A dramatic shift in momentum launched Captain Devreux out of the captain’s chair and onto the floor, the inertial dampeners unable to keep up with the unexpected deceleration of the Polaris’ warp field collapsing. As he pulled himself back to his feet, he glanced quickly around the bridge, noting with relief that the other crew on deck were ok, coming back to their senses with no visible injuries. The same could not necessarily be said for the rest of the crew down below deck, but he knew capable hands were already hard at work on that.

“Status report?” Captain Devreux asked as he glanced forward, noting the white streaks of celestial bodies passing by at high warp had been replaced by the static starscape of a ship at impulse.

“Captain, our warp field appears to have collapsed,” reported the flight controller at the helm.

“A malfunction with the warp assembly?”

“Negative sir,” replied a lieutenant at the operations station as his hands flew across the controls. “Warp core within standard operating parameters. Dilithium matrix integrity at 97%. Injectors registering appropriate flow. Stable plasma output across the coils. The warp field, by everything I can tell, was stable.”

“Then what happened?” the Captain inquired as the turbolift doors opened and a Commander in science teal stepped out.

“I’m not sure…” began the lieutenant, before he was cut off.

“What happened is that something is wrong with subspace itself,” explained Commander Lockwood, head of Astrophysical & Exotic Sciences for the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, as he approached the command island. He handed the PADD to the Captain, as if it would clear up the confusion. “Or more specifically, the geometry of spacetime around us contradicts the ADM formalism.”

Although Captain Devreux knew his way around a warp core, he prided himself in his engineering prowess, not his capacity for theoretical physics. “In English, Commander?” he asked. The alphabet soup of equations on the PADD could just as easily have been a recipe for a Jiballian Fudge Cake as an explanation of why they fell out of warp.

“The Natario and Alcubierre metrics rely on certain fundamentals like Hamiltonian mechanics, Minkowski space, and tensor mathematics,” the Commander replied. “Those fundamentals are incongruous here with what we know them to be.”

The Captain still wasn’t sure he followed.

“Think about what would happen if the speed of light were different than what we knew it to be,” offered a female voice as Admiral Reyes emerged from her Ready Room and approached the two officers standing on the command island. “We wouldn’t be able to send messages, use our sensors or go to warp. If I understand right, that’s essentially what appears to be happening here, right Dr. Lockwood?”

“Well, technically speaking, c has remained consistent…” the physicist began before realizing the Admiral was simply talking in layman’s terms for the Captain’s benefit, “but yes, while an oversimplification, that’s the jist of the issue. Subspace here isn’t like the subspace we know.”

“When you say here, do you mean specifically here?” asked Captain Devreux. “Or more generally in this region of space. Like can we turn around and go back the way we came?”

“From what sensors are suggesting,” offered Commander Lockwood, “subspace is unstable for 1.7 light years behind us and the foreseeable distance in front of us, so no, we can’t turn around and jump back to warp.”

“Commander Lockwood, how did we end up making it this far? Shouldn’t the warp field have collapsed 1.7 light years ago then?” asked Captain Devreux.

“Maybe if you assumed linearity in subspace field equations, but of course that’s not the case,” Commander Lockwood answered. How the folks that travelled on starships for their life didn’t understand the basics of how the ships actually moved around baffled him. “When we’re at warp, we’re riding a subspace distortion that contracts space in front of us. That contraction, which was already in existence, created a semi-destructive interference pattern in the spacetime waveform that reduced the amplitude of the variation between the spacetime behind us and the spacetime in front of us. Until aggregate effects overwhelmed our injectors’ ability to compensate.”

Admiral Reyes was still following, but barely, and her expression showed as much, so Lockwood gave up trying to give them a real answer.

“Essentially,” the Activity’s lead scientist explained, dumbing it down as much as he could, “we extended our spacetime into this unstable spacetime for a brief period of time, allowing us to ignore the inconsistencies with subspace for the equivalent of 1.3 light years in normal space.”

“I think we now know the plight of the Casimir and the Arleigh Burke,” mused Commander Lewis, the ship’s Chief Intelligence Officer, in reference to the two ships that they’d been dispatched to find. “Guess the good news is that, if their plight was at all like ours, they too are just stranded at sublight.”

Reyes noted the comment, but for now, her focus was on their own plight. The first rule of a rescuer is not to need rescue. “Could we do that in reverse?” They’d never be able to save the others if they couldn’t save themselves.

“Unknown. I’d have to spend a good deal longer than two minutes on that.”

“Alright Commander, assemble your team and let’s get to work figuring that out,” Captain Devreux ordered, finally getting his bearings in the conversation again. He handed the PADD back to the scientist. “But not just to see if we can get out of here. Let’s also figure out if we can use the same principle to continue our journey forward.” They still had two missing ships to find, and, always an explorer at heart, Devreux also recognized that an area of space where warp fields didn’t work right meant a place that probably hadn’t been explored in depth.

“Understood sir. We’ll get right on it,” acknowledged Commander Lockwood before accepting the PADD and heading back for the turbolift.

“In the meantime, let’s make the most of where we’re at,” Captain Devreux said as he turned his attention back towards the viewscreen, a star in the distance with what looked like the silhouette of a planet in-between. “What’ve we got on sensors?”

“Although long range sensors are inoperable because of the subspace interference, short range scanners indicate we have emerged within a solar system of a G5IV star with three habitable worlds, one Class M and two Class L,” reported the lieutant at the operations console.

“I’m detecting notable signs of advanced anthropogenic developments on all three habitable planetoids,” added the tactical officer. “Visual scans of the nearest Class L planet indicate substantial terraforming and large metropolitan centers in at least 10 distinct locations. However, sensors are not detecting any electromagnetic or radiogenic activity.”

“A dead world?”

“It would seem so,” the tactical officer replied, “but I still advise we go to yellow alert.”

“Make it so,” nodded the Captain. “And let’s launch a probe towards the nearest planet to get a better idea of what we’re working with.”

The tactical officer issued a series of commands. “Probe away.” Looking forward towards the viewer, Captain Devreux watched as a Class 5 probe streaked out from the Polaris, propelled by impulse thrusters that accelerated it at relativistic speeds towards the nearest planetoid. “ETA 2 minutes.”

As they waited in suspense for the probe’s arrival, Captain Devreux rattled off a series of questions about the status of the ship and crew to the various bridge officers. Although the shearing forces of falling out of warp had been intense, they’d come through relatively unscathed. Whether it was on account of some complex outcome of the Alcubierre metric or a streak of luck that had allowed them to survive the abrupt return to normal space, Captain Devreux didn’t know, nor was he sure he really wanted to know.

Admiral Reyes had taken up position just off the main command island, leaving the Captain free to manage the runnings of his ship. For her sake, she was exchanging a series of messages via PADD with the team buried in the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity labs below-deck. They were trying to make sense of what had just happened, what was wrong with subspace, and if they could come up with a workaround for the subspace instabilities. So far, there were more questions than answers. It sounded like the consensus was that they’d essentially have to design a whole new version of physics to model this region of space. Not exactly something that could be done in a day or two, but as opposed to the Casimir, a deep space explorer, and the Arleigh Burke, a tactical interdictor, the Polaris at least had the people to do it – although it might take months to do so. Until then, they were trapped at impulse power in the same plight as the Casimir and the Arleigh Burke. A very concerning situation, to say the least. She’d wait and hope the ASTRA science team found something more before sharing that news with the rest of the crew.

“We’re getting our first images from the planet,” reported the tactical officer after the status reports were all in.

“On screen.”

The entire bridge crew turned and looked forward as a scene of death and destruction appeared on the viewscreen. The images returning from the probe showed a massive and advanced city, comparable to something you’d expect to see on Earth or Vulcan, with two exceptions: the city was littered with craters the size of neighborhoods, and it lay completely empty and abandoned.

“What happened to everyone?” mused a junior officer near the MSD, forgetting professionalism for a moment, his mouth agape.

“Readings suggest an urban area capable of supporting 20 to 40 million humanoids,” reported the officer at the science console. “But whoever lived here, they’ve been gone for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”

“Looks like we’ve got more than one mystery on our hands,” smiled Captain Devreux with an enthusiastic look in sharp contrast to the rest of the bridge staff. “While we’re stuck here, might as well make the best of it. Commander Lewis, while we try to figure out how to get the ship back underway, why don’t you assemble a landing party and see if we can’t learn a bit about who used to live here and what happened to them?”

