In the ready room, Commander Adrián Valerio could see the flashing lights in rhythm coming from the already deployed communication repeaters. It was quite a sight, stretching as far as the eye could see. The crew was tired, having worked overtime to get the communication grid online. He heard the chime at the door, but he didn’t look over his shoulder. Instead, he simply offered, “Come in.”

Lieutenant Commander Keslara zh’Talen walked into the room, her eyes falling on her captain by the window. “The final deployment is about to commence. We should be reaching the crosspoint where USS Pacific Palisades is scheduled to meet us,” she reported, standing at attention as she stared out the window at the flashing light of the last beacon they had just laid.

“Quiet ride,” Adrián finally spoke, rubbing his fingers over each other. Something felt amiss to him. Something was not right.

Keslara raised her brow. “Aside from the Underspace asteroid, the plasma nebula and Ferengi trying to sell ration packs. Perhaps it might be a quiet mission, sir.” She found the mission more annoying than anything. They were sent out for a mundane task, rather than to support Hecate Station.

He finally turned and raised a finger. “That’s what I mean. It’s too quiet. These interactions are too mundane, too well-expected at the front,” Adrián shrugged, lowering his finger. “But I feel blind. I don’t have communications with Hecate. I got no idea what is going on out there. Seriously, what are we missing? I feel in my guts that we are missing something…” He struggled to formulate the words. “Big?”

“Like what sir?” Keslara looked dryly at him. “It’s not like a starbase is on fire. We have already seen that happen,” she bluntly pointed out.

Raising his shoulders, Adrián admitted, “I don’t know. I was expecting something.” He kind of let it out as if a child pouting for attention. This whole Blackout thing had set them quite on edge.

But Adrián’s flow of thought was broken by the voice of Thal over the comm: “Captain to the bridge. We have USS Pacific Palisades in view. They are hailing us”.

“On our way,” Adrián replied with a brief tap on his comm badge.

Moments later both Adrián and Keslara stepped onto the bridge.

“Open the channel,” Adrián ordered as he saw the familiar faces of Starfleet officers in front of him. He smiled softly as a pair of Starfleet officers, a captain and a commodore, appeared on the screen: “Commander Valerio, Captain of the USS Himalaya. It’s a pleasure to see some familiar faces after being in the dark for so long”.

“And you as well, Commander Valerio,” smiled Commodore Amit Agarwal, the chief of the Archanis Sector detachment of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. He could sense the nerves on the younger man’s face. Not as prominent as on the face of the Palisades CO’s face, but still very much there. And so he probed while keeping it positive: “I presume from the readings we are seeing that your deployment went smoothly enough?”

Looking at his side to Marisol, Adrián gave a nod, and Marisol took a step forward. “I am Lieutenant Ortiz, the special project head for this operation, sir. I can conclude that all 43 deployments have been successful. We had some problems on the way, but we worked them out..”

Adrián smiled at the Commodore, proud of his people. “As you can hear, we are well on schedule, how did the schedule went for you?”

“All good on our end,” Commodore Agarwal confirmed, not wasting breath of the problems they’d had, problems that, if he was honest with himself, were more to do with Captain Saito and his mediocre staff than with the technology itself. “II think we’re ready to give the chain a test.” If successful, this relay would serve as a bridge connecting two sectors otherwise isolated by the Blackout. Space would suddenly feel less large again.

Next to him, Captain Kenji Saito, seemed less than content though, a consistent naysayer as they’d made their way through the sliver of space protected from the Blackout by subspace interference caused by the Archanis and Betreka Nebulas. “Unfortunately, even if the chain works, you should be aware we have encountered a slight snag. While laying the repeaters on our side, we lost touch with Archanis Station.” When this had happened, he’d suggested they abort the mission – that it’d been made moot by the loss of contact, as the whole point was to connect the two stations, and one was now missing – but Commodore Agarwal had insisted on pushing forward regardless.

“Same here,” Adrián confirmed. “We lost Hecate communication after the third or fourth deployment. We were kinda expecting it. But Captain, this communication method is a way to pitch a light in the darkness. We shall know from areas around the arrays what is going on and if people need help.” Adrián felt the pressure of this growing on his shoulders.

