“Their journey will not be easy,” Dr. Brooks reflected as he watched the Choradian cutter pull away, the survivors returning home at last. How long they’d been away, that was a matter of perspective, but that it had changed them was not up for debate.

“Speaking from personal experience?” Voragh asked. The aged astrophysicist had not shared much with the Klingon about his past, but from the bits he’d inferred from hints dropped by him and Dr. Hall, he had a sense there was more to Dr. Brooks’ story.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Dr. Brooks nodded. The mind had a curious way of making do. Dr. Hall would describe it as a function of neuroplasticity that sixty seven of them had managed through the chronometric storm, but now that adaptation would challenge them as they tried to find normalcy again. Just as it had for him. “Curious as it is to say, I find myself feeling for them and what lies ahead.”

“So you are human after all,” Lieutenant Commander Sena smirked, leaving up for interpretation whether she meant it as a complement or an insult.

Suddenly, the door to the lab hissed open, drawing their attention as Dr. Hall and Commodore Larsen stepped through, the pair freshly returned from their trip to Chorad III to debrief with the locals after the events that had unfolded on Chorad IXa.

“I trust the visit with High Prefect Rho went well?” Dr. Brooks asked.

“She’s certainly warmed to us,” Dr. Hall smirked. “At least a bit.”

“Funny how that always seems to happen after we save their bacon,” Dr. Brooks chuckled.

“Don’t get it twisted though,” Commodore Larsen cautioned. “She was quite dismayed at the loss of life, and about the limited degree of information we could provide, but at least she agreed the disaster wasn’t by our hand, and she left the door open to further dialogue between our peoples.”

Of course, it wasn’t completely true that they hadn’t had a hand in the disaster. The Wall had changed the topology of the region. But Dr. Brooks wasn’t going to press the point. Some things were best left unsaid. Instead, he moved onto a more salient point: “Did she agree to a permanent Starfleet presence on the moon?”

“Reluncantly, and with some clever negotiation by Admiral Reyes, they eventually came around,” Commodore Larsen shared.

“Those who decline the guidance of those who grasp the nature of the enemy invite disaster,” Voragh offered. “Wise of them to accept our offer.”

“And the only appropriate outcome,” Lieutenant Commander Sena added pointedly. She recognized the existential threat that lay buried beneath the surface of Chorad IXa, and since they had not destroyed it as she would have preferred, the only other option was to secure it. Its capabilities were not something that could be left to the primitives of this place, or to whomever came along and found it next.

“What, then, comes next for us?” Dr. Brooks asked, selfishly hoping they might still get to spend a bit more time in the Chorad system to study the artifact before they moved onto the next crisis of the week.

“Admiral Reyes committed to the Choradians that we will stick around for some time to assist with repairs,” Commodore Larsen explained. “It’s good for strengthening ties, and it’ll give you some more time with the moon.” She knew exactly where his motivations lay.

“It also gives us some time to help the survivors on their path to recovery,” Dr. Hall chimed in. She had briefly interacted with several of the survivors, and the impacts of the events that had unfolded on the moon would not soon pass, neither in terms of temporal dissociation, nor in terms of more mundane challenges like grief and survivor’s guilt.

“Give you time to help them?” Dr. Brooks scoffed. “You mean time to study them.” Just like she’d studied him. Her motivations were never so selfless. Not that he had any issue with it.

Dr. Hall needed not to reply. They all knew it to be true.

“Speaking of study,” Commodore Larsen shifted the conversation. “Now that you’ve had some time to study the data, anyone willing to offer a conjecture as to what we found down there?”

“An instrument of this symphony’s composer,” Voragh offered poetically, not quick to abandon the metaphors that had carried them through the song.

“A clue as to the origin of this place,” Dr. Brooks elaborated in more concrete terms. “The simpletons at Starfleet Science modeled the Shroud as an energy-dampening field formed by the obelisks the Fourth Fleet has identified across the Expanse, but if their crude model was right, subspace comms and sensors would have gone to hell too. They didn’t, which means their whole premise is bunk.”

“And why do I get the sense you’re about to propose a better answer?” Commodore Larsen furled her brow, sensing she was about to get a pile of high-science conjectures untethered from any empirical foundation.

