The wind blew, and in only one direction. The cacophony of overlapping sounds had ceased, and disjoint light had settled. The colony was dark, the power out, but at least it was dark consistently. Time had caught up with itself at last, the fragments finally aligned.

“I’ve never appreciated uniformity like I do now,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor offered as the away team emerged from the deep mine beneath the surface of Chorad IXa.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to appreciate it,” Dr. Brooks warned as he nodded towards a pair of corpses that lay motionless in the dirt. One was the man they’d watched die when the conduit exploded, and next to him was the girl they’d witnessed cry out as he fell.

As Lieutenant Commander Taylor looked at the pair mournfully, he noticed something. “They both appear in quite advanced stages of decay.” By their clothes, shredded by the elements, and their skin, desiccated and drawn tight to the bone, it appeared they’d been dead for weeks.

Lieutenant Commander Sena walked over to the pair, already a sense for what she’d find as she scanned them with her tricorder. “Both deceased between eighteen and twenty two weeks.”

“But we just saw them…” Lieutenant Commander Taylor began to say. It’d been only hours ago that they’d entered the mine, only hours since they’d watched the man die and the girl cry out.

“We witnessed a causal strand held onto by a moon in conflict with itself,” Dr. Brooks corrected coolly.

“An echo of a moment too stubborn to die,” Voragh added.

“Until we terminated it,” Lieutenant Commander Sena noted.

A horrified look washed over Lieutenant Commander Taylor’s face as he realized what they were saying. “Wait, are you saying… did we, when we reset the spire… could we have…” he stammered, a sick sense developing in his stomach. “Could we have saved them?”

“We just closed the loop,” Dr. Brooks replied, shooting the Klingon and the Romulan a look as if begging them not to elaborate. “They were already dead.” It wasn’t exactly true, the moon not in a single causal presentation until they stabilized the spire, but he didn’t want to get into it with the xenoarchaeologist. It wasn’t like they could have picked and chosen reality anyways.

While the individual deaths didn’t trouble her, Dr. Hall recognized a deeper implication. “Sena, how many biosigns are you actually detecting now if you do a broad spectrum scan across the entire colony?” Given what they’d experienced when separated from their anchors, she’d wondered how any of the colonists had survived for months. Now, she recognized a hard truth.

Lieutenant Commander Sena queued it up and answered promptly: “Sixty seven.”

“Out of a colony of several thousand…” Lieutenant Commander Taylor murmured, shock flooding across his face. “Fuck. How?”

“How not?” Dr. Hall asked coldly. “You lived through the chronometric turbulence for what… just a couple minutes?”

It had been pure horror, the xenoarchaeologist knew. As the chronometric currents ripped at his body and mind, he’d barely managed to key in the strokes to realign his anchor before it took him.

“Could you have lived like that for days? Or weeks? Or months?” Dr. Hall probed. Running a colony didn’t just take living through it either. It required maintenance and coordination. “That there’s anyone still alive is frankly the most shocking aspect of the whole thing.”

“If you can even call it life,” Dr. Brooks cautioned. “Their dissociation will make mine and Jax’s look like a mild temporal hangover. Their healing process will be a crucible in and of itself.”

“An honorable death would be a gentler fate,” Voragh concurred, looking back at the young couple whose corpses lay dead in the dust. A mercy killing by the universe, if they were honest with themselves.

“I don’t disagree, except for one bit…” Lieutenant Commander Sena interjected. “It wasn’t just a few minutes.” While the others had talked, she’d run an analysis of stellar position on a hunch.

The others looked at her curiously.

“It was almost four days.”

Dr. Brooks smiled, reveling in the magic of time. Voragh chortled, impressed by what time had done. Dr. Hall simply took it in, the passage of time not carrying any particular meaning. And Lieutenant Commander Taylor looked shocked, time yet again proving a headache. 

But before anyone could say another word, Dr. Brooks’ combadge chirped to life.

“Polaris to away team,” came the voice of Commodore Olivia Larsen. “Report?”

“The team is all accounted for, and the anomaly has been stabilized,” Dr. Brooks replied cheerily. “It was quite an adventure, Liv. You really missed out, if I do say so myself.”

Looking around the lunar colony, or what little remained after being left in complete disrepair for months, and eyeing the handful of colonists now emerging from their shelters, the traumatized few that had somehow survived the storm, the others could not find it in themselves to agree. But at least they had set time straight, and now the recovery could begin.