“It’s moments like these when I miss Dr. Lockwood the most,” Lieutenant Akil al-Qadir offered. The eccentric astrophysicist would have seen what they were not. But he was dead now, having given his last breaths to save the rest of them from the Dominion bioweapon, a relic of the Dominion War that’d been reawakened on Archanis Station. “I’m a particle physicist, Admiral, not a mathematical puritan like he was… or like Ensign Vok was.”

The contagion had really done a number on their theoretical astrophysics department, Admiral Reyes knew. “The salt on the wound here is that I sent both Tom and Liv over to the Korevoth on that little field trip.” That choice, although it’d made sense at the time, had backfired when the ship went missing. “Now it’s just you and me, an applied physicist and a washed out shipyard engineer, to solve this perturbation of the subspace-like hypersurf…”

She paused for a moment, staring at the display before them.

“Ma’am?” Lieutenant al-Qadir asked.

“Sorry, I just had a little deja vu,” Admiral Reyes apologized, shaking her head and then steadying her eyes again on the math before them. “Is it just me, or does it feel like we’ve been here before?” Not even six months prior, they’d stood in this same place, mapping a similar-looking subspace-like hypersurface onto a higher order manifold as they attempted to stop an aberrant singularity that had spontaneously apperated within the corona of an orange dwarf. “It all looks awfully familiar.”

“You know, now that you mention it, it really does,” Lieutenant al-Qadir admitted as he stared at it. The tensors weren’t quite the same, but they were damn close. “Do you think the two might be related?”

“I mean, the math isn’t exactly the same, but two subspace phenomena with similar convolutions and compressions, both appearing spontaneously without warning or explanation…” Admiral Reyes observed, her voice trailing off as she contemplated the possibility. They never had gotten an answer as to why the Underspace had suddenly expanded into the Alpha and Beta Quadrants in the fall of 2401.

“Lockwood would remind us that correlation does not equal causation,” Lieutenant al-Qadir cautioned. 

“He most certainly would,” Admiral Reyes nodded. “And it would probably be the rational, scientific thing to say, but I don’t believe in coincidences.” And sometimes you just had to trust your gut. Could this phenomenon and the Underspace crisis of the prior fall somehow be related?

Lieutenant al-Qadir looked out the window at the Negh’Var menacing off their bow. “Too bad those guys are of no help.” It wouldn’t be like last time in that regard. “Pretty sure General Kloss wouldn’t even be able to work an abacus.”

“And that is why the Klingon Empire’s best days are behind it,” Admiral Reyes reflected, not hiding her bias in the slightest. “When one idolizes glory through combat over all other pursuits, their best and brightest, the ones that drive the engine of innovation and inspire a culture worth fighting for, are driven to the fringes. K’t’inga is the epitome of this, an exercise in little more than brute force shipbuilding.” The empire believed its massive shipyard to be a representation of its military might, but as a seasoned shipbuilder herself, she saw it for what it really was: a bloated and inefficient operation, little more than a brute force approach to shipbuilding.

“But what of the Science Institute on Mempa V?” Lieutenant al-Qadir asked, thinking back to their encounter over Vespara Prime.

“What about it? Brilliant minds, no question about that,” Admiral Reyes noted. Over Vespara, they had given even Dr. Lockwood a run for his money. “But for their work to matter, society must elevate them. General Golroth gave them a platform, but he was an anomaly among the High Command.” And even Golroth ultimately had other motivations, seeking to tame the Underspace solely so he could use it as a vehicle for conquest.

“I wonder what Voragh and his team would say about this,” Lieutenant al-Qadir pondered. “Even if they did double cross us in the end, gotta give credit where credit is due. We probably wouldn’t have saved Vespara Prime without them.”

“Things may have ended badly between us and them, but right now, I’d welcome their assistance,” Admiral Reyes sighed. At this point, given what they were starting to understand about the blackout, she’d willingly take any assistance she could get, even if it came with a price tag. “Too bad even Mempa is out of reach to us.” They hadn’t been able to raise Beta Penthe, and that meant that Mempa was almost certainly also inaccessible too.

Before either could say more, the admiral’s combadge chirped to life.

“Bridge to Admiral Reyes.”

“Reyes here,” Admiral Reyes said as she tapped her combadge. “Go ahead, Elena.”

“Ma’am, you’re not going to believe this, but we’ve got something on spectral scanners.”

“The probe?” Admiral Reyes inquired, curious if at last the photons from whatever had happened to their long-range had gotten back to them.

“No ma’am. It appears to be a Vor’cha class battlecruiser at a distance of 1,060 AU, moving towards us at approximately 0.9c.”

“Our missing ship?” Admiral Reyes asked, glancing over at Lieutenant al-Qadir. Who else could it be? If it was the Korevoth, this was certainly a most curious development.

“I can’t confirm for certain since its subspace transponder signal obviously isn’t reaching us, but it just appeared a couple minutes ago, and given the speed of light, it’s sudden appearance would seem to coincide with the time of their disappearance.”

Light took six days and three hours to cover 1060 AU, and the Korevoth had gone missing just over six days prior. If that wasn’t a coincidence, she didn’t know what was.

“If they maintain their present course and speed, they will cross the blackout boundary in three days and twenty one hours.”

Not that long to wait, all things considered, and in the meantime, they had an equation to solve.