“Sorry I’m late,” Tikva said as she walked into the conference, her entire senior staff already assembled for a meeting that technically should have started five minutes ago. “Little issue that only I could deal with.”

“Oh?” Mac asked as he plated a cinnamon roll before sliding it in front of her as she sat down.

“Ensigns Williams and Tabaaha needed to speak with me in one of my many capacities as ship’s captain.” And she left any further explanation unsaid. She could always tell Mac more later after all. When there were fewer ears to hear and mouths to repeat.

“Ah.” She saw him nod his head, then a second nod and that taste she attributed to recognition as one and one equalled two. “Ahh,” he repeated.

“Now, Gabrielle, this is your show,” she said, turning on her chief science officer as she started to pull the roll in front of her apart by feel alone. “Something about wanting to change course to investigate a point of interest?”

“That’s right Captain.” Gabrielle got to her feet and brought the large monitor opposite the windows to life, set up as a star chart with DS47 on the far right of the screen, Atlantis smack in the middle and a large swathe of star systems spread out before them going to the left of the monitor, all in grey denoting their unverified status. The systems and initial information were provided to them by the Cardassian Union and while taken as a reliable source, Atlantis was out here to verify after all. “We passed Ultima Thule at 0737 hours this morning, but we’re still short of being the furthest Starfleet vessel out this far by about five lightyears at this point.”

“Someone got out this far before us?” she asked before anyone else could.

“USS Motu Maha made it to system GSC-9587 before turning back to Federation space. This was in 2370.” Gabrielle brought up a small window, laying over the portion of the map that was the Thomar Expanse, detailing the Motu Maha, an old Ambassador-class ship. “Well, made it isn’t quite right either. They were approaching GSC-9587 when they detected signs of,” she paused, looking down for a moment at the floor, then back up, as if the floor had held the useful information she needed, “use of weapons of mass destruction on a global scale.”

“Global scale?” Mac asked. “As in someone was bombing their world?”

“The reports stated that warp signatures were detected in the system, hence why the Motu Maha was heading there to make first contact. The signatures they did detect looked like intra-system warp drives, at least prior to what was thought to be a system-wide civil war breaking out. Captain Gunderson decided that making first contact at such a time would be a violation of the Prime Directive by interfering in their internal affairs just by being present.”

“And you want to divert Atlantis to go check the system out?” Tikva asked before popping a piece of the roll in her mouth.

“It’s been over thirty years, so hopefully they’ve resolved their internal conflict.” Gabrielle’s enthusiasm for this endeavour was written on her face. “Finish what the Motu Maha aborted, first first-contact past Ultima Thule and officially setting the distance record, all in one system.”

“At least until we get to the next system,” Rrr finally spoke up. “Gabs, every system we explore from now on is going to be the furthest away, the new frontier, the edge of the map.”

“It’s a slight detour,” Gabrielle said, changing the entire monitor to a zoomed-in local map.  It showed Atlantis’ current course as a straight line to the far left. “Right here,” she tapped on the star system of interest, causing it to blink. By the scale of the map and the exaggerated icon sizes, it was less than a ship’s length off of their current course. Light months in reality, maybe a whole lightyear.

“We’re already at warp eight, so if we alter course, how long till we arrive?” Tikva asked.

“Two days roughly,” Gabrielle answered quick-smart. She’d prepared, that was evident by how fast she was to answer. But Tikva could feel it, taste it too. That shy, occasionally stumbling science officer she’d first plucked for her command team had grown. “And GSC-10248 will still be waiting for us when we finish. At current speed, it’ll take us a week to get there anyway.”

“Six days, twelve hours,” T’Val corrected from behind a cup of tea.

“I would like to see the scans from the Motu Maha for what ordinance they saw being used,” Adelinde spoke up from her seat next to Ch’tkk’va, who nodded in agreement. Splitting Tactical and Security had worked out pretty well for the Atlantis, allowing one to focus on the ship’s systems and the large regional concerns, while the other could focus on keeping the ship and crew safe and secure.

Without a real need for Strategic Operations, Atlantis after all wasn’t a flagship, making Tactical separate meant it could fill in those shoes as required. In the end though Lin and Ch’tkk’va keep each other appraised and cross-trained, able to take over the other’s department in a heartbeat if needed.

“Already in your inbox,” Gabrielle replied. “Navigation scans are with you Lieutenant,” she said to T’Val. “All details are in yours Captain, Commander, with a few highlighted parts from myself and my teams.”

“Ra,” Tikva turned on her chief engineer after giving Gabs one more smile, “we’ve been running the engines at warp eight for a week straight now. If we get to this system and shut down, how long are you going to want before we start off again?”

“Unless something happens over the next two days, no time at all. This young lady,” Velan reached back to pat at one of the window frames, “thrives at this speed.”

“Long-distance runner is our girl?” Tikva asked and got a chuckle from Velan.

“That she is ma’am.” He settled briefly as he corrected his seating. “We’ll be able to go to warp at a moment’s notice, but I’d be happier if you give us an hour or two at least just to run around and check a few things as they cool off.”

“Guns, Rrr,” Tikva said, using a professional nickname she’d somehow found herself using for Adelinde’s role, and using for anyone who was at Tactical at any given hour to be fair, “keep an eye out so we don’t have to go sprinting off without some warning.”

“So, this means we’re changing course?” Mac asked as he turned back to Tikva.

“For now.” She looked down the table at T’Val who was already typing away on her own padd, sending orders through to the relief helm officer with the revised course. “I’ll read over what you’ve sent out Gabrielle, but I want an update in twenty-four hours with everything we can tell from long-range sensors and anything the Cardassian dataset has.”

“Understood,” Gabrielle answered, the joy radiating off of her.

“On that note then, Mac, Rrr, can you both stay behind, the rest of you are dismissed.” Tikva waited until everyone had filed out, a couple of conversations starting as people left, cut off by the closing doors. “Rrr, need a favour from you.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Arrange, quietly and discreetly will you, for as many of the science department as possible to be in Port Royal this evening, eighteen hundred. And Gabrielle’s wider social circle as well too please.” She watched the Gaen nod their head once. “That’s all.”

“Yes ma’am,” Rrr replied and then being able to read the room, departed after a head nod to Mac as well, leaving the two senior officers in the conference room alone.

“Sounds serious,” Mac finally said, breaking the silence after Rrr’s departure.

“Deadly,” she answered, then brought up a holographic display between the two of them over the conference table, then flipped it so he could read the text. “Three months of follow-up survey work, our own first scans, that very interesting find on Felkten Minor. Not to mention being right about following those energy signatures and finding a pod of gekli.”

“And then this?” he waved at the map still on the large monitor.

“Icing on the cake really,” she said with a shrug. “She deserves it.”

“Young though, and light on time in rank,” he challenged her. As a good XO should. “She’ll end up stuck in rank for quite a while you know.”

“Unofficially Mac we’re on a five-year mission. Well, Atlantis is at any rate.” She offered him a knowing smile, having spoken with him a few times now over the last few months about his career expectations. “But Starfleet still has its isolationist running around in various places of authority, hence the short leash.” If the Thomar Expanse, then running to the far end and disappearing off the maps, was a short leash. “Relatively short leash that is. But I’m not planning on letting Gabs run off any time soon, so by the time she’s ready for something new she’ll have made up that time. But she’s running a department and has a lot of very smart and talented people under her. Just being the senior most lieutenant is only going to let her win arguments for so long before someone pushes back on her and I don’t want to see her losing ground to someone who thinks they know better.”

He nodded as he listened and read the data on the holographic display, stopping more to read the headers on reports and communique in regards to Gabrielle. Including a report that he had written and which Tikva had forwarded along to command in its entirety with no editing or foreword.

“So it’s been approved?”

“Two days ago,” she answered, a hand gesture causing the window to scroll immediately to the bottom and the response there from the Fleet Captain. “Been waiting for the right moment.”

“Promoting her a day before we hopefully make first contact, that she recommended. She’s going to be unbearable for days you realise,” he said with a smirk.

“Isn’t she just!”

The harsh, demanding and piercing whistle of the bosun’s pipes cut through the noise of a congested Port Royal, the ship’s premier social space, as if no one had been talking at all. No one had noticed when Lieutenant JG Fightmaster had entered, as was intended, the space lively and packed with a significant portion of the ship’s blueshirts. No one had noticed that all he’d done is park himself against the wall by the door, allowing it to close, and turned just enough so he could see through the window and down the corridor.

Some nearby had noticed when he raised a hand to his mouth, caught the glint of the pipe’s and briefly turned as best they could to preserve their hearing as the doors slide open and Fightmaster, with the power of a mere whistle, brought all conversation to a halt in Port Royal.

He also woke the dead, caused every dog within five lightyears, despite the vacuum of space, to start barking and ruined the hearing of everyone in the confined space.

“Attention on deck!” was then barked out, and for everyone present, Tikva and Mac included, it was an absolute shocker how forceful his call was. It wasn’t loud, his volume perfect for the room, but it carried a commanding authority with it.

Boy has lungs!

Geez, remember when we had to do that?

We were never that young, shut up.

Zillia’s exact words were ‘squeak squeak’. Can’t say that about Fightmaster.

We’re going to end up working for him one day, aren’t we?

As Tikva stepped over the threshold in Port Royal there was a bit of a clamour as people were still getting to their feet. The bosun’s pipes had been shock and awe, the call to attention had been the finishing touch. The fresher faces in the room, those only a few years fresh of the academies across the Federation, had been quicker to respond, likely without realising it at first. By the time she’d stepped in far enough, with Mac at her side, for the doors to close, the room was quiet, everyone was at attention and the tension was delectable.

Nervousness, curiosity, and concern from more than a few in the room. Mischievous glee from her immediate right was echoed by the hulking form of Rrr on the far side of the room. Trust her operations chief to figure things out. She couldn’t read Adelinde’s emotions over the wave of everyone else, but the facial expression said everything.

‘What are you doing bug?’ it read and while she wanted to respond, just a wink, she kept her face impassive as she strode further into the lounge, the crowd parting, then clearing to give them a semi-circle with the bar as the base.

“Lieutenant Gabrielle Camargo, front and centre,” she ordered, after a pause, turning her attention in the direction of movement as people moved to let Gabs through. No one wanted to be between an officer and the captain when things were sounding this official.

If the crowd was nervous and concerned, it all washed away, but Gabrielle’s concern ramped up in response. The young woman had exactly no idea what was going on. So, Rrr could keep their mouth shut.

As she stepped into the semi-circle, the crowd moved back from her even further, isolating her even more in front of the ship’s two most senior officers. No one had any idea what was about to happen and were afraid to be in the splash zone if something terrible were to happen.

“Commander MacIntyre, if you please.”

“Aye ma’am,” Mac replied, raising a padd to read off the screen, not that he needed to. “Lieutenant Camargo, you have knowingly and willingly performed above and beyond the call of your duties and responsibilities since assuming the position of Chief Science Officer aboard two starships Atlantis. You have earned the respect of the ship’s officers and crew, the captain and myself foremost amongst them. You have led your department in a manner befitting the best traditions and practises of Starfleet and the academic community. Your continual promotion of your staff’s work, your dedication to their successes and your ability to motivate your people to the best of their ability is a testament to your leadership.”

Finally Tikva smiled as she stepped forward, looking up just a touch as she carefully produced the silvered pip, showed it to Gabs, and then affixed it to her collar. “I hereby promote you to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, with all the rights, privileges and responsibilities that entails.”

The room was still deadly silent, which is probably why the quiet call from the back of the room, a voice Tikva couldn’t place, was able to carry. “Three cheers for the Lieutenant Commander. Hip-hip!”

“Hooray!” The chorus shattered the quiet, the repetitions pulverized it, and with it broken, Tikva stepped back quicly, back against the bar, as the crowd took the hint and moved in to congratulate Gabrielle, who was still looking like she’d just seen her life flash before her eyes.

“Nicely done Captain.”

“Well done Commander, about time.”

“She deserves it.”

These were just samples of some of the feedback she and Mac got as the crowd passed them, the roiling mass of a seeming majority of those assembled trying to congratulate their division leader.

“That was mean,” came a voice from Tikva’s left and she turned to see Blake Pisani sidling up beside her at the bar. Mac had departed only moments ago, pushing through the crowd to deliver a drink to Gabrielle and Blake was looking in his direction. “Poor girl still looks like she’s ready to faint.”

“Yeah, but where’s the fun in a boring promotion ceremony with just the senior staff.” She waved the barkeep over, ordered two drinks, and then turned to face Blake. “I take it you’d like me not to pull a stunt like this when it comes your time?”

“Preferably not. Just send your courier boy with the pip to my office,” Blake said, nodding in Mac’s direction. “I’m sure he’ll make it interesting.”

Tikva threw her hands up in surrender. “I don’t need to hear anymore!” she exclaimed. “Nope, nope, nope. Keep it to yourself.” As the drinks arrived, she felt the hand on her back, then Lin’s reaching hand as she took hers off the counter.

“Torturing the captain again Blake?” Lin asked.

“I was waiting for her to start drinking before truly torturing her,” Blake answered. “But now you’re here, I’ll leave her to you. Don’t fancy fighting you.” And with that, she pushed off the bar and dived into the crowd after Mac.

“How long?” Lin asked once they were alone.

“How long what?”

“How long have you and MacIntyre been planning that stunt?” Lin clarified.

“Just after the staff meeting this morning.”

“So you just gave me my pip, but you terrified Gabrielle?” Lin parked herself down on the stool next to Tikva. “How much commission does Gavin have you on?”

Tikva had stopped flinching whenever the counsellor’s name had been invoked, having had plenty of time to get to know the man now, even discovering a few shared hobbies and a taste for fine beverages. “I get a voucher book to let me out of sessions for every crewmember I scare into his office. Panic attacks get me ten extra chits. Besides, how would I scare you? Suddenly beam a Borg onto the ship and tell you afterwards your pip was inside it?”

“Ch’tkk’va and I have a plan for that,” Lin replied confidently before sipping at her drink. “Incoming.”

Tikva barely got out a “wha?” before Gabrielle burst through the crowd, Mac and Blake on her heel.

“Ma’am, I just want to say thank you so much,” Gabrielle started straight away, catatonia a thing of the distant past. This was all bubblegum and fizzy drinks and candy rolling off of Gabrielle, her emotional high just verging on unbearable for Tikva.

She really needed to sit down with a full Betazoid and talk things out, her mother had been somewhat lax in educating her, seeing as their home town had always been so calm.

“You deserved it, Gabrielle, truthfully. Of course, you have to live up to it now. We arrive at GSC-9587 in eighteen hours, so don’t overdo it out there,” Tikva said, indicating the crowd with a head nod.

“Oh ignore her,” Blake spoke up, her somewhat lax attitude to command, which Tikva had been warned about, and heard about from Terax often enough. “Celebrate, enjoy, drink real alcohol, just swing by sickbay in the morning and I’ll set you right.”

“I, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.” Gabs sounded unsure of Blake’s response. “Again Captain, thank you so much. I won’t let you down.”

“I’ll hold you to that, now go,” she ordered around a laugh as the celebratory mood of the room was pulling at Gabs, her friends and co-workers wanting to celebrate.

“Right,” she then said to Mac, Blake and Lin. “Captain’s Mess for a quieter drink?”

“You all right Sam?” Gabrielle asked as she sat herself down at the bridge Science I station.

While Rrr was sitting at Ops up front, the start of any system survey was usually a bit of a large juggling act, so Samantha Michaels had found herself on the bridge at Ops II. While Atlantis did have an impressive array of sensors at its disposal the ship could still only be in one place at a time. This meant that as soon as they had arrived in the GSC-9587 system they had launched ten separate probes to undertake initial scans of various stellar bodies ahead of their inevitable in-depth surveys. Assuming of course the probes found anything worthwhile.

And managing those probes, at least in the initial part of their flights, was her duty. It would be hours before some of them would arrive at their destinations. Telemetry would need monitoring in case of failure and another probe would need to be launched, or to adjust the probe’s flight paths for unexpected debris of anomalies, not that their own limited expert systems couldn’t and wouldn’t do so if they didn’t get a human response in time.

“Huh, oh, sorry, yes,” Sam finally spat out as her brain registered that Gabrielle had sat down next to her and spoken as well. “Bit distracted.”

“We’re heading in on impulse, it’s going to be a few hours before we aim the good arrays at anything interesting. If you want, I can take some of those probes off your hands?” Gabs offered.

“You’re about to get busy,” Sam stated with perfect timing as not just her console, but Rrr’s started chirping.

“Sensors are picking up a space station,” Rrr announced and everyone on the bridge turned to face the viewscreen as they brought it up. It was telling when officers knew what their captains would want and delivered it without being asked. Confidence in knowing what was expected, confidence in delivering it without explicit orders.

Both Captain Theodoras and Commander MacIntyre had made their presence known about an hour earlier, both wanting to be present for the initial reports and scans of the system, to set the order of events before one of them would head off duty. The captain was the one going to head off duty, Sam could remember hearing the captain say that earlier.

The station on the viewscreen was barely more than a silhouette against the bright disc of the system’s central star, that brilliance toned down many, many times by the ship’s systems. Some details could be made out, but not much, limited by using hours-old light enhanced with faster-than-light subspace scanners. The station had a central sphere, nearly three kilometres in diameter with a three-kilometre spike protruding from the north and south poles, the base of each spike nearly fifty meters in diameter and tapering to a point. And contact each tip was a ring encircling the entire structure, which had to be tens of meters in thickness itself to be seen against the star’s disc.

“Well would you look at that,” the captain said as she and the commander got to their feet. “Any record of that on the Motu Maha’s records?”

“No ma’am,” Gabrielle answered from Sam’s left, now they were facing into the bridge and not their consoles. “Motu Maha’s records only mentioned low energy warp fields and heavy ordnance.”

Sam was already turning back to her console when it chirped at her, bringing her to a halt. That was like the sixth or seventh time this morning she’d found herself about to do something just before it was required. Taking that step forward towards the door before the turbolift actually arrived, avoiding a runaway ensign in the lounge who was dashing to their duties with breakfast in hand, or in this case, turning to check results just before they arrived.

She shook her head, dismissing the sense of déjà vu, and accepted the automated probe’s report, glancing over it briefly before speaking. “Probe Gamma’s initial reports look promising for the system’s inhabited world. 9587c is L-class, just like 9587d, but is heavily irradiated and has an orbital debris field consistent with space infrastructure that someone took an intense dislike to.”

Gabrielle at her side was checking another returned result. “Epsilon is going to be another two hours before it arrives at 9587d, but I think Sam’s on the money. It’s L-class, but no signs of major debris in orbit at its current distance. We’ll know more once it arrives in orbit, but I think Gamma is on point.”

“Let’s let the probes look over things first. If there is anyone alive on those worlds, waiting a few more days for us to get around to them isn’t going to change things, I think. That,” the captain said pointing to the station still on the viewscreen, “is where I think we should start. What do you think XO?”

“It’s pretty close to the star,” MacIntyre stated. “Rrr, distance from the star to the station?”

“A truly impressive forty-five million kilometres from the star, which is a sedate G2IV. According to Federation astronomical records dating back to the late 2200s, the star is currently in a minimum of activity.”

“That’s closer than Mercury to the Sun.” MacIntyre had stepped up beside Rrr. “Atlantis can handle that right?”

“Short of flying into the corona, we should be fine.” They showed MacIntyre something on their console, something Sam couldn’t see, and that seemed to appease the Commander. “Radiation environment is volatile that close to the star though. I wouldn’t recommend transporters without pattern enhancers or a transporter pad at either end.”

“Shuttle it is then.” MacIntyre turned back to the captain. “I’ll get a team together; we’ll take the Lesbos over once Atlantis is in position.”

“Take the Lieutenant Commander with you,” the captain said looking at Gabrielle. “Lest we incur her wrath.”

“Top of the list. Michaels,” MacIntrye said, addressing Samantha directly, “you’re up as well.” And with that, he was on his way to the turbolift.

“Come on,” Gabrielle said, slapping Sam on the arm with the back of her hand. “It’ll be fun.”

“You said that last time,” she answered.

“What? When was that?”

“Haven’t we done a mission together?” Sam challenged as they stepped into the turbolift.

