The Linnaeus Two came home damaged.
Not crippled.
Not quite.
But damaged enough that the runabout’s approach vector wavered twice before its computer accepted the docking pattern. Its port shields were barely holding. Its aft grid was unstable. One impulse injector was locked out by the computer, and the other two were running hot enough that engineering on the Linné sent three separate warnings before Vale had finished transmitting his report.
Commander Soren Vale ignored the warnings until the runabout was safely aboard.
Then he let himself breathe.
The hangar doors closed behind them.
The noise of battle fell away.
For one second, nobody in the cockpit moved.
Paz sat at the helm, both hands still on the controls, as if the runabout might try to leave again without permission. Ensign Dast remained at tactical, eyes locked on a display that no longer contained Fury interceptors, cyclonic torpedoes, or a dying planet.
Vale looked at them both.
“Well done,” he said.
It was not enough.
It was all he had.
Dast nodded once.
Paz swallowed, then nodded too.
The comm panel chirped.
“Endeavour to Linnaeus Two,” Haddad’s voice said. “Commander Vale, report to the observation lounge as soon as you are able.”
Vale looked down at his uniform. It was sweat-stained, smoke-marked, and torn along one sleeve where the cockpit safety restraint had cut into him during the micro-jump.
“As soon as I am presentable, Captain.”
A pause.
“Sooner than that,” Haddad said.
Vale almost smiled.
“On my way.”
—
Larsson was still in the center seat when Vale stepped onto the Linné’s bridge.
That was correct.
He had been off the ship. She had held command during combat. For the next few minutes, the chair was still hers.
The bridge looked worse than he had expected.
Emergency repair teams had done their usual miracles, but the room still carried the memory of violence. One ceiling panel had been replaced with a temporary plate. Two aft consoles were dark. A portside conduit was sealed behind a flickering containment strip. The air smelled faintly of scorched insulation and fire suppressant.
Lieutenant Commander Evelina Larsson looked up when he entered.
“Commander.”
“Commander Larsson.”
Her face was pale beneath a shallow bruise along one cheekbone. One sleeve of her uniform had been torn and sealed with field tape. She looked exhausted.
She also looked steady.
Vale stopped beside the command chair, but did not step in front of it.
“Keep the chair for now,” he said. “I need your report in the conference, but I do not want command changing hands twice while everyone is still putting the ship back together.”
Larsson looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
“Understood.”
“You held the ship together.”
She gave a small shrug. “The ship helped.”
“That is usually the arrangement.”
The smallest smile touched her face and vanished.
Vale looked toward the main viewer.
The Enterprise-G hung off the Linné’s flank, close enough to be protective and far enough to be tactical. Her shields were up. Her weapons were powered but not tracking. Beyond her, the Endeavour and Huygens remained locked into the analysis formation around the anomaly.
The work had not stopped.
Good.
“Status?” Vale asked.
Larsson answered without checking a display. “Shields recovering slowly. Forward grid unstable above forty-two percent. Warp drive available at reduced safety margin. Impulse functional. Casualties: thirty-seven injured, five critical, no confirmed fatalities.”
Vale closed his eyes for half a second.
No fatalities.
That was a miracle they had not earned and would accept anyway.
“Captain Haddad?”
“On Endeavour. Observation lounge link is waiting.”
“Then I will report from the lounge. You stay with the ship.”
Larsson’s gaze moved once across the damaged bridge before returning to him.
“Aye, Commander.”
—
The observation lounge conference spanned four starships.
Haddad appeared from the Endeavour’s mission operations center. Captain Okonkwo stood just behind her, surrounded by the enormous processing display that had turned his ship into the task force’s temporary brain. Captain Holt and Lieutenant Commander Selak joined from the Huygens. Captain Seven of Nine appeared from the Enterprise-G, arms folded, expression calm in the way of someone who had decided long ago that panic was inefficient.
Vale entered with Dast and Paz. Larsson joined from the Linné’s bridge, still in the center seat.
Nobody commented on their appearance.
That was kindness.
Or triage.
Haddad looked at Vale first.
“Commander.”
“Captain.”
“You brought us nine hours.”
“At most.”
“At most is more than we had.”
Seven looked from Vale to Haddad.
“The Enterprise stands ready to assist under your operational command, Captain Haddad.”
The sentence landed more heavily than it needed to.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was correct.
This was still Haddad’s mission.
The Enterprise had not arrived to replace the Linné. It had arrived because Starfleet had sent help, and because help sometimes wore a famous name.
