The USS Polaris, headquarters of the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, had a sensor suite capable of mapping the most complex spacetime topologies, detecting the most obscure exotic particles, and analyzing the slightest fluctuations in subspace. None of that mattered though. Not this time. Not if they couldn’t interpret the results coming back. They had more telemetry than one could shake a stick at, but none of it made any sense. The math was too wonky, the very foundations of their understanding of subspace compromised, and even answers to the most basic questions eluded them.

What had caused the blackout? It happened all at once, in every direction, with zero prior indicators. As a thought experiment, Fleet Admiral Reyes had challenged the team to develop a framework for how one might even cause such a phenomenon, but no one had come up with even the basics of a theory – well, not except for a Q, and she wasn’t ready to go there yet.

Was the blackout a local phenomenon or something that affected the galaxy at large? The very conditions of the blackout itself prevented them from knowing. Light moved frustratingly slow, and without access to subspace, when they looked out at the stars, all they saw were shadows of the past. It would take nearly a lifetime before the light from Archanis would even reach them, and many lifetimes more before they’d know the face of Andoria, Betazed or Sol.

How could they work around the effects of the blackout? The Korevoth appeared to have tried to charge through the boundary, but now it was limping back at .9c, struggling to cross even a few hundred AU. If she sent the Polaris on a return journey under those conditions, she’d be nearly eighty before they even reached the Federation border, and courtesy of relativistic effects, a half century would have passed beyond their bulkheads.

Really, though, it all came back to one simple question: what the hell was the blackout?

She had not the slightest idea. 

Staring at the mess of PADDs strewn across her desk, Fleet Admiral Reyes let her head fall into her hands. The answer had to be buried there somewhere, but she just couldn’t find it, nor could Lieutenant Akil al-Qadir or what was left of the astrophysics braintrust down in the ASTRA lab.

A chime at her door drew her from her thoughts. 

“Come,” Reyes said as she looked up.

Fleet Captain Devreux stepped through the threshold, his eyes falling on her desk. His heart pained for her. He knew how she was taking this. “It’s time.”

Was it? The admiral looked over at the chronograph sitting on the far side of her desk. Yes, it was. “Why yes, I guess it is.” Consumed in her thoughts, she’d lost track of time. 

Together, the pair made their way out of her ready room. The Fleet Admiral took her seat at the center of the bridge, and the Fleet Captain took his chair beside her. They knew better than to ask for a status update, for until that ship crossed the blackout’s boundary, the only thing they had on it was three and a half days’ old photons, so instead, they just waited.

They didn’t have to wait long though. 

Soon, an audible alert began to sound at the tactical station. 

“The ship just registered on subspace sensors,” Captain Titus Bishop reported. “Bearing zero two zero at six zero nine AU. Ident comes back as IKS Korevoth.”

The admiral exhaled a sigh of relief. Even though they’d spent the last three days watching the visual signature of that Vor’cha class battlecruiser limping towards them at sublight speeds, to hear that they now had the ship on subspace sensors was a weight off her chest. “What’s their status?”

“Outwardly, looks pretty good,” Captain Bishop reported, reviewing the fresh telemetry. It was so much more substantive than it’d been just minutes earlier, when they’d been working from little more than days’ old photons coming across spectral bands. “Eight hundred and fourteen life signs, including three humans. All core systems operable, including warp assembly, impulse drives, deflector shields, life support and environmental systems. Only thing out of the ordinary is a small variation in their electroplasma system, but I have no baseline to compare with.”

That was excellent news. It meant that, while the blackout had knocked the ship from subspace, not only had it not destroyed them, but it hadn’t even done any fundamental damage – or at least nothing they hadn’t been able to repair during the journey back. “Open a channel.”

“The General already has one open,” reported Lieutenant Commander Mattson.

“He’s wasting no time, I see,” Admiral Reyes chuckled. The Klingons had been going stir crazy just sitting here, she knew, but it wasn’t like they’d been of any help either. “Tie us in.”

A moment later, the starscape on the forward viewscreen was replaced by a split image, General Kloss on one side and Brigadier K’mtor, the commander of the Korevoth, on the other.

“Your orders, K’mtor, were to reestablish contact with Qo’noS by any means possible!” General Kloss said heatedly. “To see you limp back like a wounded targ, you dishonor your family and your house!” He was not happy in the slightest.

“Sir, we turned around at the recommendation of the Starfleet observers,” Brigadier K’mtor offered, glancing to his left off-screen. “They felt…”

“It’s your ship, brigadier!” General Kloss snapped.

Commodore Larsen stepped into the frame beside the brigadier. “With all due respect, General,” she said calmly, unphased to be offering counsel to yet another angry Klingon given that she’d just spent the last week doing exactly that. “We found no indication that the blackout effect would recede if we pressed further. If it didn’t, and if we had to do the journey at .9c, you’re talking about a fourteen year journey for us, and thirty three years in your frame of reference.”

“No indication?” General Kloss snarled. Who was she to talk to him like this? “You found no indication because you didn’t even bother to try!” They should have pressed forward.

“There are other ways,” Admiral Reyes countered, almost condescendingly, as she finally entered the conversation. “Like, oh, I don’t know… scientific analysis?” It was a concept seemingly lost on this brash new breed of Klingon military commanders. It hadn’t always been this bad, but the rise of Toral, it seemed, had brought an end to rational thought. Or at minimum, it had at least elevated idiots like this guy.

“There is analysis, and then there’s experimentation,” General Kloss replied. “You should know that as well as anyone, Reyes. You and your people, you go fiddle with your equations if you wish, but me and mine, we’re going to field test this.”

That was almost a rational position, Admiral Reyes thought to herself. Maybe he wasn’t a complete fool. Still, what he was proposing was an experiment at the expense of living beings. “If that’s what you wish to do, who am I to stop you? But my people come back first.” If he wanted to hurl the Vor’cha into the abyss, that was his choice, but it would not be at the expense of her own officers.

“Very well,” General Kloss nodded before turning back to the brigadier. “K’mtor, bring your ship back here to drop off the admiral’s people and pick up some supplies for your journey, but then you’re going right back out there, and you don’t stop until you reach Qo’noS!”

The brigadier looked less than pleased at the prospect of being a living test subject, potentially spending the rest of his life crossing the great expanse, but who was he to argue? His duty was to the empire.