“Tell me, Tom. Is there any hope for them?”

The familiar voice, cutting through the silence of the lab where he stood scribbling equations, pulled him from his thoughts. Dr. Brooks turned to see a young woman, her eyes filled with desperation. “In what manner do you ask, my dear? Hope that the Serenity and the Ingenuity come flying out of the Vesparan star? That somehow the aperture, the one now closed to us, magically reopens?”

She nodded, although, when he’d just said it as he did, Chief Shafir knew it sounded preposterous. The Cardassians had succeeded in their plot to collapse the Underspace. But still, wasn’t there still hope? However slim it might be, she needed there to still be hope.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Dr. Brooks shook his head. “Not unless a force out there, one far beyond our scope of understanding, wills the Underspace back into existence.” That wasn’t to say it was completely out of the question. It had, after all, appeared just as inexplicably a few weeks prior. Still, it did not seem likely, not after the Cardassians had smoothed out the excited foliations of subspace that had made transit through the labyrinth possible. “And I wouldn’t hang any hope on such an improbable probability.”

That wasn’t a no, Chief Shafir noted. But then again, Dr. Brooks was one who loved the weird and wacky, who never shied away from the most unlikely of possibilities. She knew she couldn’t put stock in that. Still, as she eyed the aged physicist, she sensed there was something more. There was something he wasn’t saying. He seemed too calm for just having lost one of his closest friends. “If not for the Underspace, what about for Lewis and the others? Is there still hope that they’re out there somewhere, and that somehow they find a way home?” The USS Voyager had been thought lost to the deep, only to reappear almost a decade later. If Captain Janeway could do it, why couldn’t Captain Lewis and Commander Lee?

“That I cannot answer,” Dr. Brooks replied flatly as he folded his arms across his chest.

It was a curious way to answer the question, the intelligence operator thought to herself. Was there more he wasn’t saying? She stared at him, trying to read him through his guarded demeanor. Though he never spoke of it, she knew why Tom Brooks had been locked up, the part of his past that would be their future, and for a moment she wondered whether he couldn’t answer because he didn’t know, or whether he wouldn’t answer because he did.

Dr. Brooks met her stare with a stoic and unreadable expression, but as they locked eyes, he found himself feeling for the young woman. He knew how much the Captain meant to her. Lewis had found Ayala Shafir in her darkest moment, and he’d helped her find her way back. “All I can say is that, after all the universe has thrown at Jake Lewis, it’d take quite a lot for it to kill him off now.” It was all he could offer. All he would offer. All he dared offer. His time in New Zealand had given him new clarity and restraint. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my model.”

Without another word, Dr. Brooks turned his back to her, starting to scribble unintelligible notation upon his board once more.

Chief Shafir stared at his backside, trying to suppress her frustration. How dare he cut her off like that? She wanted to push further, but she knew it would be futile. While Tom Brooks wore the uniform of a Starfleet officer and played scientist as part of the ASTRA team, she knew who he was at his core. On Earth and then at Beta Serpentis, she’d seen what he could do, and thus, resigned to the fact she’d get nowhere with him, she took her leave. She was tired. She needed some sleep. But first, she had someone else to visit.