Chapter Text
2387
Chakotay awoke next to his wife under a canopy of Distant Stars. “Distant Stars” were what they called them. Since arriving in the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy five years earlier, their crew of intergalactic sojourners had adopted the term as ironic commentary – a constant reminder that they were dancing among the most distant stars that any Federation crew had ever journeyed to.
After taking a moment to revel in the spectacle through the window above their shared bed, Chakotay turned to gaze lovingly at his wife. Kathryn Janeway lay peacefully still, save for the gentle movements of her breathing. In their years beyond the Milky Way, the crew of the Starship Voyager had had countless adventures exploring this new galaxy. But as far as Chakotay was concerned, none of those adventures compared with that of his marriage.
Glancing at the chronometer next to the bed, Chakotay saw that it was well before the start of alpha shift – the proverbial middle of the night, a strange term in the interstellar void, but nonetheless a convention that his crew continued to live their lives by. In no hurry to get up, Chakotay settled back down in bed, and turned his eyes once again to the Distant Stars.
Which slowly began blinking out of sight, one by one.
Blinking his eyes in an effort to correct any flaws in his vision, Chakotay looked again. It was hardly a precipitous decline in the number of stars – many many remained. But still unmistakable was a steady litany of stars, seemingly disappearing from existence, one by one.
Something gnawed at Chakotay’s intuition. Quietly and gently, he eased out of bed, determined not to wake Kathryn, before moving out of the bedroom and into the living room of their quarters. The bedroom door swooshed closed quietly behind him, and he activated the companel on the wall.
“Chakotay to Patel.”
Despite the early hour, Commander Patel’s voice answered back bright and clear as day. “Yes, Captain?”
“Sorry to disturb you in the middle of the night, Devi, but I need you to meet me in the Astrometrics Lab right away,” Chakotay told her.
“Aye sir. Be right there.”
Ten minutes later, the two officers met. Five minutes after that, Patel’s sensors had confirmed the perceptions of Chakotay’s eyes. Seven minutes after that, Chakotay took the ship to Yellow Alert, and called the rest of the Senior Staff to the lab as quickly as possible.
“Ancient mariners on Earth,” Patel said as she began her briefing, “once feared – or in some cases, coveted – reaching the so-called ‘ends of the earth’. Similar stories have been told in civilizations across the Known Milky Way, dating from eras where societies believed their planets to be flat disks. Now, as incredible as it sounds, we have done what our ancestors imagined: we have clear evidence that we are presently nearing… the end of the universe.”
Some time later, in the Gamma Quadrant…
“Captain Sisko,” said Lieutenant Commander Uteln from his position at tactical, “we have two vessels incoming at high velocity.”
Captain Sisko of the Starship Robinson shared a look with his first officer, Commander Anxo Rodrigo. “Identification and ETA?” Sisko asked.
“Identification unknown, ETA less than 15 seconds.”
“Red alert, shields up,” Rodrigo ordered immediately, before turning to Captain Sisko. “At those speeds, it’s a very short list of possibilities. Could be a Voth city ship, a commandeered Borg cube, a vessel equipped with coaxial warp drive, or –”
His recitation was cut short by the sudden appearance of the incoming vessels as they dropped to sublight speeds.
Captain Sisko couldn’t help but grin as he read the names of the vessels onscreen aloud. “The USS Capitoline and the USS Aventine .” His grin faltered only as he then considered, “But what brings them out here, without warning, at such speeds?”
Commander Plante’s ops console emitted a signal tone, as she reported, “Captain Dax wishes to speak with you, sir.”
“Onscreen.”
The viewscreen lit up with the face of his old friend, Ezri Dax. Sisko rose and approached the main viewer. “Greetings, captain. It’s good to see you, Old Man,” Sisko said with a broad smile.
“You know, Benjamin,” Ezri replied, “you’re creeping up on sixty years old, while I’m out here enjoying life in my thirties. If I’m still the Old Man, you must be the Ancient Man by now.”
“Well, Old Man, if there’s one thing you’ve taught me over the years, it’s that age is just a number,” Sisko riposted amiably, before turning more somber. “Dax, it’s great to see you out here, but I have to ask: what the hell is going on?”
Dax mirrored his solemnity. “The Robinson is one of Starfleet’s most distant starships. My second officer is transmitting the latest fleetwide directives: all vessels are recalled to Federation territory, and all distant starships are recalled directly to Earth. Aventine and Capitoline were dispatched to escort you back via slipstream corridor.”
Sisko could immediately sense his command staff’s unease with that suggestion. “Captain, as far as I knew, it wasn’t possible for a Galaxy -class starship to travel via quantum slipstream.”
Dax seemed ready for this concern. “The Starfleet Corps of Engineers has developed a shield modulation algorithm that will allow two slipstream vessels to merge their corridors, creating a large enough quantum bubble to carry a third, non-slipstream vessel between them. It’s relatively untested, but Captain Scott and B’Elanna Torres believe it to be sound. And Starfleet believes the current crisis is worth the risk.”
