“She’ll be fine,” Mac said as he stepped up beside Tikva, offering her a steaming cup of hot chocolate, the aroma blending with the coffee in his other hand.

“Who?” The cup was accepted with both hands, sipped at and then hugged close, letting the heat of the cup seep through her uniform.

“Should I run through the list?” They were both staring out the windows of Perseus’ conference room, the mighty ship racing along at warp speed. Somewhere out there in the void Republic and Sagan were doing the same, but their vastly superior engines would get them on sight well before Perseus. “Let me see. Your heart is worried about Lin. Your mind is worried about Gabs. And together they’re both worried about your baby – Atlantis. So, take your pick.”

“I can honestly say I didn’t expect my ship to go missing while I was away.”

“You didn’t expect me to have a tussle with the Breen and make friends with some Tholians while you were away last time either and that worked out well for us.” Mac nudged Tivka with his elbow slightly, getting her attention and offering a smile. “Kendris called a few minutes ago. They’ve got a shuttle in the vicinity of Atlantis’ last known location and can confirm no debris.”

“They should –”

“Be careful, yes,” Mac interrupted. “They’re already back on the ground and waiting like you asked. Republic will be onsite in an hour and Commander Sadovu has already promised me, what was it she said?” he stopped to think, a finger tapping the side of his mug. “Enough probes to walk from here to DS47 and back again.”

“That’s quite an image,” Tikva answered as she turned slowly to face Mac. “How much of her intelligence packet have you actually seen?”

“Just what you gave me when you bundled me on a shuttle and sent me on my way.”

“Huh.” She turned, set her cup down on the table, and grabbed at the only padd on the empty table. A few keystrokes, a verification, then she handed it over to Mac. “You are going to end up trusting her more after reading that, or not trusting her at all.”

“Do I want to read it then?” he asked, waving the padd.

“I was only able to read the full packet recently,” she answered, waving at the bar under her rank pips while collecting her hot chocolate once more, then turned to brood out the window again. “But if you don’t want her, I’ll have her.”

“Honestly cap,” his use of the informal honorific got a smile from her, “I wouldn’t throw her off Republic easily. She’d have to have done some pretty horrible things to change my opinion of her.”

“And I hear her wife is an amazing chef.”

“You have spies on my ship already? You really are becoming a brass officer.” He was joking, eyes turning to the padd and reviewing the content. “Maybe Admiral Beckett has room after all in his department.”

“Bite me,” she responded and silence settled over the conference room. Five minutes passed before Tikva broke it, snapping Mac out of his reading. “Can’t this ship go any faster?”

“This old damn has hiked up her skirts and is high tailing it as fast as she can and you know it,” Mac answered. “Captain…Tikva…she’ll be fine.”

He could say it as much as he wanted, but she could feel the worry and concern radiating off of him.

Ships didn’t go missing without cause or concern after all.

“This is all that Republic has sent along?” Martin Stenz asked after reviewing the wall-monitor in Perseus’ astrophysics lab for nearly ten minutes in near silence. A silence that was only broken by the odd bit of muttering, head-scratching, and a single near-whispered request for coffee that his yeoman had answered.

“This is what they sent to us after ten minutes of being on-site,” Rachel clarified. “Lieutenant Commander Lake thought it best to get us some information quickly while they’re conducting a proper survey.” Her own science team, all of them fresh-faced and a few of them terrified of Stenz based purely on ancient whispered warnings handed down at the Academy, had been working on it for only a few minutes longer than Stenz himself. “Thoughts?”

Stenz’s face scrunched up for a moment as he flicked at some of the details, then brought up a few of the readings, tasking the computer with building a model of what it was that Republic had seen so far. “Well, it’s not a wormhole,” he answered after a minute and a cheerful little chirp from the ship’s isolinear brain.

Rachel had stepped forward and was looking at the animation the computer had spat out. It looked like a wormhole to her. At least on the surface. Though the two-dimensional plane with the funnel on it was just a dimensionally reduced depiction of reality. “It looks like it, though. On the surface at least.” She rapidly spat the last sentence out to defend her initial statement.

“And when you dig deeper?” Stenz asked, stepping back, collecting his coffee and sipping at it, face twisting. “Oh wow, Hendricks, let’s stick to Earth coffee blends this early in the morning,” he said to his yeoman, who nodded once.

“Well, we’ve really only got two examples of long-term stable traversable wormholes,” Rachel recited, buying time while looking the numbers over. “But the neutrino counts don’t line up with either the Celestial Temple of the Barzan Wormhole.” She mulled another set of figures. “These gravimetric readings are screwy.”

“Screwy, Ms Garland?” Stenz asked, then shook his head. “Captain Garland.”

“Screwy,” she repeated with a smile. “They don’t feel right. And the tachyon counts are over an order of magnitude higher. And the computer modelling of what’s going on subspace is just wrong for a wormhole.”

“That would be correct.” Stenz stepped forward and manipulated the wall-monitor and model on it to show the subspace layer. The computer had rapidly given up but had gotten so far as to show shadows and fuzziness that no wormhole model ever showed. “The model is sub-par because the data was rushed to us. Once Republic starts losing probes though we’ll start getting glimpses, if briefly, of what’s down there.”

“Down there?” Rachel turned on Stenz. “You know what this is?”

“Know with certainty, no. But I’m beginning to suspect because when Voyager got home from the Delta Quadrant, I know some of their findings caused quite the stir.” He reached out, tapping at the screen and bringing up records and models from the depths of the ship’s encyclopaedic memory.

“Underspace,” he announced. “Atlantis has fallen into Underspace.”