“Well, if you too have encountered the same, then maybe I shall hold on my judgement for now,” Captain Saito conceded, although he still remained concerned.

“We are in the process of deploying the last array. Do you have the communication frequency so that our team can hook up the system?” Marisol requested formally.

“Sending over now,” chimed in Captain Reed Westmoreland, the head of communications and information systems for the detachment, from his position by an auxiliary science station adjacent to the command island.

Thal looked at the incoming transmission. “I got it. Sending it down to Industrial Bay.” He kept an eye out for anything around the two ships. He tapped his finger on the console and looked up at the screen, “Commodore, Captain, I don’t want to speak out of turn of my command team, but I was wondering if your operations officer has noticed anything out of shape when it comes to the blackout?”

Captain Saito looked over at his operations officer, but Lieutenant Commander Miriam Gessler just shrugged. She was not one to be so probative or creative. She kept her eyes on the ship, her objective being its smooth functioning and nothing more than that.

“The blackout always seemed static, fixed on one spot. But recently I have noticed it becoming dynamic,” Thal explained. “It moves as if something is happening.”

“Maybe our friends in the Fourth Fleet have found a way to influence it?” Commodore Agarwal inferred. Before they had left Archanis Station, the updates over the Pathfinder array from Fourth Fleet Command had included some hypotheses about how one might belay the Blackout effect.

A bit puzzled, Adrián thought for a second. “It is quite the assumption. We know barely anything of the situation regarding the Blackout. Hopefully this line of arrays can shed some answers for us,” Adrián said, wondering both how Hecate was doing, and how the Federation was cooping with the problem at hand right now. Was the Blackout perhaps collapsing? Did Starfleet truly find a fix?

“We know from their declarations that the Vaadwaur claim responsibility for the effect,” Commodore Agarwal pointed out. “If it s anthropogenic in origin, we can infer there might be an anthropogenic solution too.” He’d have asked Ensign Byron O’Connor, the Palisades’ Chief Science Officer, to look into it, but the dynamics of such a complex astrophysical anomaly were way beyond the twenty five year old and his team of six, the engineering-oriented utility cruiser a far cry from say the Polaris and its Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity, or Archanis Station and its six hundred strong engineering and research unit.

“What ever it is, we shall know it soon enough. The array has been deployed, sir,” Marisol addressed both command teams. “I will activate the arrays now all, please stand by.” She walked to a console near Thal and taps onto it, trying to get a ping from every array as she taps the start-up button, the arrays flashing red light outside, now switch to orange and finally to its fixed green light one by one in both direction “Its working…they are getting active.”

“I can confirm I’m seeing the same,” Captain Westmoreland reported. “I’ve got a clean line all the way to Archanis Station…” His voice droned off as he tried a few things, but to no avail. “Only problem is that I’m not actually getting a ping back from the station itself. It’s definitely there, but it’s not responding.”

“Strange, I am getting the same readings. More of the surrounding is showing data…” Marisol narrows her eyes and looked at Thal. “Lieutenant, can you please check that feed, array 16, out into the Meronia Cluster?” She swiped the information to his and looked at the reflected other data points.

Thal looked at the information and then back at Marisol. She might have thought she didn’t know, but she knew Marisol needed confirmation: “The closest communicable array is picking up unknown entities.”

“This means that there is an unknown force at Archanis,” Darius concluded, becoming wary immediately. “Send me the data feed, Lieutenant. I will cross-reference it with the database.” He went to work immediately. Darius saw the information also from Hecate Station: “What the fifty-one entities near Hecate Station? These readings show civilian ships, but from the Klingon Empire, Romulan Republic, and more.”

Adrián narrows his eyes looking at the screen. “It seems we have an intergalactic problem that extends beyond the veil of the blackout.”

“Yes, I’m afraid it does,” Commodore Agarwal nodded, debating their options. Captain Saito, for his part, just looked nervous and lost as a result of all the new information. What the hell was happening out there?