The Admiral envied the explorer spirit of her colleague. Even faced with the prospect of being stuck years from the nearest Starfleet support ship at impulse, Captain Devreux’s explorer spirit held strong. This is why she’d never considered another option for her executive officer on this assignment. She’d monitor their progress from aboardship, for she was sure Captain Devreux would elect to join the field research team heading down to the surface. Maybe they’d make some progress on getting the ship back underway in the meantime.

Commander Lewis and two of the ship’s hazard team were first out the back of the Type 11 shuttle, their eyes alert, phasers at the ready, searching for any potential threats.

“LZ clear,” came the call from the Commander a few moments later, at least temporarily satisfied that the immediate area in front of them was safe. In the stillness of the ruins, he knew the shuttle’s approach would have stood out to a sore thumb if anyone remained among these ruins though. That meant neither he nor his hand-picked squadmates lowered their rifles.

Of course it was clear, thought Captain Devreux. Every indication, from the Polaris’ scanners to their probe to the elongated overflight Commander Lewis had insisted on, suggested this was a dead world and that it had been for centuries. The Captain would have rather brought more archaeologists and anthropologists instead of such a significant security detail, but he’d learned by now that it was better to humor their Chief Intelligence Officer’s paranoia than fight him on it. Those antics had saved their bacon on a couple occasions so they weren’t completely unfounded, even if Devreux disagreed heavily with how Lewis had turned the ship’s Hazard Team into what felt like a mini-paramilitary.

As the Captain and the team from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity emerged from the ship, they were hit by a strong gust of wind from the east, one that tore its way between the enormous towers of the ancient city. Devreux had to lean hard into the wind and brace himself to avoid getting knocked from his feet. A petite officer in teal, Lieutenant Emilia Balan, was less lucky. She lost her balance, and the Captain extended his hand to steady her. No life had walked these streets for hundreds of years, and it was almost as if the spirits of this forgotten place wanted it to stay that way.

As the away team made its way down the streets towards a central square they had identified during their overflight, they took in the view around them. “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” remarked Lieutenant Balan with a twinkle in her eyes as she looked up at the skyscrapers reaching more than a kilometer high on every side of them. To experience moments like this, it was why she’d joined Starfleet in the first place.

“Makes you wonder if someday all we have built will be nothing more than a memory like this,” commented Chief Shafir with a darkness in her expression as she walked along-side her colleague. “Just empty streets, aging steel and cracked glass.”

“And dust. Don’t forget the dust,” chuckled Captain Devreux as another gust blasted them with thin gray particulates. Lieutenant Balan, their Cultural Affairs Specialist, was a perpetual optimist, someone who’d somehow found beauty and grace even within the militant, ordered society of the Tzenkethi, while Chief Shafir, their Computer Systems Specialist, had done time in prison before she found purpose with Starfleet, where she’d then gone on to spend so much time undercover that she almost lost herself again. Brought together by the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity on the Polaris, they’d somehow become the unlikeliest of friends, much to the amusement of the Captain.

“But Ayala, don’t you see it?” asked Lieutenant Balan of her colleague, keeping at it. “These people, the ones that built this city, there was so much more to them than that. You can see it in the artistry of their buildings. Like look at those three,” she said, gesturing up ahead. “The central tower is anything but utilitarian with its hyperboloid lattice construction. They chose to give up real estate in favor of design. And those two buildings flanking it on either side, their curved profiles are almost designed to fit within the whitespace the tower creates, when it would have certainly been more efficient to skip that bowed-out design.”

Before the Chief could respond, Command Lewis, the Hazard Team lead, cut them off, completely uninterested in their banter. This was work, and there could be threats in every window and behind every corner.  “We are approaching the square. The anomalous power source we detected during approach is up ahead,” he said, gesturing towards a building in the center of the square. “Hazard Four, Five, Seven and Eight, take up defensive positions around the square. Hazard Two and Six, find a location for overwatch. Everyone else, let’s get moving.”

Commander Lewis’ Hazard Team broke into three distinct movements. An Ensign in security yellow and a Crewman First Class in intelligence red jogged off to find a good spot to cover the square. The four men he’d identified as Hazard Four, Five, Seven and Eight also peeled away, each heading for different corners of the square. The last two members of the Hazard team, along with the Commander himself, tightened up around the jolly band of researchers as they proceeded forward towards their destination. The focused look and precise movements of each Hazard Team member mirrored that of their leader, the man who had picked them and trained them, the man each of them looked up to.

As the main group came upon the door, with not so much as a word, one of the Hazard Team members placed a directional charge, while Lewis extended his arm to stop the advance of the rest of the party. A few moments later, the charge blew. As the dust settled, the team proceeded forward.

“Wow,” exclaimed Lieutenant Balan as the team stepped over the rubble into an ornate atrium. The floor was lined with clean white stone, sculptures along the walls on either side, a high arched ceiling at least three floors overhead. “Need I say more about their artistry?”  It was a shame Lewis’ team had blown up the door and done damage to the place rather than find a more delicate way in.

While the research team took in the sights, the Hazard Team members moved methodically through the atrium, tricorders out and phasers still at the ready, narrowing in on the power source they had detected.

“Over here,” gestured the Commander towards Chief Shafir as one of his team members pulled off a panel of the wall, unveiling a power source of some sort, glowing a dim blue, attached to some sort of a computer device. “Looks like we hit the jackpot. A power source, and a computer.”

Chief Shafir was only a few footsteps behind them. Like the Commander, she was here to do a job, not marvel at the sights. She dropped to a knee and opened her pack, pulling out a set of adaptive signal interfaces, a bioneural processor loaded with a digital infiltration and system interoperability suite, and a PADD to serve as her console. And then she got to work.

“This is no standard issue quantum processor,” the Chief remarked after a few moments. “In fact, it’s not like any digital system I’ve ever seen before.” She stepped back from the screen, pulled out her tricorder, and began scanning the power source. “Hmmm, that’s interesting…” she mused, before returning to her PADD and beginning to type furiously again.

Devreux watched on, but Shafir’s screen was unintelligible to him. Unfortunately, in this case, the data coming off the interface with this strange computer was unintelligible to her as well.

Shafir tapped her combadge: “Shafir to Lockwood.”

There was a pause, and then the combadge came to life. “Ayala, unless you’re calling about an indefinite non-degenerate bilinear form that yields accurate intervals in this distorted spacetime, I’m a bit busy at the moment,” came the Commander’s response with a mix of frustration and distraction, this call tearing him away from his work trying to figure out how to make adjustments to enable warp in this exotic spacetime. It was not pleasantries nor professionalism that got the eccentric scientist his commission as head of Astrophysical and Exotic Sciences for the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity. But in this case, even beyond that, their issue here was personal. Lockwood had been stranded once before, for multiple years that time, and he didn’t have any intention of reliving that again.

“No, Mr Big Brain PhD, that’s why we have you,” countered the Chief as she rolled her eyes, drawing a stern stare from her Captain for how she spoke to the Commander. But Ayala Shafir also wasn’t here on behalf of her professionalism, and Luke Lockwood was a pain in the ass. “But do take a look at what I’m uplinking you, if you would be so kind.”

The line was silent for an uncustomary period of time, and then two words. “What the…”

“Yeah, my thoughts exactly,” replied Shafir, becoming as animated and excited as she’d been this whole excursion thus far. “Is this computational model what I think it is?”

“This would only be possible in an Anti-de Sitter space… Chief, what the hell are you plugged into?”

“Sending you some readings from my tricorder too.”

Again, another long pause.

“Chief, this has never been more than hypothesized until now,” stammered the scientist. “Let me pack my things. I’m coming down.”

Lewis and Devreux made eye contact. Devreux’s brow was furled, and even Lewis’ usually guarded and stoic demeanor showed a hint of surprise. Lockwood was an elitist who considered dirt, physical labor, and most of the material world beneath him, preferring to stay in his lab with his carefully selected team of preeminent scholars.

“But don’t you have some equations to solve to reinvent spacetime, Commander?” chuckled Shafir.