The shuttle bay on the alien space station, located on the dark side of the station, was as empty as it was lifeless. They could have parked the entirety of Atlantis’ small craft in here, with room to space to hold a tennis match between each one. The station’s hull was a dark material, serving to be highly absorptive on the star side and highly radiative on the dark side. Initial scans hinted that the entire hull was a solar cell and heat radiator in one. For all that, the shuttle bay was stark white with bright bands of colour serving to section the bay off into sections or to guide people to certain areas if they followed some of the lines. This was how the entire away team had come to be in front of one of the doors along the bay’s back way, five distinct coloured lines painted on the floor leading up to a door that stubbornly refused to open. No panel with a display saying why the door wouldn’t open, and no audible statement about why either. There didn’t even seem to be an access panel beside the doors, which were large enough for a shuttle.

“Any luck?” MacIntyre asked, not for the first time since Sam had started on the task of trying to trick the doors into opening for them.

 “The sensor mounted above the door keeps scanning all of us,” Samantha answered. “I think it’s a bio scanner. Commander Camargo is scanning the bay for any biomaterial we might be able to use to spoof the sensor.”

Spread around the bay, no more than fifty meters from the door were half the away team, tricorders scanning, searching for anything they might find that could help them spoof the door. Skin flakes, hair samples, maybe a missed bodily fluid sample – some detritus of organic life that could give them a hint as to the biomarkers the scanner might have been looking for.

“Come all this way, no one is here to greet us and we’re stuck at the front door,” MacIntrye said. He didn’t sound disappointed, just more stating facts. “Glad we’re starting with the easy mysteries.”

“Creepy sun-staring obelisk station with no crew and locked doors,” Sam quipped while still examining her tricorder. “And yes, creepy. It’s nearly pitch black on the outside, but white and colourful on the inside. That’s just…weird.”

A chirp on her tricorder and she tapped at it, changing settings, confirming the oddity the electronic minion had dutifully reported. “This station is holding an absolutely massive amount of energy in reserve.”

“Oh?” MacIntyre asked.

“Yeah.” She checked again her tricorder, then turned it to show the commander. “Like enough that if you do something stupid you could obliterate half the star system.”

“Why would you need that much power?” he asked, checking her reading, then whistling to get Gabrielle and Gérard Maxwell, their pet engineer for this away mission, to come over. “Seems a bit excessive,” he continued after they arrived and were brought up to speed on the find.

“Maybe some sort of weapon system we haven’t spotted, or beamed power back to their homeworld?” Maxwell suggested. “Though the latter would be an iffy prospect at best. Can’t really say more till we get inside and poke about a bit more.”

“I agree,” Gabrielle agreed. “Can speculate all we want, but we’re better to get inside first I think.”

“Agreed, Samantha, I want you to-“ MacIntyre was cut off by his commbadge chirping away.

“Atlantisss to away team, we’re getting an odd energy ssssignature from the sssstation.” It was W’a’le’ki on the channel, background noise hinting at the bridge too. “Have you managed to infiltrate beyond the firssst door?” Her sibilant hiss was particularly pronounced today.

“Negative Atlantis,” Mac answered. “We’re still at the bay door. Define odd energy signature.”

“There isss a large ssscale chroniton build-up occurring in the ssstation. But the outer hull isss masssking sssome of it, ssso could be much higher than we’re detecting.”

“All right, fun’s over for now folks. Everyone back on the shuttle, we’ll sort it-“

It wasn’t the volume of the noise that made Sam flinch, but the pitch of it. The whistle was so high, so shrill and piercing that it went in one ear, through her skull and hit her other eardrum. The warble of the expertly manipulated bosun’s whistle didn’t help either, but it did have the desired effect. The only merciful thing about the whole experience was its briefness.

“Attention on deck!” shouted Fightmaster, his voice unchallenged by the now mute Port Royal and then came the sound of shuffling bodies, hers included, answering that call.

“Wait a minute,” she muttered quietly to herself.

“What’s up, Sam?” Dimitry asked out one side of his mouth. He was one of the new science offices, though new was a relative term seeing as he’d been aboard ship for months now. Tall, muscular, not an idiot, and easy on the eyes. All good enough reasons to talk to him.

“Ever had really, really bad déjà vu?”

“Lieutenant Gabrielle Camargo, front and centre.” The captain’s voice was clear across the silent mass of people gathered in Port Royal. Sam could sense motion in the crowd to her right, Gabs no doubt working her way through people at the captain’s summons.

“MacIntyre, if you please,” Sam muttered quietly, the only person who would hear being Dimitry at her side, the window to her other side. When the captain did speak the only difference was the word Commander at the start. She found herself shaking her head as MacIntyre started speaking aloud, barely hearing a thing he said. Something about traditions and ability and leadership. Typical promotion speeches that any officer could likely guess at.

Dimitry glanced at her and quietly raised a finger to his lips, a silent plea to be quiet in the face of this event. And he repeated it again when she preceded the captain’s declaration, promoting Gabs to Lieutenant Commander.

As the crowd broke out into cheers, he turned on her. “What’s up? No, seriously, what’s up?”

“Déjà vu,” she answered. “Seriously, didn’t we do all this already?”

“Uh, maybe a couple of weeks back when Borman got promoted to Lieutenant?” Dimitry had crouched down slightly to look her over, head bobbing side to side. “You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine, I think,” she said, in her defence before shrugging. “It’s a party, shouldn’t we enjoy it?”

The look he gave her was one she’d have to call disappointed. His eyes squinted slightly, arms crossed, a ‘hmmm’ from deep in his throat. “I suppose,” he conceded eventually. “But if you feel off, I’m taking you to sickbay.”

And that was reason enough not to say anything to Dimitry. No one in their right mind wanted to submit themselves to the terror that was Doctor Terax. She shrugged off the ill feelings, let the emotion of the celebrations sweep over her and dove into the festivities, happily grabbing Dimitry’s hand and dragging him into the thick of it.

“Ssshhh,” she said to Dimitry as they stumbled into the dark room. Her dark room. Her very quiet, somewhat small darkened quarters to be precise.

“I thought you had quarters to yourself?” he asked as the door slid shut behind them, what little light from the void between stars illuminating her quarters. And the constant red glow of the port Bussard collector, which was somewhat helpful in the middle of the night at least.

“I do, I do.” She turned on him in the dark, pulling him close and working away at his uniform tunic. “Just that wall is thin,” she said pointing at one wall which only bore a large monitor and a few paintings and ornaments on it.

His hands were busy with her own clothing for a moment before he glanced around for her bedroom door, then started to direct both of them in that direction as they both undressed. Kisses were exchanged, more than a few giggles from herself, and a laugh or two from Dimitry as they stumbled through the door. It didn’t take long before she bumped into the bed with the back of her legs. With a gleeful smile he likely didn’t see, she spun him around, pushing him back onto the bed before she pounced.

And that’s when the door chime went off.

Both of them froze, waiting, and then the chime sounded a second time.

Samantha sighed, physically slumped, before she crawled off of Dimitry and the bed. “Stay right there,” she ordered, a ‘yes ma’am’ in response, and then she padded out in her underwear. She failed to stop the third sounding of the chimes.

“What?” she barked as she finally reached the door and tapped the open button. She had absolutely zero qualms about who saw her in her underwear at the moment. She was wrapped in anger and being disturbed and that would do.

“Lieutenant Michaels, I need to talk to you.” The young woman before her was a Bajoran, a few years younger the Sam herself. A mere Ensign, though at least she was wearing yellow. She hadn’t seen her around in any of the Ops section meetings, so Engineering or Security was her guess. She’d seen her in Port Royal a few times, with the same collection of people.

“Bloody hell Ensign, can it wait till morning?” she said, exasperation evident. She wanted this woman to recognise she was interrupting something and to please go away.

“No,” the ensign answered.

“Well I’m somewhat busy Ensign, so it will have to.”

“Lieutenant Dimitry Malenkov is in there with you. Your tunic is on your dining table. And you’re about to get a message on your computer terminal.” The young woman pointed into the dark and just as Sam turned around to see where she was pointing saw her computer terminal light up to let her know a new message had come through.

“Nice trick,” Sam replied. “But I’m busy. Track me down in the morning.”

“I can’t,” the ensign said.

“Then type it up and I’ll read it in the morning. Good night, Ensign.” And with that, she closed the door in the young woman’s face. And with another tap disabled the door chime. Giving her eyes a moment to readjust to the dark, the brightly lit corridor wrecking any night vision, she turned back to head for her bedroom.

And spotted her uniform tunic, thrown in a hasty disrobing, spread across her dining table.

“Huh, good eyes on her,” she muttered as she slipped back into her bedroom, smiling at Dimitry. “Now, where were we?”

“Huh, oh, sorry, yes,” she said to Gabs. She’d not heard a word she said was just throwing out words in defence. For about the last five minutes she’d been feeling off, like the entire universe was out of balance. Or out of sync with itself.

“We’re heading in on impulse, it’s going to be a few hours before we aim the good arrays at anything interesting. If you want, I can take some of those probes off your hands?” Gabs was busy tapping away at her console, checking and refining the sensor reads from the sensors, but otherwise just occupying a chair on the bridge at the moment. She was right, it would be a few more hours before the primary arrays were able to get exacting reads on anything interesting in the inner system.

Sure, they had a good idea of what was in the system, but there was nothing like bringing a Starfleet explorer vessel alongside something and scanning it in such detail to read the serial number on each atom from when the Great Bird of the Galaxy had crafted it. Or so the salespeople likely told Starfleet when they pitched the sensor package to them for inclusion in the latest line of ships.

“You’re about to get busy,” she said to Gabs. It was just a feeling, but one which bore fruit. The science station started chirping away, the automated systems proud to announce they found ‘something’ worthy of attention. The same could be heard from Rrr’s station and to a far, far lesser degree Sam’s own, but hers were mostly just letting her know that Rrr was getting the bulk of notifications.

She’d read all of these notifications before. She knew what each said before she opened it. Her attention to the bridge around her faded as she mentally told herself what one notification said, opened it and had it exactly right. Then again and again. Five in a row.

Then a notification from one of the probes they’d launched, which had dutifully gone screaming into the system far faster than Atlantis, unwary of the laws of relativity and happy to go forth at nearly 0.7c. She didn’t need to read the report.

“Probe Gamma is reporting both 9587c and 9587d are L-class, but 9587c is highly irradiated and has a large orbital debris field.” She just blurted that out, all without even opening the report. She didn’t want to, it would just make the day weirder. But she did and what she expected, what she knew, was there, waiting for her. 9587c was an irradiated L-class world in the grips of a nuclear winter.

“Epsilon is going to be another two hours,” Gabs said from beside her, reading a different status update. “But it looks like 9587d is indeed L-class as well, as we suspected from long-range scans. No signs of debris, and it’s a lot smaller than c. Sort of an Earth-Mars relationship going on I think.”

“Let’s let the probes look over things first,” Captain Theodoras announced. “If there is anyone alive on those worlds, waiting a few more days for us to get around to them isn’t going to change things, I think. That,” she pointed to the viewscreen, a large alien space station dominating, something Sam had missed coming up but also fully expected, “is where I think we should start. What do you think XO?”

“Any luck?” Mac asked.

She wasn’t sure if it was the first, third or hundredth time he’d asked since they had boarded the alien station but it was getting on her nerves that was for sure. Or maybe it was the obstinate door before her.

“The sensor mounted above the door keeps scanning all of us,” she said, as a means of explaining why the door wasn’t opening. “I think it’s a bio scanner. Commander Camargo is scanning the bay for any biomaterial we might be able to use to spoof the sensor.”

She of course was trying every trick in the hacker’s book she could think of. Using the tricorder to try and trick the sensor, or induce a current in the door’s systems to get it to open, or attempting some sort of computer interface, but nothing was working. Or at least working completely.

“Come all this way, no one is here to greet us and we’re stuck at the front door,” Mac continued, filling the air while she worked. Yes, the commander was a good leader, but there were times when redshirts were just decoration while others worked. Woe be onto those under her command, forced to deal with a captain who did things!

“Glad we’re starting with-“ Mac cut himself off as the door hissed along the middle seam, then slid open at a sedate pace, unveiling a corridor beyond that just repeated the décor of the shuttle bay. A corridor that seemed to stretch into infinity though.

“Open sesame,” she said. She’d just had a random thought, a random idea that popped into her head about how to trick the door sensor and it had worked the first time. No need to dial in the approach, tune frequencies or code injections, just a first-time lucky guess.

“Nicely done Michaels,” Mac said, with a pat on her shoulder as he whistled to summon the away team back from where they had spread out around the bay.

“Right folks, since Lieutenant Michaels here has opened the door, we’ll proceed inside. All sensors on record, no one goes anywhere alone.” A series of head nods in understanding at the commander’s orders. “And if anyone sees something like a car or scooters, shout out,” he said looking down the expanse of the corridor before them. “This place is huge.”

“Atlantisss to away team, we’re getting an odd energy ssssignature from the sssstation.” W’a’le’ki’s sibilant hiss came from Mac’s commbadge after a chirp and his tap to receive the call. “Have you managed to infiltrate beyond the firssst door?”

“Just now Lieutenant. We’re about to head inside the station and start our exploration now.”

“Oh fuck me,” Sam muttered. “Chronitons.”

“There isss a large ssscale chroniton build-up occurring in the ssstation. But the outer hull isss masssking sssome of it, ssso could be much higher than we’re detecting.” W’a’le’ki’s confirmation drew the commander’s attention to Sam as she just smiled at him.

“Lucky guess,” was all she managed to say before a bright flash overwhelmed them all.

“Ssshh,” Samantha said to Dimitry as they stumbled into her quarters, the only light in the cabin coming from the red glow of the port Bussard collector, its radiance entering through the window and reflecting off a wall, casting the space in a dim red glow.

“I thought you had quarters to yourself?” he asked, the door sliding shut behind them just as his hands started pawing at her uniform, peeling it away from her just as she was doing to his.

“I do, I do,” she answered. “Just that wall is thin,” she added, pointing to one wall, opposite the red-stained wall.

As she stripped Dimitry’s tunic off him, a flick of her hand sending it flying, she stopped momentarily, the quizzical look on her face barely visible in the poor lighting. It didn’t hinder Dimitry, who only noticed she’d stopped when he’d similarly sent her tunic to parts unknown.

“What’s up?” he asked, concern in his voice.

“I’ve got that déjà vu feeling again,” she admitted. “You threw my top onto my dining table.”

“I just threw it. Didn’t really see where.”

“Computer, lights at half,” Sam said, much to Dimitry’s dismay. As the lighting came up she turned to face her quarters, generally tidy save for the two uniform tops thrown haphazardly around. Dimitry’s blue had splayed out on the floor while hers had indeed landed on the dining table as she suspected.

The guessing of the captain’s words, knowing what others at the party would say, Dimitry’s advances, where er uniform ended up – it was all starting to be just a bit much for simple déjà vu in her opinion.

And that’s when the door chime went off.

“Sam,” Dimitry said, pleading.

“You said if I feel off, you’re taking me to sickbay,” she reminded him as she stepped up to the door and pushed the open button. She was mostly dressed, just missing the uniform tunic and frankly didn’t care, but she could hear Dimitry going through the motions of collecting his and putting it back on. “Ensign Linal,” she said straight away as the doors parted.

“You knew it was me,” the young Bajoran woman said with relief. “Prophets, finally.”

“And I’m about to get a message on my terminal?” Sam asked, Linal Nerys’ head nodding in the affirmative just as the computer terminal in her quarters chirped to let her know a message had arrived. “Did you send it?”

“Manufactured evidence,” Nerys admitted. “How much do you recall?”

“I feel like I’ve done all of this a few times, but can’t be certain.” Sam startled slightly when Dimitry stepped up behind her, a gentle hand on her shoulder to get her attention as he passed her uniform tunic over. “I have done this a few times, haven’t I? What the hell is going on?”

“Time loop I think.” Nerys pushed past, entering Sam’s quarters and letting the door close behind her. The short Bajoran woman was well-built and the force of personality about her made her seem taller than she actually was. Probably things that were beneficial for a security officer.

“I’ve tried talking to the senior staff,” Nerys continued, “but the few times I have I’ve gotten nothing out of them. Haven’t managed to speak with the captain though. No one believes me. But I heard something about you and thought maybe you’re experiencing things like I am, able to remember things each time.”

“You got a tricorder around here?” Dimitry suddenly spoke up, directing his question to Sam, who just pointed at a closed drawer. A moment later he produced the device, powering it up and aiming it at both women.

“So…” Sam stretched it out in an incomplete query to continue on.

“So I’m hoping maybe instead of some security ensign trying to tell the captain or commander about the problem I can get the assistant ops chief onboard. You were awfully rude the first few times you know.” Nerys had moved until she had found a spot as equidistant from all furnishings as possible, arms crossed, and by presence alone laid claim to the space.

“I was having a nice night?” Sam looked to Dimitry with a wry smile and as he looked up at her, his smile genuine, brought one to her face as well. Honestly, she was annoyed with herself right now, letting this situation get between her and him, but mysteries waited for no one.

“Yah whatever,” Nerys huffed, unimpressed.

“Watch it Ensign,” Dimitry said immediately, never even looking up from the tricorder. “No signs of tachyons or chronitons that this thing can pick up.” He gave the device a gentle lob to Sam so she could check it as well. “But if it’s subtle we’d need either sickbay or a science lab to tease it out.”

“Chronitons…” Sam hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but his mentioning it had sparked a bit more memory. “It’s chronitons. Don’t ask how I know,” she said to Dimitry and Nerys at the pronouncement.

 “Hmm.” Doctor Terax had repeated that exact same noise five times now as he pointed various technical devices at the two women on biobeds either side of him. Both were subjected to the same scans at the same time while he read the readouts on a large padd he read on his central arm.

“Well?” Nerys asked, sounding impatient. Which to Sam, in her limited experience, seemed to the young woman’s natural state of being.

“Hmm,” Terax repeated, louder, aimed at the ensign this time. “I am conducting an investigation here Ensign, not bully-work. I will take as long as I need.”

Before Nerys could say anything, Sam spoke up to try and smooth the waters. “Just relax Ensign. We’ll get an answer soon enough.”

Soon enough, it turned out was fifteen more minutes of scans before the Edosian doctor was ready to present his findings. “There is a minuscule chroniton build-up in both of you in excess of standard background.” He presented both of them with a padd with his findings. “Ensign Linal however has a higher concentration of chroniton particles in her hippocampus than you do Lieutenant. And in both cases, it is higher than in the rest of your bodies.”

“Which means?” Nerys asked.

“Which means you have a higher chroniton concentration than the Lieutenant.” Terax’s tone was gruff and to the point. “The levels I’m detecting are well within the realm of possibility for Starfleet officers on deep space assignments.” He tapped a button on his padd and both other theirs updated with a collection of medical journal articles to support his position. “I need a larger sample size than two to attempt to deduce what might be going on here.”

“And the déjà vu we’ve both reported, or remembering time loops?” Sam leaned forward slightly and set her padd on Terax’s desk. She’d have to give the articles a read later, but right now wasn’t the time.

“My hypothesis would be the chronitons giving you an unconscious glimpse of the future perhaps.” Terax too set his padd down. “And if this is the result of an actual timeloop, then may I suggest you memorise the readings so you can compare them next time around? More information is the only solution.”

“So, there is something going on.” Nerys stated. “We should take this to the captain.”

“Two officers, with readings slightly above standard,” Terax said dismissively. “I’m not going to annoy the captain with just minor details at this time.” He raised his central hand to stop further protest. “I will however conduct further scans of the crew and keep both of you informed.”

“Appreciated Doc.” Sam collected her padd and with a hand gesture told Nerys to stand. “We’ll get out your way for now then.”

“Seriously?” Nerys challenged.

“Now Ensign.” And with that Sam herded the ensign out of the CMO’s office. “We’ll get some more info if we don’t harass him. And maybe he’ll stumble across a few others in our position.”

“Fine.” Nerys took two steps away from Sam, then stopped and turned to face her. “I’m late for my shift. Thanks for listening at least.”

“Hey, it’s not Starfleet without a mystery, right?”

With only a few hours of sleep and another few of reading Terax’s findings, the doctor delivering as he’d promised, Sam found herself yawning as she approached the alien door on the space station. She’d opted to just let things play out, though pre-empting a good number of reports and notifications.

