It was supposed to have been a simple and routine investigation.

It was supposed to be the Atlantis parked in a Trojan asteroid field, conducting scans while a bunch of people stared at screens, scratching their heads and postulating ideas. Others would be modelling those scans, running simulations and letting the computer run calculations to test multiple hypotheses.

What a bunch of people might call dull while others would call it confusing, intriguing and with a possibility of a exhilarating thrown in for good measure.

It wasn’t supposed to be whatever this was.

“What the hell?” Gabrielle shouted over the blaring alarms, themselves competing with what could only be described as impact sounds across the hull and the occasional tortured groan of the entire spaceframe.

Sounds that immediately filled the soul with dread.

“Don’t know,” came a reassuring rumble, countering the worst of what the ship was weathering. Rrr’s steady rock-like fingers tapped away at Ops, an imposing finger at the front of the bridge. “But whatever it is, sensors aren’t happy,” Rrr continued.

One moment Atlantis had been plodding along the asteroid belt, with nothing for thousands of kilometres in any direction, sensors groping in the dark for signs of a gravitational fluctuation they’d picked up the day before. A momentary flicker, enough to get Gabs’ attention (and a few of the ship’s resident astrophysicists as well), nothing more.

And then hell broke loose.

Atlantis had been tossed like a cork in a rapid, most on the bridge thrown to the floor as the inertial dampeners had managed to turn deadly lateral accelerations into merely violent. Luck had it that Kelly Tabaaha had only been slammed into the side of her console, not across the bridge, and her quick actions, her continuing actions, were keeping the ship mostly level.

The young woman’s attention was focused solely on her instruments and controls as she tried to keep the ship steady, riding out the tumult around them instead of resisting it.

“Shields coming online,” Gantzmann announced as the steady rain of ‘pings’ and ‘thuds’, some of them uncomfortably close and heavy, came to a sudden stop.

“Breach on deck eight, section three,” Rrr announced. “Forcefields in place, no injuries.”

There was another thud, this one reverberating through the entire ship it felt like and not something merely ‘nearby’. “Sorry,” Kelly half-shouted, hands rapidly manipulating the controls of the ship. “Brace!” she shouted just as another thud went through the ship.

Mercifully it wasn’t that bad a thud. For what was clearly a collision that was.

“Shields at eighty per cent,” Gantzmann dutifully supplied.

“Rrr, viewscreen.” Gabs had managed to work her way to the Ops and Helm, hands gripping either console where they met in the middle, peering between Rrr and Kelly as the holographic screen at the front of the bridge sprung to life. “What the hell?” she repeated, this time quieter and significantly less urgent.

Gone were the inky depths of space, the scattering of white pinpricks of stars, and a few brighter points of the planets of this system. Now it was a dull orange-brown corridor, its undefined wall crackled with angry red lightning. Debris littered the path ahead of them, from unknown wreckage to ruined starships of ages past.

Another thud rattled the ship as Kelly tried to shimmy Atlantis around wreckage that looked like it could have been a Klingon ship, but to which there was no good geometry and the ships met. Age had ravaged one, shields protected the other, as Atlantis ploughed through remains, scattering more debris along its path.

“Wormhole?” Gabs asked. Then rolled her eyes. That question should be aimed at her, not coming from her. Of course, she wouldn’t have an answer, but she’d be busy looking into it, putting disparate data points together and trying to find an answer to the captain’s question.

Her question this time.

“No ma’am,” came a response as Gabs turned to face the science station. Her station. Her station, where a young Bolian man was sitting, eyes flicking from one set of readouts to another, soaking in all that the ship’s sensors could feed him. “Some sort of subspace…thing,” Ensign Trel said, giving the best description he had.

“Wormholes can be subspace things,” Rrr rumbled. They were chastised immediately by another thump to the ship rattling everyone.

“It’s not a wormhole,” Trel said. His attention was still on the readouts. “It’s something else.”

