“Admiral’s log, Stardate 77483.5,” Fleet Admiral Reyes began. ”It’s been eleven days since we lost warp, and reality is starting to set in with the crew. There’s no issue to fix with the warp assembly, and no way for another ship to warp in and save us. We’re just stuck until we can crack the mystery of the spacetime we find ourselves within.”

Sitting on the couch in her Ready Room, the Admiral took a sip of her tea and gazed out at the starscape beyond.

“I guess in some ways, this is how early humans felt as they looked to space. It must have felt so big back then. We take for granted how far two light years is, a mere skip, hop and jump in even the least equipped runabout. But for us, here and now, even if we could maintain .9c all the way home, it would be a two year journey, and everyone back home will be five years older when we arrive. Relativity is a bitch.”

For a moment, right at the start of this ordeal, the Admiral had considered taking that approach. But she couldn’t see how she’d hold the crew together for two years like that. How Janeway had managed for seven years, she had no idea.

“Work continues down in the lab on a formulation to model subspace here, but Commander Lockwood shared a concerning finding with me today: based on our latest telemetry, he’s not sure a smoothness assumption holds. If that’s the case, developing a Reimannian manifold is out of the question, and this problem gets a whole lot harder.”

Commander Lockwood had seemed visibly shaken, almost panicked, when he called her earlier about that. One could not model that which was not consistent.

“I’ve looked over that same telemetry a few times now though, and I’m not seeing what he’s seeing. Sure, I’m hardly half the astrophysicist he is, but Lieutenant Sh’vot doesn’t see it either. I didn’t have the heart to ask the rest of the lab where they stand, but I think I know the answer. Meanwhile, Lockwood grows more erratic each day.”

Reyes picked up a PADD on her coffee table, already open to Commander Lockwood’s dossier, and skimmed it again. She was worried about the effect his prior stranding in the Delta Quadrant was having on him now. But besides that, with a Ph.D. from the Stern Institute on the first verifiable mathematical model of the Vaadwaur underspace, and multiple novel findings on superluminality, it was a stroke of luck they had among them one of the most qualified people possible for the conundrum they now found themselves in.

“I’ll be honest, for as sharp as everyone is down there in the lab, we won’t have a shot at modeling this without him. Which leads me to our watchers.”

She looked out the window as if she had even the slightest chance of seeing the three foreign objects whose existence could only be inferred from faint distortions they’d identified after adapting their sensors based on what they found on the planet below.

“Commander Lewis wants to shoot them, and Lieutenant Balan wants to visit them. Me, I’m not a betting woman, not when we’re in as helpless as situation as this at least. I’d rather Commander Lockwood just solve the math problem and get us out of here, and we can leave them one of the universe’s many mysteries. We still need a few of those, don’t we?”

It was one of the beautiful realizations she’d had during the five year jaunt she and Devreux had made into deep space the prior decade, that there were things out there in the universe we would never understand. Sometimes, you just had to enjoy them for what they were, the unknown. A younger Allison Reyes never would have accepted that, but things had changed.

“Still, we may need a plan B.”