And this time as she approached the door for her initial scan, instead of reporting it wouldn’t open and spending nearly forty-five minutes trying to crack it open, she had it open in the first five seconds. She had remembered the sequence she used last time, or was it the time before, maybe a handful of times before, and had made it part of the initial scan, the door hissing as the seal broke and let them into the station.

This time she was forty-five minutes ahead of schedule.

“Atlantisss to away team, we’re getting an odd energy ssssignature from the sssstation.” W’a’le’ki’s voice emitted from Mac’s commbadge as the science officer called. “Have…have you managed to infiltrate beyond the firssst door?”

She sounded uncertain in that question to Sam, which was different. Like she was asking herself about the question?

“Yes we have Lieutenant,” Mac replied, a quizzical tone to his own voice. He hadn’t even reported difficulty with the door back to the Atlantis yet but was being asked about it. “We’re proceeding inside. What’s the reading from the ship?”

“There isss a large ssscale chroniton build-up occurring in the ssstation. But the outer hull isss masssking sssome of it, ssso could be much higher than we’re detecting.”

“Roger that Lieutenant. Guessing our opening the door is letting some of it leak out.” Mac had nodded to Camargo and Sam, both of them now reconfiguring their tricorders. “We’ll keep you appraised, MacIntyre out.”

“Chroniton radiation for sure,” Gabs said when the comm line closed.

“I give it forty-five minutes until it hits critical,” Sam said, then she looked up, a sheepish grin on her face. “Just, uh, where I’d put my bet.”

“Uh huh,” Mac said. “How about we don’t bet on the mysterious scientific readings until we get a better idea?” Then he grinned at her. “I prefer to bet with something approaching an educated guess.”

“Yes sir,” Sam replied.

As Mac passed, a security officer in tow, Sam felt Gabs walk up beside her and nudge their shoulders together to get her attention. “What’s up Sam? You’ve been a bit odd all day.”

“Oh you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said, half-heartedly believing it. But only because she knew scientists had to be at least somewhat open-minded, especially Starfleet officers who encountered, or at least read about weird stuff all the time. “Hey, uh, W’a’le’ki, do you know where she was about the time you were getting promoted?”

“She was in Port Royal,” Gabs answered. “But you seemed to only have eyes for Malenkov I noticed.” Gabs grinned and nudged shoulders again. “Anything I should know about?”

Sam grinned. She needed this relaxed conversation. It was something new. “His attending Gantzmann’s exercise classes is paying off.” That got a slight laugh out of Gabs.

“Say no more,” Gabs said, then started off after the others. “Let’s go explore this thing.”

“Yah, let’s.” Same then fell into step beside her friend. “Just hope I can remember everything perfectly.”

The piercing wail of the bosun’s whistle forced W’a’le’ki to crush her left ear into her shoulder to better shelter herself from it. But of course, that wouldn’t do anything for her right ear. Just a case of which was experiencing the most pain from the shrill sound. She waited patiently, like everyone else for the pronouncements, ceremonies, and pleasantries before the true party started. So many had no idea why they were here, but surely they had to know right? It had all started to feel rehearsed for her like she’d seen this a dozen times already, but she knew that couldn’t be the case.

A few colleagues approached, she knew who and in what order, and responded exactly as she felt she should. It was all starting to get quite odd, a little disconcerting even. She expected Ensign Krek to be next, dreaded it even. Tellarite manners and hers didn’t mix well. But instead, something unexpected happened – Samantha Michaels pushing her way through the crowd, making directly for her and even going so far as to push Krek out of the way.

“W’a’le’ki, mind if we talk outside?” the human woman asked, indicating the nearest door out into the corridor.

“I…” she stumbled for a moment. For the last five minutes every conversation had felt like she’d lived it already, knew what to say, but this was new. Unknown. Normal. “Yesss.”

“Excellent.” And with that Michaels grabbed her hand and lead her through the crowd, dragged along in the other woman’s wake as crowds and doors parted and they found themselves in the blessed quiet of the hall. “Tell me, have you been experiencing déjà vu?”

“Déjà vu?”

“Human term for a phenomenon where you feel like you’ve lived through events before.” Michaels looked at her quizzically. “Has anything since that idiot Fightmaster and that stupid whistle of his felt like you’ve done it before?”

“Yesss,” she answered. She couldn’t help the smile forming on her face. So someone else was feeling it too! That was mildly reassuring. Until it dawned on her and it wasn’t. “Wait, you’re experiencing it asss well?”

“It’s not déjà vu per se,” Michaels continued. “Just that’s a good comparison, I think? And yes, I’m experiencing it as well. Like everything has happened before, knew what was coming, could get ahead of things. No surprises.”

“That actually sssoundsss dreadful,” she found herself saying. To know what was coming sounded horrible. Where was the adventure? The new experiences? And to have it happen over and over again sounded downright dreadful.

“Especially when it starts all over again with some yeoman blowing a whistle that I’m starting to want to shove down his throat.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Ssterling hass a wonderful ssinging voicce.”

That stopped Michaels dead. The ops officer just stared at her for a few seconds, eyes blinking as she processed what she’d just said about Fightmaster. “What?”

“I ssaid he hass a –“

“Nevermind.” Michaels cut her off sharply, accompanied by a shaking of her head. “He’s an emotionless automaton. An escaped A400 with a good skin job.” Michaels then looked down the corridor in both directions, sighed, then tapped her comm badge. “Ensign Linal, please report to Sickbay.”

A momentary pause, then a response. “Aye, ma’am. Meet you there.”

“Ssickbay?” she asked of Michaels, who simply grabbed her hand and started to lead her down the hall. “Lieutenant, why are we going to Ssickbay?”

“Trust me on this,” Michael said. “You’ll want to hear it straight from the Doctor’s mouth. And have you been working on your…lisp?”

“Hmm,” Terax said as he studied the tricorder in his central hand while scanning two of the three women before him with scanners in his others. “There is indeed an elevated chroniton signature in all three of you.”

With sickbay rather quiet, no pressing needs on his skills that evening, Terax had been settling down in his office to catch up on some journal reading when Lieutenants Michaels and W’a’le’ki and Ensign Linal had all stormed in, right past Doctor Walters and straight into his office. One fantastical tale later, with rather specific values that had tweaked his curiosity, and he was rather certain that there would be no journal reading tonight.

“Though your values were off Lieutenant,” he continued, directing it to Samantha Michaels. “Ensign Linal has a flux of zero point zero zero four in her hippocampus, while yours is point zero zero three eight.”

“That’s higher,” Michaels said. “So, explains why Nerys is remembering more than I am each cycle? And why W’a’s being so low could match her just starting to really notice the cycling?”

“It could also be the result,” he interjected, “of Atlantis passing near any number of undetected stellar phenomena, or some sort of issue with the warp core or main deflector. Starfleet crews are exposed to interesting subatomic particles on a frighteningly high frequency.”

“Iss there any way to detect this increasse in anyone else acrossss the sship?” W’a’le’ki asked.

“Not at such a low level,” he answered. Both scanners were pocketed, and then a command tapped into the tricorder to pass its readings to the main computer before he closed the device. “I however am showing no increase at all above background, so perhaps am immune to the effect.”

“Nice for some,” Linal Nerys said, her tone just above a growl. “Sorry,” she immediately followed up, looking a little ashamed of her previous tone of voice. “It’s been an exhausting month, couple of days, your choice,” she explained.

“A month?” all three others said almost exactly at the same time.

“Two days, ten cycles, or is it eleven?” Nerys asked herself out loud. “Give or take.”

“We need to talk to the captain,” Michaels stated. “Now.”

“I’m not getting up for anything less than a Borg invasion or Starfleet Command calling to make me an admiral,” Tikva grumbled as a hand settled on her shoulder and gently jostled her. To drive her point home she buried her face into the pillow, attempting to hide from the universe at large.

“Do you want a dressing gown, or for me to tell them you need a few minutes to get dressed, Admiral?” Adelinde asked in response, the humour in her voice evident.

It had gotten late in the evening and the two women had indeed retreated to the Captain’s Mess with Mac and Blake for a few more drinks in a more relaxed environment before calling it for the night, opting to make their way to Tikva’s quarters seeing as they were only a few doors down. And when a few hours later three officers had come calling it had been Adelinde who had heard the door chime and responded, letting Tikva stay in bed, even if both had woken at the sound.

One of the perils of command was learning to be a light sleeper, or at least to somehow respond to summons at all hours.

“The nice dressing gown,” came the response through the pillow.

A few moments later and she was tying the burgundy silk robe around her waist in the dark of the bedroom, grumbling incoherently to herself and the universe, before she took two deep breaths, straightened her back, then stepped towards the door, stopping just long enough to pop up on the balls of her feet, plant a quick peck on Lin’s cheek, then proceed through to the social space of her quarters.

Adelinde had seen their visitors in, all three officers sitting on the couch and looking a little sheepish for disturbing her in the night. Linal Nerys, Samantha Michaels and W’a’le’ki – she knew all their names and faces immediately. Any good captain should in her opinion. It lent an air of all-knowingness when interacting with the crew and the mystique of command was important to protect.

This isn’t a Borg invasion.

Or Starfleet Command either.

Can we go back to bed then?

No.

No.

Awww…

“Before any of you start,” she said, crossing the space and taking the single seat for herself at the end of the coffee table, Adelinde’s comforting presence behind her the whole way, “I want you all to know the Captain’s Mess has real alcohol, I’ve had a quiet a bit to drink this evening and I’ve had about three hours of sleep. Now, that said, I wouldn’t expect you to circumvent Commander MacIntyre unless it was dire so spill it.”

“The ship is stuck in a time loop,” Samantha Michaels blurted out.

“Prophets,” Nerys muttered, just audible to all present.

“It’ss true,” W’a’le’ki confirmed. “At leasst I’m starting to believe sso mysself.”

The mix of feelings she was getting from the three was honesty, shocked disbelief and annoyance, the latter two just from Nerys herself. Likely the disbelief at Samantha’s directness and the annoyance she couldn’t place.

“I’ll get you a coffee,” Lin said from behind her, a hand gentle on her shoulder for a moment before she went to the replicator.

She’s not telepathic, but damn that woman can read a room.

No, she’s just a good partner.

Uh-huh.

“The loop is about two days long,” Samantha continued after a brief moment. “It ends with us getting to the GSC-9587 system and discovering an alien space station. Just as we’re starting our exploration of the station  everything gets reset back to about thirty seconds before Fightmaster walks into Port Royal for Gabs’ promotion ceremony.”

“Any evidence of this claim?” she asked as a coffee was lowered over her shoulder for her. Rich and sweet smelling, with a hint of caramel. She never ordered fancy ones for herself, but Lin always did and hadn’t run afoul just yet.

“We just came from Doctor Terax,” W’a’le’ki spoke up. “All three of uss have increassed chroniton flux countss in our hippocampuss.”

“Ladies, I’m a pilot and operations-trained individual with an interest in astrophysics, you’ll need to spell that out for me.”

“The hippocampuss in most sspeciess is ressponssible for memory,” W’a’le’ki continued. “Neryss hass the highesst flux and recallss the most from each loop, with Ssamantha the next. I mysself have jusst sstarted to notice the cycling.”

“So the more loops we’ve been through, the more you’re recalling and retaining?” Nerys and Sam both nodded their heads, and W’a’le’ki merely shrugged. “And the loops reset to the same point, so presumably end at the same point?”

“I haven’t been checking precisely, but think so,” Sam said. “Last time I finally managed to open a door on the station and we got inside before everything reset.”

“Huh,” she said, then sipped at the drink in hand, giving herself a moment to think. “Something like that should set off a few red flags I would think.” She leaned forward to tap at a control that was built into the table, more to control the large monitor opposite the couch, but it served a few more purposes. “Theodoras to T’Val, can I get an update on any navigational sensor readings please.”

“One moment Captain,” the Vulcan helmswoman’s response came. “We are detecting a warp trail captain. Looks to be a few days old, travelling the same course we are currently on.”

“Can you identify it?” she asked. She could see the interest of her three visitors, even taste their own emotions as they were hungry for more information, more reinforcement of their story.

“Attempting to do so ma’am, but it would appear there are in fact multiple warp trails overlapping each other.” Silence over the comm channel for a few more moments, another sip of coffee. “Interesting,” T’Val said, breaking the silence. “It would appear ma’am we’re following ourselves. The computer has identified the warp trail as belonging to Atlantis.”

“Just one of them?”

“All thirteen of them.”

Captain’s log,

Atlantis has apparently found itself stuck in a time loop if the pronouncements of two lieutenants and an ensign are to be believed. And the evidence before us. For now, I’ve ordered the ship to maintain course and speed and asked for a briefing first thing in the morning well before we arrive in the GSC-9587 system.

“So, what have we discovered?” Captain Tikva Theodoras asked as she stepped into the busier-than-usual conference room with Lieutenant Commander Gantzmann in her wake.

Assembled were the usual suspects of the senior staff as well as the three individuals whose middle-of-the-night interruptions had spurned this particular gathering. Ensign Linal Nerys, who was sitting in her seat with her arms crossed and brow furrowed in a slight scowl, Lieutenant Junior Grade Samantha Michaels, who was smiling, excitement all over her face at being at the big table, and finally Lieutenant W’a’le’ki, who had sat in such august company before on more occasions than Michaels and was busy in conversation with her department head.

“A fair few interesting bits it would seem,” MacIntyre said from his seat beside Tikva. “Lieutenant T’Val, if you please?”

The Vulcan helmswoman nodded before she spoke up, her voice clear and rich. “Initial scans had detected only thirteen warp trails, all matching Atlantis. We refined our scans during the course of the early hours and managed to detect a fourteenth trail. No other trails are forthcoming and the state of the last few indicates it may be unlikely we would detect them. Apparently, we have flown over this exact stretch of space multiple times.”

“Any threat of subspace anomalies forming?” Tikva asked.

“Atlantis’ warp field geometry would require us to traverse this exact stretch of space thousands of times at our current velocity before we would have any detectable impact on local subspace conditions.”

“Well, let’s not do that shall we,” Tikva stated, then turned her attention to Camargo.

It took a moment before Camargo and W’a’le’ki both realised everyone was staring at them, lost in a very, very quiet technical talk. “Sorry,” she said very quickly.

“Still not used to the rank?” Velan teased from across the table.

Camargo smiled, even sat us straighter at that. “Give me a few days at least, okay?” She then tapped at the padd in front of her, then another tap and the main screen in the conference room cable to life, necessitating almost half those in attendance to turn to face it. “GSC-9587 according to the sensor readings from the USS Motu Maha. Not great, but good enough to show a few terrestrial worlds, one M-class even, a couple of gas giants and even spot when the fireworks started.” The display changed to highlight the M-class world and showed the recordings of large blossoming radiation sources.

“What the Motu Maha didn’t see however was this.” The display cleared and was replaced with an outline of a large structure, with no further detail beyond that. “A large space station in close proximity to the system primary.”

“Forty-five million kilometres from the star,” Michaels added from a few seats down the table. “The station isn’t stealthed, just the entire hull is covered in a material that acts as a solar collector and heat radiator, depending on if it can see the star or not. It makes it very hard to see on sensors.” She leaned forward to look down the table. “We had to be in the system last time to see it, how’d you do it this time?”

“Lieutenant,” MacIntyre spoke up, “perhaps if you didn’t interrupt and let the Commander finish?”

“Sorry sir, I just…” Michaels stopped momentarily, then collected herself. “I’m wanting to know for next time.”

“Narrow band active long-range scanners on the higher subspace bands,” Camargo provided, watching as Michaels sat back, repeating the words to herself over and over again. “Anyway, yes, all we got was the station silhouette as it’s transiting the disc of the star. A large sphere with these towers at its north and south poles. If the hull is a solar collector, and at that proximity to the star, it would have access to massive amounts of power. An order or two of magnitude greater than Atlantis itself.”

“So anywhere between a Canopus- to a ­Guardian-class starbase?” Rrr asked.

“Oh easily,” Velan answered. “No fuel concerns, a nearly unlimited power supply – either an incredible fortress with nothing to defend or an experimental research facility with massive demands.”

“Hasn’t fired on Atlantis yet,” Ensign Linal spoke up. “Not least I can recall.” Her head snapped to the door as it opened, admitting Fightmaster, who made his way to T’Val’s side to whisper something and hand her a padd. “I don’t recall any hostile action in the system at all.”

“Well, that’s reassuring at least Ensign,” Rrr said. “No other signs of life in the system I take it? Or unusual chroniton or tachyon emissions?”

“Not that we’ve detected.”

“You may find this interesting,” T’Val interrupted, handing the padd over to Camargo. “Navigational sensors have lost track of all warp trails approximately thirteen light months from the system primary.”

“Thirteen?” Camargo asked, then shook her head as the answer came to mind. “The M-class planet orbits roughly every thirteen months. It’s a lightyear in local time.”

“And that means what?” MacIntyre asked.

“Don’t know,” Camargo replied. “But I’ll let you know when I know more.”

“Right,” Tikva cut in. “We’ll be dropping out of warp at the edge of the system in about six hours. I want one more catch-up before then. Once we’re at impulse make directly for the space station. Mac, get an away team ready to explore the station. I want you to take Linal, Michaels and W’a’le’ki with you in case we are in a loop and you spot something interesting.”

“Hope they see it and remember it?” he asked.

“That’s about the gist of it.”

“So we’re still on the original timeline?” Nerys asked the door leading into the depths of the station hissed open and the away proceeded into the station.

“From what I think I recall, we’re about an hour ahead,” Sam offered, walking and scanning just like most of the team. “Though I don’t recall us bringing them along.” She indicated to the troupe of black-clad individuals leading the front, headed by Lieutenant Ch’tkk’va. Atlantis’ very own Hazard Team.

“Hmmpf,” was all they got out of Nerys. “Don’t see why we need them.”

“There iss an increassed chroniton count ssince we opened the door,” W’a’le’ki informed, loud enough for all to hear. “Not enough to be dangerous mind you, but it does hint that the station is rather extensively shielded.”

“So the source of the time loop could be the station?” MacIntyre asked.

“Mosst likely,” the Irossian answered. “It’ss not my field of expertisse,” she clarified, “but I’d give it better than average oddss.”

“Commander, can I make a suggestion?” Sam spoke up, continuing with the head nod she received. “We’ve got roughly an hour before this all gets reset. Could we focus on perhaps finding some sort of internal transport system? Or a map?”

“Giving up already?” Mac asked, then grinned after a moment. “You’re thinking of the next loop, aren’t you? All right then.” He gave a short whistle and everyone stopped, including the hazard team who had proceeded a fair distance ahead of them. “I want everyone looking for transportation or station maps. Consoles, wall decals, whatever that might indicate a way to operations, or a control room.”

Nods of affirmation, a few vocalisations, and everyone was back at it. An intersection nearly a hundred metres from the door had teams splitting off down separate white corridors, the only indication of which way to retreat being black marks left on the walls by the hazard team members.

“This place is huge and shielded even on its internal walls. We’re never gonna find anything quickly in here,” Sam said as she referred one more to her tricorder, intent on remembering as much as she could from the readings she and everyone else was taking.

“Why don’t we just modify a cargo grav sled and make a crude travel platform?” Nerys spoke up. “Then we don’t need to look for something. Drive straight down this corridor to the heart of this thing.” She pointed down the seemingly endless white corridor.

“Not a bad idea Ensign,” MacIntyre said as he approached the three women, having slowed down from conferring with the two hazard team members ahead of them. “By the way, if this isn’t some elaborate scheme on behalf of you three, next loop, just say periwinkle to me.”

“Periwinkle?” Sam asked.

“Periwinkle.”

Running down the corridor towards Port Royal, Ensign Linal Nerys was in two different types of trouble and likely about to be in a third. She didn’t care. The pounding headache, the absolute anger at having gotten nowhere last time, and the vague clues they’d learned was all working towards a distinct inability to care about such minor things as being late for her shift.

She rounded the last corner, saw Lieutenant Fightmaster as the doors to Port Royal closed on him. Just outside was the captain and commander, talking to each other, neither had seen or registered her. Why would they even deign to notice a mere Ensign?

“Commander!” she shouted out, closing on the two, who turned to face her. “Periwinkle.”

“Periwinkle!” came another shout as Lieutenant Samantha Michaels cleared the doors of Port Royal just as Fightmaster took his place, waiting for the door to open and admit the commanding officers of the ship.

