A/N: I may have to go back and rewrite a few details depending on what the Landry stuff is tonight... Shouldn't be major rewrites, regardless.
"The good news is," said Lorca when he made the announcement ship-wide, "the war isn't going anywhere. When we get back out there, it'll be like we never left." This was making two large assumptions. First, that they would get back out there, and second, that they would do it within a reasonable amount of time, because there was a nonzero chance it would take them months or years to escape this temporal bubble.
The bridge was down to a skeleton crew: an ensign at the science station monitoring sensors and a cadet at ops monitoring power usage. The lights were dimmed. When Landry arrived, she found Lorca leaning against the wall near the tactical station, arms crossed, looking bored out of his mind.
"Enjoy the turbolifts while they last," Lorca said to her. Restricting turbolift usage was part of Kumar's proposed "enhanced emergency protocols" for further power conservation.
"What, are we going to have people climb up and down the shaft?" said Landry. She could manage it just fine, but it seemed a fine recipe for someone breaking a neck.
Lorca heard the pun in that and bit his lip to avoid laughing. "If it comes to it," he said, motioning for Landry to join him in the ready room. He took up a position behind his desk.
"So, is this a social call, or..." There were a lot of very young and very bored crew aboard Discovery, and Landry was a little jealous of how quickly they had escalated to entertaining one another without any work to do.
Lorca put his hands on the desk. "I want a complete and total security audit of all personnel on Discovery."
"Busywork?" said Landry. It wasn't a challenge or assessment of his suggestion, it was an honest question. Busywork was probably the best-case scenario for the security department right now.
"Our situation might not be an accident, commander," said Lorca.
At first Landry looked lightly shocked to hear that, but then she was delighted. "I'll find who's responsible, captain. I guess this means no time to spar, then."
Lorca slid out from behind the desk and ran his hand up Landry's back to the nape of her neck. "If I want a sparring match, you'll just have to make time, commander."
Under the circumstances, making time wasn't very hard to do.
The first thing they did was retrieve the contaminated module and spores from engineering. Not the spores that were trapped in the drive system currently—those they were pointedly avoiding tampering with for now—the spores Stamets had flushed out prior to their ill-fated jump, the remnants of which were still present in the waste system.
If Mischkelovitz's theory was to be believed, these spores were likely as bogged down in chronitons as the rest due to their temporal charge, but they weren't connected to the active mycelial field, so they could be extracted without significant risk. Sure enough, the discarded spores seemed temporally locked. The selected a small quantity for their own research and provided the rest to Stamets for his.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" asked Tilly, hovering around Mischkelovitz.
Mischkelovitz shrank away from Tilly and hid behind Saru. Saru could tell that, while Mischkelovitz had been supportive of Tilly's suggestions in the meeting, she did not like interacting with her for some reason.
"I think we can handle it, cadet," said Saru diplomatically. In the hallway, he inquired as to Mischkelovitz's issue.
"I don't know her," said Mischkelovitz simply. They were transporting the contaminated module on a pushcart with a mobile containment field. Transporters were offline until further notice.
"You cannot interact only with people you know," said Saru.
"Why not?" said Mischkelovitz. "That's what John's for, to interact with people for me. I don't really like people."
"In my experience, people are largely good, if you give them the chance."
"Okay," said Mischkelovitz, which was her way of dismissing both the idea and the conversation subject entirely.
Saru considered Mischkelovitz. There was something sad about her beyond of the death of her husband. The fact that she had not integrated with anyone in the crew besides the people in and about her lab was apparently more to do with who she was as a person than the secret nature of her experiment.
They found Groves and Lalana sharing an apple in the lab's main area when they arrived. Groves was holding a paring knife. "Hey, have some apple before it goes bad. Might be the last one for a while." He offered Saru a piece on the knife.
Saru accepted the slice, ganglia tingling at the sight of the blade. Even without the knowledge this might be the last apple any of them ate for the foreseeable future, it was delicious. Green, juicy, and tart.
Lalana withdrew to her quarters and Saru and Mischkelovitz got to work. The cloak detection project was on hold for the time being. Until they solved this temporal bubble situation, there was nothing for Lalana to do. Groves, equally, had no real purpose, but remained in the lab all the same, sitting off to the side and staying out of their way.
They lacked the correct tools to detect the chronitons, according to Mischkelovitz, but they were able to detect lingering temporal energy and confirm the module itself was the likely source of the contamination by comparing it to their scans of engineering.
"But what contaminated it?" wondered Saru aloud.
O'Malley came in. "Dinner?" he asked. Groves invited Saru to join them in the mess. This, Saru knew, was their daily ritual. O'Malley, Mischkelovitz, and Groves always ate this one meal together and it felt like something of an honor to be invited to join.
The food rationing was already in effect. "Oh my god," said O'Malley, staring at the meager portions as they made their way to a table. "You've got to get us out of here, Melly."
"Dr. Mischkelovitz and I are investigating the cause of our predicament. It's Lieutenant Stamets and his team who are charged with finding a way out," clarified Saru.
"Oh?" said O'Malley, and Saru realized O'Malley didn't care about the details at all. He really only cared about the food. They sat down and began to eat. O'Malley looked at the bit of green on his fork. "This is a goddamn travesty. Is nothing sacred?"
"Tch," went Groves, taking offense at the word choice. "Sacred? Really, Mac."
"I didn't mean it in a literal sense," said O'Malley, glaring.