“Those can wait.”

“Here we are, stuck in a region of spacetime where general relativity does not apply, above a dead world with technology impossible under our laws of physics, and you’re not willing to acknowledge these two things are related?” asked Commander Lewis incredulously. He’d been in the intelligence business long enough to distrust coincidences.

“Correlation does not equal causation,” countered Commander Lockwood, an academic who looked down on his colleague from Intelligence as little more than a gun toting adrenaline junkie in charge of a goon squad. “As opposed to your line of work, in mine, we prove our conjectures before stating them as fact.”

“But Commander,” jumped in Captain Devreux in one of the rare moments where he agreed with the suspicions Lewis always seemed to have. “What if they are related?”

“If they are related, then they are related. And if they are not, they are not,” Admiral Reyes cut in from the head of the table before the conversation devolved further. She had hand-picked each of these senior officers, and each was excellent at what they did, but they had very different temperaments, and stress was high four days into being stranded without any hint of how to get back to Federation space. “Does a connection, or a lack thereof, change the approach you are taking to getting us out of this situation, Dr. Lockwood?” she asked, using his academic title out of respect.

“No, not at all Admiral,” replied Lockwood in a far more respectful tone to Reyes. “The reality is that without establishing a new model for the parameters of this spacetime, it will be impossible to develop new forms of the Natario and Alcubierre metrics.” Glancing across the table at Commanded Lewis, Dr. Lockwood then added for the benefit of his unlearned colleague. “Which means no warp drive.”

Admiral Reyes knew better than to ask how long that would take. What the former endowed chair at the Daystrom Institute had ahead of him amounted to essentially reinventing the laws of subspace physics. Even with the cracked scientists they’d been blessed with courtesy of the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity that the Polaris hosted, it would be no simple – or short – effort. And she just hoped Lockwood didn’t crack before then.

Shifting gears, Reyes turned to address Captain Devreux, who on a vessel of this size doubled as representative for most of the traditional departments to avoid overflowing the briefing room: “Where do we stand operationally Captain?”

“Besides our inability to leverage subspace travel, sensors or communication, the ship is in good shape,” reported the Captain. “The small amount of damage we suffered when our warp field collapsed has all been repaired, and we’re staying at tactical alert in case any surprises present themselves. Other than that, with limited workload while at all-stop over a dead world in a dead part of space, and at the recommendation of Lieutenant Hall, we are keeping the crew busy with preparedness drills, professional development, and organized activities.” He then glanced over at their Chief Counselor to expand on that last bit.

“Most of our crew grew up with the story of Voyager, and many of them knew someone impacted by the ordeal of Starbase 900,” explained Lieutenant Hall. “It is in the silence of dead time that memories and fears surface, and thus, we are running programs to keep everyone busy. Morale and counseling staff have coordinated a range of R&R activities from sports tournaments to group holodeck excursions to book clubs and more, in an effort to keep everyone busy. We have also asked all line officers to keep a close eye on their people for any concerning signs.”

Across from Lieutenant Hall, Commander Lockwood glanced down at the table for a moment. He didn’t just know someone stranded when the Borg attacked Starbase 900. He was one of them. If he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t be sitting here now, with officer pips on his collar, stranded again; instead, he’d probably be sitting comfy at Daystrom. Quickly, Lockwood pulled himself back together. This was different. That time, they’d been tens of thousands of light years away, not something surmountable with a few equations. This time, they just needed to figure out how to establish a warp bubble to transit 1.7 light years.

While Lockwood had only lost his composure for a moment, Reyes noticed it, and she was sure Hall would have as well. The former intelligence officers were all highly attuned to subtle tells, and Lockwood was not a particularly stoic or guarded person. Inwardly, Reyes suspected Hall had made that reference intentionally with Lockwood in the room. She didn’t get into counseling because she loved people. She got into it to analyze them. But nonetheless, Reyes made a note to arrange for Lockwood to get a visit later.

“What about the physical health of the crew, Doctor Henderson?”

“A few broken bones and minor cuts from the rapid deceleration before inertial dampeners kicked in, but nothing of note,” Commander Henderson, the ship’s Chief Medical Officer, replied. “In fact, I think we’ve had more injuries from holodeck programs keeping the crew busy than anything else. If it wasn’t for Captain Devreux’s fencing tournament yesterday and Commander Lewis’ routine disregard for safeties during Hazard Team training, I think my medical staff would be bored out of their minds.”

Lewis smiled smugly at the callout. It wasn’t real preparation for what the team would face in battle if you didn’t have to breathe through the thick mucus and blood that runs down your throat when you take a hard hit.

“And what about the organic matter we brought back from the excursion planet-side?” asked Devreux, referencing one of their finds besides the mysterious AdS-based computer. To him, this was an interesting mystery worth unlocking to make the best of their situation.

“Through analysis of the collected specimen, we can confirm the planet denizens are from a carbon-based humanoid with the Galen sequence,” Henderson explained, referencing the common genetic structure seeded throughout the galaxy by proto-hominids 4.5 billion years ago. “But beyond that, whoever once lived here, their genetic structure is divergent enough to say fairly definitively that they are not a species we have in our database.”

“Given where we’re located, why don’t you send the sequence over to my team too?” asked Commander Lewis. “We’ll run it through a few other databases we have.”

Henderson nodded and sent a note off to his team to forward the information to Commander Lewis. Given their proximity to Romulan territory, Henderson could infer what sources the Chief Intelligence Officer was alluding to, sources that Starfleet, if they had them, certainly couldn’t acknowledge within the medical databases available to starship medical and science officers.

“Alright, well thank you everyone for all your hard work on this,” Admiral Reyes said, closing the briefing. “Let’s keep an eye on our people, cognizant of the situation we find ourselves in, and other than that, Dr. Lockwood, anything you and your team needs, you let us know.” Lockwood nodded.

With that, the Admiral rose, and her senior staff did the same.

“Dismissed.”

Quickly, the group hustled out of the room, while Admiral Reyes turned to look out the viewport of the briefing room. For her entire life, the light years of travel were measured in hours or days. But today, standing there alone in the quiet looking out beyond, those stars felt further away than ever before.

She heard them before she saw them, the tired footsteps of muscular men and women stumbling out of the holodeck, their outfits covered in sweat, their expressions exhausted, and their shoulders sagged.

“He’s insane.”

“Yeah, but have you ever had training like this?”

“Not in my wildest dreams.”

“Nightmares man, nightmares…”

“Well, I just hope those ASTRA guys get us out of this mess soon so we have the excuse of working our regular shifts to save us from more of this.”

“It’s only been a week, and I feel like I’ve lived a lifetime on that mat already.”

“When he’s done with us, we’ll either be dead or be ready to beat a Klingon in hand-to-hand combat.”

As the Hazard Team rounded the corner, Chief Ayala Shafir stepped to the side to let them pass. “Don’t forget to sharpen your teeth then,” she remarked in jest, drawing a couple quizzical looks from the crewmen and officers close enough to hear her comment. For those who didn’t know the slender young woman, it probably came off very out of place, but they were too tired to even reply.

A few moments later, the Chief stepped through the threshold of the holodeck, which was fashioned as a traditional dojo of the Edo era with a single man stretching calmly in the center of the mat.

“You know if you break them too hard, you’re not going to have anyone left on the team.”

“At least then I’ll know that no one has my back,” replied Commander Jake Lewis as he rose to greet the new arrival. In contrast to the exhausted young officers and crewmen she’d just passed in the corridor, the fifty year old didn’t look like he’d even broken a sweat. “How are you doing with everything Ayala?” Lewis asked with a caring sincerity few rarely saw from him.

“Just another adventure boss,” she smiled lightly. “You know, that’s the nice thing about losing yourself. You have no expectations and no attachments.” Her expression gave no discernable hint of the sadness deep within her.

“Because someday we’ll all just be dust blowing in the wind, huh?”

“Already just blowing in the wind. But yes.”

Commander Lewis felt for the girl. For all the things he’d done, all the faces he’d had to wear, all the sacrifices he’d had to make, he never lost himself or his purpose. He’d killed for that purpose, fallen on his sword for that purpose, and put the uniform back on for that purpose. Sure, like her, he could care less about getting home. It wasn’t like he had anyone that would miss him being gone. But he still knew who he was and what he was fighting for. Some days, he thought Ayala did too, but other days, he wasn’t so sure.