“Aw shit,” MacIntyre said. “How many more of you are there?”

“Just W’a’le’ki, but she’s trapped in there,” Samantha said.

“What’s periwinkle?” Captain Theodoras said, looking to MacIntyre.

“We’ve got a broken clock situation.”

“Periwinkle?”

The question asked by Captain Theodoras settled over the Captain’s Mess and the gathered individuals and was answered with a simple chuckle from Commander MacIntyre as he settled into a seat.

Gabrielle Camargo’s promotion ceremony had gone pretty quickly before she had been dragged to the Captain’s Mess for an impromptu staff briefing with more than a few gathered in Port Royal. She’d found herself a seat on a couch next to Ra-tesh’mi Velan, who’d congratulated her again as she sat down, and directly opposite the couch with the three individuals who had prompted this meeting. Lieutenants Michaels and W’a’le’ki and Ensign Linal, all of them doing their best to not cast their eyes wildly about the space they’d either never visited or only once or twice before.

The other couch that formed the open box section had been claimed by Commander MacIntyre and Doctor Pisani, who Gabrielle noted had leaned into the Commander pretty quickly after he sat down. She wasn’t at all discreet about their relationship and in less public spaces she’d started to note the commander wasn’t either. And as for the captain, she’d pulled a single seat over and sat herself down, with Commander Gantzmann opting to stand behind her, arms crossed and looking like a statue.

All Gabrielle knew was there was a matter of some urgency and she was needed as the ship’s chief science officer. And apparently, it all revolved around the word periwinkle.

“Periwinkle,” MacIntryre repeated, seemingly for himself. Another brief chuckle, which didn’t seem to impress the captain. “I came up with a list of code words for time travel events as a thought exercise a few years back. Back when my career was going nowhere fast and I was dreaming of grand adventures the likes of Enterprise, Odyssey or Wells.” He shrugged his shoulders, offered a small smile, and then continued. “A few of those codewords I came up with as things I can tell people who might be looping or travelling backwards as ways of getting my attention and cooperation without having to spend precious time convincing me.”

“And you choose periwinkle?” Doctor Pisani asked as she sat up a bit to look at MacIntyre better.

“They all needed to be things I wouldn’t forget,” he answered.

The captain hummed for a moment before she spoke. “So, the fact that two of my crew ambushed us,” her eyes turning to the three women on a couch together, “adamant to get one word out as soon as they saw us, the third the same as soon as we had her fished out of Port Royal, gives you reason to believe them, Commander?”

“Must have told them that word for a reason,” he answered.

Gabrielle watched the captain study her second in command for a moment more before she relaxed a touch and even smirked slightly. “We’re going to need to get our time travel plans lined up. A single memorable word is better than trusting secrets to people.” The captain finally looked at her and the apologetic look on her face was clear to all. “Sorry for ruining your party Commander, but seems the life and time of a science officer is never boring.”

“Thought that was true of all officers, ma’am,” Gabs replied. “So, we’ve got a time travel situation going on and you three,” she looked to the women opposite her, “are at the heart of it.”

“Yes,” all of them answered in unison, though she heard the irritation in the Ensign’s voice and saw it on her face. Impatient with the situation, Linal was sitting right back on the couch, arms crossed and looked like she could bring down a starship with a scowl if she tried.

“I call it a broken clock situation,” MacIntyre interrupted. “Probably not the best, but hey, I never took temporal mechanics. Time loop that has a fixed end point and resets to the same start point, without someone noticing or remembering it, or outside interference, it would continue to play out exactly the same each loop.”

“Temporal causality loop,” she clarified for MacIntyre. “The Enterprise and Bozeman were caught in one out in the Typhon Expanse. So was the Bakersfield back in 2381.” She shook her head, an act to clear the wealth of knowledge that wanted to spill forth and let everyone know just how much she knew. It wasn’t helpful or needed right now. She then leaned forward slightly and looked at the three women opposite her. “So, what’s going on?”

“We’re stuck in a loop obviously,” Linal snapped out, her tone annoyed and angry.

“Ensign,” MacIntyre immediately snapped out. “Watch your tone. This can’t be easy, but antagonising us isn’t going to help.”

Samantha Michaels turned to face Linal Nerys and just nodded her head at the woman. “We’ll get this sorted, don’t worry,” she said quietly and then turned back. “In roughly a day and a half, we’ll arrive in a star system with an alien structure near the star. Two L-class planets, one of them a radioactive hazard. So far we’ve always opted to explore the structure and we get varying levels of success on exploring it before something, I’m guessing within it, activates and resets everything to just before Fightmaster walks into Port Royal.”

“GSC-9587,” Gabs muttered to herself. “Motu Maha’s scans don’t mention any alien structure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s near the star itself.” She’d taken to looking down at the carpet between the couches, her brain working away. “Chroniton signature?” she asked, the affirmative head nods all she needed before eyes once more went down.

“And what have we managed to find so far?” the captain asked.

“How to open a door and that the corridors are very long, wide and poorly labelled,” Samantha said, earning a slight chuckle from W’a’le’ki and a grumble from Linal, who stopped when she cast her eyes in MacIntyre’s direction.

“Ensign,” Doctor Pisani spoke up, “a word in private.” Not a question, but a statement, as she got to her feet, not letting go of MacIntyre’s hand until she was fully standing, then guided the ensign to the far side of the Captain’s Mess and more specifically to a replicator, a quiet conversation ensuing.

“How long is long?” Velan asked after a moment.

“The sstation’ss core iss kilometress acrossss and transsporterss are dangerouss in the radiation environment around the sstar,” W’a’le’ki provided. “Sscanss of the facility have been unhelpful either due to the sshielded nature of the sstructure.”

“Makes sense.” The chief engineer took a moment, reaching up to stroke his beard, then stopped and simply smiled. “I wouldn’t recommend jetpacks. One wrong move and you’d pinball down the corridor until you ended up as a smear on a wall. Oh…the Argos!” He snapped his fingers for emphasis as he settled on the idea.

“Oh no, not those things,” the captain said. “And besides, we don’t have any shuttles aboard with ramps to take them on and we can’t beam them over.”

“Don’t need to,” MacIntyre said, cutting off Velan as he was about to speak. “Just tractor them along under a shuttle, set them down in the station’s landing bay, then land the shuttle. They won’t be any worse for a little vacuum exposure, will they?”

“Nah, should be fine,” Velan answered. “Couple of them should let teams get aboard the station and scoot down the corridors with a bit more speed.”

“Now we’re talking,” Samantha spoke up, glee obvious in her voice, even nudging W’a’le’ki with her elbow. “Maybe we’ll finally find some computer consoles this time.”

“Did you just invite yourself on the away mission Lieutenant?” MacIntyre asked, waited a moment, then cracked a grin just as both of the lieutenants were about to voice their protests. “Captain, with my having provided these three with periwinkle, may I suggest Lieutenant W’a’le’ki lead the away team to the alien structure since she is the senior of the three who seem to remember what is going on?”

“I second that,” Gabrielle found herself saying straight away. “And I’m going along. We need the best eyes on this but we need the people who can remember along with us so if we do find anything they’re right there to learn it should we fail to stop the loop in time.”

“May I ask,” Commander Gantzmann spoke up for the first time, her voice quiet but firm and carrying over the small space, “what would happen if we simply changed course and avoided the GSC-9587 system?”

“I don’t know,” Samantha said, looking to W’a’le’ki, who shrugged in response. “We’ve never tried that.”

“The loop resets,” Gabrielle said, chasing down a few ideas in her head, “and we have this conversation again but the lieutenants tell us it’s pointless, or we avoid the loop, but leave a potential booby trap waiting for someone else who doesn’t have what we have – three crew members who know they’re in a causality loop.”

“Or figures out how to turn it off and then weaponizes it in the future,” Gantzmann added.

“Cheery thought,” the captain said, looked up at Gantzmann and shook her head at her. “Why do you have to do that?”

“Professionally it’s my job,” Gantzmann replied.

“Sure,” the captain dragged the single word out. “We’ll maintain course and speed for now and play things out when we arrive. I want two shuttles ready to go, Argos on the deck ready to be underslung. Yank off the cargo decks Velan and put as many seats as you can.”

“Can easily fit two on the back,” the chief engineer answered. “And still room left over for a small supply box. Scanners, cutting phasers, that sort of thing.”

“That gives you a team of eight Lieutenant,” the captain continued with a nod of her head slightly to W’a’le’ki. “Our time travelling three, Commander Camargo,” she smiled at Gabrielle briefly, “and I want one security officer on each Argo. That gives you two more slots.”

“Yess ma’am,” W’a’le’ki replied. “I’ll have my sselectionss by the time we arrive.”

“In the meantime, I want all three of you to go to sickbay for a checkup, then hit the sack.”

“Was just about to ask for that Captain.” Doctor Pisani had rejoined them, with Ensign Linal in tow. “Check up and scan for chroniton radiation exposure. And I want all of you,” she specifically turned to look at Linal,” to have a quick fifteen-minute check-in with Counsellor Hu.”

“Well, it’s what the doctor ordered,” the captain said. “Dismissed folks. Gabrielle, stay a moment.”

They waited, just her and the captain, while everyone filed out. Even Commander Gantzmann, though the captain had seen her to the door, said something in a near whisper to her, then returned, reclaiming her seat. “Again, sorry for interrupting your party Commander,” the captain placed special emphasis on her new rank.

“Mysteries wait for no woman Captain.”

“That they don’t. So, what do you make of all of this?”

“They seem honest about it, but you’d have a better feel of that than I would ma’am. Though I’ve had a few encounters with Ensign Linal previously and I’ve never seen her so…standoffish?”

She saw the captain nodding her head in agreement. “They were adamant in their statements and when they mentioned periwinkle I did since surprise from Mac straight away.” She watched the captain look away, her gaze shifting an unspecified middle distance for a moment. A thinking look. “Get your people to run every scan they can think of while you get some sleep. We’ll have a briefing in the morning before we drop out of warp and hopefully have a bit more evidence to support their claims.”

“You think something might be amiss ma’am?”

“Ensign Linal’s behaviour just has me a bit concerned.”

“Understandable ma’am.” She rose to her feet and gently tugged on her uniform tunic. “Lieutenant Commander Gabrielle Camargo. My dads are going to be so proud when they hear.”

The captain chuckled as she got to her own feet. “We’ll do what we can to get you a clear comm signal as soon as we can so you can tell them. Now, go get your people working and then get some sleep. Busy day in the morning hopefully.”

“Hopefully ma’am, hopefully.”

“These deserve names,” Linal Nerys muttered, verging on grumbling, as the collected away team dismounted from the two Argo rovers.

“Don’t they?” Lieutenant Gérard Maxwell asked as his feet hit the stark white deck plate of the alien space station, then spun to look over the Argo he’d been driving, then glanced at the other. “Huh, weird. Normally everything that moves on the ship is named.”

“Even the cleaners?” Gabrielle Camargo asked as she two followed suit.

“Especially the cleaners.” Lieutenant Krel Merktin, a Tellarite engineer and barely Maxwell’s junior sounded exasperated as she stated that fact. “You never see them unless a specific circumstance calls for it, or you’re an engineer doing maintenance, but trust me, they all have names.”

“All hail Stubby, lord of deck twelve,” Maxwell said quietly with a slight chuckle to his voice as he passed Merktin.

“May your toes remain unstubbed,” she replied.

Without even needing the question asked Gabrielle stepped up beside Linal and just shook her head, then muttered, “Engineers.”

“A breed of their own,” the young security officer agreed, then followed the pack from their rover and the other to the first door they’d seen since entering the station. They had decided to just drive in a straight line until they hit something and at a moderate pace it had taken barely five minutes. They could have gone faster if not for the optical illusion that stark white walls, floor and ceilings caused and a desire to scan away as they went.

“One hour and forty minutes,” Samantha Michaels announced after looking at her tricorder. “Or there about. Still not exactly sure on the exact time the reset occurs.”

“Then we should still have time to find something useful,” W’a’le’ki stated, speaking somewhat slower, but clearer, consciously suppressing her sibilant way of speaking as much as possible. “And plenty enough to get as close to the core of the station as possible.”

“And all that at barely over a paltry seven kilometres an hour W’a,” Michaels said as her tricorder beeped, then chirped just as the door before them started to part. There wasn’t even the faintest breath of air, as both compartments were kept at the same pressure. “One kilometre in, door opens with the same codes,” she stated for her companions.

Lieutenant Ch’tkk’va, the Atlantis’ resident Xindi-Insectoid spoke up, having never dismounted the rover they arrived on. “Scans are indicating a juncture four hundred meters ahead and what could be, by layout, a potential control room of some sort.”

“While I’d love to see whatever is at the heart of this thing,” Maxwell started, “a control room does sound far more informative. But it is your mission Lieutenant W’a’le’ki.”

All eyes turned on the Irossian lieutenant, who visibly gulped, took a moment to consider the two options, and then nodded her head. “Myself, Michaels, Maxwell and Borik,” she looked to the silent Vulcan security officer, “will continue to the control room. Linal, Merktin, Ch’tkk’va and Camargo to investigate the core.”

“If there’s a next loop, I want to see the control room,” Camargo said before everyone shuffled back to the rovers and the ever so slightly changed-up rosters.

“Seriously, who or what the hell is Stubby?” Linal asked as she sat down on the back of the rover next to Merktin, just in time for Camargo, who took the driver’s seat, the start accelerating down the corridor once more towards the station’s core.

“Stubby, lord of deck twelve, is one of the cleaner bots with some persistent obstacle avoidance problems. Software, hardware, sensors, all have been looked over, yet it will still collide with you when it’s doing its rounds and stubs your toe.”

“Hence the name,” Linal realised. “Wait, I have quarters on deck twelve and I’ve never seen it.”

“You’re not an engineer and Atlantis has never been so badly damaged we’ve deployed them during normal hours. They tend to stay out of sight and out of mind. But we’ve painted Stubby bright orange just in case. You see it, just turn around and walk away.”

Linal stared at the Tellarite for a moment. “You make it sound like it’ll hunt me down.”

“I never said that. I also never said it wouldn’t.”

And with that Merktin pulled out her tricorder to look at the latest readings being collected as they neared the core, offering the device to Linal to see so she could at least try and remember the details. “Great bird,” she cursed.

“What’s up Merktin?” Camargo asked from the front seat, the argo slowing as she eased off the throttle.

“Chroniton readings are extremely high.” As the rover stopped Merktin turned to pass her tricorder forward for Camargo and Ch’tkk’va. “My temporal mechanics is a fair bit rusty, but these are orders of magnitude greater than…” She trailed off, searching for a suitable reference.

“At least a dozen other events I can think of.” Camargo tapped at the tricorder, then handed it back. “It’s contained though, but still climbing. Let’s continue and see if we can’t find out what’s building and storing all of this.”

As the last security door hissed open, Samantha Michaels sighed in relief. “Seriously, five security doors all with different encryption methods,” she said with exasperation, as she flipped her tricorder shut. “Don’t think I’ll be forgetting them with how hard they were.”

“One hour left, yes?” W’a’le’ki asked as she stepped past and into the suspected control facility.

They had entered near the front of the room, or at least near the incredibly large wall made of various-sized screens displaying a multitude of information feeds. Four rows of consoles, ten across and two stations at each, rose away from a decent-sized open space before the first rank, each rising gently enough for unobstructed views from the bank rank.

“Real Houston vibes I’m getting,” Maxwell uttered as he started climbing the stairs, looking back over the consoles he was passing.

“I would concur with you Lieutenant,” Borik said, which had the other three turning to look at him as if he’d suddenly just grown a second head. “Touring Earth’s primitive space facilities was a fascinating insight into your species’ early space programs.”

“Well, no one’s home, but the lights are on.” Maxwell had stopped after the second rank and was now pointing at the large displays, drawing everyone’s attention away from the suddenly vocal Vulcan security officer.

A display of the station, the local variation of an MSD, dominated the right quarter. The left quarter listed a series of details yet to be translated. The middle parts were a variety of smaller displays but currently overlapped by an open display window rimmed in a slowly pulsing red with the USS Atlantis dominating the window, smaller ones floated around it with zoomed-in views of the ship’s registry and name from the nacelle ends, one of the secondary hull docking ports and an EVA hatch on the upper saucer.

W’a’le’ki’s tricorder was out in barely a second as she was running the visual translation. “Xeno detection. Threat level high. Automated reversion protocols in effect.”

“Reversion protocols?” Michaels asked. “Reverting what?”

“I’m still translating the language Lieutenant,” W’a’le’ki stated. “As we don’t have comms with the ship currently, the tricorder is having to do all the work and it doesn’t quiet,” she stopped when Michaels started to speak up.

“Have the same processing power as Atlantis. We’re networked to share results though, yes?”

“Of course.”

“Sweet. I’ll get out of your hair then,” Michaels replied before making her way up to the third row of consoles and to Maxwell who was scanning each console he passed. “Anything interesting?”

“That console,” he pointed one console, “controls the dohickey. That one,” his hand moved to the next one along, closer this time, “is responsible for whoshewhatsits and this one,” his tricorder chirped at him rather aggressively, “is station attitude control.” He reached out to the console, checking his tricorder to check he was tapping the right control, then brought what could only be a submenu. “Everything is on automatics like this place was just left to run itself.”

“Well we haven’t seen anyone, no life signs and everything is still ticking along, so perhaps it was designed to be like this?” Michaels asked.

“Then why a control centre? Or the living facilities we passed after we split from the other team?”

“W’a is the anthropologist, not me,” she said in her defence. “I’m just an operations rube.”

“You’re not a rube Michaels,” Maxwell countered. “Rubes don’t push back in such polite ways. Or have as much ambition as you do.” He looked at her with a slight smile. “Ra tells some stories, like the number of times he’s gone up on the bridge to find you sitting in the centre seat.”

“Officer of the Watch has that right,” she replied. “And either Captain, Commander or someone more senior is usually on the other side of a door.”

“Still, they trust you to man the bridge in their absence, therefore, not a rube.” He went back to focusing on the console. “Naïve and inexperienced people don’t get bridge duty.”

“Just ambitious people?”

“Or those who are entrusted with the ship trust,” he said. “Huh, there is no connectivity for supplying our language files to their systems to translate their computer consoles.”

“So we can’t just change the language in the OS, we’re going to have to learn it?” she asked as she stepped right up beside him to look at his tricorder’s output and the screen he was currently manipulating. “That’s going to be a bitch.”

“Tell me about it.” He looked up, across the rows of consoles. “One of these has to be communications. We need to find it so we can call Atlantis.”

“Any data scraps we do though won’t last past the reset.”

“You’ll know in future which console is communications, how to open a channel and then since everything in here seems to be on automatic, Atlantis should hopefully be able to break into the computers and force a language update through.” Maxwell waved as Borik turned in their direction. “Borik! Start looking for a comms console down there,” he ordered, then pointed to the left side of the room, “and you start looking over there.”

“We’re being hailed by the station,” Rrr announced from Ops with their usual rumbling tone.

“On screen,” Tikva followed up as she got herself to her feet alongside Mac. “Lieutenant W’a’le’ki, anything to report?”

The Irrosian was front and centre, but tiny as the camera feed on the other side seemed set to show the entirety of a large control centre. “We need Atlantis’ assistance in cracking the station’s computer security in order to rummage around. And I would suggest speed would be paramount as I’ve found a countdown timer and as far as I can tell we have thirty minutes left.”

A nod from Tikva to Mac and he was heading for mission operations, Rrr in two, the tap of his commbadge as he was calling others up to assist. The turbolifts would be disgorging staff on the bridge soon enough and the rear section would become a cacophony, but before then they had some time to talk. “And the other team?”

“They’ve found the station’s core and report it’s a massive chroniton generator and what at best Commander Camargo is calling a chroniton capacitor.” W’a’le’ki looked over to Gérard who took the hint to continue.

“It looks like the station is a massive temporal field emitter ma’am, with a chroniton core at its heart big enough to, and I’m making some assumptions from what I’ve glanced over, envelop an entire star system.”

Tikva knew she went blank in the face and just blinked a few times. But she pushed through it. “Why in the world would someone do that?”

