“You make it sound as though it wasn’t.”

A brief, convulsive grin. “You always wanted to rush through a good story, Nyota. I’ll get there.

“What I told you was that I trusted your instincts. If you felt there was really something there, you shouldn’t have given up on it. And you’d gotten me curious as well. I wanted to hear this… this music of the spheres for myself.

“Anyway, you agreed, but you were still a little embarrassed about it. You were so driven then. Trying to live up to a family of overachievers. So you swore me to secrecy. You didn’t want anyone to know if it turned out to be nothing.

“We had to find some… creative ways to get time on the Academy’s subspace equipment.” Shastri spread his hands and shook his head at the looks on the officers’ faces. “Nothing larcenous, just allocating an hour or two of buffer time here and there when we requested the equipment for our formal studies. You mastered things so fast anyway that you usually had plenty of time to spare.

“Before long, you were able to track down more of the signals—or at least what you believed were signals. I wasn’t as convinced I could make out patterns in the noise as you were, but I never had your ear. Still, with Starfleet equipment, we were able to verify a nonrandom structure to the patterns. Elements of rhythm, harmony, recurring motifs… like music, as you always said. Or like math—the kind of fundamental mathematics often used to establish a translation baseline starting from first principles.

“We tried sending replies on the same frequencies, to test whether there was really an intelligence behind the signals, something that might react to our response. If there was someone there, we wanted them to know they were being heard and that we wished to communicate. When we analyzed the patterns that followed, we did extract more information—hints of linguistic structure, densely packed, but too fragmentary, too alien, for the translators to parse. But we weren’t sure if we were getting results because they were actually responding to us, or just because our decryption algorithms were improving.

“As we analyzed the emissions, we determined they had attributes consistent with quantum wormholes. The kind that pop up naturally out of the quantum vacuum all the time.”

Spock and Uhura traded a look. Finally, this was starting to connect. Still, Uhura was puzzled. “Natural quantum wormholes come and go almost instantaneously. To persist long enough to transmit meaningful information…”

“Yes. We knew how unlikely it was, but that made it a mystery worth pursuing—as well as one we were both determined to keep to ourselves until we could be sure we weren’t missing some embarrassingly obvious explanation.

“After all, your original reason for giving up on the search was still there: How could the same signal come from so many unconnected points?”