“We’ve checked everything at our disposal. Unfortunately, there’s no trace of them.”

That wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be enough. Logically, she understood what he was saying, but emotionally, she wasn’t willing to accept it. After all, she’d been the one to give the order. This was on her, and she wanted a way out. They needed to find those ships. Her ships. “You’ve checked the entire sensor net?”

“Yes.”

“Even the deep space relays?”

“Yes.”

“What about our frontier explorers?”

“Yes, those too.”

“And how about…”

“Allison, stop. Just stop. You know me. You know us, all of us at Fourth Fleet Command. No stone was left unturned, not for your ships, nor for the others that didn’t make it back. We’ve reviewed long range telemetry, contacted the captains of our deep space commands, reached out to our contacts in foreign governments, and much, much more. But we’ve found nothing.”

Staring at the Director of Fourth Fleet Engineering across the link, Fleet Admiral Reyes could see the disappointment on his face. Admiral Neidlinger was a builder and a fixer. This was not what he did. This wasn’t the sort of message he delivered. She almost felt bad for making him be the one to tell her, but she’d wanted a straight answer, and a thoroughly researched one. Who better then to get it from than an engineer?

“I wish I had something to give you – anything at all – but for now, I’m afraid all we can do is keep looking. It’s possible they’re still out there somewhere, limping back on their own power.”

Admiral Reyes nodded, for it was all she could do, and then, for the first time since the collapse, it crossed her mind that the Serenity and the Ingenuity wouldn’t have been the only ones on the wrong side of those apertures. “Tell me, James, how many other ships are still unaccounted for?” She’d been so caught up in their personal situation, in the guilt she felt for the choices she’d made, that she hadn’t even thought to ask until now.

“Surprisingly few given the extent of our operation. Almost all, save your duo and a handful of others, had time to get back once the recall order was given.”

That was good, at least, but why then had Captain Lewis and Commander Lee not made it out? They weren’t even all that far out into the labyrinth compared to some of the others. One of the Fourth Fleet’s ships had even found itself beyond the galactic barrier, and even that one had made it home before the Underspace collapsed. Why hadn’t the Serenity and the Ingenuity?

“I’m sorry, Allison.”

“So am I,” Admiral Reyes frowned as she looked down at the floor. “We should have known better. We were playing with science we didn’t understand.” They’d saved Vespara, and that had been the right thing to do, but they should have moved more carefully after that. She should have moved more carefully after that.

“We will keep looking. I promise you that. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, know that the full resources of my department are at your disposal.”

“Thank you James,” Admiral Reyes nodded numbly as she closed the link. It was all platitudes. There was nothing Admiral Neidlinger or his resources could do for them, nothing anyone could do for them.

They were gone.

In a fit of rage, Admiral Reyes grabbed a glass vase off her desk, and, without a moment’s pause, she threw it angrily. It sailed across the room, slamming into the far wall and shattering on impact. The Antarian moon blossoms, no longer held in its embrace, fell to the floor, shards of glass raining down all around it.

Fuck, they were gone.

Slowly, she made her way back around her desk and took a seat, her head falling into her hands. This was on her. She’d made the wrong call.

The door chimed.

The Admiral had half a mind to tell whoever was out there to fuck off, to leave her be, to let her thrash her office and scream into the abyss, but she knew better than to wallow in her misery. Should she at least clean up the vase first? No, fuck the vase.

“Come,” Admiral Reyes ordered as she straightened her collar and looked to the door.

A Chief Petty Officer in red stepped through the door. On most assignments, the idea of a mid-level enlisted specialist stopping by an admiral’s office unannounced would have been unheard of, but the bonds forged between the two through the crucible transcended protocol.

“One of those days, huh?” Chief Shafir asked as her eyes drifted to the far wall.

The Admiral simply nodded.

“I gather no word from the Serenity or the Ingenuity?” Chief Shafir asked. If the flowers and the glass strewn across the floor were any indication, she already knew the answer.

“Unfortunately not,” Admiral Reyes confirmed. “Fourth Fleet Command is doing what they can, but Captain Lewis and Commander Lee were damn far out when the Underspace collapsed. If they escaped, they’re well beyond our reach.” She kept telling herself that this was what had happened, that Captain Lewis and Commander Lee had actually made it out, that they’d eventually come waltzing back like Captain Janeway and the USS Voyager. But there was nothing to support that, no proof whatsoever. It was just as likely that the Cardassians had discovered the doublecross and bounced their hulls off the plasmatic walls of the labyrinth.

“Permission to speak freely?” Chief Shafir asked. It was only a courtesy though. She was going to speak her peace either way, and the Admiral was going to hear it.

“I’d never expect anything less from you, Ayala,” Admiral Reyes smiled lightly.

“Why didn’t you send the Diligent back in there to find them?” Chief Shafir asked. “I heard – we all heard – the order you gave Captain Vox, the one to stand down.” Her expression was cold as she glared at the woman she’d believed in, the woman who’d always seemed larger than life. Until now. “I thought you were one of us, that you understood. We have a code. No man left behind. But this time… this time, you… you personally… you left our men behind.”

The words stung. They were words beyond rank or office, the words of one operator to another, and what hurt the most was that there was a part of Allison Reyes that agreed. Still, there was the other part of her, the part that wore the pips of Fleet Admiral and commanded a squadron of the fleet’s finest ships, that knew she’d made the right call. The only call. “If I’d ordered Dorian back into the labyrinth, where would I have been sending him?”

“Somewhere… anywhere…”

“Those are words of desperation, Ayala,” Admiral Reyes reminded her gently, locking eyes with the operator. “We hadn’t heard from Lewis or Lee for over an hour. Courtesy of the Underspace, they could have been anywhere within half the galaxy from the last time they called in.”

“But you could have at least tried.”

“And then we’d be mourning another six hundred and fifty,” Admiral Reyes countered. “If we’d sent Dorian back in, he’d have been hunting for a needle in a haystack while the haystack was on fire.” That was how Dr. Brooks had described it, and it seemed apt. “They’d likely have burned up long before finding anything.”

“Then why did we send Lewis and Lee through in the first place?” Chief Shafir asked, her eyes narrowing on the Admiral. “You don’t go in without a contingency plan, but here, you had none.”

“Sometimes the stakes require it,” Admiral Reyes pointed out. “Nasera, Earth, Beta Serpentis…”

“Ok, sure, when the cause is so great you’re willing to lose it all,” Chief Shafir acknowledged, and on those three examples, she couldn’t disagree. The stakes for each had called for it. “But this wasn’t like those. I mean, come on Admiral… what did we have to gain by going in there in the first place? A grand adventure? A new frontier? The Underspace was bad news from the beginning. I know it, and you know it.”

Admiral Reyes stood there silently, for she had no argument to the contrary.

“We should have been doing what the Cardassians were doing, trying to collapse that shit before it unraveled the entire galactic tapestry,” Chief Shafir pressed. The galaxy worked, in large part, because of the separation that existed between hostile powers, and this had been an existential threat to that equilibrium. “Starfleet picked the wrong fucking side on this one.”

A Klingon or Romulan commander would have said it offered a tactical advantage for future conquests, and a scientist at Daystrom of Brahms might have said it created opportunities for subspace research. A naive officer in Starfleet, meanwhile, might have celebrated it as an opportunity to go boldly to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life. But Admiral Reyes was none of those things. She was far more pragmatic, and in that, she had no response to offer. She just continued to stand there in silence.

“I guess, if it’s any consolation,” Chief Shafir concluded darkly. “At least with the Serenity and the Ingenuity, so too went the Underspace itself.” They just hadn’t needed to go with it.