Huge thanks to my amazing alpha/beta Insanity-Red for all the help.
Chapter 5
Shev obediently emerged from the vessel fifteen minutes later to help the team with the survey. Once the allotted time was up, he smoothly piloted the ship into orbit, where they deciphered the clue they got on the surface of the planet. It revealed their next destination to be Orillia V.
It was an unwritten rule in Starfleet that a person should sleep and eat when the opportunity presented itself, since routine was never a guarantee. And so the cadets, given that it would take them a little over eight hours to get to their next destination, followed this rule religiously, taking turns sleeping and eating.
Everything went rather smoothly on Orillia V—and after that on Lelas, one of the moons in the Senydra system. Krell and Raix, who'd been pulled away from the group for individual testing at these sites, had bravely faced their challenges and passed their tests.
Before too long, they were en route to their final destination—Kesla Prime. They'd been allotted one hundred and twenty hours (or five standard days) for the entire mission, and were so far running a bit ahead of schedule.
On Kesla Prime, things went a little differently—the area-specific survey took place before any of the challenges. After that, Hermione had been transported away from the group for her own test, while Krell received an encrypted message that she was to unravel in order to find out where they were to go next.
Hermione reappeared only fifteen minutes later, and Harry right away knew that something had gone wrong. She stormed past the waiting team, muttering something under her breath.
"Hermione?" Harry jumped to his feet and went after her.
"The goal is always to save the patient!" he heard her say heatedly as he drew closer.
"Hermione," he said, placing both hands on her shoulders and turning her around to look at him. "What happened in there?"
"I messed up!" she snapped. "That's what happened!"
The rest of their group made their way towards them, while she tried to calm herself.
"I don't know what—I just couldn't—I'm so sorry!" she babbled, tears springing to her eyes.
Harry pulled her to his chest, hiding her tears—Hermione wouldn't want the others to see them.
"Whatever you did, it can't be that bad," he said, awkwardly rubbing soothing circles on her back. "This is all just an exam, remember?"
On second thought, trivializing the exam in an attempt to calm someone who took them very seriously might not have been the best idea, but it seemed to work alright. Hermione took a shuddering breath, quickly swiped at her tears, and pulled away. She then took another deep, slow breath and turned to face the others, who'd been looking at her expectantly.
"I was presented with a subject," she began, "an approximately forty-year-old Boslic male, who was hemorrhaging internally from severe trauma to the upper abdomen. He had only about two minutes to live."
Krell looked up from her PADD. "It was all hypothetical, right?" she asked, her bulbous yellow eyes wide.
"Of course, it was," said Shev, throwing her an incredulous look. "Go on, Granger."
"My task," Hermione continued, "was to determine the appropriate surgical response, and to contain as much of the bleeding as possible before the patient 'expired.' "
She made a face and began speaking very fast. "I know it was all only hypothetical, and I should have simply followed the instructions to a tee, but . . . I used cold saline in order to drop the patient's body temperature below 27 degrees celsius, lowering his need for oxygen. Reducing the damage to the brain and all vital organs." Her voice rose with every word she spoke. "My patient would be alive for longer than two minutes, which would give me the time to not only to stop the internal bleeding but to also save his life!"
She turned away kicked the grass. "And the examiner tells me, 'You have failed to stop the hemorrhaging within the two minutes allotted. The goal of the exercise was to evaluate your surgical abilities in a crisis situation, not save the patient.' " She turned back to their team, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. "The goal is always to save the patient!"
"I don't think you'd find any argument here," Harry said reasonably, and threw a challenging look to the rest of their group.
It was clear to him that this was another one of Starfleet's no-win scenarios. That the subject's wounds were fatal and he was never meant to survive. The scenario was meant to test not so much the cadets' surgical abilities, as it was to evaluate their response to losing a patient. It was no surprise to Harry that Hermione the overachiever, who held failure as one of her greatest fears, would consider losing a patient—even if a hypothetical—as just that. A failure. To her, it was unacceptable.
