Chapter Text
The entire ship screams and shudders, as though every fastener is trying to pull free at once. It slams so hard that the artificial gravity disengages for a second and everyone is flung sideways—his wrist breaks against his chair, Detmer is thrown over her console. He sees sparks spraying in his peripheral vision and has to close his eyes against the pain; something is on fire. It feels like they’ve struck something, but when he can raise his head to see out the front of the bridge, there’s nothing there.
Nothing at all, in fact. Not even stars. “Owosekun,” he says, and she groans in pain as she sits up; she’s bleeding freely from her nose. “Something wrong with the view?”
Owosekun wipes her nose on the sleeve of her uniform and tries to steady the data flashing across her control screen. “No, Captain,” she tells him. “That’s what’s in front of us.”
“Mr. Saru!” Saru stands up slowly, favoring one leg. “Find out where we are!” Lorca looks around the bridge—Rhys is down, unconscious; Detmer is crawling back around; Airiam looks more or less functional. Tyler is fine, but he can’t see Burnham.
Lorca has taken three steps over to her station before he realizes what he’s doing and then sees that it’s unnecessary. Tyler is helping her up. Two of her fingers are broken, at least, and her lip is bleeding, but she’s more intact than a lot of the bridge crew. She sees him approaching and freezes. To deflect, he says, “If your station is working, get me a damage report!” to the group at large, then walks back to his chair. He wants to slump into it, but someone has to look like things are under control.
“Captain, there’s structural damage to the ship, reports of fires on decks three through ten, a lot of casualties but no deaths reported. Hull breaches on decks two and six but emergency bulkheads are holding.” Owosekun wipes a smear of blood off her screen. “Reports still coming in, but it looks like we’re intact. Shields at fifty percent.”
“Any vessels detected? Warp signatures?”
“No, nothing—there’s nothing out there!”
“Mr. Saru, anything?”
Saru shakes his head and continues to tap at his console’s screen. “I’m sorry, sir, but our navigational array is…offline. It will be some time until I can determine our location. But it does appear that there are no enemy vessels.”
“Small mercies,” Lorca mutters. “Engineering?” It should have been his first thought. When no one responds, he repeats, “Engineering? What’s your status?”
A quavering voice says, “Sir? Captain? It’s Lieutenant Stamets. He’s collapsed.”
Lorca grips the armrest and then regrets it when pain shoots through his wrist. “Medical, get to Engineering, get Stamets. And send someone up here to deal with the bridge crew.” He doesn’t want anyone collapsing, but he knows sickbay is about to be overwhelmed with every cadet and specialist and cook who bumped their head in the—crash? Was it even a crash?
The bridge doors hiss open, admitting a doctor to triage the bridge. “Take Rhys and Detmer,” Lorca tells her. Detmer, who still can’t stand up straight, starts to protest, so he says, “Detmer, you’re going to sickbay, you’re not all right and I need you at your best.” The doctor gives Owosekun a hypospray to stop the bleeding, tends to the various minor injuries. Lorca watches her rearrange Burnham’s fingers into the right shape. Tyler is hunched protectively next to Burnham, and he still looks uninjured, but his face has taken on a glazed, panicked look. He hasn’t looked quite sane since they returned from the ship.
Lorca looks away and begins scrolling through the damage reports that continue to arrive on his PADD. His eyes are throbbing and he’s beginning to lose feeling in one hand. He’s just examining a preliminary report on the status of the warp engines—not good—when Burnham says, “Captain.
He turns. She’s standing next to him, close enough that he has to tilt his head up to squint at her face. “Burnham.”
“You need your eyedrops,” she tells him. “Here, it fell near my station.”
She hands him the device and then mimes putting it to his eyes like he won’t know what to do. He takes it, then realizes that with only one good hand, he can’t hold his eyelid open and inject his eye at the same time. “Burnham, a little help?”
“What do you want me to do?”
Lorca tries to imagine letting someone else hold the device near his eye and can’t accept it. “Hold my eyelid open. Gently.”
Burnham presses her lips together and nods. She crouches down, and then, so that he can see her coming, she reaches slowly toward his face. She touches his temple, then lifts his upper eyelid with the slightest pressure so he can hold the device to each eye. He hadn’t realized how badly his eyes hurt until now and he closes them gratefully, just for a second. But Burnham doesn’t leave. Her hands ghost over his forehead, back to his temples, down to the corner of his jaw.
“Checking for skull damage?” Lorca doesn’t want to open his eyes, doesn’t want to break whatever miraculous island of stillness this is amid the chaos.
“Your skull appears intact,” Burnham says. She fits her hand along the side of his face, runs her thumb so gently across his lower lip that he’s not sure it happened. Lorca opens his eyes and tries to lift his own hand to touch her, and then swears, because his damn wrist is broken. “Your wrist is not. Doctor—”
Burnham steps back and the doctor descends with a tricorder and an osteogenic stimulator. She blocks his view of Burnham, and by the time he can see her again, Burnham is back at her station, Tyler too close at her side. Lorca worries that Tyler is going to fall apart quickly, now that they’re…wherever they are. But maybe he’s wrong, maybe Tyler is just overwhelmed—not ideal, for a security chief—and just needs to rest. He hopes that’s the case.