“Don’t know ma’am. But a field that massive has huge chroniton flux demands, which means a generator able to either generate that many on demand, which would just be massive and infeasible, or a smaller generator and some form of storage system. Say a generator a kilometre across with extensive and near limitless solar power and some form of chroniton particle storage system so you can then use them when you need them.”

“Can we turn it off? Or disable it somehow before it fires?”

“I wouldn’t want to try anything forceful,” Maxwell said from over the comms as he looked down at the station he was behind. “Not without knowing more. A controlled shutdown is our best bet, or if we had gotten here earlier would have done something, but this station is priming to fire right now. Blowing it up could be absolutely disastrous. Like on the space-time continuum level of disastrous.”

“Right. Okay.” Tikva stopped herself before a third confirmation spilled forth. “Rrr will be in touch in a moment when he’s ready to start his data attacks. I want you W’a’le’ki and the other two reading every screen and piece of data you can. I want you as prepared as possible for the next loop, understand?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good, Atlantis out.”

“Mister Fightmaster, would you be so good as to go ahead and await us?” Tikva asked her yeoman, who had been dutifully following her and Mac since they had left the bridge a few minutes before.

“Certainly ma’am,” he answered, then passed the box with the rank pips he’d been carrying over to Mac as he proceeded past them and into Port Royal.

“You know what I don’t like about him?” Mac asked as Fightmaster got far enough away for the two of them to speak quietly without being overheard. “He’s just too…good.”

“Reminds me of my XO aboard the Haida,” Tikva commented. “Squeaky clean, knew everything about everything, always willing to do what was needed. Let’s just hope Fightmaster doesn’t snap like she did and try to gun down a captain.”

“Precious few of those around here after all,” Mac commented.

“Tell me about it.”

As they rounded the curve in the corridor to Port Royal they saw that Fightmaster had been intercepted by Lieutenant Michaels, who was being pointed in their direction by the yeoman. She thanked him and then continued in their direction.

“Captain, Commander,” Michaels said, sounding a little bored, maybe exasperated as well. “Periwinkle.”

“Periwinkle?” Tikva asked, with an odd echo as Ensign Linal Nerys ran towards them, repeating the word just as Tikva had.

“Dammit to hell,” Mac muttered. “We’ve got a broken clock captain.”

“What?” Tikva asked.

“Temporal casualty loop,” Linal answered.

“Causality loop,” Michaels corrected the security officer. “We need to take the ship to maximum warp right now on its current course. Plenty of time to explain, but we need the extra time before the loop resets.” She then looked right at MacIntyre as seriously as she could. “Periwinkle.”

“Okay, I’m not happy about not being in the loop here people, but all I’m getting is this is serious and you believe it’s true,” Tikva said. “Mac, what’s periwinkle?”

“A stupid code phrase I made up for temporal anomalies. We should do as they say and hear them out while we’re still in transit.”

Tikva just stared at him a moment more, then tapped at her badge. “Theodoras to T’Val, increase speed to maximum and stay on course.”

“Aye ma’am, maximum warp,” was the curt reply from the bridge. Soon after the thrum of the ship shifted just slightly as it accelerated.

“Now, someone tell me what the hell is going on?” Tikva demanded.”

Captain’s log, supplemental.

I need to have a sit down with my XO and discuss his contingency plans in depth sometime soon. Periwinkle indeed. On advice from an ensign, a junior grade lieutenant and a full lieutenant whom both managed to sway Commander MacIntyre and convince me of their forthrightness, I have ordered Atlantis to emergency speed in order to close on the GSC-9587 system.

Our expected arrival in just under 36 hours is now down to 6 hours after the briefing I’ve just been given about a time machine, a dead star system and a loop which has been confirmed that Atlantis has traversed fourteen times now. All of them at our previous sedate pace of warp seven.

Velan reports that Engineering is actually enjoying the chance to let our wee girl sprint her heart out, but going this fast there is no way we aren’t showing on Cardassian long-range sensors. I wouldn’t be surprised if DS47 can see us with all the engine wash we’ll be making in subspace. Doubt it, but wouldn’t surprise me. And if our newfound friendship with the Union holds, I bet they’ll be asking Fleet Captain Sudari-Kravchik why one of her ships is out here making a mockery of the laws of physics while sending someone to find out what is making us run like a bat out of hell.

This far out however there are no Federation time signals to synch our clocks to and the Cardassian Union’s clock-sync signals aren’t reaching us either at the moment. For now, we have to assume we’ve lost nearly three weeks.

At least it would appear the phenomena is limited to GSC-9587 and Atlantis, so maybe I’ll be able to keep Temporal Investigations off my back. Even over subspace those people are just…weird.

“Time?” Tikva asked for about the tenth time in half as many minutes.

The bridge of Atlantis was staffed by all the department heads, with a suitable second either adjacent to them or along the back of the bridge, ready to take over at a moment’s notice. The air was a little tense, but most of that was a simple steady reflection of Tikva’s feelings from her staff. They saw she was a little tense, which made them tense and she picked up on that.

Stop it, they know what they’re doing.

Yeah, but do we? We did just order T’Val to do something incredibly stupid.

She knows what she’s doing and she’d have protested if she didn’t feel confident about it.

Stupid self-assured confident Vulcan competency.

She’s confident because she is competent. Now let them do their job.

“Thirty seconds till engine shutdown,” T’Val announced from the helm, her hands hovering over the controls, but not touching them. Everything about the next few seconds was down to computer control and precise timing, something no biological entity on the ship could achieve.

Warping into the depths of a star system was something reserved for emergencies, wartime surprises and lunatics. Two out of three was the best Tikva knew she’d be able to argue for later when someone called her to task for ordering such a manoeuvre. Especially as she wasn’t asking someone to drop them out of warp near a planet but instead near a star whose gravity would be hampering their warp field just as they needed precision control.

The time it would take Atlantis to cross from the system’s outer gas giant to the primary would just be over three seconds. Three seconds to cover the same distance that light itself would take four hours and nine minutes to cross. Three seconds to either drop out of warp right where they wanted to be or slam themselves into a star with enough energy to practically ensure the explosion would be seen by astronomers the universe over for untold ages.

And seriously mess up developing societies’ stellar death models with one hell of an outlier.

Silence settled on the bridge until T’Val broke it. “Five, four, three, two, one.” Her timing was only ever so slightly off, the imperfection of biology, as it felt like an eternity before a star and its attendant space station popped into existence on the viewscreen, Atlantis evidently still in existence.

What she felt, even heard from a few of her staff, was the relief at arriving safely at their destination. Something they’d done well to hide under professional calm but couldn’t in that moment. Her own brain interpreted it as blueberry pie and a fresh sea breeze in the calm after a storm.

We really should talk with one of the Betazoids in the crew about emotions and others senses.

Why? Blueberry pie is calming. Man, could do with some right now.

No, work first. Pie later.

Stupid Bossy Tikva is at it again.

Damn straight!

She practically launched herself out of her command chair, a counter to the ship’s sudden deceleration. Mac was at her side right away as well, both of them barely a hand-width apart. “Sweet mother,” Mac said quietly as they both took in the station before them. “Look at the size of that.”

“The Federation has built bigger. Lots bigger,” she corrected herself straight away.

“Yeah, but this close to a start?” he followed up.

“Point. And if what W’a’le’ki said is true, it’s one big giant time machine.” She hummed for a moment. “You ready to get over there?”

“Four shuttles, all four Argos ready to go. We’ll drop signal repeaters and bring pattern enhancers to establish beam-in points where we can.” He looked back over his shoulder and nodded to Ch’tkk’va who could be heard, along with several officers including the Troublesome Time Travelling Triplets, making for the turbolift.

“Go on then,” she said with a smile. “And find the off switch. I don’t care if I won’t remember, I’m sure I’ll remember the stress of the last few minutes.”

“All self-inflicted,” he said before leaving. “We could have just as easily come in nice and slow.”

“Arguably we should have,” T’Val said from the helm, as politely sarcastic as any Vulcan could be.

“We shaved hours of impulse time off with that,” Tikva stated in such a way she hoped conveyed that she was done with this conversation. “Nice flying by the way.” She could at least acknowledge the skill of her helmswoman.

“And now,” she declared as she sat herself down, junior officers taking over recently vacated stations, “we wait.”

“Rrr, I’m telling you, just skip past the entire alpha set. It didn’t work last time.” Samantha Michaels had perched a padd on the alien console so she could open a visual comm line back to her direct superior once they’d patched into the station’s comms upon breaching the command centre of the station. It let her talk with Rrr in a bit more of a collaborative manner as they attempted to crack the computer security using a combination of Atlantis’ processing power and the collected brain power of the operations department aboard the ship.

“Just because it didn’t work last time young pebble, doesn’t mean it won’t work this time,” they responded, not looking up from their work. “And besides, the alpha set has just finished, with no success.”

“Told you.”

“So you did,” they admitted. “But the results have hinted that the beta and gamma sets are likely not worth it either, so let’s skip those shall we?”

It had taken the away team nearly thirty minutes to retrace their progress from the end of the last loop once they got aboard the station but this time with significantly more people in the hopes that boots on the ground would help. Of course, it did mean more discoveries being made, more information coming in and more distractions. Distractions that Samantha was glad that W’a’le’ki was handling versus her.

“Huh, I think might have just found a file directory,” she announced, which did get Rrr’s attention. She picked up another padd and held it up to the screen, letting its sensors see what was on screen and translate it for her on its own screen. “Yup, file directory. Flicking you the details. Looks like there’s a language folder with thirty-seven files in it.”

“One moment,” came the gravelly reply. “Without access to their data archives, I can’t say where these came from, but I’d be inclined to say local languages. Give us a few minutes,” they said, referring to the team aboard Atlantis versus those with Samantha on the station, “to generate a new file for Federation Standard and we can see if we have write access and can dump a new file across.”

“The timer has the same endpoint,” W’a’le’ki said to MacIntyre as she continued her briefing. “So it looks like our taking the ship to maximum warp was a good call. Instead of barely having any time to find new information, if we can’t stop the process, Michaels, Linal and I are going to have problems just remembering everything new we have managed to find.”

“What about the scope of the effect?” MacIntyre asked. “You said it encompasses the star system. What effect would it have on the buoy we jettisoned a few hours back.” It had been an idly thought, a throwaway suggestion to drop a record buoy in deep space as they barrelled towards GSC-9587 in a vague possibility that it might not be reset and could carry a message over to the next loop for the crew.

“I…” She started, stopped, stared at the master display for a few seconds, then the padd in her hands, checked a few notes, and then shrugged as she looked up at MacIntyre. “I don’t know. Our experience is that everything on Atlantis is put back where it was. I don’t know what impact leaving a buoy behind would have. Would it still be there but at the same time would we be returned exactly as we were, with the buoy in inventory?”

She watched as the commander smiled at her, an infectious thing she found herself mirroring. “That Lieutenant is the type of question that will give you a headache. And at the same time the type of question we’re out here trying to answer.”

“But you’re thinking in terms of updating the buoy’s databanks just in case, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Got it in one Lieutenant. I want you to stay on top of what the teams are finding and uncovering but send me any good details. Encryption keys, door codes, secret passphrases, all the good stuff pass straight to me. I’ll do hourly updates back to the ship and suggest updating the buoy. That way if we don’t crack it this time hopefully we’ll have the keys to the kingdom next time.”

“Is this some sort of fail our way to success planning sir?”

“Hey, we’ve got a time loop to play with. Might as well take advantage of it right?”

The containment space was a large spherical void at the heart of the space station, measuring just shy of two hundred metres in diameter. A walkway jutted in around the sphere’s equator, with entrances spaced all around the exterior, though from the away teams had learned most of them just led into the machinery powering the various field emitters pointed inwards.

Inwards towards a large glowing sphere, itself half the width of the void it was housed in, white to the eyes with a slight green patina that shifted and wavered as time passed. Around the edges of the sphere, one could catch that the green light was just barely above the sphere, like a very faint corona that materialised whenever the mass attempted to expand behind a normally invisible barrier.

“Kinda pretty isn’t it?” Gérard Maxwell asked as he stepped up beside Linal Nerys, who was leaning over the rail while looking at the mysterious orb of light.

“What is it exactly?” she asked, not looking away.

“Well, it’s kind of why I came to find you, Ensign. You’re looking at a chrontion trap.”

She twisted slightly to look at Maxwell, freeing one arm to point at the orb as she did so. “That?” She watched him nod in the affirmative and then stood straight up. “That’s what’s powering this thing?”

“Well not yet, but it will do soon enough.” He pointed at a few different emitter heads around the sphere. “Those are chrontion generators and they seem to be beaming their bounty straight into the sphere. Some sort of temporal shielding is containing all the particles inside, letting new ones enter as need be and when there is enough, bam, the whole device fires off and everything takes a trip back thirty-size hours.”

“So, what if we just pop the bubble?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t recommend that, at least not yet. We’ve still got twenty-three hours until activation according to Lieutenant W’a’le’ki, so maybe we should read the warning labels before we go about firing phasers off inside the big scary time machine?”

She stood there, contemplating her choices for a few moments before she nodded, much to the lieutenant’s relief. “I’ll help with that. No real need for a junior security officer on a station with no residents aboard.”

“Good afternoon campers,” Tikva said as the viewscreen snapped to the control centre on the alien station, though unlike previous updates this was better focused on the people she wanted to talk to. Someone had obviously gained some control over the alien systems, at least more so than earlier in the day. “What have we managed to find out?”

“A lot of technical manuals, some operational procedures but none related to the temporal elements of the station and some rather dry historical documents about the station that might just explain a few things.” MacIntyre then stepped aside to let W’a’le’ki and Camargo, who’d gone over a few hours ago, take centre stage.

Both women tried to give way to the other, then again, before Camargo stepped forward, taking charge. She was glad to see Gabrielle doing that, just wished she’d done it earlier. “The historical documents are automated reports. Looks like the station was built, brought online, then switched over to automatic and left to take care of itself. Only visitors over the last hundred years were visiting maintenance crews who came twice a year to run manual checks for a few days then depart.”

“So, it’s a mostly automated station?” she asked of her team. She could just feel the bridge crew all slowing at their work, listening to everything said. Science and exploration was happening just over there, on the other side of the viewscreen and they all wanted to be there.

“Appears to be. What’s interesting however is that since coming online, the station has continually simulated activation and firing, over a trillion simulated firing, but the records detail one hundred and eighty-six actual firings.” W’a’le’ki had stepped up beside her boss as she spoke, a smile on her face causing the scales around her eyes and cheekbones to ripple slightly.

“Wait, if the station reverts everything thirty-six hours, then how is there any record of firings?” she asked.

“The builders thought of that. Temporally shielded data core to preserve records across loops.” W’a’le’ki had spoken with a hint of pride as she then tapped on a padd and half of the view screen was overlaid with a rotating schematic. “It’s not a large memory core, but enough to contain basic records and details for millennia really. The massive shielding around it,” the schematic flicked green in a majority of places, “is to protect it against the stupendous chroniton flux from the station when firing.”

“Okay, so someone else set this trap off but then got out of it. Who?” She shook her head trying to grasp the situation in her head. A nice challenging flight path, a complex tactical situation, and a diplomatic soiree that could turn into a knife fight at a moment’s notice were all preferable to temporal knots.

“USS Motu Maha,” W’a’le’ki and Gabrielle both said in unison, then chuckled briefly to each other before Gabrielle took over.

“We’re not sure how or if they were even responsible for breaking their loop, but of the one hundred eighty-six firings on record, Motu Maha is the instigator in one hundred and seventy of them.” Gabrielle’s smile was exactly what Tikva expected to see on her science officer when looking into a mystery. It helped to balance the headache she was getting. “We’re still looking into why ma’am, as well as how to turn this station off, but we’re hoping to find something soon.”

“Eighteen hours before the loop is reset,” she reminded everyone on the call, and her bridge crew as well. “Mac, are you and yours good over there?”

“Should be, why?” he answered.

“We’re just keeping station out here so instead we’ll go and poke our nose around what we think might have been the builder’s homeworld for a few hours. Worse that can happen is we find nothing.”

“Or you find something worth sending back to the buoy captain. We’re big enough and ugly enough to take care of ourselves,” he said.

“Speak for yourself,” Gabrielle shot back with feigned indignation.

“Call if you need us then, Atlantis out.” As the comm channel cut off after a moment, long enough for acknowledging head nods, Tikva stood once more from her command chair and stepped up beside the helm station, holding out a set of keys for T’Val. “Take us to 9587c best possible speed and you have the conn, Lieutenant.”

“Aye ma’am, I have the conn,” the Vulcan replied as she accepted the keys, having opted to go with the ship’s illogical tradition than fight it.

“If you need me, I’ll be in my ready room.” She stopped as the door hissed open and looked back over the bridge. “Commander Gantzmann, join me when you’re free,” she said, as professional as she could muster, then stepped through letting the door sigh closed and letting her relax.

She stepped around her desk, flopped into her chair and then exhaled deeply as she stared at the ceiling. “Computer, begin recording and transmit to buoy alpha for storage.” She waited for the chirp of acknowledgement before continuing.

“Hey Bug, I know it’s a bad sign to be talking to yourself, but this is just in case…”

“…but this is just in case. The buoy has all the technical data we’ve recovered so far to get you into the space station the troublesome trio have told you about. We’ll be updating it all the way up to the reset and if you’re listening to this without remembering you recorded this, then we obviously didn’t succeed in turning it off. Best of luck this time around.”

Sitting across from Tikva in her ready room were Mac and Velan, with the rest of the senior staff standing behind them, minus Terax who had deigned to remain in his domain conducting further exams. Silence settled over the room, stretched out a moment and just as Mac was about to speak the message continued, interrupting him.

“Oh, just to prove it is yourself,” the other Tikva said, “you moved the ouzo bottle two days ago when you were reorganising. You know where.” And with that, the computer then played the familiar little chirp to indicate the message had ended.

“You moved the ouzo?” Velan cut in before Mac. “That’s your great security message to yourself?”

“I literally haven’t told anyone, so it’s pretty good,” she defended herself. “Mac?” She turned her attention to her first officer, giving him the floor her past self and Velan had stolen from him.

“Roughly half the buoys memory is full. We must have been beaming data into it as quickly as we were translating it.” Mac smiled and turned in his seat to look at Gabrielle who was standing next to Rrr. “You two have been doing the first-order look over the data, what’s it look like?”

“There’s a lot of technical data on the station and, mundane operation stuff,” Camargo said as she nudged Rrr, which had more of an effect on her than them but earned her a playful smile. “But a lot of data on the stations’ time travel device too.” The last few words had been dragged out, uncertainty in her voice as she spoke them as if she had wanted to use other words instead. “And a middle ground that Rrr and I have our people pouring over right now. W’a’le’ki is leading the investigation on that right now.”

“As for the mundane stuff,” Rrr spoke up, “we’re looking at door codes, signals to spoof sensors, a set of instructions to activate the station’s external comms system, how to drop a translation file into the computers so we can read their consoles. But also maps, the start of a structural scan of the interior and operational manuals. It looks like the download to the buoy got cut off which we’re putting down to the time resetting.”

“Keep at it. We’ll be at the station in a few hours, I want everyone as prepped as possible so we can try to deactivate this thing and stop it from looping again.” She watched a few heads nod, then looked at Velan. “The buoy?”

“Right, so, this is going to cause headaches,” the Efrosian said as he sat forward. “The buoy we picked up has indeed the exact same serial numbers as a buoy we presently have in stock. We dropped off a different buoy this time and have noted all of this in the records. But yes, we’re up one buoy.”

“But if we got reset, shouldn’t the buoy have as well?” Mac asked.

“Not if it was outside the effect. But somehow the ship was reset to exactly how it was thirty-six hours before the reset, save for the memories of a few junior officers.”

“So this spare buoy just popped out of nothingness?” she asked. “Or was it part of some sort of energy-mass conversion from the star?”

“I told you this would cause headaches,” Velan crowed. “None of us in this room are temporal mechanics experts. And even if someone said they were I’d doubt it out of sheer principle. We should just accept we have a space buoy now and let someone back at the Vulcan Science Academy, Max Planck and Luna City University have the mental breakdown trying to sort it all out.”

“We are not dumping a flight of shuttles off the side of this boat only to try and collect duplicates on the next loop,” she found herself saying in quick order, then sighed and planted her face in an open palm. “Sorry, but all of you were thinking some variation of that.”

