She emerged five minutes later, gasping, disoriented. I caught her elbow when she swayed, steadying her.
"Can you understand me now?" I asked in standard Zandovian.
Dana blinked up at me, those green eyes focusing. Then, in accented but comprehensible Zandovian:
"Yes. I can understand you." Her voice broke. "Where are we? What galaxy is this?"
And I had to tell her the truth that would break her heart all over again.
"You're in the Shorstar Galaxy. We've never heard of your home galaxy. We don't know how you got here."
I watched her process it. Watched the hope drain from her face as she understood: they weren't just lost. They were cosmically, impossibly lost. Separated from everything they knew by distances that had no meaning.
She turned to face her people, and I knew she was about to translate the worst news possible.
I watched her shoulders square, watched her prepare to carry another impossible burden.
Then Zorn's voice cut through the medical bay: "Er'dox. We have a problem. Two of the humans aren't responding to treatment. Their biology is... reacting to something in the air."
Dana's head snapped toward the sound, and even without translation, she understood.
Her people were dying.
And we had no idea how to save them.
4
Dana
Six hours after boarding Mothership the VR pod had filled my head with language like someone downloading software directly into my brain, and now I understood every word Er'dox was saying. I wished I didn't.
"Shorstar Galaxy." I said it out loud, tasting the alien syllables. Behind me, the other women waited, their faces tight with hope that was about to curdle into something much worse. "We've never heard of Shorstar Galaxy."
Er'dox's amber eyes tracked my face with an intensity that made my skin prickle. He was reading me, I realized. Watching for the exact moment when understanding crystallized into despair.
"The wormhole," I said. "It didn't just split our ship apart. It threw us across—" I couldn't even finish the sentence. Across what? How did you measure the distance between galaxies? What unit of measurement could possibly contain that kind of cosmic fuck-you?
"We have no records of your galaxy in any database," Er'dox confirmed, his deep voice carrying an edge of something that might have been regret. "The wormhole you described, that kindof spatial anomaly could theoretically bridge vast distances. But without navigational data, without a reference point..."
"We can't get back." The words came out flat. Dead. "You're telling me we can't get back."
"I'm telling you we don't know wherebackis."
I closed my eyes. Breathed in. Breathed out. Felt fifteen other lives pressing against my shoulders.
When I opened my eyes again, Er'dox was still watching me with that uncomfortable intensity. Waiting to see if I'd break.
I didn't break. I'd broken plenty of things in my life with equipment, relationships, my own stupid idealism, but I'd learned a long time ago that breaking down in front of people who depended on you was a luxury you couldn't afford.
"The VR pod," I said, my voice steady even though my hands wanted to shake. "The others need to go through it. We need to be able to communicate."
"It will take several hours to process everyone." Er'dox gestured to the medical bay, where Zorn, the green-skinned medical officer, was already preparing the equipment. "And we'll need to conduct medical evaluations. Some of your people are in serious condition."
"I know exactly what condition my people are in. I've been keeping them alive for three weeks with a medkit and prayer." I turned to face the others, switching back to English even though it felt foreign on my tongue now, like the Zandovian language had shouldered its way into my brain and rearranged the furniture. "Okay. Listen up. The good news is we've been rescued. The bad news is we're in a completely different galaxy. A galaxy no one's ever heard of."
The silence that followed wasn't really silence. It was the sound of hope dying in real-time.
"Different galaxy?" Jalina's voice cracked on the words. "Dana, that's not possible."
