"This is Captain Eve Storm of the Deep Space Station Nexus. Can you hear me, Victor?"

Victor couldn't believe it. Was he dreaming again?

"Eve?" Victor said. "What happened?"

"Hold tight, Victor. Turn your systems back on and the ship should head for the nearest dock. We've got a lot to talk about."

As the shuttle came closer to Nexus, Victor realized that hull was not merely battered. It's once proud and gleaming surface was smudged with scrapes and dotted with debris. The place where the other half of the station had been separated didn't look freshly torn, but rusted and hard. What in the hell was going on?

When the doors of the docking bay shut behind the shuttle, Victor opened the door and hopped out. Something was definitely wrong here. He could hear the creaks and groans of the station. Was that a skittering sound? A door creaked open, dust rolling over the floor as a light and a form stepped into the dock. It was Eve, and she was a fully grown woman.

"By the grace of the stars," Eve said, looking at Victor. "It really is you. All these years and you haven't changed. The dream dwellers were right."

She walked around him in a circle, inspecting him. She grabbed him by the chin and brought her face close, looking him in the eye. Eve, if it was really her, had grown into a beautiful woman. There was a hardness etched into her face, tinged with a melancholy sadness.

"Well," she said loudly, "he doesn't seem to have bitten off my face yet."

Into the docking platform stepped two other forms. One was an older man, much older than Eve, with a mustache and a beard. He was holding what Victor recognized to be a plasma rifle. The other was Rajia.

"Victor!" shouted as she ran up to him. She stopped herself short and regained her composure. "Ahem. Before I get excited, I should make sure it's really you."

She was holding a medical scanner. It was a device that Victor hadn't seen since he was last on the homeworlds. He wondered where Rajia had gotten one. Actually, he was wondering about a lot of things. It must've shown on his face, because Eve laughed.

"You must have a lot of questions, Victor. For you, it's only been a few days since Nexus disappeared."

Victor stared at Eve blankly. He was still absorbing it all. Rajia was moving the medical scanner up and down the length of him, eyeing it's screen carefully.

"That's it Rajia," said the gruff looking man. "Make sure it's him. We've had false alarms before."

A skittering sound echoed in the dock bay. Everyone froze in place, looking upward toward the source of the sound. After a moment of silence, they all acted as if nothing had happened.

"Our scans didn't find the Relay Station. It doesn't matter now, of course, but did it disappear at the same time we did?"

Rajia and the man were looking at Victor keenly. Rajia finished the scan, but was waiting for Victor's response before she analyzed the results. Victor wondered why it was such a significant point.

"Yeah. It did. In fact, I thought it might've gone to the same place Nexus did."

"I knew it," Eve said with a smirk. The older gentleman nodded his head as he looked at the ground and contemplated something. Rajia began analyzing the results.

"Everything checks out so far," Rajia said, smiling. Victor realized that she did look a little older, maybe by a year or so. "We'll have to take him to the med bay to do blood work and in-depth scans to be sure, of course."

Eve nodded. "Alright Victor. Come with me," she said walking into the hall.

They walked side by side through the corridor. The rough looking man followed a few paces behind them next to Rajia. It was the same one that Victor had known so well, yet it was entirely different. Wires hung from the ceiling. Many of the lights flickered. The floor was not a plain white, but was covered in streaks, scrapes, and drag marks.

"It's different isn't it?" Eve said, noting the way he was looking around. "No one knows better than me. There's a lot to tell you, Victor, but I'm not sure how to do it. Maybe we'll start with questions you probably have, and go from there."

"Where are we headed?" he asked. The first thing was to make sure he wasn't about to be strapped to some table.

"The med bay. We've got to get that blood work done on you." Eve shook her head, her mirth fading from her face a moment. "It's the protocol we've established for people returning to Nexus. If we'd had it in place from the beginning...." she broke off and shook her head. "That's all in the past, now."

"Okay. How much time has passed for you?"

"That's a tricky question, Victor. For me, the answer is about ten years. For Rajia behind me it's closer to three years. For Miguel, closer to twenty-five."

"Miguel?"

Victor stopped and took a good look at the man behind him. The man smiled back. "Been a long time, Victor. I was wondering when you'd realize."

"For Nexus, the period of time is closer to a hundred years."

Victor's mouth dropped open. Seen in that light, Nexus didn't look so bad after all.

"Why are you different ages? Was it the wormhole?"

Eve laughed. "Nothing so exotic. When Nexus was first dragged into the mouth, she was under a tremendous strain. Rajia managed to get enough of the modifications to Nexus' containment field to prevent it from being shredded to pieces, but not enough was downloaded to protect the station once inside. We were torn in two, Victor. Many people died."

The expression of agony on all three of their faces told the whole story.

"The other half of the station was ripped away and obliterated. We managed to raise the energy partitions from the old days. The ones that separated the boys half from the girls? Thanks to that, we are relatively safe. Nexus still had partially functional ion drive, but as far as we could tell there was no way out of the wormhole."

They were entering the med bay now.

"Give me a few moments to get ready," Rajia said to Eve. Eve nodded and continued her story.

"We were stuck. We decided to take turns in hypersleep until someone came to help us. A few of us would stay awake so as to be sure not to miss anything, and to make sure the others were safe."

"And no one came," Victor concluded.

"Oh, someone came, Victor," Eve said darkly. "But not to help."

There was another skittering sound. This time everyone, including Victor, looked at the walls and ceiling nervously.