Leander Nune looked up.

Crackling, burning tentacles uncoiled above him. They undulated across the overhead, as if held back by a gravity field of their own. Held back, until one of the purple fire tentacles reached right for him. But no matter how close the energy reached for him, he felt no heat emanating from it.

Leander Nune looked across.

No one else in the Planetarium Lounge seemed to be bothered by the invasion above them. Not the Tellarite drinking from a tankard nor the Bajoran licking her plate clean. The purple electric fire was reflected in the glossy black floor. The lounge was filled to capacity with officers gathered around tables and banquettes. The murmur of so many conversations, and the telepathic resonance of so many emotional states, drown out the ambient music Nune could hear in the distance.

Even for those sharing the red upholstered booth with him, Lieutenants T’Kaal and Jurij looked to him with nothing more than taciturn expressions.

Nova’s eyes shone with wonder.

“Why is the sky vomiting on us?” Nune asked his dining companions. Dropping his gaze to the grilled cephalopod on his plate. Its charred purple tentacles stared back at him. His stomach churned.

The sky unleashing imminent death upon Nune was much as he imagined the invasion of Betazed to have been experienced from the surface. He had been too young to remember it.

“I did that,” Nova said, sitting taller on her side of the bench. The way she elongated the ‘I’ sound filled the statement with pride.

Nune blinked at her, both unnerved and curious about what new hobby had led to this horrific art installation.

Jurij continued sawing through the flattened meat stack on his plate. “I prefer the holographic stars,” he said without looking at any of them. Then he smiled gently. “The triangulum constellation is especially beautiful.”

“It’s the message,” Nova said, “from the Nekrit Expanse. I don’t think it was a warning or a distress call. It’s an elegy.”

Nova’s expression softened to a wistful expression, an easy smile with watery eyes.

Nune held his tongue, his father’s obituary coming to mind. He wondered if the fiery sky was very much like his father’s final look upon the realm of the living.

T’Kaal narrowed her eyes on Nova, and only then did she visibly study the roiling holographic display across the overhead. It looked more like fireworks now than tentacles.

“Clearly, your talents have been wasted,” T’Kaal offered. “Our archaeology teams would benefit from your analysis and insights.”

“Exactly,” Nova exclaimed, “This is the final story told by a civilisation awaiting its end.”

“You decoded all of this,” T’Kaal asked, “from the repeating transmission?”

“How could I?” Nova said through a good-humoured smirk. She shook her head. “Every other phrase was spoken in a different language. The universal translator never had a chance to parse it with such a small sample size. It’s like the message was pieced together from language fragments after a global disaster or societal collapse.”

Jurij nodded heavily. “So you haven’t translated the message.”

Nova huffed through her nose. “Even without knowing the words, I can recognise the tone and the rhythm. It had the loneliness of being misunderstood. The desperation to be remembered. A people on the brink of extinction, like me and the crew of the Brigadoon.”

“Where did that lead you?” Nune asked.

“I plotted the breath patterns and melodic arcs more like music than language,” Nova said, leaning in closer. “Whatever they were saying, it’s poetic. Non-linear. Having been non-corporeal, I don’t have the same limited view as the translator.”

“I’m not sure,” Jurij pointed out, “if the data construct of a translation matrix is, necessarily, corporeal.”

Impatiently, Nune interjected, “Then what is all of this?”

Nova raised her hands to the purple fire above. “This is what they saw as electrokinetic storms overtook their planet, slowly making it uninhabitable.”

“How can you prove that?” T’Kaal asked. There was nothing combative about the Vulcan’s question, but it came out as unavoidable, too.

Nova laughed nervously.

“I don’t know what story they told in the recording,” Nova said, but the longer she spoke, the admission came with less hesitation. No self-doubt.

“This imagery comes from my intuition after listening to the message a hundred times. I leveraged local Delta Quadrant mythology to make literal the feeling of cosmic abandonment. The story doesn’t matter. They’re gone now; either wiped out or left far behind us without any hope of us locating them.”

“They spoke. We listened,” Nova affirmed. “What matters is that we remember them, whoever they were, are, will be.”