Not only that, but she had magic, which meant she had the ability to save lives in situations where others might fail. Magic had its limits, of course. But in this situation, had the scenario been real, Harry had no doubt Hermione would have succeeded.
And not that Harry wanted to make any excuses, but it appeared that Hermione's exhaustion was really getting to her. Having her individual test administered days into their journey had not done her any favours. She was burning out and slipping up, reacting on instinct.
"It's just a test," said Raix, shrugging his shoulders, and then added, as if reading Harry's mind: "If it were real, your patient would most likely have lived."
"Yeah," agreed Shev, nodding enthusiastically. "So what if your first instinct was to actually save the patient instead of just showing off your skills? It's a good thing, if you ask me."
"I failed," Hermione whispered miserably.
A memory surfaced in Harry's brain. In the DADA exam at the end of their third year at Hogwarts—Professor Lupin's obstacle course—one of the tasks had been to climb into an old trunk and battle with a Boggart. Hermione had come out of the trunk screaming. Apparently, her Boggart had been Professor McGonagall telling her she'd failed all her classes. Harry wondered, briefly, what her Boggart would be now, after everything they'd gone through. He doubted it would be still a fear of failing academically. Maybe it would be a failure that resulted in worse than a splash of red ink?
"Because it was a stupid test," said Krell. "Who puts the evaluation of surgical skills over a patient's life? Ridiculous."
"I agree," said Harry.
"You did everything right," Shev said encouragingly.
"I didn't get the remaining puzzle pieces!" protested Hermione. "I'm letting you all down!"
Harry placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. "We still have some time left. I'm sure we can figure it out."
"How?"
"Well," cut in Krell, "we can start off by going to Kelana II."
When they all came to attention, she elaborated.
"I just finished decrypting the message. It revealed a set of coordinates that indicate our final destination to be Kelana II. I'm guessing the purpose of our cumulative clue is to help us find the exact location on that planet much faster, but as it is, we'll have to work a little harder. I mean, most of the puzzle is already assembled," she added quickly. "We'll figure it out. I'm sure of it."
Shev and Raix both agreed.
It was rather surprising to Harry how far their team had come in the span of the past four days. At the beginning of the mission, he'd been rather concerned that there might be some inter-team homicide by the end of it all. But things had turned out better than expected. While Raix and Krell had never been particularly difficult to get along with, Shev was a real piece of work. But something seemed to have changed in him after his panic attack on Archer IV. While still not exactly pleasant, he was definitely a lot more tolerable to be around. And he was making a real effort to be nicer—and more focused on the important things.
Even now, Shev quickly glanced at the coordinates on Krell's PADD and copied them into his own.
"It should take us five hours at maximum warp to get to Kelana II," he declared helpfully, having made some quick calculations.
"Then what are we waiting for?" said Harry, heading for their vessel.
When the vessel was about the clear the planet's atmosphere, Shev said, looking over his shoulder at Hermione: "Don't worry, Granger. We can still win this thing."
"We didn't just lose the puzzle pieces, Shev," she pointed out grumpily, still mad at herself. "We lost some points too."
"So what?" he shrugged. "As long as we win the treasure hunt, the points won't matter as much."
"Actually, about the points," Krell cut in, her expression brightening as she read the incoming message on her console. "I just received a transmission from Starfleet Academy command centre at Starbase 5. It says, 'After further review and debate, the Academy Medical Board ruled the test parameters were insufficient to appropriately test Cadet Granger's skills. The fact that her subject technically never died allowed the Board to award her full credit based on 'Creative measures devoted to the sanctity of life.' "
"Sanctity of life, eh?" repeated Shev, smirking.
"And here are the puzzle pieces!" said Harry, rising to his feet to pick up a small box that had just materialized on the middle of the floor in the cockpit. "Cheer up, Hermione."
Hermione exhaled, relieved—but not as happy as Harry thought she'd be.
"Let's just get to Kelana II and finish this thing."
"Aye-aye, Miss Sanctity of Life!"
"Just shut up and fly, Shev."
