The plan was set, and the course agreed. There was nothing left to do but execute. The team spread out around the chamber, eyes on their chronometric anchors, the only lifeline they had in the tumultuous sea, a lifeline they would soon sever.

Dr. Brooks gave the order: “Execute.”

That word echoed through the chamber, before, after, and in-between the moment when he gave it. Who acted first, that was a matter of perspective, conflicting reference frames in the whitespace between them making the sequence indeterminant, but regardless, as each of them heard his call, they reached for the device strapped to their wrist and got to work.

Up until now, the anchors had been their protection, but now they would be the colony’s salvation, a tuning fork to set the disjoint chronometric symphony straight and bring the moon back into harmony. Hopefully without losing themselves.

At first, nothing happened, but as the anchors untethered, so too did their wearers.

The discordant waves of time washed over them. Seconds stretched and moments overlapped. Individual sounds became layered chords, repeating a fraction too soon or an instant too late, a cacophony overwhelming the ears, and a blaze of light, disorienting as even cornea, pupil and lens disagreed in their perception of photons.

The Polaris away team was no longer a passive observer, shielded from the field lines of the Choradian moon and the strange spire at its center. Now, they were part of the anomaly… now, and in the future, and in the past, along with all the moments in between, their realities smearing across instants.

Dr. Hall did not so much as flinch.

The chamber split and folded around her, but it had been expected. Her vision doubled, blurring in overlapping and recursive frames, but that too had been expected. She watched her hand move before she moved it, not with awe or fear, but rather cold, clinical detachment. 

The storm was irrelevant. The instants were irrelevant. Perception was irrelevant. Only the glyphs inscribed on the chamber’s walls mattered, tempo markings inscribed by an unnamed composer. They remained constant, and they would guide her forth.

She moved her hand to adjust the anchor based on those glyphs, and it moved just as she had just seen it move before, for even in divergent slices of reality, she too was invariant. She always made the same choice, always following the plan, staying stable, matching the beat, and completing the task.

Next to her, Voragh found himself at war.

The chamber was a battlefield, the struggle of a great machine fighting with the universe itself for dominance, realities clashing with the howl of disagreeing light and sound. 

The Klingon found himself wanting to roar, to let the bloodlust flow, and then he heard his own howl, even before he let it out. But this was not that sort of enemy. Glory would not come from the fight, but through endurance.

He dragged himself back and focused on the task at hand. The glyphs carried the answer, not to conquer, but to achieve harmony. Harmony was the goal, and so his hand worked the controls on his anchor, manipulating the spacetime manifold that surrounded them.

Beside him, Lieutenant Commander Sena adapted to the chamber.

The Romulan’s eyes darted around, not with fear, but with calculation. Reality jittered between frames, snapping against itself, and instinctively, she catalogued each fragment and each discontinuity. She couldn’t help herself. It was how she was trained.

And that’s when she saw it. Patterns. Breakpoints. The unknowable, not so unknowable. For a moment, she debated stopping. There was opportunity here. She could reactivate her anchor, reset herself against the storm, let the others be taken, and then take this knowledge for herself.

But no, there was danger here too. Too much danger. The galaxy was not ready for this. Not now, and maybe not ever. And so she didn’t betray her colleagues. She stayed the course and followed the plan, using the invariant glyphs to guide her as she calibrated her anchor.

Across from them, Dr. Brooks embraced the moment.

He let the stormy sea wash over him like the gentle waves of a tropical cove, the sensation of time flipping, folding, and snapping like the feeling of finally being home. For a moment, he just took it in. This was the magic of the spacetime continuum in all its glory.

But he couldn’t enjoy it for long. As much as his mind enjoyed it, his body would not. Already the cells of his body and the atoms that comprised them would be beginning to come into conflict with themselves as chronometric field lines carved him up, and soon, he would die.

Unlike the others, he didn’t perceive it as a fight though. Instead, he guided it, gently nudging the waves of time into harmony. Soon, it would end. Soon, once the others finished, he would return to the normal flow of time. But until then, he just tried to enjoy it.

The last of them, Lieutenant Commander Taylor, stumbled backwards.

The sensation was disorienting. He was lost, reality pitching sideways as the past and the future traded places, and then swapped again. As thoughts he hadn’t had collided with those he had, even neurons themselves decohering, he struggled to stay standing and to stay focused.

But then he caught himself. The glyphs. Those were the answer. He clung to them like a man overboard hanging to a rope, and they carried him forth, helping him find strength to force his anchor into rhythm with their unwavering intervals.

As all five anchors aligned, a stable manifold settled over the chamber, and with it, a new imprint of a coherent form was cast upon the spire at its center.

The pulsation of light slowed and the reverberations of sound stopped as the chamber converged back towards a single beat. 

And then there was only silence.

“Did we…” Lieutenant Commander Taylor stammered. “Did we do it?”