The Future's Past

-: A Star Trek/Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction :-
Co-written by Aurora-cs and Matt Morwell

Chapter one - In which there is a last-minute rescue.


A small planetoid inhabited a Star System with a dying sun.

The sun would soon use up the last of its energy, and be engulfed into itself to become a red giant. In mere hours, the planetoid would cease to be able to support any life at all, and then, would no longer exist - the red giant would destroy it and the other planets in the system.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk sat in his chair on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, watching as Tactical Officer Pavel Chekov used the long-range scanners in a last-minute search for signs of life -thus far, all had been devoid of intelligent life, though there existed basic animal and plant life and teams had already been sent down to those that possessed anything informative for research and analysis.

This was the last scan to be performed, then they would stay to watch the formation of a new star, document their findings and leave the system, with the crew more than ready for a stop at the nearest starbase for some rest and relaxation after several missions that had posed much danger to the crew.

As his ears caught a bleeping from his console; he turned towards it, somewhat glad to be shaken from his boredom, and watched Sulu check on the signal, fingers dancing across his control panel, and how his eyes widened as he read the new streams of incoming data. "Captain!"

Kirk frowned. The tone of Sulu's voice had a tinge of panic to it. "Yes, Mr. Sulu?"

"Scanners show a lifesign on that planet. It must have just arrived, because we didn't pick it up before."

"Non-sentient?"

"No, sir," Sulu replied. "I can't tell without precise data, but I'm almost one hundred percent certain it's more than just a basic animal life form."

"Then we'd best investigate," Kirk decided. "Otherwise that life form is going to have quite a surprise in a few hours." He turned to his trusted science officer and second-in-command. "Spock, if you would see to that?"

Spock nodded, silently rising from his post and entering the turbolift, knowing what was expected of him - gather a small science team, find out what that life form was and what it was doing there and, prime directive permitting, remove it from the planet before the sun died.

'What would a sentient life form be doing on an uninhabited planet such as this?' Kirk wondered, drumming his fingers on the side of the chair. 'Moreover, without a ship? Doesn't it know what's going on? Science and research on this particular star has been going for years - we all knew it was going to go out, so who the devil would be down there?'

Aboard the turbolift, Spock was thinking along the same lines. He tried to come up with an answer, but could find none that were feasible.

'Highly illogical'


Putting her hand in front of her eyes, Aura staggered along in the dusty sand of the planet. Her throat was raw from lack of drinking, having exhausted her supplies of water an hour ago and she was now looking for somewhere where she could rest.

She still felt ill, perhaps even more than when she had left the last dimension she had been in. It hadn't been very welcoming there, the people having been different enough physically to be suspicious of her. Then, when she had accidentally used her lightning ability to try to get away, they had gone from just being suspicious to deeming her a threat.

Already sick, Aura would have liked to have found somewhere to stay for a day or two to regain enough strength to teleport to another place safely, but had no such luck. They kept finding her. So she had taken her chances and reached deep inside for the power she knew was there and teleported away, taking almost all of her energy to do so.

She had awoken lying in the sand, with no idea how long she had been there.

Now feeling even worse, Aura knew that she was in trouble. She had no food and no water, and in a desert region there wasn't any shelter, save for her jacket, which she now held above her head, trying to block the bright sun from her eyes and provide some shade.

She trudged through the burning desert. There was no sign of relief anywhere, no indication that there was any kind of life here whatsoever - and that was not a comforting thought. If she couldn't find life, that meant that she probably couldn't find water, either.

Aura looked around.

Not that there would be much in this place, anyway - no vegetation, not even a scrub of grass to indicate that life was at all possible here. It seemed likely that there was none, which made it incredibly inconvenient for her to have ended up here, especially since her teleporting power was refusing to work.

She squinted off into the distance, sweat stinging her eyes, but there appeared to be nothing but sand for miles around.