“So let’s see if we can actually make you work now, shall we?” Ayala asked, changing the subject.

Without waiting for a response, and while the older man stood there in a relaxed stance, the Shafir aggressively shot for a single leg. Lewis’ movements were instant and instinctive, knee to the floor, hand shooting between his legs to grab the back of her elbow, rolling straight into an omoplata. But before he could get his hips angled to lock it in, Ayala’s free hand came down and she converted over the shoulder of her restrained arm to break free, the two ending up in a scramble as they jockeyed for position.

For the next ninety minutes, the two grappled and threw strikes, and eventually out came the staves, Bat’leths, and knives. In a change of tempo from earlier, Lewis was finally sweating and breathing heavily. He still had the advantage of decades honing his craft, plus eighteen kilos over his partner, but she had the agility and speed of youth, coupled with five years training opposite him while part of their private outfit prior to rejoining Starfleet and linking up with the Polaris.

Lewis lunged with a combat knife, and Shafir parried the blow, attacking the hand holding the knife, when suddenly Lewis’ combadge chirped. Instantly, he dropped the knife and the two disengaged.

“Lewis here. Go ahead.”

“Commander, I am calling to offer a retraction to my earlier position,” came the excited voice of Commander Luke Lockwood, head of the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity’s Astrophysical and Exotic Sciences team.

“Say again Dr. Lockwood?”

“Assuming a mathematical basis where the Anti-de Sitter quantum gravimetric processor could exist, I abandoned the approach of trying to map a Lorentzian manifold to our observations of this spacetime due to the contradiction with that assumption, and instead combined a negative cosmological constant with a generalized Reimmanian metric to construct an asymptotically hyperbolic manifold. And lo and behold, your conjecture bore fruit.”

Ayala had gathered next to Lewis, leaning in as if trying to hear better. But neither she nor Lewis was following what the man on the other side of the combadge was saying so excitedly.

“Slow down for a moment,” replied Commander Lewis, “and pretend that you are talking to a golden retriever. Try putting it in terms the pup would understand.”

Now it was time for the brilliant physicist on the other side of the line to be lost for a moment, reaching for an analogue. Finally, he gave it a shot: “If this is a game of fetch in a dark yard, we just got a candle. And now we can see the shadow of a ball across the yard. But we’re still tied up with a leash.”

“Yeah ok, that didn’t work,” chuckled Commander Lewis, shaking his head. “Just give it to me straight and simple in terms of the outcome you netted.”

“Establishing a warp field is still a long way off, but I’ve adjusted subspace sensors based on our team’s calculations, and we can see something – or more accurately, we can see the subspace shadows, if you will, of three stationary objects, outside the visible spectrum, that appear to be anthropogenic in origin, sitting at the boundary of the solar system.”

“What makes you think they’re anthropogenic?” asked Commander Lewis, his demeanor immediately shifting into a combat mindset.

“Because their position and inertia does not conform to expected celestial mechanics,” explained the scientist over the line. “And because these foreign bodies have emission patterns similar to the quantum gravimetric distortions of the power source for the processor Chief Shafir found on the planet below.”

“Are they approaching us?” Lewis asked as he headed for the door of the holodeck, Chief Shafir hot on his trail. The two looked a bit haggard after ninety minutes on the map, but the news put pep in their steps and focus on their faces.

“Negative. Their relative position has remained constant since we adapted our sensor model twenty minutes ago.”

Twenty minutes? That’s a long time to sit on something like this, thought Lewis to himself.

“We’ll be right up. Call Reyes too.”

“Already did.”

Commander Lewis and Chief Shafir broke into a trot as they exited the holodeck and headed down the corridors. A few minutes later, after an uncomfortably long time waiting for a turbolift, they stepped into the ASTRA astrometrics lab to find Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes and Commander Luke Lockwood already deep in conversation in front of a display full of complex equations and sensor waveforms that the two newcomers wouldn’t have a chance in the world of understanding.

“It all looks fairly clear to me, Dr. Lockwood,” the Admiral was saying as Lewis and Shafir approached.

“And what is that Admiral?” Commander Lewis asked.

“Well, besides that our  Chief here must have just worked you over with her superior jits,” Reyes commented as she gave the two disheveled new arrivals a once over, noting how Lewis’ age was starting to get the better of him, “it appears that we have company.”

Lewis tapped his combadge. “Computer, red ale…”

“Belay that,” Admiral Reyes interrupted.

“Respectfully Admiral, we do not know their intentions. Here we are, stranded, unable to make better than impulse, half-blind, and we’ve got unknown alien ships on sensors that have not identified themselves. We need to get on a combat footing,” Lewis insisted, before adding, “just to be safe.”

Reyes raised her hand calmly. “My friend, as long as we’ve known each other, I’ve known your instincts to be good. But you go for your gun too fast. If these alien vessels had wanted to engage us, they would have already. And besides, what the hell do you think our phasers are going to lock onto? They’re out of phase with the visual spectrum, and all Dr. Lockwood has got here is a way to see their shadow, not the objects themselves. Not exactly something we could lock onto and shoot at.” Lewis looked visibly annoyed.

At that moment, a young Lieutenant stepped into the lab.

“Ah, Lieutenant, thank you for coming down,” Admiral Reyes said, addressing ASTRA’s cultural affairs specialist, Lieutenant Emilia Balan.

“Of course Admiral,” Balan replied, approaching the odd group, with its two sweaty adrenaline junkies in workout clothes, a disheveled scientist wearing a uniform definitely wrinkled beyond the regs, and their CO, who always looked ever so put together in her flag officer duty uniform. Lieutenant Balan looked up at the screen, but it was all gibberish. Whatever the scientists did here, she knew better than to waste her time trying to interpret it. She’d barely scored a five hour C in her Introduction to Subspace Mechanics course at the Academy. “I am hoping you’re not going to ask me to rerun Dr. Lockwood’s work?” she asked with a lighthearted smile.

“No, we wouldn’t want you to show up the good doc here, now would we?” Reyes replied in jest. “But, if I was to tell you we’ve identified what looks to be three ships that could be from the same race as once inhabited the planet below, but they’re just sitting there on the edge of the system observing us, what would be your first instinct?”

“Well, given the amount of orbital bombardment damage we observed on the surface, the fact that this whole region is unnavigable by any known mechanism of faster-than-light propulsion, and the fact that we do not have any known genetic records of the biological specimens we collected on the planet, my first thought would be we are looking at an alien species wary of others.”

“And Commander Lewis, assuming they have the ability to observe us better than we can observe them, what response might activating shields and weapon systems have?”

“Not the one we want,” Lewis conceded. Indeed, it could prompt a tactical response from an unknown assailant that, as Reyes had just established, they would not even be able to reliably target. The odds in that fight were not good.

“So for now, since they’re not doing anything, we don’t do anything except watch while we let Lockwood work,” Reyes concluded. “Commander Lockwood, can you route your adaptations to the bridge so that we know if these ships change their position relative to us whatsoever?”

“Absolutely.”

“Commander Lewis, did your team find anything in your records related to this area of space?”

“Going back to at least the 6th century, Romulan ships have regarded this area to be unnavigable,” explained the Chief Intelligence Officer. “But if we go back further, there are some references by 5th century proto-Imperial warlords to a campaign in what could be this region of space… But you know how shoddy the records are from that period.”

“And Lieutenant Balan, carbon dating on the ruins suggest that they’re at least that old right?”

“Yes,” confirmed the Lieutenant. “Our findings suggest that the damage was caused around the 4th or 5th century.”

“Dr. Lockwood, is there anything by chance in your work thus far that suggests the phenomena we are experiencing is non-natural?”

And now, clear as day, everyone in the room saw where the Admiral was going with this.

“Not as a direct outcome of my work,” Lockwood explained. “But, if I go into the uncomfortable territory of untested suppositions, it could be conceivable. Typically, scientific development starts at a micro scale first, and then it is projected into higher order systems. I cannot explain how a civilization would manifest the incongruity of the local spacetime we find ourselves within, but I also cannot explain the feasibility of the AdS-dependent quantum gravimetric processor we found. And, as much as I am discomforted by reckless conjectures, in this case, Commander Lewis’ approach did net our first observational finding, so yes, it is certainly within the realm of possibility.”