“Because I am,” Dr. Brooks smiled. “Equating the Shroud to an energy-dampening system is like regarding space as three dimensional. More accurately, we now know the Shroud was the product of a chronometric lattice flattening local curvature of the spacetime hypersurface.”

She knew what the words meant, and could infer how they went together, but how he’d made such a bold leap, she didn’t see it. And she’d seen the same data as the rest of them.

“Mass-heavy systems can achieve high warp speeds because time at the bow progresses fractionally faster than time at the stern,” Dr. Brooks continued, reveling in the long-winded journey he was taking her on as he headed for the grand reveal. “Erase those microgradients, and the manifold loses grip, creating a superluminal limit to acceleration.” He paused for effect and then dropped the mic. “That, my dear, is how the Shroud imposed a warp speed barrier on the Expanse.”

Ignoring his belittling ‘my dear’ he’d interwoven into his claim, Commodore Larsen wasn’t able to disagree outright that if such conditions actually existed, they could create an inertia lock. But that didn’t mean he was right. Other equally unlikely mechanisms could produce a similar effect, and she’d seen no direct evidence that his theory was any more probable. “The moon somehow told you all of this? That’s quite a leap, even for you.”

“Not really,” Dr. Brooks shrugged. “To maintain temporal smoothness across such a system, you’d need a timing control. Otherwise, the lattice would drift, and funny things would happen. That spire down there, it’s the lattice’s timing system, and its very existence confirms I’m right.”

The fact Dr. Brooks had just circularly reasoned his conjecture using itself as the basis was not lost on her. “You’re relying on the assumption that the moon was part of the same system, but what if it was an independent invention?”

“Oh yes, because two civilizations capable of rewriting spacetime both just happened to bury their toys in the same uninteresting sandbox?” Dr. Brooks laughed aloud. “Fat chance of that.”

“He’s not wrong, ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Sena offered. “Independent development would require identical technological progression advanced beyond what we have seen anywhere else in the galaxy. The probability of that happening twice in this local area is vanishingly small.”

“Unless the existence of one drew the other,” Commodore Larsen countered. From abiogenesis to stellar clustering, the universe did not distribute complexity evenly, and this could be another point of concentration.

“Doubt if you wish, Commodore,” Voragh added. “But no warrior overlooks the possibility of coincidence as a broader strategy. Even if two powers capable of shaping spacetime worked here, it is because this ground mattered to both.”

Commodore Larsen narrowed her eyes. “Or it is because, in seeking an elegant answer to an elusive question, you three are stitching unrelated mysteries into one grand design.” Many false starts in science had come from exactly that desire. “Just because the obelisks and this relic are both at the edge of our understanding does not prove they’re part of the same architecture.”

“It certainly suggests it when the physics lines up,” Dr. Brooks insisted, enjoying the spirited debate. “The obelisks are spatial emitters, and the anchor is a temporal regulator. You can’t hold space still without a stable clock to enforce it. Each exists only because the other does too.”

There was no point in arguing further, she knew. It was all just theory for the sake of theory, no practical outcome produced as a result, so instead of circling in an endless debate, Commodore Larsen simply moved the conversation along. “Supposing you are right, do you consider your solution permanent?”

“Even the most accurate clock drifts with time,” Voragh answered.

“Or, in this case, more accurately, space drifts past it,” Dr. Brooks corrected the semantics.

“The presence of the invariant glyphs we used to tune the device also suggest its architects anticipated as much,” Lieutenant Commander Sena added. “So it’s rational to assume it will again someday present an issue, but we now know how to re-tune it.”

“Then we’ll brief the permanent team when they arrive so they can be prepared to act again if it recurs,” Commodore Larsen nodded.

Sitting in the corner, Lieutenant Commander Taylor had been quietly keeping to himself, watching the others debate a topic to which he could contribute little. But now, he had a question. “What I don’t get is who these architects were.”

For a moment, the room was quiet. No one had a good answer. Not one, at least, based on empirical observation or even logical extrapolation. But finally, Dr. Brooks gave it a shot. 

“There were, are, and will be beings in this universe that transcend our imagination, beings that exist beyond our plane of perception in time and space,” Dr. Brooks offered reverently. “But on Chorad IXa, we may have found their echoes.”

No one argued, not because they agreed, but because they couldn’t disagree. What they’d found beneath the surface of Chorad IXa was beyond understanding itself.