Haddad inclined her head.
“Thank you, Captain.”
Seven continued. “Admiral Sulu reports that the Federation-side containment lattice has stabilized. Reinforcements, relay platforms, and field drones are in place. The aperture is still dangerous, but it is no longer deteriorating minute by minute.”
“That is why she sent you through,” Vale said.
“Yes.” Seven’s gaze shifted to the anomaly model. “The Enterprise was ordered to reinforce this task force, assist with closure operations, and ensure that no hostile vessel crosses into Federation space if containment fails.”
Okonkwo’s expression tightened.
“If containment fails, four starships will not be enough.”
“No,” Seven said. “They will not.”
No one mistook that for pessimism.
It was simply the truth.
Haddad gestured toward the central display.
“Then we proceed on the assumption that containment does not fail.”
The display changed.
Vale’s data packet unfolded across the table: the fourth planet, the orbital ring, the Hand of Saint Drusus, cyclonic torpedoes, the impact wound glowing across nine hundred kilometers of the planet’s surface, and fifteen large vessels turning away from the orbital battlefield toward the anomaly.
Dast stood beside the table and gave the report.
She did not dramatize it.
That made it worse.
“The planet is under active extermination. Imperial-aligned forces continue surface deployment while orbital forces bombard population centers and strategic regions. The cyclonic devices appear to be deployed in salvos. One impact was observed. Additional launches are probable.”
Selak studied the impact model.
“The psionic-resonance spike from a single impact exceeded the previous graveyard baseline by a factor of seven.”
Nilsen looked up from engineering telemetry. “One torpedo did that?”
“Yes,” Selak said.
Nilsen’s face lost some color. “Several salvos would tear the anomaly open.”
“Or make it permanent,” T’Varen said.
Jack Crusher stood near the edge of the room, close to T’Varen but not beside her. He had arrived aboard the Enterprise less than an hour ago and had been added to one of the anomaly teams almost immediately. Vale had read his file quickly: former Borg transmitter, unusual neurogenetic history, complicated relationship with the impossible.
Under ordinary circumstances, Vale would have considered that a troubling collection of words.
These were not ordinary circumstances.
Jack looked at the planet model with an expression that reminded Vale painfully of younger officers seeing their first war.
Not innocence.
The loss of a particular kind of hope.
Haddad turned to th’Ress.
“The fifteen ships?”
th’Ress brought up the formation. “They are not the same class as the first vessel that engaged Linné. Several are smaller. Three appear larger. All are heavily armed. Based on acceleration and vector, they reach the anomaly in approximately nine hours. Possibly less if they improve their transition profile.”
Seven studied the display.
“The ship that attacked Linné is still drifting?”
“Yes,” Larsson said. “Damaged but not destroyed. It will take time to restore full propulsion.”
“How much damage did you inflict?”
“Enough to slow it down,” Larsson said. “Not enough to make me comfortable.”
The display shifted again, showing the fortress-ship’s damaged engine assembly.
Okonkwo crossed his arms. “Your torpedoes took out an engine cluster. That should have crippled a vessel of comparable Federation design.”
“That is the problem,” Nilsen said. “It is not comparable.”
T’Varen brought up structural analysis.
“Their vessels appear to rely on extreme compartmentalization, redundant propulsion nodes, local power systems, and distributed weapon control. Much like Borg vessels, they may remain combat-effective despite damage that would force a Starfleet vessel into immediate withdrawal.”
“Because they do not care about crew survival,” Rao said.
The room went quiet.
Haddad looked at her.
Rao’s face was controlled, but her voice had a sharp edge.
“They destroyed their own wounded officer while he was still under our medical care. They continued deploying soldiers to a planet they were preparing to exterminate. We should stop looking for evidence that they value life in ways we recognize.”
No one challenged that.
Not because it was comfortable.
Because it was not.
Holt looked at the tactical projection. “If four Starfleet ships engage those fifteen, can we hold?”
th’Ress answered. “Temporarily.”
“Define temporarily.”
“No.”
That produced a brief silence.
Then Seven spoke.
“The Enterprise could help delay them. The Linné has already shown their firing solutions can be disrupted. Their vessels are slow to adapt to close, high-mobility engagement.”
“But they adapt,” Larsson said.
“Yes.”
Vale looked at the fifteen contacts.
“And if we destroyed them?”
Nobody answered immediately.
Haddad did.
“Then more would come.”
