Chapter Text
“You found me a new recruit on the island?” Elan is back from her own tropical vacation and is too cheerful. “How?”
“She asked me. It was easy. I told her you had final say.”
Elan shakes her head. “You don’t want to give her a few shifts in the armory first?”
“Elan,” he says. “I don’t care. Pick someone else if you don’t like her.”
She’s momentarily thrown. “No, she seems fine.” She searches his face. “What’s wrong with you? You’re even more taciturn than usual.” Elan hisses in a breath. “You didn’t. Gabe.”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” he tells her.
“The engineer? Really? More than a year on this ship, and now’s the time…?”
“It was fine,” he says. “I don’t enjoy this game where you tell me about your romantic woes and then speculate about mine.” Burnham walks into the mess hall and he can’t stop a full-body flinch, just for a second, just long enough that Elan sees it
“Oh no.” For once, Elan can’t think of anything else to say. She pushes her mug of katheka to him and they sit in silence as he drinks it.
Minutes after jumping to warp from P3X-696, they hit a new kind of anomaly. The world is suddenly utterly without sound. No alarms, no comms. He knocks a hand against his chair—nothing. Detmer turns and tries to say something, but he can tell from her face that neither of them can hear it. He looks to Burnham and she shakes her head, taps at her station, and text appears on the bridge’s viewscreen.
UNCLEAR IF SOUND-DAMPENING FIELD OR TOTAL HEARING LOSS, she types. INSTRUCTIONS CAN BE TRANSMITTED TO ALL STATIONS AND PADDS.
He nods once. Of all the things to go wrong, at least this means no one can try to talk to him. It may have started as a sound-dampening field, but after a few minutes in which the alarms return, it becomes clear that no one can speak. REPORTED SHIPWIDE. CROSS-SPECIES, Burnham types. THUMPERS ALSO UNABLE TO VOCALIZE.
IS THAT BAD? he asks and regrets it when the words appear on the viewscreen. It comes across differently in text. Burnham looks at him and shakes her head, though he thinks it’s more of a “who knows?” than anything else.
Culber and Pollard scan members of the crew of each race on board, point tricorders at their vocal cords, frown at PADDs. They have no idea what’s wrong. The cook—a generous term for the person in charge of maintaining the food synthesizers—passes out mugs of hot tea with honey, as though they’re experiencing a collective bout of laryngitis and don’t have access to hyposprays. T’Lac conducts a series of tests on the various sub-sentient lifeforms that they’ve brought on board to see if any can emit noise. There’s nothing physically wrong with anyone—vocally or aurally—and the scientists are baffled.
And then, as quickly as it came, it disappears. There’s a heartrending scream that pierces the entire ship and the air takes on an almost shattering quality, as though they’ve all been encased in glass and it’s suddenly fracturing—and Owosekun declares, “Fucking finally.”
“Figure out what that was and how we keep it from happening again,” Lorca orders the bridge at large. “Mr. Saru, plot a course out of here.”
* * *
“Elan,” he says in his quarters later. He almost wishes they all couldn’t speak again. “I…made some mistakes.”
“Like what?”
Lorca reaches into the cupboard—he can just grasp the neck of the last bottle of whiskey inside. He opens it and takes a mouthful, then passes it to Elan. “That kind of mistake,” she says.
“I told Burnham something last night,” he says. “And I can’t remember what I told her.”
Elan passes the bottle back to him. “You told her you love her, I assume.”
It feels dangerous to hear her say it. He takes a long drink. This whiskey is supposed to be drunk slowly, from a nice glass with a single ice cube. He’s never drunk it that way. “Or she might have…guessed.”
“You were sleeping together,” Elan points out. “Some people would see that as a sign that she might be interested in you.”
“And then it ended. She ended it,” he clarifies, as though it isn’t obvious.
“Why?” There are nicer ways Elan could have asked that question, but she doesn’t have a lot of patience for soft-pedaling.
Lorca clears his throat. “She realized…something about me.” He doesn’t know how to explain what happened without revealing all of it, and he doesn’t want to tell Elan all of it. “My real history.”
“That you didn’t grow up in cornfields? No shit. I assumed you were Section 31, or used to be. Given your…alternative understanding of the rules. And the state of your body.” She leers without intent.