Two hours into their trip to Kelana II, Krell suddenly turned to Shev.
"I'm picking up a distress call!" she exclaimed, one hand pressed to the transceiver in her ear.
Shev, who by virtue of the alphabet was their final acting captain, asked, "From who?"
"A Denobulan medical ship Barzai. Their warp core lost containment, and they had to eject it. The aft of their ship suffered major damage, life support is failing. They think they might have hit a space mine."
"A space mine?" Shev repeated, his tone doubtful. "In this sector?"
"It's likely just a part of the exam," said Hermione.
"That's right," agreed Harry. "They probably want to see what we'll do. Are we going to ignore them because we have an exam to finish on time, or are we going to go and investigate and render assistance—as true members of Starfleet would do?"
Shev hesitated for a split second, before turning to Hermione. "Granger, do we have the coordinates?"
"Sending them to you now," she replied, having consulted her instrumentation. "We'll be taken way off course."
Shev made a face and let out an unhappy sigh. "Setting a new course now. ETA to the destination is . . . 2 hours 18 minutes."
The next two hours turned out to be some of the longest, most nerve-wracking, most boring of Hermione's life. The distress call had thrown a monkey wrench into the last stretch of their mission and put the whole crew on edge. They were all eager to get to Kelana II and finish—no one was all too happy about this new scenario being pushed at them by the Academy just before the end.
No one said much during that time, and the only speech heard throughout the cockpit related exclusively to mission updates, log entries, and the occasional question about the status of one of the ship's systems.
Until their vessel abruptly came out of warp.
Hermione, who'd been checking the environmental controls at the back of the cockpit moments previously, flew backwards and hit the terminal behind, getting the wind knocked out of her. Another jolt of the vessel threw her violently on the floor, and she was barely able to avoid hitting it face first. A sharp pain radiated from her elbows that she'd braced herself on and down to her fingertips. Spots filled her vision as she tried to catch her breath and hang on to consciousness.
"Hermione!" she heard Harry shout over the blaring alarm and the ringing in her ears, and saw him hastily unstrapping his seatbelt to rush to her side.
But she stopped him with the rise of her hand.
"I'm fine," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
But he must have heard her—or at the very least, understood her. Even though it was clear Harry didn't believe her for a moment, Hermione was grateful that he decided to let it go for the time being in favour of addressing whatever emergency they were currently dealing with.
Hermione took a moment to compose herself, then unsteadily rose to her feet, wincing. One of her hands gingerly touched the back of her head and came away bloody.
"Vectored exhaust controls malfunctioning!" said Shev.
"Deflector dish is offline," informed Harry.
"Comms are down," added Krell.
"The engines are overloading!" shouted Raix.
"Full stop! Shut off the deuterium flow!" ordered Shev.
"Deuterium flow is sealed," Raix confirmed.
"I'm purging primary fuel intake manifolds," said Shev.
When the ship ceased trembling, and they were no longer in danger of blowing up, Harry turned to his teammates. "What the bloody hell just happened?"
"Please, don't tell me it's a space mine," said Krell. "Like, a real one."
"Not a space mine," said Hermione, carefully taking a seat at her console and consulting the readings. "At least, not according to the sensors."
"Then what was it?" asked Shev tersely.
Hermione closed her eyes against nausea turning her stomach and took a slow breath.
"I'll let you know as soon as I find the answer to that question," she said, conveying as much of her annoyance as she could through her voice.
Thirty minutes later, Harry and Raix emerged from the engineering compartment, where they'd gone in to check on the systems. To say that they were baffled would be an understatement.
"Everything seems to be functioning optimally," reported Raix. "We don't know why we suddenly came out of warp."
"I know," Shev gritted out in frustration. "There doesn't seem to be any good reason why several of our systems malfunctioned simultaneously—and now seem to be working perfectly fine."
"Should we just be on our way then?" suggested Harry. "We haven't the time to spend figuring this out, do we?"
"I'm picking up something strange on the sensors," cut in Hermione, an uneasy feeling settling in her stomach—and it had nothing to do with nausea she was feeling after hitting her head.