Even if she tried to teleport again, not knowing the terrain left her little hope of getting anywhere better. There was little chance of being able to get to another dimension altogether at this point, weak and ill, it may well use so much energy that it could kill her and besides, the skill of teleporting distances was something she had only recently learned, so she didn't know how well it would work.

Needing to rest for just a moment, Aura sat down, the searing heat of the sand burning into her clothes. It had been cold there, in the dimension she had been in before, and as soon as she had woken here, Aura had hurriedly taken off the jacket, but now wearing just a pair of light trousers and a t-shirt, she still felt unbearably hot.

Aura's vision swam as she stood up again and began to walk.

She didn't know where, and she didn't know why, but she walked.

Her fur was not helping matters any, especially the fur on the tips of her ears, which felt like they were sitting in a frying pan, hence the jacket over her head for protection, but even that provided little shelter as the heat bombarded her from all sides. Breathing the air was painful because it was so hot, and on top of that it was dry with no moisture at all to speak of.

In her travels she had been through other deserts, but none of them had felt as hot and dry as this one.

There was no one here. Nobody to call on for help. No one to show her where she could find a single glass of water. Aura almost felt like crying, so crushing was the feeling of hopelessness that hit her, but she couldn't, because that would simply deprive her of her own bodily fluids, which she desperately needed to survive.

'No crying!' A little voice in her head ordered. 'Kharis would hate you forever if you gave up!'

Even after two years, the sting of losing her brother was as fresh as ever and while it didn't occur anywhere near as often as the weeks after his death, every so often she would wake up in the night from a nightmare, an echo from the past where each second of that night would be played out in slow motion in her sleep.

"I won't stop now," Aura murmured to herself. "There has to a town or village or something out here somewhere, just so I can get something to drink and rest, then I can try and find somewhere else..." She panted. "Maybe then these... powers... might take me somewhere cool..."

She smiled in spite of the situation, at the time of their discovery those 'powers' had been a blessing in disguise. When she had run away after Kharis had died, she had tapped into them without knowing and found herself in a completely different place and in time had learnt more about them, discovering she could also manipulate electricity to a degree, and more recently that she could also teleport over distances - though without knowing where to go, this new discovery was useless.

Still, those powers had given her the excuse she had needed to get away from the pain of losing her only family. She had left Mobius far behind; now an inter-dimensional traveller, discovering new and old alike, beauty and horror all in the same package.

Aura tried to distract herself with such thoughts as much as she possibly could.

She was panting openly for breath now, having given up on keeping her mouth closed, knowing that having a closed mouth would have retained her fluids, but unable to ignore the heat any longer.

Her steps were staggering now, and they grew shorter and shorter with each passing moment, until she was only taking baby steps.

'I can't give up...'

Aura clenched her eyes shut, pushing the burning darkness away.

'Don't give up! You've gone too far to give up now!'

Her knees buckled.

'What would Kharis think of you?'

This wasn't enough to stop Aura falling to her knees as a sudden wave of dizziness washed over her, and making her feel sick to her stomach when she tried to stand up again.

Energy spent, she fell face-first into the sand.

'Don't give up!'

Aura knew she should obey the voice, but no matter how hard she fought to get up, her body refused to obey, eyes closing and breathing becoming shallow as she fell into the welcoming blackness.


Spock and McCoy materialized on the planet surface a few hundred meters from where the signal originated.

Because of the sandstorm, they could not go straight to where the life-sign was, and were at the nearest point outside the storm.

"Which way, then, Spock?" McCoy asked, already sure that with the light breeze, which seemed to increase in speed with every second, he would probably soon be trying to get sand out of almost every part of his uniform and hair.

"West, 370.5 meters, Doctor," Spock said, pointing.

"All right then, let's hurry up and go find out what this is."

McCoy's mental prediction - though usually exaggerated - turned out to be correct in this instance as the huge sandstorm suddenly seemed to curl up around them, their vantage point allowing them a full view of the sand cloud that towered high above.

It was monumental.