She expanded the image from Larsson’s first-contact exchange: thousands upon thousands of ships, not a real-time fleet image perhaps, but a statement of capacity. An assertion. A warning.
“We may have misread the scale of the civilization we provoked,” she said.
“We did not provoke them intentionally,” Holt said.
“No,” Haddad said. “But intention may not matter to them.”
The translator fragments appeared beside the image.
Imperium.
Holy Terra.
Emperor protects.
Purgation.
Exterminatus.
T’Varen clasped her hands behind her back.
“The universal translator has improved its semantic model using the additional communication exchange, the survivor’s interrogation, and intercepted traffic from the orbital engagement. Confidence remains limited. However, the term now rendered as Imperium appears to refer to a human polity of vast territorial and military scale.”
Nilsen looked at the word.
“Imperium of what?”
T’Varen paused.
“The phrase appears most often with a second term.”
She brought it up.
Man.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Vale looked from the word to the image of Earth.
“An Imperium of Man,” he said.
The sentence felt wrong in his mouth.
Too large.
Too old.
Too final.
Selak added a second analysis. “Their military expenditure patterns suggest access to resources far beyond any single-system polity. They commit city-sized warships to attritional combat. They treat those losses as acceptable.”
“They may not even consider them losses,” Seven said.
Rao’s eyes remained on the planet. “And their stated intent includes Earth.”
Haddad corrected her gently.
“Terra.”
Rao looked at her.
Haddad did not look away.
“That distinction matters to them.”
Jack spoke for the first time.
“And if they cross into our universe?”
The answer sat in the room before anyone said it.
Seven said it anyway.
“They would not need to conquer the Federation quickly. They would only need to keep coming.”
Okonkwo’s voice was low. “Klingons. Romulans. Everyone would fight.”
“Yes,” Seven said. “And perhaps that would delay them.”
“Delay,” Vale repeated.
Not defeat.
Delay.
Haddad folded her hands on the table.
“Then we do not fight that war.”
She looked at the anomaly model.
“We close the door.”
—
The science teams had divided into two camps.
Professional camps.
But camps nonetheless.
The first group occupied the Endeavour’s mission operations center. Commander Venn led the engineering model, supported by Okonkwo’s computer specialists, two Huygens subspace theorists, and one of Seven’s senior operations officers from the Enterprise. Their proposed solution was elegant, stable, and sane.
That was part of its appeal.
They called it a tachyon-field depression cascade.
Nilsen called it “pressing down on the wound until it remembers it is supposed to be closed.”
Venn did not appreciate the summary, but did not deny it.
The plan was simple in principle. All four starships would remain on the far side of the anomaly, synchronized at fixed points around the aperture. Their deflectors would project an inverse tachyon lattice through the visible breach while shield harmonics compressed the subspace fractures from the exterior. Once the field reached critical density, the aperture should collapse back toward the original Hekaras microfractures.
It kept all ships in normal space.
It avoided entering the anomaly again.
It gave each vessel clear escape vectors.
It was, by every operational standard, the safer plan.
The second group had fewer supporters.
T’Varen led the scientific side. Jack Crusher, added to the team because of his Borg-altered neurogenetic sensitivity and recent experience with collective signal structures, had begun as a consultant and rapidly become something more inconvenient: a person who saw the problem differently.
Their model did not reject the tachyon lattice.
It rejected the assumption that the breach was only a hole.
“The aperture is not the structure,” T’Varen said during the final briefing. “It is an expression of the structure.”
Venn stood on the opposite side of the table, arms folded. “That distinction may be scientifically accurate and operationally irrelevant.”
“It is operationally essential.”
Jack brought up their model.
The anomaly appeared in cross-section: visible aperture, surrounding subspace fractures, psionic-resonance flow, and a twisting internal knot of field pressure that did not sit on either side of the breach.
It sat inside it.
Jack pointed to the knot.
“That’s what keeps it open.”
Selak studied the model. “The internal resonance core.”
“Yes,” Jack said.
Venn frowned. “Your model assumes the aperture is being stabilized from inside the anomaly.”
“It is,” T’Varen said.
“You cannot prove that.”
“Not conclusively.”
“That is a problem.”
“Yes.”
Jack leaned forward. “The outside collapse will close what we can see. Maybe even for a few minutes. But the internal resonance keeps feeding on the pressure differential and the psionic field from this side. It will reopen.”
“Possibly,” Venn said.
“Probably.”
“Those are not the same word.”
