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The first rule of second contact, according to Captain Carol Freeman, was that it was never routine when someone from Command called it routine.
The second rule was that if Admiral Kathryn Janeway was involved, the word routine had already been murdered, hidden in a Jeffries tube, and replaced by a shapeshifter with a death wish.
The Cerritos dropped out of warp beside the USS Voyager in a quiet patch of space that, until forty-seven hours ago, had been a forgettable dot between two mapped trade lanes and a very opinionated pulsar. The viewscreen filled with stars, the sleek silhouette of Voyager, and behind it—
“Oh my gosh,” Ensign D’Vana Tendi breathed.
“That is not a space buoy,” Rutherford said.
Brad Boimler was already pale. “That is extremely not a space buoy.”
The object hung against the stars like a tuning fork designed by a civilization that believed subtlety was for cowards. Two long curved arms framed a hollow core filled with dark, glassy metal and faint blue light. It was ancient, enormous, and radiating just enough energy to make every sensor on the Cerritos politely scream.
Mariner leaned over the back of Boimler’s chair. “Relax, Bradward. It’s probably just a big alien ring thing. Starfleet trips over one every other month.”
“It’s a dormant extragalactic transit accelerator of unknown origin,” Boimler hissed.
“Yeah. Big alien ring thing.”
Captain Freeman sat forward in the command chair, expression tight but professional. “Hail Voyager.”
A moment later, Admiral Janeway appeared on the viewscreen. Her hair was silver at the temples now, her uniform crisp, her stare sharp enough to slice hull plating.
“Captain Freeman,” Janeway said. “Welcome to the party.”
Mariner muttered, “Oh, that’s never good.”
Freeman smiled with the practiced calm of a woman who had once negotiated a ceasefire while her ship’s carpet was literally on fire. “Admiral. Starfleet Command said you needed support with a cultural survey.”
Janeway’s smile did not reach her eyes. “Starfleet Command is trying not to panic.”
That shut the bridge up.
Janeway continued. “We’re calling the object Relay-01. It appeared on long-range sensors after a subspace shear opened near the pulsar. It’s not from any known civilization. It’s also older than most Federation member worlds’ written history.”
“Any signs of inhabitants?” Freeman asked.
“No. But we’ve detected a power core built around a material our database can’t classify. Seven believes it manipulates mass at the quantum level.”
From somewhere offscreen came the cool voice of Seven of Nine. “That is an oversimplification.”
Janeway did not look away from Freeman. “It’s the kind of oversimplification that keeps admirals from developing headaches.”
Freeman glanced toward her own operations officer. “Mister Boimler?”
Boimler jolted. “Yes! Uh, yes, Captain. Sensors confirm a massive element-zero-like exotic matter signature, except element zero doesn’t exist, so that’s impossible, except it’s right there, so that’s worse.”
Rutherford’s implant whirred. “Element zero? That sounds amazing. Can I scan it? More? Closely? From inside?”
“No,” Freeman, Ransom, Shaxs, and T’Ana said at once.
Onscreen, Janeway’s expression softened almost imperceptibly. “Your ship is here because Cerritos specializes in follow-up contact, infrastructure assessment, and making sense of civilizations after the hero ships leave a mess behind.”
Mariner blinked. “Did Admiral Janeway just call us cleanup crew?”
“She called us specialists,” Boimler whispered reverently.
“She called us mops with warp cores.”
Freeman ignored them. “What do you need?”
Janeway turned slightly. “We think the relay is a transportation device. We don’t know where it leads, or why it activated now. Voyager will continue primary analysis. Cerritos will perform secondary structural survey and prepare diplomatic protocols in case something comes through.”
Ransom folded his arms. “In case?”
The relay pulsed.
Every light on the Cerritos bridge turned blue.
Boimler made a strangled sound. “I hate ‘in case.’”
The hollow center of the artifact ignited.
Space bent.
