While gazing into a darkened display panel, Kellin’s reflection stared right back at him.  He couldn’t understand the geometry of how his blond curls were hanging over his forehead.  That wasn’t how he’d styled his hair in the morning.  He fussed with his hair, trying and failing to get it out of his face.  He lost all sense of time until the hiss of subspace signal-distortion sharpened to a piercing shriek.

Commander Jeovanni’s voice was garbled by whatever interference lay between where he was transmitting from the USS Grus and the USS Constellation.  While the audio played from the speaker wafer in the overhead, half his words were lost to the digital noise.  But it wasn’t only the subspace distortions.  Even with his voice flattened through a hailing frequency, Jeovanni normally sounded resonant.  Speaking with his whole chest.  He usually sounded melodious.  Kellin thought he heard Jeovanni’s voice crack a few times, too.  

That sound gave Kellin a stomachache.

“Shields are– –to forty-seven percent,” Jeovanni said.  “Sensor read– –as well be in Bynar for all the sense–”  Another rising hiss of interference drowned out his words.  “Ionic cyclone damaged one of our impulse– –half strength and dropping.“

Elsewhere in the lab, Kellin heard another voice.  The young Zaldan’s voice was far more legible because he was physically in the room.  Even so, his voice also cracked when he spoke.

“This was the last known location of the Grus,” Dolan said.

Kellin moved to stand behind Melchor Dolan.  They’d been friends since the science officer’s first posting aboard Starbase 72.  Dolan raised a hand to manipulate a hologram projected on the broad astrometrics viewscreen before them.  Judging by Dolan’s posture in the chair and the tightness of his uniform around the shoulders, Dolan looked like he’d been working out.  A wireframe of the Saber-class Grus appeared in its relative position within the nebula, which had only been designated as D-067 so far.

“We can’t keep track of our own search pattern through the nebula’s severe gravimetric distortions,” Dolan reported.  “We’ve no way to know if we’re going in circles over the same patch of nebula.”

Again.  Dolan’s voice cracked again.  Kellin had always known Dolan to speak from the pit of his chest, with his whole heart.  All that had changed about six months ago, ever since Dolan had admitted to dating the Changeling who had posed as Kellin aboard Constellation when he was selected as executive officer.

“Dee, We’re totally sensor-blind on the bridge since we followed Grus’s distress signal into the nebula,” Kellin said.  “Flavia is futzing with a pulse?  She thinks she can approximate echolocation?”

From the chair beside Dolan, Science Chief Yuulik laughed.  “In this bog?”

“That’s why I promised Captain Taes you were cooking up a brilliant alternative, buddy,” Kellin said, almost pleading.  He squeezed Dolan by the shoulders, giving him a playful shake.

Defensively, Dolan said, “Ah, sir, you over-promised.  Every particle in the nebula has been ionized!  Captain Jeovanni reported nothing like this from the past week of surveying the nebula.  I’m sorry, I don’t know how to make the navigational sensors punch through this interference.”

In an absurdly high-pitched voice, Yuulik interjected, “I don’t want to hear that kind of negative self-talk, lieutenant junior grade.  Despite us being buffeted by an ion front, you haven’t unspooled the lateral sensor pallets.  That’s… impressive.  I knew I promoted you for a reason!”

“Gah!” Dolan shouted.  He recoiled from Yuulik, his chair rolling back into Kellin’s chest.  Dolan reached out for Kellin, his palms taking purchase on Kellin’s forearms.  Almost as soon as he’d done it, Kellin could feel Dolan’s fingers going rigid.

“Why are you being nice to me?” Dolan asked Yuulik, suddenly crossing his arms over his chest.  “Are you a Changeling now?”

“Don’t be foolish,” Yuulik said, her voice brittle. Her gaze darted in Kellin’s direction. Seeing the desperate curiosity in her eyes made Kellin feel like an amoeba under her microscope.

Bombastically, Yuulik went on to say, “Who else but me would point out the irony of the Grus going missing when she was literally our pathfinder scout through the Delta Quadrant for the past five months?”

“And what about you, Yuulik?  What brilliant plan are you designing to outshine Flavia?” Kellin asked.  Between Yuulik searching for his pain, Dolan’s instinctive search for comfort from Kellin, and his own fear for Captain Jeovanni, the words came out too gruffly.  Kellin could hear it himself as it was happening.