Sisko’s thoughts immediately turned to his wife and daughter. What will I need to protect them against now? Haven’t we endured enough? Aloud, he said, “What is the current crisis, Old Man?”
Dax’s eyes filled with the sadness that can only be known by those who have seen too much loss. “It’s the end of the universe, Benjamin. The end of time, space… everything.”
Not long after that, on Earth…
The room at Starfleet Command was filled with the most Starfleet captains and admirals Jean-Luc Picard had seen since the aftermath of the Borg Invasion of 2381. Captain Sisko was conferring with Captain Dax, while Captain Mackenzie Calhoun of the Excalibur spoke animatedly with Admiral Elizabeth Shelby. Captain Ro Laren of Deep Space Nine was deep in conversation with Captain Christine Vale of the Titan, as Captain Sonya Gomez of the da Vinci and Captain Morgan Bateson of the Atlas listened silently nearby. Admiral William T. Riker had fallen into grave discussion with the newly-promoted Captain Tom Paris of the Viminal and Captain Regina Farkas of the Vesta, who themselves had arrived with Captain Picard, after escorting the Enterprise back from the Odyssean Pass via slipstream.
At the front of the room, saying nothing as they waited for the rest of the attendees to arrive, were Captain Chakotay and Admiral Janeway of the Starship Voyager, and Fleet Admiral Leonard James Akaar, the Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet. After a few more minutes, the doors to the conference room slid closed, and audibly locked.
“Gentlebeings,” Akaar began, his voice booming like distant thunder, “if you would please take your seats.” He paused as all present, save Janeway and Chakotay, found their seats among the room’s concentrically arranged tables.
“The briefing you are about to receive is classified at the highest level. The President, her senior staff, and the Federation Council have already been briefed, but for now this information must not leave this room, until you are ordered otherwise.
“You have been recalled to Earth on the most urgent terms following a… distressing finding by the crew of Voyager, recently returned from their extragalactic excursion to the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. Their research has been reviewed by our top scientists and subsequently confirmed by observation via subspace telescope. We now believe this finding to be as conclusively verified as any number of conventional phenomena – this is as real as subspace, germs, or gravity. For details, I’ll turn the podium over to Admiral Janeway.”
Akaar stepped back from the podium as Janeway stepped forward. Akaar just behind Janeway and to her right, standing opposite Chakotay on her left.
Janeway’s face betrayed no emotion as she began. “Fellow members of Starfleet. The news we bring you today is shocking and in some ways unbelievable. Our crew on Voyager has had the most time to process this information, and many of us are still struggling to comprehend it fully. I trust that at least some of you will not believe us, not at first. I would expect nothing less from Starfleet’s finest. Nevertheless, I remind you, as we all know, truth is stranger than fiction. We will answer any questions we can, and we will discuss with you as long as necessary. But it is imperative that no one leave this room until we have convinced you of the veracity of this incredible claim.
“Simply put, the universe is coming to an end.”
A stir rippled through the room. No one said a word, but the sharp intakes of breath, subtle shifts in body language, and in some cases expressions of abject shock were unmistakable.
“We first detected evidence of this several weeks ago while starcharting Sag Dwarf Elliptical. At first we suspected instrument failure, but test after test revealed the same thing. The stars we were charting were disappearing, at a slow but steady rate.”
Tapping a control on the podium, Janeway pulled up a holographic model showing an array of stars.
“Tracking the disappearances revealed the distinct pattern of a spheroidal body’s collapse.” The holographic stars began winking out one by one, extinguished like candles in the wind.
“Sensors were unable to penetrate beyond the de facto border in space that was being demarcated by the line of disappearing stars. Upon venturing closer, we found that sensors were not only unable to penetrate this boundary but in fact were unable to detect it at all. Its presence was discernible only by the total absence of detectable matter.”
With another tap, Janeway switched the hologram to a three-dimensional recording of a probe in flight.
“We launched several probes to examine the boundary and attempt to penetrate it. Each probe behaved normally until reaching the boundary, at which point they appeared to pass through and then stop transmitting telemetry. The same occurred when we sent a shuttle on autopilot to investigate.”
The probe in the recording fizzled out of existence, as if it passed through an invisible veil. The recording switched to a shuttle, which did the same, like the arm of a holographic figure reaching out beyond the bounds of a holodeck.
“Leveraging knowledge gained by the Borg Collective in their efforts to develop their transwarp capabilities, Science Officer Devi Patel and Specialist Seven of Nine conducted a quantum analysis of the matter along the edge of the boundary. There was only one model which matched their observations: the hypothetical model of the boundary of the universe.
The holographic display switched back to a star map and expanded to fill the space above everyone’s heads, stretching across the room, with the distinct image of the Milky Way at its center.
“Further observation measured the movement of the boundary’s edge. It is accelerating, and it is collapsing in on the Milky Way as its focal point. The rate of acceleration is not constant, so our estimates cannot be precise, but our best guess is that it is a matter of two or perhaps three months before the boundary consumes the Milky Way.”
Her news delivered, Janeway deactivated the hologram and stepped back from the podium.
Akaar stepped forward again. “Gentlebeings, as you can see, we have a great deal to discuss.”