“When I took this assignment, they warned me that you were hands-on, but I never truly understood until now,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson offered as the admiral stepped onto the bridge, her uniform, her face, and her hands caked with dust, grime and even a little blood.

“That Negh’Var ain’t gonna rebuild itself, Elena, and if what we just faced is any indication, we’re gonna need every last ship for what lies ahead,” Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes replied with a surprising vigor given the late night hour and the grueling shift she’d just worked. But her efforts had been fruitful. They’d made progress on the damaged Negh’Var, and she felt good about its prospects. Unfortunately, that was more than could be said for the other two Negh’Vars that had been parked in the yard when the Vaadwaur came. Both of those had been lost with all hands in the first ten minutes of the fight. “Plus, I’ve got to think this endears us, at least a little, with our hosts.” 

“I suppose that’s true,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson smiled meekly. Ever since the Vaadwaur blitzkrieg, all their prior beef with General Kloss and his colleagues had been put aside, momentarily at least, and the Starfleet and Klingon crews were now working side by side to save what they could of the burning fleet yard.

Admiral Reyes, for her part, had been away from the Polaris all night, putting her prior experience as a shipyard engineer and an alien technologies intelligence analyst to work as she fixed fried Klingon power grids, shield emitters, and computing cores. “How’re things looking overall?” the admiral asked, aware that Lieutenant Commander Mattson, her operations chief, had been holding down the fort solo all night while nearly everyone else was elsewhere, working on repairing damaged Klingon frigates, drydocks, and space stations.

“Honestly? Not so good,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson sighed defeatedly. “Across the system, there’s barely a drydock remaining, and only a few salvageable ships like the one you were just on. It’s honestly shocking how much damage the Vaadwaur did in so little time.” She’d never seen anything like it, but now she had a sense for how first responders to Utopia Planitia must have felt when they arrived following the Mars Massacre.

“Their tactics were quite effective,” Admiral Reyes concurred. “When the Vaadwaur turned and fled, at first I found myself asking why they didn’t finish the job, but now I know.”

“Know what?” Lieutenant Commander Mattson asked. She wasn’t following.

“You see, they did finish the job. In just twenty one minutes, they completely dismantled the heart of the Klingon military-industrial war machine,” Admiral Reyes pointed out. “Why waste precious resources to finish us off when there weren’t enough of us left to pose any threat to whatever their bigger plan is?” Such strategic discipline suggested the enemy was not just bold and well-armed, but also deliberate and thoughtful. And that was alarming in the context of what lay before them. This wouldn’t be the last time they locked horns with the Vaadwaur.

“We weren’t enough to be worth killing? Don’t take this the wrong way, ma’am, but that’s not a comforting thought,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson admitted. “What do you think their next move will be?” There was so little they knew about their enemy. An hour ago, she’d literally only ever heard the name Vaadwaur once before, buried in a footnote within some reading material in an Academy course.

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Admiral Reyes chuckled grimly as she stared at the stars beyond. Those stars that had never felt more distant than they did now. “If only we had the slightest clue what was happening out there, whether what we just went through is playing out all across the galaxy or not.” But the blackout had shrouded everything in darkness. “It’s brilliant, really. Turn out the lights, and pick us off one by one. For all we know, the Federation could have fallen weeks ago.” They’d heard nothing since the blackout first came over them.

“Again, not comforting, ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson shivered. Her family was back there, and her friends too. Had the Vaadwaur come for them as well?

For a moment, the two women stood on the bridge in quiet contemplation, but eventually, Admiral Reyes changed the subject. “How are repairs going with the Diligent?” The Alita class heavy cruiser had arrived in the K’t’inga system eight minutes before them, and in those few short minutes, she’d almost been completely lost.

“Well, to quote Captain Vox in his own words, they’re ‘right ready and in fighting shape‘,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson reported, but her face told a different story.

“Elena, when there’s an enemy on the horizon, as long as Dorian’s got a thruster, a phaser, and a power source, he’s going to say he’s good to fly,” Admiral Reyes cautioned. Captain Vox and his crew were excellent duelists, and they’d worked miracles more times than she could count, but their skills gave them a dangerous confidence, and they were so mission-oriented that their first instinct was to suck it up and stay in the fight even when logic said they shouldn’t. Not that she was really any different. “How does it really look over there?”

“Far less peachy than his endorsement suggests,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson admitted. After she’d received Captain Vox’s description, one that seemed too good to be true given what the ship had been through, the experienced operations officer had called the Diligent‘s chief engineer directly. “Commander Slade says that, while they’ve made significant progress repairing the shield emitters and hull breaches, they’re still having issues with the EPS grid. They lost several key junctions in the battle…” Her voice softened with a somber footnote. “And far too many of their crew too.” 

