Beaming down to Orvas V from the cold corridors of Endeavour was like stepping into sunlight. The city that unfurled around them wasn’t modern brightness built over old history like Federation hubs, or the rugged, comfortable environs of newer colonies. It was precise, with buildings rising in pale stone and brushed metals. Walkways criss-crossed in cool order, weaving between tidy traffic lanes, and even the gardens suspended between towers were clean-edged, managed. It was beautiful, but disciplined, like every street and corner had been designed by a planning committee.

The Orvas Institute of Physical Inquiry was carved in sharp lines of that same pale stone, its towers ringing around a central courtyard. Such a place did not need protection, particularly not physical, but it still felt sequestered, barriered against the outside world.

Inside, it was quiet in a way Airex found Starfleet facilities to rarely be. Little murmur of conversation spilling from labs, or hum of background traffic. The Orvas scientists and educators wore uniforms as often as lab coats, and moved in clustered groups with intent, eyes lingering on the trio of Starfleet visitors.

‘You must understand,’ said Luroth as he guided them along a high corridor, ‘that bringing you here is contentious. There are many within the Protectorate’s leadership who would prefer this investigation remains an internal matter.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Cortez cheerfully, ‘we’ll do our best to make it clear you’ll get to the bottom of this quicker with our help.’

Luroth’s jaw tightened. ‘Some recognise, Commander Cortez, that the damage done by that fissure – distant though it was – is a blight on the galaxy that needs understanding. And that we are dealing with something unprecedented, if it somehow connects back to the extremists plaguing our territory. There is much context we lack.’

‘Context,’ Airex echoed mildly. ‘We can provide that. Answers, we’re still seeking.’

‘And we’re not here to dictate Orvas policy or action,’ Thawn added, voice level. She did not watch the austere architecture, like Cortez, or the comings-and-goings of the institute’s scientists, like Airex, but focused on her PADD as she continued to review the personnel files they’d be given. ‘Once we understand the connection between the dissidents and these builders, you will. And can act appropriately.’

Except they had not shared the existence of the Vezda. Airex had insisted that it was unlikely to help, would probably only panic the Orvas. He did not feel particularly guilty about this; for all of their scientific advancement and lofty ideals, by the standards of a civilisation embarking on their understanding of the wider galaxy, the Orvas were children.

Luroth’s shoulders eased as he reached a doorway and pressed his palm to the sensor, reading nothing into the lie by omission. ‘Then this is your first step.’

The door slid aside with a hiss. Airex stepped into what was clearly an archival study room, sterile and climate-controlled for aged artefacts, with neutral lighting and clean worktables. That level of atmospheric regulation was unnecessary for what awaited them, though: storage crates stacked open, datapads arranged in labelled stacks, sealed boxes marked with inventory tags. All brought up from deep storage for their perusal.

On the nearest table, hard-copy notebooks lay fanned out, pages bristling with inserted loose sheets. Beside them sat a tablet loaded with a frozen simulation.

‘These,’ Luroth said, remaining just inside the threshold, ‘are the remnants of Doctor Varnir’s personal research holdings. His former workspace is now occupied by newer staff; his materials were cataloged and placed into secure storage when he departed. He never came back for them.’

Cortez gave a low whistle, drifting forward. ‘This is a lot for one guy.’

Airex followed, but did not yet touch anything. ‘He worked alone?’

‘Once, no.’ Luroth folded his arms. ‘He ran one of our foremost programmes in applied subspace mechanics – seeking to breach the Warp 2 barrier. He had students. Colleagues. A full team. But before the end, they drifted to other projects. Some more forcibly than others. And Doctor Varnir… did not take on replacements.’

Thawn looked up from her PADD with the personnel records. ‘You’ve noted that he became erratic, uncooperative with the institute’s policy, and that he effectively quit before he could be fired.’

‘He was obsessed with these… side-projects,’ Luroth said with a grimace. ‘Refusing to publish. Missing deadlines. Obsessing over simulations with no basis in theory. He stopped teaching, mentoring. When we requested interim findings, we received… this.’ He waved a hand at the notebooks.

‘You cut his budget,’ Thawn noted.

‘In an effort to redirect him,’ said Luroth. ‘Assignments to more grounded work. He refused. What the records do not show – because he was so highly respected – is that he ceased attending meetings, and when we enforced oversight of his work, he barricaded himself in his lab, demanding time and resources. Claiming he was at the cusp of something revolutionary and that we lacked imagination.’

‘Then he was removed,’ Thawn surmised. ‘And disappeared months later.’

