Ekkomas Eidran sat in the bay, five cargo containers in a line before him, makeshift coffins that he and Chief Abedayo had fashioned for their five teammates. It had all happened so fast. One second, they’d taken the chamber. The next, that grenade. That’s all it took to lose your life. 

One damn second, and one damn grenade.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran flashed back to March 2401, just over a year ago, when that Jem’Hadar fighter had struck the saucer section of the USS Serenity. Mark Gilliam, the first captain to believe in him, had died in an instant. Mark and thirty others. That had been in the opening moments of the Lost Fleet crisis, and it hadn’t gotten any easier after that. They had narrowly avoided losing it all in the clouds of Minara, sure, but the battle in Ciatar Nebula had hurt. There they’d taken the hits for the USS Mariner so she could deliver her precious cargo to the Lost Fleet, cargo that helped end the war, but dozens had died on that sorry day.

The Lost Fleet crisis had scarred him. Lieutenant Commander Eidran had never seen war before that. But at least it was over after Minara – or at least that was what he’d thought. 

But then they’d travelled to Earth, right on the eve of Frontier Day, Fleet Admiral Reyes pursuing a lead, a conspiracy within Starfleet itself. But before they could stop it, the Borg revealed themselves, and he was shot in the back by his own man, a young security officer overcome by the assimilation signal. When Eidran had awoken, he’d found the ship a morgue, over fifty dead on the Serenity, both those taken by the signal and those who’d resisted. Across the fleet, it had been orders of magnitude more, too, tens of thousands dead.

In comparison to all of that, it had almost been nice to be lost in the Beta Quadrant. 

Yes, they had been on their own, thousands of light years from everything they knew, but out there, they’d forged something more. He and Cora Lee had fallen in love. Captain Lewis had taken on a fatherly-like figure, something he’d never known growing up. And the rest of the crew, they’d become like a family. Sure, there’d been struggles, but all things considered, they were the simple type. 

Nothing like this. Not like war. He’d almost forgotten what this felt like. War.

This isolation didn’t help either, sitting on the deck of a cold alien ship racing through the orange-brown soup of the Underspace, besides the dead bodies, just him, the stalwart chief Kevin Abedayo, the ice cold Romulan Sena, the scrappy engineer Delaney Brewster, and the daredevil pilot Priyanka Dhawan. Five dead and five alive. He’d been their leader, the one that was supposed to see them through, and half of them were dead now.

His mind drifted to the others, to those in far off places, to Captain Lewis, his mentor, and Commander Lee, his lover, the pair having taken the Serenity and the Ingenuity to destroy the other array. Was it like this for them too? He hoped not. He hoped with all his heart they’d seen victory, and that it had not come with a price like this. Fleet Admiral Reyes and Captain Vox too, and all those that had journeyed beyond the galactic plane to strike the Vaadwaur command and logistics hub they’d made vulnerable by bringing the arrays down.

Please let this be the worst of it, he thought to himself. But in his heart, he knew that was a foolish thought. They, at least, had been concealed by this trojan horse, the Manasa gunboat they’d commandeered. The Serenity and the Ingenuity had assaulted their target head on, and the Polaris, the Diligent, and whatever they had rallied to their cause, they had gone direct with the enemy fleet defending the hub. What price had they paid for that?

The door to the bay hissed open behind him, and Lieutenant Commander Sena, the Romulan xenotechnologist, stepped through. “It’s not healthy to sit with the dead.” Not to stew, at least. That was clearly what the Betazoid was doing.

“It’s not healthy to forget them either,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran replied, not even turning, his eyes still fixed on the cargo containers before him. “Our choices have consequences.” Five dead on his watch. Was there something he could have done to see a different outcome?

“You did the best you could,” the Romulan offered. After her time with the Tal Shiar, she was immune to the grief and doubt stricken across her face, but it didn’t mean she didn’t understand it. “They knew what they signed up for. When Captain Lewis assembled this team, he was very clear with them. And with you.” What did Eidran think would happen when they went aboard the enemy array? Did he think the Vaadwaur would just roll over and die? No, they’d fight tooth and nail, and sometimes you had to give a life to take a life.

“Yes, I know what he said, but in training and in prep, you don’t think… you don’t really think this will happen,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran admitted. “You think you’ll get in there, do your thing, and come home.”

“Then you’re not thinking hard enough,” Lieutenant Commander Sena scrutinized. “We’re not somehow so much better than our enemy. They were intent on killing us, and we were intent on killing them. If it’s any solace, many more of them died than of us.” They’d managed to destroy the array, three Manasa gunboats, and an Astika battlecruiser, and all they’d lost was five men. That was a pretty good outcome, the best really any of them could have expected.

Still, it was little solace to the Betazoid.

“Everyone dies,” Lieutenant Commander Sena added. “It’s only a matter of when and how.”

That didn’t help.

“I didn’t come down here to commiserate, though,” Lieutenant Commander Sena shrugged. She wasn’t going to hang around for a pity party. “I came to tell you that we’re just about to arrive in the K’t’inga system.”

For days, they’d raced through the Underspace, but now their journey was at an end. Not just the journey to and from the Vaadwaur array, ten days out and back, but also their six months stranded in the furthest reaches of the Beta Quadrant. The Vaadwaur presented an existential threat to the galaxy, but to the crews of the Serenity and Ingenuity, the return of the Underspace had also brought them a way home.

That, at least, was a silver lining. Or was it? Lieutenant Commander Eidran had no doubt what awaited them when they emerged. More war. More death. But it was what it was. He rose from the floor and straightened his uniform. “Alright, let’s do this.”

It would be nice, at least, to see Cora and Captain Lewis again. And the others too.