That last bit was always the hardest part of war, Admiral Reyes knew far too well. “How bad were the casualties?” Somehow, in the race to get the shipyard back online – or maybe, if she was honest with herself, because she wasn’t ready to confront the answer while still in the thick of it – she hadn’t asked that one simple question. But you couldn’t hide from that reality, and it did matter for their combat readiness as they prepared to confront the Vaadwaur again. A ship was only as good as its crew, and these crews, the Diligent‘s included, were ultimately her responsibility.

“One hundred and eight lost, including two-thirds of their fighter wing,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson swallowed hard as her eyes fell to the deck. It was a tough pill to swallow.

The admiral absorbed the information without any visible reaction. One hundred and eight was a lot, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. They’d been seconds away from that number being six hundred and fifty, and if the Vaadwaur hadn’t pulled out when they did, it might have been twenty-five hundred all-in between the Diligent, the Polaris and the Kennedy. They were dealing with an enemy that’d come well prepared to finish them all.

The lieutenant commander stared curiously at the admiral, trying to interpret her expression, or rather the lack thereof. How was she so calm given the news? “Ma’am, forgive me if it’s an overstepping, but how do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Hear all of this and still stand there like that,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson elaborated. She hadn’t been with them at Nasera, and by chance, none of her prior postings had ever exposed her to this degree of loss. When she’d first heard those numbers, it’d been all she could do to not just curl up in a ball and start crying, but the admiral just stood there, stoic and unflappable as always.

“What choice do we have?” Admiral Reyes replied regretfully.

The younger woman looked confused.

“Elena, I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” Admiral Reyes opened up, letting her walls fall and getting personal. “But it’s going to get worse from here. It’s going to hurt, and then it’s going to hurt again and again.” There was a sense of sympathy in her voice, sympathy for what she knew this bright young woman was going to go through in the days ahead. It would change her. It would change them all. That was what war did. “If we take the Vaadwaur at their word, this is war, and in war, good people lose their lives.”

The hiss of the turbolift caused them both to turn as Dr. Tom Brooks stepped onto the bridge.

“I come bearing…” the disheveled astrophysicist began, unaware of the conversation being had, but then he paused as he noticed the somber expressions on the faces of the admiral and the operations chief. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it looked a bit like he was interrupting a wake. It didn’t matter though. What he had could not wait. “Sorry to interrupt your evening, and not to dampen the mood further, but I have news, and, umm, it’s not good.”

“Might as well hit us while we’re down,” Admiral Reyes chuckled grimly. “Not like we can go much lower.” Or could they?

“I wouldn’t be so certain about that,” Dr. Brooks cautioned as he stepped up to a console and began to queue up the feed he’d just ripped from the ether. “As you know, ever since the galaxy went dark, we’ve had a small team monitoring for unconventional emissions sources just in case someone figures out a way through the blackout before we do… and, well, someone just did.”

“What?” Admiral Reyes asked, her attention piqued, the prior conversation now in the rear view mirror. Had they finally gotten news from beyond the blackout’s barrier?

“A couple hours ago, we detected a novel emissions signature, one definitely anthropogenic in origin,” Dr. Brooks elaborated. “A phased tachyon beam, apparently using a microsingularity as a superluminal accelerant which, upon further analysis, we determined to actually be a carrier signal for an encoded triaxilating data stream.”

“English, Tom,” Admiral Reyes glared at him. She’d never been a sensors and signals gal, neither during her time in Starfleet Intelligence, nor her time in Starfleet R&D, and while it all sounded like a nice bit of technobabble, she had no idea what it meant practically.

“Neidlinger’s grease monkeys have resurrected the tech from the Pathfinder Project, and they’re using it to reach out across the Blackout’s barriers,” Dr. Brooks explained. “In the transmission we picked up, we received a video message from the admiral, plus a large data dump from Beckett and his people, who appear to have better visibility through the Blackout than we do.” That figured though. For all the capabilities the Polaris had, her sensor suite was still limited compared to what they had at the headquarters of the Fourth Fleet.

“What’d James say?” Admiral Reyes asked

“See for yourself,” Dr. Brooks said as he pulled up Admiral Neidlinger’s message and projected it onto the big screen at the front of the bridge.