‘We thought he had had a breakdown.’ Luroth grimaced. ‘In truth, many thought he had taken his own life. The manifest from the ship you found is the first sign of his existence in eight years.’ He stepped back towards the door. ‘I will leave you to examine the material. I look forward to a report of your findings. And to speak to you further, Commander Cortez.’

Cortez paused, one hand halfway to a notebook. ‘Me?’

‘You are the recognised expert on the array. I understand your Starfleet will want to classify material, but much of this is Orvas property. We have a right to understand it.’

The door slid shut behind him, and they were alone in the sterile environment with the artefacts of a dead man’s obsession.

‘Well,’ said Cortez after a moment, clapping her hands together. ‘Let’s go through the creepy dead genius’s things.’

‘Creepy,’ Thawn echoed unhappily. ‘It sounds like he needed help, and all he got was pushback.’

‘It sounds like he was influenced by something,’ Airex said sharply. ‘Thawn, you take the material records, what he actually submitted to the institute. Isa, can you see if his simulations survived?’

‘On it,’ Cortez said, sliding into a chair. ‘Wow, these guys could do with lumbar support while going through old things.’

Airex, for his part, approached the notebooks.

Much of it was professional, reflecting the scholarship and work from the official records, reflecting years of regular, rigorous outputs. Experimental subspace modelling, incremental improvement to warp-field efficiency. Then a slowdown. Fewer papers. Wider gaps between conferences. Then nothing.

‘Some of these were stored locally, on the device,’ Cortez called after a little bit. ‘But I’m finding some of his later simulations.’ She brought up a display on the tablet and held it out so they could see. Airex leaned over to recognise the general shapes, the curves and nodes of subspace domains, but far off what he’d expect for the work he’d breezed through.

‘He wasn’t messing around,’ Cortez mused. ‘This is them. Extrapolated models of triquantum pulse propagation across folded subspace.’

‘He would have had to derive that from first principles,’ Airex said slowly. ‘As an expert of a civilisation which hadn’t figured out how to break the warp five barrier.’

‘I mean, we’re still assuming he got a cheat-sheet from the gods, right?’ said Cortez.

‘Except how do you rationalise that?’ Airex asked. ‘One day, you suddenly get inspiration – and it’s five generations ahead of your most advanced scientific principles?’

‘I’m not sure he did rationalise it,’ said Thawn, pulling out a folder from the institute. ‘Look at this from some of the things he did submit. There’s proper deviations, and then suddenly he breaks off and starts scrawling random phrases. Sketches. The same motifs repeating. Look at this.’ She turned the folder around and flicked to another page. ‘Look at this.’

The symbol they’d seen daubed on Holsavar’s walls stared up at them in ink. Here it was smaller, repeated down to the margin, sometimes doubled, sometimes crossed.

For a moment, Airex’s vision blurred. The oval seemed to stretch, the line to deepen into a dark gash. Then he blinked, and it was just ink on paper again.

‘He drew this hundreds of times,’ Thawn said, voice tighter. ‘Sometimes with notes beside it. “The root.” “The knot.” “The shape of the fold.” He circles it. Underlines it. Then on the next page of the submission he’s back to differential equations like nothing happened.’

Cortez swallowed. ‘You can see why his colleagues thought he’d lost it.’

‘But he was right,’ Airex said softly. ‘He’d stumbled onto a framework to describe concepts far beyond them. There’s a pattern here, even in all of the chaos.’

Thawn was watching him in a way that made him look back at the notebooks.

‘There’s nothing here that suggests contact with the extremist groups,’ she said at last. ‘If anything, he’s hostile to other people. Not interested in building a movement. Just in his work.’

‘The movement came later,’ Airex said. ‘After he disappeared. After multiple people with similar stories all broke away and found each other.’

Cortez turned the tablet screen off. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘from a pure engineering perspective? This is terrifying. It’s like giving a bright postdoc from the twentieth century the cliff notes to build a warp-core from scratch. And that applies to this falling into the Protectorate’s hands, if they take it seriously.’

‘Then there’s your next problem,’ Airex said wryly. ‘How we kill the knowledge of this. How we stop it from falling into the next set of wrong hands.’

Thawn was biting her lip as she read, and finally shook her head. ‘One thing that’s not clear is how this happened to him. Surely the Vezda influenced him, but how? What did this look like?’

Airex glanced at the hand-written notebooks. ‘It’ll take a while to go through these. They might have answers.’

‘And there’s another line that Luroth didn’t help us with.’ At her quizzical look, she grimaced. ‘His friends and family. What did they know?’