The colony was called Immaculate Luck, a novel choice that felt, to Hardy, more like a nickname brought about because of a joke rather than a small Federation colony. It occupied a mid-sized asteroid that had been hollowed, pressurised, and landscaped over several decades. The population stood at just under four thousand: researchers, engineers, the families they had accumulated, and administrative infrastructure. There were two parks, one formal and one not, and a research institute whose reputation in the quantum sciences had grown quietly over the past decade to the point where it attracted the kind of talent that would never otherwise entertain living in such a location.
Hardy beamed down with Vennock, which was a choice he had made deliberately. If Burton was going to refuse to return to their universe – and she was going to refuse, he was increasingly certain of this – he wanted the person beside him to be someone whose professional instinct was to protect dignity rather than to secure an objective. Kincaid would have been the forceful choice, but his wife was the better one.
William met them at the institute’s entrance, which Hardy had not expected and which complicated things in ways he was still calculating when William shook Vennock’s hand and said something warm and entirely natural about being glad to meet the Victory’s doctor. Vennock responded in kind with the ease of a woman who had been performing social grace in difficult circumstances for thirty years.
“She’s expecting you,” William said, falling into step beside Hardy as they moved through the institute’s atrium. “I told her you were interested in her quantum resonance work. She was pleased. She doesn’t get as many visitors as she should.”
“Was she concerned about my sudden appearance?”
“She didn’t seem troubled.” A pause. “She’s not easily troubled, Imogen. It’s one of the things I like about her.”
Hardy looked at him sideways. “You know her well?”
“Well enough, someone who has become an unexpected friend. A close one.” William’s tone was relaxed. “She consulted on a project the Asteria ran maybe four, five years ago. Subspace harmonics, unusual resonance signatures in this sector. She’s the best in the field.” A brief pause. “She’s also, for what it’s worth, one of the happier people I know. She wasn’t always. But she is now.”
Hardy said nothing. He filed the information and said nothing.
Burton’s office occupied a corner of the institute’s upper floor with windows on two sides and the particular disorder of a working scientist: padds stacked in a system that was legible only to their owner, three separate research threads open on the wall display, a coffee cup that had been forgotten sometime earlier in the day.
She was standing at the window when they entered, looking out at the colony’s central park. She turned when the door opened.
She was perhaps forty-five, tidy, unassuming. In Hardy’s universe, the briefing notes described her as capable and under-recognised, professionally stalled, and emotionally solitary. The woman standing at the window appeared to be none of those things. The accolades littered across the office, the office itself, and William’s note of her preeminence struck a discordant tone with her prime universe reality.
“Captain Hardy,” she said. “William said you were interested in my work on quantum resonance.”
“We are,” Hardy said. “Though I should tell you directly that the interest is more specific than that.”
She looked at him. Something moved in her face. Not alarm, but a kind of preparation, the expression of someone who has been expecting a conversation and is now adjusting to the fact that it has arrived.
“You should sit down,” she said. “Both of you. I’ll make coffee.”
She had known for six weeks.
She told them this without preamble, sitting across the low table in the office’s reading corner with her hands around a coffee cup and the quality of a woman who had rehearsed elements of this conversation in the intervening period.
“The quantum signature was unmistakable once I knew what to look for,” she said. “My own research, essentially. I recognised the resonance profile immediately. I knew what it meant. I knew approximately how long I had before someone came.”
“And you didn’t contact Starfleet,” Vennock said. Her voice was entirely neutral, a doctor’s talent.
“No.” Burton looked at her steadily. “I did not contact Starfleet.”
“Because you didn’t want to be found,” Hardy said.
She looked at him for a moment. “Because I needed time to think. There’s a difference.”
“And now?” Hardy asked. “After six weeks of thinking.”
She set down the coffee cup. She looked at the window, at the park beyond it. Then she looked back at Hardy.
“In my universe,” she said, “I am a competent scientist working in a narrow field, under-resourced, under-cited, doing work that three people in the galaxy understand well enough to evaluate. I live alone. I have colleagues I like and no one I would call a friend with full confidence that the word was reciprocated.” She paused. “I have been doing this for fifteen years. I am good at it. I do not regret the work.”
She stopped.
“Here,” she said, “I made a breakthrough seven years ago. The circumstances were partly luck: the right equipment, the right collaboration, the right timing. The breakthrough was genuine. The work that followed it was mine. The recognition that followed the work was also mine, and I did not know, until I had it, how much of myself I had been spending on not minding its absence.” She looked at Hardy. “I have a partner. I have a research team who trust me. I have work that matters in ways I can measure.” A pause, precise and deliberate. “I have a life.”
The word sat between them.
“I know it doesn’t belong to me,” she said. “I know there is a version of me in my universe who is living – who is trying to live – whatever this universe’s version of Imogen Burton is living. I know the mathematics of what happens if the displaced are not returned. I wrote the paper on quantum resonance instability that underpins much of what Starfleet must now be examining, captain. I know what is at stake.”
“Then you understand why I’m here,” Hardy said.
“Yes,” she said. “And I’m asking you to understand why I can’t go back.”
Hardy looked at her. He thought about what it meant to be offered a life that fitted and to be asked to surrender it for the one that did not. He thought about the park outside the window and the research team and the partner whose name he did not know.
He thought about William, in both universes.
“I’m not going to compel you,” he said. “That’s not why I brought Dr Vennock rather than my security chief. I’m asking you to come back voluntarily, and I’m asking you because the alternative has consequences that go beyond your life and mine.” He paused. “But I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand the argument. You’ve made it honestly. It deserves an honest answer.”
She looked at him, surprised and recalibrating.
“Not today,” she said. “Give me a day.”
“We may not have many days,” Hardy said.
“One day,” she said. “Please.”
Hardy looked at Vennock. Vennock looked at him with the expression she used when she agreed with a decision he had not yet made. He looked back at Burton.
“One day,” he said.
On the beam-out, Vennock said nothing until they were back aboard Victory and walking the corridor toward the turbolift. Then she said, without preamble, “She’s going to need a reason that isn’t abstract duty to the survival of the universe.”
“I know,” Hardy said.
“The duty argument is sound. She knows it’s sound. It won’t move her.” Vennock paused. “She needs to hear it from someone she trusts. Someone this universe gave her.”
Hardy looked at the corridor wall.
“I know,” he said again.
He thought about what he was going to have to ask William to do. He thought about what it would cost William to do it. Then he thought about the alternative.
On the edge of sensors – faint that Jevlak had flagged it twice as a calibration error before flagging it a third time as something else – there was a reading that did not match any known classification. It had been there for six hours and was getting closer.
