Lt. Tahna Meru - This Is Why Everyone Hates Temporal Mechanics
Meru Tahna
((Shuttlebay 2, USS Gorkon))
Some force had thrown everyone in the room through the air, crashing into walls and crates, wrecking the shuttlebay and everything in it. Their only warning was the grating, uncomfortable vibration in the air and then...boom.
Well, there wasn't an actual boom, but it was pretty dramatic. Meru groaned from her new spot on the floor.
Reynolds: Everyone—::she grunted softly::—everyone sound off if you’re still alive. Let’s get a head count.
Gnaxac: I’m here, a-a-a-a-and I’m alive.
Meru began to stand, and her wrist kindly reminded her it was hurt, dammit, as soon as she moved.
Tahna: I’m mostly functional.
Sevo: Mostly unharmed, but definitely have injuries I didn’t have before.
Ignore the pain until it’s your turn. It was probably just a sprain, right? Shouldn’t a break hurt more? It hurt a lot, though, and she was very carefully avoiding looking at it until a medic took over, for her own sanity. So she stood, grimacing and cradling her wrist to her abdomen. She found her tricorder discarded several paces away (thank you, engineers, for making this temporal explosion-proof), and knelt beside it so she could run scans single-handed.
Gnaxac: D-d-d-did anyone see what happened? Scans sug-g-g-gest that something went down with their shields.
Meru shook her head. She’d been a little distracted by…well, everything else, but she didn’t remember the shuttle exploding. There was just an explosion. And she’d probably remember if she saw the shuttle go boom, her ears were ringing slightly from the noise but she had no signs of a concussion this time.
Sevo: Either the isolation field collapsed on its own, or that blast was too strong for it to hold and it burst through.
Reynolds: Isolation fields don’t spontaneously collapse. ::She shook her head.:: It had to be the... whatever the hell that was.
Tahna: I’m reading a massive spike in chronitons and a smaller spike in tetryons coinciding with the shockwave.
Sevo: Yeah, that’s what happens when you time travel.
Gnaxac: T-t-t-time travel?
There was obviously time travel involved, the question was why had the timey-wimey shuttle exploded…or whatever that was?
Reynolds: Or something like that.
Tahna: Do we have a way to know that the present timeline wasn’t wrapped up in there somewhere?
The thought was like a punch to the gut. Was it possible they’d just lost an away team? Did it matter if it was a present or a past timeline, even, would this sort of collapse kill them either way? Surely there was another answer. There had to be another answer. But they couldn’t cut through the planet’s interference to contact them.
Sevo: We don’t even know how it was working in the first place. I have no idea.
Gnaxac: Oh g-g-g-good.
Wait. Wait. That wasn’t what Sevo had meant by time travel. Meru took in the full, mangled state of the shuttlebay. Their shuttles, previously pristine, were little more than metal skeletons. The room itself looked like it had been blown to bits, with wall panels and wiring missing, hanging loose, and just laying about. It didn’t make sense, because this wasn’t the same Gorkon.
Tahna: We’re currently experiencing smaller spikes in chronitons and tetryons. It looks like ripples in a pond of space-time.
Sevo: So it’s possible this phenomenon has extended outside the bay, possibly the entire ship.
Gnaxac: D-d-d-do you think the whole ship is like… ::he gestured to the nearest damage:: this?
Reynolds: I don’t know.
Commander Sevo, who no longer wore her dress uniform but instead a grungy, worn outfit (how had that happened?) moved to the empty spot where the Kerla had been and took scans of her own. Gnaxac peered at the readings over her shoulder.
Sevo: The concentration is highest at this spot, where the Kerla was. It was definitely the source.
At least one thing today was as it appeared. The problem was, if the Kerla sent them there, how could they get back (or forward) to their time without it? Could they? Would they be too late? When even were they? Between the haunted expressions on the Admiral and Commander’s faces and Sevo’s new getup, she figured they recognized this version of the Gorkon.
Gnaxac: When are w-w-w-we, d-d-d-d-do you think?
Sevo: We’ve gone back about 6 years. At this time, the Gorkon was trapped in a parallel universe. The Dominion had won the war, and we were being hunted. This—::she gestured around::—is the result of several months of continual attacks and lack of safe harbour. It was… ::she paused, her eyes distant, and her voice was low when she continued,:: …a very difficult time.
“Over There,” as they called it. Meru knew a bit about it from perusing old mission reports and talking to crew who’d been there, though it was so wholly traumatic that she’d only heard bits and pieces. And then there were the news reports—six years ago she’d failed her Academy entrance exam, and her mother had told her it was a blessing.
“Look at this, Starfleet ships are always getting lost. You could end up on a ship like the Gorkon, missing forever!” Meru, depressed by the poor testing score, said there was no way she’d end up on a ship like the Gorkon, anyway. Oops.
Sevo: Ow! ::She grunted in pain, grabbing her left forearm.:: I’m not sure if my injuries are fresh from the explosion, or if these are from this time. Could those of us that were here have jumped into our past selves?
Reynolds: I don’t think it was an explosion, at least not in the conventional sense. No one has shrapnel wounds or burns. I think it was more like... a tsunami or a hurricane, throwing us around until it passed.
Gnaxac: In my exp-p-p-perience, t-t-t-time travel separates out the travellers. Which means that p-p-past Sevo and p-p-past Reynolds could be around here somewhere…
Either way, it meant they had more paradoxes to take into consideration. Yay. At least Meru didn’t have to worry about running into her past self.
Reynolds: Maybe.
Sevo: Response
Gnaxac: D-d-do you remember meeting f-f-f-future versions of yourselves? Or is this an alt-t-ter the timeline deal?
Reynolds: I’m not sure it’s either. We were on the opposite side of the galaxy, in a different universe, when this happened. Space-time isn’t so easily untangled, especially when it’s across realities. This seems more like a temporal echo—::she gestured toward the Trill::—hence the inconsistent effects.
Sevo: Response
Tahna: Right. The Kerla was the catalyst, and it’s gone, so how do we get back to our time?
Reynolds: Echoes fade once you stop making the sound. So if the Kerla is still the locus of this event, we need to silence it. The question is whether we need to work with the Kerla was—::she gestured toward the empty spot on the deck::—or where it is in this echo.
Sevo/Gnaxac: Response
Reynolds: I don’t know. Maybe the whole ship is affected. Or only parts of it. Or different parts of it might be experiencing different echoes.
Sevo/Gnaxac: Response
Tahna: Where should the Kerla be in this echo, if the whole ship is on the same page?
Sevo/Reynolds/Gnaxac: Response
Tahna: If we knew why the Kerla was the catalyst then we might have a better idea which version we need to work with to get back. If it caused this because of something that happened to it on the planet, then this location would make more sense. That variable wouldn’t have occurred in this echo.
Sevo/Reynolds/Gnaxac: Response
Tahna: What if we modified a chroniton field to stop the echo?
It had been used before on the USS Voyager in order to reverse temporal fracturing, if she remembered right. But she wasn’t the engineer, and she didn’t know what condition the Gorkon’s tech was in Over There.
Sevo/Reynolds/Gnaxac: Response