“Can you blame us?” Mac countered, earning a few chuckles, even a series of clicks from Ch’tkk’va, the closest a Xindi-Insectoid got to laughing. “The planetary survey scans included as well indicate there might be survivors from their self-induced nuclear winter. With that in mind, we can be better set to get a team onto the station and free up Atlantis for that investigation when we arrive.”

“And with confirmation the station is unoccupied, I would suggest a minimal Security presence can handle their needs and we keep the hazard teams in reserve for any planet-based activities.” Ch’tkk’va had timed their entry into the conversation as always appropriately. “Though I would have to excuse myself from any away missions due to the conditions.”

“Average temperate of negative thirty degrees Celsius, I think everyone would try that one, but yes, I understand Lieutenant.” She gave Ch’tkk’va a brief nod, understanding their biological reasonings for avoiding the cold. “I have every confidence you can manage any away missions from aboard the ship.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Now, as for the rest of you, I think we all know what you need to do, so be about it.”

“Questions I take it?” she asked of the two that stayed behind once the others had left. Mac hadn’t left his seat and Adelinde had claimed Velan’s after the door had closed.

“Ensign Linal,” Mac stated. “Has Doctor Terax said anything?”

“Not yet. I was about to go down to sickbay and ask him about her. And the other two as well. If they’re our only link outside of passing messages to ourselves via message buoys, I don’t think we can afford to lose them.” She watched him nod his head, then rise to his feet. “Mac, get a few hours of rest before we arrive. You’re going to be busy and we’ve all had a long night.”

“And early morning. You need some rest as well.”

“Captain’s prerogative to burn the candle at both ends,” and she turned her gaze to Adelinde with a wry smile, “and a few spots in the middle too.”

“I’ll leave you two to it then and be back on the bridge in four hours.” And with that, he was gone.

“Commander Gantzmann,” she said, looking at Adelinde, who hadn’t relaxed from her professional stoic demeanour.

“Captain Theodoras.” The reply wasn’t harsh or cold, but it wasn’t warm either. “You need some rest as well.”

“Lucky for me I have a cot to nap on in my ready room.” A brief head nod in the direction of the retractable couch, which could change as need be, was answered with a disapproving look. “I’m fine.”

“You had a long day and were planning an early night, then went right back into it. You need a break.”

“Who’s telling me this, my tactical officer, or my girlfriend?”

“Yes,” came the response from Adelinde.

“Smart ass.” She pushed back from her desk, then got to her feet, met by Adelinde doing the same. “Mutiny this is.”

“Respectful advice.” She wrapped her arms around Tikva in an embrace as she rounded the desk, holding for a brief moment, or eternity, one of the two. “Go see the Doctor, then bed. I’ll make sure to wake you thirty minutes before we arrive.”

“Join me?”

“Hmm.” There was a final squeeze from the taller woman, and then Adelinde turned her loose. “I’ll be down in thirty minutes.”

“How’s the patient?” Tikva asked as she stepped into the primary sickbay aboard her ship and the domain of her ship’s chief medical officer, Doctor Terax.

The space was nearly double the size of the sickbay on the previous Atlantis and larger than all the combined ones of her previous commands, though those little boats had little need for much more than a supply closet and a corpsman for all the trouble they got into. It wasn’t just a single space but part of a larger complex of wards, surgical bays, labs, supply spaces and offices in the immediate adjoining sections of the primary hull, repeated in miniature in the secondary hull where she knew Terax had banished Doctor Pisani. She’d yet to figure out if it was out of respect for her skills or dislike for her personality since Terax was a master and reigning in his emotions, giving her nothing to work with.

“Resting,” Terax responded, not looking up from the console he was entering data of some variety into. “Medically induced mind you.”

“Any more insight into why she just launched into Petty Officer Daniels?”

“Compromised inhibitions.” He stopped his data entry, looked up at her with his perpetual scowl then waved her to join him in his office. Once seated and privacy granted by a closed door, he brought up a neurological hologram. “All three of them are showing a chroniton build-up within their bodies but mostly within their brains. The primary concentrations are in the memory centres, which for Bajorans and Humans are similar enough, but Lieutenant W’a’le’ki’s neuro-physiology is slightly different as to present elsewhere within her brain.”

“And this is what’s allowing them to remember the loops?” she asked.

“Once the build-up reached a critical level yes. Though Ensign Linal seemed to be affected almost straight away from looking at my own medical records from previous loops.” Referring to oneself in such a manner was proving to be an interesting grammatical challenge for all aboard the ship. “Aside from the memory centres it is still building up elsewhere in the brain. For Ensign Linal this has impacted her impulse control. Lowered inhibitions, someone angering her…” he trailed off, not needing to continue.

“So from all accounts she was sprinting to Port Royal, PO Daniels bumped into her and she proceeded to lay into him because she couldn’t stop herself?”

“Someone bumps into you, steps on your toe or doesn’t hold the turbolift, do you get not angry?” Terax challenged.

“Sure, but not assault someone angry.”

“And welcome to a brain working normally, with proper learned inhibitions and behaviours. Now take those away and what do you get?”

She nodded her head. “An angry young woman who snaps and assaults someone.”

“Or a Vulcan experiencing Pon Farr, or a Betazoid experiencing the Phase.” Terax’s examples only drove the point home and she knew he chose the second one to make it relevant to her. “I would suggest that Ensign Linal’s cause is because she’s more sensitive and has a higher chroniton buildup than the others. They are both at risk as well with enough loops.”

“So I take then your recommendation is we resolve this as quick as we can?” His nod in the affirmative was all the answer she needed. “What about PO Daniels?” She chastised herself for not even thinking of the young man before now.

“Broken nose, bruised ribs, a few scratches.” Terax sounded bored by the injuries. “I discharged him about fifteen minutes ago and gave him medical leave from duties for the next day and recommended him to Counsellor Hu.”

“Fair enough.” She stood, forcing herself out of the seat. “When can I speak with Linal?”

“When she wakes up.” His answer carried a harsh edge at the end of it. “She needs rest, just as much as you do,” he continued as he moved his head around a little to look at her. “How long have you been on duty?”

“I’m on my way to bed for a few hours now.” She raised a hand to stop his protest before he started it. “I am going to be back on the bridge when we arrive in system. Mac is leading the away team and then we’re going to look at the planet we think there might be survivors. Then and only then will I try and get some more sleep.”

“You haven’t been sleeping well in weeks captain. Don’t make me relieve you of duty.”

She stared at him for a few moments, trying to decide if his words were a professional concern, a promise or a threat. But she couldn’t read him, emotionally or via body language and opted, in her state, to just let it be. With a perfunctory farewell, she left, letting her feet carry her to her quarters and the warm embrace of her bed.

As Atlantis settled into orbit above the world GSC-9587c, shuttles began to spill forth from her two shuttle bays, including the ship’s limited number of Valkyrie starfighters. Their flight paths were determined by the data from the previous loops, telling them where had been previously surveyed, much as the ship’s orbital path positioned it so its orbits would let it survey the world more completely this time too. Shuttles would pass over locations the ship’s sensors identified as interesting or were descending on promising sites already identified.

“Radiation is consistent with a variety of nuclear and antimatter warheads being used,” Rrr said from Ops. “Cratering along waterways and shorelines with some present around mountain ranges as well.”

“Targeting cities and military sites,” Adelinde said from Tactical.

“When you say nuclear, what exactly do you mean?” Lieutenant Commander Ra-tesh’mi Velan had ascended from Engineering to take on his duties as second officer in light of MacIntyre’s departure from the ship. And with Lieutenant Maxwell on the station helping the team there, someone in the Engineering leadership was getting to swan around right now.

“Radioactive particles in the atmosphere indicate fission all the way through to fusion weapons were used,” Rrr clarified. “Ground and air detonations for a more complete self-annihilation.”

“But why would they do this?” Adelinde asked.

“Because why wouldn’t they?” Tikva said, drawing attention from her bridge staff. “Something Terax said when I asked him about Ensign Linal. Compromised inhibitions due to the looping. How many times did the records say the station fired off because of Motu Maha?”

“One hundred seventy,” Rrr provided. Then she saw realisation settle on their face. “Motu Maha’s crew didn’t have anyone like Linal or Michaels, but the natives did. And eventually, someone in the wrong place got pissed off enough to…” They trailed off.

“It’s just speculation,” she quickly spat out. “We need to confirm if there are any survivors down there we can help out and see if we can’t find out why they did this to themselves. And why they built a giant time-reversing space station.” Heads around the bridge nodded in acceptance of the task before them.

“Velan, want the centre seat?” She held out a hand, the ship’s keys hanging by a loop off of one finger.

The man merely smiled before he reached out to accept the keys, tossing them in his hands to examine them. “Should come up here more often,” he commented as he settled into the seat she just vacated. “I’ll shout if anything comes up I can’t handle.”

“Please do,” she replied as she stepped into her ready room. A few hours of napping hadn’t been enough, but perhaps a few more would do the trick. As the door shut behind her she slapped at the controls for the cot, waiting for it to slide out fully before she settled herself onto it, then ordered the lights out, the window darkened to cut out the planet-shine and tried once more to sleep.

“It’s down there somewhere,” Carmichael announced as he threw the shuttle Waihou into a shallow starboard bank. Not that it mattered for the occupants, safely kept in a mostly static frame of reference by inertial compensators and artificial gravity systems. The only three who would know were those clustered near the shuttle’s controls and the forward windows. For the rest, they just kept feeling the same buffeting forces they’d been subjected to for the last ten minutes.

Waihou was the only shuttle in Atlantis’s inventory that violated the naming convention of being drawn from the names of Greek islands and instead originated from the old Atlantis’ use of river names from across Earth. She’d been the captain’s favourite shuttle and used as her personal transport when the old ship had been decommissioned, entering service with the new when she was brought into commission.

“Indeed it is,” Fightmaster confirmed, his hands on the headrests of the two flight seats as he leaned forward, looking for their target as well. “This blizzard isn’t exactly the most helpful though.”

“Tell me about it.” The winds surged, jostling the shuttle harder than they had so far. “We either set down and try and figure out where this bunker entrance is, or bug out and wait for the weather to change.” Carmichael had gone from trying to spot anything outside in the white-out conditions to relying solely on his instruments.

“Just how close are we?” Fightmaster asked.

“We’re orbiting within fifty meters of it, that’s all I can say.” Ensign Kelly Tabaaha was still working the shuttle’s sensors, trying vainly to refine the sensor return that Atlantis had picked up in orbit. “The fallout that’s still in the atmosphere and this storm are really messing things up.”

There was a pause, just long enough to let the most senior member on the flight deck think, before Fightmaster made his decision. “Pick a spot Tabaaha, best guess. Carmichael, get us down.”

“Oh that much will certainly happen,” the young pilot said sarcastically.

“Safely.”

“That’s optional at this point.”

Waihou’s landing wasn’t the smoothest with the slight bounce that Carmichael had unintentionally caused, but it was down, in one piece and ready to depart at a moment’s notice.  The only problem was they’d landed in a white featureless plain, with a sky that matched so well that one’s eyes couldn’t make out any difference.

“Lieutenant, with all respect,” Kelly turned away from her console to face him directly, “this is stupid. We should wait for the storm to settle and come back later.”

“The captain wants this done now, however,” he replied. Then stood up straight and turned for the rear compartment. “Keep the shuttle ready to go just in case. You’re also our comms relay back to the ship.”

While normal away teams were currently scattering themselves across the surface of the world, Lieutenant Ch’tkk’va had opted for a hazard team at this location due to the inclement weather and that it was detectable from orbit despite being buried under a mountain. An underground bunker with a sizable geothermal power plant was one of the best chances for active computer systems that might be able to tell anyone anything about what had happened. There was also a non-zero chance of natives being on site and with that a potential for hostilities.

It had only taken them ten minutes in the blizzard, scanners working to triangulate as they spread out, where the hidden entrance to the facility lay buried under the snow and ice. By the time they had breached the sealed entrance there wasn’t a soul relieved to out of the storm. All of them had opted totally out of necessity to don a winter coat over their hazard gear and were in the process of removing it as the door was pulled shut behind them. Shoulder-mounted lights started to flick to life, casting no visible light, but throwing the tunnel before them into bright illumination for the team’s goggles to pick up.

“Two and Five with me. Three and Four together.” Lieutenant Gavin Mitchell, Silver One, had his orders delivered directly to each of them via earbuds, his words crisp and clear. A quick flick of his hands at the junction ahead indicated which way each team was to proceed as they started their exploration.

“How’s it looking down there?” Captain Tikva Theodoras asked any and all in Missions Operations as she descended the stairs. “Anything interesting yet?”

“Not so far ma’am,” Ch’tkk’va answered, arms folded while observing the main display. It showed both hemispheres of the planet below, a scattering of dots showing the locations of the now two dozen away teams spread across the surface at points of interest. Destroyed cities were the preference at the moment, but two teams had been sent out to sites of interest far beyond the confines of abandoned civil population centres.

Elsewhere on the main screen were images – stills taken by the teams as they explored, showing the devastation wrought on the surface of this world. There was little hope of finding survivors in the ruined cities but they were looking nonetheless. Earth’s nuclear armageddon paled in comparison to what these people had done to themselves, having been armed with antimatter warheads and done a considerable number on their population and biosphere.

“Gold was checking a launch facility and Silver was going to a bunker, yes?” she asked. “Sorry, only just woke up, curiosity drove me here before coffee.”

“That is correct,” Ch’tkk’va confirmed. “Gold has already searched four launch silos and found nothing that would illuminate the circumstances leading to launch.  Silver has only been on the ground for thirty minutes now and took ten of those finding the entrance to the bunker.”

“I know Mac suggested my yeoman, my yeoman I might reiterate,” she was holding up a finger to emphasise the point, “not his, for the hazard teams. And I know Fightmaster has committed to it wholeheartedly, but did you have to put him on Silver team?”

“Ma’am?” Ch’tkk’va asked, finally turning to face her. “I don’t understand.”

“Silver team. Stirling Fightmaster. Stirling silver?” She tried to lay it out as plainly as possible for her security chief and got nothing from them. Obviously, it was lost on Xindi-Insectoids. But she sensed the wave of amusement from a few of those at consoles, managing teams on the planet below. Even heard a snicker from one individual. “Nevermind.”

“I can reassign him to Gold team if you wish.”

“No, don’t do that. They’ve been training for weeks now and starting to fall into a pattern.”

“Actually ma’am I constantly mix them up during training exercises so that teams can be swapped around as circumstances dictate.”

She nodded in understanding, then pointed at one of the windows on the main screen. It wasn’t a still but a live image, clustered with a series of others in a box labelled ‘Silver’. The image had gone from generic halls to someone working at a computer terminal in a room with a faint blue glow.

“I think someone just found something,” she said.

“Silver Four to Silver One, we have a live data terminal. Three is attempting access.” Lieutenant Junior Grade Brek spoke with the monotony Vulcans were famous for in tense situations.

“Understood. Keep us appraised.” The short reply confirmed receipt and implicitly told them to go ahead.

“Check the cylinders,” Fightmaster said, a quick flick of his chin indicated the contents of the room to Brek as he set his weapon down to focus on the data terminal before him.

It was part of a large control console, similar to free-standing units found through the Atlantis. But unlike those reported on the alien space station these had wireless connections as a quick tricorder scan revealed.

“Interesting.”

“How so?” Brek asked, only a few meters away.

“The crew on the space station reported the consoles there as being hardwired and secure, but this console is barely secured at all. I’ve already made a connection with it.”

“Fortuitous. Atlantis should then be able to talk with their computers via Waihou and your tricorder, allowing us to continue with our exploration.” Brek’s voice shifted as he was walking around the cylinders, surveilling them completely visually before reaching out to brush what looked like frost off the outside of one.

“Atlantis to Fightmaster,” the captain’s voice suddenly appeared in his ear, not his commbadge. “Good find there, Lieutenant. The data connection is awfully slow, however. Think it’s on their end. Mind taking a look and seeing if you can’t figure it out?”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“Before you get too busy with that Fightmaster, you may wish to come and see this.” Brek had stepped back from the nearest cylinder, a small window in the frost to peer through it present at eye level.

Fightmaster had only just made it up to the cylinder to peer through that small window when the captain spoke once more. “We see it too Lieutenant.”

“These are makeshift cryo pods,” he clarified. “We’ve got survivors.”

“Do we crack them?”

“Can we crack them?”

“It’s just a stasis tube, how hard can it be?”

“It’s not a stasis tube you idiot, it’s a cryo tube. Totally different technology.”

“There have to be instructions around here somewhere. They wouldn’t have frozen themselves without telling someone how to unfreeze them. Right?”

The first science team had beamed down from Atlantis roughly half an hour after the discovery of the cryogenic suspension tubes. The site of the pattern enhancers was fastidiously being kept clear as gear would arrive in dribs and drabs, and then a few more specialists in various fields were summoned to examine something in detail and give their expert opinions.

And with what was being called Hall One rapidly being populated by Starfleet officers, Silver Team had assembled just shy of the beam in point. Once the enhancers had been set up and it was confirmed beaming back and forth was safe, Waihou had been dismissed to attend to other duties across the planet and left Silver Team to sweep the entire complex for immediate dangers.

“Four sublevels below us,” Lieutenant Rosa Mackeson said as she and Ensign Amber Leckie joined the rest of the team. “Bottom one is power generation, life support, all the infrastructure of home.” An Australian drawl coming from an Orion was not what anyone expected when they first encountered Rosa Mackeson, nor her distinctly Australian mannerisms either over prolonged exposure.

“And the rest are broken up into compartments like this all given over to cryotubes,” Amber continued with an odd lilting accent that hinted at her southern Delta Vega heritage. “All in all, we counted nearly two thousand tubes on level three and thirty more on four. Guessing they were the folks who were helping everyone into the tubes and froze themselves last.”

“Two thousand on ground level, one and two give us eight thousand and thirty survivors. Any signs of documentation?” Mitchell asked. His phaser rifle was still on his person, a unified part of who he was on the mission, as compared to the rest of the team who had put theirs down, within reach, as soon as the boys, girls and others in blue started to arrive.

“I was about to ask the same thing,” Maxwell Simmons stated as he stepped up to the group. The senior science officer on the ground so far, he’d quickly taken charge of the examination of the cryopods. “These people can build an immense space station around their sun but they can’t build a stasis pod. And I’m hearing rumours the station is a giant time-reversing device too.”

“That last part is true,” Stirling said, speaking up with a carefully modulated volume so those in immediate proximity would hear. And it got the reaction he was looking for – attention completely focused on him. “The teams on the station were briefed hours before we arrived. You weren’t Lieutenant because you were asleep at the time and selected to head up planetary activities.”

“Humpf,” Maxwell replied, channelling the generational indignity of his supposedly aristocratic family. “I’ll have a word with Camargo about this later.”

“Lieutenant Commander Camargo,” Stirling said.

“Pah!” Simmons responded, then backed down when the entirety of Silver Team all straightened in their stances, just their expressions being enough to let him know he’d overstepped with that minor act of disrespect. “Besides the point. Did you find anything?” he continued as he turned on Rosa and Amber.

“Not a thing, Lieutenant,” Rosa responded for the two of them. “Outside of documentation on maintaining a geothermal plant and industrial replicators, both of which are still down on level four and are working just fine as far as I could tell.”

“Hmm. I’ll send an engineer down to retrieve it and make sure everything is actually working just fine.” Simmons half turned away, then stopped. “Oh, dismissed.” It was like he’d remembered the help was still there and needed to be sent away before he continued his turn away and walked off, back to the scientists and engineers who were again growing in number.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Rosa turned on Stirling, “but doesn’t Mitch have seniority over that pompous ass?”

“You both have,” Stirling answered.

“Dammit it’s neat having our own walking, talking know-it-all,” Amber joked with an elbow nudge. “You sure you aren’t some escaped android or something?”

“The Lieutenant,” Brek spoke up, “just has an exceedingly good memory for a human. And is well positioned as the captain’s yeoman to be exposed to such information on a regular basis.”

“It was a joke Brek,” Mitchell said, a nod of his head to the pattern enhancers. “Let’s beat it. The sooner we get back to the barn, the sooner the Old Lady can send us somewhere else tropical and delightful on this snowball.”

“Freak transporter accident Your Honour,” Amber piped up as they walked. “He called the captain Old Lady and well, these things just happen.”