He’s not sure if he brought this down upon them by entering whatever coordinates in whatever universe he did, or by pushing Stamets too hard, or both. Undoubtedly he’s responsible. But until Saru can tell him where they are—what universe they’re in—he won’t know what to do next. “Did we get it to Starfleet Command in time?” he asks aloud. “The algorithm?”
“We transmitted all of the data necessary to calculate the algorithm,” Saru tells him. “We had not completed our own calculations before the jump. It is my hope that we will be able to finish them once we have…more information about our present situation.”
“All right,” he says. “Computer, open a shipwide channel.” He pitches his voice to carry above the murmurs, through every hallway on the ship, every place with blood smeared on the floor and sparks flashing from the conduits, and says, “I want you all to know that wherever we are, whatever’s happened to us, we gave Starfleet what they needed. We gave them the power to win the war.” He can hear the cheers even through the closed bridge doors. The crew turn to each other, hugging carefully, wounds protected even as they do so. Tyler has pulled Burnham close, clinging to her like a lifeline, his head bowed and shoulders slumped. A broken man, Lorca hears Cornwell say.
Burnham is watching him from Tyler’s arms. He would almost say she’s smiling, if not for the raging storm he can see in her eyes. Two months ago, he wouldn’t have been able to see it. Of course—she’s only officially on loan from Starfleet prison until the end of the war. The war ends, she goes back to prison and her lifetime of self-flagellation.
There is no universe in which any version of Lorca allows anyone to take her, let alone back to prison. She should know that by now. “Mr. Saru, Mr. Tyler, Burnham. My ready room, fifteen minutes. Get…Cadet Tilly, from Engineering.” She’s just a cadet, but she works most closely with Stamets. And Burnham trusted her to run the mind-meld machine and provide moral support. “Find out everything you can before then and bring it to me.”
Tyler returns first, sweaty, eyes a little unfocused. Not good. Saru has forgotten to let a medic treat his leg. Tilly, Burnham, and the strangest Andorian he’s ever seen arrive together, Tilly trailing. She’s been crying. It’s still hard to reconcile this cadet with the Tilly that he knew. Tyler has been standing tense, every muscle locked in place, but he relaxes when Burnham arrives. “Sir,” she says, and occupies the space next to Tyler, Tilly so close they’re almost touching.
“Reports,” he says.
The lack of information is maddening. “I am running a full diagnostic on our navigational array and all other sensors,” Saru tells them. “I do not know what could cause this kind of complete failure. I have reviewed Owosekun’s data and I can find no explanation for the apparent lack of stars or any other celestial objects.”
“So we’re flying blind.”
“At least we’re flying at all,” the Andorian says. At his obvious total lack of recognition, she says, “Specialist Chrian, sir. I’m the primary warp drive technician.”
He relaxes a little. “Ah. We don’t use that much.”
Tilly gulps. “Captain, because of the condition of…of the spore drive,” she says, and her voice wavers a little on the words, “I thought it might be helpful for Chrian to report to you about the other way we fly.”
“Good,” he says. “What’s the current status?”
One of Chrian's antennae twitches. “Our arrival wherever we are was pretty hard on the warp drive. It hammered most of the EPS conduits one way or another, and the warp containment field is just barely hanging in there. I shouldn’t stay up here for long, I’ve got the others working on it as fast as they can, but we need every free hand.”
“Can we warp?”
She shakes her head, antennae waving slightly. “Not yet. If we can patch it all together, it’ll probably hold up to warp five, but I’ve only got so much to work with.”
“Do what you can, Specialist.” Chrian twitches like she’s about to walk out and then remembers that she’s in front of the captain and should wait to be dismissed. He saves her from her obvious impatience to leave by saying, “Dismissed, get back to the warp drive. Mr. Tyler, can you tell me anything?” There’s a long beat of silence.
“Mr. Tyler, your report?”
Tyler flinches and shakes his head. “I apologize, sir. No sign of sabotage. No indication that someone transported aboard. Main phasers are operational, torpedo tubes need repair but don’t appear to be seriously damaged.” He’s still sweating. “No significant injuries among security personnel. And there aren’t any warp signatures that we can detect.”
“So we’re blind, we don’t know where we are, we’re barely flying, and we have limited weapons.” He looks at Burnham. “Any idea how we ended up here?”
“It appears there was some kind of anomalous input when we jumped,” she says. “I believe Lieutenant Stamets received corrupted navigational data when he was about to jump, which threw us off course.” He wonders if she saw him adjusting the jump coordinates. “Combined with the negative physical impact that the spore drive has had on his body, it could have been catastrophic. I haven’t been able to reproduce the corrupted data, so I can’t tell how it might have happened.” Burnham glances sidelong at Tilly. “We’re working on it, sir. Depending on his condition…Lieutenant Stamets may be able to give us a better sense of what happened.”