Commander Lewis smirked. As good a concession as he’d ever get from the ivory tower academic.

“Before we are done here, we may have a first contact opportunity on our hands,” smiled Lieutenant Balan, excited at the prospect. The opportunity to interact with new races and cultures was a good part of why she’d taken to the stars in the first place.

“And we still have two ships to find,” Commander Lewis reminded everyone. He was once left behind, and he would never allow anyone else to fall to that same fate if it was within his power to prevent it. That was their original purpose that had led them into this current predicament, the fact that the USS Casimir and USS Arleigh Burke had gone missing here, and he would make sure none forgot that.

“Admiral’s log, Stardate 77483.5,” Fleet Admiral Reyes began. ”It’s been eleven days since we lost warp, and reality is starting to set in with the crew. There’s no issue to fix with the warp assembly, and no way for another ship to warp in and save us. We’re just stuck until we can crack the mystery of the spacetime we find ourselves within.”

Sitting on the couch in her Ready Room, the Admiral took a sip of her tea and gazed out at the starscape beyond.

“I guess in some ways, this is how early humans felt as they looked to space. It must have felt so big back then. We take for granted how far two light years is, a mere skip, hop and jump in even the least equipped runabout. But for us, here and now, even if we could maintain .9c all the way home, it would be a two year journey, and everyone back home will be five years older when we arrive. Relativity is a bitch.”

For a moment, right at the start of this ordeal, the Admiral had considered taking that approach. But she couldn’t see how she’d hold the crew together for two years like that. How Janeway had managed for seven years, she had no idea.

“Work continues down in the lab on a formulation to model subspace here, but Commander Lockwood shared a concerning finding with me today: based on our latest telemetry, he’s not sure a smoothness assumption holds. If that’s the case, developing a Reimannian manifold is out of the question, and this problem gets a whole lot harder.”

Commander Lockwood had seemed visibly shaken, almost panicked, when he called her earlier about that. One could not model that which was not consistent.

“I’ve looked over that same telemetry a few times now though, and I’m not seeing what he’s seeing. Sure, I’m hardly half the astrophysicist he is, but Lieutenant Sh’vot doesn’t see it either. I didn’t have the heart to ask the rest of the lab where they stand, but I think I know the answer. Meanwhile, Lockwood grows more erratic each day.”

Reyes picked up a PADD on her coffee table, already open to Commander Lockwood’s dossier, and skimmed it again. She was worried about the effect his prior stranding in the Delta Quadrant was having on him now. But besides that, with a Ph.D. from the Stern Institute on the first verifiable mathematical model of the Vaadwaur underspace, and multiple novel findings on superluminality, it was a stroke of luck they had among them one of the most qualified people possible for the conundrum they now found themselves in.

“I’ll be honest, for as sharp as everyone is down there in the lab, we won’t have a shot at modeling this without him. Which leads me to our watchers.”

She looked out the window as if she had even the slightest chance of seeing the three foreign objects whose existence could only be inferred from faint distortions they’d identified after adapting their sensors based on what they found on the planet below.

“Commander Lewis wants to shoot them, and Lieutenant Balan wants to visit them. Me, I’m not a betting woman, not when we’re in as helpless as situation as this at least. I’d rather Commander Lockwood just solve the math problem and get us out of here, and we can leave them one of the universe’s many mysteries. We still need a few of those, don’t we?”

It was one of the beautiful realizations she’d had during the five year jaunt she and Devreux had made into deep space the prior decade, that there were things out there in the universe we would never understand. Sometimes, you just had to enjoy them for what they were, the unknown. A younger Allison Reyes never would have accepted that, but things had changed.

“Still, we may need a plan B.”

Commander Lockwood frantically scribbled foliations of a space-like hypersurface across the terminal, not based on the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism that underwrote the spacetime equations of their universe, but derived from a Hamiltonian formulation that assumed Anti-de Sitter space was reality. Because, somehow it was here. For the moment, the frenetic scientist was trying to ignore that the telemetry from the latest scans suggested the subspace abnormalities might be non-smooth in nature. Even he could only handle so much complexity at once.

Consumed by his work, Lockwood didn’t notice the door to the lab open behind him. It was not until the new arrival was standing right behind him, casting a shadow over where he sat, that he realized someone was there.

Lockwood turned and sighed. It wasn’t Lieutenant Sh’vot to calm his concerns about non-smoothness. Nor was it Ensign Vok with a solution on that tensor he needed to plug into his model. No, instead it was a shrink.

“Are you here to help me with this Ricci analysis Hall?” Lockwood asked gruffly.

“Oh come now professor,” Lieutenant Hall replied in her sweetest tone, leveraging his proudest title to soften him up. “Numbers aren’t really my strong suit.” A bit of a lie, really. Whether it was psychometrics or pharmacology, math played a key role in cracking and manipulating the minds of others, her real passion when she wasn’t keeping these babies from offing themselves. But easier to play a dumb little girl for a self-obsessed man like Luke Lockwood. “It’s all really impressive work you do, and I figured if you didn’t have the time to show up at my place for the fourth day in a row now, I might as well show you the respect of showing up at yours.”

Lockwood shrugged her off. “Sorry Lieutenant, but I’m busy reinventing subspace physics with this ragtag group of Pakleds,” he replied in a pompous tone, gesturing towards the dozen or so other mathematicians and physicists in the room, some of Starfleet’s best, each hand-selected by Lockwood, all consumed in models of their own. The room was dead silent, and every one of them would have heard his comment, but none so much as glanced up from their work. They knew the stress the astrophysics and exotic sciences lead was feeling. They were feeling it too.

“You haven’t left the lab in forty nine hours, Commander.”

“We have a replicator here.”

“And sleep?”

“Nothing a few stims don’t address.”

“Commander, why don’t we step into your office for a moment?” Hall asked kindly, glancing around the room. Lockwood shrugged and crossed his arms. He had no interest in doing that. He had better things to do, more important things. Maybe she’d just go away if he stayed planted in his chair. That was the beauty of patient confidentiality. It wasn’t as if she could push harder as long as they were surrounded by all these people.

Hall sighed. Could he not see how this looked to everyone around him? 

The counselor leaned in so her face was almost touching his, her expression growing ice cold, any feigned softness from a moment earlier now completely vanished. “Don’t make me force you,” she whispered so quietly no one else could hear it, but with an unflinching, dark stare that spooked him to his core.

For a moment, they were frozen there, face to face. She didn’t blink. 

And then a moment later, Lieutenant Hall spun on her heels and proceeded with a swift step towards his office, daring him not to follow. Reluctantly, Lockwood rose and made his way across the lab. He’d never bothered to read the regs, but there was probably something in it that gave her the authority. And if not, she didn’t seem like she was taking no for an answer.

The moment the door hissed shut, before Lockwood even had a chance to sit down, Lieutenant Hall unloaded: “That stims crap, that’s a crock of shit, and you know it.” Gone completely was the soft unassuming facade she’d had when she arrived. “I know you spend your days trying to solve the universe, but I’m sure you have at least a passing knowledge of human anatomy. Sleep insufficiency is directly correlated with reduced mental acuity. And pretty sure you are beyond insufficiency at this point.”

No response.

“We have a ship stocked with rations and fuel, and a full complement of competent sailors. Why the rush to solve this right now, at this very instant?” Hall pressed.

Again, no response.

“I’ve read your dossier Luke,” Hall continued, getting personal, using his first name even though they weren’t on a first name basis, and even though he outranked her. The gloves were off. “You have no one you’re running home to. Even when you were stranded in the Delta Quadrant, your only reason for wanting to get home was your cushy little ivory towers at Daystrom and the Science Council.” A tinge of something came across Commander Lockwood’s face, so she pressed on it. “And those aren’t even waiting for you this time. Those jobs were all taken by young upstarts while you were stuck in the Delta Quadrant, people who, even if you write them off as Pakleds, are probably just as competent as you. This ship, it’s your first real opportunity to do something remarkable since you got back. And so I ask again, why the rush to solve this problem, right now in this very instant rather than tomorrow or the next day? Are you really going to solve this immense problem in the next twenty four, or forty eight, or seventy two hours, even if you just work straight through, or are you just going to keep riding the stims for weeks?”

