The bridge of the Hipparchus was bright and sleek, full of gleaming white and silver surfaces that always reminded Elizabeth Zhang that her command was essentially a research laboratory with warp engines strapped to it. Through the large forward window, the interplay of fantastical rainbow colors from the subspace distortion they were studying was cast over the whole room. Even with the steady trilling of sensor readouts and banter between the ensigns at the helm and tactical stations, it seemed too quiet. Zhang glanced up from her PADD over to the science station, where she could only see the back of Lucien Rousseau’s head, his dark curls just a bit longer than the regulations would probably prefer.

Zhang was a pilot by training, and, at best, she found her assignment on Hipparchus mildly interesting because they were frequently sent to survey dangerous anomalies that could quickly turn into huge navigational challenges. She tried to stay as far away from the science itself as possible, though, because more than about two minutes of technobabble was usually enough to make her eyes glaze over, if not make her want to locate the nearest airlock. It was, therefore, some sort of cruel joke that she’d been given Rousseau as science officer and second-in-command, as the young Frenchman was constantly in awe of everything around him—and eager to explain in excruciating detail the science behind whatever it was he was looking at. A few months into her fourth year in command, she’d become accustomed to tuning him out most of the time. Now that he was finally being quiet, she knew something was up.

“It’s awfully quiet over here,” Zhang said, strolling over from her seat to the science station. Her sleek black hair was drawn up into a no-nonsense bun in an attempt to make her seem more severe—maybe even taller. She couldn’t quite match that appearance with her invariably laidback command style, though. “What’s up, Commander? Where’s my white noise?” she asked.

“Ah, Captain,” Rousseau replied as if shaken out of a daze. He looked up at her without the normal glint of enthusiasm she had come to expect in his hazel eyes and gestured to an incomprehensible set of readings on the science station. Something had taken the wind out of his metaphorical sails. “I sent another request for a status update from squadron headquarters on when assistance might arrive. They just replied, ‘Hold position and stand by.’”

Hipparchus had been sitting there in space for the last four days. The subspace rift they were studying was interacting with a pulsar, hence the fantastic display of light. No one knew what would happen if a subspace rift were to fall into a pulsar’s gravitational field and fully collide with it. Starfleet Science’s simulations of that event weren’t good, though: channeling gamma radiation through subspace could be dangerous for the entire sector. Their tiny ship didn’t have enough power to channel through its deflector to collapse the rift, and they were waiting for a bigger ship to help them solve the problem.

“The same thing we’ve been told for days now,” Zhang noted, crossing her arms. “Do we need to tell them to step on it?”

“Step on what?” Rousseau asked, eyebrows arching.

“Never mind. It just means go faster,” Zhang said.

“I don’t think I could be any clearer in my communications with them: in six hours, the edge of the subspace rift will intersect with the surface of the pulsar. What happens next is anyone’s guess,” Rousseau said, tone neutral.

Zhang’s eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you sound alarmed by that possibility?” she asked.

“Ah! Well, that’s the thing: we’ve never observed these two phenomena colliding before. We assume the result will be catastrophic, but what if it isn’t? We’ll never know if we stop it now.”

Zhang chuckled. “You’re sad because we’re not letting the two hyper-dangerous stellar phenomena collide?” she asked. “Maybe you’re more of a maverick than I thought you were.”

“Or, respectfully, perhaps you are a bad influence, Captain,” the scientist replied with a grin. “Ah, well. If the Talos isn’t here soon, we won’t have to worry about my sadness.”

“We might not have to worry about anything,” Zhang muttered.

A moment later, the proximity alert blared. Zhang whipped around to look towards the forward stations, as it wasn’t a sound she’d heard often in her stint in command.

“Report!”

“Captain, there is a warp signature coming in fast,” Brenek responded from tactical. A Rigellian, the young ensign was brilliant but easily stressed out—perhaps the least-Rigelian Rigelian that Zhang had ever met. “They’re moving faster than their IFF signature can travel. It’s too big to be the Talos.”

“Yellow alert. Shields up,” Zhang ordered, moving to her seat. As the lighting darkened and the ship’s largely automated defense systems began to engage, her heart was pounding in her chest as she gripped the armrests. She had to quell an instinctive bouncing in her leg, channeling that impulse into something more captain-like. Finally, some action! “Helm, I want you ready to peel out of here.”

A Grissom-class starship had enough weapons to credibly defend itself against pirates, and much better shields than her namesake, the ill-fated Oberth-class Grissom that was lost over the Genesis Planet, but their best strategy in any engagement was to retreat. Zhang doubted that their emergency speed of barely past warp 8.5 would do the trick, given how fast the unknown vessel was coming in, though. Her mind jumped to using the irradiated poles of the pulsar or maybe even entering the subspace rift… until she saw what arrived.

In an instant and with a flash of light, Arcturus filled the whole viewscreen. The massive flagship had made a pinpoint stop right below Hipparchus, shining in the light of the pulsar. Zhang was now the speechless one, her breathing slowed as she experienced quietly the awe that Rousseau was often so vocal about. She’d never actually seen Arcturus since her ship’s assignment to the squadron. Really, she’d never been that close to an Odyssey-class ship at all. She imagined them to be great, lumbering whales, but whoever was at the helm of this one was pulling maneuvers that would be challenging even in a runabout. There was so little room for error, with the gravitational fields of the anomaly and the pulsar so close to them. With all that, they’d managed to emerge from warp a hundred meters from Hipparchu sand stop on a dime.

