While Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes tried to get the Choradian Overwarden to see reason, Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux slipped out of frame and made his way over to the science station where Commodore Olivia Larsen was set up.

“Any idea what he’s talking about?” he asked in a hushed tone.

“This is Chorad IXa,” she explained as she gestured at her screen. “One of the largest lunar bodies in the system, and the only one with significant anthropogenic development.”

What drew the fleet captain’s attention, though, was not the large moon that sat center of the commodore’s screen, but rather the hundreds of fine, luminous lines superimposed through it. “What are these? It looks sort of like a scrambled bowl of spaghetti.”

“It is, sort of, and that’s the problem,” Commodore Larsen noted. “They’re chronometric field lines, and they’re supposed to have a smooth, consistent curvature.” But these were anything but smooth and consistent, a bent and tangled mess of chaotic loops wrapping around themselves and each other. It was unlike anything she’d ever seen before, and it shouldn’t have been possible. “I’d wager the house that this is the reason for the causal inconsistencies in the distress call we received yesterday.”

Distress call, she’d said. Not distress calls. He knew her to be too precise for a flip like that to be anything but intentional, and the mention of causal inconsistencies… “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I think so,” Commodore Larsen nodded. “Dr. Brooks and I will need more time with this, but I’m fairly certain it wasn’t three calls we received.”

“It was three versions of the same call,” Fleet Captain Devreux filled in the rest.

Commodore Larsen nodded. “Something has gone seriously wrong on Chorad IXa.”

“Something went awry six months ago,” Fleet Captain Devreux connected the dots. “And right at the same time, the Shroud lifted. That timing is quite a coincidence.”

As he pondered what it might all mean, his attention drifted back to the front of the room where Fleet Admiral Reyes was still struggling to make progress with the Overwarden.

“The sky opened up, and your kind appeared. For a moment, my people felt optimism, but I did not. I knew this was coming. I remembered the parables, the stories of ancient times when great beings walked the sky. You are not great, not like them, but just like them, you restrain us.”

Parables and fables. Not what Fleet Admiral Reyes wanted to contend with. Maybe something worth exploring later, but for now, she needed to better understand what he thought they’d done to his people. “How did we restrain you?”

“Chorad IXa was our only local source of dilithium, and now it is closed to us. You walk freely, just like they did, while with our moon taken from us, all we can do is sit here and watch, just like our ancestors.”

The Overwarden’s words were steeped in legend, but there was a logic to them, and it was going to be hard to unwind it. “I assure you we have no intention of restraining your people,” Fleet Admiral Reyes offered. “In fact, in an offer of friendship, we would be happy to help you secure a supply of dilithium if that is an urgent need.”

For a moment, she saw a glimmer of hope, a softening in the Overwarden’s face. “We would appreciate that…” he began to say, but then, as if he remembered himself, he snapped right back to the stubborn soldier she’d been jousting with.“But this could all be a trick. If you really weren’t involved, tell me what is going on with our moon.”

“I don’t know what’s happened to your moon,” Fleet Admiral Reyes replied exasperatedly. They were going in circles. “We just arrived here a few minutes ago.”

Fleet Captain Devreux, armed with a bit more knowledge than his boss, decided now was a good time to re-enter the conversation. “We don’t know yet, Overwarden,” he offered as he stepped back onto the command island and into the frame.

Fleet Admiral Reyes looked over at her old friend with a mix of surprise and relief. If he had something, she was happy to let him run with it.

“We don’t know yet, but we’re working on it,” Fleet Captain Devreux continued. “We want to help. That’s why we came here. Even in just the last few minutes, our scientists have turned our sensors towards Chorad IXa, and down in the lab, they’re already pouring over the data coming back. We can’t give you a definitive answer yet, as we don’t have it ourselves, but together, we will solve this.”

The Overwarden said nothing, taken aback by the convictions in the man’s voice. Maybe they were actually telling the truth. Maybe.

Fleet Captain Devreux could see the Overwarden’s doubt wavering, so he kept going, trying to keep the conversation moving in a productive direction and avoid a regression. “Our sensors show chronometric disturbances – distortions in the flow of time – all over the surface of your moon. We don’t know why, but maybe you could tell us a bit more about what happened when this all started?”

When this all started. When these people showed up in the Expanse. That’s right. He wouldn’t be so easily swayed. Still, what harm was there in seeing where this led? And so, he shared a bit more. “On a summer’s night, every facility on Chorad IXa went silent. At first, we thought it was a malfunction, but then the distress calls started to arrive. They were chaotic, fragmented, and looping, voices repeating themselves, timestamps all over the place, sometimes the ends of sentences before their beginnings.”

Fleet Captain Devreux nodded knowingly. “Just like the distress call we received.” To share as such was to try and find common ground. “What did you do next?”

“We sent rescue ships,” Overwarden Var replied, his eyes growing dark as he spoke. “But for weeks, we heard nothing. Then one ship, just a single one out of the half dozen we sent, was located adrift near Chorad V. And aboard that ship, there was just a single pilot, one out of a hundred men I sent to the moon, the only to ever be seen again.”

“I’m sorry,” Fleet Captain Devreux’s face fell. He knew that feeling of loss all too well, that grief for the officers that went out on your orders, only to never come home. That’d been the story, again and again, for the last two years.

“You’re sorry for whom?” Overwarden Var raised an eyebrow. “Are you sorry for the lost? Or are you sorry for the one that made it home?”

“I’m sorry for the lost, sir,” Fleet Captain Devreux assured him. “I too have seen far too many good men and women not make it…”

But Overwarden Var cut him off. “Oh no, mister Starfleet, you see, the dead, they are at least at peace,” he clarified. “But Line Chief Jax, the one who lived, he went mad. Frankly, I’d rather be dead than like him.”

The bridge was silent. It was quite a thing to say.

“To this day, his speech is broken, his tenses confused, his sense of self lost between effect and cause, remembering events that haven’t happened, and forgetting those that have,” Overwarden Var elaborated. “And the doctors, they say he aged a year, but he was only gone two weeks! None of it makes any sense. Line Chief Jax was a good man, and now this.”

As she listened to the Overwarden’s description, Fleet Admiral Reyes couldn’t help but note the similarity between his description and the mad scientist down in her lab. What he was describing sounded eerily similar to Dr. Brooks’ struggles, except that his pilot was almost certainly less prepared for the experience than Tom had been.

“What is survival if you are not whole? Because I can tell you he is not,” Overwarden Var kept going. “Out of pure mercy for his fractured mind, we’ve had to keep him in near-constant sedation to prevent him from clawing his eyes out. There was only one cogent thing he ever said to us, and it still haunts me to this day… do you want to know what it was he said?”

Fleet Captain Devreux nodded.

“They’re still down there. All of them. Over and over again.”