There Ain't No Easy Way Out

Posted on Wed Nov 6th, 2024 @ 3:24pm by Captain Malcom Llwyedd & Lieutenant JG Randolf Forst & Lieutenant JG Hopkins Cobb & Ensign Helle Leed & Ensign Winston Hubblestone

2,040 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Mission 1: A Long Hard Road Ahead
Location: Gamma Quadrant
Timeline: Past and Present

[ON]

Winston yawned and habitually extended his arm, which banged into the upper berth above him. He grumbled and slowly slipped out of his bed. It had been a week since their time shift and Winston wasn't impressed. He was thankful that at least the Runabout had been set with berths because sleeping on the deck would have been miserable. He stumbled out of the door to the aft and made his way over to the replicator.

"Tea, green, not so hot," he mumbled.

“Morning, Winston," she said, lightly scratching her scalp for the tactile stimulus. Her face and neck showed the light red patches of a night spent more wishing for sleep than actually resting. She rested her forehead on the replicator. "Coffee. Black. My usual way.”

Winston nodded and mumbled. "Morning, Helle," he said and then took a drink of his tea, He moved to the small sitting area and slid into one of the chairs. "You look like I feel." He yawned. "I haven't checked the latest computer simulations. Hopefully, we get some more answers on how to power those devices today. It has only been a three weeks but it feels like three months."

"Only three weeks? That can't be right," she replied with a small sigh, leaning against the counter as the aroma of fresh coffee wafted around them. "I lay awake thinking about they would all be feeling, our friends. Crewmates. Parents. But... there's something thrilling about it, too, you know? Maybe we’re not just lost. Maybe we're not just marooned. Maybe we're about to discover something completely new."

Forst sat up in the bunk. Almost hitting his head, again. He picked up a cup from a panel, not sure whose, and placed it into the replicator.

"Reclaim and Coffee. One sugar, two cream." As the replicator whirred he looked to Leed.

"Did you program the replicator for your usual? I couldn't seem to make it cooperate. I thought it was just the runabout's limitations."

Helle looked up from the warm face-hug of the coffee. "Hm? Oh, habit I guess. No idea how the replicator interpreted that instruction but it's warm and drinkable," said Helle, sipping lightly from the mug.

Sitting at the console that at this point was his, and moving one of the boxes of isolinear chips that he thought contained another scan of the wormhole but at this point wasn't sure.

"At the least we know that we will have the most detailed scans of this area of space from 300 years in the past. I'm sure that someone in a stellar cartography lab somewhere will be happy."

He tapped out a sequence of commands to start another variation of the scans that they had been running for the last few days. Maybe this one would produce something new.

Winston nodded at the Lieutenant's and Helle's words. "It's really weird to think that we are three hundred years in the past from our own timeline. I don't know if I would say thrilling. Kinda feels scary to me. I hope I don't accidentally do something that changes the entire universe," he said and took another sip.

"Maybe we already have. That's been keeping me up at night," said Helle, breathing through the steam rising from her mug. "Well, that and how we can reverse those blasted machines in the incredibly exact measurements to take us back to the same time and place we left."

The incredibly exact measurements.

"Cobb, the scan that we ran yesterday. Didn't it have a blip you were commenting about?"

Something about "exact measurement" and the "blip" from yesterday was sparking in Forst's brain. It may have been nothing, or maybe exhaustion. Possibly both, but there was something.

Cobb knew exactly what was being referenced. "Correct, it was something very unusual as we fired up our devices to get readings. I think I had asked for a tachyon scan to confirm my suspicions. Should I check my equipment right now to get you numbers, or is this just a hunch?"

"Hunches are all I have right now. Every idea is a guess wrapped in speculation," said Helle. She placed her mug on the table and stared at nothing as if talking to herself. "Spacetime is like fabric, and those machines tore it open somehow. Exact readings of the moment they fired might tell us how they work, and that might let us--you--reverse engineer the effect. Maybe. Or maybe not."

"Yes, yes, that just might do it," Cobb muttered just loud enough for Helle to hear. "Certainly, having the exact measurements is always preferable, and yields more reliable conclusions, than even the best guesswork. Does everyone have their devices? I can't believe we haven't sat down as a group already to compile and compare notes."

Helle drained her mug and tossed it onto a console where it spun to a stop with a loud, scratching sound. "Haven't we? I've got my PADD right here with every possible part I could measure, scan, or describe. It seems like such a short list now." She frowned at the list as though it were a disobedient child standing in the doorway, covered in mud. "Anyone else want to compare what we know?"

Winston set his cup down, went back into the sleeping berth, and grabbed his PADD. He'd fallen asleep working on it the previous night. He made his way back to the impromptu meeting.

