“There,” said Anand as he sealed up the probe casing with a snkt. “The last lowly drone calibrated.”

Szarka approached as Anand and one of the technicians gave the drone a gentle nudge and sent it sliding along its track into the dispatch bay. “Good work, you two.”

The technician took a step back from Anand and glanced at Szarka, offering her the hint of a smirk. “Nah, that last one was all him.”

“‘One’ being the optimal word,” said Anand as he turned away from the workbench. “Thank you for your help on the rest.”

He leaned a bit to direct his line of sight and his voice over Szarka’s shoulder to the rest of the techs in the lab. “Great work! What’s the old saying? ‘Teamwork makes the multi-frequency communication protocols work’?”

Szarka grinned at the unrepentant corniness on display. Looking back at her service record, there was a definite positive correlation between tolerable commanding officers and intentional corniness. 

Which meant that she could almost certainly get away with reaching out and giving the forearm of his uniform a gentle tug as she redirected his attention.

“C’mere,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of the lab’s long, narrow window. “You gotta see this part. Or I guess I should say, I hope you can see this part.”

“I think I’m just about operational again,” said Anand as he followed her over. “Where am I looking?”

Szarka looked across the room to the control panel where a tech stood waiting for her order and nodded.

“Launching!” he announced.

She returned her focus to Anand and pointed up just as a twin jet of probes streaked past above them, scores of beacon lights all flashing in unison.

“Wow,” Anand said softly, entranced. He leaned his arm against the sill and inched closer to the glass.

Szarka hated to ruin the moment, but she couldn’t break tradition.

“Yes, FLY!” she shouted, and Anand jolted a bit. “Fly, my pretties! Bring me those ruby slippers!”

She twisted her fingers in the air and cackled until she could no longer ignore Anand’s perplexed face.

“Wizard of Oz?” she said, both an answer and a question. “It was a book and a play and several movies and a couple of holo-novels?”

“The name rings a bell,” he said hesitantly.

She waved her hand dismissively. “Eh, not that important. It’s just the ritual. Every nerd on this ship has a good luck ritual for launching probes. Ixabi sings them a little song, Bolen waves an honest-to-god handkerchief at them and pretends to cry. Even Qsshrr makes a funny little crunching noise that the translator doesn’t process. No idea what it means, and I’m afraid it would be bad luck to ask.”

Szarka poked him in the shoulder. “What about you? You never had any kind of thing you did when you launched a probe?”

“No,” said Anand, rubbing his shoulder absently. “Remember I mentioned the JAG Safety Bureau? I was a forensic inspector. Lots of mangled starships and corpses, not a lot of whimsy.”

“Oh,” said Szarka, offering the phoniest nonchalance she could muster. “Yeah, of course, that makes sense.”

“Yes, well.” Anand pushed himself off the window. “Time to get back to the bridge.”

He nodded, and after a beat of silence, Szarka realized he was waiting for her to lead the way again.

“What, you still can’t see properly after all?” she asked, heading for the door and gesturing for him to follow.

“No, I can. I’m just not sure how to find my way back from here.”

“So, where should we start, Lieutenant Ixabi?” asked Qsshrr.

‘Perhaps you could tell me about your, uh, childhood?’ Ixabi thought to Qsshrr, with one hand resting on the Horta’s side. The touch wasn’t necessary, but Ixabi thought it might make things easier.

Qsshrr’s response seemed to crash over her like a wave in low gravity, soaking in slowly, gradually, until it was all she could feel.

She was embraced, warm and safe. Every inch of her skin touched and… tasted? No, it read the world around her like braille. 

No, it definitely tasted. It tasted the electrical bonds of every molecule around her, tasted how much energy flowed along each of them, conductors and insulators. It felt the shape of the molecules. It felt the glancing edge of a fractal unfolding infinitely into the earth.

Earth? She was surrounded by earth, crystals and glass and metal and carbon. She tasted it and it dissolved away before her. She waded through.

Suddenly, lights danced across her vision like an aurora, flickering at wavelengths she couldn’t see and yet suddenly could see. Earth no longer surrounded her. Earth was below her. The lights were above her, perpetually flashing and moving. They didn’t form any shape she recognized, but she knew that every pulse and hue was a humanoid, or another Horta, or a place or a thing. A building. A computer terminal. There was so much around her to see, to learn, to do. She spent minutes, years, decades there. Everything moved so slowly.

No, it all moved too fast.

Ixabi blinked with her own eyes and saw sickbay take shape around her. For a second or two, she couldn’t remember why she was there.

“Are you alright?” asked Ang, hovering in her peripheral vision.

Suddenly, she was re-centered in her own body and mind, and she could answer, the sound of her own voice both surprising and reassuring. “Yes, yes, I think I’m okay. I just feel a little bit like…”

She tried to think of something to compare it to and rattled off the first thing that came to mind. “I feel like I was twirling around, and I suddenly stopped spinning, except I feel it in my brain instead of my inner ear. If that makes sense.”