Not like warp. Not like a wormhole. Not like any of the weird spatial nonsense Mariner had seen, caused, punched, or dated. The stars stretched into a narrow corridor of electric blue, and something shot out of it so fast that the Cerritos computer gave up on counting and replaced the velocity readout with an error tone.
The ship that emerged was unlike any Starfleet design. Sleek. Armored. Military. Black and white hull with red striping, one wing scarred by weapons fire. It spun hard, venting atmosphere from three decks, and came out of the relay pursued by fragments of something much larger, darker, and dead.
Mostly dead.
One of the fragments moved.
A red beam lanced across space and struck Voyager’s shields.
The bridge rocked.
Shaxs roared with joy. “Finally!”
Freeman grabbed the armrests of her chair. “Red alert! Shields up! Hail that ship!”
Boimler’s hands flew over controls. “They’re broadcasting on multiple bands, most of which don’t exist.”
“Translate!”
“I’m trying, but half of it is compressed through some kind of quantum entanglement protocol and the other half is someone yelling!”
The viewscreen flickered.
A human woman appeared. Her face was smeared with ash. A cut bled at her temple. Behind her, sparks rained across a cockpit where a man in a pilot’s seat shouted angrily at an orange holographic interface.
“This is Commander Shepard of the Normandy,” the woman snapped. “Unknown vessels, identify yourselves or get clear. That Reaper fragment is active.”
Freeman stared.
Janeway stared from the split-screen.
Mariner pointed at the viewer. “Okay, she has protagonist energy.”
Shepard narrowed her eyes. “Was that directed at me?”
“Open channel, Mariner!” Freeman barked.
“Oops.”
Janeway recovered first. “Commander Shepard, this is Admiral Kathryn Janeway of the United Federation of Planets. We are responding to your distress.”
The human woman’s expression shifted, but only slightly. She had the look of someone who filed surprises under later if I live.
“Federation,” Shepard repeated. “That’s new.”
The dark fragment behind her ship unfolded.
It had once been part of a machine, but not the clean kind. It looked grown and built, like a squid sculpted from black metal and malice. Red cracks pulsed along its broken edges. It was only a piece of something, but the moment it turned toward the three ships, Boimler felt his stomach drop.
A sound came through the comms.
Not words. Not exactly.
A pressure. A thought trying to become a command.
YOU EXIST BECAUSE WE ALLOW IT.
Tendi clapped both hands over her ears. Rutherford gasped, implant sparking. Shaxs bellowed. Freeman flinched, then forced herself upright.
Tuvok, appearing on the Voyager side of the screen, lifted one eyebrow. “A telepathic attack.”
Seven’s voice followed. “Not telepathic. Technological. The signal is attempting to interface with neural patterns through subspace harmonics.”
“Can we block it?” Freeman asked.
“Eventually,” Seven said.
“Eventually is bad!”
On the Normandy feed, Shepard turned. “EDI, status!”
The orange hologram beside the pilot answered, calm and precise. “The Reaper fragment is attempting to reestablish control through the relay’s dark energy core. If successful, it may open a corridor to Reaper-controlled space.”
“That sounds bad,” Boimler said.
Mariner stared at him. “Brad. Buddy. Read the room.”
Janeway leaned closer to her camera. “Commander Shepard. We can help, but we need information.”
Shepard’s eyes flicked to something offscreen. “You want the short version? Ancient machine gods wipe out advanced civilizations every fifty thousand years. We’ve been fighting them. That thing followed us through a relay misfire. If it wakes the network, everyone here dies.”
Silence hit the bridge for half a second.
Then Freeman stood.
“Mister Shaxs,” she said, voice hard. “Target weapons on that fragment.”
Shaxs grinned like a sunrise over a battlefield. “With pleasure, Captain!”
The Cerritos fired.
Phasers struck the Reaper fragment across its cracked hull. Voyager followed with a spread of quantum torpedoes. The Normandy rolled beneath the blasts, engines flaring blue, and fired a stream of mass accelerator rounds that punched molten holes through black metal.
For a moment, the fragment seemed to stagger.
Then the relay pulsed again.
The Reaper fragment absorbed the energy.