Shev turned to her, his interest piqued.
"What is it?" he asked, his tone hopeful that they could perhaps finally get an answer to this riddle.
"I'm not sure. At first, I thought it was a sensor malfunction, but now I don't think so. Take a look."
Hermione brought up an image on the viewscreen. "It keeps shifting, but it's currently off our port bow—an area of unusual blackness. It appears, disappears, and then reappears. There's no predictable pattern, no sequence."
"I don't see anything out of the ordinary," said Krell, squinting.
"Neither do I," said Shev. "Are you sure you didn't hit your head too hard, Granger?"
"I'm not seeing things! It's right . . . it was right there. It must have shifted again."
She worked feverishly at her console for a few moments, then brought up another image.
"Magnifying section 284," she said, and then pointed at the screen. "There it is!"
"I see it!" confirmed Krell. "It's like . . . a hole in space."
"A wormhole?" asked Shev.
"I don't think so," replied Hermione. "The sensors indicate nothing."
"Nothing?" echoed Raix. "Do you mean it's empty of matter? There's always some energy form at work."
"The sensors are showing this to be the absence of everything," insisted Hermione. "It is a void without matter or energy of any kind."
"Yet, this . . . hole has a form," pointed out Harry. "It has height, width . . ."
"Perhaps," agreed Hermione. "Perhaps not."
"That's hardly a scientific observation, Granger," said Shev.
He said it matter-of-factly, but there was also something biting to his comment.
Hermione didn't fail to pick up on it. She crossed her arms and swivelled in her chair to meet Shev's gaze steadily.
"The most elementary and valuable statement in science," she said, "the beginning of wisdom is, 'I don't know.' I don't know what that is," she finished, pointing at the screen.
"Look," Harry cut in hastily, "if this were any ordinary kind of hole in space, wouldn't we be able to see what's behind it?"
Hermione turned thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. "Theoretically, yes."
"Then I say we go around it," said Shev. "Who knows what that is? And we're on too tight a schedule to stick around and find out. Krell, inform Starfleet about this . . . thing. We'll also make a mention of it in our logs; they can send someone else—a science vessel, perhaps, with better sensors than us—to investigate."
"I concur," said Raix.
Everyone else agreed too, and Shev made to resume course to the Barzai.
"I can't engage the warp drive," he said, puzzled.
"Did you prime the fuel intake manifolds, after you purged them?" asked Harry.
Shev gritted his teeth and answered, "I have now."
But moments before he engaged the warp drive, alarm bells went off in Hermione's head. She couldn't put her finger on it, but something didn't feel right. Her gaze shifted to the viewscreen, as if drawn by a magnet, and what she saw there—something pitch black and smoke-like—sent shivers down her spine.
"What the—" began Harry, apparently also spotting what she had.
"Granger, did you do this?" asked Shev, turning his gaze to Hermione.
"It wasn't me," Hermione slowly, her brow furrowed.
"What's happened?" interjected Krell, scratching behind one of her ears.
Hermione shook her head carefully, her eyes never leaving her instrumentation. "Whatever this void is, we seem to be inside it."
"But how?" asked Raix, a hint of fear in his voice. "We didn't move."
"Only one possible answer," said Harry. "It moved. It enveloped us."
Hermione nodded in confirmation. "There doesn't appear to be any immediate threat to us, or to our ship."
She found Harry's gaze and gave him a meaningful look—a silent question: Do you feel it?
Harry offered a small, almost imperceptible nod in response: Yes, I do.
"We have no communications outside the void," said Krell, removing the transceiver from her ear and placing it on her console with more force than was strictly necessary. "Has anyone heard of any occurrence even vaguely similar to this?"
Everyone promptly shook their heads, and silence settled in the cockpit. It was interrupted only by the beeping of the instrumentation and Hermione's taps on her console.
"Granger?" prompted Shev a few minutes later, his antennae moving faster than usual, indicating his impatience. "Care to share your thoughts with the group?"
