Nothing was ever easy in the Delphic Expanse.
Barely fifteen minutes had elapsed since the other Enterprise docked with the NX-01, ten since Jon's urgent but frustratingly unclear message to get her ass back here because they "had a situation to deal with," and five since she entered Sickbay to discover two Sovals and a pair of white-eyed humans who looked enough like Malcolm Reed that they could have passed as siblings. Phlox's pronouncement that these people were who they claimed to be left the other Enterprise personnel present – Jon, Reed, Soval, Hayes, and the two MACOs standing guard by the door – reeling in open, visible shock, but did nothing to clue Erika in on what exactly was going on. So she'd asked, rather politely she thought, exactly that.
Which was how she found herself h
