All at once, a welcome sense of peace washed over her.
Captain Demora Sulu sat back in the command chair on the Enterprise bridge and regarded the dizzying tableaux of stars dancing on the main viewscreen. When she had first witnessed such a display seventeen years earlier, it had represented a forfeiture of virtually everything she held dear, an incalculable loss of all that she used to define herself: people and places, career and accomplishments, memories of the past and dreams of the future. She remembered being overwhelmed by the enormity of her deprivation only moments before her entire life—by some process she didn’t understand, by a seemingly indifferent randomness—had been given back to her.
As Sulu watched one pattern of stars after another appear on the viewer, she wondered what had changed for her between then and now. She could see the simple answer. When she and Harriman had unexpectedly been whisked away from their universe by Odyssey and unceremoniously deposited in another—and then another, and another, potentially ad infinitum—she’d been sitting on a shuttlecraft with her commanding officer, rather than on the starship on which she’d lived for a decade, among a crew of hundreds, many of whom she counted as friends. She and John had also become friends by then, but they hadn’t yet developed the closeness that they ultimately would. She had other, closer friends back on Enterprise, and in other places, too. Though she could not recall whom she’d been seeing at the time, she did remember that she’d been in a romantic relationship.
And, of course, there had been Dad.
The first time that Odyssey had robbed her of her place in the universe, it had taken away so much: the place she lived, most of the people she called her friends, a budding romance, and her family. It had taken away everything.
But this time . . .
Odyssey hadn’t pulled Sulu from her universe; the portal at Rejarris II had. In the end, it had also brought Enterprise back to her, the place she’d called home for the past twenty-seven years, which amounted to more than half of her life. Almost all of her closest friends lived aboard the ship with her, and the portal had delivered to her one of them who didn’t in John Harriman. She didn’t have much of a love life at the moment, but she hadn’t before everything that had happened in the previous eleven months.
And, of course, there was Dad.
Prior to encountering the portal, Sulu had lived with the grief and the never-ending sense of loss that had come with losing her father. Remarkably, he had been returned to her—or she to him. Either way, she once again had a parent, a man she admired and respected, a man whose company she enjoyed, a man she loved as she had loved no other.
And Odyssey represented only possibilities to her, and more than one. She and her crew—and the recovered crew of Excelsior—might one day find their way back to their own universe, but they might also find another in which they would settle. Perhaps they would find someplace spectacular.
That was the simple answer. The first time, Odyssey had taken everything from her. The second time, she had everything with her.
Sulu had never been a scientist, but she understood Occam’s razor, the principle that, among competing theories, the simplest one is considered more likely to be true. But as she sat on the bridge of Enterprise, among not only her crewmates but some of her closest friends, with her father restored to her life, she didn’t believe the simple answer. She didn’t think that the pain she’d felt at Odyssey seventeen years prior, and the peace she felt at that moment, depended at all on what she had lost in the past and what she possessed in the present.
I think it’s me.
Such a formulation sounded egocentric, perhaps even egotistical. Sulu didn’t mean to discount her friends or her family; they meant more to her than she could put into words. She didn’t mean to ignore the reality of having a home; she loved Enterprise and had no desire to leave it.
But if I didn’t have these people, or this ship? Would I stop being me?
When Sulu had graduated from the Academy, she could have been assigned to any vessel in Starfleet. Her posting to Enterprise had been the result of her superior performance, but there had been other Excelsior-class ships out there, ships with distinguished records. If she had ended up on Challenger or Constitution or Paris, would she have had a substantially different life? Would she have been a substantially different person? She would have had a different home, and different friends, but she thought that she would still be Demora Sulu, a woman happy with her choices, contented with her life, and at peace with herself. She worked hard each day to be the best version of herself that she could be, open to learning new things, to exploring fresh perspectives, and to growing.
That didn’t mean that she didn’t understand loss. On the contrary, she had experienced it from an early age. But that first loss of her mother hadn’t ended Demora’s life; she had gone on. And when she thought her father had died, she’d hurt, but she’d also gone on then, too.
Life is what you make it, she thought. Happiness is a choice.
Actually, maybe Occam’s razor did apply.
The sound on the bridge shifted. Sulu felt rather than heard the characteristic vibration of the impulse engines as they engaged, and then the familiar thrum permeated the air. “Ensign Syndergaard?” the captain said, even as she studied the main viewscreen.
“It’s not me, sir,” said the helm officer, excitement raising the level of his voice. He tapped at several control surfaces on his console. “It’s the navigational routine.”
On the viewer, the stars shined steadily. In the center of the screen a grouping of seven stars looked to Sulu like a backward question mark. She smiled, though she thought not so much for herself as for everybody else aboard.
Well, maybe for everybody but John and Amina, she thought, understanding that the husband and wife would have been happy wherever they’d ended up, as long as they’d ended up there together.
A boatswain’s whistle sounded. “Captain Sulu to the bridge,” came her father’s voice. Demora reached to activate the intercom on the arm of the command chair when she heard a second signal.
“Admiral Harriman to the bridge.”
“Captain,” Kanchumurthi said, “we’re being contacted from all over the ship. Commander Buonarroti in engineering, Doctor Morell in sickbay, Lieutenant Ved in the transporter room.”
Sulu stood up, a smile on her face. She appreciated everybody’s excitement. “Sort them out, Ramesh,” she said. “Tell everybody I’ll be with them shortly.”
“Captain, I can confirm from the observable stars that we have returned to our universe,” Aldani said at navigation.
“Thank you, Gaia,” Sulu said. “Lay in a course—”
“Captain,” said Fenn, “something’s wrong.” Sulu turned toward the science officer, but she felt no panic, no disruption in the calm that had come upon her. “The locations of some stars aren’t right.”
“Why is that, Borona?” Sulu asked. “Have we not returned to our universe?”
“No, it’s not that,” Fenn said, obviously trying to make sense of her readings. “The collection of stars is right, the luminosities and spectral types are right, but—” Fenn’s head suddenly snapped up from her panel. “It’s not the right time.”
“You mean it’s not eleven months since we arrived at Rejarris Two?” Sulu asked. She knew that the program written to analyze the star patterns as Odyssey moved them from universe to universe contained a time component in it. She and John had determined seventeen years ago to do that when they’d been in the shuttlecraft, and she’d made sure of it that time, too.
“No, sir,” Fenn said. “It’s three weeks before we arrived at Rejarris Two.”
Sulu laughed. “Well, then,” she said, “I guess we haven’t missed anything.” She heard some of the bridge crew chuckle, but more out of relief than amusement, she thought. “Gaia, set a course for Starbase Twenty-Three, but keep us out of any shipping lanes or populated regions. I don’t want to come into contact with any other ships. Torsten, I want low warp speed. Get us back to the Federation in a month, after Admiral Harriman and Captain Sasine have left Helaspont Station for Rejarris Two. We’ve done enough traveling from one universe to another. The last thing we need to do is alter the timeline.”
As both Aldani and Syndergaard acknowledged their orders, Tenger spoke up. “Captain, what should we tell everybody contacting the bridge?”
Sulu turned to face her friend. “Tell them we’re home.”