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“No. Not yet. And unless I’m mistaken, we won’t be for at least another three hours, or until our next duty shift begins, whichever comes first.”

“Then, go away,” Harry replied, turning back toward his room in an attempt to preempt any further discussion.

Tom managed to slide into the darkened room before the doors slid shut behind him and immediately called, “Computer, increase illumination.”

As the computer responded and the lights in the cabin rose to standard work settings, he continued, “You know it’s not a good idea to walk around in the dark, Harry. You might break something.”

Harry was already back in bed. And just in case Tom intended to be exceptionally obtuse, he had reset his eye mask and placed two pillows firmly over his head.

Perching himself on the edge of Harry’s bed, Tom checked the computer’s chronometer before saying, “Come on, Harry, you’ve been off duty for six hours already.”

Through the muffling of the pillows Tom probably barely made out Harry’s “And I have two more to go, so get out!”

But Tom was never this easily deterred.

“Harry, do you remember that time you were trapped in a parallel universe or alternate time line or, whatever, back on Earth and only an incredible act of self-sacrifice, that resulted in my death I might add, allowed you to return to your proper…”

“That wasn’t even you!” Harry screamed into his pillows.

“Yes, but it was a version of me, and the way I see it, I pretty much saved your life, so…”

Unwilling to give in to the inevitable, but still determined to make his point, Harry sat up, scattering the pillows, and removed his mask.

“You know, I didn’t even have to tell you that story. You would never have known…” he began.

“But isn’t it great to think that that’s the kind of friendship we have? I’ll bet that in almost every conceivable time line out there, we’ve always got each other’s backs,” Tom continued.

Harry had successfully deluded himself for almost two minutes that he would be able to sneak in another hour of sleep, but the twinkle in Tom’s eye made it perfectly clear that whatever scheme Paris had in mind, Harry was already an integral part of it.

“This is one of those ‘resistance is futile’ moments, isn’t it?” Harry asked.

“I’m afraid it is,” Tom replied.

“Where are we going?”

“To build a rocket ship and save the galaxy!”

Harry smiled in spite of himself.

“Could be fun.”

The first intruder isolated the dissonant electromagnetic discharges it encountered on contact with the energy barrier that had been erected around the Key and dispersed them into harmless static. The atomic particles suspended in the atmosphere of the cabin snapped with a sudden charge before the static began to dissipate. Although this process was temporarily unbalancing and therefore… painful… the intruder did not concern itself with the unpleasantness of the experience. Instead, it threw the entirety of its being against the energy barrier and endured until it recognized the futility of this approach.

A part of it retained an ethereal imprint of sensations that the organic beings who inhabited this dimension referred to as “feelings.” It had briefly inhabited this space-time reality in an alternative form once before. It knew all too well that the longer it spent here, the more vulnerable it would become to mistaking those sensations for “feelings” of its own.

It identified the “feeling” washing over it at the moment as rage. Soon, the angry tumultuous energy spasms that resulted in these “feelings” would overwhelm it, and decrease its ability to counteract the forcefield.

As it re-formed itself into a sharp directed-energy beam that might puncture the barrier, the hostile and disturbing misplaced energy “feelings” were heightened dramatically when yet another series of vibrations were detected in the mix.

It could not remember why these vibrations were so unsettling. Countless moments had passed since it had last encountered them. Turning its attention to the source of the vibrations, it sensed that the one