The muscles in Bohkat’s back burned with the effort of sitting upright for so long, but he had never slouched in public before and he was damned well not going to start now. Never let them see you relax.

In the grand scheme of things it was only a mild discomfort, one he could forget about as long as he focused on the map in front of him. A field of stars floated above the conference table, bathing the room in a soft green-blue light. It was criss-crossed by a 3D grid, marking what Starfleet had decided were the borders of sectors in this under-explored region of the Delta Quadrant. Peppering the grid were dozens of red spheres. Two of them blinked out.

“Thank you, computer,” said Anand. His shoulders slumped as he leaned back in his chair, though Bohkat would hardly call his posture “relaxed”.

“You’re welcome.”

The computer’s response seemed to startle Szarka, whose head popped up from where she’d been hovering closely over her PADD. “I’ve never heard it do that before.”

“Never?” asked Ixabi, with a tone of genuine surprise.

“No,” she scoffed. “I’m not in the habit of saying ‘thank you’ to the computer. Do you guys do that?”

“Of course!” said Ixabi.

“No,” said Qsshrr.

“Sometimes,” said Ang with a shrug.

Szarka turned to Zamora, who was sitting next to her, PADD in hand, slumped in her seat with her head resting against her fist. Zamora scrunched her nose with a small frown and gave the tiniest head shake.

Szarka then turned her gaze on him, and he huffed in irritation. He did not currently have the brain-space to review and catelogue his prior interactions with ship’s computers for her or anyone’s amusement. She just raised her eyebrows and gave an overly animated shrug.

Anand sighed. “It seemed appropriate, since I’ve been interrogating it for nearly two hours now, trying to figure out where to start looking for a transwarp aperture–”

His tone as he emphasized the words “tranwarp aperture” was strange, a quavering sound that jumped between derisive and desperate. He thrust his hand into the starscape and pushed it up, above their heads, where it defaulted to full view mode: dozens of sectors, nearly a year of work.

“In all of this. And so far, based on our data, we’ve only narrowed it down to 90 different sites, most of which are probably natural phenomena. So…”

Anand stood up, rotated the map slightly, and jabbed a finger at the red sphere closest to their current position. It flashed as the computer chirped, and he tapped his combadge. “Ensign Carver, best speed to the coordinates I’m forwarding to your station.”

“Aye, sir.”

He waited a moment before asking, “ETA?”

“Three hours and six minutes.”

“Alright. Thank you, ensign.”

He flopped gracelessly back into his chair, and still gazing up at the map, said, “We have that long to figure out how to narrow this down to something we can accomplish before the heat death of the universe.”

Then, much more quietly, “Or before it becomes a moot point entirely.”

The news from the Alpha Quadrant that the Vaadwaur had disrupted vast swaths of subspace as prelude to an invasion of the Federation and its neighbors had been shared among the crew, and though they were all subtly subdued, Bohkat got the sense that they’d all already compartmentalized the problem and were ready to distract themselves with work.

The one exception was sitting directly to his left. Anand had been vacillating rapidly between carefully schooled features and looking like he’d just been slapped for most of the meeting. After a while, Bohkat had finally stopped looking. He had better things to worry about, such as the very real problem their captain had just laid before them.

His thoughts were interrupted by Ixabi’s voice, bright and hopeful. “We could ask around.”

Bohkat glanced at Anand, who focused on Ixabi, his face calm and schooled again. He said nothing, but leaned towards her in his chair in an invitation to continue.

Ixabi cleared her throat. “There are a number of worlds in this region with whom Starfleet has recently established first contact. We could reach out to the ones nearest these–” She reached up and pointed to one of the red spheres on the map. “And ask if they’ve noticed any unusual spacial phenomena or artifacts in the area.”

Anand nodded minutely, eyes unfocused a moment, before he asked, “First contact only? As in, there’s been no second contact follow-up with these societies yet?”

Ixabi hesitated. “In most cases, no. Not yet.”

Anand leaned back and tapped his fingers on the arms of his chair. “So contacting any of those societies could potentially be a diplomatic minefield.”

Bohkat felt himself nodding along automatically, but stopped as his mind flashed back to the meeting several hours ago in the captain’s cramped ready room when Anand had first shared the contents of Starfleet’s message with him. The message had made it clear that extreme actions might be required, and Anand had shared some human idiom about breaking glass in case of emergencies that Bohkat thinks he got the gist of.

