“It is good to be back,” General Golroth flashed a toothy grin as he stepped into the lab. At his side was Voragh, the Klingon astrophysicist from the Science Institute on Mempa V. To many, Admiral Reyes included, the pair were familiar faces. They had been with them, for good and for not, over Vespara during the Underspace crisis the prior year. Now the Underspace was back, and so were they.

“You certainly have a thing for entrances, general,” Admiral Reyes offered. “But I will say, it was quite a relief to see that it was you when you guys tore out of the aperture.” When they had detected ripples within the Underspace that indicated ships on approach, they’d assumed it was the Vaadwaur returning to finish the job. And if it had been, she had little doubt they would have succeeded. The fleet yard had been hit so hard that they’d barely been able to scrounge together a dozen cruisers, and that was even if you counted the Norway class Kennedy and the K’t’inga class museum piece.

“Yes, I would expect it was a relief given how paltry the forces you managed to muster were,” General Golroth noted. “Of course, no blame towards you, my dear admiral, for this is not your territory to protect.” He glanced at the other Klingon General in the room. “Really begs the question of what you’ve done with the place, Kloss.” A defeat of this scale would never have occurred when K’t’inga was under his watch.

General Kloss’ nostrils flared. He was the chief commander of the K’t’inga fleet yard, appointed by Chancellor Toral himself. He would not be spoken to like that, especially not by a relic of the past who was only allowed to keep his toys because other old men regrettably still sat on the High Council.

General Kloss’ hand moved to the D’k tahg on his waistband, and General Golroth’s hand responded in kind, straight to the blade at his side. No petulant child would strike him down. In the back of the room too, Captain Vox nonchalantly let his hand slide down to his phaser. Just in case.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Admiral Reyes grumbled. “Can you all just put your damn testosterone away for one fucking moment? We have a far more pressing problem to solve than a dick measuring contest where I’ve got to clean someone’s body off the floor afterwards.” The Vaadwaur had declared war on what appeared to be the entirety of two quadrants, and these idiots would rather stab each other.

“The admiral is right,” Voragh, the scientist who’d come along with General Golroth, scolded the pair in an almost professorial tone. “This infighting, all in the name of honor and glory, has held us back for generations.” It was why he spent his time on Mempa V, not in the pursuit of honor or glory through combat, but on technological investments that might truly move their society forward. “Grow up, or our defeat will be on you both, and the fall of our great empire will be too.”

General Kloss spun on the Klingon scientist, shocked by the candor and the insolence. Did this fool not know who he was? Eying the little man over, the general saw no rank or insignia, nothing indicating he was of such stature as to speak to him in such a disrespectful way. “And who are you, petaQ?” 

“I’m the one that’s going to think us out of this,” Voragh replied as he pointed at his cranial ridges with his index finger. “Me and our Starfleet friends here.” He was unperturbed by the general’s peacocking. Men like Kloss were typically all show. And if he was wrong, well, he had Golroth in his corner, and Golroth was carving up his foes with his bat’leth while Kloss was still sucking on his momma’s titty.

“To be clear, this is my ship,” Admiral Reyes interjected firmly. “And if you have a problem with Voragh, you have a problem with me.”

Her words elicited a smiles from both Voragh and General Golroth. Sure, they had turned their cannons on her, and sure, she’d left them for dead, but who hadn’t, at least once or twice?

“General Kloss, I will only say this once,” Admiral Reyes cautioned. “If you plan on obstructing the important work we intend to do here, let me know right now, and I’ll have my people escort you to the nearest airlock.” Whether there was a ship attached to it or not, she didn’t really care.

General Kloss slowly removed his hand from his D’k tahg. “Very well.” As much as he hated to admit it, the admiral and the scientist were right. He’d seen the enemy and what they could do. This was bigger than any of them. “Tell us what you know, Qa’Hom.”

Voragh ignored the parting shot. It was easier to let those who thumped their chest have the last word. Instead, he just motioned for everyone to follow as he lead them to the table at the center of the large ASTRA lab, and after a moment, the researchers from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, along with the two Klingon generals, the Starfleet admiral, and the Starfleet captain, had all taken their seats. 

Voragh then walked up to a terminal and inserted a data crystal, projecting  onto the large screen at the front of the room a manifold representing the topology and curvature of the Underspace as best they understood it to this point.

“You’ve updated this since the last time we saw it,” Dr. Brooks smiled as he eyed the model.

“Since our time together, we’ve continued to refine our work,” Voragh confirmed. “Just as I understand your own Dr. Lockwood has.” One of Golroth’s spies had brought him the readout from the Federation science conference hosted on Archanis Station.

Around the room though, the ASTRA fellows and staff looked at the ground.

“Dr. Lockwood is no longer with us,” Admiral Reyes explained as she shot a glare towards General Kloss. She was acutely aware that, whether through his inaction or by his direct encouragement, he had been involved with much of the proliferation of illicit technologies that’d happened the prior winter. “Dr. Lockwood died as the result of a Dominion-engineered contagion that curiously wound up on Archanis Station.”

“Ah, that’s a shame,” frowned Voragh. “I quite liked his work.” Even if he’d almost split the man in half during a social hour over Vespara Prime, he highly respected the man’s mathematical mind.

“Yes, quite unfortunate for us now,” Admiral Reyes nodded as her eyes remained locked on General Kloss. “And a lesson in why we don’t feed the pirates. But I guess that’s neither here nor there.” She turned back towards the Klingon scientist that had the floor. “Voragh, please go on.”

