Far From Home
Posted on Tue Mar 16th, 2021 @ 11:21am by Commodore Theodore Grissom & The Narrator & Lieutenant Commander Meilin Jiang & Senior Chief Petty Officer Sharona Deluna
Mission:
S2:3: Snow Drift
Location: Canopus Station, BL4 Quarantine Observation
Timeline: MD3 12.15
White chairs.
White walls.
White lighting.
White oneies.
Well, uniforms of the mental health variety, but close enough to the cadet uniforms Reggie had worn back in the Academy. But the entire theme of the quarantine ward on Canopus Station seemed to be 'bleached and sterile. The only real colour came from the holographic wall displays (soothing outdoor locals on rotation) and the orange E-suits that the medics wore.
"Just in here, Sir." said one of the aforementioned medical techs, the transparent visor of the biological containment suit not removing the cheerful, almost pathological customer-facing service mindset of the medic. Reggie found it creepy.
"Chief," he said, running a hand through his hair as he missed the feel of his hat. "I work for a living and-HEY! Was wondering where in the seven Hell's you'd gotten to."
Inside the room he'd be lead to, some sort of interview room with a glassed off wall along one side, was JT and Justice. Similarly dressed in institutional blankness. No sooner had Reggie registered this than he realised the medic hadn't walked in with him and-
The door closed and locked behind him, sealing the three of them into the interview room.
"Well...shit," Reggie muttered. "Trapped like rats in a sump."
"Indeed," Justice said glibly as he scanned the room with his cybernetic eye. "Shall I manually fornicate with the door mechanism in attempts to open it?"
Stripped. Sprayed down with something foul and viscous which quickly evaporated, given several hypospray injections, no questions answered and a female nurse that was a long stronger than she looked virtually manhandled her from one point to another while saying absolutely nothing.
Then she found herself trapped in the room with Justice and the paper suit. "It couldn't hurt, but they'd probably shoot you. Did you bring one of those molecular disassembler grenades up your aft chute, by any chance?"
"Of course I did," Justice said, "but they found it during a most invasive body cavity search. They were so thorough that I lost what remained of my virginity." He held up a finger laden with cybertronic implants. "But they did not amputate me." Approaching the door, he sought out a catch in the panel in hopes of finding a bit of leverage with which to pry it up. "Maybe... they weren't concerned... for good reason," he grunted.
"You're not the first former Borg I've met. The wall's lined in inert lead, doped with dilithium 348. Densest material Antares Heavy Fab can spit out in a timely fashion."
The light on the other side of the glass wall lit up, revealing a troop of Starfleet officer's marching in. The grey-haired Commodore walked up to the glass wall, looking on the three.
"Rooms designed to be chemical inert, and nanologically impregnable. Not to mention there's a chemical wash on stand by to be sprayed in that'll do to you what a good Vulcan chilli does to my colon." he grinned. "Though I have a feeling we'll not need it. Please, take a seat and we'll get this pony show on the road."
"As long as your techs promised to use WD-40 during any future bodily searches," Justice said as he retook his seat, somewhat tenderly.
"Why are we being held here against our will and what do I care what Vulcan chili does or doesn't do to your colon? If bland effects you like that, I'd suggest a good Medical doctor," JT said. "And why are you wearing different uniforms than us? Well, than we were?"
"Standard quarantine procedures for this neck of the woods, purely boiler plate." the Commodore said with an easy smile. He reached out a hand, and one of his aides handed him a padd. After a glance at it, he looked back up. "Now, that ship of yours's is something ain't it? Aquarius class scout vessel, variable geometry nacelles, and that's just the standard kit. Whats the registry again?"
"NCC-748--" Justice began to recite.
"Ah-huh. See, when we enter that into our records we get a USS Hampton Rhodes. Norfolk class fast fleet supply ship," Grissom said. Part of the glass wall turned opaque becoming a data pane showing off the rotating form of a cargo ship. Nacelle's embedded into a combination saucer/drive hull, with three pontoons of cargo pods slung underneath. "Currently running with the 3rd Fleet out of Betazed. So...reckon there must be a glitch there. So we did some other checking, serial numbers on the warp core, molecular tags in the fueling and air mixes. Half of them didn't match anything, just garbage code, and the others to a half dozen other ships in the fleet all of whom were not named Magnificent."
