"This is a scientific expedition. I'm the chief scientist. When we encounter a hitherto unknown space time phenomenon, it would be irresponsible in the highest degree for me not to investigate. This is what I'm here for, Eli."

"Yeah, but Volker," Eli raised his hands, gave a twist of the mouth that wasn't quite a smile. "Volker is our astrophysicist. Space time phenomena are totally his thing. You think maybe he should be allowed to go?"

"Actually," Volker dipped his head like he was expecting it to be cuffed, "I'm good to stay at home and watch it on kino. He smiled with bright nerves at Rush's disgusted look. "Analysing the data as it comes in is exciting enough for me. I don't mind if Dr. Rush takes my place."

"Well, thank you for your permission, Mr. Volker. I'm so glad we have that out of the way. Now can we please get started? This thing may have a time component."

Oh hell, Eli thought, turning to watch as the shuttle pilot arrived in the docking bay. There was quite a little crowd here now, all the usual suspects, and he didn't know if it felt better or worse to know from their expressions that he wasn't the only one who thought this was the worst idea in the whole history of bad ideas. But he still seemed to be the only one with the nous to say anything about it. Who had died and suddenly made him the only responsible adult on the ship?

"Erm, Colonel Young? I thought maybe Lt. Scott would be the pilot for this one?"

Oh God, and they were already doing that thing. Eli looked from Rush to Young in dismay. That thing where you could see them sizing each other up for the next fight. Rush narrowed his eyes. Young crossed his arms. They both smiled like a drawing of knives.

"Scott's not out of quarantine yet. So you've got me. Shall we?"

They turned to go aboard with a weird synchronicity of movement for two people who were so at odds. Eli wasn't entirely sure whose life he was trying to save this time - both of them, maybe - when he pressed on anyway. "Um, so, as I was telling Dr. Rush, I'm not sure this data is worth the risk. Like, I mean, every time we send the shuttle out to investigate something, something disastrous goes wrong. So how about this one time we don't do it? Save ourselves, learn from our mistakes like rational people, that kind of thing?"

Say what you liked about the Colonel, but he generally listened to the voice of reason, even if he then chose to totally ignore it. He lifted his eyebrows in Rush's direction, inviting further comment.

"Oh for Pete's sake. We're here on the very edge of the universe among scientific marvels, and we're just going to sit safely at home and do nothing? Why did we come, then, if not to acquire knowledge? Why do we even bother?"

Young hit the control for the shuttle bay doors and motioned the scientist on board. He didn't say it, though something about his micro-smile suggested that he was thinking it. It was Greer who muttered the words after him, "Some of us weren't given a choice."

Rush buckled himself in. Young turned at the other side of the doors, ready to seal and pressurise the compartment. He must have caught Eli's distressed look - he paused and leaned forward to curve a hand around Eli's bicep, giving a reassuring squeeze. "Eli, don't worry. It's going to be fine."

Young's smile broadened a little, rueful and fond. Such a nice man, a kind, quiet, warm man, who noticed when you were upset and tried to offer comfort. Eli would totally have bought it, if he hadn't stood back and let Young murder Rush once already.

"We'll be expecting you both back in one piece," he said, feeling helpless and complicit, guilty and angry with himself for it. "Both of you, OK?"

"Eli, I got it." Young straightened up, expression closing over his own thoughts, apparently completely at ease. He touched the controls. Blast doors slammed down on Eli's concern, the locks cycling. The little knot of well wishers began to drift away as, from outside the door, came the thuds of the shuttle being decoupled from the hull and then the faint and rapidly fading vibration of its thrusters against Destiny's plating.

"Time to go and earn our keep," said Volker beside him, beaming like the innocent he was at the prospect of new astrophysical data. "You know, this is what I thought I was signing up for. More understanding the underlying principles of the cosmos, less being chased down corridors by aliens with guns. This should be good."

"Oh don't say that," Eli followed him back to the control room, refusing on principle to wring his hands. "That's like 'it's a piece of cake' or 'what could possibly go wrong?' We don't go provoking the universe with statements like that. It's like poking an anthill with a stick. Haven't you learned anything?"

The quiet in the shuttle was as awkward as any other time when they were together. Young concentrated on the controls, just glad to fly again. He didn't often get the chance, and though the shuttle handled more like a bus – heavy, unresponsive, underpowered – than like the whip sharp F302 he was used to, he would take what he could get and try to be grateful.

Ahead of them, the thing they were investigating writhed across a thousand miles of space like Zeus' thunderbolt, all silver flows and re-flows of energy. He stopped a safe distance away from it and flipped on the console next to the second chair. Rush unfolded himself from his seat, came forward to drop into the copilot's chair, take in the data with a single unimpressed sweep of his gaze. "We can't tell anything from out here, we need to get closer."

With someone else, Young might have admitted he was nervous. You knew how a planet behaved, or a star. Even a black hole could be predicted. You knew how far to stay away, what kind of trajectory would give you the best chance to escape if gravity or radiation or the heat or the EM field proved too intense. This thing was new and therefore totally unpredictable.