Voragh nodded and continued with his explanation. “Beyond improving the fidelity of the model since the events of the fall, you will note we have added a set of topological sink here… here… and here.” As he spoke, he pointed to a series of markers that acted as pinch points within the manifold. “These sinks are novel – they did not exist last fall – but they are the root of the phenomenon that is presently suppressing the subspace medium.”

Around the room, the ASTRA team glanced at each other in surprise.

“What are they?” Commodore Olivia Larsen, the managing director of ASTRA, inquired curiously. The Blackout had been the great mystery she’d had her team working on for the last month, and not in her wildest dreams had she expected that a Klingon, of all people, would walk into her lab with the answer.

Instead of explaining it, Voragh simply zoomed the screen in on one of the sinks and then materialized a second manifold beneath the first. The second manifold was heavily perturbed, but it looked somewhat reminiscent of the traditional subspace field. Voragh then finish out by adding a complex set of mathematical expressions describing, in much clearer terms for those that could understand the tensors, the mechanism visualized on the screen.

“Fascinating,” was the first word out of Dr. Brooks’ mouth. “It had not dawned on me until now that the highly compressed foliations of the Underspace could be weaponized like that.” And that was embarrassing to admit because, looking at the math now, it all made complete sense.

“Neither did it to us,” Voragh conceded. “Not until the Vaadwaur showed themselves, which got us thinking…” As opposed to at K’t’inga where the Polaris found itself locked in a mortal struggle for survival, Mempa V had been completely overlooked by the Vaadwaur, leaving his team plenty of time to deliberate the implications.

“The math appears to check out,” Commodore Larsen acknowledged. “But have you actually been able to validate it? Or is this all theory and conjecture at this point?” She was acutely aware that what looked good as a model did not always hold up when put to the test in the real world.

“Oh, we have most certainly validated it,” chortled General Golroth. “While you and your dear admiral were busy fighting to save my people.” He glanced over at Admiral Reyes, intentionally overlooking the chief commander of the K’t’inga fleet yards. “We ventured into their domain and put theory to the test.”

On queue, Voragh flipped to a recording that showed General Golroth’s flagship, the Negh’Var class IKS Qul’val, and his cruiser group as they flew through narrow corridors of the Underspace. And then something came into view dead ahead. It looked like a space station, and it sat there motionless amongst the energetic eddies and currents of the Underspace.

“What is that?” asked Captain Vox, trying to intuit what he was seeing.

“You’ll see…” General Golroth replied as suddenly his cruiser group opened fire in synchronicity. The station’s shields came alive, absorbing the barrage, but the Klingons kept firing, and after a good ten or so seconds, the station’s shields flickered and vanished as disruptor fire tore straight into its hull. And then it was gone, exploding in a bright blue ball of fire.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see,” Captain Vox shrugged. “How was that a test of this theory?”

Working the controls of the display, Voragh flipped to another map, this one of normal space interpolated with a lattice representing the honeycomb of boundaries that formed the blackout. “This is a map of the boundaries before we engaged that platform,” Voragh explained. “And this is it now.” He advanced the time series, and a couple of the honeycomb’s walls disappeared.

“Are you saying those stations are what turned off subspace?” Captain Vox inferred. If that was the case, he knew just what they needed to do.

“That’s exactly what he’s saying,” Admiral Reyes nodded before turning back to their guests. “But what I don’t get is what do you need us for?” They seemed to have already figured this all out.

“We got lucky in finding that one, admiral,” General Golroth replied. “While we could just charge back into the Underspace and haphazardly hunt for more, we would be just as likely to run across a Vaadwaur armada.”

“And what would be wrong with that, old man?” General Kloss interjected. “Afraid to fight the enemy head on? Prefer to tip toe around and shoot at outposts that won’t shoot back?”

“I’m not so foolish as to end up like you, puq,” General Golroth countered. “I still have all my forces, while you, what do you have left?” On the way over to the Polaris, he’d had surveyed the damage that had been wrought, and it was truly embarrassing to see what the Vaadwaur had done to the greatest fleet yard in the entire empire.

Voragh jumped back in before the petty squabble could really get going again. “Commodore Larsen, Dr. Brooks, as embarrassing as this may be for my colleagues to hear, your subspace sensors far exceed anything my people have access to. We need your help to analyze the subspace field and map it to key sinks within the network. Now that we have revealed to them what we know by destroying that outpost, the Vaadwaur will certainly reinforce their defenses, and that means we need to make each shot count.” He looked at General Kloss. “Have no fear, general. There’ll be plenty of flesh for you to take before the day is out.”

That seemed to appease General Kloss, at least a little.

“We can certainly assist with that,” Commodore Larsen nodded graciously.

Voragh turned to the aged astrophysicists with whom he’d worked with prior. “Dr. Brooks, I could also use your mind on a few things in the model that we have not quite solved just yet.”

“Most certainly,” Dr. Brooks agreed.

The scientists resolved to their course, it was now General Golroth’s turn to jump back in. “Captain Vox,” he added, addressing the man he’d run the Underspace with once before. “Once the wizards in the lab get us our target, you and I get to have some fun. Back in the Underspace, together again.”

“Round two, hmm?” Captain Vox chuckled. Round one hadn’t worked out so well.

“Just don’t abandon me this time, captain,” General Golroth cautioned sternly. They needed each other now, but the general had not forgotten how the Diligent had turned and fled back into the Underspace when they’d come face to face with the Cardassians in the Rolor Nebula.

“Then just stick to the plan this time, general,” Captain Vox countered. The plan had never been to duke it out with the Cardassians. The plan had been to destroy the Cardassian array and get out, and that was exactly what he’d done. The fact that the general had been overtaken by bloodlust and refused to leave when the Cardassian task group arrived, that was squarely on the general.

“You have yourself a deal,” General Golroth chuckled.