be far out in the unknown, but once they got the ship fixed, if they could find an Underspace aperture, they’d be back in Federation territory within hours.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, sir,” Lieutenant Tarasova frowned. “According to Commander Sena’s preliminary analysis, she believes the Cardassians succeeded with their plan to collapse the Underspace. It’s highly unlikely it will be of any assistance to us.”

Good for the stability of the galaxy, Captain Lewis thought to himself. But not for them. Not with nearly a third of their crew dead, and their ship stranded, with heavy damage, over six thousand light years from home. Hopefully the Ingenuity had fared better.

“Ma’am, we have what appears to be a Starfleet ship coming into visual range,” Ensign Elyssia Rel announced excitedly from the conn of the near empty, albeit mostly intact bridge. “The silhouette is a… a… a Duderstadt.” The awkward undercarriage gave her away.

“The Serenity?” Commander Cora Lee asked hopefully as she looked up from the latest status report from Main Engineering. While Lieutenant Raine’s stunt might have saved the ship from taking substantive structural damage, it had shorted 85% of the ship’s electro-plasma system. Ensign Kellan Seltzer, their Chief Operations Officer, had taken to reassembling the jigsaw puzzle, figuring out how to restore the conduits in the right order, while Lieutenant Dani Raine, their Chief Engineer, had organized a sea of sailors to flood the ship and replace the circuitry junction by junction at Ensign Seltzer’s direction. Even Lieutenant Commander Sherrod Allen, their Executive Officer, and Lieutenant Rafael Cruz, their Chief Security and Tactical Officer, had gone below deck to help, leaving just the Commander and the young Chief Flight Control Officer to crew the bridge.

“That would be my best guess,” Ensign Rel nodded, trying to contain her excitement. Although their astrometric sensors were still down, by simple observation of the starscape, they’d determined their position to be around six thousand light years coreward and spinward of Federation space, so who else could it be? No one ventured this deep into the Beta Quadrant. Not until the Underspace, at least. “I still don’t have sensors, or even transponder ident capabilities,” Ensign Rel reminded the Commander from behind the conn. “So it’ll be a few moments before we know for certain.”

It had to be the Serenity, Commander Lee thought to herself. It needed to be Serenity. They couldn’t be alone out here. 

Ensign Rel hung onto that same hope, although her reasons for it were more personal. Yes, she wanted it to be the Serenity so they wouldn’t be alone in the vastness of deep space, but more than that, she wanted it to be their sister ship so she wouldn’t be alone.

After what felt like an eternity, the approaching ship drew close enough to give them their answer.

“I can confirm,” Ensign Rel reported with a relieved smile. “Hull markings read USS Serenity, NCC-96138.” She’d survived the fall from the Underspace, and with it, Ensign Rel hoped its captain had survived too. Her captain, not by the chain of command, but by her heart.

For the first time in nearly twenty four hours, Commander Lee exhaled a breath of real relief. They weren’t alone, after all. “Hail them!”

“Don’t got comms yet, ma’am,” Ensign Rel frowned. “They weren’t high on Kellan’s list.” Not when you compared them to environmental and other core systems, those necessary for basic ship function, which had also been impacted by the massive damage done to the EPS grid.

“Ah yes,” sighed Commander Lee. They were, of course, still basically dead in the water – except for the happy fact that they weren’t actually dead. The crew, each and every single one of them aboard the Ingenuity, had survived the fall from the Underspace. It was only their EPS grid that was dead – or now just mostly dead – and even the EPS grid, it had been restored enough they had all the systems they’d need to keep on living. Just not enough to talk, move, scan or shoot. Not yet, at least. “Guess we just sit here on our hands staring at her awkward undercarriage.” The Duderstadt was an odd ship to look at.

And so they sat, but not for long. After only a couple minutes, in a shimmer, they were no longer alone. Commander Lee and Ensign Rel turned as a lone figure materialized in the middle of the command island.

“G’day to you both!” Captain Lewis said in his usual gruff voice as he looked around the bridge, nodding at Cora and Elyssia respectively. They’d both made it. That made him happy, more than he’d ever admit. So too did the ship seem relatively in one piece, except that half the consoles on the bridge were dead, her shields were offline, and her power signature was well below normal levels. “When you didn’t call, I figured I’d just swing by.”

”Yeah, well it’s going to be a bit before we’re whole again,” explained Commander Lee as she approached the Captain, getting straight to business. “As the Cardassian resonance pulse hit, Lieutenant Raine acted creatively and independently. She flooded our warp manifold with negative mass energy exotic matter, using what was left of Dr. al-Qadir’s modifications from the other day in order to belay the effects of our fall from the Underspace.” It had been a stroke of luck that Admiral Reyes had used the Ingenuity as their testbed to weaken the Vesparan singularity. Otherwise, Lieutenant Raine wouldn’t have been able to do what she did so quickly.

“I see,” nodded Captain Lewis. Except not really. All he really got from the statement was that they’d done something sciencey that had smoothed out their descent from the Underspace, and that the Ingenuity’s Chief Engineer deserved some credit for her quick thinking.

“Unfortunately, while it made for as smooth an exit as one could hoped from the Underspace, it almost completely blew out the EPS grid,” Commander Lee continued, ignoring the confused look on the captain’s face. “We’re having to go junction by junction, replacing it relay by relay. Ensign Seltzer forecasts three days before we’re fully back in business.”

“Any casualties?” Captain Lewis asked, their own fate hanging heavy on his mind. “Besides the circuitry, of course.” After what they’d been through, he’d feared the worst for the Ingenuity. The Pathfinder class research cruiser was an impressive scientific platform, but it was still little more than an upgraded Intrepid light cruiser in its general capabilities. That she was even in one shape at all was remarkable.

“Nope, not a single one,” Commander Lee smiled proudly. Given what they’d just put the Ingenuity through, it was close to a miracle. “How’d you guys fare?”

“Not so well,” Captain Lewis admitted, his tone flat, a defensive reaction to the emotions he felt deep down. “We lost ninety five.”

A pin drop could have been heard in the silence that followed. 

Ninety five?

Had he really just said that? 

The Serenity had lost ninety five of its crew? 

Was he serious? 

As Commander Lee looked at him, for as insane as it sounded, she knew he was being dead serious. Captain Lewis wasn’t one to joke, not in matters like this, and more than that, as she stared at him, looking past his cold demeanor, she could see something more. He looked weary and weak, wounded almost. What the hell had happened to the Serenity? Was this what would have happened to them if not for Lieutenant Raine’s quick thinking? That thought shook her to her core.

“I’d tell you more about the experience, but as it turns out, I slept through most of it,” Captain Lewis chuckled darkly. “Or, more accurately, I hit a pillar and went out like a light and only woke up twenty hours later..”

Both young women looked at him with shock and concern.

“From what I hear, though,” Captain Lewis went on explaining. “Lieutenant Commander Sharpe did hero’s work maintaining the integrity of the core or it would have been a hell of a lot worse.” The pressure gradient as they fell out of the compressed foliations of subspace had pushed the warp manifold to its limits. “Unfortunately, while we didn’t get annihilated by a matter-antimatter reaction, Serenity suffered multiple hull breaches, and inertial dampeners were overwhelmed by the explosive deceleration – and, as Doctor Laurier tells me, the human body isn’t designed for vacuum or such force.” Several had died in those first seconds, him almost among them, and many more in the moments that followed while corridors and offices were exposed to space and no power could get to the forcefields. 

”I… I…” Commander Lee fumbled for words. “I don’t even know what to say.”

”There’s nothing to say,” Captain Lewis shrugged it off. “All we can do now is move forward. We have a long journey ahead of us.”

The duo looked at him curiously. What did he mean? Wouldn’t they be returning through the Underspace? That would be a trip of only hours, once they got their ships back together.

Captain Lewis could see the confusion on the faces of his colleagues. It told him what he’d already inferred. They might have made it through with less loss of life than the Serenity, but with their EPS grid torched, they’d have no way to have detected the topological changes within subspace. “Based on what we’ve been able to ascertain,” Captain Lewis explained. “The Cardassians succeeded in their plot.”

Neither said a thing. Did he mean what they thought he meant?