Her gaze narrowed, making the scientist uncomfortable, but still no response.

“And if you make a mistake in this sleep-deprived state, what then? Best case is you’re really wrong, and we fail to establish a warp field. But if you’re mostly right, but there are perturbations incorrectly modeled, then what? Non-constant acceleration across the surface of the bubble.”

Lockwood looked up as Hall made a little explosion motion with her hands, accompanied by a boom. She was wrong on that last bit. No sound in space. But he was shocked she had even an elementary understanding of the problem at hand. It’s why he was so focused, so he wouldn’t make a mistake. Dr. Lockwood, former endowed chair at the Daystrom Institute and advisor to the Federation Science Council, didn’t make such mistakes. He could tell himself that a thousand times, but was it true?

“I’m going to guess you never even thought of it that way,” Hall concluded. “But if you don’t want to talk, let’s try this another way: I am ordering you off duty for the next twelve hours, at least eight of which must be dedicated to sleep.”

Now the Commander’s expression shifted from one of annoyance to one of anger. “You can’t do that.”

“As the ship’s Chief Counselor, I absolutely can. Don’t test me either, or I’ll call Reyes.”

Lockwood looked down again. No way out of this one.

“And while you’re taking a break, give some thought to my earlier question,” Hall added, a tone of vulnerability suddenly slipping in, something Lockwood had never heard from her before. “I know the pain of helplessness, the feeling of needing to escape but being unable to. After you break free of that feeling once, you never want to feel it again, and you’ll do anything to get out of it right away, at any cost, over anything else. And you make mistakes because of it.”

For the first time in as long as they’d been shipmates, Lieutenant Hall had a look on her face that maybe, just maybe, might actually be genuine. She might be right too about why he was in such a mad dash to solve this. He’d never even considered why, but it definitely wasn’t just in the pursuit of science.

“I’ll give it some thought,” Lockwood resigned.

“All I ask.”

And with that, he rose and headed for the door.

“I’m here if you need to talk,” Hall offered compassionately as Lockwood took his leave.

He paused for a moment and opened his mouth as if to speak. But then he thought better of it and just left without another word. By the time he arrived at his quarter, he found that access to his lab material was cut off. Hall was diligent. She wouldn’t leave him such an easy out.

The counselor waited in his office for a minute, to make sure he was really gone, and then made her way out of the office and wove through the corridors. After a few twists and turns, she rounded a corner to come face-to-face with Admiral Reyes and Captain Devreaux. Standing there waiting, both wore expressions of concern on their faces.

“I gather we were right?” asked the Admiral.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Can he get through this?”

“Doubt it.”

“How about if I talk to him?” Captain Devreaux offered. “We were both there when we got cut off in the Delta Quadrant with no way home. We shared that same trauma.”

“Trauma Gérard?,” chuckled the Admiral. “It was just another adventure for you, my friend.”

Devreaux put his hands on his hips in protest.

“If anything, I’d probably give Dr. Hall better odds than you,” Reyes laughed. She wasn’t sure how much Lockwood actually respected the XO. She’d never seen any love between the two. Lockwood was a fairly pompous theoretical physicist who didn’t work all that hard to conceal how he looked down upon those who used their hands, and Devreaux, even with his Captain pips, was still a scrappy grease monkey who excelled when he got his hands dirty.

“I can at least try.”

“No offense Captain, but I’d rather not be blown to stardust because of a math fail,” countered Hall.

“Agreed,” concurred Reyes. “Guess I’ll check in on Shafir and Balan.”

She saw the best in everyone. She wanted to believe that Lockwood would pull through. But Admiral Reyes never put all her eggs in one basket.

Lieutenant Balan couldn’t be more excited. They were going to do it. They were going to attempt a call to their mysterious watchers, a true first contact opportunity. Chief Shafir deserved most of the credit. That woman could break into any computer system, even one built under a different mathematical basis by an alien species that was a mystery to them using a language unknown to them. Standing at the head of the Briefing Room, the two presented the details.

“The quantum gravimetric processor we found on the planet was a Rosetta Stone for us,” explained Chief Shafir to the ship’s senior staff. “Every processing system, regardless of its inner workings, requires an instruction set to efficiently write code against it. Through trial and error, we developed a working understanding of the persistence accessors within that set, and then pulled as much raw signal as we could.”

Because they had no way to relocate the system they’d found on the planet, since they didn’t even understand how its power source could exist as it violated the laws of physics, the Chief and an away team had set up camp in the square on the abandoned world to do this work. She’d been down there for the better part of the first six days they’d been stranded in orbit.

“We had no way to know what we were pulling, or when we were done pulling, because the system is not deterministic in a traditional computational sense. However, once we achieved a suitably high degree of signal duplication across the wire, we concluded we had enough to start the next phase of work so we returned to the ship. ”

After they got back from the planet though, they were dead in the water because they had no way to interpret the raw signal. It didn’t help that Dr. Lockwood told them to bugger off because his team was busy with more important things. Speaking of which, where was Dr. Lockwood now? The whole senior staff was here, except for him.

“The problem after the download was that the signals were non-interpretable within our framework of computation,” Shafir continued. “Fast forward to two days ago though, and Admiral Reyes brought us the solution, a higher-order tensor transformation to convert the raw signals into a quantum form suitable for data analysis with our onboard processing units.”

It had been a real surprise when Reyes showed up in her lab unannounced. It had been even more of a surprise when the Admiral explained she’d done the math and constructed a solution to their problem herself. Why was a Fleet Admiral doing the work instead of the physicists and mathematicians on the Astrophysics and Exotic Sciences team?

“Once we plugged in the Admiral’s transformation, it was just figuring out enough of the digital structure to start extracting meaning from what we retrieved,” explained Shafir, before gesturing to the Lieutenant by her side who’d been instrumental in the next phase due to her gifts with language.

“Building out a syntax tree and tokenizing the flow,” explained Lieutenant Balan, “we deciphered a basic understanding of their syllabic language, enough that we could train the universal translator. The training has gaps for sure though. Their language does not share a common root with any known languages, as one would expect of a species isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Thankfully though, the source material on the device we found was substantial so we could infer a lot through patterns of repetition one expects to find within written text.”

“So we have enough to have a conversation?”

“Presumably, as long as they speak the same language or a derivative of it.”

Captain Devreux then jumped in: “And from an operational perspective, we understand enough about their signaling protocols from the work the Chief did. Assuming they’re using technology similar to that on the planet below, and with the assistance of the spectral modification from Lockwood’s sensors modifications, we should be able to modulate our comms array to establish a channel.”

Admiral Reyes nodded. It was as good a shot as any. If it didn’t work, and the call just went out into the void, their situation would be unchanged from the present, and they’d still have to hang their hopes on the aberrations of a scientist gone mad. “Has anything new developed on the edge of the system?”

“As you know, two more objects were detected on our sensors early this morning with the same signature as the others,” explained Captain Devreux. “Since their arrival, they have assumed a stationary position near the other three, but no additional developments.”

Commander Lewis, from his solitary position in the far corner of the room, furled his brow. The moment they detected those two new arrivals, the Chief Intelligence Officer had lobbied yet again for the Polaris to go to red alert. Beyond proving beyond a doubt that these unknown objects were anthropogenic in nature, and not just some fluke interstellar phenomenon, it had the smell of a task group amassing for an assault.

“Well, since we don’t have other reasonable options, I think it’s time we try to call our friends,” concluded the Admiral. “Lieutenant Balan, any guidance from what you’ve gotten out of the data dump?”

“Unfortunately, not much,” the cultural affairs advisor responded. “From what we’ve translated, the computer system we found appears to have been an operational system for some agency within a local government. A lot of stuff about plaza construction, waste collection, metro news, and upcoming events – a treasure trove of conversational and procedural documents that simplified language model construction – but nothing of note to explain their perspective on interstellar relations or what caused all the damage we found on the planet below.”

“If your city is under attack, or your people are at war, wouldn’t you think that would feature prominently in basically every piece of written material?” asked Commander Lewis, sitting up in his chair.