Spock continued to pace forward diligently and unblinkingly, completely focused on his task, but McCoy had been in a terrible mood to begin with, and coming down here was not his idea of fun.

He threw up one arm to try and block out the blowing sand, though it seemed to come from all directions. His only real option to prevent the sand from getting to him would have been by covering his eyes completely, but that simply was not a viable option.

"There!" Spock shouted, over the noise of the storm, pointing forwards to where there appeared to be a dark shape in the sand, already half-buried.

They hurried as far as they could, only to be pushed back by the force of the rapidly increasing storm and it seemed to take hours before they got to the shape in the sand where they wasted no time in digging out the creature.

It was a child.

Though unconscious and breathing shallowly, it appeared to be uninjured, but as McCoy brushed aside a few locks of grey hair from the face, he felt the warmth radiating from it head, even through the heat of the desert.

He tried to speak to Spock, but the storm was so fierce by now that his words were lost on the wind and sand flowed into his mouth.

Spock pointed in another direction and picked up the child, then motioned for McCoy to follow him, his tricorder showing that there was some sort of cave structure nearby where they could hopefully take shelter and find out who this person was.

They moved quickly in the direction of the cave, which was more an indentation in the wall of a sand hill, but facing away from the storm. The place was hardly large, only about three meters deep and two meters wide, but it did the trick.

Their vision now at least partially unobstructed, they inspected the child.

Its appearance was something akin to a Terran fox or squirrel, although it was bipedal and had clearly defined hands and feet, rather than paws. It was a rather strange amalgam to behold; though not unattractive - they had both seen far uglier in their time.

McCoy set to work right away, pulling at his medkit and scanning the child, reading through the information his tricoder offered as Spock tried to raise the Enterprise on the communicator.

Whatever this creature was, it wasn't any species they knew of in Starfleet, for the information was fairly sparse - resembling some species in the known galaxy to a degree, but in some ways totally different. He would hazard a guess that the creature was female, by all appearances still a child, and though he could not tell what her normal temperature was supposed to be, McCoy was sure that she had a fever.

But how she had gotten here?

Spock shut down his communicator and turned back. "I have managed to contact the Enterprise. The storm should be calm enough for us to leave in an hour, giving us 2.5 hours to leave this solar system before its destruction."

McCoy grunted by way of response and continued his scans. "She's gotta be dehydrated. There's no way you can walk through this hellhole and not get dehydrated." He tapped into his bulky tricorder a memo to get the girl an I.V. drip of saline solution when they returned to the ship. He didn't know what her blood composition was, but she obviously was able to tolerate an oxygen-nitrogen-argon atmosphere. The veins in her eyes appeared to be red, as well, indicating that her blood was carbon-based.

Spock, with his considerably sharper hearing, was just barely able to hear a moan escape the girl, and he looked down at her in curiosity.

Her small chest was rising and falling quite rapidly, which corroborated McCoy's diagnosis that she was dehydrated - her body was overheated and working hard to keep her cool, but Spock observed that its efforts were counterproductive at the moment, revealing that she was missing a redundancy that many other bipedal life forms possessed as her fur, thick and bushy, prevented her from doing what humans and many other species could do - sweat.

The hot, dry atmosphere of the planet would kill her if they didn't get back to the ship soon.


Aboard the Enterprise, Kirk found himself idly bouncing his fist on the armrest of his chair.

He didn't know what else to do at this point; all he really could do was wait around for Spock and McCoy to get back to the ship, hopefully with a live passenger.

'How could that life form have gotten there, anyway?' He mused. 'Could it have been on a ship, and crash-landed? No, because we didn't detect any debris on the surface... Could it have beamed down, and the ship exploded?'

Kirk looked to Chekov. "Scan local space for some kind of debris."

Chekov shook his head. "I already have, keptin. Sensor reports nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to indicate a wessel vos here recently."

"When was the last time a ship was even present in this system?"

"According to ship logs filed with Starfleet, almost five years ago," Chekov replied.