”Based on our latest readings, Commander Sena believes, with a high degree of confidence, that the Underspace, at least as we’ve enjoyed it over the last few weeks, is no more,” Captain Lewis continued. “There will be no apertures to find, and no corridors to ferry us home.”

It took a moment for them to process that reality. “You’re… you’re… you’re saying that, while we were just in Federation space a day ago, we’re now years from returning to it?” Commander Lee asked as she stumbled back. “How far exactly did you ascertain us to be, Elyssia?”

”Six thousand light years, ma’am,” Ensign Rel replied.

”Six thousand, two hundred and forty, to be precise,” Captain Lewis corrected. That number was burned into his mind. That was the number that they’d need to tic down, light year by light year, until at least they made it home.

“Okay, yeah, I got that,” nodded Commander Lee as she looked over at her flight controller. “But what’s that in travel time? Several years, at best speed?”

“Somewhere between two and six years,” Ensign Rel nodded. “Depending on how direct a course we can take, and what cruising velocity we can maintain.” You couldn’t run the ship at maximum warp for years on end, after all.

No, Commander Lee thought to herself. It couldn’t be. They couldn’t be years from home. Just a couple weeks ago, they’d been enjoying the sandy beaches and chalky cliffs of Kyban, deep in the Archanis Sector, but now, they were stranded in the depths of the Beta Quadrant. 

“I… I…” Commander Lee said, her voice falling to almost a whisper. “I’m not Janeway, Captain.” She wasn’t ready for this. She still saw herself as an engineer, not a commander, and it’d been easy to continue to believe that under the shadow of Admiral Reyes’ commanding presence. But now what? Now it was just her and this spook-turned-captain to get all these sailors home?

”Nor am I,” Captain Lewis laughed. “She was far too idealistic a captain for my tastes.” But from the grim look on Commander Lee’s face, he could see his joke had landed flat. Softening his expression, he locked eyes with her, trying to connect on an emotional level, as foreign as that was to him. “But we can make our own destiny here Cora. We got this.”

“Tell me, Tom. Is there any hope for them?”

The familiar voice, cutting through the silence of the lab where he stood scribbling equations, pulled him from his thoughts. Dr. Brooks turned to see a young woman, her eyes filled with desperation. “In what manner do you ask, my dear? Hope that the Serenity and the Ingenuity come flying out of the Vesparan star? That somehow the aperture, the one now closed to us, magically reopens?”

She nodded, although, when he’d just said it as he did, Chief Shafir knew it sounded preposterous. The Cardassians had succeeded in their plot to collapse the Underspace. But still, wasn’t there still hope? However slim it might be, she needed there to still be hope.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Dr. Brooks shook his head. “Not unless a force out there, one far beyond our scope of understanding, wills the Underspace back into existence.” That wasn’t to say it was completely out of the question. It had, after all, appeared just as inexplicably a few weeks prior. Still, it did not seem likely, not after the Cardassians had smoothed out the excited foliations of subspace that had made transit through the labyrinth possible. “And I wouldn’t hang any hope on such an improbable probability.”

That wasn’t a no, Chief Shafir noted. But then again, Dr. Brooks was one who loved the weird and wacky, who never shied away from the most unlikely of possibilities. She knew she couldn’t put stock in that. Still, as she eyed the aged physicist, she sensed there was something more. There was something he wasn’t saying. He seemed too calm for just having lost one of his closest friends. “If not for the Underspace, what about for Lewis and the others? Is there still hope that they’re out there somewhere, and that somehow they find a way home?” The USS Voyager had been thought lost to the deep, only to reappear almost a decade later. If Captain Janeway could do it, why couldn’t Captain Lewis and Commander Lee?

“That I cannot answer,” Dr. Brooks replied flatly as he folded his arms across his chest.

It was a curious way to answer the question, the intelligence operator thought to herself. Was there more he wasn’t saying? She stared at him, trying to read him through his guarded demeanor. Though he never spoke of it, she knew why Tom Brooks had been locked up, the part of his past that would be their future, and for a moment she wondered whether he couldn’t answer because he didn’t know, or whether he wouldn’t answer because he did.

Dr. Brooks met her stare with a stoic and unreadable expression, but as they locked eyes, he found himself feeling for the young woman. He knew how much the Captain meant to her. Lewis had found Ayala Shafir in her darkest moment, and he’d helped her find her way back. “All I can say is that, after all the universe has thrown at Jake Lewis, it’d take quite a lot for it to kill him off now.” It was all he could offer. All he would offer. All he dared offer. His time in New Zealand had given him new clarity and restraint. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my model.”

Without another word, Dr. Brooks turned his back to her, starting to scribble unintelligible notation upon his board once more.

Chief Shafir stared at his backside, trying to suppress her frustration. How dare he cut her off like that? She wanted to push further, but she knew it would be futile. While Tom Brooks wore the uniform of a Starfleet officer and played scientist as part of the ASTRA team, she knew who he was at his core. On Earth and then at Beta Serpentis, she’d seen what he could do, and thus, resigned to the fact she’d get nowhere with him, she took her leave. She was tired. She needed some sleep. But first, she had someone else to visit.

“We’ve checked everything at our disposal. Unfortunately, there’s no trace of them.”

That wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be enough. Logically, she understood what he was saying, but emotionally, she wasn’t willing to accept it. After all, she’d been the one to give the order. This was on her, and she wanted a way out. They needed to find those ships. Her ships. “You’ve checked the entire sensor net?”

“Yes.”

“Even the deep space relays?”

“Yes.”

“What about our frontier explorers?”

“Yes, those too.”

“And how about…”

“Allison, stop. Just stop. You know me. You know us, all of us at Fourth Fleet Command. No stone was left unturned, not for your ships, nor for the others that didn’t make it back. We’ve reviewed long range telemetry, contacted the captains of our deep space commands, reached out to our contacts in foreign governments, and much, much more. But we’ve found nothing.”

Staring at the Director of Fourth Fleet Engineering across the link, Fleet Admiral Reyes could see the disappointment on his face. Admiral Neidlinger was a builder and a fixer. This was not what he did. This wasn’t the sort of message he delivered. She almost felt bad for making him be the one to tell her, but she’d wanted a straight answer, and a thoroughly researched one. Who better then to get it from than an engineer?

“I wish I had something to give you – anything at all – but for now, I’m afraid all we can do is keep looking. It’s possible they’re still out there somewhere, limping back on their own power.”

Admiral Reyes nodded, for it was all she could do, and then, for the first time since the collapse, it crossed her mind that the Serenity and the Ingenuity wouldn’t have been the only ones on the wrong side of those apertures. “Tell me, James, how many other ships are still unaccounted for?” She’d been so caught up in their personal situation, in the guilt she felt for the choices she’d made, that she hadn’t even thought to ask until now.

“Surprisingly few given the extent of our operation. Almost all, save your duo and a handful of others, had time to get back once the recall order was given.”

That was good, at least, but why then had Captain Lewis and Commander Lee not made it out? They weren’t even all that far out into the labyrinth compared to some of the others. One of the Fourth Fleet’s ships had even found itself beyond the galactic barrier, and even that one had made it home before the Underspace collapsed. Why hadn’t the Serenity and the Ingenuity?

“I’m sorry, Allison.”

“So am I,” Admiral Reyes frowned as she looked down at the floor. “We should have known better. We were playing with science we didn’t understand.” They’d saved Vespara, and that had been the right thing to do, but they should have moved more carefully after that. She should have moved more carefully after that.

“We will keep looking. I promise you that. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, know that the full resources of my department are at your disposal.”

“Thank you James,” Admiral Reyes nodded numbly as she closed the link. It was all platitudes. There was nothing Admiral Neidlinger or his resources could do for them, nothing anyone could do for them.

They were gone.

In a fit of rage, Admiral Reyes grabbed a glass vase off her desk, and, without a moment’s pause, she threw it angrily. It sailed across the room, slamming into the far wall and shattering on impact. The Antarian moon blossoms, no longer held in its embrace, fell to the floor, shards of glass raining down all around it.

Fuck, they were gone.

Slowly, she made her way back around her desk and took a seat, her head falling into her hands. This was on her. She’d made the wrong call.

The door chimed.

The Admiral had half a mind to tell whoever was out there to fuck off, to leave her be, to let her thrash her office and scream into the abyss, but she knew better than to wallow in her misery. Should she at least clean up the vase first? No, fuck the vase.