“It is possible we just didn’t manage to pull the relevant data,” answered Balan.

“Or it is possible that whatever destroyed the city happened very fast,” Lewis countered.

“Yes, I suppose.” Balan wondered why Lewis always had such a dark attitude about everything.

The Commander pushed the point: “So what if the denizens of the planet are not the same folks that are watching us now? What if the planet was destroyed by the same hostile force that is now amassing on the edge of the system?” Lewis always spoke in a serious tone, even when ordering a snack from the replicator, but the gravity of his questioning caused the momentum of the room to shift.

“We can always ask them when we call,” the Admiral chuckled, attempting to lighten the mode before Commander Lewis dragged their confidence down too far.

The Chief Intelligence Officer did not look amused.

“But in all seriousness Commander,” continued Admiral Reyes, “if you are right, and they are here to kill us, we’re going to find out eventually either way. They have FTL capabilities, and we do not. They have unknown capabilities, and we can only discern their shadows on sensors. If anything, would engaging them now not provide us with less of a tactical disadvantage than engaging them at a later point after they have reinforced their forces further?”

Commander Lewis sighed. He knew Allison Reyes to be a very competent, adaptable and pragmatic leader, one that did not jump to conclusions early, but when her mind was made up, there was nothing you could do to change it. One fact was missing from this discussion though. Why was Dr. Lockwood’s work to model local subspace and enable superluminal travel no longer an option? And for that matter, where was Dr. Lockwood right now? Lewis knew better than to raise that question in this setting though. When Reyes did not share something, she usually had a good reason.

“Captain Devreux, please bring the ship to full readiness and have all personnel report to battlestations,” Admiral Reyes instructed. “However, do not raise shields, do not activate weapon systems, do not launch starfighters, and for that matter, do not do anything that could be construed as a threat. This is a first contact situation, and we will treat it as a positive one until proven wrong. Let’s plan to dial our friends in thirty minutes time.”

Captain Devreux nodded dutifully, while Commander Lewis sat there with his arms crossed and a look of displeasure on his face. Around the room, the rest of the officers were a mixed bag. A few, like Lieutenant Balan, looked excited at the prospect of first contact with a new alien species, but most, still stuck on the Chief Intelligence Officer’s words, looked concerned.

“Dismissed.”

Quickly, the senior staff rose and headed out. Commander Lewis stayed seated though. When the door finally closed, it was only him and the Admiral left in the room.

“Allison, what about Lockwood’s work?”

“It is my opinion, and Dr. Hall’s opinion, that he is compromised. He is too close to this. It’s the echoes of his trauma from the half decade he spent stranded in the Delta Quadrant.”

“Shouldn’t that just inspire him to dig us out of this mess?” Lewis asked. If their places were certainly reversed, it would just be all the more motivation to solve the problem.

“He’s not you, my friend,” Reyes counseled. “What do you do when you get punched?”

“I engage them, and I keep on pressing until they are no longer a threat.”

“Well, in the same situation, Dr. Lockwood would curl up in a ball and start shaking.”

“Can’t he just man up and push through?”

“That’s the sort of advice I’d give you,” Reyes smiled for a moment, but then it turned to a frown as she continued to explain. “But he’s not you. He’s panicked, and in desperation, he may be convinced he found a solution. And this isn’t a phaser fight. If you miss a shot, you just fire again. If he misses, this ship and all its crew ends up stardust scattered across the system. Something as simple as an unmodeled perturbation that causes non-constant acceleration across the warp bubble. Subspace physics is incredibly complicated, and the strange spacetime we find ourselves in here exponentiates that.”

The Commander did not look happy with that answer, but not because he disagreed with Reyes. She was probably right. Rather, his problem was with Dr. Lockwood. How could someone fail to rise to the call of duty when his compatriots depended on him?

“Well, I better go assemble my team,” Commander Lewis said as he got up to leave before he said something stupid. “I hope you’re right, and I’m wrong, that this gambit plays out for the best. But the universe has a habit of proving my pessimism right.”

As the Admiral watched him leave, she hoped he was wrong.

“This is Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes of the Federation starship USS Polari…”

“In our space, you transgressed, and now, on our time, you intrude,” interrupted a deep voice in a near-lifeless tone devoid of vocal intonation.

“Ma’am, we are registering a fluctuation in subspace,” reported Tactical.

“We come in peace,” insisted the Admiral, sensing the lack of welcome in the voice of their watchers. “We mean you no harm. We are simple explorers searching for two fellow ships…”

“Here, outsider, you are not welcome.”

The audio link abruptly terminated. Admiral Reyes sighed. That had not gone as she’d hoped. She needed an opportunity to explain the situation, or at least to finish a sentence. Otherwise, this gambit would fail. Had they just poked the bear, as Commander Lewis had cautioned?

“I am detecting some sort of stellar…” the officer at Tactical tried to report before cutting off mid-sentence. All of a sudden, five objects materialized directly in front of them, so dark and featureless they were only discernible through the stars they occluded.

“Are those what I think they are?” asked Admiral Reyes.

“Affirmative. Registering quantum gravimetric distortions consistent with the objects we’ve been tracking,” confirmed the Tactical Officer as her hands flew across the controls. “And the objects at the edge of the system are no longer there. It would be fair to surmise that these are them.”

“What are they doing now?” Reyes asked, struggling to make out anything visually.

“Just sitting there motionless,” replied the Tactical officer. “Although, in full disclosure, they could be charging weapons, and I wouldn’t have a clue. Can’t make heads or tails of what’s on sensors.”

“Operations, can we do any better with the image quality?” asked Captain Devreux.

The viewscreen began to change its luminance as the Operations Officer modulated through electromagnetic wavelengths. Reyes knew the outcome before the viewscreen even finished passing through the infrared spectrum. Ultraviolet, infrared, and beyond would all see nothing, because the nature of their invisibility was not EM in nature. Instead, from the emissions they’d collected, it was almost certainly borne of distortions in spacetime itself.

“Sorry sir, nothing on any spectral band.”

“Commander Lockwood,” Reyes summoned over her combadge. “I need your eyes on what’s going on up here. You and the team, get us anything you can on what we’re looking at. And see if you can analyze what we just witnessed. That was clearly an FTL jump so let’s try to reverse engineer it.” If this species wouldn’t help, but the Polaris managed to escape intact, this might lead to a way home. She just hoped ASTRA’s Head of Astrophysics and Exotic Sciences could pull it together. As reality had set in for him, and the analogues to his previous stranding, he’d been overwhelmed by PTSD that had caused a severe unraveling of his mental state.

“On it Admiral,” replied the head of Astrophysics and Exotic Sciences over the link with an energetic intrigue absent the last few days. “The fluctuations in spacetime are curious…”

“Unless it will help us shoot them or talk our way out of this, not now doc. Just get started on the analysis. We have a pressing situation to resolve first,” Reyes interrupted and then closed the call. She didn’t mean to be short with Dr. Lockwood, but he could not have reached a viable conclusion to their tactical situation that fast, and his academic musings could wait for later.

Captain Devreux, standing on the Admiral’s right, leaned over. “I hate to side with Lewis on this one, but it might be time for Red Alert,” he encouraged. Space had a way of distorting size, and the ships before them weren’t even directly visible, but the nullspace they created was enough to give the impression they dwarfed even the massive Odyssey class USS Polaris.

“Given the unnavigability of their space, it is unlikely they have encountered many, as they call them, outsiders. It is natural for them to be wary,” counseled Lieutenant Balan. While not a common sight on the bridge, in first contact scenarios, ASTRA’s Cultural Affairs Officer found herself directly adjacent to the CO and XO on the Command Island, and she knew the Fleet Admiral valued her opinion. “I cannot say whether they will engage us regardless, but raising shields and energizing weapons would almost certainly tip the scales in that direction.”

As much as she respected the opinion of her longtime Executive Officer, Admiral Reyes preferred the perspective of the young Lieutenant in this case. She debated her words for a moment and then reopened the channel: “This is the USS Polaris. If you scan our vessel, you will see our shields are down and our weapons are unpowered.”

The Admiral paused and waited. Silence from the other side.

“They may not have a way of ascertaining the truth of that statement,” offered Captain Devreux.

