Now they knew the shape of this place. It had only taken one moment to rewrite everything. Was it really so simple? Was the Federation always one message away from a descent into darkness? What did that say about who they really were?

It was a quarter past four, and the room was dark, save for the magenta luminance sneaking in from beyond his windowsill. He should have been sleeping, but he could not sleep. Instead, Captain Knight lay staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of it all.

They could not stay here. To do so would invite ruin, and even if Sirona was wrong about the Loom, this was no place for him. It wasn’t that he couldn’t fight, and it wasn’t that the Juno wasn’t battletested. It was simply that he could not live in a galaxy gone mad, a reality where all optimism had been consumed in fire, a Federation out for blood. Blood, and nothing else.

There was also what waited for them back at home. He had a wife, and two grown kids. Castillo had six adorable nieces and nephews. Minh was about to become a grandfather. Asher, Dash, Jenna, and Bellarose, they each had moms and dads who would live the rest of their days with a hole in their heart. Unless he got them home. That, too, was what this was about.

Unfortunately, almost six days since crossing over, they were no closer to finding a way back. Castillo and Michaelson had a theoretical model of the conditions that’d pushed them over, but those conditions were not the sort you could just reconjure up with a warp core and a deflector dish. They were cosmic in scale, and centuries ahead of anything Starfleet knew how to create.

Sirona had some ideas, wacky concepts like trying to slip aboard a Borg research facility twelve thousand light years away, or going to hunt for a transdimensional portal some Borg-assimilated species believed might exist beyond the Rotarran Maelstrom, but none of that was actionable. Not reasonably, at least. It would almost be easier to invent a new branch of spacetime physics, but that would take time, and time was not a luxury they had.

Even as his staff were tucked in their beds, dreaming of home, there were those who didn’t see this place as a broken mirror. Colonel Nethak seemed quite attracted to this reality, and there was the matter of the shuttle Sirona believed had slipped away from the Decius five nights prior. Captain Knight could come up with a dozen reasons Nethak might have sent a team away in the dead of the night without telling them, but none were good.

Centurion Irulan had been one bright spot in this whole affair. Ever since her dinner with Castillo, she’d been their greatest support. She’d beam over from the Decius each morning before most of his staff were even out of their pajamas, and she’d work until the lights went out. She’d been a wealth of knowledge, and while they didn’t know how she knew what she knew, he would not look a gift horse in the mouth. So far, everything she’d shared had checked out when they dug.

Castillo said Irulan was just a curious soul, but Sirona thought it was something more, that she might know more than she was letting on about the colonel’s plan. He figured it was a bit of both. She had an optimistic curiosity unusual for a Romulan, but she also seemed to be in quite a rush, almost as if she knew something was coming.

The chirp of Captain Knight’s combadge pulled him from his thoughts. “Knight, go.”

“That pattern we were monitoring for, sir,” came the voice of Lieutenant Aaronson, manning the graveyard shift from up on the bridge. “It’s back. The Decius just dropped into a blind spot again, and now I’m monitoring a slight variance in tachyonic density.”

That. That was it. Maybe that was what Irulan was fearful of. If their theory was right, that variance signaled the return of whomever it was that’d stolen away in the night. And what that shuttle bore, if that’s really what it was, it meant if Colonel Nethak was to do something, it would likely happen soon.

He looked out the window for a moment at the magenta wisps passing by. This was not his home. This was not their place. Maybe all these worries would net to nothing, and maybe Colonel Nethak would surprise him, but he couldn’t take the risk.

“Wake the others,” Captain Knight ordered. “I’ll be right up.”