“Come,” Admiral Reyes ordered as she straightened her collar and looked to the door.

A Chief Petty Officer in red stepped through the door. On most assignments, the idea of a mid-level enlisted specialist stopping by an admiral’s office unannounced would have been unheard of, but the bonds forged between the two through the crucible transcended protocol.

“One of those days, huh?” Chief Shafir asked as her eyes drifted to the far wall.

The Admiral simply nodded.

“I gather no word from the Serenity or the Ingenuity?” Chief Shafir asked. If the flowers and the glass strewn across the floor were any indication, she already knew the answer.

“Unfortunately not,” Admiral Reyes confirmed. “Fourth Fleet Command is doing what they can, but Captain Lewis and Commander Lee were damn far out when the Underspace collapsed. If they escaped, they’re well beyond our reach.” She kept telling herself that this was what had happened, that Captain Lewis and Commander Lee had actually made it out, that they’d eventually come waltzing back like Captain Janeway and the USS Voyager. But there was nothing to support that, no proof whatsoever. It was just as likely that the Cardassians had discovered the doublecross and bounced their hulls off the plasmatic walls of the labyrinth.

“Permission to speak freely?” Chief Shafir asked. It was only a courtesy though. She was going to speak her peace either way, and the Admiral was going to hear it.

“I’d never expect anything less from you, Ayala,” Admiral Reyes smiled lightly.

“Why didn’t you send the Diligent back in there to find them?” Chief Shafir asked. “I heard – we all heard – the order you gave Captain Vox, the one to stand down.” Her expression was cold as she glared at the woman she’d believed in, the woman who’d always seemed larger than life. Until now. “I thought you were one of us, that you understood. We have a code. No man left behind. But this time… this time, you… you personally… you left our men behind.”

The words stung. They were words beyond rank or office, the words of one operator to another, and what hurt the most was that there was a part of Allison Reyes that agreed. Still, there was the other part of her, the part that wore the pips of Fleet Admiral and commanded a squadron of the fleet’s finest ships, that knew she’d made the right call. The only call. “If I’d ordered Dorian back into the labyrinth, where would I have been sending him?”

“Somewhere… anywhere…”

“Those are words of desperation, Ayala,” Admiral Reyes reminded her gently, locking eyes with the operator. “We hadn’t heard from Lewis or Lee for over an hour. Courtesy of the Underspace, they could have been anywhere within half the galaxy from the last time they called in.”

“But you could have at least tried.”

“And then we’d be mourning another six hundred and fifty,” Admiral Reyes countered. “If we’d sent Dorian back in, he’d have been hunting for a needle in a haystack while the haystack was on fire.” That was how Dr. Brooks had described it, and it seemed apt. “They’d likely have burned up long before finding anything.”

“Then why did we send Lewis and Lee through in the first place?” Chief Shafir asked, her eyes narrowing on the Admiral. “You don’t go in without a contingency plan, but here, you had none.”

“Sometimes the stakes require it,” Admiral Reyes pointed out. “Nasera, Earth, Beta Serpentis…”

“Ok, sure, when the cause is so great you’re willing to lose it all,” Chief Shafir acknowledged, and on those three examples, she couldn’t disagree. The stakes for each had called for it. “But this wasn’t like those. I mean, come on Admiral… what did we have to gain by going in there in the first place? A grand adventure? A new frontier? The Underspace was bad news from the beginning. I know it, and you know it.”

Admiral Reyes stood there silently, for she had no argument to the contrary.

“We should have been doing what the Cardassians were doing, trying to collapse that shit before it unraveled the entire galactic tapestry,” Chief Shafir pressed. The galaxy worked, in large part, because of the separation that existed between hostile powers, and this had been an existential threat to that equilibrium. “Starfleet picked the wrong fucking side on this one.”

A Klingon or Romulan commander would have said it offered a tactical advantage for future conquests, and a scientist at Daystrom of Brahms might have said it created opportunities for subspace research. A naive officer in Starfleet, meanwhile, might have celebrated it as an opportunity to go boldly to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life. But Admiral Reyes was none of those things. She was far more pragmatic, and in that, she had no response to offer. She just continued to stand there in silence.

“I guess, if it’s any consolation,” Chief Shafir concluded darkly. “At least with the Serenity and the Ingenuity, so too went the Underspace itself.” They just hadn’t needed to go with it.

The briefing room was filled to capacity, every chair taken and officers standing along the walls as well. The Duderstadt class fast cruiser was never meant to serve as a flagship, but now, the USS Serenity had become one. In many ways, she was no different than her captain. By most definitions, Captain Jake Lewis was not cut out to be a commanding officer. He was an aged spook of an era long past, thrust into the big chair by an admiral who had an outsized opinion of him. Now, in some ironic twist of fate, he was in charge of the wellbeing – and frankly, the very survival – of two entire ships and their crews.

Flanking Captain Lewis at the head of the table were Commander Cora Lee, Commanding Officer of the USS Ingenuity, and Lieutenant Commander Ekkomas Eidran, Executive Officer of the USS Serenity. Their titles and pips, though, did not tell the whole story. They had less than two years of command experience between them. Commander Lee was a prodigious engineer who’d only become a commanding officer because the USS Ingenuity was meant to support the activities of Fourth Fleet Engineering. She’d never so much as executed first contact protocols outside of the holodeck before. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Commander Eidran had only received his shot at Executive Officer because his prior CO had believed in him, and that CO had died in combat almost immediately after promoting him. Through the Lost Fleet, Frontier Day, and the Borg, Commander Lee and Lieutenant Commander Eidran had survived in their roles, but that was the best one could say of them. They were full of trauma, but not of experience.

Around the table and along the walls, the reality was little better for the rest of the senior staff. Lieutenant J.G. Ashlynn Laurier was only three days into the job as Chief Medical Officer after their fall from the Underspace had killed her boss, and Lieutenant J.G. Rafael Cruz, the Chief Security Officer of the Ingenuity, was so young that he’d been assimilated by the Borg signal over Earth. Even amongst the more aged officers, there was Lieutenant Greg Gadsen, a Chief Operations Officer who broke more than he fixed with his incessant tinkering, and Lieutenant Commander Sherrod Allen, the Ingenuity‘s Executive Officer who’d failed upward by taking no risks over his embarrassingly long career in middle management.

The only true veterans at the table were Lieutenant Commanders Sena, Will Sharpe, and Grace Ellander. When a former Tal’Shiar agent, a frontier grease monkey, and a trauma therapist were your most stalwart leaders, you had a problem, Captain Lewis knew. This was not the team he would have picked, had he had the choice. But he had no choice. This was all he had, and it’d have to do.

Once everyone was assembled, Captain Lewis took a deep breath, summoning a voice he seldom used. “Two weeks ago, as we raced from Kyban towards Vespara, none of us could have anticipated the chain of events that brought us to this place,” he began, acknowledging the dramatic shift in their reality. “But here we are, thousands of light years from home, with the Underspace now closed to us and looking at a long journey home.”

As Captain Lewis spoke, his eyes tracked around the room, studying those he’d be relying on in the days – or, more accurately, the years – ahead. Trepidation was the word that best described the looks on their faces. He knew weakness when he saw it, and there was too much of it here.

“This was not the mission we expected, but it is the mission that now lies before us,” Captain Lewis continued, projecting strength and conviction in the only way he knew how. “Whatever your doubts, and whatever your fears, put them aside. We can do this. We will do this. For ourselves, for our loved ones, and for our crews.”

Captain Lewis’ eyes momentarily fell on Ensign Elyssia Rel, the flight controller from the USS Ingenuity who’d somehow snuck herself into a place in his heart that he didn’t know he had. At least she looked calm. With her past, it made sense though. Through her symbiont, Elyssia knew fates far worse than being separated from home. He dared not linger on her too long though, lest his personal feelings be too evident to those around him, and quickly his gaze shifted back to Commander Lee.

“How go the repairs, Commander?” Captain Lewis asked. Lieutenant Raine’s quick thinking and the prior modifications by the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity had allowed the Ingenuity to fall from the Underspace without losing a soul, but it had blown out the ship’s entire EPS grid, rendering the ship stationary until repairs were complete.