Its red cracks brightened.
“Oh, come on,” Mariner said. “It’s one of those.”
Shepard looked directly through the screen, like she could see all the way onto the Cerritos bridge. “We need to board the relay and sever the control link manually.”
Freeman exhaled. “Of course we do.”
Janeway’s eyes sharpened. “Seven, prepare an away team.”
Freeman turned. “Ransom, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford—you’re with me.”
Boimler made a noise like a chair being dragged across a nervous violin. “Captain, with respect, why me?”
“Because you’ve read every Voyager mission report twice and you’re the only person here who might recognize which kind of catastrophe we’re inside.”
“Three times,” Boimler said faintly. “And the classified appendices.”
Freeman stared.
“Publicly available classified appendices.”
On the viewscreen, Shepard looked unimpressed but approving in the way that only exhausted soldiers could be. “I’m bringing Garrus, Tali, Liara, and EDI’s mobile platform. We move fast, we break the link, we get out.”
Janeway nodded. “Admiral Janeway to Voyager transporter room. Energize when ready.”
Mariner cracked her knuckles. “Okay. Weird crossover away mission. Let’s go.”
Boimler whispered, “Why would you call it that?”
“Because saying it out loud gives me power.”
It did not, in fact, give her power.
The relay interior did.
They materialized on a platform inside the megastructure, and the first thing Mariner noticed was that her teeth hurt. The second thing was that the walls were humming in colors.
Not glowing. Humming. Somehow the light had texture and sound, vibrating in the bones. Blue veins of energy crawled across dark metal. Gravity felt like it had been installed by someone who had heard of down but considered it optional.
Seven of Nine appeared beside them, posture perfect, tricorder already raised. Tuvok stood at her shoulder. The Doctor shimmered into existence via mobile emitter, looked around, and immediately frowned.
“Oh good,” he said. “A haunted tuning fork.”
A second shimmer of transporter light deposited Shepard’s team.
Commander Shepard wore black and red armor scuffed by war. Beside her stood a turian with blue facial markings and a rifle nearly as tall as Boimler; a quarian in an environmental suit whose glowing eyes focused instantly on Rutherford’s implant; an asari whose biotic field flickered faintly around her hand; and a sleek white robotic body with an orange-lit faceplate.
Mariner looked at Garrus. Garrus looked at Mariner.
Mariner grinned. “Nice scars.”
“Thanks,” Garrus said. “I calibrate them myself.”
Boimler made a tiny overwhelmed sound.
Tendi stepped toward Tali, eyes shining. “Hi! I’m D’Vana Tendi, and I really love your suit filtration system. Not in a creepy way. In a medical-engineering respect way.”
Tali tilted her helmet. “That may be the most specific greeting I’ve ever received.”
Rutherford waved. “Hi! Sam Rutherford. Your omni-tool is gorgeous.”
Tali’s omni-tool flashed to life. “Your cranial implant is alarming.”
“Thanks!”
Shepard looked between both teams. “Is everyone here like this?”
Seven answered flatly. “No.”
The Doctor sniffed. “Some of us are professionals.”
A red pulse rolled through the corridor.
Everyone heard it this time.
WE ARE YOUR SALVATION THROUGH DESTRUCTION.
Boimler dropped to one knee, gasping. Liara swayed. Tuvok closed his eyes. Seven’s jaw tightened.
The Doctor scanned rapidly. “Neural stress, elevated adrenaline, cortical interference—”
EDI spoke over him. “The signal is strengthening. The Reaper fragment has established a partial handshake with the relay core.”
“Can you lead us to it?” Shepard asked.
EDI’s head turned toward a corridor that seemed to twist in five directions at once. “Yes.”
“Then move.”
They moved.
For all the strangeness of it, Mariner had to admit Shepard ran a tight away mission. No speeches, no hand-holding, no dramatic pauses unless something was about to explode. Garrus took rear guard with the grim satisfaction of a man who had made peace with the universe by deciding to shoot most of it. Tuvok moved near him, phaser held with Vulcan precision.
