Dr. Hall looked over at the astrophysicist they’d stolen away from the New Zealand Penal Colony. She knew this stuff took time, but with each passing hour, the likelihood of success slipped further away. At some point, the enemy would realize what they were doing, and they’d be in the wind. “Any progress?”

“Progress assumes directionality inconsistent with the manifold of reality,” replied Dr. Brooks as he ran a subspace resonance scanner over one of the nano-surveillance devices they’d found in the home of Rear Admiral Edir. “All that will happen has already happened, and everything that has happened will eventually happen, depending on the…”

“That is wholly unhelpful in the context of our frame of reference,” Dr. Hall interrupted. Every conversation with the disordered genius had gone something like this.

“Ah yes,” Dr. Brooks agreed, reminding himself that his body and hers existed here and now, at least in their current frame of reference, and that was the orientation to which he should root his answer. “I am closer than the last time you asked, and I am less close than I will be the next time you ask.”

“Do you have an idea of when exactly you will no longer be close, but will actually be done?” asked Dr. Hall. While a great cover story, his temporal dissociative disorder made conversing with Tom Brooks a wholly frustrating affair.

“In some manifestations of the spatiotemporal waveform, I am already done, and in others, I will never…” Dr. Brooks started to say before remembering himself. As much as it felt alien to him, she wanted a response in terms of the highest probability convergence of the waveform across their present state and directionality. “It is most likely that I will be done shortly.”

Dr. Hall nodded. It was the best she would get for now. She’d just need to be patient.

On the other side of the small studio they’d procured as a safehouse, Commander Lewis was fast asleep. Between investigations in Provence, shootouts in Milan, and breakouts from New Zealand, this was the first opportunity he’d had for sleep since the Serenity arrived over Earth. It was not good sleep, not with members of his team missing and an unknown force hunting them, but it was sleep nonetheless. Every human body needed it, and Commander Lewis knew that once they had a new beat on the enemy, they’d be right back on the grind, so he’d forced himself to sleep while they waited for Dr. Brooks to do his work.

Ensign Rel lay next to him. She couldn’t just turn the lights off like the thirty year spook could. Her nerves were racing. Were Ayala and Jace still alive? Would they find them? What awaited them when they did? And who was behind all of this? She could feel Commander Lewis’ chest rise and fall in a slow, melodic fashion. He made her feel safe, and she focused on that. Slowly, the metronome of his breathing and comfort of touch lulled her to sleep as she cuddled up to him.

Eventually, Dr. Brooks finished his scans of the communications relays on the surveillance devices and loaded the data up into a model he’d constructed. As the bioneural circuits did their work training the model on that telemetry, he glanced over at the odd pair that had fallen asleep. “Did the Commander get soft in his old age?”

Dr. Hall quirked an eyebrow. It was a surprisingly cogent and human thought from a man who, up to this point, seemed completely dissociated from reality.

“What?” laughed Dr. Brooks. “While I am the spitting image of temporal dissociative disorder, I am still well outside the extended norms of most scales, and it doesn’t take a genius level IQ to note that’s not how two platonic operators sleep.” Sure, there might have only been one bed in the small studio, and sure, they both needed the sleep, but if he’d been sharing a bed with Commander Lewis, he would have been sleeping butt-to-butt and certainly not spooning him.

“This doesn’t match your past experience with the Commander?”

“Most certainly not,” Dr. Brooks confirmed. In the years he’d served with Lewis aboard the USS Enigma, not once had he ever seen the man develop non-platonic attachment. He was a machine. It was part of what had made him so ruthlessly effective.

“It is uncharacteristic of him based on my observations as well,” Dr. Hall shared. She always appreciated how Lewis never let anything get in the way of the mission. This absolutely could. She didn’t care about the rules, but she did care about performance. “It’s the first time I’ve seen him exhibit such weakness.”

“I appreciate you see it that way doc.”

“Yeah, well I’m the one that’s going to have to deal with the sloppy little mess that will be that girl when Lewis kicks her to the curb,” Dr. Hall added. “Or gets himself killed.” It would be a race to see which happened first, and she absolutely despised the part of her job that was tending to the fragile emotional states of the willowy little flowers they put in Starfleet uniforms these days.

“He’s still trying to martyr himself?”

Dr. Hall nodded.

“In all permutations of spacetime, some things remain invariant,” laughed Dr. Brooks. Commander Lewis always had a death wish, but in a cruel sense of irony, the universe never obliged him. It kept him alive, while sending his team home in bodybags time and time again. “What about you, Dr. Hall? What made you throw in with this loony lot?”

“Because they don’t balk at what I do.”

“And what exactly is it that you do?” asked Dr. Brooks curiously. She didn’t come across like any counselor he’d ever met. There was something darker about her.

“Enhanced interrogation.”

“Ah yes,” Dr. Brooks smiled at the euphemism. “The art of torture. Not exactly something the Federation looks kindly upon, but it can prove very useful when traditional methods fail.” In a different era, Dr. Hall would have fit perfectly aboard the old ship where Lewis and Brooks had gotten into so much trouble together. Was Lewis trying to reconstruct the Enigma once more? Could such a thing even exist in a modern Starfleet?

“They don’t look too fondly on your work either,” Dr. Hall pointed out. “They literally have a directive banning it.” In preparing the cover to extract Dr. Brooks, she had become familiar with the chain of events that had landed Dr. Brooks in prison. It was dangerous work to put it mildly, and he’d gone so far that uptime had intervened.

“Starfleet is naive,” Dr. Brooks countered. “A war exists across time, and our admirals bury their heads in the sand, leaving our reality in the hands of uptime. I would prefer we played a more active role in shaping it.”

Dr. Hall was about to ask whether Dr. Brooks meant purely in defending the timeline, or if he meant manipulating it for greater gain, but her line of questioning was interrupted as the PADD began beeping. 

Dr. Brooks looked down at the PADD. “The future where progress has been achieved is now,” he reported gleefully as he reviewed the results before glancing over at Commander Lewis and Ensign Rel. “It’s time to wake up sleeping beauty. And the girl too.”