"My main focus has been on the energy that was used to power the machines on in the first place. The data dump from the Firebird was inconclusive, which means the computer had never encountered that kind of thing before. But I find it hard to believe that's true. After a lot of hours, I did find something that I wanted to share with you. I've identified a power source that is a 60% match to the one the Coalition used to seal the wormhole. It might be higher or lower but I think it is definitely related. Apparently, the computer had a reading in the Suylea system, which was a hidden Dominion base where the USS Monterey was rescued."

Forst tapped a few keys and pulled up his own searches. He was silently kicking himself for not thinking that they should pool their data earlier in this whole process. A brief meeting at the beginning of the day. He filed the idea away for later.

The tachyon scan from yesterday was overlaid with the power distribution map that Winston had set up.

"Maybe, if we overlay the different scans we are running we can see some kind of pattern? Winston, pull up the specs on that Dominion base while we're at it."

Winston nodded at the Lieutenant's order and moved to the closest console. He brought up his own data and then began a subroutine that would correlate and examine how the team's different areas of focus connected. The resulting graph and data made Winston smile.

"Sir, I think we are onto something. Our data connects in some unusual ways. The Holson Principle is concerned with the degradation of energy over time as a result of pulse modifications AND temporal energy. If we apply that principle in a retrograde fashion, we can see what the energy pulse actually was," He said while doing exactly that. There was a pause and a brilliant image of the energy beam appeared on the display. Winston rotated it so that he could examine it from all angles. "This beam is a negative temporal ray that is processed by the devices and shunted to the next device, which does the same with its ray and continues to the next device. In effect, they are doubling the power of the ray over and over until they reach a maximum point. That's what caused the wormhole to shift."

Helle watched the display turn slowly like a powerful searchlight as if guiding them to or away from danger. Something Winston said nagged at her, like an itch she couldn't reach. "There's this anomaly in the scans..." she started to say as her fingers scratched through the accumulated data on her PADD. "There were tiny fluctuations in the quantum fields when we arrived that I assumed existed because, you know, time travel is hard. I think they mean there's a limit." Helle spread a small graph to cover the face of her PADD and added it to the larger display.

"I think the devices are doubling the power and shaking up quantum stability. If so, the maximum point is right before the ray reaches peak instability and blows up everything around them." Helle glanced at the group. "We have to know exactly what that limit is before firing them up is what I'm saying."

Cobb nodded along and poked calculations into his PADD. "I think we are getting somewhere. Good visual, by the way. We may be reaching a point where if we can find a way to reverse the polarity of these devices, we can run the ray-generation procedure in reverse and hit 'go' at the right time to return to the home timeline. Seems simple enough within the context of time travel, no?"

Winston smiled. "It would work if we follow Cobb's plan. All we need is a power source," he said and fell into thought. "The Dominion power source was different but not unique. I think that we could use the warp core to simulate it and power the devices. The only downside is that if we fail, the warp core is probably going to be permanently ruined." He looked around at each of his fellow time travelers. "Go or no go?"

It all made sense, but that didn't make it a nice idea. Forst scratched at the stubble on his chin. More like a beard at this point.

"I suppose that it is technically true that I am in charge and so could order the procedure, but given that we are potentially permanently stuck here if this fails, I agree with Winston. I vote 'Go.'"

Cobb nodded along. "Absolutely go. This will go in about 100 academic papers, that will almost assuredly end up in Fleet Intelligence by the time they are published. Sure, time travel has been done before, but that's not going to stop people from reading about it."

More than 100 papers, by far, thought Helle. She bent over her PADD, and worked to find the power limit of the operational process. Words tumbled softly from her lips like pulses of a distant warp core. "Apply the Holson variable... pulse charge... same variance... damn rumbly stomach... peak instability..." After many long minutes, Helle rubbed her hands together as the adrenaline rush caused her core to drop temperature. "I'm sharing what I think is the quantum limit. There's never an easy way out of these situations but at least we'll probably never know if we get this wrong. "

Later, when they were all prepared and seated at their consoles, they shared a long look. No words were necessary. Either they were going back to their own timeline or the warp core was going to meltdown and they would be stuck in the past.

Winston nodded at Lieutenant Fors, who nodded back.

"Initiating start sequence... now," he said.

The runabout shuddered as if waking from a long nap. The warp nacelles glowed, their intensity increasing until anyone watching from distant space would have wondered if it were a new comet.

"Reaching one hundred percent!" Winston yelled over the howling engines.

There was a flash and the Little Bird disappeared, leaving nothing behind.

[OFF]

Lieutenant JG Randolf Forst
Assistant Chief Science Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Lieutenant JG Hopkins Cobb (NPC by Harlan)
Science Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Ensign Helle Leed (NPC by Leed)
Biologist
USS Firebird NCC-88298

Ensign Winston Hubblestone (NPC by Llwyedd)
Science Officer
USS Firebird NCC-88298

 

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