“I don’t get it,” Lieutenant Commander Elena Mattson said as she stared out at the stars beyond. “We look out, and we can see what’s there, but when we hit it with our subspace scanners, we get nothing. Not a star, a planet, nor even an asteroid. Just nothing.” Having spent her career at the operations station, she found comfort in the overload of telemetry that typically flowed across her screens, and the silence of this particular moment was disconcerting.

“Not to be a downer, but we don’t actually know if any of what we’re seeing is still there,” Lieutenant Akil al-Qadir noted as stepped towards the window, picking a familiar feature out from the starscape. “Take this nebula here.” He pointed at a dim blue aura hanging motionless in the darkness. “This is Gamma Hydrae… or more accurately, it is the light emitted from Gamma Hydrae sixty five years ago.” Space was big and light only traveled so fast. When you looked out into the night’s sky, you were seeing history.

“Why is it people always say they’re not gonna do something right before they do?” Fleet Captain Devreux grumbled. “Not that you’re incorrect, mind you. It really is so easy, in this modern era, to take superluminality for granted.” Everything they were looking at now could have been erased from existence, and they would be none the wiser. Not for years and years. Not until the light caught up to them.

“Did we learn anything from the probe?” Captain Bishop asked. The night prior, they had fired a long range probe, one of those typically used for deep space surveying, out from the Polaris at warp 2.5 along the same vector as the IKS Korevoth had been on when it disappeared.

“Right before we lost contact, it picked up some strange convolutions of the subspace medium, but nothing I could make heads or tales from,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson reported. “I sent them down to the lab to review further.” She looked over at Lieutenant al-Qadir.

“We’re in the process of trying to analyze it now, but it’s… umm… not going particularly well so far,” Lieutenant al-Qadir admitted. “None of the conventional math aligns with the observational data so we’re having to construct an entirely new set of field equations to describe whatever the hell the medium was that the probe was moving through.” His eyes then fell to the deck. This was not his discipline. He was just filling in. “Unfortunately, our pool of genius-level subspace field theorists is a tad depleted these days.” Dr. Lockwood and Ensign Vok had died on Archanis Station in December, and then they’d lost Dr. Brooks and Commodore Larsen aboard the IKS Korevoth when it disappeared into the blackout. “If anyone happens to stumble across a Ph.D. in subspace mechanics stowed away somewhere, please send them my way.”

Fleet Admiral Reyes, who’d been sitting quietly reviewing a PADD while the others talked, set it down and looked over at Lieutenant al-Qadir. She could see the frustration on his face, and she didn’t blame him in the slightest. On her PADD, she’d been trying to make sense of the same data that was frustrating him. “No Ph.D. on my wall, but I can twiddle with some tensors and manifolds. Why don’t I come down with you, Akil, after we finish here?”

“I would appreciate that, ma’am,” Lieutenant al-Qadir smiled sheepishly. He’d worked with many commanders who’d either never set foot in the lab because they thought they were above it, or who you wished never would because they’d just make a mess of it. Allison Reyes was neither of those though. She wasn’t afraid to engage, and whenever she did, she added value.

For a moment, there was silence, but then Captain Bishop jumped back in: “Commander Mattson, what about at the very moment we lost contact? Any emissions at that moment?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson recounted. “Just like the Korevoth, it proceeded along, intact and in contact, and then, right at 609 AU from our present position, it just disappeared without a trace.”

“Could it simply be that the signal isn’t getting back to us?” Fleet Captain Devreux asked. So far, all they knew was that their subspace carrier waves and subspace scanners couldn’t penetrate the boundary. They knew nothing about what the boundary meant for physical matter, but they couldn’t risk taking the Polaris through. Not with sixteen hundred lives aboard. “Could the probe just be continuing on in its journey without a care in the world?”

“Unlikely,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson shook her head. She had anticipated this as a possibility as they prepped the probe. “We programmed the probe to loop back at a distance of 1000 AU. Launched at 2240 hours last night, if it had maintained a consistent speed of warp 2.5 for its entire journey, it should have crossed back across the 609 AU comms boundary again at 0749 this morning.” But it didn’t, and that’s why they were sitting here now.

“Could it have been destroyed by the boundary?” Captain Bishop asked. His instincts, while not based on any tangible data, leaned towards destruction as the likeliest answer, even though, if he was right, that meant Commodore Larsen, Lieutenant Commander Ryder and Dr. Brooks were already dead.

“It is completely possible, but just as we can’t even tell if Gamma Hydrae still exists, there’s no way for us to know for certain,” Lieutenant Commander Mattson noted. “Even if it was destroyed right at the boundary, it will still be another three days and ten hours before any emissions reach us. We’ll be watching and waiting, but be aware that it’s also possible that, if it was consumed, it’s also possible that the mechanism may have no detectable spectral signature.”

“Could we at least move closer to the boundary to reduce the observational delay?” Fleet Captain Devreux asked. As accustomed as they all were to the comforts afforded by the subspace medium, it felt so strange to be sitting here waiting for photons to reach them.

“I would advise that,” Captain Bishop cautioned. “We know very little about this anomaly. We selected this as a minimum safe distance for a reason.” And he would have selected further if he’d had his way. “We have time.”

“Do we?” asked Fleet Captain Devreux, directing his attention back towards the admiral. It would ultimately be her call. “The natives are already getting restless. General Kloss just called a short time ago to say he’s not going to just sit idle on his hands much longer.”

“Good for him,” Admiral Reyes said sharply. “If he’d like to be helpful, he’s welcome to get off his ass and do something besides glower at us from his Bortasqu’. It sounds like Akil has some math for them to do.”

“Fat chance,” chuckled Fleet Captain Devreux.

“Yeah, not likely, but really, I don’t care what the hell they do. They can menace at us off our bow, or they can bugger off back to K’t’inga… or heck, they could fly off into the blackout.” There was no love lost between them. She knew what General Kloss had played a part in, and the pain it had wrought, and it was almost sad she’d never truly make him pay. “As for us, we hold position, right here, until we crack this mystery and find our people.”