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“Is that how she tampered with the autopilot?” Janeway asked. “Psionically?”

“That’s our best guess.” Lowering himself into his chair, he asked Janeway, “How’s your back?”

Janeway rubbed her tailbone, which still tingled from the bone knitting. “Okay,” she said, straining desperately to sound reasonable, then moved her hands to her collarbones. She could still feel Sem’s hands around her neck. “But I could use a cup of coffee.”

“I’m fairly certain,” Chakotay said, “that would be a terrible idea. If you were wound any tighter, you’d disappear into another dimension.”

“How would that be worse than the way things are now?”

Her first officer grinned. “I’d be all alone.”

Unable to resist, Janeway smiled in return. “Okay, fine. Tea, then.” Looking around the bridge, she saw order was reestablished, and thought, On to the next thing. “What can you tell me about the situation with the Doctor?”

“Only that there’s something wrong with the holoemitters,” Chakotay reported. “We haven’t been able to track it down yet.” His expression turned sour. “It’s pretty disturbing, Harry says, the legs just standing there without a torso.”

“Can’t you just shut down the entire system?”

“We’re afraid to try. Harry is concerned that we won’t be able to reintegrate the…the parts.”

“So until then?”

Chakotay shrugged. “We hope nobody trips over him. Them.”

Tom Paris barely choked back a snorting laugh.

“Keep your mind on your station, Mr. Paris,” Chakotay said.

“Sorry,” Tom said. “Tickle in my throat.”

Janeway almost chuckled herself, but returned to business. “Meet me in astrometrics in ten minutes,” she said. “Get Harry out of sickbay, too. We need to consult.”

“About that, you mean,” Chakotay said, pointing at the viewscreen. “About how we could possibly be seeing the Blue Eye in subspace.”

She nodded. “Call Joe Carey, too, and ask him if he can tear himself away from the engines.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And how’s Tuvok? We’ll want him there, too.”

“I just spoke to him from sickbay. The radiation hit him hard, but he’s conscious now and wants back on active duty.”

“Let him. We’ll need him.”

“Done,” Chakotay said. “Any chance I can talk you into going to your office and closing your eyes for ten minutes?”

“Do you have a crowbar to open them back up again if I do?”

“I think B’Elanna took our only crowbar with her on the away mission.”

“Then maybe just that tea.”

Chakotay pointed at the ball of roiling energy on Astrometric’s main screen, and said, “So you’re telling me that’s the Blue Eye.”

“As it appears in subspace, yes,” Janeway replied. She turned to look at Tuvok and Harry who, despite being near exhaustion, stared at the uncanny sight, utterly engrossed.

Tuvok said, “This is completely contrary to any understanding we have of subspace.”

“Precisely,” Janeway said. “But then, everything about this system is contrary. Complex life should not have developed so close to a white dwarf. Subspace should not be so warped and folded. Natural laws governing matter shouldn’t be so radically different. Nothing fits right. Why is that?”

“You have an idea,” Chakotay said.

“I have a suspicion,” Janeway replied. “I think something unprecedented happened here a very long time ago and when it was all over, someone or something tried to patch it back together again and make it look ‘normal.’ ”

“Why?” Harry asked. “For what purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Janeway replied. “Though having dealt with some of the transcendent, transdimensional beings we’ve met, I know their motives are often beyond our comprehension. Let’s just say it happened and go from there.”

“All right,” Chakotay said. “A patch. And we’ve become trapped underneath it—caught in the threads, as it were.”

“Right. The fold or conduit we’re in, it’s part of a web of energy that holds this system together.”

“And the Blue Eye,” Tuvok said, taking up the metaphor, “is a pin.”

“Correct. It pierces through different levels of the universe and holds everything