“No,” Jack said. “But in this case, one of them gets everyone killed.”
The room went quiet.
Haddad watched him.
Jack looked like he regretted the tone but not the conclusion.
T’Varen continued, precise and calm.
“The first proposal closes the visible aperture. The second collapses the structure keeping it open.”
Seven looked at the internal resonance model.
“And the second proposal requires a ship inside the anomaly.”
“At least one,” T’Varen said.
Okonkwo’s expression tightened. “That ship would have to maintain deflector output while under direct anomaly pressure.”
“Yes.”
“Shields would be degraded.”
“Yes.”
“Navigation unreliable.”
“Yes.”
“And if the collapse begins before the ship exits?”
“The ship would be trapped or destroyed.”
“Yes,” T’Varen said.
Venn looked at Haddad. “The exterior cascade avoids all of those risks.”
Jack looked at her too.
“It avoids the right part of the problem.”
The briefing lasted another twenty-three minutes.
It was civil.
It was thorough.
It was excruciating.
In the end, Haddad asked each command team for recommendation.
Okonkwo supported the exterior cascade.
Holt supported the exterior cascade.
Venn supported the exterior cascade.
Selak considered the matter for eleven seconds and supported the exterior cascade as “the higher-probability operational solution under time constraint.”
Seven did not answer immediately.
When she did, her voice was careful.
“I find T’Varen and Crusher’s model persuasive. I also find it impossible to verify in the time remaining. If we choose it and they are wrong, we may lose one or more starships before the Imperial force arrives.”
Haddad nodded.
“That is not a recommendation.”
“No,” Seven said. “It is not.”
Haddad turned to Vale.
He looked at the two models.
“I do not like the safe plan,” he said. “But I cannot prove it is wrong.”
Haddad looked at T’Varen.
The Vulcan’s expression remained composed.
Jack’s did not.
Haddad sat with the silence for a moment.
Then she made the decision.
“We proceed with the tachyon-field depression cascade.”
Jack closed his eyes.
Only for a second.
T’Varen inclined her head.
“Acknowledged.”
There was no argument.
No dramatic refusal.
No accusation.
The wrong solution won because it looked more like a solution.
And because time was running out.
—
Jack Crusher left the briefing before he said something he could not take back.
He did not storm out.
He was too much his father’s son for that.
Or perhaps too much his mother’s.
Either way, he left with his jaw tight, his hands clenched, and the words still burning in his skull.
The first proposal closes the visible aperture.
The second collapses the structure keeping it open.
They had understood.
That was what made it worse.
They had understood and still chosen the wrong plan.
He reached the guest quarters assigned to him aboard the Enterprise, stepped inside, and let the door close behind him.
For a moment, he stood in the dark.
Then he said, “Computer, seal doors. Privacy mode.”
The computer acknowledged.
Jack paced once across the room.
Then again.
He stopped by the viewport.
The anomaly turned beyond the glass. The impossible wound. The thing they were about to treat from the outside because the inside was too dangerous.
He thought of the Borg.
Of voices in his head.
Of his mother’s fear.
Of his father’s impossible moral certainty and equally impossible blind spots.
Of Q.
That last thought should have made him stop.
It did not.
“Q,” Jack said.
Nothing happened.
He felt foolish immediately.
Then angry.
Then foolish again.
“Q,” he said louder. “If you can hear me, if this is the kind of thing you hear, we need help.”
The room remained silent.
Jack laughed once, without humor.
“Of course.”
He turned away.
Then stopped.
The air had changed.
Not sound.
Not light.
Something in the room had become attentive.
A shimmer formed near the viewport. Soft at first, almost like reflection, then brighter. Not the flash of Q. Not a transporter. Not any technology Jack recognized.
A figure stepped out of the light.
Young.
Older.
Both.
Human in shape, but not held to the idea as tightly as most humans were.
Jack knew him instantly.
He had never met him.
That did not matter.
“Wesley.”
Wesley Crusher smiled faintly.
“Yes,” he said. “I have had that name. It is fine to use it.”
Jack stared.
“I called Q.”
“I noticed.”
“Are you here instead?”
“That is one way to describe it.”
“Can you help us?”
“No.”
Jack’s frustration broke through. “Then why are you here?”
Wesley’s expression softened.
“Because you called for help.”
“That sounds like helping.”
“It is not the same thing.”
Jack let out a breath and ran a hand through his hair.
