Keisha didn't like feeling trapped like this. Ever since getting back from the Icarus she had been trying to get information about where Fiolas was and no one would answer her. They had brought her food a couple of times and escorted her to the lavatories, but never let her see anyone other than the guards taking her. They never spoke.

She started pacing the two steps her cell allowed for her. She tried to take courage they had only put her in a day cell in the brig. Hopefully, they only intended this quarantine to last a day. Every hour she became more panicked. As she started debating on how to possibly pick the cell's lock she heard her guard speak softly into his comms, "How many?" silence, "We'll be right there." The sound of their boots echoed softly away from their cells. Please don't be going towards Fiolas. Her cell door made a heavy click and the door fell open slightly. She eyed it cautiously. It creaked open when she lightly pulled it towards her. The hallway appeared empty. Her heart was beating like a thousand drums, she had never snuck out of jail, actually, she had never even been in jail. Keisha had always kept her nose down and stayed out of trouble. A part of her wanted to call out to the guards and have them right was was going on, the bigger part of her needed to find Fiolas and make it right with him.

As she lightly stepped into the hallway she heard two other clicks from the doors behind her. "Keisha?" Zayd stepped out into the hallway without missing a beat.

Mina stepped out more cautiously, "Do you know what is happening here?"

"I think someone is breaking us out. I heard the guards ordered to somewhere else. I hope Fiolas is ok." Keisha said.

"I'm sure he's fine Keish." Zayd squeezed her arm reassuringly, "He's a smart guy, he's a lot more capable than you think he is."

"That's what worries me." She gave a small smile. Behind Zayd Keisha noticed the lights on their doors blinking. They started with Mina's door and cast a weird red shadow on the dark metal gray. As they watched they noticed the lights ran from Mina's cell to the door at the far end. Keisha nodded at the other two and they followed her to the door. The door clicked open just as their cell doors had. Keisha could only hope they were leading her to Fiolas.

In the conference room Zayd, Mina and Keisha had been trying to pass the time without worrying. Several hours ago they had been taken to this room from the Medbay directly above them and told to wait for further instructions. Sturletto had been called away by the captain and guards had been by to take them to the lavatory. They had joked with her the whole time about having to babysit her.

At the conference room table Mina dealt some cards the guards had given her, but Keisha couldn't just sit here any longer. "Don't you think this is strange?" She started pacing the long room while she talked. "Why would we be preparing for a mission of a lifetime one minute and the next be locked up in some room? Something is going on out there."

"Of course something happened. The Captain isn't going to just lock up her best pilots for no reason. We haven't done anything wrong." Zayd joined in.

"Maybe our mission was successful?" Mina laughed and kept dealing the cards.

Keisha stopped pacing, "How? We never even left." Keisha was starting to get real tired of Mina's nonchalant attitude towards being locked up.

"Of course, but we are traveling backward through time, we all think we're going forward, but that's the tricky thing with time no?" She gathered the piles and started shuffling, resigned to the fact the other two were done playing for now.

"We are going forward. How else would we have this conversation? If we were going backward like all those stars out there, wouldn't our speech itself be backward?" Zayd asked.

"Yes, and no." Mina gave him a pitying look. "You would be saying it backward, but if all of us are going back at the same rate, we would be hearing you backward also, so to us, it would appear normal."

"That doesn't make any sense." Keisha kept pacing. "I'm walking forward right now. This isn't in reverse."

Mina just laughed, "Either you get it or you don't. Things would only appear backward to you if you had a reference point, without a reference point, time doesn't really care what you do. If we're all going backward right now we would have no way of knowing. There's nothing moving forward to contradict what you see right now." She had now started playing a solitaire game with the cards as though what she said made any type of sense.

Keisha got tired of pacing and flopped down angrily into the nearest chair. Zayd raised an eyebrow at her. "If you're so upset Keish, what do you propose we do?"

"Well, we're not going to get any answers in here." she said.