Ang chuckled. “I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m definitely documenting it. At any rate, I saw some fluctuations in the readings from your paracortex, but nothing outside the range of what Betazoid medical literature considers safe. What about you, Qsshrr? How are you feeling?”

A ripple seemed to travel the length of Qsshrr’s form before she replied. “I think I feel well, overall. The humanoid mind is indeed a bit– startling, I suppose, but it was also nice to be able to communicate without my translator. I think the two sensations balanced each other out.”

“Anand to sickbay.” The trio paused at the sound of their captain’s voice on the comm. “I think one of our probes may have located Gomthree. How’s training coming along?”

Ixabi was a little surprised at the calm tone of her own voice when she answered. “Well enough that I think we can take this act to the bridge. What do you think, Qsshrr?”

“If Lieutenant Ixabi is ready, then I am ready,” said Qsshrr, and she seemed to grow an inch taller as her cilia prepared to send her skittering out the door.

“We’re on our way!” Ixabi confirmed.

“Excellent! Anand out.”

Qsshrr darted out the door and Ang followed, calibrating his medical tricorder as he walked. Ixabi followed behind, gently nudging a distracted Ang away from the side of the corridor. She felt unusually collected.

She felt happy.

He heard the whoosh of the doors and Qsshrr’s voice. “Captain, any further updates from the probes?”

Anand turned to see her enter with Ixabi and Ang and… Zamora?

Zamora must have felt his eyes on her because she glanced up at him as she made a beeline for the helm.

“They’ve got things under control in engineering,” said Zamora. “Figured you could use someone with two good eyes up here.”

For a moment, the relief of seeing their best pilot on the bridge was so overwhelming that he forgot to reply. He just watched as Zamora tapped the junior flight control officer–still wearing her own pair of protective glasses–on the shoulder and slid into the immediately-vacated seat.

“Delighted to have you,” he said at last, and it was an understatement.

He turned his attention back to Qsshrr and answered, “Not yet,” before calling over to Szarka’s station, “Szarka, have you figured out which probe picked up those readings?”

There was a long pause before she answered with an enthusiastic affirmative. “Sure did. I’m sending the coordinates to the helm right now, though it doesn’t look like we’ll have to travel very far.”

The second she finished speaking, they heard the ping of a proximity alert.

“Sensors picking up a craft– or, lifeform? I guess?” called Ensign Bolen from ops. “It must have just emerged from one of the vacuoles; it’s already in visual range.”

“Onscreen,” called Anand, and on the viewer appear the same pip-shaped creature they’d seen before, with the same iridescent racing stripe running down either side of its otherwise dark hull. Anand couldn’t be completely sure it wasn’t because of the sunglasses he was still wearing, but that stripe of light did seem less luminous.

“Slow to one-quarter impulse,” said Anand. “Ixabi, how close do you have to be to make contact?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” said Ixabi. “Qsshrr, shall we find out?”

“Let’s!”

She and Qsshrr skirted around the front of the center seat. Anand nodded in response to the questioning look from Ixabi and gestured to the open space on the bridge between himself and the viewscreen.

Ixabi smiled and sat cross-legged directly on the floor next to Qsshrr, one hand on the Horta’s back. They both sat staring at the viewscreen for what felt like a long time.

After a moment or two, Anand grew tired of drumming his fingers on the armrest and let his curiosity lead him out of his seat and over to Ixabi’s side. She and Qsshrr were perfectly still. He glanced down at her face.

Her eyes were closed.

His attention was suddenly caught by the viewscreen as Gomthree turned its entire mass to face them head-on in one impossibly swift motion.

“HELLO”

Anand just barely kept himself from literally jumping away from Ixabi and Qsshrr. The word had come from them both in perfect unison. 

Ixabi’s eyes were open again, focused on an empty point of space in front of her.

“I HEAR YOU,” said Qsshrr.

“you are… panicking?” said Ixabi.

Every last body on the bridge leaned in towards the pair, watching with rapt attention. All the ambient noise, every last chirp and ping of the instruments, faded from Anand’s awareness as he listened to their conversation.

“AFRAID” said Qsshrr.

“afraid of me? my fault?” said Ixabi.

“MY FAULT. LEFT HOME”

“left home? where is home?”

“WHERE IS HOME? CAN’T FIND HOME”

“Captain,” Szarka whispered, the sound of her footsteps slowly and quietly coming up behind him. “We’re getting good data on its composition and energy signatures. It’s strikingly similar to what we have on file for Gomtuu.”

“So it’s the same species?” Anand whispered back.

“I can’t say for sure, but it seems likely.”

A console flashed behind him, and Szarka rushed back to her station. “An alert coming in from another probe,” she yelled. 

“It looks like… more Jem’Hadar.”