“Right. Of course. Fine. Can you tell me what to do?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me if we’re right?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me anything useful?”
Wesley looked toward the anomaly outside the viewport.
“I can tell you a story.”
Jack stared at him.
“You appear in my quarters after I call Q, refuse to help, refuse to answer, and offer me a story?”
“You called Q?” Wesley smiled faintly. “Ambitious. Risky. A little desperate. Very Picard.”
Jack did not laugh.
Wesley did not seem to mind.
“Your father once had to ask Q for help because he had found something too large for pride,” Wesley said. “He survived that lesson. Not comfortably. But he survived it.”
“This is not about my father.”
“No,” Wesley said. “It is about what you do when the people around you are making the best wrong decision available.”
Jack looked away.
Wesley continued.
“Someone once told me that the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth. It is an easy sentence to admire after the fact. Much harder in the room where nobody wants to hear it.”
Jack’s voice dropped.
“I tried.”
“No,” Wesley said gently. “You accepted that trying once was the same as standing by the truth.”
That landed harder than Jack wanted it to.
Wesley stepped closer.
“I cannot close this for you. I cannot give you proof they will accept. I cannot make command decisions for Starfleet.”
“Then what can you do?”
“I can remind you that you already know what you know.”
Jack looked at him.
The light around Wesley had begun to fade.
“Trust yourself,” Wesley said. “And if that is too difficult, trust the Vulcan who agreed with you.”
Despite everything, Jack almost smiled.
“That may be the most practical thing you’ve said.”
“I have my moments.”
The light brightened again.
“Wesley—”
“Yes?”
Jack searched for the right question.
There were too many.
Are you my brother?
Are you human?
Are you still out there?
Will we survive this?
Instead he asked, “Will I see you again?”
Wesley’s smile changed.
“Probably.”
Then he was gone.
The room returned to darkness.
Jack stood alone by the viewport.
The anomaly turned beyond the glass.
He did not feel reassured.
That was not what had happened.
He felt responsible.
Which was worse.
And better.
“Computer,” Jack said, “locate Lieutenant T’Varen.”
—
T’Varen did not appear surprised when Jack found her in the Enterprise science lab.
That annoyed him slightly.
“You expected me,” he said.
“I expected you might come.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
He entered.
She was standing over the internal resonance model, the one nobody had chosen.
It had grown more complex since the briefing.
“You kept working,” Jack said.
“Of course.”
“They made the decision.”
“Yes.”
“And you kept working.”
“The decision was not consistent with the strongest available model.”
Jack looked at her.
A strange calm settled over him.
“All right,” he said. “Then we go to Haddad.”
“That would be the logical next step.”
“You are very composed for someone about to tell the fleet captain she made the wrong call.”
“I do not intend to describe it that way.”
“How do you intend to describe it?”
T’Varen picked up the padd containing the revised model.
“Accurately.”
Jack nodded.
“Good enough.”
—
Haddad was in the Endeavour’s mission operations center when they arrived.
Around her, officers from four ships were preparing the exterior cascade: shield harmonics, deflector couplings, tachyon generators, power-transfer sequences, escape routes, fallback options.
Workstations glowed with the wrong solution.
Efficient.
Elegant.
Doomed.
Haddad looked up as Jack and T’Varen approached.
“Lieutenant. Mr. Crusher.”
Jack glanced at T’Varen.
She gave the smallest possible nod.
He stepped forward.
“Captain, we are doing this wrong.”
Several officers turned.
Haddad did not.
She only looked at him.
“Go on.”
The words came faster than Jack expected.
Not panicked.
Not angry.
Clear.
“The exterior cascade will close the visible aperture. It may even collapse the outer subspace fracture. But the internal resonance core will survive. If it survives, the breach reopens. Maybe immediately. Maybe when the Imperial fleet hits the field. Maybe when the next cyclonic impact feeds it from the planet. But it reopens.”
Venn crossed the room. “We discussed this.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “And we chose the plan that looks survivable over the plan that actually works.”
“That is an assertion.”
“It is,” T’Varen said.
Everyone looked at her.
T’Varen brought up the revised model.
“I have updated the resonance map using telemetry from Linnaeus Two’s observation of the cyclonic impact, Linné’s combat sensor data, and the latest anomaly drift. The internal core is more stable than we believed. Commander Venn’s exterior cascade will reduce the aperture by approximately eighty-seven percent.”
Venn looked at the model.
“That sounds like success.”
“It is not,” T’Varen said. “It leaves the stabilizing structure intact.”