He grimaces. That would have been the ideal answer when Burnham accused him. The problem with secrets was that if you kept them long enough, you started to want to tell. Wait long enough and any prisoner would whisper his secret to someone, just to have it out of his own heart. “Something like that. She was…upset.”
“Why?” Elan’s understanding of relationships is very straightforward. People tell the truth. Sometimes that upsets someone. They’re mad and then they move on. “I assume you said you were sorry, etcetera etcetera.”
“Humans are more complicated emotionally than Andorians.”
“I’m in a non-relationship with a Vulcan, Gabe. I have to feel all the feelings for both of us.”
He has to give her that. “She was already uncertain. And she never liked my—flexible morality. She wasn’t happy to discover it was even more flexible than she thought.”
Elan shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says, and she does sound it. “I wish I knew what to tell you.”
“Maybe you should tell me to get over it,” he suggests. He drinks more whiskey.
“All right, get over it. But maybe try to be a little subtler as you’re getting over it with other people.”
Dread hits him. “What are you saying?”
“I saw that engineer go find you, and I saw when she came back to the beach,” Elan says. “Everyone else did too. You must have been rolling around in the sand or something pretty fierce. She wasn’t very subtle about it afterward either.”
“You’re telling me,” he says, “that everyone on the ship knows how I feel about Burnham and everyone on the ship knows that I had sex with one of the engineers.”
“Well. Most of them also know her name,” Elan points out.
And then, because things can’t get worse—it turns out that they can—the doors hiss open and Burnham walks in and Lorca catches a little bit of whiskey in his throat, which burns up through his sinuses. “Burnham,” he says.
“Captain.”
He and Elan are standing in what was a kitchen area, before he gave away his food synthesizer, leaning against the counter and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle. If he were Burnham, it would look a little pathetic. “What can I do for you?”
Elan takes the bottle from him and gulps some of it down.
“I left my toothbrush,” Burnham says. “I came to get it.”
This is truly agonizing. “I’m going to go,” Elan announces. She presses the bottle back into his hands. “Captain. Specialist.”
“Lieutenant,” Burnham says by way of farewell.
“It’s in the bathroom,” he tells her, once Elan is gone. It looks worse for him to be standing here alone with an open bottle of whiskey in his hand. He sets the bottle down on the counter and gestures to indicate that it’s fine for her to go the bathroom and get it herself.
When she returns, toothbrush in hand, she says, “Thank you, Captain,” and goes straight for the door.
“Burnham.” He wipes his hand over his face and she turns around. “Forget it, please.”
“Forget what?”
“Whatever I said last night. I was drunk. I didn’t mean it.”
Her hand clenches on her toothbrush a little. “All right. Gabriel,” she says experimentally.
“Captain.” His voice is rough.
“I apologize, sir,” she says. There’s the subtlest shift from her usual straight posture to the ramrod way she stands at attention when addressing a superior officer, like there’s a string that’s suddenly pulled her upward. “Will there be anything else?”
“Did you leave anything else here?” He remembers that feeling of anticipation, when she asked to stay another night. He doesn’t feel…good about this. He won’t be able to confess to her about life in the Terran universe, won’t be able to fall asleep next to her, won’t be able to argue with her for fun, try to get that quirked eyebrow, that tiny smile. She won’t tell him about her childhood on Vulcan. She won’t call him Gabriel again. She certainly won’t touch him again. But he’s in love with her, whether or not he told her last night, and it’s dangerous to let it go on. He should have learned that from Michael.
“No, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
Burnham walks out, toothbrush still clenched in her hand like a knife. She doesn’t look back.
* * *
The problem with trying to get over Burnham is that she’s always there. She’s on the bridge when he’s there, because he’s almost always there and she tends to work past the end of her shift and they work the same duty shifts anyway. Because they work the same shifts, she tends to be in the mess hall when he’s there. It would be strange to change his schedule and he’s certainly not going to change hers because of his weakness. She’s still clever, creative, but he tries to focus on her at her most Vulcan, whenever she says something that could be understood as cold or logic-bound or cruel. Her only rhetorical technique is logos, he reminds himself. She doesn’t say “Unless this is about me” again when he tells her that she can’t go on a particular away mission and he truly tries to ensure that it isn’t.
