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…”