“You have experience with hostile synthetic life,” Tuvok said.
Garrus glanced at him. “You could say that.”
“Your emotional state suggests familiarity rather than panic.”
“I save panic for when we’re out of ammunition.”
“A practical approach.”
Ahead of them, Boimler kept sneaking glances at Seven. He knew he should not. He knew she could probably detect admiration at twenty meters and classify it as inefficient. But she was Seven of Nine. Voyager’s Seven of Nine. Former Borg drone, astrometrics genius, Delta Quadrant legend. She had helped bring Voyager home. She had fought Hirogen and Species 8472 and time itself.
She also suddenly looked at him.
“Ensign Boimler.”
He nearly walked into a wall. “Yes! Present. Reporting. Existing.”
“You have studied Voyager’s records.”
“Yes.”
“Then you are aware that fear can be acknowledged without being obeyed.”
Boimler blinked.
The relay hummed around them. Red whispers slid beneath his thoughts, promising vastness, inevitability, the comfort of surrender. He swallowed.
“Yes,” he said. “I am aware.”
“Good. Continue walking.”
He did.
Behind him, Mariner smiled despite herself.
They reached the first sealed door, except it was less a door than a slab of metal pretending it had never heard of openings. EDI projected a schematic. Tali and Rutherford immediately leaned in from opposite sides.
“This architecture is relay-based but not Prothean,” Tali said. “It’s older. Or adjacent. Maybe constructed using the same principles but different cultural design.”
Rutherford’s implant whirred. “The locking mechanism is mass effect field tension over a subspace lattice.”
Tali paused. “Subspace?”
Rutherford paused. “Mass effect?”
They stared at each other in mutual delight.
Tendi bounced on her heels. “Science friends!”
The Doctor pointed at the door. “Perhaps we could save the academic courtship until after the eldritch machine stops whispering death into our neurons?”
Tali lifted her omni-tool. “Fine. I can reduce the mass of the lock.”
Rutherford opened a panel. “And I can convince the subspace lattice it’s already open.”
Tali’s fingers flew. “That is not how doors work.”
“It is if they’re insecure.”
The door melted upward.
Rutherford grinned. “Door believed in itself.”
Beyond it waited husks.
At least, Shepard called them husks.
Boimler would later describe them in his report as “cybernetically reanimated humanoid entities.” Mariner described them as “zombie robot nightmare jerks.” The Doctor objected to both terms on medical grounds until one of them screamed and ran at him.
“Fine,” he snapped. “Zombie robot nightmare jerks.”
Shepard’s rifle came up. “Contact!”
The corridor erupted.
Phaser beams sliced orange through the blue-lit air. Shepard slammed a husk backward with a burst from her shotgun. Garrus fired with terrifying accuracy, dropping targets before they fully emerged. Mariner ducked under a claw, kicked a husk into the wall, and shot it twice.
Tuvok fired once. A husk collapsed.
Garrus glanced over. “Nice shot.”
“Thank you.”
“Ever consider mercenary work?”
“No.”
“Shame.”
Liara raised one hand, biotic energy blooming around her like violet fire. A cluster of husks lifted from the ground and slammed into the ceiling hard enough to dent ancient metal. Tendi gasped.
“That’s incredible! Is that neurological? Gravitational? Both? Are you okay after doing that? Do you need juice?”
Liara, mid-combat, looked startled. “I—no?”
“She gives everyone juice,” Mariner said, shooting another husk. “Just accept it.”
A brute forced itself through the far end of the corridor, huge and armored, made from fused bodies and Reaper tech. It roared.
Shaxs stepped forward, eyes shining.
Freeman grabbed his arm. “No.”
“But Captain—”
“No glorious death in the relay.”
“Glorious injury?”
“Limited glorious injury.”
Shaxs howled and charged.
The brute met him halfway. The impact shook the corridor. Shaxs slammed his shoulder into it, laughing, while Shepard circled left and Mariner vaulted over a fallen husk to flank right.