He slips sometimes, like when she says that logically, she should go on a particular mission, and he tells her, “No, you’re the smartest person on the ship and it doesn’t make sense to risk you when it’s unnecessary.” When it’s too dangerous. She doesn’t—regress, exactly, but she does turn more Vulcan, until one day he snaps at her, “If all I wanted to hear was logic, I’d have a real Vulcan on the bridge!” Detmer and Owosekun both turn to stare and Saru makes himself busy and Elan’s antennae scrunch down in horror. He remembers the days when he could yell at officers on the bridge and no one gave it a second thought. “Never mind,” he says. “I appreciate your perspective, Burnham,” and he doesn’t do it again.
Lorca sleeps with the magenta-haired engineer-now-security-officer a few more times. Better than finding someone new for everyone to gossip about, and she doesn’t seem to care very much that he’s the captain, doesn’t even call him captain, so he doesn’t worry about it. She does, once, sit up and say, “I’m grateful you asked Elan to switch me,” and he pulls her back down and carefully doesn’t hear anyone else saying those words. She doesn’t stay with him and he doesn’t have to warn her against waking him.
One day, during the regular briefing in his ready room, while Chrian is complaining about the effect of the anomalies on the warp engines again, Lorca interrupts her to say, “We’re never getting home, are we.” Burnham looks at him sharply.
“Captain!” Saru is appalled, though Lorca thinks it’s more likely because he dared to say it than because Saru has never considered the idea.
“We are long past when we expected to be…somewhere previously charted,” Burnham confirms.
“Are we even going in the right direction?” Lorca looks from Saru to Burnham. “If you were wrong about where we are, in relation to what we know, how do we know that we’re traveling in the correct direction?”
“At this point, Captain, I would say that the most likely way for us to return ‘home’ would be for Lieutenant Stamets to jump.” Burnham watches him carefully as she says it.
“Out of the question,” Lorca says immediately. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Lieutenant Stamets might be able to access the mycelial network without jumping,” she suggests. “At least tell us where we are in the universe so that we know whether we’re…going in the right direction.”
He’s resistant to that too, and he knows that it’s because he doesn’t really want to go back to the Federation. He’ll lose Discovery as soon as they return, and with it the last vestiges of any purpose. The crew will scatter. He’s never going back to the Terran universe, at this point, and he finds he doesn’t really want to do that either. For now, as personally uncomfortable—painful—and sometimes boring as it is, he wants to stay captain of Discovery, with this crew, wandering around wherever they are and bumping into whatever they find, letting the crew adopt their pet thumpers and the cadets distill their moonshine, and probably some of the crew will start producing babies from all the falling-into-bed-with-each-other that everyone seems to do. Occasionally people will die, of course, and there will be more memorials, and maybe no one else will try to kill him there.
“If he and Dr. Culber think it’s safe,” Lorca says finally. He stands up. “Dismissed.”
Burnham stays behind when everyone else has filed out. It’s been weeks since they’ve been alone together. “Captain, permission to speak freely?” He doesn’t want to grant it, but he nods anyway. “I believe you’re being overly protective of Stamets. His health and safety are important, but so is that of the rest of the crew.”
“Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?”
“That’s one precept among many, Captain. Stamets is not the only person on this ship who may suffer negative effects from whatever choice you make about jumping.”
“So, logically, I should let him risk death because other people are unhappy.” He has a headache. He always seems to have a headache these days.
“You should examine the reasons that you’re so concerned about letting him jump when you’ve been entirely willing to risk his safety in the past.”
“Oh?” Lorca takes up a fortune cookie and crushes it between two hands, then picks up a piece and inspects it.
“You don’t want to go back.”
“You do?” He looks up from his empty fortune cookie. “I told you, I would never let Starfleet put you back in prison, but that doesn’t mean a world of opportunities will be out there for you. Not like this.”
Burnham cocks her head. “I could go back to Vulcan.”
“And be told you’re not good enough over and over because you’re human? Be disregarded?” He shakes his head. “That would be a waste.” After a beat, he adds, “This crew, everyone on this crew, is—Discovery is the best of her kind. I won’t let someone waste Elan, or Stamets, or Tilly, or Culber. Or Saru,” he remembers to add. He does like Saru, for all his fussiness.
“Or Specialist Pheen?”