He leaned in toward Anand who all but jumped in surprise (Bohkat supposed that might be because he hadn’t moved once throughout the whole meeting), and spoke in the lowest voice he could manage, “Is this not a glass that might need breaking?”

Anand considered his words briefly before giving one sharp, decisive nod. “Let’s ask around, then.”

Szarka pushed away from the table, ready to stand up, and said, “Okay, as your erstwhile communications officer I’ll–”

“You’ll let Ixabi do it, because she’s by far the most diplomatic officer on this ship?” said Anand, a questioning look on his face despite the fact that it was in no way a suggestion.

Bohkat felt a feeble spark of laughter trying to escape, but he quickly caught it and turned it into a cough.

To her credit, Szarka did not seem to take the slightest bit of offense. “You know it,” she said, without missing a beat. “Ixabi writes the invitations, I lick the envelopes.”

Bohkat often wondered if she put any effort at all into rolling with the punches, or if it all came naturally. Either way, it was mildly infuriating.

Anand seemed more like himself for a moment as he returned her wink and finger-guns, and he addressed the room with a little more energy in his voice. “The rest of you, in between your regular duties, review our targets again and see if you can find anything the computer missed. Have the other officers in your departments scan through as well. Maybe if we get enough eyes on the problem we’ll get lucky. Dismissed.”

Usually this was where Anand would stand up and follow his crew into the corridor, ready to keep talking to whomever was nearby and would listen even if it was no longer in an official capacity. Instead, he remained seated until the others were well away from the door. For a moment, Bohkat wondered if the captain had something to address with him specifically, but then Anand snatched his PADD off the table and made a beeline for the door without even sparing Bohkat a glance.

Bohkat allowed himself a brief second of surprise before he too was out of his chair and following at Anand’s heels. It was a small ship, so if he didn’t move fast, the captain would barricade himself behind a locked door before Bohkat had a chance to catch up.

He wasn’t sure why that idea seemed unacceptable to him.

To his surprise, Anand wasn’t heading to his ready room, or his quarters, but to the turbolift. Bohkat’s pace didn’t falter.

Until Anand abruptly stopped and turned to face him.

There was a winded OOUF sound in stereo as they stumbled and an awkward flailing of arms as they both reached out to steady the other.

Anand’s look of surprise quickly morphed into irritation. He tugged his uniform back into place and asked, “Do you need something?”

Bohkat let his arms fall back to his sides and said the first thing that came to mind. “Where are you going?”

Anand raised an eyebrow and started to very slowly turn away, looking as though he were giving serious consideration to just making a run for it. “I’m just going to walk the decks,” he said hesitantly.

“I’ll go with you,” said Bohkat, and as a small offering he added, “My back is sore. I could do with some walking.”

The look of hesitation on Anand’s face slipped into something almost like amusement, and he nodded. “That’s fine. I, uh, I like to start on the lowest deck and work my way back up.”

They walked in silence. Rode the turbolift in silence. They’d traversed the corridors of three decks in silence, Anand absently scrolling through his PADD as Bohkat strategically hovered to make sure he didn’t walk into any walls or bulkheads, when finally Anand spoke. “You know, this mission wasn’t supposed to last a whole year.”

Bohkat did not, in fact, know, so he stayed silent.

“Two months, they said, and then we’d all go home and onto bigger and better things,” Anand continued. “Leave the stellar cartography to the stellar cartographers, right? But they extended the mission by a month, and another month, and so many more months, and now…”

He didn’t need to say “and now we’re not sure there will be a Federation left to go back to”. Bohkat was relieved that he didn’t.

Anand finally stopped pretending to scroll through his PADD and let his arms drop to his sides. “Is it because of the Borg and Underspace and all of the chaos back home? Or is it something I did? And now they want us to actually go knocking around a Borg roadway.”

He clapped a hand to his forehead and sighed. “And I think that after a year of nothing but scanning and mapping, my decision-making skills have completely atrophied.”

Bohkat considered the statement for a moment before concluding, “They haven’t.”

Anand slowed to a halt and turned a puzzled look to Bohkat. “Is that meant to be encouragement, or are you implying that I didn’t have any to begin with?”

Bohkat tilted his head and pretended to be seriously considering the question. “Whichever option you find to be more motivational.”

Anand snorted, but he was smiling for a brief moment before Szarka’s voice came in over the comms. “Captain? Someone’s responded to our want-ad.”