"I'm open to suggestions, but I already tried my key card. If I don't have clearance then you certainly don't." He crossed his arms and shook his head.

"A key card eh?" Keisha thought back to the hallway and picking up the strange keycard Andromeda left for her. She tapped her top pocket, the guards had searched them but they hadn't taken the card for whatever reason. She flipped it out of her pocket and looked at it. "What if I did have a keycard that could get us out of here?"

Zayd sat up in his chair. "Where did you get that? Even Mina stopped playing her cards and was watching her.

"A friend stopped me on the way to the Medbay to make sure I got this." Keisha threw it on the table and Zayd snatched it up and inspected it.

"Must be a really good friend. This is top level security clearance. It opens all the doors on this ship." He pulled his chair up close. "Where would we go? We can't just waltz back to the Velos, or go back to our quarters. The fastest way to get information is to stay here."

"I disagree," Mina sat at the end of the long table and kept playing her cards. "The way to get answers is to get where the answers are. They are not in this room."

"Where are they?" Zayd asked skeptically.

"In the artificial gravity control room." Keisha said.

"What?" Zayd asked.

"Now we're talking," Mina said at the same time.

"Why would we go to the artificial gravity control room?" Zayd threw his hands up. "You're both crazy. I'm stuck in here, with two crazy women."

"Just listen. Think about what we've been taught about how gravity works." Keisha sat up and rested her hands on the cool metal desk, "In space we have several ways of creating a sense of gravity, propulsion, centripetal force, magnetic boots, but we never actually have gravity. We just mimic what gravity does. Here on the Pytheas, we have gravity. Don't tell me you don't feel it. It draws you toward the center of the ship, just like a planet does, but it's nowhere near enough mass to create this effect."

"Keisha, we talked about this, that is the one topic that I know for a fact can get you spaced." Zayd was angry now.

"No, listen to her Zayd. What goes hand in hand with time? Gravity. What you may not be aware of is that time also goes hand in hand with something else." Mina's eyes were lit up.

"What?" they asked at the same time.

"A place. Where you are changes how you percieve time. It's one of the bases of my dissertation, it's how my time-suits work. What if the very place we need to go to fix this time mess, is our own gravity well?" She truly laughed out loud this time and clapped her hands together. "Let's get out of here." Mina got up and looked out the small window in the door.

Zayd was staring at Keisha, "Don't do this."

"I'm going to find the truth. Come with me." Keisha said back.

"The guards are gone." Mina informed them. Keisha got up and circled the long desk and checked for herself to see the guards gone.

Zayd still had the keycard in his hand. She turned to him and he got up to face her, "I'll come with you, but I don't have to like it."

"That sounds like a good deal to me." Keisha looked up at him and smiled. "Let's go." Zayd slid the keycard through and the doors opened.

On the Icarus, Fiolas and Tempus were giddy like young school boys talking about how Tempus had rigged the time-shield with dark matter. "I can't believe you guys brought so much dark matter here. Did you know it's been outlawed shortly after you left? I always wondered why." Fiolas was sitting in the captain's chair looking at the dark matter canister in the arm rest.

"They dun gon outlawed it?" Tempus was carefully taking a panel off the side while Fiolas went through the computer logs.

Charlotte Rose sat in an officer's chair facing them, her legs crossed, steaming up the mask in front of her face. "Tempus, are you sure you should be doing that? I'm just sitting here and I can't hardly see a thing. What did you say these suits were for anyways?" She looked at Carter who had been surveying the room near the huge front window.

"Huh? Me? I'm sorry ma'am, the answer to that is classified." Carter nodded.

"What he means is, he doesn't know." Fiolas answered. "I'm not sure either, but I think you should keep them on until we know more. Tempus, did you do the calculations for this wormhole jump?" Charlotte steamed up her mask some more with all her huffing.

"Yeah, I cal-cue-lat-ed all the jumps." Tempus said. "I'm the dark matter, worm-hole jumping expert on this ship."