“It’s a term of endearment kiddo,” Rosa answered. “Besides, I’m not worried about the Old Lady, but her Amazon. Or Valkyrie perhaps. She’s German, right? Either way, if you have to get in trouble, she’s the one…”

“All right, cut it out.” Mitchell’s command killed the conversation as he tapped at his commbadge. “Silver Team to Atlantis, five to beam up.”

“Lin, pleasure as always.” Blake Pisani greeted the Chief Tactical officer as she entered into the medical lab where a number of the ship’s medical professionals had started to congregate to go over the findings from the planet below.

“Doctor Pisani,” came the response.

“Ah, sorry, forgot, professional while on duty.” Blake nodded her head in understanding, then waved her head in a ‘follow me’ manner as she took Adelinde Gantzmann to where Doctor Terax was reviewing the most recent scans from the surface.

“They call themselves the Telarook,” Terax uttered as they approached. Diving straight to the point was his form of polite introduction after a fashion, especially when he was working. “And defrosting this lot is going to be a full-time job for someone. Someone not us.”

“Care to elaborate on that Doctor?” Adelinde asked as she took up a spot opposite Terax, looking at the Edosian through the holo tank on the table that dominated the middle of the lab.

The beauty of three arms it turns out is that one can cross their arms in a disgruntled fashion and still have a central arm free to operate a control to make their point. A holographic image popped up, one of the tanks occupying the facility that had been dubbed ‘The Vault’ for now. “Just over eight thousand cryogenic suspension pods and all of them were produced after the thermonuclear bombardment of their world. What little documentation Lieutenant Maxwell has found hints that pod production started shortly after the exchange.”

The holographic display changed to show the facility layout, its floor stacked on top of each other, heat pipes descending into the table representing the geothermal plant, and a single egress tunnel to the surface. “This wasn’t meant as a shelter, but a military bunker that just happened to have industrial replicators. The command staff kept bringing in survivors but quickly realised that life support wouldn’t cope, so they started constructing cryopods because it’s what they had on hand. There’s a rather angry spiel from a technician about not having modern stasis pod patterns on file.”

“So they started to freeze refugees and themselves in order to survive the nuclear winter?” Adelinde asked.

“That was the intent. But their own medical documentation hints at a species-wide issue with coming out of cryogenic suspension. An issue that’s made worse by how long they’ve been in suspension.” Blake brought up several hovering windows, each filled with screeds of medical text, diagrams and tables. “They made the files freely available on their computers so that anyone who finds them would be able to access them and read them to understand why their defrosting protocols have to be followed to the letter.”

“It’s a long and complicated process. We could, with all our medical staff and facilities, manage twenty, maybe thirty?” Blake’s questioning look to Terax was met with an affirmative nod. “A week that is. Twenty or thirty a week.”

“Five to nearly eight years of effort. And we couldn’t defrost a handful and let them continue with the work because they’d just be in the same place as when they started this process.” Terax’s arms unfolded, hands settling on the edge of the table. “Someone not us has to help these people. The best we can do is make sure all the documentation is ready for someone else and give everything a service so it doesn’t break down.”

“And there is no way to cut corners or speed up the process?” The negative headshakes of both Pisani and Terax answered the question for Adelinde well enough. “Recommendations?”

“Get Starfleet to send out a medical ship. Or something with larger medical facilities so they can address more pods at once. I have enough medical facilities and personnel for this ship, not babysitting a species that nature never intended to be frozen like this.” Terax’s gruff answer was at least clear.

“Understood. I’ll take that to the captain.” Adelinde was halfway back across the lab, past the other doctors still reviewing documentation to see if perhaps there was an answer they’d missed, when Blake caught up to her, walking alongside. “Something I can do for you doctor?”

“Heard from Commander MacIntyre?”

“Last report they had made some progress in understanding the temporal driver systems of the station. He should be calling with an update in ten minutes.” Adelinde had barely turned her head to catch sight of a nearby chronometer. She’d maintained her professional chill this whole time, but broke ever so slightly, offering a smile. “Would you like to come to the bridge to hear it?”

“Gives us a chance to reschedule our interrupted couples date night,” Blake said as she exited with Adelinde. “Tell me, ever heard of this absolutely horrific band Kolar Blight? And I mean absolutely, positively need to be flat-out drunk to enjoy horrific.”

“Silver One, Silver Three here.”

“Go ahead Three.”

“We’ve got a functional computer here in silo nineteen. Looks like this was the command bunker for this silo complex. And a collection of dead bodies as well. Decay is pretty extensive but we’re seeing extensive signs of trauma.”

“Three, Five here. I’m on my way to look at those bodies.” Amber said over the comm channel with professional ice to her tone.

“A take it you’ve already accessed the computer Three?” Mitchell’s tone hinted at his expectation of a positive.

“Yes sir,” Fightmaster responded. “They were sent launch orders targeting their own cities. Security feed shows a disagreement between the operators followed by a firefight breaking out. Two survivors then launched before seemingly walking outside.”

Mitchell came back over the channel. “Get all that information back to the ship and keep looking. There has to be a reason why they did this.”

“Four here,” Brek chimed in. “I’ve just found a personal device I was able to power up. There’s a saved video file on it and you’ll want to hear this.”

The comm channel was quiet, then a slight click as something was patched in before it started. The alien voice started speaking but was then quickly overridden by the universal translator.

“No more! No more no more no more no more no more!” The voice sounded crazed, angry and desperate. “We can’t live like this! A day into weeks and months and who knows how long! We’re trapped in a loop of our own making and only we can end it! And if we’re wrong,” the voice stopped, silence hung for a few seconds, “then we just get to make the same mistake again tomorrow, today, yesterday.”

“There was a banner at the bottom of the video,” Brek said almost straight away, giving no time for contemplation. “It listed the speaker as the Planetary Assembly Minister of Defensive Isolation.”

“One man went crazy and did all of this?” Rosa asked over the comms.

“There are other files on the device. A quick inspection shows a lot of similar news feed clips.”

“All right Silver, back on task,” Mitchell commanded. “Four, get that device back to the ship, let the Blues look into it. No doubt Counsellor Hu will have insights as well.”

“Hello, Ensign.” Gavin Hu rarely had good cause to visit the ship’s brig and from what he had been told today was not much better than most others. Visits to assess the mental well-being of individuals incarcerated was the number one reason for his few visits here – to ensure that an individual, outside of physiological concerns, was in their right mind before proceedings could occur.

Such as today’s visit.

The young Bajoran officer in the first cell was laying on her back across the bench come bed common enough across the back wall of the brig, a hand behind her head as she stared at the ceiling. She huffed an acknowledgement, turned her head slightly to look at him, and then startled herself. She was sitting up, feet thrown to the floor, then up on her feet in quick order. She didn’t quite snap to attention, but she did at least get to her feet for a superior officer.

Which was a good sign for her mental health, not so much for her immediate career.

“No need to be so formal Ensign,” he said, carefully adopting his professional tone of voice. Calm, strong, gentle. A soothing voice as he’d been taught, could do a lot to put a patient at ease. “Sit, please.” He waved gently to indicate she should sit, a glance at the petty officer supervising the brig and the woman produced a chair for him in quick order, which he sat himself down in just shy of the containment field.

“I was wondering if we could have a talk about Alexander.” He watched her carefully, studying her facial expressions. The confusion was slow to appear but quickly vanquished by realisation. After all, why else would he be here?

“Petty Officer Daniels,” she confirmed, her tone a bit rough. Rough enough she immediately stood up and summoned the sink from its recess in the wall and got herself some water before continuing, the harmless soft cup still in hand as she turned back to him. “He got in my way.”

“Yes, he did,” he said, agreeing with her statement. An attempt to prompt more information from her.

“Got in my way. Bumped into me. Then had the gall not to apologise.” Her fist clenched slightly on the cup, water spilling over onto her hand. Her gaze went to it before she threw the thing into the sink, whereupon the computer took the hint and withdrew the sink.

“And you made him understand the error of his ways.”

“I did,” she replied. Then she stopped for a moment. “I…I shouldn’t have done that.” She sounded remorseful to him. Now at least. “I…I overstepped.”

“Why did you overstep Nerys?” he asked. Questions were his method. Prompting patients to evaluate and answer. Even a lie meant they had to think and consider to come up with something suitable. He didn’t need the truth as much as his patients did, though it certainly did make his job easier.

“I just reacted.” She started pacing. “I was angry and he got in my way and I just punched him. And again and again.” She was working herself up, he could see that easily enough.

“And Nurse Cummins?”

“He jabbed me with a hypospray with no warning.” She at least glared at him while pacing with this answer. “And I only lightly punched him. Jerk.”

“Would you normally punch a nurse doing their job?”

“No.” It was an immediate answer, with no thought behind it. And because of that, it brought her to a halt as soon as it left her mouth. “Why did I do that?”

“Are you an angry person typically Ensign?”

“You didn’t answer me,” she snapped back at him. Hands came up, running through her short brown hair as she turned away. “I try not to be.”

He waited for her to finish her pacing and settled back to sitting on the bench in quick order. “How many loops have you gone through Ensign?”

“Answer my question. Why did I punch Cummins? I wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t like discussing diagnosis with patients until I’ve had a chance to review all the facts.”

She was up again, across the cell and slamming her fists into the containment field in a split second and he had to work to keep his own cool and stay seated. To trust in the field emitters to do their job. He’d seen them hold back an angry Brikar intent to twist his own head off. A young Bajoran woman who couldn’t be more than seventy-five kilograms wasn’t getting through that anytime soon.

“Tell me why!” she screamed at him.

“How many loops?” he asked again.

A scream for a response was hardly helpful. But she screamed herself hoarse before retreating to the bench. “Fuck off,” she muttered before collapsing to her left, then rolling her feet up onto the bench, and then her whole self away.

“Computer, privacy cell one,” he ordered the ship’s electronic minion and watched as the forcefield separating the cell from the rest of the brig took on the appearance of heavily frosted glass.

Standing, he collected the chair and returned it to the petty officer who stowed it happily in a closet on a stack of three others. “Call me immediately if she decides she wants to talk again.”

“Yes sir,” the woman replied with a slight head nod.

“Compromised impulse control combined with a pre-existing anger management issue,” Gavin said as he sat himself down in Doctor Terax’s office. Beside him was one of his more complicated patients, in fact likely every counsellor’s most complicated patient – their own captain. And hovering to the side, standing with her back to the wall, was Doctor Blake Pisani, arms crossed over her chest and pulling her labcoat over her chest.

“How did a security officer with anger management issues get assigned to my ship?” the captain asked him, turning herself completely in the heavy chair to better face him. “Wait, she’s old Atlantis crew isn’t she?”

“Yes ma’am,” he answered. “You asked me the same question about a year ago in fact during some personnel reviews of new officers before we shipped out to the Delta Quadrant for our aborted long-term explorations. And the same answer applies today. Starfleet is a welcoming organisation and Ensign Linal is committed to self-improvement. She has bi-weekly counselling sessions with Counsellor Huxley and in review is either making great progress or is getting better at hiding her inner turmoil.”

“Why not just reassign her to a Betazoid counsellor?” asked Blake.

“Because not every ship in the fleet has Betazoids, let alone a Betazoid counsellor, on staff. In fact, the only Betazoid we have aboard ship is…” he trailed off, raising a hand, palm upwards and fingertips pointed at Captain Theodoras.

“Half-Betazoid thank you. Papa likes to think he had some considerable influence in my upbringing,” the captain said with a smile on her face. Her usual jovial deflections had more weight behind them when attention was on her and with one of her crew the focus of this meeting, she wasn’t trying like she normally did he noted.

“Okay, so, we have an Ensign with compromised impulse control. Even W’a’le’ki and Michaels said Linal’s behaviour was new to them. All the logs from the previous loop say she’s suffered or been exposed the most out of the Temporal Triplets.” The captain was thinking out loud, which was causing a frown to appear on Terax’s face, more so than his normal one. And Blake was a blank slate, no doubt her brain whirring away too much to bother even making her look pensive. “Could this be a result of prolonged chroniton exposure?”

“Funnily enough there isn’t a medical paper written on the subject, at least not in the ship’s computer database.” Terax clucked once in thought. “Computer, render the last brain scan of Ensign Linal Nerys and then overlay a projection of Bajoran neural anatomy, highlighting portions of the brain responsible for impulse control.”

A chirp of acknowledgement, a slight dimming of the office lights and a holographic projection sprung to life above Terax’s desk. It was faintly grey, with a blue patch appearing a moment later inside the confines of the grey. Terax leaned forward to examine, as did the captain. Gavin however was drawn to Blake who stepped forward, planting her palms on Terax’s desk and smiling.

“I see where you’re going Doc. Computer, highlight in red all portions of the Ensign’s last neural scan where the chroniton count was above her last physical’s count.” Blake’s smile grew as the blue patch completely turned purple as a swath of red appeared, roughly spherical with the purple patch off to the side.

“Lieutenants W’a’le’ki and Michaels are timebombs,” Blake said. “And we won’t know in the next loop until well after they’ve had time to cause all sorts of problems.”

“Well okay then, but what do you –“ The captain stopped as her commbadge chirped at her. “Theodoras here.”

“Captain.” It was Commander Gantzmann on the other end and he spotted the captain’s lips twitch in a faint smile. That alone brought one to his face. Happiness was infectious, even the slightest bit. “Lieutenant Fightmaster just forwarded along some video files Silver Team found while he’s making his way to a beam-out site. Said I should forward them to you and Counsellor Hu immediately.”

“Send them to Doctor Terax, we’ll look into them right now.”

Five minutes later, after numerous videos of seemingly similar content, Gavin Hu was more certain than ever that the crew of the Atlantis was in trouble. “They got stuck in their own loop for one hundred and eighty days. Not all of them, but just enough in the wrong positions.”

“Motu Maha kept trying to get here because no one on board was affected. But eventually some leaders snapped and started nuclear Armageddon for a laugh or to try something new thinking there would be no repercussions.” The captain was quiet, her gaze somewhere in the middle distance. “Those detonations convinced Motu Maha’s crew to turn around and the device out there,” she pointed in an unspecified direction that was vaguely upwards like all those born on planets do when indicating the sun, “stood down because the threat was gone.”

“What are you thinking?” Gavin asked.

“Doctor,” Tikva looked up and straight at Terax. “Those cryo pods good to keep the locals on ice?”

“That idiot Simmons has finished undertaking maintenance. The Telarook pods are likely good for another century or so now.” The Edosian crossed his external arms, this middle hand setting on his left shoulder, the closest to cross it as he got. “I’m pleased you’re thinking of something that doesn’t involve me trying to speed up the better part of a decade’s worth of work.”

“Thank me later.” The captain scrunched up her face in thought for a moment. “I want you and Pisani working on a way to flush the chroniton radiation from my junior officers. I don’t want madwomen loose on my ship if we end up doing another loop.”

“Sounds fun,” Blake said as she nodded at Terax, who shrugged his shoulders and then nodded in agreement.

“Good. Theodoras to the bridge.” A chirp, an acknowledgement of receipt from Gantzmann once more. “Recall all teams and shuttles from the surface right now. Once the last stragglers are aboard I want us back at the space station yesterday.”

“Aye ma’am,” came Gantzmann’s completely professional response before the channel closed.

“Captain,” Gavin said once more, drawing the captain’s attention back to himself. “What are you thinking?”

“Either the team on the station have got a way to turn that thing off, the good doctors figure out how to help our most afflicted crew so we don’t have to worry about them next loop or we get everyone back aboard this ship and high tail it out of the blast zone before the reset.”

“Can we still do that last one?” Blake asked.

“Maybe. If we’re fast enough. And Ra can perform a small miracle with the engines. But that’s Plan C.”

“Found an off switch yet?” Samantha Michaels asked as she sat herself down in the seat next to W’a’le’ki. The two-seat console had a hard clear sign on top designating its purpose in the alien script, but all the screens had finally converted to Federation Standard. And the control room, mission control as someone had referred to it when she asked where W’a’le’ki was, was now a fair bit brighter than it had been when they first boarded the station.

First boarded. For the thirteenth or fourteenth time.

“I’ve found three,” the blue-skinned woman said in response, though the purple scales around her eyes were a very weird contrast as they reflected the monitor before her just enough. It was oddly entrancing how the lights flickered and danced as W’a’le’ki breathed and simultaneously went through screen after screen.

“Really? Then why haven’t you told the Commander?”

“Because all three of them result in catastrophic explosions.” W’a’le’ki’s fingers brought up details on the screen in front of Sam’s seat and she looked it over as W’a’le’ki sat back, rubbing at her eyes. “We do any of these and Ensign Krek is going to have to share the title of Starkiller with us.”

“Forced subspace harmonic feedback resulting in localised suppression of electrostatic resistances,” Sam scrolled over the contents of the warning before her for a second. “Wait, the entire star overcomes the electrostatic barrier and fusion takes place at all layers at once? The explosion would be –“

“One of the largest supernovas in recorded galactic history. And only thirty-five lightyears past the Cardassian border. The nearest colony world is about fifty lightyears so would be safe but a few military installations would need to have their shielding reinforced in a few decades before the first light arrives.” W’a’le’ki had tilted back to stare at the ceiling, swivelling her chair side to side as she continued to work the problem.

“Who else is looking at this?”

“Every engineer we brought with us and a working team back on the ship. And every scientist with a relevant field.”

“So,” Sam said, joining her companion in staring at the ceiling, “can’t just turn it off or it feedbacks into the star. Can’t blow it up as it feedbacks into the star. Can’t disable the firing controls because safeties kick in and feedbacks into the star. These people really knew how to build a better mousetrap.”

“Oh, I think I figured out why they did it as well.” W’a’le’ki sat forward and brought up some information. Both women crowded around a single monitor as a document came up, then flashed as it was translated so they could read it. “Here we go. The Ministry of Defensive Isolation – Project Windback.” A few more taps as she searched through the document quickly for keywords. “In the event of xenos contamination of the home sphere, in order to preserve the purity of our kind, be it technological, cultural, ideological or biological, the purpose of the facility will be to undertake a temporal reversion of the home sphere to a state prior to xenos contamination. It has been determined that upon reversion, quantum fluctuations in decision-making will result in sub-intelligent xenos undertaking a different course of action and avoiding the home sphere.”

“Sub-intelligent xenos?” Sam said with a scoff. “Charmers these folks were.”

“I read the whole document. There’s a whole section about fears that intentionally destroying a ship would result in outside investigations, which would mean more ships, and then more contamination would occur. And it appears they thought they were the only true intelligence in the universe and anything else would merely be clever animals or lucky sub-intelligent creatures. Basically, they thought the universe was full of Pakleds.”

“So these people were isolationist and xenophobic to the point of building a time machine to wind back their entire star system to before first contact?”

“Not just their star system,” W’a’le’ki said, bringing up a diagram on the master display of the control room. “Three lightyears, local measurement. Works out to about two lightyears, five lightmonths by our measurements. They wanted a really big buffer around their star.”

“They had warp drive, a damn decent understanding of temporal mechanics to the point of building this,” Sam waved her arms all around, “and they never wanted to travel and meet the rest of the galaxy?”

“Not everyone wants to explore. Not everyone wants to conquer and not everyone could build a Federation.” W’a’le’ki smiled at Sam’s confusion. “You humans are all the same. Why isn’t everyone like you, wanting to explore the majesty of the galaxy, the universe? Because sometimes the universe needs a homebody.”

“Yeah, well, look where it got them. Deader than dead and their only functional relic being a giant time machine that only goes backwards a single local day.”

“What if it didn’t?” W’a’le’ki asked.

“Okay, repeat that plan one more time now I have everyone aboard Atlantis that’s been helping with it here,” stated Captain Theodoras.

The bridge of the Atlantis was on full display in mission control, each figure was a massive giant version of their real-life counterparts thanks to the whole massive wall being a monitor. To the left of the captain sat Commander Gantzmann, and to her right sat Commander Velan. A gaggle of engineers and scientists were just past Velan, all with a padd in hand.

“Shutting down the station properly is going to take weeks if not months. We can’t do it because we would constantly end up triggering the auto-reset these people built into it. But, their infosec is sloppy.” Sam had been given the honour of presenting the initial findings by both Commander MacIntyre and W’a’le’ki, which instead of fearing she relished. A chance to be front and centre.

