As the second day wound down, they were no closer to finding a way home than when they’d first crossed over. But that did not mean no progress had been made. They understood more of this place, though what they now knew was quite chilling, and they still had no idea what had led this universe to take such a different shape.

After walking the Romulan science officer back to the transporter room, Commander Castillo made his way up to the Captain’s Ready Room. There, Captain Knight and Commander Sirona were already seated, waiting for him. 

“I take it we’re not indulging in a whisky tasting tonight?” Commander Castillo inferred as he took a seat beside Commander Sirona. On normal nights, the command staff of the Juno would often unwind with some smooth libations, but from the expressions on both their faces, he knew tonight would not be one of those nights.

“No, most certainly not,” Commander Sirona replied, her eyes shifting across the table.

Commander Castillo, too, looked over at Captain Knight. “What’s wrong, Anthony?”

“Colonel Nethak may be playing both sides against the middle,” Captain Knight offered without any preamble, the gravity in his voice a stark contrast to his usual levity. “Maya identified an anomaly.”

Commander Castillo looked back at the executive officer. “What sort of anomaly?”

“A sensor blip we believe to indicate the launch of a shuttle under cloak,” Commander Sirona answered. “Between 2224 and 2227 hours last night, the Decius passed through a dense nebular cloud that obscured our tactical sensors. Coincident with the three minute interval when we could not see them directly on our scopes, we detected a trace tachyon buildup. It wasn’t enough to be the Decius, and they’re clearly still sitting here, but it was not nothing.”

Commander Castillo turned the information over in his head. “You heard the pull of temptation in the colonel’s voice during the briefing, but do you really think he’s up to something?”

“I don’t have to think,” Commander Sirona replied flatly as she handed him a PADD. “The data simply says what it says. See for yourself.”

Commander Castillo quickly reviewed the data on the PADD. He saw, almost at once, what she was getting at. Nothing in the nebula’s composition was likely to naturally produce the tachyonic output he was now looking at, and he could think of only one technology with such a signature. How she’d noticed something so faint, though, he had no idea. “Maya, color me impressed. This is some quite impressive detective work, as usual.”

Commander Sirona nodded, but said nothing. Being former Borg had some benefits.

“John, did any of your interactions with Centurion Irulan hint at something afoot?” Captain Knight inquired. Castillo had spent the better part of the day with the science officer from the Decius, and he knew the commander’s easy way of talking often led others to say more than they meant to say.

“No,” Commander Castillo shook his head. “In fact, Irulan was quite lovely, and she has a quite curious worldview. More optimism than I’d expect to come from a Romulan, and frankly more than I would probably have in her shoes. Even when we discussed the supernova, she spoke of its positives as a break with old certainties and a catalyst that forced her people to grow.”

Commander Sirona raised an eyebrow. “You must recognize that she could be playing you.” What he was saying seemed quite inconsistent with all she had seen of these people.

“I don’t think she was,” Commander Castillo replied without having to think about it. “Everything I got from her felt genuine, and she seems as repulsed by this reality as we are.”

“Or she just knows how to present herself that way,” Commander Sirona countered. “People reveal what they want to believe, but operatives reveal what you want to hear.” She respected the commander’s scientific acumen and his strengths as a member of their leadership team, but she did not think he, nor Captain Knight, were particularly suited to matters such as this.

“Can we really trust no one?” Captain Knight muttered. He wanted to believe in this alliance. He had even written off Fleet Admiral Reyes’ cautionary words as those of a once-wounded soldier unable to move past, but now he was beginning to question his faith.

Commander Sirona, on the other hand, did not predicate her worldview on faith. She built it on data and patterns. For her, the evidence was clear enough. “Anthony, we need to consider the possibility that Nethak may be laying the groundwork to defect, and we need to decide what we are going to do about it.”

She was right, Captain Knight knew, and he had already begun to mill it over. “Nethak may make his own fate. Each sentient being is entitled to that. But the Decius is under our command, and that makes her crew our responsibility. I will not allow him to choose their future for them.”

“There’s also the spirit of the Prime Directive to consider,” Commander Castillo suggested. “To allow any individual from our timeline to remain in this universe is to potentially alter the flow of events as they were meant to naturally occur.”

Commander Sirona pursed her lips. Even if they could engender a situation where each member of the Decius crew chose for themselves, which Colonel Nethak would never permit, and even if they could legalese their way out of Commander Castillo’s proposition, which was more philosophical than she was willing to consider, this still wasn’t going to work. “There’s a more fundamental problem with your plan, Anthony.”

They both looked at her, waiting for her to elaborate.

“The Loom,” Commander Sirona said flatly.

Captain Knight’s eyes showed no recognition of the name.

“The Loom…” Commander Castillo began uncertainly, composing his thoughts as he went. “They are a theory… a possibility… transdimensional beings that supposedly hunt for paradoxes in the timeline and then resolve them.” Most of what they knew of the Loom had been shared second-hand by a Traveller, a being who itself was not well understood, and there were many who remained skeptical as there were many documented cases of causality-impacting events that had occurred without any intervention by the so-called Loom. Still, given the existential threat they posed if they really did exist, he agreed it was right to at least consider them.

“The Loom are not a theory,” Commander Sirona insisted firmly. “The Borg were aware of them, an extrinsic pattern the Collective could neither assimilate nor reconcile with its model of causality, yet one it had to account for in the consideration of any temporal or dimensional incursion.”

“Alright… got it… the Loom…” Captain Knight said as he tried to process. But he wasn’t quite there yet. “What do you mean by resolve?”

“To resolve an anomaly, they erase it from existence,” Commander Sirona explained. “Not just the physical being from that particular moment, but all memory the universe has of it across all of time.”

Captain Knight shifted uncomfortably.

“The real problem comes, though, when a universe itself becomes irreconcilable because it has drifted too far,” Commander Sirona continued. “When that happens, the Loom’s solution is to erase that reality altogether.”

“You can’t just erase a universe,” Captain Knight objected.

“No, we cannot erase a universe, but there are beings beyond our primitive comprehension who absolutely can,” Commander Sirona replied, her tone sounding almost reverent as she said it.

“Supposing you are right,” Captain Knight posited, still not certain she was, but at least willing to entertain it for the moment. “Are you saying that if we were to leave Colonel Nethak here, we would be condemning this universe to certain doom?”

“Not to certain doom,” Commander Sirona corrected. “But Nethak isn’t one to sit quietly and make no impact, so I’d say the chances are certainly better than zero.”

“I didn’t take you the type to worry about his wellbeing,” Captain Knight chuckled. Commander Sirona didn’t have Lieutenant Ward’s blunt disdain towards their Romulan allies, but she had expressed her concerns on several occasions.

“He, as an individual, is not my concern,” Commander Sirona shook her head. “But Anthony, if you let him stay, you are not simply abandoning a man to another universe. You are pulling a thread through the fabric of two realities. Here, he becomes an intrusion, but back home, he becomes an absence. Both universes become something they are not meant to be.”

“Oh,” Captain Knight exhaled as he saw it. “Shit.”

“Oh shit, indeed,” Commander Sirona nodded grimly. “So the question, then, is simple: what are we going to do about it? Colonel Nethak and the others, they must all come home with us, or there may be no home for any of us to return to.”