"Then how could that life-form have gotten there?" Kirk frowned. "It can't be a native of the planet, the last Starfleet mission here showed no settlements on the planet..."

Put simply, he was stumped, as was the rest of his crew.

Maybe Spock and McCoy would know when they returned; all he knew at this point was that Spock had contacted the transporter room to see when they could be transported back to the ship. Apparently, the science officer felt there was no breach in the Prime Directive in bringing the alien aboard, since he had informed the transporter room that there would be three to beam up ASAP.

They had the time to do it, but Kirk still felt uneasy whenever any of his officers - and even more so when it was his close friends - were put into danger.

All he could do was sit and wait.


Spock and McCoy continued to keep a close watch on their unconscious companion. Fortunately, nothing seemed to grow much worse as time passed, though she continued to incrementally lose badly needed moisture.

The storm began to subside, and soon enough it became clear enough to beam back to the ship.

Though McCoy wasn't usually eager about having his molecules sent into a data stream, at this point he welcomed it, pleased to see a stretcher was waiting in the transporter room, as well as a fully equipped medical team, headed by his head nurse, Christine Chapel.

McCoy had to grudgingly admit to himself that he was proud of these people; they knew exactly what he expected of them, and they performed to those specifications with great alacrity and speed.

The child was quickly placed onto the stretcher and taken to the Sickbay, Spock followed, desiring more information on this unknown life-form, stopping at the inside of the medical room to contact Kirk and inform him both of their passenger and that they could now leave the solar system.

A slight shudder signalled the ship moving into warp.

Spock turned his attention back to their unknown passenger, who now lay on a bed. An I.V. line had been placed in her arm to deal with the dehydration, while McCoy tried to bring down the fever, as well as get a more accurate detail of her condition from the Sickbay computers.

Spock had seen this sort of procedure before, and could see that McCoy was having trouble, undoubtedly due to the unknown biology of his patient, but knew better than to interfere with the doctor's work. Not only was it counterproductive, but it generally tended to make the man cranky and considering his already heightened level of crankiness, Spock felt no desire to increase it further.

Instead, he simply watched as the talented hands of Doctor McCoy worked to stabilize their alien passenger.


Authors note: Welcome to my new account here on and the return of an old story. This was co-written over countless late-night AIM sessions with Matt Morwell (go and read his stories) after we were talking about what would happen if Aura (my character) ended up in the Star Trek universe.

Well, what had started as a humourous poke at Star Trek - including Kirk getting his shirt ripped and the inevitable fate of the red shirt (only with jam) - developed into an actual story with characterisation, scientific terminology and *shock* a plot.

It does still include Kirk getting peeved and going on away missions despite being the Captain, McCoy waving around a medkit and complaining about the transporter, Scotty being protective of the ship, an attempt at a Russian accent for Chekov and a succession of eyebrows being raised by a certain Vulcan - so this story is still true to 'Trek continuity.

As for continuity, I don't think we were ever really sure when it is set, though the following episodes have occured - 'The Tholian Web', 'Amok Time', 'The Deadly Years' and 'The Trouble with Tribbles' - so my personal opinion is that it is set several months after 'The Tholian Web'.

This story has been re-edited by myself, with permission from my co-author (thank you Matt! :D) and beta-read by another amazing author - Tylec Asroc - also here on .

Last thing - yes, this story is a crossover with my character - Aura Starfire - and will involve and mention details of my own Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction continuity, but it isn't a 'true' crossover, which is why it hasn't been put in the crossover catagory as I consider it more of a 'Star Trek' fanfiction with elements of Sonic.

Right, I'll stop talking/typing now.

Oh, before I forget...

Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek. I do own the new and improved dvd of Season 1 of the original series and a set of playing cards, but sadly nothing else. I also do not own the characters from Sonic the Hedgehog, but do own Aura Starfire and several other original characters who will be mentioned in future disclaimers when their chapter has been introduced (otherwise it would kind of spoil the plot)

Thanks again to Tylec for beta-reading for me!