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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ninety five?

Had he really just said that? 

The Serenity had lost ninety five of its crew? 

Was he serious? 

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

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

Both young women looked at him with shock and concern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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