“Your security chief is enthusiastic,” Shepard said.
“He’s having a very good day,” Freeman replied.
“Is that safe?”
“No.”
Shepard smiled for the first time. “Good.”
The brute fell under combined fire, biotics, and one final Bajoran headbutt that the Doctor loudly declared medically irresponsible.
They kept moving.
The deeper they went, the louder the relay became. It was not merely active now. It was waking.
The walls showed images sometimes. Not holograms exactly. Memories, maybe. Blue light folded into shapes: ships like arrows, cities under alien suns, people with faces no one recognized looking up at the stars with the same fear and wonder every species eventually discovered.
Then red cut through them.
Worlds burning.
Ships harvested.
Voices silenced.
Boimler stared too long at one image: a child reaching for a sky filled with descending machines.
A hand gripped his shoulder.
Mariner.
“Don’t,” she said quietly.
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not. But keep walking anyway.”
He nodded.
Ahead, Janeway’s voice crackled over comms. “Away team, report.”
Freeman tapped her badge. “We’re inside and moving toward the core. Hostile cybernetic entities engaged. No casualties.”
“Voyager and Cerritos are holding position, but the fragment is drawing power faster than we can strip it away. Commander Shepard, your pilot is either very skilled or very insane.”
Over the shared comm, a male voice snapped, “Hey, I can be both.”
Shepard did not slow down. “That’s Joker. He’s earned it.”
Another voice, cool and artificial, followed. “Jeff is currently executing evasive maneuvers that have a seventy-three percent chance of causing him to say something smug.”
“EDI,” Joker complained, “you’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am. Statistically.”
Freeman looked at Shepard. “Your ship talks back too?”
“All the time.”
“Finally,” Freeman said, “someone understands.”
The core chamber was cathedral-sized.
At its center floated a sphere of blue-white energy contained by rotating rings of black metal. Within the sphere, something shimmered like liquid gravity. Around it, red Reaper code crawled in jagged lines, corrupting the relay’s systems.
Seven scanned. “The fragment has adapted to our weapons fire. It is using this core as an amplifier.”
EDI stepped beside her. “Agreed. The Reaper signal is not fully compatible with this relay, but it is forcing integration.”
Tali looked up. “Can we shut down the core?”
“Not without collapsing the corridor that brought us here,” EDI said. “The resulting dark energy discharge would destroy all ships in range.”
Boimler raised a trembling hand. “So that’s a no?”
“That is a no,” Seven confirmed.
Liara’s gaze fixed on the sphere. “The Reaper signal has a pattern. Almost like indoctrination, but incomplete. It needs an organic cognitive bridge to stabilize.”
Everyone looked at the red lines.
Then the red lines looked back.
The voice returned, not through comms but through bone.
YOU ARE MANY. YOU WILL BECOME ONE.
Rutherford cried out. His implant flared red.
“Sam!” Tendi grabbed him as he staggered.
His eyes flickered. “Uh, guys? My implant just got a really aggressive software update invitation.”
Tali lunged to his side, omni-tool active. “It’s trying to use him as an interface!”
Seven moved instantly. “Disconnect him.”
“I can’t,” Tali said. “It’s already in the hardware.”
Rutherford’s jaw clenched. “Wow, this is bad. This is really bad. I can feel it trying to make everything simpler. Like, no choices. No friends. Just one big awful instruction.”
Tendi’s voice shook. “Don’t listen to it.”
“I’m trying.”
The red lines surged toward him.
Seven seized Rutherford’s wrist. Borg tubules extended into his implant.
Mariner shouted, “Whoa, whoa, is that helping or assimilating?”
“Helping,” Seven snapped.
The word left no room for debate.
Seven’s face tightened as the Reaper signal hit her too. For a moment she was somewhere else: a cube, a collective, a voice that had once called itself perfection. The Reaper signal was different, but not different enough. It promised order. It promised an end to loneliness by murdering the self.
Seven knew that lie.
“No,” she said.
The chamber trembled.