The turbolift doors hissed open, spilling more senior officers who’d hurried when the alarms had sounded. Gabs caught sight of T’Val making her way down the ramp, carefully in the steady rocking that the not-wormhole was imparting on the ship, combined with Kelly’s evasive manoeuvres that were keeping collisions to a minimum. Engineering had sent someone a bit more senior to relieve the poor ensign on bridge duty who looked fit to panic right now.

And then Maxwell Simmons strutted out of the turbolift, or as much as one could when the ship would lurch without warning. He was already glaring at her and she could just taste the disdain the man brought with him wherever he went.

But she didn’t have time for that.

“Kelly, T’Val can take over,” she said to the young lieutenant to her right.

“I got this,” came the response. “I got this.” She never looked up, watching not the viewscreen but her own displays and monitors, all much better suited to the task of flying the ship.

“Very well Lieutenant,” T’Val spoke up, a hand now on the back of the helm station’s seat. Unflappably Vulcan is her simple statement despite the circumstances. “I am right here if you need me.”

“If everyone could let me just fly the ship please,” Kelly continued, “that’d be great.”

With that, the three more senior officers around the lieutenant junior grade had been told.

“Something ahead,” Rrr announced as Gabs was drawing breath. She looked up to see what was a series of branches in the tunnel ahead. All of them bore the same orange-brown walls, the same angry red lightning, though some more than others.

And the least angry was the one straight ahead of them.

There was no other information to work with than some visual representation of whatever the universe was doing to them.

“Steady as she goes helm,” Gabs ordered.

“If she’ll let me,” Kelly responded. “Steady ahead aye.”

The rocking subsided, and the debris cleared as they passed the cluster of branches. But then the motion of the walls around them accelerated, the patterns whipping past them faster and faster. There was no time to ask what was going on before a flash of angry red light whipped out from the tunnel wall and struck Atlantis.

And then it was gone.

Inky blackness once more filled the viewscreen. Stars blotted the void just as they rightfully should.

Just…not as many as there should be.

“Report,” Gabs said, trying her best to sound like the captain.

“We’re back in –“ Trel’s report was cut off by Simmons’ placing a hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

“We’re back in normal space,” Simmons declared. Not to Gabs, but to Gantzmann. When Lin merely nodded in Gabs’ direction, he turned and repeated himself.

“I can see that,” she responded, shook her head and then looked to Lin, who gave her report with a simple look and just one nod of her head. We’re fine was the message and would do for now.

“Rrr?” Gabs asked next.

“Couple more breaches, main power is out on deck twelve, a report of a rogue shuttle in the main bay.” The Gaen was flicking through a variety of status reports as quickly as they could, or they came up. “Sickbay is reporting multiple injuries ship-wide. So far seventeen serious.”

“Navigation is a mess,” Kelly followed up. “Sensors aren’t finding anything they recognise.”

“May I?” T’Val asked and finally, Kelly surrendered the helm.

Gabs couldn’t help herself as she reached out and pulled Kelly to her side, an arm wrapped around the young woman’s shoulders, giving her a comforting squeeze. “Nice flying,” she commented. It seemed to mean something as a smile briefly appeared on Kelly’s face.

“Thanks.”

“No navigational beacons, no pulsars, no nearby nebulae,” T’Val rattled off. The first few galactic signposts one could use to roughly establish your bearings all yielding nothing.

“Oh…oh dear,” Rrr said. “I think I know why.”

A few keystrokes and the expansive hologram that made up the ship’s viewscreen shifted from what was ahead of them to one of the many other external cameras dotted along the ship’s hull. The screen filled with the majesty and beauty of a full spiral galaxy on display, well above the ecliptic and looking upon one of the faces of the celestial structure. It was so large that Rrr had to zoom the camera feed out a few factors to fit it all on the viewscreen.

It was a sight you couldn’t see anywhere within the Milky Way galaxy.

And yet there it was.

A galaxy.

A barred spiral galaxy.

Taking up the viewscreen.

Thankfully it was Trel that broke the silence that had enveloped the bridge, and not Simmons. “Good news is that is the Milky Way galaxy.”

“That’s the good news?” Gab asked.

She was rapidly coming to the conclusion she preferred delivering the news to receiving it.