“Stand down yellow alert,” Zhang ordered, relief washing over her.

“Aye. We’re being hailed,” Rousseau replied.

“On screen.”

The view switched to Arcturus’s much larger bridge, where newly promoted Commodore Michael Lancaster was sitting ramrod straight between his first and second officers, the creases of his service dress uniform as severe as his expression. Still a commander herself, Zhang found it a little galling that Lancaster’s right-hand man outranked her, the four pips on the collar of a mere first officer mocking her as a starship captain in her own right. It made her shift in her seat self-consciously to turn her pips away from the viewscreen as much as she could.

“Herodotus, this is Arcturus. What is your status?” Lancaster asked.

“Hip-par-chus here, Arcturus,” Zhang replied, emphasizing the correct name of her ship. “We’ve conducted a full scan of the anomaly and have calculated the frequencies we’ll need to collapse it. We were expecting the Talos, sir.”

“Hipparchus,” Lancaster repeated, though he didn’t apologize. Typical. Why would he know the name of the smallest ship in his squadron? She tapped her fingers insistently along the edge of her chair’s command console to channel the irritation she was feeling towards her superior into something that wouldn’t get her court-martialed. “Talos is navigating through a partial subspace blackout and couldn’t arrive in time. Sync your systems with ours, and we’ll take care of the rift.”

Zhang turned to Rousseau at science and nodded. “Aye, Commodore,” she said.

“Very well. Stand by,” the commodore replied before the channel was cut.

Zhang stewed for a moment, wanting to quip about the commodore’s lack of social graces but holding back for the sake of the junior officers in the room. After a few moments, a beam of blue energy lanced out from Arcturus towards the anomaly. It flooded the bridge with light.

“Arcturus has initiated an anti-graviton beam,” Rousseau replied. “All indications are that it’s proceeding exactly as planned. Dieu, that ship’s power readings are off the chart.”

“She’s certainly impressive,” Zhang agreed through gritted teeth. She ran one of her hands along the padded armrest of her white leather chair. “Size isn’t everything, though.”

Rousseau chuckled. “The good news is that we’ll be done with this in half the time compared to having a light cruiser lend a hand,” he offered. “We’ll be onto our next adventure soon enough.”

“Goody. More scanning.”

In less than three minutes, the beam from Arcturus fully collapsed the subspace rift, leaving them with just a normal, everyday pulsar. Crisis averted. This crisis, anyway.

“Procedure successful. Arcturus is ordering us to stand by for further instructions,” Rousseau reported.

The minutes ticked along, and Zhang was nearly ready to go wait it out in her ready room.

“Uh, Captain, Arcturus is moving closer to us,” Ensign Ramos reported from the helm. In the same class as Brenek, Ramos was a hotshot who looked for any excuse to pull crazy stunts from the helm. It was unlike him to sound nervous. “Like, really close.”

Commodore Lancaster popped back up on the screen before Zhang could ask any follow-up questions.

“Olympia Station has sent us several garbled transmissions. We believe they’re either under attack or experiencing a Blackout event. Either way, we’re going to investigate,” Lancaster explained. The display switched to a diagram of Arcturus coming up under Hipparchus, cradling her behind the shuttle bay and between her massive warp engines. “We’re sending our precise structural integrity field and inertial dampener settings. Sync yours with ours, and we’ll hold you in our warp field with a tractor beam.”

“You’re giving us a piggyback ride, sir?” Zhang asked, incredulous.

“Do you want to get there in seven hours or a day and a half?” Lancaster quipped. The math on their top speeds checked out, but it was not a routine maneuver at all. “I don’t want to risk your ship getting cut off from Olympia without support, so we’re not leaving you behind.”

Zhang swallowed, imagining the possibility of the Blackout event isolating them from starbase support. A ship like hers wouldn’t last long stranded in deep space.

“Understood, sir. Syncing systems now,” she said.

Arcturus rose up under Hipparchus, so that the much smaller ship was nestled above the flagship’s secondary hull, moored in place by the two tractor beam emitters on the partitions between the shuttle bay doors and the main dorsal emitter. Zhang’s entire field of vision was taken up by the massive aft shuttle bay on Arcturus. It made her keenly aware of the difference in scale between the two ships—Hipparchus with her crew of 80 and Arcturus with something like 32 times that many people aboard. That was a real starship, while hers was like a plastic bathtub toy in comparison. Even with some looming feelings of inadequacy and despite the antipathy she held towards her command staff, Zhang found the proximity of Arcturus reassuring—a reminder of being part of a big, happy fleet that didn’t often come during the months-long deep space surveys the Hipparchus was tasked with.

As Arcturus jumped to high warp with them in tow, Zhang and her crew settled into an uneasy silence. As with most small ships, any significantly high warp factor would make the deck vibrate slightly—and there was always the hum of the engines at any speed. Hipparchus was going faster than it ever had gone before—over four times faster than its own stubby little engines could propel it—and yet there was stone-dead silence. Even despite her own desire for action—for command of a frigate or a cruiser that got to do something other than scanning empty space—she could only hope that Olympia would be just as quiet.