“Who?” He remembers, too late, that that’s the name of the magenta-haired security officer. “Ah, no, not her either.” They don’t talk much. He assumes she’s good at her job or Elan would have dumped her back in Engineering. “It’s a good crew. They’ll take my crew away.”
“Not everyone wants to stay out here,” she says.
He manages to keep from saying that he doesn’t care. “I said that Stamets could try.”
Burnham frowns. “You feel guilty for what happened to him.” What Lorca did to him and still won’t confess to her, even if she knows it.
“They’ll take him too,” Lorca says. “He performed illegal genetic manipulation on himself. They’ll take his blood and study him, and they’ll keep him until they can replicate him without using a human.” He grips the edge of his desk. He doesn’t like the thought of that, for more than one reason. He and Stamets spent the five months between him taking command and Burnham’s arrival fighting with each other, with Stamets refusing to accept that they were at war. Stamets in the Terran universe was…terrible, a sniveling lackey. But he’s grown to like Stamets here, his exaggerated reactions to everything and his dreamy love of the mycelium, and he can respect Stamets’ obsession with his work. He clears his throat. “No, Burnham, I don’t want to go back.” He grinds one of the smaller pieces of cookie into powder on his desk.
“I would’ve liked to have the chance to fix things with Spock,” Burnham says slowly. “But…I suppose I’d be all right otherwise.” She seems to catch herself and takes a deep breath. “Thank you, Captain.”
He nods.
* * *
“No,” Culber says. “Captain, you promised me that you wouldn’t ask.”
Burnham shifts to the side just a little, just in front of where Lorca stands. “Dr. Culber. I was the one that suggested asking you about his condition. The Captain isn’t asking Lieutenant Stamets to do anything.”
“Hello, standing right here? I can take a look,” Stamets says.
“Paul.” Lorca watches the two of them argue without speaking, only in glances and facial expressions. They’ve been together a long time, he knows. He envies them that familiarity. He wonders if Culber has also followed his own train of thought, consciously, or if there’s only a suspicion deep in his heart that bad things will happen to Stamets when they return.
“The white matter in his brain hasn’t returned to normal,” Culber says finally. “He’s not even back to post-Pahvo levels. And even then, as you know, the plan was for him to be examined in a medical facility beyond what we have on board.”
“I completely understand, Doctor,” Lorca says.
Stamets cuts in. “Hello, again, it’s my brain. I can sit in the chair and plug into the network without initiating a black alert.”
“I’m keeping sensors on you at all times.” Culber is clearly unhappy. “And I want Dr. Pollard there too.”
“Agreed,” Lorca says. “We should minimize the risk of anything going wrong. Burnham, Lieutenant Tilly.” The smile flickers across her face—she’ll probably never get tired of being called Lieutenant. “I want you both there too. You know more about the spore drive than anyone but Lieutenant Stamets.”
They convene in thirty minutes in the spore lab. Culber places sensor node after sensor node on Stamets’ head and face until he swats at Culber and says, “Enough, Hugh, I feel like I’m developing warts all over my head.” Culber adds a wrist cuff and then smooths his hand affectionately from Stamets’ wrist to his shoulder. Lorca’s throat tightens a little and he looks away. He remembers Culber saying they had to stop, remembers ordering Culber to do whatever it took to keep Stamets alive. Burnham sees him—Burnham sees everything—but she doesn’t say anything.
“All right,” Culber says. “You’re ready, or as ready as I can make you.” He looks to Dr. Pollard, who nods. “Remember, you’re not jumping.”
“Yes, I know, no jumping, don’t worry.” Stamets walks into the spore drive chamber and sits. He holds his arms out for insertion and says “Ready,” and Tilly hits the button. His entire body goes rigid when the connection begins; Pollard catches Culber by the arm and holds him in place. In a great rush, the smoke creature flies from the cultivation bay, slips into the spore chamber, and curls around Stamets, who settles back and breathes in deeply. He opens his eyes and they’re shining. “It’s so beautiful,” he says. “I’ve missed it.” Then he closes his eyes and frowns; Lorca can see his eyes flicking back and forth behind his eyelids like he’s dreaming.
After three tense minutes for the rest of them, Stamets says, “I’m home, you can let me out now.” Tilly disconnects him and he steps out of the chamber; the smoke creature flees back to the cultivation bay.
“How are you feeling?” Culber asks immediately. Dr. Pollard watches them both but doesn’t intervene.