EDI looked toward Shepard. “We have an opportunity. Seven’s Borg nanoprobes are slowing the Reaper intrusion. If we combine her adaptive algorithms with Tali and Rutherford’s access, Liara’s biotic field may be able to isolate the dark energy carrier wave.”
“And then?” Shepard asked.
Tuvok answered. “A controlled phaser burst at the moment of isolation could sever the connection.”
Mariner lifted her phaser. “Great. Shoot the evil math.”
“Not precisely,” Tuvok said.
“Close enough.”
Freeman looked at the unstable core, then at her officers. “What are the odds?”
EDI said, “Low.”
Janeway’s voice came over comms. “I’ve beaten worse.”
Shepard’s mouth twitched. “Same.”
Freeman sighed. “I hate when legends agree on reckless plans.”
The work began.
Tali and Rutherford knelt beside the core access panel. Tali’s hands moved in quick, elegant patterns through her omni-tool interface. Rutherford’s implant projected Starfleet code in flickering green. Their systems should not have understood each other. They came from different centuries, possibly different realities, built on different physics and wildly different assumptions about what counted as a reasonable safety standard.
Somehow, under pressure, with death whispering at them, they made the machines talk.
“This relay uses mass fields like we use subspace geometry,” Rutherford said, sweating.
Tali nodded. “Not the same language, but related math.”
“That is so cool.”
“It is extremely cool and extremely fatal.”
“Best kind of cool.”
Tendi hovered nearby with a medkit, one hand still on Rutherford’s shoulder. “Less fatal, please.”
Across the platform, Seven stood rigid, nanoprobes linking her to Rutherford’s implant and through it to the Reaper code. Her skin had gone pale. The Doctor scanned her, worried despite his theatrical scowl.
“Your cortical stress is rising.”
“I am aware.”
“Seven—”
“I am aware, Doctor.”
His expression softened. “You do not have to prove resistance to anyone.”
Seven’s eyes flicked toward him.
The red light surged.
For half a second her voice overlapped with something ancient and cruel.
“We are—”
She stopped.
Her hand closed into a fist.
“I am Seven of Nine,” she said. “Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One. Annika Hansen. Voyager crewman. Individual.”
The red light recoiled.
Mariner, who had been pretending not to be emotionally invested, swallowed hard. “Damn.”
Liara stepped into position beneath the core. Violet biotic energy wrapped around her, hair and coat lifting in the artificial wind.
“Shepard,” she said, “when I isolate the carrier wave, it will only last seconds.”
Shepard nodded. “We’ll be ready.”
Tuvok, Mariner, Garrus, Freeman, and Shepard lined up their shots. Boimler stood with them, phaser trembling in both hands.
Tuvok glanced at him. “Control your breathing, Ensign.”
“I am controlling it.”
“You are hyperventilating in a controlled rhythm.”
“That counts.”
“It does not.”
Mariner nudged Boimler’s shoulder. “Aim at the red glowy part. Don’t think about the death voice.”
“That’s impossible advice.”
“Most good advice is.”
The relay shook harder. Outside, the battle intensified. Through the chamber walls, they could hear distant impacts as Voyager, Cerritos, and Normandy fought to keep the Reaper fragment away from the core.
Janeway’s voice came through, strained but steady. “Away team, whatever you’re doing, now would be good.”
Shepard lifted her rifle. “Liara.”
Liara thrust both hands upward.
The core turned violet.
For one impossible second, the red Reaper code peeled away from the blue relay systems, exposed and furious, a wound made of signal.
EDI shouted, “Now!”
They fired.
Phasers, disruptor-like mass accelerator rounds, and Shepard’s rifle tore into the isolated wave. Tuvok’s shot was perfect. Garrus’s shot was perfect and smug about it. Mariner’s shot was not perfect but hit anyway because Mariner had a talent for offending probability. Boimler’s phaser beam wavered, then steadied.
The red code screamed.
Not in pain.
In rage.
YOU CANNOT DELAY THE HARVEST.
Shepard stepped forward, armor scorched, eyes blazing.
