Her room was bathed in bright orange hues, the warm embrace of the Underspace all around them. She knew the science, the danger posed by those energetic eddies, but lying there in her bed, the chaos seemed almost peaceful. She accepted it, just like the chaos all around them.

What else could she do?

They were a little more than two days into their journey, and a little more than two days from their destination. What a surprise it had been to hear from the captain, her captain lost to the deep. She’d known Captain Lewis was alive, courtesy of the Cardassian on Montana, but to hear his voice across the great distances that separated them, and to hear he had a plan, it made her feel like the old days all over again. Even stranded 5,000 light years from Federation space, of course he’d come up with a way to strike back at the enemy.

That’s just what he did.

For many, the prospects of what lay ahead would have kept them awake, but for Chief Petty Officer Ayala Shafir, it was comfortable because it was familiar. And so her eyes grew heavy, and sleep began to over take her. 

Right up until the moment her door chimed.

She looked towards the door. Why the hell was someone bothering her now? It was 0100 hours, the dead middle of the graveyard shift. Plus, it wasn’t like she often had visitors for it wasn’t like she had friends. Not here on the Polaris, at least. Lewis was halfway across the galaxy, while Grok, T’Aer and Lisa Hall had still been tied up hunting ghosts when the Blackout came. Besides those four, who else would it be? The others who would have cared to stop by, they were all dead.

The door chimed again.

“Who is it?” Ayala grumbled gruffly.

“It’s Lieutenant Balan. If it’s not too much to ask, can I come in?” 

Her voice was sweet and soft, but there was something else too. Despair. And for that reason, for the pity she felt for the sweet young woman who had not chosen the path they were now on, she sat up in her bed. “Enter.”

The door slid open, and there stood Lieutenant Emilia Balan. She looked worse for wear, her bright eyes wet and her curly hair frazzled. 

The lights off and the chief in bed in a sports bra and cheeky boyshorts, that’s when it dawned on Emilia what the time was, and how inappropriate this visit might be. “I’m sorry to disturb, chief. I didn’t realize…”

“Didn’t realize the time?” Ayala chuckled as she swung her legs out from under the covers.

Emilia, for her sake, looked embarrassed, whether for the time or for the sight of the chief in her underwear. “Um, yeah, sorry… I really didn’t…” For hours, it seemed, she’d just been wandering the corridors in a daze, uncertain where she was going or what she was doing, right until she’d found herself at Ayala Shafir’s door. And she wasn’t even sure why. “I’m sorry. Really, I can go. You don’t need this.”

“No, no, it’s all good,” Ayala smiled warmly. 

That Emilia had even apologized was nice. If it’d been Lewis, Lisa, Grok or T’Aer, they’d have just strode right in and gotten straight to business, regardless of the hour or the attire. Emilia’s sheepishness was almost cute in contrast.

“Please come in and have a seat,” Ayala offered as she rose and gestured to a small couch opposite the bed. As a senior specialist in the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, she had her own studio-style quarters with a window, but they were nothing to write home about, and they were a far cry from the appointments offered to officers on the large flagship. “Sorry it’s not as lavish or spacious as what y’all got up-deck.”

“Oh no, really, I just appreciate being able to come in,” Emilia replied, keeping her eyes anywhere but Ayala’s half-naked body as the lithe chief walked unabashedly across her quarters. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I just… I just needed someone to talk to.”

“I don’t think of myself as much of a talker,” Ayala smirked as she found her way to her makeshift bar. “But a drinker…” She plucked a pair of glasses off the shelf and began to pour herself a short glass of Acamarian brandy gifted to her by Frank Negrescu during their recent off-book jaunt through pirates dens and smugglers coves. The old man always knew how to pick the good stuff.  “May I offer you something?”

“I’m alright,” Emilia answered shyly.

But she didn’t look alright. 

“You sure?” Ayala inquired with a raised eyebrow. The lieutenant really looked like she could use a drink. And a tall one at that. “It helps.”

Emilia wasn’t much of a drinker, but she also hadn’t been a shisha smoker until that brisk Arabian night sitting across from Ayala. “Eh, why not? I’ll have whatever you’re having.” 

“Acamarian brandy, a good vintage,” Ayala smiled as she poured a second glass. She walked over, handed it to the lieutenant, and then plopped down cross-legged on the couch next to her. “So what can I do ya for?”

“I dunno, Chief…”

“Just Ayala, please,” the chief interrupted with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood. “No rank, you know, since you’re sitting here at 0100 with me in my skivvies.”

Again, Emilia looked quite embarrassed.

“Relax girl. It’s all good. I said you were welcome to come in,” Ayala said nonchalantly as she took a sip of her brandy. “What’s on your mind?”

Emilia’s gaze drifted to the window as the bright hues of the Underspace rushed by them. It looked so chaotic. This all was so chaotic. “I feel like we’re spinning out of control,” Emilia said as her eyes welled. “First, the Blackout. Now, the Vaadwaur. Even before that, the Lost Fleet, the Borg, and everything that happened this fall. This… all of this… it’s nothing like I imagined.”

“Few things ever are,” Ayala offered as she took another sip.