“We are nearing the end of the work to retro the EPS grid, thanks to Lieutenant Raine and Ensign Seltzer,” Commander Lee offered, nodding towards her spunky Chief Engineer and her diligent Chief Operations Officer. The young pair had worked miracles. Ensign Kellan Seltzer had mapped out an optimal sequence to reconstruct the hundreds of circuits across the power distribution network, while Lieutenant Dani Raine had organized a sea of yellow, red and teal to flood the ship and do the actual rebuild. “We anticipate being ready to get underway in the next few hours.”

Captain Lewis, of course, already knew this. It’s why he’d called the meeting now, rather than three days prior as the Ingenuity drifted aimlessly. Still, he’d decided to ask, both in case there’d been any change, but also to allow Commander Lee to acknowledge her crew. Such recognition was a powerful motivator.

“And what of our duty rosters, Lieutenant Commander Eidran?” Captain Lewis then inquired as he turned to his own Executive Officer. Where the Ingenuity had endured a mostly mechanical failure in its fall from the Underspace, the Serenity had suffered a far more human one. “Where’s our staffing at?” This would be a far more long-lasting problem, he knew.

“We suffered significant losses across all departments,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran said, his voice a bit shakier than his CO would have liked. “But our worst were in Engineering, on account of the negative pressure from deceleration causing a manifold burst, and in Science and Medical, as both our main science lab and sickbay were within the sections affected by the hull breaches.” The Betazoid paused as he was overcome by emotion, both his own and that of those around him. Every senior officer on the Serenity had lost people in their dramatic fall from the Underspace, and now, as he spoke, all their emotion was slamming into him. “It… it was a lot.”

Captain Lewis already knew this. He’d read the casualty reports. “But what are we doing about it, Commander?” He didn’t need an Executive Officer that sat around feeling sorry about what had happened. He needed one that would figure out how they’d move forward.

“Oh yes… yes, that…” Lieutenant Commander Eidran fumbled, trying to regain his composure. “Given the parameters of our last mission, the Ingenuity had an abundance of engineers on hand so Lieutenant Commander Sharpe is coordinating with Lieutenant Raine to ensure we have enough coverage on both ships.”

Captain Lewis stole a glance at Lieutenant Commander Sharpe, who nodded reassuringly. The veteran engineer, who’d spent much of his career on the borderlands making do with little, was never phased, and this was no exception. He’d manage, as he always did, regardless of what was at his disposal.

“For sickbay,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran continued, trying his best to maintain his composure as he ran through the most impacted departments. “We have minimal duty shifts established, but we’ll be running short.”

Captain Lewis looked over at Lieutenant J.G. Ashlynn Laurier. He could see the exhaustion on her face. There’d be no relief from the Ingenuity on this one either, as the Pathfinder class had a minimal medical complement to begin with. “You gonna be able to make it work, Ash?”

“The sick and twisted part of this whole affair is that our resourcing needs are defined, in large part, by crew size,” Lieutenant J.G. Laurier nodded. “The less crew we have, the less staff we need. While we lost 45% of our staff, the Serenity is also down 33% of its total complement.” How she managed to get the words out without crying, she wasn’t sure, but she did. Still, her eyes gave her sadness away – the deep, deep sadness she felt. Her friends and colleagues, every single member of the medical staff that’d been on duty when the hull breached as they were ejected from the Underspace, they were all dead now.

“I’m sure a few of us can pick up hyposprays, if you need,” Captain Lewis assured her as he glanced at Lieutenant Irina Tarasova. He’d heard what the Serenity‘s Chief Tactical Officer had done to keep him alive until medical staff arrived, and in time, they could probably train a few more field medics like her to bolster their needs. “We’ll work together to make it work.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Lieutenant J.G. Laurier smiled sheepishly, appreciative of the captain’s show of support. She just hoped she would be enough to lead the department. She had been training under an incredible Chief Medical Officer, but she certainly didn’t see herself as one.

The Captain then turned back to his first officer, gesturing for him to continue.

“For our science department, unfortunately, the entire team was studying the Underspace down in the lab on deck four when… when…” Lieutenant Commander Eidran explained, stuttering as he thought back to that moment. “When the resonance pulse ejected us from the Underspace.” Every single science officer in the lab had perished due to a lack of oxygen before Lieutenant Commander Sharpe could get power restored to the force fields. “And as for staff rebalancing, the Ingenuity had left its entire science department back in the ASTRA labs on the Polaris.”

Captain Lewis looked past the end of the table to the Romulan that stood leaning against the far wall. She’d been on the bridge with them. She hadn’t been in the lab with the others.

“Lieutenant Commander Sena is our science department now,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran concluded, stating what was already obvious to the Captain.

Wonderful, thought Captain Lewis. A Romulan would be their best chance at engendering a creative scientific solution to get home faster. “Gonna work miracles for us, Miss Sena?”

“If the universe allows,” Lieutenant Commander Sena nodded calmly. She was fully aware of the Captain’s feelings towards her. She’d have likely had the same towards him, if their roles had been reversed. “All subspace telemetry I’ve reviewed suggests the Underspace isn’t going to bail us out, but the galaxy is full of curious phenomena that may accelerate our voyage home.”

Captain Lewis nodded. “So about that voyage home,” he then said as he turned back to address the room as a whole. “That is our one and only mission, the thing we will commit ourselves to in every decision we make, from now until we reemerge in Federation space.” From what he remembered from the report on Voyager, another ship that had faced a fate similar to theirs, Captain Janeway spent far too much time on stellar phenomena and first contacts. Each of those had presented an opportunity for something to go wrong, and he intended to lead them on a more direct and safe path home. “I’m sure there’ll be deviations – we’ll need supplies, and may need to avoid troublesome regions of space – but this will be our north star.”

Around the table, the senior staff of the Serenity and the Ingenuity nodded. After what they’d just been through, none were in much of an explore and discover spirit.

“Sir, I presume protocols like the Prime Directive still remain in force?” asked Lieutenant J.G. Cruz. He could envision situations out here in the unknown where they might be forced to make difficult decisions, and more than that, he was aware of the rumors about Captain Lewis.

“The Prime Directive? Yes, certainly,” Captain Lewis nodded, recognizing it a reasonable question. “As for others, they’re not always so black and white, nor were they written for a pair of ships separated from Starfleet by thousands of light years.” His mind went to the Omega Directive and how Captain Janeway had been forced to improvise when her ship came across those troublesome particles while deep within the Delta Quadrant. “We should stick to our general operating procedures, as much as practical, but we must also adapt, as necessary, to our circumstances.” That, really, was no different than it was back at home too.

“And what of the intelligence gathering opportunity this presents us?” Lieutenant Tarasova asked, using language more aligned to his way of thinking than the mission of exploration and discovery that Starfleet often preached. “Starfleet knows little about what lies out here in this region of space far beyond the borders of the Romulans and the Klingons.”

“Observation will be helpful for our cause, and it may be helpful to procure information about the area to ensure success in our voyage,” Captain Lewis acknowledged pragmatically. “But if Lieutenant Commander Eidran’s report was not reminder enough, we do not have the luxury of resupply or restaffing. Out here, if we use a torpedo, lose a shuttle, or suffer a casualty, that loss is permanent, so our goal is to avoid it, if at all possible.”

His words were sobering, and the staff grew quiet as they contemplated them. They really were alone out here, and this was going to be a hard trip home.

Lieutenant Commander Ellander, sensing the mood, then jumped in. “Your teams are going to be struggling with our new reality,” the counselor noted. “And it is totally natural and understandable if you are as well.” She knew the debilitating impact that trauma could have on one’s performance, and this situation was no simple trauma. “It’ll be important in the weeks, the months, and the years ahead, that we keep our ears to the ground, and if you get the sense that anyone needs support, know that I and my staff are here to assist.”

“Thank you, Grace,” Captain Lewis acknowledged before, as much out of a discomfort with the topic as anything, moving the conversation along. “Now, as I understand it, Lieutenant Selik and Ensign Rel have plotted an initial vector to begin our trip home, so as soon as Commander Lee and Lieutenant Raine give us the final okay that Ingenuity is ready, we’re going to depart. So now’s the time to get back with your departments and make final preparations to get underway.”