“We already did.”
She fired the final shot.
The connection snapped.
The relay core flashed white.
Everyone lifted off the floor.
For a strange, weightless moment, Boimler saw all of them suspended in light: Starfleet officers, Delta Quadrant survivors, soldiers from a galaxy at war, a holographic doctor, an artificial intelligence, a quarian engineer, an asari scientist, a turian sniper, his friends.
Then gravity remembered its job.
They hit the floor.
“Ow,” Mariner said into the ancient metal.
The Doctor sat up indignantly. “I am a hologram. I should not be able to experience that with such specificity.”
Rutherford groaned. “Is everyone alive?”
Tendi scanned him frantically. “You are! Please don’t do that again.”
“Get hacked by a machine god?”
“Yes!”
“I’ll add it to my calendar as unavailable.”
Seven withdrew her assimilation tubules from his implant. “The Reaper signal has been purged.”
Rutherford touched his implant. “Huh. Feels cleaner, actually.”
Tali leaned closer. “I may have removed three redundant Starfleet diagnostic loops.”
Rutherford gasped. “You optimized me?”
“A little.”
“That’s so nice!”
The chamber lights shifted from angry red to calm blue.
EDI tilted her head. “The relay is stabilizing.”
Freeman tapped her combadge. “Freeman to Cerritos. Status.”
Ransom’s voice answered, triumphant and slightly singed. “The Reaper fragment just lost power. Voyager disabled it, and Normandy is dragging the pieces away from the relay.”
Shaxs’s voice boomed in the background. “Tell them I wounded gloriously!”
Freeman closed her eyes. “Noted.”
Janeway came on next. “Well done, away team. Prepare for transport.”
Shepard looked at the core. “Can you send us back?”
EDI interfaced with the relay, orange light meeting blue. “The corridor to our point of origin is unstable but accessible. We have a limited window.”
Liara looked to Shepard. “After that, the relay will likely phase out of this space-time continuum again.”
Boimler made a weak sound. “Again?”
Mariner pointed at him. “Nope. Don’t start. You’ll write the report and cry later.”
Freeman faced Shepard. For a moment, the two captains—because Shepard was a captain in every way that mattered—stood in the humming blue light between universes.
“I’d offer formal first contact procedures,” Freeman said, “but I’m guessing you’re busy.”
Shepard glanced toward the place where her ship waited beyond ancient walls. “You could say that.”
Janeway’s voice came over the comm. “Commander Shepard.”
Shepard looked up.
“If what you said about these Reapers is true,” Janeway said, “your people are facing something no civilization should face alone.”
Shepard’s expression tightened. “We’re used to it.”
Janeway’s voice softened, but only slightly. “So were we. It didn’t mean we had to stay that way.”
For once, Shepard had no immediate answer.
Garrus stepped beside her. “Not to ruin a touching interdimensional diplomatic moment, but our exit window is shrinking.”
Mariner grinned. “I like him.”
Tuvok said, “That is unsurprising.”
The teams transported back.
The Normandy looked even worse up close from the Cerritos viewscreen, but it held together with the stubbornness of a ship that had survived because no one aboard had given it permission to die. Voyager held position nearby, tractor beam guiding the inert Reaper fragment into a containment field. The relay’s blue light began to dim.
Onscreen, Shepard stood on the Normandy bridge with Garrus and Tali behind her. Joker was at the helm, muttering to EDI. Liara watched the relay with the expression of an archaeologist seeing a library burn and a doorway open at the same time.
Freeman stood on the Cerritos bridge. Janeway remained on the split-screen from Voyager.
“This may be the only chance we get to exchange information,” Janeway said.
EDI’s holographic interface flickered beside Shepard. “I am transmitting a compressed data packet containing non-sensitive information on Reaper indoctrination signals, mass effect physics, and relay operation.”
Seven, from Voyager, nodded. “Receiving. I am sending counter-intrusion algorithms adapted from Borg defensive protocols.”
Tali leaned into frame. “That could save lives.”
