“So now we know the source of the vacuum flares.” Spock addressed the briefing room screen like a professor before his class as he summarized Rajendra Shastri’s revelations. His audience consisted of Admirals Morrow and Cartwright as well as Federation president Chab jav Lorg, who had joined them in Starfleet Headquarters’ Major Missions Room for this briefing. Uhura stood alongside Spock, with Montgomery Scott on her other side. The subspace signal was clear enough for mutual comprehension, but it was overlaid with both visual and aural static that made Uhura’s fingers twitch, reflexively seeking a console she could use to clean up the signal.

“The entities existing in the primordial universe—which we have provisionally designated ‘plasma beings’—lost their line of communication almost immediately after opening it. We surmise that they have been attempting to reestablish that link by sending more and more intense quantum wormhole probes to those approximate locations where they made partial contact with Commander Uhura before.”

Uhura stayed quiet. She was still wrestling with the emotional impact of what Shastri had told her. She thought she had worked through her grief and anger long ago, but here was one more precious thing that Nomad had stolen from her, and the pain was as fresh as the discovery. Her mind reeled at the lost possibilities, the life she might have had if only she hadn’t been humming to herself on the bridge that day.

The personal blow of discovering a forgotten love was painful enough—but beyond it was a far more profound sense of loss. Nomad had not only stolen her love; it had stolen her life’s work, and with it the hope of an unimaginably ancient and alien civilization to pass along its legacy. In their desperation to renew contact, the plasma beings had unknowingly killed or injured hundreds of innocent people. Her personal loss had snowballed into a far greater tragedy.

“But why start now, twelve years later?” Cartwright asked. “And why track backward through prior contacts?”

Spock had clearly anticipated the question, given the readiness of his reply. “The early universe operated on a profoundly different time scale from our own, Admiral. As the wormholes are temporal to begin with, the relative passage of time at the different ends need not align. I would hypothesize that their first successful attempt to restore contact at Argelius simply happened to manifest a dozen years later in our time frame—an infinitesimal margin of error compared to the billions of years of separation between their era and ours. Subsequent attempts were presumably calibrated to follow its parameters and thus have occurred near the same time.

“As for the reversal of the sequence, they could be systematically backtracking through their prior contacts—or there could have been some form of temporal inversion in the original transmissions Uhura and Shastri sent to them. Again, the relation between our time flow and theirs is arbitrary.”