Captain Lewis looked around the room to see if there were any additional questions, but the staff all appeared to be good – or, if not good, at least processing. That was all he could really hope for, given the circumstances. It was a lot to take in, he knew, but the best way to cope was to start putting one foot in front of the other again, so it was time to do just that.

“Dismissed!”

She took a deep drag and exhaled slowly. The smoke danced upward, snaking around her nose and rising into the blackened sky of the cold desert night. She watched it go, its wisps like her worries and her sins, fading into the darkness. The stars, the patio, and the shisha pipe, it all felt so real, but really, it was nothing more than an illusion of photons, forcefields and replicated matter. Wasn’t it all though? In the end, was any of this – even her life itself – any more than a passing projection? Wouldn’t they all disappear just the same, no different than this place? Still, in the moment, it didn’t make it feel any less real – not this simulation, nor her life itself.

“Ya sayyida alfawdaa, ‘akhbiriniun ean mashakilik?” the old man with yellowing teeth and weathered skin asked from across the table. Nadeem Abadi was a veteran of a war centuries before her time, a conflict of fates as scarring on him as her own had been on her, yet while, in reality, he was nothing more than a construct of bioneural subroutines and holographic emitters, he was, in many ways, still the closest thing to a reflection of what Ayala Shafir saw in herself.

“Tell you of my troubles, sadiqi alqadim?” the chief sighed as she passed the hookah hose. “Where would I even begin?” Where was it that things had really gone wrong? Was it Nasera, when she pressed that detonator and erased Lieutenant Commander Brock Jordan from existence? Or was it back nearly two decades now, when she watched, motionless and emotionless, as her fellow officers were executed, simply to preserve her cover? Or was it during those times in-between when she ran with the Fenris Rangers and Sebold Logistics, walking in the gray? The gray, just like the smoke now rising from the old man’s mouth. “It’s been quite a journey, Nadeem, over the years.”

“Your scars, the scars of that journey,” Nadeem replied, his words soft as he switched from his native tongue to hers. “They live forever on your body, yes.” His skin too was weathered and marked by his own journey. “I sense, though, there’s something more present on your mind.”

He passed the hose back to her, and as she raised it to her lips, her hand passing by her face, she stared at the stub where once her index finger had been. The doctors had offered to make her whole again, but she’d declined. She’d lost that finger in captivity, but Lieutenant J.G. Jace Morgan had lost so much more. Jace had died a forgotten fighter of a shallow victory. Forgotten by all but her. Her and that stub of a finger. “Does anything we do ever really truly matter?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask that of, my dear,” the old man admitted. “I fought war after war to protect my people, and to avenge all those they’d taken from us, but sitting here now, what’d it really accomplish? We are still divided, and still we suffer.”

“If there’s a synopsis of our galaxy someday,” Chief Shafir lamented. “Maybe that’s all it needs to say: we are still divided, and still we suffer.”

For a moment, the two sat in silent contemplation. In the late night hour, the lights in the mudbrick flats had been extinguished, and no vehicles passed by. The only sound in the background was that of the desert wind as it blew softly down the dusty thoroughfare afore the patio. That wind, though, couldn’t blow away that which afflicted them. Nothing could.

“We fight, we suffer, and we die, but for what?” Chief Shafir asked at last. “Maybe Nasera was worth it… and Earth… and Beta Serpentis, even… but the Underspace? I’m not even sure we were on the right side.” The Underspace had imbalanced the galaxy, but it was the Cardasians, not Starfleet, that had taken it upon themselves to restore equilibrium. Captain Lewis and the others, they’d been lost, and she wasn’t even sure if it’d been for a righteous cause – and what they’d done, and their sacrifice, it certainly had not mattered in the end.

“There’s an old proverb that seems fitting for what you’re going through now,” offered Nadeem. It was one that he, or at least the subroutines that defined his personality matrix, held close to heart. “Falsayf sabaq allawm.”

An apt metaphor, Chief Shafir thought in quiet contemplation.

“The sword preceded the blame,” came a new voice, not that of Nadeem, but rather a female voice, one beyond the patio, somewhere out in the darkness. 

It pulled the chief from her thoughts, her face growing wary as she looked for the speaker. A faint silhouette was advancing towards them down the dark thoroughfare. Who had intruded on her in this private moment? The holodeck wasn’t programmed for this, and she certainly hadn’t invited anyone. As the figure neared, the dim lamps of the cafe’s patio cast long light upon the new arrival. At first, it was just enough to make out a Starfleet uniform, but then, as the figure drew closer, her blonde hair and her fair skin came into view.

“Emilia?” Chief Shafir asked. She was more than a bit confused. Lieutenant Emilia Balan was a colleague from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity. She worked in the Cultural and Psychological Research Unit, and they’d been on a couple away missions together. That didn’t mean they were friends, though. They didn’t socialize together – not that the chief socialized with practically anyone – and she certainly hadn’t been invited to join. Still, at least the girl was harmless. “You… you speak Arabic?”

“The galaxy is full of languages, but it speaks with only one voice,” Lieutenant Balan mused as she drew to a halt beside the table. What a curious sight, thought the lieutenant: a Chief Petty Officer and an old man with decaying teeth, sitting on either side of an Arabic water pipe on a dusty cafe patio in a nondescript desert village.  “From Earth to Qo’noS, nearly all cultures have a similar proverb. I’m curious, though, what it means to you?”

The chief studied the young lieutenant. There was nothing off-putting about her, and her question carried not a lick of judgment. Just curiosity. Still, Ayala Shafir had no interest in sharing her most private thoughts with anyone besides the illusion of Nadeem. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Lieutenant, but what are you doing here?” Her tone was pointed, and it came out a bit more harsh than she meant it to.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lieutenant Balan backpedaled, noting the response she’d provoked from the chief. That certainly hadn’t been her intention. Had she overstepped by inviting herself in? “I had a holodeck reservation to enjoy some hearty Klingon opera, but I arrived to find myself in…” She looked around at the nondescript desert architecture, the trappings of the cafe, and the wardrobe of the hologram opposite Chief Shafir. “The Arabian desert on Earth in what looks to be about the twentieth or twenty-first century?”

“Not bad,” Chief Shafir nodded, impressed by her deduction from what little surrounded them. The young woman had placed it as close as one could, for it wasn’t a specific place or point in time, but rather a generic representation of her heritage. “I should be the one to apologize though. I had not realized the time. I can shut this down so you can enjoy your…” She couldn’t keep a straight face as she said it. “Your Klingon opera.” What the hell was the innocent, pretty little flower that was Emilia Balan doing listening to such a raucous cacophony of sound?

“Oh no, the ambitious solo passages of Gav’ot toH’va, belted by the great tenor Moktor, son of Grogh, can wait for another night,” smiled Lieutenant Balan as she stared at the mysterious woman who, although they’d ventured out on away missions together, she still knew almost nothing about. “I’d much rather join you, if you’d be willing to have my company?”

Company was not the least bit what Chief Shafir wanted – not real, human company, at least – but this was Lieutenant Balan’s holodeck time, so maybe she’d humor it? At least for a bit. She could always excuse herself if need be. “Nadeem, would you give me and my colleague some time to talk?”

The hologram, as with most, had been programmed to accept hints of intent. “You know, it’s gotten mighty late, truth be told,” he said as he rose with labored effort. “I think my old bones would benefit from some sleep. Close up the cafe when you’re done, would you, Ayala?”

“Certainly, old friend,” Chief Shafir nodded as she watched him go. Nadeem Abadi, or at least different incarnations of him, had followed her ever since her time on the USS Nyx a decade and a half prior. “Please, Lieutenant,” she then offered, her tone more formal as she gestured to the vacant chair opposite her. “Have a seat?”

“Just Emilia, please,” Lieutenant Balan smiled warmly as she took a seat. In a setting like this, the formalisms hardly seemed fitting. And she’d never really liked them anyways.

“Alright, Emilia,” Chief Shafir replied with a smile. “First names it is.” She drew another long drag from the hookah, and then, as she exhaled, she extended her hand, offering the hose to the lieutenant. “Would you like some?”

“Is it…” Lieutenant Balan asked, hesitating. “Is it real?”