Justice held up a querying finger. "Just to be certain, did you rule out the possibility of user error in your verification process? That is the most common explanation for discrepancies in database retrieval glitches."
"As you can see, it isn't a Norfolk class," JT said. "It's an Aquarius class escort. Me and my crew were...nevermind what we were doing. What you're saying doesn't make sense. This ship is practically new and I was put in charge of it with these." She pointed in opposite directions at Justice and Reggie. "Idiots and a bunch of cadets and do-nothing enlisted."
"I can confirm most crew members possess intelligence quotients and competency ratings at least one standard deviation below average." Justice nodded.
"Some more so like this over archiver here," Reggie piped up.
"All true. So we dig a little deeper. We start having the Engineer and Science divisions take a look into your ship. That's when we start to find some interesting deviations from what is standard SOP. Your uniforms, for instance, have interlaced graphene webbing throughout. Excellent kinetic energy absorption, not to mention thermal and radiation. Like walking around with a forcefield that's machine washable," Grissom nodded. "My team spent a fun few hours shouting down the comm's array at the tech boys back in the Milky Way about someone letting vapourware like that just waltz around. Except, it's not ours. No one is making, or experimenting with graphene webbing. Hell thanks to the Self-Replicating Machine Law there are not more than 4 or 5 labs in the Federation playing with the technology that could make this. And we spend good time and energy ensuring our friends across the border don't try and make a dust plague."
He shook his head and flicked a hand at the glass wall, displaying a picture of San Fransico Bay. There was the Golden Gate Bridge, the city sprawl, the bay, and rising out of that expanse of blue water was a gossamer tower-like diamond spider web stretching up into the sky.
"What?" Reggie asked, after a moment. "The Charles Tucker Memorial Space Elevator. Bit of an eyesore to my refined opinion."
"That doesn't exist here," Grissom said. "Nor a half dozen other landmarks in the database your computer core stores. Bajor does not have a Dukat Square, I can promise you that."
"Not yours," JT grasped on that. "As it isn't yours and this is clearly a parallel timeline, if one that's radically altered to the point you'd have that eyesore still, then none of our technology is yours to do anything with, including our uniforms. Rest assured that we are Starfleet." I hope he overlooks these buffoons I got stuck with, she thought.
"Not timeline. On that point we run into a commonality, all shipboard and station chrono's are running to within measurable tolerances of each other. Your from a parallel universe, not quite a Mirror Universe thank god, but one close enough to our own that when your drive system malfunctioned you jumped you here instead of your intended destination," Grissom explained. one of his underlings stood, a bulky Tellarite in a gold engineer's uniform.
"From what we've discerned of your ancillary drive system, it was designed to run along similar lines to the Phase Space Accelerator. But instead of using an external device to generate the power needed to push a ship momentarily into higher dimensional space, your's was internal. That was the error," the Tellerarite snorted. "Your black box recorders showed the moment the drive cycled and activated and registered it was functioning in a high dimensional plane, it powered down catastrophically. Turns out the underpinning physics of the drive don't work in higher-dimensional space."
"The technobabble checks out," Reggie said with a grumble. "The engine was screaming an excursion event a moment before it shut down and set fire to most of everything attached to it."
Justice sniffed. "Even if it fails to properly define the distinction between an alternate timeline and a parallel universe."
"So, an alternate reality without being a mirror and we're what, stuck here because you don't have our technology level?" JT asked.
"No. Aww hell's great blue blazing ball sack," Reggie cursed with a shake of his head. "We're stuck here 'cause of that bastard Heisenberg and his sack full of demonic cats."