"That is so cool. Ok, tell me how you came up with the time-shield, I want every detail." Fiolas was practically drooling with how much information the Icarus had onboard.

"Ok," Tempus sat up, "So I was in my bunk one night after the general tol' me to find a way to get this ship to Rigel, when it hit me. The only thing keeping us from just worm-holin' through was keeping the ship structurally in tact. So I says, what if dark matter won't just make us a worm-hole, what if it powers the whole goddam ship! Then it was just a matter of riggin' up a combustion unit, which is just under the captain's chair, and he was not happy when I pointed that out to 'em."

"Wait, so the entire ship was powered with dark matter? Fiolas asked.

"You betcha. Woulda worked too if we'd known it mattered what direction in time we was goin."

"You mean, if you had gone forward in time, none of this would have happened?" Fiolas clarified.

"That's exactly what I mean." Tempus smiled and Fiolas caught sight of a golden tooth.

Stars above, how did these people figure out wormholes before us?

"So Tempus, if we used dark matter to jump forward in time, would that reset the clock?"

"Don' see why not." He popped the canister out of the arm rest. "Got it!" He held it up so Fiolas could see it. The canister was almost empty of the strange dark substance.

"How much dark matter would we need to make the Pytheas go forward in time?" Fiolas looked at him.

Tempus looked at Charlotte, "Rosey, I like this kid. He's got guts." He looked back over at Fiolas, "I'd reckon we'd only need a couple of these canisters."

"Let's do it, we can't let Rigel get any closer to the event horizon. We have to do something." Fiolas motioned for Carter to come get him.

"Let's do it!" Tempus jumped up, and held his hand out to help Charlotte up. Fiolas got re-strapped onto Carter's back and the four of them went down to the lower level.

Once down in the cargo bay Fiolas asked Tempus to get what they needed. He didn't know if he could handle seeing Sturletto's body again. They rushed down the stairs and Fiolas was all ready to tell the men to stand down when they saw Tempus and Mrs. Rose, but the small hangar bay was empty of all personnel. The quiet was deafening. Fiolas pointed at his chair and Carter asked, "Are you sure sir? We may need to work quickly, it might be faster for me to run you wherever your going."

"Thanks for worrying about me, but my chair is faster than your legs. You might want to push me then hop on the back." Fiolas retorted. Carter seemed to think about it for a minute and took him to the chair and got him settled in. "You have the goods?" Fiolas called out.

"Yeah, I got the goods. Should have enough for two trips if we need to." Tempus called back.

The four of them got to the door and found it locked. "Are you kidding me?" Fiolas slammed his fist on the door.

"You don't have access to leave?" Charlotte asked him.

"Apparently not. Carter, call the captain and have her unlock this." Fiolas ordered.

"Why don't you just use the keycard in your front pocket?" Carter asked. "Did you forget you had it?"

Fiolas felt his front pocket, "The card Andromeda gave me." He flipped it around a few times.

"Who gave it to you sir?" Carter asked.

"No one. Here," Fiolas handed it to him and he slid it through. The door opened right away. Fiolas led the way through the halls to the Medbay, Maybe we can pick up Keisha while we're there. "The artificial gravity control room is through here," Fiolas led them through a back door of the Medbay. He had spent a lot of time here and had always wanted to go through this restricted door.

It led to a narrow hallway with a small door at the end. The door behind them closed the way back to the Medbay. "Sir, maybe I should go in first." Carter tried to get around his chair but the hallway was too narrow.

"It's fine Carter," Fiolas stopped him. "It's just a control room, what do you possibly think could happen?" He slid the card and the door opened to a cacophony of shouts and guns. Carter pushed his way in and pulled out his own gun, pointing it at the assailant.

"Keisha?" Fiolas wheeled forward and saw Keisha in front of a medbay stretcher and a small girl with long blonde hair. He followed where she was pointing her gun, "Keisha?" Another Keisha stood pointing a gun at the first one with Zayd and Dr. Mirlaj behind her.

"What is happening here?"