The model changed.
A simulated aperture collapsed under the exterior cascade.
For three seconds it vanished.
Then a thread of red-black light reappeared inside the center of the model.
It widened.
Slowly.
Inevitably.
No one spoke.
Jack pointed at it.
“That is why it keeps adapting. We are pressing on the wound. Something inside is holding it open.”
Haddad studied the model.
“How confident?”
T’Varen answered.
“Ninety-one percent that the exterior cascade alone fails within hours. Sixty-eight percent that it fails catastrophically if the Imperial fleet reaches firing range during or immediately after collapse.”
Okonkwo, nearby, swore under his breath.
Haddad looked at Jack.
“And your solution?”
“Still dangerous,” he said. “Still ugly. Still the only one that collapses the structure.”
T’Varen overlaid the second plan.
“At least one ship must enter the anomaly and project an inverted resonance shear from within the core. Ships outside the aperture then collapse the Hekaras-side and local subspace fractures simultaneously. The internal ship does not close the door. It removes the hinge.”
Nilsen, listening from engineering via comm, muttered, “That is offensively poetic for a Vulcan.”
T’Varen ignored him.
Venn looked at the projected stress levels.
“The ship inside will take impossible shield strain.”
“Not impossible,” T’Varen said. “Severe.”
“Severe enough to destroy it.”
“Yes.”
Jack looked at Haddad.
“She was right in the first briefing,” he said. “The first proposal closes the visible aperture. The second collapses the structure keeping it open.”
Haddad looked from Jack to T’Varen.
T’Varen had been cautious from the beginning. Conservative with conclusions. Reluctant to name what she could not prove. Every time she had finally said something, it had mattered.
Hekaras.
The human baseline.
The language structure.
The psionic-resonance field.
Exterminatus.
And now this.
Haddad turned to Venn.
“Can we alter the operation in time?”
Venn looked furious for half a second.
Not at Haddad.
At the universe.
Then she began working.
“If we cannibalize the exterior lattice and retask Endeavour’s main deflector, maybe. We need one ship inside the anomaly with strong shields and enough deflector control to project the inverted shear.”
“Endeavour,” Okonkwo said immediately.
Haddad looked at him.
“It is your ship.”
“Yes,” Okonkwo said. “And it has the strongest shield capacity and the most processing margin. If this plan requires someone to sit inside that thing and hold the geometry steady, we are the logical choice.”
Seven spoke from the Enterprise channel.
“The Enterprise can take the second internal position.”
Haddad shook her head. “No. I need you outside. If the Imperial ships arrive before closure, you and Huygens are our best chance of keeping them off the aperture.”
Seven did not like it.
She accepted it.
“Huygens can maintain outer-lattice precision,” Holt said. “But we are not a brawler.”
“No one is asking you to brawl,” Haddad said. “I am asking you to be exact.”
Holt nodded once.
“That we can do.”
Venn looked up.
“We need a second ship inside the anomaly. Not for the primary shear. For field counter-rotation. It does not need Endeavour’s capacity, but it needs to survive long enough to hold the phase.”
The room went still.
Everyone knew which ship remained.
The damaged one.
The one that had already survived the crossing once.
The one whose shield grid was burned, patched, unstable, and somehow still there.
Haddad said it before anyone else could.
“Linné.”
Nilsen’s voice came over the channel.
“Captain, as your chief engineer, I am professionally required to hate that idea.”
“Can she do it?”
A pause.
Too long.
“Yes,” Nilsen said finally. “For a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Long enough to matter. Not long enough to make anyone comfortable.”
Haddad closed her eyes briefly.
When she opened them, the decision had been made.
“Change the operation. We proceed with the internal resonance-shear plan.”
Venn nodded and began issuing orders.
Okonkwo turned to his team.
Holt began reassigning sensor-pod power.
Seven spoke quietly to someone off-screen aboard the Enterprise.
Jack looked at T’Varen.
T’Varen gave him no smile.
No praise.
Only a small nod.
It was enough.
Haddad looked at him.
“Mr. Crusher.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“You were right to come back.”
Jack swallowed.
“Thank you.”
Haddad’s expression remained steady.
“Do not make me regret it.”
“No, Captain.”
Outside the ships, the anomaly continued to turn.
The visible wound pulsed once.
As if it had heard.
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. I do not own any of the recognizable worlds, characters, or trademarks featured in this story; they belong exclusively to their respective owners. I make no money from this work.