Now son, you’ll know that I’ve never been one to take bad news lying down. So naturally, I didn’t sleep a wink that night. As the station’s chronometer crept towards 07:00 hours I found my focus slipping from the events of the day before towards affairs of the heart. After all, I’m only human. Seeking emotional comfort is a natural response to bad news.

Still. I can’t say I’m proud of what happened next.

No need for those formalities these days. Call me Jack.

Have you ever heard of Captain Janel Zon?

He was a good man. We were... Close.

He wasn’t what you’d call a textbook officer. Always had a slightly disheveled look about him. While it rubbed some of the Admirals the wrong way, I found it endearing. Made it very easy to wind him up though, all I had to do was feign interest in making him adhere to protocol and he’d snap upright so fast I was always surprised he didn’t put his back out.

He was the captain of the Lakota at the time and while I had reached out to him for comfort, he had found a way to surprise me beyond my wildest expectations. On one of the worst days of my life, it turned out his ship was on its way to me to pick up some sort of cargo. They always had those old Excelsiors running odd jobs around the quadrant...

Now where was I? Oh yes.

As I began to get him caught up with the previous day’s events, I got the call I had been dreading.

The San Diego and Anaheim had arrived, and were asking permission to lock on to the never to be completed Intrepid class hulls. I made my way to Operations, gave the order and my only just re-floated heart immediately sank again.

As you might imagine, I wasn’t particularly in the mood to socialize. So I headed back to my office. After recycling yet another cold Raktajino my sleep deprived mind got back to theorizing. But before we move on I have to reiterate. Despite everything, whatever you may think. The Intrepid class design is not the problem.

Quite right. Quite right.

Well. It turned out that the context break of going to Operations was what I needed to make my next breakthrough. It had been there in the testing records for Intrepid. Cherenkov radiation. I thought that that must be the key.

It’s a good question. If I’m being honest with you, I latched on to it because it was just so abnormal. We know it can be produced when tachyons interact with a planetary atmosphere but there were no planets in the vicinity of the weapons tests and no planets in the area where Voyager went missing.

As Arther Conan Doyle said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”. In other words. It was unusual and I was desperate.

Not exactly... But looking for them in the badlands led me to my next breakthrough. Abnormal polarized magnetic variation, which led me to signs of tetryon particles.

Now, I don’t know how much you know about tetryons. But they only typically exist in subspace. We were already familiar with them from our work reworking the Intrepid after the Hekaras incident.

If I was sure of one thing, it was that they didn’t belong in the badlands, but to investigate further, I needed a ship...