“Do you know why I joined Starfleet, Ayala?”

Ayala shrugged. She did not.

“My father was a composer, and my mother a singer,” Emilia shared. “From Teatro alla Scala to the Kasseelian opera house to the Great Hall on Qo’noS, everywhere we went, I saw beauty and wonder that you can only see in the stars, and I wanted more, to see all the diverse cultures and peoples of our galaxy.”

“And did it deliver?” Ayala asked. She would never have described Qo’noS as a place of beauty, but if anyone could, it would be Emilia.

“For a time, yes,” Emilia nodded. “Believe it or not, even when we were invited to the Tzenkethi homeworld, beneath their militarism and their xenophobia, there’s brilliant art full of hope and a rich oral tradition.”

There was no way, Ayala thought to herself. Maybe she’d buy the Klingons if you could just get past the howls of their baritones, but the Tzenkethi? Nope.

“But here’s the thing, Ayala,” Emilia continued as her face fell. “There’s no hope out here. Think about Nasera. We lost almost a thousand of our colleagues in that battle alone, and that’s just counting us.” The numbers of civilian losses on Nasera had been staggering, and the losses across the Deneb Sector absolutely heartbreaking.

Ayala’s face went dark. Emilia had lost colleagues, sure, but she hadn’t killed any by her own hand. Ayala had. In the tunnels beneath the planetary control center, she had pressed the detonator that ended Brock Jordan’s life. She’d killed him for the simple fact that he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, staying back, the good guy he was, to cover their escape. To cover her escape.

“And then, watching the Borg worshipers kill our security detail on Beta Serpentis…” Emilia kept going, horror in her eyes as she flashed back to that moment on the surface, the first time she’d seen the light leave someone’s eyes. “There was no reason for those men to die. It was senseless.”

Ayala’s eyes fell. For her, Beta Serpentis had been personal. It wasn’t just a place where good men had died at the hands of bad guys. It was also the place where one of their own, Lieutenant Jace Morgan, had died, not by the hand of the enemy, but in the grasp of his PTSD, left alone in his pain because they had failed to see the signs of his struggle. Because she had failed to see the signs.

“And you weren’t there for Archanis, but it was…” Emilia kept going, stumbling with her words, so lost in her own melancholy that she hadn’t noticed the emotion splayed across Ayala’s face. “The body bags, they piled up. They just kept piling up. I’ve never seen so many body bags. Over a thousand, almost two thousand, lost to the contagion before it was over.”

But Ayala wasn’t listening any more. 

Her mind was on Brock and Jace… and on Ryssehl Th’zathol, Nam Jae-Sun, Jason Atwood, and Kora Tal… and on… No. She couldn’t start running the rolodex of all those that had stood beside her, only to fall. There was nothing good to come of that.

Little boxes. Put it all in little boxes. That’s what Captain Lewis had taught her. 

And so she did. 

She took a long draw from her glass, and she swallowed the biting liquor down. She was better now. Her walls were back up, those troublesome thoughts put back away in their little boxes.

“It just is what it is,” Ayala said flatly.

But Emilia wasn’t there. She didn’t have little boxes. She hadn’t built those walls. “Is it? Is it really?” she lamented, her eyes welling with despair. “Ayala, you know the saddest part? As much as my heart aches for them, it’s me I’m most scared for. I’m scared I might end up just like them… that I might end up dead.” It sounded so selfish to admit.

“In the end, we’re all just stardust,” Ayala shrugged.

Emilia stared at her confused.

“From the stars we came, and to the stars we shall return,” Ayala reiterated the words spoken at so many funerals over so many generations, the words she knew someday someone would say at her’s.

“How are you okay with that?”

“What choice do we have?” Ayala asked. “We’re all just along for the ride, wherever the universe takes us, up until the day death comes for us.” It was so much easier once you accepted that basic fact. “It just is what it is.”

That didn’t make the lieutenant feel any better.

“Look, Emilia, I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you,” Ayala apologized. She felt bad for the girl. She really did. “But take it from me. It’s not worth fixating on. Long ago, I was part of something, something no one should ever endure, and after that, I wasted far too many years of my life looking for the answers you’re now seeking.”

“Did you ever find them?”

“No,” Ayala chuckled. “I found Captain Lewis instead.” Not that he’d been a captain then. In those days, he’d been a vigilante, ostracized by Starfleet, yet still fighting in his own way for the Federation he held so dear.

Emilia looked at the chief curiously. Captain Lewis? The haggard spook in a captain’s uniform hardly seemed a substitute for existential needs. “I’m not following…”

“Purpose. That’s what he gave me. Purpose. A reason for being. For existing,” Ayala shared, her tone almost devout. He had saved her life. “I don’t have the answers. None of us do. The universe simply is what it is. The best we can do is make something with the time we have, knowing it might come to an end at any moment. That’s why I do what I do.”

Now it was Emilia’s time to drink, processing those words. “I’ll be honest… I don’t even know what it is you do.”

“I sit at a terminal,” Ayala smiled coyly.

Emilia shot her a look. She didn’t buy it.