“The water pipe? Hell no. With how much I jump from place to place, I’d certainly break it,” Chief Shafir chuckled. “And besides, once I got the specifications right, the holodeck does a fine job with it. It even materializes fresh, warm coals with a flick of the wrist.” As if to accentuate the point, she waved her hand over the bowl, and the burnt coals transformed into a fresh set, rewarming the shisha in the bowl beneath.

The Lieutenant seemed appeased and reached out to accept.

“But, I should warn you, the tobacco is real.”

The lieutenant paused, looking at the pipe warily.

“The holodeck can’t – or more accurately, won’t – recreate it,” Chief Shafir explained. “At least not the real stuff, the stuff that gives you that nice soft buzz, due to associated health hazards.” Instead, she had to import it from where it was still grown and cultivated naturally.

Now the Lieutenant just looked confused. “I don’t understand. Why do you… why do you smoke it? Isn’t it… isn’t it bad for your health?” There was no condescension in her tone. Just genuine curiosity. The hazards of smoking had been understood for hundreds of years, and while modern medicine could cure many of its ails, why would a sharp and fit Starfleet officer partake in such an activity?

“Many things are bad for my health,” Chief Shafir laughed. “Running with Reyes or… or Lewis…” She looked down regretfully as she mentioned his name. “Running with this crew is gonna kill me long before a little pipe does.” She retracted her hand and took another long drag as she thought about Captain Lewis, her mentor, now lost to the deep. She never thought the captain would go before her.

“If you feel that way about running with them,” Lieutenant Balan asked. “Why do you keep doing it?” Who would willingly do something they felt would kill them?

“Because I believe,” Chief Shafir replied reverently.

“Believe in what?”

“In them,” Chief Shafir replied without a moment’s hesitation. “It’s fitting that Reyes flies her flag on the Polaris, isn’t it?” She looked up at the sky. Here in this simulation, unadulterated by light pollution of modern Earth, the north star shined bright. “Against the Dominion, the Borg, and even Starfleet itself, she’s our north star. And Lewis, he never waivers, a rock that never cracks.” She then turned back to Lieutenant Balan. “What about you, Emilia? Why are you here? What do you believe in?”

“Not for anyone or anything like that, certainly,” Lieutenant Balan admitted sheepishly. “I came to the stars to see the beauty of our galaxy and the diverse peoples in it.” She’d been wholly unprepared for the boundless tragedy she saw on Nasera II and the cold ruthlessness she witnessed on Beta Serpentis III. “To be perfectly honest, though, I’m not sure I had any idea what I was getting into.”

“None of us ever really do, huh?” Chief Shafir observed, thinking back as she took another long drag. “In my younger years, I thought I knew it all.” She let the smoke go as she flashed back to those days. “Back in the early nineties, I signed up for a mission to infiltrate a terror cell, thinking it’d be a quick thing… we’d dig up some dirt and squash some bad guys. But then I spent a year undercover – deep fucking cover – seeing things… doing things… I thought I knew darkness, the worst the galaxy could offer, but it turned out I had no idea.”

“How did you process it?” Lieutenant Balan asked curiously. She was still trying to process what they’d survived over the last year, the scenes she saw of broken worlds, the stories she heard of a brutal occupation, and the moments – moments, plural – when her life flashed before her eyes.

“For a while, I didn’t,” Chief Shafir admitted, her eyes darkening, growing almost black. “I turned in my pips, and I drifted, aimless and faceless, in all the darkest places where one can go to just disappear. For years, I was nobody, and I was nowhere.”

“But you’re here now, Ayala,” Lieutenant Balan offered warmly, her heart paining for the woman across the table. What a thing to share, she thought to herself. It suddenly made her struggles, those nights spent crying alone at night, seem like nothing. “How’d you find your way back?”

“Because Jake found me,” Chief Shafir replied.

Lieutenant Balan appeared to not get the reference.

“Captain Lewis.” 

Now she got it. At least who Chief Shafir was talking about, but not how. Lieutenant Balan had only peripherally interacted with the man who stalked shadows in the corridors for a pastime, but Captain Lewis didn’t seem the sort of person who’d help you out of your darkest moment. Quite to the contrary, he seemed the sort that gravitated towards them. She’d heard, second hand, what had come out at the trial, the accusations of murder… and worse.

“You see, back then, Starfleet had given up on him, but he wasn’t ready to give up on them,” Chief Shafir explained. “He went off and created his own private outfit to do what he could, in the service of the Federation while beyond it. He brought me back, and he gave me purpose. We did the things that Starfleet couldn’t – or wouldn’t – sometimes with their quiet nod, and sometimes without it. Those had been the days, doing what needed to be done.” No protocols, and no policy. Just what they had to. On Nasera, with their old colleagues, they’d fallen back into that same pattern, except of course that the JAG had come for them when it was all over.

Lieutenant Balan just sat there with a stunned look on her face. She’d come to the holodeck for an opera, but she’d gotten so much more. She’d certainly never expected to, in such a short time, learn so much both about the aloof Chief Shafir and the haggard Captain Lewis. There was always more to a book than its cover, and this was more proof.

“And then, a couple years ago, when the Osiris Initiative was first launched, Allison… or sorry, Admiral Reyes…” Chief Shafir continued. “She reached out to Jake and asked him to come back. And then Jake called me, and the rest is history. I followed him at Sebold Logistics, and I followed him back to Starfleet.” She regretted none of it. Except Vespara. Except when they lost the Serenity and the Ingenuity to the Underspace. Where was he now? Had he made it out? Was he limping back from some distant place, and would he make it home? Or had he fallen to the enemy? Or to subspace itself? She longed for answers. She needed answers.

“I… I…” Lieutenant Balan stuttered, trying to come up with a response. At last, she settled on something simple: “Thank you, Ayala.”

“For what?”

“For welcoming me to your table,” Lieutenant Balan offered with all the sincerity in the world. “And for sharing something so personal.” She had a sense how vulnerable it must have made the chief to share it. Fuck it, she thought. If Ayala Shafir could open up to her like that, couldn’t she at least be open to something so small? She reached out and nodded at the pipe. “May I?”

“This?” Chief Shafir asked, raising the hose with a surprised look on her face.

Lieutenant Balan nodded.

Chief Shafir folded the end over itself in a traditional gesture of respect and passed it across the table. Why, she wondered, the change of heart?

Lieutenant Balan accepted the hose and turned it over in her hand, tracing it back to the water chamber. She noticed, for the first time, the delicate ornamental scene carved onto it, one depicting some battle from an era long past. Curious, she thought to herself, that the chief, in providing the specs for this device, had taken the time to inscribe it with such art.

“Just gonna stare at it?”

Slowly, Lieutenant Balan raised it to her mouth and inhaled. But as the smoke hit her lungs, she began to cough uncontrollably, leaning over the table to catch herself.

“Takes a bit to get used to it,” Chief Shafir giggled.

It was a sweet giggle, Lieutenant Balan thought to herself as she regained her composure. It was nice to see Ayala Shafir giggle. It was almost cute, and a nice shift from the mood of the prior conversation. “It’s… it’s not bad.” A hell of a lot less abrasive than her experiences on the Polaris had been recently. She took another drag, and this time, it didn’t hurt. Exhaling slowly, hints of vanilla and cinnamon tickled her tastebuds. “Actually, it’s pretty good.”

“Wait til you try zaghloul.”

Lieutenant Balan looked confused.

“The flavor of toothless old men,” Chief Shafir explained as she glanced towards the mudflat where her holographic old friend had turned in for the night. “A favorite of Nadeem’s. It’s a bit like being punched in the face.”

“You don’t sell it well,” Lieutenant Balan smiled. “Not that I’d know what being punched in the face felt like either.”

“All that Klingon opera, and not one melee?” Chief Shafir laughed.

And from there, they fell into a comfortable conversation – strangely comfortable given how different they were, but it was nice, Chief Shafir had to admin, to just sit and talk with someone like Emilia Balan, someone so genuine and curious with not a lick of judgment.

Slowly, the minutes turned to an hour, and an hour to two, and as the night drew late, the pair shared a great many things, stories of the beauty Emilia Balan found beneath the Tzenkethi skyline, and tales, both triumphant and tragic, from Ayala Shafir’s turbulent past. They shared, too, their perspectives on the galaxy, their lives, and themselves. It was a form of healing, in a way Ayala Shafir never knew she needed, to listen and talk to a young woman, so beautiful and so different from herself.