"In a nut shell." The Tellarite engineer said with a snort. "The drive itself is simple enough to construct if labour and materially expensive. It is its execution, it suffers the same instability we see in a Phase Space Jump: there is an element of randomness that see's 20% of our jumps to Messier fall within their landing coordinates. The others are scattered in a three lightyear cone into the star cluster. Your's, on the other hand, suffers from the fact the drive is active during the transit, making not only your exit coordinates random, but also your dimensional vibration. You very well could have landed in a reality where the plank constant is slightly off, and every electrical impulse in your body simple stops working."
"In short, it's a miracle you're alive" Grissom said.
"So where does that leave us?" JT asked.
"Lucky to be alive," Justice answered by way of repeating the commodore. "But since 'luck' is merely the primitive conception of higher mathematics disguised as fortunate chaos theory, our continued living requires something of us. Would it be inaccurate to presume, Commodore, that you have a most inequitable proposition at hand that was intended to seem more desirable due to the aforementioned 'luck'?"
"Well, as it so happens I do happen to have a few ideas," Grissom said with a smile lifted from the back pocket of a second-hand used shuttle salesman in New Jersey. "Way I see it the simplest thing is to just landlock you. You'd be free to roam the station but given your 'extra-territorial nature' you'd be barred from service, meaning you'd be basically civilians. Holodecks, tequila, three-dee chess all the fun T's you can have. But your ship would be on lockdown, and I am of a mind to have the Yard Dog's strip it for parts and reversible engineering specs."
Grissom raised a hand as Reggie's face grew red, and he made to crawl over the table to beat his way through the glass partition.
"Thats option A, in which we treat you as non-citizens of the United Federation of Planets. At least the version that's here that doesn't have that space elevator coming up out of the Bay of San Fransisco. Option B, well, that entails you swearing a new oath of service to this UFP and becoming citizens. In which case you can serve in Starfleet, more specifically the Office of Special Investigations. I.E my department. We deal with the sort of things I reckon you'd find fun: nanotech plagues, bioweapons, high-end technologies that can warp the rules of nature in ways God never intended. And that's just the stuff we can release to the closed sessions of the Federation council. So, what'll it be?"
"As I'm the senior officer in charge, and my Lieutenants are as stupid as Seelat in mating season, I'm going with Option B. However, the Magnificent must be destroyed," JT said.
"Er, boss, I don't want to be riding your coattails, but we ain't exactly over brimming with the sort of negotiating power that'll let us call the shots." Reggie whispered to JT.
"Deal. To be honest half of what's on that ship is too dangerous to try and even take apart. I have every intention of having your crew go back on board, pick up their personal kits, and then it'll be towed out of Carpathian air space and used as target practice for the Shore Battery. Six crust buster warheads all going off within a picosecond of each other on contact with the hull should do the trick of wiping out every atom of that thing." Grissom said with a shrug. "Besides with the Cardassian Union holding a controlling interest in the Long Jump Project that brought us out here, I'd be 'obliged' to share half of what we know with the grey lizards."
JT shuddered at the thought of an alliance with the Spoonheads. "I could also activate the self destruct on it," she offered because she wanted some of the tech from the ship.
"You could. You could also pick up something that looks like a hairdryer than can core out a moon at the flick of a button. The only way you, or any of your command crew or senior cadets are getting back on that ship is under watch and in small groups. I've read through the inventory report, and I am startled that a vessel filled with cadets have access to some of it." Grissom said. "That and the quantum echo of your self destruct would be unique to your dimensional frequency. Sort of ring a dinner bell of sorts. Our way ensures the blast wave distorts any spectral trace of your ships point of origin."
"How do you know Reggie's breath here can't core out a moon?" JT countered. "I've smelled it up close and then the EMH knocked me out to save me. Oh, that fucking thing. Destroy it. Decompile it. Shred it to zeros and ones. Fuck that thing."
"I did, in fact," Justice said, "but I broke my sonic driver personal attachment while doing so. Could I... get a new one if we joined your OSI?"
"No, you can't and stay away from sh'Zam," JT said.
Grissom made a cutting gesture from his side of the glass, and the comm line disconnected. Fortunately for the crew of the