“Allison, I hope this message finds you, and that it finds you in one piece. As I suspect you are already aware, the galaxy has been plunged into darkness by a phenomenon we do not fully understand. We are doing what we can from here, but our work is limited. Out there among the stars, you may have better luck. Or not. Nothing is certain now. Not with this. But encoded as part of this data stream is a copy of all our analyses thus far in case it might be of help to you and the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity.”

Admiral Reyes looked over at Dr. Brooks. “Did we get their analyses in the data stream?”

“Yes, we got it all,” Dr. Brooks confirmed. “Right before coming to see you, I woke up the entirety of ASTRA – at least those not assigned to field work on the Klingon barges – so that they could start parsing through it. It’s… it’s a lot.” And buried in there, maybe they’d find something that would help them unlock the mystery that’d been confounding them for the last few weeks.

As Admiral Reyes looked back at the screen, she could not help but notice how tired the Director of Fourth Fleet Engineering looked in the recording. There was something more there too, an uncharacteristic darkness in his eyes.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat this, Allison. War has come to the Federation. Our sensor suite, able to penetrate with limited efficacy the boundaries of the Blackout, has confirmed that we are under attack. Vulcan… Risa… Alpha Centauri… you name it, it’s been hit. Even SB:B, although it at least got spared the brunt. The magnitude of this attack has all the analysts confounded, and it’s not even constrained to the Federation. How the Vaddwaur, a seemingly dead power, managed to rally an assault of this scale, opening a war on a hundred fronts, we have no idea, but attached to this message, you will find a full breakdown from Beckett’s people. At least as best we know. There’s still so much we don’t know, and so many places we still can’t see. You and yours included.”

Everywhere all at once? From the beginning, she’d assumed K’t’inga wasn’t the only place hit, but Vulcan, Risa, Alpha Centauri, Mellstoxx, and ‘a hundred fronts’ as Neidlinger described it? 

The admiral looked over at her operations chief, who looked almost as if she was about to fall over. “It’s going to be okay, Elena. We will solve this. Just like we always do.” But if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t so certain. For the Vaadwaur to have hit them here, and to be simultaneously striking at the core of the Federation, this was big. Way bigger than even she’d conceptualized to this point.

“It’s just…” Lieutenant Commander Mattson stammered, overtaken by a crippling sense of dread, not in a general sense, but rather a distinctly personal one. “It’s just that my parents are on Alpha Centauri.” And Admiral Neidlinger’s message had specifically mentioned it.

“Oh… ” offered Admiral Reyes, caught off guard by that twist. “I’m so sorry.” But then it dawned on her that Elena Mattson’s struggle with this news wasn’t going to be unique. There’d be others too. This was a galaxy-spanning crisis, and just like the Dominion War, that meant almost everyone would be touched by it in some way. It was something they were going to have to manage. “But Elena, this is why soldiers go to war.”

“But ma’am, I’m not a soldier,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson said softly.

“You are now,” Admiral Reyes replied firmly. “Like it or not, we all are. The Vaadwaur have made sure of that. But Elena, hold onto those feelings of family and home. They will give you strength. They give you something worth fighting for.” Something worth dying for too, she thought to herself, but she was wise enough not to say that aloud. Not now for someone so green. She knew, though, that especially given this new development, there was no promise that any of them would ever see home again. In war, there was no promise of anything but fire and death.

As Lieutenant Commander Mattson considered the admiral’s words, the recording resumed.

“To speak candidly, Allison, I’ve never seen it this bad. We haven’t been able to reach Starfleet Command at all, and while we’re doing what we can to organize the Fourth Fleet to respond, the Blackout has ensured we are going into this with both hands tied behind our back. I understand from Beckett that your mission to K’t’inga was not exactly about making friends, but now it is. Rally the empire – or whatever portion of it you can reach – to our cause. The Vaadwaur Supremacy has shown itself to be a threat to all free peoples of the galaxy, and we’re going to need all the help we can get. We’ll be in touch when we have more. Godspeed, my friend.”

And with that, the message ended, leaving the bridge in silence.

“Woulda been nice if he actually provided us with some semblance of a plan,” Dr. Brooks grumbled. It was the second time he’d heard the message, and he was no less annoyed than the first. “You know, mission orders, a strike package, a target for a counterattack… or really anything at all.”

“It’s because he doesn’t have it,” Admiral Reyes observed. “None of them do.” They were in uncharted territory, and they were going to have to make it up as they went.

“So what are we going to do, ma’am?” Lieutenant Commander Mattson asked skeptically.

“We’re gonna make happy bedfellows with General Kloss and whomever else we can rally to our cause,” Admiral Reyes answered. “And then, one way or another, we’re going to take this fight to the enemy.”