“I concur,” added Lieutenant Balan. “This is a species with technology so different from ours that they may understand as little of our technology as we understand of theirs.”

“We are sending you a series of records pertaining to our civilization’s history and culture,” Admiral Reyes offered over the channel. She nodded at the Vulcan officer at comms, who dutifully began uploading the standard Federation file for first contact exchanges of information with warp-capable civilizations.

“As well as specifications about our technology so you can confirm what I am saying is true,” Admiral Reyes added, to which the Vulcan officer at comms paused. He looked up to confirm what he had just heard. It was illogical. As opposed to the history and culture file, technical specifications did not fit within standard first contact protocol. Instead, it could expose a weakness if the situation turned tactical, which logic would dictate it absolutely could. Captain Devreux also looked thrown off, and if Commander Lewis had been up here, he would have lost it at the idea.

“If our technology is so foreign to them that we ask them to have faith in our claims,” explained Reyes to her doubtful staff. “Then we will need to have a little faith in them too. But just a little… send them the article from Starships Explained about the Odyssey class.” She referenced a popular science article that went deep enough into phasers and regenerative shields to allow a reasonably scientific reader to understand them, while omitting any really juicy material not intended for the public. As Reyes recalled, its narrative also leaned in heavily on the diplomacy, science and exploration aspects that inspired the class’ purpose, something that could help soften their counterpart’s suspicions of their intentions given that the USS Polaris was no small ship.

“Sent.”

And then they waited, but this time, the comm link stayed open.

The voice on the other side of the link finally cut in: “Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes, as you are called, explain to us how you came to exist in our space.”

Reyes let a breath out, only then realizing she’d been holding her breath that whole time. “A ship from our civilization, the USS Casimir, ventured out on a mission of exploration into space unknown to us, but it vanished without a trace in this area. Another ship, the USS Casimir, was sent to find it. It also vanished. We are here in search of our colleagues.”

“Why explore where you know not?”

It was a strange question, but not necessarily unsurprising for a civilization sealed off from the rest of the galaxy due to the incongruity of subspace present here. “Because we take pride in discovering all that the galaxy holds,” Reyes explained, a twinkle in her eye as the explorer thought of all they had come to know in their time amongst the stars. “The peoples, the places, the great mysteries out there, we find great pleasure in discovery.”

“In those unknown places, what if you are not welcome?”

The voice was flat and lifeless, just as before, but the questions gave Admiral Reyes hope. It indicated interest over hostility. “The United Federation of Planets respects the sovereignty of all sentient species,” she assured, assuming from their curt interaction that this was likely her opposite’s greatest concern. “We come in peace, and we go only where we are welcome. If we are not, we leave in peace, though where possible we look to establish relationships with those we encounter. It is my sincerest hope that…”

“The Romulans, are they of your Federation?” the voice cut in with its first hint of any actual vocal intonation.

Reyes quirked her brow at the question. This civilization was not totally unaware of the galaxy around them. “No, the Romulan Republic and the Romulan Free State are not part of the Federation,” explained Reyes, constraining her words to ensure she did not step on a minefield as few had good interactions with the war-like civilization over its nearly two millennia of existence. She found it interesting that these natives of the Talvath Sector knew of the Romulans when Lewis had found nothing in the Romulan archives that mentioned them. “Why do you ask?”

“To this place, the Romulans came two millennia ago, in ships not all that unlike yours. But unlike you, they spoke not of exploration, only conquest. We knew not what to think until our cities burned. So we bent our space, and their engines no longer worked. Then we waited among the stars, our sanctuary from their disruptors and torpedoes. In time, their rations depleted, their ships decayed, and their crews died. Over the centuries, we have watched many, but you are the first we have spoken to in a thousand years.”

Admiral Reyes had so many questions, but right now, there was one question more important than the rest: “You watch many, you say? Have you seen our sister ships? The ones we have come to find?”

“We watch them, yes. With time, they will fade. Just like you. And just like the others who came before.”

That was a fairly dark take on things. The Admiral doubted that they would suffer the same fate as the Romulans, unless these strange ships directly engaged them in combat, but she wasn’t going to point that out. The Casimir was a small science vessel with limited supplies, so it might struggle to limp back to Federation territory, but neither the Casimir nor the Arleigh Burke had likely marooned much deeper into this territory than the Polaris. It would be possible to limp back at impulse. Starfleet vessels of today were far better supplied, and its crews far better trained, than those that would have featured in a Romulan assault of the pre-Imperial era.

“But what if we gave you our assurances we would not return to your space unless we were invited?” asked the Admiral, leaning into what seemed to be the central thesis of her counterpart’s motivations. She didn’t like this outcome. First contact was usually an opportunity to build new bridges. Here though, there was a more pressing matter to address. She needed to see to the survival of her ship and her crew, and the ships and crews of her two fellow vessels. “Would you help us and our sister ships leave your space?”

“You would not be invited back.”

“As is your right, and we would respect that.” The Admiral was fairly certain that now they knew this race existed only a few of parsecs beyond Romulan space, the Diplomatic Corps would have interest in renewing contact, and Starfleet Intelligence would want to know more about this unknown power. But that was an issue for another day when they were safely back in Federation space.

There was a pause on the line.

“Assurances… what assurances would we have?”

“You have documents of our history and culture to confirm what I am saying,” Reyes offered. “The Charter of the Federation affirms the fundamental right to self determination for all sentient beings.” The Admiral spoke her words with a deep conviction, although she had no idea if her counterpart’s understanding of their linguistic articulations would identify it.

“But of many wars, your history also tells.”

“Wars of defense from those who did not respect those same rights we hold so dear. Such as the Romulans, who we had to repel from our territory on several instances. In fact, it was partly in defense against Romulan aggression through which our Federation was born.”

“Your answer is… satisfactory. We will return you from whence you came, fellow sufferer of Romulans.” Admiral Reyes smiled at that last bit. It reminded her of the old Earth proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Amazing how they could encounter a civilization completely divorced from their own in practically everything, and yet that simple adage could still hold true.

“And our sister ships?”

“Them too.”

Reyes let out a sigh of relief. The gambit had paid off. They did not have to depend on the mental state of a troubled genius struggling with PTSD to devise their escape.

“Our warp bubble, as you call it, we will extend around your ship to deliver you back where you belong. But only on the condition you disable your sensors and save nothing about what you witness.”

“You have my word,” Reyes confirmed with deep sincerity.

“Then from whence you came you shall go.” The voice paused, before adding one more condition. “And the boundaries of the space you shall not again transgress, we shall send to you.”

“We understand and will respect your borders. If you don’t mind, what can we call you?”

“Nothing. Our existence is not of substance to you.”

The link cut abruptly, but this time, the conversation had been had. The dark objects before them began to encircle them. As they neared, even featureless and blacker than black, it became clear how much larger they were than the Odyssey-class Polaris. The starscape almost vanished in the nullspace they cast. Reyes wondered to herself if they’d taken their entire population aboard these ships millennia ago as the Romulans burned their cities, but she’d never know for certain.

“Cut all active sensors,” the Admiral ordered. “But capture everything you can through passive monitors. Anything you can get that won’t be detected.”

Lieutenant Balan gave her a questioning stare.

“I lied. Sue me,” chuckled the Admiral. “Establish trust and do what you must to maintain it, but don’t give an ounce more. At minimum, however they distorted spacetime, and however they transit it, that could be a boon for us. And don’t for a minute think we may not find them opposite us again someday. If that time does once again come, I intend to have more answers than we have today.”

The Admiral’s gaze drew dark, that of an old warrior who would never truly heal from the scars of past wounds.  In many ways, the two shared the same explorer spirit, but in others, Allison Reyes was a very different person from the optimistic young woman. The cultural affairs officer frowned at the pessimistic perspective. Emilia Balan hoped she never fell to that same depressing cynicism.

In the background, the flight control and operations personnel shouted out status reports as a strange subspace distortion, similar albeit divergent from the mechanics of their own warp field, surrounded the vessel. And then the ship was pulled forward at superluminal speeds back in the direction from whence it had come. Down in the ASTRA lab, Dr. Lockwood was having a field day.

“But until then,” commented the Admiral as a smile crossed her face again, “the Watchers of Talvath shall be one of the universe’s many wonderful mysteries.”