Naina and Valera exit the elevator together and enter the bridge, where Perez is sitting on a chair near the wall, watching a screen.
"Captain Melcey, Dr. Mizuni," Quera said. "You may need to look at the data. It doesn't match my charts, and I'm unsure what is incorrect."
Naina walked to the captain's chair, Valera to a console near her.
"Quera, charts on the big screen, give me navigation data on my console," Naina said.
The large screen filled with a sort-of map of their current whereabouts, and Naina's console displayed their route since they emerged from the sub-space bubble.
Naina scrunched her eyebrows together, tilted her head, and scratched the tip of her left ear. She lifted one eyebrow higher and tilted her head in the other direction.
"Quera, this doesn't make any sense," she said. "Where is the hypergate?"
"Exactly, Captain Melcey," Quera said. "All the charts and data say that it should be here, and our navigation data agrees with our direction, but ... it isn't here."
"Daew," Naina said. "Power up wide-area scanners and give me the data as soon as possible. Do we have directional?"
"Not like the one in Travelstar," Quera said. "We have a standard array with effective cone variation."
"That's not gonna cut it, probably," Naina said. "Eh, doesn't hurt. Aim the array at the presumed hypergate location, and set the cone to the smallest possible. I don't want background noise."
"Acknowledged, Captain Melcey," Quera said.
"The spbub shouldn't affect our trails anymore. Quera, can I have the radiation charts?" Valera asked. "And pop the sensor arrays at the back of the ship. Those that are designated just 'Trailer0 and Trailer1'. I have a weird feeling about this. I need to make sure of something."
Charts and data started to appear on various screens, and both of them watched them intently, not paying much attention to anything else.
"Quera, do you know what they are doing?" Perez asked.
"I have an idea what Captain Melcey is doing," Quera said. "She's looking for evidence of a phenomenon called 'hypershift' where known hypergates relocate naturally to nearby areas. We have seen this happen a few times on our travels."
"Of what Dr. Mizuni is doing, I have no clue," Quera continued. "My educated guess based on her questions and what I know about her, is that she's looking for traces of hypergate propagation. I'm not familiar with how that works, though. Captain Melcey read her paper at one point and said something about hypergates spreading around. More than that, I don't know, Captain Perez."
"Thank you, Quera," Perez said. "The girls are doing something mere mortals like myself have no business in. If they can settle their feelings between them, I'm not sure the galaxy is ready for what they can do."
"Daew!" Naina yelled suddenly, and listed a few dozen other selected swear words from several languages. "It's been closed?! Valera, are you reading this?"
"Qenaith Culdran!" Valera swore. "I think you're right. There are no traces of it propagating around the area either, and the trailers are still picking up the remnants of the gate's existence." She sat back in her chair and tapped her lips with her index finger.
"Who -- or what -- has the ability to close hypergates?!" she continued. "They are a natural phenomenon. There's no way to ... well, at least thus far there has been no way to create them spontaneously. I have a theory, but ... but closing one?! I have no idea how that is even remotely possible."
"I do," Naina said quietly, and pursed her lips together.
"What?!" Valera exclaimed, and spun around in her chair so she faced Naina. "How? Tell me, Naina!"
"Di'gatha," she said. "I don't ... I don't know how many people know of this outside Quenstar, but ... they can do it. They've done it before. It was thousands of years before our time, but Quenstar used to have a hypergate in her orbit."
"A what now? A hypergate? IN ORBIT?" Valera exclaimed. "How is that possible?"
"The elves figured it out many thousands of years ago," Naina said. "Each of the planets used to have one, and they used it to travel between them. But then the Di'gatha arrived."
Naina took a deep breath and stood up. She started walking back and forth in the room. "There'd been enmity between the Di'gatha and the ancient elves for tens of thousands of years. Some even say we share an ancestor, and the Di'gatha are just 'weird elves.' I don't believe that myself, but that's what they say." She went on, stopped, and scratched the tip of her left ear.
"But when the Di'gatha arrived at our borders then, they had changed. They had advanced faster than anyone could have guessed. They held technology far more advanced than they should have had access to," Naina continued. "Some of it more advanced than we have even now. And that included Qa Gwegnaith Ti'arran. The Dark Devourer."
Naina stopped walking, and her shoulders dropped. "Initially, I thought it was a myth, a legend to scare children. Like the boogeyman the Terrans have," she said softly. "But I found the records. I found the traces of the hypergate. I know it was true. The Di'gatha had a device to close hypergates. They could strand anybody in the galaxy, if they wished."
Perez shook his head. "That's a lot to take in," he said solemnly.
"But why would they ..." Valera said, then jumped up from her chair. "Sweet mother of life, the war!" she shouted. "That's why we shut down! That's why the Sunstar was abandoned! The Di'gatha are stranding the Empire from the rim inwards!"
"Daew! I think you just figured it out, Valera," Naina said. "I think we're in a deeper trouble than we originally thought we'd be. We thought we'd just head into the Core Worlds and drop the pods off at a suitably advanced medical facility, and wait."
Valera nodded. "Yeah. Seems like that just became a rather harder job than it was supposed to be. Any other ideas?" she asked.
Naina pursed her lips together and scratched the tip of her left ear. "That depends," she said and took a deep breath. "Can you do what you did in two years, but in reverse, and this time in like ... two weeks?" she asked, grinning nervously.
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