He'd have appreciated some back and forth about flight-paths and risks, but with Rush you never knew whether he was telling you the truth, or just feeding you a line to get you to do what he wanted. So it was pointless. Worse than pointless, working on bad intel. Better to have none at all.

"OK, I'm going to take it in a slow spiral to starboard, closing in on that... tendril at twelve o' clock. I don't know what conditions will be like, so hold on and shout if you see anything dangerous."

"Yeah, yeah," said Rush dismissively and gave him a gallows smile, "though you and I might have different definitions of what that is, aye?"

Young picked up the dark humour and begrudgingly smiled back. He'd long since stopped thinking Rush was a coward, but it took a special kind of balls to taunt your killer like this, even if, through circumstances beyond his control, the death sentence had not been so final as anyone expected. It reminded him pointedly of how lucky he was that Rush was tougher than any cockroach. He owed Rush for living on despite it all, the best thing that anyone had ever done for him in his whole life.

Still didn't mean he liked the man. "Anything that happens to this ship happens to you too."

A cold, creeping feeling travelled up his back and lifted the hair on the nape of his neck. Maybe he'd have felt it earlier with an F302, to which he was more attuned - the fluttering jolt through the frame, the almost sub-audible whine of engines beginning to labour. The readouts changed an instant later as he'd already known they would.

"D'you not think I know that?" And then the semi-sarcastic easy bantering tone dropped from Rush's voice as he hunched forward in fierce focus over his monitors, noticing the change. "Well now."

Young flipped the shuttle over, 180 degrees head over tail, engaged all the engines at full throttle, manoeuvring thrusters and all, as the blue white promontory of the thing filled the rearward viewscreen, strangely in motion. An ever changing electrical current with nothing visible to generate it. The engines' whine became a shrill and then a howl. The decking beneath his feet shuddered and groaned as the shuttle fought to get away from the sudden, inexorable pull.

"I've never seen a gradient like it." Rush sounded fascinated. Young gritted his teeth, his hands breaking out in an inconvenient sweat. OK, so there was no breaking free by main force. But if Rush's instruments could map the edges of it he could change course to skirt them, find a shallower patch, break free there.

"Some help here?" He tried to alter his angle of escape, but the pull was just as strong at 90 degrees as it was at zero, and he didn't like the feel of presenting the ship's belly to the thing, irrational though that was.

Rush's scientific interest had finally been replaced with a more appropriate level of hard faced fear. He reached up to flick on some switches. The shuttle's shield engaged, gold against the angry silver twining that was beginning to be visible even through the front windows, lighting up the cubbyholes of the small craft with harsh halogen light. "It's not just gravity. There's some kind of EM flow along those outer flares that the shields might interrupt."

A little of the brutal grip wavered. Not nearly enough. Young didn't like the feel of the engines, the thruster controls beginning to feel mushy, unresponsive in his hands. Oh shit. It was going to be another one of the fucking disasters for which his command was so justly famous. He knew it already. "That's not working. I need a course. Find us an edge with a shallower gradient."

"I, ah..." Rush clutched at his hair and then began to lever up a panel on the edge of his console. "There's too much data coming in. The shuttle's mainframe is overwhelmed. I'm routing it through to the Destiny now."

A moment. A very very long moment. Panicked voices yammered over the radio. The air began to smell of smoke as something in the engine caught fire. The shake of the airframe was beginning to work small fractures through the deck plating. A conduit in the passenger compartment burst in a shower of white sparks.

"All right," Rush held on to the sides of his console with both hands as if the information displaying there might spill if he didn't keep it steady. "Well, that's not good. Destiny can't find a course along the edges that doesn't lead to us breaking up in fifteen to twenty minutes. At best."

By this time, that wasn't a surprise. Young wondered if he could afford to give up now, finally accept the death he'd been courting one way or another since Icarus began. It would be mostly a relief, and he couldn't think of a better way to go than this.

"But the powerflows in this thing's interior are much smoother," Rush was still talking. "It's actually bearing some resemblance to the interior of the wormhole set up by a stargate." He looked exalted and fascinated and in his element. Young had to admit to envying him that.

"So?"

"If we keep trying to break away the shuttle will shake itself apart. But there's a possibility that if we go straight in, we might pass through, come out on the other side, relatively unharmed."

"Into what?"

"I've no idea," said Rush, mockingly, "but it's got to be better than this."

That seemed unwarrantedly optimistic to Young. An upswelling of darkness, tiredness, despair threatened to overwhelm him. If he dithered for a moment, if he just did nothing, it might all be finally over and leave him at rest.

But that would mean leaving Rush to die, and he'd sworn to himself it would never, it would never happen again. He flipped the ship back, the silver and ultraviolet seethe of energy overflowing the forward screen on either side. "Thrusters are failing. Give me a course while I can still steer."

The data streamed to his station. "You have it now."

He took a deep breath, aimed the shuttle at the centre of the storm. Terrible light swarmed over every surface, washing out all the shapes, blinding him. Rush laughed beside him, and the sound made him grin with borrowed resilience.

"See you on the other side."

The light swallowed them down.