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Captain Janeway was recovered from the array, but for the time being is…

Chakotay paused. He couldn’t even bring himself to say it. He was relieved when a chiming at the door of the captain’s ready room made continuing his log unnecessary for the moment.

“Come in,” he called.

B’Elanna entered, pausing at attention before the captain’s desk. He rose to greet her, moving from the chair he could not yet find any comfortable position in and saying, “Report.” He crossed to the rail that separated the main area of the room from the low benches that lined one wall and ran his hand along its cool surface.

“I think I know at least part of what happened to the Doctor,” she said.

His head snapped up. She didn’t sound pleased by whatever she had discovered.

“Just before we left the array, there was a shipwide blackout,” she began.

“I remember,” he said.

“For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, when the dissonance field hit the ship, all photonic energy in its path was pulled into the field. I assumed we simply suffered a brief power drain, but the only systems affected were those that utilize photonic energy.”

“Which explains the loss of the lighting systems and the holographic emitters,” Chakotay said.

“Right,” she nodded. “But in the case of the Doctor, the field’s impact was unique. All of the other holographic systems simply went offline. But the Doctor’s program was extracted. There isn’t a single subroutine remaining… and given the nature of the event, that shouldn’t have happened. None of the other holograms were deleted. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What do our most recent scans show about the singularity that Gremadia was orbiting?” Chakotay asked. “Is there anything that suggests…”

But B’Elanna cut him off, saying simply, “It’s gone.”

“What?” Chakotay asked in disbelief.

“I can’t explain it. Within minutes of the array’s destruction, the singularity disappeared.”

“That shouldn’t have happened, should it?”

“I stopped asking that question soon after we entered this system,” B’Elanna replied wearily. “Of course it shouldn’t have happened. All I know is that it did. And now there’s nothing to scan in order to help me confirm my hypothesis about the Doctor’s disappearance.”

Chakotay took this in, gazing out at the starfield that rested in an illusionary static position beyond the window.

“Neelix,” he muttered.

“I beg your pardon?” B’Elanna asked.

“Neelix said something a few days ago… he mentioned in passing… one of those sort of impossible suggestions you just tend to write off because it’s Neelix.”

B’Elanna smiled faintly. Obviously she too had been guilty of this on more than one occasion.

“Naomi did a drawing of the Monorhan stars, and gave it to the captain,” he continued, crossing to the credenza. He found the drawing resting in a cleared space and made a mental note to replicate a frame for it. “Then she did another, for her mother, and Neelix got a little concerned because the drawings were different. She was using a view from the mess hall for her model, and at the time the area of space where we collapsed the Blue Eye was still visible. Neelix thought some of the stars were missing.”

B’Elanna considered this.

“What are you suggesting, Commander?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure,” he replied. “There’s so much about this system that we don’t understand. We’ve theorized and hypothesized and all but decided that there is something artificial about Monorhan space, that it was probably constructed by the Nacene, and that somehow it is a boundary between what we consider ‘normal’ space and Exosia. I’m beginning to think that we need to know more about the exact nature of this artificial system. The microsingularity created when we destroyed the Blue Eye might be evidence of some kind of serious destabilization of the boundary.”

“Because in normal space the Blue Eye would have simply collapsed,” B’Elanna interjected.

“And not only did a singularity form instead, but we know it’s getting bigger,” Chakotay