"No fighting at dinner," said Mischkelovitz. This was apparently something of a hard rule; both O'Malley and Groves immediately apologized.
"Tell me, Saru, does your species have any religions?" asked O'Malley.
"No," said Saru. "After living so many years in a futile and hopeless situation, we realized there was no higher power coming to provide us any salvation. Surely if there were, it would not have waited so many generations to come to our aid."
"Shame," said O'Malley. "It can be quite a comfort, even if it is all a lie."
"I'll take a comforting lie over a truth any day," said Groves, which seemed an odd thing to say given his position on religion. (In fact, he would have taken the comfort of religion, if only he could bring himself to believe in it, which was why he was so angry about the subject.)
"I'll take the truth," said O'Malley, which again, seemed at odds with his earlier statement.
"And what about you, Dr. Mischkelovitz?"
Mischkelovitz thought about the question carefully. "It depends," she said at last, "on whose lie it is, and why they're telling it."
Groves left after dinner and O'Malley took up a position outside the door, leaving Saru and Mischkelovitz free to continue their investigation well into the night. As midnight came and went, Mischkelovitz said to Saru, "You don't have to stay up on my account. I usually work late."
"Kelpiens sleep very little," said Saru. "Out of a need for constant vigilance for predators."
"Ah!" said Mischkelovitz brightly. "They can get you when you're sleeping, unless you find a good place to hide. Mischka finds the best places to hide."
Saru considered that with a vague feeling of dread, because unlike Lorca, Saru understood something from his conversation with Mischkelovitz about her husband some weeks earlier.
Mischka wasn't Emellia Mischkelovitz. Mischka was Milosz.
Lorca was still going over security footage in the ready room well after he would normally have gone to bed. Somewhere, someone on Landry's team was doing the same, but Lorca felt obliged to do his own review. So far, he had not been able to find anything out of the ordinary in engineering that would account for the jump issue. He had watched Stamets run around alternating between contentment and various degrees of stress, Tilly trail Stamets like a lost puppy looking to help and sometimes managing to do so, and various other engineering personnel go about their duties in an utterly normal fashion. At one point, he even watched himself deliver Stamets yet another performance ultimatum that Stamets failed to live up to.
The comms beeped. "Lab 26 to Captain Lorca." It was Lalana. After a long moment of careful consideration, Lorca answered. Lalana forewent any greeting and launched right into a question: "Are you all right, Gabriel? It is oh-two-thirty."
"Is it?" he asked, blinking and rubbing his eyes. It was. He groaned. "Just... working on something. Sorry about the holocomms." They were currently disabled as a power-saving measure.
"You sound exhausted. Your voice is almost as good your face, you know, at telling your truth."
"Is it now." He was far too tired to do anything but make the most basic observations. "You're probably right. I should go to bed." She had not actually suggested he do so.
"Is there anything I can help with?"
That was a fair question. "You want to watch five weeks worth of security footage?"
"If it will help, then yes."
The question had not been a serious one, but having said it, even in jest, Lorca suddenly was struck by how good an idea it was. Lalana was among the least likely to have perpetrated the sabotage, because while she was certainly capable of moving about the ship undetected, she lived under lock and key behind a guarded door and could not have beamed anywhere in order to perpetrate the sabotage.
Except, if she had somehow managed to escape confinement, it was the perfect sabotage because she alone would live long enough to escape the temporal field. So maybe she was the culprit.
Then again, why would she want to kill them all? She was on the ship voluntarily. If she wanted to be rid of them, she had only to contact Cornwell and request to leave. Moreover, why would she want him dead? Or was this a ploy to spend more time with him? Was the nighttime holocomm chat not enough?
Could she disguise herself so well she would be invisible on cameras? It seemed unlikely. The security monitors captured multiple angles. The idea of her perfectly matching her fur patterns to the angles present in the footage seemed extreme. Plus, no matter what color she was, she still had a shadow, and engineering was never empty. Someone would have noticed an alien of her size and shape in the room. Right? Camouflaging yourself on a starship was a great deal different than camouflaging yourself in a forest of trees, where you had an abundance of forgiving, irregular textures and patterns.
If she had not left the lab herself, perhaps she had gotten someone else to do the deed for her? A witting or unwitting accomplice? Who had then trapped themselves in the same predicament?
That was a point he had come back to a few times now over the past six hours: unless someone how managed to get aboard and then leave Discovery undetected, the culprit was likely still among them, and therefore might have the means to undo this state of affairs themselves. Except there were much easier ways to disable a starship and its crew once you were aboard. A pathogen, explosives, command overrides. What was the point of a time-lock, specifically? Was this about sabotaging the spore drive in particular? An attempt to make them stop trying to pursue the technology altogether?
He had not said anything in almost four minutes. "Are you still there, Gabriel?"
There was no real risk in having her watch the footage. So long as he made sure she could not delete or alter it, the worst she might do is try to pretend nothing was there or point fingers in some sort of false flag operation. "I'm transferring you access to the security footage on the ship. Look for anything out of the ordinary."
"Certainly. Will you please get some sleep now?"
"Yes," he said. If nothing else, he was willing to admit he was getting nothing out of the security logs at this point given how tired he was. The past four hours he had been staring at them mostly out of the nagging obsession he was missing something really obvious.
She signed off with her traditional words goodnight: "May your sleep be unencumbered, and tomorrow be a brighter day."
For all their sakes, he hoped it was.