“Okay, fine,” Ayala conceded. “That and I occasionally shoot some bad guys.” Her role on Nasera was, as much as she wished otherwise, public knowledge given the trial that had followed, Commander Robert Drake exposing much of what they’d done even if he’d failed to stick the charges in the end. He’d been close though, and he might have succeeded if she hadn’t lied on the stand, one simple lie among a pile of truth that unraveled his case.

“You never did tell me where you went last winter, why you just up and vanished, stealing away in the dead of night without so much as a goodbye,” Emilia raised an eyebrow. She had sat there, waiting for the chief to return, but she never did. All she’d left was a cryptic note. “Gone for months on end, and then back as if nothing ever happened.”

“I took a vacation.”

“I may be an idealist, but I’m not an idiot.”

“We went to learn the fate of our lost brothers and sisters,” Ayala replied. “There was a lead about Serenity and Ingenuity, and we followed it to an answer.” She probably shouldn’t have said it, but it was Emilia. She was harmless and disarming, so easy to talk to.

“Wait… did you know…” Emilia said, realizing what the chief was saying. “Did you know the fate of the Serenity and the Ingenuity before we received the call from Captain Lewis the other day?” It’d been a shocking moment for all of them, those presumed dead for the last six months suddenly reappearing on their viewscreen, alive and well.

Ayala nodded.

“Did the admiral know?”

She nodded again.

“I don’t get it…” Emilia stumbled on her words. “For the last half year, this squadron, we’ve all hung on baited breath, wondering what happened to the Serenity and the Ingenuity, and you’re saying you and Reyes knew all along? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Knowing wouldn’t have changed a thing,” Ayala answered flatly.

“How do you know that?” Emilia asked, frustration washing across her face. “Even if we couldn’t have brought them back, our people had friends on those ships. They hung on hope as long as they could, but with the passage of time, they eventually had to accept that the Serenity and the Ingenuity had been lost. They mourned, and they grieved. They didn’t need to go through that. Not with what you knew. You could have spared them so much heartbreak.”

That thought had never even gone through Ayala’s mind. She’d only been focused on the practical, and the practical was that if they had disclosed the fate of their sisterships, they’d have had to explain how they’d come of that information. The Cardassian on Montana had not given it willingly, and she had no intention of getting hauled before the JAG again for what they’d done to get the answer from that asshole. “There were… other circumstances involved.”

“I get the sense that there are often other circumstances with you,” Emilia observed.

“More often than not,” Ayala admitted. “I’ll be honest. I’m not perfect. I’m just here, all alone in the night, doing the best I can with what little I know. I make mistakes. I fuck up. I’m not a good person.”

It pained Emilia’s heart to hear her say that. She believed everyone, at their core, was good. It was more than that though. She had a sense of how much Ayala had sacrificed for them. “You’ve got two things wrong there,” she replied with deep sincerity as their eyes locked.

Now it was Ayala’s turn to look confused.

“You are a good person. Your purpose. Your reason for being. If you hadn’t gone down to Nasera and did what you did, risking your life for us, we all would have died. The colonists too, they would have continued to suffer under that wretched occupation,” Emilia offered. She’d seen firsthand what those colonists had gone through. “I can’t pretend to know all the other things you’ve done, but I get the sense it’s not the only thing for which we owe you our gratitude.”

“It wasn’t just me,” Ayala acknowledged as she looked down once more. The others just hadn’t made it back. Not from Nasera, nor from Earth, nor Beta Serpentis, nor so many other places. Why they had died while she kept on living, she had no idea, but it wasn’t worth dwelling on. Again, they were all just along for the ride, and someday, they’d all just be stardust in the wind.

“I get that, but you’re the one sitting here,” Emilia replied. “So thank you.” She reached out her hand and set it on Ayala’s leg.

Thank you? Ayala wasn’t sure she’d ever heard someone say those words to her. Not in this way, at least. “You’re welcome.” She set her hand atop the lieutenant’s.

As their fingers interlaced, offering a mild sense of stability against the chaos beyond the bulkhead, Emilia looked back at the Underspace racing by, a reminder of the unknown that awaited them. “I just hope it doesn’t all come crashing down.”

It might do exactly that, Ayala knew. They were flying beyond the galactic plane to strike an enemy stronghold guarded by complicated science and a formidable adversary, all on the word of a single Vaadwaur pilot. But it wasn’t healthy to spiral, so she redirected the conversation. “What was the other thing I got wrong?”

“You are not alone.”

And with that, Emilia leaned in, and Ayala let it happen. 

Emotions were high on the precipice of oblivion, and whether it was an expression of appreciation, or a need for companionship, or something else altogether, it was nice. They kissed, and they cuddled, and eventually empty glasses were left behind as they made their way to the bed. 

Emilia let her uniform fall to the floor, her remaining imperfections now bare for the chief to see – not that Ayala saw any there – and they lay together beneath the raging currents of the Underspace, Ayala the big spoon, and Emilia the little.

There was something comforting about the chief’s arms wrapped tightly around her, the warmth of her firm body against her bare back. It made her feel safe, and slowly, sleep came at last.