Seven inclined her head. “Use them carefully.”
Tali’s tone turned dry. “That is usually how we try to use mysterious alien cyberwarfare gifts.”
Rutherford, at ops, whispered, “She’s so cool.”
Tendi whispered back, “You’re both so cool.”
Boimler stared at the Normandy crew. “Commander Shepard?”
Shepard looked toward him. “Yeah?”
He straightened. “Good luck.”
It was not much. It was not tactical genius or diplomatic brilliance. It was two words from an ensign on a ship built for second contact to a soldier carrying the weight of extinction.
But Shepard seemed to understand.
“You too, Ensign.”
Mariner leaned into view. “Hey, Shepard. Kick the machine squids in the teeth for us.”
Shepard smiled. “That’s the plan.”
Garrus added, “We’ll calibrate the kick first.”
The relay flared.
The Normandy turned toward it, engines burning blue.
For one second, as the corridor opened, the Cerritos, Voyager, and Normandy shared the same impossible patch of stars.
Then the Normandy shot forward and vanished into light.
The relay dimmed behind it.
Then, with a sound like the universe exhaling, it disappeared.
The stars were ordinary again.
No ancient machine voice. No blue corridor. No impossible physics humming in their bones.
Just space.
Freeman sat slowly in her chair. “Damage report.”
Ransom checked his console. “Minor hull scoring, overloaded EPS relays on decks six through eight, Shaxs has requested permission to keep a Reaper fragment as a trophy.”
“Denied.”
“He anticipated that and requested a smaller fragment.”
“Also denied.”
“He anticipated that too and has already named it.”
Freeman pinched the bridge of her nose. “Of course he has.”
On the Voyager screen, Janeway looked amused in the way admirals did when they were about to make paperwork someone else’s problem.
“Captain Freeman,” she said, “I’ll classify the relay encounter under temporal-spatial contamination until Command decides what kind of headache it wants.”
“Thank you, Admiral.”
“And your crew performed admirably.”
Boimler nearly fell out of his chair.
Mariner covered by clapping him on the back hard enough to reboot his spine. “Hear that, Brad? Admirably.”
Janeway’s gaze shifted to the lower deckers. “The galaxy is larger than any of us know. Sometimes Starfleet’s job is to explore it. Sometimes it’s to help someone else save theirs.”
Tendi smiled softly.
Rutherford touched his implant, still thinking about alien code and a quarian engineer’s careful hands.
Boimler looked at the empty stars where the Normandy had vanished.
Mariner crossed her arms, but her voice was quieter than usual. “Think they’ll make it?”
No one answered immediately.
Then Seven, still on the Voyager feed, said, “Commander Shepard demonstrated a statistically significant resistance to impossible odds.”
Janeway smiled. “That’s one way to put it.”
Freeman leaned back. “Set course for Starbase Eighty. Warp six.”
Mariner groaned. “Starbase Eighty? After all that?”
Freeman gave her daughter a look. “We need repairs.”
“Can we fight another machine god instead?”
“No.”
Boimler was still staring at the stars.
“Boims?” Mariner asked.
He blinked. “I was just thinking. Somewhere out there, maybe in another reality, they’re fighting a war we’ll never see.”
“Yeah,” Mariner said. “And?”
“And we helped.”
Mariner smiled.
“Yeah,” she said. “We did.”
The Cerritos turned away from the empty place where the relay had been. Voyager glided beside her for a while, two Starfleet ships moving through the dark with their running lights bright against the endless night.
Then they went to warp.
Behind them, space remained quiet.
But for years afterward, in sealed Starfleet archives and encrypted Normandy files, two records would survive.
One described a mysterious alliance of ships from a future that should not exist.
The other described Commander Shepard and the Normandy, who came out of nowhere pursued by nightmares, borrowed a little hope from Starfleet, and carried it back through the blue fire to war.
Neither record was complete.
Neither made much sense.
Both agreed on one thing.
For one brief hour at the edge of known space, three crews from impossible worlds had stood together and told the dark no.