Qsshrr skittered down the corridor towards the turbolift, grateful that Anand seemed lost in thought and disinclined to chatter. She needed a moment of reprieve from the high-pitched waves of human voices on the air, even if just for a moment.

The tension on the ship was obvious even to her, and as they rode the lift down to engineering, she imagined how she’d describe it in her next journal entry so that a future Horta reading it might understand.

The atmosphere on the ship–no, not the gasses that fill up the empty spaces–it’s the influence of their emotions on the environment. They don’t burn their subjective mental experiences into the rocks like we do, but once you’ve been around them long enough you can taste it all the same. Sometimes it’s sweet as quartz, like when we rescued the creature Gomthree from the clutches of war and loneliness. Sometimes it’s stale as calcite, like the long months spent sweeping the stars. Now it’s bitter and dense, like diamonds. It’s like trying to tunnel through a wall of diamonds. It’s terrible.

The door to engineering whooshed open, and the reprieve was over.

“Eighteen hours until we hopefully find our transwarp aperture,” Anand said as he approached Zamora, seated at a console near the warp core. “We need to start thinking about how to mark the conduit so that other ships can use it. We can’t just map it out like we would normal space, right?”

It was that very problem that Qsshrr had been mulling over since they’d received their orders. “We could create a map, but it would be very incomplete. Using regular space as a frame of reference, we could show where we enter and exit the conduit at any point along its length. But the conduits aren’t singular tunnels. They’re like branching rivers.”

Qsshrr activated a Horta-height panel at Zamora’s console and pulled up all the raw data on transwarp conduits she’d been reviewing. She checked the connection and confirmed that her data was being output on Zamora’s screen as well, even if she couldn’t even begin to imagine what it looked like to a humanoid. Once again, she felt grateful that she wasn’t limited to viewing only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum through a flimsy pair of ocular nerves.

“Is there some way we could mark the route from inside the conduit?” Qsshrr asked.

“How?” said Zamora. “With a probe? A buoy? Or a large, flashing sign that says ‘Hello Borg’?”

“What if we could program the probe to self-destruct?” asked Szarka as she joined the group.

“Could do…” said Zamora. “Still don’t think we have enough probes for that, though. I’m still hearing from the quartermaster at Deep Space 17 about how many we lost last year in those vacuoles.”

“The quartermaster can get bent–”

“To belabor the river metaphor,” said Qsshrr, hoping to head off the airing of grievances, “A dye tracer would be preferable to a buoy or a probe. It is significantly less likely to attract Borg attention, and even less likely to link back to Starfleet if it did.”

“Oooh, like what?” asked Szarka. “I assume we’re not going to literally dye transwarp space red, as amazing as that would be.”

“Cortenum,” said Anand, in such a low voice that Qsshrr wasn’t even certain it was meant as a response, until he spoke up again. “Cortenum has a radioactive isotope with a half life of 33 hours. It would be detectable in the transwarp conduit for two weeks or so.”

“Well, there we go,” said Szarka. “Where do we get Cortenum?”

“It’s all over the ship,” said Zamora.

“Right,” said Anand. “It’s popular as a metal alloy in ship-building, but when that metal alloy is vaporized by, say, phaser fire, it produces that radioactive isotope. That’s one of the ways we’d locate and analyze debris when I was with the JAG Safety Investigation Bureau.”

“That’s what you did in JAG?” said Szarka. “I thought you were a lawyer.”

Qsshrr’s translator picked up a particular change in tone on the word ‘lawyer’, though she wasn’t sure how to interpret it.

“No, I was in forensics,” said Anand. “Investigation for ship hull-loss incidents.”

“Sounds delightful,” said Szarka. “So we blow up the ship, got it.”

“Most of our probes and buoys are made with cortenum alloys, too,” said Zamora.

“Even better!” said Szarka.

“How many will we need?” Zamora asked, and Qsshrr could feel the sound waves directed at her carapace.

“I’ll calculate the necessary parts per million,” said Qsshrr, “But it will also depend heavily on how far we travel and to what extent the conduits branch… I estimate no less than 65% of our supply.”

The huff of air Qsshrr felt from Zamora was most likely, she guessed, irritation.

Szarka, in contrast, was clearly delighted. “I can’t wait to get back to DS17 and see the look on the quartermaster’s face when he finds out what we did to them.”

“If we get back,” Qsshrr corrected.

“If we don’t accidentally run into the Borg ourselves,” Zamora added.

“If the transwarp aperture we’re heading towards actually exists,” said Anand.

“If we’re not incinerated by a rogue gamma ray burst or have our atoms ripped apart by false vacuum decay in the next five seconds!” said Szarka. Qsshrr felt every humanoid in the room tense their muscles, and she was shocked to realize that even her own cilia had frozen in place.

When the five seconds were up, Szarka noted, “Okay, now we’re a quarter of the way there!”

Qsshrr decided that she wouldn’t check the math on that one.