Yuulik leaned over the large LCARS console, tapping at its interface. Three more scrolls of sensor readings were layered over the nebula representation on the viewscreen.

“I have a gut feeling about the right direction,” Yuulik said cryptically, “but I can’t visualise it enough to put it to words yet.”

“You really are Yuulik,” Dolan flatly said.  He scooted his chair closer to the LCARS desk, too.  “You’d rather be correct alone than wrong together.“

Yuulik looked at Dolan and smiled.  It looked like the expression was paining her.

“Interesting,” she said.

Kellin cleared his throat.  “Yuulik, can I see you back here for a minute?”  He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.  An expression of confusion marred the smile on Yuulik’s face, but she nodded her agreement.  Yuulik followed Kellin to the astrometric lab’s back corner, and Kellin watched Dolan over Yuulik’s shoulder to see if Dolan was listening in.

“What are you doing?” Kellin asked in a conspiratorial whisper.  He waved his hands, indicating a noxious aura around Yuulik.  “This masquerade you’re giving is deeply unsettling.”

Yuulik shoved him in the chest, and she screamed, “You told me to do this!”  She sucked in a ragged breath before she continued in a quieter hiss: “You told me you’re not impressed by my brilliance, but you’ll be impressed by how many officers want to follow me.  You said you’d brag exponentially on my performance review for every success I mentor out of my team.”

Kellin cringed.  “You’re doing all that because of what I said?” he asked incredulously.

“You know I prefer a junior officer who shuts up and listens to me,” Yuulik said, “but your advice on mentoring sounds like the type of metaphysical nonsense Captain Taes would believe too.  C’mon, take credit for it.  I really valued your opinion this once.“

Yuulik looked down at the deck.

Even softer, she said, “Changeling Kellin never would have thought of that.”

“Commanders!” Dolan interrupted.  “We’ve lost the subspace signal from the Grus.“

“No!” Kellin exclaimed, and then, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”  Kellin chased back to the astrometrics station.  As if to taunt him, the holographic representation of the Grus winked out.

Too afraid to say it above a whisper, Kellin asked, “Was she destroyed?”

With just a glance at the readings on the viewscreen, Yuulik said, “No, there’s no sign of a matter/anti-matter obliteration.  We would have detected an energy discharge even through the gravimetric distortions.”  

Kellin couldn’t understand how she had learned so much from just a glance.  She didn’t follow him either.

“You’re my brilliant boy, Dolan,” Yuulik said effusively. “I trust you’re going to work the problem.  But, alas, I won’t see it.  My place is on the bridge.”

“Yuulik?” Kellin asked, but she had already ducked out of the lab.

“Commander, there’s something… else?” Dolan said, but he couldn’t have sounded less confident.  “Something else in our path.”

“Is it the Grus?” Kellin asked.

Dolan touched a contact on his panel, and a visual sensor feed took over the whole viewscreen.  It looked like little more than a red sandstorm, occasionally lanced with lightning; the particles of the nebula whipped up by the gravimetric distortion Dolan had described.  There was a single grid of the screen, though, where the sandstorm seemed to be swirling in a repeating pattern.  Everything else was chaotic and random, but a singular swirl was gaining momentum.

While he continued manipulating the sensor controls, Dolan bluntly asked, “Why do you spend so much time with Yuulik?”

“Because she’s my best friend,” Kellin answered guilelessly.

“You told me Captain Taes is your best friend,” Dolan countered.

“Taes is my best friend,” Kellin replied.

“That’s nonsense,” Dolan said.

“No, that’s nonsense,” Kellin said, pointing at the impenetrable nebula on the screen.

“I just saw Yuulik hit you.  You should press charges,” Dolan insisted.

“Hitting is one of Yuulik’s love languages,” Kellin remarked fondly.  “I know she would never lie to me, and I know she would never pity me.  Maybe it’s not much, but that’s a comfort.”

Constellation’s spaceframe groaned like an old house buffeted in a hurricane.  There was a hiccup in the inertial dampeners –just a microscopic one– but it still sent Kellin reeling backwards.  He crashed to the deck, rolling onto his shoulder and hip at the last moment to take the brunt of the impact.

“The readings make no sense!” Dolan exclaimed.  “It’s like a wormhole, but it’s weird?”

Through a painful sigh, Kellin lamented, “Why’d it have to be another wormhole?”

Dolan cried, “We’re caught in its gravimetric wave.  It’s pulling us in!”