The blond woke, and was instantly aware of the absence of one figure. Moving slowly so not to wake the sleeping form of the dark haired woman, she slipped off the large bed and out of their sleeping quarters. She saw the redhead sitting in the darkness of the lounge area and approached. The darkness was no barrier to her, her enhanced vision allowed to see the other woman sitting in the chair, a half empty glass in her hand resting on its arm. She observed the brooding form for a minute before making her way slowly to her and dropping into a crouch in front of her. The brooding woman looked down at her for a moment before taking a swig from the glass, ice tinkling in the bottom of it before she spoke.

"If you're going to tell me that this wasn't my fault, don't bother" she said acerbically.

The blond didn't speak immediately, she just glanced at the redhead who refused to meet her eyes. Slowly, she reached out and settled her hand on top of the one holding the glass, causing the woman to finally look at her. "This. Was. Not. Your. Fault." she said, spacing her words evenly and without any inflection. She continued before the woman had time to react or refute her words, "We knew the risks when we decided to make the attempt. We knew the possibility existed that, despite our best efforts to reverse the effects of The Sweep and return us to our universe, the possibility existed that we could not exactly match the universal variant and harmonics. We made the choice."

The redhead snorted.

The blond sighed, "I sometimes wonder if what Lord Albus said about you is not closer to the truth than you care to contemplate." The redhead raised an eyebrow in query. "Before we left to attempt our return journey he spoke to us. He said has great respect for you as a leader and a warrior, but he said to us that he sometimes suspected you took too much on your shoulders, expected too much of those under your command – too much of yourself. He wondered if you did not have a martyr complex."

Oh?"

"I refuted that of course, but considering your reaction now, I begin to wonder. You expect too much of yourself."

"I promised to..."

"I am aware of what you promised, and I have never questioned the dedication you have to the tasks you set yourself. But there comes a time beloved when you must accept that you cannot control everything, that some things are beyond your abilities. I know" she said, raising her hand to forestall her, "You hold the old adage that Starship Captains are invulnerable and infallible..."

"... because they have to be." she finished with a wry look.

The blond inclined her head, the merest hint of an amused smile on her face "But there are limits, and sometimes I ….. we worry that you fail to see those limits."

"I promised to get us back, get us home." she said in a soft, small voice. "Six years, six years we were stuck in that universe, two of them as slaves to that … that ….. animal and his ... 'Experiments' before we were able to break free and join Albus' forces. And we spent the last four in that hell of a civil war. I swore I'd get us home when he was finally able to overthrow his nephew and reestablish the proper rule of law, and just when I think I've got us back, and helped him destroy that abomination of technology, I find we're nowhere near where we should be." She slumped back in her seat. "I failed us."

"You have not failed us. We are home."

"NO! We're not!"She shouted, tossing the half full glass against the nearest bulkhead. "We're in some damned other universe!"

"One that is similar to our own. One that, granted, is also temporally out of sync with ours enough to have placed us back in time close to the stardate when we were captured by The Sweep." She sighed. "I know you wished to return us to where we belong, and I and the others who worked all those long months to reverse The Sweeps effect did our best, but you must accept that we are here and there is no going back."

"She's right" came the voice of the dark haired woman, who had quietly entered the room and begun cleaning up the broken glass and spilled liquid before she went over to the redhead. She slipped in behind the redheads chair and loosely wrapped her arms about her.

"Look," she said after a drawn out moments silence, "I've no fondness for the damned situation we're in either. All in all, I'd rather we had made it back to our own universe. But the point is, we're here, and now we either can crawl into some corner of the Delta Quadrant, hide and beat ourselves up about it, or we can do what we always do."

"And what's that?"

"Make the best of a bad situation, and turn it to our advantage."

"And just how, prey tell, do we do that?!"

The two women shared a look before the blond rose to her feet and went over to the wall console. A few touches on the controls brought up both an image and information that she had gleaned from the small crafts powerful sensors. She turned back and raised an eyebrow.

The redhead took only a moment to understand what her partners were silently suggesting. "Surely you can't be serious?!" When all she got from the blond was a familiar quirked eyebrow and from the dark haired engineer a lopsided grin, she swore.