Burton beamed aboard at 0800 with a single bag. She was composed. But unhappy, diminished. What Hardy observed in the transporter room remained the scientist: precise, present, pragmatic.

William had beamed over with her. He walked her from the transporter pad to the corridor outside and said goodbye to her there, with one of the Victory’s security officers waiting patiently to escort Burton to her quarters. Hardy hovered in the transporter room, waiting.

When William came back toward him, he had the look. Hardy had been trying to classify it since their conversation on the Asteria, since the moment William had told him to get her home. He had it now. He could read it now.

It was the expression of a man who had hardened. William was thirty years older and a distinguished captain: it should not have surprised Hardy that he was capable of difficult decisions.

“William,” Hardy said.

“Get her home,” William said. The same words. Then he stepped back onto the transporter pad and dissolved into light.

Hardy stood by for a moment longer. Then he went to the bridge.

Victory broke for the portal at warp eight, and the Loom came after them.

Not attacking, Jevlak had been precise about this. They followed the dimensional instability that Burton represented with the patient inevitability that they would achieve their aim, whether or not it was conscious or some transdimensional animalistic drive. Jevlak described their approach in the careful language of a scientist classifying a phenomenon and the description landed on the bridge with a weight that was simultaneously accurate and unwelcome.

Parr’s corridor model was on the main display. The resonance degradation was measurable, trending, the numbers moving in one direction with an alarmingly increasing pace. The Loom’s proximity was accelerating the instability. At current rate – Parr said it once, clearly, without editorialising – the corridor would be too degraded to transit safely in forty minutes.

Victory was twenty-five minutes from the portal.

Hardy knew their arithmetic was sound. He also knew that sound arithmetic and a comfortable margin occupied different categories: forty minutes minus twenty-five minutes was fifteen minutes. And fifteen minutes assumed everything went correctly, which was not an assumption he was prepared to make.

Then Velkar spoke from engineering. “Captain. The Asteria has matched our heading and speed. Running parallel, two thousand kilometres off the port bow.”

Hardy looked at the display. He had not given William a departure time beyond 0800. He had not transmitted the corridor numbers or the Loom proximity data. He had not, as far as he could determine, given William any information that would explain why a Prometheus-class warship was currently running alongside Victory at warp eight on a heading for the portal.

He opened a channel.

William answered immediately, which meant he had been waiting for it.

“What are you doing,” Hardy said. It was not a question.

“The corridor requires a ship-strength power input from the alternate side,” William said, in the same cold professionalism that Hardy had observed earlier. “Held at the aperture. It stabilises the resonance under the pressure from the Loom long enough for Victory to transit. Victory can’t do this from inside the corridor. You’ll have insufficient power output at transit speed.” A pause. “The Asteria, held at the aperture, can.”

“There has to be another way,” Hardy said.

“I spent the night looking for one.”

Hardy looked at the corridor model. He looked at the Loom signature. He looked at his brother on the viewscreen, who was looking back at him with the patience of a distinguished captain who had done his work and was waiting for someone else to do theirs.

“Your crew,” Hardy said.

“Safe. They’re on Immaculate Luck, supporting maintenance upgrades and some shore leave. They think I’m running diagnostics.” A brief pause. “They’re good people. They’ll be fine.”

Hardy said nothing for a moment. The numbers on Parr’s display continued their patient movement in the direction they had chosen.

“What happens to you?” Hardy said. “When the corridor collapses.”

William told him about the resonance field. That the collapse produced a one-way crossing with enough energy to either bring the Asteria through behind Victory before the field closed entirely, or wipe out the ship from existence. He would lose his universe either way. If they were lucky, he would have Hardy’s. The Loom would assess the crossing and find it beneath their threshold: one man, one ship, a near-prime variant with negligible paradox value, not worth the energy of erasure.

“You calculated that,” Hardy said.