Hermione bit her lower lip and exhaled before responding: "It's difficult to make a judgement based on the absence of information."
"Speculate?" said Harry, trying to do the thing that the two of them often did when confronted with a problem they didn't have a solution to. The right answer often revealed itself when one of them asked the right question.
"According to the sensors, this void has a total lack of dimension," said Hermione. "Therefore, by any accepted standards, it doesn't exist. Yet, being within it denies that conclusion," she finished, giving him a pointed look that she knew he would know the meaning of—whatever they were dealing with was quite possibly magical.
In all the time that Hermione and Harry had spent in this new universe, they'd never come across anyone or anything magical. Sure, thanks to Will's computer program and the Tsiolkovsky's strictly classified mission (it was a science vessel that had been specifically assigned by Admiral Marcus to seek out magical plants, creatures, and hopefully people) they now had several plants growing in the special greenhouse close to the Academy grounds. But the plants weren't exactly what they were used to; not strictly magical—or magical in a way they didn't yet know. Still, they were close enough substitutes and could be successfully used to make some of their potions.
The point was: the unfamiliarity of this world's pseudo-magic only made possible encounters with it all the more potentially dangerous.
"Is it possible our sensors are malfunctioning?" asked Krell.
Hermione shook her head. "I don't think so. I've seen no indication of glitching or inconsistency."
"Could we somehow have moved into another dimension?" asked Raix over the intercom. He'd gone back down to the engineering compartment to run more thorough scans on the systems.
Hermione began twirling a lock of hair, her mind churning as she contemplated the question. "Could a lack of dimension be another dimension in itself?"
"That's an interesting question," said Krell, rubbing her hands together.
"Yeah," interrupted Shev, "for a later discussion. For now, let's get ourselves out of here."
"Good idea," agreed Harry.
Hermione made herself focus. She quite possibly had a concussion from her recent encounter with the wall and would have to check for a serious brain injury when she had a few moments. For now, they needed to get out of this void. Whatever it was, magical or not, it felt . . . dark.
"I'm reversing direction," said Shev. "Maximum warp."
Everyone kept an eye on the view screen, hoping to see the stars churning by soon. But minute after endless minute went by, and there was still nothing but black smoke.
"Our engines have engaged, haven't they?" asked Krell, baffled.
"Affirmative," confirmed Raix.
"Engines are operating normally," added Harry.
"We should be seeing something other than this," Shev said unhappily, one hand moving in a sweeping motion towards the viewscreen. "Granger, can you confirm the distance travelled? Inertial guidance is showing 0.75 light-years."
"Confirmed," replied Hermione. "That's what my readings say, too."
Five hours later, the team was still no closer to getting out of the void, no matter what they did, which direction they travelled and at what speed.
Hermione sighed tiredly. "We need a fixed point of reference to confirm speed and distance," she said, inwardly berating herself for not thinking of this sooner. "I suggest we deploy one of the portable emergency distress beacons and monitor it."
"Do it," agreed Shev. "Lock onto the beacon, and I'll keep it dead astern."
The beacon was deployed, and they moved steadily away from it. At one point, they'd gotten so far away that they'd lost the signal . . . But then they picked up the same signal once more.
They'd travelled a full circle.
"Great," said Harry. "We've been travelling in circles all this time."
Like insects stuck inside my beaded bag, Hermione thought absently, reminded of an Undetectable Extension Charm.
"A very apt observation, Hermione Granger," said a deep, disembodied—almost mechanical—voice.
Hermione started, goosebumps erupting throughout her whole body.
"What was that?" she asked, searching for the source of the voice.
She hadn't imagined it, had she?
"You all heard it too, right? Where's the voice coming from?"
Hermione got her answer a moment later, when a gigantic humanoid face with large eyes appeared on the viewscreen. Whatever the creature was, it had a bluish complexion and warped appearance, as if it was pressing its 'face' against the view screen.
Hermione felt like everything inside her body was sinking all at once. As if she went completely cold and hot at the same time. She could hardly breathe.
Krell screamed.