"I've got it!" exclaimed a clearly excited Dexter Gray from his workstation at the rear of the Longbow's forward cabin.
Captain Matthew Cross turned his chair where he sat at the pilot's position to face his young sidekick. "Got what, Dexter?"
"I know where we are. We--"
"Hold that thought, Ensign," said Cross holding up a forestalling hand. "Let's get the Banshees in here so everyone's in on the discussion."
Ten minutes later, Matthew Cross, Dexter Gray, Lee Carter, Max Vasser, Sam Beckett, Jo Schmidt, and Alex Dalton were comfortably seated around the small table in the Longbow's crew cabin. The Banshees had parked their starfighters in tight formation with the larger Cat's Eye recon vessel and had floated across the short distance between their cockpits and the Longbow's underbelly hatch, their flightsuits protecting them against the airless environment for the short duration. Now they all sat, awaiting Dexter's momentous revelation.
The young man appeared somewhat nervous, not accustomed to being the center of attention like this. A reassuring smile from Alex however, bolstered his courage and he began.
"I've been trying to figure out where we are," he said by way of introduction. "Normally, I would have had the computer identify a few dozen stars by analyzing their spectra and then triangulate our position based on that."
"But there aren't any stars," interjected Jo. She too had tried that approach and found it useless.
"Ah, but there are!" said Dexter, smiling triumphantly and annoying the heck out of Jo. "On a hunch, I took a visual image of the darkness outside and had the computer super-enhance it. I saw galaxies. Billions of them! They're all around us, but we can't see them because they're simply too far away."
"Oh by the Great Bird, don't you dare finish that thought, Dexter Gray!" exclaimed Jo. She suddenly looked stricken, having guessed at the conclusion reached by the young sensor specialist.
"You don't know the half of it!" said Dexter.
"What?" demanded Carter. "Don't know the half of what? What does all this mean? Where in the Galaxy can we be that the stars are too far away to see?"
All feelings of elation and triumph at having solved the puzzle drained from Dexter Gray as the cold hard facts of their true situation actually hit home for the first time. He'd known the numbers for half an hour now, but hadn't stopped to consider what they meant for him and the others until just this moment as he was about to explain it. He shot a worried look at Jo, the only other person in the group who could truly understand the seriousness of their situation, trying to find some comfort there but finding instead only confirmation that they were totally screwed. He looked next to Alex, who, although not understanding yet, smiled in reassurance, confident in her guy.
"We're not in our Galaxy anymore, Commander Carter," said Dexter. "We're not in any galaxy. We're not even between galaxies. We're adrift in the void between galactic superclusters! The Black Gate has dumped us in the Great Void. I've triangulated using quasars... We're somewhere between the Virgo and Corona Borealis Superclusters, 50 million lightyears from the nearest galaxy, and over 500 megaparsecs from the Milky Way!"
Around the table, six jaws dropped in utter disbelief. "That's halfway across the known universe!" whispered Sam, eyes squeezed shut and shaking her head, refusing to accept the terrible reality of Dexter's pronouncement. She did a quick mental calculation and was even more horrified. She opened her eyes and looked at Carter. "If we traveled nonstop at warp 9 all the way, it would take us over a million years to get home!"
"Better not forget to go to the bathroom before you start that trip," joked Max, though her expression was dark and devoid of humor.
Cross spared her a tired look, took a deep breath and, looking around the table at all their faces, said simply, "Then we better find a quicker way home. We'll proceed to the sub-stellar mass Jo discovered."
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