“I had time.” Something moved in William’s expression. It was not quite the warm, wry quality that had characterised their dinners and conversations, but related to it, wearing the family resemblance. “I also had the advantage of knowing what the Loom considered significant. Burton represents a genuine displacement paradox, she’s an important figure here. One who alters how my universe should be. Whereas I die here, or I occupy an empty space in your universe.” A pause. “That’s not too paradoxical. I hope.”

Hardy looked at him.

He thought about the estrangement, and the thirty years, and the particular silence that had been the last thing for longer than it should have been. He thought about what William was giving up and what he was choosing instead.

He took a breath.

“Hold it long enough, brother” Hardy said.

“I will,” William said. “Go.”

Victory dropped to impulse at the portal threshold and the Asteria held position at the aperture.

On the sensors, the Asteria’s power systems were at maximum. More than maximum, running into the margins that Prometheus-class engineers built in for situations they hoped would never arise. The corridor resonance steadied under the output. Parr looked at her model and said, quietly, that it was holding better than projected, that William had given them more margin than the minimum required.

The Loom were thirty seconds behind them.

Victory entered the corridor.

Transit was not dramatic. It was a shimmer. The same domestic disturbance of light that the outward crossing had produced, the same brief rearrangement of the stars, and then the corridor closed around them with the completeness of water closing over a stone and the viewscreen showed the prime universe’s stars in their familiar configuration and Velkar confirmed dimensional resonance stable and Parr confirmed prime quantum signature and Jevlak confirmed the Loom signature was absent, was not following, had assessed whatever crossed in the final seconds of the window and found it insufficient to pursue.

Burton was standing at the back of the bridge. She had come up from her quarters when the pursuit began. She was looking at the viewscreen, blank and bleak.

Then Ayres, from the chair beside him, very quietly: “Captain. Sensors.”

The Asteria was there.

She had crossed in the last seconds of the corridor, riding the collapsing resonance field. The ship was sitting two thousand kilometres off Victory‘s port bow, and the image of her on the viewscreen – the Prometheus-class lines, clean and still and entirely present in a universe that had no record of this ship – was among the stranger things Hardy had seen in a career that had contained several.

She was broadcasting a Starfleet registry. The registry was wrong for the prime universe and Parr was already noting, in the clipped surgical language she used when she was managing several things simultaneously, that this was going to require considerable administrative attention before anyone senior started asking questions. Hardy acknowledged this and set it aside. There would be time for administration.

He opened a channel.

William answered. He looked, Hardy thought, precisely the same as he had looked thirty seconds ago in another universe, which was entirely obvious and somehow surprising. The crossing had not marked him, that he was simply there, present and intact, looking at Hardy across a channel in a universe that had not known him a minute ago and would need to be introduced.

“The Loom?” Hardy said.

“Moved on,” William said. “I watched them go.”

A silence.

“You’re here,” Hardy said.

“I’m here,” William said.

The channel held the quiet between them. Not the silence of people who have run out of words, not the silence that had been the last thing for thirty years and had stayed the last thing because one of them had died before either of them could find new ones. A different silence. The silence of people who have more to say than the moment can contain, and who understand that the moment is not the last one.

That there will be others. That the conversations are not finished. That the last thing, this time, is not the last thing.

“Welcome to my universe,” Hardy said. “It’s not as gentle as yours.”

William looked at him across the viewscreen. The easy warmth that Hardy had spent days watching him extend toward a version of himself that had earned it was there in his face, unchanged, extended now without adjustment toward the version sitting in front of him. The version who had not earned it in the same way, who had thirty years of the wrong kind of silence to account for, who had come through a portal looking for a displaced scientist and found instead the proof that the wound had never been inevitable.

“I’ll manage,” William said.

Hardy looked at his brother. His brother, in his universe, alive and looking back at him from two thousand kilometres off the port bow, with everything still ahead of them.

Behind him, Burton was watching the viewscreen. Hardy did not look at her. The universe was unfair, he thought. He would speak to her shortly. There was a great deal to say, and none of it was going to be easy, and he owed her his full attention when the time came. The time was not yet.