Lorca nods. “Update me when anything changes. That goes for all of you. We need to develop a plan for what happens next, and I need information from you to do it.” He smiles a little. “At least we won the war, even if we don’t get to see it. Dismissed.”
As they turn to leave, he says, “Burnham. A word.” She stays, even as Tyler looks panicked at the thought of separating for more than a moment. When they’re alone, he spreads one hand on the smooth top of the desk, rubs his other thumb against the edge. There’s the tiniest imperfection there, as though he hit it with something heavy and it fractured just barely. He meets her eyes. “I would never let Starfleet put you back in prison,” he says.
“I know,” she says, almost wonderingly. “I never thought you would.”
“You’re destined for something more.”
“Destiny didn’t get me out of prison,” she says. “You did.” She almost looks like she’s smiling.
Lorca heard this in his mind, knew what she would say, but it still hits him like a truck—the satisfaction in hearing her say it, the inexorable need to be closer as she does. He walks around the desk unthinkingly, steps toward her—the last time this happened, she’d mirrored his steps, one back for every one he took forward, but this time she doesn’t move away. “Burnham,” he says, his voice grating. He reaches out and grasps her shoulder, slides his hand down her back to her waist, slips his fingers under the edge of her uniform and strokes the hot skin beneath. She gasps a little, so quiet he can barely hear it, and closes her eyes. Lorca hooks his finger in the waistband of her uniform and tugs her closer until their hips meet, her body radiating heat against his own, and she pulls his head down to kiss her. Her chapped lips catch against his own, tongue slick, and she tilts her head to pull him closer.
Somehow they move and she’s pressing him against the wall, unzipping his uniform top and pushing it off—she breaks away just long enough to pull his shirt over his head—and then she’s dragging her nails across his bare skin, biting his neck and sucking until it bruises, catching his nipple between her teeth until his brain sparks. He turns them around, pushes her against the wall and she wraps her legs around him as he thrusts raggedly. Burnham is trying to drag his pants down without letting go of him when the comm chimes and Saru says, “Captain, I believe we’ve found something.”
“Fuck,” he says against Burnham’s neck, and pulls away just an inch, holding Burnham up until she finds her feet. He’s so tempted not to answer that it frightens him. But he’s saved by Burnham sliding away, bending over to retrieve his shirt from the floor—god what she does to him—and tossing it to him. She shivers a little and he wishes he’d torn off her uniform. The bruise on his neck throbs when he zips up his uniform, and he presses two fingers against it. He hears Burnham’s breath catch.
“You should—” she says, and walks back to him, unzips his collar just enough to reveal the bruise, and kisses it, wet, open-mouthed. Then she zips his collar back up, straightens it a little, runs her palms over his shoulders and his chest like she’s smoothing his uniform.
He comms Saru—it’s already been too long—and says, “I’ll be there shortly, Mr. Saru.”
* * *
More accurately, Saru has found that there’s nothing wrong with their sensors. “It appears that we have jumped beyond the known portion of our galaxy,” he says. “My best estimate is that we are…here.” He points one finger well outside Lorca’s own mycelial map that hovers, glowing, on the screen.
“But we’re in our own universe?” Lorca asks.
Saru, Burnham, Tilly, and Chrian all stare at him. Tyler continues to gaze into the middle distance.
“Lieutenant Stamets and I discussed it, before the jumps at Pahvo,” he adds. “A full enough map of the mycelial network could allow us to travel to alternate universes that are also connected to the network. He believed that the 133 jumps might fill that in.” Stamets is in no condition to say that it had been Lorca’s idea. “It seems possible that he would have unintentionally jumped to the same coordinates as Starbase 46 in a different universe.”
Saru frowns. “…I suppose it’s possible…”
“How would we know?” He doesn’t want to push this too hard, not right now, but he needs to know as quickly as possible if they’re in his own universe.
“If we come across any object, I can examine its quantum signature to see if it matches our own,” Burnham says, her voice becoming more emphatic the way that it does when she’s presented with a new problem. “That should tell us whether we’re in our own universe.” She’s flushed with excitement still, and Lorca has to work hard to look away from her. He can almost feel her fingers on him.
“Good.” He turns to Chrian. “While we’re waiting for the spore drive to come back online”—while they wait to see if Stamets ever recovers—“how quickly can you get us back to some kind of known space?”
“With the warp drive the way it is, I wouldn’t try more than warp five,” she tells them. “But if Saru is right, and if we don’t run into anything on the way—assuming time and space are the same here, which the lack of stars makes me doubt—it could be several weeks, maybe a month.”
That’s a grim thought, out in unknown space for a month, with a weary crew and no idea what enemies exist, what technology they have, how they’ll communicate. If they're in his own universe, it'll been worse. In Starfleet's universe, other ships have gone out exploring—Enterprise hasn’t even come back for the war—and Discovery’s intended purpose was always exploration and scientific discovery, but this means limping home, hoping not to run into any obstacles, hoping nothing breaks. Including the people.