“Lieutenant W’a’le’ki discovered that we can access the settings for the reset function. While we can’t make changes to the reset that’s in progress right now, we can make changes for the next reset. Even implant commands for the station to action on the next loop. And with that in mind, and with what we’ve learned about the situation that took place here, we’ve got a rather audacious plan.” She tapped at her padd, half the display in mission control now taken up by a short bullet-pointed list which was hopefully being duplicated on Atlantis.

“We implant the commands and setting changes into the temporal memory core. The main system constantly queries the temporal core so that after a reset it knows what happened. Then we high-tail it out of the system as fast as Commander Velan can coax.” Sam looked to the chief engineer who was smiling.

“Not a problem,” he answered. “We’ve done all the checks after our sprint, we’re good to go on my end.”

“Once the current reset triggers, the station then checks the temporal core, gets the setting updates and then implements the commands we give it.” Her second bullet point blossomed into a diagram of the star system, then the red circle for the current range of the temporal reversion and a much smaller blue circle just surrounding the star system. “The new settings resize the effective zone of reversion to only include the star system, not some massive piece of the current sector. It also changes the reset period from one day to thirty years.”

“You want to revert the entire star system thirty years?” the captain asked.

“They want to revert it to the start of the Motu Maha cycle,” MacIntrye said out loud, throwing his own weight behind the idea. “Gives the Telarook a chance.”

“Won’t they just redo their self-destruction?” asked Gantzmann.

“We implant messages into the station and have it transmit them to the Telarook.” W’a’le’ki stepped forward. “We identify all the individuals in those messages Fightmaster found and include them in our message as people who need to be stopped. Hopefully, they can stop them in time and we essentially undo the catastrophe they suffered.”

“And,” Sam moved the presentation on to her next step, “the station then enacts its next programmed action which starts the automation onboard to begin a controlled shutdown of the station and its temporal drive. It’ll stop it from triggering until the Telarook can get aboard and retake control, so hopefully, some time to think over the warnings we’ll leave behind.”

“Sounds like we’re stepping on the Prime Directive in here somewhere,” the captain muttered.

“I prefer lightly trampling actually,” MacIntrye said in response. “Yes, we’re interfering in their time machine madness, but we’re bringing back an entire dead civilization if we get this right. And undoing some unintentional influence that caused them to destroy themselves.”

“And dooming them to repeat their deaths if we get it wrong,” Gantzmann replied.

“Letting them die, or the survivors remain frozen until proper help can arrive versus giving them a second chance and removing their time machine for a while,” the captain said, thinking out loud in the mass meeting. “Is the machine able to even do thirty years?”

“Just barely,” Gabrielle spoke up again. “But we’re not pushing it that far, just near the limits. It should be fine.”

“I agree,” Gérard Maxwell said from beside Gabrielle. “Our assessments aboard station indicate it should be capable of the task.”

“It’s a lot of shoulds,” Velan said from Atlantis. “But this lot,” he indicated the team behind him, “agree with the engineers Gérard has on the station. And from the technical specifications we’ve read over, any danger would be just as the reversion starts, so even if the station does blow itself up, it’ll just revert the system it what it was programmed to just as it’s exploding. Which will conveniently reset the explosion as well.”

“Not entirely true,” W’a’le’ki cut in. “There is a small chance it’ll still cause the forced subspace harmonic feedback all of my first ideas resulted in.”

“How small?” asked the captain.

“Two per cent,” she answered.

There was silence as the captain thought, as everyone did in fact. Glances around as everyone tried to judge what their colleagues were thinking, reading facial expressions or trying to portray their own thinking wordlessly.

“Captain, we should do it,” Sam spoke up after only ten seconds. “A fighting chance is better than nothing and there’s a ninety-eight per cent chance this will work.”

“Lieutenant, I appreciate the enthusiasm but –“

“But nothing ma’am!” Sam burst out. “It’s either this or waiting on ice until –“

“That’s enough Lieutenant,” MacIntyre cut her off, maintaining a stare long enough for her to get the message.

Silence reigned supreme before the captain stood, up and took a few steps across the bridge, closer to the pickup. She loomed over the mission control and its assembled personnel. “I understand your position, Lieutenant,” she said with a calm tone, even a slight smile. “You want to help; you want to help a lot. We all do. But we need to weigh the odds of some of the Telarook definitely surviving versus the complete obliteration of a star system. We don’t need another Ensign Starkiller.” That got a wry chuckle from a few people, a glower from the Tellarite ensign in question at the back of the bridge.

“If I may ma’am,” W’a’le’ki spoke up. “That two per cent chance is initial assessments. We’ve got a few hours left. Let us keep working the numbers and see if the odds improve.”

“Captain,” T’Val, the Vulcan helmswoman spoke up, “we will need to depart the system within the next hour if we wish to escape the sphere of effect from the station.”

The captain thought about it for a moment, then wrapped her knuckles across the front of Rrr’s operations console. “Get everything back aboard ship right now.” The Gaen nodded before she turned to the screen once more. “Mac, get everyone back on Atlantis now. And triple-check, I don’t want any mistakes.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“Camargo, you, W’a’le’ki and Michaels get back here right now. You’ve got priority on computer resources. I want the best odds possible in twenty minutes. And two sets of instructions ready to go. One where we go with the plan just proposed, and another wherein we simply reduce the zone of effect to reduce the hazard.”

“Understood,” said the Science chief. “We’ll be over right away.”

“And the timer starts now. Atlantis out.”

As the comm channel closed and the wall screen went back to its collection of readouts, MacIntyre spun to face Samantha Michaels. “Lieutenant –“

“Don’t be like Linal, I know,” she cut him off abruptly, then stopped and shook her head. “Sorry, that was…” she trailed off.

“Rude and unprofessional,” he finished for her. “But Doctor Terax did warn us after he and Counsellor Hu came to their conclusion. So, with that in mind, I’ll excuse it, for now. Be better. Understood?”

“Aye sir,” she answered. “Permission to leave sir?”

“Dismissed Lieutenant. See you back on Atlantis.”

“The numbers aren’t looking much better,” Gabrielle Camargo muttered as another simulation run started to produce viable data for analysis.

“So what are the odds that everything will explode in our faces?” Samantha Michaels asked as she stepped up beside the recently promoted chief science officer, a coffee in both hands. Though for her and W’a’le’ki it had been the better part of a month of looping two days periods, each starting just before Camargo’s promotion ceremony.

“One point nine per cent,” Camargo said aloud, accepting the offered cup, an experimental sip, not even really registering the drink as she watched the statistical model continue to update as more of the thousands and parallel simulations finished. “Weird,” she continued as the computer then highlighted a single simulation whose results fell well outside the norm.

“Edge case we can ignore?” Sam asked as the specifics were brought up on a screen for review.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Give me a second.” There was just silence as Camargo read over the simulation results, whistling towards the end. “So I’ve got two filters on the results coming in. Dropping true edge cases where the simulation just went a bit wonky and produced exaggerated results and another for ones where the results ended up way the heck off the bell curve.”

“Shits and giggles at the computer just making things up?”

“Hey, sometimes new science can be found off the bell curve. Other times you get to have a wee laugh and move on. But this,” Camargo waved at the data on the screen before her, “is not something you want to see Sam.” She tapped at some specifics and highlighted values. “I have to tell the captain about this.”

“It’s one result,” Sam pleaded. “Out of how many simulations have we run now?”

“Two million.”

“One over two million,” Sam paused to do the math in her head briefly, “Come off it Gabs, that’s easily outside of five sigma. It’s a computer glitch, nothing more.”

“It’s a result with a calculated blast radius of a thousand lightyears. That covers everything between here and the…the…”

“Far side of the Federation,” W’a’le’ki finished as she stepped up to the other two women. “Sorry, ran into Stirling on the way back.”

“No worries,” Camargo supplied as she went back to the data. “We don’t have time to run another series of simulations to reduce the number further. It’s a risk, a super minuscule one, but I’m still going to highlight it to the captain.” A tap of commands and the results were sent to a padd, scooped up and she turned towards the door. “Let’s go tell the captain the news.”

Letting Camargo take a few steps lead, both Samantha and W’a’le’ki fell in side by side. As soon as they cleared the door from the science lab and were making their way to the nearest turbolift, Sam jostled W’a’le’ki with her elbow gently. “So, Stirling is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You call him Stirling?”

“He said I could,” W’a’le’ki answered.

“No one calls him Stirling. He’s Fightmaster, herald of the captain, bringer of bad news, the man most likely to be an admiralty spy.” Sam did say all of this with mirth, a smile on her face and mischief in her eyes.

“Well, he said I could call him Stirling, so I shall.”

“And you just happened to run into him on the way back from the head?”

“Yes,” W’a’le’ki defended herself.

“Seems odd he was down here, wandering the halls, running into good-looking science officers he’s said could call him by his first name, don’t you think?”

“Are you implying he might have had some ulterior motive?” W’a’le’ki demanded as the three of them piled into the turbolift.

“Yes,” answered Sam and Gabrielle in unison, the first time the other two had seen Gabrielle’s smile at the conversation that had happened behind her. Barely a heartbeat passed as both Sam and Gabrielle broke out into a laugh as the door closed and W’a’le’ki’s cheeks went to red alert.

“Five times ten to negative five per cent chance of blowing up the quadrant?” The captain was looking over the padd in her hand with a look that said ‘Are you kidding me?’ that was plain to see. She tossed the padd down on her desk, leaned right back in her chair and pinched at the bridge of her nose. “And still one point nine per cent we cause a star to go supernova. A star I might add that is way, way too small to ever go supernova.”

“Ma’am, permission to speak freely?” Sam asked after a brief silence.

“No,” came the captain’s reply almost immediately. “You’re going to say we should give it a go. I’m going to remind you that Ensign Linal has lost impulse control and you and W’a’le’ki could be right on the verge as well. Then I’m going to remind you that ultimately the decision is mine to make and not yours, but your position and recommendations are understood, Lieutenant.”

“Ma’am,” Sam said, ready to refute the captain, but stopped by Gabrielle’s hand on her arm. “Yes ma’am.”

“Commander Camargo,” the captain finally said after a handful of seconds spent in silent contemplation. “Gut feeling, go.”

“Revert the whole system.” Gabrielle tossed a smile to Sam, then turned back to the captain. “The longer we run the simulations, the lower the chance of stellar detonation. And that blowing up the quadrant result is a statistical fluke. I think it’s all just edge cases we’re seeing early and the odds are in our favour. A few more days and I could make it all disappear into statistical noise. I think we’re good to run like crazy and set the whole thing up to bring the Telarook back from the dead. Or…stitch time up so they never died?”

“Don’t think about it,” the captain advised. “You’ll end up with a migraine.”

“Personal experience ma’am?”

Tikva nodded in her head, then looked to Sam. “Can you take two steps backwards?”

“Ma’am?”

“Just two steps Lieutenant.” And waiting for Sam to do so, Tikva grinned as the door to her ready room swished open to the bridge. “Mac, are we good to go?” she then shouted through the open door.

“Aye cap,” came MacIntyre’s response from somewhere on the bridge. “Shuttlebay doors are closing now. We got everything and everyone.”

“Get us out of here,” she ordered, then indicated with a wave of her hand for Sam to step forward out of the door’s pickup, letting it close. “Sorry, you were there and it was easier than getting up.”

“Uh, no worries, ma’am,” Sam replied.

“Now, go transmit the program for that time machine to do what we want it to do. I’ve got a warning to the citizens of Telarook to record.”

“You’ll have a while,” W’a’le’ki spoke up. “Modelling suggests it should take a week for the station to build up enough power for the reset.”

“Now that’s appreciated news Lieutenant.” Tikva smiled at the three of them. “Right, you lot, dismissed. And Michaels, W’a’le’ki, go see Doctor Terax. Until he says so I want you to check in with him once a day. And any rash decisions, report them to Counsellor Hu.”

“Reset should have happened by now,” Blake muttered in the darkness.

“Yup,” one Charles MacIntyre replied.

“We’re still here.”

“Yup.”

“Haven’t been sent back in time. Haven’t blown up most of the quadrant.”

“Yup.”

“You going to say anything else besides yup?”

“Eventually,” Mac said, finally changing his tune. “Just waiting for my brain to restart.”

“This is going to be one of those weird reports, isn’t it? Potential second contact turns into time travel shenanigans highlighted by three junior officers and ends with us bringing back a species from the dead and running away because they’re a pack of xenophobic jerks.”

“Yup.” He exhaled sharply when he got jabbed in the side. “What was that for?”

“Yup,” Blake replied mockingly.

“Fine, geez. Break a man’s brain then start up a conversation.” He drew in a breath. “Yes, it’s going to be one of those weird reports. And I have to write my report without the help of any of the other versions of me. Too busy turning up information and passing it along to start writing up a report and save this version of me some time.”

“Well, I’m glad I have this version of you,” Blake said before kissing Mac only to suddenly break the kiss. “Got a wacky idea for clearing the chroniton buildup in the triplets. I need to get to sickbay,” Blake said before shuffling under the sheets away from Mac. Footfalls upon the carpeted floor could just be made out before an exclamation. “I need the sheet!”

“Get dressed if you’re hurrying off to do science then.”

“And risk forgetting my idea?” she protested. “Just give me the sheet.”

“No, take a dressing gown. I’ve got one for you anyway.”

That brought silence to the darkness for a moment, then the swish of a closet door opening, a faint light from inside casting illumination on a room in turmoil and the bare form of Blake Pisani before it was hidden away once more.

Once more she moved through the room and then kissed Mac on the forehead. “Silk too. That’ll earn you some extra points.”

“Enough to keep you from running off and staying here?”

“No, but enough that I’ll be back straight away. Just need to get to Terax and tell him what I’ve thought up.”

“Afternoon Cap,” Ra-tesh’mi Velan declared as he settled himself down in the XO’s seat on the bridge, a full fifteen minutes early for shift change. “Anything I should know about?”

“Slowed our roll down to a paltry warp nine,” Tikva supplied, watching Velan’s feigned relief with a smile. “Transmitted our message back to the station for replaying to the Telarook. Nothing fancy or inspiring to be honest. Dossier of what happened, who to stop, and a warning the machine has started a controlled shutdown. No identifiers in the message. They want to be isolationist, let’s give them a slight mystery.”

“Let them come up with wild ideas like some Telarook from a far distant future working to save their species?”

“That’s the most likely seeing as how they consider the rest of the galaxy to be populated with clever animals or semi-intelligences,” she couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “We’ve been out of touch for over a month so we’re rushing back towards the Cardassian border to try and hook in with their comm network and just let DS47 know we’re still alive.”

“We could push the engines to nine-five if you want without any problem. Even keep jumping up to nine-eight for a few hours, then back down to nine-five if you want to keep a high speed.”

“You want to be in Engineering if we do that though don’t you?”

“At least myself, Maxwell or Merktin present. Which since Jamieson is duty officer down there right now…” he trailed off.

“Fine, fine, go. But give me that promised speed, or better. I’m likely to change my mind and decide to run us back to DS47 anyway if the Cardassians will let us cut across the yard.”

“Hey, we’re all one big happy Alpha Quadrant these days, right? Why wouldn’t they?” Velan got to his feet, habitually stroking at his beard. “We’re rated for nine point nine five max. Wonder if we can push that.” But the glare he got told him the answer as he chuckled lightly. “Well keep within the design limits Cap. I’ll send Jamieson up to take my bridge shift. If you want a lieutenant on the bridge that is.”

“I’m thinking we can trust our junior officers with flying in a straight line.”

“Oh?”

A sudden call to the bridge, when her duties for today had been primarily paperwork and procedure reviews, had put Samantha Michaels just a little on edge. Especially in light of recent events. Time travelling, being associated with Linal Nerys and therefore under medical supervision at the moment, standing up to the captain, if just a little bit – it all added up. So, she thought to herself that being a little nervous was perfectly acceptable.

As the turbolift came to a halt she was forced to step aside as Commander Velan stepped him, grinning like a madman. “Afternoon Lieutenant,” he said as they passed each other. “Have fun.”

“Have fun?” she asked, but any response was cut off by the Commander reaching out and tapping the button to force the doors to close, cutting off any retreat. Not that she would.

A handful of steps brought her down the ramp and around the ends of the arch to face Captain Theodoras. “Reporting as ordered ma’am.”

“Good,” the shorter woman said as she stood up. She too was smiling and that unnerved Sam. “Current course is zero-five-five mark zero-zero-three relative to the galactic core. We’re at warp nine but Engineering is about to clear us up to nine point nine-five. Call me as soon as we’re able to make contact with the nearest Cardassian comm station.” Then the captain made a show of reaching into a pocket and fetching out the keys to the ship, a quick jangle of the entirely useless artefact and she tossed them at her.

“You have the conn, Lieutenant,” the captain declared for all to hear.

“I have the conn,” Sam found herself replying immediately. “Uh, ma’am, isn’t Commander Velan supposed to be the officer of the watch?”

“He was, but now it’s you. Just you.” The captain stepped past her, stopping to put a hand on her shoulder. “Last few times either Commander MacIntyre or myself have been just a door away. Not tonight. Velan’s a call away if you need him.” Then the captain squeezed her shoulder gently. “You’ve got this Samantha. You were right to push for a reset of the Telarook system. You’ve got good instincts.”

She knew she stood there, staring at the centre seat for a good few minutes as everyone else just worked around her. Yes, she’d had the conn before, but always with someone a door away. But now she was being thrust into an officer of the watch shift with no warning or prep.

No safety net.

But it was just flying the ship in a straight line.

And the Second Officer was just down in Engineering if she needed to consult.

Or the captain and commander could rush to the bridge if she declared an alert.

She had this.

Right?

“Nearly five per cent of the entire armed forces have had to be removed from duty, including numerous officers in highly sensitive command positions.”

“Too many of them with access to weapons of mass destruction as well.”

“Add to that two cabinet ministers, fourteen ministry chief executives, and enough civil servants to cause quiet the turmoil for the foreseeable future. The Ministry of Ideological Orthodoxy reports they are very much understaffed for the current crisis.”

“Yes, well, they can deal with their own problems for now. We need to continue to make efforts to secure our weapons and make sure they can’t be used against us. Minister Chalkis, you’ve had time enough to send a team to the Great Machine. Report if you please.”

“It’s as the message we all received stated. The Great Machine has indeed completed a temporal reset far greater than we ever intended for it to do. And it is also in the process of shutting down. A process which we can’t abort and must allow to complete before we can attempt to restart the temporal core.”

“Our ancestors had to harness a quantum singularity to make the Great Machine work. As I recall shutting it down involves quenching the singularity.”

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

“Which means we’ll need to source another one in order to restart the temporal core.”

“Yes sir. I’ve already tasked the Hilkon Institute with restarting the conversion engines used in the creation of the last singularity. They report it could take a couple of years to bring everything online to produce a new singularity.”

“Very well. We’ll just need to maintain our vigilance until the Great Machine can be restarted. Admiral Freh, you wished to discuss something?”

“Yes, Prime Minister. Our scouts have identified warp trails around our sovereign system. Sixteen trails overlap on approach and a single warp trail departs on a different heading. It doesn’t match any of our ships and is orders of magnitude greater than anything we currently possess.”

“What are you saying, Admiral?”

“There might be some credence to the Intelligent Interference theory that’s been growing in popular circles.”

“I find that highly offensive Admiral. The Great Machine was designed to only allow Telarook lifesigns within its hallowed halls. And its systems are the most complex our people can produce, so highly capable it doesn’t need a crew for normal operation.”

“And normally I’d agree Prime Minister. But we have just had a mass chroniton-induced madness across our two worlds. There are unidentified warp signatures entering our system repeatedly, like someone getting reset, then a single departure, as if someone was attempting to escape the field of effect of the Great Machine.”

“Never underestimate the clever animals or semi-intelligences, Admiral. Whoever these fools are, they’ve just stumbled into a more powerful drive by happenstance.”

“Requesting permission to send a scout in pursuit Prime Minister.”

“Why? Why broke the risk?”

“We need to learn about these potential threats and ward against them at least until the Great Machine is operational once more.”

“Fine Admiral, you can have a scout. One only. An older ship as well. There is no need to potentially alert any foes to our true capabilities. You may go forth and attempt to ascertain just how smart these animals are you are so concerned about.”