Stamets begins peeling the sensor nodes off of his forehead and his temples absent-mindedly. “Something very strange is happening,” he says. “It’s like we’re in a bubble.”
“A bubble?” Lorca isn’t sure what he’d expected, but that wasn’t it.
“Or a—a concave mirror.” He spreads his fingers out and then pulls his hands apart, trying to demonstrate branching. “The mycelial network shouldn’t look like that. It’s like tree roots, like branches—it extends far beyond what any consciousness we know of, including mine, can grasp. But here—it’s like it hit a barrier and grew back on itself. The branches have curved along the walls.” He looks frustrated at his inability to explain it. “There’s no path—outside. I went as far along as I could, in every direction. It’s all tangled back in on itself. I wouldn’t begin to know how to jump out of here.”
It's what Lorca wanted to hear, maybe, but the weight of it is still hard to absorb. They’re trapped in some kind of galactic bubble that the mycelial network can’t penetrate. He can’t fathom it.
“Can we pop it?” Tilly shrugs when they all turn to her. “You can pop bubbles. We got in here somehow. There must be a way out.”
“Lieutenant Stamets, can you tell me where we are inside this—bubble? How we would get to one edge of it?”
“Yes,” Stamets says. “But we’ll have to get there the old-fashioned way. Warp, I mean, not the old-old-fashioned way. The network here is so tangled that one wrong jump would probably send us to an alternate universe, and if we do manage to pop the bubble, as Lieutenant Tilly so charmingly phrased it, and get out, I want to be able to jump without worrying about whatever other variables are at play.”
Lorca doesn’t react to the mention of an alternate universe, and he certainly doesn’t look at Burnham. For all he knows, this is some kind of…pocket universe that he sent them to. “Lieutenant Stamets, work with Mr. Saru to figure out a course, and when you’ve done that, I want an estimate as to exactly how long it’s going to take us to get to the edge of the bubble.”
“The anomalies,” Burnham says. “Could they be some kind of weakness in this bubble? Lieutenant, would you be able to map the locations of the anomalies that we’ve encountered onto your view of the mycelial network here and see if there’s any connection?”
“It doesn’t really fit the metaphor, but yes,” Stamets says. “They might be places where the network folds back into itself. Once we’ve got the course set. Tilly and I can work on that.” He doesn’t call her Lieutenant but respects her promotion enough not to call her Cadet, which means that now he mostly just says “Tilly.” He gives Culber the handful of nodes that he’s removed. “We should get to work.”
Dr. Pollard watches Culber and Stamets leave the spore chamber. “Sounds like it’ll be a little longer,” she comments.
“Sorry about that, Doc,” Lorca says.
“Oh, no rush,” she tells him. “All I have waiting on Earth is a storage locker and an ex-husband. He got tired of coming second to Starfleet,” she adds. “Everyone knows that when you get on a starship, you might not come back. Your partner either accepts it or they don’t stick around.”
“Right.” He presses a palm to his forehead. His head is aching again. It occurs to him that it might have to do with wherever they are. “Doctor, I want you to let me know if there’s any increase in…physical ailments, on this ship. People coming to you with headaches, dizziness, that kind of thing.”
“There hasn’t been,” she says. She looks at him curiously. “Are you experiencing headaches or dizziness, Captain?”
“Headaches.” The ‘obviously’ is implicit. They walk out of Engineering together. “You all never figured out why my light sensitivity went away.” He wonders if that, like these headaches, are a side effect of overstaying his welcome in this universe. Entropic cascade failure, something like that.
“Are you sleeping well?” Pollard looks at him by the light of the turbolift and amends her question. “Are you sleeping?”
Lorca hadn’t meant for this to turn into a doctor’s visit for himself. “I sleep fine,” he says. He does, generally, once he’s exhausted enough to fall asleep. He just doesn’t sleep very much.
“Hmm.” Pollard is unimpressed. She’s never been intimidated by him. “I can give you a hypo for the headache, but it’s not going to do anything if they’re recurring. I’d like you to try to sleep at least eight hours out of every twenty-four and see what that does.” At his expression, she says, “We’re not at war right now, Captain. Six hours.”
“You should give me a different hypo for that.”
Pollard purses her lips. “One, for tonight,” she says. “After that, we’ll talk more.”