The wormhole was like a door but the Daedalus passed through it so slowly that Razor was able to recount all of his time aboard the ship in one swooping daydream.
He had met Alice and Shaw the first day. They were both sitting in the mess having breakfast and he hadn't met anyone aboard yet. Ryan "Razor" Strickland was shy. He wasn't yet the hard-grit, tough-as-nails Security Chief that everyone had come to love over the past few months. Even when Strickland had seen his first Drengin as a boy, a two-foot hairy demon climbing out of a crate of tomatoes, he had been scared.
Razor had wanted to leave that shyness, that feeling of solitude, behind. Life as an officer, especially as a Security Officer, meant that he needed to deal with distressing daily issues. What if Yor boarded the ship? What if he had to come face-to-face with living machines ripping his crewmates apart, impaling his friends right before his eyes? What if the Drengin pushed past the Sivil System and straight for Earth? Would he be able to stomach a surrender? Would he be able to stomach a fight to the end? A loss to the Drengin would mean slavery. A loss to the Yor meant extermination.
That first morning had been an uneventful breakfast. Shaw chewed loudly. Razor thought Shaw was Italian. He thought Shaw was annoying and full of himself. He also thought that Alice was hot. Alice, it turned out, was a fixer. She made sure things worked when by all logic, they shouldn't work. She beat pipes with wrenches and tied up loose wires. She rerouted systems and extended communications range. She made bulky ships loaded with people and cargo go faster than ever before and she did all this with her brains and her hands.
Razor had started following her because he had discovered that Alice wasn't human. She really could do anything. She could do things that really were impossible, like saving her ship from an almost imminent plasma overload. The Daedalus was not built to withstand any plasma shock. It was another flawed design. The Bureau updated their ships monthly, not only to keep up the weapons race with the Drengin and Yor, and they lacked the foresight to keep up with the demands of more power being loaded onto incapable vessels. Hull designs and alloys came second to the starship's ability to blast its enemies back into the void.
Razor had been following Alice for months and his first encounter with a Drengin was always in the back of his mind. Did the Drengin genetically engineer tiny stowaways? It was odd but it made the most sense. Couldn't the Yor create an android? Couldn't the Arceans breed down to human size? Something fishy had happened. Maybe Starfleet or the Federation were in on it. Maybe it was an internal matter, not involving any alien races. He had to find out.
In the time it took for the Daedalus to pass through the void, Razor had it all figured out. But he wouldn't live to tell anybody.