“You never did tell me… Why a Klingon opera?” That’d been what originally brought Lieutenant Balan to the holodeck, the original reason for her intrusion on the Arabian night. “You don’t exactly come off as a Bat’leths and bloodwine chick.” Not that she wouldn’t look good like that, Chief Shafir thought to herself as she eyed the young officer over.

Lieutenant Balan giggled at the notion. “Hah! Definitely not! I’d probably cut myself on the blade, or you’d be holding my hair back as I lost my guts after half a goblet.” She was neither a fighter, nor a drinker, but who knew? Before tonight, she’d never thought she’d be sitting in the desert night, smoking shisha with one of Polaris’ shooters – nor that she’d have anything in common with her either. “It’s the emotion infused into the story itself, and the way it carries into the operatic form, that gets me every time.”

The way her eyes lit up as she described it, Lieutenant Balan seemed like she really meant it, but before Chief Shafir could inquire further, her combadge chirped. She sat up straight and set the hookah down. “Shafir, go.”

“Good evening, Chief. Polaris Comms here. Sorry to disturb you at this late hour, but you have an incoming subspace call, designated urgent, your eyes only.”

“Caller?”

“Link validates as Starfleet official, ma’am, but the caller info is redacted.”

Curious, thought Lieutenant Balan. Who would redact their calling info? And how? She looked over at the chief, but Chief Shafir didn’t seem the least bit phased or surprised. Was this some of that cloak and dagger stuff she’d hinted at earlier? 

“Alright, patch it through,” Chief Shafir said as she rose from her chair.

“Understood. Have a good night. Polaris Comms out.”

The chief slid the hose across the table and then stepped away. “I’ll just be a minute,” she assured the lieutenant as she disappeared into the cafe, closing the door behind her. Lieutenant Balan was kind and harmless, Chief Shafir knew. She had no reason not to trust her, but there were some conversations best had without an audience. “Computer, terminal, and connect me to the incoming call.” 

The computer chirped in acknowledgement, and a terminal materialized in the middle of the mudbrick wall before her. For a moment, the terminal was adorned only with the seal of the United Federation of Planets, and while Chief Shafir waited for it to connect, she stared out the window of the cafe, back at the lieutenant who sat enjoying the hookah. What a nice evening, she thought to herself. Emilia had such a sweet soul, and the night, it’d been soothing in a way unfamiliar to her. Plus, to top it off, Emilia was beautiful too. That was always a plus.

But then the seal vanished, replaced by a stern-faced Vulcan in drab clothing. The Vulcan was neither sweet, nor beautiful – at least not in the ways Emila Balan was – but suddenly, Emilia Balan no longer mattered, and the nice night had been extinguished from her mind. If T’Aer was calling, it was something important. “What’ve you got for me?”

“A lead.”

There were no greetings and no frivolities, for neither were necessary. “Of what variety?”

“An individual with knowledge of what happened to our friend.”

Chief Shafir didn’t need to ask. She knew of which friend the Vulcan spoke. She also knew that, if T’Aer was speaking in ambiguities, it was for a reason, so she kept her questions simple. “Where?”

“Montana Station.”

From the outside, that was good news. A Starfleet officer visiting a Starfleet facility would raise no eyebrows. However, if she’d need to go off-book, it could also present problems, although it’d be nothing new for her. “Should I expect any support from the locals?”

“Certainly not.”

Yes, that meant what Chief Shafir had already suspected. This would be off-book. “Starfleet or civvie?”

“Neither.”

That meant foreign, which meant complex. It wasn’t unsurprising though. If memory served her right, Montana Station was a backwater nearly as trailing and rimward as one could venture. “What brings them to Montana?”

“Commercial enterprise.”

She had a good many more questions, but they’d have to wait. Although encrypted, the channel wasn’t impenetrable, something she knew as well as anyone. “Would it be good to bring some friends along?”

“If you have any such friends.”

That she did. The mad scientist and the twisted psychologist would certainly join her. Dr. Brooks owned Captain Lewis his life, many times over, and Dr. Hall would welcome an escape from the petty sob stories of soft-skinned sailors. “You can count on three of us. Will you be joining as well?”

“Yes, me and our lobed friend.”

It really would be like old times again, Chief Shafir thought to herself, traipsing around with Grok and T’Aer. All they were missing were Ryssehl and Lewis. The Andorian had died over Nasera, and Captain Lewis had gone missing in the labyrinth. “We’ll see you soon.”

The channel cut without another word, and Chief Shafir was left standing alone in the night. She looked out the window again, at the young lieutenant, so sweet and so bright. What a nice night it had been. But now it was over. Now, she had work to do.

“Computer, doorway.”

She turned her back, and she was gone. Without even saying goodbye.

Wispy clouds whirled and blue seas sparkled, lit by the cool blue gleam of the young Herbig Ae/Be star flickering 6.7 AU away. By the wall clock, it was the dead of the night, but space was a curious thing. It was always bright, if you had the right frame of reference. Standing center on the wide bridge, Gorion VII looked absolutely brilliant from their position 30,000 kilometers overhead. It reminded Lieutenant Commander Elena Mattson a bit of the view from the Sol Station operations center, her first assignment out of the Academy back in 2384. The Polaris was far smaller than the Federation’s pinnacle starbase, yet somehow, it felt almost as complicated. Her role was also far more expansive than it’d been over Earth all those years ago.

Vespara had been her first mission as Chief Operations Officer of Polaris, and it had put her to the test. Frankly, it had tested all of them. The gravity of the situation, the fate of a civilization hanging in the balance, it hung heavy over them, and the logistics of organizing a planet-wide evacuation while fighting an aberrant singularity, it was a massive effort to manage… and that was before the Klingons had turned their disruptors on the Polaris.

As Lieutenant Commander Mattson looked past the planet and the massive spaceframe of Archanis Station, her thoughts drifted to those who hadn’t been as lucky. What had become of the Serenity and the Ingenuity? She hadn’t been with the squadron long enough to have really gotten to know Captain Lewis, Commander Lee, or their crews, but still, her heart pained for them. Had they escaped the Underspace as it collapsed? Were they slowly limping back from parts unknown? She hoped their story would be like that of the USS Voyager, not the USS Hera.

Suddenly, the turbolift behind the command island whooshed open, puncturing the solitude of the silence. Lieutenant Commander Mattson turned to see Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes, their squadron commander, stepping onto the bridge. Immediately, she straightened up, as did the only other officer on the bridge, a Bolian lieutenant seated at the conn.

“As you were,” Admiral Reyes said nonchalantly. She wasn’t here to assume command from Elena Mattson, nor to bark orders at the Bolian flight controller, but both were at rigid attention like fresh cadets just called into the commandant’s office. “Really, at ease, both of you.”

Both officers loosened up, but only slightly. 

“Ok, seriously, don’t mind me,” Admiral Reyes insisted as she plopped herself down casually in the chair usually reserved for Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux. “I’m just here to read the latest edition of the Subspace Science Digest under the starlight of the Meronia Cluster.” As if to accentuate her claim, she swung her legs over one armrest and nestled her back against the other, curling up with her PADD like she was in a cozy lounge chair, not her first officer’s duty station.

Odd, thought Lieutenant Commander Mattson to herself. Wouldn’t the view be equally phenomenal from her suite? She knew better, though, than to question a Fleet Admiral, and instead she settled with some gentle hospitality. “Can I… can I get you anything, ma’am?”

Admiral Reyes furled her brow. “Elena, you’re the Officer of the Watch for a kilometer-length marvel of modern technology, and you’re most certainly not the orderly of a washed up admiral. If I need some tea or crumpets, you tell my lazy ass to get them myself.” Long ago, she’d been not all that different from the young lieutenant commander, but she hadn’t risen to her post by shining the shoes of the admiralty. And she wanted better for Elena Mattson too.

“Yes… I… umm…” Lieutenant Commander Mattson fumbled, struggling to reorient herself. How was one even supposed to respond to something like that? She was just trying to be kind. “Yes, ma’am.” 

The message received, she forced herself, as weird as it felt, to turn her back on the admiral and return to what she was doing. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling the admiral was watching her… but watching for what? They were just sitting stationary alongside Archanis Station. They had nothing to do except to wait for something to do. 

Maybe she’d run some system diagnostic in the meantime? She pulled up the latest system report for the impulse drives. All good there. Then it was off to a review of the warp assembly. All good there as well, and no surprise for either. Commander Lars Bauer kept both in far better condition than that unruly mat of hair on his head. Just as she was about to move onto a health check of the EPS grid though, her combadge chirped to life.

“Flight deck to bridge.”

“Mattson here,” she replied, welcoming the interruption. “Go ahead.”

“I have runabout Calvera requesting departure clearance.”

“Curious,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson replied. “I don’t recall anything tonight for Calvera.” She’d just reviewed the schedule when she assumed command of the bridge. “Do you have anything on file?” It’s been a few hours since she looked. Maybe something had changed?

Behind her, Admiral Reyes casually set down her PADD.

“No ma’am. Nothing on file.”

Whether it was a late night joyride or a critical mission, it didn’t really matter though. No paperwork meant no flying. “Inform Calvera,” began Lieutenant Commander Mattson, “that they’ll need to file…”

“Belay that,” came the commanding voice of the admiral as she rose from the first officer’s chair. “This is Fleet Admiral Reyes. You are to clear the Calvera for immediate departure.” Suddenly, it was very clear who was in command.

“Ma’am, we don’t have anything on file for their…”

“Flight deck, do I need to repeat myself?” Admiral Reyes asked sternly. “It was an order, not a request.” The expression on her face was no longer relaxed. Now, it was firm and unwavering.

“We just… ummm… oh, no, sorry ma’am. Clearing Calvera for immediate departure.”

“Very good. Reyes out.”

Lieutenant Commander Mattson stared at the older woman with confusion, but Admiral Reyes’ eyes didn’t so much as meet her gaze. Instead, they were fixed forward upon the main viewscreen, almost as if she was waiting for something. 

Slowly, the Arrow-class runabout that Admiral Reyes had just cleared for departure appeared on the screen and crossed their bow. It moved slowly at first, but then, as it put some distance between itself and the busy airspace of the planet, the station and the squadron, it began to accelerate. And then its warp drive came to life, and it leapt forth, vanishing from view.

Admiral Reyes whispered a single word under her breath: “Godspeed.” 

Without further explanation, she then turned and departed the bridge, the PADD still on Captain Devreux’s chair. This never was about reading Subspace Science Digest, but what then was it about? Lieutenant Commander Mattson just stood there, more questions than answers.

Down below deck, Lieutenant Emilia Balan had just returned to her quarters. She too had unanswered questions. Over warm coals and flavorful shisha, she’d been having a delightful time with the usually guarded Ayala Shafir. And she’d thought Ayala was too, right up until… until she went to take that call, and then she never came back. 

Why couldn’t she have at least said she needed to go? That would’ve been the normal thing to do. The decent thing to do. But no, she’d just vanished. Was it something she’d said? Or was it something more ominous, something related to the dark matters on her mind?

As she crossed her quarters, Lieutenant Balan looked over at her wall. The console fitted into its center was blinking with a notification. She walked up to it. “Computer, display message.”

It was just a few simple words:

A night I didn’t know I wanted,
And a friend I didn’t know I needed.
When next the universe allows,
A Klingon opera perhaps?

The first two lines and the last, they made her smile. But that third line, there was something odd about it. It didn’t make sense. Why would the universe have to allow it? Couldn’t they just meet at the Northern Lights Lounge or down on the holodeck again. They were, after all, on the same ship… wait, who was that caller on the other side, and what’d they said? Had something happened? Did she need help? “Computer, locate Chief Shafir.”

“Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir is not aboard the USS Polaris.”

Wait, what? Not aboard the ship? How was that possible? They’d just been together, not even an hour earlier. “Then where is she?”

“Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir departed on the runabout Calvera at 0210 hours.”

Just a couple minutes ago. But why? Lieutenant Balan looked out the window of her quarters, almost as if hoping to see the runabout off their bow. Of course, there was nothing though. Her view was dominated by the glowing blue seas of Gorian VII and the sparkling superstructure of Archanis Station, and a small runabout, not even four dozen meters in length, would never be discernible against the backdrop. “Where was she headed?”

“Unknown.”

“What did the Calvera’s departure paperwork say?”

“There is no departure filing on record for the runabout Calvera.”

Huh? How? Whether an emergency medevac or a sightseeing expedition, paperwork was a universal guarantee. Everyone had to do it – except the chief, this time, for some reason. Why? Where was she going? What’d happened that had caused her to drop everything and leave?

It’d been two weeks since they stole away from the Polaris in the dead of night, and two days since anyone said a word. For the three tucked aboard the runabout Calvera, the silence was comfortable. It was normal. It was the thing that filled the moments in-between, whether racing the vastness of space or surveilling a safehouse on a stakeout.

Dr. Tom Brooks sat at the helm, not because he was the best pilot, but simply because someone had to. It didn’t matter that he was the oldest at fifty five, nor that he was the slowest as a result. To those who saw them on their scopes, they were just another unremarkable runabout making an unimpressive flight through an uninteresting sector on the periphery of Federation territory, and there wasn’t even a notable planet or outpost within a light year in any direction. He was just babysitting the ship as it did its work.

At present, the Calvera was holding steady at warp 8, bearing 215.54, angled rimward and towards the trailing edge of Federation space. Archanis Station was two weeks behind them, and Montana Station lay two weeks ahead. There, on the Presidium class starbase in the Rital system, the unknown awaited. Unknown even to him.

Captain Lewis’ old accomplice, the Vulcan sharpshooter T’Aer, had said very little when she called, but the fact she’d said so little said a lot. It meant she didn’t trust a Starfleet encrypted channel, and that meant this wouldn’t be a casual house call. But when had it ever been a casual house call when Captain Lewis was involved?

When Chief Ayala Shafir had come to him in the lab, he saw it in her eyes immediately. After all Captain Lewis had done for her, if there was any hope of finding answers as to what had happened to him, she had to go. She owed that to him. Dr. Lisa Hall, too, seemed similarly motivated, though such a sense of indebtedness seemed strange coming from a woman so typically detached. That was just the impact Captain Lewis could have on you, Dr. Brooks knew from personal experience, when he stood beside you on the line. These folks, both the Polaris’ hazard team members aboard Calvera and the Sebold operators meeting them on Montana, they’d been through a lot together.

However, while Dr. Brooks had certainly put in his time with Captain Lewis, it wasn’t loyalty, nor a debt unpaid, that had compelled him to join in on this adventure. No, he knew what the others did not. Instead, he agreed to go simple because he knew that an unknowing version of himself would have gone. Truthfully, foresight was not a gift. Really, it was a mindfuck.

Amidship, Dr. Hall sat in the runabout’s small kitchen, nibbling on a bowl of quinoa while reading an article from the Tri-Planetary Journal of Counseling on the trauma caused by recent events. While she found the premise frustrating, namely the sociopsychological forgetfulness of peoples towards threats of the past, she couldn’t disagree with its findings relating to how Starfleet officers were – or were not – coping with the reemergence of the Dominion and Borg in recent months.

For the psychologist, her mind was far from the mission before them. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about the plight of the Serenity and the Ingenuity, for she did, nor that she had any illusions about what was to come, for she did not. Rather, it was just that, at this particular moment, those thoughts were irrelevant. They’d matter in two weeks, when they arrived at Montana, but why waste neural load on them in the interim?

In the rear hold of the Calvera, the same could not be said for Chief Shafir. She had neither the prescience of Dr. Brooks, nor the poise of Dr. Hall, and lying in one of the crew cots, she was restless, turning things over in her mind.

It wasn’t that the chief feared what awaited them on Montana Station. Whatever T’Aer and Grok were scheming, and whomever their target was, they’d do what needed to be done, and they’d get their answers – just as Captain Lewis had taught them. Instead though, what she feared was the answers they’d find.

Captain Lewis’ last transmission had put the Serenity and the Ingenuity about 6,000 light years from Federation space. At those distances, how did someone have knowledge of what had happened to them? And if someone did, why were they here, while Captain Lewis wasn’t? She could come up with many possible explanations, but none were good.